Or: what happened to Bethesda Softworks?  A mystery adventure!

When I was eleven or twelve, my best friend who still plays paintball and Left 4 Dead with me installed a DOS game on my aging 486 because—get this, dude—it has literally thousands of towns and dungeons and shit.  My first experience playing Daggerfall almost resulted in a glorious Fatality as dozens of quarts of blood fled my loins and shot straight into my cerebral cortex, or whichever part of the brain it is in sullen preteen boys who are really too intelligent to like Isaac Asmiov as much as their parents that’s responsible for really, truly believing that they’d like more than anything in the world to live in Middle Earth.

I am paralyzed by this game's ineffable charm.

Mostly this was because the first dungeon is so labyrinthine and confusing: a big mess of practically unmappable 3D space, it looks like two octopi mating from a bird’s-eye view, and represents a gleeful disregard of 2D norms and an ecstatic, if haphazard, exploration and exploitation of space that characterizes a lot of early 3D games, from Tomb Raider to Warhawk.  No tutorial popups here, and many a Daggerfall neophyte has quit the game in frustration, never to return—defeated by the legendary Privateer’s Hold.  What’s more fantastic?  There really are thousands (or maybe just hundreds, or just a couple hundred, though who am I to count?) of towns and dungeons and shit, even though they’re mostly indistinguishable, aside from the three big capital cities of the game’s twenty or so provinces.  And more fantastic than that?  Every dungeon is more mind-bogglingly complex than the first—and each is unique, though you’d never be able to tell.

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Much has been made of the fact that games are not the same as movies.  Despite any apparent similarities, they have different goals; they work different ways. They cannot be evaluated using the same criteria.

(Thus the indignation over Roger Ebert’s game-related comments. Electronic gaming’s would-be defenders somehow combine smug disdain with a curious undercurrent of desperation in their rejection of Ebert’s scorn. Yeah, sure, Ebert doesn’t “know” games. Nor need he: the guy’s job is to know movies, and he’s spectacular at it, a necessary consequence of which is that he’ll never see gaming except in terms of how it fails to live up to the standards of cinema. Stop wasting his time and ours with litanies of refutations and counter-examples.)

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A last desperate act.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare¹ is a game about exactly what it says it is: what it means to be a soldier in the Year of Our Lord 200whenever it came out, 8 probably. For the first time in history, a majority of the people fighting in an honest to God war grew up playing videogames that play at war. The rock solid geniuses over at Infinity Ward have, in response, made the first and only game that really captures the zeitgeist of the Bush Years, probably—hopefully—without realizing it.

The brilliance of MW is that it turns the usual videogame oo-rah power fantasy on its head by subversive measures and actually entertaining gameplay. It stands out best as a contrast to Bioshock, which wore its “lol videogame” on its sleeve and managed not to say anything about anything in the process.

MW is one long series of failures. There can only be one conclusion to draw from the game’s presentation: that violence begets violence.

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Warning: There will be no discussion of stars in this review.

On a base level, an obvious comparison between videogames is available: Braid is to time as Portal is to space. It is capable of—no, it actively changes the player’s perspective and fosters new ways of thinking about the world. For this experience alone, Braid is well worth playing, but it further reveals itself to be intricately more (or, you may feel, less) than the sum of its parts. I reacted, as I find myself doing with most any work that so requires interpretation, on an intellectual more than an emotional level, and yet Braid is a very emotional work. It may take time to see it, as it did for me, but I believe this to be an earnest and sincere expression.

Upon first experiencing the final action-puzzle event, I was inspired with the presumably intended awe and horror but also rage. If it weren’t for that meddlesome, distracting text framing the gameplay, this lovely, clever, unassuming platformer could have accomplished a simple and elegant feat of storytelling. Instead, I felt, it is wrapped in convoluted, analytical prose that stinks of pretense (and I am not one to use that word lightly). Let me describe the changes necessary to create my ideal version of Braid: No cloud rooms. That’s it. No cloud rooms with text (or alt-text) about Tim leaving his woman to see a movie and then invent nuclear weapons. Just get rid of it.

What’s left?

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Definition:

The direct result of input; the immediate properties of avatar behavior caused by the player.

Avatar is used for lack of a more all-encompassing term for the in-game agent representing the player’s will. It is meant here to include the unseen “body” (regardless of that body’s physicality) of the player character in a first-person shooter, the cursor in a real-time strategy game, and the indicator denoting the current menu selection in a role-playing game.

A lack of input is here considered a form of input, including both intentional pauses within a sequence of commands and a protracted idle period.

The result of input and the properties of those results are two different things.  The latter are important for mechanical texture, which will be discussed following elaboration upon and defense of this definition.

Illustrations:

Essentially, imagine Mario in a vacuum, so to speak. Picture a barren world that consists of nothing but a straight line representing the ground, and play Mario. Everything possible within this scenario represents mechanics, and the qualities of these mechanics can be said to include momentum, gravity, and so on.

A mechanic represents an ideally replicable cause–effect relationship. Every time a command or sequence of commands is given, the same mechanical result occurs independent of non-player influences such as situational elements—the series of button presses that causes Mario to run and jump will give a different result if a pipe is in his way. Whenever the same command yields two different results, something extra-mechanical is interfering.

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Since the demise of its commercial era circa 1990, interactive fiction, also known as text adventures, managed to survive thanks to development tools such as TADS, Inform, and ADRIFT, and today a thriving community of authors, readers, critics, theorists, software developers, and others continues to output an extraordinary body of high quality, innovative work, displaying a sophistication and artistry that often bears only a passing resemblance to even the greatest Infocom classics—for free. So vast is the breadth of this community, in fact, that it can seem difficult to penetrate, despite a number of helpful and informative websites.

For those who are disinclined for whatever reason to parse out a solution to this particular puzzle, I would like to present a compilation of interactive fiction (IF) titles, the tools necessary to access them, and a wide assortment of documents that are of practical, historical, theoretical, and critical import.

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Although we typically refer to media such as books and film as passive inasmuch as their audiences do not directly impact the work, it has long been recognized that reading a story or watching a movie is to some variable extent an active engagement.  Nonetheless, truly interactive media such as videogames clearly involve a more collaborative form of participation; one might describe a packaged title as an incomplete work of art waiting for a player to come along and dynamically cocreate its final release, not unlike a written play yet in need of an acting troupe.  Appropriate language for discussing videogames is experiential—because videogames happen.  We must speak of texture and flow and tactile feedback just as often as we elaborate upon mood or symbolism, for these constitute the very form of the performance.  Unlike in a play, the basic nature of performing in one videogame is different from that in any other because each has a unique set of bodies for the actors, ways in which those bodies can move, rules about how those movements interact with the environment, and so on; each literally takes place within its own world, however great or small.

But what is the experience of playing a videogame?  Well, in Mario games, we feel momentum and its effects upon our joyful leaps, contrasted with the tight, deadly circumstances of perilous floating platforms and a veritable zoo of odd creatures that all share the common ability to end our fun with the slightest touch.  Shadow of the Colossus is at bottom about lacking control as we rely upon the navigational intelligence of our stead and clumsily flail about landscapes or up giant beasts, tripping over our feet or desperately holding on as we are tossed about.  Bionic Commando is simply defined by the inability to jump.  And when we play a role-playing or real-time strategy game, we feel the physical push and pull of navigating the user interface and menu systems while developing an indirect aesthetic awareness of the crunch of a sword blow, the indistinct bubble of a water attack, or the way in which our units interact (or don’t) with the playing field.  These visceral experiences actually take on the qualities of what would in other media be called theme, as they are both pervasive and often mirrored or paralleled by the wider game structure or narrative.

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