Infinite Lives

Exploring the value of games-as-iconography in art, literature, and popular culture

When I was a fiction writing undergrad, our class was visited by the great Lee K. Abbott. I felt at odds with him, I remember. He told my class that it was wrong to write a story with certain facts concealed. He told us that when the facts of the full story are only gradually uncovered, the process is, to the readers, unfair.

Annoyingly, Lee K. Abbott was not wrong. There are stories we tell that are very deliberately ‘unfair’; it is now obvious to me that Abbott is not a fan of horror.

In the horror genre, and especially in Japanese horror, real fear comes from the thrill of discovery. And Japanese horror itself takes a cue from, not just the principles of Asian cinema and plotting, but also the very distinctly Japanese design philosophy. Japanese design is less about agency, and more about uncovering a plot. Lee K. Abbot would be furious with it.

Recently Leigh Alexander published this intriguing feature at Kotaku, about the history of survival horror. Apart from being an excellent overview of the genre, it wisely compares Western and Japanese game design philosophies. Most importantly, Alexander asks this question: does survival horror still exist? She writes,

Don’t Fight, Just Run! Titles like these all have distinct differences, of course, but they all tend to have a few traits in common. First, they largely de-prioritize combat mechanics, favoring challenging the player through elements like on-location puzzles, mazelike game areas, using the environment itself against enemies, and even fleeing and hiding instead of direct combat.

It’s true. Alexander names Siren and Fatal Frame as two of the finest examples of using vulnerability to create horror and panic. In the Fatal Frame canon, you do not use weapons or ‘defeat’ anything, per se—rather, you are a young woman wielding a camera.

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Ah, the game cheat: it’s pure magic.

The following is a screenshot from Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. The article itself, “Video Game Hints, Tricks, and Cheats,” was published in 2002. It’s pretty weird.

Oh, it gets sillier. Much sillier.

• McSweeney’s – Video Game Hints, Tricks, and Cheats.

Another one for the Backburner. And what a find! 61 Frames Per Second’s Cole Stryker located a real gem of a book title, The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy. Stryker notes that this is actually just one title in a larger series in which essayists hunt for deeper meanings in ubiquitous pop culture icons (The Matrix, Battlestar Galactica).

Amazon gives the book’s description thusly:

With both young and adult gamers as loyal fans, The Legend of Zelda is one of the most beloved video game series ever created. The contributors to this volume consider the following questions and more: What is the nature of the gamer’s connection to Link? Does Link have a will, or do gamers project their wills onto him? How does the gamer experience the game? Do the rules of logic apply in the game world? How is space created and distributed in Hyrule (the fictional land in which the game takes place)? How does time function? Is Zelda art?

To which Cole Stryker responds:

Ugh. If these musings are any indication as to the content of the upcoming book, count me out. It will sell thousands of copies while real philosophy languishes on the shelves of your library. I’m not saying video games aren’t fertile ground for philosophic discussion, this one just seems…a bit surfacey.

Now, while I can certainly appreciate Stryker’s lack of enthusiasm, for my own part, I just added the book to my Amazon wishlist. It sounds like comparative lit to me! I sure hope there’s an essay about the workings of time and choice versus determinism!

The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy is scheduled to hit booksellers in late November.

• 61 Frames Per Second – Philosophy? In my Zelda?

When Game Life’s Chris Kohler reported that the Wii had finally outsold the Xbox 360 in the U.S. yesterday, he also reprinted Nintendo’s annoucement, which itself is written in a strange, alien shorthand. “After just 20 mos, Wii is the new console leader in the US @ nearly 10.9 million units, says NPD 2day.”

Kohler received said information from Nintendo directly—not through a formal press release, but instead through a text message.

That’s a text message that Nintendo of America just sent to journalists’ phones, knowing they’d be away from their desks covering E3. (The company used the same delivery medium to announce the Wii MotionPlus controller on Monday.)

Although Kohler’s SMS message from Nintendo isn’t the main point of his update, I find this unbelievably interesting. Two days ago I noted that I’d followed E3 news and rumors using Twitter almost exclusively—and using the new Twitteriffic iPhone app, at that. “When I look over my Twitter friend-feed,” I’d said (yes, quoting myself is bizarre), “it’s like this extremely concise liveblog written by ten or twenty people.”

Nintendo, SMS, and Howard Rheingold’s ‘Smart Mobs’: connecting the dots

Well, now, here’s a book to add to the Backburner in a few months.

Two years ago, independent game designer Steve Swink wrote an essay, an amazing, brilliant manifesto titled “Principles of Virtual Sensation.” In this design primer, Swink lists the tenets of movement and animation, and how these principles correspond to virtual sensation, which in turn makes for what Swink simply calls “good-feeling gameplay.” But what is virtual sensation? Swink explains:

Driving a car, you have a very strong sense of the position of that car, the feel of steering and controlling it, of mastery. This is the ability that every person who’s ever learned to drive a car has: the ability to extend precise control over something outside your body. There is a great amount of pleasure in the learning and eventual mastery of such a motion translation. [...] Many people also find this pleasure in video games, where it is both distilled to its essence and free of the constraints and dangers of more physical activities. You can change the turning radius of a car, but you can’t change gravity. This experience of control is derived from an artificial kinesthesia. This is the ‘feel’ of the game, the thing that makes your mom lean left and right in her seat as she tries to play Rad Racer.

If Swink’s essay leaves you wanting more, don’t worry!

Game Feel: a Game Designer’s Guide to Virtual Sensation is over 300 pages of game design philosophy, with plenty of insights from Swink’s indie design peers. (Incidentally, Phil Fish of Fez designed Game Feel’s cover jacket.)

Game Feel drops this October.

• Amazon preorder – Game Feel: A Game Designer’s Guide to Virtual Sensation
• Steve Swink – “Principles of Virtual Sensation”
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