How are you?

God, how are you? How have you been? It’s been so long I’d almost forgotten your face.

I’m fine, myself. You know. I’ve just been thinking about games, just like always.

On my desktop, there’s a single .txt file called “New Text Document.” Inside is the better part of the ideas, dreams, and asorted brain-drippings I’ve been having for over a year. I think it might be fun to riffle through it and extract the best of it to examine here. As a way to clear the tubes, get ready to post more, and look back at what I’ve been since the years we’ve held this blog. You can join in, if you’d like. No pressure- it’s only the terrible lack of professionalism that I bring to this blog that lets me do this with a clear conscience anyway.

It’s crowded in here, like opening a closet to have everything collapse out on top of you in a rush. A stream of numbers, passwords and addresses clogs the top – “Problem signatures” and “Locale ID’s”, the forgotten remnants of long-dead errors. A link to an old image from a comic I never completed, some old account numbers. In amoungst there is the cut/pasted postage address of a friend who travelled overseas. He was looking for a care package; some of the old pixelated treasures to warm his thumbs in a place far from home.

Matt ##### – College ######## – PO box ## – Isangel – Tanna – Vanuatu

do me a favour, get harvest moon and a yugioh game and pokemon

those three games are priority

oh and if possible, age of empires

I thought I knew games better than he did, so I sent him Armageddon Empires, the Doom roguelike, Cave Story, Majora’s mask and a snes emulator with Chrono Trigger and the rest of the greats. Deus Ex might have been in there. Grudgingly added in Pokemon. While he experienced the literal extension of the Desert Island idea, I figured he’d be forced to get a gaming education without any of the modern twitch-slash delights to distract him from the slow, patient wonders of yesterdays gaming. I bundled it all up in a USB in an envelope, adding in a glittery heart .gif entitled “BEST FRIENDS 4EVER.”

It never reached him. He came back this week, spiritually fulfilled and full of talk about how little we really need electricity. Seeing as everything I get entertainment and income from is now based on the fickle wire-spirits, I couldn’t really agree with him.

Next, mysteriously, a definition of some german word:

“Schönheitsfehler” (”beauty-flaw”)

Past-Jack is as enigmatic as he is devilishly handsome. I might have been thinking about the glory of imperfect games- how Deus Ex shines through the awkward aiming, how Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines achieves transcendance in the broken beauty of it’s bittersweet betrayal of an ending.

Or maybe past-Jack just thought it sounded cool and I should calm myself and put the alliteration down.

I found myself rendered insane
by some malignant twist of brain.

This was a fragment of an unfinished poem based on a dream I had; I went insane, but with a long mental struggle I managed to push the insanity out of my body and confine it to just one of my eyes. One eye saw the normal world, while the other saw madness and twisted forms.

A clever plan, with just one hitch:
I cannot tell which eye is which.

Under there, cutting through a mash of inexplicable info, we reach a bold banner of names cutting across the page.

INCEPTION, AVATAR, THE MATRIX, SCOTT PILGRIM

The subtitle explains:

Movies lately have been symbolically glorifying games, calling for a time somewhere in the future where we cast off our fleshy meat-sack bodies and live in a pure idea-scape we make ourselves. Scott pilgrim’s kind of the opposite, talking about how these things affect our real lives.

Followed by the MSN  transcript, discussing an idea for an article that I never wrote.

I think I saw that
I like his point in avatar
how virtuality is trying to bring people back to reality
Jack says:
oh?
Miles says:
it’s an odd concept
but it’s like
Jack says:
James cameron, you mean
Miles says:
yeah
reality is competing to out do eachother in genuineness
there only things that feel real are those that are fabricated and original
————————–
same with the matrix
and same with Inception
they’re all talking about the idea of a fully immersive videogame that you could lose yourself in completely
the matrix shows that idea as a terrifying threat
Miles says:
I think I’m starting to form a good policy for cinema here… but carry on
Jack says:
Inception’s wary of it
but avatar glorifies it
the movie ends with Jake sully triumphantly managing to stay in the world forever
I mean, the whole pandora thing was obviously a game metaphor
Miles says:
oh yeah definitely
Jack says:
he’s a cripple, but he goes into the chair and he can become a magically free-running etc in this paradise world
so yeah, it’s weird that movies are (intentionally?) doing this
it’s become a reccurent theme
I think it points to something that’s emerging in human psychology
an erge to escape our fleshy meat-sack bodies and live in a pure landscape of the mind.
And then there’s scott pilgrim, which is the opposite

It was strange to see how so many popular recent movies have such obvious raging hard-on’s for games. Looking at the most popular movies of the day must give you an insight into the zeitgiest, right? In which case, the zeitgiest really, REALLY wants Virtual Reality.

Andrew Ryan said it best. “A Man Chooses,” he tells you; “A Slave Obeys.”

Pretty fine words, for a man being beaten to death with a golf club.

Ah, I remember this one. I argued that, in most games, We Are Soldiers: Someone tells us what to do and we follow their orders unquestioningly. The Goal is always right. Think? They don’t pay you to think. Such games encourage an attitude of unflinching loyalty towards authority. I looked for an opposing genre, where We Are Detectives; Games that let us choose our own goals, or question and go against the ones that are given to us.  Games where the quest-givers actually lie to you. Minecraft and Sim City are two examples. Deus Ex and Bioshock make you consider dissent, but don’t actually let you deviate from the orders you’re given, no matter how much you might want to. I thought such games could help to encourage ideals of thinking for yourself, making your own decisions, and not taking those in charge at their word. It would be especially nice to see some of these made for kids.

I strongly believe that video games can be the most powerful teaching tool you can use. Even wild animal cubs learn through play.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if someone made a game that taught you not to question? A game that taught you not to take things To think about things
beyond a surface level?

I came up with all of this while working minimum-wage in my first job. No surprise, eh?

WATER, AIR, FIRE AND DIRT…

(ICP pic)

Games need more miracles.

This little idea-seed was based around the thought that games should stop all this explaining everything all the time, with numbers and digits and so-forth. It robs a lot of the magic and mystery from a world. When you read about Gandalf, you’re told he’s a wizard of unknowable power. When you play a wizard in a game, you’re told that you can cast a level three fireball (Dmg 30-50 with a cooldown of 1.3 minutes). Magic is unexplained science- with a clear explanation for everything, the magic disappears.

Shout-out’s would have gone out to games that add in huge dollops of mystery by not fully explaining the rules they follow- Spelunky’s tale of mystery and discovery, and The Void’s blind fumbling in a strange universe.

Another out-of-context image in there.

Soon, things degenerate. The original headline for “Smut Ain’t so bad”:

SEXY SEXY SEX GAMES

SEX SEX.

A short smear of words I can’t remember writing, and then huge scrolls of ideas, ideas, ideas, for all sorts of games and mods and god knows what. Here’s something I don’t understand:

An old man in a robe, confuscious looking, metal-worker. Stands in a giant fortress he made. (Another picture- him at a furnace, space-time distorting so you can see him from the back on the right and front on the left.)

“It seems you must find the heart of the castle and kill the life-form there. And as you do, perhaps, prepare the castle for a NEW lifeform…”

Jesus, I swear I’ve never even touched the stuff.

Robin hood in a Dystopian future: Everything ruled by one man, with a number of lords under him that rules seperate cities. An anarchist/communist sniper, idolizing the ideals of Robin Hood and concealing himself with a hood to escape detection by spy sattelites, sets up a guerilla group of fellow snipers- giving to the poor by stealing from the rich, assasinations, etc.

Oh, lordy! I do understand the rest of the dregs at the bottom of the file, though.

Zombie
– warrior
– sewed-up waistcoat
-Strong, silent type
-Voodoo zombie- drugged.
– had life before zombification, hinted at frequently.
– dialogue trees = mummy from Day of the Tentacle.
– way to return him to human
– gained in Zombie Harvest?

They’re ideas for a Dragon Age mod, based around the kind of pirate adventures you might know from On Stranger Tides or Monkey Island. I never made it, of course. The list there is for a Zombie party member; one of the old zombies, the kind created by Voodoo Drugs and Rituals. He’d never say a word, but you could talk to him on the ship to enter massive dialogue trees where you talked about everything and anything to no reply. You’d be able to search his belongings and find that he was actually intelligent despite his silence, and had kept a diary:

I have finally discovered the gruesome truth behind the motives of my strange traveling companions. It seems that their modus operandi is to venture beyond the horizon, visit exotic foreign locales bursting with interesting culture and history, and kill everything residing there in the most violent manner possible before grabbing all the goods they can stuff into their pants and fleeing back to the ship to sail away to their next mark.

They are funded in this endeavour mostly by the natives of these nations, who seem to view our arrival as a welcome chance to get any odd jobs they had lying around completed. In return for these favours, they allow us to pillage their homes at will as they stand there, presumably stock-still with terror.

The final entry, under huge lines of ancient saved MSN conversation, is this.

Nostalgia, right? Gamers are still mired in it, like an evolved homo sapien who still reminisces about how fun it was clubbing saber-tooths. Braid takes time out from making deep and meaningful statements about a lone mans obsession to tell us that the princess is in another castle.

And there, on that suitably ironic note, is where I’ll end this little retrospective. If you’ve read through this all, then I’d like to thank you for coming over and sticking with this blog.

Look at that backlog. We started here on 2009, posting design updates on a game we never finished to the resounding applause of our invisible audience. We started in April, and got our first comment in december. This is almost the anniversary, really. So many words, so many thoughts, so many dreams that died before they left this warm little word-womb of a wordpress blog. “The Machination”. An anachronism- the name of a game company that never managed to make a game.

Well, the new year comes. A time for the future. Miles will be going into University, and I’ll be starting my second year of Game Design. I don’t need to wait ’till then to know what my new years resolution will be: to take one of these little bedraggled thought-kin that lie crammed where they fell in text files like these, smooth its feathers, help it up, and finally, gloriously, bring it out to fly.

I hope you’ll be there with me when I do.

-Jack.