Part I. EVE Online and the BART.
Part II. Press pass and Jenova Chen.

Part One. The call; the journey.

Part Two. The people.

Part Three. The atmosphere.

Part Four. The meaning, or lack thereof.

Please enjoy.

It is well understood that ert is important and a big deal. Many people pay respect to ert– and as such, if games became ert, then respect would be paid to games. This means we could talk about what we do in good company by saying “oh, I make video games,” and our interlocutors would respond “oh, yes, games– they are a kind of ert, aren’t they?” And we all know that this is certainly not the case right now.

To confuse matters further, there is also a contingent who have spearheaded a kind of backlash against the question itself– games, they counter, should be about something else– having “fon,” apparently, and thus it is lamentable that anything else (especially ert) would be the concern of those who make games, particularly because the quality of being “fon” interferes with, or somehow contradicts, the quality of being ert. Which begs another important question: can games be both ert and fon at the same time?

Many further symposiums, blog posts and ert-fon diagrams will be necessary to answer the question definitively.

Though I am not really equipped here to discuss the real implications of the possibility of a brain in a vat, I thought that another interesting area of inquiry might be how some (evil?) demiurge might construct such a mechanism using what we currently know about real-time virtual reality– or, in other words, video games.

The first is summed up by The Matrix, wherein all of humanity are brains (plus their bodies) in vats, and interact in a kind of shared hallucination. The video game equivalent of this is probably a massively multiplayer online game, like World of Warcraft, or a more freeform online world such as Second Life, where each avatar is piloted by a human brain through the world of the game and interacts with other brains in their own vats through the various methods that the game provides.

It doesn’t take long for the technical issues of this approach to become manifest. Every brain would need its own powerful client machine to “render” and feed the brain stimuli; the client machine would also need to connect to a central server in order to reconcile each client’s version of “reality.” Coordinating the actions of many brains in vats together– people jostling each other in a crowd, for example, or playing in a band, or multiple cooks in a kitchen– would tax a system of any known design enormously. Complex physical simulations would need to be carried out either by the central server and propagated instantaneously to all clients or calculated completely deterministically on each client simultaneously. Such coordination is extremely difficult to achieve even with the relatively simple information that networked games must share today. (The only way I can think of that this might be possible is if the system does not actually run in real-time, and that each “frame” of reality we experience is actually the result of days or weeks or centuries of calculation on the part of the demiurge’s computer system. But one imagines him getting as impatient as we do with poor frame rates.)

There are other problems with a Matrix-like scenario, too: how would such a system handle human births and deaths? Is our pet dog or cat a smaller brain in a smaller vat somewhere? The line between what is simulated versus what is “real” blurs in many ways in this arrangement, making a consistent illusion of reality difficult to define, let alone manage.

The second major brain in a vat scenario is the solipsist one: you are the only brain in a vat, and the vast world you perceive is generated solely for your benefit. Serious philosophers usually recoil from solipsism, and for good reasons. One is that there’s no place good to take it (the world is false– okay, so now what?). Another is that it doesn’t feel right morally; we must accept the existence of other beings in order to behave well. Believing that others do not really exist leads one down the road to psychopathy.

The games that best encapsulate this form of the brain in a vat are in my opinion Bethesda Softworks’ recent role-playing games, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Fallout 3. In these games the entire world is created solely for the entertainment of the singular player, who is the only “character” possessed of agency in their vast worlds.

As a game developer, the solipsist model seems much easier to manage. After all, one of the most important things a game does is decide what not to do: the game’s renderer decides what not to draw, the sound system decides what doesn’t need to play, the artificial intelligence decides what enemies do not need to think. The complex graphics, soundscapes and interactions we enjoy are due to these judgements– if our consoles actually tried to process in full what was going on around us they would chug to a halt.

We have all heard the koan about the tree falling in the forest and its sound, or lack thereof, in the absence of observers. In terms of a video game, the answer is obvious that if there is no observer present there is no reason to calculate the observable property (armchair quantum mechanics enthusiasts may bring up the Heisenberg uncertainly principle here). In terms of technology, a singular brain in a vat could be much more easily convinced it is in a “real” place, especially if it has never known any other world.

Between these two extremes there are some compromises available, such as the idea that perhaps only two or four or six brains exist in vats– though situations like that seem more the province of science-fiction plotting than a serious possibility.

None of this idle speculation is to suggest I believe the world is indeed simulated, so I’ll close with a paraphrase from Borges: the world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Matthew.

The practice of regional censorship of internationally created media is nothing new, of course. But the technology of video games can make alterations more precise and more surreal than a black bar or a jump cut (the same system that switches out a game’s spoken language or text for localization can swap any asset in the game itself, so it is usually quite simple to configure builds of a game for certain territories that have special rules). One could be in the same virtual room as a player from another country and be looking at the same wall and be seeing two entirely different things. So though we extoll the shared experiences that multiplayer games can give us, the potential for fragmentation of experience– of, indeed, a kind of reality– is just as possible.

Hiro was tired and his eyes burned. He bit the inside of his lip to distract himself. “Yeah, I suppose so.”

“You suppose so? Have you ever seen a well-endowed woman’s breasts? I mean in real life, like right in front of you. Not in a porno.”

“Sure– now and then.”

“Don’t lie. I can tell when you’re lying.” Kazu had the controller in his hands, making the girl crouch over and over.

Hiro took his glasses off and rubbed his face. Delineate deformable regions, grab acceleration data from the bone in the torso. “I can implement that, sure. You want it on all of the female characters?”

“Put it on the characters that make sense to you. I’ll review it later.”

After Kazu had gone Mayuko crept up behind him. “What was that about breasts?” she said conspiratorially.

Mayuko looked disappointed. “That’s it? I thought you were talking about real people.”

“No, in the game.”

“Boring. I suppose they do look pretty strange right now, though.”

“I think I’m beyond being able to even notice,” said Hiro, slouching in his chair. It was very late.

“You seem unhappy– are you upset about it being too sexual? Some kind of Christian morality thing?”

“That has nothing to do with it,” Hiro said. “It’s just, I guess for me, this is a little disappointing.”

“Tomorrow why don’t you try telling him what you think, then? Aren’t you old classmates?”

Hiro shrugged and slouched some more.

“What are you doing? Don’t look at idol movies,” said Kazu, the next day. “Watch an anime or something for reference. I don’t want the breast motion to be floppy and liquid. It should be springy and hold together.”

Hiro said, “Well, before, you were talking about experience with real women, so I thought you wanted–”

“Are you crazy?” said Kazu. “What about this character makes you think a realistic treatment is called for? Look at her design! Don’t be ridiculous.” He paused, studying Hiro’s face, then pulled up a chair and sat down. “What’s bothering you, classmate? Your eyes have been so heavy-lidded lately.”

“Nothing. I’m just tired. Maybe I’m a little worried about– I thought we were making something a little more universal. But lately the game seems more and more about, you know, fan service.”

“‘Fan service’ doesn’t mean the audience is only in Japan,” Kazu said. “You know, Gotoh just came back from a big convention in Los Angeles and said his most otaku-oriented titles are the ones that are selling the best abroad. Besides, how much more ‘universal’ can you get than a sexy character? That’s a language that everyone immediately understands.”

Hiro nodded, deciding not to explain he meant something slightly different.

“You still don’t believe me, I can tell. Let’s get a foreigner’s opinion right now– where’s Fastow?”

“Come on, we don’t need Fastow here,” said Hiro, but Justin was already close by, maybe close enough to have heard him say that.

“Uh, it doesn’t seem wrong to me,” said Justin, after they’d explained. “It will certainly attract attention– I can guarantee all the American blogs and message boards will make posts on it. But I don’t think it will exactly surprise anyone, either.”

“See?” said Kazu. “He likes it. You’re being overly prude, Hiroyuki. It’s the influence of your parents– your upbringing.”

Hiro hated the constant mention of his background as if that one detail explained everything about him. His parents were not overly censorious, and just because he was a rarity did not mean that was the whole of his being.

“I mean, sure, there’s sometimes a disconnect over the context in which each culture places sexualized content,” Justin continued, unaware that his role was already over, “But it’s not as if comics, anime and game fans haven’t been already exposed to these kinds of elements many times over. I think they’re used to it. Some Americans might think it’s embarrassing to admit enjoying such content, but they do just the same.”

Mayuko ordered another beer before he could refuse. “Go on, pour out your heart to me,” she said.

Hiro took a long sip. “How many is this? I’ve lost count.”

“Don’t worry about it. You can pay me back tomorrow.”

“Sure. Well in school I studied computer science because I thought that was my talent, but it took me a while to realize that it might not be my number one interest. As I’ve worked at this company I’m finding it harder and harder to be interested in the kinds of games we’re making, and I’m looking back on my life, just wondering where it went, and wondering where I can go next. What avenues are open to me? I don’t think there are any. I’ll always be implementing someone else’s vision, even if that happens to be not particularly inspiring.”

“That sort of talk reminds me of my grandfather,” said Mayuko, “He was a lathe operator in a machine shop for basically his entire life. I don’t think his generation had the same idea of ambition that people our age do. He just assumed he would always operate that lathe forever. The idea that money or power could be obtained was completely alien to him. So to excel inside the constraints he’d been dealt was the only thing he could do.”

“Whatever,” said Hiro. “No offense, Mayu-chan, but I’m not some long-suffering character in a sappy television drama about life after the war. I’m a programmer in the modern world, and I’m already thirty one, and I have things I want to do but I can’t do them because I’m stuck working for laughable wages for a ‘friend’ who thinks nothing of asking me to put in ridiculous amounts of overtime to make his insipid video games. For fuck’s sake, thirty one!”

“Why are you so worried about your age? A lot of people have–”

“Yoshinori Kitase directed Final Fantasy VII when he was thirty one.”

“You shouldn’t compare yourself to–”

“Hideki Kamiya directed Devil May Cry when he was thirty one.”

“Are you saying you want a–”

“Fumito Ueda directed Ico when he was thirty one.”

“Would you shut up for just one second?” said Mayuko. “You’re making random comparisons that have no meaning! You’re not them. You’re you. Why are you so worried about this? I had no idea you had this strain of ambition in you.”

Hiro took another drink. “I wouldn’t call it ambition, exactly. I just hoped for something more. Something a little better than implementing algorithms for breast bounce for my old classmate who, I should add, was always partying in school and got good grades anyway while I actually tried to study hard and did like shit.” He pounded his fist onto the bar like a cartoon character. “Is that okay? Is it alright to acknowledge I want more than this?”

Mayuko shrugged. “Sometimes it can’t be helped, right? Sometimes there’s nothing to be fought for, nothing to win, and the only thing on the line is your pride.”

“So you’re saying the only thing I can do is be proud of doing what I’m ordered to do? No matter what it is?” he said, and snorted. The izakaya’s loudness with its wall of chatter enveloped his head like a wet towel. Coding forgettable bits of soft-porn silliness might be all that he had any right to expect from his non-charmed life, but if that was the case he would just need to understand that human existence would not make him happy or fulfilled.

There was a long pause in the conversation (Mayuko seemed chastened by his acerbic ranting) and Hiro gazed drunkenly at the bar’s other patrons. Surely, playing the cards that the universe dealt was its own kind of art. Not everyone has talent and not everyone has skill. Not everyone is in the right place to take advantage of either, and even then the vicissitudes of the world operated under their own cruel inhuman logic such that a man’s power diminished into nothing but his ability to influence others and his meager personal understanding of craft.

Craftsmanship. Suddenly there was Mayuko’s grandfather in sepia tones hunched over a third-rate lathe making cheap tin toys in the aftermath of the war (what a schmaltzy thing to envision!), meaningless knickknacks that he poured his sweat into because it was the only thing he cared about– the only thing he could care about.

It was true that one could not always choose what work one did, or where, or how, or with whom. Sometimes, the only real choice was how seriously one could take that work, and to what degree it could be accomplished.

The Bible says: whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might–

“Well, that’s fine,” Hiro said abruptly, slamming his pint glass down a little harder than he meant to, his nose flaring with alcohol. “I’ve decided. I won’t program Kazu’s stupid feature for him just because he asked me to. I will do it for myself. And I will program the greatest goddamn breast physics in the world.”

The real debate, then, is about what exactly we’re going to muster to show the world to prove that what we’re doing isn’t just a fun diversion, but something of genuine cultural import. And the irritation with Thomsen seems to stem from him calling Metroid Prime a work of art for the ages with about as much guile as a schoolboy proclaiming the genius of a trade fantasy novel he read over the summer in front of the rest of the class. “That’s what you’re going to show to Ebert to convince him videogames are a legitimate art form?” Burch wrote. “You’re going to show him the morph bomb and expect him to nod repeatedly, and admit that the story of an extinct bird race and a woman with a bazooka on her arm is just as meaningful as La Dolce Vita? Seriously?”

Well, what else can we point towards? Thomsen picked Metroid, he told me, partly because he was just trying to talk about something that he personally responded to, and felt had some connection to the technical innovation for which Kane is known. But there are many other games out there with thoughtful, artfully constructed designs– games absent of laser beams in space, games that when played invite us to consider the rules and the mechanics that govern the world around us. We give these games awards and talk about them in polite non-gamer company as proof of their worthiness, but ask a typical gamer about the most memorable moment in his playing life and he is as likely as not to mention the time he sniped five guys in a row to save the day in a particularly hotly contested multiplayer match.

The idea that the embarrassment of admitting you really like games might be mitigated by pointing out that there exist certain works of interactive art that deserve to be taken seriously also doesn’t hold water when one looks at the fate of comic books, which, despite having been blessed by many works of absolute sincerity, seriousness and subtlety over the years, have largely failed to make a dent on the popular imagination as anything other than the province of the juvenile in body or mind. And how video games may or may not avoid the marginalized fate of comic books is another worried strain of thought running through the industry’s creatives. It serves as a warning to those who assert that cultural acceptance is simply a matter of time, that we can wait around for a coming generational shift. Michael Abbott, a professor at Wabash College who teaches theatre and film, notes his students usually aren’t particularly impressed with Kane when he screens it for them, but that they aren’t therefore automatically interested in video games, either: “From time to time I mention games in my class, and sometimes they respond and sometimes they don’t. They’ve all played games, sure, and see them as a fun thing to do. But the idea that one could think critically about games, that one could take them seriously, is really quite foreign to many of them.”

Real maturity, then, is about more than just appearances. It is about what lies underneath. Even though Burch wrote scathingly that Thomsen’s comparison “makes our most beloved art form look like kid’s stuff, and us like a bunch of idiots,” the very same day Destructoid also ran a story entitled White Knight Chronicles 2 has pointy boobs, droopy boobs. The implication of this being that treating games as the inwards-facing exclusive province of boyish adolescence is perfectly acceptable as long as Mom and Dad aren’t looking; if they are, though, hide the controllers and put on a tie. This inferiority complex runs so deeply in the gamer mindset that we will often swear up and down it does not exist while we continue unbridled our wildly passive-aggressive approach towards the artistic establishment, equal parts brash and defensive, trying to look older and more experienced than our years: the hallmark of youthful insecurity.

So before we can confidently come forth with our own particular offerings towards the sum of human cultural output, the light of civilization, it seems we must continue to gyrate through this adolescent process of self-discovery, as awkward and humiliating as it can be. Whether we like it or not, however, learning to be comfortable in our own shoes is not a journey that we can delay indefinitely.

But when I walked inside my new house, I saw it all completely differently– for there was my stout wooden table, lit in a warm amber glow, and my food: a loaf of rustic bread and a wheel of artisan cheese accompanied by a bottle (or two) of country wine. I experienced for a brief moment a kind of domestic reverie, of the sort that furniture sellers live or die by their ability to enkindle within us, imagining the simple, elegant lifestyle that we are tempted to believe lies just a couple more purchases away. I sat down– another feature of the game completely useless up until this point– and simply admired the scene for several moments, Jeremy Soule’s tranquil strings floating over the top. I might have even taken a deep breath in real life, a kind of contented sigh– even though I could not actually eat any of it, and the wine, I knew, would only debuff me.

The foodstuffs of Fable II are all edible, however, and their effects are so pronounced I probably took more care with my diet in the game than I did with the one in my real life at the time. I began as most do: not really paying attention to what I was putting in my mouth. I had work to do, after all– saving the world and such– and cheap meat pies were as good as anything to keep me going. I came around as most do, too: suddenly noticing myself vastly different than I had used to be. When did I become so paunchy? When did my skin become so sickly and gray? I did some quick research, began scrutinizing the nutritional information on all the foods I came across, and went on a strict vegetarian diet. I was on a new mission: to slim down again. Saving the world would have to wait until I looked good enough to do it.

But if teleporting around the globe in order to buy up a rural shop’s supply of celery every morning sounds not particularly fun– well, it wasn’t. Fable II makes losing weight easier and faster than it is in the real world, of course, but cannot do much to make it entertaining, because its central conceit of food is that it becomes us, as it does in real life. Its effects are cumulative; your choices have long-term consequences. After I reaching my goal weight I stuck mostly to purified water and tofu– surprisingly easy to do when the food is all virtual and all you ever see of it is icons. Fable II’s comically exaggerated world, where one piece of fatty food could make you noticeably bigger, forced me to pay attention to what I ate, but once I realized it, I felt no temptation to eat anything bad.

Vanillaware probably could have worked in an element of food-related temptation if they had wanted to, but they don’t. Their take is mostly one of indulgence, in keeping with their voluptuous interpretation of the world, with its lush vegetation and curvy female characters. In both Odin Sphere and Muramasa: The Demon Blade, dishes are lovingly detailed, steaming hot, looking delicious. They are not just a restorative and a character strengthener but a kind sensual joy in their own right. Odin Sphere gives us a restaurant lined with pots and pans, a roaring cooking fire off the screen, where entrees from an extensive menu are served steaming-hot to your character, seated at a table. He or she will dig in carefully, it so that it lingers in a half- or quarter-eaten state, before finishing with a unique, character-specific animation (the dark warrior burps quietly; the fairy licks her fingers).

Muramasa shows you your food in first-person, slid over the table towards you. You will watch as each piece of nigirizushi is picked up and dipped carefully into the soy sauce on the side before it disappears out of the frame and your character’s voice exclaims in delight, as every bite of tempura is consumed, as onigiri is fashioned from a clump of rice, a rectangle of nori delicately folded over one side. Full-frame, two-dimensional animations for every piece of food– from udon noodles to roasted fish to mochi cakes– aren’t the sort of thing that comes cheaply, and yet clearly a large amount of the developer’s limited resources were dedicated to these. Someone decided that instead of another playable character or more stages, the player ought to get a detailed recreation of the experience of stopping by a roadside stand and getting a bowl of hot soup.

Food items have long been a staple in games as a healing or buffing agent, but aside from their use as a mechanic to alter stats, or as a metaphor around which to wrap a standard puzzle game, the majority of development teams don’t seem to ever consider trying to capture the powerful emotional quality that food can have: sausages grilling outdoors on a bright summer day, rich stew cooking in a pot at home while it’s dark and stormy outside. So as games continue to catapult forward in their sheer intensity, and as we make noise about their need to incorporate other notions of high drama– great joy and deep sadness, abiding love and inconsolable loss– I reserve a special fondness for games that can communicate some of the fine and subtle texture of life in its everyday sublimity.

But the fun of the game, such as it is, does not hinge on its mechanics– it works through the application of them to its subject matter. “In the Middle Ages monks were silent vegetarians,” explains one of the game’s several fourth-wall breaking footnotes. “At carnivorous feasts they set aside the vow of silence for a little Meat & Conversation.” We join our character just as he is sitting down to one of these feasts, listening to a story told by visiting Russian. His overactive imagination takes over, and we find ourselves in the world of the story, a place as metaphorical as it is representational. Thus, Meat and Conversation does not attempt to get its player to believe that what is happening to him is literal, but sets the stage for the player to inhabit a character who, by some force intrinsic or external, vividly experiences a philosophical and spiritual point relayed to him through a trial-and-error text adventure.

It is no wonder that Meat and Conversation was so esoteric for so long. It was originally only for the Macintosh (a modernized version now works on Windows). It is exceedingly short. It is either incredibly hard or incredibly easy, depending on your experience with old-style adventure games. It deals with very serious subject matter (though not without humor– a hint system is accessed by clicking on a button labelled “temptation,” with a woodcut image of demon on it; the text above it reads, “If you don’t know what to do, the demon below will lead you astray.”). It is dedicated to French philosopher and Christian mystic Simone Weil, and the story is quite spiritual, if not overtly religious, depending on one’s perspective. It seems to have very little to do with the isolated and insular world of video games as they are today. Traces of its influence are difficult to come by, and even those who do remember it tend to praise it in terms of its earliness and not its content. Macworld magazine once wrote (of the entirety of Monks), “Without this oddball product displaying the power and potential of hypermedia, applications such as the groundbreaking 1990s game Myst would likely never have appeared,” not something I am sure any working game designer I know would consider high praise.

Now, though, I feel we are better equipped to understand and to talk about something like Meat and Conversation. At the very least, we have a neat mental category for this kind of “oddball product,” the personal game with the big idea: the little art game, the indie apothegm. But while the examples of such that we experience today are often achingly conscious of themselves and the audience for which they are intended, Meat and Conversation feels refreshingly genuine, coming as it does to us from outside the gaming sphere– and outside time, for most intents and purposes. I submit it as an antecedent, nearly twenty years old now, that we should not neglect.

The real description of what I highlighted, then, might not have been “bad writing about games” so much as lazy or careless writing about games. Thankfully, since I began this blog I’ve discovered a lot of the opposite: thoughtful, intelligent writing about games, much of it off the Internet’s beaten paths, and completely free to read. It is written by a loose circle of critics, theorists and designers who clearly desire the same kinds of discussions that I had hoped to encourage with my possibly ill-advised and obnoxious browbeating of enthusiast outlets. In that sense, Bad Writing draws to a close with a happy ending. Or at least despite the occasional example I may yet happen upon, over which my friends and I’s laughter will indubitably continue.

In Braid, time does not flow like a stream, but is rewound constantly, in the manner of a person trying to figure out where it all went wrong, someone who constantly revisits his own mistakes in his mind until he decides what he ought to have done. The game does not just invite us to look backwards– we must travel backwards, again and again, in order to get anywhere at all. It examines time in a series of thought experiments: here is a world where it all runs in reverse. Here is one where traversal through space and time are inextricably linked. Here is one where multiple timelines exist simultaneously.

In Einstein’s Dreams, by Alan Lightman, the young patent clerk’s meditations on time in various fantastic configurations are what lead to his enlightenment about how it works in the world we know. His dreaming is the act of taking assumptions and seeing them through to their logical consequences and conclusions– a exercise of make-believe that leads to truth. But whereas Einstein’s Dreams took on the world, Braid takes on the past. The entirety of the game looks only backwards, save for a moment at the very end. The game is not just nostalgic, it positively drips with sentimentality at times. It gives us a world made out of clouds and great castle-building stones, where diffuse light shines from nowhere and everywhere at once. It makes constant retrograde reference to the unimpeachable classics of the Mario series. The text struggles with events from a hazy past, and the innocence of childhood comes up more than once. As we begin to play we are told not that we are searching for the princess, but that Tim is. We are not Tim, and we remain distant from him as we guide him through what appear to be the shards of his own shattered consciousness.

Braid’s breathtaking climax, in which a sequence played forwards is revealed to have another interpretation when seen backwards, is the game’s most clear articulation of the ideas behind the literary modernism in which it finds inspiration. By putting the princess on a pedestal, by defining her rigidly, Tim has not attained her but lost her entirely. The way we understand things is not linear, not always the orderly, gradual process we want it to be. Of course, the hunters for that singular interpretation, the Cliffs Notes writers, are given plenty of grist to chew upon. What do those cryptic snippets of text about candy stores and atomic bombs signify? Why are there alphabet blocks arranged in the traditional WASD pattern in Tim’s bathroom? Is speed run mode a bonus in the name of replayability, or part of what we should be analyzing, too? Are the piranha plants simply coy homages to Mario, or are they, too, suffused with some secret significance?

This is Braid’s troublesome aspect, to me– the way it tacitly encourages meaning-as-metagame, the idea that there is a single specific explanation to be found for it all, and Jonathan Blow’s assertion that nobody has yet done this (at least who has made their theory public). This attitude interprets critical thought as a kind of guessing game where, I am imagining, Blow will one day descend from his mountain fastness onto a blog, a forum or an academic conference and say, “yes, you got it– you win.” Although most of the extant purported explanations of which I am aware seem wrongheaded, I do not think it is really possible to have it both ways: in order to successfully convey meaning, one must either be didactic or acknowledge that interpretation will take place.

One of the tests of a great work, though, is how we can see ourselves in it. And I know what Braid is about for me. I recognize the way it loops back over itself constantly, revisiting and trying things a new way, the way its mechanics build in successive steps, fugue-like in its theme and variations, and the obtuseness of the puzzles themselves– the frustration when one gets stuck and the rush of the breakthrough when the way forward suddenly becomes clear. I recognize the longing for the spectral thing that may or may not exist, the employ and dead-end of pure science, the consuming need to somehow capture and regain an early magic that was lost. I recognize the triumph at the end when Tim resolves to build a castle out of “the moments he’s contemplated.” Braid is, of course, about the process of creation.

The anonymous days, however, are over. Now, the only people I can cause difficulty for are me and my wife (who is used to that idea). After many years of working on very big games I have decided to try something new. Floating untethered without an idea of exactly where one is headed is an odd sensation, but one that I hope will turn out to have been necessary: the right decision. I am designing and writing, and hopefully all of the game journalists who have held deep in their hearts fiery vendettas against me for lampooning their typos– I’m flattering myself, I know– will see fit to forgive, and look upon my future creations with a benign eye. Magical Wasteland will continue to be a place for my personal thoughts on games, and future updates on the other things will come from more appropriate venues. I’ll conclude this little announcement of a post with a quote that I hope I will not get in trouble for, from the good people of Bungie (whom I all still love dearly, don’t sue me please), occasioned by the studio’s triumphant, nearly miraculous departure from Microsoft on July 7th, 2007. “The road to World Domination,” they wrote, “is twisty, and paved with bumps, potholes and sweet, sweet jumps.”

The demo included only one area, though, and for my budding thesis I needed to see it all. I rented the Xbox 360 version only to find that one had to unlock cars and fast-travel heliport locations by actually winning races, something I very much did not want to do. So I returned the Xbox 360 version in exchange for the PlayStation 3 one– Sony’s platform for some reason being much more amenable to trading of save files. I found one on GameFaqs and, after some gentle persuasion to convince the system to accept the save as one I had created myself (and forty two suddenly-awarded trophies later), was soon exploring the full breadth of Fuel’s world.

I spent an eternity rocketing over nondescript plains, nondescript forests, and nondescript rocky hills. One area was supposed to be a salt flat, where a plane of white void stretched before me resembling nothing so much as a developer-only debug level. The world defied interpretation and understanding not in a profound way but in a way that irritates. The landscape was a nonsensical mishmash of geological formations and climates; the roads were incoherent cobwebs that only ever led to other roads. Trucks without payloads wandered aimlessly, failing to react even if you drove towards them head-on. Post-apocalyptic brigands apparently stored their most precious resource, the fuel of the title, in barrels randomly strewn about in the middle of nowhere. The coming of night was heralded by everything around me suddenly turning dark purple.

I’d been in a production of Waiting for Godot in my senior year of high school (the surrounding circumstances of which are too unbelievable to get into here), which we chose in part because of the ease with which it could be produced; as far as a set went, one really needed only a moon and a tree, and the more crude they were the more they could be said to hammer the point home. The entire play is spent waiting– waiting for something to happen that never does but that we always hope will, perhaps tomorrow. Fuel, I thought, might have transposed the waiting in Godot into the traversal of space, in that one can continue to traverse and traverse, always hoping something interesting will appear over the horizon, always thinking maybe, this time, I will actually get somewhere, a dream routinely dashed but never extinguished. I hopped around to different heliports in pursuit of points of interest (the game helpfully designates scenic lookouts for you). That the endless vistas and dramatic bridges and destroyed architecture I did see was only ever mildly impressive sewed up the whole disappointing package for me: racing endlessly through an indifferent world to see things that don’t even look that good.

In situations like this, one’s thoughts naturally turn to suicide, but perversely, the game does its best to prevent you from that escape, the one thing that would actually be fun in free-drive mode: careening off a cliff results in an immediate respawn, before your car can fall very far. Your car also cannot be flipped. It never takes visible damage. Like Sisyphus, your vehicle will always come back, new, and you will always be driving. Shadow of the Colossus– the game for which this blog is named and which I do intend, one day, to write about– gives us a wasteland that crackles with magical energy, where potential seethes in the air. Fuel is the opposite, massive and dead, a world from which all possibility has been drained.

The game, the play: we visit their worlds and then we are done with them. We, unlike the fiction upon which we spy, move on. I returned the game; the audience leaves the theatre. But somewhere out there, Vladimir and Estragon are still waiting.