Infinite Lives

Some time ago I stopped understanding how to use the Deli.cio.us cron; I’ve consequently relaxed in culling roundups of games-related writing I like. This, I think, is bad. I wonder how much terrific writing is slipping past me.

So I am back with an all new, not-automated Linksplosion.

By the way. It’s Death Week at Unwinnable, and I am very proud of its EIC, Stu Horvath. His piece, “On Death and Gaming,” was reprinted today at Kotaku.

The column stands on its own, but the explosion of reminiscence and reflection in the comments really underscores what cathartic, nourishing work Horvath has done.

There is a style of good experiential writing, and maybe it takes a certain type of experience, then, to know it when you see it. When people know it, though, they are on the same page. They gush. Check the comments. (Also, see the story’s second half. Also, there is newly a third act, which is the most fascinating of all of them, to me, except it waits until its very last paragraphs to even acknowledge video games. I think this is fine.)

The allure of “retro gaming” could well have a great deal to do with memory, with remembering where you were and what you were doing when you felt this one thing. I could make so much more fuss over why video games and death and loss and loneliness are all so connected, but I will stay simple, recommend that you read Stu’s articles, and encourage you to think about how video games connect to your own sense of grief and loss. Because it’s there, it’s there, even if you haven’t connected all these intermingling narratives yet.

I am also into emergent gaming and, uh, agoraphobia.

This is why I really appreciate writer Shaun Gannon’s piece “Professional Gamer.” Gannon has been experimenting with some different types of writing, and this one is maybe like a poem about fearfulness. I bet you’ll like it.

I shouldn’t try to explain anything else, and anyway, you people are not dense.

The website Critical Distance recently invited games writers to discuss “being other.”

Kotaku Australia editor Mark Serrels was up for the challenge, and his “Meeting My Daughter for the First Time (In the Sims)” really struck me.

I am scared of babies, but I am getting to the age where I ought to reconsider my worry, too. But there is a bigger thought, here—about avatars, about artifice, simulacra, that movie Synecdoche, NY—that also occurred to me. I like thinking about how we do and do not resemble our own avatars, about how self-perception is so skewed. But Serrels’ essay goes a step further.

I have heard of people using video game sports simulations to play “future games” and estimate sports brackets, as if sports video games could be accurate ecosystems anyway.

But suppose you were able to use a game to simulate your future son or daughter? Suppose you were secretly and grimly terrified about seeing the outcome? Suppose you played The Sims and discovered your own sense of relief? I am all for existentialism and all its blues, but this was a surprisingly pleasant column.

My friend Nick Disabato recently founded a quarterly print publication called Distance, which pledges to underscore “longform essays about design and technology.” It launches next month.

Nick himself is something of a comparative media Renaissance guy, and on the whole I trust his judgment. Last week he recommended I skim an excerpt from one of the magazine’s first essays. The piece was written by somebody named Benjamin Jackson. Nick suggested I might find Ben’s work “interesting.”

Um, yes. Yes, I found it interesting. Why, a week and a half earlier I had hemorrhaged something passingly similar to Ben’s excerpt, albeit nothing so cohesive.

You owe it to yourself to read Ben’s essay, too, because it connects seemingly disparate ideas about patternicity, carrot-dangling, “gambling,” and the ethics of the con:

It was later revealed that the machine, more commonly known as the Mechanical Turk, was an elaborately constructed ruse, where a highly-skilled human chess player of extremely small stature was hidden in the cabinet. Openings on the sides revealed gears, levers and machinery designed to misdirect the viewer into thinking that the Baron had devised some mechanical means of intelligently responding to a player’s moves.

The Mechanical Turk is an early example of unethical game design. Later examples include three-card monte, in which a spectator is shown a card, is asked to follow it with their eyes, and is then misled into following the wrong card. Many casino games are unethical: for example, slot machines usually randomize their payouts to ensure that players keep coming back, even when they’re clearly losing money. But unethical traits can appear in any game, no matter how subtle, and a recent crop of games shows a fuzzier moral ground.

The primary characteristic of unethical games is that they are manipulative, misleading, or both. From a user experience standpoint, these games display dark patterns: common design decisions that trick users into doing something against their will. Dark patterns are usually employed to maximize some metric of success, such as email signups, checkouts, or upgrades; they generally test well when they’re released to users.

For example, FarmVille, Tap Fish, and Club Penguin take advantage of deep-rooted psychological impulses to make money from their audiences. They take advantage of gamers’ completion urge by prominently displaying progress bars that encourage leveling up. They randomly time rewards in much the same way as the slot machines described above. And they spread virally by compelling players to constantly post requests to their friends’ walls.

This trend is not just limited to social games, though: many combat games, like America’s Army, are funded by the U.S. military and serve as thinly-veiled recruitment tools5. Some brands have launched Facebook games like Cheez-It’s Swap-It!, and they serve as tools to sell more products. These techniques can be used in any sort of game, in any context.

What, with all these concurrent ideas about “scams,” is Ben readying to describe to us?

ZYNGA. He is about to discuss ZYNGA.

A longer excerpt appeared this afternoon at The Atlantic. Now you can really see how cohesive Ben’s piece is. It is all about the maturation of the con, how Zynga lands us, hook, line, and sinker.

Here is an especially magnetic aside about “what” makes a “game” “good,” and why we might choose to invest in any game the way we do (it strongly borrows from the sociological idea of “cost,” wherein every human relationship is a type of transaction):

At IndieCade in October 2011, Adam Saltsman, Canabalt’s creator, discussed the notion of “time until death.” All of us have a finite amount of time on earth, and any time we spend on a particular activity is time that we can’t spend doing something else. This means that the time we spend gaming represents most of a game’s cost of ownership, far more than any money that we spend. If that time is enjoyable (or rather, if its benefits outweigh its costs), then the game was worth our time.

Really exciting stuff; I can’t wait to see what the entire essay contains.

You can help Nick Disabato kickstart Distance over here.

Strap in! I’m not sure how much I can—or want!—to tell you about this gallery show, but know this: it opens on February 11, and there will be art. Details forthcoming.

I posted these to my Twitter account this morning, but here they are again: two ads from the November 1998 issue of Teen People.

There’s something anachronistically stylized—very late-80s/early-90s, I mean—about the forced perspective in this 1998 Game Boy Camera ad. Like, why is his hand way up here when the rest of his body is way over there? I don’t know.

The print ad for Girl Talk: the CD-ROM Game of Truth or Dare was what really gave me the heebie-jeebies, though. “It’s just like life but with better graphics,” the ad copy touts. Oh, dear. Worse, if I am interpreting correctly, there is single-player mode. So you are a 12-year-old girl playing Truth or Dare, at your desk, alone. That’s… well, it sounds a lot like my preteen years, OK, but my mother really tried her best to not encourage that type of loneliness.

I have the 1990 edition of the Girl Talk board game (I have it right here, actually), which was really only a pinker redesign of the original 1988 Girl Talk. Since my own girlhood, the game has been rehabbed as Hannah Montana Girl Talk, That’s So Raven Girl Talk, and—yes, I saw it in a Toys ‘R Us—Bratz Girl Talk. (Up-to-the-minute variants on Truth or Dare include “Girl Talk Sassy Stix” and Girl Talk Sparkle Spots.”

So I am staring at this ad for PC multimedia Girl Talk and I’m just like, I have no idea whether that were a good idea.

This Christmas I told my mother about Mohan Srivastava, some dude I first started thinking about ten-and-a-half months ago. Back then I’d written some diary thingie about “cheating,” “stealing,” and “cons.” The February 2011 issue of Wired was about all those things, too—the magazine had included an article about Mohan Srivastava—and reading the magazine was the first time I ever thought more carefully about “game-breaking” and morality. (Belated edit: I just remembered how much I like this book also.)

Over the holidays, my mother and I were watching an episode of The Mentalist together, which I like to watch with my mother sometimes because, even though it is a terrible television show, I like the idea of the main character being a mentalist and skeptic. A mentalist understands all these little rules about people (like how to perform a “cold reading”), and the hero of the TV show uses these talents for good.

This particular episode was about a town where all its residents are obsessed with finding veins of gold. The fictional people in this fictional town are all looking for gold but they are sidelining their lives to pursue it: going broke, wasting money on mining gear, alienating family, pinning every hope to finding those riches. (The episode is also about scams and cons, so I was really enjoying it, even though it was just as mediocre of every other episode of The Mentalist.)

“This really happens!” I said to my mother during a commercial. “People really waste their lives trying like this! On a pipe dream. It’s all just gambling,” I concluded. I was thoughtful.

“Haven’t I told you about Mohan Srivastava?” I asked my mother then. “The geological statistician?”

Srivastava is a type of statistician who consults the evidence, runs the variables through a complicated algorithm the rest of us will never understand, and thereby deduces the location of gold veins. So it turns out that locating a vein of gold is already a “solved game,” just like chess but more intricate.

This isn’t why Srivastava is famous; there are other geological statisticians who can also do what he does. Instead, Srivastava is famous because he realized “solving” the lottery isn’t so unlike “solving” the location of little streaks of gold in rock, and so Srivastava used the same rules and algorithms he already used for his job until, finally, he could no longer “lose” the lottery.

I think my favorite part about the gAtari 2600—besides, you know, the body of the guitar is an actual 2600—is how the “frets” are just these ginormous footpedals, all fused onto the “fingerboard” in a row.

No, I realize the pedals are actually being used to play loops (Right?? And then the “whammying”), but they look hilarious. This machine does not sound hilarious, however. Rather, it sounds awesome.

• Hack A Day – The GATARI “2600” Musical Instrument

• cTrix

This video has been around for maybe a day and a half, tops—in Internet Time, it’s already months old—but I really enjoyed its not-too-malicious dramatic reenactment of the dumbest, most interesting Holiday Shopping Nightmare human interest story ever told in 2011.

Also, Revision3’s Anthony Carboni is nowhere near jacked enough to play Paul, the villain in this melodrama, and this bit of miscasting is charming all on its own. (Kotaku and Escapist have the full deets, but the video might be enough.)

There are a lot of things about this I don’t understand. I don’t quite understand why “Dave,” the unhappy customer, forwarded his ongoing, charged email exchange to Mike Krahulik (“Gabe” of Penny Arcade, AKA the hotheaded one), except that Dave needed some muscle on his side. Mike tried his best to mediate, which is weird enough anyway, but there was little reasoning with “Paul,” the erstwhile giant of PR (whether he is even a PR guy is up for debate) who until recently had mishandled the marketing for some weird video game peripheral. Which, if you are wondering, did not ship in time for the holidays, and how dare you email Paul about this, Dave.

In a way I do feel bad for Paul. When a shipment is trapped in customs, you might feel helpless, especially when the holdup is not your fault. You can’t get frustrated with other people, though. Like, you just can’t.

So it turns out Paul might be a little bit of a nutjob; unsurprisingly, Paul no longer has a job.

And yet, and yet. There is so much pleasure—so much schadenfreude!—to be derived from this entire Greek tragedy, and I’m trying to wrap my head around why I’m getting off on it, along with the rest of the mob. It’s just so much fun to see a juiced-up marketing guy finally get peed on, isn’t it?

But why do we even feel that way?

Scapeghost

AKA Spook
Level 9 · text adventure · text parser · 1989
Platform · Amiga · Amstrad CPC · Atari 8-bit · Atari ST · C64 · DOS · ZX Spectrum
Download · DOS · Spectrum

There is only one reason I would ever deign to tell you about some boring old text adventure, and here it is: Scapeghost is awesome.

For one thing, the game is well-written—we hardly get to applaud computer games for good writing anymore!—and for another, it is authentically creepy.

A lot of the creep factor is indebted to the atmospheric artwork that accompanies each new location’s block of text. (One 1990 review calls the VGA art “photorealistic,” which, no, but all the versions really are very good.) You can’t interact with the pictures—that’s the sort of thing you’d find in Déjà Vu, a super-duper-early Macintosh point-and-click adventure game—but each backdrop goes a long way in establishing the setting’s grim moodiness.

You were Alan Chance. You were a good cop; now you’re a dead cop. You were trying to bust a dirty drug deal and now, in death, everyone assumes the worst about you. You wake up at your own funeral. You can practically taste the mist.

From the get-go, this adventure is slim on real mystery. If you already know to follow the one especially-suspicious dude, he basically confesses to your murder under his breath. God, why do murderers always talk to themselves? I ask you.

So you already know the identity of the two-timing detective who offed you. All that’s left is to vindicate your own death… FROM BEYOND THE GRAAAAAAVE.

Sierra is pleased to present this living Christmas card. It is intended to help you demonstrate the color and sound capabilities possible with today’s personal computers while promoting the Christmas spirit within your store.

As an added bonus, you may customize this program each time you run it with a message of your own. This allows you to advertise your sale items, or to wish your customers a Merry Christmas in your own words.

This program is hard disk installable and is meant to be run in the morning and left running all day.

After what seemed like ages The King of Fighters XIII has finally come out to consoles, bringing a gameplay style and aesthetic practically lost to the modern clump of fighting games. Gorgeous hand-drawn 2D spritework with a combat system that values smart gameplay and skill over comeback mechanisms, it is exactly what I’ve been wanting in a fighting game for a long time, and hopefully heralds SNK’s big break back into the US fighting game market. Sadly, the man who really brought me into the Neo Geo gaming fold, the man who was a die-hard fan of SNK’s games in general and the KOF series in particular, passed away a year ago, on October 16, 2010.

That man, Kinn (also known by his handle “Robotron,” or by his real name, Kim) was more than just another guy who played video games in the Metro Detroit area. He was a patriarch to the gaming scene who worked to foster a sense of community, and whose breadth of classic gaming knowledge made him nigh-unstoppable in games such as Mr. Do, Burgertime, and Zanac. An old school player through and through, Kinn grew up in the heyday of arcades in the late 70s through the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s. He worked in arcades, won local tournaments in games like Robotron: 2084 (leading to his handle) and generally enjoyed gaming as a pastime on par with fishing, comic books, and cheesy science fiction featuring robots. Naturally he picked up the consoles of the day as well, and even started importing Japanese games in the early 90s once catalogs became available to purchase them through.

After a grievous injury on the job, Kinn lost his left leg, limiting his chances to take part in his more active hobbies and exacerbating preexisting health problems he already had to deal with, and so he spent more of his time with games and movies at home. While he did not entirely eschew modern gaming systems and genres, from the Dreamcast era on he focused his new purchases on arcade-style shooters (shmups, STGs, whatever you want to call them), multiplayer games such as Mario Kart, classic games, and of course, fighting games. Due to this fairly small trickle of new content he was picking up –- both domestically and imported –- he was able to focus much of his new-game budget on the newest releases for his favorite console, the Neo Geo, right up until the end of the console’s run, topping off at over 60 games before he ultimately sold the whole thing. In context, these were all critical components to a weekly event he held at his house off of 8 Mile since the 90s, known as Friday Night Gaming, or FNG.

Put your pants back on and take that seat over there. Good, thanks. Let’s hash some things out.

Let me start by reminding you that I’m a girl. Not only that, I’m an angry girl.

Joel Johnson, Kotaku’s fairly-recently-appointed Editorial Director, posted a little article titled “The Equal Opportunity Perversion of Kotaku.” (Evidently, Johnson has been taking a lot of flack for Kotaku’s new editorial direction[s], which is increasingly fluid and interesting.)

And I enjoyed the post on its own terms because, let’s face it, it is filed under a blog category titled “Fan Service.” So the post was very conspicuously directed at Kotaku’s “old guard”: here, of course, I mean the Internet’s loathsomely entitled commenters, who are mostly white and heterosexual, and male, who might fulfill almost every possible permutation of “ordinary” and “normal,” and who tend to shriek for the smelling salts anytime a lady or queer struggles into their line-of-sight. (This is a terrible stereotype to perpetuate, yes, yes, and Gawker’s own comments sections do a bang-up job of perpetuating it, not for any fault of its editors.) But let’s be coolheaded. When you deal with that type of readership, you have to be very caring and compassionate and patient, even when you don’t want to be, and so you assert things in a debilitatingly accessible way.

“What’s happening to my precious Kotaku?” the old guard must have screamed through the tips of its nervous little fingers, illuminated as one in the glow of the laptop’s screen.

So Johnson defended all of Kotaku’s editorial decisions, and his argument was compelling, and if you aren’t going to just look at the post I’d better do my best to recount it:

Johnson did anticipate that some readers would have difficulty reconciling Kotaku’s overt legacy of, say, cosplay galleries, with Kotaku’s now-implicit stance on genderjamming. So naturally, he combined both arguments into a single blog entry. Maybe he shouldn’t have tried. Listen boys, he might as well have said, you can screech about “what’s with the scary minorities on my video game blog all of a sudden” as much as you like, but it’s about as ‘normal’ to love tits wrapped in cosplay as it is to be ‘into’ anything else. That was his argument to these folks in a nutshell.

And Johnson posited this assertion in a way that heteronormative fellows who have never had their realities rocked might understand, and he pursued his argument to its logical conclusion, which is that we all fetishize something—like it or not, I’ve seen Dan Savage make this exact same argument in his columns about sex and love—and maybe you fetishize cars, computers, video games, politics, girls dressed up as Soul Calibur characters, chubby people, Japanese things, French things, your own sex, whips and chains, quoting Jesus when you do it, whatever. And if you’re fetishizing—as opposed to exoticizing, right—what’s ‘normal’ versus ‘abnormal’ is kind of beside the point. You’re into what you’re into, and that is in some way neurologically hardwired.

Besides! Johnson sagely added, the site is actually called Kotaku, which riffs on the word otaku, which lends the notion that it’s, uh, cool to be into whatever you’re into. So let’s all be good people; let’s not fracture in dissent. Thanks!

Johnson posted all of this, not as an editor, but as a moderator. He explained all the sides of everything that has ever been, ever, just as well as he could. Maybe it got a little mangled in translation. Sure.

He probably posted all this and then ducked for cover, and with plenty of reason: every pocket of enthusiast readership he could have humanly offended was sure to let him know.

Jeesh, how had I ever missed this? It’s called “Colossal Katamari,” and I guess Joystiq reported on it in 2006 (the year in which I continue to live, apparently). And! It’s MS Paint. MS Paint, you guys.

I feel like you can get a much better feel for it at the link, so go look. And use the little zoom buttons!

• Pixel Joint – Colossal Katamari

I am about to try something really new. I’ve said that before, but this time I definitely totally mean it.

Lately, I have been getting messages from friends (Allan) about an essay of mine that appeared in Kill Screen Magazine, Issue 3: Intimacy. People, this thing was published in April. Come on.

Obviously I think you should buy the US$15 magazine, which is still available. I know a lot of people get irritated at the idea of spending that kind of money on printed media, which baffles me, but some people believe everything should be online for free. They’ve gotten used to a certain type of accessibility, and I guess that’s OK.

There are a lot of reasons you should buy the magazine, though. For one, it isn’t that old, and it’s a really good issue, and $15 isn’t that much money, and you will have this magazine forever, unless you lose it. For two, we need to support print media right now. (This is very much like a plea I meant to post back in April.) For my own part, I was already paid for my contribution to the magazine, so just buy the magazine, already. For another, we owe the person who ably and singlehandedly edited the piece, writer Chris Dahlen, because he really did do most of the work. Without a good editor, I A) would have given up, or B) would have written something much longer/shorter/worse, but probably just option A.

I wrote this essay, “All the Spaces Between Us,” very specifically for Kill Screen Magazine. It had occurred to me to pitch it to Chris one night in the car, I think in October 2010, when I was going down the highway. (This is how the magic happens, you guys.)

I realized I had some things I wanted to talk about, but if I wanted to go all the way, all-in, I’d have to write for print. That’s because the printed word affords you a freedom you don’t really get with Internet writing. Everyone can see Internet writing and then pass it around, so you have to watch what you say. Plus you don’t want to experiment with putting your whole soul on the line for strangers, and then here comes Joe Dickhead in the comments, picking it apart. Listen, Dickhead! That’s what college was for! OK!

With print, though, people have to pay for the privilege of taking your writing seriously, and because your writing isn’t very muscular anyway, a lot of people are going to flip past your essay. That’s a very freeing feeling, to know that a lot of people won’t stop to read, or else they will get exhausted and stop reading before you ever start making your Very Important Points.

I have, more than once, written in defense of Love Plus, a game I have never even played. (In fact, I have only played and critiqued one high school dating simulation, Brooktown High for PSP. My review appeared in Electronic Gaming Monthly in 2007; I remember feeling very conflicted, because that game was hardly The Worst.)

In early 2010, the Japanese-language dating simulation got a ton of maybe-undue coverage, mostly because the types of people we figure are playing Love Plus on their Nintendo DSes are, we imagine, Akihabara-dwelling hikikomori who have never touched a breast that isn’t made of plasticized vinyl.

In April of last year, I admittedly got a little agitated and said too, too much about Love Plus+’s “Rest Mode.” Soon after that post, someone anonymously asked me to go into more detail, so I did:

…I can’t condemn a love simulation like Love Plus+ because that game only asks the heart to do real things in artificial situations.

Much worse, I think, is behaving artificially during true situations. And that is a truly human behavior. I guess in that way, some games train us to be better than ourselves.

So if Love Plus+ really is about manipulating girls and playing romantic odds, to hell with it. But if it instead teaches painful moments of human connection, which are rare in these times, that’s awesome! Embrace it! “Personal Trainer: Heartbreak.”

The point of all this is, I’ve always wanted to play Love Plus, since God knows I’ve already stormed the Internet with all my readymade assessments of the game. No more excuses: an English-language fan translation is now available as a patch.

• Tiny Cartridge – Lonely no more: full English translation patch released for Love Plus

From a longwinded, boring diary entry wherein I transcribe notes on a panel/Q&A/lecture with comix author Chris Ware, dated May 9, 2010:

That is because comics use space instead of time (McCloud, Understanding Comics).

Also, speaking of space-as-time, as the eye travels from (in our English-speaking world) left to right, the eye’s spatial movement conveys the illusion of the passage of time. And after all, the passage of time itself is illusory. So what happens on the left side of a panel happens before what happens on the right side of the same panel, and the eye arrives at each spot and puts them into that spatial/time order, into sequence. Or! If a panel makes your eye jump left and right and left and right, as with speech bubbles in a dialogue, you interpret it as a fast exchange, bullets shot back and forth in almost a single moment. And! A long panel is a long moment, or maybe a long sequence of moments, and a huge panel with not too much inside of it is a perfect and lingering, cinematic Tarkovsky moment which, you know, is the exact opposite of montage. So I want them to all talk about that.

During the Q&A session, and I do not know this yet, they’ll get to it.

[…]

Here come questions about scripting a story in advance. Do you? Do you script your stories? Ray [Ray Pride, the panel’s moderator] wants to know.

This question made me think about college and about Professor Gary Saul Morson’s excellent textbook, Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time, which is important for you to read if you have any interest at all in not-linear, unscripted literature, and also especially Slavic literature, which is Professor Morson’s mode. That book is about time, chance, and narrative possibilities (McCloud’s Understanding Comics is about space, chance, and narrative possibilities, so there is your connective tissue).

[…]

Morson’s book is also pretty great if you like the idea that morality is grounded in all things being changeable. What I mean is, a lot of Doomsday Christians, right, excuse themselves from accountability because they believe we are driving toward a predetermined ending anyway. Eschatology allows for incredible human unkindness: if all that matters is the Next Life, what shit ought we give about one another in this life? And so we are preoccupied with saving one another’s souls when maybe instead we ought to pay more thought to how we are planning to feed, clothe, and shelter one another, etc etc. So if you believe in determinism, and I try so hard not to, how can you believe in living ethically also?

Anyway, “narrative freedom” is an important point to stress, because how can a story, told in seeming sequence, be full of narrative possibility, if it is true that the story is also barreling toward a predetermined end? How can that be so? Morson’s book is about that, about how the two can impossibly happen at the same time, and so is McCloud’s.

And actually, I have always dreamed of Chris Ware talking about this, because in his stories’ architectures maybe you are not always sure of which direction your eye ought to travel (or, and so, in which direction “time” and sequence ought to be moving), or in which order you ought to read, but his storytelling itself is good enough (and seemingly pre-plotted enough!) that the story works in all radiating directions, and so, in navigating the seemingly sequential narrative, you are free to wander and choose.

Here I have written in parentheses, “video games too,” and I don’t remember why.

But maybe this is an OK thought because, say, the Astro Boy game for GBA is about hopping around through “time.”

Like, OK, in any 2D platformer, time is plotted as “stages” (or “levels” or “boards”), and these are basically panels that usher you through the “timeline” of a game. And that’s interesting because if you are “stuck” on a level and can’t pass it, you’re basically locked in this stagnant moment in time and story. So Astro Boy is a pretty normal 2D platformer, and you play through levels like normal, as in any game. But when you are made to play through the narrative again, or maybe not directly play through, but “revisit” the stages, I guess—and this is happening in the game because, as Astro Boy, you have to make something right in another place and time, looking for the spots where a time-traveling villain has changed the narrative timeline to suit his own nefarious ends—you play the levels out-of-original-and-established-sequence and not-linearly, and there are all these clever little narrative changes happening in the levels as you are revisiting them.

Or, OK, I like Braid, and while I’ve long since lost my notes on Braid, that game is about time being represented spatially—like, in some stages moving left-to-right makes time move forward, and in kind, moving right-to-left makes time go backward—and you play through the levels asequentially, or you can revisit narrative sections on a whim, and so on. And that game is all about stopping time and reversing it so that you can rectify your mistakes: you have second, third, fifth, millionth chances to make things right again, not only as a gamer who made a concrete misstep, but also as a human who is incapable of loving people the way they wish you would love them. I think that’s what the story is about, anyway. Maybe it isn’t.

Or, maybe—I’m not sure why I wrote “video games too” in parentheses, remember—maybe I’m not thinking about different ways to afford a gamer his own narrative freedoms at all. Maybe I am wondering instead about what would happen if a game were not too, too well scripted before its developer actually began working on it. That could be why I prefer smaller, low-budge games to big-budge AAA games, which are terribly scripted and, also, terribly scripted.

On scripting, Ware—who pre-plots sort of, kind of, but not especially so—sez: “Scripting seems to make both the reading and the drawing of the work ‘drearily boring’”

I like that idea, too, because it’s easy to forget that, as a writer and illustrator, the not-knowing, the wide open possibility, is preferable to the mundanity of always-knowing, or always driving ahead according to preset goals.