Tag: World disclosure

Powers of Four: Setting

Published by Graham on October 18, 2018

One of the first things I did when my HDD quit after seven years was choose which games to reinstall. I decided that Skyrim was on the list. I have on various occasions tried a second playthrough but for some reason August was a better time than others. I think one of the reasons why I got back into a video game from 2011 is that Tamriel is an extremely rich setting, and the writing is detailed but not overbearing. For example, I chose not to care about the civil war quest line at first because I remembered more about it from my most recent attempt at a playthrough. I thought I was bored with that part. But then I tried to explain to my wife the differences between the Empire and the Stormcloaks and found myself having to take a lot of time to do it properly. Once I got into talking about the facts about both sides I found that there was something to care about even if clearing forts is a little tedious. Despite a little bit of corny dialog, the setting is highly consistent and does not engage in much absurdity. Other games with different kinds of settings, like Great Ork Gods, crank up the absurdity because it’s fun. This is something I and the storyteller from my recent campaign identified as one of the key choices to make.

Sure, the placement is glitchy and the object (body) really should have been removed upon reload, but I feel like this is a good representation of how the Stormcloak Rebellion went for Ulfric in this playthrough.

One of the goals I have as a DM is to run a campaign, not necessarily a super-long one, but something more aptly called a campaign rather than an adventure where people love the setting so much that they want me to run something else in the same setting and/or seek permission to run something in that setting themselves. I don’t expect it will ever compete with Forgotten Realms as a setting, but it would melt my heart if someone could ask for a setting by name rather than “the same world as your last campaign.” One of the things I will be watching closely is the consistency/absurdity balance. As the person running the show I will need to keep the group interested while also considering what I want to build, which will definitely skew towards the consistent. I really don’t appreciate when I or someone else really wants to do build up a world that exists in our imaginations beyond the field of view of the player characters, but others insist on making it into a farce of pop culture references and self-parody. It’s fine to do those things as long as that’s the kind of game the group has agreed to play, but it’s something I find harder to enjoy than when it’s baked into the game from the start. Going from consistent to absurd usually doesn’t work well for me.

However, as much as it is jarring when it gets dark and serious in a setting where I expected something more along the lines of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, I find it preferable to the reverse (going from consistent to absurd). There is one time that stands out to me where something shed a lot of its absurdity; I actually enjoyed it a lot. I was a player in a Risus campaign which started as a fandom mashup of stuff our group liked, but as we probed into the penal system of a very “enlightened” civilization we came to the horrifying realization that in their desire to eschew traditional prisons they invented a new kind of psychological torture. This wasn’t originally the intention, but if I am going to have intentions about this sort of thing, I hope to be able to strike the balance as well as it was done in that campaign.

As much as I enjoy Skyrim, I can see getting into something more absurd again as long as it’s the kind of game that my group wants to play at the time. Whether by meticulous planning or by skillful improv, it’s something that I think is really important to consider in some way.

The Quiet Con

Published by Graham on May 7, 2018

This weekend (Friday evening May 4, 2018 to Saturday night on May 5) was the first spring iteration of Edmonton’s IntrigueCon. I had a great time playing some 5e D&D (and running it for the first time) and playing a flavour of World of Darkness that I hadn’t tried before. As much fun as those sessions were, I have to say that the most interesting game to talk about wouldn’t be any of those. It would be the one that involved no dice rolling and drawing a map on the paper table covers.

The Quiet Year is a game that uses nothing but pencils, paper, a few six-sided dice, and a standard deck of playing cards in addition to the rule booklet. There were no grand maps of the city of Waterdeep at this table nor any carefully arranged dungeon maps. Although there are a few rules to pull the game along to its conclusion in an orderly fashion, the rules have very little impact on the success or failure of the fictional civilisation being rebuilt.

The first thing we did was set the scene by drawing a coastline, a river, and some mountains to frame the area.

This is how it works: a society has suffered a catastrophic conflict with “the Jackals” and have four seasons to rebuild until the “Frost Shepherds” arrive to mark the end of the game. What the Jackals are (literal canines, gang members, aliens) is not specified, nor is the precise cause of the fall, nor what the Frost Shepherds are. This means that this game can be played out as a science fiction adventure on an alien world, as a medieval high fantasy, or anything else a person might come up with. In our case, we went with a fairly plain post-apocalypse theme.

Extremely well-drawn golden idol — *The discovery of this expertly-drawn golden idol buried in the clay near the river bank was a result of drawing a card directing the player to discover an omen of some kind.*

On each turn, the players draw a card and play out the corresponding events from the booklet. This may direct players to choose what shortages or abundances of resources there are, or do something specific with the map. There is often an OR choice on these events and there is nothing regulating how many times the players can choose the good (or at least less-bad) event over the worse one. After playing the card, the player may make their own choice of starting a discussion, adding something to the map, or beginning a project of their choice. Again, there is nothing stopping the players from making oh-so-convenient resources readily available, that fill the gaps in resources, and that are close to an idea plot of land to build a village on. Players may also start a crisis for the community with forest fires and poisoned rivers. It is entirely up to the players at the table whether this is a legend of prosperous pioneers or a tragic tale of woe and misery in the twilight of human civilization.

*Dice are used as counters for how many turns it will be until the project is complete.*

As the game progresses, players add projects to the map and use the dice as counters: projects may take up to six weeks (each turn is one week), and this timeline is set entirely at the discretion of the player placing it on the map. The only limiting factor is that there are a set number of project dice to be deployed at any given time, so players are occasionally compelled to choose between starting a community discussion or adding a new feature to the map instead if there are too many projects active.

*This is what we had created when the game ended. The clear conclusion is that none of us are taking the plunge into making a living as a freelance illustrator.*

The whole experience was a lot different that the tabletop games with wargame ancestors. This was as much of a collaborative storytelling experience it could be while still being a game rather than a writers’ circle. Looking back on how much stress I was experiencing in trying to get my dungeon set up and getting players set up with suitable characters for D&D, I really see the value in a game like this where there is no preparation required and no storyteller/GM/DM to have expectations of. In being so minimal in its restrictions on players it really allows something interesting to develop at the game table. As excited as I am to run another 5e scenario at IntigueCon’s main event in October, this is the game I am going to remember for being something different.

There Is A Good Chance I May Have Committed Some Light Cheating

Published by Graham on January 13, 2018

Cheating sounds like a bad word. In video games is a good way to get yourself instantly banned from popular online services. But what is cheating when it comes to recreational video games? When there is potentially money on the line it could be an issue of basic fairness, but in a private instance of a game where no money or fame is on the line it is merely a self-imposed standard not to spoil the game. Those who remember the video games of the 90’s and early 00’s can probably still name their favourite cheat codes. In the hands of a person who is simply playing (rather than testing, demonstrating, or reviewing) the game these are basically spoilers: you can get on with the plot, see the “victory” screen and all that without being subjected to the challenges inherent in the game. This, in itself, is not immoral. Only when one brags about having beat the game does it become so, and in that case, it’s not the dodging of the rules itself but attempting to lie to people about how you got to the end. For oneself, the only reason not to cheat is to be able to enjoy the game as it was intended and to preserve your own belief that you are progressing fair and square.

But what about a sandbox-ish game where there isn’t an “end” where the credits roll and the game is over? In Your Own Objectives I wrote about what I am doing in Terraria where there is a boss monster progression but the building and crafting game is largely up to the player to decide what their goals are. In pursuit of my goal of ridding the world of the crimson blight legitimately (that is, within the play of the game rather than simply deleting it with a third-party map editor), I hit a wall at 1% as reported by the Dryad NPC. I thoroughly excavated large areas of the world in an effort to eradicate the crimson. But, eventually, the reality that I can’t spend all of my time tracking down that one last block I missed caused me to break down and download a map viewer called TerraMap. I used that to highlight all remaining crimson tiles. It showed me where that one last block was, as seen in the screenshot below.

*See the red thing? No, not the arrow. That is the cursor. Right under my character.*

I went and removed that one tiny little piece of red ice. But, when I went back to the Dryad, she still reported that my world was 1% crimson. How can that possibly be?!? I went back to TerraMap. The only thing it highlighted were not terrain blocks, but the locations of various chests, and then it finally occurred to me: the reason the chests were being highlighted was that the Dryad was reporting on the crimstone blocks inside the chests. I never would have guessed this if I had dug out every last one of the approximately five million blocks in a small world if TerraMap had not given me the hint. None of the forums and wikis that I usually use as a companion to the game ever mentioned blocks inside of chests. Now, armed with that knowledge, I was able to go through and dispose of the blighted blocks that were safely ensconced in boxes but counted nevertheless. The Dryad now reports complete purity of the world.

Was that cheating more than using the wiki to look up crafting recipes instead of manually presenting materials to the Guide NPC inside the game? More than when I found this forum post that tells a person how to make horizontal tunnels through sand in apparent defiance of how sand is supposed to work in the game? Yes, in the sense that the map editor did not merely relay general knowledge but actually read data from game files and presented it in a way not possible within the game itself. If I was absolutely true to my original goal of making a tamed world without reducing it to pixel art created in a map editor then I sure did cheat. However, as far as my enjoyment of the game goes, it is infinitely greater than if I had insisted on continuing the hunt for the last block even after that angled ice block pictured above was found. And I don’t use that word lightly: if I had stuck to my goal without giving up AND stuck to an absolute standard of purity then my enjoyment of the game would have been zero. So take any number of seconds I will spend enjoying the game from this point forward, then divide by zero.

So, back to building pyramids for now. Will I load up TerraMap again? I can’t promise I won’t. But neither do I think that the ongoing project of a small world that is completely under control will be illegitimate if I need a second hint in the event that my post-hardmode world has one of those tiny angled blocks that escape the cleantaminator sweeps. There are things I am willing to do in pursuit of an in-game goal, and things I would be willing to “cheat” to avoid if it leads to less spoiling of the enjoyment of the game rather than more.

The Partial Success

Published by Graham on November 4, 2017

“Here, try reading this,” my dad says. He is, in his retirement, enrolled in Latin classes. He hands me a printout of a passage that he had been looking at for his class. Not being fluent in any of the modern Latin languages, let alone the original, I certainly was not able to understand the whole thing. But between the cognates between English and Latin, cultural and scientific loan words, and cognates with the little French and Spanish that I have dabbled in, I was able to make out a few of the words.

Libro, Satyricon, celebrato, monstrum, lupus, ferrous, argentum. I don’t read or speak Latin, didn’t understand that it was a reference to a specific tale of a werewolf, but I managed to figure out that the passage was a reference to a book full of monstrous beasts of fantasy. My immediate thought was that I wish I did more of this at the D&D table. I think there is an unfortunate tendency towards the simplification of interpreting languages that aren’t “Common” which is a euphemism for English. Players are usually eager to check their character sheets to see if, by virtue of being a Dwarf, that it was Goblin or Giant or Orcish that they are assumed to be able to speak. But without the rule book saying that their character by virtue of race or class speaks the language fluently, the player might give up right away.

*What about Giant? Can someone try talking to them in Giant? No? How about Goblin?*

I can also appreciate as a DM who has definitely run some sessions with less time to prepare than what was desired, that it is a lot of work to either plan or improvise these extra steps rather than calling for an intelligence check, picking a number between one and twenty, and then either giving the player the page from your notes detailing what the ancient stele has written on it, or give them nothing if they fail. However, there are some things when it comes to extra effort on the DM’s part that makes more of a difference than others. As much as I like making visual maps, I have to admit that it’s not the highest priority a DM should have. One thing that I think does make a big difference is allowing for the partial success. An experience like the one I had in real life can make things really interesting. Think about it… rather than just having a scroll of unintelligible writing in their inventory, your players could get: something something vampire, something something cave, something something priestess. Even without expertise and/or the favour of the dice, this could be enough to keep them going on a (mis)adventure.

I don’t know if this is going to make it into the very next game that I run, but I do hope to remember that little moment I had when challenging players to try and make some sense of something that isn’t written in their everyday language. Overcoming a challenge should not always be an all-or-nothing scenario, especially not when it’s trying to pick apart a written text at the characters’ leisure. I think a really good DM is one who can make partial successes the most meaningful rather than reducing the game to rolling high numbers on polyhedral dice. As a player I would certainly rather go ahead with a partial success than be told “no” and get stuck because of that 3 on a d20. In a game of fantasy we’re certainly foolish to expect everything to be “realistic” but a little dash of realism here and there to make it feel like the character’s situation is a life that a person could live helps players feel more invested in their characters than in their dice.

Today (November 4, 2017) is officially the game day for Extra Life, but my team is holding our private event next week. If you have not yet done so, please consider clicking here to contribute to my page. Note that this year I decided to try something different and play in support of the CMN hospital in Puerto Rico because I am sure they can use some extra help. I will play for my home town again next year. I don’t know how long after official game day that my donation page will be available, so if you have the means and the inclination please don’t delay any further.

Next week, Alastair continues his Full Steam Ahead series with Street Fighter IV. If all goes well with running a tabletop adventure with my Extra Life group, I will post all of the DM’s notes with additional commentary on November 18th.

Myth and Place

Published by Graham on March 25, 2017

Every game occurs in a place. Each instance of a finite game, certainly, has a very specific place it occurs. Superbowl LI tool place at NRG Stadium, Houston, Texas. In general, American football takes place not in a specific place, but at any number of places that can be considered football fields. But we know that American football, especially at the college and professional level, is not just a matter of a ball and players on a field with goalposts. It is a cultural phenomenon. To really be what it is, it must either take place in the USA or if it happens somewhere else then that place must be seen as an other place, a different place, considered in relation to the USA. In Canada, we have Canadian football, which is a very similar game. It is not the same game, not just because of the small differences in rules, but also because the places where it happens are different.

The American election of 2016, a political game, also took place in the USA. There are many differences between that and Superbowl LI, but the thing they have in common is that both are, to some extent, affected by the fact that their place is in the USA. The existence of such a place rests on its mythology. It is therefore inevitable that the game is affected by American mythology. The word myth does not mean “false.” It means “story.” Specifically, a story that explains why something is, with more regard to meaning than to historicity. Every game has a place, every place has a people, and every people has a myth. Therefore, to understand a game, one should be aware of the mythology that surrounds it. Some games are affected more than others: a game of chess is more easily divorced from its context than the Rose Bowl Game which is more easily divorced from its context than a general election.

*American football isn’t American football without American mythology.*

Turning our attention to the sort of games I spend more time writing about and playing than football, the typical tabletop RPG is saturated in myth by design. It needs to be, because in construction of a fictional world we have to explain why the kingdom is good (and therefore the current evil king is an aberration rather than a normal leader), or why life is so rough under imperial rule, etc. In games where the place is either the real world itself or a fictional facsimile we can assume certain things: we usually don’t have to explain what Britain or China is in order for us to understand that the games which take place there. We do have to do that for players pretending to be characters in a fictional world. It is not necessary for every DM to do world-building to the same extent as Tolkien because of the metamyth that most people who play these games are already aware of. We have assumptions about the existence of wizards and elves and dwarves and fair folk that ease us into the particular mythology being created for games like Dungeons and Dragons whether in famous settings like the Forgotten Realms or the DM’s own creation.

Joeseph Campbell identifies four functions of myth:

The Mystical: connecting us as individuals with something much larger than ourselves, whether it is considered formally divine or secular awe and wonder
The Cosmological: explaining how and why things came to be the way they are in form and function
The Sociological: shaping and justifying the power of society
The Pedagogical: teaching what is and how to live a good life

Some games are very limited in scope, and therefore do not interact with all of the functions of the mythology of their place. American football, for example, has very little to do with cosmology. It does, however, have a lot to do with American beliefs about social order and how to live a good life. Other games try to build an entire universe, and must therefore concern themselves with all four functions. The bigger, richer, and more detailed the universe, the more time and effort must go into constructing the mythology of the place.

There are different ways to go about building a world and I am not here to tell anyone how to do it, but the approach I am taking right now to the world I am building for tabletop roleplaying is to consider the mythology of the place using Campbell’s four functions, in order to guide where the details need to go. I will try not to get too bogged down in the practical aspects (names, maps, pantheon, characters) until I can see the need for each of those things to serve at least one of the four functions. The goal is to make the tabletop adventure as inseparable from its setting as American football is inseparable from America. It’s a bit more work, because players don’t enter the world with as much experience with the mythology, but success in this endeavour will be a place that endures by the power of myth.

Mandagon: I Don’t Get It

Published by Graham on November 19, 2016

“Explore Mandagon, a world inspired by Tibetan theology and philosophy. With a focus on life and death, discover what it means to make a true sacrifice…” – Mandagon’s store page on Steam

That sounds exciting, doesn’t it? Sounds like a video game I would write about. And available for free on Steam? Too good to be true! I just had to download and play Mandagon. The game is relatively easy to understand: you move your totem-block avatar through what I think is the most beautiful pixel-art landscape I have ever seen. This game is gorgeous.

Caption — *The beautiful pixel-art landscape, with the blocky protagonist in profile.*

It seems fairly straightforward: you find stone tablets to insert in the shrines, and in doing so unseal the big temple door. Along the way the player also finds several cryptic messages in a series of steles:

The mechanics are neat, especially the statues that enabled short-range flying. Other things like unlocking the elevators was just challenging enough to make it feel like a game without making it difficult. There are also lots of seemingly-significant symbols scattered throughout the world:

There is just one problem in all of this: I don’t get it. The game was a fun little diversion and I loved the art. But the world itself remains just as much a mystery to me as it did when I read the description before downloading. I suppose I might have been able to piece something together if I wrote down all the cryptic messages from the steles. But I without an in-game incentive it was hard to find enough determination to figure it out. I just cruised through the world and did what I was incentivized to do: get the tablets to break the seals to unlock the big fancy temple door. Where is the theology? Where is the philosophy? Perhaps over my head, perhaps I passed it by, but wherever those things were it didn’t hit me. I didn’t get my mind blown any more than I did when I played through Hook, another simple almost-free game I picked up looking for a simple diversion. It was peaceful, fun, then over.

This is one thing I hope to avoid in my own work: being too clever, too subtle, for my readers/players to get it. While I might strive to write a video game or a tabletop adventure for “everyone” I still have to remember that I can only reach people who come into the experience with a similar enough set of tropes in their mind. I found Mandagon to be good, but I lacked the context to be able to appreciate anything deeper than the simple game of matching the tablets to the shrines. Perhaps I will have to find some references, read up on Tibetan Buddhism, and try again. But for now, I still have to admit that I just don’t get it yet.

Space, space… going to space!

Published by Graham on September 3, 2016

Back when I wrote Diversions and Doorkeys I stated that I was not a video game reviewer at the beginning of the post. The comment on the post then praises my review of Undertale. I propose to resolve this apparent contradiction by talking about what I meant when I said I am not a reviewer.

My objective when I started this blog was to talk about the ideas behind games, not necessarily the games themselves. My intention is not to for this to be a rinky-dink self-published version of what Gamespot, IGN, Polygon, Kotaku, etc. do professionally. I don’t want to try and keep up with what’s new or the most popular. I want to write about games I find interesting even if they are several years old and/or somewhat obscure. A video game reviewer might have to be familiar with how new games compare to others in the genre or other games released in the same time frame, while I don’t intend to keep up with all of that. Sometimes I might want to skip over talking about some aspects of the technical gameplay to focus on why a person might play a game over how. A good reviewer would have to make some comment on several aspects of each game, which means that they would have to actually play the game in order to give it a fair review.

That brings me to a game that is fairly recent and that grabbed my interest fairly quickly with one of my favourite watch words: infinite. As soon as I heard a little bit about No Man’s Sky, I had to find out more. And I did: I found out why I’m not actually as excited to play the game as I was initially, before even trying it out myself. I’m not reviewing it because I haven’t played it, but I’ve watched and read some things about No Man’s Sky that has knocked it off the top of my list of video games I’m eagerly anticipating.

At first, I was as excited about the prospect of peaceful exploration of a vast and beautiful universe as you might expect the space core to be. “Procedural generation” is the buzzword that most of the hype I’ve heard about No Man’s Sky revolves around. It means that the game world that isn’t designed and drawn by a developer or development team. It comes together in a new way each time a new instance of the game is started. That’s not new; I still remember playing through Diablo II’s procedurally generated dungeons sixteen years ago. What’s new is the scale: No Man’s Sky promises us 18 quintillion planets, which is more than any human can possibly explore in a single lifetime.

*The observable universe, containing an estimated 100 billion stars, or 1/1,800,000 of what is said to be possible in No Man’s Sky.*

If you only spent one second on each planet, and did nothing but explore planets for 100 years, you’d fall short of 3.2 billion. Spending one second on each of 18 quintillion planets would be like taking the approximate age of the Earth, multiplying it by 1400, then by a million, then by a million again. My math is heavily simplified, but the point is that No Man’s Sky is almost incomprehensibly YUGE. I’ve heard it described as “infinite,” though I think that is a mistake.

No Man’s Sky seems every bit as finite as Andariel’s Cathedral: you may never see the precise same thing twice, but the limitations still exist. They’re conceivable even if we can’t reach out and touch them, and to be truly infinite is to be beyond the conceivable. In both Diablo II and No Man’s Sky the player can’t rely on specific knowledge of what monster or mineral deposit lies around which corner, but can know exactly what to expect conceptually. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; in fact I would be really worried about any game that was indisputably infinite. That’s getting into The Matrix or OASIS territory. That No Man’s Sky is a finite game is not the problem I have with it. It’s that I was hoping for something that would push more boundaries, spatial and otherwise, rather than simply having well-defined boundaries that just happen to be far outside my reach. From what I am led to understand from watching play-through videos, it’s an exploration game where the main antagonist is your inventory management system, sort of like a massive multi-planet 3D Terraria but with less emphasis on building construction.

So, what would excite the space core in me? A spiritual successor to Hyperspeed, a game from 1991 that I picked up on Steam a few months back for a cheap nostalgia trip. It’s a game where the player is sent out in a Trailblazer class starship, which though huge and powerful, is capable of being piloted by a single person. The idea is that you have been sent out ahead of a colony ship in order to gather resources, find a suitable planet for a colony, and ensure the neighbourhood is safe for colonization through some combination of peace treaties and warfare. As the player, you manage exploration, resource gathering, diplomacy, ship-to-ship combat, and the ship’s engine configuration. The limits in this game can be quite harsh due to the design standards of its time (remember, this is a game that was available on 5.25″ floppy disks). I can certainly forgive it for being limited compared to what is available today. One example of these limitations is as follows: my impression is it is almost impossible to honestly roleplay your way through the first trip into the Cerberus cluster and win. I tried. I explored, I gathered as many resources as I could find, secured the right alliances, and defeated my mortal foes. Even after turning on my allies and going on a resource-hungry rampage through the cluster I came to a dead end in being able to find what I needed to start my colony. To win, I would need to metagame: know which unknown star was the Athdalde homeworld, beeline it for that system, then commit swift genocide before I could even see what they do to solar systems (the only thing they are good at is strip mining at the planetary level). Without taking this step it may very well be impossible to gather enough resources before the rapacious Athdalde turn too many systems into barren husks. And perhaps even then I might have to do more. Knowing that I had to have the foresight that can only come from a previous run at the same cluster made the whole thing a little less fun, though I still thoroughly enjoyed the nostalgia trip for what it was worth (less than $5).

This is what I imagine is possible: start with the same concept by giving me an awesome ship and tell me to go on a single-player expedition in an unexplored region of space. Except with the magic of procedural generation, unbind me from having to know what sequence of actions leads to success and create new star maps and alien races for each new instance of the game. But don’t stop there. Randomize the plot elements too. Does one of the generated races enslave a quadrant? How many previously unknown human colonies does the player come across? What possibilities are there for war and/or peace? Do I need to find a habitable but unclaimed planet to settle on, or can I impose (or peacefully negotiate the place of) my people on a populated world? What happens after my new colony is established? Am I even obligated to support the mission of resettling humans from Earth? In addition to the amount of space that can be covered, several other boundaries can be explored and played with. I know that’s asking a lot, and No Man’s Sky may well be a masterpiece in its own right and I still do want to play it, but I know it’s not the near-infinite space exploration game that I thought it could have been when I first heard of it.

First Impressions in Game Worlds

Published by Graham on July 16, 2016

“A finite game takes place in a world… A world provides an absolute reference without which the time, place, and participants make no sense.” – James Carse, pp. 89-90, Finite and Infinite Games

There is a lot that can be said about the importance of the world in a game. Today I will be talking about the importance of visual elements in making first impressions, and one of the first games where the world itself made a big impression on me, Commander Keen 4: Secret of the Oracle.

First, let me be clear about what I mean by “world.” This word is often used as a synonym for the planet Earth, but that’s not helpful for looking at the worlds that games take place in. The world, to any given group of humans, is how we collectively make sense of what we see around us. This is how you can have a “world economy” or a “world war” or a “western world” that do not encompass the entire planet Earth. Some of those come very close, while some exclude most of the planet. The point is, the world is everything a game’s audience could possibly interact with in the context of playing that game. In Pong, the world is comprised by two paddles, a ball, a centre line, a scoreboard, and the boundaries of the screen. It is not a terribly compelling world, but it does not detract from the game because it’s a simple amusement; people don’t play Pong to escape into another world. If a game is designed to be large and meaningful in some way, the world needs to be many times more complex and engaging than that.

It’s not just a matter of appealing graphics, nor the absence of apparent boundaries that make a world seem interesting right from the get-go. Visual elements (such as screen graphics, printed cards, boards, tokens, etc.) are usually the first thing that introduce a player to a world. That’s why they’re not just there for the wow factor or to make marketing easier, though they do help with those things too. The look of a game is the first tool the audience gets for making sense of the game’s world.

That brings me to one of the first video games I ever played a lot of, the Commander Keen series. For those of you who haven’t reached ~~age~~ level 30 by now, this was an episodic series of games for the PC in the early 1990s, a time when PC gaming was a niche interest compared to the popular consoles like the SNES and Sega Genesis. I, however, was not among the kids my age who had those consoles in their homes. We had no consoles newer than the Intellivision until I was in grade seven and the age of the Nintendo 64 had arrived. I did not grow up playing Sonic, Super Mario Brothers, or Metroid. My PC gaming nostalgia is brought to you today by the letters D, O, and S. Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Ultima Underworld — these are the games I remember from the 1990s. I played plenty of demos and shareware, but Keen was to me what Link or Mario was to most gamers close to my age. And it was playing Commander Keen that gave me the first experience of truly appreciating the world in a video game based on the visual elements of the levels.

Mars, as presented in episode one of the Vorticons trilogy. Landscape features also include climbing barrels and molded plastic walls in other colours such as lime green. — Mars, as presented in “Marooned on Mars,” episode one of the Invasion of the Vorticons trilogy. Most of the game looks a lot like this. Landscape features also include climbing barrels and molded plastic walls in other colours such as teal and lime green. This blog does not receive any advertising revenue from multinational beverage corporations.

Before the age of DLC, there was a way that game developers could release part of a game and then charge for the rest. It was called shareware. The additional content, whether branded as sequels or additional episodes, were not truly distinct games. You copied a game for free, then you (were expected to) pay for the remainder of the content beyond what the developer deemed to be enough of a teaser. Commander Keen is ostensibly a series of six episodes, but it’s really two games: the Invasion of the Vorticons trilogy and the Goodbye Galaxy trilogy. For the sake of simplicity, I am counting Aliens Ate My Babysitter in the second trilogy because it plays the same as episodes 4 and 5 even though there were differences in story arc and license/distribution that set it apart from episodes four and five. Six episodes, two distinct games. At one point I had both of the shareware episodes: “Marooned on Mars” (#1) and “Secret of the Oracle” (#4). I was offered a choice: my parents would pay to complete one trilogy and not the other. I had to choose between sticking to the chronological order and continuing Invasion of the Vorticons, or getting the rest of the newer games. I chose the latter. If you asked me at the time, I would have told you it was for aesthetic reasons. I wouldn’t have used those words, but that’s what I would have meant when I said “better graphics.” It’s actually quite remarkable how far things advanced between December 1990 and December 1991. But the appeal is not just in the fact that the Mars presented in “Marooned on Mars”looks kind of like a maze made of molded plastic, while the Shadowlands of “Secret of the Oracle” contain diverse biomes rendered in stunning 256-colour VGA graphics.

It’s apparent when you walk around the first few levels in Secret of the Oracle. The backgrounds imply a bigger world than the maze you are currently navigating. You can go in and out of doors. And most strikingly, there is a new feature: you can look up, look down, and see that are other areas in the level where life goes on without you needing to be there, right in the middle of the screen. The difference a year makes is not just in aesthetics, but also in the little mechanics that help me believe the world exists outside of the boundaries of my screen.

The rich visual splendour of 256-colour VGA graphics make a good impression. The picture shows the same stretch of path looking up and looking down. — *This game was released one year after the game pictured above. Shown here is same stretch of path with Commander Keen looking up and looking down.*

The visual elements of a game’s world doesn’t have to involve sprawling, highly detailed landscapes in order to make a good impression. The blocky worlds of Minecraft and Terraria do just fine without realism. If the game world gives me the tools I need to feel like my place in it is meaningful and relevant, then it becomes something I can get invested in. Sometimes that can involve beautifully rendered landscapes with the appearance of horizons. Sometimes that can involve something as simple as being able to look up and look down. And so, to conclude, I leave you with the recreation of the Bean-with-Bacon Megarocket I built in a Terraria world I named Gnosticus IV. The concept of a world in that game is really neat, but will have to wait for a future post.

*The skull statue is placed to mark the world spawn point. I may not be an accomplished Terraria artist, but this is a few steps beyond the first noob hut I ever built.*