A Political History of the Future: Tacoma at Lawyers, Guns & Money

My latest Political History of the Future column discusses Tacoma, the follow-up to Fullbright's paradigm-busting exploration game Gone Home (see my review here).  Tacoma takes a very different approach from Gone Home's 90s-set domestic drama.  It puts us in the head of Amy, a salvage specialist in 2088 dispatched to the titular space station, to discover what catastrophe caused the crew to evacuate, and how they responded to it.  So far, so familiar, but as in Gone Home, Tacoma plays with our genre expectations, approaching its premise with a refreshing lack of melodrama or sensationalism, and exploring the human connections formed on the station, and how the disaster affects them.  It also, as I write in my column, gives us a panoramic view of life in this late 21st century future, where corporations have even more power than they currently do, and people find their lives, relationships, and happiness held hostage to the whims of a company's bottom line.

One of the points revealed by these conversations and email exchanges is how strongly the economic system in the game's future is tilted towards corporations. While money still exists in the game's world, it is heavily supplemented, and in some cases superseded, by loyalty points—either "customer loyalty", which locks consumers into purchasing from a single company, or "company loyalty", which discourages employees from moving from one corporate employer to another. The game is very smart in how it introduces this concept—it takes a few conversations for us to realize how commonplace and insidious it is, because most of the characters take it for granted. ... What's smart about how Tacoma introduces these ideas is how it avoids the obvious, dystopian spin it could have put on them ... while also making it clear how they curtail the freedom and happiness of ordinary people

Night in the Woods

You've probably heard about Night in the Woods even if you haven't played it, or have only a vague idea what it is.  Released by indie studio Infinite Fall last year after a highly-successful kickstarter campaign, the game, an adventure-slash-ghost-story starring anthropomorphic animals who live in a dying Rust Belt town, is an irresistible combination of cute and spooky.  Its story, in which twenty-year-old college dropout Mae returns to her home of Possum Springs, reconnects with her friends and family, and slowly begins to realize that there are dark doings afoot, seems designed to appeal to a certain type of young fan, with its themes of early-adulthood aimlessness, coming of age, and mental illness.  Graphics from the game have been cropping up on my twitter feed and tumblr dash for months, almost instantly iconic due to the game's simple yet evocative (and expertly-executed) design.  What surprised me, however, when I finished the game last week and went looking for in-depth discussions of it, is how little talk there seems to have been about Night in the Woods's politics.  To me, they feel not just important, but like the key to the entire exercise.

My first play-through of Night in the Woods was a little disappointing.  The game was beautifully animated, with a rich, wide world, well-drawn characters, and a fairly simple mechanic (especially for someone like me, who prefers the absolute minimum of key-mashing in her gaming).  But it also felt rather aimless.  Despite its title, Night in the Woods actually takes place over roughly two weeks following Mae's return to Possum Springs.  Each day she wakes up in her childhood bedroom, chats with her exasperated but loving parents, leaves home to wander around the center of town, and then hangs out with some subset of her closest friends: irrepressible bad boy Gregg; his boyfriend, the decent and dependable Angus; and caustic Bea, who has been forced into an early adulthood by her mother's death and father's emotional collapse.  Slowly, elements of the uncanny begin to reveal themselves.  Mae begins having strange, disturbing dreams.  At the town's Halloween celebration, she seems to witness a reveler being kidnapped by a mysterious figure.  And the local police keeps warning her off sticking her nose where it doesn't belong.  

But this part of the story takes a while to reveal itself.  The game's first half feels rather slow and a little pointless, which only makes its final act feel more rushed after all that buildup.  It was only when I played Night in the Woods a second time (and armed with information from its fan-wiki about areas of the game and side-quests that I'd missed) that it became clearer to me what it was trying to do.  Far from being the goal-oriented story that its supernatural component suggests, Night in the Woods cares a great deal more about Mae's relationships, and about her understanding of herself.  The repetitiveness of its story is designed to allow her to build (and in some cases, rebuild) friendships, rediscover her town, and slowly work her way towards admitting the reasons she dropped out of college.  In one instance, Mae can choose to spend a portion of each day visiting the church where her mother, Candy, works as an administrator.  These visits help to repair the frayed relationship between mother and daughter (which is rocked by a vicious fight halfway through the game), and if you repeat them often enough, Candy will invite you on an outing to "Jenny's Field", where she tells you a story about the person the field was named after, a child who fell into a sinkhole while walking with her mother.

In the moment, this might seem like nothing but a cute scene (and a way of racking up an achievement), but the more you play Night in the Woods, the more important, and multifaceted, the image of the sinkhole becomes.  At the most basic level, they are a menace that is plaguing the town, which the overstretched public works department can't get ahead of.  From Candy's perspective, the image of a mother losing her daughter in an instant probably resonates with her own fears for Mae.  Meanwhile, Mae herself, who has a history of emotional problems and even psychotic breaks, sees the sinkhole as a representation of her own capacity to simply drop away from reality.  Later in the game, Mae is ominously told by a friend's grandmother that "you've got a dark spot in you".  Though the woman immediately claims to be kidding, Mae angrily replies that "I'm not just an effing shell for my problems to walk around in".

Beyond the personal level, the sinkhole represents the dwindling fortunes of Possum Springs, a town that is literally rotting from its center as businesses close down and buildings are abandoned, as well as "a hole at the center of everything", the place where the malevolent being that Mae and her friends end up confronting has hidden itself.  When Mae searches for this creature, she ends up falling into an underground lake in an image that clearly echoes the way Jenny fell into the sinkhole in Candy's story.  The way this single image keeps recurring in different guises is just one of the ways in which Night in the Woods layers the personal, the political, and the supernatural over each other until it becomes clear that they are ultimately the same thing.

As Mae explores the town on her daily excursions, she gains insight not only into the lives and personal histories of the people she talks to, but into the history of Possum Springs itself.  Mae is selfish and immature, and in the early parts of the game in particular it quickly becomes clear that she's given very little thought to the struggles of anyone besides herself.  She takes it as a given that her parents will be able to cope with the mortgage they took out to pay for her college, even though her father has been laid off from his manufacturing job and is working at the meat counter in the local supermarket.  And she doesn't seem to realize that Bea, who had to stay in town to run her parents' store, is desperately envious of Mae's educational opportunities, and angry at her for squandering them.  But as much as the purpose of Mae's exploration is to open her eyes to other people's suffering, it also serves to educate her, and us, about the political and economic currents that have brought that suffering about.

I'm struggling to think of a recent work of pop culture--not just games, but film and TV as well--that so brazenly incorporates progressive, pro-labor politics and buzzwords into its story.  Characters who speak to Mae frequently lament the loss of unions, and observe that the bosses at the few businesses left in town would fire anyone who even tried to organize their workers.  Mae speaks to an old woman, Miss Rosa, who tells her about her grandfather's history as a firebrand, who once trashed the car of a visiting mining executive.  That same mine has a familiar but resonant history, including lethal accidents caused by the bosses' cost-cutting and indifference, strikes violently broken by the military, and a brief period of prosperity after the unions got their way.  

In the present, that prosperity is long gone, and again that's expressed in explicitly political terms.  Bea laments that austerity and budget cuts mean that basic infrastructure repairs, including to the washed-out bridges out of town, aren't being carried out.  A local WPA-style mural depicting heroic miners is defaced, and when Mae confronts the culprit they struggle to articulate their anger over a promise that has been betrayed.  The new pastor at the church tries to get permission to let a homeless drifter sleep in the basement, but the chamber of commerce, desperate to project an image of progress that might lure in new jobs, turns her down.  Mae's friend Selmers writes "short, cute" poems about heartbreak and her favorite foods, but when she appears at a poetry reading she delivers an enraged diatribe against plutocrats who make more in a day than she could in a century.

The more you explore the town, the more you poke your nose into even the most irrelevant-seeming corners, the more examples you come across of how economic deterioration is affecting everyone in it, from a former schoolmate of Mae who turns up at every shitty part-time job in town, to clickbait news headlines that advise people struggling with their mortgage to rent out their bathrooms for public use.  The cuteness of its graphics, and the gentle repetitiveness of its gameplay, can serve to obscure the fact that Night in the Woods is a profoundly angry story.  It's this anger that comes to dominate, especially over repeated playthroughs, over the supernatural story that ends up giving the game its shape and climax.

Throughout these adventures, Night in the Woods refuses to separate the personal from the political.  Mae's frequently referenced and slowly exacerbating emotional problems, for example, are not simply a personal issue, but an economic one.  As we find out late in the game, the "Dr. Hank" that she and her mother keep referencing, who has been treating her since a violent breakdown in middle school, isn't a psychologist, but the local GP-slash-dentist, who offers well-meaning but ultimately insufficient remedies for serious mental health issues.  It suddenly becomes clear that Mae might simply not have access to the psychiatric care she so badly needs, which turns a story about one person's struggle into a story about the failure of a badly needed system.

(One place where Night in the Woods fails to make these vital connections is when it comes to race.  The game's basic conceit effectively nullifies any possibility of talking about race, since the characters are all animals, and there doesn't seem to be any Maus-like correlation between specific animals and ethnicities.  And while the role that racial resentment played in dismantling the social safety net is referenced, it's done rather obliquely--a character complains that the government gives money to "lazy people 'n immigrants".  In a game that is otherwise so upfront about social issues, this feels like a glaring omission.)

This refusal to separate the personal from the political continues all the way to the game's climax.  It's not uncommon for horror stories to juxtapose the cosmic and the mundane--as Bea rather blatantly puts it, ghosts scare her a lot less than medical bills and mortgages.  What's interesting, however, is that Night in the Woods refuses this straightforward dichotomy.  The ghost story isn't opposed to the political story, but inextricably tied to it.  When Mae finally confronts her "ghosts", she finds that they both are and are not supernatural creatures, both are and are not a response to the failure and impending death of Possum Springs.  There is a monster, and there are also people so demoralized by the loss of their way of life that they've allowed themselves to become monsters.  Even the imagery used in this sequence works to conflate the two types of horror.  Mae has a vision of her parents' street, but all the houses are gone, and as far as she can see there are only barren fields.  This is a common image from cosmic horror--the post-human world, with all of our tiny efforts swept away.  But it also expresses the more mundane fear that the town's elders have been struggling against, of Possum Springs falling to decay and abandonment, becoming a ghost town.

When Mae confronts the monster, all the things she's been struggling with--cosmic horror, mental illness, her lack of future prospects--combine into one image, a tiny creature facing an immense, powerful being that doesn't care about it.  This is not, as you might expect, a boss fight, and there isn't even a right or wrong choice that the player can make.  But it's here that the choices you've made over the course of the game--to shoot straight through to the ghost story, or to meander and let Mae learn about herself, her friends, and her past--can imbue this scene with added meaning and significance.

As we've learned over the course of the game, Mae, despite her often infuriating flaws, her seeming inability to cope with reality, is fundamentally strong.  When pushed, she fights back, and protects herself and the people she cares about.  "I'm not going to die in a hole", she announces very shortly after the game's beginning, in what feels at the time like a joke, or even a comment about her recklessness (she ends up in this particular hole by jumping on a pile of discarded timber and causing it to collapse), but ends up being her mission statement.  So it's not surprising when, at the end of the game, Mae chooses defiance.  But the choices we've made throughout the game can give that defiance an added depth--is Mae lashing out blindly, or is she fighting a particular political enemy?

Another way of describing Mae's adventures throughout Night in the Woods is that she's had her consciousness raised.  From a self-absorbed child, she's become a slightly less self-absorbed adult who is at least aware that she is part of chain, a community, and a family.  That knowledge gives her the strength to defy entropy, at least for a while longer.  It's impossible to get to the end of the game without being exposed at least some of its political weight, but the experience is much richer when you've taken the time to get to know Possum Springs and its inhabitants--as expressed in the game's epilogue, when Mae discusses everything she's seen with her friends, and has much more to say in the iterations in which she's done more exploring.

Some fans have described the Night in the Woods's ending as disappointing, and it's easy to see where they're coming from.  Nothing really happens, after all.  Mae doesn't defeat the monster, and the villains she does defeat are sufficiently pathetic that one can't help but join in the characters' horror and guilt at their demise.  But this, too, is part of the game's point and of its political message.  There's no false hope here.  Possum Springs is probably doomed and many of the characters we've come to love probably don't have very bright futures ahead of them.  The triumph is in their willingness to fight (and in their hints of political defiance, such as Bea's membership of a local Socialist group).  Not bad for a story about talking cat people.

The Kids Are All Right: Thoughts on Gone Home

I'm pretty far from what you might call an avid gamer (games I've played in the last five years: Portal, Machinarium, Tales of Monkey Island, Botanicula, and, uh, that's it; I still haven't gotten around to Portal 2), but even I couldn't miss the attention paid to The Fullbright Company's Gone Home.  Part of the reason that I ended up playing Gone Home--aside from the fact that it doesn't require shooting anyone or terrific hand-eye coordination--was that it was a game that people seemed to be seriously discussing and debating.  Having played the game myself, however, I found my own eagerness to join the conversation curtailed by this blog's spoiler policy.  Which is: a) that I don't have one, b) that I am sick and tired of the way that the word spoiler has been allowed to control and denature the discussion of pop culture, and c) that any worthwhile piece of fiction is one that can't be "spoiled" by knowing what happens in it.  Gone Home, however, is a work that challenges that last belief.  Its effect is rooted in the expectations it creates in its audience, and a player who goes into it knowing what to expect will probably get much less out of it than someone who goes in completely ignorant.  And, unfortunately, I can't in all good faith urge you to buy the game and play it, since for all that it is interesting and worth playing, Gone Home doesn't really justify its $20 price tag.  I don't doubt that the price reflects the cost of making the game--whose graphics, gameplay and voice work are all top-notch--and I see the value of encouraging independent game developers, but none of that changes the fact that Gone Home takes maybe three hours to get through and has almost no replayability value.  So, I leave it with you: Gone Home is overpriced, extremely interesting and worth playing, and if you read the rest of this post before playing it you probably won't enjoy it as much as I did.  Your call.

Gone Home takes place over a single night in June 1995.  The player character is twenty-year-old Katie Greenbriar, who is returning home after a year backpacking in Europe.  Once she gets into the house, Katie discovers that her family--parents Terry and Janice, and younger sister Sam, who has left Katie a cryptic and urgent note telling her not to worry but also not to look for her--are missing.  The game consists of directing Katie through the house (actually a mansion), and discovering, through documents, letters, and journals entries belonging to the three family members, what has happened to the Greenbriars in the year that Katie's been away, and where they've all gone.  Through these documents, the player discovers that the family has only moved into the house, which originally belonged to Terry's reclusive uncle Oscar, in the last year (adding an extra level of meaning to the wordplay in the game's title, since Katie is returning to a home she's never been to), and that in that time both parents have gone through a crisis.  Terry, a failed science fiction writer who now writes electronics reviews, has started drinking heavily, while Janice has struck up a flirtation with a colleague at her job in the forestry service.  The bulk of the game, however, is taken up with Sam's experiences, which are also related through journal entries directed to Katie and read by actress Sarah Robertson, as she finds herself first the odd man out in her new school, and then befriends an older girl named Lonnie, with whom she shares a love of the punk aesthetic and riot grrl music.  Over the course of the year Sam and Lonnie's friendship deepens and becomes a romance, which is overshadowed by the fact that Lonnie is planning to join the army after graduation.

Much has been written about the way that Gone Home takes advantage of its players' reading protocols to achieve its effect.  This is, after all, a game in which you explore a strange, dark, (apparently) empty mansion whose previous owner died in it, in the middle of the night, in a thunderstorm.  Specific moments in the game are clearly designed to create expectations of a horror narrative.  Almost every review of the game, for example, will note the moment in which the player explores one of the mansion's secret passages and picks up a wooden cross, only for the light bulb illuminating the passage to suddenly burn out and leave the player in pitch darkness.  All the reviewers discussing this moment reported scurrying out of the passage as fast as their mouse clicks could carry them (I did the same thing), and this is clearly the response that the game's designers were hoping for.  But the timing of the bulb's explosion turns out to be just a coincidence--one that the player is even prepared for when they find, in Terry's office, an electrician's report explaining that the house's old wiring will result in flickering lights and power surges.

Throughout the game there are similar wrong-footing moments.  When turning on the lights in Sam's bathroom, the player discovers bright red splashes staining the bathtub--and then notices a bottle of hair dye on the floor.  The purpose here, however, isn't simply to scare us.  It's to teach us to expect a certain type of story.  When Katie explores Sam's hiding places, she finds a Ouija board and the following note:

Because we're playing a game--and in particular, a game that is trying to recall other horror games in which creepy crawlies jump out at the player from the shadows (for me, this was The 7th Guest, a game that imprinted on me at a too-young age and which still has the power to send shivers down my spine)--we take this note as an indication of the kind of story we're in.  It's no coincidence that the note is discovered alongside the key to the house's previously locked basement--where lighting is particularly scarce (one room even remains completely dark, forcing the player to either abandon it or flail blindly for something to interact with), and where most of Oscar's belongings are stored.  When we reach the end of the game, however, we realize that we should have looked at the note the way we would in real life, in which messages delivered by Ouija boards are the result of players unconsciously (or deliberately) moving the planchette.  What's more, by the end of the game it's clear that if Sam had known the impression that the note had created in us, she would have been extremely bemused (it seems likely that she kept the note not because of its association with Oscar, but because she was playing with the Ouija board with Lonnie)--that Sam, in fact, had no idea of the impression created by her absence, her frantic notes to Katie, and the empty house.

At the same time that it's using the conventions of games to achieve its effect, however, Gone Home is taking advantage of those same conventions to tell its story.  The fact that Katie is a stranger in the house, for example, dovetails perfectly with the player's unfamiliarity with it.  And being the player character in a game means that it's not at all strange for Katie to tear through her family's most private documents--including reading her mother's letters and rifling through her father's locked drawers.  Though there is one moment in which Katie the character asserts herself over the player--when she finds a diary entry in which Sam describes her first sexual experience with Lonnie, and refuses to read it--for the most part Gone Home doesn't address how traumatic the experience of exposing her parents' faults and foibles would be for Katie (in fact, this is a seam of drama--young girl returns to an empty home, and, suspecting a terrible tragedy, uncovers a host of smaller tragedies that she wasn't ready to face yet--that the game's format isn't capable of exploring).  Being a game, as well, means that Gone Home can expect its players to overlook some of its contrivances--that Janice has left letters in which she discusses a near-affair lying all over the house where her husband and teenage daughter could read them, that Terry hides a sensitive letter under the false bottom of a drawer in his desk in the same room in which he already has a locked file cabinet drawer, that Sam has locked Katie out of a wing of the house that includes the kitchen--which are necessary for the orderly progression of its narrative.

Ultimately, Gone Home isn't a game so much as it is an interactive narrative pretending to be a game, and drawing much of its power from that category confusion.  This goes beyond the genre confusion caused by the game's misleading use of horror tropes.  The fact is, there really isn't any skill involved in playing Gone Home.  Though it has puzzle-like aspects--certain parts of the house are locked and the player needs to find ways to get into them--these are solved not through intelligence or out of the box thinking but through sheer bloody-mindedness--by walking around the house, manipulating objects and reading documents until you find the path to the next part of the story.  The primary skill necessary to play the game successfully is the ability to find the various lamps, string pulls and light switches that make the house navigable.  What's more, there's nothing for the player character to do.  By the time Katie shows up at the house, everything has already happened, and all that's left for her, and us, is to discover it.  This is reflected in Katie's situation in-universe.  Even once she discovers what's happened to her family--that Terry and Janice are on a couples' retreat, and that Sam, having learned that Lonnie got off the bus to basic training because she couldn't bear to be separated from Sam, has stolen some appliances for gas money and driven off to be with her--she's still trapped by a storm, with no car, and no phone numbers to call even if the phones are working. 

So what Gone Home actually is isn't a game, but a story, about how Katie arrived at an empty house, came to some horrifying and slightly ridiculous conclusions about what had happened to her family, and then learned that the truth is more mundane but also more fraught with complications.  If you told this story as a piece of fiction, it would come off as anticlimactic, and maybe a little gimmicky (that's certainly the impression formed when I baldly lay out the game's plot in this post).  But by turning the reader into a character, Gone Home invests its story with an emotional urgency that a straight telling couldn't have.  It's not just that we're scared, worried, and fooled into imagining ridiculous things along with Katie, but that we're forced to participate in the story actively instead of consuming it passively.  We're puzzling out the mystery with her, making choices that affect how she sees it (and overlooking clues and important items that could have changed her understanding of it).  When Katie discovers Sam's diary entry from the day before the game's events, in which she describes her despondence over Lonnie leaving to join the army, saying "I just want to sleep," and her plan to go to her hideout in the attic (the last locked location in the house) "and wait," the expectations aroused--that Sam has committed suicide, or that Oscar's vengeful ghost has had its way with her--are faintly ridiculous even in the moment.  But because it's left to us to find out the truth--because we control whether Katie unlocks the attic, whose key she finds next to Sam's diary entry, and can either delay that choice or rush to it--those ridiculous possibilities are invested with real weight, and the more mundane reality feels equally significant.

Another way that Gone Home uses its game-ishness to breathe new life into a fairly simple story is the way that it uses the found documents format to give each member of the Greenbriar family (living and dead) a voice--and how each of those voices is expressed in a different way.  Sam's voice is, quite literally, the most present in the game, and Robertson invests her diary entries, with their frankly rather by the numbers tale of self-discovery and sexual exploration, with genuine feeling.  Her joy at discovering that she is seen and loved, and frustration at her parents' inability to do the same--when Sam comes out to Terry and Janice, their response is not to hear her, and to insist that she is simply going through "a phase"--are palpable.  Katie, meanwhile, is the only active character in the game, but the one whose voice and personality are completely absent from it--all of her belongings are packed away in boxes (the sole exception, her high school athletic trophies which are on display in the foyer, seem to exist mainly for the contrast between them and the evidence of Sam's hobbies--making zines and recording Lonnie's band--which is hidden away in the house's secret passages), and the only examples of her writing are the vapid postcards she sent from her year away, in which one can sense Katie straining to say something new about some of the most written-about places in the world.

The rest of the family, however, lies in an interesting zone between exposure and opaqueness, one largely determined by how thoroughly the player investigates their (ultimately, ancillary) stories.  Janice, for example, has almost no voice--there are virtually no examples of her writing in the house.  But her story is laid out almost step by step for the player to find--first a ticket stub to a concert, then a letter from her colleague Rick inviting her to use his spare ticket, then a hairdresser's bill for the day before the concert for more than $100, then a letter from Janice's friend Carol assuring her that Rick and his girlfriend can't be serious, then an invitation to Rick's wedding, and then a brochure for a couples' retreat--requiring our active participation in working it out.  Terry, on the other hand, is loquacious--the game is full of his commercial, fictional, and personal writing--but throughout all of his writings he seems to struggling to say something that he can't express, and which he sometimes expresses in the wrong way--a letter from the editor of the technical magazine for which he reviews complains about the personal details that have begun creeping into his reviews.  Oscar, meanwhile, is almost entirely absent, represented--out in the open at least--by newspaper clippings and business documents.  And yet he looms over the game, first through Sam's joking evocation of his ghost, and later through a more tangible haunting of Terry.  The three items that spell out the source of Oscar and Terry's turmoil--a letter from Oscar to Terry's mother, returned to sender, in which he apologizes for a "transgression," Oscar's will in which he leaves all his property to Terry, and a letter from Oscar to Terry congratulating him on his marriage, which Terry tore up and then sellotaped back together--are all hidden behind false panels or combination locks.  It's unlikely that any but the most determined players will find all three in their first run through the game, and so the conclusion that most discussions of Gone Home have reached--that Oscar molested Terry as a child--remains opaque, expressed solely through Terry and Oscar's inability to express it.

The same format that gives Gone Home its power, however, undermines it once the game is over, and our power to determine Katie's emotions and reactions is lost.  The game ends when Katie finds Sam's final letter, explaining that she's gone off to be with Lonnie, and that the sisters will see other again "some day."  Most reviews I've read of Gone Home have found this ending transcendentally happy and hopeful, a refutation of the trope of the miserable lesbian (as you'll recall, the game teases the possibility that Sam has killed herself out of heartbreak), and an affirmation of the ability of outsiders to find their own space and their own community where they can be accepted.  While I can see that this was the game's intention (and agree that it's a laudable one) I'm not convinced that this is the story it's told.  In the game's reality, what's actually happened is that Sam, who hasn't even finished high school, and Lonnie, who has just gone AWOL, are off on their own with only Sam's car and a few stolen VCRs to live off.  It's hard to believe that this is going to end any other way than with Sam marched back home and Lonnie in jail (actually a pretty optimistic scenario in this situation, all things considered).

And yet, precisely at the point where I deviated from how the narrative (and Sam) wanted me to feel, the game's interactivity shut down.  After Katie finds Sam's last journal entry, the game ends with a hopeful reading from Robertson, and then allows the player to return and continue exploring the house (presumably to look for overlooked documents and hotspots).  As noted, there's nothing that Katie can do, even if she feels--as I do--that Sam has behaved recklessly and selfishly.  There's no space in the game for my feeling that Sam and Lonnie's romance, though very sweet, is far from the forever love that might justify their throwing away their lives for each other.  (Not helping matters is the fact that Lonnie is probably the least persuasive character in the game, whose personality and interests seem crafted entirely in order to make her the perfect girlfriend for Sam--cool and edgy, but also completely in love with our heroine.  The game even draws attention to the limits of Lonnie's construction when it has Sam point out her inherent contradictions--a punk lesbian who plans to join the army--but it doesn't resolve them in a way that makes Lonnie seem any less like a means to an end.)  There's certainly no space to react negatively towards Sam for hurting her family--for example, stealing from Terry and Janice, which to me is just gross, and indicative of a child who still hasn't grasped that her parents are human beings deserving of respect, not walking ATMs (I was particularly bothered by the fact that Katie finds Terry and Janice's bedroom ransacked, the drawers pulled out and left hanging from their rails with no more consideration than you'd expect from a burglar).

To be clear, the fact that Sam is self-absorbed and foolish is not a problem in itself.  It's certainly not unearned--Terry and Janice react very badly when Sam comes out to them, and from other documents in the house it's clear that they've been neglectful and caught up in their own issues during what must have been a difficult and stressful year for Sam.  And Sam has enough good qualities that behaving recklessly and thoughtlessly under the stress of almost losing Lonnie is understandable and even sympathetic.  The problem is that Gone Home's format doesn't allow us to come to this nuanced conclusion about her in a way that isn't entirely unsatisfying.  The game's power is rooted in planting the expectation that something horrible has happened to Sam, and then revealing that she is actually all right.  If, like myself, you don't think that Sam (or Lonnie) are really that all right then you'll end the game feeling conflicted.  It's a limitation of the interactive story format that having created this identification between the player and Katie, and encouraged the player's independence in exploring the house, the game then forces the player to feel what its designers think that Katie ought to be feeling--and unlike the game's success at eliciting fear at just the right moment, its attempt to elicit acceptance and happiness, in my case at least, didn't quite work.  Despite this reservation, Gone Home is a very exciting piece of fiction, a fascinating exploration of the potential--and limitations--of interactive storytelling.  If its designers haven't quite managed to get me on the right page, I'm still looking forward to what they do next, and to what other creators inspired by them do with the medium.

Myst V: End of Ages: Very Scattered Thoughts

• In a word: no. Just... just no. Can we pretend this game never happened? Can we? Please?


• The plot in a nutshell: Atrus' daughter Yeesha, previously seen as a bouncing, apple-cheeked cherub in Myst III: Exile, and more recently as a hilariously wooden young actress in Myst IV: Revelations, is all grown up, and has the facial tattoos and pretentious inner turmoil to prove it. She's also bugshit crazy but, surprisingly enough, not a homicidal maniac, which puts her ahead of the curve when it comes to her family. Yeesha and another D'ni survivor, Esher, send you on a dimly understood quest through the remains of the D'ni city and four other ages to collect four artifacts (the Slates) which will in turn release a fifth one--the fabulously powerful Tablet (not that we ever see even a hint of its power). The whole thing is very vague, and there are also some kind of alien creatures who respond to the Slates and the Tablet. In the end, you have to decide what to do with the Tablet, in an ending that mirrors the final choice of the original Myst, if by 'mirrors' we mean 'replicates the situation without any of the attendant tension or interest'.


• There's something profoundly un-Myst-ish about the entire game. It's not just the absurd and quest-like plot, but the very look of it. Myst games have always placed a high premium on beauty and on spectacle--lots of elaborate, lushly decorated interiors and breathtaking exteriors, lots of cut scenes, usually fly-bys, whose only reason to exist was to give the player a visual treat--see the following examples from Myst, Riven, Exile and Revelations:
  
  The price for all this exquisite detail was restriction of movement--the first two games were essentially slideshows, series of static tableaus, and although the third and fourth games allowed 360 degrees of motion from any fixed position, movement between these 'nodes' was still static.
  
  In End of Ages, the game designers made the decision to move to a fully immersive 3D environment--all movement is animated, at the cost of image definition and the aforementioned cut scenes (even the swirly fly-bys when you link into a new age are gone). You can see the results here:
  
  Pretty as they are, there's simply no comparison between these images and the earlier ones, and these screenshots fail to convey the gameplaying experience itself, which often seems to be a miserable cross between your average, polygonized FPS and Monkey Island. There's almost no detail and very little texture to the game worlds--they all come off rather plastic.


• And speaking of the plastic and the textureless, how about the decision to switch from live actors before a green screen to motion capture? I was rather critical of the game characters' appearance when I reviewed the Myst V demo, and I have to admit that there was some improvement on this front in the game itself. The characters' faces no longer look as if the skin were hung on a frame, and Cyan's 'face mapping' technique does allow an impressive range of expression. The final result is still plastic--there's simply no way to convey the intricacies of skin tone and muscle movement with motion capture alone--but it suits the look of the game itself. To bring live actors into this paltry environment would only call attention to its deficiencies.


• The decision to move away from highly detailed graphics falls flat on its face when it comes to the game's non-human characters. Previous Myst games, Exile and Revelations in particular, incorporated lovely and realistic animal characters capable of tugging at the player's heartstrings. When End of Ages introduces the Bahro, the alien creatures whose fate is inextricably bound with the Tablet, what we get looks like something we'd be expected to shoot at, a rough conglomeration of mud-colored polygons. With watermelon-shaped lumps studded with eyes for faces, the Bahro have zero range of expression, which hardly contributes to a sense of sympathy for their plight.


• Credit where credit's due: the voice acting for Yeesha and Esher is really quite good, a first for the series (even Brad Dourif couldn't do much with his role in Exile). The motion capture acting is slightly less engaging, mostly because of the plasticity of the characters but also because, possibly as a way of compensating for their limited facial movements, the actors chose to convey emotion with lots of exaggerated hand waves and body movements.


• Another point in the game's favor: for the first time in the series, the writers have not only acknowledged but embraced the inherent bleakness of its premise. After all, we're talking about a group of people who are the last survivors of a fallen empire. Great-grandma was indirectly responsible for this fall, grandpa was a despotic maniac, Mom's a depressive, and the two sons are psychopaths. The notion that Atrus or Yeesha might be even remotely normal--which we had been expected to swallow in previous games--is here exposed as an absurdity. The game opens with what appears to be Atrus' suicide note, and culminates with a visit to Myst, to which the intervening years have not been kind. The writers have to have been aware of the effect that seeing the island as it is now--a water-logged, overgrown waste, its structures ruined by time and neglect--would have on long-time fans of the series, and they revel in it. These two scenes suggest a darkness that the rest of game shies away from, to its own detriment.


• Since I raised the issue when I first wrote about the Myst series, I suppose I have to deal with the question of anti-intellectualism in the game--does Myst V continue the series' trend of vilifying intellect and extolling 'wisdom'? To a certain extent, yes--Esher, the villain of the piece, is obsessed with D'ni's lost stores of knowledge, and lambasts Yeesha's vague spirituality. But like the rest of the game's story, this juxtaposition is so vague as to barely register with the player, and so Myst V turns out to be less virulently anti-intellectual than Revelations or Exile.


• You'll note I haven't said a word about the puzzles. In all honesty, I needed hints on more than one occasion, but I don't say this to praise the game's difficulty. The original Myst's puzzles grew organically out of the game world--they were genuinely about figuring out how the world you were in worked--but after Riven, the series started moving away from these organic puzzle. Unfortunately, the games never fully made the transition to the 'look, there's a chess problem under this carpet' type of puzzle, and the result strains the player's suspension of disbelief even as it demands it. For example, one of Myst V's early puzzles involves getting out of an icy cavern. The solution is to place the Slate on a particular spot, where, helpfully enough, the outline of a slate has been drawn. Even if we could ignore the fact that this use of the Slate is completely inconsistent with everything we've come to learn about it, or that there's no reason why placing it in that position should crack the ice, there remains one inescapable question--who drew that outline, and why? That the game designers can introduce such an absurdity with a straight face and then turn around and explain that really, this combination of pulled levers will allow you to cross over to that location because there's a lifeform in the water that responds to heat blah blah blah simply serves to confuse the player--how much realism should we expect from the game? The answer is constantly shifting, and makes for a frustrating gameplaying experience.


• A word of advice to Cyan's marketing people: you do realize that the universal reaction to your chosen tagline, "Choose Wisely, For There Will Be No Second Chance", is "Is there something wrong with the save function?"


• I can't imagine any hardcore Myst fan will be swayed by this recommendation, but I'll make it anyway: don't buy this game. It isn't a worthy successor to the Myst title, not even the two most recent sequels. It does wrap up the Myst universe, but in a way that will actually make you glad that there will be no further games, and I know that's not how any rabid fan wants to feel about a beloved series.

Myst V Demo, Reevaluated

A brief review of Myst forums reveals that I was wrong about a lot of things in my previous review of the demo. The Slate is used during the demo. Details that I had assumed were extraneous, such as the D'ni numbers and the symbols they correlated to, turn out to be vitally important. In fact, as it turns out I failed to make all but the most basic connections when I played the demo.

And yet, I managed to solve the puzzle and get to the demo's end, simply by using a brute force approach. There are four revolving pedestals with eight symbols on each one, each affecting a different door. It's not a combination lock, so it takes less than 32 attempts to find the right symbols. Which right there forces me to reevaluate the entire puzzle. You're not supposed to be able to crack a Myst puzzle by trying all the possible combinations, and one of the most important things a puzzle designer has to keep in mind is that as long as the number of combinations isn't prohibitive (and from my own personal experience, 'prohibitive' means a hell of a lot more than 32), most players will prefer the brute force approach to stopping and thinking.

As it stand, the puzzle also brings up some unfortunate questions from the previous Myst games, which I had hoped the End of Ages designers would have enough sense to keep in mind: why does the last man on the planet need combination locks? And even if we accept the combination locks, why would he leave himself hints to the combination which other people would be able decipher with ease? In Myst and Riven, the combinations to most locks were written in diaries, so that the challenge became getting your hands on the diaries, or, if the hints to the combinations were in plain sight, the locks themselves were hard to reach--in other words, a fairly realistic approach to security, implying the existence of real people who didn't want strangers in their secret hideaways. In Exile and Revelation, the locks were clearly meant to be openable by anyone with enough free time who happened across them. The game-ishness of the world began to peek through, destroying the player's suspension of disbelief.

Judging from the demo, it seems that End of Ages is taking the same approach, which is a shame. The quality I always liked best about the Myst puzzles was their integration into the game world. At their best, the puzzles weren't really puzzles but a series of hurdles that the player had to overcome, as if they had really been dropped into an unfamiliar place and had to figure it out as they tried to explore it. It's part of what made Myst so immersive, and it's saddening to think that the final installment in the series might not offer that same experience.

Myst V: End of Ages Demo

(Available from Macgamefiles.com. The demo weighs in at 457 MB and is available only for Macintosh. The game's official site also contains a trailer and screenshots.)

The first thing you always say about a Myst game is that the graphics are lovely, which, of course, they are. When it released the demo for Myst IV: Revelation, Ubisoft sacrificed image resolution in order to keep the file under a certain size, to the horror and concern of fans. It's good to see that they've learned their lesson, even if the result is a gigantic file that not everyone will be able to download.

Beautiful as the game world is, however, I'm not certain about its Myst-ishness. Myst worlds are painstakingly detailed: whether it's indoors, where every surface is covered with books, scraps of paper that have been doodled on, pens, scientific implements, oddly shaped rocks, bits of string, pictures of loved ones, and even desk toys, or outdoors, where every bush, rock and blade of grass seem to have been individually drawn. The small area that the demo allowed me to explore--a tiny island where one of the game characters has settled--was disappointingly barren. Even the man-made objects didn't have the level of detail I've come to expect from the game (a closer look at some of the screenshots available online suggests that, even at its gigantic size, the demo may feature low-quality graphics).

A major departure from Myst tradition is the decision to turn away from green screen acting and use motion capture animation. The result is what we've come to expect from motion capture--body movements are rendered perfectly, but facial expressions are almost unreadable. The game designers have been making noises about a new 'face mapping' technique, but the results remind me of nothing more than Vincent D'Onofrio in Men In Black--there's a face, and there's something moving underneath it, but the two don't seem to be connected in the normal way. I'm really not certain why the designers chose to move away from filming before a green screen, especially when it's obvious that they still need the actors for the voice work and the motion capture itself.

Another problem of the Myst IV demo was that the puzzle was ridiculously easy (really, it was at the level of finding the not-terribly-well-hidden instructions and following them). The new demo also addresses this problem--not only is the puzzle relatively challenging, but it's clearly only a small part of a much larger puzzle. It's already clear that there's a complicated system of symbols in the game that the player is going to have to learn (I was especially pleased to see the return of D'ni numbers in base 25). In this sense, the demo does exactly what it's supposed to do--offer a tiny taste of mystery that whets the appetite for more answers. Unfortunately, very little of the story is revealed, and the only character we meet seems to have nothing to do with Atrus or his family.

Absent from the demo are the camera and the journal, which were both so helpful in Myst IV. Even worse, there doesn't seem to be a Zip Mode, a well-loved and desperatly needed feature, as the Myst games require a lot of back-and-forth-ing as the player tries to see what consequences their actions have had on the game world. I'm holding out hope that all three features will be present in the final game.

Bottom line, this is a better demo than the previous one. I have serious reservations about some of the designers' decisions (I haven't even mentioned the Slate, a writing device introduced in the demo but not used, which is another departure from Myst tradition), but like most fans, I'll be lining up to buy the game as soon as it becomes available.

Careful, He's Educated or, Thoughts Prompted By a Computer Game

I played a lot of computer games as a kid, but the ones that I've kept playing are the Myst games. Commonly known as a game for non-gamers, Myst is brilliantly minimallistic. No cumbersome inventory management, no labored backstory, no complicated interface. Most importantly, Myst has a good story. I adored it as a young teenager, when it occupied my mind from morning till night for more than a month. Its sequel, Riven, was the Empire Strikes Back to Myst's Star Wars--a wider world full of tougher puzzles with a more interesting story that ended in several intriguing ways, not all of them complete losses or wins. The series has persisted to the present day, with two sequels (Myst III: Exile and Myst IV: Revelation) and a related game originally intended as a multi-player environment (Uru). A fifth and final installment is scheduled for release this fall.

All Myst games revolve around Atrus, one of the few survivors of a highly advanced civilization called the D'ni, whose greatest achievement, The Art, allowed them to write books through which they could travel to different worlds. In Myst, we discover that Atrus' greedy and power-hungry sons, Sirrus and Achenar, have lured him into a trap so that they could ravage his library and the worlds it linked to, eventually becoming trapped in two prison books of Atrus' devising. In Riven, the player follows Atrus' kidnapped wife Katherine to her home and matches wits against Ghen, Atrus' megalomaniacal father, who wants Atrus to repair the damage he's caused through his inept mishandling of The Art. In Exile, a former victim of Sirrus and Achenar (Brad Dourif, making ends meet before Peter Jackson and the producers of Deadwood started handing him fat and well-deserved paychecks) tries to take his revenge on Atrus by stealing his only link to the new D'ni homeworld. Revelation, which takes place a decade later, sends the player to Sirrus and Achenar's prison worlds to discover which one of them is responsible for the kidnapping of Atrus' young daughter, Yeesha.

The first two Myst games (and the three tie-in novels that tell Atrus' backstory) emphasized the fact that the good guys were highly educated, inquisitive, and scientifically minded. The bad guys were lazy, uneducated, unable or unwilling to acknowledge their intellectual inferiority and constantly looking for shortcuts on the way to knowledge and power. If that wasn't enough, the metaphor of books that allow you to influence the physical world and travel to distant places is a clear indicator of a pro-intellectualism mindset.

Things start to change in the third game, Exile, in which we get a glimpse of the process of educating someone like Atrus when we follow the villain to his prison of two decades, a lesson world written by Atrus for his sons as they began to learn The Art. These lessons, however, are nothing more than insipid New Age mantras such as "energy powers future motion".

Things get worse in Revelation. Atrus summons the player to offer an unbiased opinion on whether Sirrus and Achenar have reformed enough to be allowed out of their prisons. While exploring these prison worlds, the player gets a glimpse of how the brothers have spent their incarcerations through flashbacks and journal entries. Sirrus, the "smart" brother, immediately sets out trying to find a way out. Using only crude tools, he somehow manages to MacGyver everything from circuit boards to airships. When Atrus inserts an impervious meeting chamber into the prison world, through which he and Katherine can talk to Sirrus without allowing him to escape, their unrepentant son immediately begins trying to find a way to shatter it, going so far as to manipulate his young sister and tug on his mother's heartstrings to do so.

Achenar, on the other hand, is depicted as a lumbering, grunting he-man (the brothers' personalities in Revelation are a gigantic retcon from the original Myst, in which Sirrus was a greedy, effete abuser of alcohol and narcotics with zero understanding of technical matters, and Achenar was a giggling psychopath with dark and grotesque appetites) who uses his incarceration in a jungle world teeming with wildlife as an opportunity to hunt big game. Though not unskilled with his hands, Achenar is clearly Sirrus' intellectual inferior, as his crude handwriting and poor spelling reveal when the player reads his journals. These journals also reveal a slow but definite change in Achenar's personality. He begins to be horrified with his and Sirrus' crimes, and with his own depletion of the jungle's wildlife population. He becomes a conservationist, spending hours observing and studying the indigenous monkey population. When his mother makes him a gift of a home-made garment, the simple giant is moved to tears by its beauty and softness.

Revelation's final act takes place on the world to which Yeesha has been kidnapped, a New Age wonderland ruled by of a group of priestesses who travel to "Dream" to meet the spirits of their ancestors. There the player discovers that the still-evil Sirrus is Yeesha's kidnapper, and that he plans to take over her body in order to learn The Art from Atrus, whom he intends to kill once he's learned all he needs. Through the self-sacrifice of Achenar and, of course, the help of The Ancestors, Yeesha is saved.

The transformation is complete. From a series that extolled the values of education and erudition, Myst has turned the intellectual into a boogeyman. The only permissible kind of intelligence is the ethereal, illogical, fortune cookie "wisdom" of the spirit world. To paraphrase Achenar as he describes his quarry in the jungle world, stupidity has become a virtue.

Anyone watching popular culture depictions of academics knows that the stereotypical egghead is and always has been cowardly, weak, and effeminate (unless they are female, of course, in which case they usually aren't womanly enough). The stereotype doesn't exist without reason--if only because the kind of mindset required to do something very brave probably doesn't benefit from too much introspection or imagination--but recently it has evolved to include moral deficiency. Most worryingly, a lot of these new depictions of the academic as heartless and amoral come from science fiction--supposedly the stronghold of geeks and rationalists.

• When Farscape's John Crichton is duplicated by an alien device, one of his copies is farther along the evolutionary scale (naturally, this copy is pale, bald and less well-hung). The more advanced Crichton is smarter than the regular one and, as the audience soon discovers, is coldly amoral. He manipulates Crichton and the rest of Moya's crew in order to preserve his own life, whereas Crichton's cave-man duplicate selflessly sacrifices himself for the greater good.

• When the new Doctor Who picks up Adam, a self-proclaimed genius, as a companion, the young man immediately turns around and tries to make time travel work for him by stealing schematics of future computers, not caring how he might disrupt the flow of history. This is in contrast to the selfless Rose, who dropped out of school (which she hated) without getting her A-Levels.
  

• Battlestar Galactica's Gaius Baltar was probably the smartest person on his planet, and when he discovered that the Cylons had used him to destroy nearly all of humanity, his first reaction was to shirk the blame and try to hide his guilt from the other surviving humans, going so far as to frame another man for being a Cylon spy. At no point during the series' first season has Baltar expressed remorse for his part in the genocide of his race.
  

• Willow, the geeky best friend of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, thoughtlessly manipulates the minds of her lover and friends to prevent them from being angry at her. Buffy's mentor, the bookish Giles, proves the be the most morally flexible character in the cast when he kills a helpless man to prevent his monstrous alter-ego from reemerging, and later when he distracts Buffy as the vengeful Robin Wood tries to kill her sometimes-ally Spike.
  

• On Angel, the educated Wesley Windham-Pryce betrays Angel by kidnapping his son. Even more distressing is the staunchly moral Gunn, a street kid frustrated by his intellectual limitations, who receives a magical gift of legal knowledge. He becomes so enamored with his new erudition that he betrays his friends, causing the death of one of them, rather than lose it.

The mad scientist archetype exists for a reason--genius is the flip side of madness, and it is the role of geniuses to push the limits of the possible and the permissible, and sometimes to go too far--but the plot lines I've described deal with ordinary people, not geniuses, who have chosen to contribute to the world through their intellect rather than their muscles. Without fail, all of them lose sight of the difference between right and wrong, believing themselves to be more worthy than their less intelligent peers.

I would hazard a guess that the devaluation of the academic as a moral entity has something to do with the belief that intellectuals can't be spiritual. Again, that's a sterotype with roots in reality (although plenty of scientists and academics are also religious), but whence the assumption that a person needs to believe in God (or Goddess, or Gaia, or Buddha, of The Force, or some non-specific deity-ish bugaboo) in order to be moral? I find it vaguely offensive to suggest that the only reason people know that killing is wrong is that God told them so, or even that they don't kill because they fear God's retribution.

Morality is a tricky notion. Some people suggest that it is inherent to us as thinking beings (or as immortal sparks of the divine, whatever floats your boat), that something in us recoils from causing pain and damage to others. Others claim that morality is a construct of civilization, and that our animal nature, left to its own devices, would prompt us to act out of total selfishness to secure our own survival and comfort. I vacillate between the two, but either way I don't see why it should follow that an intellectual would be any less moral than an uneducated person. Whether from God or from society, the impulse to act morally should exist in all of us, and I see nothing in the process of education that would distance a person from that impulse.

I find it unfortunate, therefore, and not a little bit ironic, that the people who have made the sterotype of the intellectual as amoral and untrustworthy so prevalent should be the same kind of intelligent, educated people who make games like Myst.