The Sources of Exploration: Miyamoto, Philip K. Dick & The Heart of Art

In Philip K. Dick's 1965 sci-fi classic, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, the earth has become an unbearable fireball, a perpetual Texas summer that is barely livable. The United Nations is colonizing planets and moons, sending millions of twenty-first century John Smiths to kickstart agriculture on the harsh, cold, crystallized soil of places like Mars and Europa. In these dark and miserable habitats, removed from the comparative bounty of Earth, the colonists find redemption in Can-D, a drug that "transforms" the user to an imagined paradisiacal beach in southern California. The Can-D users are, in their minds, transformed to another world in an experience described as wondrous, mystical and even religious. In Palmer Eldritch, Dick imagines a world in which drug-induced simulation is the only source of natural wonder for a race that has destroyed its own habitat.

I was reminded of Dick's work today while reading Nick Paumgarten's "The Master of Play," a profile of Nintendo game guru Shigeru Miyamoto from the December 20 issue of the New Yorker. Miyamoto is more or less THE man behind Nintendo, engineering not only its classic and still popular games like Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda and Wii Sports, but also its philosophy - the fun first, complexity later purity that Nintendo is known for. Paumgarten's profile details Miyamoto's inspirations for games like Mario and Zelda as emerging out of his childhood explorations in the woods of a rural Japanese town:

[Miyamoto grew up] thirty miles northwest of Kyoto, in a river valley surrounded by wooded mountains. As he got older, he wandered farther afield, on foot or by bike. He explored a bamboo forest behind the town’s ancient Shinto shrine and bushwhacked through the cedars and pines on a small mountain near the junior high school. One day, when he was seven or eight, he came across a hole in the ground. He peered inside and saw nothing but darkness. He came back the next day with a lantern and shimmied through the hole and found himself in a small cavern. He could see that passageways led to other chambers. Over the summer, he kept returning to the cave to marvel at the dance of the shadows on the walls.

I was familiar with these stories of Miyamoto and had always thought of the Mario and Zelda games as exploratory masterpieces. To me, they were alternate universes, interactive versions of Alice's wonderland, accessible only through the application of the player's imagination. Such games, rendered in now-rudimentary 16-bit sprites, require a certain willingness to play along, to "fill in the gaps" as Wolfgang Iser might say, a willingness that likely benefits the young over the intellectualized and habituated, a willingness perhaps only accessible to adults through hallucinogenic drugs. It seems almost foreign to me now, and I'm sure even moreso to adults divorced from the experience or who never had it, to consider them in this way. It was a later part of the article, however, that brought Dick's work to my mind. Paumgarten continues,

There may be no starker example of the conversion of primitive improvisations into structured, commodified, and stationary technological simulation than that of Miyamoto, the rural explorer turned ludic mastermind. In his games, Miyamoto has always tried to re-create his childhood wonderment, if not always the actual experiences that gave rise to it, since the experiences themselves may be harder to come by in a paved and partitioned world. “I can still recall the kind of sensation I had when I was in a small river, and I was searching with my hands beneath a rock, and something hit my finger, and I noticed it was a fish,” he told me one day. “That’s something that I just can’t express in words. It’s such an unusual situation. I wish that children nowadays could have similar experiences, but it’s not very easy.”

It's hard to argue that the world we live in is not more "paved and partitioned" than the world Miyamoto grew up in, fifty-some years ago in rural Japan. Living in New York City, I frequently reflect on the effects of my concrete environment and the feeling that everything has already been discovered a thousand times before. Even the structure of public transportation can make the world feel small; by necessity, a subway prevents the ability to wander off somewhere of your own choosing, as any destination must be one that someone decided it was worthwhile for people to go, and worthwhile enough that millions of people would be regularly going there. No discovery, nothing new. This is, of course, a selective analysis of New York and the subway system, but one that has its roots in real feelings. As the world becomes more urbanized and more and more people grow up in cities, or comparatively urbanized areas, I wonder what avenues will be available for the sense of play described by Miyamoto.

I'm sure the problem feels especially acute in Japan, the world's most urbanized country, but the idea pops up again and again in Western fiction as well, especially in science fiction. In Dick's Palmer Eldritch and a host of other apocolyptic or pseudo-apocalyptic literature, a depreciated natural environment deprives us of essential aspects of our humanity. Dick's Do Android's Dream of Electric Sheep offered a similar vision of the future in which religion was practiced through computer simulation. While I'm not so much concerned here with religion, I do worry that the feeling of wonder that perhaps burgeons into spiritual elation and intellectual curiosity is increasingly inaccessible in an increasingly urbanized world, and, along with this dearth, available only in simulated form.

Link encounters The Deku Tree in The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time(1998)

Even looking beyond the medium of computer games, roller coasters, playgrounds, Discovery Zone franchises, and most obviously literature and film provide human-created opportunities to explore other avenues of experience. While video games and other forms of media built on newer technologies are in their infancy, to what degree will we become reliant on them, or more advanced versions of them, for sensations that mirror the ones discussed by Miyamoto? Or, once they are not presented to us through our environment, will we even notice that they are gone?

2 Course Proposals

Descriptions of 2 courses I proposed for Duke University's Talent Identification Program. The first one was accepted and is being offered summer 2011. The second is a proposal for a weekend course in the fall of 2011. I'm writing this post to practice the habit of posting about something other than freewriting about various media issues. While I've posted other things before, I'd like to get better at it. So here goes:

Existentialism in Film and Other Media
This course will explore the ways in which existential philosophy manifests itself in texts from a variety of media sources– films, novels, comic books, music and more. Beginning with an introduction to classic existential texts by Sartre, Camus and Dostoevsky, students will get a strong understanding of the basics of existential thought. From here, the class will examine short stories, films and other texts, creating interpretations through discussions, paper writing and in-class activities. The course will help students to create their own philosophical interpretations and grow in their ability to analyze and make sense of literary texts and the world around them.

Inspiring Writing Through Multimedia

This course will explore the ways in which internet and multimedia texts can be used to inspire creative writing. Students will learn how to use photographs to help develop characters, YouTube videos to write inner monologues, electronic music to create settings and more. In addition, the class will offer a brief introduction to online publishing and peer feedback on writing. During the course, students will have the option of producing a short story, several poems, or a multi-genre piece. The goal of the class will be to equip students with simple ways to continue writing on their own by drawing on resources already available to them.  The course materials will build upon the most successful lessons from my Inspired Writer and Writer’s Workshop classes, both offered as part of the 2010 TIP Summer Studies program at Texas A&M University.

It's interesting to see these two side-by-side. I had never written a course proposal before submitting the Existentialism course earlier this year. Since the class was accepted, I used this paragraph as a template for the second. Even on top of the obvious stylistic similarities, it's interesting to see my own interests shining through so similarly in both, despite the fact that they were conceived apart. It's also fun to see a little bit of BS in them both.

Thoughts and Rants About Heavy Rain

I finally played Heavy Rain after months of reading about it in various online publications. I started and ended the game feeling...weird. Not that this hasn't been written about, but the level of realism present makes the game feel creepy. Since the early days of games, pixels and computer graphics acted as representations of people and places. Even as graphics have advanced and become more realistic, there is still a representational element - still a clear limitation that detaches the characters from real humans. Here, the characters, rather than serving as representations people, are more like a brand of pseudo-human, looking near-photo-realistic, but moving and acting clunky, wooden and bizarre. This leaves the player with an icky feeling of simulation. I feel like I'm in some sort of zombie Matrix, where humans have been replaced with robots acting like humans (which, I guess, since it's a computer game, is what the characters actually are).

The tense, intended-to-be-emotive music and the uber-suburban setting/plot aren't helping either. The house where the game starts seems ripped off of the set of a poorly designed drama for young adults who want some sort of teenage-dream of cool penthouse-for grownups.

The game's controls, arguably the central element, are a mixed bag. They don't really stray that far from quick-time, FMV games like Dragon's Lair, but the objectives are different. The game has the player press a series of buttons for any number of mundane actions - tooth brushing, door opening, sitting down, etc. The idea, I imagine, is to create a sense of immersion - you can do anything, not just exciting things. However, much of the time, the game forces you to act out these mundane actions. It has a certain novelty, but winds up making the control scheme feel more like work than fun. Especially when you are literally doing the character's work. The game, of course, builds to allow the player to do more exciting things, but small details like pulling money out of a wallet or locking the door are still required. I would be more forgiving if this level of detail actually gave the player freedom to do anything, or even a large number of things, but much of the time, I was wandering around in whatever room or setting I was placed, waiting for an icon to show up indicating that I could do something. What is intended to be immersive, again winds up feeling bizarre.

Things do get better in the control department, however. The action sequences are are some of the most suspenseful I've played, but these sequences get repetitive as well (another mysterious stranger enters, gets in a fight with the protagonist, who must utilize any number of found objects until the stranger gets away.) Overall though, they are well done and are perhaps the most effective part of the game. Still, for a game so heavily built around the ideas of immersive storytelling and moral choices, why are the fight scenes the only parts that are engaging?

This brings us to the story and cinematics. Heavy Rain has been described as having "intriguing plot twists" and a narrative that rivals that of "any" (ANY!?) Hollywood movie. IGN named it Game of the Year for 2010 and described it as "a thriller that had just about everyone on the edge of their seats." I don't know what game these critics were playing or what movies they've seen, but I think when people say that Heavy Rain's story is up there with the best of Hollywood, what they mean is that it feels like a piece of TV or film drama - in other words, its story is, shall we say, of the cinema. This does not make it the best. I'd place it somewhere near the level of I STILL Know What You Did Last Summer. It's incredibly cheesy and horrendously directed. I can't imagine sitting through this as a movie, let alone proclaiming it the best, or even good. And why...WHY...does dramatic music swell up randomly every 4 minutes. I just picked up a pencil. DA-DA-Duuuuuum! I just walked to the other side of the room and sat at the computer. DA-DA-Duuuuuuum! The music has little sense of purpose, and the moments when the music is well-suited to the situation are sullied by the fact that so often, the same music is playing with little to no purpose.

Since I've just went on a long rant about my complaints about the game, I'd like to take a step back and look at it a little more dispassionately. It's hard not to say that it's not impressively ambitious and, in some ways, innovative. Its success will hopefully inspire more develops to at least invest in a higher quality of writing and story, even if this game failed in those departments (in my opinion). Heavy Rain, if it has any impact on development, will likely move games in a direction that I don't like- towards a more narrative, film-mimicking approach. To my mind, this is not what games are good at doing and I believe developers should be looking for ways to exploit user control to create unique experiences only available through games. Still, that's just me. For narrativists, this may be just the game they are hoping for, what Flower is to me: a game that strives in just the right way to push all of gaming in a more serious and thoughtful direction.

Kanye You a Genius for This One

Kanye West featuring Bon Iver - Lost in the World. Whaat? Fantastic. My favorite track so far on the new Kanye CD, this song may be the most effective indie music/rap collaboration I've heard. Building naturally from Bon Iver's autotune-heavy 2009 release, Blood Bank, Lost in the World uses its guest star with surprising necessity. Rather than a novel and perhaps ironic cameo, Bon Iver's looped voice is used to set the emotional tone -  a simultaneous build-up and resolution to Kanye's ego-fueled, emotional torrent of a record. This type of confusion-in-resolution recalls the last track from from Bright Eyes' Cassadega, Lime Tree (at least to me) - an attempt to create something that feels large, substantial and meaningful, but one that is mired in its own wanderings. How can you create a resolution to an album that's about heart-wrenching upheaval and self doubt? Here, on Kanye's track, Justin Vernon's encoded voice starts out the track and later becomes layered over what appears to be a choir-like R&B loop, with only a short verse from West himself. It's like indie-rap Daft Punk. I'm not the biggest Kanye fan in the world, but damn! every new record he puts out takes the thrasher to genre conventions, creating something that feels fascinating and new. Each album could be taken as a strand to be built on, to create an entirely new brand, not just of rap music, but musical in general. Apologies for the lack of mp3s. I'm still a blogging novice. Anyone know how to add music tracks to a Blogger account?

Fallout 3 & The Road

I've been playing a lot of Fallout 3 lately, Obsidian's sprawling, post-apocalyptic, go-anywhere, action/RPG/adventure game for PS3 (and other consoles). The 1950's Americana aesthetic, the grand, orchestral touches at crucial plot points, and the VATS slow-motion combat system give this game a strong artistic feel. The open-ended structure also seems like a great example of fitting form to content: a post-apocalyptic world would feel rather vapid, empty and free. A game set in a society with no form and no law should be similarly light on formal restraints. While playing, you can follow a storyline, but the game doesn't necessarily guide you heavy-handedly. You can go anywhere from the start, talking to NPCs, completing alternative quests and so on.



As I was playing, this form and content match began to remind me of Cormac McCarthy's bleak novel, The Road. In that work, McCarthy plays loose with the conventions of standard English, leaving out periods, quotation marks and other handy punctuation. In interviews, he has stated that for an apocalyptic novel, tight sentences and impeccable grammar seemed...out of place.

But the connection goes further than just a lack of form. Players will spend hours (literally; I'm 35 hours into the game right now) scrounging through trash cans, old boxes, abandoned houses and whatever else they come upon. It gives the same sense of desperation as The Road, in which the father and son consistently rummage through everything in search of food. Creator Ted Howard commented that, "[The team] mix it up, moments of sobering loneliness, with you searching for food and water, and moments of craziness, with splashes of dark humour." It's almost as if he's refering to Mccarthy's novel.

I was most struck by the Road-ness of Fallout 3 when I was wandering through the game world and came upon some "raiders" sitting outside of a run-down house. Upon entering the house, I discovered dismembered corpses tied to blood-stained mattresses, old grimy cooking utensils, a strange beige light, and a strong sense of claustrophobia. It was one of the most disturbing and powerful segments I have played through in a video game. The scene appears to be taken directly out of McCarthy's novel, in which the two protaganists encounter a nearly identical house, filled with screaming victims of a similar group of raiders. The father in the novel has the same reaction I did: get the fuck out. However, in the game, the player has more freedom. Since the character in the game is, in a sense, the same as the player, the situation is less real in a way. The player can linger, rummage for food, wander the house (as long as they as they can stand the ambiance). In contrast to the game world and the player, the situation in the novel is reality to the characters, even if it is a fiction to the reader, since there is a stronger divide between reader and character.

I was amazed at how well Howard and the rest of the Fallout team captured this sense of abject horror in a video game. I had the same sense of repulsion and fear playing the game that I did reading McCarthy's scene. In a separate interview, Howard directly notes the influence of The Road, remarking it was required reading for every member of the team.

What feels a bit disappointing in Fallout, then, is that video games have not yet evolved to a point where experiences this emotionally or artistically intense are consistently conveyed. With all of their interactive power, games should be a prime landscape for artistic forays. Fallout is a brilliant work that presents a beautifully dark world, that can make you recoil or reflect, but so much of it is wasted on standard video game tropes. The writing and voice acting are atrociously bad most of the quests represent the same type of fetch or find actions that were standard in the early 90s point-and-click adventure games. The reliance on experience points, levelling up, collecting an absurd amount of guns and other standard RPG and action elements may add to the game in terms of traditional gameplay enjoyment, but take away from the potential for other types of enjoyment or artistic potential, specifically the ability to experience the decayed world that Fallout so imaginatively renders.