Am I feeling pulled in the direction of a megathesis about simulation,
repetition, and representation?  Because I should resist that if I am.


Create the Game, not the Player

Adventure, like fun, is a thing that can not be described in technical terms.
In film and game alike, successful adventuring never comes down to a formula.
Yet each success is followed by a flurry of measured imitation, carefully
hybridizing genres to create a mathematically perfect blend.  So-called
"exploration-based" video games, the bastard children of GTA3 and Assassin's
Creed, all feature familiar maps full of letters and symbols, their menus
straining with checklists, carefully curating which copy-and-paste structures
the player should explore next.  They inspire us to complete, not discover.

When I first played Assassin's Creed I was hooked.  I stayed up all night, my
roommate waking to find me still on the couch and the game's HUD burned into
his television.  Its movement system was like nothing I'd ever played, and its
cities brought me back to the fun I had as Mario scaling the towers of Delfino
Plaza.  My favorite task was finding new lookout points, since at the time it
felt so basic and free to just pick a spot on the map and try to go there.
Doing this unlocked several less interesting tasks.  Even in later games in the
series I felt that the missions and other "content" paled in comparison to just
wandering the city, going from point to point, the city's architecture engaging
as an environment instead of as button inputs.

A similar thing happened in GTA3, when I decided to get all of the hidden
packages.  I wanted all the free weapons in my hideouts, but in the end even
though I had used a guide the real joy was looking behind everything and
learning all the little nooks and crannies in the game's city.  The hidden
alleyways and police bribes that I learned about were ultimately far more
useful than any of the guns, because GTA3 was the last (probably only) game in
its series to really be about City.  The trajectory of Assassin's Creed, where
it caught the ball GTA dropped only to spike it into the bottom of the ocean,
makes a lot of sense in this context: these games succeed when they establish
their environments as interesting places, then fail when they abandon the city
for the open world.

Now every game has GTA's mission structure, AC's viewpoint system, and Just
Cause 2's uselessly gigantic game world.  Each feature, while sensible in its
original implementation, can only highlight the nihilism of modern game design
when divorced from the essential inspirations that made them work.  So we have
Arkham, we have Far Cry, we have Black Flag and Watch_Dogs and Shadow of
Mordor---myriad implementations of the same flowchart but with different art
assets, so that gamers can endlessly stim until all bars reach 100% and the
adventure is, to the player's relief, at last complete.

Achievements as game design taught us a lesson: that games had the power to
reduce humans to Skinnerian puppets, rats in an exquisite maze.  All kinds of
work were suddenly being "gameified"---crude numerizations of productive
activity being rewarded with nothing but the release of anxiety one feels upon
finishing.  With the right push, a workforce could be encouraged to abuse
itself almost as much as their employers would.  This trend seems to have
backwashed into actual games, turning them into the same simulations of work
that our jobs have become.  Game players, as well as their developers, are
victims of the same dehumanizing methodology.

Part of the reason for this is the pigeonholing effect of focus marketing.
"Too big to fail" game projects must explicitly target the coveted
straight-white-douchebag demographic, coiling themselves seductively around the
prosopopoeia their marketing teams convinced a generation of men to resemble.
Whatever the project started out as, whatever vision the developers had, must
gradually give way to the leveling-down brought on by this process.  The result
is a game world where every landscape, every character, every foe has been laid
out to please Cody.  The environment reaches out to him, meeting every
expectation halfway.  To do otherwise risks an experience outside sales
expectations.

What adventure is possible within this model?  Unsealing an ancient tomb or
leaving the big city for the first glimpse of the countryside should reveal a
place that belongs to itself, brimming with potentials that did not include you
until now.  Locations where the player can collaborate with the game world are
a thing of the past, and the motifs of advisable game design govern paths that
briefly occult their linearity, neatly belching us back at the entrance once
the three-phase boss has elapsed.  Like Jorge Luis Borges's map from "On
Exactitude in Science", the flowchart of boss and dungeon design circumscribes
our games so neatly that there is no longer any point in looking underneath.

Shigeru Miyamoto once made a game about being a kid and playing in the forest;
he did a good enough job that a generation of children no longer needed to play
in the forest to have an adventure because they could play his.  Is it possible
that today's games are repeating this same cycle, making a game about what it
was like to play Zelda?  Through how many layers of imitation can a single idea
perdure?  It is no longer possible to disturb, to interrupt, to uncover, when
all we are doing is re-revealing an adventure that has already been had.  In
the end, all that remains is the skeleton, the formula.  If there is meaning to
be found, where will it come from if not us?