A Brief Chart Illustrating the Collapse of PC RPGs in the Mid-1990's

Game Series	Previous Release	Mid-1990's Release	Later Release
Might & Magic	IV: Clouds of Xeen 1992	V: Darkside of Xeen 1993	VI: The Mandate of Heaven 1998
Ultima	VII: The Black Gate/ Serpent Isle 1992-93	VIII: Pagan 1994	IX: Ascension 1999
Wizardry	VI: Bane of the Cosmic Forge 1990	VII: Crusaders of the Dark Savant 1992	8 2001
The Elder Scrolls	Arena 1994	II: Daggerfall 1996	III: Morrowind 2002
Krondor	n/a	Betrayal at Krondor 1993	Return to Krondor 1998
Lands of Lore	n/a	Throne of Chaos 1993	II: Guardians of Destiny 1997
Quest for Glory	III: Wages of War 1992	IV: Shadows of Darkness 1994	V: Dragon Fire 1998

Published again

I have a new article in The Escapist, called Out of the D&D Closet, about my relationship to the game and my first attempt at playing it.

On Writing

A few months ago, I put up a post here about the history of video games I'm writing. This project is continuing, but I'm having some conceptual and practical issues with it.

I've realized that a full history of games, in the way that I want to write it, is just too big for a book. If I have 20,000 words on Japanese role-playing games in the 1990's, and the average nonfiction book in bookstores is 80,000 words, I've got way too much detail. It needs to be narrowed down in some way. Obviously I can (and will) edit the chapter, but that's as likely to add as it is to subtract.

In a practical sense, there are also just too many games I haven't played, and playing them now is a major time-sink. It also, for the newer games, requires much more money than I have at the moment. So with those two things in mind, I've decided to simply focus on the 1990's (or more accurately, 1990-2001). I believe that it's the most important transitional era in gaming (especially from 1994-1997 or so) and by some happy coincidence, it's also the one I have the most pre-existing knowledge of.

There are still big problems, though. I have over 30,000 words in two and a half chapters (two on JRPGs, half on PC RPGs). Granted, these are the kind of games I'm most interested and knowledgeable regarding, and also some of the most timeless and continually interesting games. But I've been working on this for maybe six months, and expect the book to need about 20 chapters. Two and a half is too little for me to be at now, and 30,000 words is too many.

I feel like I'm going to have to do something to continue narrowing it down conceptually, but I'm not sure what. The most obvious choice would be to divide it between console and PC games, but I'm opposed to that for a few reasons. First of all, I've divided my work so far roughly evenly between them, so it would force me to have to ignore a few months for a while. Second, I don't think the two platform styles are so different. I don't have specific theses for the book, I prefer to see what emerges, but comparing the similarities and differences between console and PC games is one of the main recurring concepts I've written about. That's seriously diluted if I divide them.

If I do manage to complete it and start shopping it around, I'd ideally like it to be a volume in a larger history of at least three volumes, which includes the 1980's and before, and the 2000's +. This adds the extra issue of shopping around the second volume in a series without the first or third. But to be honest, I'd probably be pretty happy about getting the point where I'm shopping a completed book around.

I do think I have at least half of the title: Spoony Bards, Vespene Gas, and the Chaingun Cha-Cha: video games in the 1990s change everything something something.

Lord of the (Lich) Kings, or, There Not Back Again

I can't go back to World of Warcraft.

I want to sometimes. The new expansion pack certainly appeals to me. I miss the world, the exploration, the camaraderie when times were good. I miss the setting and the storyline and the music. And part of all of that are the reasons I can't go back. Wrath of the Lich King wasn't something that I, as a WOW player and a fan of the storyline of Warcraft III, could miss. And I missed it all - lack of money and decent internet connection being the primary culprits.

For those who don't know. The second expansion pack was the culmination of the storyline started in Warcraft III and its expansion. That game was in large part about the corruption of the human paladin Prince Arthas, and his rise as the Lich King, the embodiment of evil on the world of Azeroth. Although there is some backlash now against Blizzard's overly epic, humorless storylines, I remain a fan of them.

In most story-based video games, the designers seem unwilling to have their villains actually commit atrocities or raise the stakes for the players. Not so with Warcraft III, which not only had villains who did things like kill their father then use his ashes to summon an archdemon, but actually had you, the player, control them on their destructive path. Arthas' rise as the Lich King in the final cinematic of the game represents both the player's great success in finishing the game, and a horrific experience for the game world and its inhabitants, which you also sympathize with after having completed several campaigns in Azeroth. It's a neat little storytelling trick.

World of Warcraft, of course, makes you a character within that world, trying generally to set right the horrors of its predecessor's storyline. The villains of the original WOW release and its first expansion, The Burning Crusade, were occasionally new to the universe, but they were generally progressively more dangerous villains from Warcraft III, leading inexorably to the Lich King in his expansion pack. I played some of the original game, and was a pretty hardcore raider for a few months during The Burning Crusade. I'd say I was invested in the storyline, but that's not entirely true - WOW doesn't have much of a storyline. It might be more accurate to say that I was invested in its representation of Warcraft III's storyline. I liked the feeling that it gave of being one of the small soldiers of the strategy game, but building up to become someone special, capable of heroic feats. And that part of the game was a major part of what I was invested in.

That's not all of it, of course, either on my end or on Blizzard's end. Of course they should continue making expansion packs if people are interested. They have a good game, and they're raking in cash. More power to them! And of course the storyline should continue after Lich King, and of course it's not a bad thing to have the nominal Foozle killed in an early expansion pack (did you know that Everquest has had seventeen expansions?) while your game is still relatively fresh. I will also grant that it's personal. My guild, formed towards the start of The Burning Crusade, collapsed not once but twice. Many of my best friends in the game during that time are no longer playing.

It's just that for me, the biggest appeal of going back to World of Warcraft would be seeing Northrend and fighting Arthas. And I've missed the bulk of that. Everyone will have already done this - and I haven't. The things I might want to do will be played out. Passé. Unpopular both in the colloquial sense and in the sense that the things which require a group to accomplish will no longer have people motivated to do them. It would be like a Star Wars game without the ability to take on Darth Vader, or Lord of the Rings where both Saruman and Sauron had been killed and you were suddenly supposed to believe Smaug was a bigger threat.

This is an odd feeling. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that in today's media world, it's almost unprecedented. There is always a fascination with the new - seeing a movie on opening night, or seeing a band as they're starting to make it big, or playing a game system at launch, yes. But by and large, there's also a trend towards making media consistently accessible. Old books, movies, and albums have almost always been available, and games are becoming more and more consistently available due to remakes, emulation, and downloads like the Wii's Virtual Console. Virtually everything can be experienced later on, and sometimes in a better format, than it was when it was initially released.

Except for massively multiplayer role-playing games. For these, you really do have to be there. Many of them have collapsed, and no longer even have servers to play upon. Virtually all of them have expansion packs or major patches which render some or much of their content obsolete or unplayable. As someone interested in media, this concept intrigues me. As a historian who' is interested in video games, it disturbs me. And as someone who is, by nature, curious and wants to know everything about everything, it horrifies me.

So I can't go back to World of Warcraft. It's probably for the best, anyway. I'm hearing good things about The Old Republic anyway. Maybe I'll be ready for a new MMRPG when it comes out.

A Bridge Too Far

I recently blogged about militarism and war in video games. It's not a subject which is often far from my mind when I think about games. It's come to fore again, which EA in the news for setting their newest Medal of Honor game in Afghanistan, and allowing players to be on the side of the Taliban in multiplayer mode.

This is kind of disgusting. Ghoulish is the word that springs to my mind.

But why do I find it ghoulish? Let's be realistic here. Video games let you play the bad guy and/or do horrible things all the time. In fictional settings, I consider Warcraft III to have one of the most interesting storylines of all time, and part of that includes what is virtually genocide against the human and elvish races. The Bioware/Fallout model of RPG includes good and evil paths for your characters to follow, with the evil path usually involving the wanton slaughter of innocents. Grand Theft Auto games are famously amoral and violent. In Master of Orion II, you can destroy entire planets of your enemies, wiping out billions of people at a time. Games like Wizardry IV, Dungeon Keeper, and Overlord cast you literally into the role of the bad guy, killing heroes over and over.

Those are fictional, of course. How many games put you in the role of playing historical evils? The entire genre of wargames puts its players in roles of dubious morality constantly. I remember how shocked my sister was when she discovered that I was playing as the Confederacy in Sid Meier's Gettysburg. Broader strategy games like Civilization allow you to play as many of history's greatest monsters: Stalin, Genghis Khan, or Mao Zedong. In Rome:Total War, every conquered settlement gives you the option to enslave or exterminate the populace - and choosing one of those is often the most successful strategy.

And then there are the Nazis. World War II-era Germany is the most morally reprehensible state in human history. Other groups or nations have oppressed and killed peoples, or started bloody unjust wars. Only the Nazis made all of those things part and parcel of the functions of the state. Only the Nazis used death camps. And yet playing as the Nazis is built into the fabric of video games. The most popular wargames have consistently been set during World War II. Panzer General, which was credited with saving the genre - for a time - wasn't merely set during WWII, but as the name implied, focused on playing as the Germans. The single-player campaign was only German! First-person shooters allow it as well, of course: Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Medal of Honor to name a few.

It's not merely the present-day setting, however. For over a decade now, multiplayer first-person shooters inspired by Counterstrike have included generic "terrorists" as the opponents to the conventional army in their battles. How much of a difference is there between the apparently generic terrorist of a SOCOM and the specifically named Taliban of the new Medal of Honor? Perhaps others see more of a distinction than I do. Even if you accept that specific modern conflicts should be off-limits, what is the statute of limitations? Holocaust survivors are still alive, yet obviously you can still play as Nazis. Would the first Gulf War be okay? The Rwandan genocide?

What the new Medal of Honor does in allowing you to play as the Taliban is it takes one further veil off of the constant positive portrayals of violence and militarism in video games. It says, nakedly, that video games support war no matter who is fighting. It says that there is no veneer of morality or ethics in mainstream video games. It says that major game publishers just don't care. It's disturbing and ghoulish, but look on the bright side - it'll only seem that way until it becomes normal and shocks have to be delivered another way.

The Sopranos: Season One

The AV Club has started covering classic Sopranos episodes, which has finally given me the motivation to start watching. Some thoughts on the first season:


The Sopranos is built around tension, but it's a formal tension more than a narrative tension. There is a narrative tension, certainly, involving Tony Soprano attempting to navigate his life as a mob leader with his family life, amongst other things. The formal tension comes from the show's framing device and initial pitch: "a mob boss goes to see a psychologist...." The show walks a fine line between the psychological aspect of the story, which is metaphorical, and the actuality of Tony's life, which is literal.

Most art is, in some ways, metaphorical. It's designed to allow the viewer to fill in the blanks. On television, for example, Buffy and her friends don't start out in high school, they start the series in "high school." Though nominally sophomores, they're played by actors and actresses in their late teens or even early 20's. Then again, the show is based on metaphor, using supernatural horrors to stand in for the horrors of high school and later, young adult life. The dialogue goes along with this. Xander, who is supposed to be the geekiest of geeks, is consistently clever and witty, but he does so in a way that represents social awkwardness.

On the other hand, a show like Freaks and Geeks takes a more literal approach. The "geeks" of the title are supposed to be only a year younger than Buffy's group, but the actors are obviously closer to their nominal age. Their social awkwardness actually manifests as awkwardness on-screen. There's still a great deal of metaphor - it's network television, after all - but the stammering and fear actually manifest as a somewhat authentic high school experience, instead of "high school." I'm not saying that a literal approach to television is necessarily better than a metaphorical one - that would be foolish for science fiction fan! - just that it's there.

The Sopranos uses both, though. Tony's interactions with his shrink, Dr. Melfi, are almost entirely metaphorical. They're "therapy" more than therapy. Everything has a direct one-to-one correlation: Tony hallucinates an ideal mother figure when his conflicts with his real mother reach their peak, for example. Tony's interactions with Melfi are generally entertaining, and the idea of 90's therapy, when random drug prescriptions were at their peak is certainly good story fodder (why is Tony on lithium? Why not!). However, the rest of the series is at its best when it's understated and literal. Tony's interactions with his family, for example, or him hanging out with his crew talking about The Godfather.

As the season progressed, I found myself more and more frustrated by this tension. The best episode of the season, "College," was totally therapy-free, and was riveting television. A couple eps later saw "Boca," which took the metaphor outside of the shrink's office, and suddenly had a soccer team, soccer coach, new friends, and a sexual abuse plotline that were all vaguely surreal - and it was easily the worst episode of the season.

The therapy sequences made sense in the pilot. The entire show was a simple pitch: "mob leader sees shrink." For a pilot, this makes sense, as it's like a movie that's asking for sequels. But over time, it becomes a device or worse, a gimmick.

Yet by the end of the series, I found myself less frustrated with the therapy conceit. The Sopranos is a show about its metaphors as well as the literal. It's going to have goofy dream sequences, ham-handed metaphors, and blatant TV-style artificiality. These things don't lessen the show, they force the viewer to watch it critically instead of simply for artificiality, and that way the viewer can see the intentional cynicism and darkness that the characters and setting exude. To put it simply, without the layers of metaphor and formal tension, it would be easy to simply declare Tony Soprano a hero or a villain, someone to root for or against. He is the reason to watch, and the artificiality makes me, as the viewer, say "Why am I watching this? What makes it good and interesting?" And usually, the show has answers to those questions.

Why Can't I Play The Seven Samurai?

Thanks to the Kurosawa Centennial going on at UC-Berkeley this summer, I had the exciting opportunity to see Seven Samurai on film, in a crowded theater. It was an excellent experience - the big screen helped bring out the best of the cinematography and sound, the audience was quite inclined to enjoy Toshiro Mifune's antics, and the film is as always eminently rewatchable despite its length.

As I was watching it, however, I kept thinking "this could be an excellent video game!" There is a distinct - and somewhat surprising - lack of Kurosawa-inspired samurai games. There's the oddity of Seven Samurai 20XX and a Diablo-esque PC RPG Throne of Darkness, neither of which I've played. I have played the 20-year-old classic Sword of the Samurai, which allows for a recreation of Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, but not much else.

Kurosawa's focus on ronin and their relationships with society would make fertile ground for a game. In Seven Samurai, it's a group hired by peasants to defend the village against bandits. What makes the peasants better than the bandits, or the samurai different from the those brigands? Yojimbo and Sanjuro utilize the classic plot of a dangerous stranger coming into a town with problems, and he - despite apparently mercenary motivations and disdain for straightforward morality - ends up doing the right thing. This is pure RPG gold! Rashomon's puzzle and ambiguity regarding the truth is a good model for video games, albeit not one which is often followed. Epics like Ran, Throne of Blood, and to some degree The Hidden Fortress do deal with fallen dynasties and pitched battles, but they still focus on the humanity of individual characters.

I could see a Baldur's Gate-style RPG build about Kurosawa's samurai films. A Rashomon-like story could operate as a tutorial, and by the time the player character has skills and strengths, they could move onto villages with problems - like Yojimbo. Gather a party, and defend a village like in Seven Samurai, and more strength and followers leads to epic confrontations like Ran. It could be done, I think, but it would be quite ambitious.

I could see Seven Samurai done as a much less ambitious, fast-playing strategy RPG. Perhaps even as a board game. The player has the ability to customize or randomize the starting position - size of the village to defend, amount of food and money to hire samurai with, size of bandit force, and number of days before the attack. The game starts with the peasants in the town looking for samurai. Once they get one, they have an easier time getting more, but have the tension of time to return and train. Each samurai would be rated for leadership, charisma, sword skill, bow skill, and stealth.

Once back at the village, the player prepares by training the peasants, keeping their morale high, building defenses with fences and floods, and raiding the enemy camp. The tensions of the film could pop up in the game. Maybe the player finds a cache of defeated samurai armor. Use it on the peasants and their combat skills improve, but the samurai morale plummets.

The battle, once it begins, would have difficult-to-control peasant troops fighting the raiders in real time, but with samurai under more direct control. The wonderful graphical representation of the circles with 'x's through them from the film would be easy to transpose to a simple game. I think it could be done in Flash, and playtime would be 20-60 minutes. This is my vision - although it's not one I can make reality anytime soon. I think it could be a lot of fun to play, though.

Militarization and War in Video Games

Leigh Alexander has an interesting meditation on the discomfort she feels about war in video games, which is certainly worth reading. I feel similarly, but I think there's a point in the history of gaming which made some of these war-and-violence-based games more disturbing to me. As Alexander says, war-inspired games are nothing new:

"Projectiles have been part of gaming since forever," he says, and it's true – early arcades were all about shooting galleries. Think of old-school duels and kids playing cops and robbers; weapons have, in fact, been part of play for a long time. "When you get into the first-person view, shooting continues to be what feels most natural," he says.

The issue isn't necessarily shooting, in my view. It's the creeping advance of militarism into games.

If you look at the evolution of first-person shooters specifically, they've been violent, yes, but the focus has changed dramatically. In Wolfenstein and Doom, the main character was nominally in the military, but in the game world, they were totally cut off from their nation and command structure. Duke Nukem was an unattached action hero stereotype, while Half-Life's Gordon Freeman had a Ph.D. in theoretical physics (and a M.S. in KICKING ASS). These characters, whether they were in the military or not, fulfilled the role of the Lone Hero Winning Against Impossible Odds.

Starting in the late 1990's, most notably with Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six (1998), games became more overtly militarized. The solitary hero became a part of the machine. Halo is a kind of bridge between the solitary hero model of earlier first-person shooters and the soldier of later shooters. The Master Chief exists within the military, and to some degree interacts with it, but he's also very much a solitary hero. They're human, he's not, really. As the Halo series continues and its mythology becomes more complex, the Master Chief also becomes more normalized within the human military.

The militarization of the first-person shooter ramped up significantly in the start of the 2000's. In addition to games like Rainbow Six and SOCOM, which used real-world or near-real-world militaries, the real United States Armed Forces started directly creating and releasing video games like America's Army and Full Spectrum Warrior.

This all makes sense, I think, in that widespread internet play made team-based games more appealing. The "deathmatch" of early first-person shooters like Doom, in which every player was against every other player, was replaced by squad-based team games like Team Fortress and especially Counterstrike. As first-person shooters turned into first-and-foremost multiplayer experiences, the setting and storyline had to fit this. Duke Nukem and the Master Chief don't make as much sense if there's 20 of them - but opposing army squads work perfectly. There are also already existing tactics and terms used for such combat in the military, so it's a natural fit.

Nowadays, it seems like every major FPS involves players in some kind of military or paramilitary organization. Gears of War and Halo: ODST do it in the future, while Call of Duty did it in the past and now the present, with Modern Warfare.

Although this makes sense in historical context, it also has the effect of changing the perception of the military and war in video games. The events of Doom and Half-Life are extraordinary, with a lone person taking up a gun and using it to survive. They are the solitary hero because they have to be the solitary hero. In games like Half-Life and Deus Ex, the military forces of the state are the enemy. In more recent games, as members of the military, the player is now a representative of the state. And in order for their premises, settings, and storylines to work, video games have to justify the actions of those militaries. This necessarily means that the violence of the state - war - is now the focus of most first-person shooters, instead of survival. And those wars have to be justified and even glorified for the games to work.

For some people, including myself, and apparently Leigh Alexander, this is discomfiting. It should be.


Addendum: I would be remiss if I didn't mention September 11th, which helped engender a surge of militarism in the United States. I think it was important, and possibly even hastened the process, but I suspect that the move towards squad-based, military-style combat would have happened anyway.

Angel: Season Three

The first season of Angel was defined in large part its relationship with its parent show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the second season by its increasing independence and development of its own voice. That trend continues in the third season. Part of that had to do with network politics, as Buffy switched from the WB to UPN, rendering direct crossovers impossible for Angel S3/Buffy S6. Angel's continuing independence isn't a bad thing, of course, but I can't help but feel that this season of television might have been stronger had Angel felt more connected to its predecessor.

I say this because two of Angel's biggest plot developments are things that Buffy (both the character and the show overall) would love to comment on. Angel goes through some big life changes in season three, including new family and a new flame. Since Buffy recently acquired some new family of her own, learning about Angel's addition would certainly be of interest to her, and Angel's romantic entanglement with her high school rival/friend Cordelia? Well, given how Buffy reacted to Angel giving Faith a hug back in the first season, this would likely drive her ballistic. Yet it's never mentioned.

But I get ahead of myself. Joss Whedon's shows are somewhat notorious for their slow starts, but Angel Season 3 puts the lie to that reputation with a strong set of episodes to begin the season. The third episode, "That Old Gang Of Mine," is particularly strong dramatically, as Gunn is forced to confront his, well, old gang, as they turn aggressively violent. The next episode, "Carpe Noctem," goes comedic as a horny old man switches bodies with Angel in order to score with chicks. The new addition to the team, Amy Acker's Fred, makes herself more and more useful to the team and essential to the show over the course of these episodes.

As all this happens, Angel's murderous progenitor Darla is pregnant with their child, and traveling to see him. This culminates in a strong set of episodes in which the human baby starts to infect Darla with a soul, causing her to become almost good, and Angel and Darla's old enemy, the vampire slayer Holtz, is sent through time to chase them both down. The ninth episode, "Lullaby," isn't just the confrontation between Holtz and Angel, but also Darla giving birth. This is dramatic enough, and well done, but it's a filled with some great - and surprising - laugh-out-loud moments. The combination of tension with comedy is the hallmark of Joss Whedon shows at their best, and "Lullaby" is the strongest of the season.

The middle part of the season, unfortunately, is not as strong as beginning, as life with the new baby, Connor, tends to take on either tired sitcom tropes or equally tired "Defend-the-baby!" storylines. The worst example of the former is "Provider," in which Angel suddenly decides that making money for Connor's future is the most important thing, and by the end of the episode has learned the valuable lesson that money isn't everything. The only Whedon-penned episode of the season, "Waiting in the Wings," sees the team go to the ballet only to discover - surprise! - that all is not as it seems. Angel and Cordelia are forced to confront their growing feelings for each other, and it features an always-welcome appearance by Whedon favorite Summer Glau as the cursed star ballerina.

This otherwise somewhat disappointing stretch of episodes is held together in large part by the superb portrayal of Holtz the vampire hunter by Keith Szarabajka. Holtz is played with a deep, growling malevolence, and the ambivalence of his motivation of vengeance against the vampire who slaughtered his family only adds to his magnetism. This proves important, as the previous antagonists at Wolfram & Hart are much less interesting after season 2, with Lindsay gone and Holland Manners dead. Lilah Morgan, the new embodiment of Wolfram & Hart, just isn't as interesting as Lindsay, and neither are her new rival or her new boss.

Unfortunately, the big plot twist towards the end of the season involves Wesley being deceived into thinking that Angel would kill Connor, and so he kidnaps the baby with Holtz's help. The former part makes sense, but there's no reason for Wesley's plan to involve Holtz, who unsurprisingly betrays Wes. This betrayal, and the total lack of forgiveness from his friends, leaves Wesley in a horribly dark place by the end of the season, and promises fascinating developments in his future. But that doesn't entirely excuse the incoherent kidnapping twist.

Still, Wesley's not the only character going interesting places at the end of the season. Lorne is, literally, as he leaves for Las Vegas. Cordelia is apparently recruited by the Powers That Be to become an angel, or something. Angel's at the bottom of the ocean, and the newly returned Connor has embraced the dark side. I'm looking forward to Season 4, although I know it has something of a mixed reputation.

Hardcore Maleness

I have an article on gender and marketing in the video game industry up at the Escapist this week! Check it out here.

Baldur's Gate

Dear Bioware, Infinity Engine, Baldur's Gate, and Dungeons & Dragons:

I have a message for you. I'm sorry,





I've talked a lot of crap about Baldur's Gate and the Infinity Engine in my day. I found it unplayable. I thought that Planescape Torment had many wonderful ideas, mostly rendered frustrating and unworthy of its reputation by the Infinity Engine. And Icewind Dale! Who could have been so entranced by the combat of the prior games that they'd want to play a game of nothing but? Only the most die-hard Advanced Dungeons & Dragons fans, desperate for a computerized version of their tabletop games, that's who.

This was pretty much my argument, though not always so sarcastically.

I like computer role-playing games. It's probably my favorite genre of game. The whole genre owes an obvious debt to Dungeons & Dragons. It was invented purely to simulate D&D. Naturally, I've played a bunch of games based on D&D rules: from Curse of the Azure Bonds and Heroes of the Lance to Dark Sun to Baldur's Gate and Knights of the Old Republic. And I've never once said "well, that was a classic." There's always been something in the way, usually lack of plot, which makes sense, as the rules which the game is simulating are almost always combat rules. But there may be more to it than that. D&D is designed to be played on the tabletop, where the rules are simple enough that they can be accomplished through dice rolls. This isn't necessary on a computer, of course, which can process two, three, even ten dice rolls at a time! By focusing on modeling the AD&D rules, most of the games ignored the things which made video games good.

At least, this was my argument. And in many ways, it still is. But Baldur's Gate was the chief counter to this argument. Baldur's Gate saved CRPGs in the '90's, according to legend, and certainly put AD&D games back on the map after a lull that decade. It turned Bioware into one of the most respected developers in the industry. Its multiplayer options and even its single-player mode were considered the closest CRPGs had ever come to simulating the tabletop D&D experience.

Ah, but there's the rub, that last bit. I haven't played tabletop RPGs. In fact, it seemed to me that Baldur's Gate was critically acclaimed for being an accurate simulation of tabletop role-playing, something that I didn't really care about. I had no problem with people liking it, of course, but it wasn't me.

A couple weeks ago, however, I suddenly got the urge to play Baldur's Gate again. Maybe it was writing about late-90's JRPG for my book. Maybe it was the discussion I got into about whether Fallout was a direct inspiration for it or not. Maybe it was just time. But I felt the urge, and so I started playing.

I didn't hate it. Hell, I liked it. Rather a lot. Able to sit and play for hours at a time. What had been infuriating was now entirely playable and dare I say it, immersive. So. Bioware, Baldur's Gate, AD&D, and Infinity Engine: it looks like I was wrong. Sorry.

I'm not quite at the point where I'm going to declare Baldur's Gate an all-time classic. Its setting and plot are uninspiring, and it doesn't really do a good job of building and releasing tension over the course of the game. Most of fans don't put it on that pedestal either, saving their love for its sequel (all in good time, Bioware, all in good time). But now I grasp what it was trying to do. I respect it. And I even look forward to playing the other Infinity Engine games: Torment, Icewind Dale, and Baldur's Gate II.

This normally doesn't happen. I did give the game a good honest try when it was released. My gut feelings usually stick with me. Sometimes I'll develop a more, ah, nuanced opinion, such as the case of Final Fantasy VII which left me with a bad taste in my mouth in terms of storytelling, but which I've come to love for its gameplay. So why is Baldur's Gate different? If I knew, this would probably be a more interesting blog post (yeah, read to the end for the kicker. Sorry folks!)

Riddley Walker

Last month, the AV Club's "Wrapped Up In Books" group read Riddley Walker, a marvelous post-apocalyptic novel written in an apparently devolved form or English.

Whenever I've spoken with social historians of pre-modern culture, especially medievalists, one of the things they always stress is that the normal state of mind for ancient or medieval was more non-linear, metaphorical, mystical, and unified. Unified in this case means that the mind is constantly in a state of drawing connections between stories, religion, music, and life. In the modern mind, we divide these things up, into different, atomic categories, like television, songs, church, and so on. We logically can draw connections between the different segments of our life, but we know that they are different and treat them as such. I can conceive of how this might affect life, but I really could make no serious claim to understanding it - until I read Riddley Walker.

Riddley Walker accomplishes this not through description or analysis, but through a brilliant use of language. As a post-apocalyptic, far-future novel, it uses a variation on English which initially appears as a devolved kind of dialect. However, the language of Riddley Walker is not a simple 1-to-1 substitution of one word for another, but instead allows the reader to understand the characters and their world in the same way that the characters understand the world themselves. Because the words used by the characters are often a puzzle for the reader, they take on expanded meaning instead of lessened meaning.

To take one word as an example, I was most confused initially by the term "oansome." It is used fairly regularly throughout the book. It means something like "being alone" on the most superficial level, but actually means much more than that. It could be derived from a variety of different terms. "Oan" is used by itself and can mean "own" (as in, "my own self") or "one." "Some" turns it into a descriptor, a state of one-ness or alone-ness. Its apparent rhyme with "lonesome" continues along that thought. However, the southeastern England dialect and tendency to swallow consonants or even entire syllables means that "oansome" could also be derived from "winsome" or "handsome," which imply sexual attractiveness. In the rapacious world of Riddley Walker, sexuality is a danger, and a winsome lass or handsome lad, traveling alone, is a target for rape and possible death.

This would be merely clever if it weren't for the stories within the story that almost overshadow the main narrative. The very first chapter has "Hart of the Wood," an immediately gripping story of cannibalism and Faustian bargains, which makes the statement, I think, that the stories-within-the-story is a necessary and important part of the work. But it's the two stories where the language is different, the "Eusa Story" of chapter six and "The Legend of St. Eustace" of chapter fourteen which make the cleverness of the book's language obvious.

Eusa is the focus of religion and society in Riddley Walker. He's a metaphorical figure whose story is used to illustrate whatever the storyteller wants from the story. He's based on a foundational text - the "Eusa Story."

I was waiting for the "Eusa Story" for the first several chapters. I wanted to know how it happened. I wanted to know who started dropping the bombs and how society was reconstituted. The "Eusa Story" wasn't that. It was better. It established, through the nebulous Eusa. Like "oansome" Eusa doesn't have a straight translation. He's everyman. He's society before the collapse. He's arrogance personified. He's humility personified. Unlike "oansome," Eusa is a religion. The entire "Eusa Story" is an elaborate set of metaphors for nothing and everything, or in the Riddley-world, the 1ce and the 2ce.

I went into the "Eusa Story" expecting to logically understand the world of Riddley Walker in a historical sense. Nothing like that happened. Instead, I came out of it understanding Riddley Walker in a metaphorical sense. Or rather, I understood that metaphor was the only way to understand Riddley Walker.

This is hammered home in the fourteenth chapter, in which Riddley confronts Goodparley, the political leader of Riddley's culture. Goodparley attempts, as his name might indicate, to convert Riddley to his point of view. Goodparley does this first with "The Legend of St. Eustace," the first modern-day text which appears in the story. After reading it, Goodparley and Riddley try to translate it. This is partially hilarious, like when Goodparley translates "hamlets" as small pigs. But as the translation continues, something fascinating and brilliant happens: they stop translating the text to make sense to them, and instead, use the text to make sense of their own world. Via this completely irrelevant little text, Goodparley and Riddley start to figure out scientific truths! The idea of using metaphor to discover scientific truths isn't all that far-fetched, actually. The structure of the chemical compound benzene was supposedly theorized by chemist Friedrich Kekulé after a dream of a worm eating its own tale - the Ouroboros myth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benzene#Ring_formula).

A fact, the life of St. Eustace, became a myth and a metaphor. That metaphor lived on, becoming a fact again in the nature of the myth, written down. That factual metaphor was discovered by the Ram, who treated it as a simple fact. Their interpretation of it relied on the metaphors inherent to their religion and their language, but those metaphors led them to discover scientific fact.

Here's the thing that makes Riddley Walker so excellent, though. The same thing that makes the "hamlets" pun so entertaining also makes "oansome" meaningful and also "The Legend of St. Eustace" so illuminating to Riddley and Goodparley: the language. By narrowing the English language to fewer words, and blurring the meaning of those words, Riddley Walker encourages us as readers to project our guesses at meaning onto the words. Along with the characters, we puzzle through new ideas and new concepts to try to make sense of the world. The metaphors of the characters are our metaphors as well. In order to understand the book of Riddley Walker, we have to understand the world and mindset of the character of Riddley Walker. We have to enter a world where language, metaphor, religion and science are all intertwined - unified.

It's only in thinking like this that I figure out what Riddley's (and his father's) job is! As "connexion man," Riddley is supposed to make the world make sense to the people of his village. His job is working within these metaphors to bring in external aspects of life. He's part priest, part storyteller, part translator. It's an important role, too, as the chief representatives of the theocratic Ram are the ones who invest the power of the job in him, by scarring his belly.

I think that, while the genius of the book is that it forces the reader to get into its mindset to read it, it also, in the end, rejects that mindset. Riddley Walker, over the course of the story, seems to discover or at least begin to uncover the idea of a goddess religion of sex, birth, and life. He also discovers a Punch doll, then the Punch story from Goodparley, and ends the book in a traveling troupe of storytellers. The stories that he's trying to tell are, at least in name, specifically non-religious. He has to make that disclaimer in order to try to tell the story, and he still starts a fight with his heresy!

But Riddley doesn't understand it as heresy. Hell, he doesn't even seem to understand it as new. He believes that he's acting against power, and in a sense, is undermining the hierarchical theocrats in the Ram. However, he may be building a different kind of power, which could be even more important than the gunpowder which drives the main plot. Riddley is building literature, and with it, he may be beginning the process of atomizing the metaphors which are the foundations of his world.

Angel: Season Two

The second season of Angel is a bit of a mixed bag, but in it, the show begins to find its form outside of its origins as a Buffy spinoff. In the first season, Angel was still indebted to its parent enough that its most memorable episodes and most of its characters came from Buffy. In Season Two, the crossovers are rarer, and Buffy herself doesn't appear at all. Angel has its own story now, for better or worse.

The season also marks a departure from the Buffy form of "Big Bad," single-season based storytelling. Several different stories weave in and out of the season, with varying degrees of resolution. At times, it's almost a straight-up serial with very little of the Monster-of-the-Week storylines which drove the first season.

The first few episodes are marked by Angel's lethargy, as the newly resurrected Darla and Wolfram & Hart begin fiddling with his sleep schedule. He's able to go through the motions, but his mind, and often body, and elsewhere. When Darla finally makes her physical appearance, Angel becomes obsessed. It is somewhat frustrating in that the audience knows who's behind Angel's dreams of Darla and why, but he doesn't know for several episodes. The frustration, of course, is thanks to the inherent drama of the reappearance of Angel's sire and the knowledge of their inevitable confrontation, delayed until the fifth episode.

The confrontation is somewhat cathartic, but leads to Angel's Darla-obsession coming to the fore, further alienating his co-workers. The rest of the Angel cast is increasing in both complexity and charm through the second season. The addition of the vampire-fighting gang leader Gunn to the crew is an especially good touch, as he adds a good mix of comedy and drama. Wesley's character continues his improvement, particularly in the episode "Guise Will Be Guise" in which he impersonates Angel. Later developments cement him as a leader as well as simply an expert in demonology.

However, it is Cordelia who steadily becomes the show's strongest character. By the end of the season I was about ready to declare her the best character of the Buffyverse. Her transition from Homecoming Queen Bitch to a powerful character in her own right has been almost seamless, especially once she switched from Buffy to Angel. I've always liked the dynamic that Cordelia brings to the shows, but now she's becoming likable as well, without sacrificing the humor she began with.

Angel's confrontation with Darla and the law firm lead to some of the season's strongest moments. He fights Darla, as well as attempting to turn her to good, as Wolfram & Hart continue hoping to push him to evil through her. Angel's quest comes to a peak in the ninth episode, "The Trial," in which he finally through stubbornness and heroism manages to convince Darla to accept her mortality. Naturally, this is almost immediately followed by the shocking re-emergence of Drusilla, who turns Darla to a vampire again as Angel is forced to watch, helpless.

The entire season so far built to that point, and the remainder seemed to stumble, unsure of where it was going. Angel becomes obsessed with revenge against Drusilla and Darla, turning dark - if not evil - and firing Gunn, Cordelia, and Wesley. In theory, this is a brilliant twist. In practice, it's awkward, forcing Angel to go all dark and the rest to turn almost entirely comic. Occasionally it works, like when Angel smokes a cigarette and then uses it to torch Darla and Drusilla, or when Wesley solves a crime a la Cluedo. But generally it's awkward (especially when Angel resorts to clumsy narration in lieu of talking to people), and a relief when Angel gets out of his funk and the gang gets back together.

Like its sibling, Buffy's Season Five, Angel improves in quality in its last third. In its best episode, "Dead End," the primary antagonist at Wolfram & Hard, Lindsay, receives a replacement hand for the one he lost in the first season finale. Lindsay quickly comes to realize the hand is evil and has a will of its own. This tips him over the edge, finally causing a break with Wolfram & Hart, but not before leaving in a blaze of glory - slapping Lilah's ass, shooting a security guard in the foot, threatening a board room, and explaining it all away with a gleeful declaration of "Evil hand!"

Towards the end of the season, the show breaks from formula and veers into a completely different direction, offering a four-part serialized string of episodes in a demonic dimension, more akin to a fantasy movie than the L.A. setting of the show. It's a quality run of episodes, with each character's development being highlighted: Cordelia's vanity is tempered by responsibility; Angel's heroism always threatened by the monster within; Wesley's leadership role forces him to make hard decisions with clarity; and Gunn tries to do the right thing while being pulled in multiple directions. Lorne, an empathic demon with a musical soul, who had been in and out of the series all season finally starts being treated like one of the main group, and the crew also rescues Fred, a mentally damaged supergenius played by the gorgeous Amy Acker, who officially joins the cast soon after.

It's a solid, if unspectacular, finish to a season with plenty of ups and downs. The second season of Angel doesn't quite put it on a level with Buffy the Vampire Slayer just yet, but much more than the first season, it says that it's possible.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Five

The premiere of the fifth season of Buffy the Vampire serves as something of a microcosm for the entire season. "Buffy vs. Dracula" is, for the vast majority of the episode, is an occasionally weird, occasionally funny episode with a few character quirks. Then, at the end, the show pulls the rug out from under the viewer's feet:

Joyce Summers: "Buffy, if you're going out, can you take your sister with you?"
Buffy & Dawn, in unison: "MOM!?!"

This is one of the most audacious plot twists in television history. Prior to this moment, Buffy was an only child. Suddenly, she has fully formed younger sister, and a properly improper familial relationship with the sister. The show seems entirely comfortable with this new state of affairs, leaving the viewers completely confused.

Unfortunately, the ambition of the plot twist isn't matched by its implementation. The biggest problem is the younger sister, Dawn. She's, well, annoying. Part of it is that, as a little sister, she should be annoying. Sadly, Dawn succeed mightily at being a bother, and doesn't add anything else to the show at all for most of the season. It takes until much later in the season, the episode "The Body," for Dawn to become at all sympathetic.

Dawn's presence often has potential, as she shares the history of the show without actually having been in it (akin to Jonathan's presence from season four's "Superstar.") For example, during an episode with a robot, the season two episode "Ted," which also with a robot is mentioned. This opens a an interesting door: if Dawn had been around during "Ted," would she have sided with Buffy in seeing him as evil? How can the new Dawn-based continuity not affect the "real" continuity we've seen? This could be played for laughs, or played for drama, or both, yet it's virtually never brought up.

The other major issue dragging down the first 2/3s of the season is Buffy's love life. Following the fourth season, Buffy's relationship with soldier boy Riley seems fairly secure and straightforward. That may be nice for Buffy, but it's bad for storytelling. Riley, never the strongest character on the show (although perhaps not deserving of the vitriol he receives from Angel fans), is suddenly saddled with massive insecurities leading him to take more and more self-destructive actions. At the same time, the formerly bad-ass vampire Spike realizes that his obsession with the Slayer isn't hatred, but rather love. Spike's new-found crush leads him to show Buffy Riley's self-destructive behavior, then try to take her for himself.

This string of episodes are almost uniformly weak, thanks both to the speed with which Riley and Spike change their behavior, as well as them generally being weak episodes. A major exception is the superb episode "Fool for Love," in which Buffy speaks to Spike about the Slayers he's killed. This episode works well for two reasons. First, its flashbacks pair well with the Angel episode which followed. Both show the vampire gang of Angel, Spike, Darla and Drusilla all together for the first time, adding depth to the characters and the universe. More directly, Spike's depiction of the Slayers he kills superbly foreshadows the chief emotional arc of the season. Spike describes how the Slayers just seemed to give up. A part of them was disconnected from the rest of the world, and realized it would be easier to let him win. This, he tells Buffy, is unlikely with her, because she is directly connected to the world thanks to her friends, her mother, and her boyfriend.

In that sense, and in many others, the first fifteen episodes of the season lead up to the sixteenth and most famous, "The Body." Buffy's mother, diagnosed with, and apparently cured of, a tumor earlier in the season, suddenly dies, and Buffy must deal with the body in both a metaphorical and literal sense. Everything that the show had meandered incompetently around in the first 2/3s of the season suddenly work, no doubt in large part because show creator Joss Whedon wrote and directed it.

"The Body" succeeds on its own due to its superb direction, an experimental style which intentionally disorients the viewer from normal television perspective in order to simulate the viewpoint of the suddenly shattered main character. All the major characters are at their strongest, weakest, or both. Giles steps in superbly as a father figure. Xander and Willow panic, not knowing how to help. Dawn acts as the child a Slayer's little sister would be expected to be, alternately disbelieving, scared, disobedient, helpful, and finally, likeable. Tara and Anya, who rarely had a role other than girlfriend or comic relief, respectively, put in perhaps their greatest moments. Tara acts as the voice of sanity and reason, situating her as the show's emotional center. Anya, on the other hand, panics, completely unable to understand her emotions and how she's supposed to behave. Her social awkwardness, usually played for laughs, suddenly becomes the heartbreaking. "The Body" somehow takes a mediocre season of Buffy and turns it into something bigger, better, and amazing.

Virtually every episode after "The Body" is stronger than those which preceded it, and the season proceeds to finish its main plot with reckless abandon after two episodes which consolidate what went before. In "Forever," the emotional death of Joyce Summers causes Angel's first return since the end of Season Four, and Dawn attempts to resurrect her mother, further humanizing her. Then, in "Intervention," the Spike crush storyline suddenly moves from annoying to emotionally involving, no doubt thanks to the writing of Jane Espenson, traditionally Buffy's best non-Whedon writer.

The main plot of the season involves a hell-Goddess named Glory, who seeks a mysterious "Key" to return to her home dimension. A group of monks opposing this transmogrify the Key into a form guaranteed to be protected by Earth's champion, the Slayer, thus Dawn is created. Dawn is both fully human and the mystical object sought by the invincible Glory. Glory is a fairly effective Big Bad, but compared to the wholesome evil of Season Three's Mayor, or the emotional connection to the Angel-Spike-Dru combination of Season Two, she's sorely lacking. She does, however, provide an excellent sense of threat. She could, and does, drive characters mad or simply kill them.

Glory's storyline suffers, like most of the others, during the lull in the middle of the season. Once Dawn's nature is revealed in the fifth episode, the main storyline simply spins its wheels while the Riley and Spike arcs are dealt with. Her storyline also suffers from the presence of her human host on Earth, a fairly normal fellow named Ben, whom Buffy encounters interning at the hospital. Ben's relationship to Glory slowly becomes clear - he is her human form, which she can occasionally take control of. Anyone who witnesses this, however, forgets it soon after. The story suffers, however, with its inconsistent characterization of Ben. One episode he's a perfectly nice guy, then he's a mass murderer working with Glory, then he's nice again, then he'll do anything to defend Dawn even at his expense, then he'll do anything to save his skin. It's the weakest part of an otherwise strong set of episodes at the end of the season.

The strongest part is Buffy's resolution. Early in the season, Spike gave her a list of reasons she would maintain her resolve. But first she loses her boyfriend. Then her mother. Her sister is revealed to be a construct. When her friends are attacked and Glory learns Dawn's nature, Buffy's only response is to run. And when Glory finds them and takes Dawn, Buffy simply stops. She finally has found something which makes her simply surrender. Of course, Buffy has one more thing attaching her to the world - her friends - who drag her out of her funk. A newly accepting Buffy finally confronts Glory, defeating her, but not before Dawn's sacrifice threatens to destroy the world. Buffy refuses to stop the ritual by killing Dawn, and instead sacrifices herself to save the world.

This was initially supposed to be the end of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It was certainly effective and touching, although not quite at the level of Babylon 5's tearjerker, but certainly not at the laughable level of Battlestar Galactica. The final shot, of Buffy's tombstone with a line at the bottom saying "SHE SAVED THE WORLD. A LOT" is an almost perfect summation of the series, being funny, precious, and sad, all at once. It also caps Buffy as a character, who was often overlooked based on the sheer charm of her sidekicks, but really was the greatest character on the show.

However, a great ending does not a fantastic season make. Compared with the emotional punch of Season Two, the wall-to-wall quality of Season Three, or even the excellent standalone episodes of Season Four, the fifth season falls a little bit flat. Yet it's only just behind, and "The Body" is probably the best Buffy episode ever, and one of the best ever on television.



TOP 5:

1. "The Body" - What more can I say? This hour of television is the reason people think Joss Whedon is King Of All Nerds.

2. "Fool for Love" - Spike walks Buffy through the real perils of being a Slayer. The "Spikeification" hasn't pulled his teeth totally. It might be the last time we see Spike as a bad ass, as unable to compete with Buffy physically, he gets to her mentally by telling her the truth.

3. "The Gift" - The finale may be most notable for its ending and Buffy's death, but its opening, a throwback in which a single vampire chases a scared young man into an alley, calls back to the first episodes of the series. Buffy's workmanlike quipping and dispatching of the vampire, followed by her world-weary response to the kid she saves, are pitch-perfect. It's the same show, but so very different.

4. "Intervention" - Buffy becomes the last of the big three characters to get a doppelganger, after Willow's vampire and Xander's clone. Hers is a robot, or more accurately, a sex-bot for Spike's pleasure. Hilarity begins to ensue, but is quickly ruined by Buffy being told that "Death is her gift" by the First Slayer and Glory attacking and capturing Spike, who knows Dawn is the Key. Writer Jane Espenson seems to know how to make Spike, even lovelorn Spike, work as a character, and it shows in this episode, as he's likeable for the first time since his crush was revealed.

5. "Triangle" - With Riley gone, Buffy is an emotional wreck, and dedicates herself to saving Xander and Anya's relationship. Anya's tension with Willow leads to the summoning of a pissed off troll-god. What sounds like a soap opera with monsters in the ways that Buffy can occasionally grate, but it's turned into gold by the deft touch of Espenson.

Fallout 3

Fallout 3 is a game with history. It has antecedents like Fallout 1 & 2 or Morrowind and Oblivion; it has a fully fleshed out game world; it has a full role-playing system. These are all valid, if entirely obvious, points to discuss for comparison. However, playing the game itself evokes a different kind of feeling. The slow uncovering of a game world filled with interesting nooks and crannies evokes the best aspects of the exploration-based Castlevania and Metroid games, while the role-playing system successfully melds Fallout with a first-person shooter.

Fallout 3 is built around exploration and character development more than previous games in the series, thanks primarily to its switch to a 3D engine. In previous Fallout games, each important part of the game was segmented off from the next. The player traveled to a town over a world map. This is gone in Fallout 3, replaced by a contiguous world where the player can walk from one side of the map to the other. In addition to that, it rewards the player who chooses to walk by showing interesting things to walk towards, in addition to having a compass with a marker showing where unexplored areas are. The scope is smaller - it's simply the D.C. area (now the "Capital Wasteland") instead of half of California - which is somewhat disappointing only because the game makes the player want more.

This makes Fallout 3 feel like it is unfolding naturally in front of the player – Where you are feels exactly where you're supposed to be. Certainly, some parts of the game are harder than others, but ideally, the player soon realizes this and wanders in a different direction. This is why it is such a shock when, upon finishing the main quest, the game simply ends. Sure, this happens in most every other RPG, but in Fallout 3, this sudden, arbitrary imposition of boundaries was a betrayal. Likewise, the official downloadable content released by Bethesda disappoints largely because it takes the player away from the Capital Wasteland instead of providing more to explore.

That Fallout 3 was even released, given the distance between it and its predecessors, was a pleasant surprise. That it's a great game, and a worthy continuation of the name is even better. That it takes the franchise in new directions, with new perspectives, while maintaining much of original games' charm makes it a modern classic.

A New Project

I am writing a book. I've been working on it for about six weeks, and I've got over ten thousand words. This is significantly more than any other book project I've started, which includes a few novels in the past, and a brief poke at trying to write on the Antioch situation. This time, more successfully, I'm choosing to write about something I've already done much of the research on - the history of video games.

It began when The Escapist put out their publication schedule, including an issue on how games were better in the old days (followed by one on how games' best days are ahead.) This gave me the impetus to write a short piece on how the games we play these days were pretty well defined in the 1990's. All of the major genres were either created or refined in the 1990's, with very little new being done in the 2000's. The article was rejected, ironically, but it helped me to get started on that process. This has helped me realize that:

• The history of video games can be told in an interesting fashion using genre as a lens. It's how gamers perceive games, and it keeps the focus on the games, instead of on the designers, corporations, or technology.
• I've probably played enough games to be able to do this well. Whenever lists of "The All-Time Greatest" or "The Most Influential Games" come out, I've played most all of them.
• I think at this point, I have the writing ability and longevity to do it.

I've already written around 10,000 words, mostly on Japanese/console RPGs in the 1990's, at the suggestion of FF7 fan Renaissance Poet. The relative ease with which I've managed to do this may cause problems later on, as JRPGs have had maybe the most thought and argument poured into them of any genre, and likewise, I can make the claim that I've played many of the most important of them, so don't really need much research.

On the other hand, the research is going to be fun. Although I've played most of the great games, there are still several which I missed (intentionally or not), don't really remember, or perhaps quirky outliers that I never got around to. So next on list, while I still have access to a Wii, is Super Mario Galaxy.

After that? I'm looking forward to spending some time with M.U.L.E., The Ocarina of Time, Metroid, and Silent Hill. I'm more wary of Tomb Raider, FarmVille, Myst, and Resident Evil, but you know - the things we do for art.

A History of Histories

In A History of Histories, British historian John Burrow sets himself a nearly impossible task in the title of the book alone. Impressively, he succeeds, describing the general form of history in the west in a single volume, and even more impressive is the fact that he makes it entirely readable.

Along the way, there are some excellent summaries, some explanations for why we know Livy and Tacitus so well, as well as some laments for the lists of lost histories. But when the book gets out of the Middle Ages to the point where the modern history genre starts to take shape is where it starts to get really interesting.

Perhaps the most interesting section is when Burrow starts discussing the underappreciated legal scholars of the late Renaissance and early Enlightenment who trace the history of law through archives, only to discover that everything their societies believe about how their law is a corrupted version of "Roman law" is wrong, and it's actually a collection of compromises and creations within the context of the times, as opposed to wisdom descended from the "ancients." At this point, the book is a fascinating chronicle of the intersection of society, history, law, and perception.

If the book has a major weakness, it's that the 20th Century section seems narrowly-focused and cursory. The author freely admits that he cannot go into the entirety of 20th Century histories in the single chapter he allots to it, which is fair, but it certainly leaves the reader wanting more - perhaps a second volume on the subject? Its narrow focus on "History" as an academic discipline, as opposed to the conception of "history" within society based around that discipline is disappointing, although also understandable.

A History of Histories has a fairly narrow audience, who probably know if they would be interested simply from the title. Members of that audience likely won't be disappointed.

Obvious Influence: The Philip K. Dick Reader

American science fiction is generally divided into a Golden Age from the 1940's to the 1960's or so, when the giant names of Clarke, Bradbury, Asimov, and more wrote. The transition between their short, pulp novels or entertaining short stories to today's modern science fiction isn't always easy to grasp, but reading a set of Philip K. Dick stories all at once, such as the collection in The Philip K. Dick Reader demonstrates where that transition may have taken place.

The short stories of early SF were often more entertaining than the early novels, for the simple reason that they let the authors show off a sense of humor. They were generally based on some scientific or pseudo-scientific concept discussed and implemented by scientists, which leads to some kind of twist ending, usually ironic, occasionally horrifying. The Arthur C. Clarke short story, "The Nine Billion Names of God" exemplifies this model: A few computer engineers are called to a Himalayan monastery to help the monks there achieve their goal of writing down all nine billion mathematical combinations of letters which could spell any name for God. Having achieved this task, the engineers leave the monastery, pleased with themselves, only to notice that the stars in the night sky are starting to disappear.

The first story in the collection, "Fair Game," operates under this model. A well-respected professor of physics at a Colorado university starts noticing a giant eye observing his movements, and seems to be having surreal traps placed for him. It could be mental illness, but he and his colleagues, a little too easily, decide that it must be a race of giant aliens who take all their ideas from humans, and have chosen this professor because of his genius. After trying to run, he eventually gives in, rationalizing that he'll still be an important and respected physicist...only to discover himself being thrown into a frying pan.

The form is the same as most early SF, but it involves Dick's most characteristic attribute in his writing: the intersection of mental illness with science fiction, or more generally, the psychological argument of what is perception and what is reality? Mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia or psychosis, cause people to mistake their perceptions for reality. Mind-altering drugs, a characteristic common to later Dick works, also have many of the same issues. In Dick's science fiction, technologies which can alter perception or reality offers fertile ground for growing interesting stories. Dick would later write a novel called The Simulacra, which sums this up in a single word.

The second story in the collection, "The Hanging Stranger," builds on the perception theme while adding in another of Dick's focuses, totalitarianism. An ordinary man notices a hanged man on a lamppost, and determines, through logic little different than mental illness, that other people aren't noticing the hanged man because they've been taken over by alien beings. He escalates the situation - horrifyingly believing his young son has been taken over, and killing him - until the reader discovers that the main character was right all along.

The fourth story, "The Golden Man," brings in the last of Dick's major themes, fear of nuclear war and radiation-based mutations. An overwhelmingly powerful government organization dedicated to hunting down mutants discovers a man with golden skin which they try to study, then kill, only to find out that the Golden Man, who can see the near future, is also irresistible to women, which he uses to escape. The implication is both that the Golden Man, a near-animal who lives entirely in time that he can perceive, is also able to breed at will - and the mutants will end up destroying humanity.

If that sounds vaguely familiar, it's not just that Dick is generally influential, but may be the author who's most connected to Hollywood. The recent Nicholas Cage film Next was loosely based on "The Golden Man." When published in 1997, The Philip K. Dick Reader contained two stories which had already been turned into the movies Total Recall and Screamers. In the next decade, three more just from this collection were turned into films: Minority Report, Next, and Paycheck. These are generally some of the best stories in the collection, and they demonstrate Dick's flair for both cinematic and psychological writing. "The Minority Report" especially stands out, both for its inherent quality, and when compared to the Tom Cruise film it inspired. The original story is similar, but isn't quite so excessively twist-filled, and has a significant anti-totalitarian aspect of the storyline largely missing from the plot (though not the setting) of the film.

The story "Shell Game" brings together many of Dick's favorite themes in an entertaining satire. A small colony of humans on a distant moon are convinced that they're under constant attack from an elite group of Terran soldiers. Everything that goes wrong on the planet is sabotage, and constant military presence is necessary to fight off the soldiers. Some of the leaders, concerned as to why they never see the Terran attackers, find evidence their colony was actually a rocket of mentally ill paranoids who crashed onto their moon. How, they ask the others, can they even know if they're under attack or mentally ill? They try to find a scientific test to see if the colony is in the grips of a collective mass paranoid hallucination, but others, still-paranoid, treat them as in league with the Terrans. The story ends with the paranoids loading up the repaired rocket with H-Bombs to attack Earth. Group-think infiltrating politics with disastrous results made the story disturbing to me having seen how the media and political class did much the same thing with the Iraq War, and I'm sure the story had the same effect on people who saw Watergate or the Bay of Pigs Invasion or McCarthyism or the rise of fascism in Europe or the French Revolution. It is, quite simply, science fiction at its best.

Not every story is a winner, but with nearly 30 to choose from, that is no surprise. This is an excellent collection of stories, as well as a historically important collection of influential science fiction.

Fallout 3 - Antici...PAtion

I have Fallout 3 and I'm not playing it.

This shocks me. In fact, I kind of feel physically anxious that I'm not playing it right now. There are lots of reasons that I'm not playing it, but do they really trump the reasons TO play it? The original Fallout is one of my all-time favorite games, and also one of the most important games ever. Its sequel, while creatively uninspiring, is generally an excellent extension to the classic game. I've played the hell out of both. So why am I not playing #3?

Partly because I'm downloading mods. The last Bethesda game I played, Morrowind, was almost instantly dramatically improved by adding a few mods. So, I'm doing the same with Fallout 3. But as interesting as it could be with good mods, am I really sure that it's not worth playing without? No, but it's not that alone.

Partly because I'm worried I might like it too much. It's not like I'm lacking in spare time, but I at least have a few things to do in my life. Had a programming class tonight, and graphic design tomorrow. I've also got a few writing projects I'd like to be doing more of: book reviews, movie reviews, game reviews, and a big game history project. If I started Fallout 3, well, what if it was so good that I didn't do anything else for three weeks? I had some access to the game last summer, when I was staying with someone who had it for PlayStation 3, but it was not my PS3, and not my TV it was attached to, so I didn't play it because if I had really liked it, I couldn't have played it when someone else wanted to use the PS3 or TV, which was pretty much constantly that wasn't M-F 9-5. Should I be so concerned about a game taking over my life? When it's Fallout, apparently.

Partly because, well, I just can't believe that it's real. The original Fallout came a full 10 years before its second sequel, and the first sequel was just a year later than the original. That's an odd ratio, but it gets worse when you consider the business standpoint. Fallout's original developer and publisher, Interplay, was one of the best game companies of the late 1990's, with Fallout, Sacrifice, Jagged Alliance 2, Wizardry 8, and more. Yet it still went out of business. Happily for Fallout, Bethesda Software was paying attention and decided to add it to its business, but there's still a part of me that gave up on ever seeing a third installment. It's the part of me that says "HOLY FUCKING SHIT I OWN FALLOUT 3!!!" in the bad, disbelieving way.

Partly because I missed my chance. A few years ago, I really wanted to put together a game-related portfolio to break into the industry. I decided that my careen and game interests would be best served by becoming an expert Fallout 3 modder. Then I got distracted by idealistic poverty, got new ambitions, and couldn't afford the game when it came out, and also thought it wouldn't run on my PC (turns out I was mistaken). My ambitions have been altered somewhat - more interested in writing about than writing for at this point - but my emotional investment remains, to some extent.

Partly because I have other games I want to deal with at the moment. I'm still trying to finish Okami, in addition to various other Wii games, like No More Heroes. I also just got Dynasty Warriors 5 Empires and Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow. I'm worried that they'll get overwhelmed by Fallout. And that's probably okay generally speaking, a game is a game, but part of my brain says once started, games should be completed.

And partly, finally, because I'm scared not that it'll be great and take over my life, but that it'll be bad, and maybe it won't. I think the idea of merging the Fallout setting and character development with a first-person shooter is a wonderful idea. I was arguing that it was a good idea back in the '90's, when it was horrifically unpopular. I just don't know if the extraordinarily-ambitious-with-somewhat-disappointing-returns Bethesda model will work. Consciously, I think it should. There's no reason why not. Reviews and sales certainly indicate that they got it right. But I've got enough of an iconoclast in me that I'm a little bit worried.

Once the mods finish downloading, I'm going to start playing. I'm just surprised at my restraint and my chomping at the bit. It's an important series, and an important game, and one I expect to have a lot to say about. This blog is about to get post-apocalyptic.

Promethea

My rave review of Alan Moore and J.H. Williams III's Promethea is up, here. I'm not posting it in full here only because Lunch's picture capacity is much better, and some of it really should be seen.