I've come to a conclusion about level design philosophy that's probably elementary knowledge for someone, say, studying game design in college, but it just congealed for me during my stint at TimeGate. Even when building a level that only provides the player with a strictly linear path, the designer should build the path through the place, not build the place around the path. It's about contrivance and cohesiveness.
I think that there's a natural inclination when laying out a linear shooter level to sketch an 'interesting,' abstract path first, then rationalize it by building out the appropriate geometry around it. In my experience, this tends to lead to spaces that feel very contrived and 'gamey.' Places built around a path are disconnected from a sense of purpose-- where is this curved hallway supposed to lead? Why do these storerooms feed into one another like a string of pearls? Why would they make people in this facility go up a series of ramps and catwalks to exit this room? Why is the layout of this place so convoluted?
I believe that the superior approach is to build a place first--a cohesive, functional space, with a purpose--then define a path through it by strategically restricting the player's movement. If it's a factory setting, build a small complex of storerooms, packing floors and shipping bays in an open structure that could simply be a place of its own, then start blocking off hallways, locking doors, collapsing staircases, and so forth to remove all means of egress that conflict with your chosen gameplay path through the space.
Hereby, the overall space inherently makes sense, while still allowing the designer to have a strong hand in leading the player. No part of the built space, and therefore valuable time, need be wasted-- the player can still be given controlled access to each room; or if a room isn't visited, it is at least visible, understood by the player as a part of the place he's exploring, showing him that there's more to the gameworld than the little path he's running along.
5.30.2007
Path
5.28.2007
Justification 3
Full Throttle
PC / 1995 / Developer & Publisher: Lucasarts Entertainment Company LLC.
In a good game, you can tell a lot by the way the player is introduced to his in-game character. When we take control of Full Throttle's Ben, we find him punching his way out from the inside of a garbage dumpster.
Full Throttle was a point-and-click that didn't pull any of its punches-- bad things happened, people died, and sometimes the solution to the puzzle was just to kick the damn door down. The gameworld was oppressive, dust-choked, and generally unfriendly; the supporting cast ranged from simply duplicitous to outright homicidal. But the game used its terse characterization to make me genuinely care about the sympathetic characters of Ben, Maureen, and old man Corley, from the initial rush of the opening sequence, to the tragic turning point at the end of the first act, to the devastatingly bittersweet ending sequence. Full Throttle told a melancholy tale of a handful of people-- not video game characters, but what felt like real people-- thrown together by fate, irrevocably changed, only to be scattered to the winds again as the sun set over the desert highway. The game had levity, sure, but it also had real gravitas, where almost no other game has.
Full Throttle deserves praise for standing out from the rest of the Lucasarts point-and-clicks. Unlike Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max Hit the Road, or Monkey Island, Full Throttle manages to be funny without being silly, and to tell a meaningful, human story through the conventions of the genre without ever taking itself over-seriously. It's an incredible balancing act, and in my opinion just about the pinnacle of what a 2D point-and-click could aspire to. I feel lucky to have played a masterpiece like this during my formative years.
5.26.2007
Justification 2
Sam & Max Hit the Road
PC / 1993 / Developer & Publisher: Lucasarts Entertainment Company LLC.
Point-and-click adventure games were my gateway into modern PC gaming, and Hit the Road is my all-time favorite of the genre. Point-and-clicks are largely linear, designer-dictated, and often frustrating. At their best, they make the player feel clever for figuring out their puzzles; at their worst, the player is banging his head against an illogical impediment for days, with no hope but random trial and error to progress. I think that what Hit the Road and the other funny adventures from the period teach is this: make failing fun. Even when I wasn't making progress in Hit the Road, even when I was repeatedly failing as I tried to unlock the next location, the game was constantly feeding me rewards for my input, by way of Sam & Max's humorous remarks. Even when my clicking didn't reward me with tangible progress, I still received something enjoyable-- a funny little quip, a clever description, some non sequitur piece of dialogue I hadn't heard before. The game rewarded the player simply for playing, not just for succeeding.
Hit the Road's tone is something hard to encapsulate simply-- maybe "screwball noir?" It had edge to it and a down-to-earth vibe while dealing with bigfoot, molemen, and celebrity-lookalike vegetables. It boasted hints of reckless nihilism, what with the opening sequence involving a damsel in distress being left to rot, a mad scientist being decapitated, and a time bomb being tossed into a passenger bus, all by a cartoon dog and rabbit. It was the perfect strange, hilarious, out-there world for my 13-year-old self. It didn't talk down to me, and it kept me in stitches from start to finish.
I think Hit the Road is the game I've replayed the most in my life, probably about a dozen times through. I'm glad that the Freelance Police have been resurrected by way of their new episodic releases, and I'm proud to know some of the fine people at Telltale who bring the games to life. I wish I could go back in time and tell my 13-year-old self that one day I'd get the chance to shake Steve Purcell's hand and tell him how much I've appreciated his work over the years. I'm sure I would've been floored.
5.24.2007
Justification 1
Through a link on Gamasutra, I ended up reading the blog of Stuart Roch, a producer at Treyarch. In one post, he wrote up his 10 favorite games of all time , along with a short statement on why each was important to him. On that note, I felt like it might be useful to justify the games I've listed in the "Favorite Games" field of my profile over there. I'm going to split each of mine into a separate post, in the arbitrary order that I initially listed them.
Syndicate
PC / 1993 / Developer: Bullfrog / Publisher: Electronic Arts
Up front, I'll admit the possibility that my esteem for games from this time period might be elevated by nostalgia to some degree; on the other hand, I've played all of these games since their original release, and still, objectively I think, hold them in high regard.
The world of Syndicate is a cyberpunk dystopia. The player is a high-ranking executive in a multinational corporation, tasked with remotely controlling a squad of cybernetically-enhanced field agents to wreak havoc in cities across the world, gaining control of each territory in turn. The goal is complete world domination, the method wanton destruction.
I like the setting, but what I think really stuck with me was the game's structure, and the amount of control the player had over the gameworld. From the outset, the player is presented with the whole globe, and then given the power to conquer it however he chooses. The globe is divided into territories, each of which is represented by a discrete playable space; this playable space is comprised of an open-structure city, into which the player's agents are inserted. The player must then complete specific objectives within each level, by observing the area's physical layout and NPC behavior, formulating a strategy, and executing it using a small but focused set of affordances. The player decides in which order to approach the levels, and must then himself decide how to accomplish the goals in each level, pushing the game's progression forward along the path he's chosen.
It's human-scale tactical conflict in a series of open-structure levels, which generally describes my favorite type of game to this day. That in Syndicate the order of the level progression is also dictated by the player is an added bonus. The rest of what makes the game great are the specifics of the action and the artifice that I won't go into, but for 1993, I'd say that everything about Syndicate was far ahead of its time.
For me personally, leading up a modern-day spiritual successor to Syndicate would be my dream project. It's a game experience which has never been duplicated to this day, and which I believe has enormous potential to be translated into the contemporary game sphere. If only.
5.16.2007
Gamespy
A little bit of cool news: Residential Evil got written up by Gamespy today (at the bottom of this page.) It's nice to get some recognition, especially for the first finished map I ever publicly released. Now both of my F.E.A.R. maps have gotten mentioned on Gamespy, which I hope means they've been played by a lot more people than they would have otherwise. If only I could let those people know that my work will be in TimeGate's next release, but it hasn't even been announced yet. C'est la vie.
To anyone who's downloaded Residential Evil or BENEATH: hope you dig'em!
5.12.2007
Mappings
Sometimes it's fun to think of things in terms of controller mappings. I'm using some device or performing some activity-- how could I map this interface or action onto a standard (or non-standard) game console controller?
One recent example that translated very intuitively was mapping the iPod's interface onto an Xbox 360 controller. I was thinking, what if a character carried an iPod with them ingame, and could use it to choose selections from their custom soundtrack playlists on the fly?
Upon selecting the iPod from his inventory, the player would be presented onscreen with the familiar iPod interface.
Luckily, the 360 controller has a layout and array of buttons that translate perfectly to the iPod's interface.
1) Rotating the left analog stick on the 360 controller maps to sliding your thumb around the touch-sensitive input ring on the iPod. Rotating the stick clockwise and counterclockwise navigates menus and changes volume and other settings, as sliding your thumb clockwise and counterclockwise does on the iPod input ring.
2) Clicking in the left analog stick ("L3") maps to clicking the button at the center of the input ring on the iPod, to confirm selections.
3) The four face buttons on the 360 controller map to clicking the four input symbols on the face of the iPod input ring. Y maps to Menu, X maps to Back, B maps to Forward, and A maps to Play/Pause.
I think it works out particularly simply and nicely. I'm not sure if this exact thing has been done in a game before-- I think that in Mark Ecko's Gettin' Up: Contents Under Pressure and in Saints Row the player character has an iPod and can use it to choose the in-game music track. Were they presented in such a way as to map the player's direct input onto the iPod interface itself? I could find out, but suffice it to say I came up with this mapping in a vacuum.
I find this to be a nice design exercise, especially with increased complexity (for instance, attempting to map classic mouse-driven PC games onto a console interface, or dreaming up a port of a current game from one system to another with a completely different interface.) Try it sometime.
5.03.2007
Group 2
I think my last post deserves a little more time.
When I attended this year's GDC, I made sure to see Clint Hocking's presentation, "Exploration: From Systems to Spaces to Self." At present, he's one of the guys most publicly engaged with progressive single-player narrative game theory, emergent systems, and the whole Looking Glass legacy. His talk was, well, an exploration of the ways that players explore games, and thereby explore their own character through their in-game actions.
One example in his talk was the game Spider-Man 2. As I understood it, he argued that while the game hands the player the palette of Spider-Man's physical abilities to explore the physical space of New York City, the player is given no tools to explore the character of what makes Spider-Man a hero instead of just "an asshole in red tights." He noted the backstory of Spider-Man: that when Peter Parker initially gained his super powers, he just used them to win wrestling matches, until the day that he witnessed a robbery and didn't bother using his powers to stop it. That robber went on to kill Parker's beloved Uncle Ben, teaching Parker that "with great power comes great responsibility." The lesson is imparted by a loved one's being lost forever due to Parker's own decisions, his own inaction. From that point forward, Parker would be motivated to use his powers to prevent further tragedies.
The player of Spider-Man 2 has experienced no such personal tragedy, and has no motivation to much more than dicking around with Spider-Man's powers, beating up random criminals and returning errant balloons to gain points. It's the "what" of Spider-Man without the "why."
As I understood his presentation, Hocking went on to consider how one might build the intended characterizations and emotional responses in the player through the play of the game itself-- if you were going to build a game about Muhammad Ali, how to convey the conflict between his public persona and physical power, and how it would affect the following fights. And presumably, if you were going to build a Spider-Man game, how to convey the sense of responsibility through the play's mechanics and dynamics, though he didn't expand on how that might be done.
Immediately after the presentation ended, I began talking it over with a couple colleagues of mine. The stance I took was that, for the player to be legitimately invested in the theme of responsibility, the events that imparted the message would have to be personally meaningful to the individual player. They couldn't be concretely authored by the designer-- if Uncle Ben were going to be killed every single time you played this theoretical Spider-Man game, the event would be just as inevitable, and therefore just as meaningless, as if it happened in a cutscene. To truly affect the player, the designer can make his presence felt no further than creating and to some degree encouraging the possibility of Uncle Ben dying due to the player's own inaction.
Perhaps in this theoretical Spider-Man game, there are constants: the player is Peter Parker, post-bite, with his powers. He lives at the home of his Uncle Ben and Aunt Mae, and must return there frequently to sleep, eat, etc., and meanwhile become attached to his Aunt and Uncle through their interactions at the house. Among other things in the world, there are Robber NPCs with the goalset to rob other NPCs or banks, armored cars, etc. The Robber NPC type might also kill innocent civilians.
Now with just this base set of actors, we have the very barest possibility of the player witnessing a robber rob someone, fail to stop him, and that robber going on to kill the player's Uncle Ben. The possibility is there but extremely slight; only the rarest player would cease being an asshole in red tights through this series of events.
This is where tracking metrics come in. For one, Robber NPCs might tend to be much more likely to perform their robbery action when the player is nearby. Furthermore, perhaps each spawned Robber NPC maintains a record of whether or not he has entered the line of sight of the player while he's performing his robbery action, and from what distance and for how long. The Robber also records whether or not the player has deployed an attack at him at any point during or following the robbery action. Hereby, the system can fairly well confirm whether the player has duly witnessed a particular Robber perform his robbery action. The system can also record whether the player attempted to stop the Robber after witnessing his robbery action.
When it's confirmed that the player has witnessed a robbery and intentionally let the Robber go, that particular Robber NPC has a high probability of receiving the goal to kill the player's Uncle Ben. This wouldn't have to be as transparent as it seems-- the Robber wouldn't necessarily make a bee line for the player's house and shoot his uncle for no reason. When the Robber receives the goal to kill Uncle Ben, Uncle Ben might receive the goal to go into town to buy something, causing the Robber and Uncle Ben to meet in a plausible location for the act to occur.
Hereby, the game would set the possibilities in motion for a figure the player had grown attached to being lost through the player's own inaction, motivated by the dynamic events ingame instead of a pre-plotted series of scripted events. The metrics and goal systems would greatly raise the probability of the intended sequence of events occuring, but they would only occur when the player's actions spurred them to do so.
This would also bring up the interesting possibility of the game finding a player that had come to the table with the lesson of personal responsibility already learned, and acted with great diligence from square one without being prompted so by the events of the game. A player who stopped every robbery he witnessed would never lose his Uncle Ben because, for the purposes of the game's theme, he wouldn't need to. He would already be acting like Spider-Man.
I guess in large part the point of this post is to argue that worlds and narrative driven by dynamic AI actors needn't entirely preclude the idea of designer-intended events or story arcs, and could in fact make the authored elements more meaningful when received through the player's decisions and actions.
4.27.2007
Group
When we were in the hotel in Austin, I caught part of a reality TV show called Work Out. Like most reality TV, it's an ensemble drama about a diverse group of personalities working toward a common goal, in this case the founder and staff of a high-class fitness center trying to run a successful business. The intrigue comes from the personal and cultural friction between the conflicting personalities types within the group, and to this end as many divergent characters as possible are brought together to put on a show. In Work Out, we're presented with the cast in such a way that their most outward traits are immediately caricatured: there's the tough, assertive lesbian entrepeneur and her crew of trainers composed of, as I remember them being portrayed, the 'funny-gay' guy, the 'butch-gay' guy, the Texan guy, the slutty girl, the vampy Posh Spice girl, the ex-Marine black guy, and possibly a couple of other less immediately-exaggerated members of the team. The top dog of the operation pushes them all to give 110%, and sparks fly; the minute-to-minute plot events of any given episode are an afterthought compared to the drama of the personality dynamics between individual group members.
When it comes to games, I'm very interested in single-player, character-based experiences. This isn't to be confused with my being "into games for the stories;" no, I normally find the author-dictated plotting of video games to be functional at best, regrettable at worst, but useful primarily for motivating the player's actions forward through the gamespace. However, I think that games can be extremely successful at presenting memorable supporting characters to the player, and allowing him to form strong bonds with these characters over the course of the experience. In almost any character-based game you care to mention, I can almost guarantee that three elements stand out above all else: the player's own actions (the "what,") the places the player visited (the "where,") and the people the player interacted with (the "who.") Coming in a far distant fourth might be the backstory and authored plot events themselves-- the specifics of the "why."
I'll take for example here No One Lives Forever 2. What do I remember about that game? First would be the "who"-- Cate Archer, Magnus Armstrong, the world-weary second-in-command at UNITY, the wheelchair-bound Dimitri, the foppish Director of H.A.R.M., and other colorful agents. I remember the "where"-- the UNITY offices, a mime school, India, Japan, Siberia, an undersea base, an artificial volcano, Akron Ohio. And the "what"-- shooting, sneaking, deploying clever devices to thwart foes, rifling through secret documents. But besides the broad strokes, I'm more hard-pressed to remember the "why"-- I know that H.A.R.M. has something to do with creating super soldiers, and Cate Archer has to stop them. This somehow involves a lot of globetrotting to exotic locales, killing bad guys and stealing interoffice memos. Eventually Archer defeats her foes at H.A.R.M. and saves the day.
How about another example? Metal Gear Solid 3. My first touchstone again is the "who"-- the fresh but tough Solid Snake, the support team of Major Tom and Para Medic back at the base, The Boss (The Boss!!) and her eccentric Cobras-- The Pain, The Fear, The End, The Fury, and The Sorrow; the heartless soviet Volkov, a young and naive Ocelot, Eva the double agent, and the Russian scientist who just wanted to build space rockets. The "where" is a series of jungles and covert facilities within Russia proper, mainly lush forested areas and concrete bunkers, perfect for infiltration. And the "what" is the meat of the stealth genre-- crawling, sidling along walls, creeping up behind enemies and interrogating them, firing silenced pistols, and hiding under cardboard boxes. Again the specifics of the "why" are harder to recall. Volkov is attempting to harness the power of Metal Ray, a supertank capable of firing an ICBM. He's employed Boss and the Cobras to help him, and Snake must stop his evil plan. So you meet the "who," do the "what" in the "where," and then beat the game. The noble and complex character of The Boss, the outlandish affectations of the Cobras, the duplicity of Eva, the amateurism and enthusiasm of a young Ocelot, and the menacing demeanor of Volkov are what leave the greatest lasting impression of any of the narrative elements, far before what order the events of the plot occured in or even what exactly they were at all. Games like this aren't short-- we spend a lot of time with these characters, get to know them, and form strong memories of just what sort of people they are. More than anything but the actual play mechanics and dynamics themselves, the strength of the supporting cast is what sustains the player of a narrative game; they are the game's lifeblood, the human conduit through which the player connects with the rest of the experience.
That said, I think that the majority of games suffer from the problem of integration. Like most overt narrative elements in games, interaction between and characterization of the PC and members of his supporting cast are kept entirely separate from the interactive elements of the experience; the player performs the "what," then is passively shown the "who" in a non-interactive scene. The potential as I see it lies in integrating the drama of the group dynamics into the central play experience itself, making it a part of the possibility space.
The drama of group dynamics is central to more significant fiction than reality TV, and demonstrates what aspects might be useful to games. For instance, I recently watched Oliver Stone's Platoon for the first time. Here is a story that's fueled not by the specific plot points of the timeline, but by the pressures of the setting and a diverse group of characters with conflicting morals. The young, naive Charlie Sheen character, the "player character" as it would be, is the viewer's link to the experience; we lose our innocence along with him. The rest of the drama blooms from the squad bending under the pressure of war: Barnes' frighteningly calculated wielding of death, DaFoe's warm and compassionate manner with Sheen and his desire to reign in Barnes, the gung-ho sociopath on the squad who wants to "do'em all-- do the whole village," their well-meaning but ineffectual C.O., and the rest of the characters who just want to get home to their sweethearts.
Central scenes of the film revolve around two conflicting approaches to war, as embodied by the strongest personalities in the squad. Barnes has been turned into a machine, focused on his objective regardless of the human suffering it causes. DaFoe's character is the liberal voice of reason that tries to hold Barnes back and do things "the right way," morally and according to protocol. Sheen's character lies in between, an observer more often than not but a mediator when emboldened by DaFoe, as in the scene where Sheen drives away a group of GI's who are attempting to rape a villager. These three characters might embody the id, superego and ego as did the three Sellers in Dr. Strangelove; they are the three forces pulling all the characters' meta-actions back and forth across the line from humanity to animalism. More than any objective to "clear X village for VC supplies" or "get to the checkpoint," the events generated through the squad's group dynamics under pressure are themselves the drama.
Thinking of it this way, grouping the player of a video game with NPCs of strong character types that hold their own goalsets and carry them out according to their AI desires would be one approach to generating dynamic narrative through the group's and player's actions themselves-- how the group of NPCs interacts between themselves, the world, and the player. If Platoon were a game, and a well-defined Barnes and DaFoe (I should really look up his character's name) were grouped with the player, and then the group was given an objective to search a village for hidden weapons, the drama would follow based on the actions they dynamically performed in reaction to the obstacles in the gameworld that they happened to encounter while trying to achieve that goal. Barnes might tend to kill civilians who tried to impede his goal, while DaFoe might tend to block the killing of civilians. This might affect the allegiance of Barnes to DaFoe; if Barnes' allegiance to DaFoe dropped from "friendly" to "threat," Barnes might gain the internal goal of isolating DaFoe from witnesses and killing him. This might be true of any GI character that became a threat to Barnes, including the player. The player's decisions, based on the NPCs' actions, which in turn would be based on their own ingrained personalities and received stimuli from the gameworld, would itself define the "what" and "why" of the gameplay experience.
There have been games that play with the idea of dynamic squad interactions. I'm thinking of Bioware's games such as Baldur's Gate II and KOTOR, or the Jagged Alliance games. These games feature interpersonal dynamics between individual group members that occur during and at times tangibly affect gameplay-- mixing certain squad members in Jagged Alliance can raise or lower the morale of your squad, causing some members to perform better or to desert entirely. However, as far as I know it's as yet unheard of for the NPCs' desire sets and available actions to dynamically define the meat of the narrative and the gameplay. I would love to see a game where the concrete authored narrative is restricted to only the broadest objectives, and the drama and tension grew from the meaningful interactions between the human player, the richly-defined cast of NPCs, and the gameworld that they shared.
4.23.2007
Evelyn
This weekend, Rachel and I went to Austin, TX. It was a lovely town that reminded me very much of Portland. There were a lot of vintage shops and a lot of tattoos. We even got to see March Fourth, the Portland goth-freak marching band/sideshow act play along with Austin's own White Ghost Shivers at Antone's on 5th Street downtown. It was a hell of a show. Day to day, we ate some of the best food I've had in what seems like ages. Seeing the trailers for the special events at the Alamo Drafthouse made me wish I could attend their screenings all year round. Our time in Austin was a wonderful few days, over too soon.
Also this weekend, Austin put on a "City-Wide Garage Sale" at the local convention center, which ended up being much more of a flea market or vintage bazaar in practice. There were a lot of tchotzkies and knick-knacks, jewelry, beads, old clothes and the like, but one booth in particular caught my attention: it was a seller of old magazine pages, from the earliest decades of the 20th century to the 70's. Full-page ads, illustrations, celebrity photos... and one section labeled "Bizarre." I came to it last and as I flipped through the selection I was presented with an array of shockingly morbid and sensational images, apparently clipped from Life magazine's Picture of the Week section in the 40's.
One picture of the week was a still of a woman's body falling through the air in front of a New York storefront-- according to the caption, she'd been perched on a ledge eight stories above, threatening to jump, and the photographer snapped the photo only a second before she met the earth. Another jumper was a black man who had been interrupted in his suicide attempt at the edge of the Washington bridge. He was being held from falling by a police officer and a priest; the photograph showed him only a moment after he wrenched free, his face twisted in a grimace as he began his descent to the river below. Another was of an overturned semi truck, the cab set aflame; through a small mangled gap in the carriage a young man's pleading face could be seen. The caption read something like, "as the flames roar about him, a truck driver pinned inside his vehicle begs for onlookers to find a gun and shoot him." Another was of a drowned boy being carried from a river bank.
I was shocked that any of these would be in the back pages of Life magazine-- how could images so raw and grim see national print? Was Life a different magazine sixty years ago? But one image of all of them stopped me cold and wouldn't leave my head:
The small caption, inset onto the photo itself, reads, "AT THE BOTTOM OF EMPIRE STATE BUILDING THE BODY OF EVELYN McHALE REPOSES CALMLY IN GROTESQUE BIER HER FALLING BODY PUNCHED INTO THE TOP OF A CAR" An excerpt from the facing page elaborates: "On May Day, just after leaving her fiancé, 23-year-old Evelyn McHale wrote a note. 'He is much better off without me ... I wouldn't make a good wife for anybody,' ... Then she crossed it out. She went to the observation platform of the Empire State Building. Through the mist she gazed at the street, 86 floors below. Then she jumped. In her desperate determination she leaped clear of the setbacks and hit a United Nations limousine parked at the curb. Across the street photography student Robert Wiles heard an explosive crash. Just four minutes after Evelyn McHale's death Wiles got this picture of death's violence and its composure."
I was instantly awed by the photo, transfixed. It's incredibly dramatic, and fraught with contradictions; I was amazed at how beautiful and elegant Evelyn looks, so peaceful, at rest. But of course the reminders of her state are unavoidable: the twisted metal and granulated glass that envelops her; the shoes lost and stockings tattered about her ankle; the way her hand grips her necklace, desperately, with a permanence. But her appearance is so delicate-- she's made up, with lipstick, and her dainty white gloves. There's no physical signs of bodily trauma, no blood, or limbs at tortured angles. Somehow it is an image of peace in a death where there should be none.
All that afternoon and the next morning I was thinking of her. I had to return to the garage sale and buy it. I couldn't explain why, and I still don't know. For some reason I felt that I needed to take it with me. The image is powerful.
Looking for an attachment for this post, I put her name into google. A grad student's homepage features the same image, and a story of the author being touched by the photo at a young age. She also shares that Evelyn was turned into Pop art by Warhol; the caption to Warhol's appropriation of the image reads much differently from both Life's and my own interpretation: "The repleated image of the body of a suicide, crumpled, twisted and almost unrecognisable within the near-abstract forms surround it, presents one more disturbing vision of disaster." This text, in my opinion, is utterly removed from the image itself, and what makes it so affecting. Evelyn is not crumpled, twisted, or unrecognizable; quite the opposite in fact is central to why her picture holds such power. She is whole, composed, graceful in death, almost as if not in death at all, but at rest, asleep, as the evidence of trauma billows around her, seemingly kept at bay by her own defiance of its chaos.
In any case, it's clear that I'm not the only one who's been moved by this photo over the years, and a copy of it is now in my home. It was an odd purchase, one I can't necessarily rationalize-- I haven't got anything to do with this picture but keep it in a drawer. But it was something I couldn't leave in that box in Austin, for whatever reason. I wonder what Evelyn would think if she knew that people born 35 years after her death would be touched by the image of her final sad, defiant act.
4.12.2007
Kojima
I'd been aware off and on that Hideo Kojima keeps (or I should
say, kept) a public blog, but had never taken the time to read through it. Today I started digging into his posts from the beginning, and I think they're quite fascinating. His posts focus very little on game design or theory in any way-- at most he mentions in passing the goings-on of the development process at Kojima Studios. Instead, his blog entries are heavily diaristic, and demonstrate that he is an extremely observant and reflective person. The detail of his descriptions of everyday occurences and abstractions of reasoning are interesting to follow; he has a unique viewpoint, and while I find game-based writing to be useful, I think I enjoy Kojima's observations on life at large more interesting than I would his notes on game design. It's a shame his blog didn't even last four months (late Sept. 05 to early Jan. 06) but the volume of writing during that time is generous.
Upon reading his blog, I felt jealous of Kojima. Not for any of the prestige aspects of his career, but for the simple daily amenities he describes. I miss living in a city where I can walk to anywhere I care to visit. I miss having trains to ride on. I miss ducking into a cafe or record shop on a whim, just because I'm passing-- of seeing people, masses, milling about the sidewalks. I miss the corridors of the city streets. Tokyo and San Francisco are an ocean apart, but the rhythms of the lifestyle aren't so distant. Living in Sugar Land is an exercise in isolation-- when I walk to a shop, it's down long, curved, four-laned streets, lined with nothing but fences until you reach the highway. The sidewalks are empty; there are no other people around, just cars with mirrored windows streaming by. Passing the occasional jogger feels like crossing paths with another nomad in the desert. A city like San Francisco is alive-- the streets are there to be walked by me. The streets here are just for the cars to get to a house or a store. Maybe one reason I like being in the office so much is because I'm surrounded by people there.
I'm also jealous of Kojima for all the photographs of his meals:
I wish my diet were more like that. Here, I'm limited either to what I bring from the grocery store (I'm not big on cooking in the office) or what other guys in the office want to eat out or order in. My grocery stuff is either soup or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and restaurant food normally consists of something like fried meat with sauce and bread. But rice, fish and vegetables-- it's light, always tasty, relatively healthy, and won't weigh you down in the afternoon. It is not Texas cuisine.
Kojima also writes often about the dreams he has. I wish that I remembered dreaming more than I do. The last couple of nights I have had some dreams, but that's the exception. I don't know if I'd dreamt anything before that since I moved to Texas. If I dream, it's usually the dreams of a repressed mindstate-- images of violence, sex, taboo. The recurring dynamic is of movement contrained, and for a long time was of careening down a highway, out of control. Pair those together and the frequent image was of myself in the driver's seat of a car that's gone out of control, constrained to the point of being unable to reach the pedals or turn the wheel. These images make sense metaphorically, but the more visceral blood & sex stuff makes less sense to me. Is my id really so eager to exercise itself?
I'm going to try reading the rest of Kojima's blog entries today or this weekend. I also picked up Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance for the PC the other day at a used book store. I tried playing through it when it was first released and just couldn't make it. The complete absurdity of the plot and the extreme long-windedness of the exposition couldn't motivate me through the gameplay, sparse as it was. I hope I'll make it through this time. I think it deserves another chance.