I've transitioned out of "game-vacation" mode to
work mode over the last few days, as I went from teaching around forty students
to teaching closer to 90. The time I
would, right now, be putting into Dragon
Age's latest expansion is instead being absorbed by a rapid-fire hate read
of dense classical literature, literature I'd purposely crafted my undergraduate
studies around avoiding. This is and of
itself isn't so much "odd" as "the way I've been making a living
for the last two years:" relatively few people have to read things to
lecture on them in rapid succession.
It's not a "native" form of textual engagement, even for most
college professors, who will usually read and develop syllabi in their off
season. It's exclusively a problem of
the adjunct, and it is, oddly enough, one that the last two games I've played
prepared me for superbly.
Shadowrun: Hong Kong,
which I touched on last week, is a game made up of various walls of text,
almost all of them important or, barring that, pretty interesting. It's a game more reading intensive than most
books, and I found myself more engaged with it than the book I was reading at
the same time, Bolano's Monsieur Pain. That's not a knock on Bolano - the man's a
fine writer. It's a compliment to Shadowrun: Hong Kong, which presents
more writing in a denser, more involved setting, and lets readers insert
themselves more fully into the text.
Shadowrun: Hong Kong
is a game that, at least for me, was almost entirely about reading. The combat, when it occurred, was just a
quick break between passages, a chance to catch a breath of fresh air, a chance
to reflect on what I'd just read as I waited for my turn. Most of my play-time was actually accumulated
in between missions, as I talked to my teammates and got to know them a little
better. I started to look forward to
those missions not just as progress tickers in the traditional RPG sense, but
as spaces where I could get to know these characters I was rapidly coming to love
a little better.
This kind of gameplay, where reading is a crucial component,
doing a lot of reading all at once in particular, used to be a great deal more
commonplace, back in the day. Before
recorded audio and FMV cutscenes, the only way to convey information to players
was to ask them to read stuff, sometimes lots and lots of stuff. The Marathon
games are perhaps one of the best examples of this: the story they tell occurs
entirely within the confines of text, a story so epic that it spans back to
Greek mythology and forward to future titles like Halo. The Gold Box RPGs of
old relied entirely on text as well, though much of it was nowhere near as
well-constructed as the kind that Bungie and Harebrained Schemes are showing
off in these titles.
When these games started to vanish, iteratively replaced by
the partial voice-over era of games like Baldur's
Gate and Neverwinter Nights
which, in turn, gave birth to Bioware's full voice over era, something was
lost: narrative malleability, perhaps, or flexibility, or perhaps some of the
capacity that players had to insert themselves into the text and build
relationships with the characters around them.
After all, if a voiceover actor has to record every line in a game, the
options are fundamentally limited based on that constraint. Late-development changes, and especially
flexible or nuanced tonal shifts in personal interactions, are no gos: the
scripting required to include things like that is already quite complex, and we
can already look at the landscape of story oriented games and see it littered
with scripting errors from shore to shore.
Even my aforementioned and beloved Shadowrun:
Hong Kong had scripting errors up the wazoo in it, some of which actually
made it impossible to complete the game "the right way."
But these losses are being made up in other theaters: Sunless Sea, my other recent obsession,
is a game almost entirely dedicated to text, a game where careful close reading
is the difference between success and grisly death. I find that pretty amazing, and while it owes
that meticulous focus at least partially to its status as a rogue-a-like, which
makes being killed because you misinterpreted a given passage far less
unforgiveable, its presence represents a return to the form of games of old,
the form that hooked me and drew me in to reading constantly and closely, to
taking notes and double checking them at crucial moments. There have been other great games that have
brought back this trend, like Pillars of
Eternity, which REALLY likes for players to take notes, or Legend of Grimrock, which encourages
players to engage in the kind of pen and paper mapping that days of yore
imposed upon them.
Because those games of yore weren't just great vectors for
storytelling, they were frameworks for developing skillsets crucial to other
parts of life. When I first settled in
as an undergraduate, I went from a public school environment where the mantra
was "keep your head down," to an environment filled with private
school overachievers. Many of the
lessons they'd had in school, the texts they'd read and the lectures they'd
heard, were things I had never encountered before. The things that kept me afloat, that taught
me how to compartmentalize and solve problems in general, were the skills I'd
built up playing games over a decade and a half. Things like situational awareness, rapidly
reading walls of text with a ticking clock in the background, and improvising
when things didn't go my way to try and scrape together a solution to a given
problem were all crucial tools in my young-person toolkit. And many of them came from games. Weird, superlative games that inspired me,
and challenged me, and, above all else, forced me to read large passages of
text to locate relevant or interesting information.
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