Star Wars - Wan or two ideas...

May 2005. Episode III inspired me to dash off a few random ideas for an Obi-Wan Kenobi...something. Back then the idea of a dedicated film would have been ridiculous so I was probably thinking about a graphic novel or game. But now with the prospect of spin-off movies to accompany the new trilogy, this seems like an obvious avenue to explore. Just what did he do on that rock for twenty years?

The following is taken from a Word doc dated 11/05/05:

Idea for Obi-Wan story

Concentrate on his settling on Tatooine. It is decided he cannot directly see Luke as his proximity to the boy would be dangerous should Vader ever come (ref. “I sense something, something I have not felt since…”)

He sets up his home. Solitary existence.

First changes name to Ben.

Not interested in creating loads of inferior rip-offs from the films. Use characters seen around Tatooine. Possibly Watto, Jabba, Sebulba, etc.

An encounter with Sandpeople. Explore them more. Perhaps he finds one, but scares it off. It returns with others in the night. He says he does not want to fight, to hurt them. But he is forced to attack (mirroring Anakin’s slaughter of them in Episode II). He stands over their bodies with his lightsaber humming, fizzling in the rain (this whole section referring to his comments on Sandpeople in Episode IV). Also ref. tracks, hiding their numbers.

He goes to town to get supplies in a big cloak – mysterious to other people. Uses mind-tricks. Has problems there.‘Mos Eisley, a wretched hive’. Cantina visit.

He encounters a trader or a bounty hunter who has a lightsaber of a fallen conrade and he is angered by this, taking action to retrieve it and either keeping it, burying it, or dismantling it and doing something reverential with the crystal.

See an image of him trading with Jawas, mirroring Anakin’s info hunt with them.

He always has a sense of defiance, a shadow of Qui-Gon. Wishes to train Luke as he knows that he will be extremely gifted, perhaps a final hope for the Jedi, but is worried about his failure with Anakin. Lars will not allow it, or any knowledge of Luke’s father whatsoever – links to “That’s what you’re uncle told you”.

A scene where a young Luke is followed by a group of heavies. Obi-Wan steps in saving him. “Be mindful of your surroundings little one”. Convey the fact that Kenobi is watching/guarding Luke from afar.

Luke and Biggs perhaps. Beggar’s Canyon, Womprats, T-16s, 2 meters.

Perhaps see the very beginnings of the Rebellion in some form or another, although Tatooine is out of the way of the Empire, and therefore the Rebels’ focus.

Podracing. Something with the Hutts.

Some kind of communication with Alderaan and Bail Organa, perhaps even a little Leia.

On occasion he meets Luke as a child. Lars discourages Luke from talking to him, calling him a ‘crazy old man’ and a ‘hermit’. Mirrors Episode I with Qui-Gon finding Anakin. Luke sees him as mysterious and feels drawn to him.

His home has several small things linked to the bygone age of the Jedi order.

Key point at the end of the story – he lays down his lightsaber for the last time – final image.

Frustration of a man struggling to reconcile the annihilation of his way of life and beliefs. Patience wins over. Communing with Qui-Gon. A true Jedi by the end. Mastering his emotions.

Questions about Vader. Rumours. Is Anakin really Darth Vadar? He has dreams where he faces Vadar/Anakin.

Lingers on thoughts of failing Anakin. Guilt over leaving him.

...

Rough and rambling but there's a kernel there. Not sure they get much rain on Tatooine but the image of a dark figure standing over bodies in the light of a sizzling lightsaber isn't bad. Get Ewan McGregor back in. A ninety-minute character piece with guilt, scum and villainy. And speeders. Obi-Wan does Drive.

Feel free to cherry pick, JJ. 

Wish You Were Here... part 3

Following on from part 2, finally we look at arbitrary restrictions and sharing the digital space.

All the gear…AVOIDING INVISIBLE WALLS & FRUSTRATING GATING
Simply having satisfying tools at your disposal can make an environment sparkle. Give a man a meaty shotgun and a corridor can become interesting. Any generic, crate-filled space can be made engaging if a stealth takedown 'feels' good. The player forgives the contrivance if it provides an opportunity to exploit an enjoyable mechanic. Conversely, they become frustrated if they are denied that opportunity. Grand Theft Auto IV restricts access to different districts until you have reached a certain part of the story and completed objectives. This is no doubt intended to provide a sense of progression and character development as the player gains prominence and unlocks new areas, but in practice it creates disharmony between the tools they have and opportunities to use them. Gating is at odds with the nature of the sandbox and the lawlessness depicted - in a game sold on a ‘drive anywhere, do anything’ philosophy, I'm left awkwardly trapped and impotent. This is where Skyrim soars. The mountain on the horizon is immediately available to you. It’s a dangerous world, and perhaps you don’t have the chops to cope with it, but Bethesda let the player discover their own limits rather than closing the bridges until you fulfil dreary mission requirements. Of course, gradually opening your field of play as you gain new items is a stalwart pillar of game design – Zelda is built around it – but you walk into Liberty City with access to any car that passes yet the mean streets and skyscrapers of Algonquin are illogically inaccessible. Cordoning off swathes of the city in a space designed for exploration and play feels cheap. The hackneyed plot hoops you’re forced through further expose the artifice of the world, something surely at odds with the Rockstar’s intentions.

Viewed from above, Hyrule's modular design is obvious.

Imagine blowing away that fog and discovering more

pieces of the puzzle.

Imagine a prelude act to GTA IV with Nico hiding out in a cabin on some bleak snow swept farmland in Eastern Europe. Cold. Desolate. Big beard. Maybe he has to go hunt a rabbit (cue gunplay tutorial). He’s alone and frozen, cut off from civilisation. Exploring yields no surprises, just more emptiness.

Cut to his arrival by boat to The Big Apple. The sun glints off Miss Liberty’s dome and the skyscrapers offer a teeming maze of opportunities. The bridges are open and you’re free to explore. The stage is set, the orchestra engaged. Now let’s see if you can dance…

Framing the city in this way aligns player and protagonist motivation; we are both itching to explore this new environment. Rockstar should let us do so from the off (and they now have with GTA V).

One area where they do excel is streaming a huge, perpetual space. San Andreas is still breathtaking in this regard and advancing tech has allowed huge worlds to be engineered. Team Ico created an incredible, desolate kingdom in Shadow of the Colossus on PS2. As with Wind Waker’s overworld, traversing it gave time for reflection – more poignant here as the player begins questioning their motives for killing the colossi – but unlike Nintendo’s game it was tarnished by technical issues. The land was too vast for the hardware and the frame rate damaged the player’s perception of it. Rareware’s later N64 titles suffered similarly. Perfect Dark and Banjo-Tooie pushed the console beyond its limits and returning to those games now is jarring. Framerate aside, Tooie in particular suffered from a surplus of everything – moves, collectables and space. Levels were labyrinthine and easy to get lost in. Though shot through with the team’s trademark charm (and Grant Kirkhope’s wonderful music), it’s hard to enjoy a world where your patience is tested by a chugging frame rate and overwrought design.

Thatgamecompany’s Journey provides a perfect example of a compelling environment working within very narrow parameters. The game is as linear as life and pregnant with narrative, though it's rarely explicit. There’s not one line of text or dialogue. The locations echo Team Ico’s take on desolation but the ambition is tempered to preserve the player experience. Running away from the mountain across the dunes will only get you so far before sandstorms blow you back. It’s a crude device, one of only a handful that remind players they’re playing a video game, but the desert is so enchanting you forget you’re stuck in it. The sand is a joy to trudge and surf through. When I first met a fellow traveller I tried to say hello by writing my name in it. My moveset was limited to a jump button and a restorative ping! but the space itself was the tool – location and language – and a beautiful one too.

It’s dangerous to go alone...SHARING AND CELEBRATING THE SPACE
Journey’s land is a place best shared. The first time you sight a stranger is confusing as you try to work out who or what it is. Then you discover they’re just like you – just another person trying to find their way in the world. The social dimension can be transformative. When given a companion and a shared objective, an environment’s role in creating atmosphere is aided through collaborative experiences whether they involve huddling behind a rock in a blizzard to restore energy, dodging green shells or bandying together to battle the undead horde. The farmhouse from Left4Dead is burnt in my memory not because it’s a special or memorable structure but because I spent hours dug in there with three friends, strategising and scouting the best vantage points, covering blind spots, scrambling onto the roof and blasting the infected until the rescue vehicle arrived. The house was meticulously designed, of course, but my affection comes from the actions facilitated by that design rather than the building itself.

Deeds done in a place can create an affinity with it and more than once I’ve finished a great game and felt a little empty. Not because it was deficient in any way or the ending was unsatisfying, but because for all my efforts I don’t get to enjoy the peace I’ve brought about. After hours spent liberating the world, I rarely get to kick back and enjoy it. My experience is solely the catastrophe, solely the drama. Having watched the credits I’m invariably returned to the File Select screen and the game forgets I’ve already won. Hyrule is forever in a state of impending doom that I am powerless to affect no matter how many times I thrash Ganon.

Imagine defeating him and riding into town a hero, being offered the key to the city and basking in the glory a little bit. Imagine taking Zelda for a picnic or playing with the kids in Kokiri Forest. Imagine having new ways to enjoy the places I’ve saved. Okami gave me such an opportunity when I returned triumphant to Kamiki Village for the festival. Fireworks exploded and the jubilant music heralded my victory like the end of Return of the Jedi. It was short-lived, of course, for I was only halfway through the game, but it felt so unusual and fulfilling to see the results of my questing and enjoy some kind of respite. Developers invest so much in building these worlds they should explore the possibilities in expanding your experience meaningfully beyond the endgame. I can’t be the only player to feel deflated when all my heroism results only in New Game+.

Final Zone
Most games for me are one time playthroughs, and that’s fine. Some have narratives that need to be completed but once it’s over, I’m satisfied. Though Eternal Darkness was a story worth finishing, there’s nowhere in there I want to return to. But who wouldn’t want to spend three more days in Clock Town, or a year watching the changing seasons in Oakfield or Click Clock Wood?

Well, perhaps many. Nostalgia weedles its way into all these places and, as anyone who has been met with apathy while trying to share something amazing will testify, it’s crushing to realise that we all experience things and places differently and form bonds for different reasons. For some, Spiral Mountain is just a crude collection of polys and lo-res textures with a Dixie tune on top. It’s pleasant enough but not moving, just like my childhood home is innately significant to only me. I find that sad because I want to communicate and share the feeling these places give me and, more often than not, that’s impossible.

But it’s okay. I can still go back and visit. Every Christmas I return to Freezezy Peak because, well, it’s not quite Christmas without it. Nobody wants to live in City 17. Nuke it and head for them there blue sky hills.

Tokyo Stories: Ozu and Pixar accepting the inevitable

Even before I ever watched Tokyo Story, I assumed the title Toy Story was referencing Yasujirō Ozu's 1953 film, though while writing this I could find no reference or allusion to it online. Having passed over such titles as To Infinity and Beyond and Toyz in the Hood, Pixar knocked two letters out of Ozu's classic familial study and had a winner. Toy Story is as much about the toy chest as Tokyo Story is the Japanese capital, and the films share much beyond a name; they both examine abandonment, disillusionment, loss and the changing dynamic of relationships.

Ozu's film follows an elderly couple who make a rare trip to Tokyo to visit their grown-up children who, busy with various mundanities, have little time for them. Only Noriko, their widowed daughter-in-law, makes an effort to entertain them, and the couple are forced to accept that their children have changed and that they cannot expect too much from them.

John Lasseter's 1995 Toy Story and its two sequels follow the relationship between Woody, a pullstring cowboy doll, and his owner, Andy. The toys' desires revolve around being loved and played with and the first film highlights the tension as Woody is supplanted in Andy's affections by Buzz Lightyear, a space-marine action figure. It explores themes of obsolescense, rejection and acceptance that carry into the following films and, arguably, define the trilogy. For the purposes of this piece, I will discuss the three films as one entity.

Both Ozu and Pixar's films share resolutely domestic settings. For all the hijinx of Woody and Buzz's capers, they take place primarily in Andy's house and neighbourhood. When they venture into the outside world they wind up at a day care centre, a petrol station forecourt and a toy store. It's through the eyes and diminutive stature of a toy that these places become prisons, jungles and Raiders of the Lost Ark­-esque warehouses. Ozu's camera shares this angle on the world. It famously remains static and low, observing impartially every character from the same point-of-view. The setting is similarly suburban, opening on a train passing through a sleepy neighbourhood with washing hanging on the lines. A nosey neighbour pops her head in the door and finds Shukichi and Tomi, the two elderly companions, preparing for a trip to the city to see their offspring. Unlike Woody and Buzz, they have watched their children grow and begin their own adventures, but both pairs have experienced rejection as their children need them less with the passing of time. On arriving in the city, the awkward smalltalk highlights the deterioration and redundancy of their relationship. The utility they once had has been lost and they now represent an inconvenience, taking up space and clashing with their childrens' routine and lifestyle. Their daughter, Shige, is embarrassed by their presence, lying to a client in her salon that they're "just friends from the country." Shukichi and Tomi still wish to please - they retire to bed readily at the suggestion they must be tired. They lie awake, but out of the way. Shukichi's genial grin mirrors those of Woody and Buzz when in the childrens' presence. Though rejected, he realises the importance of being there to support them, as does Woody ("What's important is that we're here for Andy when he needs us.") Relationships are outgrown and discarded, and loss of contact is a natural progression. Shukichi tells us of his surprise at how children change and that "a married daughter is like a stranger" but efforts to halt this change result only in heartbreak and loneliness.

Death has a lingering presence in these films. Old friends and toys are lost along the way. Few characters realise the importance of the time they have and value it accordingly, although they pay the notion lip service. Keizo, Shukichi and Tomi's youngest son, recites the advice "Be a good son while your parents are alive," but fails to heed it. He arrives too late to say goodbye to his dying mother and chooses baseball over keeping his grieving father company after the funeral. Only Noriko, Shukichi and Tomi's widowed daughter-in-law, dedicates time to them, perhaps viewing the opportunity as a chance to exercise her devotion to her dead husband. Though well-meaning, she has failed to move on in her own life, tied forever to his memory. Just as Woody resigns himself to a box in the attic, forever dedicated to a past relationship, Noriko has her tiny apartment and her dead love's photograph on the wall. She lies to Tomi, telling her "I'm happy," but Tomi worries that she "should have had a better life," urging her to move on. "You may be happy while you're still young," she says, "but as you become older you'll find it lonely." Noriko's effort to prevent the decay of relationship and memory is futile, as she admits when she tells Shukichi of her loneliness at the end.

The narrative crux of Toy Story is surmised in the second film with Jessie's flashback montage, the most explicit example of the breakup anxiety that permeates the trilogy, distilled to two and a half minutes. We witness her owner, Emily, inevitably grow up and away from her, then rediscover and discard her as an adult, leaving her in a box on the roadside. We see for the first time a painful and final ending, not merely the prolonged hiatus of a box in the attic. Jessie tells us "you never forget kids like Emily or Andy...but they forget you," and the whole trilogy hangs on the acceptance of this fact. Woody dearly wants to be involved in his kid's life and we see him clutching the telephone with Andy on the line, desperate to be noticed and relevant, but unable to communicate due to strict social rules. These rules are broken only with friends or in extreme circumstances (eg. to frighten Sid into 'playing nice'). Shukichi is similarly unable to speak with his children, only with his friends - his wife and the men he drinks with when he is turned out of his daughter's house. Neither protagonist is capable of expressing their feelings and are forced to watch their children grow distant. The parent/toy analogy is evident when Andy's mum sees his empty room and breaks down telling him "It's just I wish I could always be with you." Woody does eventually accept the inevitable, partly when he rejects 'immortality' (ironically a lifetime encased in glass in a Tokyo museum) and realises "life's only worth living if you're being loved by a kid," and, ultimately, when he himself faces the end of his relationship in the third film.

In Tokyo Story, this transience is captured with the image of Tomi walking on the hill as her grandson plays in the grass. The scene recalls the dance with Death from The Seventh Seal. Tomi, dressed in black, is silhouetted against the sky and we are shown the generation gap and the progress of time. She wonders if she'll still be there when the child grows up. Protagonists in both films know and even spout the 'life is short' truisms and clichés. Andy's mum reminds us "toys don't last forever". Woody's romanticism is countered by Potato Head's gruff cynicism and the pragmatism of Hamm ("Let's see how much we're going for on ebay.") Stinky Pete confronts Woody with reality when he asks "How long will it last, Woody? Do you really think Andy's going to take you to college, or on his honeymoon?" Even Buzz, having gone through his own journey of self-discovery in the first film ("You are a child's plaything!"), accepts the end is coming. Woody slowly learns that he can't delay the inevitable - he "can't stop Andy from growing up, but [he] wouldn't miss it for the world."

Woody consoles himself that "when it all ends, I'll still have ol' Buzz Lightyear to keep me company." Tokyo Story mirrors this buddy sentiment with Shukichi and Tomi, though Ozu takes their relationship to its inexorable human conclusion, a place where Pixar can't bear to go. Death splits the partnership and exposes Shukichi to a loneliness that Woody will never encounter. Though Pixar do explore the notion in the recycling plant scene when the toys face (and accept) a fiery end, even here they are together. Rejection is one thing, but beloved characters never face adversity alone. Even the troubled Lotso is consigned to his fate on a trucker's front grille with some comic relief for company. Pixar addresses themes of loneliness in several of their films but the overriding message is one of hope and salvation through friendship. Wall-E begins as a lone figure in a desolate landscape, but his is an initial state that is resolved by the end of the film. It is also our introduction to the character - we don't have a three-film emotional investment in him. Likewise, as affecting as Up's opening montage is, we're familiar with Carl for only a few minutes before he is widowed, and he soon finds himself with company, whether he likes it or not.

Noriko's final exchange with Kyoko, Shukichi and Tomi's youngest and unmarried daughter, shows romanticism giving way to wisdom and acceptance. Disgusted with her older siblings' behaviour, Kyoko complains about their selfishness. Noriko explains "they have to look after their own lives...children become like that, gradually." "Isn't life disappointing!" Kyoko exclaims. "Yes," comes the reply.

Ultimately, however, Woody's faith and devotion earns him a 'second' life with Bonnie. The final shots of Tokyo Story and Toy Story 3 both echo their respective beginnings and alude to life going on, with the train once again rolling through the suburbs, neighbours still calling by and the clouds hanging in the sky as they did on the wallpaper in the first Toy Story, but Shukichi experiences solitude and indifference where Woody goes forth to new adventures with the old gang. As Shukichi's neighbour and family insist on reminding him, "you will be lonely."

Wish You Were Here... part 2

Having looked previously at Music and Cohesive Ecosystems, part 2 continues exploring ways digital environments are made to feel like intriguing, living spaces.

The illusion of life...ANIMATION

Imagine a static Green Hill Zone where the water didn’t fall and the rings didn’t spin and the TVs didn’t buzz. Sonic, however beautifully drawn, would be running through a dead space. The dancing sunflowers and endlessly cascading waterfalls on the horizon add weight and tie the world together convincingly. A simple looping animation gives the illusion of life just as it did in the intro shots of early cartoons. Animated backgrounds appeared on 8-bit hardware but they really flourished in the arcade and the 16-bit era. SNK Neo Geo beat-‘em-ups especially highlight how beautiful art and a few looping frames can make a location really pop.

And in order to sell that world, the characters must tally with it. In Epic Yarn Kirby is made from the same material as his surroundings and his animation couples with the base environment to make the simplest interactions satisfying: threads give under his weight as he lands; pulled cords draw platforms closer; patches rip off to reveal passages under the quilted façade, bulging as he walks beneath. The embroidered take on the familiar elemental settings is charming enough but the real joy comes from watching Kirby lurch and transform into a car with a double-tap or begin skating on ice, pirouetting to change direction. My moveset is minimal, but it doesn’t feel restrictive. I can’t affect or modify the world much but the animation makes it a satisfying place to inhabit nonetheless. Spaces mirroring real-world visuals and physics present a challenge to designers. Filling a room with destructible objects is all well and good but the bare space that remains once you’ve compulsively incinerated every last crate/barrel/panel is usually a hollow, uninviting one - a problem compounded in First Person Shooters when your protagonist isn’t onscreen to provide visual interest. Seeing the player character impacting the environment convincingly gives it a persuasive tangibility, and again, this becomes even more complicated when representing a 'realistic' character.

The original Banjo-Kazooie is my most replayed game. Nuts & Bolts boasted a fantastic

vehicle building system but was let down by dull missions and the weight of expectation.

Nutty Acres was so beautiful you were almost content just cruising around testing your

toy box creations. Almost. Nintendo Land uses a similar patchwork art style to great effect.

Good character animation makes you invest in a scene. I could watch Banjo’s backpack for hours, bouncing with each plod through the field grass, and it makes me forgive/forget that this grass is actually one large textured plane with collision toggled off. Conversely, watching my character ‘skate’ through Albion’s beautiful grasslands in Fable II was alienating and it took time for me to accept that ‘quirk’. This is one reason MMOs remain unattractive to me – the fidelity of the world is too often negated by simplistic animation and character behaviour. NPCs run into walls and get stuck on scenery. They cast spells repeatedly and repeat lines and say things entirely out of context. In time I’m sure I could appreciate Skyrim for what it does well and celebrate the meme-friendly incongruity, but accepting those limitations seems at odds with the beauty and potential of the world at a macro level. Being drawn deep into an MMORPG is a frightening prospect knowing how engrossing they can be and how obsessed I can get. Exploring a living, populated world that evolves irrevocably over time would be fascinating but I dare not enter. One does not simply walk away from WoW.

Blue skies...RIVULETS & MEADOWS>SEWERS & CORRIDORS

Admittedly, I’m a sucker for blue sky in games and perhaps it’s unfair to condemn areas designed to elicit discomfort or oppression. If Ravenholm were an idyllic haven, it would conflict with the narrative drive to get-the-hell-outta-Dodge. Valve’s uninviting environments are still engaging and the bleakness of City 17’s concrete makes the escape to the mountains in the following episodes all the more striking. Resident Evil 4 was full of stunning locales that delivered a nail-biting and varied experience but, fun as it was, I’m not rushing to revisit Salazar’s Castle. It served its purpose beautifully. Now point me at the blue sky…

Valve don't want me rolling out the picnic blanket in Ravenholm. Check out Electric Blue Skies

for some great virtual photography from Half-Life 2 and many others

But pretty sunsets and mountain ranges alone don’t make me want to visit a place. I spent a few hours on Crysis’ tropical island marvelling at the foliage and the water (and I royally shat myself when the shark began circling). As a playground for emergent gameplay it was interesting, but I got lonely and bored. Give me a bear and bird bounding around Treasure Trove Cove any day. Give me Mickey Mouse marching through the Enchanted Forest on the Mega Drive or the 64-bit mist over Lake Hylia before sunrise (something the 3DS remake couldn’t quite recapture). That mist made me feel the crispness of the morning, the possibilities of a new day.

Impossible is everything...MEANINGFUL INTERACTION

Beauty alone can’t make a space compelling – it needs to be mechanically motivating. Non-interactive set dressing looks great but ultimately disappoints. Perfunctory backdrop detail is easily (and often unavoidably) exposed when the player is forced to search for the interactive component. Fumbling around to discover which of the cupboards actually opens ironically tests my suspension of disbelief in a way that highlighting said element does not. Watching Tom & Jerry cartoons from the ‘40s, the viewer can quickly identify objects in the environment that the characters will interact with in any shot. The background plates have a washed-out painterly appearance under the outlined animated elements. Rather than take you out of the scene, it’s actually rewarding to recognise that the poker by the fireside is about to become significant – it fosters anticipation of what’s coming next. As with video games, it’s vital that the viewer quickly understands what’s important. Making the background façade indistinguishable from interactive elements exposes the unreality of the scene because players are unable to perform the simplest of tasks. A door! Oh, it’s just a texture on the wall. An apple hanging from a tree! Maybe I can…no, just set dressing. A poker by the fire!? Wow, that’d be fun.

What to do, what to do...

Now I don’t expect fully functioning PCs in the shady corporate office I’m infiltrating but I want my character to be able to do something with them, even if it’s touching the mouse to get rid of the screensaver. The glowing mission critical object was born to guide players through all the non-interactive shit, but one has to ask if said shit is really needed. Are those banks of inactive PCs contributing enough tonally to outweigh the frustration of non-interactivity? The glowing object and breadcrumb trail are fudge solutions and rarely have any narrative context. Navi, annoying as she was, was a clever answer to multiple design challenges. Targeting enemies and highlighting POIs in a 3D space were handled by one system in the guise of a contextually relevant character. In a full library she could locate the one book you needed and it would make sense. Without her you’re left to look for clues in camera angles (borrowing a filmic device) or to follow the glowing breadcrumbs or shiny object. Fine, but why not just put the book on a table and stop pretending?

The whole library is faked to create atmosphere. Developers are intent on making visually credible worlds but rarely have time and resources to create non-critical content. Therefore the player is presented a plastic feast, nailed down to maintain the mood. In the ‘90s the shock of seeing environments realised so beautifully muted the issue. Resident Evil's prerendered backdrops created and preserved tension successfully as dioramas but their limitations were evident once the novelty wore off. The fully 3D environments of following instalments have created new problems. Blundering into the scenery (gun drawn), blindly tapping and testing the surroundings for goodies you know are hidden in random locations kills the mood the developers have crafted and tests players’ patience. In Revelations, a Metroid-style scanner (the contextually legitimate sibling to the glowing object) does its best to maintain a sense of player accomplishment that the glow might strip away but risks making the whole shebang feel like work. Making every cupboard in an environment interactive is within the scope of the current gen but time and resources are required to fill them. And is the equivalent of searching for lost car keys off the critical path worth recreating? Overlook a lockpick in Bioshock Infinite and maybe you’ll miss an audio tape, losing out on a fascinating narrative nugget. I played that game for the story, so it had me obsessively hoovering resources from desks and cupboards. It became a real chore. It made me nostalgic for Rapture. When does fidelity stop adding to the environment and detract from the core experience? (And on the subject of fidelity, why can’t my mutha-fuckin’ RPG obliterate that puny lock!?)

[F] Search. [F] Search. [F]-[F]-[F]-[F]-[F]...

I don’t need a meaningful system behind every object but I want something to justify its existence in the world. Deus Ex let me login to PCs and access emails, and I could uncover more of the story myself. The audiotapes in the original Bioshock were a beautiful contrivance but how long can these techniques continue to convey narrative before they pall? Who’s dropping these personal logs conveniently in my path to stumble upon? And in chronological order too! The Navi-like companion/guide became a cliché almost immediately.

Is it even fair to call these ‘devices’ problems? Art needs direction. I’m not irritated when a director uses his lens to highlight a dress hanging in a protagonist’s wardrobe or when an author has a character improbably reveal vital plot points. Concise storytelling demands framing and coincidence. The issue lies with the fact that I’m being presented possibilities in a video game. The illusion of choice is advertised and I feel short-changed when I discover my options are severely limited. Of course Batman is The World's Greatest Detective - my nan would be if she had Detective Mode in her specs! The cowl tech provides context for the glowing item, but really? Sherlock doesn't need any of that shit. The very best narrative games are quickly forgiven because the story engages you so well you ignore inadequacies in the peripheral environment. Unfortunately video games aren’t renowned for the quality of their writing and picking the world apart is all too easy when you’re bored and looking for something to do.

Wish You Were Here... part 1

I don’t replay many games. Considering the time investment, it puzzles me how people play the same thing repeatedly. Revisiting cherished favourites every few years makes more sense but then only for a specific reason. Not to beat the bad guy again or for a shot at the high score. I’m a sucker for a good story but that isn’t enough to make me return, nor are specific mechanics or controls (though they must be intuitive and satisfying).

What brings me back is a sense of place. I return to certain worlds for the same reason I revisit real world places I love – I want to be there. There’s something joyous in the fabric of the best game spaces. It’s exhilarating to trot around Outset Island with seagulls screeching overhead. Bemoaned by some, you can really smell the sea breeze while sailing The Wind Waker’s ocean overworld. Watching the water turn an autumn orange at sunset, or swirl into a grey tempestuous mass when a storm broke was stirring and I welcomed the five-minute voyages between islands as time to relax and take stock. For brief periods the tick-box nature of questing gave way to blessed peace, and (save for the occasional Octo-wotsit battle) I could mull over my own life and box-ticking while gazing into my ship’s wake. Or I could have a cup of tea. Conducting the wind was cumbersome (I would have mapped the baton to the C-stick for breezy navigation) but sailing away on the high sea evoked the same self-reflection I experience on long journeys in the real world. How exactly is this feeling achieved in a digital space? Why do I go back to certain game worlds and not others?

“It’s…ALIVE!”

Let’s take a critically acclaimed game: say, Gears of War. I enjoyed the campaign. I fought through the hordes in co-op and was satisfied with the chunky reloads and chunkier character models. The locales were beautifully detailed. But Gears is a game about progression. With the area cleared you move on along the path, through the newly opened door, over the bridge, into the sewers, etc. You do this unthinkingly – you’re driven onward, not only by the narrative but also by lack of anything to recommend the area you’ve just liberated. Try investigating your surroundings and you quickly discover that there’s very little worth saving in this world. Likewise Modern Warfare, Half-Life 2, even Bioshock.

If Jules Verne built the Sea Life Centre...

Rapture may be a joy to explore, digesting the sunken art deco decay and the vivid sound design, but it’s constructed to be experienced on-the-fly. These are games as novels, pulp or otherwise. They are divided into chapters, levels designed for progress, punctuated by set-piece spectacle. When you interrupt that flow you’re directed back to the narrative by way of bottleneck design, impassable debris or sheer boredom. Pleasure comes from working towards a clear goal and engaging in that process. I rarely replay these games. Once the puzzle is solved the world itself becomes the only draw and, though often attractive, they’re typically dull places to be.

At first glance the problem appears to be one of linearity but this isn’t the case. The classic 2D platformers run from left to right only but offer spaces I return to time and again. Perhaps, rather, it’s a constraint of narrative-focused games. The story plays second fiddle in nearly all the games I revisit. Mario is all about jumping on platforms and goombas. Zelda is about exploration and the thrill of that item-get sound. The stories, affecting as they can be, are secondary. Often they’re just pish. Save the princess. Save the world. Yadda yadda.

But a game that creates a world worth saving, a world worth being in – now that’s a mark of greatness. A place I think about while walking to work, or whistle the tune to while peeling potatoes. That’s what makes me fire up Sonic 2 again. Emerald Hill is a wonderful place to be. It has waterfalls and intrigue and an incredibly melodious feel. Trouncing Robotnik is incidental; I return to visit the place. Sometimes it summons memories of when I first visited. Emerald Hill, Chemical Plant and Aquatic Ruin Zone are Christmas morning ’92. The floating fairy debris and notes of Kokiri Forest are Christmas ’98.

*angry face* He's just pissed that I always take
the shortcut on the last corner.

And here the dreaded spectre nostalgia appears. This is a powerful ancillary factor because it has the ability to overpower all else. We spend long periods with video games and they form part of our routines over time, like meeting friends in the pub after work or reading the paper on a Sunday morning. A game can evoke memories not just of the digital space but also old living rooms, dorms and people from the past. When I blast through the cannon on DK Mountain in Mario Kart Wii, I’m not really thinking about the greenery and the angry buck-toothed volcano (cute as he is) but of epic nights spent at university tripping over Gamecube cables and slurping lager from the can between rounds with housemates. There’s a whole social and historical aspect to the game world which takes place entirely outside of it. That track reminds me of good times and I’m eager to return to it when I play now, though not because the circuit is intrinsically appealing. Conversely, my Wild World village is one place I can never return to. I feel ashamed for abandoning it and now it would be full of weeds and strangers and memories. But there’s a part of me desperate to go back, to see if I remember the geography and to discover how it has changed in my absence. Nostalgia is tricksy. It can persuade you a game has universal merits when only you experience them. It can get you just like old songs. Which brings us to my first integral component of great game places…

That takes me back… MUSIC

Back in the 8-bit days hardware simply wasn’t up to rendering extraneous visual detail. You had your character, your enemies, your platforms and your background. By the 16-bit era animated backgrounds (more of which later) helped to enliven the environments a little but developers relied on sound to create atmosphere. Mute the volume while playing Mega Man or Super Mario Bros. and you realise just how much the audio is contributing. It was the music that made Famicom-era Hyrule epic.

Gamer Print's Hyrulean Travel and Karting
Classics posters evoke the tone of pre-war
railway posters, advertising the environments

as holiday destinations with cheerful slogans.

16-bit machines brought more texture to environments. The sprites and sound effects remained but became more ambitious and animated and specific synth instruments and genres began to emerge. Masato Nakamuro’s work on the first two Sonics took electro-funk beats and juxtaposed them with melody that the series lost with the try-hard rock of the Dreamcast era. Yuzo Koshiro’s Streets of Rage 2 soundtrack pushed towards the club with house/techno/trance tracks, a precursor to the electronica of Wipeout and the Playstation generation. I remember Axel rocking on his feet under flashing neon signs after clearing the street of Galsias and Donovans. I started punching along to the beat, moving left and right, cycling through my repertoire before rounding off with a grand upparrrr. Essentially I was ‘dancing’, finishing with a Travolta-esque signature move. These were grimy hoodlum-filled streets, but I wanted to stay there, throwing shapes with my fists.

As environments turned polygonal, increasing data storage also allowed for different approaches to audio. Mario 64's Bob-omb Battlefield still invited you to play with an infectious system-powered tune but the space on a CD-ROM allowed for high-fidelity sound effects and speech. Composers were able to use sweeping orchestral scores and licensed tracks. The online furore last year over the Tony Hawk HD tracklist (altered due to licensing issues) highlights just how effectively music can evoke a time and place. Warehouse or Hangar without Goldfinger? Unthinkable.

The areas are conveyed as much by their colour
palettes as the iconography of the landscape.

The greatest video game music evokes smells and sensations in environments that simply cannot exist in the code. EAD may build the boat and fill the ocean but Koji Kondo provides the salt in the sea air. His work on the Zelda series especially demonstrates an acute understanding of the soundtrack’s role, whether creating an overt accompanying theme (like the breezy panpipe melody of Dragon Roost Island), something more ambient (the mysterious abandoned tone of Forest Temple) or simply understanding when silence is golden. I have a vivid memory of being transported to the moon in Majora’s Mask. After chasing Skullkid up the Clock Tower I expected the final showdown, and the ominous score indicated as much, echoing the struggle against Ganon in the previous game’s finale. Without warning, I was whisked to a faraway glade with a single tree atop a hill at the centre. What? It was disorientating after the kaleidoscopic world of Termina – where every field had its own refrain – to be standing in a dreamscape that had no melody. I ran towards the tree. Masked children were playing around it. I had no idea where I was or what was happening. The familiar and comforting sound of music had gone AWOL but this hill was definitely alive. I was speechless. That juxtaposition showed an understanding of the space and the power silence can have in a world of sound.

Entire kingdoms can now be rendered and streamed down to the tree. Stirring overworld themes have arguably become superfluous in a landscape where the boundaries are unseen and unknown. Shadow of the Colossus’ Forbidden Land is traversed without orchestral accompaniment and the space feels all the more profound with only the wind and Agro’s hooves punctuating the stillness of the kingdom. Maybe we have Nintendo’s unhurriedly iterative approach to the Zelda template to thank for the dozens of golden themes Kondo has written for its compartmentalised, contained spaces. While tech has evolved and it looks better than ever before, Hyrule is still a walled garden – it’s still the music that makes it feel epic.

Location, Location, Location...COHESIVE ECOSYSTEMS

Hyrule offers a range of terrains and vistas. If the heat and frustration of Death Mountain becomes stifling, you can go cool off at the lake or visit Saria in the Lost Woods. Narrative or genre limitations can narrow the breadth of environments available (Dead Space's Isaac Clarke is unlikely to take a restorative jaunt to the seaside, for example). However, games and characters that aren’t restricted by genre can equally succumb to locale fatigue. The elemental grass/ice/fire/water worlds are old tropes and reinvigorating them has become increasingly challenging since the jump to three dimensions. Diverse as it is, Hyrule is always made up of the same component regions – you start in the leafy forest, then journey through the fire, ice/water and sand areas. The Mushroom Kingdom suffers similarly. Where else could Nintendo take Mario but ‘the final frontier’ in Galaxy? The blank canvas of the cosmos, a setting for the first video games, was now the plumber’s last resort. And once there he was still shooting between playground planetoids based on the traditional elements. Following the innovations of Super Mario Bros. 3 proved difficult and in the early ‘90s Sega were arguably more successful at creating arresting, convincing settings without resorting to the same old rhetoric. Beyond the introductory grassland zones, it wasn’t until Sonic 3 that the hedgehog visited anything as predictable as a ‘snow’ world. The levels contained the familiar vocabulary but it was sewn into environments without becoming the explicit, monotonous theme. Marble Zone had lava but it was just a facet of the ruins and seemed entirely coherent in that context. Labyrinth Zone had water as a natural (and terrifying) feature of the maze. While Mario waddled through deserts and jumped from one block to another, Sonic was spinning through mystic caverns, inside chemical plants and over oil oceans. Casino Night Zone built on the blueprint of Spring Yard blending it with a flashing pinball/fruit machine aesthetic. It produced something that felt original and suitably zany, but utterly cohesive and believable as an environment.

Reconfiguration and distribution of familiar elements stopped
levels becoming stale in the early Sonic games. Lava, water and
grass flesh out the zones rather than become the overriding theme.

That isn’t to say that Nintendo suffer from a dearth of inspiration – their level design, mechanics and art direction have been consistently outstanding for decades – but the Mario and Zelda series’ in particular have borne thematic repetition that threatens stagnation. It’s telling that the Van Gogh-esque impressionist backdrop to Painted Swampland in New Super Mario Bros. U was so well received. The series is starved of innovative environments to explore and it was a welcome variant in a roster of beautiful-yet-forgettable worlds.