Some rambling things I was thinking about, specifically related to memory and 999.
I think I'll remember 999 very well, despite the vaguely generic Anime Murder plot and stylings. Part of the reason I'll remember it is that I ended up doing a lot of math. I'll always remember that Lotus is 8 and Clover is 4, and those hooks help me to remember their personalities, traits, and eventual fates as well. This is very interesting to me - why would doing a bunch of math help me to remember that Snake lost his arm in a car accident and is a great detective?
I think that memory is very strange. Long-term memories slowly get eroded, but at different rates depending on a number of factors. The feeling for me is this: short term memory is is like a scaffold for a building. The more detailed and engaging the memory, the better the construction will be. As time passes, the scaffold is taken down, and long term memory is the building itself. What remains can be shoddy (my memory of work yesterday) or very strong (memories of my wedding day).
I think this varies from person to person, but my "scaffolds" are made stronger with a few things. A strong emotional reaction, be it good or bad, definitely makes the scaffold stronger. A highly detailed experienced also makes the scaffold stronger, so doing a lot of math combined with detective work (999) will create a very strong memory. Repetition also helps - another strength to 999.
I think it takes more than one of those factors, though, to make a long-lasting memory. I played a lot of Farmville when it was popular, but I don't remember anything about it, so repetition alone doesn't work. Minecraft, on the other hand, is very repetitive but also creates in me a deep feeling of satisfaction and peace, so I remember many more of the things that I've done in that game.
Working on spreadsheets for my job is highly detailed but very forgettable. Making a game is also highly detailed, but very much a labor of love, so I remember the games I made pretty well.
The only exception is a strong emotional reactions. I remember those for a long time, without anything else.
I'm very invested in memory because mine is very bad at times. The period of my life between the ages of 11 and 18 is a huge blur for me, and some days I feel a profound sense of loss. I don't want that to happen again.
I've recently started posting a lot on the selectbutton.net forums, and some of these are long-form posts about games. I wanted to save them somewhere accessible. The original post can be found here.
WARNING: I'm spoiling this entire game, also a CW for self harm/suicide
DISTRAINT is one of the least effective horror games I've ever played. It is neither scary in a visceral way, nor does it dive deeply into some sort of psychological horror. Its premises are stated very plainly about 15 minutes into the game and the plot is simple enough to be predicted basically from the outset. Its method of foreshadowing is to simply tell you what is going to happen in a few minutes. Plus it's really ugly.
The premise of the game is that the main character works in a vaguely debt collecting related job, and his job is to seize people's property from them. Just a few minutes into the game he starts hallucinating things like blood on the walls, and zombie elephants. Maybe 20 minutes his dead parents show up to tell him that greed is bad and that's basically the moral of the story.
Oh, and the elephant is literally referred to as the "elephant in the room" and is later explicitly defined as his subconscious guilt given physical form. It's so bad.
The main character ends up seizing 3 homes, then deciding he's going to quit even if it means living in a dumpy, leaky apartment forever. At the last minute he changes his mind because he's made Partner in whatever this vaguely debt-related firm is. Then it cuts to 10 years later and he lost his job because his guilt elephant made him mentally unstable and now he is being evicted.
Then he kills himself.
Oh and also an old lady who died earlier in the game gets to meet her husband in heaven as the credits roll.
THE END
...As much as I'm giving this game shit, I actually didn't hate it. It's sort of charmingly bad and is so blunt with its message that I almost (almost (almost)) like it for being so naive and sincere. I could go into some giant speech about how criticizing the lowest members on the capitalist food chain for not wanting to live in a dumpy leaky apartment is totally missing the point, but...I don't think it really matters.
But it is interesting how not horror-like this game is! Everything is super concrete and obvious, so even jumpscares aren't scary because there's no atmosphere. The puzzles can be a bit trippy (the last house involves taking psychedelic drugs to go through doors that are locked in real life) but for the most part they are very straightforward.
There are a couple of moments where it tries to go for a "horrific absurdity amongst mundanity" feeling. The one I liked was the nursing home where a janitor is cheerily grinding up a body, and you have to take a chunk of it to the Cook because he wants to make meat. The main character is just sort of like "Well, this is gross but whatever" and it's kind of funny/scary. But then it's undermined again by how straightforward and back-tracking everything else is.
So I guess what I'm getting at here is that even things in this game that are actually scary:
Your dead parents chopping up mystery meat in the middle of the night
are undermined by the lack of atmosphere and lack of vagueness:
They immediately tell you they're going to feed you the elephant of your guilt and they want you to quit your job
I know it's obvious to say that "good horror has both atmosphere and scares" but it's amazing how completely gutted horror is by missing one entirely.
Friday the 13th wouldn't be scary if everything was well lit and we all knew that it was Jason's mother in a burlap mask the entire time. It would be funny, but not scary.
Halloween wouldn't be scary if it was set in a bright, crowded wal-mart, and Mike Meyers wore a mask that said "I LIKE TO KILL PEOPLE" on it.
Anyway I'm rambling at this point. Don't play DISTRAINT.
Holy crap there are some SPOILERS below for 999 - Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors. It's a good game, so it might be nice to play it first, but hey, read on if you want to.
I just wanted to write something briefly about 999. Released on the Nintendo DS in 2009, it's a very serious and very funny visual novel. The main plot is about being trapped on a boat with a bunch of people, playing a deadly game involving the number 9 in a bunch of ways. It reminds me most of Death Note, in that its setting is very rule-based. Many of the plot twists are about people bending the rules to suit their needs, or about new rules coming to light suddenly.
The story of 999 is also very entwined with the actual structure of a visual novel, which impressed me very much. Visual novels are similar to Choose Your Own Adventure books, in that they typically focus on breadth rather than depth. So instead of a book where a single chain of events happens, they usually branch out into many different chains of events with significantly different results. The game-ness of a visual novel is found in exploring all of these different endings. Getting the "true" ending usually involves using knowledge gained from prior play-throughs...something that the characters themselves would not have access to.
999 plays with this idea of character/player split at the very end of the "true" route. The player and the character simultaneously discover that someone has been guiding them to this end using knowledge gained from the other failed endings. It's as if someone was playing a visual novel, but in the universe of the visual novel itself! It's very interesting, and it brings the player closer to being part of the universe than just a mere observer.
It reminds me of Deadly Premonition in a way. The main character in that game talks to his "alternate personality" a lot. But the alternate personality is really a stand-in for the player, allowing the main character to address the player directly, and for the player to control the main character's actions with an in-universe explanation. It gives the player a direct and very real role in the fictional universe of the game.
The idea of bringing players into the "magic circle" of the game isn't a new one, but I rarely see it performed effectively. Deadly Premonition, 999, imscared, Baten Kaitos...these are the only examples I can think of off the top of my head, and they happen to be some of my favorite games.
One last thought: 999 is a great example of why visual novels are more than simple books, or just games with a lot of words. They can give an experience that a book can't by allowing the player to assume a role in a universe and affect it in unique ways. But their high text-to-game ratio allows a lot more character analysis than a typical game could. Playing 999 is the closest I've felt to being a detective; I was analyzing people's motives, reactions, and abilities so I could make good decisions.
I highly recommend the game, but for your own sake, play it on an emulator. The text scrolls way too slowly and I ended up playing most of the game at 2x speed. I don't think I would have finished it otherwise.
I picked up Nintendo Land for $10 the other day, and I've played a bit of it with my wife and on my own. It's a fun game with a lot of neat gimmicks that have longer lifespans than I would expect from a bunch of mini-games. It's definitely a mini-game collection, but it feels meatier than most games I would describe like that.
When Nintendo Land first came out it was seen as a showcase of all the neat things you could do with the Wii U's gamepad. This turned out to be terribly true: it's just about all the neat things you could do with the gamepad.
The Wii U is dying at this point, and I think most of us can agree that the gamepad is pretty much a bad gimmick. I can't think of much that it could do that wasn't done on the DS or the Wii better, except for maybe Mario Maker. Even that game is something you could accomplish on a tablet - the TV display is just a nice bonus. Looking down at the gamepad while playing a game is a really awful experience, and the best thing about it is that I can play games with the TV off. But even then I just want a nice, powerful portable machine, not something locked to my living room
I loved the Wii, and I loved the DS. But combining the two was doomed from the beginning. Nintendo Land was supposed to be a shining light towards all of the new things you could do on the Wii U. Instead, it ended up showcasing almost everything interesting the Wii U could do, and with the benefit of hindsight we can see how limited the console truly is.
I've been playing a lot of Terraria this week, in lieu of doing things that are actually productive. Terraria is a fantastic game, but I've already played 280+ hours of it according to Steam. And the new patch didn't necessarily add anything that interesting. So why am I starting a new character yet again?
I've also been playing a lot of the PSP version of Disgaea, which I already completed on the DS. Disgaea is, again, a fantastic game, but I've already finished it and even did some power leveling back on the DS. So why is it that I feel compelled to dive into the item world yet again?
I think there's something in common here. This past week has been stressful to me for various reasons, and I feel like I don't have control over my life in some ways. I also feel overwhelmed by the amount of things bouncing around in my head, which is distracting me from the things I need to get done. All in all, it's been kind of crappy. So why those two games?
Terraria and Disgaea could not be farther apart in how they play, but the way that they feel in my brain is very similar. Both games occupy my brain almost completely. My spacial reasoning is occupied by digging or trying to find Geo chains. My forward thinking is occupied by planning the best builds to fight the next boss, or by planning on which items I will level up first. My senses are occupied by constant input, either from massive particle effects and lighting changes, or by amazing combat animations. I'm usually doing math in my head at the same time, either counting the blocks I need to build a cool house, or the damage I'm doing to enemies and how many attacks I need to do to finish them off.
That said, neither game is that hard. The parts of my brain being occupied are challenged, but not that much. It's relaxing in a way that only video games seem to be, at least to me. I've got constantly shifting, realizable small goals, along with overarching large goals that I am always making progress towards.
I have a few "stress relief," or more accurately "problem avoidance," games. Terraria, Minecraft, Disgaea, Dragon Quest, Peggle. They are pretty different on the surface, but in the end they all occupy multiple parts of my brain so that I'm not really thinking about anything else.
I don't think this is always healthy behavior. It can be very toxic, in fact. But it is something I do, and I think it's something that can be done healthily as long as I'm aware that I'm avoiding shit, and what kind of effect these games have on me.
Link is not really an interesting character, and purposefully so. He is a cipher, intended to help the player project themselves into the game. The most boring thing that somebody can talk about is Link's characterization, Link's feelings, Link's personal connections.
I'm here to talk about Link's feelings.
In Ocarina of Time, Link is cast as the Hero of Time. In practice, this means that the player can jump between a time before the rule of Ganon, and a time 7 years later when Ganon is doing his big-bad routine to the whole world. The plot of the game starts with Link as a child. Soon, he transforms into a 7-year-older version of himself without experiencing any time in-between. The cruelest form of time travel - he still ages, but gets none of the benefit of having lived the years between 9 and 16.
In the end, Link saves the world in the future timeline, but returns to his present, when he was 9 years old. The implication is that none of the bad things happened and, therefore, the world didn't even need saving. His role as the Hero of Time is totally negated, and nobody knows what he did.
Another part of the tragedy is that by this time Link has not only discovered that he has no family, but that he doesn't even share a species with those who surrounded him as a child. He can remain in the forest, but he is the only one who will age. The Kokiri who raised him remain forever children. What does he have left? He's essentially an orphan, and it's implied that the only person who even knows him outside of the forest is a princess in a castle town far away. And there's no way he can be friends with a princess.
The direct sequel, Majora's Mask, begins with 9 year old Link racing through a foggy forest riding his horse, Epona. He gets mugged by a Skull kid in a weird mask and loses all of his possessions, as well as his horse, and falls down a hole into another world.
Majora's Mask is a game about impending doom. The moon is going to crash into the world in 3 days, and nobody can stop it (except Link of course). Death is everywhere - the three major masks that Link can acquire are all the faces of dead people, and one of them is a child. Almost everyone is miserable, and even those who have found happiness will be dead in 3 days.
I think this is a perfect mirror for the turmoil that Link must be experiencing. He has no family, he has no friends, and even his accomplishments are taken away from him. He's thrown into a cruel world where nobody wants to speak to him. He finds himself repeating the same 3 days ad nauseam, having almost all of his achievements taken from him every single cycle.
And yet, he starts to make progress. He starts to learn the world, its pitfalls and its charms. He gets to know the strange, miserable people around him, and he begins to use his curse as a way to help those around him, even if it's only temporary. He plays songs of healing for those near death, and finds a way to make their sacrifices (or meaningless deaths) into something that will eventually save the world.
At the end of his mission, he discovers that the Skull kid who mugged him is just a lonely little boy. And even the main villain is a lonely deity who can't find friends to play with him. They are reflections of his emotional state, but he is able to use his likeness with them to learn about them, and in the case of the Skull kid, save a life.
The perfect encapsulation of the theme of misery being turned into progress or even joy, is when Link puts on a transformative mask. Watch this animation:
Link is obviously in terrible pain every time he puts on that mask, yet it is necessary to do this maybe a hundred times during the game itself. The pain is worth the results, and it's a reminder of the sacrifices that went into making that mask.
So Majora's Mask ends up being a catharsis for Link. He may still be miserable, but in helping others through their misery, he can maybe find a way to help himself.
I'm not here to say this was intentional on the part of the designers, but I think it ties in nicely to the Hero of Time legend. It's probably the darkest of all of Link's incarnations, especially when you consider that Wind Waker effectively erases everything Link DID achieve in Hyrule. Majora's Mask is a perfect send-off for the loneliest Link, and it's my favorite of the series.
