simulated memories

here i go, trying to Write Something For A Website again.

but those words - they don't come. words that do come, come slowly and unsurely. with trepidation, i try slowly rolling back over doing something that seemed to come so easily before, but i hardly get anywhere. shoveling ground that can't be shoveled anymore. the ground is hard as rock, all frozen over. things look strange and different now. i see people i don't recognize, or their faces seem to have changed somehow. the landscape is strange and alien. i feel sick all of a sudden. i get more headaches. i'm unsure what i was really saying or building up before was of any good use, or if it wasn't just me puffing myself up. wasn't i just hoping for something, some recognition? something to get me out of the hole i'm in? someone to save me? ...huh? where am i? what is all this?

hey, here i am, somewhere, so i might as well try. what else do i have? survival comes before all else, in a panicked frenzy. nervously laughing at the sun and the sky, hoping they don't catastrophically fall. and yet even survival is just barely met. the light is much too bright outside for me to look at for very long.

i get images, like this image that keeps coming back from the beginning of episode 2 level 4 of Wolfenstein 3D:

it seems so gray, looking at it again, and so empty. you thought it was yellow, the color of the ceilings in a lot of the other levels. or dark green. or i thought it was yellow. you, i, they become the same.

hahaha, you're so stupid for thinking about this. but you would. your mind would go there, you little bitch. you're so pathetic. what about all the people who didn't have what you had, you fucker? they didn't have fucking videogames to escape into. you and your fucking simulated memories.

in this particular area, there are two sides of the hall, yet i specifically see the image of the left side in my mind's eye. the left side is where the exit lies, and on the north side of the map. is that what it is? an interesting opening idea, and certainly memorable because of the zombie you shoot at the start (off-screen). is it that zombie? he's evil, he's scary, he's unknown. he's grotesque, and he only appears at times. the slimy vines on the walls are an unknown. or are you confusing the green slime on the walls with the vines on the purple walls in the game? those vines, they're a representation of something, something else. they tell me something else. they're telling me to think, but i don't want to think. hahaha, that's not true, i say. i'm better than this. i will not let it get me down. i will not do this again. i refuse. i'm putting my foot down.

but then, inevitably, there's an unbearable darkness - one that i keep wanting to cry when i try and think about it too deeply. it's not there when i look back at it now on the outside, but it's still there somewhere. i want to point it out frantically and shout that it's there. why can't anyone else see it? where is this coming from? i remember that specifically playing this level is attached to a traumatic memory of mine. a dark time, dark thoughts. one that i would rather not explore anymore. one i would rather not think about. the barbed, scaly tendrils of time close up around it and rapidly overtake it in a dark fog as i recede outward from it. i cannot smile and act like i'm still there, that little child. the sadness comes, and it is overwhelming. i have to close the door after too long.

over time, things should fade. and yet here it still is staring me in the face, just as intently as ever. i can't even crane my neck to look away for a second. it is bolted in place.

it's not just this space, it's all of them. they're all there. episode 5 level 4, the completely symmetrical level. haha. the beginning. mister officer. the police guy, the fucking blue one. he has a machine gun. he's gonna shoot me. more and more of him, the same everywhere. always the same. but they're just meat. not even meat, digital meat. weird, funny little impulses. they don't mean anything, really. 

what are these spaces? why are there here? i look for a reason, but none comes. i cry at the infinite abyss, and people laugh or are confused, or they laugh, confused. they don't know and they never will.

it's not about me. it's about something else entirely. product worship. so pathetic. no real memories. no real hopes or dreams. always inside a machine. always living life inside a machine, because outward life doesn't exist. it's horrible. you're just part of a fucking stupid culture. a fake fucking culture. a subculture. don't try to look for support, cause you're not gonna get it. don't try and understand, because it can't be understood. it's all about anger, and product worship. it's all about the hatred, and the gnashing of teeth. the beast that snarls and howls and pulls apart the flesh those that get in its way. those people fight for their simulated memories tooth and nail but you can't fight for yours, because they seem so stupid and indefinite. so silly. so ridiculous. so childish.

everything's looping back on itself. circles and circles and circles again. circles and circles and got to stop spinning.

try to resurrect, rebuild. reconstruct these memories. try not to laugh at myself for how silly this all is, and how silly i am. how stupid must i be. i can't speak, not like i used to. instead of grasping at anything and everything i can, the truths now seem to float above my head, loudly proclaiming themselves and i am overwhelmed. hahaha. i can't. the thoughts come - indefinite, incomplete. unsure how to manifest themselves. dancing a strange little dance. sometimes violent. sometimes they calm down for awhile and let me look at them.

take your memories and your pain and hastily paint BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH over top of them until you can only see little bits and pieces of those partially obscured memories, with smiley faces drawn all over them. Winking Emoticon, *nudge* *nudge*, you guys. boy howdy, will you look at that. i don't want it to be this way, but it is undeniably this way. here you are a part of this world, this infinite series of little uniform patterns and grids, shuffling along, gradually erasing what was underneath and starting the same pattern anew.

and so, take all the complicated emotions you felt and try to distill them so that anyone in the world will understand. don't hope that anything will be maintained in the translation. don't even try to be true to them in the first place. no one will understand if you do. they'll squint their eyes slightly in the way they do and cock their head, perplexed. they must be feverishly following those shuffling patterns, hanging on for dear life. "huh? wtf am i reading?" wtf is this bullshit?

you're just crazy. 

tell me you're crazy, maybe then i'll understand. you say this to everyone around you, silently. they don't hear it, even if you say it.

but that's because it's all been taken over, isn't it? it's all been colonized. colonized memories. digital support groups sponsored by Pepsi and Mountain Dew and Doritos. evil entities that cannot help themselves. digital lions. big square machines on a strict schedule of complicated circuitous routes that take in and poop out at an alarmingly fast and strange rate. their patterns appear so erratic and convoluted to look like they cannot possibly be maintained, yet they somehow are for the time being. and no one notices, or wants to notice. snack like you can never snack again, because it's no more, that space is no more. it's just a memory, that's all.

and then, proud statements i make come back to me. i see myself as silly little thing. a silly, sad little thing. it's all a lie. what a joke. but maybe there's also something there. maybe they can't see. maybe they never will. you tear up slightly thinking about it. maybe that's all there is.

it's time for you to do something, but what? tell the world? what? what do you have to say? what will it mean? what ways can it be aggregated and related and complicated and juxtaposed and rearranged? what conceptual frameworks can you be made to fit into? what trends are you seeking? what is your target demographic? where is all of this going? why am i reading this? why is this on my feed? who are you? why should i care about this? when will you ever stop being this way? what headaches are yet to come, ahead of you? what people are you yet to deal with in this arena? where will you be in fifty years time? where will you be in one years time?

it's all a mystery. just a mystery. not something you can even think about, or pretend to think about. you entertained a notion of it before, but that is gone. it's not for you, not your life. you strongly suspect it isn't really anyone's life either. probably not. yeah, that's a good thought. that's progress.

anyway. whatever. yep, whatever. hmm. well, whatever. 

oh well. time to erase and try again.

adventures in level design: Wolfenstein 3D Episode 3: "Die, Fuhrer, Die" PART TWO

part one is here

the Fuhrer welcomes you to the conclusion of Ridiculous Videogame Representations of Historical Events.

in part one i focused mostly on how Romero established a pretty consistent design vocabulary in the first five maps, only to be called into question by Tom Hall's map six. when talking about any of these sorts of things, it's very difficult to tell how intentional the pacing is, and how much of it is just an odd, random juxtaposition that happened by chance. there is really no way to tell how far the experience lies on each side of the spectrum. i can, however, give my own interpretation based on my own experiences playing them. and we've seen how creators can create experiences that end up being about something much deeper, or at least much stranger than what they could consciously articulate about they were doing. 

this is both the joy and the frustration about a game like Wolfenstein 3D. it gives the player enough in the design to call into question what they're seeing, but never really escapes outside the confines of being A Videogame Released in 1992. one could just say that things were made this way because that's how Hall or Romero felt like they should be made, or because they thought it was fun, or funny. but that's an easy way to absolve oneself of artistic responsibility that game designers have traditionally used throughout the history of games, and doesn't really answer any of the deeper questions about the experience players face.

adventures in level design: Wolfenstein 3D Episode 3: "Die, Fuhrer, Die" PART ONE

you can view part 2 here

episode 3 of Wolfenstein 3D, otherwise known as "Die, Fuhrer, Die" or The One Where You Kill Hitler, is probably the most-played episode of the registered version of Wolf3D, no doubt because of the fact that You Get To Kill Hitler. if a new generation of WW2 based FPS games have proven anything, it's that people in the have an endless fixation with killing Nazis. undoubtedly these people would have played this episode. and they'd get what exactly what they wanted, in some ways, but not before getting something a bit stranger and more disturbing.

"Die, Fuhrer, Die" is an interesting example of how pacing and context greatly affect how players will respond. everyone playing it had a vested interest in reaching the end and to see Hitler as the end boss in a videogame. its nine (not counting the secret level) maps do follow a pretty typical linear get-more-crazy-as-you-go-on progression, and much of the levels feel pretty internally consistent to each other. but it also undergoes an abrupt shift a little bit more than halfway through the episode, from by far the easiest set of maps in the the game with cohesive, short levels to a little bit weird and amorphous. this is partly because it's the most true collaboration of the two map designers for the game: John Romero and Tom Hall. floors one through five were designed by Romero, and are among the shortest and easiest maps in the game, though not without a few tricks. floors six through eight were designed by Hall (who did a majority of Wolf3D's maps), and take the episode into a bit of an alternate-universe netherworld version of the first five maps, if they can even be compared to those maps at all, before sending you plummeting towards the final showdown with Hitler (which is designed, again, by Romero). 

i'm gonna start by talking about three of the first five maps (two, three, and five) and then the turning point, when things start to get stranger and more complicated, at map six. i'm skipping floors one and four because they're two of the most conventional-feeling and, quite frankly, boring maps in the game for me. part two of this article, coming soon, will focus on maps seven through nine. 

please note that from now on, i'm going to use the terms "map" or "floor" instead of "level" to describe each map, because "floor" is how the game refers to each of the level on the player's status bar, and "map" refers to what it is, design-wise. 

also note you can put the mouse cursor over the ingame shots (and also click on them) to see them without my lovingly mouse-drawn labels.

without further ado, here's floor two:

chemical warfare: a wolfenstein mod i did when i was 14

after finding out that the embedded youtube videos i was using for my adventures in level design articles here are gone, i thought i should do something to make up for it.

i came up with the idea of looking back at a wolf 3d mod i did over 10 years ago called "chemical warfare". it was my first and only real significant contribution to the small wolfenstein community before i started getting into doing remixes of game music. chemical warfare is supposed to be loosely based off of wolf3d episode 4, which i have written a bit about my fascination with in this blog. and indeed, there are levels which are basically "remixes" of wolf3D levels, in episode four and elsewhere, except bigger and better..er in the eyes of a 14 year old. the level in the above video has parts which are a fairly obvious remake of episode 4, level 2 for example. but it's also a mishmash of every other thing i liked or new idea i could come up with at the time, mixed with any new graphic i could take or any new source code change i could make without changing the feel of the game that much. the result is kind of jumble of a bunch of different ideas: some really slapdash or incomplete, some too complex, some boring, some over-the-top cartoony, some too cruel, and some surprisingly interesting.

i stuck with wolf3d editing partly as a way to understand and re-experience the emotions i felt from playing the original game (i talk about this in video part 22), and partly because it was easy to visualize - every bit of data in the level was on a single screen, represented by different colors or symbols making up a big 64x64 grid. by comparison, doom and other games that i was into were full of all kinds of incomprehensible (to me) technical details. i was too overwhelmed by all the things i had to tweak just to get something working, and too bad at visualizing what everything would finally look like in the game. with wolf3d i could exorcise the ideas for spaces i felt must get out without losing my mind in the process.

i'm about halfway through the playthrough now (with commentary). i can't attest to how interesting any of this will be to someone who's not me. but i'm at level 20 now, basically halfway through the mod (there are 42 levels). my abilities and enthusiasm increased exponentially the further i got into making this, so the best levels are mostly still to come. here's a playlist of my progress that i'm updating every other day or so:

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEdRlER1F5rFAAaW3Q5XSZVAwCf9kcXmr&feature=view_all

i don't think this mod was a work of genius, or anything like that. there are many, many things wrong with it. but i'm someone who is very prone to relentless self-doubt and self-examination, and i didn't really have any friends in real life to share this with or talk about any design ideas with. i was (and still am to some extent) ashamed to reveal to other people that it was even an interest of mine. it was very personal to me, and hard to talk about at time. these things i did when i was much younger are still haunting me to some extent, and making it hard for me to move on into adulthood.

i'm hoping doing these videos will at least be some sort of snapshot of something that was a big part of my life for a little while, especially for someone who won't feel like playing through all 42 levels of a 10+ year old wolfenstein fan mod. i hope at least a few people can take something meaningful from it. if not, then at least doing it will make moving on a little bit easier for me.

Happy 20th Birthday, Wolf 3D!

i did a short essay for the 20th anniversary of Wolf3D over on Midnight Resistance. it's more about memory than the game itself, but i'm pretty happy with it. let me know what you think!

Wolfenstein 3D Director's Commentary

the 20th anniversary of Wolf3D is this month. to celebrate, John Carmack did a commentary of the game on youtube! i've embedded it here:

in conjunction with the commentary, they released a browser version of the game at http://wolfenstein.bethsoft.com/

sadly, only the first three episodes are available. and the graphics are a little blurry, presumably for speed reasons. but it's definitely worth checking out!

more adventures in level design articles will be coming soon!

adventures in level design: Wolfenstein 3D, episode 4, level 5

"atmospheric" is a popular staple word of the gamer vocabulary. i have seen it in so many magazines and websites over the years that it seem like it's ceased to have an actual meaning. i only imagine it being sincerely used now as an item on some checklist game companies have, like "necessary features to add before shipping". a buzzword, if you wanna call it that.

i feel like we've come to a point where the popular understanding of what that word means, among game designers, is making an environment evoke emotion by adding a lot of manipulative, gimmicky features into the game. this is very far from the "atmosphere" of a Silent Hill 2, or Ico, which is part of the core of those two games.

so i'll just compromise and say that "atmosphere" is the word that gamers use when they want to describe anything in the feel of a game that fits outside the gameplay mechanics. that's an awfully all-encompassing term, but i think it has stayed that way because explaining all the ways an environment can affect a player is an impossible task. not to mention that there's so little critical vocabulary for games, and so few people who are even interested in looking at these things in any detail.

with that in mind, i couldn't write an entry about level 3 of episode 4 ("A Dark Secret") without doing one about level 5. this is the only level to make me cry out of utter betrayal. after looking through it again, i'm convinced that it's the closest thing the game has to a masterpiece. it's probably one of the best levels i'll ever write about, anyway. i say this despite it being totally manipulative and unfair. this is not unfairness in the sense that Kaizo Mario World, or I Wanna Be The Guy, or "challenge" levels are unfair. it's much more deeply unfair, because it breaks rules that the game previously lets on will never be broken. it gives you ample resources to beat it, like any other level, and then...it just doesn't let you. it's like it's saying, go back to the fucking Kill Hitler episode to feel good about yourself, cause you're obviously not ready to deal with what's going on here.

this is the level that planted the thought in my head, many years ago, that maybe some levels are just meant to be impossible. maybe they're just there, floating in space, not ever meaning to have a solution. that carried over into my experiences with DOOM. i had a friend in school laugh at me because i told him certain DOOM levels were supposed to be impossible. he said "why would the levels exist if you couldn't beat them?" he may have been right, but i still don't believe him.

the idea of an "impossible level", one that exists for mysterious reasons and never lets you beat it is ultimately a reason why i'm interested in game design as a thing. i'm so deeply angered by the idea, and that's why i find it fascinating. i'm going to go out on a limb and say that this is probably the level that inspired the careers of many game designers, at least if we're going by amount of keyboards smashed.

adventures in level design - Wolfenstein 3D, episode 4, level 3

episode 4, "A Dark Secret", is the first episode of the "Nocturnal Missions" (d'ya get the pun? eh? eh?). unlike all of the other episodes, it has no easily distinguishable features. a couple of new walls are introduced, but only one of them (a weird light brown stone/cave wall with lots of blood splatters) is used more than once. it may seem mundane to mention the variation in wall textures. they're such a huge part of what defines the feel of the game, though, that their impact can't really be understated. the brown wall, especially, contributes strongly to the feel of an episode. still, i couldn't easily sum up what this episode is about, or how exactly all the levels are tied together.

i intially ignored episode 4 because of the relatively uninviting first level. after a pretty entrance room, it wastes no time in plunging you into a series of bland winding passages to get the gold key and exit. the mazes are short, but they seem to already put you in a couple agonizingly claustrophobic situations. looking at the level now, the way both of those passages are introduced with bright lights seems almost too perfectly surreal. at the time i didn't like that feeling, so i guessed that it must be representative of what was to come. in a way, i was right, but the episode also makes many so left turns and breaks design taboos the game went to a lot of effort to previously establish that it's impossible to categorize. this is where you can see Tom Hall, the designer of all of episode 4 (and a majority of the Wolfenstein's maps in general), starting to shift away from trying to make realistic-feeling environments, and move towards a kind of a surreal farce on his previous realistic levels. many odd chances are taken, design-wise, and some work much more effectively than others. the effect this has on you as a player is definitely disorienting. though looking back, i think having the rug constantly pulled out from under you makes this episode a lot more representative a depiction of the fevered, all-encompassing cruelty of the Nazi regime than previous ones. Brenda Brathwaite, when she absurdly quipped off-the cuff that Wolfenstein was about the Holocaust in a talk in her "One Falls For Each Of Us" series, might actually have been onto something.

here i think it would be easy to dismiss some of the design decisions made in the later part of this game as poorly thought-out relics of an older style of game design. that seems to be a dominant philosophy in a lot of game design theory, and one that i'm trying my best to stay as far away from as humanly possible. certainly fairness is very important if you want the player to feel in control of a situation. Wolf 3D even does this to an extent by letting you save at any point in any level and giving you the choice opt out of a particular episode you don't like and choose to play another one. those may not seem like much now, but at the time being able to save anywhere was a luxury. more importantly, though, suggesting that all design must follow an established set of rules of "fairness" to the player would completely ignore its power to communicate more abstract, complex feelings than just how to reach the exit. what may look like a design troll on the surface often has a much more complicated effect on the player. this level contributes to that idea in just a few bits of surreal imagery.

adventures in level design: Wolfenstein 3D, episode 5, level 5

one of the things i've always enjoyed about first person games is that you're stuck with tunnel vision. it's pretty damn cruel, being forced to move forward without ever really knowing what might be coming to hurt you. most 2d games there's a great deal of information on the screen at one time that you can use make a decision. in first person the world beyond what is immediately in your view might as well not exist. playing is a process of exploring and reacting to each situation as it comes, never knowing what lies beyond until often it's too late to get out of a bad situation. the suspense created by the threat of near-instant death at any turn is a lot of what makes a Wolfenstein 3D a good game. unless you know the levels by heart, you need to play very cautiously and take few chances.

Wolfenstein 3D, design-wise, is very puzzling. there is very little consistency across episodes, even level-to-level. the only accurate statement i could make about the design is that the odd-numbered episodes (1, 3, 5) generally are pretty internally consistent, while the even-numbered episodes (2, 4, 6) are all over the place. i have no idea why this is the case. you could say that id was strapped for time to come up with 60 levels, which is probably true. but i prefer to think of it as Tom Hall and John Romero (Hall in particular) being so excited about the amount of possibilities afforded by a completely new style of game that they couldn't possibly limit themselves to a small set of ideas. and that's a big reason why i still love Wolfenstein - the design completely eludes categorization. playing through the game, there's an unspoken mystery to it that, even 20+ years later, has never worn away.

i want to look at more levels from the game in the future, but the one i want to examine right now lies right in the middle of episode 5 ("Trail of the Madman"), the only episode in the game entirely by John Romero. Romero is probably most known as a designer for his "tech base" levels on the first (and shareware) episode of DOOM, "Knee Deep In The Dead". those had their own sort of beautifully consistent aesthetic, with a lingering feeling of otherworldliness. episode 5 is Wolf3D's closest analog to that sort of design, even if the settings are completely different. the levels are short-to-average length, often hard but still fair, and have generally less labrynthine layouts than the other episodes in the "Nocturnal Missions" (episodes 4 thru 6). they tend to focus on pretty simple, but oftentimes hairy, scenarios.