On "Comprehensive Game Criticism" and Plastic Ghosts of the Past

"we need more comprehensive game criticism" is something i remember seeing a lot of people say on the twittersphere a couple years ago, partly in response to me writing some of my Wolfenstein 3D level design posts. mostly this call seemed to come from dudes who were really into first person shooters. as such, i was already skeptical that they even really understood what i was trying to get at in the first place. this was not about looking like a "serious critic" or raising videogames' cultural clout, just offering some new ways of looking at something strange from the past that interested me. Brendan Keogh's Killing is Harmless seemed to embody the exact opposite of the kind of criticism that i wanted to do - something that fetishized details in the story or game world while willfully ignoring admitting to the bigger picture. the point was to be acutely aware of all the shortcomings while still giving respect to the stranger and more resilient parts of a game, not to pick for little details until i've created an interpretation that i can disregard the overall experience with completely.

ok, i admit that i generally feel anxiety about writing nuts and bolts criticism of things like level design because it never really seems to appeal to anyone outside of a niche audience - namely, people who are fans who are already intimately familiar with the source material, or other game designers. and videogame insularity has become increasingly tired and boring to me.

not to mention writing this kind of stuff gets you immediately lumped in with all other writing of this kind done of the past, even if it's only vaguely related. the biggest problem with many of the level design critiques i've read online is how undiscerning they generally are, and how unwilling they are at interrogating decisions made in the games as anything other than examples of "good design" or "realism" or "atmosphere" or any other vague concept that usually never gets articulated. there's generally no real point of view in the analysis beyond a bunch prescriptive, cliched assumptions you've heard a million times before. detailed game analysis usually just serves the purpose of reaffirming the status quo, through the old traditional (and highly stale) modes of thinking about games.

fact is, videogames have that ineffable "magic" thing for its players, that thing that makes its faithful start to tear up when they think about those grand old game campaigns they took part of. that thing that makes them think they are greater. that make us think we can fix everything. well okay, only if we're the type who hasn't had very many experiences outside of them. but nevermind the outside world, it's about the games, man. it's about the technology. that's the magic key that'll fix everything. we say this as people on the outside watch as we continue to stare endlessly fascinated into these unchanging flat computer-generated approximations of crystals on the TV screen, wondering what's so hypnotizing about it all. and when we can't come up with any new or more decent argument about why we keep staring so intently, it sure doesn't make us look like we know what we're talking about.

the presence of things like level design pieces all end up just feeding back into the same kind of nostalgia tourism - it's a curiosity. it's not the kind of writing we're doing regularly these days. it's boring, it's "necessary", it's a chore, but it's not something that feels altogether very relevant. broad generalizing statements about game culture are in, nuts and bolts are out. maybe a big reason for that is because people doing nuts and bolts writing don't know how to make it feel relevant to the current cultural climate. or maybe it's because most people still just don't really respect games that much. maybe they still have a good reason for that.

===========

i never really expected that i'd be writing anything about Perfect Dark. Goldeneye is much more memorable to me now - it's more streamlined, and much better evokes the feeling of freedom that comes from old smeary lo-res 3d geometry and elegant compromises that arise from awkward technological limitations. on the contrary, it's hard for me to even think about Perfect Dark without thinking of slow framerate and awkward aiming with the N64 controller; or the bizarrely long insta-fail missions with equally bizarre and cryptic mission objectives. strange that so many resources got poured into making something on a system that seemed to be fighting it every step of the way.

the first word that comes to mind when i think of Perfect Dark: "bloated". it wants everything, it awkwardly grasps at achieving more robust and serious and weighty storytelling than its predecessors, yet its still unhappily caged within its smeary, lo-res plastic shell. it's also highly hypocritical, game design-wise. you have detailed mission objectives to follow, you have voice acted cutscenes, it seems like you should understand how to proceed intuitively but things are still not really clearly communicated. often it seems like the game is punishing you for no real reason, just MISSION FAILED because you didn't insert an item correctly into the right slot. and this might be interesting if it felt in any real way intentional. it mostly just feels stressful and tense, and like the game wants you to conform to its arbitrary and quite frankly poorly-conceived design to proceed. the Goldeneye-esque no save point missions make even less sense here, as they are much longer and harder and full of bizarre details you must keep track of. it just seems like that format was imported unthinkingly, without much attention paid to how it affected the game.

yet if you look past the game constantly hitting you over the head for not meeting its largely un-telegraphed expectations, there are still some moments of beauty in there. i guess that's what Zolani Stewart senses in his "Let's Crit" videos of Perfect Dark. there are spaces in between the bloat that manage a kind of levity, that feel very intentionally constructed.

Zolani eschews some of the usual prescriptive analysis and mostly tries to focus on the game's strangeness. he talks about how Perfect Dark oscillates between being disorienting in its design in an interesting way, and just being obscure in a bad way. he also asserts that Perfect Dark isn't really a shooter, or really best looked at as a shooter anyway, but instead is more interesting as a place to explore strange spaces. i would be less generous, as a lot of the spaces often aren't really strange in an interesting way, just awkward series of hallways that add nothing to the missions at hand other than adding a more "realistic" or robust feel, and as such feel antiquated in a way that something like Mario 64 with more overtly abstracted spaces don't. i will say they do feel much more alive with detail and colorful than Goldeneye, though. their range certainly isn't something i've seen attempted in similar kinds of titles.

it generally feels like he's letting some nostalgia tint the game in a softer light. i mostly can't agree with him on Perfect Dark not being a shooter either, for example, as the game does try to reassure you pretty consistently that it is a shooter, often throwing an absurd amount of guards to shoot as meatwalls to your progress. i will agree with him in part, however - the variety and construction of environments, particularly some of the Area 51 levels, or the final Skedar level, does achieve a sort of abstract but highly detailed sense of place you definitely don't see in games these days. and the juxtaposition of these environments with all the bizarre requirements thrust upon you give Perfect Dark a feeling unlike other games, for better or for worse.

=============

but let's compare and contrast. my favorite Goldeneye mission is called "Surface 2". a snowfield thoroughly shrouded in a disturbing red fog. it's like a bad omen swept over Surface 1 (an earlier level)'s bright snowy fields. there are more security cameras planted on buildings that and lots of enemies will wander in and out from your view, but both the fog and the N64 limitations make it difficult to make either of these things out until you're really close to them. even the indoors are shrouded in this dark fog. inside a big satellite building (still seemingly shrouded in the same red fog) where you previously had to shut down a satellite dish in Surface 1, you now have to blow it up. hitting B will just cause you to activate it, failing the mission. no remorse. just a big feeling of evil.

or Statue - a graveyard of abstract geometry filled with smudgy greys and brownish greens, and shapes you only half-make out, and sometimes unwittingly get stuck on. the actual design of the map is linear and feels too long for what it is, especially when there are plenty of places to get lost in which becomes especially infuriating as you have to run back through with a time limit and shotgun guards are flooding in. it's like a disturbing train ride into a deep and dark part of James Bond's past. looking back there's something bizarrely beautiful and singular about it.

both of these missions precede your character getting captured and held prisoner in the next mission. it's as if these missions exist as a dark omen clouding over the rest of your story.

the closest parallel in Perfect Dark is the "Chicago" mission (Zolani also acknowledges this as well in his video on the level). you're in a Blade Runner-esque perpetually raining neon cityscape at night, except it's only a block of a cityscape. and you can't even enter any of the buildings (except as an Easter egg), they're just a weird-looking backdrop. as a piece of grand ambitious realism this mission fails. but somehow the little world in it also feels a lot more robust and dangerous than other missions in PD. FBI spies that will report you that look nearly identical to civilians you're not supposed to kill, which almost seem to outnumber the actual guards in the level. also there's a security drone wandering up and down the block that somehow knows who you and you alone are and will start shooting with lasers and shout "STOP WHERE YOU ARE" in a scary robot voice when it sees you. when trying to remember details of mission, the robot felt like such a strange part that i thought i must have made it up completely.

the mission objectives also don't seem to make much sense and force you in uncomfortable and awkward positions, like a taxi you have to scan for several seconds to create a diversion that happens to be right in the street where the robot patrols. but because of all the elements at play there, there's a palpable feeling of tension to the mission. because the environment is small you can visualize it and develop strategies for how to deal with it. the feeling of anxiety and lack of control you experience feels very intentional and fitting for a futuristic dystopia, not arbitrary like other missions.

and i mean, i can still think to the aforementioned hallways of Area 51 which kind of have a lost, forlorn feel to them even as they're populated by guards or annoying drone guns. or the aforementioned final Skedar mission, which is highly linear but has a much stronger and more unique sense of place clearly constructed to work within the limitations of N64 hardware than anything else in the game - and also features very tense fights with the Skedar aliens. their different anatomy and behavior make for a much more entertaining enemy to fight than the same old meatwall guards. these environments work when they work in tandem with, and not against, other elements of the game.

contrast that with a mission like Air Force One, which is filled with awkward hallways, triggered story events and empty dead-end rooms. the level certainly looks a lot more like the actual Air Force One might look like, but not really to its benefit. or the Pelagic II, which is just a series of pretty but boring hallways. or the even more generic green alien hallways of Deep Sea. or even the Carrington Villa, which might be a fun place to explore if the game ever let you and meaningfully interact with anything else in the environment aside from shooting guards. the game often seems afraid of its abstraction, desperately grabbing for more detail and gravitas to lift it out of its abstract, formless shell. it has to be a shooter, it has to try and justify itself to you, it has to be taken seriously. it's an awkward adolescent, trying to do so much more without understanding what made it work in the first place.

mostly (and rather unsurprisingly) Perfect Dark just feels like a combination of half-realized ideas with mixed levels of execution made within the genre limitations of a FPS game made in the late 90's. it's sad, but beyond that, i don't know if there's really anything else to say about it

=============

Goldeneye was regarded by its development team as a crappy licensed game until its surprise success. by contrast, Perfect Dark was hyper-ambitious, hyper-resourced, hyper-followed by eager fans.

around 2007 i remember sadly peering through the glass case in a corner at my local videogame store that contained the N64 cartridges. there was something sterile and empty feeling about all of them. all the life and possibility that sparked within me from seeing N64 games when they were new seemed all but left behind, only their husks remaining, like little ghosts. still, i remember seeing Mario 64 sitting gleaming at the top of the pile, or an occasional copy of the original Super Smash Bros that would usually quickly disappear. and then there were the multiple copies of Perfect Dark sitting at the bottom, all labeled for 5 dollars. it was almost eerie.

i spent a whole summer with Perfect Dark back in 2000 when i was young, and a whole year prior to its release on Perfect Dark forums feverishly checking for any new info about the game that i could. it seemed like something i could get really lost in. it was the newest, greatest, biggest experience. but now all that content, all that time and energy, all that had built up to the release, was now sitting at the bottom of the shelf in its plastic grey shell for 5 dollars. the newest and greatest never seems to be as new or great the second time around. that bloated, awkward monster of compromises made just for us - the fans, now looks like nothing more than a little glimmer of the past. but now the fans are elsewhere. they've moved far, far beyond it. and meanwhile those grey shells are still somewhere at the bottom of the pile, collecting dust, sitting next to Madden 98, or Ridge Racer, or Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, or any number of other husks of disposable grey plastic that look just like it - all neatly sealed-off and lined up in a row, as if they were gravestones.


===============

(note: you can support my work on Patreon here: http://www.patreon.com/ellaguro)

an in-depth look at Doom Episode 1

in the past week i did a few videos looking back at the design of "Knee Deep in the Dead", the original shareware episode of Doom for the game's 20th anniversary (coming up this December). part of my goal was to show why the game, and this episode in particular, has held a strong hold over so many people even 20 years later. i'm not sure whether i really succeeded or not since these videos are fairly off-the-cuff, but hopefully people will get something useful out of them. another part of my goal to show what makes Doom fundamentally different from the current FPS games it's supposed to have spawned. indeed - those games don't really seem have much of anything that comes close to resembling Doom as far as the design of the spaces or the direction of the experience goes. Doom still seems as completely foreign and of another world as it ever has, maybe even moreso.

one thing about the first episode that's clear from both playing back through it and from reading John Romero's design rules (mentioned in the video) beforehand: there's an insistence on a very abstract, but very specific set of rules tailored for the engine the game is made in. the spaces may feel "real" insofaras they are detailed, or their shapes or textures might resemble existing structures in our world - but there's nothing particularly functional about them as architecture outside of the context of the game. and yet you don't feel that at all, as the player. the world makes complete sense once you become acquainted to its language.

and that's what the first episode, in particular, does very well - bringing the player into the language of this very strange, very new kind of experience (when it came out in December 1993) while also providing a surprisingly coherent arc. yet it also subverts the rules it sets out to establish in many subtle but noticeable ways. no design idea is ever exactly repeated in the same way - there's always a new or different twist put on it to stay surprising. if the player starts out in an enclosed, safe area in one map, they'll start out in an open area with enemies in the next. ideas that might seem monotonous on paper come to life in the game because of all the little details and juxtapositions placed in front of you. no part of this episode ever feels like a tutorial or a trudge, because there's no need to tutorialize to get you up to the pace of the story or whatever in the first place. Doom is not trying to be anything other than it is, or tell you it's anything else than what it is. the story is the experience.

that's not to say this is the only valid way to approach to design. it's standard practice in the Doom community to talk shit about Tom Hall or Sandy Petersen's levels for not being as open or elegant or taking advantage of the engine's architecture so self-consciously. a lot of that is they just had less time to work on things, or were part of a compromised, half-realized vision. but that ignores the very strange and interesting ideas that lie in the other two main episodes, even if they don't have the benefit of coming together like in the first. not to mention that sometimes John Romero's maps feel almost silly for their level of interconnected-ness, like he was just trying to make singleplayer levels that doubled as multiplayer levels. but the continual return back to these specific pre-defined design rules create spaces that feel consistent to each other when they might not be otherwise, and i think is a big part of explaining why this first episode still contains the kind of allure it does.

all three videos are here for you to enjoy. look for more videos from me about Doom in the coming month or two, as well as an article about one of my favorite (if not my favorite) Doom mod that's coming soon. enjoy!

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:

why should i love them?

this is level six from the shareware episode of a videogame released in 1993 by Apogee Software for the Disk Operating System (aka DOS). the most notable thing about this game, beyond that it's a lesser-known predecessor to the game that turned the pop-trash-culture-quipping icon of hyper-misogyny Duke Nukem into a household name, is that it's in many ways a pretty egregious rip-off of the Turrican series, particularly Turrican 2, and borrows many game ideas (and graphics) from it. i could go into great detail on the extent of the things that are ripped off from that series, some rather pointlessly or randomly, but that isn't really the point. the point, for me, is that i played Duke Nukem 2 when i was young and impressionable, and hadn't even heard of Turrican 2 until maybe last year.

because of the highly-embraced ugly values of what the Duke Nukem of Duke 3D and beyond represents in the "gaming pantheon", it would be easy for anyone who identifies as any kind of self-respecting feminist to mercilessly trash these games. not to mention that i have a friend in the industry who sees Apogee/3D Realms's business guy Scott Miller as an piece of utter human garbage because of the way he conducted his company over the years. but as is the case with many commercial games over the medium's history, the DN games tell contradicting stories.

these kind of games always led a very transient existence. the crushing wave of constant technological advancement that forced developers to constantly make their games bigger, longer, faster, better-looking or be left in the dust ensured this. in a year or two (maybe less), they'd become completely irrelevant, and players would seek out something else. the point was to just make whatever you thought might make money within the narrow gap of time you had that hopefully aligned with your own interests as a designer. most of the design decisions made in that era end up being attributed to the consumer demand (or at least perceived consumer demand) or not having enough time to think of anything better, or just plain ignorance. designers still didn't really know what they were doing at all, but had at least a decade of experiments and mistakes behind them to build off of. the more perceptive and imaginative designers seemed to have some kind of intuitive sense that there was a vocabulary of design decisions that were maybe "cool" and ones that were "uncool", and how to be interesting and engaging while still making something that could sell, even if they didn't know how to articulate this consciously. or maybe, in the end, it was mostly just luck and being in the right place at the right time while being too dumb to know any better.

games and anything game-like were, meanwhile, very deeply marginalized by larger culture. the media acted as if games couldn't be anything but these quirky, abstract little kid's toys. by the end of the 90's, developers were starting to undertake greater efforts to make games more "real" so they could be some kind of participant in mainstream (usually film) culture. this is where you began to see a split between games packaging themselves on the surface as purporting to be some part of larger, more "legitimate" cultural tradition, and the still very "videogamey" design decisions made by many designers. over the years, a couple of different narratives have floated around, both of which marginalize the "videogamey" side. people in the industry now tend to see that kind of abstraction as a relic of technological limitations or designer ignorance that games had to accept because they didn't have the processing power to make more realistic human environments. the educated, culturally-aware people who wish for games to become something "greater" now have mostly learned to accept that games must completely wear on their surface their hope to be a part of larger culture. anything that might seemingly run counter to that must be falsely empowering, "videogamey" nonsense.

what popular culture remembers about Duke Nukem 3D is that in the first level you could go into a movie theater and watch an animation of a scantily clad woman and you could blow a hole in the woman to find a secret, and in a later level there was a strip club and you could play pool and pay the strippers to strip or kill them. anyone playing the game now might be very confused to find that the experience of actually playing the game is much weirder and more unsettling than they probably ever remembered. one might forget that there was a second episode (my favorite) entirely set in space with all kinds of evocative, abstract, and terrifying environments. Ken Silverman's Build engine led to an explosion of creativity for the level designers, who were presumably looking to take complexity of environments one step further from previous FPS games like Doom. but the winners write the history on their own terms. the Bruce Campbell wannabe character Duke Nukem quickly wrote over anything in the game of his namesake that might contradict what he stood for.

in the case of level six of Duke Nukem 2, pictured above, there is so much fucking weird shit cluttering up the environment. you wander around climbing ladders and jumping from pipe to pipe, killing guards and disabling robot drones and shooting open differently colored boxes that will give you more health or weapon power or points and searching for where to go. as it turns out, you don't need any items to reach the teleporter that leads you to the key you need, in the area on the bottom right of the map where the pipes connect up to (though powerups help). there is a stronger, mini-boss style flame enemy, a save point, and bunch of guards on computer terminals who are guarding a teleport to go inside the machinery to the area on the top left of the screen, where the key is. once you have the key, you can use it to open the exit on the top right of the level.

this all seems easy enough, but because the size of your screen is so small, the act of navigation is very confusing (you can see this in this video playthrough of the level). it's really hard to tell where you need to be at any given time. it seems as if the pipes could just go on in every direction, forever, and there are so many fucking boxes hiding items around, some helpful, some that hurt you to add to the confusion. and yet, there's a beauty to the level that can only be witnessed when it's completely zoomed out like in the image above. piece by piece, through playing the level, you build some kind of relationship with it and begin to construct an image of a coherently functioning environment in your head that might look something like what we can see in the image above, though you'll never actually see that image in the game.

this clever level design, by far one of the most well-realized in the game, seems like it's really undermined by requiring players to be engaged with so much cluttering, seemingly pointless shit from moment-to-moment to get from point A to point B. that stuff was probably all in there because the developers thought it was cool to add more features, not because there's a particularly conscious story the item boxes or turret-bots are trying to tell. young and impressionable me might not have understood why the boxes are there, but accepted them as part of the game and built my own interpretation of the narrative around them. the feeling of playing Duke Nukem 2 was about being overwhelmed and confused by these frustratingly abstract, winding, futuristic hellscapes. it was a game about the world's intense over-saturation of technology turning it into a kind of terrifying wasteland, yet there was something still oddly exciting about it all.

compare this to, let's say, level 8-1 of the first Super Mario Bros game (right click and "open in new tab" to make it bigger).

in a typical 2D Mario game, most levels look like some kind of long horizontal strip. the design is intentionally directing the player towards making a series of linear, moment-to-moment decisions. there's next to no backtracking, or maze navigation, or confusion. in Mario you do have a coins and points and power-ups, and 8-1 is a frustrating trap of a level in many ways: but the game always, no matter what, makes you feel like you know exactly what you need to do and that the end is always within your grasp.

we tend to view that as "good design" and the swirling, incomprehensible mess of a game like Duke Nukem 2 as "bad design". Mario 1 understands what its function is, Duke Nukem 2 doesn't. i won't say that this isn't correct on one level, but it still completely misses the point.

so Duke Nukem games seemed to have no real idea of what that were about, beyond things stolen from other games, until they decided to be about a misogynist bully - and by then it was far too late to erase all of the counter-threads that had been running through those games up to that point. and thank fucking god for that, really. the first game (which i have a special relationship with and hope to write about more), was a clunky, puzzle-filled techno-futurist platformer. the second tried to be less incomprehensible and clunky and move towards a faster action game, but ended up at some awkward point in between the first and some kind of grotesque Turrican rip-off. both are alienating, sometimes weirdly intense experiences to play now.

Duke Nukem 3D was a point of high absurdity for games, built with a bunch of hyper-complex, interactive, abstract environments of keys and switches in the vein of Doom (though often more obviously representational of "real" environments), all masked by the idiotic ugliness of its newly culturally aware protagonist. the marketing story told by the Scott Millers of the industry overwrote the design story told by the Todd Replogles or Allen Blums or Ken Silvermans. afterwards, nothing like it could ever hope to exist. no self-respecting game designer afterwards could ever purport, without extreme embarrassment, to make one kind of game and actually make a completely different one. no self-respecting game designer could ever hope to get away with creating a character as stupid as Duke Nukem ever again, either. the game was an unstable beast that pulled itself apart and pissed on anything that might have hoped to come after.

and so videogames "grew up", but instead of learning to love and embrace their own unique, sometimes seemingly incomprehensible and "videogamey" design vocabulary, they opted instead to convince themselves that they were moving forward, torching the confusing design threads and cognitive dissonances of the past in an endless, stupid search for cultural acceptance. people wanted "real" environments, and "real" stories that they could connect with, so that's what they got. a game like Duke Nukem 2 is now an embarrassment and a relic because it couldn't understand what it was about. a game like Duke 3D is only remembered for its pathetic stabs at cultural legitimacy, and all the idiocy that came after.

i see many game designers of 2013 engaging in a peculiar kind of self-flagellation. they want to erase all the embarrassment of the Duke Nukem 3Ds of the past, instead of trying to come up with any understanding of why games like that existed or what relevant counter-threads the games themselves might offer now. in a post Duke 3D world, they can no longer recall that anything other than the narrative they now accept about videogames ever existed, or if they do they see the past as immature and messy and not at all useful or relevant for the future. they're videogame monks who are trying to retain some idea of purity by completely cleansing themselves of all their previous sins. they're vast oceans away from accepting that the greatest insight tends to be found in the messiest, stupidest, and most broken of places. they stood aside and let the Scott Millers of the world write the story.

if videogames can't love themselves, why should i love them?

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 Romero, 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.