Björk on electronic music

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.

The Unidentified Flavors - Live Active Cultures (Assorted Fuckups 2005-2009)

http://ellaguro.bandcamp.com/album/live-active-cultures-assorted-fuckups-2005-2009 

After a lot of internet drama and creative frustration, freshman year of college I decided I was done with videogame arrangements. I always wanted to do more songwriting (because pop music has always been what I really want to do), and I finally got an excuse to do more when I decided to make an EP of songs for a winter term project (in January 2006). Half of the month was taken up by a pretty miserable swim team trip to Florida, and then I ended up rushing out the songs at the last minute (like I usually did). Most of the songs have terrible playing that I tried to mask with a lot of effects, and the lyrics were taken up with hating people in my freshman dorm. My setup was so frustrating - using an external program to record wavs, and then importing them into Reason and trying to get the timing just right. A couple years later, Reaper would solve those problems. I also hated my voice so much that I felt like giving up halfway through most of the performances, because I knew they'd never be what I wanted them to be. I've never really got over that feeling. Now I feel like I have a very beautiful and feminine voice on the inside, but what ends up coming out sounds like vomit.

A year later, I was spending a very depressed six months at home. I was trying to work through all my self-loathing and guilt and deal with the fact that I felt like a woman while being in an unstable relationship. I didn't really finish anything during that period, but I did record a lot of demos of songs I more or less made up on the spot. Some of them actually have interesting parts, which I"ll probably use in the future. A few of them became songs on here.

Most of the rest of the stuff was done the summer before my senior year of school - June 2008-ish, another period of intense self-loathing and frustration that I still mostly directed at the (what I saw as) spoiled rich kids at my school. The most out of character ones were done September/October 2008, for a weekly songwriting competition on the Electrical Audio forums. Another one was done around Feb 2009, for the same competition, and then I "finished up" an old song around June 2009.

Around Christmas 2009, I was out of school for 7 months and had floated around to 2 different places before my apathy about being a filmmaker landed me back home. I felt like I absolutely had to move on from the darkness of absolute frustration of the time these songs came out of. I thought the best thing would be to make a compilation to send it to friends and just move on. The album isn't sequenced in chronological order - it's more some kind of very loose narrative. I saw 1-12 as the first "side" and then 13-20 as the second. I never really wanted to send it to anyone but close friends, because I didn't want these songs to be seen as representative of me, and I felt very ashamed to be the person with the crackly, nasally voice singing them. I still feel like most people won't understand from this that, although everything here is from me, I'm a woman, I'm feminine, and this is not how I would like to sound. But putting basically everything into one document has at least led me closer to closing the chapter on that part of my life.

After getting a lot of positive comments about the Dys4ia soundtrack, I decided I might as well put this on bandcamp and let people hear it. I'm sure someone, somewhere will get something out of it, even if I want to distance myself from it as much as I can.

I did the soundtrack for Anna Anthropy's new game Dys4ia, which you can play here:

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/591565

I've also uploaded the soundtrack here, for anyone interested:

http://ellaguro.bandcamp.com/

More on the game later!

The Language of Videogames

Over fifty years into the existence of moving pictures, critic André Bazin wrote “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema”, suggesting that film had the power to effectively communicate what could not be communicated through any other medium. About ten years later, critic and soon-to-be director François Truffaut wrote “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema” where he articulated the idea of an Auteur theory (formed on the basis of Bazin’s writings), that the director is the primary author of a film and uses this power to communicate his or her own personal world, like an artist or composer.

Right now, over thirty years into the existence of our medium, we have a vague notion that there are a few of what we’d call “videogame Auteurs”: Miyamoto, Will Wright, Hideo Kojima, Fumito Ueda, Warren Spector, whatever. Beyond the ability to recognize that their games are maybe weirder or funner than others, however, we really don’t understand what they’re doing or what makes them a meaningful experience.

A mention of a “language” of videogames is even rarer - mostly in an academic setting, tied to the systems of board games. While using board games as a frame of reference for looking at videogames is useful, it only encompasses a part of the experience. The rules are there but without any kind of real-time feedback or context, and the aesthetics (visuals, sounds) are not even a factor. How videogames actually work to communicate with the player on a moment-to-moment basis might as well be a mystery to us.

This mystery addresses something fundamental about our lack of ability to truly comprehend how technology shapes our experiences on this planet. We can build a machine, we can bring it into being, but we are perplexed when we see that machine begin to build us. Our experience with videogames is no exception. Almost all game designers are probably aware that they’re communicating something to the player through their design. These are concrete: what area to go next, what items to use, what part of the boss to punch (hot tip: the glowing red part). Sometimes the feeling goes further than that, like creating a feeling of anticipation before a major boss fight, or a feeling of unease after setting foot on a recently massacred planet.

Taking this communication into a more abstract realm has been much more problematic. Many game designers, even several of the Auteurs previously mentioned, would likely dismiss outright the idea that they may be communicating something deeper through their games. They might state that they make games for the player, not for themselves, and that their primary purpose is entertainment. They’re may be very concerned with being fair to the player and creating an enjoyable experience, but they are not trying to communicate something personal.

Doesn’t that say something horrible about the state of videogames as a medium for expression? Aren’t these guys supposed to be ones we look up to for inspiration? Why, then, do most seem to hold such conservative views of game design? What if they’re just wrong about their creations? How could they not spend years passionately devoted to a game and not have some personal ideas or beliefs seep in somewhere? Isn’t that inevitable? And how could anyone think that they know what we, the players really want out of their game? How do we even know what we want from a game?

Maybe we don’t even deserve games that are personal! I mean, we should probably just admit that the image of a person who likes videogames is not one of a well-adjusted, emotionally mature human being with a lot of life experience. Our medium mostly seems to have been a willing reflection of our own shallow desires back to us. And we love this! We willingly participate in the illusion that this means more than it really does. We still tend to approach “fun” as the ultimate goal, and see anything that brings our fun into question (re: “art games”) as the enemy. We still see this issue like children. It’s as if we’re afraid that whenever something brings our “fun” into question, it will just disappear forever. How would we know how to want something other than entertainment?