http://www.amazon.com/Communities-Play-Emergent-Cultures-Multiplayer/dp/0262162571/
I don’t know her work very well, but I did dip into Uru Live during its renewed life on Gametap, and was struck with how much more interesting the style of a game like Myst was to me than the other multiplayer, based-off-DikuMUD MMO spaces were. Especially with the success of WoW, there’s the assumption nowadays that 3D massively-multiplayer virtual worlds need to rely on game structures inherited from RPGs. I’d love to see more exploration and challenging of this assumption, but it’s clear that the Uru model didn’t have commercial success.
]]>Loved this part of your post, Kyra — in my Game Studies classes, my students always seem a bit dumbfounded when I describe how normal this kind of behavior was for a previous generation of gamers. I still have a bunch of handwritten notes from Riven lying around somewhere! In grad school, one of my friends expressed shock and horror at what gaming must have been like during The Dark Ages Before the Mini-Map.
For the text adventures I am old enough to have been weaned on (M. Scott Adams and Infocom), this wasn’t just necessary, but I think assumed — and challenged — by game designers. Nick Montfort talks a bit about the prevalence of the maze in early interactive fiction in his book Twisty Little Passages, and this carries through to Warren Robinett’s Adventure and on. Game designers weren’t just assuming that players were doing this to keep track of where they were in these games, but they were intentionally trying to make it more and more difficult. Until, perhaps, it all just collapsed on its own weight. There’s been an image floating around re: FPS maps that encapsulates (for some) how spatial complexity has been reduced in gaming in recent years:
http://furiousfanboys.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/BITmX.jpg
One idea I’ve found myself thinking about lately is whether or not these kinds of hand-drawn mapping techniques will see a resurgence with procedurally-generated games such as the excellent Minecraft. When the game landscape is confusing not because someone is trying to obfuscate but because a “dumb” computer program just generated the landscape that way, I wonder how players today make sense of where they are, where they want to go, etc. Cool area to study.
]]>I remember loading Myst on to my 386 PC only to be stumped for days by the very first puzzle! I nearly gave up until, by coincidence, I finally got around to installing a sound card, which was not in the original configuration of my “new” machine. Myst was my first experience gaming on a Windows OS and the sound card incident was just the first of so many necessary hardware upgrades in order to play the latest titles. Like many PC owners, I have gaming to thank for my knowledge of the insides of a CPU. What strikes me about your experience playing Myst, particularly on the locked-down iPad, in contrast to my experience in the early 90s, is how little hardware knowledge is necessary to game today. I haven’t opened up a PC in nearly a decade and rarely need to tweak software settings. Granted, I have also moved away from PC gaming almost entirely to happily embrace my consoles. But now I stare at seemingly endless PS3 updates, wondering what is going on in there before I can play COD!
To further date myself and confess my own weakness for “cheating” I will add this comment about the Internet’s collective intelligence available for games, which you suggest was not a part (or was less of a part) of earlier gaming experiences. In addition to a notebook I kept of tried and failed puzzle combinations and hand-drawn game maps, I recall scouring and contributing to the active alt.games usenet communities. People posted detailed FAQs, ASCII draw maps (labors of love and sweat!), troubleshooting guides for tech issues, text-only walk-thrus and so on. The material was there, just not as pretty, organized and searchable as sites today! For fun, check out the archives of alt.games at Google Groups.
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