Comments on: Late to the Party: Myst and Why You Can Never Go Home Again

By: Sean Duncan

Sean Duncan — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 16:47:09 +0000

You might be thinking of Celia Pearce — she’s written a lot about Myst Online/Uru Live:

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.

By: Nina Huntemann

Nina Huntemann — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 22:10:13 +0000

Yes, I agree. The ease of access and lack of specialized knowledge required to play games (both in terms of hardware and software) is certainly one reason why the market for games is so much more diverse today than in he 90s. My younger brother got into deep trouble with our parents for racking up a HUGE phone bill from calling hint lines. We still joke about it at family gatherings!

By: Newbs

Newbs — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 17:29:14 +0000

You know, I am pretty sure they upgraded the graphics for the recent re-releases. There are full-3D versions available too. It’s a different game today than it was back in 1993, that much is clear. And the moment has definitely passed. I tried myst and hated it, but I was a console gamer even then… Myst was for the as-yet unnamed casual gamer market, and it provided a guilty pleasure much as more recent phenomenons like Heroes or Lost did. Something to puzzle over at the water cooler while the kids were at home playing Super Mario World.

By: Kyra

Kyra — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 16:49:54 +0000

Thanks for the comment and those amazing map images. As someone who came late to the gaming party generally, how practices that were developed as early as in MUDs are lost or retained is so fascinating to me and I really liked your points about this. Maybe one interesting place that this map making remains is in the new video game engines designed to let people play table top games, like Dungeons and Dragons over the internet. I believe they build in a component allowing for similar kinds of mapping by the dungeon master. So maybe that might be a direction that this goes in the future, instead of users drawing maps to keep track of the space generated by game designers users may begin drawing maps to create space in the game?

By: Kyra

Kyra — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 16:44:43 +0000

Nina, thanks so much for the suggestion! The alt.games groups are fascinating, thank you so much for directing me to them, and it is true that the material was always there (I also vaguely recall hint books you could buy for games and pay for hint help phone lines too). I suppose the difference for me was back then (and honestly well into adulthood) I was simply not technologically savvy enough to know what a usenet group was, let alone find them. As a result getting to the walk-thrus required more specialized knowledge/experience at that time then today. If you can google, a skill that most posses, you can get hints in a matter of seconds whether or not you have any experience at all with gaming or technological communities. The difference might not be as massive as I portrayed it but for a relative luddite it was significant.

By: Kyra

Kyra — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 16:39:04 +0000

Thanks for the comment Noel. I think in a way I was a bit more interested in the transmedia products (particularly the comic) before I played. I had always wanted to understand Myst’s storyworld and the books/comics seemed like a way to do that with what I had conceptualized as an impossibly difficult and time consuming game. Now that I have played a bit I want to reserve my discovery of the story to the game itself, as an incentive during the more frustrating portions of the game. Maybe when I have beat the game though my feelings will change.

By: Adrienne

Adrienne — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 07:15:12 +0000

Thanks for this! Myst was the game that got me back into games and onto PC gaming, and, in turn, more or less into grad school (and ultimately a PhD, so I supposed I owe a debt of gratitude to Cyan). This was a great post, and I think beyond the interface and options for getting hints (or cheating, whichever way you want to put it), the very experience of the game is likely very different on mobile platforms. I got into Myst, and in fact played the whole series (minus Uru which I never finished), over the course of a year in 2004-2005. I think my experience falls somewhere in between those who played it when it was new and those who are playing it on iPhones and PSPs now. At the time, I was playing on a circa-2000 laptop, which was on its last legs. I didn’t have internet access at home, so I kept notes on pads of paper. When I got really stuck I’d wait until my day off to use to local library computer for an hour (that was the time limit), and get as many hints or answers I could after checking emails and sending off grad school applications. I’d try and figure out puzzles on my lunch break or while sitting on the bus on the way home (which is different, but perhaps the corollary to you playing as you wait for meetings to start). And then, after my partner went to bed, I’d play with headphones on late (much too late) into the night, solving puzzles and discovering new ones. Playing in a dark room with headphones on— it was how all the ad copy said the game was meant to be experienced. It was supposed to be immersive, pulling you in to that world. While I am hesitant to say it was all-immersive, the extent to which it was seems hard to capture in a mobile platform. A similar shift happened I think (and I can’t find the citation for the person who wrote about this) when Myst Online started. All of which is to say, I think you are right that both the interface and social context shift the way in which games (anything really) is experienced in interesting ways.

By: Sean Duncan

Sean Duncan — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 21:48:00 +0000

By the way, I’d totally go see this:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/10/4/

By: Sean Duncan

Sean Duncan — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 21:40:11 +0000

“Friends who had finished the game, and most hadn’t, had told me about creating huge bulletin boards and walls full of maps and post-it notes in order to keep track of the information necessary to finish. Most had eventually just given up. I had a choice that wasn’t available to them, a choice that as I played became increasingly difficult to resist.”

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.

By: Nina Huntemann

Nina Huntemann — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 19:25:58 +0000

Thanks for this walk down memory lane Kyra! 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.