this proteus game-thing and the allure of exploration

despite the fancy-sounding title, this post will be all about me gushing over a new game (or sort-of game) that i've been playing.

though, actually, i'm essentially doing that exact thing in my dissertation right now, so maybe the personal and professional dimensions of my life have finally just blurred into one huge hurricane of audience-unfriendly nerdom. oh well. at least i've got this three-day old, re-microwaved burrito. and proteus.

first thing's first: the proteus web site is here. not that it will tell you a lot because it's basically just some pictures right now and some mumbo-jumbo about exploring and feelings and being a game-that's-not-a-game (like seemingly all good games nowadays, it's on sale now but still just in alpha). but, if you're me (you're not, for the record) and you're currently writing a dissertation chapter on how minecraft leverages player agency to create emotional attachments to virtual place (i hope you're not doing this because if you are, we're going to have words, and those words are going to be "copyright infringement"), then you see a byline in your RSS feed about something called proteus being a non-game about exploration that seems pointless but captivates the fuck out of your favorite games writers nonetheless and you say "hell, this sounds stupid as ox shit in a palm tree, but it's five bucks so what the hell?" and you download it.

then you start up the game-thing, watch as the word "PROTEUS" appears and then slowly melts, commodore 64-stylee, off the screen, to be replaced by the opening of a single, blocky eye, an eye that opens on a multicolored, smudgy-looking, fog-socked island...and suddenly you realize that this cheap, tiny, poor-looking not-even-a-game has you by the face and is not going to let go until you realize that you've forgotten to eat dinner, go to bed or even change the pants you just pissed in.

so long, PANTS. i hope you like the taste of PISS.

exploring is fun. pretty much nobody will argue with that, except for perhaps the most extreme type a people (who, in a possibly abbey-esque way, i would argue aren't even really people in the traditional sense of the word). yet, you take that experience of exploration, transpose it into a video game world where quite literally anything can happen (you can, for example(s) fly, turn into a dog, swim for years or go on a murderous rampage without facing any consequences) which seems like it would make it even more exciting, and suddenly people refuse to believe that it can mean anything. because it's not "real", you're just pretending. as if that sofa fort you built when you were four and then cried like a ninny because your big brother knocked it over didn't matter. it did matter, and it's silly to pretend that we grow out of pretending. people cry at movies, at a hypermediated, two dimensional representation of some other person's fictional problems, and yet the idea that video games (a medium in which the player is, by default, naturally a fundamental part of the outcome of the story) can mean something is largely accepted as dumb.

well, enough with the rant. i know you don't believe me (i know it!), but i've played proteus a lot and it's awesome. and by "played" i suppose i mean that i've just loaded up the game a few times and spent awhile wandering around. because that's all you can do. just wander around, and take pretty pictures of the pre-8-bit landscape.

because it's there.

like this mountain. this mountain is not a real mountain (surprise!), and to climb it, all i had to do was hold down my "w" key whilst pointing my face mountainward using the mouse. yet climb it i did, because that same base part of my brain stem that screams "go up!" when i see a high thing in real life kicks in inside proteus as well. and, if you're feeling lazy, climbing a virtual mountain is way the hell easier than climbing a real one. is it as meaningful? not really, but it still beats the hell out of watching bear grylls do it on tv.

proteus does have some...i guess you'd call them "events". that is, occasionally while exploring you'll stumble upon something and something will happen and it will be cool because you don't expect it. however, these things aren't judiciously spaced out within the gameworld, or scripted, or really triggered by anything that i can tell. you just randomly happen upon them...or you don't. i've played for about 30 minutes 4-5 times now, and each time i find something i didn't find before, and some of the things i saw the first time through i've never seen again. occasionally there'll be a dry spell of sorts where i'll walk for 10-15 minutes without seeing anything interesting but i don't feel like this is unreasonable. i mean, i go on 20 minute walks all the time in "real" life and often the first 15 minutes are boring...that doesn't mean i kill myself before i get to the end. at least, not usually. so to reflect this, in proteus  i sit down and decide beforehand that i'm going to play for a certain time. invariably, by the end, it's been worth it. just loosening yourself from that cycle of expecting something to happen every thirty seconds is maybe something that is really good for video games right now. hell, it's probably really good for your actual life, if you live with that expectation of constant outside stimulation.

"when the moon hits your eye like a piece of bread that got crushed at the bottom of the grocery bag..."

oh, and in addition to being all explore-y and otherwise "pointless", proteus is procedurally-generated both topographically and aurally; that is, the island you explore is different every time you play, and the background music is made from various ambient soundscapes that are stitched together on the fly by a computer algorithm depending on your location in the world and what's happening around you. i was a bit leery of this second property at first, but last night while playing i had a moment that really sold me on it. while i was standing on top of a hill, watching a rainstorm blow inland from out in the ocean, the soundtrack (again, randomly) latched on to this particularly interesting bass groove, coupled with a weird reverb effect i hadn't yet heard in my two-odd hours of playing the game. it repeated a few times, each time modulating just a bit, until it had established a sort-of theme that somehow suited the aesthetic of the rainy landscape perfectly. it was, for lack of a better analogy, as if the landscape and the music were two jazz musicians who had just briefly, perfectly locked onto one another for thirty or so seconds and created an instant of music neither could have made alone. i've never had anything like that happen in a video game before, and it was worth my five bucks by itself.

hey, look! it's pullman in the winter!

anyway, proteus is a badass simulation about what it's like to be the spirit of a disembodied alien warlord trapped in the corpse of a cybernetic zombie rottweiler.

wait, that's not right.

proteus is a non-game about doing something we often don't even do that well in "real" life: taking a few minutes to appreciate the swell of a particular hill, or the graceful flight of a barn owl, or the way the light changes just before the sun hits the horizon. and that is, in a lot of ways, a more important and engaging challenge than slaughtering ten thousand space nazis in five minutes using your gun-chainsaw or whatever the balls passes for an "achievement" in most games these days.

okay. now i've got to back to writing real things about fake things instead of fake things about real things.

things i heard today, part three

1. [On C Street, just outside of Valhalla, courtesy of a girl in a tube top and shorts and heels, despite the fact that it was snowing sideways]: Girl 1: "Hey motherfucker! Yeah, I'll cut your dick off with a knife...is what I would say to him if he was here."

2. [In the Emerald Downs parking lot, from a group of four guys gathered around a car]: Guy 1: "Hey, faggot, I didn't know you were legally allowed to buy a car that color unless you were sixty years old!" (The car was silver.)

Also, in two separate places along B Street, two different people (with different "hand"writing) had written the word "FUCK" in the snow using their fingers within about fifty feet of one another.

things i heard today, part two

1. [On the Hello Walk, one guy to a group of his guy friends] Guy 1: "Yeah, so then she was just standing there, waving her snatch at me!" Guy 2: "Yeah?!" Guy 1: "Yeah, and I just really wanted to punch her as hard as I could in her snatch, you know?" Guy 3: "Yeah, I totally get it!"

2. [In front of the library, two girls] Girl 1: "I just don't get why I have to take this class, you know?" Girl 2: "Yeah..." Girl 1: "I mean, I just don't see what history has to do with anything!"

diss extracts: interlude 3 (part 2 of 2)

here's part two! if you have no idea what's going on, read part one first.

At first, I panic. The world seems to tilt on its axis under my feet and I find it hard to breathe. Reflexively, I use the moon to take a bearing and still firmly in the grip of terror, I start running. Remembering the pile of bones and the charred stone, I keep running. I run for nearly a mile and then, seeing nothing and hearing nothing, I come to a panting stop. Suddenly my back hurts where the rocks in my pack must have slammed against it over and over while I ran on, unaware. Scanning the area, I recognize the grasslands around me and the gentle slope of the ground to the north as it moves toward the edge of another, smaller lake. I am still far from home, but I'm headed in the right direction. At least there's no–

My thoughts and blood are frozen as a piercing shriek cuts the air. In its wake, I hear the rattle of bones. I know these bones too well: they live somehow without skin, without organs, powered only, it seems, by malice. I turn towards the sound and in the moonlight, silhouetted against the hills to the east, I see the skeleton, already nocking an arrow and drawing its bow. It's still too far away, I think to myself as rationality wars with terror for command over my thoughts. Sure enough, it fires an arrow – the twang of the bowstring mixing with a gleeful murder's hiss – and I watch it arc gracefully through the night sky before it thunks into the ground twenty feet in front of me.

Suddenly, a snarl from behind me yanks my attention away from the skeleton. So there are enemies on at least two sides of me, now. I need to get to high ground, ascertain the situation, and decide how to fight my way home. There is a rise to the southwest; I jog toward it, putting the skeleton at my back but moving at a pace that makes it certain it won't gain ground on me while my attention is diverted.

The zombie, of course, is waiting for me at the top of the rise. By the time I see him, I don't have time to check my momentum, so I dive and roll under his first swing, ending up behind him. He turns slowly, but it takes me a moment to shrug off my rucksack and yank my old sword from its scabbard. By the time I've drawn my weapon, he's shambling forward to rake his claws across my face. I don't let him, obviously. I take one step back to put myself out of his range and then I follow behind his swing with a descending cut of my sword, hacking off the offending limb.

Zombies cannot feel pain. Once I did not know this, and that ignorance nearly cost me my life. Now, though, when the zombie responds to losing his arm by immediately swinging the other one at my chest, I'm ready. Snapping my sword back up, I step inside this second swing and cut the arm off before it gets to me. It slaps wetly against my chest as it falls away, and I take a step back, putting distance between myself and the zombie's teeth, which are his last remaining weapon. He comes at me immediately, as I knew he would. As he does, I hear an arrow wizz by both of our heads, but there's no time to worry about that yet. Instead, I set my feet, grit my teeth, and let the zombie impale himself on my sword. Then I quickly plant my foot in his chest and kick, sliding my blade free as he crumples to the ground.

Thanks to the time I've wasted on this skirmish, there's no point in trying to develop a plan now. From atop the rise, I can see the countryside swarming with dark shapes in all directions, and the skeleton is almost on top of me. By the time I shoulder my rucksack and slide my sword back into its scabbard, it's already nocked and drawn another arrow, so I take off as fast as I can to the southwest, running in a zigzag pattern and hoping it's less of a distance to my house than I suspect.

The next two miles are a blur of desperation tinged with fear as I slowly become aware that I am being hunted, herded by a large group of skeletons who are – unfortunately – not nearly as stupid as their zombie allies. Over flat land, though, I can outrun them on foot, and as the light of torches comes into view slowly but certainly to the south, I actually begin to think that I'm going to make it home safely. Then, I top the final rise and see how thoroughly I've been outmaneuvered. Quite literally at the door of my house wait two enormous, red-eyed spiders and one of the grotesque, limbless, mottled-green creatures I've come to think of as “creepers”.

With who-knows-how-many skeletons closing in from behind me, I don't even have time to be scared. Leaving my pack on this time, I unlimber my bow and draw an arrow. The spiders have begun to move toward me, but seem torn between holding their position and attacking outright. I make the decision for them by burying my first arrow in the nearest one's hide. It hisses and comes at me, oozing a brown-black liquid from the wound. The creeper follows, deliberately, behind it. I simply wait, patiently putting a second arrow right next to the first and slowing the spider down a bit more. It is on top of me, however, before I can draw a third arrow. I drop the bow and draw my sword instead, slicing off the spider's first questing limb. It retreats back a few steps, and I do too. Behind the spider, the creeper is circling to my left, so I move to the right to keep it in view. This odd dance goes on for a few moments, the spider and I taking testing swings at one another while the creeper attempts to flank me. As I hack off a third spider leg, I begin to wonder what exactly is going on. Then a hiss from behind me makes my mistake painfully clear: in turning to keep from being flanked by the creeper, I allowed the second spider to come up behind me unnoticed. And now, I'm trapped and quite probably dead.

Seeing the creeper closing, though, I remember the charred corner of my house and the scattered pile of skeleton bones, and I know that I have one last chance. Going for the weakest enemy first, I charge the wounded spider, bringing my sword down in a two-handed, overhead blow that nearly cuts the thing in half. I try to pull my sword free as my enemy dies beneath me, but the rusty blade has been thoroughly mangled by this last, desperate blow and I realize after a moment that even if I manage to free my weapon, it will be worthless to me. This is unfortunate, but really doesn't change my quite-possibly-suicidal plan. The spider behind me hisses again – much too close this time – as I go for the only other thing I have that could be construed as a close-quarters weapon: my pickaxe.

I manage to raise it in a two-handed grip and take a step over the spider corpse at my feet, which seems to surprise the creeper who was lurching forward on its four mottled-green legs, perhaps sensing victory. Before it can recover, I swing the pickaxe laterally, scoring its hide and driving it back a step. I keep moving toward it, aggressively. As I bring the pickaxe up for another strike, the creeper begins to close again, hissing loudly. Throwing a look over my shoulder, I take a step back – against all of my instincts – and feel the spider's forelegs begin to close around my waist. With the creeper coming down on me from the front and the spider's hungry mouth lurching toward me from behind, I will myself to wait until the last possible second...and then I hurl myself aside as the creeper's hiss reaches its highest pitch.

The creeper explodes – as creepers are wont to do – and the explosion hits me in the chest, seeming to unhinge my bones from my muscles. I'm thrown across the front lawn of my house and I land in a bed of dirt, crushing a row of decorative flowers. The spider, closer to the center of the explosion, is completely vaporized. I try to stand, but the ground jumps down away from my feet and I stagger sideways. For a moment, I simply stand staring at my front door, struck dumb by the explosion. Then the sizzle of another arrow passing near to my head puts things into perspective. The skeletons that had been chasing me over the northern plains have finally caught up. I grab my rucksack and make a run for the door.

I fumble with the door lock, and as a result, I almost don't make it. But the skeletons are consistently poor shots and I finally hurl myself inside, locking the door behind me as they growl in frustration, fired arrows zikking off the stone walls of my home. The torches and the stone walls will keep them out for the night, and in the morning, if they aren't smart enough to disappear underground, the sun will melt them where they stand, leaving little sign of their passing except, perhaps, an incomplete pile of charred bones.

I pant heavily for a few minutes with my back against the door, knowing that the hisses and growls I hear outside will continue for most of the night and that, at some point, I'm simply going to have to just ignore them and go about my usual business of cooking and preparing the furnace for smelting another pile of iron ore.

Today, this world has shown me both of its faces: joy, in the exploration of a bounteous wilderness and in the feeling of hard work well done, and terror, in the persistent threat the night creatures pose to my life and all that I've built here. Ultimately, I am free to make my own life here, but it is a life that is earned, not given.

Survival is hardly a game, after all.

diss extracts: interlude 3 (part 1 of 2)

here's the first version of my third "interlude" section of the diss. as usual for the interludes, it's a nonfiction-y narrative thing that sets up the upcoming chapter. this particular one is from the perspective of the player's avatar in minecraft. this is the first half, second half is coming tomorrow. enjoy (i hope)! a few of my avid readers might catch a sly reference to an earlier nonfiction piece of mine, which was published posthumously in the element.

okay, not really posthumously. moving on...

The first rays of of the day's sunlight suffuse my bedroom, drawing me out of a deep sleep. I open my eyes slowly and for a moment I simply take in my surroundings. I am lying in my bed – rickety wooden bedframe, rough wool sheets – in a small, but solidly built room comprised of grey stone walls and a roof made of overlapping slate tiles. The bed takes up almost the entirety of one wall, while the opposite wall is lined with a series of shelves supporting nine chests made from polished wood. A few of the chests have been left open and old tools and worn-out clothes are barely visible beneath their lids. Near the bedroom door – a hinged, wooden affair that is currently closed and locked – a single, failing torch gutters, its wan light overwhelmed now by the warm glow of the rising sun. Outside the room's one window, a cow lumbers by, mooing. It's time to start the day.

I slide out of bed to a standing position. The floor beneath my feet is more hard stone, but it is cushioned and warmed somewhat by a layer of soft-colored rugs, weakly dyed a cloudy white. I pad over to the door, which yields with a creak, and then I proceed into the house's main hallway. Straight ahead of me is the door to a bathroom of sorts, where a porcelain washtub dominates an otherwise sparsely-filled space of roughly the same dimensions as the bedroom. To my left, the hall opens up into the house's main living area. Here, the rugs are a bit more vibrantly colored – a muted blue – and the walls are lined with earth-toned hangings that catch and soften the sunlight angling in through the windows. Against the far wall of the room, a furnace smolders dully, and beside it a few bars of shaped iron – last night's work – are cooling. On a wooden table near the furnace lay a crust of stale bread and an apple. I grab them and put them in the pocket of my trousers. They won't make for a spectacular breakfast, but I'm in a hurry to be on my way this morning and I don't want to take the time to make something else. I reach into another wooden chest that sits on the floor beside the table and pull out an old leather rucksack. Into it goes food for later: some smoked meat from the pantry and a skin of river water, along with a half-loaf of fresher bread. Back at the front door, I round up the usual equipment: pickaxe, handaxe, bow and arrow, and my notched, rusting sword. Then it's out into the world.

As I step outside, I check the two torches that hang below the house's eaves, framing the door. I fully intend to be back before dark, but it never hurts to be safe, and at night these torches will be visible from a long distance. With my back to the front door, I am facing south, and directly ahead the gentle plain on which my house rests continues for a hundred or so feet before terminating in a cliff; it's a fifty-foot drop into the lake that spreads to the horizon. To the east, the land thrusts up almost immediately into a hill that stands, at its highest point, nearly two hundred feet above my roof. As I do most mornings, I turn this way and begin to climb. On my way around the corner of the house, I pass the cow I saw earlier, and as I do he looks up from grazing, mooing again in what I suspect is a cow-greeting.

Climbing the hill is tough going, and, as usual, I don't bother walking all the way to the summit. Instead, I climb just high enough so that I can see out across the flatland to the west and north of my house until it butts up against the smaller, less spectacular hills in the distance. From this vantage, I can see the first sliver of the sun as it inches its way into the sky to the north, and as it does, its light spills out across the entirety of my work at surviving in this place. Waves of golden wheat sway in the wind to the west; they are arranged in precise rows, fed by narrow irrigation channels and protected from roving wildlife by a sturdy wooden fence. To the north is a similarly arranged but less impressive patch of wheat – I culled this one only a few days ago, and what few stalks remain are short and green yet. Along the edges of the lake to the south, papyrus shoots grow taller than a man, and cows and pigs dot the landscape in all directions, numerous enough that I've deemed fencing them in unnecessary. As I scan my environs contentedly, one particularly enterprising pig snorts at me from the hill's summit, startling me and then prompting me to wonder what in the world inspired him to make the journey all the way up there.

All is well this morning, I think to myself; yet, even as I do, my eyes are drawn to the foot of the hill below me, where a few human-sized bones rest in a pile and the corner of the house nearest them looks somehow burnt, blasted, the grey stone charred black. But now is not the time to dwell on such things. Now is a sunny summer morning, and there will be plenty of time for such darker concerns later. With some difficulty, I avert my eyes and turn away to face the day's demands.

There are only two tasks on today's agenda, but those two tasks could easily take me the remaining balance of daylight to complete: I need to find iron ore and wood. The iron ore will be used eventually for the forging of a new sword to replace the brittle, misshapen thing that currently hangs at my hip, and the wood will be shaped into more fenceposts to encircle the third, larger wheat field I am currently in the process of planting. Because of the flatness of the land immediately surrounding the house, it has been hard to keep the fields properly irrigated and the wheat in the first two fields hasn't been growing as fast as I'd like. Getting more seeds in the ground is easy; making sure that the resulting stalks aren't destroyed by any number of wild creatures is much more difficult and requires some forethought.

Fortunately, finding wood should only require a short walk. I've long since cleared the flatland below of trees whose wood went toward my earlier projects, and though I've replanted some saplings in their place, they haven't had nearly enough time to grow to any sort of size yet. So I strike out to the east, skirting the large hill and following a gentler ridge up and up until my house is lost to sight behind me. I've never been logging in this direction before and so I know it's only a matter of time before I come upon some suitable trees. Eventually, the ridge leads me up into the first foothills of the eastern mountains. On a clear morning like this one, I can often see these snow-dressed hinterlands from the top of the hill near my house. They loom in the far distance, gauzy-looking, like something out of a dream, tugging at my curiosity. But for now I have more pressing concerns.

From my current elevation, I can see that along the flanks of the foothills, the trees grow thick and large, and I will have my choice of trunks to cut. I spend much of the rest of the morning chopping down a few of the closer, smaller trees, stripping the the trunks to fencepost-sized poles, and eventually plowing through my nearly-forgotten breakfast. By the time I judge that I've cut enough wood, the sun is directly overhead. Rather than spending the rest of the day hauling logs back home on already-tired shoulders, though, I decide to leave the logs where they are until tomorrow and take a circuitous route back to the house while keeping an eye open for potential iron veins.

I head back down out of the hills and circle around the house to the north, where the land is rough and uneven. Here, rocks jut out of the dirt, forming odd-looking plinths. Occasionally, the ground under a bluff has given way completely, revealing a tunnel or shallow chasm that twists down and down into the stony guts of the world. These tunnels could lead anywhere, and if they ran deep enough they would almost certainly lead me to iron ore. But just looking into their depths from a distance fills me with foreboding – I don't yet need the ore that badly.

After an hour or so of walking through this strange land and another few bites of smoked meat, I am surprised to see a tunnel entrance bracketed by two of my old torches. I know that I haven't ranged far north of home recently, so this place must be one of the first caves I ever dug, lost to my memory in the confusion and darkness of those first days. Regardless, I know that if I've been here already, this particular cavern is at least relatively safe. Checking the position of the sun one last time, I light a fresh torch and disappear down the tunnel's throat.

The cavern opening leads into to a labyrinth of stone. Some of the tunnel's arteries are very clearly my own work – they are neatly head-height, squared-off, and run straight into the earth – while others are more angular, twisting, and disorienting – likely formed naturally by running water. I follow a number of these paths in succession, leaving more torches behind me as I go so that I can retrace my steps if necessary. The deeper the tunnels go, the greater my chances of finding iron ore become, and yet the crushing darkness at those depths is intimidating, and so I ultimately choose to stay just barely belowground. It is only purely by chance, then, that I find an iron vein in short order.

The hard work of chipping through the surrounding stone with my iron pickaxe prompts me to eat through the rest of my lunch as I work, and so by the time I've finally collected what I judge to be enough of the ore, I'm quite ready to be out from under the ground and en route to home and dinner. I follow the trail of torches back to the tunnel exit easily enough, but as I reach the surface, I'm struck by a sudden all-consuming fear. While I was underground, I must have lost track of the time! The sun is long gone, and it has been replaced by the apologetic silver light of a waning moon. It is night, and I am still miles from home.

Screenshot taken from Tom Francis's (PC Gamer) Minecraft travelogue, which I am citing heavily in my chapter.

re: your need to poop.

DEAR MEN,

WHEN YOU ENTER THE BATHROOM AND SEE THAT ALL THE STALLS ARE ALREADY OCCUPIED, YOU DO NOT NEED TO "WASH YOUR HANDS" METICULOUSLY BEFORE LEAVING. IT'S OBVIOUS THAT YOU WANTED TO POOP AND ONLY AFTER ENTERING THE BATHROOM DID YOU REALIZE THAT THERE WAS NO POOPING VENUE AVAILABLE. AND THAT'S FINE. BETTER LUCK NEXT TIME.

i'm writing a lot of diss stuff right now, so no time for real posts.



lol, pooping.

mysterious dungeons of desktop castles of dredmor (the roguelike)

i suppose that this is a review of sorts, but neither game i want to write about is officially finished, so titling it a  "review" in earnest seems a little unfair. of course, if you play indie games at all (which i do) pretty much every fucking game in the universe comes out nowadays in "alpha", "beta", "triad", "delta" and "half-cocked" stages for everyone to buy, and only 2 years later is it revealed that because the game is so not-mainstream it'll never actually be "finished", dude. because actually finishing is for The Man, or something.


so yeah. i want to write a little bit about some roguelikes i've been playing, how a game that forces you to constantly do basic math can still be fun, and how sometimes i get so fucking mad at video games i really just want to kill and eat somebody, anybody, to make the pain stop.


and now that i have scared the absolute SHIT out of you, here we go.


this is a tale of two roguelikes: mysterious castle and desktop dungeons (and, to a lesser extent, dungeons of dredmor). so maybe i should talk first about what the hell a roguelike is, in case you don't know. according to the internet, "The roguelike is a sub-genre of role-playing video games, characterized by randomization for replayability, permanent death, and turn-based movement. Most roguelikes feature ASCII graphics, with newer ones increasingly offering tile-based graphics. Games are typically dungeon crawls, with many monsters, items, and environmental features. Computer roguelikes usually employ the majority of the keyboard to facilitate interaction with items and the environment. The name of the genre comes from the 1980 game Rogue." according to game designers, however, a roguelike is "whatever the hell we want it to be because people tend to buy games with words like 'roguelike', 'procedurally-generated world' and 'permadeath' in the description this year".


if you're benedict cumberbatch's sherlock holmes, you can probably tell from the capitalization in the first quote that i pasted it in here from wikipedia, while you can probably tell from the lack of capitalization in the second quote that i made it the fuck up. but they're both completely true!


so. i got into roguelikes the way that i got into pretty much anything i've done that's been fun in the last two years except for high-speed sledding: minecraft. among many, many other things, i was drawn to minecraft because of the procedural generation of the gameworld, its stressing of freeform exploration, and the very heavy consequences of failure/death (there's no permadeath, but death is still a huge pain in the ass, unlike in most games nowadays). i hadn't really seen these qualities expressed in a game together before. they were new to me, and they were exciting. never-ending, randomized worlds? fuck yeah! with no map or totally prescriptive goals, so you can just wander but still feel a sense of accomplishment just by surviving? that's how i feel about real life, so YEAH! so when i started to see lots of other games with these buzzwords attached to them (unsurprisingly, shortly after minecraft blew up like a skyscraper-sized creeper), often for 2-3 bucks on steam, i started buying them by the virtual fistful. very quickly, though, this buying spree brought me to wonder if roguelikes were actually supposed to be fun, or if they were instead just some weird mutation of a "game" that you "play" for insanely sadomasochistic people who don't actually know what either of those words mean. 


take, for example, dungeons of dredmor (or, as i like to think of it, rageons of ragemor). this is billed as a "beginner's roguelike", so unlike something completely fucking nutballs like rogue or dwarf fortress, dungeons at least acknowledges that there might be a bridge between semi-autistic dungeon-crawl savants and your typical frat boy whose gaming literacy only extends to the best camping spots on the latest iteration of modern warfare's multiplayer maps. dredmor acknowledges this by tricking impressionable gamers with a pretty interface and an interesting presentation style and then it crushes their goddamn skull to a pulp by striking it again and again with a huge microwave while belting out lyrics to korpiklaani songs at the top of its lungs.


dredmor is not a bad game, per se, but it's a game that makes me question if i understand what "game" really means. so much time needs to be spent sorting equipment, digging through loot piles, and interpreting excruciatingly detailed minutiae just to get past the game's first few levels that i felt like i was hooking up an HDTV/DVR combo instead of playing a video game. even on the rare occasion that i succeeded in completing a level (and had paid enough attention to understanding why i succeeded), i was just exhausted afterward. this trailer makes it look both fun and easy, but it was neither of those things for me.

i was intrigued by the game's premise: that a turn-based affair with potentially endless dungeons, heavily randomized loot and a modicum of stat-based strategy could have such a small focus: that you didn't need to command armies and the fate of the multiverse every time you took a turn, that you didn't need to micromanage the grain watering rate and the education levy percentage every time of ever province in your entire civilization every time you took a turn, that turn-based gaming could be a bit more personal than in something like civilization. distilled in such a way, turn-based gaming with a touch of roguelike-ness could be a satisfying puzzle generator. fortunately, the makers of desktop dungeons were apparently thinking the exact same thing.


desktop dungeons has been my favorite go-to activity during writing breaks for something like six months now. for one thing, the game hits that perfect balance between "easy to play" and "difficult to master", and as such, every time the dev team tweaks something or adds something or removes something else, it makes the game (in a sense) completely new without forcing you to relearn the basic rules. also, it does something brilliant by taking the rogue formula and not only making it more accessible but confining play sessions into quick 20-minute dungeon runs. this deals brilliantly with a problem that many devs haven't seemed to notice yet: that procedural generation can easily come to just mean "really huge, boring levels". i've felt this even a bit from time to time in minecraft: you're a player playing a game, ultimately, taking time out from your actual life to get caught up in the game's world, but also to feel the sense of accomplishment you get from, you know, accomplishing something. in minecraft, that "something" is often as simple as finding a new cave, forging a new plate of armor, or just climbing a mountain and checking out the surrounding landscape. often, though, this new breed of procedurally-generated, "open-world" game seems to assume that exploration for the sense of exploration is enough. but it's not. and desktop dungeons realizes that, and shrinks each dungeon adventure down into almost a puzzle-like, single-level encounter that, at the end, you either win or lose. the overworld map and all the game's unlockables make certain that you never lose a sense of the game's scale, but the small levels make sure you're always getting the feedback that makes gaming fun.

mysterious castle, on the other hand, is like a not-quite terrible girlfriend when you're 16 years old: generally i'm unhappy around it, but it offers me something that i can't see to get anywhere else. in the metaphor this "something" would be sex, but in reality, i'm not entirely sure what it is about castle that's so absorbing. it is a game that was originally made for tablets, as is pretty obvious from the tablet-y (but still effective) interface. exploration is a bit more random in this game, but ultimately unsatisfying, because the game so badly wants to hold on to the roguelike aesthetic of "super-difficult, only for maniacs" that it sort of ruins itself. and with that, after about 2000 words, i've finally realized the thesis of all this shit that i'm writing. genre cross-pollination is well in good, in general and in games in particular. but i'm starting to think that making all games a little bit like roguelikes is not a great idea. the genre's qualities are very niche, and they're not something that transfers well. desktop dungeons works because it's a dungeon-crawling game with RPG elements, but it's self-imposed constraints (of scale, of time) make it more of an RPG/puzzle game than an RPG/roguelike. castles is troubling to me because it's actually really visually interesting, the battle system is efficient and intuitive, and fighting/looting is fun. with, say, a leveling mechanic, it would be a neat little RPG. instead, because it's interested in grafting roguelike elements onto its structure, it's something much less fun. every enemy encounter is a new terror: are you going to randomly meet enemies against which you can triumph? or are you going to meet enemies that slaughter you no matter what you do? either of these can happen at any time, without warning. and, because there's really no clear way to make your party stronger, faster, better armored, etc. (aside from random loot drops), there's never a real sense of progression. sure, i eventually got to the point where the absolutely easiest enemies in the game couldn't really effectively destroy me instantly because my new armor was too awesome. but then i just ran into a group of 20 of them instead of a group of 5 and they mutilated me. mysterious castles is like icewind dale if you took out the ability to level up and just threw the player in one of the game's dungeons randomly with no regard for how well-prepared they were. 

so basically, i think i'm perturbed by everything suddenly having to be roguelike because all that really seems to mean is "really difficult" and "devoid of ludic rewards". i'm no inexperienced or lazy gamer by any stretch of the imagination, and so while it's possible that i'm just bad at games like dredmor and castle, i think it's much more likely that they're just bad games. they might be good [insert something else], but i don't know what. 


that said, i keep coming back to castle for some reason. there's something about the graphical style and the battle system that makes me keep thinking that if i can just get strong enough characters, the difficulty will taper off and i'll be able to enjoy what would otherwise be a really excellent little RPG/dungeon crawl. but i'll probably just quit in rage again 20 minutes from now, braining myself with my own water bottle and screaming obscenities that haven't been invented yet.

two of my favorite diss-related images

i've been alternating between both of these as my desktop on my work computer for awhile now. they're both pretty interesting visual representations of a lot of the issues i'm writing about in my dissertation with regard to wilderness, civilization, and technology. plus, i took the first one myself. so there's that. the second one is made by someone else and superimposes a bit of minecraft landscape atop what i imagine is probably a 19th century landscape painting.

i've got another post in the pipe for later about roguelikes and why they generally (but not exclusively) enrage me as a genre of video game.

i'm a wheel

or at least i feel a bit like one.

i'm settled back into the writing nest at the moment, and have been for about 24 hours now, but this weekend turned out to be a pretty significant adventure (beyond even what i had expected).

way back when, in the days when i could imagine having free time, lindsey and i decided it would be fun to go see wilco a few times during their most recent west coast touring jaunt. two februaries ago, we took a weekend to catch them in both seattle and portland, and both shows were great, though at the time i lamented the fact that all wilco shows are more or less the same. of course, "the same" should be read "awesome", but i doubted the necessity of seeing back-to-back shows ever again. this time, though, one show was within a short driving distance of our friend john's apartment in portland and the other was a short distance from my own apartment, in spokane, and was taking place almost on my and lindsey's 3 year anniversary, at the spot where we'd met for the first time. it seemed imperative to go to both.

lindsey at the hult center.

we left town late friday morning, and did the usual pullman-to-portland commute, shooting down 395/82 and then through the columbia river gorge. we made a quick stop-off just outside of the city proper to pick up john (who was visiting a friend in eugene, where the show was taking place), and then it was on to the hult center. as always, wilco was stellar. the setlist was a bit obvious, and i was likely a bit crotchety from not having eaten since we'd stopped at burgerville in the dalles early that afternoon, but that was offset somewhat by the fact that we'd stumbled on to second-row tickets.


after the show, i'd assumed that after having been awake for a million hours and driven almost 9 of them, we'd just head back to portland and sleep. instead, (fortunately, as it turned out ) we got to meet up with john and his friend, and went in search of food and drink in post-midnight eugene. this led us to an excellent pizza/beer joint called (i think) cosmic pizza and reheated vegetarian slices paired with an excellent vanilla stout. from there, things became a bit of a haze featuring organic american spirits and a rather enthusiastic eugenean (?) who kept insisting that "the spirit of the 1890s is ALIVE!" and solicited smooches from all four of us (lindsey included) before disappearing into her apartment building. 

a pizza place with sriracha!

fortunately, john opted to drive back to portland, and so all i had to do for the next two hours was struggle to stay awake as the roadlights flashed by. i think we might have also listened to daft punk's discovery and kid a. upon arriving at john's apartment, i'm pretty sure i was asleep in less than five minutes. which was good, because there would be only a little rest for the wicked.

we woke up the next morning shortly after sunrise, but i was feeling pretty good. actual, legitimate sunrise in portland is such a rare thing that it's rather inspiring to experience. as such, i shook off my lethargy, forced lindsey to make me breakfast (women are for cooking!) and then settled in to work a bit on job applications and watch the city wake up.

it wasn't long before john woke up and gifted us with a second breakfast, and then we were off to bridal veil falls for a little (read: lot) of hiking.

lindsey being dwarfed by bridal veil falls.

our original plan for the day had involved a 2200 foot ascent to a place called devil's rest, over the course of a 3-or-so-mile hike, which we were then planning on retracing back to the parking lot. this hike would take us past some pretty amazing northwest coast basalt cliffs and accompanying waterfalls.

as might be expected, though, the lure of a entire day in which there was no school-related work to be done tempted us into a bit of laziness and we'd gotten on the road a lot later than we'd originally planned. as a result, we were only about two-thirds of the way to devil's rest before the sun began to go down in earnest. it became obvious we weren't going to make it up and back before dark, and hiking long distances over a dramatic elevation change in the dark sort of takes a trip out of "fun day hike" territory and straight into "possible survival scenario" territory. so we decided to turn around. and then we decided to run.

lindsey and becca in front of another waterfall.

 not for any necessary reason, mind you. we're just idiots. some of these idiots (read: me) were even wearing non-hiking shoes which were not happy about supporting my ankles in the least bit. as i type this, my toes are asking me "what were you thinking?!" over and over in the language of PAIN. nonetheless, breathlessly shambling down 1500 feet or so of altitude over 2 miles at a good jogging clip while jumping stones and exposed roots in near-darkness is a good way to make the best of a shortened hiking day.

upon our re-arrival in portland, we settled in for a typical john-style repast, featuring much more home-cooked food than could have been eaten by eight people, and store-bought vegan chicken wings from a portland restaurant called fire on the mountain that were quite possibly the best thing i have ever eaten in my entire life. for serious.

i don't remember much of the rest of that night, because the lack of sleep from the previous few days caught up with me in a huge way after dinner. i vaguely remember passing out (quite literally) from sleepiness shortly after the huge meal, and waking up briefly later that evening to say goodnight to everyone before dropping off again.

lindsey, john, and becca at a lookout point above bridal veil falls.

we woke up in the morning just before sunrise (due to an early bedtime) and got on the road by 10am, which opened up the whole day for an awesome, meandering drive along the north side of the columbia gorge on WA-14. this was amazing until about the time we reached the dalles bridge, when the road suddenly became covered by fog and stayed that way until we got to richland. eaten lunch at a great mexican restaurant in richland before finishing the drive back to pullman, though, put the perfect exclamation point on our first leg of the wilco-trip.

after an interlude of about 16 hours of frenetic work and worry and such, we left just before dinnertime on monday to get to spokane in time to eat and catch the second show. our dinner-location of choice was the fascinating (if you're an urban-spaces geek like me) steam plant grill in spokane, which had severely jacked up its prices since our last visit but still offered great food and an excellent vanilla bourbon stout. for the show proper, we were once again in the second row, which i know have found makes the show much easier to see, but less easy to hear. we had john stiratt's bass in our faces the entire night (not necessarily a bad thing), and the setlist was a lot more varied, and there was a seven-song encore.

by the end of the trip, i'd spent a little more time, money, and energy than i'd really planned for, but it was all worth it. after this, i'll likely be chaining myself to my writing desk for good until this dissertation is finished, so it was a nice send-off to freedom, and if wilco keeps up their habit of visiting the pacific northwest only once every two years, the memories will definitely make the wait for the next go-round more bearable.