Smiley: I was thinking…
Smiley: The Legend of Zelda dungeons have rooms that serve no purpose, really. Death Mountain has entire sections that seem to be there for the sole purpose of wearing down people who wander into them.
Smiley: They’re just there so the dungeons look like something.
Smiley: If that happened in a game today, it would be considered unacceptable. Everything’s got to be clever. Everything’s got to have a purpose. What’s a long string of rooms without a treasure chest at the end?
Smiley: Hm.
Smiley: But… one might think that, today, we have the technology to actually make those “pointless” things worthwhile.
Smiley: I guess it might just be a matter of engaging the imagination.
Smiley: There’s still a lot of details to fill in, these days. You just need to look harder.
Aderack: Yeah, though — that’s a problem that I have with contemporary design, that Ico kind of is an indirect example of. If there’s a long string of rooms, then there’s GOT to be something good at the end, right?
Aderack: With Zelda, you just don’t know.
Aderack: Everything is so uncertain.
Aderack: Zero Mission does a lot to fix the pointless bits in Metroid. I actually applaud this, though, for the most part — as it was kind of a problem in the original.
Aderack: That’s a really interesting point.
Aderack: Especially given that the two games are contemporaries.
Smiley: Myst is one of the few games that actually could easily have pointless things, yet… nothing is.
Smiley: Well, not in Riven, anyway.
Aderack: Hmm.
Aderack: Yes. Although you don’t know that until much, much later.
Aderack: And it’s kind of a moment of revelation when it does come together.
Aderack: That’s one of the grand elements, I think.
Smiley: Mm.
Aderack: Not too many games have a structure like this.
Aderack: Can’t think of any others offhand.
Aderack: Oh, Metroid Prime kind of.
Aderack: Phantasy Star II, kind of and less so.
Smiley: There is almost nothing you can point at that does not, in its way, hint at the interwovenness of all things.
Smiley: Metroid Prime… yes. There are a lot of “pointless” things that are there because they’d really be there.
Smiley: FFX-2 has a lot of pointless things in a bad way. Except for the Pointless status, which I probably mentioned.
Aderack: This Zelda-like sense of the unknown — you’d think that it would be a strong element in Metroid. If it was a problem in the first game, Metroid II played it much better. The whole game is tonally so… creepy, and depressing, that the unknown game structure, and dead ends, and getting hopelessly lost, kind of helps.
Then it was gone from the series forever, starting with the third game. Same with Zelda, with the third game.
Aderack: The design had gotten too good.
Aderack: Prime, though –
Aderack: Yeah. That’s an exception.
Aderack: I think that might be part of why it makes an impression on me.
Aderack: It’s messier, yet in a grand sense.
Aderack: It just seems random in some respects, until it begins to come together.
Aderack: And then there’s the Riven-like epiphany.
Smiley: Aha!
That game. You know. The… uhr. Yogurt Factory was the main song, right? That was almost an exercise in pointlessness.
Smiley: The good kind.
Aderack: Seiklus?
Smiley: Pointlessness may be the wrong word, now.
Smiley: Yeah.
Smiley: I mean the game has things are there for their own sake.
Smiley: Maybe a Taoist kind of pointlessness.
Aderack: Well. Pointless in the sense that it is not part of a focused, well-honed design but rather serves an emotional purpose by making the world more unpredictable and real-feeling.
Aderack: That lends the game an air of mystery.
Aderack: You’re never quite sure what its limits are.
Smiley: Mm.
Smiley: Which is a problem with current game design.
Smiley: Which needs to say, “this, this is your limit,” or else people complain.
Smiley: I think the invisible swimming walls in Super Mario Sunshine are a pretty good metaphor.
Aderack: If anything is hidden, it tends to be so stupidly arbitrary.
Aderack: Not really part of the world at all.
Aderack: Like the bizarre lengths that you need to go through in a Final Fantasy game to get that really, really good weapon.
Aderack: Something you’d never find just through honest tinkering with the world’s boundaries.
Aderack: It would be interesting to play with those expectations that people have now.
Aderack: To put an invisible wall in, apparently to contain the player — and yet…
Aderack: Well, I’m not sure.
Smiley: Hmmmmmmm…
Aderack: Push some buttons. Make people question what they have come to accept.
Aderack: I guess that perhaps ties in with making those pointless things worthwhile, as you said up front.
Aderack: It’s really the SNES which began this junk. Or at least, that’s where the modern design concepts got honed and popularized.
Aderack: It reminds me of the classical style of art — where everything has to be in its place, or it is wrong.
Aderack: No room for messiness. No room for emotion. Just mannequins and religious symbolism.
Aderack: I want some expressionism.
Smiley: We have enough games about ninji for now.
Aderack: What about an expressionistic ninja?
With dialogue by Bertolt Brecht?
Smiley: But what would they do for the sequel?
Aderack: I’m not sure. Brecht first. Then we’ll do lunch.
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