Thing is, there’s a difference between being accurate and not being inaccurate. The Downey movies may not technically be inaccurate; that doesn’t make them truly accurate.

Prior to about 1980, nearly every adaptation of Sherlock Holmes was deathly inaccurate. Since the Granada series with Jeremy Brett, the popular image of Holmes (and, particularly, Watson) is actually pretty close to the source material.

To date that’s probably still the most accurate portrayal in terms of the character motivation and dynamics. The recent Steven Moffat series is also weirdly accurate, despite all the liberties it takes. I don’t think I’ve seen another adaptation that focuses on Holmes’s complete ignorance of facts and concepts outside of his area of study (like that the earth revolves around the sun, or who the current prime minister happens to be).

The Downey movies go with a fun interpretation, that actually hews closer to the facts and themes of the material than one might expect. The way it extrapolates the facts and themes, though, ain’t close at all.

The boxing scene is a key point of reference. Holmes is an expert pugilist, true. He is also very observational. He is not, however, a sensor. Outside of a few parlor tricks that he has mastered in order to impress potential clients, he needs time and thought and focus to make sense of his observations. Put him against an untrained ruffian, and Holmes will deftly apply his memorized technique to get the upper hand. Put him against a professional boxer, and he will have no instincts. Even if he may conclude that his opponent is from Devonshire and chews a particular brand of tobacco, his observational skills will not be of the required sort and the speed to guide his hands like an assassin. That’s not the way his brain works.

The skill of Sherlock Holmes is in identifying important information in a sea of noise. Making sense or use of that information is another skill entirely, and one that comes to him with far more difficulty. Likewise, that focus comes at a great cost elsewhere for the character.

In adaptation, the inclination is often to burden an odd and cranky but otherwise well adjusted character with superhuman powers of observation and extrapolation. You get a bunch of the super power in Moffat’s adaptation as well, and it can get tedious. You do get far more than usual of the cost, though. And it’s on that point that the show is interesting.

In the Downey movies, the super powers are bolted on top of a stock action hero. The movie goes into more than the usual detail on the nature of his observations, allowing the audience to follow his line of reasoning. The speed and application of his conclusions, however, remains mystical.

It’s that misreading, or rather deliberate misinterpretation, of Holmes’s mentality that informs the pace, structure, and thematic weight of the films. They need to work like a stupid Hollywood blockbuster, and if you squint then Doyle provides the material to bend. So if you know the material back and front, then yeah, the movies are surprisingly clever in how they use it. That doesn’t make them a faithful representation of that material. Their faith lies somewhere else entirely.

That’s fine, because they’re good natured in the way they use the material. I don’t think the movies make any secrets about what they’re up to, and nearly every beat is accompanied by a wink. It’s fun to be free with this stuff, sometimes. Break a few expectations and shine a new light in an old, dusty room. The Granada series did just that by hewing starkly to the original material for the first time ever, and breaking out of all of the material that pop culture had aggregated on top of it. For 1980, that was revolutionary. In his weird way, Steven Moffat is cutting even closer — while at the same time bending the concept (and any characters outside of Holmes and Watson) to his own whims.

It’s just — all the good will in the world doesn’t make it accurate.

The premise (and one of my basic assertions about design) is that deliberately or not, every component in a game communicates information to the player. The task of the designer is to pay attention to what and how the elements communicate, and to use those properties to communicate deliberately.

Ideally a game will instruct, inform, and illuminate its own premises with every beat of play — and ideally all of that will be invisible to the player. A game that fails to communicate deliberately will often misfire and lead the player down undesirable paths, or otherwise fail to explain itself to the player. Either result will tend to lead to a sense of manipulation or neglect, which in turn will lead to frustration and boredom.

In the article I singled out a very good game that due to its scale and ambition is not often prone to criticism. There are many of these games — imperfect, yet grand enough to be holy. Since they are holy, every part of them is beyond reproach. It’s the same problem with any medium, but gamers seem to get out less than other connoisseurs and from my experience often have less of a frame of reference.

The trouble with situations like this (that is, the golden calves) is that bad habits, unexamined, become codified. People repeat them by rote because that’s what they know. This poor grounding sets up a basic lack of discipline to design, which leads to further lapses in judgment, which only exacerbates the psychological detachment between the player and the design.

So although those original games may be solid, with just a few problem areas, a failure to illuminate those problems may be irresponsible by virtue of the games’ influence. That, to my mind, is one of the biggest failings of modern game design. If something generally works, the overwhelming tendency that I see (in the press, in the design community, and in the most obsessive audience) is to let the problems slide.

With videogames, blinders are almost a badge of honor. If you can’t overlook a few minor problems then you’re a casual player, which means that you don’t know what you’re talking about. Since videogames tend to be highly technical and specialized, only experts are qualified to comment on them. One of the worst insults for long-time gamers is to call someone a casual gamer, or a non-gamer. It’s like you’re either with them or against them. If you’re against them, then nothing that you say is of value.

The responses that my writing generates, then, tend to fall into two categories. In the first circle we have the game designers, the artists, the creative, and the analytical. In the second we’ve the gamers, the forum trolls, the obsessive, and the consumers. Broadly speaking, category A seems to appreciate my game writing. Category B does not.

The typical category B response contains any of a few common elements. Usually it’s angry, usually dismissive. The reader will focus on a passing error of fact — I counted the wrong number of stages or I didn’t know about a secret code — and ignore the actual argument. The user will complain that I failed to cite any sources, and insist that my arguments mean nothing unless I’m quoting someone else. Most often, the reader misconstrues the article in ways that I can neither predict nor understand. When I explain where they misread the piece, they tell me that I’m wrong and that what they interpreted was what I really meant.

As rude as it may sound, my experience shows that gamers tend to have real problems with reading comprehension.

My typical category A response contains none of these elements. The reader may have missed a shade of meaning, or failed to connect a couple of dots in my argument, but they get the general picture. If I clarify the point, they tend to accept it. They might offer a well-reasoned counter-argument. They express relief that someone has verbalized an issue that has bothered them. They express surprise that this is the first they have heard or thought about the issue, and vow to think about it further. Even if they don’t agree, they are interested in the arguments and they respond with civility.

By its nature, Group A is interested in how and why things work. It always wants to know how things could be better, more elegant, more eloquent — because its members themselves have a need to express themselves clearly. Group B is interested in how things are, and how they have been. The current consensus is the rule, and the only ideas that matter are those that reinforce that rule.

It’s a battle of principles versus facts, subjects versus objects. Both are, in a sense, rules — and rightly so, as videogames are all about rules. Again, though, it’s focus and priority. A principle says, “This is a good thing to be aware of.” A fact says, “This is true.”

Though they lend a practical weight, facts tend to shut down discussion. The only inherent meaning they hold is a record of what has been said before. When the thing that we’re talking about is a medium of communication, the most rational way to address it is in terms of pragmatic idealism: given the tools and limitations at hand, what’s the best way to say what you want to say?

Expressing ideas is difficult enough that outside of a deliberate exercise it would be irrational to close off any useful options or avenues of expression. When talk turns to videogames, however, that is a common response.

I have said before, with no small hyperbole, that the ideal game designer would never have played a game before. You can see why; in place of preconceptions, all they would have is conceptual problems and solutions. Likewise, I think the ideal game should be transparent to someone who has never seen a videogame. From my experience, I think that the people who matter generally agree. The gamers… not so much.

The eternal question is how to achieve this transparency without without sacrificing nuance or complexity. Hit the balance right, and the gamers won’t know the difference — but the new players will think you’re speaking just to them. This is the way that we keep the medium alive.

The best answer that I can give is to keep talking about it. So long as the wrong people keep telling you to shut up, you know you’re on the right track — and if the noise starts to blur the path a little, a little support from the right people can help to make it real again.

Maybe I’m just being a stubborn coot; a big part of my reason for dredging this engine back up again was this idea that although form dictates the shape of design, design transcends the shape of the form.

This engine is super old and cranky and doesn’t do what many people would ask of it. If a person can’t work within that and figure out how to say something relevant, maybe he’s going in there with too many preconceptions. And maybe that’s a sign of a lack of discipline. And maybe that mentality is why so many games are so terrible.

Some of the best games ever made were made with wires and transistors, or with incremental adjustments to hardware little stronger than the Colecovision. There’s something wrong when with the greater the level of technology available to us comes less elegant and sophisticated a basic level of design.

I am being cooty, but there is something real in the “it was better then” mentality. Used to be, everything in a game was there for a reason, because it had to be. There was no room for clutter, and it was hard enough to get a basic idea working that it was unlikely that you were on auto-pilot when you did it.

Once they reach a certain sophistication of representation, old games don’t tend to date the way that games do — because the diminished clutter and assumptions based on things other than precisely what they have to say (be that perceived audience expectations, design trends, or simply decades of experience dictating what a game is supposed to be) means that they still communicate clearly. I mean, if they communicated clearly in the first place. Clearly meaning, through game design alone.

…

Yeah. Anyway. I just wanted to prove a point to myself. If someone else digs it, maybe there’s something to the point. I dunno!

9 Jan 2011 – So for anyone not yet up-to-date, I got married a week ago. And I am posting this via SMS, which is something of a revolution in itself.

24 Jan – I married a liquorice hedgehog.

24 Jan – My wife sleeps in the cheese.

27 Jan – My wife said no beans, so no beans did I get.

24 Mar – I keep noticing that I’m married. Not sure if it feels like waking suddenly or narcolepsy. Either way, it’s a reality shift.

7 Apr – My wife: “What was it? What did you hit me with? It smelled so… clean.”

13 Apr – My wife in the shower: “I-AM-A-RO-BOT-MON-STER! I-AM-A-RO-BOT-MON-STER! TAKE-ME-TO-YOUR-LEADER! AKAKAKAKAKAKAKAK!” Over and over again.

29 Apr – I’m married to a bedraggled fraggle.

9 May – Almost totally screwed up half a day of my wife’s work on her blog. Fixed it, though! Lateral code patching.

13 May – Watching Dinosaur Train with the wife. DINOSAURS! ON TRAINS! Kids have it so great.

16 May – Every time my wife leaves the house, moments later she buzzes or rings for something she’s forgotten. Then she’s back again. And again. Etc.

20 May – Me: “You really are wonderful.” My wife: “I’m thinking about when you’re dead.”

10 Jun – My wife won’t let me put turkey in my shoe.

13 Jun – Wife: “Awho, I stepped on candy.” Me: “Why’d you step on candy?” Wife: “Because I can.” Wife and me, together: “-dy.”

15 Jun – My wife is always like when the ice cream says hello.

16 Jun – Wife on extended hold with the phone company. Customer service can’t get through to customer service. Wow. This is getting amazing.

18 Jun – Ask my wife about “the three biggie pears” and their relationship with porridge.

23 Jun – My wife is sick but she’s sexy. Sicksy.

23 Jun – Was Sonic the Hedgehog especially popular with black people? My wife claims not to know.

4 Jul – My wife just admitted that she has tormented Rosemary’s Baby.

14 Jul – I just threw a fedora and totally hit my wife in the face. Score!

24 Jul – My wife has super smelly hearing.

25 Jul – I feel terrible today. Improving things is the remains of last night’s dinner. My wife made the best chicken ever, all of her own recipe.

4 Oct – Wife: “Why you laugh in my mouth for?”

11 Oct – Wife, singing in the shower to a certain Beatles single: “And when I touch you, you feel creepy inside… I can’t hide! I can’t hide!”

19 Oct – Hey, I just bought this new game console called the Wii. How novel! I’m sure it will be amazing in a few years when developers break it in. [...] Moving in a few days, so haven’t opened any games yet. Basically just set the thing up to make sure my wife has a Mii waiting for her.

26 Oct – My wife’s got so much moxie, she gave me some.

28 Oct – My wife is afflicted by psychosomatic hay.

6 Nov – Wife: “Why you always trying to scare me for, right when I’m trying to sleep and eat turkey burgers?”

13 Nov – People always stare at us on the street. Or me. Today a man in a playground craned his neck as we walked past. Didn’t try to hide it. [...] He almost fell backwards, tracking me with his head. “Do you know him?” wife asked. Very much no.

23 Nov – My wife’s job is to feed me cheese.

23 Nov – “I’m not a disaster area! A disaster zone, maybe.” -wife

25 Nov – There is a certain period in one’s life when one may dance through the living room with one’s wife, eating pie, and singing about butter.

10 Dec – My wife controls the horizontal. My wife controls the vertical.

12 Dec – Wife: “Pizza Pages, Pizza pages, open up your Pizza Pages / Come and watch Bill Cosby eat a pencil…”

24 Dec – Wife: “Are you tweeting something bad about me, twit-face?”

26 Dec – Eggs over easy on toast with cheese / That’s what my wife is gonna
have to eat (Repeat)

26 Dec – My wife asked why I was being dastardly, to which I replied, “Why not?”

26 Dec – Wife: “That’s being real-time! You can’t be real-time tweeting me!”

28 Dec – If my wife were a mollusk, she would be a scallop.

30 Dec – Tomorrow is my first anniversary as a married man. Much has happened, as quickly as time seems to escape me. There is so much more to do.

Bonus 2012 material:

1 Jan 2012 – My wife found a Nerd in her pants. Then she ate it. I think I married Liz Lemon.

12 Jan – Wife: “You’re a foot-and-mouth lizard! That’s a thing! I saw it on the
news before!”

16 Jan – My wife insists that people no longer punch each other in the nose. Is
this true?

16 Jan – Wife, angrily: “And don’t make a pun about sofas!” [long pause; then,
giggling:] “I just made a pun about sofas in my head. It was funny.”

If you’re not enriching the player’s life, you are stealing the player’s time and replacing it with emptiness. This is not only socially irresponsible; it has the side effect of burn-out. Eventually the player will notice how little he is getting from the medium, and will cease to participate.

Just assume that the player has a life that does not revolve around jumping through your hoops, and they won’t necessarily do everything you tell them to just because they’re holding a controller. If you’ve got something to say, figure out how brief and rich you can make it.

Locks and keys are the clumsiest of obstacles, and they take many forms. If it is impossible to enter a dungeon without a wand that can burn the surrounding bushes, and the wand serves little purpose other than to permit the player access, then it is little but a key. A key holds no practical value; its value is symbolic of a current lack of hindrance — and in its subtext, it speaks to the player of helplessness in the face of an arbitrary and contrived world, built to impede the player rather than to provide opportunities to explore and learn.

The items that become treasures are those that expand the player’s horizons by allowing the player to transcend the routine and inhabit the world on a higher level. They don’t unlock basic functions so much as they provide a better way of doing things. Much as a good home appliance relieves a person from the burdens of daily maintenance, Link’s recorder relieves the player from having to continually walk familiar terrain. His magic key means no more worrying about keys. His wand means no more worrying about sword beams. Add the magic book, and no more fussing with candles either.

Perhaps the greatest treasure in a recent game, Gordon Freeman’s gravity gun makes everything in the world both tactile and potentially useful.

Unlike previous Gradius games, in Gradius V losing your power-ups is a setback rather than a death sentence. All it means is that you have to be more careful. Likewise gaining power-ups means that you can relax and better appreciate the game’s nuances, but beyond that insight the player misses nothing crucial by failing or refusing to upgrade.

There is a place for locked doors, both literal and functional — but think about why you’re using them.

A game’s method is defined as the manner in which a game conducts itself — the rules, actions, and objects that comprise play, and the way that they interact. A game’s object is the overall idea that the game serves to communicate. Whether or not the designer has considered the game’s message, by the act of playing the player will receive one.

Every action is a verb, and every object is a noun. The game tells a story by the manner in which every action happens to every object. Therefore everything that you ask the player to do, however minor, is a part of the message that you are communicating to the player. Taken as a whole, the most common behaviors over the course of play define the perspective that the game communicates to the player.

Avoid all exposition. If you can’t explain an idea through pure game design, then you need to rethink what you’re saying and why.

An environmental cycle is defined as a complete refresh of the player’s surroundings, be it one screen (in a 2D side-scroller) or the area between here and the middle distance (in a 3D game). The specific measurement differs from game to game according to its pacing, format, and spatial sense.

A point of interest is defined as a new concept, or a significant elaboration on a known concept. The concepts need not all be profound; they need only expand the player’s perspective on the game’s object or method.

This principle extends to knowledge of prior game design, as well as to knowledge and experience beyond the medium. Of the two, the former is more of a fundamental problem.

What confuses me is when people complain about Cartmel’s vision for the show. They say it’s “just not Doctor Who”, as if the show had ever been static. Well, beyond the doldrums of Tom Baker’s era and the early-mid 1980s. I’m guessing that’s what they mean, but that’s not how they explain it.

Their problem, as I often hear it, is in the portrayal of McCoy’s Doctor. Suddenly the Doctor is a puppet master; his mind is all in the future rather than the present, as he winds huge schemes around everyone and everything to achieve some goal of his own. This is overstating the case, of course; although the novels go nuts with this concept, in the show McCoy’s Doctor is more of an awkward professor. He tries to plan or anticipate situations, but he only ever sees the big picture and so spends most of his time reeling from the unexpected. The result is a strange little man who always seems to know more than he should, and who rarely steps forward to explain himself.

Thing is, that characterization has always been there to some extent. There’s a great deal of the Columbo to Troughton’s and Tom Baker’s portrayals, for instance; their Doctors allow everyone around them to underestimate them wildly, to allow them the space to explore or manipulate the situation behind the scenes.

Take Troughton’s handling of Klieg, in Tomb of the Cybermen. He allows the man to rant and assert his ego, while the Doctor scurries in the background to press buttons and work his own solutions. With his understanding of the situation, the Doctor could well have asserted authority and taken control — but that’s not his style. He would rather observe, and insert himself at key moments to change the course of events.

This is actually the trait that has always attracted me to the character; you never quite know how much the Doctor knows, and the supporting characters know even less of it. All you know is that he’s the most observant person in the room, and that his brain has already extrapolated things many steps beyond what’s in front of him.

McCoy’s portrayal just seems like a pointed example of this characterization — which may be why, for me, his Doctor feels like one of the most definitive. This is also probably why it has taken so long for me to accept more authoritative portrayals like Pertwee’s and Tennant’s; they lack that subversiveness, or at least neglect it by comparison.

This may be the first time I’ve compared Tennant to Jon Pertwee. Good grief.

Anyway. Cartmel’s era feels to me like an attempt to return the show to its 1960s roots — the subversive and ambiguous protagonist, who acts more as a supporting character to the companion; the ambitious scripts that explore broad social or theoretical concepts. I believe that Cartmel has said a few times that this was his intention, and I think it shows. Take out everything from Pertwee through Colin Baker, and I think the show progresses pretty seamlessly.

Did I say that things got better? Maybe eventually, but first we need to backtrack a bit. So far we’ve been looking at character games. Some of the characters are fictional; others are based on people I knew or who I didn’t know were fictional. Whatever the origin, these games are based more on objects than subjects. They didn’t start out as theories or experiments, or attempts to express a thought or feeling though the psychology of game design. Maybe in dropping these objects into the pond I drew some subjective ripples, but in principle my methods would have fit right in at THQ.

What we’re going to talk about now is another level of objective. You will have noticed my constant references to other people’s games — mostly professional, mostly derived from the Miyamoto-fed Japanese school.

It’s normal enough for one artist to look to another for inspiration; art is a form of communication, and nothing speaks to an artist like art. It’s also normal for a novice to model his or her work on something familiar. You can’t begin to speak your mind until you know the language, and you have some idea how to fit the pieces together to express ideas. An illustrator traces to get a sense of form; a musician may spend a lifetime interpreting other people’s music before he feels comfortable writing his own.

I guess what I’m doing is justifying creative laziness. I applaud the growth of new forms, and there will be a period of grasping before a form takes shape, but I always wonder why people will take an existing recording, loop it, and add a few riffs on top. If you drew inspiration from Abba or some Motown artist, great. Build on that. Then, erase your tracks.

There can only be so many Andy Warhols, making a statement about our perceptions and expectations of art. There is a place for collage and documentary, and cultural commentary. Generally, if someone is claiming a recognizable hunk of someone else’s work as his own, to me that speaks of a character flaw. It says that the derivative artist doesn’t give a shit about the original artist, about his or her own reputation, about the integrity of either the original or the derivative art, or about the intelligence of the intended audience.

Unless it is very well signaled I don’t really buy the tribute angle, and I have little patience for pastiche. I hate it when people quote from presumed authorities to make their own points in an argument. I cannot abide organized systems of belief or thought. If you can’t find your own thing to say, in your own words, I don’t want to hear from you.

So this chapter is about my own hypocrisy. I don’t know what parts to damn and what to excuse, so I’m laying out the whole problem now. I also have problems with absolute perspectives; as strict as I may sound, I know that nothing is ever that simple. There’s the principle, then there’s pragmatism. And sometimes to embrace the principle one has to spend a while fighting it.

Take piracy, in the modern lawyered-up creative sense. Is it wrong to copy someone’s work? Maybe; why are you copying it? And what’s the result? Did it do more harm, or more good? I think that copyright should expire after fifteen years, as you can’t control an idea once it gets into the DNA of public thought — but I also think that the original author should be able to enforce attribution. Organized chaos, if you will. Evolution with footnotes.

That doesn’t stop my own guilt when I indulge (as with the borrowed images in these posts), or temper my annoyance when someone builds on my work. I guess I should just get over it.

My least shameful tributes are those where I feel I built something original out of the borrowed material, however wholly I may have borrowed it. That isn’t to say that my divergence was deliberate. How much if art is really deliberate anyway? Anything that matters is usually an accident of technique or circumstance, and anything you try to do tends to end up obvious and meaningless. Why is that? Well, think about it. If you can’t even surprise yourself, how interesting do you think your ideas really are?

Nejillian Flux was supposed to be a carbon copy of Gradius, maybe with a bit of Life Force for variety. As it happens, RSD’s Game-Maker is a poor platform for scrolling shooters. They knew it, and improvements were on the radar, but they never quite happened. So I found some workarounds. Not good workarounds, but distinctive ones.

This was an early project. I can tell you how early because of an even earlier pastiche. When I was finishing up Linear Volume, I asked my client for a title. Linear Volume, he said; I went with it. I also mentioned my next project, a scrolling shooter based on Gradius. He told me to call it Nejillian Flux. It sounded good, so again I went with it.

To this point I had designed, I think, six games — three platformers, and three adventure-RPGs. Although I completed most of them, only one of those games — A-J’s Quest — had been very successful. I figured maybe it was time to try something new.

I hit three technical problems: scrolling, map size, and power-ups. The most fundamental of those is the scrolling, or rather the lack thereof. Game-Maker only supports a strange shifting-focus scrolling, where the camera always tries to place the character sprite 1/3 of the way from the opposite edge of the direction of the character’s motion. If the character is running right, the game wants to put 1/3 of the screen to the left of the sprite and 2/3 to the right. The same principle goes for all four cardinal directions, which in a game with free movement can cause the camera to lose all reason.

There are ways to work with this trait, but for a scrolling shooter it is fatal. The two common workarounds are to point the background gravity sideways, or to adjust the character motion so that it must always move in one direction. Neither really works, but if done well the player gets the general idea.

A related problem is in the engine’s strict map dimensions: exactly 100 pixels, square. That’s 6-1/4 by 10 screens, which may be fine for an overworld map. If you’re scrolling exclusively to the right, that means in less than 7 screens you will loop back to the start. Think of Eugene Jarvis’ Defender.

My solution was to double-decker the levels, and to hide a tunnel between the two stories. The player would keep looping until he or she found the passage, from which point the level became linear until the end. An eccentric choice, but it was the best I could think of at that time.

I also ran into problems with the weapon upgrades. The engine does not allow for arbitrary character or control states, so you can’t simply pick up a weapon and use it. The only solution is to give any weapon pickups a hierarchy, and to limit their ammunition. So if you pick up a very powerful weapon, you may only have 20 shots. When you have expended those, you default to the next most powerful weapon for which you have ammo. If you want to use one of the lesser weapons, then first you have to blow through the greater ones.

Then there is the question as to what makes a tougher power-up, as Game-Maker is very black and white about power levels. If your weapon has a level of 150 and the monster is at level 100, then the weapon kills the monster. If the monster has a power of 151, then the weapon does nothing. So weak weapons are pointless, and powerful weapons are perfect. If you’re creative you can find some lateral solutions; in 1993, I was not that creative.

Game-Maker’s engine was always a point of contention and curiosity. With a little lateral thought, it was capable of many things. Its odd and often simplistic arrangement resulted in dozens of unlisted features, and encouraged creative problem solving. Its comfort zone, though, lay in top-down action adventure games. It had the inventory and the four-way scrolling of a Zelda or Crystalis, and it was much happier when one avoided things like gravity or nuanced control schemes.

There are three ways of approaching a set of limitations. You can fight them, you can work within and around them, or you can subvert them. If you fight them, generally you will lose and your work will suffer. If you subvert them, you can produce very clever tricks to wow your peers who know what you’re up against — but chances are the tricks will be glitchy, and will fail to impress anyone else. If you work within the limits, maybe the walls won’t be so obvious and your work will be able to stand on its own merits.

Link vs. Gannon was my first go at working with the engine. This was maybe two or three games before Nejillian Flux. It was clear to me that neither platformers nor RPGs worked to Game-Maker’s strengths, so I relented. If the engine was geared toward Zelda, as it appeared to be, I figured I might as well see how close it could get.

The NES Zelda games are amongst my favorite things ever; the first for the actual moment-to-moment design, and the second for its weird atmosphere and its bold deviation from the original. I loved the claustrophobic focus, but I also loved that sweeping adventure too large to record in every detail — so I combined the design and dungeons from the first game and the free-roaming world of the second. Points of interest were scattered around a huge area, broken up by fields, rivers, hills, and bridges.

I doubt I meant to finish the game, and indeed Link vs. Gannon is the first that I left incomplete. I just wanted to figure out what the engine would handle well. The frustration came early on, when I realized that I was fighting far more than I had planned.

I often think of Game-Maker, if it just had X feature then it would be complete enough and I could work with all of the other problems. When I was in high school, I really needed a better music format. At other times I needed text boxes, or more detailed control mapping, or more complex enemy logic. On reflection, I think the sorest omission is the ability to make pervasive changes to the gameworld.

Here’s what I mean by that. In Game-Maker’s engine, the character can interact with the background — change blocks, pick up objects, kill monsters, and increase abstract counters linked with things like keys and locks. If the player dies or leaves a level, all changes to that level are reset — yet all counters remain as they were. So if you have a level that contains a precious item, you can pick up the item, leave, return, and pick it up again. If you kill a boss then return, the boss is back. And so on.

For a game like Zelda, that is all about exploring, discovering precious tools, and making slow significant changes to the world, it is disconcerting when nothing the player does can stick.

There is a way around this issue, but it involves a bunch of busywork and a tangle of logical wires that are very easy to lose track of. I also didn’t hit on the solution for a very long time. If I did, then evidently I never felt it was worth the effort. And that was my ultimate decision with Link vs. Gannon; it wasn’t worth the energy to figure out how to make it work, or to draw custom background tiles, or to put real work into the level design. I filed the game away, and for a while I continued with my own projects.

Over the years, the counter-and-flag issue kept raising its head. If I tried to do something complex, it was the lack of flags. If I tried to do something simple, it was the counters that wouldn’t reset. One of my more successful games, curiously enough, was a very hard Pac-Man clone. I asked that anyone who enjoyed the game simply send me a postcard, saying “I like Pac!” I got maybe half a dozen cards over the years. Nejillian Flux also traveled a bit. For a while it seemed I couldn’t browse a shovelware CD or Russian shareware site without stumbling over the game.

The problems with Pac were twofold. First, there was no way to contrive it so that power pellets made the character immune to the enemies’ touch. I got around that by turning the pellets into projectiles that the character could spit out. More worrisome is that if the player died before eating all the dots, the counter would carry over but the background would not. In retrospect I’m sure I could have contrived a way to drain the counter at the start of a new life, but the solution I found was to give the player only a single life. One life, one hit point. To reach the end, you have to play a perfect game. Not the most elegant solution.

If it wasn’t the flags and counters, it was a lack of arbitrary character logic. Pac can’t eat ghosts, and Mario can’t stomp enemies. For kicks, one of my later projects involved transcribing the background tiles from Super Mario Bros. and the sprites from Super Mario 3, almost pixel for pixel out of a magazine, in attempt to find some way around the stomping issue.

Even more so than Link vs. Gannon, Jario! is barely a game. I didn’t bother to animate the sprites or design a real level; my whole concern was with trying to force an issue on which the engine wouldn’t bend. It was just as well; I never much liked Mario anyway.

So most of my tributes were a bust. That can be a problem when you have a fixed idea of what you want to do. When you follow the tides of intuition, things tend to just work. You take what comes and you look for something unusual to build on. When you’ve a specific goal and method in mind, anything can trip you up — and since that’s not where your head is you won’t be prepared to roll with the problems and compromise. As time went on I softened in my preconceptions as to what I wanted from a game, as to what a game was, and as to how to achieve that.

About thirteen years after my last Game-Maker project, I unearthed the software as part of a series for an indie game blog. I was surprised how good the design tools still were. If anything, they were more fun to use than most of the games they produced — clear, intuitive, instantly rewarding. I knew the engine’s limits, and I was curious how well it would serve to make a contemporary indie game. In my articles I had mentioned the engine’s strengths; as a test, I chose to replicate The Legend of Zelda as exactly as possible.

I ripped the original sprites and background tiles, then enlarged them by 25% in Photoshop to fit Game-Maker’s standard. It turned out that despite the difference in scale one Game-Maker screen had the same number of tiles as an NES screen — so I recreated the maps as closely as I could, block by block. I found tricks to allow Link to burn bushes and touch an Armos to bring it to life (and maybe find a secret passage). I gave the Octorocks complex behaviors and allowed the Leevers to burrow, immune to the player’s protests.

The only real problem remaining with Overworld was the counter/flag issue. I used a web of level nodes to ensure that Link would only find the wooden sword the first time into the cave, but I knew that after just a few choices the game would soon get much too complex to keep track of that way.

I stopped after filling the world map; I figured I made my point. The dimensions are different from the original Zelda overworld — taller, narrower, and a little smaller overall — so I made do, compressing some locations and expanding or moving others. I figured if I ever continued with the game I could split the overworld across two maps; maybe connect them with bridges across a river.

Although the game was never a serious effort, and indeed took no more than a few hours from me, my mind began to swim with the new techniques I found while bending and cajoling RSD’s engine — the screen-by-screen level design; the complex monster behaviors; the constrained color palette; multi-stage attacks; new monster birthing techniques; and in particular, using monster counter-buffers to alter the level geometry. Those techniques, and their very buggy repercussions, would become the basis for Builder, my first new Game-Maker game in half a lifetime.

Builder was a web of secrets, accessible only to a player who surrendered to and explored the engine’s glitches. A big part of the design involved ensuring that the game’s secrets remained secret until the player hit the right triggers, which on the lowest level I controlled with level nodes and paths. Finally a Game-Maker game responded meaningfully to the player’s actions, and in the most profound sense it did it behind the scenes.

Between these new tricks and my success with Builder, I was ripe with enthusiasm. It had been ages since I had worked on any game, never mind this old engine. I had the notion that I would pull out all my old unfinished Game-Maker games (nine, including Overworld) and wrap them up with style. I would put a cap on that whole thread of my life. No one would ever play them or care, but I would feel a sense of closure.

After perusing then discarding the obvious candidates (The Return of A-J, Sign of the Hedgehog 2) I turned to the best of my tributes, one that had lain neglected since 1994. Rōdïp was the unripe fruit of a competition with another Game-Maker user, a fellow whom I had met through a long distance dial-up board. Both he and I set about designing Blaster Master tributes; his was nearly as literal as Overworld, and my game took on a life of its own.

The vehicle looked similar to the one in Blaster Master, and on paper it had similar abilities — and the background tiles in the first level were similar to the tiles in one room of Blaster Master‘s final level. My vehicle controlled very differently, though — indeed better than nearly any pre-Builder character. The moves and attacks all had their own interesting flavor. The monsters were original and memorable. The level design needed work, but it involved some big, brave ideas. The game had spirit. I wondered why I ever put the game aside; it wasn’t much, but it was good.

It was also fully planned. Maybe I’d just had an Alfred Hitchcock moment and grown bored the moment I knew how the game would pan out. I had blocked the whole thing out — all of the levels, all of the bosses, the environments, the upgrade sequence, and the web connecting it all. All the game lacked was content and polish. So, slowly I added content and I polished it. Maybe I’m still doing it. I haven’t touched the game in months. Right now it just needs a final level, a transition level, and five or six bosses. I also need to complete a water level. I’d say it’s 80% done. I think I’ve just had other things on my mind.

The real trick to Rōdïp is its structure. It’s a free-roaming action-adventure; you beat bosses, earn upgrades, and revisit old areas to climb that wall or destroy that barrier with your new powers. This means affecting your environment, which means setting flags, which Game-Maker won’t abide without a headache.

Well, I survived the headache. The game has only a few items to account and maybe 18 unique areas, but it needs 80 nodes to track the changes and who knows how many links to hold it all together. If I weren’t intent on copying someone else’s idea of a game structure, I wouldn’t have bothered — but I did, and it works.

I’m building up to a point here. Hang with me.

Continuity notes:

After Nejillian Flux, The next game I designed was Explorer Jacko — you remember, the insertion game with all of the Star Control and Trek references. The ship that Jacko steals, early on? Why, the Nejillian Flux of course.

Also, some of the elements in Link vs. Gannon would later be incorporated into Linear Volume and Explorer Jacko. This is why in effect you will see Tektites bouncing around the fields of Motavia.

The thing is, I find his work tedious and smotheringly middle-class. True, he did have more of his own to say than Eric Saward (who was in charge during the early ’80s). And when he hid or diverged from his references, I rather like the results. The Deadly Assassin is probably his most progressive set of scripts. Although people talk up the Manchurian Candidate parallels, it has basically nothing to do with that story and it brings the show somewhere it had never been before. The closest that it’s come since is probably “The Waters of Mars”, which again is one of the best stories of its era.

Doctor Who has always had an aspirational middle-class sensibility, and since its very first episode always has been a jumble of cultural and genre references — particularly Welles and Verne. At its best, though, the pastiche has been subtle and practical. It’s not like The Daleks lingers around, rubbing your nose into parallels with The Time Machine; it uses the basic framework of that story to explore some fresh ideas and move the show’s concept forward. The first few years of the show (and indeed the last few) make great pains to be socially and culturally progressive. The show is aspirational, but generally toward new ideas and complex values (rather than security and leisure). If that means borrowing a few props from the cultural vault, then fair enough.

With Robert Holmes, though, the middle-class values become stifling and the pastiche becomes shameless. That middlebrow sense of entitlement and smugness shows far more than normal, and it rather puts me off.

Under Holmes, there’s always a false sense of superiority lurking just beneath the show’s skin. In every story there has to be a comedy lower-class or regional character (Milo Clancey, the Spearhead poacher, Vorg and Shirna) or lazy stereotype (Talons). Similarly, to me all of the overt pastiche hints at a false erudition; you spot what the show is referencing (Frankenstein! The Thing from Another World! Sherlock Holmes!), which makes you feel clever and superior even though neither you nor the writer has done anything to warrant the impression. It’s just a pat on the head for being of the right demographic. And then there’s the whole jolly imperial tone to the proceedings, with the Doctor as the cultured white man who knows everything — just, ick.

Again, it’s better than the creativity vacuum of Saward’s stewardship. At least Holmes was a confident and competent writer. His work just makes me feel icky. Combine it with Tom Baker’s attention-hog performance, and my mind begins to glaze over.

My sister moved out when I was seven. For a few years after, her room lay dormant and so became sort of a playroom. It was always my assumption that I would inherit it as my bedroom, to replace the ten-by-five closet that was mine from birth through high school. That never happened. Still, for a couple of years it was a nice retreat. I would play NES games and watch TV, or — as the room was the furthest point from the rest of the house — just escape there from the noise and drama.

One evening in that room I was flipping through the basic cable package, and paused on a curious movie. In the film, a man was walking down a creepy hallway. He entered a bathroom; the sink, the tub, the toilet — all were filled with blood. He spotted something in the toilet, and bent down to get a closer look. A hand erupted from the toilet, and began to pull him in.

Cut back to the hall. A woman crept along, calling the man’s name. She entered the bathroom, and it was vacant. All was clean. As she spun to exit, she bumped into the man’s chest — except there was something wrong with him. He was stiff; robotic.

“I love you,” the woman cried. “I love every part of you!”

The man barely looked at her. “Even the mole on my arm?” His voice carried no emotion.

“Yes,” the woman said. “Even the mole on your arm.” Then she paused. “What mole on your — ”

At that point something began to burst from the man’s arm, and I changed the channel.

That scene stuck in my head for over two decades. I described it to some grade school friends, and it became a point of reference for any discussion of haunted houses or other scary situations. I often saw parallels in pop culture — The Amityville Horror, Namco’s Splatterhouse. In college I asked a few people about the film. They shrugged, and suggested the 1986 film House. That wasn’t it.

A few weeks ago I found the movie: a 1984 horror satire called Bloodbath At The House Of Death. It’s an odd British movie, featuring Vincent Price in ultra camp mode. When I watch the scene now, the humor is obvious — if weak. The thing that emerged from the man’s arm was, in fact, a mole — you know, the small burrowing mammal. It’s a pun, you see. Ha.

I have a couple of other memories that I would like to identify. One is an even earlier TV memory, from when my sister was still home — so it must have been from the first half of the ’80s. My parents had one of those CRTs in an enormous wooden cabinet. You’d pull the knob, and the tube would give off a “Whom!” Then you would have to wait a few minutes for the set to warm up. This was back when nobody had cable, so every time my sister invited over one of her boyfriends I had to explain to him how the cable box worked. It was one of those old mechanical switchboxes, with the fake woodgrain.

It was late at night, and the lights in the living room were low. I hadn’t chosen the station; I had simply wandered into the room. On the TV, a woman was sitting in the passenger seat of a parked car. Her window was down. I think she was waiting for the driver to return. Suddenly the head of a hobby horse appeared in her window. In a bad Peter Lorre impression, a man asked her, “Want a head?!” At that point the screen froze, and a message appeared, advising viewers to always roll up their car windows.

A moment later the camera was in a women’s locker room. As happens in movies from that era, the women were running around naked, showering with each other. The perspective was of an intruder lurking through the scene, as yet unnoticed. As for what happened, I don’t know. It was too intense; I left the room.

What on Earth am I remembering, here? It comes back to me more frequently than one would imagine. It’s hard for me to look at a rocking horse without hearing that voice.

The other memory is more innocuous; it’s of a children’s book, of which I can find no record or mention. It was a picture book, with the pictures split horizontally. If you were to open the book in front of you, all of the pictures on a side would line up such that you could flip any half of a page and combine it with the other half of any other page. On the left were pictures of swans, of a scared child in a four-poster bed, of a train going over a bridge at night, and of cream pouring into a bowl — amongst many other paintings. On the right was a cluster of trees, a bearded man licking a fistful of lollipops, and other pictures that escape me.

By flipping the pages, you could make the child afraid of his headposts, all of which had the heads of live swans — or you could have a giant licking a cluster of lollipop trees. On the front cover, swans melted into a white goo.

I loved this book, and took every opportunity to read it in my grade school library. I am confused that it is so hard to track down, as it registers in my mind as a solid classic. If anyone can help with this, I would appreciate it.

So. There you go. If I finish the lyrics, I may post them. Or not!