metroid

SR388: A Spelunker’s Nightmare

  • Reading time:8 mins read

[ The following post is assembled from fragments of discussion from July 2014, October 2014, July 2016, and August 2017. ]

Long before that AM2R thing, which is exactly what a cynical observer would predict from a fan remake, I’ve often rambled about ways to do a sensitive update of Metroid II, that (unlike AM2R) honors the original game’s tone and thematic material and develops it even further, makes the game even more awkward and upsetting to play:

I still think the best way to tackle a remake is to consider the affect of the original, and try to recreate it. The original is claustrophobic, in part due to feeling lost — sameness, lack of a map — in part to the screen.

So, make light a scarce quantity. The world would be desaturated and have a big focus on environmental light sources — lava, certain bioluminescent plants or animals, Chozo technology. At times it’s hard to see anything. Sort of a Silent Hill aspect.

Samus’s suit may project a slight glow around her, reflecting on things. Generally the glow would extend about as far as the boundaries of the GB screen. Occasionally more or less. The glow from Samus’ suit would give things a sort of monotone hue. Maybe greenish, from her visor.

If you wanted to expand on the game, you could give her various kinds of light beam. Or make her suit glitch out. Maybe special heat and X-ray visors would be needed to navigate certain areas. Glitchily. It would be all grainy and prone to error. Make it go totally dark, for a scripted segment here or there, in the spirit of those segments where you have to blindly fumble around in ball form. Maybe you have to navigate by noise and touch. Maybe a sort of a sonar, so you can hear when the Metroids are getting close.

There might be an attempt at a map, but it doesn’t work right. Glitchy. Staticky. Suggests non-Euclidean space. Some key parts of the interior may not make any sort of euclidean geometric sense. They kind of don’t, already.

This would also play up some of the Zelda-style risk-and-reward progress limitation. You CAN go down there, but… should you?

Also see: Dragon Warrior, Phantasy Star II, Lost in Blue.

But, that’s if I were pressed to reinterpret the game. Insofar as its native form on the Game Boy, Metroid II is basically perfect. The worst I can say is that the control can get a little mushy at times. Speed up Samus’ movement by 125%, maybe tighten collision and response time. Little stuff like that.

Something I really dig about Metroid II is that as designed, it wouldn’t really make as much sense on another console. If you play through as an adult, with a modicum of design literacy in hand, it soon becomes clear to what extent the game actively uses its technical and conceptual limitations to say its own thing.

Unlike Super Metroid the world that it draws doesn’t feel like a playground set up for your benefit. It’s just there. If it’s confusing, then it would be, wouldn’t it. You’re invading this space that was never meant for a thing like you.

The game’s affect is just so subjective.The way the Spider Ball is used nails down how unfriendly the space is. This is a space where we really shouldn’t be, and it’s just by the skin of this overpowered miraculous thing that it works.

When you get to the cramped corridor forcing you to draw a visual parallel between Samus in ball form and the unhatched Metroid egg, there’s not a lot of space left (as it were) to question how expressive the design is meant to be.

It’s supposed to be claustrophobic. It’s meant to be disorienting and upsetting. You’re supposed to lose your way and freak out, the way you probably would in reality if you were dropped into an unmapped hole in the ground on an alien world. Or even ours. Even if mapped. It’s meant to be distressing, in no small part because you shouldn’t be there. The mission is wrong. You are playing the bad guy.

That’s not reading into it. In its closing moments the game tells you how you messed up, and Fusion‘s plot is based on this revelation. (Another irritating thing about Super Metroid is how it not only glosses over this failing; it compounds it. But Fusion gets the story back.) Fusion also gets the claustrophobia and tension back, in a shifted form, where Super throws them out in favor of Whee Shiny Perfect Action.

As far as how Metroid II uses the resources it has, the only thing I would treat differently is the lava. To quote one of many earlier discussions on the topic,

That goddamned lava. What is that? Of all the ways to limit progress. I mean… I can make up some silly theories that kind of work. But how arbitrary is that? At least it’s an apparent phenomenon of the gameworld, even if it’s triggered by discrete player-dependent flags.

Instead of progress clearly resulting from the player’s action it’s just, “What the hell was that rumble? Oh… there’s… a route here. Was it here before? I don’t think so.” Granted, it doesn’t affect me when I’m playing. It’s just in retrospect that it’s so incredibly clumsy and weird.

Of course the game is pretty linear, and it can’t let you miss a Metroid. If there were some narrative rationalization, maybe that would be enough. But then you’re in danger of needless exposition.

On reflection, I would add a horrible piercing screech after the extermination of each set of Metroids and before the earthquake and lava drain. Each time, as Samus strayed deeper into the caverns, the screech would get louder and longer, while the screen would shake with ramping violence. Toward the end, it basically would peak all of the sound output and leave the game a nauseating shaky-cam mess for minutes at a time.

This would serve many purposes.

  • It would make the game more disorienting and upsetting to play.
  • It would introduce the Queen early as Samus’s opponent.
  • It would establish the Queen’s growing pain and anger.
  • It would help to underline that maybe Samus isn’t quite doing the right thing here.
  • And it would resolve the structural weirdness around the lava, which as it stands is a VERY CONVENIENT and unexplained progress limiter.

All of this would be totally doable on the Game Boy. Pretty easy, even, in this engine. Everything’s already set up, pretty much. Just add a screech that gets louder and longer each time, and make the screen rumble longer and more violent each time. That’s all! But, it would make such a big difference to the game’s narrative flow, logical consistency, and thematic unity.

Would this change be on-the-nose, in terms of the game’s themes? Maybe. But done well, it wouldn’t be clear what was happening at first. It’d just add a layer of “huh?”, growing to “oh hell.”

Right now there’s little feedback to completing each wave, and the mild rumble has little impact, the lava drain nothing like an explanation. This would add at least a sense of intentionality to the design, which as designed leaves room for interpretation, yes, but also feels sloppy.

Significantly, all of the scream’s and the rumble’ thematic resonance becomes clear only in retrospect. You get ramping uncomfortable chaos as you burrow in, but aside from feeling increasingly intimidated, it’s only clear what’s happening when you finally meet the Queen, which snaps it all into focus.

Currently there is no clear moment of epiphany, and the Queen’s role consists of sitting there, unseen, until you burst in and kill her. The epiphany comes with the egg, which is great. Really great, actually. But its significance would be enhanced, coming out of the catharsis of that encounter with the thing that had been expressing pain the whole time. “Oh hell,” you’d think, “so that’s what has been happening all along. What… does all of this mean? What have I done?” And then, a baby Metroid imprints on you.

You’re still free to interpret however you like, but this gives a touch of emotional feedback and clarity to undermine any sense of bravado. And all it is is a screech and a more violent screen shake. That’s all it takes to snap it all into focus.

The Return of Samus, But Hold the Uterus

  • Reading time:8 mins read

As with many recent posts, this isn’t going to go in deep; I’m retreading a Twitter rant/discussion, with a bit of framing information so that it makes sense as a block of prose.

So there’s this Metroid II remake project that just finished. I’ve seen progress before, and dismissed it on the basis that it seemed to miss the point of the original almost entirely. It looked like the idea behind the project was that Metroid II was the “bad” game in the series, or at least the one that didn’t match the others, and that for anyone to enjoy the game it ought to be brought up to the standard of Super Metroid or Zero Mission (a remake of the first Metroid, made to look and play more like Super Metroid).

This is… kind of an offensive way of thinking, no matter what subject we’re talking about; that the nail that sticks up has to be knocked down, that the strange voices have to conform, that everything needs to be of a sameness. That the game in question is actually one of my personal favorites, one of the most expressive and artistic games that Nintendo has ever published, makes the project all the more irritating.

What it looked like they were doing was stripping out all of the atmosphere, the tension, the thematic intensity that made the game worth playing in the first place, under the misapprehension that all of this was a flaw because it made the game strange and difficult to play. Every game should play like Super Metroid, especially another Metroid game — and the first game has already been “fixed” to match, so that just leaves the one everyone hates. Let’s try to change their minds by turning it into another bouncy chapter of the Samus Zappy Puzzle Room Adventure.

So — and here’s where the tweet storm starts, I relented and I played it. A little of it, anyway. It really is very well-made, as fundamentally misguided as it may be. That said, I tuned out when it started to insert random puzzles.

Because it absolutely has to have the fucking shinespark, I guess (a convoluted ability introduced in Super Metroid that fans have taken, er, a shine to), we now have a charge beam as the second pick-up — which totally changes the focus of the narrative. Originally, you got the bomb, and then the Spider-Ball, because this is of fundamental importance. It’s pretty much what the whole game is about.

Now, the Spider-Ball comes almost incidentally, in an afterthought chamber after the big reveal of the charge beam and lots of distracting puzzles that take away from the significance of the event.

The charge beam is just one of many features from later Metroid games retrospectively crammed into here for no reason other than that people liked them. The idea being that game design is a constant march of progress, and this game was dated — so let’s incorporate all of our modern concessions. Let’s let the player grab ledges! Does it fit what the game is out to accomplish? Don’t understand the question; why wouldn’t we put it in?

Now. I haven’t played too far yet, but on the basis of what I’ve played… for all of this laboring the game with later concepts that it doesn’t need, I bet they missed a thing. I can’t verify if it’s in there, but it seems unimaginable to me to revisit Metroid II now and not reference the X parasite.

The X parasite was introduced in the fourth Metroid Game, Metroid Fusion. That game revealed that the player did a very bad thing back in Metroid II, by wiping out all the Metroids. As it turned out, over the course of that game Samus totally unbalanced the ecosystem, allowing a much worse threat to take hold. As that game began, Samus even paid for the mistake with… not her life, exactly, but her being. To save her from the X parasite, she had to be infused with Metroid DNA. Her old armor had to be physically cut away. Basically, she would never be the same again.

So if I were remaking Metroid II, you can bet I’d keep this development in mind. You couldn’t make a big deal about it, but for people who knew what they were looking at, some foreshadowing would be obvious. Considering that these guys are basically upgrading Metroid II to play like Fusion (by way of Zero Mission), you’d think they’d pay attention to the game’s greater narrative significance. And yet, something tells me the thematic development is going to be pretty low here. In messing with the flow leading up to the Spider-Ball, they’ve already diluted the first major beat.

The whole game is supposed to be womblike. The Spider-Ball and final Metroid egg (which the player first rolls past in ball form, emphasizing a similarity between Samus and the egg — and then which hatches in the game’s final moments, leaving one last Metroid alive and imprinted on Samus as its mother) just being obvious facets of that. This being the game where Samus finds her compassion and becomes a “mother” is not a coincidence. The womblike way you hold the game, the claustrophobic display, the dark, the atmospheric soundtrack.

I mean, the whole story is about the Metroid queen and her babies, about hatching. You spend most of the game in ball form. You can keep picking away; the metaphor extends as far as you want it to.

Here, they’ve basically stripped the progesterone out of the game and turned it into a dur-dur zappy puzzle adventure. So, no, I don’t think that thematic resonance is high on the list of concerns. But if you were to go the sensitive route, and do a remake that emphasized and further explored the game’s original themes, then having that retrospective concern about genocide and ecological destruction and unforeseen consequences would make the discussion even deeper. It’s not the immediate point of the adventure, and it can’t be, but seeding in the occasional overt hint would be nice.

Imagine a version of Metroid with the building suggestion that You Are Fucking This Up, that you shouldn’t be doing this, that this is wrong. That would be welcome. Shadow of the Colossus was 12 years ago now. You know what came out 13 years before Shadow of the Colossus? Metroid II. You know how long ago Zero Mission came out? Also twelve years ago. Some fucking selective education in this system here.

Game design isn’t an objective thing, and there is no such thing as progress except in our growing understanding of how design mechanics can be used to express ideas. Game design means nothing in and of itself, and its application as an intellectual exercise or a means to entertainment only makes the most facile use of the potential for material betterment available to us through forty years of study and (often ineffectual) experimentation.

Ultimately, though, this remake is just one take on an existing story. It won’t supplant the original. The mentality guiding the remake is troublesome, but it is on its way out. Other perspectives are available, and many enlightened ones have made themselves heard over the last decade or so.

Though there’s no real need to revisit Metroid II, I can see an advantage to calling back to its affect — on what the game actually does, artistically; what it serves to communicate. We have the tools now to convey this all more clearly. Any such emphasis would help to underline the greatness in the original work, to make it easier to appreciate. In the process, there’s also a bunch to learn for future work.

So, here’s an idea. What about a game jam? How about a bunch of voices get together to trade alternative readings of Metroid II. Give their own concerted personal interpretations, emphasizing their own themes. Draw on the contrast between experiences.

That’s probably the way forward. Despite what this remake would serve to insist, there’s no one truth to be had. There are no Platonic forms. Our experiences are what make us what we are, and in the end that’s all that we have to say for our lives. So, we might as well respect our individual experiences for what we are. That’s the only way we’ll ever grow, ever achieve something great as a people — by acknowledging the limits of our own two eyes in our own skulls. If we want to expand our views, we need to pool our resources. Every perspective we accept makes us richer, makes us better, makes us wiser, makes us more kind.

All of which videogames could use.

Crackles in the Dark

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Another excised bit that I might as well post here. Unsure if I’ve blogged about this before, though I’ve certainly mentioned it to everyone under the sun. So here it is for posterity.

*   *   *

Imagine a proper remake of Metroid II that focuses on the confusion and nervousness of being stuck down a dark, claustrophobic hole where everything looks the same and you can’t see more than a couple of yards in any direction. That’s the way the Game Boy game plays, and that’s why it has always felt the most emotionally authentic game in the series. It’s the limitations of the hardware that lend the game its power. Fan remakes always focus on making the game exactly like Super Metroid except with different levels.

The Playlist / Those Tenuous Twos

  • Reading time:23 mins read

by [name redacted]

You may have read the first part of this column in the December 2009 Play Magazine. It was intended as a single article, and the start of a whole series of such lists. In the event, I was asked (due to my incorrigible verbosity) to break the article into three pieces; only the first found its way to print. Here is the column in full.

Used to be, when a game was successful enough to demand a sequel, the design team would do its best to avoid repeating itself. Though I’m sure they mostly wanted to keep their job interesting, the practical effect was that if the games were different, they would both remain relevant. In an arcade, Donkey Kong Jr. could stand handsomely by its father, each shilling for its own share of the coin. You might call them companion pieces, rather than updates or replacements.

When home consoles hit, design teams were even more modest, and were generally left to do their own thing. So starting on the NES, you will see a certain trend: successful game spawns weird, only tenuously related sequel; fans of the original scratch their heads; a greatly expanded dev team releases a third game, which is basically just the first again, on steroids; fans think it’s the best thing ever, because it’s exactly the same, except better! And to hell with that weird second chapter.

Thing is… usually the second game is the most interesting you’ll ever see.

The Process

  • Reading time:9 mins read

Following some earlier points, a forum I frequent saw some discussion on the apparent deification of the Doctor over the last few series of Doctor Who. Someone strongly objected to what he saw as Davies’ “all-powerful, all-knowing, ‘he’s a Time Lord, he can do anything’ approach to the Doctor”. Thing is, that’s not really what’s going on.

Generally Davies tries to undermine that concept, and show that it’s just bravado. Both in and out of the fiction, that myth is just the way that people perceive him, and the image he tries to project.

There’s a long discussion of this on one of the Moffat commentaries, amongst Davies, Tennant, and Moffat himself. They talk about how, for all of the facade he puts on, all the mythology that springs up around him, some of which he encourages, there’s nothing really special about the Doctor. His only real asset is that he can (usually) talk his way into anything.

“He’s almost a charlatan,” Moffat said, “in a good way. He poses as this god-like figure, but he’s just a bloke under there.”

Man and Myth

So much of the new series is about people’s perceptions of the Doctor, counterposed with the reality of the Doctor. This is precisely what “The Girl in the Fireplace” is about. Look at the way Reinette mythologized the Doctor in her own mind, and turned him into this huge figure from her childhood, a man of magic and awe. And there he was, just bumbling around, doing his thing as best as he could. Occasionally showing off. Occasionally acting like a complete ass.

And we, as adult viewers, see both sides. We know that the Doctor is just this guy, doing the best he can, yet we also know him as a figure of myth and legend who brings us monsters and death, because that’s what he chases and that’s what we tune in for — but then he does his best to put it right, and usually succeeds.

It’s not that he’s innately special; he just operates on a different plane from what most people see as normal life. Specifically, he lives the life of the protagonist to a long-running TV fantasy adventure. In that, he sees things that most people don’t see, and does things that most people don’t do. And to be credulous and put ourselves in the weekly companion role, that allows him to introduce us to fear and wonder, and just maybe expand our perspectives, with the assurance that everything will be all right in the end. Roughly. Usually.

So basically the new series is just being postmodern, and aware of itself as a modern myth. And it toys with that. (See “Love & Monsters”, that Clive guy in “Rose”.) Granted, in execution it’s gotten a bit lazy of late… But going by the commentary, everyone still seems to be working on the same wavelength they were in 2005.

Jesus Guises

Of course, “Forest of the Dead” plays a lot with the notion of an all-powerful Doctor, from River Song’s tale of the man Tennant becomes to his apparently new ability to enter the TARDIS by snapping his fingers. As far as River Song is concerned, though, that’s her mythologizing him again. It’s just her own personal impression of the man. Assuming she’s referring to a particular event, and knowing how the Doctor does things, you can imagine the sort of circumstance in which a whole army would run from him. As much as she talks it up, the actual event was probably some bizarre and desperate slight of hand on the Doctor’s part. Yet it sounds impressive if you don’t know the details! As things do.

Everyone believes in the Wizard of Oz, but he’s just a schmuck behind a curtain.

The snap is a little different. I halfway expected that to be revealed as Donna opening the door for him, but no. Then again, you know. TARDIS. It likes him. If anything is truly special, it’s his box. With a little thought, given the Doctor’s bond with the TARDIS, the snapping really isn’t that remarkable. It’s a bit of a parlor trick, really. Consider that Rose flew the thing just by staring into its console and wishing.

Then there’s that ridiculous floaty denoument from last year, which a lot of people point to. That’s not a good example either. It really, really wasn’t executed well, but that’s supposed to be about the power of humanity and hope and faith (to contrast with the Master’s message of despair), with the Doctor as just a focal point of all of those emotions. It’s only in encouraging everyone to believe in him, in becoming a legend, that he gained his power — which is sort of the concept I’ve been talking about, except made clumsily explicit and practical.

Bibliocranium

The encyclopedic knowledge business is getting tiresome, however. “Silence in the Library” is probably the worst offender yet, on this front. As “Midnight” shows, often it’s dramatically better not to have a clue what you’re facing.

The problem, as I see it, in the Doctor already knowing what he’s facing most of the time is that it removes a sense of discovery and danger and wonder from the proceedings, and all the emotions and ideas those might conjure up, and skips right to the business of solving things — a process that the new series (rightly) considers so obligatory as to use all of these shortcuts (sonic, psychic paper) to speed it along.

It’s meaningless to hear someone name something fictional, then watch him fiddle together some random fictional nonsense to defeat it. What really gets the head and heart going is something like The Empty Child, where — although there are hints along the way, and the Doctor may have more or less figured it out by halfway through episode two — the threat largely remains undefined until the end of the story, leaving the protagonists to react the best they can to their immediate circumstances.

Which isn’t to say that every story need be a mystery; it’s just that having bottomless resources is boring, especially when all you’re conjuring up and babbling about is fictional fact. Show, don’t tell! If the Doctor has seen it all before and can defuse any situation by pulling random convenient facts out of his hat, that basically tells us that what is happening right now doesn’t actually matter; that the show is just a sequence of doors and keys, and the Doctor already has most of the keys on file. So why are we watching it?

Keys are for Doors; Heads are for Thinking

You can do a certain amount of this with a smirk and call it postmodern, but you have to be deliberate and do it well — as in “Rose” or “Aliens of London”. “Doomsday” treads a bit close, but gets away with it on the basis of sheer chutzpah. Lately, I think the handwaving has just become a smug excuse.

It’s a similar feeling to what I get with post-NES era Nintendo games — Zelda, Mario, Metroid. It’s all about hunting for the correct key to pass the appropriate tile, and moving on to the next section. Interpretation, picking away at the cracks, the sense of endless possibility you get in something like the original Zelda or Metroid — all gone, in the face of cold, arbitrary mechanics. Which ties into the whole modern fallacy of the Videogame, that assumes that doing things, simply pressing buttons, is and should be rewarding in and of itself.

Mind, this isn’t a crippling problem with the show — yet. As I said, though, it is getting a bit tiresome. And I think this year in particular, it’s starting to undermine the storytelling. As with the dismissal of killer shadows as “Vashta Nerada — the piranhas of the air!” God, what’s more interesting: shadows that can KILL you, or some kind of gestalt entity with a pretentious name, that the Doctor conveniently knows how to detect and whose canned history he can spin off at a drop of his bottomless hat?

Finding and Doing

So basically, yeah. I see the things that people are complaining about. I just think the explanation is a bit off. The Doctor isn’t particularly powerful; he’s just arrogant. The sonic screwdriver and psychic paper and occasional ironic doodad like anti-plastic work in the favor of efficient storytelling. Take away his ability to quickly solve problems and the story will become cluttered with meaningless procedure.

Take away his ability to quickly identify problems, though, and stories may become far richer. Allow him to dismiss any scenario by identifying it off the bat, and unless the writer really knows what he’s doing, the entire story is in danger of collapsing into meaningless procedure.

I’m reminded of an old review of the Dreamcast version of Ecco the Dolphin (narrated by Tom Baker, don’t you know). It’s a beautiful, atmospheric game with a clever story by David Brin. I’ve described it more than once as an underwater Shenmue. The problem is that it’s just about imposible to play. You can know exactly what you have to do (and it’s usually not that tricky to figure out), and still you need to fight with the game for half an hour, trying and dying and trying and dying and waiting for the game to reload each time, to get through a simple hazard.

I think it was an IGN review that praised the game’s difficulty, saying it was the perfect balance — you always know what you need to do, and the challenge just comes in doing it!

… What? Just, what? I mean, granted, IGN. These guys probably give extra points to a game that comes in a bigger box because it looks more impressive on the shelf. But what?!

Meaning comes from extended and nuanced exploration of a topic. Yet you have to balance the reward of any insight against the frustration involved in realizing it. You don’t want to labor too much in the exploration or in the solution; smack your hand too long on anything, and you will lose grip on the threads you’re grasping, along with any sense of perspective you might have been developing. What you want is to cover as much ground and see as many sides of the issue as you can, collecting strands and weaving them together until you’ve completed the picture as well as you may.

In all things, logic should be always a method; not an impediment, not an answer. When process becomes a barrier to development, or is mistaken for development itself, there is an inherent flaw in the system.

The Remake of Samus

  • Reading time:4 mins read

Someone put a lot of effort into addressing the common complaint that the entire Metroid series isn’t exactly like Super Metroid, with different maps.

You know what a Metroid II remake would really need? Complex lighting. And lack thereof.

Lack of ambient lighting, a lot of the time. You’d get some from lava, from certain bioluminescent materials, and whatnot. Maybe some areas would be brightly lit. Mostly, though, and at times exclusively, you’d be relying on a certain tapering bubble of light around Samus. Outside of that you’d get a vague hint of shapes and motion. This would also give the game a somewhat monochrome appearance.

Maybe the more injured Samus is, the smaller the window or the dimmer the light, or the more flickery.

Heck, maybe phaser shots would set things on fire, creating light and attracting/distracting certain monsters.

Maybe, instead of a map, a way of marking the terrain. So you’d know if you’d been somewhere. Like, if the spider ball were to leave a faint residue behind…

Shepard: You could even have upgrades that enhance how much light Samus gives off, as an extra bonus.
Like maybe your gun shots are a little more sparkly now.

Me: I can see an argument for adding the charge shot.
Just hold the charge to light the room, pretty much.

Shepard: Try to tune it so that Samus’s ambient light increases as the environmental light decreases.
So at the beginning you’ve got all these fungi and lava pits and glowbugs.
And by the end it’s just… a dead pit.
Maybe the occasional nigh-dead Chozo lamp.

Me: I like how a lot of the natural lighting will be a deep, threatening red.
From all the lava.

Shepard: Mmm.

Me: A lot of the game, where there’s color, it will seem tinted.
Oh heck. And light would generally just show the surface of things. So outside a certain number of pixels (one “block” or so), walls would be flat black.

Shepard: Yeah.

Me: A narrow, well-lit corridor would still leave half the screen dark.
Creating a sort of letterboxed, managed feeling to the space.

Shepard: I wonder how that would look if you had the rare, fully-lit-even-penetrating-the-tiles room, for Chozo Artifact rooms.
I get the feeling players would want to just chill out in those rooms.

Me: That would seem comparably tranquil, wouldn’t it. especially if the light were to have a sort of ethereal, light blue cast to it.

Me: I want to play this now.
Heck, this sounds closer to what Metroid should be doing in general.

Shepard: It is warm inside the power suit.
Everywhere else is cold.

Me: The third game set too much of a template for laying everything out in front of you like a videogame. Here’s this kind of tile, which needs this kind of key to break. You need this to get through here. Everything laid out clearly; you just have to go through the motions. All very rational. Of course, it’s a lot less obnoxious about this than other games that followed (and preceded it). Still, Metroid shouldn’t be an action puzzle game. It’s supposed to be mysterious, oppressive, anxious, and a little wonderful.
The first two games have this.
Fusion does, a little, in its completely different way.
Prime does, pretty much. The first one.

Shepard: It turned “do it because I said so” into the actual story.

To add to earlier ideas: surfaces glisten. So (depending on the potency of a light source and the reflectivity of a material) to things just outside the range of full lighting, you’d still get some faint one-pixel-wide reflection off any surface parallel to the light source, partially outlining an otherwise black mass. Which would be incredible if there were several living things around the edges of the screen.

Combine this with the business about spider balls leaving residue, and there’s a lot of complex stuff going on with edges.

Maybe an infrared visor upgrade, that you can toggle. Danger of flaring sometimes, especially when you’re shooting. When exploring and travelling, generally speeds things up.

The Wii that Wasn’t

  • Reading time:6 mins read

by [name redacted]

Originally published by Next Generation.

Market analysts call the Wii a return to form after the relative flop of the GameCube. Design analysts call it a potential return to form after the relative rut of the previous fifteen years. Whatever the spin, when people look at Nintendo’s recent misadventures, generally the Gamecube sits right on top, doe-eyed and chirping. Its failure to do more than turn a profit has made its dissection an industry-wide pastime. Everything comes under the microscope, from its dainty size and handle to its purpleness to the storage capacity of its mini-DVDs. The controller, though, has perplexed all from the start.

A very old story

  • Reading time:4 mins read

I keep harping on this, yet the original Zelda really isn’t that sequenced. There are certain barriers you can’t get past without certain items, yet you find most of those items early on — and you can at least explore most regions and dungeons to a certain extent, whatever equipment you have. You can beat the entire game without a sword, if you want. You don’t require half the items the game offers; they’re just convenient to have. Most of the things you do require, you can buy in a shop.

What Wind Waker kind of does is try to pull the design back in that direction, only more so — yet it doesn’t completely have the confidence to break with the sequencing and hand-holding. Which, for such an otherwise free-spirited design, is kind of frustrating. It’s like it’s taunting you with excellence. This is almost such a great game. It just needed more encouragement. Or a rewrite.

You know that business at the start where you’re picking up weapons and items all over? Imagine if the entire game were kind of like that, until you found the Master Sword. Instead of necessarily having specific “treasures”, each with its own specialized use (grapple versus hookshot, for instance), you’d mostly just find and hang onto whatever objects seemed convenient to the task at hand, or looked like they’d be useful down the road. If you found really special, “permanent” items, they’d mostly just serve as a shortcut for tasks you could perform otherwise only with a bit more effort and inconvenience. Kind of like how paths open to earlier areas in Metroid games, to allow you to cut back and forth instead of taking the long route every time.

I like that Link is a real character, for once, with his own life, ideas, likes, dislikes, and priorities, that the player and the quest are just intruding on. I like the way it treats all the previous Zelda games as, literally, a legend; a relic of an unthinkable time, that doesn’t really matter to anyone anymore. I like the implication that Link actually failed at one point, by not appearing when he was needed. Someone suggested once that Wind Waker is sort of the follow-up to Majora’s Mask, in that the historical Link went off somewhere and never came back, without growing up to save Hyrule as he was supposed to. That’s pretty interesting.

And, again, I like that nobody except Ganon really cares. Hyrule is gone; life goes on.

The world has a certain coherence and thought put into it, strictly for its own sake, that the main series rarely has. It’s very much a reinvention of the franchise, in the form of a storybook; an acknowledgment that the same story will keep repeating, even if nobody believes in it anymore. Somewhere out there, maybe in the real world, there is a Link and there is a Zelda, even if they don’t know it. There is a Hyrule, buried somewhere, if you know where to look. This is pretty good stuff.

Mechanically, the game feels smooth and cozy to play. For a while, anyway, there is a real sense of adventure and discovery; that anything could be out there. The fact that you can pick up and use all manner of stuff even if it’s not an “important” item adds to the sense of improvisation. The game puts a lot of work into this feeling. It also undermines most of that work, but we’ve had that discussion.

The entire game is sort of jaded about the idea of a Zelda-like quest. (In theory; it becomes credulous as hell, in practice.) Yeah, we’ve seen this all before; tell us a new one. Isn’t the whole thing a little twee? I mean, look at this green outfit. Who on Earth would wear something like that? Yet it’s also joyful and energetic, almost driving home the message that although, yeah, this story has been told countless times before, what matters isn’t the broad structure and gestures; it’s the individual lives that are affected, and what it feels like for them to take part in that story.

It’s a very postmodern take on the series, and pretty sophisticated. Again, though, it just doesn’t go all the way — which keeps the game from really making its point as solidly as it might.

Ueda Coulda Shoulda: The Quest as the Shadow

  • Reading time:23 mins read

by [name redacted]

A somewhat edited version of this piece was published by Game Career Guide, under the title “Rock in His Pocket: Reading Shadow of the Colossus“; here is the article as originally intended. This version is also available, largely intact, in The Gamer’s Quarter.

Going by his two big brain dumps – Ico and Shadow of the Colossus – Fumito Ueda is a complicated guy to put in charge of a videogame: an ivory tower idealist, with only a passive understanding of practical architecture. As a dreamer, his ideas are too organic, too personal to fit the cliches that most of us take as the building blocks of game design. Knowing that, he sidesteps convention whenever it gets in his way – which is often. The problem is in those conventions which, though they mean nothing to Ueda as narrator, just as frequently get in the player’s way.

Horii Himself, Out.

  • Reading time:6 mins read

Yeah. This doesn’t completely surprise me, except in the sense that it actually happened.

Handhelds are a better place for introverted, focused experiences. (See Metroid II.) In terms of the mindset involved, playing a handheld is like reading a book, whereas playing a console is like watching TV. Again, look how perfect Dragon Warrior is on the Game Boy — how much better it is than on the NES. Also: having a lengthy “novel” game makes more sense if you can pick it up and put it down at leisure, rather than being forced to sit in one place and stare at a screen for hundreds of hours. Leave the consoles for flash and fun; visceral stuff. Like the Wii, say.

Also to consider: as great as DQ8 is, there are two major abstractions left that seem kind of contrary to what Horii wants to do with the series. For one, the player controls more than one character. That’s a little weird. For another, it’s got random turn-based battles. Honestly, that doesn’t seem like part of Horii’s great plan for the series. It never has; it’s just been something he’s settled with until now.

So yeah. The DS seems like an ideal place to put the game. What’s really interesting is the multiplayer aspect — which I didn’t expect at all, yet which again sort of makes sense, depending on how it’s implemented. If players can come and go at will — join each other or set off on their own tasks, each with his or her own agenda — it’ll work. If there are too many constraints to the framework, keeping people from just playing the damned game whether their friends are around or not, it’ll be a bit of a downer.

I’m kind of undecided what this game means in the end. On the one hand it seems likely it’s meant as an intermediary step while Horii works on Dragon Quest X for the Wii. Considering how far along this game seems to be (implying it’s been in the works for at least months, maybe a year), it seems like it’s part of a long-term plan. Also considering that the sword game seems basically like a testing bed for a new battle system… well, do the math. And yet, there’s this issue about the DS actually being the most suitable system out there right now (in terms of market saturation, the nature of the format, and the qualities it has to offer).

Maybe it’s just the most suitable platform for Dragon Quest IX in particular, for everything he wants to do with the game. If X is going to work the way I think it might, it’s going to pretty visceral and showy — demanding a home system. One in particular (that being the most visceral available).

Basically, every game Horii makes appears to be just another approach to the same game he’s been trying to make for twenty years. He never quite winds up with what he wants — though lately he’s getting a little closer. From what I can see, this is just one more angle, allowing him to capture a certain aspect of his vision that he hadn’t been able to before (perhaps at the expense of some other elements, that he’s already explored). So, you know, right on. These details seem worth exploring.

The next game… maybe it’s time to assemble? See how all the pieces fit?

The thing that I dig about Dragon Quest is that, whatever the surface problems, the games are visionary. It’s a strong, uncluttered vision that all the games reflect even if they don’t always embody it. As “retro” as they seem, they’re not just crapped out according to a formula; they’re each trying to achieve something that’s way beyond them — meaning an endless pile of compromises.

I find that pretty encouraging. Not the placeholders; the way Horii isn’t afraid to use them, while he roughs out everything else. And that he doesn’t let them distract him; he just devises them, then discards them when they’re no longer of use. He keeps chugging along, going through draft after draft until he gets it exactly right. It’s a very classical disposition. Very honest, at least to my eye.

He’s a lot like Miyamoto, except Miyamoto sort of gave up a long time ago. And Miyamoto’s vision isn’t quite as focused (though in turn, it is broader than Horii’s).

The one problem I can see with going from turn-based to real-time battles is that the battles in Dragon Quest — I don’t think they’re really always meant to stand in for actual fighting, as much as they’re a stand-in for any number of hardships and growth experiences that a person like the player might encounter in a situation like the quest at hand. Some of that might be actual battle; some of it might be much subtler and harder to depict in a game like this.

Keeping the battles turn-based and separated from the wandering-around makes the metaphor a lot clearer as a compromise, rather than as something special or important in its own right. Changing to a system that makes the game actually about fighting loads of monsters… I’m not sure if this is precisely the point he’s looking for. Still, it’s a trade off. Get more specific somewhere, you have to lose a nuance somewhere else.

I wonder what other sorts of difficulties or experiences could be devised, besides semipermeable monster walls holding you back. Ones that would add to (or rather further clarify), rather than detract from (or muddy), the experience. And preferably that wouldn’t be too scripted.

I’m thinking a little of Lost in Blue, though I don’t know how appropriate its ideas would be, chopped out and inserted whole. Still, general survival issues seem relevant: having certain bodily needs (and maybe psychological ones — though who the hell knows how to address that) that, though not difficult to attend to, cause problems if you don’t. So in the occasions you do run into real immediate difficulty (battles, whatever), you’ll be in far greater danger if you’ve been pressing yourself too far; if you haven’t sufficiently prepared. Likewise, injury might be a real problem — so the player would have to think carefully, weigh cost and benefit, before charging into dangerous situations.

Not pressing out would mean you’d never learn more, get better, stretch your boundaries. Being foolhardy would get you killed. Same deal we’ve got now; just more nuanced.

I’m sure there are other ways to do it. Maybe more interesting ones.

It could be I’m reading in some things that aren’t overtly intended. Still, I’ve never felt the battles were as important as what they stood for. They’re too straightforward. They’re used too cannily, as a barrier. The trick, again, is whether there’s an interesting and functional way of more literally representing what they might stand for. I dunno. Maybe not! At least, not right now. So all right, violence. Fair enough.

Boundary Scout

  • Reading time:5 mins read

My brother has been hounding me about how to recreate that crazy mysterious glitchy feeling from old NES games, and this whole time I’ve been telling him that I figure it’s impossible. But uh, I guess not!

Apparently the trick is to actually focus on making it seem mysterious and glitchy!

Well, the focus here is on the glitchiness — mostly because I think that would be a cool-n-subversive way of doing things. I think the real point is in the kind of thoughts and emotions and behavior that those glitches trigger in people who are prone to pick at them. I think all of those qualities are very close to the ideal purpose and potential of videogames in general.

It’s that feeling of breaking through the boundaries of an established system — of the suggestion of unknown yet possibly grand potential hidden somewhere beyond the mundane, that you — as a free agent and very clever person — are specially qualified to unlock.

The way a person might break through the boundaries could be mechanical or emotional or intellectual. Some of the best touches in some of the best games borrow from this principle. See the scanning in Metroid Prime, how it comes directly out of the themes at hand, then ties everything together, hinting at a sort of order and coherence and reality to the entire Metroid series and everything in it that you never really suspected before. Yet it never shoves the stuff down your throat; it’s just there for you to put together on your own — much like all of the abstract stuff in the original Zelda and Metroid and whatnot, except deliberate and intellectual rather than incidental and material.

And then there’s Riven.

I think my point with the overt fake-bugginess was to exaggerate and glorify the whole pointless search process that we go through — poking the edges of the scenery, seeing what’s possible within the world, experimenting, and only rarely being rewarded with anything for our effort. And when we are rewarded it feels cloying and false, like those dumb treasure chests that have to be at the end of every single cul de sac in every single dungeon, to overtly reward you for going down and simultaneously make you feel obligated to go down every one.

It’s working on the suggestion that maybe this behavior has a real purpose behind it after all, that sometimes — just sometimes — there’s something magical and special and completely unprecedented to find. And the point to that is to bring into light that whole behavior, that whole mindset — which, again, I think is implicitly what videogames are made to suggest, yet which I don’t feel is often really addressed for all (or even much) of its potential.

I think this mode can be addressed in less gimmicky ways, even if the gimmick is maybe one of the clearest ways to illustrate it. The problem is that a videogame has to work on a couple of levels at once. It needs to have a completely workable status quo, that feels solid, that the player is convinced is meant to be solid, for the player’s subversion of that status quo to mean anything. There’s a lot of psychology here; the player shouldn’t know immediately whether he’s supposed to be able to do what he’s doing, and that it has been accounted for; just that, for whatever reason, he’s able to.

Beyond the psychology and the multiple layers to keep track of, the game of course has to be designed and programmed as well as possible, to avoid unintentional exploits. So there’s a certain level of virtuosity required here.

…

Maybe I’m overstepping the line a bit, in defining the importance of these characteristics. The basic nature of a videogame lies in the causal relationship between the player and the gameworld; the basic potential lies in the narrative ability of that causal relationship (what it means for the player to act, given the established boundaries of the gameworld). The natural mode of player action is to explore those rules and challenge them. I suppose it doesn’t follow that the player need subvert a status quo as-such; it’s just, this is a good way to illustrate that mode of player interaction and its narrative and emotional potential.

The player should feel free; that he is at all times in control over his immedate decisionmaking, and that through his decisions he is just perhaps blazing into unknown territory, doing something nobody else has done, having a unique and visceral personal experience that’s entirely generated by his own free will. Half-Life 2 is great at making the player feel clever and subversive for doing exactly what the game is expecting.

I think it’s a misdiagnosis of this quality that has led to this sandbox nonsense (most recently reined in and made less inane by Dead Rising), and sense that players want “freedom” in their games.

…

I’ll get back to this. Will post what I’ve got now.

A completely unsaleable idea

  • Reading time:3 mins read

A vague concept came to me a couple of hours ago:

Take a game that, ostensibly is… this one thing; it’s of a particular genre, with certain goals — and it’s entertaining enough, if mired in its genre and a little buggy. If you’re so prone, you can poke away at the seams all over the place, and get effects that probably aren’t intended. The first model that came to me was something like a…

Side note: Wi-Fi DS or Wii Pictionary could be interesting. Not for this, necessarily; just had the thought.

Anyway. Something like a video board game; an adaptation of a very famous Game of Life clone that you’ve never heard of, or a Mario Kart or Mario Party clone. Something vapid and small in imagination and ambition, though diverting. The kind of trash that builds up on the store shelves and you never think about, though maybe with a little more personality and irony about itself.

Then if the player happens to be bored enough — happens to keep picking away at the discrepancies, at the bugs and exploits, happens to keep veering out of bounds, he’ll wind up… out-of-bounds. And then the real game will begin. If not, the dippy little game, with its goals and rules, is all you’ll ever see.

As for what’s out there, I don’t know. It could start off just seeming like an error — the Metroid Secret World sort of effect. Random garbage that it’s interesting to screw with. Then keep picking through the garbage, and eventually there’s something grander beneath that. Like you’ve just emerged from a dungeon into the blinding sunshine. And it just keeps getting more and more mysterious. There’s no explanation for any of this; you have to piece it together on your own, through exploring and continually picking away at the edges of what’s possible and observing and filing things away in your head.

What would be even better is if the initial part of the game had some kind of license — say, a videogame version of Jeopardy! or some other known quantity — to further cover up what’s really going on.

And then put the game out and say nothing. And see how long before someone finds the secret, and word begins to spread. Then see the noise grow and grow, and paranoia develop about the glitches in every other game under the sun, as people wonder if they lead to anything secret and special — the way we used to, twenty years ago when we didn’t know any better.

…

I don’t know. I think it would be kind of neat. If impractical. It would require a Kenji Eno or some other funster, to take charge then sit in the background and not be credited.

The Crying Game

  • Reading time:14 mins read

by [name redacted]

Part six of my ongoing culture column; originally published by Next Generation under the title “Can Videogames Make You Cry?”.

A few weeks ago, Bowen Research published the results of a survey, on the role of emotion in videogames. Hugh Bowen polled 535 gamers on their own views and history, with the end goal to rough some kind of an objective analysis out of their subjective experiences, and thereby maybe to shed some light on what emotional effect videogames have had in the past. The paper is well, and humbly, written; its conclusions, though, are less than revelatory: the only genre that tends to elicit reasonably complex emotion is RPGs (presumably Japanese ones), while other genres all inspire at least some basic kind of motivational urge in the player – be it rage or fear or what have you. Meanwhile, the paper is full of comments about Aeris, and the profound affect of her death on people who had never played Phantasy Star II.

The problem, I suppose, is in the question being asked: “Can videogames make you cry?”. It’s a binary question about a complex issue, much like asking whether Americans are happy and then concluding “sometimes!” And indeed, Bowen’s answer seems to be “well, yes… probably. In theory.” A second issue is the way Bowen approached the issue as a matter of statistics – and then based his analysis on the subjective responses of a skewed sample. “Gamers”, as with any obsessives, have by nature a peculiar perspective of their medium – a medium which, furthermore, is not yet refined as an expressive platform.

The question should not be whether videogames are capable of eliciting complex emotion – as, given the complex analog weave of our brains, anything can result in an emotional response of any depth and sophistication. Rather, what Bowen might have asked is how innately bound any emotion is to the current fabric of videogames (that is, whether it has anything to do with what the medium is trying to accomplish), how much emotional potential videogames might ideally hold, and – assuming some degree of innate potential – how best to insinuate emotion into the framework or theory of a videogame. Or rather perhaps, how best to cull emotion from that same framework.

The Method

  • Reading time:5 mins read

So.

* Zelda 1 and 2.
* Dragon Quest in general.
* Riven.
* Shadow of the Colossus.
* Metroid II.
* Half-Life 2.
* Phantasy Star II.
* Metal Gear Solid 3, in particular.
* Lost in Blue.
* OutRun.

There is a common thread to all of these. It has to do with the gameworld, and the player’s method of interaction with it.

Stacking boxes to make your own path or eating the parrot in Half-Life and Metal Gear are the same as the magic wand in Zelda 1 or the structures in Wanda that serve no apparent purpose except to look at them, climb on them, stand on them, ponder about them. Building a spear in Lost in Blue is the same as gaining that level or buying that copper sword in Dragon Warrior, as finding a heart container or a boomerang in Zelda, as making that leap of logic in Riven, about that device halfway across the island.

The technique names in Phantasy Star are the same as the number system in Riven, as the clues in Zelda, as the Erdrick lore is in Dragon Warrior, as the artifacts are in Lost in Blue. And these are the same as the boxes and the parrot and the spear and the boomerang.

These are all different approaches toward the same, or similar, ideals. Player progression relies on personal growth and curiosity. Within its own laws, the gameworld is responsive to nearly all actions allowed the player. There is a strong focus on trial and error. On exploration on both the micro and macro levels. On pushing the limits of the gameworld to see what happens, and maybe being punished half the time. On intuitive leaps of reasoning, within the given laws. On patience. On innate appreciation of the intangible within a greater scheme.

The laws and structure of the gameworld are a framework filled with an open question. Rote progression is never a problem, and yet the purpose never particularly lies in the plot. Or in completion. Any story, any imposed goals are simply excuses. MacGuffins. They’re there to get you out the door. To give you an anchor, a point of reference. Maybe a path to walk down. The real joy, the really important material, comes in the unimportant treasures of providence provided by the player’s presence in the gameworld, by interfering as an outsider in a self-contained system.

The player, as Link in the first Zelda in particular, is not particularly meant to traverse Hyrule. He has no weapon. He has no defense. He has no health. There is no path specifically laid out for him, and yet there is a certain logic to be exploited — inconsistently, though consistently enough. At no point does the game call for the boomerang, or the wand. The game can probably be beaten without the sword, if the player is so inclined. Yet the tools are there to be made use of.

The world of Riven is alien to the player, and presents a barrier at every turn — and yet there is a logic behind it all; a reason why everything is where and as it is. As an outsider this lack of familiarity is an initial barrier. Later that same outside perspective and status puts the player in a rarified position. The simple joys of Riven come again from a whimsical turn of that same relationship with the gameworld — from sitting on a sun-baked stone stairwell, listening to the birds and the insects and the surf below. Imagining the coolness of the shadows and the moss on the stones. Appreciating what would go unappreciated were the player to belong here. Finding one’s own treasure in a broader system.

And yet none of these games are wholly open. Unlike Morrowind or Fallout or Baldur’s Gate, there is a clear and immediate structure. There is a limit to the options available to the player. The rules and the logic of the worlds are all simple and compact. There are only so many actions. There are only so many items. There are only so wide a world, so many levels, so many set pieces, so much of a variance in direction. There is a specific ultimate task before the player, a specific direction to move in. Save the princess. Learn about these Biomonsters. Figure out what’s going on in this world. Defeat the Metroids. Survive and maybe escape. Defeat the Colossi.

The secret to success in all cases is in understanding the reasoning of the gameworld, and the method of understanding — as in life — is experimentation. It is in the quirks, the exceptions, the trivialities — that with no clear explanation — that the searching mind finds the most wonder and curiosity. And it is in these quirks that such a mind imbues the most meaning, specifically for their lack of meaning, their lack of purpose. Their lack of structure, and all it implies about the gameworld and the player’s presence within it.

It is in these imperfections that we find beauty and we find reality. In which humanity and therefore something we identify as truth shows itself. In which we see hints of a structure or a randomness beyond our comprehension, that is greater than us, that is greater than our mission and yet that leads us to our fate. It is here that we find significance, that we find meaning, that we find verification for our continued efforts.

It is this which drives us on.

More on experience

  • Reading time:3 mins read

If EXP and other RPG elements are so horrible, why do they get implemented in just about every other type of game? From platformers to GTA to fighters to shooters to sports games, there’s no other genre that hasn’t been infected by the RPG virus at least a little, and often a lot. RPGs don’t seem to be dying, as much as growing, in both audience and into other genres. So they must be doing something right, right?

Not necessarily something right, in that it’s ideal for its own sake. It’s simply an easy solution for just about any context. Design problem? Balance issue? Afraid the game will alienate people if it’s too hard? Throw in an experience system, and let the player work it out.

For a topical example, see the discussion on Sigma Star Whatever in the other thread, and the people pissed off that its shooting segments depend on levelling-up rather than on skill. From some accounts, it’s to the point where skill doesn’t really matter, as the game will just throw things at you that you can’t deal with through any means other than leveling up.

Another high-profile example. The only reason there’s an experience system in the Metroidvania games is that Igarashi wants everyone to be able to finish the games, and doesn’t want people put off by the difficulty. This is a design problem with many elegant solutions (see Metal Gear Solid — or hell, Metroid). Experience is the easiest, though. You don’t have to think about it.

It’s kind of a lazy out. Which would be, I’m guessing, the best reason why it’s used so much, in so many games. It’s almost a get-out-of-jail-free card if you don’t know what you’re doing as a designer.

On that note: experience is often used as a way to make the player feel like he’s actually doing something in a framework where he’s not really doing much of anything else. When you win a battle, you feel like you’ve accomplished something because, hey, you just collected 156XP! It’s materialistic in a monetary way, in a system where there is no real ceiling to inflation, therefore no implicit value.

This is even more obvious when you consider that as you progress, the difficulty generally scales to match whatever experience you collect. Some games even cause monsters to level up at the same rate as your characters, meaning there is effectively no point to this game system at all.

And that’s what I think annoys most of us, and sends us looking for alternatives.

Then again: although obsessive-compulsive game design is a plague in a general sense, and you honestly can’t make me care about those last few emblems in Sonic Adventure, not every widget hunt is unfulfilling. It’s all about context.

Similarly, if experience points aren’t an annoying mechanism in, say, Dragon Quest, then maybe that has to do with what they mean both in the context of the game’s objective design and in the psychology of the playing experience.

The question, therefore, is: what’s the difference? Is it in how the EXP are gained? How they’re used? What they represent? What’s the context?

I venture a big factor in Dragon Quest has to do with expanding horizons (on the player’s end), and the part EXP play in the facilitation and regulation thereof.

That is, they are the key objective metric. They therefore have purpose, value, and weight. They have practical representative meaning, even if they remain mere representation.