The Last Dream

19 thoughts on “The Last Dream”

1. Joel, bravo. The ‘Where We Came From’ series has, as a whole, has been sincere and intimately detailed in a way that few pieces are these days. That you strung together several of them in a row, well, you know how much work you put into it. What I’m saying is it paid off brilliantly.

   The video piece was especially neat. I dug the footage and the song at the end a bunch. Was that stock footage or did you shoot that?

2. Now THAT was beautiful. I’m honored to have helped with this project.

   I think gaming’s past is safe in some regards- geek chic brings in a lot of imitators but it’s also a backdoor into keeping older games cool for the masses. I think the appeal of games that are organically rules-driven will not fade, even as designers of all stripes get ever closer to finding out how to blend narrative with play effectively.

   On the other side of that coin is the fact that games from the Before Now era could also be more complex, at least on the user’s end. In other words, PhysX integration is complex for developers, but choosing equipment and materia in Final Fantasy VII is more involving for players*. Some friends of mine recently got into D&D despite not having a lot of experience in games with complicated calculation systems. Yet, after this, I think any RPG that automated aspects of this process would be much easier to digest.

   What could really do old games a service is if upcoming generations learn coding together on a society-wide level. All of a sudden, the achievements packed into these games will blow minds (as they should now, but the majority of people can’t even read the code, myself unhappily included).

   I’m glad I got to know you better this way, Joel. It makes me wonder if there should be a grand game history or just a giant collection of autobiographies-via-gaming. It would also perfectly illuminate how personal this gaming business is.

   And in the grand scheme of things, video games are among the easiest things to enjoy once you reach the other side of age. I doubt footballers are successfully recreating their youth once they’ve gone grey. Losing those reflexes with age just shuts one out of reflex-driven games.

   *I just realized how amusing it was that FFVII was remembered as a game where you tediously used the Fight command over and over, when the reality of playing it now reveals it to be a much more complex beast compared against more streamlined/opaque games like Fable or Square-Enix’s own Kingdom Hearts series.

3. Gah! Nice read, I disagree with quite a bit of what you are saying although my piece on Sonic (BC Ruminates: Misremembered?) touched on some of that.

   At the same time I have gone back to games, or even gone to games that I never played at the time and enjoyed them immensely.

   The idle thumbs talking about The Last Express is a really good point of reference.

4. @jordan: Thank you – it’s been quite a fight these months so it’s great to hear that people have got something out these “old stories”. The footage at the end was all done by me over the weekend just gone. Just in time, really, as it looks like the 2011 summer is dead already. Incidentally, I picked up the song from series 2 of the Swedish series Wallander. It just seemed a perfect uplift after what had gone before: you know it’s the ten second countdown that gets me every time.

   @beamsplashx: Thanks Sid, I had to squeeze your name in there. You bring up an idea which I thought was kind of inevitable ten years ago, but we’re still not there yet. With the rise in computing and programmable devices, I thought it was only a matter of time before coding became a common skill. But what’s happened is a big push on the HCI front, with Apple leading, to simplify interfaces and minimise the need for a coding mind. I don’t know if this is good or not. Simplicity plays well in the short-term but often stabs in you in the back in the long run.

   @badger: There’s a lot of nuance that could have been added (you have no idea how many paragraphs were cut from this) but it would’ve weakened the overall thrust of the writing. But as I don’t want anyone commenting who disagrees with me I… where’s that banning button gone again? There are certainly titles that will still work; I am fired up with the idea of going back to blast through some unplayed Infocom adventures after enjoying a super-fast replaythrough of Planetfall at the start of the WWCF.

   But all of the 30 year old stuff I played for the video didn’t fill me with feelings of “ooh goody, I want to play this again!” but more “hot damn, good times”. I’d love to play Ultima Underworld, but it offends my hands.

5. I think coding should either replace or at least supplement math and science education in schools. Did I pass calculus in high school? Yes. Do I remember anything beyond basic algebra? No- and it hasn’t had a negative impact on anything other than my desire to learn a programming language over a scripting one. Writing programs makes for a perfect answer as to what real-world uses of math and science might be if neither one will be your professional field.

   I feel like the major aspect holding me back from Underworld is the choppiness and the input method for attacks. There was a Playstation release of it, but it’s Japanese only (just like the PS2 release of Might & Magic 8). Having a PSX version wouldn’t be as problematic as modern consolized ports might be, since the 90s tended towards a million button combinations over simplified controls, which I’m totally fine with.

6. We should get Underworld rewritten for modern systems. Oh hang on, some already did it: Arx Fatalis.

7. But the pixel art, Joel!

   Granted, I’m still totally going to play Arx Fatalis one day. And it should be soon since my computer can actually handle it.

8. Arx is a great place to explore, I really enjoyed it (some years ago, now). And some of the secrets of the game are, like, really actually secret and hard to figure out.

9. On The Stick puts up a counterargument against the idea that “retro is just nostalgia” which underpins The Last Dream.

10. Hmm, his counterargument centers around the NES-era games like Contra and VICE, which are hardly similar to something like Rescue on Fractalus. I wasn’t nostalgic for those games either, but they have an obvious immediacy that some Atari games you wrote about wouldn’t have.

    Also, you addressed the issue of lineage pretty well- you can trace Angry Birds back to Mighty Bomb Jack, but is that enough to get Angry Birds players to actually play it? Angry Birds has all the polish. And while no one will be applauded for slagging off Citizen Kane, it shouldn’t be a surprise when precisely no one recommends that you actually see it. Not because it’s bad, but because its value isn’t as visible. The main attraction now would be Orson Welles’ performance, just like Rescue on Fractalus’ appeal for me would be in its unique visuals.

11. Sid, I nod towards you sagely. I do concede that there definitely are games of the past that are still worth our time and someone like gnome does a great deal of digging to celebrate what we might have easily forgotten.

    I have no stats to prove this, of course, but it’s reasonable to assume most of the retro interest stems from people who lived through it. And that’s the key thing – that you lived in that era. From Joe’s article:

    “It’s an NES game I missed, but when I played it, I found it to be a woefully underappreciated 8-bit gem. I could not have nostalgia for it, because I never played it as a child. And yet, I still enjoyed it.”

    But! He still has the nostalgia of the NES era pumping through his veins and is no stranger to its control schemes and game design and is more forgiving of the era’s drawbacks. The real test is whether someone can go back and find something suitable to play before they got game. Can he engage with Atari 8-bit titles? 2600 titles? Kyle Orland couldn’t and he made an Escapist project out of it, even seeking help from Ian Bogost.

    This was the kind of revelation I had from my day with Prof Steve Furnell. I found myself not particularly interested in consoles I hadn’t experienced: “With the Videopac I feel no nostalgic warmth, just frustration with an antiquated interface from pioneering days when little was known about game console design.”

    I doubt many readers of the series were encouraged to fire up an Atari emulator to look at these old games (apart from Switchbreak, gawd bless him, who even bought a copy of Necromancer from eBay). Few readers clicked on the game videos presented in this series and I do have stats to prove that.

    This strikes me as telling.

    I’m glad I’m taking a holiday off Electron Dance, because I can write ridiculously long comments like these. Fear me blogs of the internet, I am back!

12. Wonderful, thank you for this series. Although we have a different frame of reference when it comes to video games and the past (my being nintendo 8/16/64-bit, and turn of the century computer games such as baldurs gate, commandos, hexplore and grim fandango), these series strike something within me, that yearning back, that nostalgia. For me, it’s like I’m stuck in the past somehow, in more than one sense; I dream almost every night of my childhood, of coming back to that now twisted place, as if through a looking glass; my psychoanalysis focuses much on the ghosts that haunt me, and all that proper love and admission of proper value which I should have been given; the memory of video games and my experience with them, my living in them, secluded, my own, a place to which I cannot return, even with the help of the video games themselves. It’s like everything of unity and innocence lost is channeled into those video games I played when I was a kid, as if they are the ultimate synecdohce of all that was bittersweet and have become more bitter since, all that which I continue to search for in new games but never find because I’ve changed, because I’m so fucking analytical.

    And today, even the sadness I used to feel over that lost place is hard to find when I boot up the games. Which is why I’ve decided to not do it for another 20 years, until I get children of my own, or just decide I want to return. Dare return. Huh, what a disappointment I would get if my children wouldn’t get anything out of it, and they probably wouldn’t either. These feelings are essentially something which cannot be shared, or recollected, and I would probably do my future children a disservice to put that pressure on them to experience these things which I want to regain with me, simply because these feelings are so important, and I’ve waited so long, and because something would change within me if my childhood memories got “rejected” by someone else that way. As if it made it less real somehow, a feeling of realness which is barely possesses as it is.

    A piece that reminded me of yours was this one:

    http://nightmaremode.net/2011/06/your-homosexual-lover-is-in-another-castle-a-year-of-interviews-with-jeffrey-auburn-1-6558/

    http://nightmaremode.net/2011/08/_____-on-the-planet-x-a-year-of-interviews-with-jeffrey-auburn-2-8751/

    It has this nostalgia over something which kind of never was and never will be that makes me sad and happy. So thank you once again, your journey was one that I enjoyed. Good luck with that garden now, and those plants. I read about someone who was all stressed out and never took the time to enjoy, to cultivate oneself and ones sensibilities, ones interests, so zie got a flower (was interested in botanics) and every time zie saw that the flower was wilted or somehow “sad”, zie would know that this reflects what zie was feeling, was a consequence of hir not taking care of hirself… Hopefully, we can all get flowers of ours so that we can take care of ourselves.

13. I think growing up in the 16-bit era actually makes the 8-bit generation acceptable. Games on the SNES weren’t necessarily more complicated than NES games.

    That said, the PS2-era is still a sweet spot for UI, innovation and production value. The succeeding generation seems to be repeating the 16-bit era’s advances, but there’s even less new-ness than before.

14. Hi Ava, thanks for the enormous comment!

    I still find a modern joy in gaming but nothing, of course, will be the same as that play of exploration in my younger years: years where everything seemed full of wonder and mystery, where rules and pattern were unknown. But now the years of play have yielded all that mystery. We know too much and we can’t go back. Not as we are, anyway.

    I think it would be possible to teach your own children to play old video games – provided you started out with those titles before jumping forward to iPhone experiences and so forth – but I another question I would ask is: do I want to impose my childhood on them or let them discover their own?

    I guess I will share some of my past with my own two children – but will probably let them develop their own gaming childhood memories that will serve them well in years to come.

15. Certainly a good question, but one must also make a choice when one decides to let ones kids play modern games, if the question concerns new vs old. Probably they’ll have more to discuss with friends with newer games though, and maybe in the long run they’ll get more out of learning the rhetoric of modern games. Hey, not only would I love to go back to my own childhood through kids, but I would also like to see myself be left in the dust with youngsters taking gaming to whole different levels. 🙂

16. Ava, the question of how I let my children grow into gaming is a thorny one which I’ve put off for the moment. The eldest is three years old. I still have time.

    I have so many conflicting voices in my head on this that there’s almost definitely an Electron Dance post in it somewhere =)

17. The entire series was so enriching. And I tried to watch as many of the videos as I could! I’ve read this final piece twice now, and it is certainly the masterstroke of WWCF.

    My hat is off to you, master of harbours.

18. Max, thank you for your kind words! I’ll cross you off the list of people who didn’t watch the videos! Also epic thanks for today’s post on Tap for the full WWCF series.

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