Et In Arcadia Ego
Gentile or Jew
O ye who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
A friend of mine is an illustrator and cartoonist and when I left Pandemic he said “hey we should do a webcomic! You write it and I’ll draw it!”
It would be easy to interpret that as “I think you’re a good writer,” which would certainly be flattering, but I think mostly he just likes me and so presumes I’m a good writer. 
Really what he wants is to work with someone he gets along with and in this I think he’s probably right. I’ve worked on a lot of stuff and looking back over the last 15 years of my career, my memories are always of the people and the process, not the final product. If I were a singular genius I’d probably have the opposite view but from where I sit, the alchemy of the creative relationship is more important.
In the end, I couldn’t say yes because even though he had what I thought was a good idea, I felt like it wouldn’t be substantively different from a lot of other stuff, and I didn’t feel like I was the right person to execute on his idea so brilliantly that it transcends all the other shite out there. Thinking about his offer, I thought maybe a fantasy/action strip with no words would be new and difficult. That’s what appealed to me. The challenge. As a writer, trying to tell a story with no words. He basically wanted to do Dilbert but at a video game company, which is a fertile environment for that sort of thing, and my suggestion was…admittedly far afield.
I thought about it for about two months though and in the end I kept coming back to Penny Arcade. Usually I’m such an egomaniac I think that it doesn’t matter whether other people have gone down the same road, or who we’re ripping off, or who’s ripping off us, I think we can execute on it better and that will ultimately make the difference. But every once in a while I recognize something that renders anything I might attempt in a given arena moot.
James Gleick in Genius the biography of Richard Feynman said; “There are two kinds of geniuses. The everyday genius, who is just as smart as you, if only you were much smarter. You see his stuff and while it’s brilliant you think ‘I’d have got there eventually.’ Then there’s the otherworldly genius. The guy who’s insight was so alien to your experience that you realize it doesn’t matter how smart you were, you’d never have figured it out.”
Hard to seriously suggest the guys at PA are either, but I must admit, reading Penny Arcade has completely quashed any desire on my part to enter that field. While their peers devolve into personal drama, PA has stayed on message for ten years and are still funny and still relevant and it’s still the best way for anyone not on the inside to keep their finger on the pulse of gaming.
And that is the VERY roundabout way I arrive at the thing that prompted my insight on the upcoming game The Last Guardian. But it gave me the opportunity to bust out my favorite quote from Genius and I couldn’t resist.
Watch this trailer and tell me it doesn’t make you want to work in video games.
Now here’s Penny Arcade’s take on the issue.
I can’t know that Team ICO are deliberately trying to prove Steven Spielberg and Roger Ebert wrong. But I have to think they’re aware of the criticism. I know the origin of the project lies in the team’s desire to focus on and expand the relationship between the Hero and his Horse from the brilliant Shadow of the Colossus, but I have to presume that anyone working on a project like this in this industry and this climate is aware of the criticism leveled against video games as a storytelling medium, and wow it seems like they’re attacking that criticism head on.
I don’t know if I’ll ever do another story for a video game, the last process was so powerfully souring. Even had the story for my last game turned out decent, the process was so absurd and painful I would not easily be able to consider doing it again. Talking to a friend about an upcoming project I said “Nonon, I’m not going to write it. We’re going to pay someone to write it.” Design and production, sure. But I think I need to let story lie fallow for a while. I haven’t written here about my experiences because A: I’m afraid once I start I won’t be able to stop and B: video games are my chosen profession and it would not be seemly to vomit forth all the bile and vitriol I accumulated. My peers might come to the wrong conclusion.
The LEAST of the problems I dealt with was being surrounded by people who thought either A: video games should not have stories. At all. Ever. Or B: Seamless and powerful stories in games are inevitable and we should be trying to deliver a profound transformative experience with every go round.
Everyone in the first camp presumed I was in the latter camp and everyone in the latter camp presumed I was one of them. But having run D&D for 20 years, my attitude is; “This isn’t that complex. It’s pretty easy to tell a good story.” It only becomes difficult when other people interfere with the process. Video games are, alas, too young a medium. Not too young for good stories, we’ve already had lots of good stories in games, but too young for there to be lots of studios where they see Story as just another workmanlike part of the process, like animation or sound. Instead, because everything’s new and the opportunity to tell stories still novel, people in charge tend to panic. Eventually this will sort itself out.
The Last Guardian isn’t out yet, won’t be out until next year, but I was struck by two things watching the trailer.
First, wouldn’t it be wonderful if there was no dialog in the entire game? See how I brought this back to the thing I wrote at the beginning about a comic strip with no dialog? It looks like there’s no dialog, and it doesn’t look like it needs dialog. And so I hope they try and do the whole thing without dialog. I think many game studios overlook the benefit of being daring. I loved a lot of Assassin’s Creed, and I’m the only person I know who defended the deeply stupid Framing Device.
I don’t mind spoiling you because the game’s been out for over a year, but Assassin’s Creed appears to take place in 12th century Jerusalem and you are an assassin BUT IN FACT it takes place in the 22nd century and you are some goddamned emo hipster douchebag and the whole game is a training simulation.
While everyone around me was dutifully criticizing the execution (some of us thought it was a good idea, badly executed on) I thought it was incredibly brave. Because in every development environment I’ve ever been in, that kind of thing would be the first thing cut when the rubber hit the road. All those unique assets developed for something with no gameplay. That’s a lot of money to spend on part of the game you can’t play. So my hat goes off to those guys for not cutting it when anyone else would have.
But overall I was disappointed because even though it was a good game, it was an opportunity missed. I thought the idea of a game set in Jerusalem during the Crusades in which you play an assassin was brilliant and daring, but I had misinterpreted the game. I thought you played a Muslim assassin going after the Christian occupiers in Jerusalem and I thought “Wow, that’s fucking ballsy.” In this climate to take on that story. And your defense against sensationalism would be, on top of a brilliant game, busting your ass on historicity. Making it real and authentic so the player actually learns something about Islam and Christianity and Jerusalem and the Crusades and everyday life in the 1100s. While doing bad-ass parkour and slicing people up. Just like in real life.
I thought Mirror’s Edge was breathtaking, but I was deeply disappointed by the fact that the exhilarating and beautiful and liberating Free Running gameplay was actually very brief and the majority of the game was taken up with inane jumping puzzles, knocking people out…and shooting people.
And I was really disappointed by the story. I don’t mean “wow, that story sucks,” even though it did. I mean “Oh. It has a story.” How much more exhilarating, how much more bold, more daring, more noteworthy, would it have been if you just ran. That was it. That was the whole game. EA Presents, a DICE game…now run motherfucker! And do not stop for 20 hours.
That wouldn’t mean “no story” but if I were Mr. Mirror’s Edge, it would mean never explaining it. No exposition, stopping only to find someone, get a cryptic piece of information (cryptic to you the player, not your character) and then, run again. Things would happen around you, you’d never understand why. People would be chasing you, you’d never know who. I’d have worked the story out anyway, and maybe you could piece it together, and that would be part of the fun, but you’d have to work at it. It wouldn’t be easy, and it sure as shit wouldn’t be necessary.
The CAG tell the story about why they were able to get Pablo Escobar when no one else could. All the other people hunting him, the DEA, the CIA, the Colombian police, the Colombian military, the other drug lords, none of them could “close the last 1,000 yards.” The guy could have been anywhere on Earth and these agencies would track him and narrow him down to a city block, no mean feat, but he’d always slip away. The hard job turned out to be easy. The easy job turned out to be hard.
That’s what I feel like playing these games. Great games, worth checking out, hell I think they’re worth buying, but they can’t close the last 1,000 yards. The gameplay in these games are a great achievement. But they can’t make that leap, take that bold action that sets the game apart.
Would it be unreasonable to hope The Last Guardian achieves that? I feel like I can depend on Team ICO. They have, as it says in the Bible, their shit together. Yeah, I’ll be disappointed if there’s dialog in the game, but just trying to tell a story like that in this medium is bold enough, I think.
My second thought was on the nature of the ending. An ending we’ve not yet seen to a story we don’t yet know from a game that’s not yet out. My response to Penny Arcade’s take on it and the whole reason I started this is…it doesn’t matter what the ending will be. This game is going to be emotionally devastating no matter how you slice it.
Because even if the boy and his dog, or whatever the hell that thing is, fly off into the sunset, the existence of their relationship directly implies loss. You can’t look at the Griffon looking at the boy without knowing that it knows it will someday die, or the boy will die, and that all this is fleeting. The relationship, therefore, whatever else it is about…is about death. Et In Arcadia Ego. If we are sad watching the trailer, and we are, it is because we know what the Griffon knows, what the boy cannot know. There is only one way this all ends.
No one here gets out alive.
If you’ve gotten this far and you’re suspecting that really the point of all this was to give me an excuse to post a link to a trailer, then as the man says; “See? We are getting to know each other.” Don’t judge me!
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June 18th, 2009 at 3:33 pm
Beautifully said. I found myself thinking that whatever events brought the unlikely pair together already carry tragedy. After all: we see no other humans and no other griffons in the trailer. It’s already a cliche that the desolate landscapes of Team Ico games are characters in themselves, but they are also characters with relationships to the other, more prosaic characters, mutually defining and defined.
June 18th, 2009 at 8:15 pm
No and you will notice that the griffon, in almost every shot, has arrows sticking out of him. It seems to be a creature that’s experienced a lot of pain. I’d like to think that the arrows are a metaphor for life. The experience of it, the fact that existance is, by definition, painful because it is limited, but I don’t know how far Team ICO is willing to go in that direction.
July 1st, 2009 at 2:33 pm
<blocquote cite="">That wouldn’t mean “no story” but if I were Mr. Mirror’s Edge, it would mean never explaining it. No exposition, stopping only to find someone, get a cryptic piece of information (cryptic to you the player, not your character) and then, run again. Things would happen around you, you’d never understand why. People would be chasing you, you’d never know who. I’d have worked the story out anyway, and maybe you could piece it together, and that would be part of the fun, but you’d have to work at it. It wouldn’t be easy, and it sure as shit wouldn’t be necessary.</blocquote>
This was done as a series of short animated segments. Perhaps you saw it in your youth? It was called Aeon Flux.
July 1st, 2009 at 4:02 pm
Great example.