Games, Design, Culture, Politics...

I’m Matthew Colville, and SquareMans is my blog and a kind of alter ego for me. I’m a professional video game designer, writer and occasional producer. I’m not sure if I’m a writer who designs, or a designer who writes. It usually depends on which I feel embarrassed by less. Not entirely unlike trying to figure out which of two embarrassing sexual kinks to admit to.

This isn’t a personal blog; it’s not about my life, how my pets are doing, or who’s the current subject of my autoerotic fantasies. No one would want to read that crap. Instead, this is where I write about games, movies, game design, writing, politics. Anything from a relatively small list of topics that strike me as interesting to write about. Which…is to say, also crap, but the crap I like to write about.

Let me begin by saying that the thing I crave most, the thing I hope most to gain from this, is readers. I believe that’s the thing all writers want most. Money is nice, fame and fortune and everything that goes with it. But first, writers need readers. Readers who like what they read are nice, readers who think it’s crap, but who keep reading, are also nice. The best way, of course, to get readers is to write something people want to read, and that’s what I aim to do, but I thought it worth putting my motivation up front. We might write because we want to be famous, or relevant, we may do it because we are compelled, but first, please…someone read this shit. Tell your friends.

These posts are long, and often involve a lot of introspection that might not be directly relevant to the subject matter. That’s by design. I’m paid to be concise but here in my own territory, working for free, I can indulge myself. Plenty of blogs are short, lists and bullet points, so if that’s what you crave, there’s the whole internet for you to consume.

The name and visual theme of the site is a little window into what the site’s about. Some of you may remember the old Atari 2600 game, Adventure. We call you people beardies and I am proudly one of you.

Adventure was a very early fantasy game for the Atari 2600. Released in 1979, you played an…adventurer, who ran through a series of rooms and mazes trying to find the keys to various castles, and eventually the Chalice. It was the first graphic adventure game released for any console, was the origin of the term easter egg, and for a small boy in the late 70s, it was a hell of a lot of fun.

This was, as you can guess, not a visually sophisticated game. Nethack has better graphics…and Nethack doesn’t have any graphics. Your character, your sword-wielding adventurer, was a square. Not a cube, ah a cube would have been luxury. Literally a square. The art on the box was by far the most evocative element of the presentation. This description is more…you get the point.

Now, I’m not going to write “what’s interesting looking back, is that in spite of being a hero who looks like a square, wielding a sword that looks like an arrow, fighting dragons who look like ducks, I imagined a vivid world full of…vivid…things!” I did no such thing. I imagined I was going to beat the game, come hell or high water, and I damned well did.

What interests me now, looking back, is that this was a game I played well before I was a geek. Certainly before I was a gamer geek. I’m fascinated by the idea that all this stuff I associate with being a gamer; the quest, the adventurer, dragons, swords, mazes, castles, keys, and drawbridges, were all part and parcel of my mental landscape already, years before I’d run into D&D. Where did that come from? Not from Adventure, surely. Adventure was exploiting my existing understanding of these things. Somewhere in there, day school, kindergarten, Sesame Street, Sid & Marty Kroft, somewhere in that milieu, the blueprint was laid. Did I become a geek because I was exposed to those things, or did I seek them out because I was born a geek? The world may never know.

When it came time to name and theme my blog, I was struck by the idea of using the little square mans from Adventure. Which brings me to the other reference in the name. “Mans” has become, on certain gaming forums, a humorous catch-all term for whatever represents you in a game. Whatever you control. Whether it’s Altair from Assassin’s Creed, or your tanks and infantry in Axis and Allies, in all cases, those are your “mans.” That is your mans. In Adventure, the square was my mans. It’s important we don’t take ourselves too seriously and injecting the term “mans” into the most pretentious discussions about game design helps keep us grounded and reminds us this is supposed to be fun. Also, we sometimes sound like wankers and saying “mans” gives us a reason to laugh at ourselves.

I thought the idea of the square mans from Adventure appearing in lots of other games would be possibly humorous and certainly extremely geeky. Like me! The header graphic, therefore, depicts a game, usually a board game because that’s easy, into which the little square mans, sometimes wielding a sword, sometimes a key, fights off the Luftwaffe, or the Harkonnens, or the Outlaws and the Renegade.

And there you have it. Games, Design, Writing, Media, Politics. I should add a disclaimer that the kind of political thought I find interesting is not the kind that leads one to watch the debates on TV. I find that kind of politics to be largely wankery akin to listening to King Crimson. Something that actually contains all the negative stereotypes we associate with the genre.

Instead I’m talking about the kind of stuff you get on Charlie Rose. Diplomacy, strategy, foreign policy, statescraft. That kind of thing. The same kind of thing, no surprise, that makes good drama, and makes good games. About which, more later.

I encourage you to respond, even if it’s negative. Negativity, I can handle. Vitriol, however, is something I can do without. If there was anything in here that sparked a memory or an idea, respond. From such things do great communities rise.

I said the blog would not be personal, but I feel there are some things you should know that will frame the discussion. I live in Orange County, California, I worked for several years at Pandemic studios and now run my own video game company. I have two gaming groups, one in L.A. one in OC, that will receive frequent reference. I’m an avid gamer across all categories, including PC games, console games, board games, card games, RPGs, CCGs, miniature wargames. Everything. I’ve been in the video game biz for many years and before that I was a writer/designer in the Traditional Adventure Gaming industry, at places like Wizards of the Coast and Decipher. I’ve worked mostly on licensed games; Star Trek, The Lord of the Rings, Dune, Star Wars. I’m not sure how much of this, if any, is relevant or interesting, but one never knows, does one?

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