Going Back To BASIC(s): Some Early Game Design Books, and Why They Rock/Suck.(Part 1)

So, thanks to a game developer friend, or rather, her retweet of a question about gaming and game-dev books, I dug up a series of old books I remember from my childhood... Well, I only remember some of them, as, naturally, libraries don't always have a complete series in stock. But either way, we're gonna be mentioning most of them... And here they are. You can find them yourself at http://mocagh.org/loadpage.php?getcompany=usborne-hayes , and I recommend you do so if you were ever a BASIC fan, or just want to understand how (ho ho) basic programming could be sometimes, back in the day.

That... Is a fair few books. But, as we'll see, they have a fairly common pattern.

Now, one thing to remember about these books is... They're quite obviously designed for kids, or adults who like kids' educational books. And that's actually a little telling about coding books for this day and age (The series was published between 1983 and 1986, as far as I am aware.)

Why? Because on the one hand, they're more accessible than the programmer's guides for many 8-bit systems of the time, and, for the other, none of these books assume you're an idiot, explaining things without getting patronising, and even offering possible experiments for yourself you could look into.

An Example of not assuming you're an idiot: Telling you that it's easy to make mistakes in coding.

...It really is.

So let's start with the three "lots of small games" books: Computer Space Games, Computer Battle Games, and Weird Computer Games (There was also a fourth, Creepy Computer Games, but it's a bit harder to find.) In a lot of them, we're going to see the name of Usborne Publishing's Editorial Director, Jenny Tyler (Who also wrote a series of puzzle adventures for 8-13 year olds that I sometimes still look at when the mood takes me. :D )

The one thing in common with the games in these books is that they're small, manageable projects. The most complicated programs run in at something like 200 lines of BASIC, and it's not always guaranteed that the largest, most complicated program involves graphics (In fact, in each of these compilation books, the graphical games are between 50 and 70 lines.) However, not all of them are programmed the same way, and not all the books in the series deal with all systems (More on that in later parts.) Also, the games vary widely in "Fun Factor": Playing Hot or Cold with the computer via text was... Pretty disappointing, even in the days where a Scott Adams text adventure was Manna from Heaven. But still, they taught programming, and usually in a fairly logical way. Let's look at a few, shall we?

The Absolute Basics: The Aforementioned Guessing Games

Huh... So... Robots complicated enough to wage war are using single letter defusing codes?

I can feel 5-Year Old Me's skepticism through the mists of time, for some reason...

Two of the books (Battle Games and Space Games) begin with what is essentially "Hot or Cold", albeit with a wide difference in difficulty between the two. They both have simple mini-stories meant to fire the imagination: In Battle Games, it's a battle against the Robots, where you have a limited amount of time to defuse a missile before it goes off in Earth HQ (By guessing which letter of the human alphabet defuses it... Go figure), and in Space Games, you're trying to guess what force you'd need to escape an alien world in a stolen spaceship before the locals capture you.

In a way, these are the best starters, because they only involve simple things: PRINT (text), variables (Storing single bits of data that can be changed or referred to), GOTO (A feature in linear languages where you jumped around to a certain point of the program), IF...THEN statements (Explains itself), random numbers, and FOR loops (Do this thing X times)... Simple stuff. 

In another... God, even to 5 year old me, they were dull and tedious. Here's how playing Starship Takeoff (the Space Games one) usually went for me.

GRAVITY: 10

TYPE IN FORCE

> 100

TOO LOW

TYPE IN FORCE

> 200

TOO LOW

TYPE IN FORCE

[eight attempts later]

YOU FAILED -

THE ALIENS GOT YOU

Wonderful stuff. Properly looking at the code, I could have done better, but this was one of the games that never incentivised me to try. Shame I didn't, because otherwise, I would have realised (as I do now), that there are always only 40 possible answers (The gravity * a number between 1 and 40), and I have 10 attempts. Robot Missile, by comparison, had 26 possibilities (A-Z), and only 4 attempts. Both were frustrating as hell, so I never did.

Of course, there are always variations of this, so there's also multiple variable Hot/Cold (Intergalactic Race... Which was about picking angles and velocities of satellite launch to get it into the right orbit height), Which Monster is Weak to Which Weapon? (Monsters of Galacticon, where the "guesses" were your fellow redshirts), and other types as well. Eventually, these games move into teaching you about arrays, but the guessing games weren't very entertaining, although they were instructive in absolute basics.

Shooting Galleries and Simon Games

Okay, so this isn't code to a shooting gallery game... I just wanted to set something up for later in the post. And the shooting gallery games look boring, anyhow.

Another simple, easy to program category, these generally used the number keys, although it was pretty easy to change them to use arrow keys. But here, another concept gets introduced: Timers. All the timers were loop timers, which sounds a bit kludgy, but hell, it gave pretty consistent times. In any case, the most basic versions went along the lines of "There is an enemy who can pop up in one of X positions. Hit the right key for where they are (Between 1 and X) to shoot them when they appear."

Game wise, despite the ASCII graphics ( "0" for a soldier poking his head up from some battlements, "OO" for the Bug Eyed Monsters of the space version), they were simple, they were fun, and there was no gruesome "OH NOES, THE [THINGUMAJIG] ATE ONE OF YOUR CREW!" messages... More's the pity to the older, bloodthirstier me...

...Actually, come to think of it, I knew how programs worked by this point in both books, and added some in with an IF [score]<5 GOTO [line which then printed out that I'd been nommed on by Bug Eyes, and ended the program]. So young me was a bloodthirsty sort as well.

Of course, some of the games weren't shooting galleries, they were "Quickly work out/memorise this thing, then type an appropriate response." Alien Snipers had you quickly typing a letter that was X letters after the printed letter. Asteroid Belt had you typing a number proportional to the size of the Asteroid (represented by the number of stars it was made of.) Shootout was a straight reflexes game, where it didn't matter what key you pressed, so long as it wasn't BREAK (Which would quit the program on any 8-bit system that had the key), and so long as you did it very quickly after it actually told you to (The other shootist must have been walking backwards, because shooting early would mean you got the "He shot you!" message. :P )

They were definitely among the fun ones. But the main thing they taught was how to kludge the shit out of timers with FOR loops, something that is now... Well, we have dedicated subroutines in most languages now for doing that, so we don't need to be so clumsy ourselves...

A Sidenote: It's Amazing How Many Of These Involve Blind Chance

Even Repton was pissed off at this development!

Of the games in Space Games, Battle Games, and Weird Games, there are three main forces to contend with in pretty much all the games to some degree or another: Reflexes, Blind Luck, and Logic. And that's actually kind of telling. Not because these are basics of videogames (Although the second is only really glorified in the bloody handed Roguelike), but because, in nearly all of these games, they're pretty much all it is. There is no talking to people, no degrees of victory... It's all black and white, do or die: Shoot the Cowboy. Find The Resonant Frequency Of These Robot Guards to Kill Them Before Your Execution. Shoot Robot HQ By Guessing Where It Is In This General Area To Win War.

Multiple types of endings beyond "Win/Lose" weren't actually going to be a thing in games until after these books had seen the light of day. Talking to people would happen, but only in Interactive Fiction, and only in a limited sense (Hell, today is still a limited sense... But a less limited sense). And RNJesus puzzles (Where the answer is to pray to holy hell that the Random Number Generator doesn't hate you this time), are still in some videogames today, mostly received with horror (Repton 2, released a year after Space Games, would be lambasted for an area which had randomly falling asteroids that would kill you on impact, forcing you to restart the whole sodding game.)

So things have changed, and these books seem quite primitive in terms of game design... But not by as much as we'd like to think. More on that later, methinks... For now, back to -

The Outliers

Wait, I... Get to move and shoot?!? (Sort of... Sort of...)

Each book has its own little games that are neither about guesstimates, Hot/Cold, or reflexes. Take, for example, Death Valley. It's an ASCII Tunnel Racer, where you have to move left and right without hitting walls for a specified length of time. I for walls, * for you, so it would look a little like this:

I              I

 I              I

 I              I

  I              I

 I              I

I     *      I

Doesn't look too thrilling, does it? Here's me playing it, at the difficult width of 8 characters spacing, on a BBC Emulator. I still suck at that game, even today.

Doesn't grab you? How about a management game? Space Mines is kind of like the ancient Lemonade Stand game... Except it also has random events, like radiation leaks, or the market glutting, ruining your net take if you do too well on the mining end. These kinds of games thrive by being text, although I'm sure a talented BASIC programmer could add some graphics for funsies.

Weird Games has the biggest proportion of these, though, with an ASCII pachinko game (Skulls of the Pyramid), a sort of pacman game (You are a shark, avoiding a hunter, while eating folks. Sometimes, however, your controls briefly randomise after eating someone!), and a "Bombing Run" style game where you are a witch, trying to pick up spell ingredients by diving onto them (Flying Witch, which, sadly, has an RNJesus death as another core mechanic). There's even a small text adventure, at a whopping... Well, okay, for these three books... 200 lines (or less, depending on system)

Finally, we have the graphical games. There's only two (Missile! and Touchdown), but they both use drawing commands, which shows the downsides of drawing on certain systems (To save your eyes, I'll just tell you... It flickers. A lot. Many old games used User-Defined Symbols instead, to make life easier.)

In the end, it's the outliers that make these books truly interesting, and each one teaches something new. Scrolling (in systems which need a SCROLL command to do so, and just by the text scrolling itself otherwise). More ways to use the RNJesus. Dear god, even realtime games and directional controls!

But the games themselves can only teach so much. Sooner or later, the young game developer has to leave the comfy nest of a DIY book, and get out there and PROGRAM. Do these books help with that? A little.

How Do I Change Stuff?

Awww... You... Actually wait, you should and you did. Bravo.

For me to even pretend I didn't need to learn how to change these games to grow as a programmer would be arrogant. More importantly, it would be untrue, because I certainly struggled, even at a somewhat precocious 10, to fully understand what did what in a linear programming language. But the two books I had, out of the three we've been looking at so far, did help a little. At the end of each is a short programming reference, letting you know what does what, and how to do it. It recommends other books in the series, and some more advanced books (Like, y'know, the thick-ass BBC User's Manual that came with every BBC Micro). And it set you little challenges, simple homework assignments.

How do you make this game more difficult? How do you add a game over message? How do you change messages? (Actually, that one shouldn't really have been in any of the books, because how it described PRINT was pretty fucking obvious, yo... But hey, 5 year old me was chuffed to get such an easy assignment, let's not rain on his parade and cause a paradox where I become even more crusty and salty, eh?) At least half the games had suggestions on things to do, ways to change things, and it didn't take a super-genius to know that a game about shooting bug eyed monsters could just as easily be about throwing chalk at Demanding Teachers, that the context could always be shifted round.

In a way, that was the most important lesson of all: That games could have context wherever the hell you wanted them to have context, and that all the worlds of imagination were yours. It even had sections, like the one pictured, that showed you how to add things, although it didn't get into the complexity of some of the other books.

In the next part, we'll deal with some of the Adventure Game books, and why these really didn't insult your intelligence.

Why "Objective", Performance/Tech Based Reviews Are A BAD Idea

So, one thing that I have seen people calling for is "More objective" reviewing. Sometimes, they mean "Less biased overall" (Which is good to ask for), sometimes they mean "I don't want political viewpoint X to be represented so god-damn much" (Tough titty, writers have political viewpoints, readers have political viewpoints, and if you don't want to deal with gender and politics, good fucking luck in life. No, really, good fucking luck.)

Sometimes, however, they really do mean "objective", in the sense of purely representing the technical aspects, how well it runs, etc. Let's illustrate how misleading this can easily get with two hypothetical reviewers. Let's call them Jim and Graham, after Jim Rossignol and Graham Smith.

Jim has a computer which often meets minimum specs for AAA games, but rarely optimal specs for the newer ones. So he can play the game, but he can't afford to get the whole experience (Because, spoilers, even guys who write full time for a mag don't get paid a whole lot!). He experiences some slowdown at certain points in the game, but, unbeknownst to him, this isn't because his setup isn't top notch. It's because he's using an AMD graphics card, and the game was primarily coded around NVIDIA cards. Yes, that's a thing that still happens, even to this day. So he, naturally, mentions this as part of his review. NVIDIA fans slam him.

Graham, meanwhile, has a swanky computer with all mod cons, an NVIDIA card, and... A top range anti-virus program. This causes some problems, and, because he has a top of the range setup, he makes a bigger deal out of it. A week later, it's discovered that his particular anti-virus program fucks with the game, and he looks like a twat.

Meanwhile, both of them use different routers, and have exactly the same problems in multiplayer, problems which are widely reported. Their editor, Steve, doesn't have these problems, and writes an apology about both pieces when the folks who didn't experience these problems, and didn't notice all the complaints, decided to write in to say that they shouldn't lower the score based on this "nonexistent problem."

...Three months later, the readers look like twats when it turns out that, yes, the netcode was shit all along, and they start experiencing problems and complaining. And nobody's happy.

All three of these things have happened at least once. Because there are so many different components for PCs, software and hardware, and that means Your Mileage May Vary. I've seen windows updates, graphics driver updates, lack of graphics driver updates, all sorts of things fucking with performance in games that sometimes, it's hard to tell what's actually causing a problem.

"Ahhh, but consoles are different!", I hear you say. Perhaps. But sometimes, consoles look like they're working when they're actually about to break, and this, too, can occasionally affect reviews. Less than PC reviewing, it's sure, but you still have to use a router to connect, an ISP, so keep in mind that no system is free of this.

Then, we come to another issue: With only certain exceptions, older games re-released will, on a performance based scale, consistently score higher than newer ones. For example, I can play Jet Set Willy with so much less hassle than I used to have. Before, it was "pop a tape in. Is the tape clean? Is the cassette drive jammed? Do I have the cable connected?"

Now? "Put thing on hard drive, run program/emulator, fiddle with performance settings a little." 100000/10, much god-damn better than it used to be. Sonic 1 runs far better, on my current system, than Lichdom: Battlemage, and so it scores higher.

"That's not what we said, though! We meant as they come out!"

Ah, you're right. But re-releases are often reviewed as new products, because some of them (Not all, but some) come with slightly swankier graphics, and a slightly improved engine, and nothing else. Oh look, that re-release, on a performance base, still runs better than brand new AAA game, because it didn't have extra fancy gubbins.

Indie games would consistently score higher on a performance basis, because they're less resource intensive and smaller. The simpler the game, the higher it could score on a performance basis. And then comes the real killer: You then have to consider how much performance the game needs compared to its compatriots. Is it "objectively" better because it needs less resources, or "objectively" worse because it doesn't need to be as effective in using your computer's resource allocation?

"But you don't need to know these things, all you need to know is whether it's 'objectively' good or bad on your system, let readers..." No. Stop right there.

"Good" and "Bad" are rarely objective statements, because they're value judgements. You're stepping into "Worth" territory, and if you think that's something that can be objectively judged, I'm going to laugh. Hard. An object's worth changes, fluidly, based on subjective factors.

Good example: The white jacket I wanted for ComicCon. It's worth less to me now that I don't need it for a costume, because when I tried to get it, it was for a specific purpose. That purpose has been and gone, so it's "worth" less. If other people don't like how I look in it, it's worth less based on their subjective views, because it's going to get dickheads yelling stupid shit at me, which reduces its worth because of the hassle it cost me. If I lose or gain weight, it's going to hang differently, look differently, and so have a different worth to my self-esteem.

Then there's all the factors you're now leaving out, whether due to space or time constraints. Most reviews are 500-2500 words long. That's it. Are you going to read an article that's 2,500 words about how it performs on System X with Hardware Y,Z,A, and B, when you yourself have System X with Hardware C,D,E, and F (Not to mention that the reviewer probably won't have even noticed that Software G, which you have, and they don't, causes bugs in the game)?

Would you read it if it didn't comment at all on the writing, or great moments in the game, or how a mechanic feels like it fits with the theme you think they're trying to portray? All of these are subjective things you'll be missing out on: The cornering on Burnout Paradise isn't, by any means "Realistic"... Hell, describing it objectively, it would be "The lower statistic X is, the more likely it is to rotate the vehicle you are driving in a manner more consistent to 'sliding' than 'turning' , especially at higher speeds." ... But it's fun, not to mention collisions. We like collisions in racing games, right? "The collisions are rendered using a physics engine that -" GOD STOP, PLEASE, THIS DESCRIPTION CAN GO ON FOR HALF A PAGE, AND IS NOWHERE NEAR AS EFFICIENT, FOR A READER, AS...

"The collisions, meanwhile, are sufficiently meaty, with lots of crumpling, slow motion replays, and a delicious feeling of 'Yup, that car is fucked, and there is no consequence for this. God bless Fun'."

Which is, you'll note, largely subjective. Long live subjectivity, I say!

New Ideas: Why Listening to Other Perspectives *Helps*

So, while it may not seem it, I've been working on a game at a glacial pace (Mainly because, before concentrating on gamedev, or reviewing, or a number of other things, I want my life to be stable, and, quite honestly? It isn't, not really...), and writing down other ideas for the time when I'm actually able to work on them.

But recent events, and new acquaintances (Hopefully friends, but I'm not going to be presumptuous and assume such) have encouraged me to go back to the drawing board. I actually rewrote that last sentence, because I said "made", when, in reality, "encouraged" is a much better word. I should also note that while I go into two folks here (and a third group), there are many more, so if I don't mention you, don't take that the wrong way, please!

You see, these perspectives have not only given me new ideas, but also, before they're even fully fleshed out, criticisms of those ideas, areas I can improve. And, as anyone who's worked on creative projects knows, a well constructed criticism before you've set your projects in at least clay is extremely useful. Obviously, a less well constructed (or destructive) criticism can sink a project, but since this isn't the case, we'll merely mention that, and move on to the folks I've met, and their perspectives.

Let's start with Veerender Jubbal . Veerender is one of the nicest people I've met in recent months, he happens to be a Person of Colour, and he happens to be a Sikh. Despite my saying "happens to be", these are actually both quite important. Because just like women, the video-games industry does not appear to have much of a PoC perspective, and Veerender was the first person in a while to remind me of this. More folks followed, and one group in particular will also be mentioned. But let's take a brief moment to digress on my main project (I'm not afraid of someone "stealing" the idea, because A: Not a lot of folks read my lil' ol' blog, and B: Each developer puts different touches on much the same basic idea. This is a kind of diversity, but not in the sense we're going to discuss.)

My main project at the moment is a game called Section M. It's inspired by three things: the works of Charles Stross (Which I may never live up to), the works of Howard Phillips Lovecraft (Which, in a sense we're going to go into, I don't want to "live up to"), and Covert Action, by Microprose. Set in an alternate 1930s-50s (Still haven't *fully* decided yet), it is planned to have similar approaches to Covert Action (Minigames as a mechanic for the duties of a covert operative attempting to disrupt the plans of various organisations in a Cold War setting), but set in a world where the Great Old Ones were given temporary lease on the world, which led to horrors greater than World War II, changes to the geopolitical structure, and the bringing to the fore of the dangers and wonders of the supernatural.

Obviously, I am somewhat of an idiot for making this my first major game project (Which is why I'm also, when time permits, working on smaller games to make sure my skills are up to the task), but Veerender has highlighted a certain aspect of this idea that, to my shame, I didn't actually notice that much before.

Where are the Sikhs? Where are the People of Colour? Many games in the modern day (A little less so in earlier games, where characters were more of a Tabula Rasa (Blank slate you project yourself onto)) have all the main characters as white heterosexuals, often male, and when People of Colour are put into games, it's in roles already noted as ideologically contested (Meaning, generally, offensive stereotyping and creepiness... Not the best summary, but it'll do for now). The Spirit Warrior (Native American), the Token Black Guy Who Dies To Save The White Hero, The Mystic Indian... There's a big ol' list of stereotypes, and even many games today include them, unaware of how somewhere out there, there's an entire segment of folks they just pissed off with one character.

Now, this goes back into a comment I've thrown out a few paragraphs back: I don't want to emulate all of Lovecraft's themes. I specifically don't want to emulate the fact that he projected his own dislike/fear of People of Colour and his attitude toward "miscegenation" (Interracial relationships, and I put it in quotes because the term itself is... Well, not the most enlightened, as it deeply implies biological differences between white folks like me, and People of Colour that weren't, and aren't actually there.)

Go read a bit of Lovecraft. Notice that many of the villainous individuals and groups in his works are, in one form or another, interracial ethnicities. As an important aside, I grew up with the term "half-caste" for folks who are children of white and non-white groupings, and, even fully aware that it's considered an offensive term in the modern day, I have to edit myself not to use it as a description... Which, if you think I'm the tolerant and open-minded person I believe myself to have become, is a single example of why racism is so problematic to deal with... Because often, those of us who grew up with certain words still reflexively use them, even though they fully understand why it's not a good idea to do so. (Caste means "purity" or "race", so... Half-pure, half a "race".)

So this now leads me to feeling that I want to actually think about other cultures within this world, outside of "They exist", and to explore, somehow, somewhere, the cultural identity of these fantastical races that may have cropped up in universe. Which neatly ties into the next person I wish to talk about.

But before I do, let me link you to a stepping off point for exploring this yourself: I Need Diverse Games (and their Twitter feed), a Tumblr Blog exploring issues of race in videogames, and some other perspectives you may want to explore if you're a game dev.

Okay, so we mentioned cultural identity. Cultural identity encompasses a lot of things, because, surprise surprise, there are a lot of cultures out there, all with differing attitudes to beauty, women, men, LGBT issues, race issues, politics... And religion. Now, I fancy myself somewhat of a hobby scholar when it comes to religion, but there are those who seriously study the subject, and those who then apply this thought to the theory of game design. One of those individuals is Jenni Goodchild , who studies Theology and Philosophy. And she, also, has made me seriously consider aspects I am ashamed to say I had not considered seriously before. Namely, religion in video games.

I won't go into too much detail on that one, except to say that my own perspective is a syncretic belief, essentially pantheist in nature, that nonetheless does not place deities very highly on the trust scale. I'm also going to start by linking a video, specifically a recent talk Jenni presented for VideoBrains: Playing Games with Gods: Why Games Need Religion

Don't worry, this blog post won't go anywhere while you watch it, I can quite happily wait. Especially as it raises many valid points about how we don't really think about these things. And, because I wish to change this, I will quite happily own up to being guilty of this. Points to especially listen to so far include how Bioware might not have thought their "different" religion through, how Civilisation: Beyond Earth deals with religion in a very interesting way, and how the Elder Scrolls series, essentially... Doesn't (or rather, kludges it somewhat). That's just from the first half of the talk, by the way.

So now, I find myself quite happy with this "predicament", because both of these people have highlighted more places for me to potentially explore. Yes, okay, I now have more work to do before I can consider the game's setting, lore, and the mechanical support I may have to introduce into my project, but at the same time, these two people have, by drawing attention to how little I've previously thought about these things, opened up whole new cans of worms for me to slop my hands into, feel, and examine... If that sounds gross to you, many folks who work in creative fields, even as a hobby, think of concepts as things we can explore, dissect, get our hands dirty in, and we love it. We also love folks who give us ideas, especially by pointing out areas we can improve in, and, more to the point, how to improve them.

So be fully aware, game devs, that more perspectives may be, at times, confusing, distracting, more than a little heartbreaking... But by taking in, by wishing to know other viewpoints, and to understand how your viewpoint will nearly always be lacking in some area compared to someone else's, you can not only improve your games... You can improve yourself.

I only hope I do at least an okay job of that. And I hope you do too.

The Dam Broke Today (And Why It May Not Be A Bad Thing)

Don't expect amazing writing here. I'm not editing this beyond correcting my spelling as I go, this is something that has to be written, has to be written down raw.

So, for those who know me, or read my blog (All some of you), you may remember that I have depression. It's not severe. At least, I thought it wasn't. And maybe it still isn't. I just don't know for sure. There's only one thing I know for sure:

Today, the dam broke. Just a little, but enough that I was getting strange looks, because it was pretty plain to see on my face. It happened just over ten minutes ago. I'd just finished posting a series of old vignettes I'd written, based on characters from tabletop sessions (And some who, sadly, never reached a table to have their tales grow, like Finlay Houlihan, the Irish Hunter, or Saint Nicky, the Demon of the Spring Court)... And, just before I left the house, I tweeted that I had to sort the electricity...

...Which is when I started crying. Not full on tears, and it still isn't full on tears, bawling, tearing of the hair, that sort of thing. But it's pretty obvious that my many masks had slipped, and even as I'm writing this, I have to pause for a moment and take a deep breath, close my eyes.

But not to fight back the tears. Because, for the first time, perhaps in a long time, these tears are healthy. I want you to understand that. I need you to understand that. Because a big part of depression is locking your heart away, a little piece at a time, so that you don't do this anymore.

It's not the done thing.
You just need to man up.
What do you have to feel bad about?

Right now, as I'm writing this down (You'll see why it has to be written down soon, I hope), I know what I have to feel bad about. I've reminded myself, and opened a door I closed on myself some time ago.

I have songs, but I only sing them to amuse close friends, people I trust. I locked away those songs, because they're not the done thing.

I have stories, so many stories, so many dreams, and I locked most of them away, treated them almost clinically, because technique, writer, technique, you'll never get good if you don't master technique before flair, or feeling.

I have love to give, so much love, and nobody seems to want it. There are friends, family who accept it, and I love them dearly for the kindness they pay (And it is a kindness, for they know as well as I how valuable a gift it is to give)... But as much as I love them, I am too far away from most to share this love, and perhaps I've not found love in recent years because I don't want to show someone how much I want to hold them, kiss them, caress them, because if you do that right off the bat, no matter how passionate a person you really are, that's creepy, what a creeper, what a freak.

Even knowing that some of these things are exaggerations, my mind magnifying the pain, the fear, the loathing, I know they're also true, at least to some extent. We fear close contact. We're told not to sing, to show joy, after a certain age. We're told that having our own look is unfashionable, or dressing like a douche, or asked why would you want to look different? Answer? Because we want to show people more than one aspect of ourselves, or we want to change ourselves for the better, reach the ideals we know exist, or we just do it to have fun.

The dam's closing up a little now, but I want you to know that, for all that this has sounded like a bad thing, that dam is holding something back that should be in the light, plain for all to see. I shouldn't feel the need to hide it.

I have songs, but I do not sing.
I have words, but I concentrate on meaning, on interest, rather than the raw emotion.
I have love, but I do not express the passion in my soul.

This short (and it is short) outpouring of pain and grief and loss and a million other things that have quietly reverberated through my mind and my heart? For one terrible, awe inspiring, and blackly beautiful moment, they came out. You may think "Oh my god, he's in terrible pain" or "Such a god-damn drama queen!", but the fact is... They've been there. They've been there for a long time... And it is not healthy for them to hide so well.

Today, the dam broke. Just a little. And though folks inexperienced with depression won't think this, that is a healthy thing to have happened. Even if I am crying a little, I'm more worried that the tears are drying up than that they started.

Many Masks.

I thought I'd write this down to give you some idea of... Well, not the "Real Me", for reasons which will become clear. But to help you understand me a little better. Not a lot better, that involves actually getting to know me. But I know there are some folks who seem interested in the writer, rather than the writings out there, so let's start with a statement that seems obvious, or nonsensical, but is very important.

I am, like you, a person of many facets. I wear many masks, many hats. The only real constants are that all of them, at some point or another, will talk about the same things.

One mask is the Big Bad Wolf. I acknowledge that I have a sensual side, that it's always, on some level, hungering for new tastes, new bodies to explore, new thrills and sights and sounds and moans and - I acknowledge that if I was always the Big Bad Wolf, I'd be a sorry individual indeed, nothing more than a rutting beast. So I'm not always the Big Bad Wolf.

Another is that of Mummy Jamie. I worry about my friends, I want to help them, care about them enough to want to care for them. But Mummy Jamie doesn't mind banging heads together, can be a bit of a shrew and a worrywart, and is, on the whole, a somewhat prudish individual. So I'm not always Mummy Jamie.

I'm the Mad Welshman. Why am I mad? Because very few people seem to understand me. They've even told me so to my face. Family members among them, no less! Madness can be a creative force, but it can be isolating. And, in the end, I might not be so mad after all, as, to quote Larry Niven's somewhat conservative Puppeteers, "The majority is always sane, Louis" (A statement that sanity is always judged as a relative matter.) So whether I'm always the Mad Welshman or not, I'm not always seen that way.

I'm the Mystic, my head in other worlds, rather than this one. I know things you don't, but it's very possible they don't apply to normal, everyday concerns, or even reality. What is reality, anyway?

I'm the Noble, I'm the Grump, I'm the Clown and the Wise Man. All of these are masks I wear, and not all of them have what you would call a "Human" perspective on the world. The Thinker calmly goes through logical scenarios, not caring that they're things like "How a terrorist could actually be effective, instead of randomly bombing yahoos" or "How many people it would take to destroy the Internet". And you may get the impression, reading this, that I have some sort of dissociative personality disorder, but no. These are all facets of the complete me.

I'm complicated, and yet simple. And I love it. Talk to me sometime, you might find you have a lot of masks too!

Experimenting with Genre: The Graphical Parser Games

Everyone who knows gaming knows that Text Adventures (or, as many know them now, Interactive Fiction) are a thing, and that Point n Click Adventures came afterward. What not so many know is that there was a middle ground that got explored quite heavily from the late 80s to the mid 90s: The Graphical Parser Games.

Why call them that instead of Graphical Adventure or the like? Because, as I noted, they're an in-between point. They had text adventure style inputs (and later early Point n Click interfaces), or collections of parser you could click on, and graphics. Here, let me show you an early example: Shadowgate. Notice the differences between that and, say, Maniac Mansion (released between this game, and the Atari STE game I'll mention next, in 1987)

Hit self: You die. Open door: You die.

While it's not the earliest example (that would be Deja Vu: A Nightmare Comes True, by the same company, ICOM Simulations), you can see many of the features of the prototypical graphic parse- What? You think it's an RPG? No, 'fraid not. There are no HP in this game, just a series of "You did the wrong thing and died horribly." No, really, there's a lot of that in this damn game. Going into the wrong door at the wrong time could kill you!

But we're not here to talk about the foibles of earlier designers, who often conflated "Dick move" with "Challenge" and "Replayability" because they didn't know better... So let's see... We have an EXITS doohickey we can click in the bottom left (useful, because often we can't look around), A set of verbs, an inventory, a self button, spells, and... Wait, what do we click on?

Ah, here's the "beauty" of these experiments. The items are actually on screen, and that's what you click! Shadowgate, as one of the earliest, actually suffered for this. Good example, under this carpet, or one very much like it, there is an item. The only way to tell this item is even there (and you need it) is to pixel hunt. What's that? Well, nowadays, most of the irritation is finding a small area you can click on to do a thing, mostly because of glitchy context sensitive controls in the games that have those. In older games, with a smaller screen size (Go look up EGA limits to get some idea of how big this would have been, at its best... Or perhaps CGA, for extra magenta funtimes!), the thing you could click on could be as small as... A single pixel. In among, at the time, anything up to 307,200 on the screen (or less, like Shadowgate)

Now you know why I'm a grouchy old sod about games sometimes... Because I grew up with this shit.

In any case, Shadowgate didn't have a great story, but other experiments happened around the same time as ICON's games. Here's Wonderland, as you would see it on an Atari ST.

And this screen, like others in the series, was ANIMATED too!

Pretty neat, huh? No? Well, consider that, at the time the Atari STE came out, you had... Er... GEM. Not even Windows 3.1. Fucking GEM. And these windows you're seeing? They aren't the Atari ST's Little Green Desktop (AKA Crystal, the precursor to GEM), they're a system that's part of the game itself. And all of these windows are resizable, movable, and can be closed out if need be. Of course, not every system got something this sweet. Here's Guild of Thieves on the C64.

Nary a window to be seen.

Not as cool, is it? In fact, apart from the well drawn pixel art (considering the limitations of the system), it's no different from, say... Twin Kingdom Valley, or Questprobe's Marvel graphical text adventures... Where, on most platforms they came out on, you had to specifically request the drawing, and it would look... Well...

You see a cabin in the woods. It is where you put treasure.

...About like that. But like their ICON contemporaries, the Magnetic Scrolls adventure games had a selectable parser. You could, if you were somehow in possession of an Atari ST without a working keyboard (Not completely uncommon, but relatively easy to fix), you could click on a VERB or COMMAND menu, then something either in the room, or in your inventory. It had separate windows for both, with pretty icons. In this way, the Magnetic Scrolls games beat the metaphorical tar out of their compatriots. So let's look at the final compatriot, which did one thing both ICON and the Magnetic Scrolls games didn't quite manage.

Legend Entertainment released their first game in 1990. It was... Er...

Hoo, boy... This is awkward.

...This, Spellcasting 101. If you guessed from this screenshot that the series (for lo, they made three of them!) was on par, writing and tone wise, with Leisure Suit Larry... You'd be quite right. But, regardless of my opinion of the game (Slightly embarassed it exists, thanks for asking), it nonetheless belongs to the subgenre, and Legend (With chief writer and ex-Infocom staffer Steve Meretzky at the helm most of the company's life) went on to better things. Mostly better, anyhoo. Fast forward two years, and you have their first tie-in (A thing they became famous for) ...

Know what impresses me? That item list!

...Frederik Pohl's Gateway. Based on the science fiction series of the same name (And, not oddly at all, the same author), the game was... Actually critically lambasted for feeling out of date, design wise. But suffice to say, it now has quite a cult following, as do Legend in general and Steve Meretzky. Sadly, the sequel to this game (also panned) was the last gasp of the subgenre in the mainstream, and after this, Legend went on to make first person graphical adventure games, with the mostly familiar elements you'd expect. And so history trundled on. But Legend pretty much thrived in this field, whereas ICON and the MS team... Didn't really.

Companions of Xanth: Not Legend's greatest achievement. That would be Callahan's Crosstime Saloon.

Experimenting with the Genre: "Failed" Boulderdash Games

Sometimes, experiments in a genre are missed, or aren't appreciated. I thought I'd start, in my usual "When it occurs to me" way, to take a brief look at various experiments in gaming history, starting with four "Boulderdash Clones" that were released on the BBC Micro over its shelf life: Repton Infinity, Bonecruncher, Clogger, and XOR. XOR, as we'll see, only tentatively fits this category, but some of you, no doubt, are scratching your heads and saying "Er... Bold-Her-Dash?"

Let me explain. This here, in the screenshot below, is a typical Boulderdash screen:

Boulderdash (The Amiga Version) - Prettier than the original 8-bit versions.

Now, there's quite a few things missing on this screen, but three of the absolute basic elements are here: Your hero (named Rockford), who must collect all the diamonds/eggs/whatever the hell thing he's collecting today (Believe me, it varies, but most often it's diamonds, because diamonds were easy to draw on an 8 bit game), while not getting trapped or crushed by rocks (which follow certain rules you can abuse, and later have to abuse), or killed by monsters and fungus. You also have a time limit in each level, which can, in some versions and clones, be reset or added to with a collectible. A nice, simple formula that spawned... Metric fucktons of clones.

But not every game was a lazy clone, and, while all four of the games I'm now going to talk about were moderately popular at the time, they've been relegated to the sidelines of gaming history, for the most part.

First up is Repton Infinity (1988, Superior Software). Repton was the BBC equivalent of Boulderdash, a green lizard man (Rockford's apparently human) who had three main games, a couple of standalone expansions, and Infinity. Infinity was, at its most basic level, a "Make your own Repton", and at first, it doesn't look much more fun to play with, or more powerful, than Boulderdash Construction Kit (released two years earlier than Infinity, in 1986)

But then you actually get into the thing, and you realise (mainly from the demo levels provided) that you can change the rules. Not many of them, but the templates provided allowed for more mechanics than had previously existed across the whole series. Below is one example of the modified rule and tilesets... The worst of the three.

Robbo Doesn't Want to Be Here.

Meet Robbo. Robbo, like Repton, has to collect... Things. But he has different obstacles, and they act somewhat differently to the way they would in the main Repton games: Instead of keys (Which open all diamond-holding safes), he has a computer disk... Which he has to actually put in a computer. There are things he has to hit with a wrench to make them work again. And there are things that don't fall the way you thought they would if you played much Boulderdash or Repton.

The Robbo levels were annoying as hell, but they opened up the game to ever so slightly more than just "I recolour Rockford to be Red, and make maps". I respect that. So, moving on...

Bonecruncher, also from Superior (I'm not promising, but there might be a pattern here), also experimented. It also had resources to collect, and if you could guess from the cover that it involved bones somehow, you'd win yourself an imaginary cookie: Bono, our hero, is the proud owner of a business selling soap to the monsters that surround his island castle. For reasons best left unexplored (IE - Because it's a puzzle game that wasn't actually worried about plot except as a framing device), monster soap is made from very human skeletons strewn around the castle (5 per bar of soap), and winning the level does not, in many cases, require you to grab them all... Just enough to make soap for monsters. Let's take a brief poke at a Bonecruncher screen.

Ahh, the only unhappy folks are Bono and that eggsiwhotsit.

Okay, we've got most of the game's puzzle elements on this screen, good enough (Thanks Wikipedia). Skeletons for soap: Check. Keys for doors: Check. Thing that could be a monster, but is actually your co-worker Fozzy: Check. Eggsiwhotsit that's probably a boulder: Check. But apart from Fozzy, this doesn't seem that different, does it?

Except... That arrow, and the unpictured elements, are what make this one unique. And challenging. See, even though it looks like it's side-view, it's meant to be a top-down look at a floor of Bono's Castle (Just assume I made a St. Bono U2 joke, to save us both some pain), and those eggsiwhotsits (Glooks) don't fall... But they do stampede in the direction of the most recently soaped-up monster. So, let's break down how this is more complex.

• We have to get skeletons. Okay, that's like Boulderdash, think of them as diamonds.
• Glooks, if they roll over us, will kill us, but will also kill anything they trap. Cool.
• Once we have five skeletons, we find a cauldron to make soap. Okay, that's new.
• Once we have a bar of soap, we can hit up a stairway to throw soap to a monster. This changes the Glooks' "fall" direction after a short period of time, allowing us to get to new places, and changing the layout. Ah, that requires a bit of thought...
• We also have two kinds of monsters, like Boulderdash and Repton. Like those games, they're a wall-traveller, and a chaser. Gotcha.
• We won't always have enough skeletons, which is a shitter, but, if we're low on skellies, we can trap chaser type monsters behind Glooks (if they can't move anywhere, they die and turn into a skeleton), or Fozzie can trap them (Don't depend on him though, his AI's a bit erratic)
• Unfortunately, Fozzie can also get killed by being trapped or Glooks.
• If we really want a monster gone, but don't need his sweet, sweet skeleton, there are pits, too. They'll kill anything that walks into them. Including Bono.
• And finally, once we've taken soap to all the moat-monsters, we move on to the next level.

Whew! That was a lot of changes, and some interesting and thought provoking ones at that! Alas, the fact that they weren't always implemented well in the map design, combined with the fact that sometimes reviewers miss the point, meant that it had mixed reviews. I'd hardly call it a "merely average addition to an already jaded format", but obviously, tastes differ.

Clogger, again, is a different beast.

I think it's safe to say... MY MIND!

Clogger is a strange one. Again, the "plot" is only a framework, but collecting things (Apples, in this case) is only half the fun! There was, as an aside, a sort of unwritten rule back then that a game had to have a plot. I've already written about how you don't need plot in a game, and that sometimes it's a waste of time here , and early game devs don't get a pass for this, even if the knowledge wasn't easily disseminated.

Anyhoo, what made this game different? Screenshots don't really tell the whole story, but the two main goals are as follows:

• Collect apples and pies.
• Make a pretty picture by pushing the pieces into place with your shovel attachment.

Now, those of you who've played Sokoban, or any other block puzzle game, will instantly see why this is both different, and very possibly frustrating as hell. You can only push. To make life even more "fun", our poor little Clogger can't go over rough grass (It clogs him up something fierce. Oh ho ho ho ho. Ho. Ho. ho.), although he'll occasionally find a thing that can cut grass when pushed. Not to mention other puzzle elements, like gyroscopes and... Look, it was hella complex, but the goals were shown relatively organically for an early game like this. As with most early games, however, reading the fucking manual was a must. I really should write a GTtMMR about folks not reading the manual, or folks not making good manuals, because it's not fucking rocket science, and people still cock it up! [pant... pant... pant...] Okay, rant over. For now. So that's Clogger. Finally, there's the odd one out here, XOR.

Yes, it says Commodore on it. Multi platform was a thing, even back in the day!

XOR, like the other games in this article, including Repton and Boulderdash, was about finding your way through a maze, collecting all the things, and reaching the exit. But, unlike pretty much every other game in this post, it didn't have a time limit. It didn't need one, because it was a game where failure was really easy. Let's do our best to sum up how it differed from its compatriots. Screenshot, maestro?

Well, that was needlessly abstract!

What's pictured are a few of the main elements: Masks, wot you pick up. Map segments, which show where masks are (but not you, or those wibbly bits), and wibbly forcefields that, depending on the way they point, either block vertical (pointing horizontal) or horizontal (vice versa) movement through them, but get destroyed when you move through them the right way. Also, that shield is us.

Not pictured is the other shield, which is also us (We can switch between them), chickens that always fall down (and can kill you if they fall on you), fish that move sideways (and again, kill you if they hit you from more than one tile away), and these four elements provide the majority of the challenge of XOR. It's all about "How do I get all these masks without dying or getting into a Dead Man Walking scenario?" , and I think the developer was very nice (compared to peers of his time) to not give a time limit for thinking about these things (also a password system and the ability to restart a level. Say "Thank you" !)

If you'd bought the game back in the day, you'd also have been asked by the dev to try and complete the game in a minimum number of moves, for a shiny certificate (Devs liked giving out certificates and letters back then, and I'm sure those who still have their shiny certificates are happy, despite the death-stares child me is throwing them from the ether to this day.) It doesn't look fun, but... Actually, if you like logic puzzles, it straddles that fine line between dickish and engaging with aplomb.

Now, at this point in the post, I imagine some people are expecting some sort of moral, or message beyond "Hey, look at these interesting past experiments in a genre mostly made of the same game, but with different maps for ten years!"

There isn't one. I can't say whether the devs got rewarded for their experimentation, or at least felt they did. I don't think it provides anything clear on the old "Tired Sequel XVIII: The Sequeling versus The New (And Possibly Bad) Hotness" argument (Which is a purely opinion style ballyhoo anyhow.) I don't even think all of them are good (I hate Repton Infinity, for example.) But I do think there's some value in looking at these experiments if you're into game development, seeing how changes to a formula can and can't work in a game. Hell, I think that's a good learning experience overall, for any dev, reviewer, or gamer who wants to know what makes this fucking thing tick. So yeah, they're easily found and played, so give them a shot, see what you think of them, and the changes they made to a formula that, honestly, started boring the tits off me somewhere around 1989.