Secure Immaturity

“Check this out,” I said to my friend Todd. We were in my bedroom, seated in front of the television on which a realistic-looking hockey game was taking place. I twisted the knob on the paddle controller in my hand and the guy with the puck dodged around an oncoming defender. I clicked the button on the controller just as my guy passed the puck to a teammate.

“What are you doing?” Todd asked.

“I’m controlling the players.” Duh.

“You’re just watching a hockey game and moving that knob,” Todd observed. “Isn’t that the controller for your Apple II? It’s not even connected.” Indeed, he pulled out the cord from under the TV set, dangling the connector prong in front of me.

Here’s a sad (but in the end awesome) fact about my nascent video game geekhood: I grew up without an Atari 2600 or an Intellivision or a Colecovision. The only game “console” I owned was a Telstar Ranger, which, like an electric blender, had many switches for doing essentially the same thing: playing Pong. I finally bought a Nintendo in early high school, but that was years in the future.

So, in the interim (and here’s the awesome part), I pretended to have a game console. I had the most amazing, mind-blowingly cool game system because it could, via modular expansions, play games from any other game system ever made! It could even play games that didn’t even exist yet! Theoretical games! And, if a better Atari came out, all I had to do was attach another cardboard box to the side of my console, cut a cartridge-shaped slot in the box, label it was black magic marker and boom! I had tons of games for my imaginary game console, each lovingly crafted from folded card stock. The cardboard monitor had interchangeable screens so, when I wanted to play Pitfall, I could just slide in an image from the game (recreated in crayon!) and then anyone could obviously see that I was playing a skillful and high scoring game of Pitfall. I could never get past that first screen with the crocodiles, though.

But one day I saw a game that caused me to completely rethink the hardware specs for my ultimate system and inspired my ahead-of-its-time Photorealistic Hockey Game Simulator. I walked into one of the local arcades (alas, poor arcades, I knew them, Mario) and noticed a bunch of dudes thronged around one machine, up on the raised “hot new games” platform. I shouldered my way into the crowd, standing on tip toes to see over the player’s shoulder. I saw something that couldn’t possibly be real: He was playing a Saturday morning cartoon. A knight from a Disney movie I had never seen was leaping about a crypt while slashing at giant skeletal hands with his sword. Then, all of a sudden, he was riding on this enchanted horse armor, dodging oncoming columns. Finally he walks into a laboratory, picks up a potion bottle and gets his head chomped off by this crazy acid monster.

During the nanoseconds when the machine wasn’t in use, the booming voice over in the attract mode announced “Dragon’s Lair – A fantasy adventure where you become a valiant knight on a quest to rescue the fair princess from the clutches of an evil dragon. You control the actions of a daring adventurer, finding his way through the castle of a dark wizard, who has enchanted it with treacherous monsters and obstacles. In the mysterious caverns below the castle, your odyssey continues against the awesome forces that oppose your efforts to reach the Dragon’s Lair. Lead on, adventurer. Your quest awaits!”

Dragon’s Lair hit arcades like a mortar round. It looked, sounded and played like nothing else in the room. Dragon’s Lair made the once fearsome voice of Sinistar sound like a broken kazoo and it made the rest of the arcade games look like, well, games that weren’t epic fantasy cartoons. The game accomplished this via laserdisc technology. Just imagine a DVD as big as a vinyl record. It could store a couple hours worth of high quality digital video. Laserdiscs were already in use as a movie format, but no one was really taking advantage of the medium’s random access abilities.

Enter arcade developer Cinematronics and animator Don Bluth, the creative mind behind Secret of NIMH and All Dogs Go to Heaven. His studio essentially created a short Disney-esque fantasy film with one important twist: it was non-linear. All of the key action scenes could play in any order and, every few seconds, the current moment could branch between two outcomes. One outcome moved the hero, Dirk the Daring, a bit further towards rescuing Princess Daphne and the other outcome inevitably resulted in his grisly death.

For the player, a chain of these short video sequences shown in succession gave the illusion of controlling Dirk’s actions. A doorway would light up and you had a second to push the joystick left or Dirk would die. A giant skeletal hand would reach toward Dirk and you had a second to press the sword button or Dirk would die. Dragon’s Lair was a perfect example of style over substance. Underneath the flashy animation there was absolutely no game there. In reality, the player was just navigating through a really complex DVD menu system. Only perfect timing and rote memorization of the required motions for each sequence would lead you to the game’s conclusion. But in 1983 we didn’t know any better and the machine devoured our quarters.

You might think, “How quaint your ancient games were compared to what I pop into my PS3 today.” Not so fast, friend, for let me illustrate how Dragon’s Lair’s legacy lives on, even in the games you play now. Oh, yes.

Dragon’s Lair gave you the feeling that you were somehow responsible for all the cool things Dirk was doing on screen. The reality was that no combination of game engine, control interface and player skill could ever hope to offer that level of precision in real-time. But rather than showing you a completely non-interactive cut scene, game designers came up with a compromise to grant players a sense of agency. These semi-interactive sequences are called “quick time events”. Not to be confused with the media format created by Apple.

Quick time events are everywhere. If you play God of War, you may find yourself battling a mini-boss and suddenly the game flashes the triangle symbol. You instinctively hit the button so that Kratos performs a brutal attack. That’s a quick time event. If you play Resident Evil and a zombie latches on to you, how do you break the hold? Hammering on the button that flashes on screen. Quick time event.

These are simple examples. Some games make quick time events a central play mechanic. Take Indigo Prophecy, for example. The game is filled with insane Matrix-like sequences far beyond anything its physics engine and control scheme could accommodate were they real-time. Instead you have to match, Simon-style, incredibly long chains of button combinations that flash on the screen. The sequences have only the most abstract relationship to the moves your character is performing.

I was playing the most recent reboot of Prince of Persia on the XBox 360. Like many games, the first part of the game is essentially a tutorial woven into the opening story sequence. I learned all about wall-running and grabbing onto metal hoops to extend my jump and other acrobatic maneuvers. If I didn’t make a jump over a fatally high chasm, my companion caught me in the nick of time and teleported me back to the ledge. While it looked cool when executed properly, I soon realized that the moves were really only useful in very specific situations which I encountered at convenient intervals. In fact, the moves have to be performed in a certain order or else I died. Sometimes I had to retry the sequence five or six (okay, ten) times before I got it right.

That’s when it hit me: I wasn’t “playing” Prince of Persia any more than I was “playing” Dragon’s Lair. While sometimes it seemed like the game offered a choice between Path A or Path B, once on that path there was usually only one way to get to the end: wall run, jump, jump, wall run, grab the hoop, jump, etc. Or else I “died”. The game, or at least the first few hours of it, was just a series of quicktime events with the illusion of freedom due to the fact that everything happened in real-time. I stopped playing and returned the game to Blockbuster.

It all comes down to scale. If you think about it, ALL games are really an elaborate series of quick time events. Microdecisions and branching pathways happening at a rapid pace. I think the best games offer generous amounts of decisions, meaningful consequences and exponential possibilities. Some games make you feel like the possibilities are limitless and do a good job of reinforcing that illusion. Nothing wrong with that and those games are still fun if you don’t think too hard about them. Take the venerable Pac-Man. It’s a memory and reflex game. Study it. The game is not random. Each level can be completed by following a specific pattern. Once you know it, it will work every time. But, at that point, you’ve solved Pac-Man and it isn’t the same game any more.

So the next time you’re playing that hot new video game, ask yourself, “Did that just happen because I am a skillful player with a sound strategy? Or is the game just manipulating me into pressing the right buttons? Is the game playing me?”

Resources

Digital Leisure – As the laserdisc was a close ancestor to the DVD, it didn’t take much to port Dragon’s Lair to DVD and Blu-ray. You can actually play the game on your DVD player using your remote control. No console required.

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