Dank Dungeons

thetrashbang:

Have you tried playing a PC game from the nineties recently? I won’t blame you if you haven’t, since a lot of them were written in ancient primitive tongues for machines that struggled to count to sixteen, but even when Good Old Games work their magic and make ageing games palatable to your fussy modern operating system, there are more than a couple of barriers to entry. Your game could be locked to a resolution in completely the wrong aspect ratio, or could have an archaic numpad-focussed control scheme ostensibly designed for somebody with an extra arm, or could be packed with agonisingly awful FMVs full of the developers’ family members wearing whatever they could find in the bargain bin at the costume shop. The one common feature I hear complained about the most, though—and totally sympathise with, I mean—is interfaces. Yes, interfaces; hideous, over-designed, clunky mouse-driven monstrosities that have about as much respect for screen real-estate as a colony of ants does for an abandoned raspberry tart. Anything with complex functionality tended to follow this trend, with RPGs and strategy games as the worst offenders, and no game was quite as emblematic of this problem as the original System Shock: a cluttered dogpile of multi-functional panels and cryptic buttons that felt less like an FPS and more like a very squishy mech simulator. Nevertheless, System Shock is a special case; one where the interface actually elevates the experience, rather than detracting from it.

Let’s be honest with ourselves here for a moment: for all its groundbreaking brilliance in the field of immersive sims, System Shock is still about as generic nineties cyberpunk as it gets. All the boxes are ticked: artificial intelligence, shadowy megacorporations, transhumanism, nauseating low-poly wireframe cyberspace, and of course, reclusive young men typing at ludicrous speeds into parser terminals. It is Neuromancer with text logs and crap CGI, and there’s nothing wrong with that either, but with that kind of thematic background comes a very particular view of technology, borne out of extrapolating the computing systems of the time a decade or so into the future. Snow Crash envisioned the Gargoyles; a subculture of people near-perpetually jacked into cyberspace with the help of heavy, unwieldy full-body wearables, and while the present is notably devoid of quad-core hyperthreaded fanny packs, we do have other kinds of monstrosities, like Google Glass. It was Neuromancer that pinned down the concept of cyberspace decks, and let’s not forget, this was the era when people were desperately pushing VR despite the ideas being at least two decades ahead of the blurry, rubberised, cable-ridden reality. The point is that System Shock shared much of its vision of the future with works like these; a vision where computers have grown only marginally less bulky and impractical, but have nevertheless been made absurdly ubiquitous.

This is where we come up against System Shock’s opening sequence. You are a nameless hacker—a real hacker, I mean, not a teenager who goes on sketchy forums and asks how to DDOS their big cousin’s Minecraft server—who’s been caught trying to access TriOptimum’s files and has made a deal with one of the company’s major execs, granting them backdoor access to SHODAN in exchange for a military-grade neural implant. The exact specifications of this implant are left up to the player’s imagination, but our hacker is prepared to get his hands incredibly dirty and then sleep in a tube for six months to get it plugged into his brain, so it is presumably some pretty phenomenal shit. Then you get into the game proper, and are greeted with… this shit.

To a modern player like you or I, accustomed to professionally crafted interfaces designed to translate our abstract intentions to in-game actions as smoothly and painlessly as possible, this is like heading out to work in the morning only to discover that your car’s dashboard has been replaced with half a UNIVAC console. Why are all these panels on-screen at once? What are these tabs for? What do these buttons on the side do? Should I toggle that thing? Why does clicking on that also change that? You mean I have to unhook my mouse from the movement controls every time I want to change anything? Even in fullscreen mode, which at least lets you play the game without a letterbox jammed on your head, it still feels as if you’re communicating with the game via a system that was designed on the same principles as Office 97. Everything from inventory management to reloading to opening your map is needlessly fiddly, and you’re going to die at least a couple of times because you clicked on the wrong thing and threw your weapon on the ground instead of snapping a new magazine into it. Obviously most people are going to interpret this as a bad thing, but that’s predicated on two big assumptions: first, that the interface is something external to the game’s context, and second, that interfaces are only there to efficiently facilitate what we want to do.

Let’s tackle the first. This is one of those crucial questions that crops up a lot when people start discussing immersion: is our view of the world identical to that of the player character? In the case of, say, Metroid Prime, the answer is ‘yes’, because everything in the in-game interface—the HUD, the map, menus—is a function of Samus’s power suit, while in the case of something like Ultima Underworld, the answer is ‘probably not’. System Shock, interestingly, is something of an ambiguous case, but I’d like to propose that the answer is also ‘yes’. Suppose that the overdesigned, clunky, user-unfriendly display you see isn’t just a graphic designer not knowing when to stop, but is actually part of the neural implant; the specky piece of coveted hardware that got soldered to the inside of your character’s skull six months ago. When System Shock’s interface is viewed as an in-universe feature, rather than an abstract device, a lot of things start to make more sense. Why does it feel like you’re wrestling with a piece of horribly-designed software with no concept of a good user experience? Simply put, because that’s exactly what it is: a tool made for the utilitarian rigours of the military, barely tested, and about as user-friendly as a bear-trap trampoline. More importantly, this is utilitarian software as envisioned by System Shock’s cyberpunk world: something that takes all the technology trends of the time and imagines a future where they go off the goddamn rails. All the bad design decisions of early nineties software have been bundled up into something that’s futuristic and alien, but at the same time, heavily reminiscent of panel-based MS-DOS utilities and early window managers. System Shock’s interface is clumsy and impractical because that’s what the sci-fi lens through which it is viewed dictates. “This is what it’s like to have the raddest piece of decker tech in the cyberverse grafted to your wetware” says the game with an air of unshakeable coolness, as you poke cluelessly at your inventory tabs. “Deal with it, script kiddie.”

And in a way, dealing with it is an integral part of the game. The thing about adversity is that we only expect it to come from outside, not from the systems that enable us to play the game in the first place. It’s much more acceptable for a game to be difficult because of its encounter design than, say, its controls, because we see controls as a basic service from the developer to us, and being obstructed by things external to the game’s fantasy world just strains the connection between us and the player character. You wouldn’t accept an enemy design that intentionally tanks the framerate whenever it’s on-screen, even though that could be a legitimately interesting challenge. This is why it’s crucial that System Shock’s interface is an in-universe representation of your hacker’s augmented view: because it means it no longer has the unwritten responsibility to make your user experience as smooth and painless as possible; it can be a genuine obstacle in itself. Awakening from the recovery coma fresh as a daisy, all geared up and ready to take on the hordes of mutants, cyborgs, and carnivorous vacuum cleaners? How pedestrian. Stumbling out of the medical unit with a head full of unfamiliar hardware you’ve lost the manual to and have no idea how to use? Now that’s an interesting setup. Getting familiar with the clunky heads-up display is a vital part of the learning experience, as much as feeling out the range of the lead pipe or working out what enemies are weak to bullets. You learn techniques, skills, shortcuts, and while the interface’s inherent design means that you’ll never reach the level of efficiency offered by, for example, a hotbar, you can certainly become a better neural implant operator. Countless games have you grow in skill by mastering combat mechanics, or movement physics; System Shock just throws a bit of grappling with a retro-futuristic operating system into its mix.

There’s more to the interface’s inherent limitations than just propping up the learning curve, though. What distinguishes a survival horror game from a game that’s merely horror-themed? Common sense would dictate that being forced to conserve resources—like ammo and health—would be fairly high on the list, but if stingy item placement was all there was then you could probably get such an experience just by cranking the difficulty up. Much more significant is the practice of making the player character feel vulnerable. While I’ve never really bought the idea that Silent Hill ‘needed’ crap controls to make the combat a clumsy panicked struggle for survival, there’s no denying that they helped solidify the feeling of being a hopeless nobody desperately swinging a big stick at twitching, twisted monstrosities from the Other Side. Amnesia might have jump-started an entire subgenre of one-dimensional spook-em-ups where your only means of dealing with enemies is to run and hide in a pantry for ten minutes, but the lack of reassuring heavy weaponry protruding from the bottom right hand corner of the screen definitely accentuated the crushing sense of defenselessness, at least for a little bit (@ForgetAmnesia on Twitter recently took a much more nuanced peek down this particular rabbit hole in his video, “Why Horror is Scarier With Weapons”). System Shock’s interface is just another approach to vulnerability: one that leaves you frequently hindered as you rummage through your possessions, slow to perform simple tasks like applying first aid, and often outright distracted because something started blinking at an inconvenient time. Your weakness is not due to tank controls, or weedy arms, but TriOptimum’s lousy QA testing.

Was any of this intentional, or merely a product of its time? Probably the latter; even the main creator of System Shock’s interface, a chap called Marc LeBlanc, later denounced it as too complicated, calling it “the Microsoft Word school of user interface”—which was probably a far sicker burn in nineteen ninety-something when observational statements like “Microsoft’s software isn’t very good, actually” still had a hint of freshness about them—although System Shock 2 retained the idea of needing to fiddle around with your cyber-rig’s mouse-driven panels to get anywhere, so the principle, at least, was deemed worth keeping.

With the passage of time and the ravages of late-2000s game design, though, I fear that people are too busy sneering at clumsy, overcomplicated interfaces as a mark of studios that can’t hire turtleneck-wearing UX managers to stop and wonder if maybe there’s value in this sort of approach. The remake’s Kickstarter is rocketing towards the millionaire barrier even as I write this, and yes, the demo is a lovely reinterpretation of the game in many ways, but in other ways it feels too clean, too refined. You get a nice little animation of the hacker plugging the little cyber-modules into their head and you just know that if you ever come across a mirror you’ll find a visage that’s more semiconductor than skin, yet everything from the HUD to the inventory to the log is the same muted, minimalist, translucent shapes out of some generic sci-fi shooter. Isn’t that a bit ill-fitting? Don’t give me the interface of a game, Nightdive Studios; game interfaces—in all but the worst-case scenarios—are slick and convenient and always striving to encircle the experience, rather than being an active part of it. Make the interface a hazard in its own right. Give me the interface of a crude, poorly thought-out software package, developed by a faceless megacorporation in a world where ethics mean nothing and technology is going down a dark and dangerous path.

If you need inspiration, might I suggest the Twitter client?

thetrashbang:

Creativity is hard. Really hard. I regularly run into people who claim to simply not have an imagination, and while I’m not one to insist that every human being is a boundless font of wondrous fantasies waiting to be uncorked, it seems far more likely that they’ve just underestimated the difficulty involved. Creativity without bounds is even harder: confront most people with a blank canvas and they’ll probably struggle to do more than doodle idly, or fall back on some reliable standby, like a still life of a fruit bowl or a drawing of that cool S that every primary school kid knew how to make.

It’s the same story with level design, naturally. When granted the infinite power of the Hammer editor—alright, not so much ‘infinite’ as ‘modest, obtuse, flexible, a little bit buggy’—a lot of people tend to forego alien landscapes and secret laboratories, instead opting to recreate… their house. Or their school. Or their office. Familiar, mundane spaces; the sorts of places that the designers must’ve seen every day. Such maps litter the Counter-Strike community’s ageing archives, passing slowly into total obscurity alongside de_dust2 clones and deathmatch yards with misaligned textures.

As far as most people are concerned, the appropriate response is “good riddance to bad, unplayable rubbish”. They were crap. Counter-Strike, contrary to its gritty, tactical façade full of burly men with military hardware strapped to every inch of their body armour, doesn’t actually perform well with faithfully recreated realistic spaces. They’re too cramped, or too wide-open; too cluttered, or too empty; too full of areas that are impossible to hold down, or impossible to assault. You ever do that thing with your housemates where you’re both heading towards one another in a corridor and neither of you can pass because you keep picking the same side to pass each other on? Right. Now imagine that you have the size and flexibility of a fridge freezer. Also you’re stuck in a door that won’t stop trying to open, and you’re being shot in the shins, and your housemate is actually a man in a balaclava who fucked your mum.

What I’m saying is that these maps had very little value as spaces for play, which is—rather understandably—the only metric we ever really gauge them by. We see level design as a means of creating a product; an arena for twitchy young men to gun each other down in on a lazy Sunday afternoon. A map is the platform on which experiences play out, not the experience itself. Nevertheless, like any blank canvas, the level editor’s grid is a creative medium through which aspects of the designer can seep, and while most maps are pretty outrageously poor at getting such aspects across, it’s a different story when the map itself is a recreation of somewhere the designer has personally left their mark on.

Have you ever wanted to see inside a stranger’s home? I don’t mean in a creepy, antisocial, ‘stake out for twelve days working out when it’s safe to break in and sniff the toilet seat’ kind of way. I’m talking about seeing a single incandescent square on the side of a darkened apartment block on your evening train ride home, and wondering what kind of life that person lives. I’m talking about waiting in the living room of a stranger while they fetch the television you bought off them on Craigslist, taking in every possible detail out of mild curiosity; I’m talking about wanting to be a fly on the wall, not of somebody you know, but of a person you have no connection to and will never meet, just to see all the little ways that their lifestyle differs from yours. It’s a special kind of intimacy, driven not by perverted fantasy but by the knowledge that everybody’s life is a different story, and the honest craving for just a tiny slice of that story.

When people recreate the spaces that are important to them as maps, they inject a little bit of that intimacy into them. They’re inviting you—all of you, even the requisite weirdos—to explore these recreations, use them as stages for play, get familiar with every last nook and cranny and work out which ones can be best abused. They may be crude imitations of physical locations, limited by the constraints of the engine, tweaked for gameplay and cobbled together out of whatever ill-fitting assets the designer had to hand, but they still reflect reality, hinting at their creators’ lives, the things they value and the things they notice most about the world around them. In a community for a game played all over the globe, by people from a wide range of socio-economic and cultural backgrounds, a diversity of physical spaces is only to be expected.

And not to overstate my part in this, but in my endless archaeological digs through the GoldSrc community’s not-entirely-lifeless ruins, I’ve seen them all. I’ve tossed flashbangs through the living-room windows of suburban homes, perfectly clone-stamped across canvases of freshly-trimmed grass; I’ve led hostages down the stairwells of ageing Soviet housing tenements, pausing only to check out the album of reference photographs that guided their creation; I’ve played grenade dodgeball in the halls of American elementary schools, pondering the kind of reactionary panic such a map must have had to endure around the turn of the millennium; I’ve been in college dorms, glass-filled offices, upper-class mansions, inner-city apartments, country abodes, public libraries, terraced houses and oh-so-many net cafes, all crafted by people who would have seen them in the flesh—or at least, in the mortar—on a regular basis. They invited me into these spaces, in a form quite unlike amateurish camcorder footage or photographs. You only see what they choose to put there, and however sanitised that may be, you can explore what’s been made available to your heart’s content.

You can learn a lot from the small details people choose to spend their meagre polycounts on, too. Much like in rats maps—a phenomenon we should probably leave packed away for another day, I think—many choose to flaunt possessions or taste, meticulously placing game boxes, planting functional stereos, or modelling their workstations, complete with monitors displaying their favourite forum boards. Others are careful to map out every last inch, from closets to crawl-spaces, clearly as invested in exploration of the real-world space as the virtual one. For some, what matters is a perfectly accurate, to-scale floor plan; others wrap blurry photographic textures, clearly sourced from their own camera, around barely-fitting brushwork. They’re no substitute for a hefty autobiographical tome, but they’re a similar sort of avenue: an outlet through which a creative work can serve its functional purpose, yet still say “this is who I am, and where I come from”.

So remember, even in the world of flashbangs and sick headshots, level design doesn’t have to be primarily for the purposes of play. For a multiplayer game like Counter-Strike, inherently built for those who already live in a connected world, designers sharing works that allow an occluded peek into their everyday world seems almost inevitable; a kind of obtuse ‘About Me’ for a world that had yet to be engulfed by the full force of social networking. Perhaps, with time, designers so inclined will learn to consciously throw away all pretences of balanced gameplay, and simply invite people to freely wreak havoc in minutely-detailed recreations of the spaces they call home. It’s cathartic, y’know?

bogleech:

Every day I’m still getting notes on an old post where I said that eating healthier costs more money and of course every so often is another health zealot swearing I’m wrong.

EXCEPT:

one dollar at dollar tree

one dollar at mcdonald’s

A fucking quarter almost everywhere

And what these bozos aren’t factoring in is that these foods, loaded with salts and fats and carbs and sugars, are FILLING for a shitload longer than whatever colon cleansing non-GMO avocado unicorn poop some thinspo blog is bragging about. The box of oatmeal creme cookies even lasts more than a day, just two of those things and I have no appetite again for hours.

Personally we are eating better and making more money currently but when I was a kid it was all the above shit and potatoes. Lots and fucking lots of potatoes.

STOP FUCKING TELLING POOR PEOPLE THEY’RE STUPID FOR NOT EATING LIKE YOUR HIPSTER ORGANIC CRAP