A Canon for Gaming?
William Shakespeare. James Joyce. Virginia Woolf. J.R.R Tolkien. These are familiar names, some more accepted by the designators of literary classics than others. Now imagine another set of names by their side. Will Wright. Richard Garriott. John Romero and John Carmack. Roberta Williams. Sid Meier. We know our great computer game designers but we rarely speak of them. Rarely are they afforded the same respect that we afford the great authors: their games are not considered essential to understanding the medium. When someone like me starts talking about the merits of one particular title or another, we are unlikely to be speaking from the knowledge of a core set of canonized games. Any English teacher will tell you this leads to trouble. We can’t see the precedents of our own form if we do not know those precedents. We can’t envision the games that are to come if we don’t know where we’re coming from.
Outside of communities devoted to their favorite classic games, many of us don’t even play the computer games that started the traditions. Canonizing games is difficult. Each year our expectations change and the technology advances. Old games are made unplayable by an upgrade in Direct X, or in hardware, or in operating system. Playing old games becomes work: investing time in finding emulators to make the conditions favorable and fussing with setting upon setting to convince the game to play with sound or in full-screen. Even finding the old games is a challenge. Most games disappear from the shelves within a couple of years, and the physical media of game storage — the CDs and floppy discs — can become obsolete or unreadable. Try buying a computer today with a floppy drive reader. You’re unlikely to find one: that form and the information it contains are obsolete.
Somewhere in my great closet graveyard of old computer parts I have floppies in a range of sizes, computers that could only run Windows 3.1, and even a DOS machine or two. They linger in boxes, forgotten and abandoned. I doubt I could get one to run if I wanted to, but still I keep them around, the shells of the games of my past.
We constantly discuss among ourselves what is new and great, and we cannot help but compare it to what is old: sure, arcade gaming has come a long way, but that Pacman machine in the corner is still there for a reason. The gaming industry overwhelms us with even more sequels than the movie industry can dish out. Once a form of gameplay finds its fan base we anticipate seeing revision upon revision of that same familiar concept brought onto the latest software platform. Like James Bond, old games never fade away: they just keep getting a new look. And just as with James Bond, those new looks often cannot live up to the original. A designer’s vision is replaced by a corporate mandate, or an inspired graphic style is abandoned for a hollow 3-D.
The games that survive in our collective memory are but a sampling of those that were available. So what makes a game a classic? Are the “old” games still worth playing? What can the industry learn from the titles that the computer industry leaves behind in a constant rush towards that next big thing? In this series, I will be examining older computer games with an eye towards compiling a useful gaming canon, as well as discussing the ways each game has impacted those that have followed.
Explosions of Doom
Let’s start with a series that even the non-gaming media can’t forget about fifteen years later: Doom. Before Doom, killing things in virtual worlds was a fairly blasé affair. Early arcade style warfare gave us point and shoot without the rewards or any real sense of progression through a world. One screen of Space Invaders is much like another. But in 1994, John Romero and John Carmack changed all that with the game that would convince parents and Concerned Responsible Adults everywhere that gaming was nothing but a training ground for the socially vindictive.
Certainly, there was nothing else like Doom. The hyper-intense experience of these games stands in sharp contrast to the more sedate and mental playing experience of adventure games or even arcade games, the other big competitors of the day. Despite the highly regrettable film adaptation, those of us who cut our first-person-shooter teeth on Doom know that it wasn’t about a storyline. We were space marines. We killed demon creatures. There wasn’t room for negotiation.
To the horror of parents everywhere, Doom set the tone for shoot first, ask questions never gameplay. Doom defines the genre morality of the first-person shooter: a game where the player is looking out through the screen and interacting with the environment only through weaponry during a one man crusade to eliminate everything in sight. Doom tracks a “kill percentage” to motivate the player to eliminate every opponent on each level. I didn’t have to stop and think before shooting. There was no fear of encountering an innocent bystander. There was no reason to sympathize with any of the enemy characters. They do not have dialogue routines programmed in them, nor do they run away. They exist simply to attack.
Doom is supposed to be the first of the true “boy’s games.” It has all the hallmarks: marines, guns, non-stop violence. I remember it as the game my preppy dancer neighbor and I would play every afternoon for hours after we came home from middle school. Even though we didn’t look much like the angry space-marine faces that looked out at us from the bottom of the screen.
Placing Doom in the Canon
My friend and I might have put Doom down more quickly if not for its most important contribution to the future of gaming: cooperative mode. Non-stop violence was fine with us, but me against her, well, it wasn’t a very interesting battle. The two of us together against an entire world of demons: that made our after school time special. Cooperative gameplay is different from the team gameplay that would become much more popular as the world of computer games continued its trek forward: cooperative pits man versus machine, with no hint of man versus man. Perhaps most importantly, cooperative mode on Doom went through the entire game, so that we could go from fighting the occasional possessed human to going toe to toe with the spider mastermind — together. Arcade games prior to Doom, and even many afterwards, usually emphasized the reverse. They wanted us to compete with our friends.
Certainly, Doom allowed that as well, and there are many heirs to Doom’s deathmatch mode. But we were ensorcelled by a style of gameplay that would eventually take over networks across the country, forming teams in Asheron’s Call or in World of Warcraft dungeons: cooperative, strategic alliances with other people. In our quest for united victory, dinners were forgotten and the television set ignored completely.
Thankfully, our parents weren’t the types to fret over our newfound fascination with murderous gameplay. Parents across the country were not so comfortable with the idea, and the linking of Doom to school shootings in the attempt to simplify violence to an easily-targeted source made Doom the face that computer gaming would show the nation for the next decade. Like the game or not yourself, you cannot escape the fact that Doom colors the perception of the gamer for the outside world.
The full potential of network gameplay first came home with Doom, even though first-person shooters don’t look much like Doom anymore. They have stories, and characters, and even the occasional innocent bystander to rescue. Rainbow Six, Half-Life, Unreal, GoldenEye, Halo — many of the great new first-person shooters jumped ship to the world of console gaming and left the computer behind entirely.
But some of the most important heirs to Doom’s networked gameplay continue to eat up bandwidth on networks across the country: the massive multiplayer role-playing games that pile layers of complexity onto the same basic model with which Doom once held us enthralled. A sequel to Doom emerging from the same designers’ vision, Heretic, would even set the precedent for other elements of MMOs we’ve become familiar with: Heretic brought in a fantastical world with an inventory system for magical items, but retained the same dynamics of multiplayer gameplay.
Today, some MMOs even retain the ability to switch into that familiar first-person perspective, where the screen becomes your eyes viewing into the world and the only remnant of your character on screen is your weapon of choice. While they are thought of as the heirs to role-playing games, and certainly retain some of those characteristics, MMOs still offer for their predominant gameplay a style fifteen years in the gaming canon.
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