EPISODE 305: I’LL PLACE THE SKY WITHIN YOUR EYES

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

In recent years it’s become kind of a “thing” for Catholic retreat houses to install labyrinths. We’re not talking Danny Torrance running through the snow from Here’s Johnny hedge mazes – though that would be awesome, how is that not a thing?

Come on: Who wouldn't want their first experience of God to involve being chased by Jack Nicholson?

Nor is this live action cover bands of mid-80s Bowie. No, a labyrinth today is a sketch of a maze painted onto pavement, or if you’ve got the room to be woodsy maybe some twigs and stones as demarcations in a field (see: below).

You can see the whole maze laid out before you; and instead of trying to figure a way out, the goal is just to take the journey.

I remember seeing these things popping up and thinking they were ridiculous. They’re like a spiritual vestigial tail; what is the point of that?

Then I had a half hour before dinner some night on a retreat and I went out and wandered one of these things. And it was so relaxing. You bring all your thoughts and worries and this is ridiculous what am I doing here, I’m in the wrong story with you. But with time it kind of all just falls away, and you’re just left there present in the moment.

Ernö Rubik, the inventor of the Rubik’s Cube, had a similar take on playing with his famous “Magic Cube”. For as much as the whole Rubik-hype pretty quickly devolved into “But how fast can you solve this?”, for Rubik himself it was always a much more Zen experience. At first he was transfixed by the beauty of a mixed up cube – he called it a “color parade”. Later it was the journey of experimentation that drew him, the attempt to try and find your way back to its initial state. He thought of playing with a cube as an inspirational experience, something to spark creativity and also give you hope that whatever lay before you, with time you would get there.

As much as we tend to think of video games in terms of speed and sound and explosions, some games, even very popular ones, have always been more peaceful and reflective. Pong never really went at the pace of a tennis match; its strange floating aesthetic is part of what made it interesting.

When I was a kid I used to spend hours playing Lode Runner on our Apple II+. In a way it was a Pac-Man knockoff; you run around a multi-leveled mine, trying to pick up packages and escape from pursuing guards. But where Pac-Man was non-stop sound stimulation even when nothing was happening, Lode Runner is almost entirely silent, with no ticking clock or other elements used to increase tension over time. There wasn’t even much color or detail. You’re just this white stick figure, running silently from opponents who are much the same. Like in Pong, that emptiness is both otherworldly and yet nourishing.

Or maybe you remember Minesweeper, which debuted in 1992 as part of Microsoft’s Windows 3.1.1. Minesweeper was basically the 90s preface to social media, something to do in the office that was not work but would not get you in trouble. One of my fellow Jesuit classmates spent our entire three years of theological study sitting directly in front of his professors, computer open, playing the game. He never got caught. (It was insane.)

Minesweeper was actually designed not to be a compelling game but to teach people how to use their mouse, which was then still new. (Solitaire was similarly created to help users understand the whole concept of “drag and drop”, and Hearts to help people get a sense of networked computers.)

As a result it was really basic. There’s no sound, no urgency, no ka-blams or sha-pows. You just click a box, it either shows a mine, a number representing how many squares nearby have mines, or emptiness. And you move on.

(True story: in Italy the game got changed to be about finding flowers rather than mines, after people protested at the idea of turning what is a very serious crisis in some countries – the prevalence of land mines – into entertainment.

Some today would no doubt howl at this change, but Curt Johnson, the Microsoft employee who invented Minesweeper, said in 2014: “Would I come up with a game called Minesweeper today? No, for the reason they described. Field of Flowers, though? It’s a fine name.”)

++

Obviously “a moment of Zen” is not the ideal state meant to be created by most video games, past or present. In fact the norm seems much more “moment of deep anxiety”. Tetris is a classic example: you’re faced with falling blocks that you have to arrange in such a way that that they fit together or else they quickly pile up; the blocks fall faster as you progress; and always in the background, that manic, pulsing invitation to madness.

(Theory: half of what makes video game background music crazy-making is not its tempo but the fact that it quickly goes back to the beginning, repeating itself over and over and over again.)

In a way the game is a riff on Space Invaders. There, too, there’s a sense of something descending, starting slow and gradually speeding up.

But Tetris was created in 1984 by a Russian A.I. researcher just trying to test the capacities of some new hardware his lab had gotten. The shapes of the falling objects were in fact based on the shapes from a Russian puzzle game that he loved as a kid.

The music is likewise a 19th century Russian folk song called “Korobeiniki”, but it wasn’t originally a part of the game. The U.S. company responsible for marketing the product outside of the Soviet Union actually added it and some scenes from different parts of the Soviet Union to make the game seem more “authentic”. (Creator Alexey Pajitnov remembers seeing Russian kids at a performance of the original song start chanting “Tetris! Tetris!” He was appalled.)

Of course the real question is, why would we look to things that are meant to stress us out for entertainment? How would that even serve as a form of escapism? It’s like mice in a cage saying, You know, what I’d really like though is to spend another sixteen hours in the maze. (Or worse still, on the hamster wheel.) Why not just take it easy and enjoy your little sliver of carrot? #ChexMixandChill

Here’s one theory why we like these games: in addition to creating discomfort in us, they also present themselves as the means of resolving or ending that discomfort. Just finish this layer, and you will feel better. Or die, which is pretty much just the same: I was trying Tetris last weekend, and I was surprised to find that I felt best at the very end of the game, as the blocks had grown close to the top and it was clear I was going to lose very soon. Suddenly there was no more reason to fight on, and I could just step back and kind of enjoy the whole thing.

This is nuts, of course. Short of walking away, there is no resolution in most classic video games (or most mobile games today). They just keep going, and in many cases keep getting faster and harder. To enter in is to suspend our understanding of cause and effect. The game says if I finish the level, I’ll feel better. So that’s what I try to do.

(And probably it sweetens the deal that along the way we get fun new elements – a new power up here, a new kind of maze to crack. Really, what made Ms. Pac-Man so much better than Pac-Man? (Or even different at all?) It was just the fact that in Ms. Pac-Man the longer you lived the more different kinds of mazes you got to see.

In a video game, the most satisfying thing might be to defeat the boss or a level; but the second most satisfying is almost definitely the prize you get for that, a big part of which is seeing what comes next.)

++

But that also points back to the notion of a game as a journey. Maybe part of why some of us play video games is because we long to explore another world. A game is like a vacation where you get to do more (and more crazy) stuff. We set out and we get to discover all kinds of cool places and things for ourselves.

So many big console and computer games of the modern era work like this, really. Even if the game is “I’m in a war zone and have to survive”, much of what we’re doing step by step is about exploring an area, collecting stuff and learning things.

You can see it all played out in some mobile games, too. Take what I believe to be perhaps the most addictive game of all video games, Candy Crush Saga. On the surface, it’s very simple -- a match-these-objects game meets the “eliminate rows” aspect of Tetris. For the most part it’s not a countdown or anxiety game; most levels you play until you win or you run out of moves. And the music playing in the background is this unexpectedly lazy Sunday, super mellow cowboy-whistles-while-he-moseys song.

Meanwhile every single level – and there appear to be hundreds – adds some new twist or variation, and also some new cool device you can use or fun point-scoring innovation. So you have at one and the same time this constant sense of the game always offering more to learn and discover (aka more fun to have), and an underlying message of “Hey, you don’t have to go yet. It’s all good. Take a break. Relax. Enjoy.” Seriously, it is the instant-addiction version of video games.

(One of its most ingenious techniques to keep you playing: even at higher levels, some screens you unexpectedly finish very fast. And here speed creates a certain dissatisfaction. It happened too fast to enjoy it. So, you might as well do one more.

Imagine that – a game that delays gratification in the actual moment of winning.

WHAT KIND OF MONSTERS WROTE THIS?)

++

When I was talking to my friend Shane last week, I asked him about why we play games, and what it’s like to make them. He had some interesting things to say about games and empowerment.

How did you get into this crazy business of video game design?
So! My undergraduate degrees were in Theater and Cognitive Psychology with a Computer Science minor. The first was not terribly lucrative (my focus was directing and playwriting), the state of graduate studies for the second wasn’t great when I was looking at it, and I wasn’t good enough at the third to do anything fun. But the fact that I could do all three to some extent made me a useful quantity in the world of games, which bridges all three fields.

Undergraduate degrees in Theater and Cog Psych and the money was not rolling in? What?
I’d always been a fan of games, but it wasn’t until I took some media studies electives that focused on games that I realized maybe it was something I could, like, DO.

So I went to grad school at Carnegie Mellon, which at the time was one of two programs in the country. (The other being USC, which is a bit more high profile these days. I chose CMU simply because it was two years instead of three and more student debt was not a thing I was after.)

While I was there I did an internship with Walt Disney Imagineering and briefly considered pursuing theme park stuff full-time, but when we got word that Steven Spielberg was building a team to make games and they wanted someone young and impressionable/teachable/gullible in the mix, that was a hard thing to turn down.

So I worked on one of the Spielberg projects on EA for about three years… then the economy tanked and my project got cancelled.

Three years working on a project and it doesn’t get made. That is incredibly harsh. (Also, way too familiar.)
Thankfully, my creative director at the time used to work with one of the senior folks at Bethesda [creator of Skyrim] and put in a good word for me there. (Bethesda almost never hires people who have not already shipped a game. I may have been one of the last.)

When I got there, they were finishing up the downloadable content for another game, and there was a small core team of people who were starting on Skyrim. I joined that team and was basically on Skyrim from Day 1.

Wow. That is amazing!

What can you tell me about the process of developing Skyrim? It’s such a massive world.
So I was still a pretty junior designer at the beginning of Skyrim. The big picture stuff had already been done. But filling in those broad strokes with increasing amount of detail was a task for the whole team.

We were really driven by the concept art… that helped establish the flavor of the world and the identity of the society we were creating.

We also have a huge history of Elder Scrolls lore [from prior games] to draw on.

Interesting to hear that the art helped drive conceptions of the story. The Star Wars films today seem to work pretty similarly, with artists sketching things that might be cool leading to actual plot lines in the movies.
The first thing they had me do was “people” areas — the map was already laid out, but I was given regions and had to populate the settlements there. A lot of free reign to do what I wanted… “OK this little town is by a lake… maybe it’s a fishing village? Yeah, ok.” Then figuring out the people who lived there, what their overall stories and situations were, etc. No quests just yet, only story potentials.

Then came quest pitches, where we’d propose our ideas for various quests we’d been assigned (I was given a specific city and a few world-wide quest lines) and they were considered and reviewed by the senior designers.

Once a concept was approved, I’d start working on it, usually in concert with a level designer and occasionally an artist if there was something very specific that needed to be done.

So basically you were God (or one of the angels – one of the nicer ones). What was that like? I know you weren’t a Jesuit then, but did that kind of world-building work have any sort of spiritual dimension for you?
It absolutely had a spiritual dimension for me, and has definitely informed my view of God. I have experience, for instance, creating a world and letting it run, full of people who don’t always do what I want them to do. For me, they’re bugs; for God, it’s sin.

When you say it helped you understand God, how do you mean?
Well, as much as anyone can understand God, obviously. I think it helps me try to imagine how God sees me. The love and affection I feel for my creation is nothing compared to the supernatural love God feels for Creation. So where I might wipe it out, God lets it keep going.

(This makes the Incarnation even more spectacular to me, as I imagine what it would be like to actually put myself inside that created world…)

Wait. I did put myself inside that created world. Does that mean I’m the Messiah?

Or that I’m living in a video game that Jesus is playing?

Actually, kidding aside, suddenly now I’m thinking the Incarnation ends up being a way of understanding the appeal of so many video games. In a game, I get to be this world’s Messiah.

I don’t know what that means, but it seems significant....

Especially since games today are interpreted a lot like TV was when I was growing up -- entertaining escapism, for better or worse. But my very strong belief is that anything people spend this much collective time doing cannot just be that.

In your opinion, what is it we're all doing when we play our computer or iPhone games? What are you doing when you play games?
I think the defining thing about games is the notion of agency. Not just that you have control over the story (which we’ve had in some form since Choose Your Own Adventure books), but that you are an active force of will in the virtual world.

At one level, the medium has this underlying message (cue Marshall McLuhan) that Your Choice Matters™ and that You Can Make a Difference™.

(All the points for excellent use of “™”.)

Like a lot of kids my age when I was growing up, games were an escape. But not just a daydream, they were an escape into a world where I could have an effect that I felt unable to in reality.

In a lot of games that agency takes on a very violent nature, but that need not be the case.

So do you think gaming in general serves for people (young and old) as a form of empowerment, a way of feeling like we have some control in our lives?
Yes, it can absolutely be a form of empowerment. I’d go so far as to say it definitely is. (The hazard comes in when you ask what is being empowered.)

We’re living in an age where so much seems out of our control. The idea that games offer a realm in which we can still feel agents who have an impact? Yeah, that makes sense.

(And it gives me plenty to think about as I try to finish this next mission and become elected king of Skyrim.)

++ LINKS ++

So much more to talk about, but I think it’ll have to wait until next week.

Go see Black Panther. It’s really really good. And in most ways not at all a Marvel Comics movie. No prior knowledge required, and almost no spandex on display.

Also, do you need a little joy right now? Two suggestions: Listen to this song immediately. I don't really know what it's about, but it make me happy.

And go watch Mozart in the Jungle on Amazon. The new season just dropped and it is as joy-inspiring as its predecessors. A show that never forgets that it’s about the glory of music and dance. (And if you don’t have Amazon Prime, here’s the first episode for free.)

If you’ve ever been in a New York subway, or you long for Jon Hamm like I long for chocolate, please can I give you this? I think it was intended for you.

Or maybe what you long for in the deep down depths of your heart is really the opportunity to relive your childhood while you rescue a princess?

Spent the last couple weeks researching someone I really love, a complicated and fragile and just plain beautiful person who I really want to write about, only to discover someone else got there first and pretty much threw garbage all over them.

Hollywood, you are a mean, mean master.

Still, you never know what next week might hold. Whatever it is, let’s pinky swear we’ll go through it together.

Here we go.