Or “you can’t get ye flask”.
I’m in the middle of moving, so while I box my worldly possessions, I’m putting up some excerpts from Randy Smith’s column in the May 2008 issue of Edge Magazine.
It’s an excellent article, and if it wasn’t a bit too long (and a bit too legally dodgey) I’d post it here wholesale. It’s a then-and-now analysis on the dominant paradigms of video game design (and, y’know, life).
Randy makes his comparisons to Ultima V, but I kept thinking of hours spent playing King’s Quest, and its unguided, open-ended world mantra of “take anything that isn’t nailed down”. (As well as the many unforeseeable consequences. Oh god the consequences… “People who play King’s Quest should expect their characters to die rather frequently”).
It’s just one example of some damn interesting conversations happening around what’s going on in videogames, who’s playing them, and where they’re going. And that’s not even counting the conversations happening in my house.
From Randy Smith’s “The Tyranny of Fun, and of Lord Blackthorn”, Edge Magazine, May 2008.
“Am I the only one who gets really worked up about the fact that choice and consequence are out of vogue?
…
Ultima V had a 50-page manual that didn’t teach you how to play the game. It afforded crucial tips like “Britannia has undergone a great transformation from totalitarian monarchy to representative democracy,” and “the newly risen moon, Trammel, is in its Gibbous Waxing phase,” and “slimes carry no booty”. But, after playing through the introduction, there you were holding a dagger and a cloth map with a teeming, jester-infested world sprawled out unhelpfully before you. Who would point you to glorious victory and amassment of booty? How would you make progress? Progress on what? The petty tyrant Lord Blackthorn, who hated freedom, advertised no vulnerabilities.
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more inside…)