Gaming Made Me

Rock Paper Shotgun have been running a feature since last week called Gaming Made Me, with the following premise:

The games that made us the kind of people that we are today. Which was the game that made us stand on a table and say “O Captain, My Captain”? Which game bullied us after school and made us frightened of walking alone at night? Which game would a psychiatrist want to talk to after our first session on the couch? We’ve picked out a bunch of titles that stood out as defining in our lifetimes of button-mashing, whether good or ill. What will they be?

I’ve had a lot of fun reading first about the picks of four RPS authors, later the auto-analysis of various game developers and other journalists, but I didn’t see a reason to write one of my own since I doubt interest in my gaming past is really that great. However, today I came up with a good enough reason: it’d be kinda fun to write.

It’s pretty hard to pick just four games that were especially important in forming my gaming habits of course, not least because it’s difficult to think that far back and try to analyse the impressions that different games left on me. But I’ve picked the four games that seemed most obviously influential to me:

Command & Conquer: Red Alert

Oh how I wanted to pick Planescape: Torment. Torment showed me the sheer brilliance possible to achieve in interactive narratives, and it taught me that game stories can be so great that their gameplay almost doesn’t matter. But somehow, almost perversely, Red Alert seems more important. I think it was the first game that really captured me with its story. Those FMV cinematics were campy and clichéd in exactly the right way to suck in my naïve 10-year-old self, with the perfect mixture of espionage, war, and completely ridiculous fantasy technology.

It made me shoot Soviet conscripts, blow up Mammoth tanks, and dodge Tesla coils outside with my friends after school. It made me write fan fiction. It made me open up the level editor and attempt to construct worlds.

Might and Magic VI: The Mandate of Heaven

This was an important one – it was the first game where I basically came to live inside its world. I played it for a good half year with my best friend, twice a week, as we took turns to control the game, and its pausable real-time combat had enough tactics that the input of the one not at the controls actually mattered. The story was surprisingly original, a defiantly strange mixture of fantasy and science fiction, and somehow they managed to show most of it instead of telling it, even with those simple 1998 graphics. The multiple revelations of the world’s history were imparted subtly and gradually, but felt no less shocking and momentous.

M&M6 had a huge, expansive open world that ran like clockwork – it was completely obvious in retrospect that it had been designed in a spreadsheet, as everything fit so perfectly together (12 regions = 12 shrines = 12 months in the year), but I’ll never forget the joy of figuring out a system as enormous and complex as that game, picking it apart and mastering it completely. Years later I got the same thrill from analysing Oblivion for a university paper, cataloguing its cities, its storylines, its missions, its races, and picking apart its gameplay down to the constituent mechanics. For M&M6, we had a three-ring binder full of notes on travel routes, shrines, obelisks, skill trainers, traders, colour codes, alchemical recipes, artifacts, and secrets. We once spent a whole day experimenting with herbs to make a complete list of all possible potion recipes in the game. A week later, we found that very same list somewhere on the Internet, but it didn’t matter because our list was our list.

It was also the first game that showed me how stories can be created dynamically if the game system is sufficiently large and complex. We were so proud of our wizard when he became our first character to reach his third and final rank as grand master when we killed a powerful lich far earlier than our character levels should have allowed, and finding Excalibur in a rock long before we had the ability to pull it out made us completely obsessed about getting that damn sword. With such a love of M&M6′s expansive world and open gameplay, I still don’t understand why I never got on with Morrowind, but maybe I should’ve played it together with somebody else.

Half-Life

With the possible surprises out of the way, here are the nobrainers. Half-Life not only defined my current understanding of immersion in video games, it was my first leap into real 3D level design as well as my proper introduction to multiplayer gaming. I never became very good at it, mind, but I actually spent some time on it, unlike my quick brush with multiplayer in eg. Quake.

Half-Life seemed like a completely new way to tell a story in a game – so much more involved than the weak narrative tagged onto the beginning of a level yet far more natural and elegant than the expansive reams of text RPGs would happily throw at you, it was of course a storytelling technique already employed in games like System Shock or Ultima Underworld before Half-Life, but I’d completely missed those games, and combined with modern animation technology and modern FPS gameplay, Half-Life just took it to a whole new level. An entire year of my life was pretty much dedicated to Half-Life, and then I got Deus Ex.

Deus Ex

I’m not sure I need to say much about how much this game changed my life. The major achievement of the game was the fact that it caused me to involve myself so completely in my fandom for it. It was exactly the mixture of FPS, RPG, and adventure that I craved, and thankfully its unique, complicated gameplay clicked very quickly with me. It still took me about 5 years to completely figure out its design, but in that process, I also learned about other approaches to game design and even game development in general.

Seven years of my life were spent working with Deus Ex, and for that reason, it’ll always have a special place in my heart. Though in that period, I’ve discovered and suffered under pretty much every weakness in the game’s design and construction, I still see it as the most ground breaking and visionary piece of game design in my life.

Deus Ex is the reason I admire non-linearity, it’s the primary cause of my love of exploration, it’s why I crave non-lethal action gameplay, and it’s why I don’t fear complicated hybrid gameplay. Deus Ex has been my mentor.