Introduction

I blame Ken St. Andre, Liz Danforth, and Mike Stackpole.1 What and why for, you ask?

Let me explain. Back in the day, those three authors were responsible for, at least in part, the writing on a game called Wasteland.2 For those not hip to the scene, Wasteland was a relatively early, textdriven computer game about exploration and survival in a post-atomic war future - the great-grandfather of the recent CRPG extravaganza Fallout 3, if you will.3 Now, I played a good number of computer games back in those days, sequestered away with my Apple IIe in my parents’ basement, embodying the stereotype, but Wasteland in particular stuck with me. Why does it haunt me?

They made me kill the dog.

Now, I suspect some of you are right here with me. I know that very often when I bring up Wasteland to those gamers of a particular age they immediately get that familiar haunted, damaged look and utter those troubling words with as near to a death-rattle as you can and still be standing up – “I had to kill the dog!” Let me explain the horror that some of us carry with us to this day to those spared of this burden.

In the game, you are part of a military combat team exploring strange goings on in the wasteland, travelling from survivor town to survivor town scavenging what you can and killing nasty mutated things that

try to eat you without even so much as a considerate mention that you look tasty. In one of these ramshackle towns that are somehow surviving with no apparent means of perpetuating sustenance (a couple of mutant chickens only go so far) there’s this kid named Bobby. Bobby has a dog named Rex, and Rex means everything to Bobby. The dog is, in all this desolation, all the boy has.

One day while exploring the area around Bobby’s town you enter a cave, and upon trying to leave you’re confronted by Rex. But Rex has been bitten by something and is now rabid. And Rex will not let you pass.

spent hours upon hours trying to figure out how to get past the dog. Nothing worked. Saved game after saved game. Reload after reload. Nothing worked. At about 2:30 AM (on a school night, no less…tsk tsk.) I came to the deeply saddening conclusion that there was only one thing I could do to get out of the cave.

I had to kill the dog.

Wasteland was a text-driven adventure game, so it wasn’t just a simple mouse-click to kill the dog, no no. My choice to kill Rex wasn’t some disconnected, remote-control point-and-click death, I had to spell it out plainly and precisely. This was my deed, my action. This was my responsibility and my fault. I had to kill the dog. Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you have to kill the dog. Sometimes you cannot win. Sometimes you have to pick the lesser of two evils. Sometimes you have to kill the dog.

So, I killed the dog… but Bobby hated me. I’d killed his dog. Bobby didn’t just hate me; he despised me with that soul-blackening anger that has turned many a good man (or boy) into a villain. Later, after some time has passed, Bobby hunted me down across the wasteland to enact his revenge. I had to kill him too.4

So, yea, I blame Ken and Liz and Mike.

But what does this all have to do with games and art and the themes of this journal that I am supposed to be introducing? Everything, I hope. Sure, it was a narrative force, the kind that us high-falultin’ authors sneer at (and use routinely), but I remember it clearly nearly twenty years later.5 Isn’t that what it’s about? Isn’t one of the keys to art that it changes you? That you bring it with you even after you’ve walked away from it?

I had to kill the dog. I remember that moment. As a creator, I aspire to the emotions of that moment.

Now, my art is not your art. I think we can establish objective criteria to determine if games – or any other medium – has artistic merit and elements, but the ultimate decision on whether or not something is Art lies with the beholder. Games overall are not Art, nor are all paintings Art, nor all music. Some are, certainly. Culturally we define and redefine what “art” is constantly, but a true categorization of Art only ultimately gets applied to works that pass the test of time. The art of a generation is constantly lost and all but forgotten with the passing years. And I will not wade into that muddy river of “high Art” versus “low art” here and now.

Some argue that games need their Citizen Kane to show the world that the relationship between art and games is not like Mentos™ and Diet Coke™. Maybe that’s true, but Kane isn’t the film people think it was. It was only moderately successful with the public and the critics when it was released.6 What it did do was influence contemporary and future filmmakers and convince them that films could be different, that films could be more. It was those filmmakers who later on pointed back at Kane and said “No, you missed it… That was when it changed.” The point is that film didn’t really have its Citizen Kane, so it’s unreasonable to insist that’s what games need.

What games need is heart and soul married to technique. We had, in my opinion, more heart and soul back in the day.7 Games like Trinity, Planetfall, the aforementioned Wasteland, the adaption of Harlen Ellison’s I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, and others. I’ll also pin the “So Close…” ribbon on games like Blade Runner and Phantasmagoria 2: A Puzzle of Flesh, but the point is that as the game industry transitioned to a visual/interaction dominated paradigm from a narrative/interaction directed one we lost some of that ability to stir and affect.8 9 Sure, there are moments. Aeris’ death in Final Fantasy VII deeply moved many players, but there was never even any illusion that you might be able to save her.10 There have been others as well, many of them accepted collectively but I suspect an even more are privately noted. Interestingly, Darren Aronofsky (the writer/director of Pi, Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain, and others) was recently asked by the New York Times for his notable media/entertainment moment of 2008.11 His response – wandering the recreated streets of his childhood stomping grounds of Coney Island and Brighton Beach, New York City in Grand Theft Auto IV.

Does that make Grand Theft Auto IV art? No, certainly not… but it shows that meaningful, that art, that gift of something unexpected you get to carry away with you, exists even in the most unexpected ways for Darren Aronofsky and perhaps others. And isn’t that, really, the point?

Footnotes:

1. Stackpole blames Danforth, by the way, which I suspect might just be his early preparation for Judgment at the Pearly Gates, “Saint Peter – I swear! – she did it!” Peter, I suspect, will not be buying it either. Liz is just too nice to have done something this heinous…
2. Wasteland, Interplay Production/Electronic Arts, 1988.
3. Fallout 3, Bethesda Game Studios/Bethesda Softworks/ZeniMax Media, 2008.
4. No, I didn’t try as hard to save him as I tried to save Rex. Food for thought.
5. Here’s the weird thing… when sitting down to write this I described the events leading up the killing the dog as I remembered them. Then I figured I’d actually be like professional or something and check my facts. Silly me, since it turns out my memory was wrong. What do I remember? I remember the kid and the dog. I remember the kid following my character around asking questions and being all hero-worshiping of me. Then I remember returning to town one day and the Mayor telling me that Rex had gone rabid and had bitten Bobby. Bobby was going to die unless I did something, and fast. In fact, there were only a certain number of commands I could input before Bobby died. Ultimately, many saved games later, I had to kill the dog. And the town thanked me, and Bobby hated me. So, this memory – this strong memory – I have is wrong. What am I remembering? Some homage to the original found in Fallout 1? Is it some amalgamation of scenes and games? I’m not sure, but it is linked strongly and in many ways irrevocably with Wasteland, right or wrong. If you know, let me know and ruin it all for me.
6. Pauline Kael, The Citizen Kane Book (Boston: Little Brown, 1971). 7.
7. Cue the groaning now… Remember, I did use the phrase “back in the day…” early on. You were warned.
8. A wonderful example of how simple branching narrative can really work to create a dynamic plot and sense of real influence on events. The in-game events, and outcomes, of Blade Runner change significantly based on the decisions that player makes.
9. Buy me a drink at a conference one day and I will explain this bit of madness…
10. Spoiler Alert! Doh… too late.
11. “Looking over Niko’s shoulder up at the virtual parachute jump in Grand Theft Auto IV’s version of Coney Island, grabbing a dollar hot dog off the boardwalk to get my health back, then leaping into a bullet-hole-riddled Hummer and smashing through my childhood neighborhood, flying over sand dunes on Manhattan Beach and finally drowning in the sea off Brighton Beach. Thinking, Man, I wish they made this game when I was a teenager.” Emily Gould, “Moments That Mattered,” The New York Times, Magazine (November 21, 2008). http://www. nytimes.com/2008/11/23/magazine/23Favorites-t.html?_ r=2&ref=magazine. (November 30, 2008).

References:

Gould, Emily. “Moments that Mattered,” New York Times Magazine. November 21, 2008. (accessed November 30, 2008).
Kael, Pauline. The Citizen Kane Book. Boston: Little, Brown, 1971.

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