Goobur
2004
Epicenters of degeneracy. Purgatories for the socially inept and underdeveloped. Criteria: cheap; popular; acceptable performance on even the worst systems; customizable, presumably towards some flavor of anime. Welcome to adolescent hell.
We were never meant to thrive in typical social scenarios, yet we still tried to cling towards community. In a medium that moved more towards matchmaking, I spent a large chunk of my teens seeking out the last throes of an essential online experience. Servers populated with familiar people at similar times; this was our third place. Forums to discuss, cliques that talked bad behind backs, administrators and moderators that reveled in the only power they had in their lives. People came and went, servers shut down and successors were erected quickly after, friends and eternal memories were made in ugly maps while annoying music played and a child screamed into their cheap microphone. The systems and mechanics of the mode itself became secondary to the reality that the regulars really just wanted to hang out and crack jokes, sometimes at the expense of newcomers—outsiders.
The move towards virtual worlds as a central social space shouldn’t be too surprising, the shift really started in the 1990s. Nerds that just wanted to find their “people,” even if those people had questionable morals and liberal use of slurs. The appeal is obvious, though: Be anyone you want, control how people perceive you; a second life where the first one “failed.” Grow in a way the “real world” could never allow you to. The worst thing to realize is that everyone else there is a loser just like you, maybe even worse than you are. It’s hard to look back and not have some pity for them—for yourself. We were just sad, I think. That tends to be the epiphany you come to on a reflection of youth. You don’t realize it at the time, it’s just afterwards, when you reach some invisible limit. Maybe virtual lives are becoming more mainstream, but deluding ourselves into romanticizing the past as somehow more appreciable and respectable is just a little silly—a little disrespectful, too. I was there, I grew up in it; we shouldn’t go back. We can’t, thankfully. Let’s shut the door and find a way forward.
We were never meant to thrive in typical social scenarios, yet we still tried to cling towards community. In a medium that moved more towards matchmaking, I spent a large chunk of my teens seeking out the last throes of an essential online experience. Servers populated with familiar people at similar times; this was our third place. Forums to discuss, cliques that talked bad behind backs, administrators and moderators that reveled in the only power they had in their lives. People came and went, servers shut down and successors were erected quickly after, friends and eternal memories were made in ugly maps while annoying music played and a child screamed into their cheap microphone. The systems and mechanics of the mode itself became secondary to the reality that the regulars really just wanted to hang out and crack jokes, sometimes at the expense of newcomers—outsiders.
The move towards virtual worlds as a central social space shouldn’t be too surprising, the shift really started in the 1990s. Nerds that just wanted to find their “people,” even if those people had questionable morals and liberal use of slurs. The appeal is obvious, though: Be anyone you want, control how people perceive you; a second life where the first one “failed.” Grow in a way the “real world” could never allow you to. The worst thing to realize is that everyone else there is a loser just like you, maybe even worse than you are. It’s hard to look back and not have some pity for them—for yourself. We were just sad, I think. That tends to be the epiphany you come to on a reflection of youth. You don’t realize it at the time, it’s just afterwards, when you reach some invisible limit. Maybe virtual lives are becoming more mainstream, but deluding ourselves into romanticizing the past as somehow more appreciable and respectable is just a little silly—a little disrespectful, too. I was there, I grew up in it; we shouldn’t go back. We can’t, thankfully. Let’s shut the door and find a way forward.
2003
Games are often limited by their need to be “fun.” Despite video games being the only medium with interactivity—an aspect that should be ripe for all kinds of exploration—we are mostly limited to things that are entertaining on some level to our brains. Games are not designed for sadness, hatred, anger, or a litany of any other emotions as their primary motivators, as these are antithetical to the “fun” designers desperately need to find and the conventionality that audiences crave, despite their protests otherwise. Further, games are often heavily concerned with coherency and reaching standards of “good”-ness. That is: a story should be mostly understandable on some level; production values should be high and apparent; and said production values should contribute to the player’s enjoyment in some way. Games desperately want to be liked, and so they cling to these ideas in the hopes of audience validation.
Drakengard cares not for any of this. You roam through gray hazes of environments, cutting down endless hordes of mindless enemies, in the hopes of increasing in power until the very act of playing the game becomes meaningless. Broken music accompanies your rampage while characters shout vague probings of human nature and desperate attempts to contextualize the battles you fight. Your brief respites are inscrutable cutscenes that are meant to tell some semblance of an utterly hopeless and miserable story as you are flung wildly from beat to beat with little in the way of build-up or logic. You descend further and further into this hellish nightmare of absurd imagery until, miraculously, it ends. You awaken from your fugue state and attempt to comprehend what you’ve experienced.
Well, here’s how I see it: Drakengard has the unique ability to radicalize the player so that they completely reconsider what video games are and what they value from them. Whether this is intentional or not on its part is entirely irrelevant—although its brilliant soundtrack lends some credence to that vision—because it is such a fundamentally bare and broken experience that the only option is, ultimately, to project onto it. Drakengard martyrs itself in order to question the very construction and presentation of video games. It hands you the scalpel and then slowly brutalizes itself to death in front of you, with the hope that whatever conclusion you come to in the autopsy is a valid one. There’s a disturbing smile on its face that invites you to revel in its self-destruction.
Drakengard cares not for any of this. You roam through gray hazes of environments, cutting down endless hordes of mindless enemies, in the hopes of increasing in power until the very act of playing the game becomes meaningless. Broken music accompanies your rampage while characters shout vague probings of human nature and desperate attempts to contextualize the battles you fight. Your brief respites are inscrutable cutscenes that are meant to tell some semblance of an utterly hopeless and miserable story as you are flung wildly from beat to beat with little in the way of build-up or logic. You descend further and further into this hellish nightmare of absurd imagery until, miraculously, it ends. You awaken from your fugue state and attempt to comprehend what you’ve experienced.
Well, here’s how I see it: Drakengard has the unique ability to radicalize the player so that they completely reconsider what video games are and what they value from them. Whether this is intentional or not on its part is entirely irrelevant—although its brilliant soundtrack lends some credence to that vision—because it is such a fundamentally bare and broken experience that the only option is, ultimately, to project onto it. Drakengard martyrs itself in order to question the very construction and presentation of video games. It hands you the scalpel and then slowly brutalizes itself to death in front of you, with the hope that whatever conclusion you come to in the autopsy is a valid one. There’s a disturbing smile on its face that invites you to revel in its self-destruction.
2009
Demon’s Souls is everything we wish we could create: intelligent, subversive, respectful, challenging, varied, and consistently surprising. When I say “we,” you know who I’m referring to: the aspiring game developers and the arm-chair game designers. I see you there, with your scribbled notes of ideas and concepts. “One day,” you think to yourself, “I’ll pull myself together and make this happen.”
Sometimes I play games and I get a little envious—I wish I had what they had. That drive to actually turn a dream into reality, that skill set to make it come to fruition with any modicum of sense. Even if it’s kind of an accident, like how I view Demon’s Souls. It doesn’t really seem like they were sure of what they were doing or where they were headed, but somehow it all came together. They just did whatever they felt like would be cool, would be different, would be interesting. It doesn’t really work all that great a lot of the time, but it does, indeed, work. I’m aware things like this don’t happen overnight; tons of skilled, experienced, and talented people worked their asses off to make this happen, but you can’t tell me that any process of creation isn’t basically just wandering through a dark forest and hoping you come out the other side in one piece.
Let’s think on it for a minute: Is there anything else like Demon’s Souls over a decade after its release? Sure, its spiritual successors carved out some pieces, but it's not the same, is it? They’re too scared to continue on the path it never even finished carving—iteration eventually leads to homogenization. You’ll get your peak, but those wings will burn off. Can we even blame them, though? The market’s calling and bills need to be paid: how would you approach it? Compromises between the conventional and the experimental are made, and it works—the formula works—but maybe a little too well. Maybe we’ve gone too far with it. Something’s gotta give; that’s the hope, at least.
One day, I’d like to at least try. It won’t be good, it probably won’t even be all that unique or interesting, but at least I did it. Is that a low bar? I’m not sure, but something’s gotta give eventually—things can’t keep going the way they are. The foundation will crumble and be built anew. On that new dawn, I’ll finally build that house I always wanted to build—it’ll be beautiful.
Sometimes I play games and I get a little envious—I wish I had what they had. That drive to actually turn a dream into reality, that skill set to make it come to fruition with any modicum of sense. Even if it’s kind of an accident, like how I view Demon’s Souls. It doesn’t really seem like they were sure of what they were doing or where they were headed, but somehow it all came together. They just did whatever they felt like would be cool, would be different, would be interesting. It doesn’t really work all that great a lot of the time, but it does, indeed, work. I’m aware things like this don’t happen overnight; tons of skilled, experienced, and talented people worked their asses off to make this happen, but you can’t tell me that any process of creation isn’t basically just wandering through a dark forest and hoping you come out the other side in one piece.
Let’s think on it for a minute: Is there anything else like Demon’s Souls over a decade after its release? Sure, its spiritual successors carved out some pieces, but it's not the same, is it? They’re too scared to continue on the path it never even finished carving—iteration eventually leads to homogenization. You’ll get your peak, but those wings will burn off. Can we even blame them, though? The market’s calling and bills need to be paid: how would you approach it? Compromises between the conventional and the experimental are made, and it works—the formula works—but maybe a little too well. Maybe we’ve gone too far with it. Something’s gotta give; that’s the hope, at least.
One day, I’d like to at least try. It won’t be good, it probably won’t even be all that unique or interesting, but at least I did it. Is that a low bar? I’m not sure, but something’s gotta give eventually—things can’t keep going the way they are. The foundation will crumble and be built anew. On that new dawn, I’ll finally build that house I always wanted to build—it’ll be beautiful.