Just how important is it?

I’m an unabashed old fart; young to some, but increasingly decrepit in a gaming culture dominated by the sub-35 demographic. In my day, we argued about the relative benefits of Apple’s sixteen dithered colours over CGA’s four-colour palette. Well, not really – anyone with any brains knew that the Apple was better, even if it was frequently fuzzy as hell. Still, it was a simpler time. Games were normally built around a single mechanic; sometimes they even did it well! You could fit anywhere up to thirty games on a single 140KB floppy disk (back when they were still tangibly floppy!), and 640×480 was considered “hi-res”.

Still, as simple as they and we were, it was also a time of breathless revolution: without any hyperbole, there hasn’t been such a great proliferation of new ideas since. Like the little bear’s porridge, the ecosystem was just right – the cost of entry was low enough that any yahoo in their garage could potentially create the next big thing, and the ground was fertile enough to support any wacky idea. Have a great idea?  Code it on the weekend! Keen developers often got their entry into the industry that eventually made their fortunes by writing short games for Nibble, and the like. And it’s not like the implementations weren’t impressive – some solutions are still around today. Procedural generation, for example, isn’t something new: Elite did it back in 1984, offering a universe with 2,048 unique planets and a wireframe 3D flying engine, all in less than 100KB of compiled code.  The moral dilemmas offered in Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect can trace their roots back to Ultima‘s move away from pure combat to moral and ethical exploration. And, while Demons Souls is the current golden child of action-based punishing exploration game design, how many remember that Sword of Kadash did it first in 1984?

Things moved fast, too. Looking over release frequencies of sequels during the 80s is an educational experience – not only did almost every release typically re-invent itself from the ground up, they were also often published on a yearly cycle. Every Ultima used an engine rewritten from scratch specifically for that release (the exception being Ultima VII parts 1 and 2 which, if you believe Origin, were always intended to be two parts of one story). We had M.U.L.E., we had King’s Quest, and we had Starflight – the industry was so young, no-one knew what was impossible.  Much like the Cambrian explosion, those early days of development were a raging fire of creativity, the results of which we’re still capitalising on today.

Here’s the thing though: how important are these artefacts of a bygone era today? I’m probably the wrong person to ask – given half a chance, I still play many of them. And, for a historian or archivist, it’s a moot question: they existed, therefore they’re important. However, I wonder – how much can a modern designer keen to cut their teeth on their first commercial project actually learn by studying (and playing) the games of the 80s?  How important is a contextual grounding in the industry?

I’d like the answer to be, “very”, but I have my doubts. While these ‘old’ games defined the vocabulary and design ethos we use today, most of them are borderline unplayable by modern standards (as Michael Abbott experienced when getting his students to play some of the classics). Film students still watch Hitchcock and, if they have any taste, still consider him a great director with information to impart. You’d think that interest in history would carry over to the relatively analogous study of games, but for whatever reason, that doesn’t seem to be the case; research into design focuses either on relatively recent games or too-frequently repeated specific examples. SimCity, Super Mario Bros, and Zelda all feature heavily, but where’s Murder on the Zinderneuf and Kampfgruppe? Courses and discussion that revolve around the body of work as a whole that was created in those days are few and far between. And, when they do exist, they focuses almost exclusively on the consoles – they ignore the rich history of the Apple II, the Commodore, the original PC, and the Spectrum, four platforms which, between them, probably did more to define modern design than Nintendo, Sony, and Atari combined.

I believe there’s still lessons to be learned by studying and playing the classics. I believe that it’s fundamentally important to have a strong grounding in the history in which one designs and writes; the twisted thing is though, I can’t explain why it’s important. Often, their mechanics are somewhat broken, their graphics pitifully archaic by modern standards, and their difficulty punishing; by comparison, modern games are a marvel of design, similar to comparing the Kitty Hawk to an A380. And yet surely, if it’s been done before, isn’t it important to know about it and understand how it was done?

Studying the past is like studying ideation, the process by which ideas develop. Within these games, one can see creativity germinate, grow, and often fail. One can tangibly see developers going down evolutionary dead-ends and, by doing so, learning from them and re-defining their ideas into some that’s “genetically” competitive. It’s more than that though – modern directors are lauded for their subtle references to historically important films. Authors gain literary cred by paying homage to Steinbeck and Milton. And, while we seem to be going through a minor resurgence in replicating older games (such as the neo-retro Mega Man 9 and the Wizardry-esque Etrian Odyssey), design still seems to be focused on replicating rather than incorporating. It’s a great step forward, but it’s still a small niche that’s doing it – it just seems to me that one can’t reasonably chart a path when one doesn’t know where they’ve been.

Is it important to properly understand the entirety of the history of our industry? I don’t know. But I’d like to think so.

Related posts:

1. Why I’m making my kids play games
2. This is Week – Generous Edition
3. RKD on… 2010: Part 1 – The “meh” year that was?

Tags: ahead of their time, creative design, evolution, hitchcock, ideation, retro

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010 at 9:30 PM and is filed under Culture, Experience. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.