The first and sometimes the only thing people say about Dark Souls is that it’s hard—really hard, migraine hard, ready-to-shoot-yourself challenging. The players say it (“I can’t take this!”). The people who are scared to play it, say it: “Wait, that’s the one that’s really hard, right?”

I’m as guilty as anyone of defining this game by its difficulty level, when there are actually a hundred other things I’d rather celebrate. But I want to tackle the “difficulty” thing head-on, because the difficulty is key to the experience of this game—but not in the macho, “tough it out” sense you might expect. In Dark Souls, the difficulty isn’t a club the designers bash you with, but the palette with which they paint the experience.

Let’s take an example: the section named Sen’s Fortress. (Spoiler warning: we’re going to be talking about Sen’s Fortress.) Jayson Gegner praised it on Twitter as “Dark Souls’ gameplay design & level design in microcosm,” and he’s right: almost every design decision that makes Dark Souls great can be seen in this sequence.

And you won’t even see it coming. You may look straight at Sen’s Fortress a hundred times before you learn what it’s for or even what it’s called. Dark Souls has an “open world,” although you’d be better to call it a semi-open world. It is not like Bethesda’s contemperanous Skyrim, where you can start walking in any direction and find something to do; instead, you have a handful of choices at any one time, and you have to figure out which one is best.

Your first big choice in the game is to go up, or down. Nobody points you to the trailheads: you just realize after poking around that these are your options. Which is better? Nobody tells you. There is a guy sitting nearby who tells you that your job is to ring two bells, but he doesn’t say much more. From here, you’re on your own.

Now, it won’t take long to figure out that going up is easier than down. Following the path of less resistance will bring faster progress, while going down will take you to encounters that range from painful to impossible. (You could also go across, through the graveyard, which would be a really bad idea.) Technically, you could be stubborn and ring the down bell before the easier up bell. But I’m sure that almost everybody hits them in the order the designers expect.

Why would the designers give us these options when all but one of them leads to disaster? Because if we make the decision, we own the consequences. When we talk about “open world” games, we think of words like “discovery” and “freedom,” and sometimes we conflate the terms: if we can discover the world on our own, then we must be free. But there’s no freedom in Dark Souls. The designers let us experience the place on our own, while hooking us on an invisible leash to keep us more or less on task. Yet we still feel like we’ve conquered this space, because we put it together ourselves—unlocking our own shortcuts, discovering how the levels connect, and making our mental maps of the entire world. (Here’s one simple way From Software could have ruined the whole game: by giving us an on-screen mini-map.)

So, you start with a simple goal: ring the two bells. Get that done, and you’ll open the gate to Sen’s Fortress. By now, you’ve definitely seen the place: it’s a big, imposing building at the end of a walkway leading from Undead Parish. The front gate’s open. Let’s check it out!

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The first section of Sen’s Fortress is the most challenging. It acts as a kind of overture, introducing all of the elements that will give you grief: pressure plates in the floor that trigger traps in the wall; tough, fast lizard men; snipers that shoot lightning bolts at you from the darkness; and platforming sections, that force you to thread your way across narrow catwalks between giant swinging axeblades. Fall off the catwalk and you end up in a mucky pit where your movement is restricted and demons lurk in the darkness, waiting to clock you. Get stuck there once and you’ll be even more nervous the next time you run that gauntlet, which just makes executing your moves even harder.

If you’re a so-so player like me, you may run through this opening section a dozen times before you’re comfortable with it, and you’ll still screw up every third or fourth time thereafter. So let’s stop here and ask: why is this damn game so hard? Are the designers mean people? Are they superhumanly good at videogames? Did they, at the inception of the franchise, do some market research and conclude, “Well, you know, there are already plenty of easy RPGs on the market?”

I can’t speak for the designers—truth be told, I’d be scared to be alone in a room with them. But the challenge accomplishes a few things. First and most obviously, it forces you to pay attention. Play any other recent action RPG—Fable III, say—and the dungeons fly by in a whirl of similar rooms, easy encounters, and piles of devalued loot. It’s rare to go through any piece of real estate more than once, and in Fable III, I remember running through several beautiful dungeons and fortresses and paying almost no attention along the way. By contrast, Dark Souls shoves your nose against every inch of the game.

Because you repeat each section of the game so many times, and commit it so firmly to memory, you build up certain tricks and patterns. You achieve mastery, which is satisfying, and yet you always feel like something could go wrong, which is exciting. It’s not like memorizing a tricky cadenza on piano; in Dark Souls, your timing (well, my timing) is never perfect. Take Undead Burg, in the sequence right after the first bonfire. You run across a catwalk into a room. The first skeleton will rush at you, but let’s say you’re a split-second too slow as you dash across the catwalk; he may have his shield up in time to block your swing. While you stop to deal with him, another skeleton has time to throw a firebomb at you. And because you were probably cocky going in, you were probably a little careless, and now you’re mobbed. You could get killed on your twentieth time through this room, or even your fiftieth.

This is why the same handful of skellys by a catwalk can keep you entertained for hours, and it probably has the level designers on Fable III—and the producers who set their budgets—crying in their pints. And while I hate to boil this down to quality versus quantity, it is odd and maybe terrifying to think that so many AAA games—with teams in the hundreds and budgets in the tens of millions—are built to deliver content that the player experiences only once, if at all. That’s some “fall of the Roman Empire” stuff right there.

But more than anything, the game’s difficulty level leads to a dynamic and exciting experience. While the game is consistently difficult, it’s difficult in very different ways, and this gives each level its own challenge, its own tempo, and its own intensity.

In Sen’s Fortress, once you run the gauntlet of the first two catwalks, things start to calm down. You can take your time exploring the next rooms, and at this point, the game will even start dropping sight gags. Right after the opening section, you’ll come to a room where a lizard man is leaning against the wall, taking a snooze. After struggling with three of these guys on the way in, you’ve found one who’s stone cold asleep!

Dark Souls doesn’t get enough credit for its sense of humor, which largely falls under what Anna Anthropy calls “masocore.” For example, in Sen’s Fortress, you’ll run into an eye-popping number of treasure chests. This place is a land of plenty compared to the rest of the game, where loot of any kind is scarce. By the fourth or fifth chest, you’ll be so greedy that you’ll run right up and open it—and then suddenly, two arms spring out of the sides and pull your head inside, where a giant pair of jaws chews you up. The designers knew you were going to walk up to that chest without a care in the world, so they decided to have some fun and throw in a Mimic.

Then there are the traps. Sen’s Fortress has three types, stating with a pressure plate/lethal dart thing that that you step on just a few feet inside the entrance. (After a few tries you’ll probably notice that you can lure the lizard men out right in time to catch them in this trap, and if you do it just right, you’ll take one of them out and make the fight much easier. I pull that off about three-fourths of the time.) The flying darts appear a few more times in the Fortress, and they get easier every time: after all, you’ve got the whole map memorized, so barring a distraction or mistake, it’s pretty unlikely that you’ll fall for the same trap twice. In that way, the floor plate traps feel like a missed opportunity. It’s clever the first time, but in Dark Souls, repeatability is more important than first impressions.

The boulders are better. The first time I saw one, I was watching a lizard gurad as he turned to face me, and just as he started walking, BAM!—a giant boulder smacked him down and rolled him away. Peering carefully out the door, I found a grooved track where the boulders were rolling by, every eight or so seconds like clockwork, giving me a narrow window to run up the track and look for an exit. (Naturally, I found one.)

As you go deeper, you’ll discover there are four tracks for the boulders to roll down, and you can even find—and rotate—the mechanism that lines them up with each chute. When I discovered that I could reroute the boulders myself, I wondered if this was a puzzle—say, I would have to send the boulders down the chutes in a certain order to unlock the next path. But that wasn’t the case. While the boulders will knock through a couple of walls to open secret rooms, figuring that out is strictly optional. I’m sure it was tempting for the designers, who are smart and devious people, to gate our progress until we work through this puzzle. But they didn’t, and for a good reason: that’s not the type of game Dark Souls is.

To stick a new kind of puzzle in the middle of this game would be disruptive. Even the players who like that kind of puzzle would have to change their frame of reference and dust off a set of skills that nothing else in the game has used. See for example the inventory puzzle in the middle of Portal 2: the player has to grab a turret and drop it into a scanner in a weapons factory, in order to trick the assembly line. This puzzle is so incongruous that the voiceover almost immediately gives away the answer, to keep the player from stalling out. Portal 2 may be a puzzle game—but it’s not that kind of puzzle game.

In any case, the boulders aren’t your chief headache: the axes are. Keep climbing through the fortress and you’ll face two more catwalks defended by swinging axes. The fourth and last set swings over the narrowest catwalk, in the highest point in the fortress, with the worst angle to check out how much space you have between the blades. Strangely, I’ve never failed to get through, but I’ve always been terrified, because the thought of getting knocked off and falling down and losing all of my hard-earned progress is excruciating. It would be about as bad as dropping your ice cream cone on a summer day.

The traps in Sen’s Fortress—the darts, the boulders, the axes—reinforce something you knew from the beginning of the game: the very ground you walk on is treacherous. This is something you don’t see in, say, BioWare RPGs, where the space you walk through is mainly there to pace out the encounters. In Dark Souls, you have to pay attention to the floor. You can fall off the edges of cliffs, or shimmy along a narrow ledge to a treasure. Without going as far as Prince of Persia, Sen’s Fortress makes you aware of the physical space you’re in by making it treacherous—and it’s treacherous in a different way than the cliffs up to Undead Burg, or the shaky platforms of Blighttown, or the invisible pathways of the Crystal Cave, or the tree roots of the Great Hollow (where falling can be the easiest way down). In Anor Londo, you can stroll across grand, flat, wide-open bridges, but it also forces you to shimmy up flying buttresses and sneak around narrow ledges—which tells you that this place is magnificent, and that you don’t belong here. In the same way, the traps and catwalks of Sen’s Fortress give the environment its own character, and brings a new texture to your experience.

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When you get to the roof, you’re supposed to feel nervous as hell. In fact, when you first set foot up there, you’ll see a metal giant. If you’re like me, you will stand dead still to see if he’s going to attack you—yes, he’s maybe a hundred feet away, but who knows? But he ignores you, and once you’re at ease, you can creep around the rooftop, fighting knights (who are tough but familiar), sneaking around corners, and the whole time feeling torn between two impulses: the urge to explore what’s up here, and the fear that you’ll get killed and have to start over.

The designers know that right now, you’ll be looking for a bonfire. In Dead Souls, the bonfires are your checkpoint system. When you rest at a bonfire, it becomes your homebase; if you get killed, you wake up back at your last bonfire and head out to try again. Right now, your last bonfire is all the way back outside the Fortress, which means you desparately want to know: Where’s the next one?

Bonfires usually appear out in the open, with the consistency of highway rest stops. But once in a while, the designers decide to hide a bonfire, or block it off with a gate. In Sen’s Fortress, you have to look for a gap in the wall on the rooftop that lets you drop down a few feet and land in a balcony, where you’ll find the level’s only bonfire. You might miss it at first because, for one thing, the gap is hard to see from where you’re standing, and for another, the first time you reach that part of the roof, a grenade drops right in your face and sets you on fire, making you scramble as you try to figure out where it came from and how to escape.

That’s a good joke! The first giant you see on the roof will startle you, but he won’t hurt you. But there’s a second one who makes his presence known by throwing those grenades that burn off most of your health. Once you get a handle on where he’s aiming, he becomes predictable and easy to evade—but he’s still a nuisance. You can make your way up to his tower and try to kill him, but if you haven’t found the bonfire yet, this is a dicey proposition: it usually takes two or three runs to beat a mini-boss, and if you whiff it on this one, you’ll have to take on the whole fortress before you can try again.

But like I said, find the bonfire, and the entire dynamic changes. Now you have a waypoint at the edge of the roof. You’re gotten past the hardest parts of the region. You don’t have to mess around with swinging axes or dark tunnels or lizard men. You finally have time to explore.

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Dark Souls has been praised for its backstory—or as Tom Bissell put it, for not telling you what the backstory is. To a limited extent, Dark Souls practices environmental storytelling. The game takes place in a ruined civilization—you can see that just by looking at the buildings. The few characters you can talk to are faded ghosts from a better time; that’s why they seem helpless and in fact, rarely even move around. The few bits of backstory you pick up come from quick dialogues and from the loading screens, where objects flash by with a few breadcrumbs of exposition attached. Big Hat Logan? Anor Londo? You only have a dim idea of what these mean.

Dark Souls is one of the most engrossing games I’ve ever played. No matter what I’m doing, I feel “in the moment.” I imagine this is how a feral cat feels, prowling the same neighborhood night after night, looking for fights—and like the feral cat, I don’t really spend a lot of time thinking about how it all came to be. Where most RPGs try to pile on history to give their stories weight, Dark Souls—for all the evidence of its history—keeps you focused on the here and now, rarely giving you a reason to reflect.

Dark Souls may be a hard game to play, but it’s an easy one to spectate. Big guys are tougher to fight than little ones. Heavy weapons take longer to swing than light ones. Fast, clumsy, strong, agile—we can see what these creatures are and what they can do, and the numbers floating over their heads just affirm our instincts. And the monsters aren’t just big, they’re weird. A wolf that fights by gripping a sword in its mouth? A giant bulbous demon that vomits lava? A topless woman attached to a spider? You don’t need much lore to prop up stuff like that.

Meanwhile, the guideposts through your journey have basic, humble descriptions. You have to ring the bell. You have to light the bonfires, and then kindle them. Everything is called what it is, and even the levels have short, simple names. Slapping ornate names onto everything—say, the Bell of Qualla’goggooo, the Bonfire of Shamalama—would, in trying to layer on meaning, merely slop on too much and disturb the beauty of what’s in front of you.

From Software is more concerned about “theming” than “storytelling,” and they are very, very good at it. Take the bonfire. In gameplay terms, this is your checkpoint, the place where you save your progress and recover your health—one of the oldest mechanics in gaming. Dark Souls represents the safety and comfort in this idea by using one of our oldest symbols of warmth and protection. You know without being told that if you sit by the bonfire, you’re safe.

Now look at the gesture a character makes when they make an offering to the bonfire. The pose is humble and pious: the character is on bended knee, hand on heart, as it reaches into the fire and makes an offering, or a pledge. The gesture isn’t cast as a “power-up” but as a kind of restoration. Your character is damaged and “hollow,” but by performing this rite, it recovers some of its humanity—reinforcing that this is a place to rest, to heal, to get back what you’ve lost. This is really, really well done.

Dark Souls‘ approach wouldn’t work for every game. “Something bad happened here” is not exactly the greatest story ever told, and what you learn about the specific characters and specific events is not as striking as the raw imagery of the fire, the undead, the sun. The NPC quest chains are brittle, and key encounters with the handful of NPCs are easy to miss. When you find someone to talk with, the overt exposition ranges from mediocre to bad. Half the exchanges end with a “ha ha ha ha” or “heh heh heh heh,” and sometimes, the dialogue doesn’t even understand the gameplay. When a character first warned me that Sen’s Fortress is a treacherous place where many have gone but none have returned, I wanted to ask: “Didn’t you tell them about the bonfire?”

Still, there is a story here, and I counted two pieces of lore in Sen’s Fortress. First is the name: Who is Sen? I have no idea. So far, I haven’t found another reference to him anywhere. (Though Reddit has some theories.) More compelling is an archer who we find on the rooftop, guarding a tower. When you approach him, he doesn’t stand out from the other knights and guards you run into up here. But if you close in and engage him, you’ll notice he has a few more tricks up his sleeves than the average bad guy: he can jump and roll, he’s tougher to kill, and his armor’s really shiny. The real tell comes when you kill him and loot the body. He’s carrying a weapon named Ricard’s Rapier, and this is how you learn his name.

Even on the Internet, I can’t find much lore about Ricard. But I’m fascinated enough by where he ended up, out here by himself, guarding some tower, with nobody but a few ghouls and lizards to keep him company. It expands the story just that little bit more: “Something bad happened here—and here’s a guy who suffered.”

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The boss fight that ends the region is, counterintuitively, the easiest thing you’ll encounter. The Iron Golem that guards the exit may look tough, and he has a few tricks: if you get too close to his hand, he might pick you up and throw you right over the side of the building. But as with most of the bosses in the game, there’s a simple way to beat him: hide behind his legs and whack at his ankles until he’s dead. Once you’ve tackled the rest of this place, the boss is just an encore.

When you beat him, you’re done. Sen’s Fortress has changed from an out-of-the-way building, to the next step in your quest, to a nigh-insurmountable challenge, to an old friend. You’ll probably still remember every nook and cranny of the map, but now you’ll have a shortcut—a prison cage that acts as an elevator—that lets you skip all the challenges in between. There may still be a few corners and secrets you haven’t checked out: the chutes at the end of a few hallways that drop you down to the bottom, or the pit where that creepy headless Titanite demon hops around. You can tackle that at your leisure.

But I’ll wrap up this runthrough with the image that to me, makes sense of the entire fortress and maybe, the entire game. I still remember the first time I walked out on the rooftop and saw that metal giant, just like the one who opened the gate in the first place.

When I caught sight of him I backed up and raised my shield: was he going to attack me? Then I noticed what he was doing: he was hard at work throwing boulders down a hole. I had seen the device that caught the boulders, the tracks they rolled down, the holes where they broke through the walls, the lizards they crushed. I knew that the tracks ran through the entire Fortress, and now I could see the giant creature that kept the boulders rolling, moving like clockwork: lift, turn, drop, lift, turn, drop. He’s the coldly beating heart of this puzzle box, the engine that drives the entire machine, the creature that just keeps dropping rocks on your head to see if you’ll quit. He’s the most obvious metaphor for a game designer you’ll ever find. Is he making your life miserable—or richer, and more exciting? That’s for you to decade.

/ / /

So you may still be wondering, “That’s great, but why is the game so difficult?” That’s a good question. It’s a question I’ve asked dozens of times, whenever the difficulty spikes—or should I say, lurches ahead of me. Because for all I can say about the wonders of this game, the difficulty is still what makes the biggest impression. And honestly, it doesn’t always work. The last stretch of the game is a slog. It grinds you through one miserable boss fight after another—some of them coming within minutes of each other—and by the time you’re done you may just feel a kind of achey relief.

We tend to fixate on challenge because it’s that’s how we cope with it: we try to measure it and gauge it, we wonder if we can handle it, and then we slowly prepare to confront it. We lower our expectations and, at the same time, raise our skills through practice, until finally the mountain that looked so high from the base seems kind of small and cozy once we’re at the top. Things are only difficult until we understand them. To people who have beaten Dark Souls, the game doesn’t really seem that hard—hence the expression, “the real Dark Souls starts here,” meaning, in the much harder New Game Plus.

In music, film, and literature, difficult works provoke the same kind of response. We talk about them in terms of whether we can deal with them: War and Peace is “too long,” Lars Von Trier’s films are “too disturbing.” Audiences may balk at a work because it’s unfamiliar, complicated, opaque, taboo, exhausting, unpleasant to the senses, and so on—but in every case, the audience often hangs back and wonders: Are we the problem? Or is the work failing us? Is it challenging because the challenge is key to the form, the message, and the experience—or is it challenging because the artist is a jerk? If the artist has a message to send us—well, to paraphrase Samuel Goldwyn, why couldn’t they just send us a telegram?

Games shed new light on this old debate, because here, challenge is understood from the get-go as being integral to the experience. All games test their players, and the players accept that they are taking a test and they will be graded. We’re also more comfortable with the idea that the difficulty is the point of the game. We accept that sometimes, you have to earn your place in the audience. Consider this letter from Randall Shown that ran in The New York Times, replying to an article about choreographer Merce Cunningham:

Without the bias of an education in dance, I came to Merce on my own. Sitting in the rafters at City Center every March, I’d watch the legions leave halfway through, unable to grasp the language of his gestures or the sounds that accompanied them. Years later when coincidence led me to share my life for some years with a dancer in the company, Merce admitted his pleasure at testing the limits of his audience, suggesting in not so many words that the ones who made it through somehow earned the pleasures he suffered, and earned, in his own art.

The primary language of Dark Souls is difficulty. The game paces and varies that difficulty with the same craft that goes into its character builds, sound effects, and environmental design, and with the same purpose: to explore distinct, exquisitely-realized variations on one unified experience. What starts as a dare is revealed to be the reward.

… And okay, sure, it also gives you something to brag about to your friends. And did I mention: I beat Sen’s Fortress! I did it! See you in Anor Londo, if you even get there suckas!!!!!!!!

[CHANGES SINCE THE ORIGINAL POST: I corrected two mistakes, first that the dude by Firelink Shrine doesn't tell you where the bells are (he does), and second, that the giant who drops the boulders is the same one who opens the fortress (he isn't). Added a link to a theory from Reddit about where the name "Sen" came from. Also tweaked some wording.]

Kill Screen’s latest issue, Sound, was my final issue. I will no longer be editing the magazine, although I’ll probably be a contributor. There’s no real story or drama here – this was just the best time to move on. It was a challenging and awesome experience, and it gave me the chance to work with the best writers in the business. So, for all that, I’m incredibly grateful.

I recently wrote a piece for the Kill Screen website about my experience ghostwriting a blog for the fictional character Rachael Webster, aka PixelVixen707. The essay took me about a year and a half to finish. And good timing, because the original PixelVixen707.com site recently disappeared off the Internet. I don’t know if Smith and Tinker took it down on purpose, or if someone over there just needs to reboot a web server, but all of the content I wrote seems to be offline. Lucky for me I took a back-up …

In other news, I’m writing for a game that should be announced soon, and I’m working on a few short stories. I’m sending around a sci-fi romantic comedy that’s gotten a little interest, and hey, I like it, so if nobody buys it, I’ll just post it here.

I’m also wrapping up a 5,000 word essay on Dark Souls, ha ha, so that should be up here later this week.

All in all, this was a hell of a year, both good and bad. I wish I had resolutions lined up for next year, but once again I think it’ll go: write, publish, edit, code, support friends, get out more, stay in shape. There, that’s a good list.

Happy New Year to you all!

For as long as I’ve kept track of it, the age of the average gamer has been the same as my own – 37 this year, according to the ESA. And I’m proud! I’ve grown up with games. Once or twice I’ve told myself that I’ve “outgrown” games. And now here I am, spending a good chunk of my life writing and thinking about games, and come to find out I’m normal.

In honor of being perfectly average I thought I’d give a quick rundown of the highlights in my gaming life. This is a timeline of the games, electronic and not, that meant the most to me from the ’70s to the present – as well as a couple of major omissions. I’m not a typical gamer, and I spent way too much time on certain obsessions while totally missing seismic shifts like, oh, Nintendo. But even if I’m not typical, I am average.

December, 1973 – I was born. How awesome was that?

~1978 – Pong My neighbor bought a Pong home console, one of the very first home videogame systems. I seem to recall it cost about $200, and it came with three hardwired game modes. (No, there were no cartridges. Are you kidding me?) He hooked it up to his TV by tying a wire to the connector for the antenna and switching it to Channel 4.

Early 80s – Arcades … like the Aladdin’s Castle at Liberty Tree Mall. I would go in there and waste my whole allowance in half an hour. I loved videogames, and they hated me.

1983 – Pac-Man I was obsessed with Pac-Man. I made drawings, I memorized the “winning” paths in walkthrough books, I lived and breathed Pac-Man.

I was never any good at it.

Early to mid ’80s – Apple //c Oh man … finally I could play Infocom games, Ultima II – V, um … Eamon … some sidescroller called Captain Goodnight? Some kid in third grade traded that to me for Choplifter. I kept dozens of floppy disks in a smoked plastic container, and they were full of weird little games I had traded with friends at school. But I always bought the Infocom and Origin games. I hung that cloth map of Britannia on my closet door for years!

1985 – Super Nintendo I never had a Nintendo. I mean, come on. They were for kids.

1987 – The end? I stopped playing games when I went off to high school and college. I was busy studying, and reading, and not dating. I didn’t have time for games, well, except for …

1991 – Tetris I swear to you for a week or so, I was the office champ at the Chicago Maroon. I still remember hanging around the office during finals week, setting a high score and drinking Black Label. The version I played on the Mac had a soundtrack of Russian folk music and a sample of Bill Pullman’s “Game over man!” from Aliens.

1993 – ZenMUD My only experience with an online multi-user dungeon came when I was wandering around in a Telnet client during the night shift at the Oriental Institute. I found ZenMUD, and the instruction story told me I should log on and not type anything. (Zen, get it?) I lasted a minute.

1996? – Duke Nuke’m The office LAN FPS of choice. We would play ’til 4 AM in a dark office and then go next door to the IHOP for breakfast.

2000 – Baldur’s Gate II I picked this up on an impulse. It had been a while since I had played a game – well, I did try Half-Life – but anyway, I had landed in a dull corporate job and I needed to kill time, and I was at the Burlington Mall and I thought, hey, what’s up with computer games lately? Oh … they got really good.

2001 – Planescape: Torment and Grim Fandango Oh shit – they got really really good. And finally people are making games I can beat.

2005 – Xbox With my first and only kid on the way, I asked my wife for an Xbox for Christmas. I was busy writing about music in all my spare time, but I made time for Halo, Mercenaries, and Burnout: Takedown. I wrapped up Fable right before we went to the hospital.

2010 – Machinarium The first game my kid and I ever played together was Machinarium. He loves videogames. And he’s almost as lousy as his old man.

I’ve been listening to her a lot, and here’s a reason why.

So, I’ve been busy lately. In addition to editing Kill Screen Magazine, where we’re about to ship our fourth (and possibly best) issue, I’ve been working on a game writing project. They just announced it yesterday, so I’m pleased to post that I’m one of the writers on Blue Fang Games’ Where In the World Is Carmen Sandiego?, coming to Facebook on February 9. You can read more here. I worked on it with Rob Dubbin and Jay Katsir of The Colbert Report, although you may also know Dubbin as a regular writer at Kill Screen, and a designer of interactive fiction, and a bunch of other stuff. Dude does a little of everything.

I was focused on location clues – e.g., writing the hints that lead you to the next city. If you’ve seen me lately hunched over a stack of Lonely Planet guides at the Portsmouth Library with Atlas Obscura and a Google Doc spreadsheet on my screen, this is why.

It was a great experience overall. I love the folks at Blue Fang – they’re super-talented, super-professional and super-fun. I learned a hell of a lot – about writing, about working on a game, about stress and fatigue. It was a lot of work. Let me rephrase that: it was a lot of work. I always knew that you game industry people were busy, and you had crunch times and late night pizza and whatever. But now I get it. And I was just a part-timer.

So, with that done and a few other projects put to bed, I can take a break. Start working on my next short story (which is going to be a futuristic romantic comedy thing, I’ve already started it, it’s going to be awesome). Work on another game. And start work on the next issue of Kill Screen.

And sleep, and play video games, and read a book, and talk to my wife, and …

Here’s the intro, and then I have a few notes about the story.

My name is Ted Tuscadero. And I want to be your President.

I say that with a humble heart. I realize that even after eight stellar years in the Senate, some of you are still getting to know me. And I’ll admit, I am not perfect. The other day, when I told a VFW in Littleton I would blast Iran to glass, and at the same exact time I swore off the war at a town hall in Concord? My bad. Or the time that three of me showed up for the big debate in Manchester, and we got in a fistfight over who was going on the air? Yeah, the chattering classes had a few laughs over that one.

And that little incident before the holidays, when I crashed, as lit as a Christmas tree, into a pole and my car exploded, killing me instantly and taking a mailbox, a transformer and a barn cat with me? It looked bad, I know. But that proxy was on the fritz. That’s not me. That’s not who I am. And the more we talk, the better you get to know me, the more you’ll see what I mean.

I’ve been working on the story since last fall, and was pretty far over the moon to sell it to somebody. It’s the first short story I’ve ever published, and the first I’ve written since I was 13 and wrote horrible Douglas Adams-influenced sci-fi on an electric typewriter. While I’ve had the opportunity to publish a lot of stuff in the last decade, this one’s special because, well, it’s useless. It’s not a review of some hot new thing, it’s not a news story, it’s nothing that anyone in the world needed – it’s just a piece of entertainment, and wow, someone wanted to run it.

Here are some notes and links about the story.

• I’m a political junkie and a New Hampshire resident, and the 2004 Primary season – where I got to see every Democrat running, and some of them several times – was obviously a big influence.
• You can find a great discussion of the story over at the Escape Pod forums.
• This is a hairy angler. You can probably figure out why I chose it for the name of this particular character. Kudos to the show The Blue Planet for introducing it to me.
• There really is – or was – a topless donut shop in Maine.
• Fairport is Portsmouth, NH. The windmill thing was loosely based on the new library that was built, after some heated debate, around the corner from my house on Parrott Ave. We were involved in the debate, and it taught me that local politics – the least sexy and celebrated sector of our ever-flashier democracy – can be the most important. That was a big inspiration to my idea of a guy who wants to run for President, but who ends up obsessing over one little project in one little town full of people he may never see again.
• Though I changed his name slightly, Joe the Barber is my barber. He gives me a hell of a haircut.
• One last shoutout. In a funny coincidence (or maybe it wasn’t), Escape Pod editor Mur Lafferty, the reader Cheyenne Wright, and I are all pals of former made-up games blogger Rachael Webster. In fact, that’s Wright who drew the main portraits on her site. So, shout-out to Rachael in Japan, or wherever she’s gone since then.

So yeah, read the story! Let me know what you think!

So after my first run of posts about worldbuilding, I took a break to edit Kill Screen #2—and with that task almost done, I’m ready to write some more, narrowing in on specific topics or problems around creating fictional worlds. Let’s get back to it, with Avatar: The Last Airbender.

Early in the first season of Avatar, we meet a character who plays a minor but memorable part on the show: the Cabbage Merchant. Actually, he’s not so much a character as a running gag. Every so often he shows up with his cartful of cabbages, and he ends up in right in the path of the good guys right when they’re being chased by the bad guys. His cart is smashed and he yells, “My cabbages!” And that’s his entire schtick.

He’s easily the least important of the supporting characters we meet on Avatar, and yet he’s one of the first characters who makes Avatar feel like a world, and not just a story. Why? Because he’s one of the first recurring characters we meet.

When you think of worldbuilding, you probably think of a herculean task of history-writing, and character-making, and map-drawing. You think of the legendary show bible at Lost or the deep lore of a game like Morrowind. We know that this stuff makes worlds. I mean, you’re practically doing it brick by brick.

But I want to approach the problem the other way: what is the least you can do to make a world? What are the fewest things you need to add to make a story feel like a world?

As rich and brilliant as it is, Avatar has a thin world. The show is driven by the stories of its two protagonists, Aang and Zuko. They have a strong supporting cast and their adventures take them across a fascinating planet, but the show is built around the plot, and it ends when their conflicts are resolved.

At the same time, Avatar does feel larger than the story we’re seeing. This is a living, breathing place that’s sucked up a corner of my imagination. Ever since I watched the show I can’t stop thinking about it, and my impressions of it – my emotional connection to it – goes deeper than choosing which episode I liked best or which character I had the most in common with. I don’t even think about details at all – it’s more like I’m just stewing on it, like the day after a two-week vacation or a thirty-course meal.

How did it do that? It’s not the history: we only have a dim view into anything that happened more than a century before the show starts, and we only really get to know two of the past avatars who came before Aang. The geography doesn’t matter much either. The Fire Nation is far smaller than the Earth Nation but the characters spend roughly a season getting across each one. In fact, it takes them just one season to get all the way from the South Pole to the North. The map doesn’t drive the story, so it doesn’t really interest us.

But one of the things that really makes the place feel big is the set of recurring characters, both important – the members of the White Lotus, the bounty hunter, the swamp people – and small, like the Cabbage Merchant. The fact that these people come and go reminds us that there’s a larger plot going on. They remind us there are many ways to look at the story that we’re following. They make the world feel larger simply because they’re gone for weeks at a time, and that makes us realize they have somewhere else to go.

In most works of fiction – like a short story – there’s a commonly-assumed rule that every single element has to have a purpose. But in a fictional world, you leave things around that may or may not be useful. Even the trivial stuff that didn’t interest the writers could find a fan in the real world. (Cabbage Merchant cosplay is not unknown.) This stuff may not be crucial to the plot – but it’s crucial to the imaginations of the audience, which is almost as important.

You have your pick of alternate realities to dwell on, all of them creative powerhouses that spin a simple idea into multiple multi-million dollar channels of product. But I wanted to pick one. I figured if I could single out one transmedia world as somehow greater than the others, it would serve as an example for all the ideas we’ve been talking about. And luckily, it wasn’t that hard. In fact, I had absolutely no trouble settling on the one property that most dominates our culture and all of our media. And I will name it after the jump.

The story starts with a far-off land, ancient but familiar. A war breaks out. A relentless enemy rolls its armies across one country after another. On the other side of the world, its ally starts a war with its neighbors and threatens to throw the entire globe into turmoil. Things are looking grim – until suddenly, there’s a new hope: a new country, young, a little naive, but brave and strong, jumps into the fight.

The tide starts to turn. Our heroes in this plucky upstart nation win one battle after another. But the bodies are piling up, and the final foe – ruled by an almighty Emperor who claims divine power – refuses to surrender. And then all of a sudden, a miracle weapon appears, an almost science-fictiony superbomb that can end the war in one fell swoop (or okay, maybe two). It’s so perfect it’s almost corny, a deux ex machina, but it fits the myth: the young, brave and true heroes defeat the Emperor and finally bring peace to the world.

In broad strokes, this is the story of World War II. It’s a true story – our grandparents lived through it and everything – but it is also the greatest imaginary world we have.

Let’s count the reasons.

It’s a fight between good and evil. The Axis powers were the bad guys. They were really bad. The Allies beat them. That was really good. This is a clear conflict between well-defined adversaries, and it’s easy to latch onto.

Around this clear core, thousands of stories are possible. Let’s take a look at just a handful of stories from around the world and across the decades that are all united by the era and the context of this single war. Catch-22. Gravity’s Rainbow. The English Patient. Castle Wolfenstein. Captain America. The Thin Red Line.. Saving Private Ryan. Atonement. The Diary of Anne Frank. City of Thieves. Velvet Assassin. You’ve got heroic stories and anti-heroic stories. Comedy and tragedy. Stories of people on the fringes of the conflict; stories of the people who set it in motion. New perspectives, alternate histories, works of experimental or fantastical fiction – all united by the core mythos of the biggest conflagration our planet’s ever seen.

World War II was filled with strong personalities, but it didn’t depend on them. Churchill, Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Patton – you can rattle off a lot of names from the War. But the War went on even when, for example, Truman replaced Roosevelt. Like our last point, this is the key difference between a world and a story: you have plenty of heroes and villians, but this is not the story of any one of them.

Likewise, you can tell a story with your own characters without injecting any of the big names into it. In most properties, if you create a new storyline in a new locale, your central characters at least need to make a cameo. Most new Marvel comics throw in Captain America or Spiderman. The world of The Last Airbender barely exists outside Aang or Zuko. But in World War II, you can tell vast stories about the men on the front without sticking in a big-name general. We know we’re in the War, and that’s enough.

Nazis. Who’s worse than the Nazis? Who’s worse than Hitler? Pundits keep fretting that if we keep wheeling out the “so-and-so is as bad as Hitler” analogies about every single leader we don’t like, we’ll start to wear it out. But it hasn’t happened yet. It doesn’t get any worse than Hitler.

And yet, so broad and mature is this property that it also holds up under satire. I could wheel in one of those Hitler rant videos that’s been making the rounds of YouTube, but this is still my favorite:

Character is action, and there was plenty of action. A professor of mine once told me that military history and biography are the lowest form of history writing. It’s not hard to write a book about a bunch of tanks rolling from point A to point B; and likewise, it’s not hard to inject drama into a situation where millions of people are dying. This is why there are dozens of videogames set in World War II, and pretty much none set in hipster coffee shops.

… And you can tell a great story without action, too. The suffering on the homefront, the plight of refugees, the wives left at home waiting for letters from their husbands – the quiestest stories get more dramatic against this backdrop. Nobody needs to slap you in the face every other page and remind you what’s going on at the front; how could you forget?

Awesome technology. From codebreakers to submarines to the A-bomb, there are plenty of reasons to geek out over the war and the tech it produced. People like gadgets, and the inventions of the war were instrumental to its progress and its conclusion.

With the passage of time, reality can lift into fantasy. The PlayStation exclusive Valkyrie Chronicles emulates the themes and era of the War, but its world is made-up and magical. The recent Wolfenstein lets us shoot zombie Nazis. And then there’s this:

There’s just one drawback to my choice: World War II was real. It took the lives of millions of our relatives, and starved millions more. It paved the way to the Cold War and set America for a several-decade fall from whatever innocence we imagined we had.

World War II is a world, but it’s not strictly a “fictional” world. And yet it sets the stage for millions of works of fiction. All its complexities have been boiled down to a narrative as linear as the one in Avatar: The Last Airbender. All of these made-up worlds aspire to the same complexity, the same drama and the same importance as this single, several-year conflict. Every time Star Wars tries to be more than the story of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, every time Lord of the Rings throws a bazillion orcs at a fortress, every time a writer tries to scare us with the ultimate evil, and every time a sci-fi story tries to make us believe that this miracle weapon that appeared in the last act is more than a convenience; every time a publisher tries to stretch into more and more media, and bring us more and more entry points into their property; every time anyone waves a screen at you and says, “Seriously dude, this is important! This isn’t just any war! This is like, a war for the whole world!” – every single time, they’re reaching for the bar that was set over sixty years ago.

I don’t know why Hollywood hasn’t cooked up a sequel.

When it opens, Avatar: The Last Airbender is a very simple show. The opening titles tell the whole tale: the world’s at war, and the Fire Nation (the bad guys) want to conquer everyone else (the good guys). Only one person, the Avatar (the hero) can stop them, and as luck would have it, he just showed up and he’s ready to fight. Of course, he has challenges: he’s been gone for a hundred years, he hasn’t mastered his powers, and he’s an immature little kid. But that’s okay; that’s interesting. Watching him make his Hero’s Journey sounds like a hoot.

Of course, as my kid and I have watched Avatar – we’re halfway through the last season – we’ve learned more and more about how this world works. In the first episode, the characters’ “bending” looks magical: you wave your arms and water floats or fire shoots or the air turns into a tornado. But as the show goes along we learn that it’s more like a martial art, requiring massive skill and discipline. We learn about the four elements and what they signify, in terms that match the characters we’ve met: fire, like Prince Zuko, is destructive and tough to control; earth, like Toph, is stubborn and stands its ground. We learn about politics in the Fire Nation. We pick up the history of the previous avatars, and meet the last two to hold the title. And the Earth Kingdom’s capital city, Ba Sing Se, plays a major role in the second season – but as far as I remember, we first hear the name when it’s dropped into conversation. The show has a rich backstory, but we only learn about it when we need it.

When we talk about worldbuilding, it’s easy to assume we’re talking about something really heavy and excruciating. Blame it on Tolkien: ever since he gave Middle-Earth dynasties, legends, and even its own made-up languages, the bar has been set high for “lore.” I know that my own childhood experience of reading the first three pages of Silmarillion gave me the idea that your made-up little story is lightweight if you don’t have a linguist on staff.

At the same time, most of us like things simple. Your decision to make an investment in a game, book, comic, or what have you, depends on whether the first few minutes make you care. And Tolkien apparently got that, too; as my dad once put it, that’s why he has hobbits.

Avatar’s world is rich, but never complex – and that’s what I like about it. And here’s the thing: thinking about Avatar, or Star Wars, or a bunch of my other favorite works, has made me think that simple is good. Give me a world, but give me a good guy and a bad guy. Keep the details in a shoebox until I really need to see them. Don’t do what they did in Mass Effect, where you have some computer encyclopedia with tons of stuff from your story bible that you crammed in there because hey, maybe five different people will read it someday. Why would you ever make things so hard?

And then I remember The Wire.

Sometimes, you want a world that gives a meaningful backdrop to a long-running story. And sometimes, the world is the story. If you’ve ever watched HBO’s five-season masterpiece, you’re probably know it’s a little complicated. There are dozens of characters, all of them morally complex. You’ll have trouble picking out a “protagonist.” There are clear conflicts in the story, but no clear resolutions, which fits the show’s vision. The city is a broken system, and we see all the reasons that noone can fix it.

Fans of The Wire revel in its complexity, but it didn’t come from nowhere. David Simon and his team built on many other works – Simon’s reporting on both the police and the drug dealers led to two earlier books that both became TV shows, and seeing Homicide and reading The Corner prepared me for what he was doing in The Wire. The Wire just does it better, and does it all at the same time.

Even a casual viewer can latch onto all the familiar cops-and-criminals tropes. Both white and blue collar workers, no matter how boring their jobs are, will see their own frustrations reflected in the storylines. You don’t need hobbits here, because all adults can see themselves somewhere in this show.

But more than Avatar, we’re drawn in by the entire world that we’re given – a system where tiny details have big impact, where a chance encounter in one season can pay off in another, where characters from all walks of life have a chance to change each other, and only the audience and the author get to see the whole picture. We want all the things that are only possible in a world this big.

I could probably write 20,000 words on the show and about 20,000 other people already have. But I guess what I’m getting at is that The Wire‘s complexity works because The Wire is based on real life. A fantasy world could grow into something just as complicated, but to make people care, you’d have to throw in some hobbits. And even then, you’d risk ticking off your audience. Imagine if someone made up a world that was as frustrating as The Wire‘s. Wouldn’t you hate the writer of that show? You’d want to know why they were thwarting their characters, why they made a clear win impossible, and why they’re not seeing a shrink like right damn now. You’d start to wish there was a hero – a really straightforward one, like the Avatar and his gang. And it would baffle you why they couldn’t just go out and save the day already.

(The official GameLoop 2010 t-shirt. Pictured: organizers Darius Kazemi (left) and Scott Macmillan. For event pics, go here. And hey, who’s that guy?)

This Saturday I went to my first Boston GameLoop, and I was one of 200 game nerds from Boston and beyond who spent all day at the Microsoft NERD Building, talking about games. I’ve been remiss about hanging out in the Boston scene – living in Portsmouth only puts me an hour away, but sometimes that’s enough. GameLoop made me realize just how incredible that scene is.

The big area companies like Irrational, Harmonix, and Demiurge were well represented – and so were hot indies like Dejobaan and Fire Hose. (Not to mention out of towners from No Fun Games, Shadegrown, and Haunted Temple.) I saw some folks from MIT’s Gambit program, and Boston’s storied history in text adventures (“INTERACTIVE FICTION!”) was well represented by Jason McIntosh and Andrew Plotkin, who led an impromptu training session in Inform7, a natural language authoring tool. And I met or ran into a bunch of awesome game journos and bloggers, including – and I’m really sorry to whoever I missed – Rob Zacny, J. P. Grant, Maddy Myers, Dan Bruno, Nicole Kline, and David Bolton. We had 200 really smart people, and all of them were up to something.

I’ll share a few notes on unconferences for anyone who’s never been to one. I knew that it’s an informal way to run a conference: people throw ideas on a whiteboard, and then you wheel out a second whiteboard where people vote on those ideas, and finally you move to a third, grid-lined whiteboard where you schedule the most popular sessions. Somebody steps up to moderate, and you’ve got a talk.

The sessions were usually either discussions or tutorials. I signed up to moderate a session on game journalism and game crit, but “moderate” is a loose word: I asked a few questions and tried to make sure people got a chance to speak, but generally, once the conversation gets rolling, it can go wherever the attendees want to take it.

We had a great, lively discussion, and I took away some takeaways to inform the loose community of “brainy” game bloggers – aka the brainysphere, and boy did that term get old as the hour went on. People agreed that there was smart writing about games on the ‘Net, but I heard from several people that it was hard to find. This is especially a problem for reviews: the classic format review is broken, because the write-up that appears the day the game launches is usually a simple consumer guide (“The graphics rate a 7, the gameplay rates an 8,” etc.) – but the terrific writing that comes afterwards, and that can show up a month after launch, has a harder time finding an audience. (For example, Michael Abbott’s terrific “I’m Your Huckleberry” post, which is a fascinating take on Red Dead Redemption but is not a review.) At the same time, I agree with Dan Bruno – it’s never been a better time to write about games, and nobody reported having a difficult time getting their work out there. Getting paid, of course, is another matter completely.

Anyway, that was one takeaway I can remember – if I find other write-ups I’ll link them here. And good news, I sold a bunch of copies of Kill Screen #1, and got some extremely kind feedback from people who had already seen it. K. Adam White even wore his KS t-shirt (and looked super-natty in it)!

The discussions were fascinating, even the ones I didn’t spend much time in. You’re expected to “vote with your feet,” and noone takes offense if you decide that a passionate discussion about prototyping in Unity isn’t your thing. Niche sessions were usually balanced out by more general ones, and there were a number of great tutorials: Jeff Ward gave a great introduction to XNA and the AngelXNA prototyping framework, and like I said, the Inform7 tutorial was fantastic. Even though Jason and Andrew said it was thrown together last minute (nobody really prepares their talks – it’s part of the genius of the thing), they did a great job of introducing the tool and walking us through a simple example, and Jason followed up later on Twitter with more links. An hour of that was just enough to get the gist of how the tool works and whether I’d want to learn more, and I’ve been to better-organized talks that weren’t as persuasive (or nearly as much fun).

I don’t know if the model would scale to a thousand participants; the scrum around the whiteboards might get a little intense. But for a small, superb crowd like this one, and under Darius’ and Scott’s impeccable and passionate leadership, it was perfect. GameLoop was a hit, and just as important, it was a great day for Boston – a town that’s been on-and-off as a games biz leader, but that’s proving itself a scene to be reckoned with.