Winda Benedetti reports that Mike Mika “didn’t have an agenda when he changed Donkey Kong” by hacking an old NES ROM and turning damsel in distress, Pauline, into Mario’s potential savior in what he has dubbed the Pauline Edition of Donkey Kong.  No other agenda, that is, than to just “keep my daughter playing games with me” (“Damsel (not) in Distress: Dad hacks Donkey Kong for his daughter”, NBCNEWS.com, 12 March 2013).  Nevertheless, clearly the alteration that he did make to the game, the role reversal of the game’s protagonist and the game’s object, has an effect on how one sees the game and what it communicates. 

After all, Donkey Kong is in many ways the proto-damsel-in-distress, the proto-saving-the-princess game.  It would lead to the “plumber saves princess” motif of Super Mario Bros. (and, yes, yes, I know that he was Jumpman before he was Mario, but, yeah, same guy), to saving Princess Zelda, and to the general tone that Nintendo struck with their boy friendly foray into the console market back in the mid-1980s.

Leene’s bell chimes three times from the town square and a teenage adventurer is awakened by his mother, a cadet at Skyloft’s knight academy throws together his belongings and dashes to his practicum, a busty archeologist hones her skills on an obstacle course in the gardens while her gremlin of a butler scuttles behind her carrying a light midday meal. These are the first scenes we see of three characters in three different games. In these opening scenes, we meet the star characters in their homes, seeing how they live day-to-day when they aren’t adventuring. Games have long been good at world-building through locations: towns, monuments, castles, skyscrapers, markets, schools and squares are structured to illustrate a sense of setting that often carries over to character building, but surprisingly few games explore their protagonist’s home.

In the openings to Chrono Trigger, Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword and the tutorials of the early Tomb Raider games, the protagonists’ homes establish the status quo. We know from the first frame that we see them that Crono and Link are well behaved, well off, slightly slothful, mute teenage boys off to enjoy another day in a good life. We know that even though Lara Croft enjoys every luxury of a British manor, she’s dedicated enough to her physically demanding job to dedicate a substantial portion of her property to maintaining her strength and ability. When these characters answer their calls to adventure, the player has an immediate sense of their motivation and the kinds of lives that they’re trying to protect. It makes sense for them to run off to save the world because we’ve seen that their day-to-day lives are worth defending.

Two concepts have entered my thinking as of late. The first is the idea of uninterrupted spatial travel in video games and the second is the using cinematic concepts as a way to describe games. On the surface these seem like incompatible ideas held together by some form of cognitive dissonance on the player’s part. Video games are described as cinematic, yet cinema edits out the time when nothing or unimportant action is taking place. Video games show everything. They show the whole journey.

As time has moved on and technology improved sufficiently to realize designers’ dreams gaming has marched inexorably towards creating large consistent and open worlds for the player to explore. We are in the cities of renaissance Italy, the frozen north of Tamriel, the ridiculous parody of urbanization of Steelport, etc., etc. But one must ask, what is the point of these continuous worlds? They are there to make you feel immersed in a fictional land by surrounding your digital self with digital space. Yet, there is a lot of space that feels empty when traveling in these games.

This post completely spoils the twist ending of Little Inferno.

Little Inferno is a wonderfully uplifting game. Ostensibly, it’s about burning all manner of items in a virtual fireplace, but over the course of a couple hours, the game peels back its own layers to reveal a surprisingly thoughtful narrative. Little Inferno is a game about moving on—that much is unmistakable—but it’s vague on what you’re moving on from and where you’re moving on to. With its colorful cast of characters, its recurring dialogue, and its early-Tim Burton art style, it has that kind of surreal atmosphere that just begs for reinterpretation and turns the game into a kind of Rorschach test. It’s interesting how many different interpretations there are of this game. Christopher Franklin from Errant Signal sees it as a compassionate criticism of casual games (as in, it doesn’t demonize those kinds of games or those who make them). Mike Rougeau from Kotaku sees it as a pre-apocalypse fable. Others in the comments for both articles see it as a metaphor for global warming. I see the Little Inferno Entertainment Fireplace as a rather direct metaphor for childhood: A place where we can play, seemingly forever, but that has to end sometime.

To hear Sony tell it, every piece of their upcoming PlayStation 4 is an industry-changing marvel.  As John Teti aptly writes, their mantra is “More”: more processing power, more polygons, more texture, more social network hooks.  It’s hard to separate substance from static in the middle of the hype storm but now that some time has passed, I’m more confident that the most important feature announced is linked to a single button labeled “share.”  Assuming it’s implemented gracefully (which is a big assumption given Sony’s console software track record), the ability for players to stream and save gameplay footage will have a much larger effect than any amount of increased visual fidelity.