Please note that this piece contains spoilers, some of which are significant.

Banjo-Tooie (2000) marks a significant place in 3D platforming history, yet it appears to be somewhat forgotten now, perhaps buried amongst its own brand obscurity. To be fair, the Banjo-Kazooie “brand” doesn’t lend itself to ubiquity in the first place—Banjo began his life as a character in developer Rare’s 1997 racer Diddy Kong Racing, along with other throwaway sentient animals such as Timber the tiger and Drumstick, an overall wearing chicken. The ulterior motive behind DKR, it seems, was to use the game as a vessel to lay the groundwork for future character-specific Rare titles (the only one to succeed was Conker the squirrel, famously), but, really, there doesn’t seem to be anything significantly endearing or memorable about, well, a bear with pants. Granted, sticking clothes on an animal mascot may not be the oldest trick in the book, but it sure seems that way, and I think that’s enough to result in Rare’s IPs getting glossed over with the same kind of dismissal that seems to befall every new Saturday morning cartoon show that isn’t specifically tied to an already popular product. Banjo the bear and his bird sidekick Kazooie had a very, very, very steep hill to climb when their first game, Banjo-Kazooie, was released in 1998—and despite its popularity (popular enough to warrant two sequels, at least), in the face of that OTHER franchise competing for consumer dollars on a Nintendo system, there really was no way that Banjo’s first solo effort would seem like anything other than an ostensible conglomeration of every other non-Mario mascot in existence.

Faded characterizations aside, however, I’m happy that Banjo-Tooie exists as both one of the platforming swan songs of the Nintendo 64 and as a recent re-release on Xbox Live Arcade, because it is a fascinating video game relic, a resolute and finite amalgamation of the N64’s capabilities and Rare’s boldness to address the trappings of a genre that it helped to define, even doing it with an almost parodistic zeal.

Treating Banjo-Tooie as a “sequel” to BK, however, may not be wisest approach. Granted, the game certainly aims to improve upon the first title in concrete technical ways like graphics and camera control and, for the most part, succeeds admirably—there is some clever “elasticity” tech, for example, that gives soft and squishy environments an appropriate bounce: this isn’t the first N64 game where you end up inside of a sea creature’s stomach, but it’s much more impressive to traipse through intestines that have grosser jiggle to them. And the variety of mini-games tucked away within each level shows that the development team was making a solid effort in trying to craft a more robust experience for the player than its predecessor (never mind that most of these gameplay sidebars are either boring or, in the case of the first person seek-and-shoot timed missions, downright annoying). But underlying all of my assessments of the game and its nature as a “continuation” of BK is this ecstatic revelation that came to me during my recent play-though of the 360 remake, brought on by my desire to follow the Stop N’ Swop arc to its deserved conclusion (read here for a little history of this esoteric feature).

It feels to me as if Banjo-Tooie was the game that the developers wanted to make all along but weren’t able to until they constructed Banjo-Kazooie as a kind of prelude, since BT presupposes your involvement and familiarity with the first game in delightfully fecund ways. This is apparent from the first screen of the game, picking up from where the last screen of BK left off, with the evil witch Gruntilda trapped under a huge boulder—the direct result of the player’s assumed job well done. What’s more, when Banjo and Kazooie begin their adventure, they already have their entire previous move-set intact, and things only progress from there as each new world offers at least one new special technique or item or weapon to use. This actually led to a very frustrating moment for me—I was required to use a specific beak attack in order to gain a jiggy (the equivalent to Mario’s stars), but in order to correctly execute the move, I had to tap a shoulder button instead of hold it—a variation on an attack from the first game that I wasn’t even aware I still had. The assumption is that you can remember every ability from BK, and the new move-set is simply mapped on top of that (luckily, strict XBLA requirements mean that the “Help and Options” section has an onscreen guide to all of the moves, or else I would have been totally stymied without the original instruction book or an FAQ). It’s an incredibly ambitious development tactic that results in a game that, while not necessarily “deep,” is certainly impressive in terms of breadth; Kazooie can shoot and lay eggs as before, for instance, but now there are no less than five different egg types to use in various situations…and one of those eggs actually hatches a miniature Kazooie that is controlled remotely and is used to get into small crevices and squeeze past large path-blocking enemies, among other things. I smiled.

A core aspect of Tooie’s improved gameplay derives itself from the new ability to separate and individually control both Banjo and Kazooie (in BK, Kazooie was permanently tethered to Banjo’s back via his rucksack), which could have made for some deep and interesting puzzle solving, but unfortunately falls back on the “simultaneous switch hitting” trope found everywhere in everything. The bird and the bear both feel properly unique, however, and each character builds up their own individual abilities as the game progresses, so it just manages to stay fresh enough through completion. Kazooie can glide on her own without a flight pad, for example, and Banjo can use his empty backpack as a kind of potato-sack hopping vehicle and zip himself up inside in order to gain health. Again, these gameplay aspects aren’t necessarily implemented in a masterful way, but the fact that so much is nascent makes Banjo-Tooie a curious experiment in uninhibited design.

The true appeal of the game, however, lies in the inter-connectedness of the environments. I know I’ve written this before, but it bears is worth repeating again: for 3D video games, environment is KEY to an enjoyable experience, especially in a game where exploration is a core aspect of gameplay. And I don’t think I’ve ever played a game that had its levels reveal themselves as smaller branches of a larger overarching design as often or as well as Banjo-Tooie: you truly get the feeling that, as new areas are unlocked or discovered non-linearly, Rare constructed a master blueprint that was meticulously mapped out and designed to fold back onto itself at specific points like a complicated origami sculpture. In short, the whole game is a virtuoso’s ode to platformer backtracking, and in my opinion it’s done spectacularly.  One of the very first jiggies earned, for example, requires Banjo to travel from a Mayan inspired treasure chamber in the first world to a prehistoric cave in the fifth world, where a sleeping caveman is guarding a golden idol he stole from the vault. This is an instant and jarring transition; you simply walk through a door and are transported into a completely different time and place, a time and place that you won’t see again for quite some time, when you unlock the area proper. I didn’t even put the pieces together until I found my way into that specific cave again and spotted the hiding spot where the idol once stood. Rare has taken the setting of Spiral Mountain from BK and developed it into a fully realized, Byzantine universe that somehow feels more easier to navigate than the endless array of cavernous spaces that constituted Grunty’s lair, the overworld of the first game.

The issue of methodological collection has to be addressed as well, since it’s the bane of Banjo games specifically and Rare games in general (even Diddy Kong Racing had the player riding around and collecting balloons in a hub-world to unlock courses). Gamespite’s article on the matter does a fine job in summing up the problem with most 3D collectathon platformers, in that the burden of having to use the game’s programmed and technical limitations to look for something in these gargantuan areas is disproportionate to the incentive for actually getting them. The stats alone for Donkey Kong 64 (1999) should incite a tsk from almost any gamer. While Banjo-Tooie doesn’t reduce the amount of acquirable trinkets in any significant way, there is definitely more thought put into how exactly they are distributed within the areas. The 100 golden notes scattered throughout each world are now grouped into bunches of 5 and 20, lightening the load somewhat, and I didn’t have to comb through every nook and cranny in the way that BK required me to. And while shamans Mumbo Jumbo and Humba Wumba (…) each require a tiny animal called a Glowbo to perform their level-specific spells, these creatures are always found near their respective dwellings, and the game makes it a point to mention that to you via one of many hint signs strewn everywhere.

What’s more, Rare seems to actually be toying with the cliche of item collecting, making disarming jabs at their own fastidious audience. There are many NPC’s throughout Banjo-Tooie that will ask you to find this or that item or recover this or that offspring…but then, about three-quarters into the game, you encounter Mildred and George, a couple of “square” and star-crossed ice cubes who ask you to reunite them. Unfortunately, due to a necessary item tucked away inside Mildred, and a pre-designed “accident” that befalls George–which the player has to inadvertently set into motion—the only way for Banjo to acquire all the necessary jiggies necessitates that the pair is destroyed. So, Mildred and George actually are reunited, but in a unspoken, existential, and oddly beautiful way. The multi-colored Jinjo creatures also return, as expected, but about halfway through the game, a new enemy type is introduced—Minjos, who are actually evil doppelgangers of Jinjos—requiring the player to now be on their toes when they discover a Jinjo, since it may actually attack them instead of fill out a pre-determined quota. It’s another daring and meta move on Rare’s part; by subverting the very idea of item collecting that the developers introduced by using false Jinjos—and then, in the last world, the ultimate, a false Mumbo—they seem to actually be redefining somewhat what it means to play a “Rare game,” but specifically for those who have been following their games long enough to identify what it means to play a “Rare game” in the first place. It’s a defiant statement for both the fans and the critics, and undeniably original.

While one can surely see in Banjo-Tooie the groundwork being laid for Conker’s Bad Fur Day (2001), Rare’s N64 swan song—there is plenty of PG level toilet humor, large breasts and non-PC characters—the game isn’t simply a bridge or a contractual obligation. There was a surprising amount of “breadth” and ambition put into it, using expectation as a means to expand upon, and even satirize, itself. For all of the frustrating and characteristically Rare things I came across, I was compelled to continue playing, if for any other reason than a desire to see if my criticisms would be addressed or mirrored back to me. I don’t know if these thoughts equate to a positive review, but it is certainly an interactive study that I’m happy to have invested in. I came to Banjo-Tooie for Stop n’ Swop (which I’ve not unintentionally neglected to mention altogether), but once I arrived there, I found something more.

Screenshots from Spiral Mountain and GameFAQs.

The things you find in New York alleys. Actually, this garbage depository on the side of my apartment building has been bearing some interesting fruit lately: About a month ago I found a stack of gently-read Edge magazines, and shortly after, a broken set of Rock Band drums (and they were in fact destroyed, no doubt in the wrong place at the wrong session). I shouldn’t be too surprised, considering the density of my neighborhood and how gaming is all but mainstream now, but still…I can’t help feeling a little less alone around here.

Of course I peeked.

Ico (2001) requires nothing less than complete investment in its construction. Every crumbling stone and rusty lever serves to reinforce an exacting and authoritative design, as staged and artificial as the huge obtrusive castle that serves as the only environment. The game remains strangely ironic in this way, exhibiting a realism and artistry that’s twice or maybe even three times removed from prominent troubles on the receptive level: the controls are unintuitive, in-game cameras are stubbornly restrictive and refuse to comply with direction, and bloom lighting frequently threatens monotony, casting everything in a hazy glow that makes one squint and strain unnaturally.

Fine. As a game—as an interactive apparatus—it’s not perfect.

But behind Team Ico and Fumito Ueda’s unnerving design lies moments so inescapably beautiful and human that to call Ico anything less than moving is missing something entirely, something important. Yorda (the NPC that the player, as young protagonist Ico, must lead through the massive fortress labyrinth) curiously checks her elbow often when left idle. Perhaps it’s to knead the arm that Ico must constantly tug on, ushering the both of them through gameplay sequences of puzzle solving and light combat that would be brisk enough in the first place. Or it could simply be fatigue—after all, stress manifests itself in many forms and, without spoiling the story, to say that the adolescent Yorda is worried about sneaking out without Mom’s permission is quite an understatement. Later, when freedom seems all but spread out before the pair, Yorda is so physically and emotionally drained that she can barely stand on her own two feet, and stumbles when Ico tries to drag her with the same aggressive urgency that he (the player) has used before.

Many people cite the bridge sequence, the false endgame, as the crux of Ueda’s authorship, the “moment” in which the game crosses over from simplistic platformer to emblematic beacon of art, but the true measure of Ico’s brilliance comes from everything that came before: Ico’s half-lanky and awkward stride as he struggles to carry a bomb (clearly biting off more than he can chew but masking the struggle behind not-quite-realized machismo); the small controller vibrations set off when Ico and Yorda’s grip snaps taut; and Yorda, when given a moment to herself, quietly examines her elbow, and humanity’s small intricacies become stylized revelations of themselves, lasting far beyond their intention.

The apparatus of Ico is flawed, to be sure, but at the same time, how alive the diffraction is!

Images from VGMuseum.

We are now officially done with one-third of our summer, and I couldn’t be feeling more pressure with regards to the videogames that I’m currently playing. It’s not like the old days: Summer slammed into our soft impressionable minds like a freight train of liberation, and the possible configurations of doing everything but anything stretched on for subjective eternities. Videogames were a part of my everyday playscape, as it was for a lot of people, and while the leisure-ness of games also lent itself a little guilt during the school year, summer meant we were free to spent hours and hours—days if some of us wanted to—tackling a game (or two, or twenty) without fear of any harsh parental scoldings other than the occasional “go outside” mantra and, frankly, I was totally fine with that. It all fused together into a tapestry of seasonal freedom and I could shift activity gears seamlessly. The games would always be there, after all, and time was simply a measure of sunlight, not scheduled events.

It’s different now. This is something every gamer realizes when they reach their 20s: our calendars condense closer and closer together (”the circle is closing in,” I think the old saying goes) and free time becomes a commodity as precious as a gemstone. Nothing will bring those carefree days of childhood back. Coincidentally, the gaming industry seems aware of this as much as we do, and exploits our nostalgia to nefarious ends: “Retro” releases tantalize with the possibility of re-living our pre-pubescent periods, and franchise reboots claim to strip a game down to its core appeal, to its “roots,” brewing the feelings we once felt when we first laid eyes on them. The industry didn’t simply abandon our demographic when we aged out; it followed us because we are STILL the demographic, and are doing everything imaginable to persuade us to purchase new merchandise by disguising it as the old. And, for the most part, it’s working.

Yet old habits die hard, and I have a particular summer gaming tradition that I’m currently agonizing over, which is to play a Zelda game from front to back. I’ve been doing it on and off for the better part of twelve years, and while last season was Zelda barren as I tried to settle into a new full time job, this year I plan to ritualistically dive in head first, which is exactly where my conundrum lies. But first things first: why this particular tradition?

Zelda games, to me, exclusively have the summer vibe going on more than any other. One can indirectly channel the feelings that creator Shigeru Miyamoto must have experienced as a youth during his own adventures in the forests and caves around his hometown of Kyoto, the inspiration for the Hyrule universe. The essence of Zelda has remained resolutely intact all of these years, and no matter how ridiculous and off-center the series may spin (for example, Link shredding on a cog), one aspect of gameplay is delightfully ever-present: environmental exploration, the timeless techniques of turning over every rock, bombing every crack and poking through every bush while searching for all manner of hidden treasure, finding your way around more by memory and natural landmarks than by map. Of course, Zelda games do have maps—considering some of the trickier 3-D temples, it would be ridiculous if they didn’t—but do you honestly use them more than sight alone?

Another important and quintessentially summer-like staple of Zelda games is that more than half of Link’s time in Hyrule is spent outdoors, dwarfed by his natural surroundings and forcing the player to simply take a moment and assess their rightful place within that world. Every time you enter a town or dungeon or acreage of land that hasn’t been revealed before, a short panoramic cinema offers a quick geographic survey that both invites and overwhelms, a travelogue of epic proportions, the ultimate vacation. The inevitable warping takes much of the tedium out of travel, but at the start of these games, all that legwork is actually useful in getting a sense of the scope of the Zelda universe, a scope that, with the later 3-D iterations, spans time as well as space. The sheer pleasure of living in Hyrule for dozens of hours isn’t just from Link’s satisfying workout on that gentle Nintendo treadmill—starting as frail and all but written-off forest waif and ultimately arriving at nearly indestructible master swordsman—but from taking part in a narrative that encompasses an entire ecosystem, in which a reward can stem from merely watching that Hyrulian sun rise and set many, many times, a constant in a game constructed around a remarkable transformation. Link’s adventures encompass summer, to be sure, and not just any summer, but ones that we always remember as occurring long ago: fresh, exciting, and endless.

What’s vexing me isn’t the issue of whether or not to play through a Zelda game: considering the unusually cool and damp June that the East Coast has gone through, it’s high time for some sun and adrenaline. The question, rather, is WHICH game to play? I held off on finishing Twilight Princess because I purchased it with my Wii in January ‘07 and, snowboarding section or not, it just didn’t feel right to be playing it in the winter. I wouldn’t mind revisiting Wind Waker again, and Majora’s Mask recently made its way onto Virtual Console (never mind that the game is a masterpiece of dread; that’s a topic for another article). Oh, and the handheld games! I can actually play those outside, in the open air, maybe sitting on a park bench or walking The Ramble. What a Mobius strip that would be! I have been meaning to play through Link’s Awakening again after being swaddled in fuzzy Game Boy memories this year. Or maybe Ocarina of Time? Or A Link to the Past? Or The Adventure of Link? Argh!

Now that there are only a little less than two months left, time is running out for my Summer Zelda playthrough, and I’m a little panicky. Maybe the only way to settle this is through a marathon series session. Hmmm. What do you think? And more importantly, what were your summer gaming traditions, and do you still observe them today?

]]> http://www.bliterations.com/2009/07/my-summer-conundrum/feed/ http://www.bliterations.com/2009/06/pipelines-spirals-and-betweeness/ http://www.bliterations.com/2009/06/pipelines-spirals-and-betweeness/#comments Wed, 17 Jun 2009 16:20:09 +0000 Kurt Shulenberger http://www.bliterations.com/?p=642

Space is a crucial element in a video game. It helps dictate the environment, defines the limitations of the player, and establishes the boundaries that can either help or hinder one from progressing through what can sometimes be many many hours of real world time. The way that the interactive environment has evolved—from concrete and planar to a fluctuating open-world 3D ecosystem—gives the awesome impression that you can “go anywhere” and “do anything.” Unfortunately, it’s kind of the exact opposite: with such a highly complicated and tech-based infrastructure, the freedom a player actually experiences is all in-game, and the possibilities of trying to color outside the lines (or full-out “breaking” it) are getting fewer and farther in-between. Many people like their realism, and that’s fine, but sometimes I wish that games hearkened back to the olden days (of yore), when the discourse was more elastic and dictated by gameplay, and the spatial relationships were more “open.”

For instance, a mechanic (shudder) that seems to have fallen by the wayside involves a looping, continuous line authored by the player: when the character you control travels in one direction, he/she will continue in that direction, even if they leave the playing field. If they go off of the screen, this doesn’t result in failure and/or a lost life: you’ll simply cycle around to the other side of the screen without ever losing any momentum. Kid Icarus (1987) utilizes this concept in some of its level design—what appears to be a blocked vertical path can actually be circumvented by moving from one side of the screen to the other, not by traveling across the designated geographic layout of the level but by purposely leaving that space and popping out on the other side. In other words, the player is manipulating the game’s “negative” space. Pac-Man (and his Ms.) allow for this technique also, as you can move from one side of the board to the other via the two openings in the middle of the maze, a quick way to avoid closely pursuing ghosts. Early one-screen arcade and NES titles like the original Mario Bros. and Balloon Fight contain an extra dimension of strategy because of the perpetual direction you can apply to both sides of the board at any given time.

I remember one of my literary professors back in college describing Eastern writing as “spiral-like” by nature, and that concept stuck with me ever since. Modern Japanese authors like Kobo Abe and Haruki Murakami employ a writing style that is both flowing and cohesive, never lingering on a plot point yet also never failing to laterally connect with the events that came before. The results are fluid, briskly paced works that, while often dealing with the surreal and fantastic, never have any rough edges or tangential prose. The plots of most games—retro and modern—certainly don’t hold a candle to the masterpieces of the great Eastern novelists, but in games like Kid Icarus, the spiral materializes in other, more implicit forms. (It may seem like I’m trying to argue that this is a fundamentally “Japanese” quality, but games like Williams’ Joust and Rare’s Jetpac also use the non-terminating line, although the argument of whether any particular game influenced any other is an historical matter that I’d rather skirt for the time being.)

Another interesting implementation of space is “warping,” but in the case of a game like Super Mario Bros. (1986), the idea of using an interstitial space to travel between two points within a game’s diegesis is actually a tool with a physical presence: the pipe. This was all designed as a means to encourage exploration and tuck away secrets that could be discovered after multiple play-throughs, of course, and I concede that there is something very whimsical and fun about having Mario duck into a pipe or climb a quickly growing vine as a means to traverse terrain that breaks from the game’s pre-established norms, but it seems that a little bit of the “metaness” charm present when you actually force yourself off-screen is lost by making it a mechanic (oh, that dreaded word again). It turns into something explicitly anticipated and flaunted by the designers instead of being a more subtle technique that creates the illusion that the player is discovering and exploiting some unseen bit of architecture all by themselves. But the pipe serves a valuable purpose: by being an in-game object in SMB (one that everyone recognizes) that is also a vehicle for quickly skipping through game areas or accessing secret rooms, it fills in a spatial gap that would otherwise break our engagement with Mario’s world if we simply just jumped, say, from World 1 to World 4; without the pipe, it would seem like a cheat, like we were passing over something, but with it we instantly picture Mario tubing through some unseen labyrinth of plumbing that some very enthusiastic Mushroom Kingdom planning committee drew up one night. And all of this taking place telepathically, while the screen flashes black.

The “continuous line” principle does make a brief comeback in Super Mario Bros. 2 (1988) (or Doki Doki Panic, depending on whose side you’re on), but unfortunately it’s severely restricted as the closed, mostly scrolling, and compartmentalized level design is not very conducive to physics-based platforming puzzles or strategic cross-screen vegetable throwing combat. You would think that the boss fights might try to involve some geo-spatial quandaries, but alas, the lairs in which you battle these large enemies are woefully brick-laden and claustrophobic, with hardly any character finessing involved at all; it becomes either a block stacking mini-game fit for a robotic operating buddy, or a surprisingly boring round of explosive hot potato.

With the advent and popularity of side-scrolling in game design, the fixed screen grew out of favor and never really came back in any significant way, with some exceptions (the puzzle genre, for one). Even today, I don’t think that developers want to mess with the idea of left-right screen wrapping anymore: it’s too jarring, too unrefined. How can Realism exist when the player is given the opportunity to go Dada? And while warping remains a feature in use today, it certainly doesn’t have that element of discovery and imagination that it did in the days of SMB—oh look, Niko, you found a subway car. Stand clear of the closing doors.

I would love to see more clever uses of negative and interstitial spaces in today’s games, because the potential is there: Closure (2009) is an excellent example of “negative” design done right, and Portal (2007) deliciously hints at how continuous momentum would work in a 3-D environment. I say “hints at” because Portal uses its level design to cocoon a system of control around its concepts instead of allowing much player freedom, but hey, everything starts somewhere. Can you imagine a Portal multiplayer mode, for example, in which the maps are simple, single rooms, much like the one-screen boards of Balloon Fight? Or a game where the player can only inflict damage or influence the environment when their avatar is out of view, in the game’s ”between” spaces, resting in the seams? Perhaps by looking back at the early titles (of yore, remember) that favored a more interactive method of spatial discourse, video games can be open-ended enablers of self-narrative that also feature the polish and production values that gamers enjoy today. There’s no reason why developers can’t focus their hindsight a little more; after all, the line of technology is always curving, never straight, and the most important quality of a spiral is that it can continue to grow while still revolving around its origin.

Game screenshots from VGMuseum. Magritte/Pipe image by Genée Cosden.

Breath of Fire image source: VGMuseum

Now that bump mapping and real-time shadow rendering are common vernacular, 3-D modeling is a career path to aspire to, and the consciousness of the gamer/consumer has been invaded by industry buzzwords and comparison charts, we often forget that the visual representation of the video game centers around a single element: the pixel, the simplest graphical unit by which all manners of computational drawing were first based. These literal building blocks (although “shapes” is a more accurate term, because you don’t dare call them squares) represent all that is good and right with modern media: a fixed system of creation that produces an endless variety of forms.

Severe technical limitations ensured that the first video games would have bare and almost laconic presentations, but, as Mark J.P. Wolf notes in “Abstraction in the Video Game” from The Video Game Theory Reader (edited by Wolf and Bernard Perron), the blocky and abstract visuals of the early games, while primitive by today’s standards, served as an educational tool as well: it was a way to wean people onto the different skills of manipulation that had to be mastered in order to succeed at the machines they were trying to play. With less ornamental distraction, one could better concentrate on the task at hand, namely, objective and input: What do I have
to do, and how do I do it? Without gamers even being aware of it, the pixel quietly and seamlessly taught them how to properly partake in video games, sharing in the interactive experience without becoming confused and disillusioned.

After the arcade machines of gaming’s infancy—and the graphics they introduced—laid the foundation for this new, interactive method of media reception, the first console systems began to appear in homes, signaling and embracing the convergence of abstraction, engagement, and technology. In a way, these pieces of hardware were the apex of post World War II consciousness, with counterculture, escapism, commercialism and raw information desperately trying to be contained into something compact and palpable, something that the average person could obtain—for the right price, of course. And what better way to distill modern thinking than through an equally modern and purchasable device that can also be switched off when things get too overwhelming or difficult?

It would be very easy to see these video games—and personal computers, which were tracing their own congruous path—as the first embodiment of this cultural merger, seeming to arrive suddenly and fully formed…but that’s not to say that other forms of art and media weren’t conceptualizing the forthcoming digital age. A few years ago I discovered the wonderful films of artist Norman McLaren, and I find such a close compatibility in his work to the notional quandaries that game scholars would later pose that I dare call McLaren the spiritual predecessor to electronic gaming, “pixelating” our world before anyone knew what the digital revolution would actually come to represent.

Born in Scotland in 1914, Norman McLaren immigrated to the United States after graduating from the Glasgow School of Art, where he tinkered in set design, painting and filmmaking. After a few years of working on various commissions for table scraps in New York, McLaren was asked to lead the National Film Board of Canada’s animation division, with the purpose of making educational and utilitarian films for the greater Canadian population. McLaren remained at the NFB until his death in 1987, making movies that ranged from war time PSAs to arithmetic primers for schoolchildren, all while retaining a prolific creativity that thrived via the different and wildly inventive production techniques that he created for himself. Some of the more “systematic” films, such as Canon (1964), show McLaren’s fascination with creating an aesthetic from complex sequences and parameters. For him, the means did not merely justify the ends and create something clever to watch; the means, and the patterns they created, became the ends, the finite materials of artistic existence.

One of McLaren’s works, Mosaic (1965), deserves particular attention. The film is actually the result of two previous films, Lines: Vertical (1960) and Lines: Horizontal (1962). The optical combination of the two works, and subsequent selective masking of portions of the frame, birthed something wholly unique and extraordinary: a lone, tiny square, the film’s own building block, bounces around the frame while splitting and multiplying again and again, creating a varying tapestry of configurations before condensing back down into a singular form:

When I first watched Mosaic, I was instantly reminded of the shifting swaths of rectangular shapes in the games made for the Atari 2600, the first home system that achieved true mainstream status, and the first that my family owned. Those games also relied on abstraction to convey their meanings and engage the viewer; the box art and title provided the semantic starting point, but after that it was pure imagination.  A visual symmetry is present in both McLaren’s Mosaic and the Atari 2600’s titles as well, allowing for freer, more adventurous thinking and interpretation. Granted, with the system, it was a processing restriction—as Wolf points out in “Abstraction,” the graphics could only be drawn on one side of the screen and then either copied or mirrored on the other side—but the resulting designs were not only pleasing to the eye (or, at the very least, not taxing to comprehend), they helped reflect a sense of scale and spatial continuity that bred creative supposition. A cross-view of a castle, for instance, is hardly ever used as an iconographic way to represent it: its grandiose scope is better conveyed when looking at it from the front, with towers on both the left and right sides equally completing the shape, focusing our eyes all the way across its expanse before bringing them to a final elevated point. The fluctuating squares in Mosaic can be interpreted as all sorts of things, of course, but the film encourages that same kind of whimsical engagement: it’s a self-contained fantasy that never falters or lags, and the viewer, in turn, is likely to be captivated—and stay captivated—regardless of the stark synthetic visuals being presented.

Does this all seem familiar? Could the shimmering and shifting grid of squares in Norman McLaren’s Mosaic be the forerunner to the modern pixel—which, coincidentally, was establishing its own identity and moniker around this time? Well, if that film piqued your interest, then consider Synchromy (1971), which is even crazier:

(A higher quality video can be found here.)

In Synchromy, McLaren not only creates a complex network of shape and color, but employs sound as the means through which those patterns are created. To briefly provide some background: celluloid film has a narrow strip running alongside each frame where the soundtrack is placed. This soundtrack is optical, meaning that recorded sound is rendered as an image that is then “read” by a sound system synchronized to the film projector, and finally output as sound again. For Synchromy, McLaren has taken the image that normally goes on the optical sound strip and replicated it exactly onto the frame itself, visualizing what  usually is only heard. What’s even more amazing about this film is that McLaren created the sound entirely by hand: after calculating what pitch a series of rectangles would create when “read” by a projector, he painted the corresponding pattern onto a card and labeled it, filing away six octaves of notes and corresponding volumes—size and spacing dictate volume and pitch, respectively. From there, he would select a card, place it onto an animation stand, and “compose” the resulting note. Synchromy was created in this manner, one frame at a time.

I was reminded of this particular McLaren film after reading about blogger Leif Chappelle’s recent foray into chiptune making. For his post, I commented that so much of the creativity involved in composing good chiptune music isn’t necessarily in what note is composed, but rather in how that note corresponds to the others on a song’s overall discernible timeline—much like the manner in which a single pixel means nothing until it combines with others to create a “readable” image. It very much requires a lateral appreciation, since each note is a singular, contained and uniformed unit, the exact opposite of the organic, fluid entropy coming from human musicians. Every nuance of sound that a chiptune produces is crucial to its overall enjoyment; due to computational restrictions and strict playback methods (chiptune music is very much a self-contained production cycle), compositions have to exist exclusively within the abstract, so our ears seem to work double-time in order to connect each bleep musically. The possibilities that emerge from this system, however—from the dichotomy of the digital—is where true artistry is forged and why the best video game music moves us, no matter how archaic the technology used to produce it may seem in retrospect.

McLaren’s Synchromy doesn’t just anticipate this new method of music making, but illustrates it, allowing the detail of those informational gaps and their on/off duality to be revealed to us in a way that no iTunes visualizer ever could. As a gamer, watching this film triggered a kind of epiphany that made me reflect on how games exist on several levels, the material (the ephemeral sounds and images that we scrutinize with almost obsessive detail) and the notional (the thoughts and feelings that our interactions evoke), and through our very real and pleasurable engagement with these games, we have an acute understanding of both, a kind of mutual reverence. McLaren realized this relationship with a different medium, naturally, but it cuts to the very core of what “gaming” means.

So, is McLaren the father of the pixel AND of chiptunes? No, at least, not historically: avant-garde filmmakers and animators were experimenting with optical soundtracks before McLaren, and many branches of abstract and expressionist art use their own base units of construction, creating the expansive whole from the meager singular (Pointillism, for instance). But the timing of McLaren’s works and the boom of video games that was a few years away—and in the case of Synchromy, made in 1971, it was quite literally right around the corner—shows that, at least to me, the abstract filmmaker was more prescient than anyone probably thought. Considering the trendy revival of retro titles, it would be easy to just fold the Atari 2600 and other early systems in with our stock instruments of nostalgia, but from an evolutionary standpoint, these first audio/visual modes of interactive expression were absolutely crucial in planting the critical and analytical seeds that seem to be sprouting in the minds of thoughtful players today. The fact that there were similar conceptual questions being asked and explored in other artistic fields—like the groundbreaking and “play”-ful films of Norman McLaren—shows that maybe the “game as art” debate has been around longer than we initially thought.

(Adventure screenshot courtesy of VGMuseum. I’m not one for pimping, but the
DVD box set of Norman McLaren’s NFB work is a must-buy for all film lovers. The NFB also
has a selection of McLaren films on their website. Begone Dull Care is required viewing.)

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