The Patreon Letters - June 24, 2017

Hello everyone! M here again for another Patreon letter. First things first, as is tradition, some updates to get y'all started.

• The first Patreon-funded episode of Goof Zone has been unleashed upon the world! People really like that cast. I'm pretty sure Destiny and Jackson are recording a new one next weekend?
• The Amory Score continues to baffle me. Check it out if you dare. 
• I finished Shovel Knight! Mega Man is supposed to start next week, but until then enjoy the playlist of Shovel Knight episodes.
• Our voting for the next game club game is almost closed. Looks like it'll be Devil May Cry, but ... we will get to El Shaddai in time. Maybe even this year! We have plans.
• Our Knights of the Old Republic 2 episode records Sunday. Consider this your last call for questions or comments you can email in to podcast@abnormalmapping.com

I'm actually ahead on work a bit so I'm writing this one earlier than I normally would, which means I'm sitting here thinking about the fallout of another E3 and where games are at in the endless cycle of hype and release. It's strange. I've been watching E3 conferences as long as they've been streaming them, and following them years before on top of that via liveblogs and websites. My one take-away from years of E3? I'm tired.

I was watching hour 9 of Giant Bomb's actually very wonderful E3 night show when I was struck with a real sense of melancholy about where games culture is in 2017. We have great writers and critics getting into the politics of every new release. We have a games twitter that can be many things to many people. There are at least five interesting games coming out every day, it seems like, and probably one really good game a week. Most of us will never play them, but they're there. Things are ... well, okay isn't the right word. Things are on fire like they are everywhere. But things seem stable. So why the melancholy?

Everyone in my sphere of games twitter gets very excited about the Giant Bomb E3 night shows in the same way children get excited about Christmas. It's anticipation, celebration, a free-wheeling glut of abandon when everything is often very constrained. Thinking about why these nights are special relative to other things we're exposed to in games, I came to a conclusion: our joy isn't in the announcements, or the pomp of the show, but in the window into the people and history we often forget in a medium so obsessed with product cycles and capitalism.

Abnormal Mapping as a podcast was built on the idea that games spaces should be more backward focused. We should learn our history. We should read books and watch documentaries, we should grapple with old games that are flawed or even incomprehensible, we should understand the world of gaming that came before so we can firmly reject that profit-driven virus that infects all of us to tell us that the only games that matter are the ones on the horizon and now is always the best time to be playing video games.

This is a lie and a trap. It seeks to cut us off from honest communication and nuanced emotional experience. How many times have you talked games with someone and only focused on whether a new game was good (and who said it was good, can you trust them?), whether your favorite franchise would get a new entry, or if your platform of choice was thriving? I've spent years doing it. Probably, so have you.

Some of our trickiest episodes for Abnormal Mapping have been when we play each other's favorite games from Before Criticism. Me and Jackson got into a literal shouting match about the merits of Final Fantasy VIII. It took Herculean efforts for me to understand Tony Hawk's Project 8 enough to respect what it was doing, coming from only having played Skate. But navigating these spaces has been invaluable--not because they provide the best podcasts (they don't), but because they allow us to understand each other better. Understanding the art that speaks to people is to understand people. But that requires the idea of having been spoken to. Past tense. One has to talk about the games played. The life lived. The past of each of us is a mountain of media viewed at a distance through the lens of the individual, hastily scrawled onto a map labeled TASTE and offered to others to haphazardly navigate.

Which brings me back to Giant Bomb. I was watching the segment with Lorne Lanning and Tim Willits and watching them talk about the experience of having lived the game industry for decades. They're both a book's worth of stories about the culture and people of games, and so Jeff Gerstmann asked them about VR. Lanning was very skeptical. Gerstmann relayed an anecdote about VR in the 90s, when it was a fad that had a bright flash and receded. He remembered interviewing VR developers for a magazine, new to the industry, when the developers of this cutting edge future-defining technology stopped as one of their engineers ran into the room to talk about this crazy new game they had seen: Wolfenstein 3D. So Gerstmann and these developers all abandoned their thousands of dollars of prototype equipment to huddle around a computer and watch a gun race through the halls of a Nazi compound. In that moment, all the promises of the product cycle had been forgotten in the face of this shared experience, a game that has left a legacy so long the newest game in its franchise was many people's most exciting game of E3. But let's not talk about new products.

Knowing that guys like Lanning and Willits and Gerstmann exist in a place where they've seen everything before, where Gerstmann can relay the last time the hot thing was hot and how it came and went, is to remember that people outlive products. Sure, Wolf 3D exists, but who plays it in 2017? A few devotees, making mods and whole new games out of its bones. And me.

This is a very long prologue to talk about the fact that I'm playing Wolfenstein 3D, I suppose, but I wanted to talk more about the headspace in which I approached it. Abnormal Mapping is formally a podcast about old games, but I want to also be a person who is about old games. I want to touch the living artifacts that shaped the past. And the best part of gaming is that the medium is young enough that, for the most part, you can actually achieve that with minimal effort. I bought Wolf 3D on GOG during their summer sale. I got a source port that makes the game run very well on modern systems and at modern resolutions. And I've been playing the video game. Living history. And trying to keep in mind the reality in which Jeff Gerstmann watched developers abandon their own exotic future tech to play this game that you can just play in a dusty browser window now, a vestigial promotion from two Wolfenstein games ago.

One of the problems with a medium with a canon is that people begin to just believe in the canon without tracking it down. How many people just know of classic literature by name and reputation? Maybe they read one in school, maybe they were surprised how much they liked it or not surprised how much they hated it, and that's it? Gaming is quickly running headlong into this reality, where people acknowledge that Final Fantasy VII is a Great Game, but will tell you that no you shouldn't go play it because it's Old and Doesn't Hold Up, words engraved into the language of games by marketers who need you to buy every game that gets on a Game of the Year list every year.

But Final Fantasy VII doesn't have to hold up. Neither does Wolfenstein 3D. A bit of context about what games looked like at the time and letting go of expectations for what a game like this Should Be is enough to get your foot in the door. And after that you can open yourself up to whole worlds you've only heard talked about through dim memory and undoubtedly inaccurate anecdote. History is to be lived, the canon is to be played with, and old games are to be not treated as precious but enjoyed with the gusto of the fresh new Steam release. 

Our podcast has talked about a lot of old games, but what I really want it to do is equip us as hosts and you as listeners to be able to get your heart right to live the culture and the history, to understand that these are works by people, and that those works thrive in the hearts of those who came before and can be a link between them and us, if we allow ourselves to remember that those ties are as simple as an open mind and a willingness to reach out. And not just reach out to an old game, but reach out to the infinite variety of people who lived those games before and will continue to live them well past the collapse of the company selling you the new hot product available with a statue you don't want for $800.

Which is to say, Wolfenstein 3D is good and maybe play it? Play old games that are new to you, always. It'll change your view of the world.

Until next time,

M