Myst and Living the Experience

I had never really been into Myst before. I tried it a couple of times, got tired of it and moved on. I met a friend my first year of college here who loved this game. He would tell me stories about how his dad and he would keep detailed journals full of notes in order to decipher puzzles later in the game. I just thought they were a little enthusiastic, maybe a little nuts. At the time, I didn't realize the importance of the journals.

I have started to play the game again, but this time, I'm enjoying it a lot more. Maybe it's because I'm older and can understand it better or maybe it's because I appreciate that type of game now, who knows. But through my journey, I find myself bombarded with so many facts and details that it's impossible to remember them all, so I started to write them down in a notebook. I realized that my friend wasn't weird, he was smart. And once I started to take notes, I started to REALLY enjoy the game. I was no longer some spectator viewing through the eyes of another person. It took the action of me physically writing things down to make me feel like I was actually part of the adventure.

That's the real goal of any game right? To provide a fun experience and to make you care about the character so it seems that you're part of the story. Online RPGs use the expansive world and almost unlimited options to make the characters people create seem real. But in the end, no matter how often you play, what you have is still only a character. It's some avatar you control. With Myst, you really ARE the character.

I know that was the goal of the creators but I never felt that way until I started taking those notes. The experience started to exist outside of the game. Any time I would look over the notebook and think about "what's next," I would be transported back into Myst. The game created a multimedia experience that made it all the more real.

You can read a book and take notes in the margins to try to explain your thoughts, but it's not really the same thing because once you flip that page, the notes are gone and with it, the things you were supposably commenting on. You can even go back and reread that portion, but that would only help for clarification purposes because once you read something in the book, it becomes the past. Myst allows you to constantly revist anywhere in the Age you're in. It's so big and there are so many things to manipulate, that you HAVE to go back and look again to take it all in. But since it's a game, you're not rereading the past, you're just experiencing it again in the present.

I never expected that taking notes would change my perspective on something so much. I've taken notes for plenty of other games to remember where a key was or to remind myself to go back and talk someone for a the secret reward, but those were all little things that I jotted down as a quick reminder. I still write down orders for myself for later on in the game when I get the chance, but now I have detailed maps and notes. Looking back over what I've written down and finding the answer to my current puzzle hidden in my writings is the most satisfactory part of the Myst experience. No book forces you to do so much in order to live the story it gives you.

New Way of Looking at World of Warcraft

I was playing World of Warcraft the other day and something we said in class resinated with me. I was downloading my umpteenth patch to update my files to fix all the latest bugs and glitches. After it was installed, I got the message that I should disable all of my old mods because they may cause trouble in the new version of the game. But why? Was it because there was a different script now and they wouldn't configure correctly? Or was it because Blizzard just didn't want me changing the gaming experience they provided for me. This got me thinking about who's version of the game is the "correct" one.

At first, I thought, well it'd have to be Blizzard's because they created the game. They'd be the "author of the text." The gamers who invent the mods would be changing the original intention of the author by creating new interfaces and devices for the game. The final product is no longer what Blizzard wanted for me to play, but aren't the patches and updates they make me install kind of like the mods gamers create? Both seek to fix problems with the system and to make it more user friendly. An author wouldn't be able to constantly go back to a text and continuously fix all of the little problems he encounters. Eventually, he'd be forced to let it go and let it stand on its own, but Blizzard doesn't do this. They realize that the real-time game is fluid and there are always problems to be corrected, but who has the authority to fix them? If a gamer creates a mod that's more effective at combating a particular problem then the latest update, what happens? Or what about after the NEXT update, when THIS mod is obsolete because Blizzard changes things again, but still doesn't create the fix that the mod did? Who's right? Does the author ever lose hid athority over the "text?"

Are the mod-creating gamers similar to readers who don't fully understand the message of a text, or readers who seek to personally fix holes they find in a text's argument? Is Blizzard merely "telling" the gamers that they're wrong to try to fix the game themselves? That maybe they should let the author do it, because the author knows best, right?

I haven't really come to any sort of conclusion. These were just some of the thoughts running through my head as I waited at the load screen to enter the world, recently stripped of all of my mods.