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.