in bookish play a commentary of Myst

A Senior Thesis Project By Zachary McCune

First Reader

Professor Wendy Hui Kyong Chun Brown University

Second Reader Professor Alexander Galloway

New York University

Department of Modern Culture & Media Brown University April 22, 2010

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-3 introduction

“…truth abandoned by play would be nothing more than tautology.” - Theodor Adorno, The Essay as Form “A book itself is a little machine. But when one writes, the only question is which other machines can be plugged into, must be plugged into in order to work." - Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus “In gamespace even if you know the deal, are a player, have got game, you will notice, all the same, that the game has got you.” - MacKenzie Wark, Gamer Theory

This project comes as a consequence of a long planted concern with how critical

theory will metabolize and respond to the rise of the video game as a mass cultural form. In

that, the project has many, many fore bearers. Theorists like Alexander Galloway, Ian

Bogost, McKenzie Wark, and Nick Montfort (among many others) have formally addressed

video games as objects requiring their own theory. Many of these scholars have come to the

video game from literary, cultural, and media theory backgrounds. But perhaps more

importantly, these scholars have found video game theory massively (inescapably) informed

by film theory and the growing academic ubiquity of film studies in the American university.

Film theory proves inspirational to the would-be video game theorist because it gets

us away- however briefly- from textual (here explicitly alphanumeric symbol system) analysis

which has been the focus of Western scholasticism. In film theory, the video game theorist

finds that a contemporary media discourse developed within the past 150 years, can be

transformed into a critical text, like and unlike the written word, which is by its very

existence, in need of interpretation. So film theory presents in its discourse the ways in

which contemporary culture objects can be recuperated into objects for theory.

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Simultaneously, film theory presents a success story for the invention of an academic

practice founded on dynamic visual media objects. There are many teaching today who

remember and discuss how film theory was legitimized. How it progressed from a society of

committed cinephiles to scholarship, and how it in informed subsequent film production

and consumption. As much as the game scholar attempts to deny that his/her analysis will

treat the video game as a film (as a passive narrative medium) the game scholar cannot deny

the importance of film theory. It has provided a road map for the gamer theorist, and a

source of inspiration. Film theory proves that the academy can engage productively with

contemporary entertainment media, and even allow critical theory to intervene in the

production of these ‘entertainments.’

McKenzie Wark has hailed the present as a moment in which the study of the video

game becomes essential and unavoidable. He writes, “Games are no longer a pastime,

outside or alongside of life. They are now the very form of life, and death, and time itself”

(Wark, Agony 006). This is to say that games are not merely at a cultural or social periphery,

“a pastime” that is somehow secondary or merely a distraction from life, but instead “the

very form” in which we now conceiver of life, and death. No doubt Wark’s statement plays

at the fact that ideas from video games, such as ‘multiple lives’ in platform games or

‘fragging’ in first person shooters, have altered social ideas of life and death, forcing cultural

mutation. Time too has been altered. Our time, Wark adds, has become the time of games.

In Run Lola Run, the heroine hurtles through Berlin trying to “beat” a difficult day. Montages

actually occasionally re-render Lola as a 8-bit avatar. Robert Ebert has called this slippage

“Lara Croft made flesh” and focused his review of the film on the fact that the narrative

repeats three times, until Lola manages to “clear” it (Ebert “Run Lola Run”). Game time has

invaded and changed cinematic time, giving it a game-like reproducibility. With the option

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for repetition, time becomes a try, a chance, and in this change, it shifts from the passing,

durational time of cinema into the looped time of computers.

The video game has invaded life, and in the process, become visible in life outside of

games. In a recent music video for “Happy Up Here”, Norwegian electronic duo Röyksopp

present an ambiguous western city as the site of an alien invasion. Except that the aliens are

really invaders – Space Invaders. The city is changed from a site of contemporary living into a

space of imagination and nostalgia, all informed from a game fiction. The game is never

mentioned. The familiarity of the allusion is assumed. Moreover, the “alien” figures are really

not extraterrestrials, but figures formed from the lights and signs of the city. The suggestion

is modernity and its technologies have given birth to these new, gamerly forms of life. These

are forms of life that co-inhabit spaces of physical reality, having escaped from their

technologies in the nostalgic recollections of society itself.

In a recent advertisement for the XBOX 360, a man is walking through a train

station when he suddenly pulls a gun on two men walking by him. But it’s not a gun. It’s his

hand held statically like a Desert Eagle. The two men instantly turn and pull their “guns” on

him. The entire train station follows creating an impossibly oversized “Mexican standoff” in

which every member of the station has become interlocked, related. For a few tense

moments, the camera surveys the people. They are businessmen, janitors, students, mothers,

fathers, taxi drivers, the diversity suggesting that this somehow all of society. “Bang!” yells

the instigator, and the station erupts in mock violence, the “hand” guns playing out a

children’s fantasy in the adult world. As the “violence” spills out of the station, there is a

moment in which we fear that game is only permissible inside; a taxi driver will not respond

to being shot. And then, finishing his phone call, he joins in, “dying” dramatically. The

XBOX 360 logo appears. A slogan invites us to “jump in”. The impression is, at any time, in

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any place, the entire world is a game is waiting to be played. Or to return to Wark’s point

life, death, have (all of which are presented in this ad) have become games in contemporary

society.

This project has always been a consequence, a reaction, and a result of this society.

This project is in inextricably embedded within a society where everyone has been remade by

the game. Consequently, theory has moved past the film, and in seeking new bodies with

warm blood to prey on, theory spies the video game. It finds it in places like the XBOX 360

train station. It feels its own familiar objects like Run Lola Run, made over in the time of

game. Theory is ready for video games, and, more importantly, the gamer is finding theory.

For every emerging scholar who is taking on the video game project is approaching the

subject with some gamerly persuasion. Bogost is a game developer, as are Galloway and

Montfort. Wark on the other hand comes as a player, as a gamer, and thus grounds his

theory in play itself, not design. “Be a gamer,” he writes “but be a gamer who thinks- and

acts - with a view to realizing the real potentials of the game, in and against the world made

over as gamespace” (Wark, Agony 025). So this is where a gamer theorist must begin: “in

and against the world made over as gamespace,” in and against the world that has been

altered by video games.

In becoming theorist, the gamer has a unique problem: how best should video games

be approached critically? Again, a certain way forward is provided by film theory, which

struggled with a similar approach question at the inception of its own studies. Informed by

theater (Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein likened cinema to Japanese Kabuki theater), by

literature (American poet Vachel Lindsay would write an early “poetic” approach to cinema

called The Art of the Moving Picture), and by the still nascent psychology (see Hugo

Munsterberg’s The Photoplay: A Psychological Study) film theory invented a hybrid approach.

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Video games too will need to build on existing discursive techniques from literary criticism

(the game as “text” as in Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck), from film theory (Alex

Galloway carefully historicizes the first person shooter as an outgrowth of cinematic framing

(Galloway 39-69)) and from developing fields like media archaeology (such as Anne

Friedberg’s The Virtual Window) which will prove indispensable in asking questions about the

origins of the video game’s visual preoccupations and tropes. The roots of game avatar’s and

views/framing are something that media archaeological approaches will hopefully provide.

In developing a hybridized approach, critical video game studies will approach the game as

the gamer finds it: familiar and alien, filmic and literary, historical and futuristic.

But we must start by playing. Espen Aarseth makes this clear in writing “games are

both object and process, they can’t be read as texts or listened to as music, they must be

played” (Aarseth, “Computer Game Studies, Year One”). In seems impossible not follow his

advice. The game must be played. It must be participated in and with as a game. So that’s

where the project begins and remains: this is a playing of a video game. There is simply no

other way to take the object on, for as Aarseth writes it is more than object, it is also process.

Which means the game must be taken on as sequence and as an experience. It must be

considered as what Ian Bogost has called a “procedural rhetoric” which is to say as discourse

that makes certain moves in sequence and as part of a exchange- an exchange between player

and the game/game-as-machine (Bogost Persuasive Games). In brief, the game must be

approached as a totality (an object) and as a process, which is also to say in a process, the

process of play. In play the gamer will use actions and choices in the game force it to reveal

itself.

But just playing about a game will not make you a gamer theorist (to use Wark’s

category). Instead, something must supplement play. Something must make play more than

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play, something like criticism. For the time being, that supplement is writing. The gamer who

writes of games aspires to find something in them that play alone will not reveal. With little

reservation game scholars have allowed themselves recourse to writing as a space in which to

reflect on video games, and produce theories of them. The scholar has not stayed “in-game”

but has instead returned to writing from the video game to speak of play.

The danger here is of course that in this transition, this flitting between playing and

writing, the video game and written language, certain unavoidable discrepancies take place.

For instance, in playing Super Mario Brothers 3 we never need to know the word “jump” in

order to clear levels. We only need to know the keystroke that summons that given action,

and must execute that action at timely and even crucial moments in the game. Only in

writing about the game must this action be named and labeled. What was previously

naturalized and part of a progression of events is suddenly made discrete and isolated from

its context. This is what writing about video games can do.

But simultaneously, writing provides the gamer with a space in which to reconsider

and re-write the game as a text in an act of being interpreted. Through writing, games are

allowed to become texts, and the gamer is allowed to become a writer, a producer of texts

and interpretations. In writing, the gamer is afforded the opportunity to become what

Roland Barthes calls in S/Z the “writerly.”

Our evaluation can be linked only to a practice, and this practice is that of writing. On the one hand, there is what it is possible to write: what is within the practice of the writer and what has left it: which texts I would consent to write (to re-write), to desire, to put forth as a force in this world of mine? What evaluation find is precisely this value: what can be written (rewritten) today: the writerly. Why is the writerly our value? Because the goal of the literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text. (Barthes, S/Z 4)

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Rephrased for the video game theorist, the goal of the ludic work (of games as work) is to

make the player no longer a consumer, but a producer of texts, texts about and of video

games. Playerly texts. Texts that invert the idea that players merely read games but do not

write of them.

This text attempts to become playerly. I have started by playing a video game, and I

have supplemented that play by becoming writerly. Barthes and his theorization of literary

analysis have heavily informed my writerly approach. I have called this project, a

commentary, and that is a conscious nod to Barthes’ idea that “the commentary on a single

text is not a contingent activity, assigned to the reassuring alibi of the "concrete" ... it is never

anything but the decomposition (in the cinematographic sense) of the work of reading: a slow

motion, neither wholly image nor wholly analysis” (Barthes 12-13). Moreover, my role in this

text as a commentator is always an attempt to “trace through the text certain zones of

reading, in order to observe therein the migration of meanings, the outcroppings of codes,

the passage of citations" (Barthes 14). All of this labor, this “tracing” “decomposition” and

“slow motion” will allow for a "re-reading” that “is no longer consumption, but play”

(Barthes 16). Framed in this way, the Barthesian commentary is the ideal form in which to

imagine the critical treatment of video games. For it begins by challenging the reader (the

interpreter) of texts to become a writer (a theorist). His labor will become writerly, which is

by Barthes’ definition productive and creative. His text will become commentary, a

“decomposition” of the primary text, in order to render in as “slow motion.” The outcome

will so subvert the readerly position that consumption will be replaced by play. The

reader/gamer becomes player.

In becoming a “commentary” this text will also represent a notably hybridized

approach to the video game as form. I will use tropes from cinema, figures of literary

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technique, concepts of visual perspective and framing from art history and visual studies,

and ideas of play as both labor and as social activity. My hope is that in drawing together

these threads of critical theory, I will not create a chimera of games but instead reveal that the

video games is inherently a chimera. Its developers and players do not exist in a closed world

of video games, where their media is made into some essential, inalienable form, but rather

live in a world of shifting mediations where paradigms, techniques, and ideas shift between

media. In fact, as a consequence of the video game emerging at a moment of what has been

called media “convergence,” the video game offers a unique portrait of media form as

convergent, as a place in which previously disparate media forms now co-exist united in

digital binary code. The video game has the algorithms of a piece of software, but it also has

the representation of photography and animation, the frames of a cinematic sequence, and

the narrative structures of a novel. Addressing some but not all of these co-existing media

formations is to only find the video game half-rendered.

-2 Myst This project attempts to create a commentary on the game of Myst. Published in

1993, Myst has become a landmark in the history of video games. It has been given a place

on the grand chronology of the medium. It has been hailed as a canonical game in the yet

unformed canon of essential video game titles. Consequently, Myst continually returns to

haunt the present with its unmistakable mise en scene and its signature exploratory game play.

Just eight months ago, it was released for iPhone, cuing a new cycle of blog posts, reviews,

and reflections on a game that “changed” games according to the New York Times. Before the

iPhone, the game was released for the Nintendo DS, following years of being offered as a

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PC title that was consciously improved on by its publisher (shifting from static images to a

real-time 3D world) and augmented by a host of sequels.

There is an unmistakable irony to the fact that on attempting to play the original Myst

CD-ROM, I discovered that the operating environment needed to play the game was no

longer available. Called “timeless” and hailed as a “classic” Myst nevertheless remains tied to

the fixity of file formatting. As ideas of video game canons circulate and Myst is mentioned

as canonical, an archival problem emerges: video games become fundamentally unplayable

outside of the necessary console/computational environments. The implication of these

reality also works on a figurative level: the video game as “classic” or “canonical” is always

contingent on its relationship to the framing apparatus that renders it and makes it more

than code. This transformation happens at the level of hardware – computers, consoles,

screens, controllers, etc. – but also at the level of the player: for the player environment

shifts alongside the technologies of play.

Viewed from this historical problem of the technology of gaming, Myst becomes all

the more interesting. For it persists, and where most games remain tethered to their

technological and playerly environments. Developers continue to adapt Myst for new

platforms, and gamers continue to buy new copies of the game on new platforms. Where

Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost have begun a project called “Platform Studies” to engage the

hardware environment of gaming apparatuses, perhaps games like Myst should remind us of

the importance of cross-platform studies. For perhaps the real definition of canonical video

games is not those that remain unchanged, but those that manage to mutate across platforms

and technologies perpetually adapting their stories and play for new players. Surely these

types of mutable games, resilient and continuously attractive cannot be ignored.

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Few of the ports and translations seemed to change the central value of the game.

Evaluated as an aesthetic object, Myst has been hailed for its beauty and, strangely, its

surrealism. Considered as a work of narrative, Myst launched the writing careers of its

“authors” allowing the Miller brothers (Robyn and Rand) to publish novels that further

furnished the history of the game world they created. Even more interestingly, the Miller

brothers helped produce an idea of “game authorship” at a time when games were produced

by either studios, or individuals whose sense of vision and design were somehow

unremarkable.

A popular history of Myst situates the game at an inflection point of video game as a

media. Before Myst, games occupied a realm of “mere” entertainment. After Myst, games

could be art, and could furnish the kind of introspective meanings of society high culture

objects like film and literature were already doing. Because of Myst, critics have argued,

games took on new agendas for the future: agendas of immersion, narrative, and artistry.

Game players were also fundamentally changed by Myst, as millions of individuals bought

copies of the game and played it for hours, forcing themselves through its Byzantine game

play that nonetheless kept them at their computers.

In Myst, one finds himself deserted in a both foreign and familiar world. It is new,

but it is populated by an odd amalgam of buildings and transhistoric Western cultural

symbols (log cabins, rocket ships, Greek temples, tall wooden, ships and industrial gear

works) that resemble a postmodern work of architecture in which reference and allusion

inform the design of contemporary spaces. But while the visual appearance of Myst may have

appeared postmodern, its inherent philosophy was that of the enlightenment. Run by rules,

the island of Myst worked as a deist universe where the gamemaker (god) is the absent

clockmaker. The game player, by convention, is thus the rational scientific player who need

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only apply himself logically to the game in order to be allowed vision of some meaning

concealed in the game.

But what is the meaning of Myst? For all the nostalgia (an odd sentiment to attach to

a digital media object) Myst evokes in gamers of a certain age, and for all the outspoken

praise of the game (Wired magazine hailed the Miller brothers as successors to Dante) there

is relatively little interpretation of the game. Which is not only shocking, but unfortunate, for

as the world of critical theory moves in on games, it seems crucial that scholars undertake

analysis of key specific media objects like Myst. And Myst is a powerful, complex work to

take on, one that is as connected with questions of form (it helped popularize the nascent

CD-ROM) as it is to content and representation (after all, why would we be alone on an

island in 1993?). Additionally, Myst pioneered a structure of interlinked images called

HyperCard that essentially allowed for a complex world of inter-related media objects (in

this case images and sounds) to flow seamlessly into one another. Essentially a hyperlink

system, this game play mechanic (click to advance directionally through a game world)

mirrored elements of the story (where linking and un-linking worlds is an art form) and

pointed out the skeleton of the system running the game. In short, Myst is very much a story

of its own production and technological paradigms.

-1 the playerly in practice

Walter Benjamin once wrote that “writers are really people who write books not

because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books they could buy but do

not like” (Benjamin 61). I fear I am this kind of writer. Over a Winter Break, I went looking

for a book I assumed existed: some sort of critical/theoretical treatment of Myst – a

commentary on the game as a cultural text in need of interpretation. Not only did this text

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turn out to not exist, it soon struck me that virtually no long pieces of analysis on single

video games existed. I was shocked and disappointed. Where Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ had

spawned innumerable commentaries, monographs, books, and interpretations, no video

game – not Mortal Kombat, not Mario, not Tetris, not Space Invaders, not Oregon Trail, not

GoldenEye 007, etc – had been treated as the single subject of a critical inquiry. To be sure, it

has become popular for game critics and scholars to use several games in a text and offer

short interpretations of them as examples of larger game mechanics or structures. Both

MacKenzie Wark and Alex Galloway have looked at games (plural) in this way. But what

about a single game? Could anything productive come out of an interpretation of a single

work?

This text is not an answer to that question, but an experiment in answering. Myst was

selected because I had never actually finished it (like most of its players), because it was

canonical and well known, and because I suspected that it lent itself to a scholastic

interpretation. I was not wrong. The game begins and ends with books. It requires a

systematic playing. It’s original packaging came with a blank journal and the suggestion that

writing notes would help the player “solve” Myst. In short, Myst allows for a transition point

between written theory and gamer theory. Situated between literature and the ludic, Myst

forms a link between the physical book and the informational network.

I have tried not to break the text up with theoretical interventions. I wanted to find

the game in and of itself, as contrived as that seemed, and not be constantly deploying a

tool-belt of references and theoretical frames for my interpretative ideas. This may seem un-

rigorous, but in the effort of asking how critical theory can take on games, I have attempted

to be slightly creative and inventive. I have given myself a certain playerly license. Don’t

think me worse for it. I had fun after all.

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I a game The book is speaking to me. Invoking me to restore its pages. Begging me to make it

whole again.

In a small window in the book’s pages, a face appears distorted and panicked. Their

image is broken, the sound garbled. It is interrupted by the noise of a mistuned radio and a

filled with the black and white static (sometimes called “snow”) that fills a television when it

is set to an empty or distant frequency.

The books are speaking to me. They tell of a betrayal. Of death. Of greed. I listen. I

watch. I judge. I am in a library alone to my thoughts and these mediations, these ghosts.

For though the images speak to me, addressing me as “friend” and “you,” I have never met

them in person and I doubt their humanity. No one lives on this doomed island. I am

shipwrecked to a world of failed civilization. And when one somebody speaks, it is only his

mediation that I hear. A ghost in a machine; crying out for me to make it human again by

making whole the technology of their image and their speech.

If I riddle the correct set of numbers in a hidden keypad I can make water itself

change into a human face and recount to me a message of fear. The water-ghost calls me

“Catherine” but I do not think I am her. The water-ghost tells me of two sons, but I do not

think I am one of them either. And I the water-ghost himself? Have I returned to find

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myself as a mediated other I do not recognize? The questions go unanswered. In this world,

my identity is the first thing to be effaced. I must let it go, put it aside, ignore it.

My identity will not be restored to me. I will look over the ocean surrounding the

island and not find my reflection. No matter how I turn, I will not see my shadow. I am not

here, or perhaps I should say I am not really there. Because this island is a mediation in itself

and I feel distant from it.

The island does not account for my physiology. When I move, I do not hear myself

walk. I encounter the island as sequential images, one vista following another. When I reach

out to “touch” certain objects, they move as if possessed by a poltergeist. There is no hand

reaching for the switch, no finger pressing the button, no arm pushing aside the door, and

yet they all move. Perhaps they are capable of locomotion, or perhaps they respond to my

thought and wills.

I cannot shake the notion that I am not really here/there on this island. If I am, I am

certainly not a physical entity. Instead I am disembodied, made spectral and mediated like

the faces I find in the books speaking to me, or the water-ghost, who calls me Catherine.

Except that I have no image, nor voice. I float above the island at human eye level, finding

the space both familiar and legible, like a postcard from a generic destination I have never

been to and eerily unreal, a destination that is not humanly. No footsteps echo on the island.

It looks untouched by human hands though it is filled with human objects. I have the

faintest impression that it is civilization taken towards a logical conclusion: it is a construct

of humanity which physical humanity cannot touch to threaten or destroy. It is perfect.

Totalized. Complete. It is a world made hypothetical- only available to perception and

intellect. And when I physically move away from the island, when I find my body and again

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and recognize it, the island ceases to be here/there. The island ceases to be real, and I cease

being a ghost.

But I return to haunt the island. It is a doomed place, fated to be haunted again and

again by a specter who wants to touch it, change it, and manipulate its conditions. The island

is an uncanny place where nothing ever changes without haunting. If I return to it a hundred

times, moving from vista to vista without “touching” anything, I will find the sun has not

climbed higher in the sky, the seasons have not changed, the angle of grass has not bent in

the wind. The island is something of a memento immori. It will not change. It memorializes the

unchanging promise of a digital media object. Its colors flow from a pale palette that appears

de-saturated like a cinematic memory sequence. And as I remain spectral, haunting the

island, not alive in the space, or dead, but undead, I realize that the island too is undead,

though it is unclear if it was ever alive.

Around me, all I see is signs of culture, a culture suspended ominously. Paths are

well worn between buildings. The grass is cut short. Lights are on in the library, but no one

is home.

There are no signs of life except for all of the signs of life. Rockets, ships, and log

cabins, are embedded in the landscape- clear signs of some humanoid civilization that feels

familiar. The doorways are cut square and tall like doorways should be. The library is

trimmed with historically Greek columns, the half-sunken ship at the dock appears to be a

galley from the “Age of Discovery,” metal gears protruding from a rock face appear as

oversized monuments to the Industrial Revolution, and that rocket, sleek and iconic,

suggests the terrifying power of the V2 program of Nazi Germany. Embedded on this small

island, each object suggests highlights of Western History. Each object is a sign of culture so

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familiar that they can be named from an everyday English vocabulary: rocket, gears

(machine), temple (library), and ship. They are not odd or even unexpected. I do not ask

what the objects are. I do not struggle to name them- which is to say recognize them in an

archive of available things I feel knowledgeable of. I only wonder why they are here, which is

to wonder what they mean. What do they signify here/there?

The natural setting of the island too is familiar. The sea, the rocky shore, the tall pine

trees, and the grassy knolls all remind of places in the Northern hemisphere. Temperate

climates. Lush vegetation. Murky waters like the Northern Atlantic or Pacific. It looks like an

island in Maine. Or in the Pacific Northwest. The ambiguity proves liberating and terrifying.

The horizon stretches towards nothing in all directions. The waves of the sea disappear not

into the arc of the planet, but a fog hung round the island insulating and isolating it. This is

the mist.

This temperate island is so western, so American, and thus so familiar. I’ve seen a

place like surely. Even visited a place like it. Bar Harbor, Maine for one, looks just this

island. But there I heard my feet crunch on the leaves of the paths, and there was no

deserted village of western symbols left unexplained.

The island is American like the modern city is American. Filled with a cacophony of

histories, architectures, and stylistic signs, it speaks of temporal heterogeneity- a cross-

section of Western Civilization’s achievements and aesthetics. Across time, the island

collects these symbols into a joined time and place. For an island always suggests unity, being

bounded by that which is other from the land (the sea), and this island shows itself to be

cohesive and integrated with every corner accounted for. Oddly collected, the signs of

Western Civilization form a theme park of sorts, a miniature world for Western society’s

highlights integrated tightly into a nature made to respect man the builder. Tides can be

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cataloged and built over. Rocky shore can be made steady and secure. It’s beautiful on the

island of Western Civilization- nature knows better than to act up.

But where is man? I seem him accounted for everywhere. I see his library- his books

tell me of his thoughts, his hopes, his humanity. But nowhere do I find him, in the flesh. I

find the shell of man instead. His things. A built environment embedded into a submissive

nature that has been mastered and worked around. I find no animals either. In the sky, no

gulls wheel and screech. On the shore, there is no busy activity of crabs at break of waves.

There seem to be no deer in the woods. No woodland creatures busy in the trees. No foxes

cutting through the fields.

I look again out to the horizon, out to that fog-line. What’s beyond it? What does it

keep away? What un-reality is delineated there? I am reminded of the fogginess of cinematic

memory- the dissolve fades that suggest disconnection and recollection. Is this an island of

memory? I am reminded of cinematic dream sequences, always blurred at their edges, always

visibly differentiated from a primary reality. But there is no real real here on the Island. Is this

an island of dream?

I find myself staring at the shore staring at the clock tower. Its hands do not

advance. There is no time here. If I reach down to a box in front of me, I can change the

clock’s time. I can advance the hour or set back the minute. Nothing changes with the time.

The time is rendered out or made present by the clock. I become the clockwork, and more

than the clockwork, because I do not merely advance the time, I set it. Without hands,

without a body, I become the ghost in the machine. Though I cannot see myself, I can see

my labor rendered into change and movement. The time advances and retreats. Nothing

happens. If I wanted, I could remain over the clock-control box and render out “real” time,

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or set my own pacing of the day. But instead, I position the clock at random hours. I wonder

about some hidden time, some secret symbolic value hidden in the clock face. How many

times could I try before I might get it? And what if there is no secret value at all?

I am a haunting of this island, but this island is haunting me. It proves uncanny. I

find it familiar and utterly un-real, alien. There is a technology of time, but no time. There

are signs of man- the objects of his civilization are everywhere- but no one here. There are

sounds of nature, and vistas of it, but no life. The state of the island does not change, the

sun does not shift in the sky, the grass does not bend in the wind, the tide does not rise or

fall. It is a simulacrum of a familiar place; it looks like Maine or Washington State, but is

nowhere. I am reminded that the word utopia comes from the Greek for “no place.” This

island is a utopia. A “no place.” And I am a “no body.”

The terms are set. The island and I will play.

II re:play And what I could I mean by play? This is dangerous ground, and well-trod

dangerous ground as well. Johan Huizinga (a Dutch sociologist) must be invoked. I must

call upon his Homo Ludens and explicate my use of “play” with his definition of play that

scholars have accepted and augmented.

But Huizinga never really resolved play. Because he writes that “play is older than

culture, for culture, however inadequately defined, always presupposes human society, and

animals have not waited for men to teach them to play” (Huizinga 1). Older here means

anterior to culture. Then play is not culture? Play is not cultural? Hardly. Play is very much a

part of culture now. But Huizinga points towards some mystic irresolvable thing about play-

it cannot be merely cultural, or even exclusively human. If animals, without human society or

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cultural intervention “play” then play is something generated in life itself. To live is to play. To

play is be alive.

Alexander Galloway writes “begin like this: if photographs are images, and films are

moving images, then video games are actions. Let this be one word for video game theory.

Without action, games remain only in the pages of an abstract rule book” (Galloway 2). So

let’s begin like that. This island and I, we are inter-actions. I find the Island; I move through its

vistas, I reach to touch it, to move its parts, to change it. To act upon it. And in acting on this

island, it re-acts, changing its organizations, its vistas, and its parts. And in changing, the

island changes me. I cannot remain the same in a space that is so mutable.

“Without action, the games remain only in the pages of an abstract rule book.”

Nothing could be truer of this island, where the books do not resolve themselves but beg

resolution. The books cannot act but they can move me to act. They speak, they ask me to

restore them, to take action.

This island is something in a book. I found it hidden in an open codex, between the

pages, an image, and then that image, once acted upon manifest as a new reality, a reality

fallen into. If Galloway’s point is an equation: action + book = game, then when I acted on

that first book, and on subsequent codices, I took part in a game. Which is to say I played a

game. For the object of play is a game.

No, that’s not right, I am the object of play. The game is the subject of play. It

becomes somewhat hard to say who is which. Who acts on what? Or in another phrase: who

is being played? Does it matter? A certain equivocation occurs in playing a game, a certain

free exchange between the game and myself as player that blurs our delineation. For with

“action” the “the games” no longer “remain only in the pages of an abstract rule book.” In

fact, with action, the “the pages of an abstract rule book” become “games.”

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There is a question of what constitutes action in a video game space. For action,

related to “act,” and “do” usually corresponds to physical activity, interventions in a tactile

reality where action is measured by changes to the system. In a video game, “actions” are

always inherently mediated. They take place in the game. And yet, they begin outside of the

game, at the level of physical activity. Between the game and myself is the game-apparatus:

the console, and with it, the controller. There, at the physical threshold of the controller, do

I “act” on the game in a physical way. But it is merely symbolic action, for though I press

one key, the meaning of the key is not fixed or permanent. It may change (as we will see)

depending on circumstances in the game. And yet, it soon become clear that what I “do” at

the liminal site of the controller is an intervention and exchange with the game. In fact, at

the threshold of the controller, I produce the play of the game. For at any moment,

untouched, the game will likely remain in stasis. Nothing will occur. It will be as “the pages

of an abstract book.” But with action, with button pressing and joystick directing, the game

and I enter a feedback loop of action and responses that we call play.

IV a player

Games have players. Allow me to introduce myself. I am he who acts on the rules of

abstract books. I make rules into games. I play. I can be called player. Or, if I must

acknowledge the tradition of Johan Huizinga again- I am homo ludens – man the player. You

have found me at my home, in game. This is Myst. An island as a game, although all games

might be islands, we will have to wait and see.

This Myst is a quite symbolically a book. I came upon it in a void. It was falling. And

a voice, that I did not know, from a body I could not see, spoke. He called his it “Myst

book”. He feared its fall and passage to some other body.

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The place I found it, I could not tell you how I got there. Besides the obvious that is-

I went to a store, I bought a game cartridge called Myst, I loaded into the slot on my

Nintendo DSi. It was a cold January day. I was on Charles Street in Boston in a coffee shop.

I turned on the DSi, the publisher’s credits rolled on the small touch screen. I heard the

voice. I saw a book falling. The voice called the book Myst.

Edged in white, the book glowed. I could hear a wind blowing. And then, not

knowing what else to do, I clicked to touch.

The screen filled with an open book. In a small picture, I could detect movement

over a sea, and then small green and gray traces, an island forming. In cinema and television,

they call this a fly-over style establishing shot. But unlike television or cinema, it did not fill

the screen. It was a small image on the page of a book. In fact, the image didn’t even fill the

entire page it was on. It didn’t even take up half of it. There was more page than image.

More book than cinema. A prelude of things to come. And prelude is the right word, for pre

– before, and lude from game, reflect on the fact that the game had not yet begun.

On the facing page, there were two terms.

“New Game”

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“Load Game”

I tried clicking on the image, but nothing happened. In order to escape these pages

of the book, in order to enter it and to act on it, I would need to take it on as a game, by

acknowledging “game” as the term of my entry.

It’s funny that I have to go “through” the word “game” to enter the game. Through

the linguistic sign for game rather than through the visual sign of game-space located on the

right. Many games let you press “start” or the “a” button to begin the game. It has become a

conventional opening action for the player. Myst is different. It re-centers text and changes

text- by text a “button” or “link” into the game, it make the text into hypertext, which is to say

text that links to other text. Here, the “hyperlink” of the text transitions the player from text

to game, suggesting that the game is just another text. Which suggests that I may “read” it.

Something else about this foregrounding of the textual link: the fact of a textual

beginning for player inter-action with the game. In the West, the word is the law, the word is

logos, which connects divinity, knowledge, and ontology (being) with the word. Here, at this

opening of a game book waiting to usher into a game, I confront a game-logos: the game

rendered as a textual sign first and foremost. In acknowledging this game-logos (“new game”

or “load game”) I acknowledge an underlying principle in this game, which is that the word will

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govern all in the game of Myst. Atrus, the maker/creator of the world of Myst, is a writer of

words that become more than words, words that become worlds. And the game itself as an

object is claimed as a piece of writing by its “authors” Robyn and Rand Miller. Their

ideology, articulated at this logo-centric opening, is the ideology of the word and written

document. I am already in a book. In this book, images are merely representations while

words are what change my state and move me.

The terms of entry are also different. “New game” is a noun-phrase. “New” modifies

“game.” It is not a verb; I do not “new” the game. I may “start” a new game, but “start” has

been elided. “Load game” is a phrase with a verb and a noun. I will “load” a “game.” The

action of this phrase is not elided. Not that it matters for my purposes. I have no games to

load.

I click “new game.”

I am on a dock.

I hear water lapping.

Nothing moves.

V new game

I hear sea gulls crying, but do not see them. The sound of water lapping forms a

gentle rhythm, but the waves appear frozen. The image I behold has the odd ability to seem

as though as it is moving, without actually moving. It has something to do with the sounds

of movement that compels my eye to find the scene changing, however slightly and subtly. I

continue gazing at the scene, but nothing moves. Nothing dramatic occurs. I do not feel

better. What ominous kind of game is this, where nothing happens? Where nothing moves?

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What about this image: What does it depict? Of all the ways to begin a “new game”

why this view? Why start here?

There are almost too many good answers. First, the image positions its viewer on a

dock, that threshold between the habitable world of dry land, and the inhospitable sea.

Docks are always man-made, especially this one with its clever diagonal wood planking and

tar-capped pylons. My view is thus from a position afforded only by man’s engineering, and

not some natural vista allowed by a geologic accident. This is a view of intentionality.

Then there’s the consideration that docks are often the transition point from ship to

shore. A buffer between sea travel and coming home, coming ashore. A dock like this could

be called a “landing” following from the maritime tradition for identifying ideal places to

“land,” or to transition from a means of travel to a destination. As a child of the age of

rockets and airplanes, I have a tendency to think of landing only as the process of returning

to terra firma from a state of flying. And I don’t think I am alone, for in the short “fly-over”

of the Island (that ushered me from the linguistic “new game” to this view), I was made to

feel visually as though I were above the island, and only at the end of that sequence was I

lowered to the land. “Landed,” I might say, and in that landing, given this view.

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The dock is solid. It looks well kept and new. But beside it, to my right, is what

appears to be a shipwreck. Spars protrude dangerously from the water from some unknown

source. Shipwrecks or any wreck for that matter trigger great curiosity. They beg the

question: what happened here? How, after all, does a ship sink next to a dock? That seems

odd, even paradoxical. A dock is meant to be safe for landing, clear of danger and

opportunities for the catastrophic. Wrecks are also always charged with tragedy. They

suggest loss, accident, and misfortune. And what misfortune, I wonder, is attached to this

wreck?

Another odd thing about the shipwreck: was I onboard? I have arrived on a dock

after all, and to my right are the maimed and submerged spars of a boat. Was I a passenger?

Am I the lone survivor? Or, if I have arrived by air, as I saw myself “flown” onto the island,

why I am landed next to a wreck? Is this my state as well? Am I shipwrecked metaphorically on

this island even if I was not a literally shipwrecked? What a bizarre exchange of states: I am

directly, even perfectly landed on this island, and yet I am symbolically shipwrecked here.

The violence of being shipwrecked, of facing the chaos of the ship’s collapse and material

failure, has been made external to the fact of my being shipwreck. I have not knowledge of

whatever caused this wreck, whatever shoal or reef lies beneath the surface of the tranquil

lapping water. My failure to experience the wreck leaves me detached from the production

of knowledge in that chaos. Instead, I have only a symbolic chaos and no real knowledge.

Directly ahead, a raised mound with large gears rises above the dock. It is an

ominous, unnatural integration of machinery into nature, for the gear work seems to run

under the surface of the ground, into the hard rock of the island itself. Is the island a

machine? It’s unclear. The gear-work is bounded by a railing and a set of steps lead up to it,

suggesting human visitation. I will inevitably visit, if I can, for it has been clearly demarcated

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by the citizens of the island. It speaks of undeniable importance. It is raised like a ritual

mound. The gears seemed inhumanly oversized, perhaps merely symbolic, but otherwise

parts of a quite massive and powerful machine begging the questions what cog-work do they

form? What mechanic labor does it do?

{ I have the impression it may just be a monument. Just a sculpture for Industry, or

of industry. I see industry everywhere after all. I am on a man-made dock, next to a man-

made ship. I see products of industry, but no means of production. No matter. The raised

gear work monument attests to the importance of industry on this island. This could be

Britain or Japan, those islands of industry. }

The gray objects to my left resist immediate categorization. They appear to be stone.

But the lack of definition makes reading them difficult. Their muted dark colors send my

eyes back towards the gears, the dock, and the sea.

And there is something else in the scene worth remarking on: at the end of the dock,

almost squarely at the vanishing point of the image, next to the staircase, is what looks like a

small box or doorway. I will later learn that this is a “marker switch.” I will later learn there

are eight of them on the island. I will later learn that this particular “marker switch” can be

opened, and that inside, there is a single white page.

Everything I have commented on before was mere notes on the symbolic. They have

been speculations on the values or meaning of the visual objects of this first Myst scene. But

this comment is different; this comment is about a game token and not a game meaning. For

pages are the indispensable game tokens of Myst. They are objects of play, necessary for

advancing through this game-text. Remember that I entered this game through a book.

Books are made of pages. They are the elements of the very technology/symbol that has

brought me here. The single white page hidden in front of my very eyes in this first Myst

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image is the solution to the game. It completes a book holding Atrus, the writer of worlds

including the “Myst book” I found in the void. This is the end of the game at the beginning

of the game. The alpha in the omega, a clever act of ludic recursion.

VI click

When I click on the screen, I advance dramatically. Clicks are movement in Myst. A

click in the center of the screen takes me further into it. The perspective changes: the

“marker switch” is now close to my right, and a stairway curves away from me to my left.

The gear-work mound grows tall and intimidating. As Lev Manovich writes “In Myst, the

player is moving through the world literally one step at a time, unraveling the narrative along

the way” (Manovich “Navigable Space”). This draws attention to the fact that in Myst the

‘click’ is more than exploration, it is advancement. The “world” of Myst opens only to clicking.

The ‘click’ renews my view of the game and the game-world, and most importantly the game

“narrative.” For as Manovich asserts, Myst equates exploration with the “unraveling” of the

story. As an “adventure game” Myst binds exploration with revelation; the game cannot

simply be played, it must be mapped. The narrative will become revealed in this mapping.

There is a switch on the “marker switch.” It is oversized, like the switch Dr.

Frankenstein strains to throw to raise his monster. Do I dare “touch” it? What monster

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might it raise? I click the switch. I hear a thud, and see the switch locked into a new position.

From “up” to “down.” Is this “on” from “off”? Or “off” from “on”? I expect that

something has changed, but hear nothing new of different. The sound of gulls (still unseen,

always unseen) echoes. The water ripples. The image has not altered beside an adjustment of

the switch position in the image. If I click it again, the thud repeats, and the switch state

changes. From “down” to “up.” But nothing seems to happen. I have altered nothing in

altering the switch. A thousand clicks yields no further clue to this switch’s purpose.

Perhaps the mistake is assuming the switch does something. When I find a switch,

and it moves, I expect change. This switch subverts my expectations. When I see a switch, I

assume it symbolizes power. Generally, this means electrical power, but it could just as well

be any power dynamic- the power to illuminate (lighting), the power to kill (electric chair

execution), the power to enact (turn on machinery). I assume this switch stands for a larger

hidden power that it will articulate in my interaction with it. For the meaning of a switch is

always that which it enacts, the power dynamic it deploys or controls. I wait for the switch to

“do” something, to speak of its significance, to enact its meaning.

The switch also represents the control of power, the interruption and thus

intervention into a system of power. A switch interrupts a circuit to give an outside force

opportunity to gain agency in the otherwise closed circuit. This switch suggests my

opportunity to intervene/interrupt/control a circuit and in the process, become an arbiter of

logic within the circuit. With a switch, the human subject is given entry and control over a

system. In using a switch, the human becomes a part of the system.

A switch has two states: “on” and “off”. It is representation of binary logic.

Consequently, I expect a switch to be embedded in logic. When I click this switch, I await a

change in states. I await the switch to articulate its meaning, its action, its logic. But when

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nothing happens. Nothing that I can see, hear, touch, perceive. I am betrayed. Either I have no

real agency (this is no switch, this is a sign of a switch, but like a children’s toy cell phone it

does not do what it signifies) or this switch controls something on a scale I cannot perceive.

A binary logic conclusion for a binary logic left illegible.

Clicking this switch is likely the first “action” a player undertakes in Myst. No, that’s

not true; the first “action” is movement. Clicking for movement. This switch click is the

second “action” of Myst, and it represents the complete overview of available interactions

into the game.

Click to move.

Click to interact.

Click for meaning.

Click for agency.

Myst’s mechanics read this single player input (the click) as a switch case. Clicking

either affords movement, which is a change of image or view, or an altering of game states

(switches), which is a really just a change of image as well. At least so far. Because the

changed switch has not yet articulated its meaning in a game action (something moved,

opened, illuminated) it remains just a visual sign that changes within a given view. An image

change within an image.

A click to my left turns me around. A full 180-degree pivot. I am afforded a view of

my origin, which is nothing special. The dock terminates in a raised bank of dirt, and a forest

of tall thin pines rises in the background. Again, I am reminded of the dock as a transition

space, a threshold. On the one end, a monument to human mechanical industry, on the

other, a virgin forest dark and magical.

31

Clicking the edges of the screens turns me 90 degrees now, not the full 180. I am

afforded a view of the shipwreck. The crow’s nest is virtually level with the dock. I click

towards, hoping perhaps to “jump” the water gap, and land on the ship. Nothing happens. I

can look but I can’t touch. The mast recedes into the water, its distorted dark shadow fading

into the green sea. The horizon forms the center of my view. There is nothing to see.

Overcast skies blur with the flat, pocked water.

Another turn brings me to something odd, a frame. If I click again, the frame opens.

It is a door. This is technically still a switch- a mechanism rendering a logic of “open” or

“closed” but I can’t help but see it as something new, something different.

Clicking into the open door advances me into a corridor. It is dark and eerily

illuminated. I click “down” a flight of stairs, to a chamber with what appears to be a small

fountain centered in the room. There are buttons. I click. The water disappears and I see a

mechanic grid-work exposed in the fountain. Was the water merely an illusion? It seems so.

In a few moments I find the water has returned. I wonder if “the sea” outside is “real” or if

some button, some switch on the island will reveal the mechanical imagining apparatus

beneath it? This chamber is like Plato’s cave. It allows me to realize the truth behind the

image, which is that there is no image, only a technology of image production.

McKenzie Wark’s groundbreaking Gamer Theory begins by positioning the gamer

experience as an heir to Plato’s cave. He asks his reader to imagine himself as a player and a

patron of a neighborhood arcade called, of all things, “The Cave™.”

You have played in The Cave since childhood. Your eyes see only the monitor before you. Your ears hear only through the headphones that encase them. Your hands clutch only the controller with which you blast away at the digital figures who shoot back at you on the screen. Here gamers see the images and hear the sounds and say to each other: “Why, these images are just shadows! These sounds are just echoes! The real world is out there somewhere.” (Wark, Agony 002)

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How the gamers have come to this conclusion is unclear, but its impact is dangerous.

When the game becomes exposed as a game, the text enters a vulnerable moment of

insecurity. Perhaps unintentionally (or perhaps intentionally), this chamber subverts my

willingness to accept the visual world of Myst. The experience of the water surface changed

to a mechanical framework has left me wary of the island’s ability to be what it appears to

see. Like Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, I am made to doubt my own senses-

playerly or indeed more broadly human. It is a little interaction to be sure, a short exchange

that perhaps ought not to be taken so seriously. But like Scrooge seeing Marley’s face in his

doorknocker, and then seeing the door knocker again, I am unnerved and make skeptical

simultaneously. I have grown fearful about some hidden agenda on this island, and skeptical

of the possibility of such an agenda. This curious fountain that is not a fountain has re-set

my understanding of Myst. Perhaps this is an island that is not an island.

Appropriately the subversion takes place in a subterranean chamber. I am beneath

the surface of the island of Myst, underneath and within it, and from here the island’s

cohesion and reality is undermined. But with nothing clear to do with this chamber- I click

the button again, the water is un-revealed and then returned- I make my way out of the cave,

back into the sunny reality of the island. Back to the dock. Back into the fabric of the game.

Though undermined and exposed, I feel compelled to return to the fiction of Myst and take

it on its own terms. Or, as Wark writes:

The existence of another, more real world of which The Cave provides mere copies is assumed, but nobody thinks much of it. Here reigns the wisdom of Playstation: Live in your world, play in ours. (Wark, Agony 002)

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VII pages

Click. Click. Click.

This is my labor as a player. With three clicks I am up the stairs, onto a terrace above

the dock.

Click.

Click.

Click.

My view now allows a peek at the interior of the island: trees on my left, classical

stone structures on my right, a wooden-planked path snaking between the two.

And lying on the ground is what appears to be a page.

For anyone who has dropped a piece of paper on the ground, the sight of a page

lying still on grass proves irresistible. I must touch it. I must read it. But simultaneously, I am

struck by the odd conceit in such a discovery: brittle pages blow easily in the wind, so what

magic gravity or purpose has kept this page pinned to this position, so visible and accessible?

No doubt, it is a certain gravity of purpose. The game maker (always a writer) has been made

visible in the fiction by consequence of this conceit. This situation speaks of some

significance. In recognizing the odd interruption of empty unyielding space, I see and feel

for the first time, the agency of another being in this game. It may be some other character,

or some other player. But no doubt, someone else has been here. This page attests to that. It

is a recursion back to the fact that I have entered this world through a book. A page unbound,

has fallen out of a book, or been torn from it. What meaning lies in the existence of this

page?

Clicking the page, I find it summoned to fill my field of vision, and encounter this

message:

34

Catherine, I’ve left a message of utmost importance in our fore-chamber beside the dock. Enter the number of Marker Switches on this island into the imager to retrieve the message. Yours, Atrus

Catherine. Is that me then? Am I “Catherine”? Is that my name and role as a player?

This game is in a book, a fiction, and so perhaps I am bounded in a character, restrained to a

certain subject position that is called/named “Catherine.”

By reading this correspondence, by intercepting it, I gain entry to the private,

intimate conversation of this letter. I am allowed the position of Catherine as a reader, and

additionally (subtly) encouraged to take up this Atrus’ suggestion to action. For this message

is a message about a message, and it presents me with a way in to some hidden story or

interpersonal narrative contained within the dubious reality of this island, this Myst.

Ironically, this message seems to be hidden in that room were I just was. That

chamber where I found nothing save a fountain that was not a fountain. Could that be the

imager?

This correspondence tells me to “enter the number of Marker Switches on this island

into the imager to retrieve the message.” I am slightly unsure what a “Marker Switch” is, but

I have a hunch. That box with a switch at the end of the dock seems a likely “Marker

Switch.” It has a switch on it after all. Of that much I am certain. And no doubt exploring

the island will allow me to survey all of the possible Marker Switch candidates. Surveying the

island is, after all, the real purpose of this mission. For in order to count the proper number

of marker switches I will need to walk every part of the island. I will need to make it familiar.

To click into every view of the island. Only in mastering the contents of the island, by taking

35

stock of its components will I be able to retrieve this message from the imager and further

dive into an archive of private correspondence. Regardless of whether or not I am

“Catherine,” I have found myself positioned as her and must thus act as her surrogate or

avatar. My labor is in her name. My resolutions will be of her story.

One of those resolutions will be resolving who this “Atrus” is. He has signed this

letter, but what relationship does he have to this island? He speaks of its parts (“our fore-

chamber” the “Marker Switches”) with familiarity. In this letter, he claims that dark, eerie

room I found as “our fore-chamber” suggesting that he has lived here, and shared this place

with me/Catherine. But where has he gone? And why leave this message on the grass of all

places, where it might easily have blown into the sea or into the woods, and never been seen

again?

Why, moreover, should I take ownership of this letter and its directives? Why should

I not mind my own business? Perhaps because in this fiction, in this book-world, in this

game, everything is my business. This is my readerly/playerly prerogative.

VII of the island The surveying of the Myst Island has already been done for me. On the cover of

game’s box, the island pictured as if viewed from helicopter. On my Nintendo DSi, the

default image for the upper screen is this view of the island. Taken from this view, Myst

Island appears a jumble of architectural objects, mixed and matched from an archive of

Western history. It appears like a microcosm of Western heritage: the Greco-Roman origins

embodied in the stone temple-like structures, the woods referencing something like

Germany’s black forest, the dock and sunken ship referencing the ‘age of discovery.’ And

there’s more: the gear-work mound and clock tower recall the Industrial Revolution. For the

36

clock tower is perched on an island, which from our “birds-eye” view turns out to be an

oversized floating gear. It is as though Lewis Mumford, who called the clock “the herald of

the Industrial Revolution,” (for producing the discrete units of time) was given the right to

manifest his thesis in this miniature Western world.

And then there’s the rocket. Its shape immediately recalls the rocketry of 1950’s

science fiction, which itself was inspired by the feared German V-2 rockets, which American

scientist Robert Goddard claimed were stolen from his designs for first liquid fuel rockets in

the world. A whole history of the rocket as popular symbol could be interrogated in this Myst

rocket. From Jules Verne’s From Earth to the Moon, through George Melies’ Le Voyage dans la

Lune into Tintin’s Destination Moon, the ideas of a rocket as a symbol of power, knowledge,

and cultural achievement are embodied/displayed in this object. It is the cousin of the

sunken ship, suggesting a new age of discovery. It is the most modern thing on the island, if

the island is read as a teleological arc of society and technology. For virtually every object on

the island is indicative of some moment in the Western project to advance man against

nature- those damning limits of his humanity.

There is a log cabin, partially hidden in the woods, suggesting America and the

conquest of the frontier. The cabin recalls the myth of American power, most notably the

romanticized origins of Abraham Lincoln, the “log-cabin president.” And it recalls the

“Frontier Thesis” of historian Fredrick Jackson Turner, which posited the frontier of

American expansion experience as the origin for American exceptionalism. In the log cabin,

we find the alternative Western history to the Industrial Revolution. As man developed

machines, man also conquered the “empty” land of the American west. The Age of

Discovery was thus continued alongside the Industrial Revolution, and the two trajectories

were only married together when the rocket was developed as the synthesis of mechanical

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technology and the urge to explore and conquer. Jean Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next

Generation made this late 20th century dream explicit when he began the show “Space, the

final frontier…” with an opening shot of a star ship- a rocket made into a city.

And there is the power generator, hidden underground, with only its lighted

entryway suggesting the underlying importance of electricity to the present and future

dreams of western society. The rocket, I will discover, can only be opened when the

appropriate voltage is supplied to it from this underground power plant.

I continue exploring. Things turn out to not be exactly what they seem. The Greco-

Roman origin-buildings turn out to not be temples, but a library and an observatory. The

library, as the collection of all (written) knowledge, has been sited in the center of the island,

a clear focal point. It itself bridges time as well as space, for its contents- books and writing-

are that technology of memory/forgetting that Thoth mythically gave to man. The library is

actually something of a neo-classical structure, for though its façade its classical, its interior is

warm wood, recalling the Library of Congress, or the libraries of New England colleges, or

the libraries of 18th Century Europe. This is an enlightenment library, a simulacrum of the

Age of Reason. Its ordered architecture, modeled on history, attempts the same magic as its

contents- to bridge time, and in the process become timeless.

The observatory, which allows me to survey the position of stars, presents a historic

requisite to the development of the ship and the rocket. For the stars have been a tool for

navigation, and are now a site of navigation. The rocket promises visitation to these spaces of

the night that have only been dreams, and references of position. The stars are also

instrumental in revealing the unseen realities of our own world. History records that it is

studying the stars that man learns his earth is not the center of all things. Appropriately, the

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observatory is located askew of the center of the island. The Copernican revolution has been

rendered out in the island’s civic plan.

So Myst, as a game and a book, presents a history of the West reduced to moments

and technologies. There is no necessary path or timeline through them, as they are present as

simultaneous facts. On the island of Western history, who should privilege one moment or

technology over another? And yet, there is most certainly a causality. The island and its

contents recall what Walter Benjamin critiqued as historicism. He wrote "historicism

contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history.

But no fact is for that very reason historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were,

through events that may be separated from it by thousands of years" (Benjamin 263). So it is

on the island. Causality is everything. Nothing can be done without the library. That is the

center point. And in “opening” the orbiting technologies, one must “solve” history in

historical order: the clock must be set before the Industrial Revolution opens, the electrical

plant must be powered before the rocket is primed, the observatory must be consulted

before the ship is raised and ready to sail, and the log cabin must be heated (made livable)

before the wilderness will reveal her secrets. This is the order of things. This is history in

reenaction.

But what isn’t here? What has not been accounted for in a history of the West

rendered as a magic island? A magic kingdom? Number one, people. Where are they? Where

is the story of the people who sailed the ships? Who manned the machines? Who wrote the

books? Who built the log cabins? Human agency has been effaced in favor its products. A

Marxist gamer would scream at the conspiracy against the worker, for this game, this fiction

elevates the means of production (gears, electricity) and products (ships, books, rockets)

above the producers. And in doing so, human emotions, suffering, and experience, which no

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doubt are consequences of these productions, are elided from the game. Without people,

civilization becomes a garden, filled with beautiful achievement, vacated of human emotion.

There is also a distinct evasion of religion. Where is the temple, the synagogue, or the

cathedral? There is an evasion of discipline and power. Where is the castle, the dungeon, or

the fortress? Where are the mechanisms of war that enabled Western man to advance his

civilization? There is an evasion of spectacle and civic entertainment. Where is the stadium,

the coliseum, or the theater? There is an evasion of the law, and government. For where is

the courthouse, the assembly hall, or the parliament?

In curating such a selective exhibition of Western society, Myst takes on a specific

ideal for civilization- the ideal of the enlightened population centered on libraries, books,

and learning. The suggestion is that monuments to technology will inspire mankind to

greatness. Understanding history and the relationship between technologies, will position

mankind in society. There seems no need for centers of power, courts to arbitrate justice,

technologies for war, or most of all, any need for religion to misguide a population that will

be led by reason alone. The absence of religion from Myst declares the game’s secularism.

With this reductive intellectual history, Myst obfuscates human experience in favor of

abstract ideals for how humans should feel, act, and behave. It appeals to a utopian social

construct, reinforcing the inescapable observation that this island, this Myst is “no place”

indeed, where man is as machine: logical, progressive, un-erring.

VIII look, don’t touch I found the “Marker Switches” by the way. There are eight. They are located at

points of interest, the built features of the island that I have already discussed. The dock, the

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gear-works, the observatory, the rocket, the electric plant entry, the log cabin and the clock

tower all have marker switches perched alongside them.

The only unusual location of a marker switch is a strange corridor in the center of

the island. Eight columns flank a small fountain with a model ship submerged in its still,

stony water. The model immediately suggests the ship submerged by the dock- it even has

the same features and wood tones. I click on it hoping to raise it and in the process raise the

larger “real life” ship off the coast of the island. Like a sword in a stone, I immediately

assume this model has symbolic power over its larger subject. Some metonymic potency. But

nothing happens when I click the model.

Game scholar Jesper Juul complains of this immutability in his book Half Real

accusing the Myst game designers of thwarting a human desire to act on this model (Juul

176). He has a point, and yet Juul has clearly ignored the entire tenor of the game to make

this quip. For you are not human in Myst and on this island, you don’t have a body. Very few

objects allow you to interact with them, highlighting the things you can act on as all the more

important. That there is a model of the ship sunk of the dock emphasizes the importance of

that phenomenon. That I cannot raise it with a simple click doubles my desire to do so. The

ship itself has been doubled by this model. It has been re-emphasized. And as frustrating as

it is not have the object behave as it might in “real life,” this is not real life. Which is the

thesis of Juul’s book, pointedly titled Half Real, and his interpretation of video games at large.

The ship model that will not respond to my clicks is the half of video games that ‘isn’t real.’

Juul’s frustration is the part of video games that are.

Next to this fountain there is a marker switch. Judging by the importance of the

locations of the other switches, I suspect some significance to this row of columns. On

examination, I find them patterned with symbols of animals and nature. There are glyphs of

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a snake, a leaf, a spider, etc. Unlike the model ship, they respond to clicks, glowing green or

red in response to my touch.

I should also tell you about the library. For I have spent hours doing what one does

in a library- reading. There are books in the library after all. They behave like the first book I

encountered, the book that brought me here. With a click, I find them filling my screen,

summoned into a visual totality. Many of the books are burnt. I do not why. Others are filled

with notes and illustrations. There are discussions of “worlds” other than the island. And a

family is mentioned, for the writer of all the books seems to be the same. The books give

hints about the significance of things on the island. Here, for instance, I find the glyphs from

the columned walk reproduced alongside new patterns- constellations. A connection looms.

Some link exists between the observatory and the columns. The link goes through this book

and its translation of one information (constellations) into another (glyphs). The library will

be central to my actions.

There is something else in the library. Books that are different. Books that speak to

me. I have already told you of them, but I am still haunted by. In halting, static, mistuned

messages, two men speak to me through small windows on the page. I know not who they

are. But they want to do something for them. Find the pages of their books. Complete them.

IX Hearing, speaking, seeing

It takes me a great deal of time to figure out how to enter the number of marker

switches on the island (again, there are 8) into the imager in Atrus’ fore-chamber. Nothing

on the device allows me enter any number, and only in my frustration to leave the chamber

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and read the note again does a misguided click find an interactive detail on the doorway’s

lintel. It opens a keypad and I enter the number.

With a click on the imager, a skewed face appears in its elliptical surface. It is a man’s

face, bearded and spectacled. It addresses me as Catherine. So this must be Atrus. Pleased to

meet you again, I think to myself.

Atrus, ghost in the machine, hidden beneath a magic number, tells me his story. His

primary concern is his books- they have been burned/destroyed. I already know this, but

hearing him say confirms his importance to this island and its civilization. This is his island.

The books are his writings and possessions. Still I can’t understand why the books are so

important. Atrus tells me/Catherine that he “must leave immediately” as though the

destruction of the books requires serious action and evacuation. I’ve walked all over the

island. Everything is pristine. Only the books have been attacked/damaged. So there seems

no dramatic need to flee the island- it is not under attack from powerful outside forces. The

buildings are not bombed out. There are no combatants to speak of. While walking across

the island, it even felt peaceful.

The message continues, and the motivations of Atrus’ flight become clear. This is

not an international conflict, or a tribal war. This is a domestic dispute, and according to the

testimony of Atrus, the blame lies in one of his (or “our”, if I am Catherine) sons. He

suspects one- Achenar- but cannot be sure. In the meantime, he has “hidden the remaining

books… in the places of power.” I must access them, “if I have forgotten the access keys”

by using “the tower rotation.” He signs off telling me not to worry. He will see me shortly.

He will resolve this matter before I ever have need to fret.

But I am wary of this message. For like all media, its time is indeterminate, and I

cannot know if Atrus has only just left Myst Island, or if he has been gone for years, decades,

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or centuries. The only clear time presented by the media is the time within it, the duration of

the message. But the message is undated, foregrounding the fact that media left undated

seem as if eternal. The image, the voice, the recording all suggest life but without and fixity.

The media says that this image/this mediation has been but does not tell us when, or

moreover, what has become of the subject image and recorded. The odd life of a mediated

object, to become eternal, to reference a subject and message that has been but which has

also gone. That is why this mediation and all of the mediations I find in Myst are ghosts.

They have become severed from a fixed point in history, which is fixed point in time. I know

that the images I see are not taking place “in the present” because the subjects of the media

tell me that these are simply recordings. Echoes or shadows of things that were.

Reconstructions.

X mediation

This message, which appears as a video recording of an individual detailing a crucial

event in his familial life, foregrounds a major focus of Myst- the question of mediation.

Already, the question of mediation and the history/technologies of mediation has been made

central to the game’s play by forcing me as a player to enter the game through a book, by

clicking on a word. This book with its magic linking properties demonstrated at the very

opening of the game the centrality of intertextuality to the Myst fiction. Take it literally for a

moment: through books, whole new worlds are available for exploration and play. Take it

figuratively: literature is always an adventure.

Once “inside” the book, mediation became audio-visual, a series of images and

sounds suggesting semi-familiar spaces. On the dock, I hear the lapping of water and see the

ocean all around me. On the meadow in the center of the island, I hear the wind whooshing

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by me and rustling the grass. It seems acceptable: the space is wide open, and vulnerable to

such breezes. I think the word for places like this is windswept.

On that same plane, I found a new layer of mediation- the letter. It was textual, like

the book I entered this world through, but also intimate. It was addressed to someone, and

signed by someone else. Its words were not links into other worlds, though I tried to touch

them and make them move me. Instead, this letter behaved like a letter. It detailed some

information, from one person to another. Intercepting it, I became the recipient, and formed

a link to the letter’s writer through his thoughts.

Following the writer’s instructions, I found him again. This time, he was visible- I

saw his mouth move, and heard him. He became audio-visual, like the island itself in a way

except that he had a fixed duration I easily detected. Unlike the island, he does not loop

eternally. He must be triggered. He must be played.

A cycle is forming in the mediation of Myst. Things here always begin as text- as

books or letters, and are then rendered as audio-visual information. They must first be read,

and then can be seen and heard. Consider for a moment that without a very basic literacy,

one could not begin the game. You must be able to delineate between a “new game” and

“load game.” Further into this game, you are forced to read Atrus’ letter. What can you do

without literacy there? You will never move past that letter and its crucial instructions. The

game has already yielded you a beautiful place to play and explore, but the game’s further

fictions and indeed the games further worlds cannot be revealed without reading about them

first. Myst requires a readerly player, in addition to a writerly player. No wonder it seems so

apt for a close reading/close playing. This is a game text with an unusually heavy emphasis

on textuality and the skills of readers.

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This is not to play down the importance of audio-visual literacy. To the contrary,

once the textual challenges have been hurdled, you must be able to parse and distinguish the

significance of audio-visual content. For instance, one must be able to read Western one-

point perspectival images. Judging the perception of available depth in the provided picture

planes is what allows for movement in the game. Take that first image on the dock for

instance. It’s a flat image. But it invites movement directly forward if you recognize the

image as constructed according to Quattrocento perspective. There is a single vanishing point

hidden in the image, and clicking on it will “advance” you in the gamespace. You will be

confronted with another image. You must find the vanishing point again.

Consider the sequence of images you must travel through to leave this dark fore-

chamber. They are up several flights of stairs. You click continually toward the light, the

vanishing point in the image plane. You are advanced up, and out. Salvation and escape is

available to those trusting in the unity of picture plane.

It is true that sometimes the vanishing point is not the way forward or back.

Sometimes it is blocked by a building or natural formation. But the game will still be

generous to you if you click on the vanishing point. It will still advance you in some

“direction.”

It is true that you cannot masterly navigate the world of Myst by relying on the single

vanishing point. Clicking the sides of the image will turn you around. This is simply a

convention of the game. You must also read its images for architectural signs of other paths.

Consider the fork in the wooden path on the crest of the meadow. If you recognize the

planks as paths, you can determine that this image shows a split. Selecting a path should take

forward along the path of your choice. Here, it is tempting to give yourself over the

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“veracity” of the image. It is tempting to say a player must play the objects and situations

that the image “provides” – here the forking paths.

But a closer look at this image reveals that the problem of perspective has been

quietly complicated. This is no longer a single point perspective image. Follow the vectors

off the roof of the stone library in front of us. They run towards two different points, not a

single point of interception. This is thus a two-point perspective image, and it consequently

yields two paths. Coincidence? Hardly. The game grows more complex, requiring a higher

visual literacy, in the same way it goes from simple phrases (“new game”/ “load game”) to

longer letters.

This first iteration of Myst never gets to three-point perspective, the next progression

in the literacy and advancement of perspectival practice. Only a subsequent edition of the

game, titled Real Myst will deliver that, alongside the ability to walk through the world of Myst

and pan around it freely. It will no longer be a series of images, advanced through in cut

sequence. The game will lose a dramatic component of its visual feel- the rough jump cut

montage of movement. The emphasis on reading perspective to understand player choice

within an image will be entirely eliminated in favor of a flaneurial flow-movement. New

challenges will no doubt be present, but Real Myst will remain just as ideologically

constructed as Myst and the need to demonstrate visual literacy will not be completely

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forsaken. After all, movement will still be based on finding openings between solid objects

like buildings. And reading the hard vectors of the stone library will still point towards two

vanishing points, and with them, two pathways forward.

XI sound reasoning

What can we say about sound? For surely when I look at this recording of Atrus, I

also hear him speak. This sonic element is a third level of mediation of mediation in Myst that

is connected to second visual level. But it is also hostage to the visual level, the sounds heard

are always cued by visual choices- clicking on the button displayed on the visual sign of the

image, or moving to a new part of the island through sequences of images.

The island has a subtle sonic geography. By the dock, as has been noted, we hear

water lapping and gulls crying. But if I move to the center of the Island, I hear wind blowing.

By the forest, I hear birds chirping cheerfully. These changes in the soundtrack of the game

add richness to the experience of the island’s topography and delineate the spaces aurally.

They suggest difference, at a level that compliment visual changes- by the water, in the

meadow, by the trees- but also unite disparate images. The birds chirp just the same by the

log cabin, the tallest tree, and the pathway towards the clock tower. These spaces share

something: a soundscape superimposed on the experience of the visual landscape unites

them.

But these sonic unities are generic and predictable. They seemed culled from an

archive of established sound effects and reflect nothing more than a codified “natural”

atmosphere for the island. Consequently, the natural, familiar sound of birds chirping, wind

blowing or water lapping reinforces the feeling that this island is a real place, or that it is

modeled on spaces I have been to before. This “place,” if Myst is a place, is not so strange.

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The sounds of a familiar natural world suggest that it is an extension of the reality I am used

to. In fact, if I close my eyes, I can imagine myself in any number of other “real” places. The

soundtrack is deliberately more natural and familiar than the visual landscape, causing a

tension in my reading of the game as a player. The visual elements show me a world I do not

know, despite its familiar shading, objects, and orientation (sky is up, ground is down). But

the audio elements suggest a space that is perfectly commonplace. It could even be an album

of relaxation sounds sold at a Brookstones.

That said, there are some spaces on the island that are not bound together by natural

sounds. In sharp contrast to the recognizable, familiar soundscapes of the dock, the forest,

and the meadow, these sounds seem alien and discomforting. When I enter the fore-

chamber by the dock, the game soundtrack switches to a looped violin melody, with

ominous bass drum highlights and occasional piano flourishes. In short, the soundtrack

becomes completely artificial, consciously man-made in that it has clearly been orchestrated

and performed by human musicians on manufactured instruments. I encounter a similarly

orchestrated soundtrack when I enter the power generator. Only in that grim, gray toned

space, the soundtrack becomes much more abstract. I can hear the sound of chains echoing

with a metallic clang, and an undulating bass frequency whose volume rises and falls. Is this

the sound of power? The orchestration of electricity?

It is not surprising to find orchestrated/man-made soundtracks inside of these man-

made spaces. The choice to use such soundtracks here calls attention, however indirectly, to

the differentiation of these spaces to the rest of Myst Island. This is a human space, not a

natural space, as the changed soundtracks seem to signify. But perhaps more importantly,

these different soundtracks allow the domestic spaces to be differentiated from one another,

and characterized by the music. For the soundtrack of the fore chamber feels hopeful and

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poetic in its use of stringed instruments and piano flourishes. It feels cinematic. Specifically, it

feels like the soundtrack to accompany a dramatic revelation or tragic turn of events, which

is perfectly suited for the message I receive there.

The power plant soundtrack on the other hand comes across as foreboding and

haunting. Its cinematic genre would be that of a horror film, or a suspenseful moment. When

I descend the stairs, into that dark gray-stained chamber, I feel that something is waiting for

me, some sudden and terrible attack. Which never comes. So the soundtrack is somewhat

misleading if it is meant to compliment a diegetic event. But then again, the music raises my

concern, and in creating fear, the soundtrack does something that it has not done yet: it

creates player anxiety about what it is going to happen to him. This is a truly cinematic use of

sound, for it does not render and atmosphere, but instead attempts to characterize a coming

event in the story.

The scattered orchestrated soundtracks of Myst offer a further complexity in the

delineation of gamespace. Where I find “natural” soundtracks, I begin to realize that I am

merely in an “inter” space- a space between “event” spaces. The natural sounds of the dock

give way to the orchestrated sounds of the fore chamber. On the dock, I can only look. In

the fore chamber, I can interact, I can learn, I can advance the story of the game. The

“event” spaces, delineated by orchestrated sounds, do not even need to be interior spaces.

As I summit the gear-mound, I hear a soft melody and the sounds of muffled metal gongs.

These are not atmospheric, or sonic conditions of the space, they are an interruption of the

natural (gulls and lapping water) soundscape, drawing attention this place’s “special” status.

Clearly, something is of note gamically here.

Back in the forechamber, I play Atrus’ message again. I see his face. And hear his

voice. His speech, and the speech of all the recordings (him and his sons) constitute a final

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layer in the soundscapes of Myst. And they cannot be ignored. For if I cannot hear Atrus

speak, and if I cannot understand his oral speech, and the game cannot be advanced. His

instructions are not written, but spoken. His message is thus a test of my language listening

skills, specifically my English language listening skills (though I am sure there have been

translations of Myst). Thus far, I have found that Myst tests reading literacy, visual literacy,

and now we have the test of oral literacy. “Can you hear me?” Atrus and the game seem to

ask, “Do you understand the words I am saying?”

If not, the game is over. These skills are pre-requisites for play, though they are not

listed on the box. Where the natural soundscapes and orchestrated soundscapes only

characterized the experience of games-space, the game’s speech is a dead roadblock. In Myst,

you must be able to hear and understand. Do you understand?

The division between the sounds and their importance comes down to diegetic and

non-diegetic game content. To borrow the use of these terms from Alex Galloway, diegetic

game objects are those that related to a game’s story and non-diegetic objects are those

outside of the story (Galloway 37). Atrus’ speech is most certainly a diegetic act. Retrieving

his message (finding the note, counting the marker switches, finding the forechamber,

entering the number in the keypad) and hearing it (which is always also understanding it) is

required for further play. On the other hand, noting the aural differences between spaces on

the island, between natural and orchestrated soundtracks relates to the story, but does

inform or advance the story. So these categories are inherently non-diegetic. Delineating

between the two happens almost naturally for the game player. The soundtracks are present,

but are not consciously reflected on during play. During Atrus’ speech however, the player

pays close attention, and likely listens to the message several times. What does “tower

rotation” mean? Am I this “Catherine”? The distinction between diegetic and non-diegetic

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content is also how the player delineates himself from the game tourist. I am here to play,

the player says in focusing on the diegetic content, and on listening to Atrus, where the game

“tourist” reflects on “how pretty the soundtrack is” and wanders the island, looking at the

shading on the trees- a digital flaneur.

XII the digital

Playing Myst is slow. It’s not like a book, despite the game’s framing as such. There is

no clear next page to advance to. It is not an object where one thing follows another. Where

words form sentences, sentences form paragraphs, paragraphs form chapters, etc. In short, it

is not what Ian Bogost called a “unit operation” (Bogost Unit Operations 1). It is not an

object defined by small, micro interactions that character ideas of a larger whole. Every

interaction only matters in the context of the larger whole. That’s how Myst works. It’s an

island as a total system, not a series of discrete, autonomous units.

Myst is also most certainly not a film. The series of game-images do not play

themselves while I watch. I become the playhead of the game-images as film, and my

movements are multilinear and given to recursion. I move one way, reach an end, turn

around and move another way. There is no fixed path, there are several. This is because Myst

is a digital media object.

In the history of computation, Myst will someday be fully hailed for providing

emerging digital technology and video games with a mythology of the hyperlink. For each

image of the game is linked in to another, if not several, and the regions within the image

that “move” the player turn out to be technically nothing more than hyperlinks. Nothing

more than the linguistic signs of re-direction that have become commonplace in the age of

the world wide web. What is more, that first link I clicked to enter the game (the “new

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game” phrase) proves to be the hypertextual technology hidden behind all of Myst. As I

“move,” and “explore” this island, it is only hyperlinks that I flow through. This is the

architecture of not only the island, where everything is linked to something else, but of the

entire game. My labor as a player is clicks. The hyperlinks are my targets. If I strike a

hyperlink, I am rewarded by change. The image I behold changes, or some object (perhaps a

switch) changes its state. The hyperlink is woven into the very ontology of the Myst player. If

this is a game of hypertext, then I am a hyperreader.

Technology experts have hailed Myst for making a software called “HyperCard” into

poetry (see Dale Dougherty, “The iPad needs its HyperCard” and Drew Davidson, “Myst:

Static Images as Immersive World”). HyperCard allowed even casual computer users to

render stacks of content into interactive software that worked like choose-your-own-

adventure novels. Instead of progressing through a single sequence, HyperCard

players/readers could navigate any number of pre-set pathways in any order. The HyperCard

system thus proved to be a founding architecture for hypertextual systems and databases,

pre-figuring the types of navigation websites would someday provide.

Myst used HyperCard to structure player movements through its worlds.

Consequently, the game allows for a sort of freedom and player agency that was not to be

found in the one-way sidescrollers of contemporary console game (i.e. Super Mario Brothers

3) or in the single frame games of arcade cabinets (such as a Space Invaders). Myst was based

on a new electronic writing schema, and it seeped through into the game mechanics, where

choices (however limited) give players a degree of autonomy that causes them to take up

new responsibility for the game’s advancement. In place of the ordered progress of novels,

or the sequential stream of cinematic images, HyperCard architecture made Myst a Borgesian

“Garden of Forking Paths,” an idea that Lev Manovich has connected with all “new media”

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in his essay for the New Media Reader (Montfort & Waldrip-Fruin 15). This idea, Manovich

continues, is at least as old as Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” article from 1945, which

put forward the idea that branching structures of data might be preferable to single

sequential orderings. Or as Deleuze & Guattari may have said, data should be not one wolf,

but several (One Thousand Plateaus 27).

XIII the link

Beyond merely being based on hypertext, Myst exhibits an outward obsession with

links and linking. The game is all about moving through links, and discovering hidden

connections. As a player, I am left to resolve the links that are not explicit. From a first order

of navigation linking (from this image to that image, as in up-the-stairs out of the

forechamber) I must consider narrative linking (who is this Atrus, who are his sons, how do

they connect?) and the links that have been damaged or hidden in response to fractures in the

narrative links (Atrus says he has moved the books to “the places of the protection,” where

are they?). In time, I will discover that some links are more important than others. Some

links connect the Island to other “ages” whereas the bulk of the game’s links simply advance

my position within Myst’s audio-visual gamespace.

And I will learn of the dangers of linking, or rather be un-linked. In the game’s

resolution, I will discover that Atrus and his sons were all manipulated to be linked into

places that had no links out. There is famously no death in Myst. I cannot “fall” into an

abyss, or be killed by enemies. But I can be un-linked from the rest of the game, and that

fate is a game-over. That fate is the great fear, and I will feel it when I first traverse into new

ages. I will wonder if there is anyway back to the Island, or if this a permanent relocation.

Linking is vital. Unlinking is death.

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The sensation of traversing through links, into new “ages” and across space, suggests

that the game of Myst is about mapping a network. It is about uncovering and revealing the

connections between nodes, which is not just about immediate point-to-point connections,

but about causal relationships. How the game’s switches and keypads, which are all simply

links, impact the network at large. The challenge is seeing the network as a whole, and not as

a series of individual vertices. To become over-absorbed in an individual image is to neglect

the vitality of linking, of drawing the connections. The ludic significance of an image is never

located within the image. It is always somewhere else in the network. So my playerly scope

must be adjusted: I must learn to imagine the island as a network, and the network as a

totality. Each part gains significance in relationship to its meaning within the network.

Considering the game/fiction of Myst as a network means that I must re-consider my

status as player. What is my task in this network? What is my role? In short, who am I? We

have considered that I may be “Catherine,” spouse to Atrus, mother of two sons whose

motivations and actions are in question. Regardless of whether I am “truly” she, I have

found myself in her position – hailed as her, asked to do her work, willing to do her work.

That work is mapping the network of the island and its content, an action I began in

counting the Marker Switches, and re-establishing the balance of information and

connections within that network. For I learn that the network has been under attack. Its

default balance has been thrown out of equilibrium. And I know that the cause of this dis-

balance is from something, or someone within the network. For there is nothing else. Even

my mysterious interpolation within the network has no meaning save that I am not

something created within the network. But I am present in it now, and that’s what matters.

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My previous or other lives/characteristics have no value. The network now allows for me. I

have been flattened into the subject position of a network investigator.

Revealed as a network, Myst proves systematic. It is a game of hidden casualties, but

there are casualties nonetheless. The difficulty is judging how things relate. The island

obfuscates the connections. I must become scientific in my search for casualty and

interconnection. I start a journal. It is more than personal initiative. Before buying the game

for the Nintendo DS, I found an original boxed copy of the game in the Brown University

library system. Its contents were a CD-ROM and a paperback journal that encouraged the

player-to-be to take notes on the game. Moreover, in reconstructing this network, in

restoring its balance, I will need to re-invent it. My journal will become both a place for

defining the ways the network works now and how it should work. It will become filled with

my speculations, and ideas. These efforts attempt to imagine the network before it was

undone by violence, and create a network be restored by my limited linking agency.

Appropriately, in this game of books and reading, of links and literacies, the only way

to succeed as a player is to become more than a reader. Sure, the player of Myst must be a

consummate and discerning game reader. And there is no explicit need to write down

anything on paper in order to “solve” Myst. But you are invited to. In my Nintendo DS port

of the game, there is a “notebook” option, which allows me to store small amounts of alpha-

numeric information. I can also take “photographs” (screenshots of a given game still),

though the game will only store a photo at a time so generally I don’t bother doing that.

Instead, I revert to writing, an appropriate path to re-constituting a world made in the

game’s narrative itself by a powerful writer, Atrus. His power, I will later discover, is to

“write” links to new worlds and ages, and to build objects with his mystical form of writing.

Writing also emulates the act of the game’s designers, who have framed this game from the

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onset as a book, a work of text, and a product of writing. In emulating that urge, in shifting

from reader to writer, I offer the broken world of Myst, deserted and fragmented, a

resolution as only a writer can. A resolution only writing will allow, for when I decide to

keep a journal, the disparate details of Myst begin to take shape in a scope I can manage, and

the game, however slowly, works towards a conclusion.

Deleuze and Guattari have been here, in a way, before me. In A Thousand Plateaus,

they write “A book itself is a little machine. But when one writes, the only question is which

other machines can be plugged into, must be plugged into in order to work” (Deleuze &

Guattari 4). Something of that tension is in my desire to write as a player of games, for

writing in of this game, I ask what “other machines” must be plugged into. There is the

machine of critical theory, that I have interfaced with even now, and the machine of the

game apparatus itself. My writing cannot “work” without being plugged into these machines.

But there is more. More even from Deleuze and Guattari who write “Writing has nothing to

do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come”

(Deleuze & Guattari 4-5). Surveying and mapping! Yes, that is what writing in, of, and about

Myst allows me to do. For in writing, I find the Myst object/narrative available for survey,

free to mapped and thus known. Lev Manovich writes of this in his essay “Navigable Space”

connecting an exploration of the Myst world, with its revelation and conclusion. But most

importantly, writing allows me to see Myst as a book, as a book that is “a little machine” that

works like a machine. Writing allows me to create my own machine. A little machine to plug

into and understand other machines; my efforts to link into Myst with own book/writing are

efforts at intertextuality as reverse engineering.

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XIV ages and ages of Myst

There is so much more to say. I haven’t even unlocked the four (plus one) ages of

the game. We have not yet heard the dispositions of the men (Atrus’ sons) trapped in the

books. They have spoken to me. They do not stop. When I return with their pages from

other places, other ages, they come into better focus and their discourses become more

vehement and repetitive. I see nothing further of Atrus, who promised to return quickly. I

fear he has died, and yet this is Myst: no one dies here. The worst fates seem these that have

befallen the brothers Sirrus and Achenar trapped in a single book, not free to move through

a library of magic books sending their readers to entirely new worlds. New topoi, which like

Myst Island, are haunting empty and broken.

The game takes me to places without humanity, shells of civilizations without

citizens. I become an archaeologist of worlds that need more than mere excavation to be

healed: they need to re-populated, or to have their people returned to them, for surely these

places were once filled with people.

The only signs of people I find harken back repeatedly to the men in the books.

There are always two bedrooms, in the new worlds I find, differentiated by contents and

stylings. One bedroom always seems decadent and regal, a chamber fit for a dauphin. The

other is filled with human bones, detritus of death and violence, swords and weaponry.

Occasionally, I find mediated echoes of the brothers. Recordings in audio-visual technology

that remind me of their father who I cannot find.

In the Myst Island library, a brother tells me that his sibling killed Atrus. I believe

him, though I prefer not to. From the contents of the bedchambers, while puzzling the

networks of the new ages (Selentic, Mechanical, Stoneship, Channelwood), I form an

opinion. The dashing Sirrus is innocent. His brother Achenar, whose testimonies are always

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hysterical and self-centered, and whose rooms are filled with swords and spinal columns,

must be guilty.

I fall in love with the awesome, if empty, beauty of the Myst ages. Unlocking them

proves straightforward but incredibly time-consuming. The “tower rotation” of Atrus’

ghostly message turns out to be a clever visual indexing of the island’s “places of

protection.” These places are the ones where I found the “orchestrated” soundtracks. When

I oriented a high iron tower towards them, and climb through a hidden passageway up to the

tower’s observation deck, I find a key – pure information – that I can use to reveal a linking

book.

This work proves scholastic. To open the Mechanical Age, I master time. At 2:40

precisely on the clock tower, a secret bridge rises from the still seawaters and allows me

access to the gear-island. There, a second sequence opens the gear-work mound in

miniature, and upon traveling back across the island, I realize that the “real” gear-works have

too been changed, to reveal a book. Like that first moment in which I entered the game,

framed by the binding of mysterious book, I am transported.

Once transported, my only challenges are to investigate and get back. This will take

reciprocal puzzling and discovery. My scholastic work does not end. I map. I note. I click

and explore. Something will work itself out. Some logic is always present. I take this for

granted because the game is predicated on systematicity. It is always a Deist world, a world

made like clockwork but from which the clockmaker has withdrawn.

Trusting in the systematic nature of this reality, and working through the system, I

force the ages to reveal the way out. This is always also, a book- a Myst book, like the one I

found in the void so long ago. If I wanted, I go ignore it, and stay in the

Mechanical/Selentic/Stoneship/Channelwood Age forever. But a desire for resolution and

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further exploration propels further into the game. I desire to see things made right. Perhaps

this is my motherly/wifely instinct as “Catherine”.

Some ages prove more complicated. Raising the ship, for instance, requires

considerable scholastic work. Like a medieval monk or Renaissance explorer, I move from

the tower’s key (three dates) to the observatory (three constellations) to the Library (in my

scholarly messing about I find an index of constellations in a book) and then finally to that

columned corridor in the meadow. The ship is raised, but it takes over an hour. And the

work was not navigating some side-scrolling level, not killing off hostile enemies, or beating

an artificial intelligence, but rather the work of a scholar. I have translated information

between sources in order to puzzle out a fact of nature. I have become science, a rational

enlightenment thinker who only needs time and discipline to unravel the significance and

workings of the island.

I can trust in rationality. I can trust in my own abilities as a rational thinker. The

game will never thwart this logic. In fact, it seems to reify patience, reflection, and logical

thinking. The game makes its player scholastic, which is no doubt why Myst famously

spawned a whole secondary literature of guides and books and printed explications. Like

CliffNotes to a work of Shakespeare, some people decided that taking the time to work out

personal explication and interpretation simply was not worth it. Inversely, this is probably

exactly what has drawn me to Myst, and what has drawn me to writing about it as a subject of

interpretation and critical scholastic attention. Myst invites the scholar to become a gamer,

and vice versa.

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XV an end

Soon, there is only one thing to do. I have the pages. I have visited all four ages, and

returned with red and blue pages to nearly complete the books holding Sirrus and Achenar

prisoner. Sirrus promises me great wealth and reward should I free him. Achenar promises

nothing. I have already decided to release Sirrus when he gives the final instructions to

release him. Hidden in the library is the final page needed to restore his book. I follow his

instructions: a specific pattern from a book in the library must be reproduced in a door in

the fireplace. Sirrus tells me not to touch a green book I will find there. A green book! He

tells me it will trap me as he has been trapped. I follow his instructions. I find his page, and

above it, the green book forbidden to me.

For a long time, I remained at this image. I paused at this moment, which seemed a

dramatic culmination in the re-mapping and restoration of this island’s great network.

Then I made the obvious decision, and opened the green book.

The binary, it turns out, was a false dichotomy. I am instructed to return to the dock,

to that view from which I first beheld and studied this island. There, hidden at the vanishing

61

point is a white page. The omega in the alpha. This page makes whole everything on the

island. The writer is restored to his place of power. His malevolent children trapped in

books, are dealt with.

Only one thing remains. Catherine.

I am not her. She is somewhere else, in great peril according to Atrus.

So who am I?

A player.

And something else…

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+ 1 conclusions, briefly

I needed to take a break from games after playing Myst and playing the game of

writing about Myst. Something had happened I had not expected: Myst changed and I changed

as a player of Myst. I suppose I should have foreseen this as obvious – a consequence of

taking something formerly just of entertainment value and re-reading as critically valuable –

but I didn’t think that the game would really change dramatically or that I would suffer a

certain crisis as a player of games. But the fact is, writing about games changes your

relationship to them. I believe that it shifts the player of games from being a tourist to a

travel writer, which is to say that in reflecting on the way a game works, you see the game

within a new frame, a frame of reflection and reconsideration. Simultaneously, one shares an

idiosyncratic experience and offers it as popular experience.

Following the reader response theory of theorists like Umberto Eco, I believe that

each individual reader/gamer will and should come away from a game with different ideas.

In his Kant and the Platypus project Eco writes “I decided to shift from the architecture of

gardens to gardening, so instead of designing Versailles, I limited myself to digging over

some flower beds barely connected by beaten earth paths” (Eco 4). This is how I feel about

this Myst study. It is not a proscriptive model for critically approaching a video game (what

Eco calls “architecture”). It is not a “designing.” Instead, it is an act of “gardening” which is

to say a semi-organic approach, a personal approach, and an approach that is fundamentally

interested in growing and not confining what could be called critical gaming.

I believe that the gamer has the ability to intervene in the interpretation of a game.

In fact, games are particularly available for such invention, exploration, and creation. Like a

Situationist detournement, games can be re-purposed and re-played, even against themselves.

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Consider the “Velvet Strike” art project, or Cory Arcangel’s much beloved “Super Mario

Clouds.” These are interventions in games that make them into esthetic objects or political

forums. But this is not to say that a game itself cannot become a space for new games and

new forms of play. For the rules can often be changed in video games. No one player need

ever score in a FIFA 2010 game. The ball could be passed between the teams, or the rules

could be re made for a simple game of keep away. This will not be enforced by the machine,

but rather in the gamer as the game machine. Which is to say the gamer can reclaim certain

agency from the game and in that act change in. This ability to intervene and ‘counter-play’

games raises an interesting question about my methods here: have I allowed myself to be too

manipulated or directed by the game/gamespace? Have I just played but not fought and

subverted the game? If so, might this whole account merely reify the control systems and

expectations of the game makers and publishers? Play, after all, can be incredibly free and

creative. Have I merely performed Myst but not played it?

Johan Huizinga, author of Homo Ludens would say that play is always a performance,

a “ritual” placed inside of a “magic circle” and that performance does not rob play of its

“freeing” value, but re-affirms it (Huizinga 8-10). Because play is always a performance, it

also always has a value to society. In short of defense of myself, I have may have performed

Myst, but it was also certainly play. I would like to believe this is because there is a

negotiation and exchange between the player and game whenever the two are interlocked.

The exchange is performative and bounded, but it cannot be taken for granted. It must be

continued, repeated, expanded. It is not identical and perfectly reproducible. A game may

offer a million different playings. And each playing offers a “pushing” or “unpacking” as a

critical theorist might say. The tension of play is not performance, but pushing at the

boundaries that exist and inventing places and ideas beyond them.

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Huizinga’s idea of a bounded game space is certainly present in video games that are

always framed by screen media, and contained/rendered by discrete technologies. Even the

games themselves have places you cannot go, not because they are hidden, but because they

do not exist. Behind some doors in GoldenEye 007, there is nothing. Just nothing. No code was

written for them. No map exists. They have no written game-value. But this does not mean

that as a gamer, you cannot or should not imagine what is behind it. Gamer communities

and forums live for speculation and creation. My first forays onto the internet were through

a public terminal at my local library. My first Google search was a query I have never

completely resolved: how do you catch mew in pokemon red version?

The original Pokemon gameboy title (offered in Red & Blue versions) had 150

characters. #150 was called “Mewtwo” but everyone knew (I do not recall how) that

“Mewtwo” was a clone of another pokemon called “Mew” (strangely numbered #151). I

was convinced, partially informed by urban legend, that was it possible to find and catch

“Mew” in the game. To this end, I trawled message boards, writing down notes and ideas

about how “Mew” could be found. They were long, intricate procedures. None ever worked.

The closest I ever got to “Mew” was a glow-in-the-dark key chain I bought in Chinatown.

I realized recently that in looking for “Mew” I became incredibly intimate with

Pokemon as a game. I completely mastered its controls, its cheats, and its maps. I also realize

that I kept a small scribbly notebook on my quest to find this mythical game figure. In this

notebook, I wrote down the methods from message boards (printing at the library cost

money I didn’t have) and annotated the effectiveness of the techniques. That journal is lost,

but something of an approach and a concern remains.

In a cute way, I’d like to imagine that “Mew” was really never a character I could

actually possess but something just as slippery in games: meaning. For in seeking “Mew” I

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was forced inadvertently to become rigorous and scholastic. I surveyed “research” on the

subject. I took notes on the game, proscribed techniques for locating this subject, and

marked down solid websites for future queries. But the time I had failed at finding “Mew” I

had succeeded at something else: something like becoming a critical gamer. A writerly/playerly

gamer.

Theory will, unfailingly, address the video game. It has already begun indexing the

subject, building a standard approach, creating a critical framework. But here on the

doorstep, video game theory lingers. For the gamers have not been accounted for, and no

one “knows” games better than they do.

If, as if from out of fissure into a dark void this book should fall, and in that void be

discovered by anyone, I would have that person be a gamer. Some one who likes playing

games but fears getting too critical about them, as if that will rob the fun from the game.

Read on dear gamer, and then write. The video game, to follow Deleuze & Guattari, is a little

machine and in writing of it one truly plugs in.

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