Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Myst is stupid.

Reading through Kotaku I saw that Myst is coming to the DS in March. This news reminded me of a long dormant truth to which I subconsciously cling: Myst Fucking Sucked.

This is my play experience with Myst: Some number of years ago I sat at a computer which had Myst installed. Curious, I loaded the game. The game loaded and there I was looking at a screen which displayed poorly rendered graphics of...I think it was a room. Either a room or some sort of platform on which there were things.

And that was it. There were no NPCs telling me to do something, no text bubbles or voiceover giving me a goal, no obvious enemies, inventory screens, paths, or anything. I was simply there. I sat there for four minutes waiting for something to happen. Nothing happened. So I got up from my chair and walked away.

If I am placed in a situation in which I have no motivation, objective, goal, explanation, or reason for being in that situation? I leave. Hell, even if I am given motivation, objective, goal, explanation, and reason I often leave those situations too.

Sure, maybe the vapid existential void of Myst was the point of the game. Maybe, as the wikipedia page for Myst says, "In a sense, the primary objective of the game is to discover the objective of the game." Great. Except I already have that situation. That situation is called "life". I'm already in a platform with things the purpose of which is unknown to me or, most likely, doesn't actually exist. Except in life I have motivational forces that spur me to action. In Myst? Not so much. I don't need to distract myself from the vapid existential void of life by engaging a fabricated vapid existential void with poor graphics, no obvious point, and seemingly no inventory system.

I don't care how many times you've read Being and Nothingness. I don't care how many hours you spent collecting keys and books in the hope of eventually discovering WHY you were collecting keys and books. I don't care if you can make some convoluted argument which makes Myst the game from which all other sandbox games are formed.

Because Myst fucking sucked. And anything you say to try and justify its existence is going to make you sound like a strung out art student fresh off a hit from your opium bong.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Or in other words, you didn’t understand the game, so the game is stupid.

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Caleb said...

Opium!

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gerlachmark said...

MYST holds a special place of nostalgia for those of us who craved accessible content in the '90s, but that does not mean the franchise gets a “free pass” from criticism or exemption from censorship. The games still employed sexist tropes and game mechanics that enforced/internalized misogynistic ideology (granted, to a lesser degree than other games at the time) in the individual minds that were participating in this male-created adventure. The supplemental books and comics that were released were a little better in their depiction/treatment of female characters, but not by much, and managed to gain a cult-like following amongst the less developed minds of that generation. It would have been better for all if MYST was sequestered to the nostalgic past, but in the last two decades, there have been attempts to resurrect the franchise onto the "big screen" in the form of a movie or series. These attempts have mostly self-destructed under poor management, but the project keeps getting passed to larger studios, and I would be lying if I said I was not worried about the continued proliferation of '90s era game misogyny to modern media. We are/were too late to stop another Mortal Kombat, but we can stop this. If you consider yourself to be a feminist, please consider signing this petition to "cease any-and-all progress on creating a movie or TV series based on the misogynistic video game franchise of Myst"
[ https://www.change.org/p/stop-movie-based-on-sexist-myst-video-game-series ]
Even if they modernize the content for the movie or series, people will possibly want to explore the source material and ingest the inherent sexism therein. It must end. As my favorite line in the new Star Wars movies suggests, we must "let the past die. Kill it, if you have to."
Please note, I am not the author of the petition, but I do believe in it.

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