Episode 495 - Friday, October 26, 1979
Episode 495 · January 5th, 2018 · 16 mins 17 secs
About this Episode
Internal commentary for the potential song title "Yar's Revenge Designer Howard Scott Warshaw Slam Dunks A Football" by The Flowers of Disgust appears here courtesy of The Flowers of Disgust:
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The football was innovative yet enigmatic. | HSW is in my view the most important pre-NES Era game designer from a creative standpoint, and I include Al Alcorn in this statement. | pre-NES or pre-Miyamoto? | Is there really a difference? I mean yes, I suppose you could date a so-called "Miyamoto Era" from the time he joined Nintendo in 1977, or maybe with his creation of Donkey Kong in 1981, but I really don't think this is what people normally think of when they think of Miyamoto's influence from a game design standpoint (Not to mention such a designation would completely ignore the meaningful contributions of Gunpei Yokoi, who was essentially Miyamoto's mentor on the project). While no serious person would claim Donkey Kong itself isn't historically significant, the game itself doesn't hold a candle to the likes of Super Mario Bros. or Zelda in terms of actual influence on the direction of video game design. In many areas DK is much more derivative than it is innovative, from its characters and plot (cribbed from King Kong and Popeye, among others) to its gameplay (which owes a lot more than is generally recognized to earlier titles such as Space Panic and Crazy Climber). What I think is actually the more important thing to recognize about Donkey Kong is the story of its development, from the last ditch effort to recoup the sunk costs of the Radar scope debacle to Hiroshi Yamauchi's decision to entrust NOA's future in the harebrained schemes of one low-level engineer -- and the lucky accident of its sucess. It's this spirit of throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks that continues to drive most of Nintendo's successes to this day. So in summary I would say that although Miyamoto's pre-NES work certainly represents an auspicious beginning to his career as a designer, he did not achieve greatness (nor his corresponding industry "rock star" status) until his later work for the NES/Famicom, which likewise did not become a true worldwide phenomenon until the successes of SMB and Zelda, among others. This is why I would argue that to say "Pre-Miyamoto" is essentially the same thing as saying "Pre-NES" from a periodizational perspective, which is the implicit perspective of all of our song titles and commentary. | Have you played "Space Panic"? That game SUUUUUUCKS! | No, but I did play Crazy Climber on an original cabinet last week, and the control scheme is pretty fascinating. There are two joysticks that have to be alternated simultaneously up and down to simulate (more or leass) the physical act of climbing. Takes some getting used to but it's really quite clever. | To me the important thing about Miyamoto isn't any particular game feature or innovation that he invented. The genius of Myamoto is really his ability to take an existing genre and carefully refine it so that it becomes more "fun". Hence, Donkey Kong is way more "fun" than Space Panic. Even though, through a certain narrow lens, Space Panic might be more "innovative", Donkey Kong is really a much more important game in the history of the genre. To go back to your original statement, I guess I think the central questions is: what do you mean by "from a creative standpoint"? I wonder if you aren't defining "creativity" a bit too narrowly when you dismiss Miyamoto's early arcade work. | Sure, that's probably a valid criticism. And I do agree with you in regards to Miyamoto's penchant for refining the innovations of others, and of course the "fun" factor remains something that is poorly understood to this day (On this particular point I would recommend Curtiss Murphy's excellent blog and podcast "Game Design Zen", especially his hugely insightful visual representation of what he and others term 'flow' which can be found in the post for episode 2). I just think if you're going to be so reductive as to say, "This here is 'The Miyamoto Era'" (and though you didn't use that exact term I think it's fair to say it's implied by your use of 'Pre-Miyamoto' as a delineator) then it makes far more sense to designate his work on the Family Computer as the herald of that era because, again, it was not until that point that he became an icon. It was not until that point that he did his most important, most innovative, and most influential work. It was not until that point that he fully emerged from the shadows of Yokoi et al. to finally wield complete control over what I would without hesitation call the Gesamtkunstwerk of SMB and Zelda. Donkey Kong is a landmark in the history of Nintendo, surely, but in the story of Miyamoto's development, it is mere prologue. | What?? | Please explain to which element(s) of the preceeding your query is referring. | Objectively speaking, I think the original Donkey Kong is probably more significant than Yar's Revenge in terms of it's impact, though admittedly, without defining precisely what we mean by 'significant', this is basically a nonsensical statement. With regards to fun, I think it's all well and good to explore the concept of "fun" on a objective/theoretical level. "Fun" may indeed be a wooly concept that, from a game-design perspective, is tricky to define in a purely reductive sense. HOWEVER we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that in our subjective experience as players-of-games, it is all too easy to identify when a game is "fun". One is reminded of the famous line by Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart, "I know it when I see it". Stewart of course, was referring to pornography, but it is equally applicable in this case. I can't tell you precisely what makes a game fun, but I know whether a game is fun or not when I play it. I will look this Curtiss Murphy gentleman though, as this does seem an interesting topic. | When did I ever say that Yar's Revenge was "more significant" than Donkey Kong "in terms of it's [sic] impact"? My original statement was focused solely on creativity of design, and did not reference DK at all. I freely concede that DK was more impactful than YR; I'm simply stating an opinion about Howard Scott Warshaw's artistic chops. At the risk of going off on a tangent, let's draw on, as an analogy, a comparison between Pong and Computer Space, Nolan Bushnell's prior effort from the previous year. Now I'm sure as hell not going to say Pong is poorly designed (the hallmark of good design often being simplicity, which is its own rabbit hole...), but what I will say is that Computer Space is a way more interesting game, at least considered intrinsically. While simple by today's standards, it failed essentially because it was designed and playtested exclusively by engineers and mathematicians, and hence was too confusing for the average n00b to grasp. I think there's room to argue which game is 'better' from a creative standpoint, but we should absolutely not make the mistake of saying Pong is artistically better than Computer Space specifically because of the former's relative success. Now, with regard to your rather confusing citation of Potter Stewart (who always makes me think of (Jimmy) Stewart's nemesis Mr. Potter from It's a Wonderful Life), I'm not certain what point you are trying to get across. Potter Stewart's statement is generally not quoted earnestly even by anti-pornography activitsts these days; are you reappropriating it into the arena of fun in video games in an effort to genuinely endorse the concept of subconscious objective identification as a process, or are you making a wry, pithy critique of modern gamers' fickleness/proclivity to rush to judgement? I am reacting specifically to your statement "...in our subjective experience as players-of-games, it is all too easy to identify when a game is 'fun'." [Empahsis added]. It seems like you are implying in this first part of your argument that we are making a mistake when we rely on our gut instincts when engaging in video game criticism, but then you go on to, it would seem, essentially endorse the Potter Stewart approach immediately thereafter. Could you clarify, please? | To clarify, I am endorsing the view of "fun" as something that we should generally trust our guts on, even though it is difficult to define in a reductive sense. In that quote, I should not have said "all too easy", but rather just "really fucking easy". Likewise I think Potter's statement re:pornography is in most cases correct, though I'll concede that it really doesn't lend itself to any concrete legislation–certainly not any good legislation. Re: HSW, Yar's Revenge, Donkey Kong etc… I think essentially we are struggling with different ideas about what "creativity" is, what it means for something to be "important" and certainly what it means for something to be "important from a creative standpoint". You seem to be endorsing the view that a game can be "important from a creative standpoint" when it is interesting but shitty. If you think "creativity" is really just about doing something "original" or "new", being the "first" to do some particular thing, then I guess that's a reasonable statement to make. I tend to take a more holistic view of creativity myself, put more emphasis on the overall artistic vision, and the execution thereof. | And I'm not necessarily disagreeing with most of that, I'm simply drawing a distinction between creative success (or artistic success, if you prefer) and commercial success. Frankly, I don't know what you're talking about when refer to something being "interesting but shitty"; are you saying Yar's Revenge is shitty?? Or are you referring to Computer Space/Pong/Crazy Climber/Space Panic? I'd say Space Panic is the only one of those you could credibly claim to believe is shitty, but for the sake of argument I'd say that yes, something can be interesting even if it is shitty. However I do concede it most probably can't be "important from a creative standpoint", at least in the sense that I employ that phrase (that it has exerts a lasting influence on at least some significant subset of game design). In this sense I think it's laughable to say that Yar's Revenge is not significant. If you look at HSW's body of work it seems to be his most fondly remembered game (or at least tied with Raiders) and he is easily the most celebrated Atari designer from that time period. | Yars' Revenge is ok I guess. It's certainly quirky, and I could see how people might have found it fun. If we're talking about single-screen space shootin' games i'd definitely take Robotron 2084 over it any day of the week. "Raiders", OTOH, seems completely unplayable and cryptic. I think people probably like to talk about the importance of Raiders because (like "Adventure") it seems kinda like a proto-adventure-game or proto-metroidvania thing. Fair enough I guess. Again, for my part, I'm less concerned with who "came up with" these ideas "first", and I'm more interested in who made games that were actually fun to play. When I look at "Raiders" I see a game whose designer was over ambitious and didn't really understand the limitations of the platform for which he was designing… an interesting failure at best. That's better than an uninsteresting failure, but not exactly the hallmark of a great game-designer IMO. Again, if all you care about is who was first-to-market with some particular "innovation", then sure HSW is your man.| That's all well and good, and such reductionism would be fine if we could all agree on an objective classification of what constitutes "fun", which is in my esitmation a fool's errand. However, since we are prisoners of our own predilections in taste, we cannot make a consistent, quantifiable analysis of any game unless we make the effort to subsume our subjective reaction underneath at least a veneer of cold, logical, data-driven criticism. Of COURSE it matters that we find a game "fun", but without the wisdom that comes from patient, comparative study of the titles that comprise its various peers, antecedents and imitators, and without appraisal given to the personalities and forces behind its genesis, our analysis is doomed to be incomplete. I'm not by any means saying that innovation is the only important thing to focus on, but I am fascinated by it because I yearn to gain a deeper understanding of how things developed and where they are likely to go in the future. That's what keeps me getting up in the morning, at least from a video gaming standpoint. | I prefer to think of my "fun" benchmark as more holistic than reductive. | Sure, and Id *prefer*to be having sex with Scarlet Johanson, but that doesn't mean it's the case. | Zing! | Agreed. I think we're done here.
