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RG2: adventures in level design – Wolfenstein 3D, episode 4, level 3
NOTES
Article Discussed:
adventures in level design – Wolfenstein 3D, episode 4, level 3
Liz Ryerson
http://ellaguro.blogspot.com/2012/04/adventures-in-level-design-wolfenstein_27.html
Music:
“Yarn Ball” from Love ZZZV.
Support Zan-zan-zawa-veia at https://www.patreon.com/zzzv. Find out more about Zan’s music at https://zan-zan-zawa-veia.bandcamp.com or http://aanaaanaaanaaana.net/
Other Links:
The full Adventures in Level Design series is available here: http://ellaguro.blogspot.com/search/label/adventures%20in%20level%20design
Liz also has level design videos available at https://www.youtube.com/user/indianfables/videos
Rough Script:
I’ll try not to do this too much going forward, but I want to call out why I think this stands up as a solid second entry in this series. It is, in many ways, the opposite of the previous episode. Where last time we tackled broad ideas and their implementation, here we will be much more invested in techniques. Instead of constructing an argument from the various parts of a game, it drills down into levels to pull arguments out of. For the purposes of this podcast, though, the big difference is that what is under discussion today is heavily visual in a way that the discussion of Mother wasn’t. That makes this whole speaking into a microphone with no visual aid thing a bit awkward.
There’s a line in the first entry in this series that is important to understanding what I read as the goal of this article. Liz is describing the way a Let’s Player has gone into a particularly rough area and reacted in a reasonable way, only to die. He tries again and finds the correct answer. Liz says “this a great example of games as a language – of acting based on the systems of the game and the information you’re provided with.” I’m not sure that I agree with the use of the word language here, but it gets at what this series helped me to understand: the ways in which games communicate. Without getting too Theory here, I mean both major definitions of the word. The obvious one, which means “to make known.” But also the intransitive one, meaning “to open into each other.” Merriam Webster’s example of that definition is “the rooms communicate.” My appreciation of this post, and the whole series, comes from the ways in which it helps to make known how spaces open into each other, in the context of this first person shooter from 1992.
The post itself opens by immediately jumping into the technical analysis. So let’s get there.
“unlike all of the other episodes, it has no easily distinguishable features. a couple of new walls are introduced, but only one of them (a weird light brown stone/cave wall with lots of blood splatters) is used more than once. it may seem mundane to mention the variation in wall textures. they’re such a huge part of what defines the feel of the game, though, that their impact can’t really be understated. the brown wall, especially, contributes strongly to the feel of an episode. still, i couldn’t easily sum up what this episode is about, or how exactly all the levels are tied together.”
And we’re into it. This is the pleasure of this series: it immediately assumes you are interested, without assuming you have the game memorized. It tells you of a very particular detail and simultaneously recognizes that it is worth contextualizing why that detail is important. In one sense, this is simply saying that it’s an effective piece of writing. Which is true and, I think, notable. Because so much of the similar literature I’ve read goes one of two ways. Level design is either the umpteenth variation on “Mario 1-1 is good because it teaches you how to play the game,” or it’s “this area seventeen hours into Thief 2 is brilliant because of these incredibly nuanced, technical reasons that I don’t have time to explain.” Very little, in my experience at least, even attempts to bridge the gap between people who just want to learn and people who are already deeply invested. I’ve never particularly given a shit about Wolfenstein 3D, and I think this article does a pretty admirable job of being the bridge.
On top of that, the technical analysis of the use of a texture immediately presages the argument that Liz is going to make. The mundane isn’t something to be ignored. It shapes the feel of the game. Variations in it can cause ruptures. And, most importantly, this ordinary-seeming level of a videogame that many wouldn’t bother diving into is deeply weird.
Liz then goes on to talk about how she was not fond of this whole episode, initially. At the time of writing this article, she saw something different in the first level. I’ll note that I’m eliding some words here, which I’ll try to mark with slightly longer pauses.
“looking at the level now, the way both of those passages are introduced with bright lights seems almost too perfectly surreal. … this is where you can see Tom Hall, the designer of all of episode 4 (and a majority of the Wolfenstein’s maps in general), starting to shift away from trying to make realistic-feeling environments, and move towards a kind of a surreal farce on his previous realistic levels. … looking back, i think having the rug constantly pulled out from under you makes this episode a lot more representative a depiction of the fevered, all-encompassing cruelty of the Nazi regime than previous ones.”
There is a lot to unpack here. First: the bright green lights are Wolfenstein’s decorative overhead lighting. They’re a standard model throughout the game, usually placed to either provide atmosphere, make the space seem more coherent, or highlight a hidden area or a secret. They’re the kind of thing that most players completely ignore. But they’re also intentionally placed things that communicate information. This is one important aspect of game design: nothing is accidental. That makes it have meaning. That meaning, of course, is filtered through the realities of labor conditions and the vagaries of human psychology.
Which brings us to the second thing. Liz brings in the author of this episode, Tom Hall, to talk about the ways in which it both differs from and plays off his work in previous areas. This is the point where this article connects with the one discussed in the previous episode. And in doing so, it bolsters the case for the importance of a way of recognizing authorship in games that might not exactly mirror Auteur theory. Because knowing that Tom Hall did this allows Liz to contextualize the surreality of this level and to evoke how different it is from his previous levels. On the subject of that authorship, Liz has a relevant quote in the episode 4, level 5 entry in the series. “i maintain that despite the limitations, they could have made a more realistic feeling game and they deliberately chose not to.”
Using the bridge that Hall’s authorship provides is how Liz gets to the third thing. The famous quote about fascism, under Mussolini, is that it made the trains run on time. That is would be the earlier levels mentioned: a (perhaps naive) belief in the order that fascism provides when it is politically ascendant. But Liz hits on something important here: the inherent absurdity, which is not at all absurd when taking human lives into consideration. Nazis didn’t just have rallies or build the concentration camps; plenty of them believed in things like Glacial Cosmology, or the World Ice Theory. It was a proposition that ice was the fundamental element, and the ether was made of frozen water. More sober, moderate practitioners believed that astronomy was largely correct, but knew that the Earth’s core was made of ice. It explained so much, and, most importantly, wasn’t the official theory of the Jewish “elites” they were invested in exterminating. The railway improvements that Mussolini took credit for were largely begun under his predecessor. The test state for Italian fascism was a city taken over by a poet who co-wrote its charter with a syndicalist, and was full of anarchists and pirates. All of these details help contextualize the ways in which, despite being a game with hardly any explicit narrative, Wolfenstein 3D can place its lighting fixtures and wall textures in certain ways to communicate two things at once. Read into, it evokes the way the fascists actually operated in the world. On the surface, it still manages to give the player a sense of where to go next; how to get to the exit.
In the next paragraph, Liz Ryerson talks about her previous reaction to the latter part of Wolfenstein 3D, noting that these episodes seemed “poorly thought-out” or like “relics.” This is followed by a crucial moment.
“fairness is very important if you want the player to feel in control of a situation.”
And then, a bit later,
“suggesting that all design must follow an established set of rules of “fairness” to the player would completely ignore its power to communicate more abstract, complex feelings than just how to reach the exit. what may look like a design troll on the surface often has a much more complicated effect on the player. this level contributes to that idea in just a few bits of surreal imagery.”
I think these points are relatively self-explanatory. Being fair to the player is a very good way to make them feel like they are in control. And that can be a laudable thing. But it also happens to be the thing that is inordinately praised within the industry. The second bit does a good job of explaining the holes in this orthodoxy. Being perfectly fair, in the sense of always making sure that they player knows what she is doing, leads to a dull pragmatism that hinders communication. In the paradigm where all game design choices are pedagogical exercises toward completion, anything that lands outside of that goal must be trolling. But there are alternatives. There are ways of communicating surreality that evoke both filmmakers like Kubrick and Lynch and that map onto the complex realities of fascism.
Let’s continue to drill down. After talking about the area map and how it feels to actually play through, Liz gets into the fact that there are two options to take in a particular room. The Let’s Player she is following chooses one, and she describes why that is interesting.
“inside is a large room with bunch of ammo and health. [the fact] that the beginning of the room is so generous with health and the end of the room isn’t in sight, [means] it’s likely that there’s something pretty formidable ahead. the layout, with the armored suits and steel paneled announcements, are a very effective foreshadowing – or at least they would be if you even had to go into this area to beat the level!”
This is game design. There’s the obvious version of this observation: building a thing as complicated as a videogame requires these kinds of mishaps to happen. Having an idea and executing on it isn’t as simple as getting the right words in the right order or drawing a brush stroke just so. It means checking and rechecking the code so that the physics don’t break that level, and then so that they don’t interact with a minor moment ten hours prior in such a way as to break that. It also means playing through, because the code can only tell you so much. There’s the pretentious response, which says: the same goes for writing. Your book won’t fall apart if you use a word you used a dozen chapters ago, but the results might well be the same. Trigger the wrong response in enough human brains and your book will never get read. Or for painting, where a brush stroke or a dab of yellow paint that seems insignificant might be the difference between a masterpiece and something your mom buys out of pity. And there’s the idea of a material reason: making games has never been lucrative. There are deadlines, there are monied people to please. Whether you worked at iD software in the ’90s or work for Ubisoft or Epic today, you are probably barely a step away from precarity. Sometimes you foreshadow something one week, have to work on something else entirely, and come back to finish that foreshadowed element with only hours to spare before launch. The secret is that none of these things stop this moment from being evocative.
But that isn’t the kind of essay this is. Instead, Liz goes on to talk a little bit more about the way this particular level works in terms of navigating its architecture and enemies. She then goes on to say, getting more into the surreal quality of the level – and this is a long one:
“this room, pictured at the very beginning of this article, is covered by a grid of lights, a dreamlike pattern that also never reappears in the game. despite not actually emitting any light, they seem to burn down on the player, suggesting something troubling. that is indeed the case, as several officers are tucked away in alcoves at the side the player enters and come running the moment the key is picked up.
“this would be an interesting area in itself, but the most peculiar thing about it is that you’re given a dummy key. the game is not just mocking you for thinking that a key that you just picked up directly across the way would be the correct one to open the locked door. other levels at least give you a key to a door buried in some secret. yet this is the one and only level where you’re given an item that is entirely fucking useless.”
She continues to describe this area, and notes that it feels like it should only exist in the character’s dream. I feel compelled to mention, here, 2017’s Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus, which I love. That game, which came out a half-decade after this article, had much more explicit political statements on both the causes and effects of Nazi ideology. It also played in the space of surreality and dreams. Specifically in the courtroom sequence. In the 2017 game, the courtroom was among the worst moments of the whole experience. Instead of these subtle surrealities, that game makes the dream an explicit power fantasy that you – or I, I should say – was bound to repeatedly fail. Instead of allowing a space for the subconscious and narrativization, it tied dreams up into mechanics. The sprawling spatial layout played into all the worst elements of the game’s mechanics, forcing you to trial and error your way through enemies that were constantly flanking you. A quote from an earlier post in the Adventures in Level Design series seems apt here. The introduction to the first post, on episode 5, level 5, goes,
“one of the things i’ve always enjoyed about first person games is that you’re stuck with tunnel vision. it’s pretty damn cruel, being forced to move forward without ever really knowing what might be coming to hurt you.”
Level design, here, is a method of mitigating that cruelty. It is room layouts, atmospheric textures, and environment objects that highlight where enemies or secrets might be. It’s the way Mario 1-1 teaches you to move right, to jump, to avoid enemies, and to hit bricks, all without saying a word. But it’s also more than that. Back to a room that isn’t necessary to complete episode 4, level 3.
“this area really feels like it should be the centerpiece of the level. at the end of a huge, conspicuously quiet high-class area that’s building you up for something big, there is indeed a confrontation of huge group of guards at the end that the game prepares you for. you bust in, an unwelcome guest to their dinner plans – yet they seem distracted by their own pleasure, and not aware of the things that are going on in the rest of the level. but sadly, there’s nothing much at the end. … here the game very intentionally ratchets up the anticipation and then pulls the rug out from under you … this area seems like it was supposed to be waiting for you to come, but in reality it was just some dinner party that you came in and crashed awkwardly. maybe they weren’t all waiting for you. maybe the game doesn’t revolve around you.”
This is kind of the whole thing. The lesson of this series, in my reading, is how games can be pedagogical machines that don’t necessarily prioritize the player. They are ways of communicating. They make up mechanics that require an entire world’s worth of justification, down to the importance of brown stone/cave walls in creating the atmosphere. But in the course of making the thing which explains to you how to proceed, they abandon the player. Because they are ways of communicating. They make things known. But by making things known, they begin to open into themselves, and onto other things. They build spatial logics that abide by alien material concerns: not the need to withstand gravity and account for soil and the movement of variegated people, but the exigencies of code. But that doesn’t mean that games aren’t other things as well. Like engines of dissociation, for instance.
Before we leave this essay, I want to read the final paragraph. Like last time, I think it hits at a lot in a particularly cogent fashion. Here it is.
“so here we have a map that seems to be both perfectly logical and perfectly illogical at the same time. what it could be communicating is a complete mystery to me. it may not be worth trying to analyze its “story” seriously. but at the very least, i hope this kind of analysis can reveal some of what’s hidden under the surface – the unspoken, inexpressible “ghost in the machine” of these levels, and show how level design can suggest much more nuanced feelings than just a set of instructions on how to beat the game to the player.”
Next time:
A Disputed History: Attack of the Friday Monsters
Austin Walker
http://clockworkworlds.com/post/56557215335/a-disputed-history-attack-of-the-friday-monsters
