🐝 The Sting
Learn AI in public. Embrace the ridicule. Ship daily. Share experience and results. Measure.
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😎 🏝 Chillin’
Saturdays aren’t for working
Every Saturday I’ll bring you something different, just for fun.
A couple of years ago my youngest kid decided he was interested in retro gaming.
Being an 80s kid, I jumped at the opportunity to use his interest as the justification to indulge my own nostalgia.
I’ve played video games at least since we first got a Nintendo sometime in the late 80s, probably earlier. I’ve played any system since then. I’ll spare you the sequence of platforms but suffice it to say, I have gone full circle and then some. Sometimes hyper modern, sometimes old as dirt.
Each is magical, but in a pinch, I prefer the dirt.
Because in the dirt, the story telling better be damn good. There is nowhere to hide.
One of my favourite games is Legend of Zelda.
There is endless work explaining the story it’s trying to tell.
When I contrast Zelda on the NES and SNES to later versions, including on the N64 which are considered to have been transformative to game based storytelling. The earlier versions clearly win out.
Because of the space they leave between each note.
Their sparseness, the simplicity of their mechanics, and their addictiveness made so much room for the player to insert themselves.
With time, Zelda got more sophisticated, more specific in being able to tell its story. At one point, the developers probably were able to tell their story without being held back by the limitations of technology. Which is when so much of its magic disappeared.
Now we knew what we were supposed to know. We saw what we were supposed to see. We progressed the way we were supposed to progress.
I think about this a lot when I feel twitchy sitting in front of my computer, or on my phone in bed in the morning. The weight of all the content. The precision in their intent. The absence of negative space.
I can appreciate the artistry of something like The Last of Us, probably one of the pinnacles of modern, video game story telling. All of its triggers work on me. But only they do.
When I play something like Zelda in it’s NES incarnation, I experience an entirely different kind of magic, most of which is happening in my head rather than on the screen.
It’s more like meditation rather than exercise.
🧘♂ Last Word.
There has to be a Ying and a Yang when it comes to you and content.
Just Chillin’,