The Making of "Sack Trek: Arena"

Pardon a little fuzzy-headedness; I'm running on what amounts to two hours' sleep, and that sleep marked by dreams so vivid and involving it might as well have been wakefulness. Dreams of shifting platforms, flickering menus, pistons, gears, pulleys and explosives, and the constant cycle like a fever-vison: fuckup, undo; fuckup, undo; fuckup, undo. Welcome to the late-nite madness of LittleBigPlanet authorship.

Now, making stuff with LittleBigPlanet's creation tools is easy. Knocking together, say, a functional fire-breathing dragon – or, perhaps more amusingly and certainly more demographically likely, a giant dick on tank treads launching electrified sperms – is the work of a couple minutes. Making an actual entire level, a level more sophisticated than the thousands of worthless “steep hill with ramp” stages clogging up the LBP servers, is more arduous. When my first opus, a cutsey adventure featuring a ride on an owl and a mission to aid a group of deer-worshipping cultists, got vaporized by the close of the pre-release beta period, my heart kind of went out of it; I was content just to meander through the work of others. Yesterday, though, I was inspired to rejoin my worldwide brethren and sistren and get back into the wonder, joy and toil of creation.

Creation... otherwise known as “intellectual property infringement." Unless you move in certain subcultural online circles you may not have heard the howls, but they have been loud and echoing in the hidden chambers: LittleBigPlanet publisher/developers Sony/Media Molecule have been perceived as being hard and merciless in their moderation (i.e. deletion) of LBP levels featuring famous properties. Unfortunately, this means a Pac-Man-shaped portion of the LBP pie is living on borrowed time; seventy per cent of the “community content” – and almost all of the best stuff – has been themed on Batman, God of War, Shadow of the Colossus, Grand Theft Auto, Sex and the City (?!) or some other familiar touchstone. This is natural and wholly predictable behavior for early-adopting nerds, and its censure pisses them right off. In old-school fuck-you solidarity, I abandoned my original IP, the deer-cult-owl thing, and set to work on a stage based on the original-series Star Trek episode “Arena". The one where Kirk fights a lizard man.

Sleeves rolled up and elbows-deep into the toolkit, and the depth of possibility LBP makes available becomes more apparent as every new idea becomes quick reality, even (or maybe especially) when doing the broad strokes. Hang a big black rectangle, spangle it with stars and a moon or two, and bam: Space... the final frontier. A few swipes with some grayish-white material, and there's a recognizable Enterprise. Hollow out bridge, Captain's quarters, turbolift shaft, transporter room... drop to the “planet surface," pull in the readymade Desert scenery, click three times and there's a passable ruined colony, still in flames from the Gorn (aka lizard man) attack. Bam, bam, bam. I am like unto a God, a Roddenberry in virtual styrofoam.

Ah, but... God's in creation, and the Devil's in the details. Two hours of tinkering to get the turbolifts a) working and b) not crushing the player against a bulkhead. Another two or three puzzling over how to create a beam-down effect before just saying Fuck It and letting gravity (and a transparent tube) handle the problem. Tinkering with the Gorn character 'til 3 a.m., first fussing over the motion of its limbs (there's a fine line between threatening and spastic) then fine-tuning the aim on the deadly boulders he's chucking. Agonizing over a spring-loaded death-contraption where Kirk has to zipline over some flaming spikes – it's not canon, but no LBP level can be called complete without flaming spikes. Now to model Kirk's improvised musket...

And that's just the mechanical stuff. What really traps you is the set decoration, the need to get everything exactly right. As long as I spent modeling the Gorn, I spent at least twice that furnishing my Enterprise. The red-alert lights, the space-plants and astro-tapestries in Kirk's Love Chamber. The bridge decor: Captain's chair, consoles, viewscreen and the alien face thereon, Spock's dialogue, background electronic ambiance. Machinery of the transporter room, Scotty's red uniform, sound effects of the beam-down...

The only way to stay sane is to stop fighting for fidelity and let yourself roll with LBP's lo-fi arts-n-crafts aesthetic – suggest, rather than simulate. A viewscreen? Here's a sticker that looks kind of like a TV; slap it up on the wall and move on. Players will get it. Here's the power and glory of theming your level on an established pop-cult property: readymade context. Build a big, urban level with lots of ziplines and pulleys and a big black hotrod... fine. Begin that exact same level with a tuxedoed gingerbread man saying “Good evening, Master Bruce!” and suddenly those clankity traverses become Bat-Ropes, that car becomes the Batmobile, a narrative is in play, and it's f'n sweeet.

I think Sony/MM will relent on their IP-infringement crackdown; I think they'll have to. Their core audience – which in the case of a crowdsourced-content game like LBP is also their core creative team – are bred-in-the bone fanboys, remixers, nostalgists and payers of homage, and those folks won't play (or make) ball if their work's a moderator's click away from becoming electron dust just because it has a picture of Mega Man in it. Meanwhile, look for “Sack Trek: Arena”, coming soon to a Planet near you... just as soon as I get those goddamned boulders right...

Dwarf Fortress, pt 2

Sweet southern springtime, the last late skiff of snow evaporated, the lawns lousy with more robins than a Teen Titans cosplay convention. I really ought not to be spending these golden-crisp sweaterweather days indoors, quasimodoed over a laptop, but… other worlds have other seasons and their attendant responsibilities. Besides, I’m parked here by the picture window, plenty of Vitamin D flooding in; I even get a bit of a social life, when I make eye contact with passers-by.

Maybe I should have shaved.

Or taken a shower.

Or at least changed out of my pajamas.

“I can smell you from here,” my lady calls from an adjoining room, and I know she’s not exaggerating. I can feel it on me, familiar as favorite socks: old-time Gamer Sweat, sour scent of The Zone, pheromone cloud biologically calculated to attract… who? Not the female of the species, for sure. Maybe it’s a primitive, cellular matchmaking service, XBox Life: caveman nerds would catch a whiff across the glaciers and know someone nearby was up for a few rounds of StoneThrow 10KBC…

I’m still playing Dwarf Fortress, you see, and though you all come here for only the freshest videogame coverage I’m going to take a Mulligan on last week’s column – time, tide and deadlines forced me into it too early: I’d only logged twenty or so hours, and most of that in a series of pathetically stillborn Fortresses. I’ve since sunk another twenty into this most intricately geeky world-simulator and managed to see one noble outpost through two whole game years without collapse… and I’m still Holy Shitting every half hour or so, at the crazy crap that emerges from the simulation’s natural chaos.

But even with a whole workweek’s worth of time dropped into DF, I’m still scrambling up the lower slopes of the game’s craggy learning curve, the rest of the mountain rising before me. Dwarf Fortress is a pain in the ass to play, DOS-shell-style menus on top of submenus on top of sub-sub-menus detailing everything from, for example, the attributes of each individual morsel of food, to where each individual Dwarf sits at dinner, to how that Dwarf feels about her seating assignment and how those feelings affect the healing of her sprained wrist. And it’s all displayed via an indecipherable textlike GUI that looks like somebody’s dog ate the Rosetta Stone and barfed it up all over the Matrix.

Some tips for prospective Dwarven castellans. After grabbing the zip from Bay 12 Games, go immediately to the Dwarf Fortress wiki, devour as much of the newb material (esp. “Your first Fortress”) as possible -- and plan on keeping that window open for a week or so, even though DF’s omniscient God-brain snarls at sharing process time with other programs. And even with your hand held minute-to-minute by these thoughtful tutorials and walkthroughs you’re going to be frustrated – and, let’s be honest, kind of bored -- to the point of Fuck It and beyond… the only way to endure through this is to have a source of hope, a vision of what your manky, poorly-sited, starving cavern of losers could become, of what wonders Dwarf Fortress can offer the stalwart.

I personally recommend the Saga of Boatmurdered, a “succession game” in which multiple players guided (or tried, mostly in vain, to guide) the fortunes of the titular citadel, handing off the controls at the end of each game year and recording the events of their turns in-character. The writing is spotty as you’d expect from an ad-hoc rota of geeks, ranging from workmanlike to comedy gold, but without the example provided by their tale – complete with marauding elephants, genocidal lava traps, grand achievements, hubristic vanity projects and eventual mass insanity – I’d never have had the will to force my head into DF’s maddening depths.

So now I’ve finally got a thriving little outpost going, known to the Dwarves as Thikutostuk: “Booksneak”. Irrigation’s all figured out (only a single puppy drowned in the flooding, this time!), I’m mining a tidy little ore vein, got some lukewarm trade links established, and hopeful immigrants are filling out the population, bringing with them much-needed expertise – or, at least, strong backs and an Old World work ethic (also alcoholism). And speaking of filling out the population, I note that my engineer, Ilral Knifemachine, has been dallying with foredwarf Logem Relicsalves… might the pitter-patter of tiny (yet sturdy) feet soon echo through the halls of Booksneak?

Time – hours of precious, precious time – will tell, and damn me but I’m willing to put in those hours… because I’m more involved in Boooksneak than I have been in any videogame character in a long while. That’s the terrible secret of Dwarf Fortress: behind the savage wall of user-unfriendliness lies a world-simulator of constantly surprising complexity, and the extreme abstraction of the world’s presentation requires reactivation of imaginative capacity long lulled by the advance of graphics technology. More than any other sim game, Dwarf Fortress really lives, and lives inside you...

...which makes it pathetically tough to live outside it.