I Am Flynn

I saw TRON: Legacy just before Christmas. Twice. I loved it for some very personal reasons.

When I'm not pretending to be a 3000 year old high elf, I'm a computer scientist and developer. I've worked on some games, I've worked on operating systems, I've worked on system software such as compilers and linkers, and I've worked on a silicon compiler as well.

When I was in grad school, I went to see TRON with a bunch of my CS grad school friends. We saw it in Sunnyvale, in the heart of Silicon Valley. We stayed for the credits so we could see where it said that it had been rendered on a Cray supercomputer (THE most powerful computer at the time)

Tron was fun for us in that it invoked all sorts of little things that were a kind of "secret" lore at the time. Tons of concepts in computing were given physical manifestations. Overall, though, it was kind of a dumb movie, but I loved it because for once, my life was up on the screen. I'm not a hot pilot, or a whip-bearing archeologist, or even a county sherriff who thinks we need a bigger boat. But here's my world, being portrayed by Hollywood, or a reasonable facsimile thereof.

The same holds with TRON: Legacy, primarily in the character of Flynn. Flynn is a programmer, a very talented one. I am a programmer, and I have a few decent credits, nothing so astonishing as Flynn. Flynn dresses like Steve Jobs and decorates his house as though he were in an Apple commercial. My own house could be an Apple commercial, as I own probably half a dozen computing devices made by them.

Flynn spends a lot of time in the film's present practicing meditation and action through inaction. I have been studying Tai Chi for years. One of the companies I worked for, Silicon Graphics, had a CEO - Ed McCracken - who was known for his practice of Transcendental Meditation.

And then there's the central idea of the plot - that Flynn created CLU as an agent of himself, in a kind of parthenogenesis. By the way, programming seems to me the closest equivalent our world has to Athena's creation, springing from the brow (the locus of thought) of Zeus.

But it's gone wrong. CLU manifests the same issues that HAL did, or Skynet did - what we see as valuable, he only sees as imperfection. But Flynn's response to this is not that CLU must be destroyed, but that he must be re-integrated.

I love this part most of all, and it's got nothing to do with computing. Evil is not something perpetrated by some unknowable other, it is the product of good desires carried out to extremes, and in denial of the consequences. To Flynn, the error was not anything that CLU did, but in turning him loose.

And if I am Flynn, it must follow that I am also CLU, which is a sobering thought.

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At Terra Nova, Timothy Burke writes that in the MMO world, World of Warcraft is CLU. Psychochild discusses the issues of order vs chaos in MMOs thus:

In general, many people strive to impose order on chaos. Along came World of Warcraft and imposed order on MMO gameplay. Using deep pockets, Blizzard created a world that was more orderly and stable than other competitors... and, perhaps more importantly, a lot more popular and financially successful than those competitors. The wild nature of the other games had been diminished in favor of a tightly scripted and controlled environment which people flocked to in large numbers. For some people, this is frustrating because with all this order there's no room for the chaos needed to show new possibilities in game design. People keep chasing after the order imposed by Blizzard, but can't quite match it for various reasons.

I don't think that World of Warcraft is evil. It's exactly what its developers and players want it to be. Which is pretty much an argument in favor of Wow = CLU. However, I don't think that its success has all that much to do with the imposition of order, on the transition from "open gameplay space" to "closed gameplay space" And I argue that because Everquest II, which launched one month before World of Warcraft, had many, many features which promoted order and structure, most of which were despised by the player base. No, it has everything to do with how well it enabled solo play, via the same quest-heavy structure that EQ2 had, only EQ2's was oriented to groups.

EQ2 promoted group play endlessly, with group-only encounters, group bonus experience, group-only buffs, and shared experience debt. Well, that last was meant to enhance good group behavior, but it didn't work out so well. The crafting system was highly structured and also was meant to impose more interdependence among crafters. The player response to this was to make alts to do the crafting of needed subcomponents. Independence and self-reliance are a high value among MMO players, and WoW let them do that.

The other two pillars on which the success of WoW rests are, in my opinion, low system requirements and the Blizzard sense of humor and story. The success of WoW certainly has spawned many imitators of the solo-friendly, quest heavy style, but few of the "low system requirements, but still looking good" variety. Which has kind of stifled creativity, but don't blame Blizzard, they are us; they are me, and I don't even play WoW much any more.

Yes, But Is It A Cloverleaf?

The other day Roger Ebert declared that videogames are not, and can never be art. I love ya, Roger, but you're wrong on this one. Really, though, we're arguing about the meaning of a word, "art".

Wilhelm of The Ancient Gaming Noob, takes issue and gives a fairly broad definition of art:

Art is more about having a message, about communicating something to people, than about the medium the artists chooses. Anybody who declares something “not art” because they object to the medium is kidding themselves. Art is not the medium. Art is the message, the intent.

I have an even broader definition of art, one I got from my kids' high school art teacher (and host of a couple of art appreciation trips to the orient that I went on with him).

Whenever humans alter their environment, art is there. Any decision made with an eye to someone's reaction (not necessarily pleasing, no no) there is art.

"Is this art?" is the wrong question. It's always the wrong question. The right questions are "How does it affect me and others?" and "How successful is it at achieving its aims?"



And yes, I do believe that freeway overpasses are art. I do not believe that all freeway overpasses are equally successful art, though. And its true that I find a painting by Magritte more interesting. Mostly.



Roger says that Bobby Fischer didn't consider his chess games to be art. Well, maybe not, but lots of people who play chess and replay his games most certainly do think of them as art. I think maybe its best that creators not be too self-conscious about their art, even painters and filmmakers. "Is this art?" is at least one step away from what you ought to be asking yourself when you are creating something. Maybe more.

Ok, here's five games I think are pretty interesting and influential pieces of art.

1. Adventure. By Will Crowther and Don Woods. Seemingly simple minded, this was the first text-adventure game and succeeded in capturing the imaginations of a lot of us. Simple descriptive passages evoked a quite particular mood.


2. Myst. Who remembers Myst? It was Mac-only, a complete pig in terms of resources, and a completely compelling multi-media experience.


3. Super Mario 64. The importance of this game is that it explored 3D not just in terms of visuals but in gameplay, too. Succeeding wasn't about finding the exact timing and sequence of button pushes, but to find one solution among many.


4. Portal. This game has more to say about our life, alienation and freedom than most paintings. Could the ideas in Portal really be communicated any more effectively as a film? I don't really think so.


5. Rock Band: The Beatles. Derived work at its finest. Models, sets, audio outtakes from studio masters, fantasy sequences. All of it distills the essence of the Beatles in the format of a video game. It's an impressive piece of work, and it engages one utterly.

So, in the end, I think Roger needs to either play a few more video games or shut the hell up. And I say that with the greatest affection.