Cymothoa Exigua

I've been thinking about the structure of videogames. Iriquois Pliskin or someone made a comment that's been smoldering in my mind for a week now: referring to the traditional End Boss as a final exam of sorts. A game will present you with a new mechanic, let you loose to experiment with it, and then, perhaps, give you a boss as pop quiz, separating those in the class who've mastered the material from those who need to stay after class. Then, at the end of the game, the final boss is a recapitulation of all the bosses beforehand, a last test to see if you've truly mastered the concepts that came before.

In school, I liked math. A lot. My memory has a bit of a nostalgia halo, but I derived a pure satisfaction from learning new rules, solving problems, and acing tests. I think that the specific challenges I seek in games are a substitute for that kind of pursuit. That same spot gets scratched when I play Sudoku or do crosswords or what have you, but they lose their flavor after a too long. Sudoku is unsatisfactory to me because it lacks the protean ruleset present in games and algebra. n will always equal n, but in the process of learning new rules are introduced that build on one another. You learn the quadratic equation, and you use it for awhile until you get a new, shinier weapon, but when you're fighting Calculus you find that you need to pull it out again to win.

Braid disappointed me for multiple reasons. Despite all of Jonathan Blow's talk of melding gameplay with story, he chose to segregate the two in a pretty artificial way. There's no sense of progression in the puzzles; what you learn in one world doesn't really apply to the next. But its mortal sin, in my eyes, is not including a final exam. I can understand using anticlimax as a device to shape the experience of a game, but Braid didn't do anything with it. Near the end of each world, there's a very large boss-guy, who is basically Bowser, from Super Mario Brothers 1. It walks around and shoots fireballs in a fixed pattern at every encounter. You must use your time powers, in a fairly rote manner, to drop chandeliers on it. It is to the traditional boss what a sheet of busy-work math problems is to a well thought out test.

Often, games get criticized for being all work and no play. But the play that games offer us is no more than novel work. We want work that will change, or, failing that, work that will challenge us in different ways as we progress. The type of games that earn the most love resemble a waltz, rather than a march: escalation and descent, rather than step by step by step. Even games like Tetris, which only ever presents the player with a single set of problems and a single toolset, adheres to this cycle of tension and catharsis.

When asked what my favorite games are, I run through a mental checklist of my favorite final bosses. The ending is not the point of a game, but it's what I remember best. I'll play horrid games to their completion in hopes they'll pull a Vader and be redeemed by their final act.

I've got no conclusion to this post. The irony is eating me up inside.