When I was a little girl, we had branded versions of the Internet. Some people had AOL, some had Prodigy, some had CompuServe. A few people had MSN (sorry, little joke there). The Internet, it seemed, came on CDs. Bear with me – this is complicated: You used these CDs to install software; and when you double-clicked on the icon on your desktop, it would begin the process of dialing up the world wide web, or at least a proprietary part of it.
The brand we bought into was Prodigy. It had Zagat ratings, Consumer Reports articles, news, e-mail – it was a portal pioneer. This was 1989 or so, and it seemed super awesome, and almost nobody else I knew had anything like it.
We also spent about as much time at Egghead Software stores as other people spent at Blockbuster Video. Just about any time we went to Fred Meyer, we had to cross the parking lot to the mall behind it, the one with the Honey Baked Ham, and a bunch of random little shops. Because there was software there – there might be clip art we didn’t have, or font sets, or games, and we needed to see.
Oh, how many times did I inspect the box of Leisure Suit Larry, raising one eyebrow at the 8-bit image of him in a hot-tub with some bikini-clad babes? I was certain something pornographic lay within that box, my parents seemed to regard it as a tacky joke that they were in on, and it never did make it up to the counter.
I remember my brother’s love of games like Monkey Island, or MYST; my parents addiction to Sim City (mine, too). Later, there would be The 7th Guest, and Riven. But somewhere in the middle of all this, there was a game that was just for me. It was called “Laura Bow in The Dagger of Amon Ra” and it was pretty much awesome.
The Dagger of Amon Ra is set in New York City in 1926; you are Laura Bow (yes, it’s supposed to sound like Clara Bow), and you have just graduated from Tulane, moved to the big city, and got a job at a big newspaper. You’re given your first assignment: cover a fete at the local museum for the opening of a new Egyptian exhibit.
You think it’s a Mickey Mouse assignment, that it’s beneath you; you are a young person who thinks rather highly of yourself. But when you arrive at the museum, someone is killed, and the guests are locked inside the museum – everyone is a suspect.
As party guests die, one by one, you must solve all these crimes before the perps escape, or you die too.
I liked this game – a lot. Murder, mystery, intrigue, and an intrepid girl reporter who must solve the crime in a race against death. For a kid who’d spent a summer reading every Agatha Christie paperback in her mother’s arsenal, a female character under 70 was a gift.
But as it turned out, a gift from a wrathful god.
Scene by scene, you collected information and evidence, interacted with other characters and the environment and tried to, well beat the Reaper. It was a much tougher game than I was used to (with the exception of “The Fabulous Wanda and the Secret of Life, the Universe, and Everything“). Somehow, and I’m not sure who suggested it first, I started looking around on Prodigy to see if there were hints on how to get from one scene to the next. Eventually I found a Sierra chat room where people were posting comments and questions about this specific game. It didn’t take long to find some incredibly detailed and useful walk-throughs that helped me get through the level without giving everything away.
So I started printing those puppies out and using them as scripts for my game play. Soon enough, I’d made it through to the end of the game. In fact, the last levels really seemed to fly by, and I felt so successful. I also felt rather crafty – that I’d found some of these ‘cheat codes’ or something that my brother was always talking about. That I was pretty much a hard core gamer.
But then we came to the end, and something happened that I wasn’t expecting.
The game suddenly resembled a routine that was commonplace in our household: my mother would be talking and my dad and his ADHD would drift away. My mother would pause or ask a question and wait for my father to say something; he would say nothing or just murmur a sound of assent. My mother would say, “You weren’t listening.” My dad would say, “Yes, I was.” Mom: “What did I just say?” Dad: <crickets>.
The game would ask you a series of questions, in the form of a police report, to force you to prove you’d actually solved the mystery. I had no idea what the answer to most of those questions were because the walkthroughs skipped a lot of the environment and character interactions, just showing you where the ‘door’ to the next scene was. I figured the questions were a mere formality and that it didn’t matter, because I’d made it out of the museum alive.
But getting the answers wrong means humiliation – the Coroner scolds you, your newspaper fires you and blames the unsolved crime on your bungling as a reporter. The fates of all the characters, many of whom commit suicide over the incident if they weren’t killed in the course of the game play, scroll before you. The final scene is of you, asleep in your one-room apartment; a figure creeps in, approaches your bed, and then pulls out a tommy gun and sprays you with gunfire. You die, a spatter of red pixels on the low-resolution screen.
I remember feeling horrified. I hadn’t just failed at the game, I’d paid the ultimate price for it. This seemed hardly fair – I was only doing what the guy who wrote the walkthroughs said you should do.
I don’t believe I ever returned to the game. I felt that what was done, was done. Laura Bow was dead; and I wasn’t welcome in her world. To this day I am haunted by the image of being gunned down in my sleep, even though I’m no redhead, this isn’t 1926, and I don’t live on the Lower East Side.
Now, when I play, I chase down every lead, inspect every shining object or errant laptop or seemingly unnecessary room.
And this is how I got into trouble again…
I recently began to play Red Dead Redemption. After years of not playing video games, I returned with three versions of Call of Duty (Modern Warfare, Modern Warfare 2, and Call of Duty). After completing them all, and then 007: Blood Stone, I decided to take up RDD.
Much has been written about the sweeping, epic scenery of an imagined American West in RDR; of its expansive story and seemingly infinite game play; of the moral quandaries of a hero with a questionable past. It is beautiful. It can also be lonesome, and even boring, as you ride from one end of the territory to another, for seemingly no reason at all.
After coming from games with clear missions and perspectives as first person shooters, RDR was disorienting. What was I supposed to do? Why did I seem to have so much damn time on my hands? Wasn’t I supposed to get those bad guys that used to be my friends or something? How do you know when you’re winning?
It took me a while to get the hang of riding the horse, of driving the carriage, of shooting old, non-automatic guns in the dark. I’d been skipping ahead, clearly deviating from what was the intended routine – too purpose-driven. I’d been wandering around, hunting down men with bounties on their head, mostly to no effect, and was getting tired. One night, in Armadillo, I wandered up and down the thoroughfare trying to figure out where I might lay my head. I heard a noise out behind a building in a livery yard. I hopped the fence and somehow landed on the back porch of the building.
And this was where things got surreal. Under a wide open night sky, by moonlight, I could see my character atop that horse – I think I’d stolen it early on, and it had eventually grown to trust me enough not to throw me when I needed to get up to a proper gallop. But the horse was doing something I’d never seen it do before – it was running, in place. It was stuck on that porch. I zoomed around madly, trying to find the offending block or trap; there was nothing. I tried to go forward, to back up, to turn; nothing. I dismounted the horse, and to my surprise found this was an option. I walked around the yard trying to find some way to dislodge my horse, still running in place, desperate to be free.
I stood some distance from the horse, watching it go crazy, and then had an epiphany – I’ll whistle. The horse always comes when I whistle. No such luck, the horse just picked up speed, but remained stuck on that porch, her hooves hitting wooden boards, over and over again.
I hopped the fence again and ran out onto the thoroughfare and whistled again. Nothing. I could faintly hear her hoofbeats again, but she never approached. I ran down the road to the empty sherriff’s office and whistled and waited. Nothing, no sound, no horse. I ran back to the livery yard, and as I approached it, I could hear her hoofbeats growing louder. She’d heard me, she wanted to run to me, she just couldn’t get there.
I started to become distraught. The more I stared at this surreal creature, running and snorting in place, stuck on the porch, in the livery yard, within the game, the sadder I got. I counted my money to see if I had enough for a new horse. No. I went back out onto the thoroughfare in hopes of stealing another horse, not having to look at this one anymore, to worry about what would become of it, going mad as it tried to escape. There were no horses around, at least none without drunken owners on or very near them, and I didn’t want to get into a gunfight when technically I already had a horse.
I wandered into the saloon and had a shot of what I figure was whiskey. I hoped I might pass the time, but after a shot or two, I wandered back outside and it was still night. I returned to the livery yard, and there was the horse, still running, still stuck. I walked up to the horse, pulled out my pistol and shot her in the head.
50 honor points were deducted from my profile. My shame had a price on it. And while I felt terrible, especially while I was skinning the horse and cutting out flesh to sell at the general store in hopes of raising enough money to get another horse; I also felt that it was the only humane thing to do. This horse was stuck in video game purgatory. An endless lifetime of running in place, trapped behind a livery, trying to get to the only owner it had every known. This was no life for a virtual horse, no life at all. It was the only thing to do, after all; put that horse down and then put it to productive use. In some respects, I told myself, I’d done right by that horse.
But now I was as stuck as the horse had been. No horse, miles from my rented room; how was I going to get home? I decided to try to raise some cash, and headed back to the saloon and a back room poker game. But I’m no card player, so I had no idea what I was doing most of the time. While I lucked out and didn’t lose all my money, I also didn’t make any. I bowed out of the game and headed back out to the bar.
A seeming miracle had occurred. It was now morning, the sun was up, I had horse meat and skin in my satchel to sell to the owner of the general store. And a drunk had left his horse tied up to the hitching post in front of the saloon, right there in what was now broad daylight. So I liberated that horse, and rode back to my rented room; slightly richer for money, slightly poorer for honor, and now making do with a new horse to whom I vowed not to become too attached.
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