The things that kids want to embrace

[tcepsa]

gipsieee and I recently downloaded the Toki Tori game for the Wii. It's a lot of fun--some really great puzzles in there--but as we were discussing one of the levels that we had gotten to, I was joking about the level design and said, "Why is there lava in a castle?"

Beat.

"Wait, why is there always lava in castles?!"

When I stop and think about it, it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

Except it makes perfect sense and it is sheer genius (or at least sheer dumb luck that in hindsight turns out to have been a really winning combination, but the makers of the Super Mario Bros. series have had too many hits for me to think that they're continuously getting that ridiculously lucky.) It's one of those things that, as a kid in the early days of video games, I got to the first castle at the end of the first world and went, "Holy crap! Those are spinning bars of fire! And that's a giant pit of lava with fireballs shooting out of it!!! Oh my god this is the coolest thing EVER!!!"

I didn't question it, I didn't have to question it; it was a videogame! And as Nintendo had just proven to my young mind, anything was possible--because if you can put lava in a castle, there is clearly absolutely nothing that you can't do.

Now I know I'm kind of out there with some things, but this is one thing about which I am sure I was not alone. And that, of course, is what sells videogames. After that, a bar had been set. You want to do better than Mario? You're going to have to top spinning firebars, lakes of lava with globs of burning lava shooting out of them, and, oh yeah, a fire breathing dragon at the end that will kill you if you so much as touch him. (Sometimes you just had to get close enough without even touching him, and his sheer ferocity would overwhelm the poor plumber...*)

So yeah, nowhere in this world's history will you actually find a castle that had lava as either part of its temperature control system or its invader control system, but that's part of what makes it so awesome as a component of a video game; it's a bending of reality in a way that lots of people think is fun to imagine and that lots of people love pretending to experience. And that's what videogames are all about. (At least the good ones ^_^)

*Stupid bounding box errors...

Comments

[reedrover]

::smile:: I like this post. It makes me happy. I hope you don't mind: I'm sharing the link out to some friends.

[tcepsa.livejournal.com]

I don't mind at all ^_^

[wetdryvac.livejournal.com]

Once upon a time, deep in the dark basements of Morowgath, a crack developed. Thick squares of granite floated up on the slightly heavier molten material, and the odor of rotten eggs gradually crept through the entire castle.

"Jason, would you go down below and see what all this stink is about? Oh, and check on the political prisoners while you're down there."

Jason went down, but failed to return.

"Rachel? Oi, Rachel, when you're done with that embroidered wren, would you go take a quick peek to see if the political prisoners got ahold of Jason?" *pause* "Oh, and see what's making that horrific stench, would you?"

Rachel went down, and having learned the fine art of embroidery, wove herself a magical cloak which allowed her to not catch fire.

In the dungeon, she found many political prisoners crying into their heavily scented gruel, and noted that the gruel and sulphur actually went together rather well from a dystopian prison building perspective.

After much adventuring she finally found Jason locked in a small re-solidified stone chamber hiding under his bag of eternal food giving, covered in cool pudding to combat the heat and fending off rats with coconuts.

Combining their forces and leveling up through the fine art of threaded foodstuffs, they ventured on, befriended the freshly hatched and incredibly hungry dragon with a hankering for cleverly stuffed pasta, explained to it the fine art of chimney digging, and went home, each in a size larger clothing than they'd had before.

The political prisoners, now quite looped on the fumes, were set free with a new moral imperative they didn't completely understand and a fresh coat of pudding. Mmm, vanilla pudding.

[tcepsa.livejournal.com]

...

So, side-scrolling platform-jumping puzzle-solver?

(The great thing here is that I can't tell whether that's the synopsis of an actual game that I've just never played, the synopsis of an actual game that you've tweaked a bit to protect the accused, or a synopsis that you just made up on the spot. Or whether you just grabbed the nearest completed Madlib that you could find. All seem approximately equally likely ^_^)

Edit: It's Rainbow Islands, but different!

[wetdryvac.livejournal.com]

Made up from whole cloth. I was thinking in terms of 3/4 perspective RPG, ala Twinsen's Little Big Adventure.