Dreamcast Worlds:

a design history

Zoya Street

rupazero

rupazero

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. I would be delighted if you were to share it with a friend, but please don’t copy it without attribution, and don’t sell it without my permission. For more information you should consult the full text of the license by visiting:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/

All illustrations and images remain the property of their copyright holders.

Acknowledgements

This book would not exist without two main groups of people: first, my supervisors, teachers and fellow students at the Royal College of Art and Victoria & Albert Museum; and then, of course, the incredible individuals who kindly supported my crowd-funding campaign on indiegogo.

In the first group, I would like to particularly thank my supervisors Christine Guth, Nicolette Makovicky and Sarah Teasley, and the head of department Jane Pavitt. They are all phenomenal people and committed educators, who provided unparalleled insight and guidance with patience and understanding.

As for my kind and generous supporters on indiegogo, who had faith in my work even when I was losing hope; every last one of you is a marvel. I have promised to specifically name the following people, who contributed at least $150 each, and I’ve taken the liberty of bragging about how amazing they are:

Austin Buchan

Researcher into biomimetic millisystems

Tom Cleaver

Media and human rights lawyer

Alex Fleetwood

Director of Bafta award-winning art games studio Hide & Seek

Brian Kwek

Game producer and co-founder of Witching Hour Studios

Mathias Nordvall

Innovator in haptic interfaces for digital games

Drew Onia

Prolific writer on all things Sega

Rory Starks

User interface designer

Robert Matthew

Engineer of robotic exoskeletons, and the person I love.

Illustrations

I have been extremely fortunate to benefit from donations of work from three extremely talented individuals:

Laura Moat

Graphic designer

laura.rupazero.com

Diagrams in ‘The Dreamcast: Networked’

Daniel Boczarski

Photographer

www.boczarski.com

Yokosuka images in ‘Shenmue’

Martin Houlden

Concept artist

www.martinhoulden.com

Cover image and game vignettes

Contents

Introduction

Design History

The games studied

Motivations

The Dreamcast: networked

Sega

The Dreamcast

Professional networks

Direction

Communication with Fans

Skilling

GD-ROMS

Development tools

The Camera

Where are we now?

Skies of Arcadia

Pushing frontiers

Pirate Isle

Elements and materials

Three-dimensionality

Pyuramis Shrine and Daccat’s Island

Circulation

Mazes and labyrinths

The Sky

Explorative architecture

Spatial challenges

Controlling ships

Challenge space

Towns

Magic space

Silver Shrine

The Nostalgia Cascade

Dreamcast games and Paris

What is game space made of?

Polygons

Dimensionality

Screenness

Graphical interface

So much for the tech

Drifting in Space

Game space as theme park

Human computer interaction

Phantasy Star Online

Siting online gaming

Oral history

Multi-sited play

PVE and PVP

Trees and Rhizomes

Character creation

Lobby

Dungeons

The test of time

Genre

Sword and Sorcery

Geography

Open-world game design

Remembering Shenmue

Shenmue

Expanding outward

Opening world

Conflicting myths

Time

The Japanese home

Clutter

Does Ryo feel at home?

Nostalgia

Emotions

Adulthood

Conclusion

Appendix A: Theorising Game Spaces

Play and Games

Game design as spatiality

Game space as map

Reading spaces

Heterotopia

Narrative and architecture

Appendix B: Actor-Network Theory

Notes

Bibliography

Gameography

Primary sources

Secondary sources

List of illustrations

1 Pirate Isle in Skies of Arcadia, ©Sega 2000

2 Watercolour of H.M.S. Agamemnon by Robert Dudley, lithograph copy from p.28 of The Atlantic Telegraph by W.H. Russell, 1865

3 Skyrim joke image

4 Train in Skies of Arcadia, ©Sega 2000

5 Train in Final Fantasy VII, ©Square 1997

6 View of Nasrad in Skies of Arcadia, ©Sega 2000

7 Trademeet in Baldur’s Gate II, ©Bioware 2000

8 Unusual gravity and planet on the silver shrine in Skies of Arcadia, ©Sega 2000

9 From 2001: a space odyssey, ©MGM 1968

10 Sleeping pod on the silver shrine in Skies of Arcadia, ©Sega 2000

11 Sleeping pods and unusual gravity on board the Discovery in 2001: a space odyssey, ©MGM 1968

12 The Naked City, Guy Debord 1957

13 Grocers in Shenmue ©Sega 2000

14 Daniel Boczarski

15 Jacket store in Shenmue ©Sega 2000

16 Daniel Boczarski

Introduction

During my undergraduate degree, I spent a year interning in a museum in Japan. I wanted to become a curator, and I thought that the year’s work experience would make me a competitive candidate in the arts jobs market. This little museum was my training ground, where I had to navigate Japanese culture, workplace culture, and the challenges of the museum world, all at the same time. So what did I do for the first three months? I quietly sat at my desk and translated documents that nobody would ever use. I’m not a natural networker.

The documents were a hefty set of guidance materials to go along with the museum’s permanent exhibition of swords, armour, religious statues and other artefacts gathered from the local area. This odd little building in the shape of a castle took the title ‘Folk Museum’ in English, but its Japanese title ‘kyoudo hakubutsukan’ better describes its role as a storehouse for the local history and culture of the city and its environs. Every object on display came from nearby, many of them were donated by the public, and they all had their own story. I was fascinated by them. How did they get here? How did they survive hundreds of years of earthquakes and fires? Why were they made the way they were?

Sadly, the document I was translating didn’t tell that story. It was a long and winding account of battles and political wranglings between samurai that explained how one clan rose to primacy in the area. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, and I’m not going to claim that politics and power play are irrelevant to history. But to me, that document didn’t say all that much about the swords, armour and statues on display. It didn’t answer the questions that the objects seemed to pose. It wasn’t a fitting testament to their preserved existence in this strange little institution.

Years later, mid-way through my Master’s degree at the Victoria and Albert Museum, I made an intellectual and career u-turn and decided to focus on pixels instead of pottery. Yet even as a historian of video games, I found myself asking the same questions. The few histories of video games that exist focus on leading figures, business decisions and battles between consoles. Surely history isn’t just about powerful men fighting for dominance? Don’t the objects that survive history have their own stories to tell?

Design History

Every historian brings to their work their own peculiar set of interests, and that affects the kind of history they tell. So far, video game histories have mostly been told by people who are either interested in how successful businesspeople operate, or who have a strong interest in the history of technology.

Business journalist Reiji Asakura’s history of the Sony PlayStation games console is a case in point. Following the career of Ken Kutaragi, heroically labelled the ‘father of the PlayStation’, Asakura traces a series of technological developments and dramatic business meetings, focusing on commercial strategy, invention and competition for market dominance.[1] The consumer experience and cultural significance of computer gaming are black-boxed as ‘market forces’. In the end, the success of Sony’s PlayStation is put down to Kutaragi’s tenacity, business sense and technical genius, with no attention given to consumer tastes, social factors or the design of successful game software.

Journalist Martin Campbell-Kelly wrote a history of computer software, but even his chapter on digital games[2] eschews any study of game design and instead focuses on the production and sales figures of progressively more technologically-advanced game hardware. On top of that, he remarks:

‘That videogames are based on software is a secondary and somewhat parochial issue relative to the creative processes by which hit games are generated’.[3]

For Campbell-Kelly, like Asakura, the content of games is a minor issue compared to business practice and technological progress.

Even writers who have a clear interest in the design of video games themselves still rely on hardware to organise their stories when giving a historical backdrop to their work. Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron’s introduction to The Video Game Theory Reader[4] gives a history of video games up to 2003, focusing like Campbell-Kelly on technological innovation. Digital Games history is presented as a progression from arcades to the home console, from cartridges to CD-ROMS, from 2D low-resolution graphics to highly detailed polygons and texture maps. Any historical change relating to game design is implied to have occurred as a result of technological innovation.

While a text targeted at game designers in training and their educators does not have to feature a thorough or robust history, there is still a lot to be said for passing on histories that reveal a broader range of agencies at work in design change. Surely it should be part of building citizenship as a member of the games industry, to understand the role of both human and non-human agencies in games history thus far? The way we see the past determines how we try to change the future, and if we go on implying that game design change was guided only by technological advancement, that leaves us with a rather depressing image of the work of game designers themselves.

Other writers have attempted to give a socio-cultural account of digital game history from the point of view of consumers and players, most notably in the internationally touring exhibition ‘Game on’.[5] However, these have stopped short of any in-depth study of the relationship between computer games and wider cultural changes, and have failed to question existing assumptions and clichés, such as the idea that computer games are designed only for a male audience[6] or the notion that Japanese games are successful because of some unique Japanese creative spirit[7]. These accounts tend towards social determinism - game design is bound to be masculine because game designers have usually been male, and Japanese games are bound to be interesting because of some unique Japanese aesthetic sensibility.

Many parts of the network of production and consumption of digital games have been ignored by stories of technological innovation and business enterprise. What about the teams of people who make games? How are their skills developed? How are games made and sold? What about the tools of game creation? And how do we account for the role of the console beyond giving it undue credit for human design decisions about 3D graphics? Stories about heroes and tech trees are easy to follow and fun to read, but they leave a lot of interesting questions unanswered - and they don’t really describe the video games that are supposedly at the centre of the story.

My hope is that by describing networks, rather than focusing on heroes or technological progress, I can find a way to tell a design history of video games themselves. I’m going to anchor this in video games as virtual spaces, and look at who and what made those spaces what they are. This thesis is not only a design history of the Skies of Arcadia,[8] Shenmue[9] and Phantasy Star Online[10] game worlds’ design, but also an experiment to find out what it means to write video game design history.

The games studied

All three of the games that I focus on share a common origin. They were all made in game studios under the Sega umbrella, following a call from the higher-ups for more role-playing games (RPGs) to be made for the Dreamcast. Other than that, they share very little in common.

Skies of Arcadia is the closest to what one might call a traditional Japanese RPG (JRPG), so it is the first game that I examine. It is an emotionally poignant story told through a series of events in a large, diverse world. The mechanics rest on probabilistic battles and optimising character stats. Aside from the on-screen player-character that is teleoperated through the town and dungeon maps of the game, there is also a party of other characters that join the adventure and assist in battles.

Phantasy Star Online was the first massively multiplayer online RPG (MMORPG) to be made for a console. It was a step ahead of other console RPGs in terms of facilitating social interactions through the internet, and it was a steap ahead of other MMORPGs in its brightly coloured, three-dimensional graphics. While the chapter on Skies of Arcadia is a conventional documentary history based on design analysis, interviews and contemporary reviews of the game, the chapter on Phantasy Star Online focuses on oral history interviews, to reconstruct what the game’s spaces felt like when the servers first went online.

Shenmue is more often thought of as an action adventure game, but I will show that Suzuki and his team at AM2 certainly saw it as an RPG — albeit one with a difference. Shenmue was intended as an epic seven-part series that would scale gaming narrative up to cinematic proportions. Instead, the project was first scaled back — part 2 was skipped altogether, and parts 2 and 3 were compressed into a single game — and then abandoned altogether, with no further games produced after the second edition. This book will focus on the first game, which is set in the Japanese city of Yokosuka in the years 1986 to 1987.

Motivations

This book focuses on an interesting point in Japanese computer game history. A new ‘generation’ of video game consoles was in its infancy, and much speculation in the industry surrounded how networked gaming and large, open, three-dimensional game worlds would change game design in the years ahead. Design innovations from this period continue to significantly influence the basic features of what video games are today and what they will be in the future.

Gamers and developers are nostagic for this time, but this nostalgia hasn’t just arisen in retrospect. Console gaming already had a heritage and tradition to draw upon by the late 1990s, and many games were being designed with a nostalgic gaze. This book is not a nostalgic history. In some ways, it is a history of nostalgia.

At the end of my Master’s degree, when I was writing up my dissertation, a major challenge I had to overcome was bridging culture gaps. Ordinarily, Japanologists grapple with this because they are describing and analysing a foreign culture to an English-speaking audience that is, for the most part, not Japanese. My problem was a little different. I had to explain video games to art historians and anthropologists who had little experience of them. It’s easy to take so much for granted that is completely foreign to non-gamers, or even gamers who aren’t into RPGs; right from the start, when presenting my work in progress, I had to explain what it’s like to interact with the game, how the basic mechanics for movement and battles function, what players can and cannot do. It was only from there that I could then start to do the interesting work of complicating the assumptions that gamers have about video game design, to create challenging and critical historical analysis.

On top of this, I had to deal with a knowledge gap about how games are actually made. Most work in Design History is concerned with linking our reading of objects to the processes and networks that led to their existence, consumption and preservation. No historian of ceramics would go about their research without a decent understanding of what’s involved in firing clay, sourcing glazes, running a workshop and selling your wares. For a historian, this is just as important as artistic intent, design motifs and categories of style. Historians haven’t really studied game development in quite that way; a lot of people who write about video games work within the field of digital game studies, or are writing for an audience of game developers, so they might take this knowledge for granted.

As a result, I have to do this research myself; conducting interviews with developers, visiting studios, taking supplemental courses in computer science, as well as combing through user reviews for interesting points about human computer interaction and design breakdowns. It’s impossible, when you see the world as a network, to cover everything that might be relevant, but I have tried to write the most comprehensive account I can of how humans, computers and institutions interacted to create the games industry in the late 1990s, with particular focus on Sega and other Japanese developers making RPGs. The advantage of having built my approach to video games from the ground-up is that it’s very thorough; I sought out every relevant theory I could, blended them with descriptions of video game space, and explored how they intersect and overlap. The down-side is that my work covers ground that might seem obvious to gamers. But it’s the notions that seem obvious are always the most fun to turn on their heads.

The Dreamcast: networked

Sega

Sega was founded in 1964, from a merger between Service games and Rosen Enterprises, two companies making and distributing coin-operated machines in Japan. Both companies were run by Americans who had started their businesses in Hawaii and Tokyo during and shortly after the Second World War, importing machines made in the US to military bases in Japan during the occupation. The resources gained in the merger allowed Sega to transition from an import business to manufacturing their own machines. In 1969 Sega was acquired by the American mass media giant that would later be known as Viacom. In the 1970s they began to make machines that ran on microprocessors, reflecting a wider shift in the arcade machine industry, and they acquired San Diego-based Gremlin Industries to develop and manufacture them. The company grew rapidly as part of the arcade industry boom in the 1970s.

On Friday 15th July in 1983 Sega and Nintendo both simultaneously entered the home console market, amid trouble in the arcade machine industry. Nintendo released the Famicom, and Sega the SG-1000. The Famicom dominated the market, but these early years gave Sega’s in-house game developers practice making well-received game software in spite of the limitations of the console. In 1984, Sega was bought out by Japanese conglomerate CSK, who connected Sega to a family of companies that would influence their success for the next fifteen years.

Sega was unable to eat into Nintendo’s market share until the summer of 1991, when they released the Mega Drive ahead of Nintendo’s next console offering. The new hardware was made to look particularly impressive with the Sonic the Hedgehog software, a visually spectacular game with a fast tempo not matched by Nintendo’s Super Mario. Packaging the Sonic game with the machine gave players the impression of a fast, powerful piece of technology capable of feats unimaginable on a Nintendo machine. Sonic games and the Mega Drive sold superbly, and Nintendo lost its lead in the console market.

Sega didn’t maintain their lead in the market for long. The Saturn, released in 1995, was meant to compete with the 1994 Playstation, but it was expensive to produce, difficult to develop games for, and had no clear selling point. In 1997 Bernie Stolar, who had previously worked for Sony, joined the hardware division and announced the end of the Sega Saturn. Software teams who had been working on projects destined for the Saturn were to produce games and tools for a new piece of hardware. Work began on Sega’s next device, and two competing teams were formed; one in Japan, the other in the US. Each team developed a separate device, and only one would be selected by Sega as the basis for development on what would become the Dreamcast, released in November 1998.[11]

The Japanese team won, and the internal rivalry following this may have led to long-term rifts. There was an atmosphere at Sega of America of frustration: their work was not appreciated as much as it ought to be, because Sega of Japan always took precedence.[12] This culminated in the flight of members of the American team such as Stolar himself. Although the Dreamcast, expected to heal the wounds left by the failure of the Saturn, was to be abandoned in 2001 as a disappointment, the same hardware used in the Dreamcast was also used in the Naomi, one of the most popular pieces of arcade hardware ever.

To make the Dreamcast and Naomi an easier and cheaper platform for third party games development - in other words, to gain the network power not won by the Saturn - Sega collaborated with Microsoft to bring Windows CE to the device. This introduced Direct X and C++ support, both of which would be familiar to developers making games for the growing PC market. In addition, Microsoft brought their online platform Web TV to the Dreamcast, allowing online gaming and ‘interactive TV’.[13]

The network features of the Dreamcast were almost like a prototype for XBOX live - it had leaderboards, it tracked which games its users were playing to make recommendations to other users, and it allowed multiplayer online.[14] It seems likely that this early experience in networked gaming helped Microsoft to develop their XBOX, which became infamous for its committed and competitive online gaming community.

The late 1990s were challenging for all players in the electronics industry. In January-March 1999 Sony operated at a loss due to a slump in the electronics market, although video games remained a ‘bright spot’ on its report with 22 million Playstation unit shipped in the 1998 fiscal year.[15] Nintendo was also suffering as a result of the high valuation of the yen.[16] Sega was the smallest of the three big players in the games console market, with a 17.1% market share in Japan by 1999.[17] The games industry had a poor reputation for unpredictable results, partly as a result of the industry still working out how to manage its financials, as Nicholas Lovell explained in an interview:

Simple things like when you do R&D for a project that is going to last for two years, do you dispense that R&D immediately, which depresses your profits, or do you capitalize it as an asset and only expense it when you release the game. You say we’ll only take the cost of developing this when the product’s released. If you cancel a product, then there’s this massive sudden drop in your numbers. We saw a lot of companies doing that thing of suddenly announcing terrible losses, which were just ordinary course of business of cancelling projects that weren’t going anywhere.[18]

The years 1998-2002 saw significant financial trouble for Sega, closely connected to the failed launch of the Dreamcast in Japan. This was mitigated by a more succesful launch in the US, and an announcement in 1999 that they would start making games for other consoles[19] - in 2002 Skies of Arcadia was ported to the Game Cube.

By 2001, Sega had announced to the press that it would no longer make the Dreamcast, and would focus on its new role as a third-party software developer for other consoles. But in fact, the upper echelons of Sega had already decided to drop the Dreamcast even before it launched in the US. When long-term investment in an eighteen-month-long PR campaign paid off in the form of one of the most successful console launches of all time, this made no difference the decision of Sega’s Japan-focused leadership, who had already decided — at least in part on the basis of its failed launch in Japan — that Sega had no future in console development.[20]

The networked power of console development relied in part on the creation of a positive cycle between hardware and software. If the software was desirable, gamers would buy the hardware. If the hardware was promising and sold enough copies, talented and well-reputed developers would buy the development kit and license and make good games for the console. To drive this cycle, Sega would call upon its in-house game designers to make games that took maximum advantage of particular hardware features. The main point of this would be to demonstrate to third-party developers that the console was a viable platform.

The first games to come out for a new platform don’t push the hardware; they are either safe or where they are edgy, they have rough edges. Until you’ve got programers who have been using the [console] for a while and giving you feedback, it’s a tough time. [...] The real objective I would have thought would be to persuade other people to emulate this thing, because it works so well. A large amount of what initial console launch product is, is to show third party, from first parties, is to show third party devs what the platform can do.[21]

Unfortunately, third-party developers were often unenthusiastic about the Dreamcast, because of Sony’s ambitious promises and hints about the forthcoming Playstation 2. This put more pressure on Sega to produce games that would not just demonstrate the console to third-parties, but would sell the console to players; normally the role of high-budget, third-party game titles.

One factor in Sega’s financial problems during the late 1990s was the soaring development costs for in-house games, particularly Shenmue, a game which faced long delays in the development process, subsequently cost a considerable amount of money to make, and eventually sold only about one million copies. In 1999 the software and arcade sections of Sega were spun off to work as semi-independent companies, in order to increase competition and thereby improve efficiency.[22]

In 2007, Stolar recalled that a considerable factor in his split from Sega and the failure of the Dreamcast as a console was a lack of commitment to hardware. He agreed with Sega’s policy that software should drive hardware, but without commitment to marketing the hardware Sega’s position as a first-party developer was doomed to failure.[23] I would argue instead that it had more to do with Sega’s inability to deal skilfully with external connections, such as infrastructure, branding and partnerships with other companies such as Microsoft.

The Dreamcast

You can’t talk about consoles without mentioning the notion of ‘generations,’ and in 1999 there was a strong awareness in all areas of the games industry that a new console generation was on the way. As different hardware companies attempted to release consoles that could compete technologically, several consoles were usually released within a couple of years of each other with comparable hardware specifications. To refer to these waves of console releases as ‘generations’ is somewhat deterministic, as it implies that evolution and renewal are natural, constant processes necessary for survival. It is a determinism that benefits sales by condemning older consoles to irrelevance. It is a discourse that supports and reflects the strategy of planned obsolescence. It also excludes hand-held consoles and gaming on personal computers. I think that the frame of reference in the term ‘generation’ is too narrow to be of any use to a historian, and determinisms like this should always be opened to questioning.

It also raises odd questions from a networked point of view - who is ‘generating’ the console? When describing the design features, flaws and discourse of the Dreamcast, I am going to refer to Sega as if it were a stable entity, but I want to note that interviews with people who worked for Sega complicate this assumption. Game developer Shuntaro Tanaka referred to Sega as if it were external to himself, ‘information about the Dreamcast came from Sega’, while Tom Szirtes, who developed libraries and tools for Dreamcast development, also spoke about the Dreamcast as an external thing that he was developing for. As mentioned above, Sega as an international company was divided over the design of the Dreamcast. In addition, the naming, branding and publicity of the Dreamcast were dealt with by at least one and possibly more third-party PR firms,[24] so to say that the console came from Sega masks levels of complexity that are really quite interesting.

Instead of just accepting that Sega had to spew progeny into a pre-scheduled ‘console generation,’ consider this: the imperative to create a new console came from somewhere in the network, perhaps outside of Sega, and then proliferated out through corporate channels to reach in-house and third-party developers, and along the way the idea of ‘Dreamcast’ took on meaning from all the people and technologies involved in its creation. Imagine Katamari Damacy, but instead of being rolled along by a heroic auteur, the Dreamcast began at the top of a hill somewhere, was given a push by someone in the right place at the right time, and it rolled downhill from there.

While leaving open to question the idea of ‘generations’, I want to point out that the idea held strong sway among game developers and fans, both of whom held great stock in being up-to-date on the state of the art, and the agency of generations has strong sway in the construction of consoles. The idea that a console generation was due soon was one of the forces that was making that katamari roll down the hill. The Dreamcast is considered the first console of its generation to be released, because of its networking capabilities and graphics processor.

Japanese game developers in training reading Konpyuuta Geemu no Tekunorojii (Computer Game Technologies), one of the few textbooks on the topic available in 1999, would have found three pages devoted to an explanation of the Playstation’s hardware, half a page for the Nintendo 64, a few lines each given to the Dreamcast and PCs and a further two pages given to the as-yet unreleased Playstation 2. The Playstation 2 was treated as the next-generation console par excellence long before its release date, and the Dreamcast was given relatively little attention.[25] Sega had suffered a similar problem in the late 1980s, when its technologically-advanced Sega Master System failed to gain market share from Nintendo, who dominated home games consoles at the time.

One factor contributing to the perception of the Dreamcast as a relatively insignificant technological offering was its appearance. Its form was very similar to the 1994 Playstation, with a square, greyish body and a disc drive accessed under a sprung, circular door opened by a release catch. Sony left this form far behind with their Playstation 2, a sleek, tall, black structure with a disc drawer that slid out with electronic motors activated with a digital switch. This simple shift in the operation of the disc drawer demonstrated technological advancement, and allowed the Playstation 2 to be conveniently stacked among other entertainment appliances under the television.

The choice of colour for the Dreamcast was also behind the trend, as consumer electronics followed the lead set by the Sony Vaio in 1998 by phasing out beige and grey and releasing instead in black. The packaging for Dreamcast accessories was perhaps more appealing, in simple white - also a trending colour[26] - with details in orange or teal, depending on whether they were intended for PAL or NTSC devices.[27] However, the packaging was uncommunicative of the device’s function.

Although the discourse of console generations implies that the most important competitive feature of consoles is their standing as state of the art technologies, the relative success of the Playstation 2 compared to the Dreamcast might complicate this. The Playstation 2 lacked a built-in modem, although one could be bought separately to allow networked gaming, while the Dreamcast’s internet connectivity was seen as a major selling point, particularly at this time during the dot com boom when all brands were being told by investors to get online or risk irrelevance. Even though the powerful Sony brand was closely associated with the state of the art, this example shows that in fact Sony and Sega both made strategic decisions on where to invest in advanced hardware and where to economise to limit the price point of their products. In addition, Sega was a much smaller company than Sony, who possessed massive financial welt, and was better able to survive the damage caused by the economic slump in the electronics sector and the high price of the Yen.

Rather than hurry to compete early on internet interface devices, Sony invested in building the infrastructure needed to enable high-speed internet access in the future. When Sony restructured in March 1999, they established a unit for Digital Network Solutions, declaring an intention to ‘invest aggressively in research and development, capital equipment and facilities.’[28] Meanwhile, Sega focused on demonstrating the utility of its net-enabled console through alternative distribution channels. By enrolling students in lessons on how to navigate the internet[29] and giving 3,000 Dreamcasts away for free to schools[30] Sega hoped to demonstrate that the Dreamcast was not just a games console, but an access point for the growing online information network, with which Japanese children would have to be familiar if they were to keep up with the USA and Europe.[31] They also developed links with Internet Service Providers (ISPs); Vice President Sadahiko Hirose was moved in 1999 from Sega to ‘At Home Japan,’ an ISP also owned by CSK. They also forged business links with BT and AT&T, to arrange subscription plans for the Dreamcast’s release in the USA and Europe.[32]

At this point, internet connections were still slow. In Japan, internet access was still charged as a local call, for which users had to pay by the minute.[33] Although brands were under pressure to have a web presence, the monetisation of the internet was still embryonic, with banner advertising and e-commerce still much-hyped ideas that were yet to be successfully implemented. When one online merchant made ten sales a month, this made front-page news in the Nikkei Weekly.[34] ISPs were a profitable industry, but by 1999 not enough Dreamcast owners were making use of internet connectivity for Sega to profit as an ISP.[35] This gave Sega few options for capitalising on the Dreamcast as an access point for the internet, so they were left competing with Sony on a technological level and on player engagement.

Technologically, the Dreamcast was in some ways more advanced than the Playstation, but the very areas where Sega had economised, such as using off-the-shelf components, were the areas that Sony was able to brag about for its Playstation 2, which used highly advanced processing chips developed exclusively with Toshiba. This cross-industry cooperation in technological innovation played well with Sony’s brand image, making the forthcoming PS2 a towering presence long before its release. By the time Sony did enter the networked-gaming scene, they had ensured that there was sufficient access to high-speed internet to support a large audience of paying subscribers.

Nevertheless, the Dreamcast’s unique built-in modem and powerful graphics card lent themselves to the creative ambitions of game designers who were keen to advance online networked gaming and 3D open-world game formats. Its Windows CE compatibility and off-the-shelf components made it relatively easy to develop games for the console. Developments in game design for the Dreamcast would come to define trends years after it was discontinued by Sega. The first game to feature 3D cel-shaded animation, some of the first ‘full 3D’ game-worlds, and the first console networked games, were all created for the Dreamcast. Yet Sega’s marketing efforts failed to overpower the hype surrounding the anticipated Playstation 2, particularly in Japan, where the Playstation 2 was released earlier than America or Europe. The Dreamcast never saw comparable unit sales, and attracted few third-party software developers.

The Dreamcast benefitted immensely from a large catalogue of critically acclaimed and popular games when it was released in the US in February 1999.[36] In contrast to the frustrated marketing efforts of the Japanese release, which was overshadowed by the prospect of the PlayStation 2, Bernie Stolar’s presentation at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco showed off the Dreamcast as the home for many already well-received games, such as Shenmue and Sega Sports.[37] Throughout the console’s life many games were released that were originally designed for the arcade machine Naomi, which was built on almost identical hardware.

Another competitive edge that the Playstation 2 had over the Dreamcast was its backwards compatibility - it could read CD-ROMs as well as DVDs and could play games intended for the first Playstation. Giles Slade discusses backwards compatibility in his book Made to Break with the example of the 1964 IBM System/360 line of mainframe computers, which made use of microprogramming in order to ‘emulate’ obsolete computer models, allowing customers to buy a new device while still being able to use their old software.[38]

I think of planned obsolescence as two related discourses. In the first, obsolescence occurs naturally, such as in our genealogical metaphor for console upgrades. In the second, obsolescence happens as a result of user purchases - replacing old hardware with new might make prior investments in software go to waste. The first discourse supports an idea that you have to buy the most up-to-date device, so as not to become obsolete, while the second suggests that you should hold off on buying the latest hardware because it will make your software investments obsolete. Backwards compatibility supports the first type of planned obsolescence while eliminating the second, making it a very powerful marketing tool to encourage further consumption. The Dreamcast lacked backwards compatibility, making it even harder for consumers to be convinced to purchase it rather than saving their money for the anticipated Playstation 2, which would already be able to play many of their favourite Playstation games.

The Dreamcast is an interesting case, as it shows that the significance of technologies lie not merely in their nuts and bolts functions but also in the social and economic forces that surround them. Its relative failure compared to the Playstation 2 was partly due to the extraordinary attention given to Sony in the late 1990s. As a result, Dreamcast games that received glowing critical responses regularly sold very few copies compared to Playstation 2 games that received similar praise. Skies of Arcadia could be compared here with Final Fantasy IX - both received 9/10 stars from well-respected critical publications such as IGN, but while the latter sold over 2 million copies in its first week,[39] Skies of Arcadia sold only 46,000.[40]

The unique technological features of the Dreamcast were significant, because they permitted it to become the platform for some of the first networked console games, such as MMORPG Phantasy Star Online, the first open-world games, such as f, and Skies of Arcadia, one of the first game-worlds to be made as a fully three-dimensional setting. But these software advances were almost entirely made in the context of Sega’s in-house games development - it wasn’t just the hardware that was responsible, but business decisions too.

The significance of these games is not just a function of their console generation. In fact, the success of a console, and our memory of it, relied on its games. As software technology, as game design solutions, and as virtual architectural statements, these three games stand out in the design history of video games. Their inception, creation and reception all relied on other aspects of the network - the game developers, the players, and their design as immersive experiences in virtual worlds.

Professional networks

Direction

The director is a key person in charge of a game development team. Directors are responsible for giving games a coherent shape and scope, and gives feedback to leaders of smaller teams of designers, programmers, engineers etc. Beyond this, the role of a director is shaped by the individual. In 2000, Yasumi Matsuno,[41] Director for Square Enix’s Vagrant’s Story, defined himself as ‘not a creator, but fundamentally a businessperson, more like a salaryman.’ He saw his role as a leader and manager, who uses his own understanding of the market to determine the direction of games projects. The creative work was carried out by people who work under him.[42]

Yu Suzuki, the director of Shenmue, is probably one of the more stark counterpoints to this. He is famously and widely credited as a visionary and creative leader in Shenmue, passionately spending time and money pursuing artistic goals, at the expense of the game’s profitability. A celebrated heroic designer, IGN ranked him 9th in its ‘top 100 game creators’ in 2012[43]. Originally trained as a computer scientist, he joined Sega in 1983. His reputation for creative vision was first cemented by Virtua Fighter, an arcade game released in 1993 that was the first of its kind to use fully polygon 3D graphics. This achievement is rumoured to have been recognised by the Smithsonian in 1998.

As a game creator, Suzuki does deserve serious artistic attention - his deep interest in the creative process was showcased at the Game Developer’s Conference in 2000, when he discussed the making of Shenmue, which had not yet been released in English.

“I have spoken to many different types of game developers, but I have never met anybody who makes games the way I do [...] for example, I think it’s very important to watch movies, or look at the sky and the sunset. I would like to keep making games this way.”

He went on to describe, with video footage, the development process for Shenmue from beginning to end, explaining that before any drawings, storylines or design documents were created he made sure that they first had a soundtrack for the game - using that soundtrack, he asked his team to be creative and let their imaginations lead the way. However, the project came back to his own authorial leadership after the concept art had been made, with a ‘general direction’ book distributed under a code name. This is not simply a ‘design document’, which was a standard stage in game development. The ‘general direction’ contained a specific snippets of dialogue as well as event trees and descriptions of the game’s locations.[44]

Suzuki’s role as an artistic creative type is perhaps best signified by his 2012 request to obtain the a license for Shenmue from Sega, so that he could make further iterations in the series independently.[45] He has hinted at the plot points he intends to pursue in further sequels, indicating that his desire to make more Shenmue games is creatively motivated. Meanwhile Sega executives are hesitant about the commercial opportunity represented by Shenmue sequels - “We take all of that very seriously,” said Sega of America’s Mike Hayes, “but at the same time we’ve got to look at the market opportunity and the cost of doing it well.”[46] This indicates that for Yu Suzuki, business decisions were to be made by publishers, if they factored into game production at all - the opposite of Square’s Matsuno, he is a creator and not a businessman.

Shuntaro Tanaka was Director on Skies of Arcadia. His own sense of direction in the project seems to have come from two main sources: firstly, his communication with his seniors in the company and the hardware division of Sega; and secondly, his perception of what the target demographic would enjoy based on existing cultural products. One case where direction came from above was in recognising the importance of the game as a product that would demonstrate the Dreamcast’s hardware capabilities. Tanaka heard from the hardware division that the Dreamcast would provide unprecedented graphics processing power, and that Sega’s consoles needed a large-scale RPG to rival Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest, both of which ran on Sony’s Playstation. RPGs were by 1999 perceived to be a very profitable genre, which the Nikkei Weekly conjectured, ‘could revive the games industry’ off the back of the 17.88 million units of Final Fantasy games shipped by Square by the time Final Fantasy VIII was released.[47]

On world design (sekaikan) Tanaka’s direction came from other cultural products that were held in high esteem, such as the anime films of Hayao Miyazaki. This quotation of familiar images and products was well-received by fans.

When I was a child, big warships and the Metal Max Series[48] left a deep impression on me. If you liked this sort of thing too, you’d enjoy this game.[49]

It’s so satisfying to be excited by an RPG again.[50]

The Skies of Arcadia development team was structured as a heirarchical pyramid, with Director Tanaka at the top, reporting to Producer Rieko Kodama and the upper echelons of Sega - these were referred to in our interview simply as ‘Sega’, effectively black-boxing them into an almost non-human structural entity. Below Tanaka were team heads, such as Main Designer Toshiyuki Mukaiyama. Each team leader was in charge of further, smaller teams, such as battle scripting, map design, and sound engineers. According to Tanaka, he gave direction from the top, which was passed on through team leaders to the smaller teams at the bottom. Their work was checked by their team leaders, who in turn reported back up the pyramid to Tanaka, who would give criticism and request changes based on his own sense of the creative direction of the project and his communication with Sega.

This pyramid structure was to some extent replicated at Sega Europe - despite the small size of the European branch, a heirarchical structure leading back to HQ in Japan was preserved, as former R&D technician Tom Szirtes explained:

In our office we had the CEO, or maybe a step below, he was this guy called Miyaki. He was in charge of Sega Europe. Then there was a director of product development, the head of our department, and I was reporting to him. It was a bit of a strange set up. Most of the communication would always come through the Japanese to Japanese. It was a very Japan-centric organisation at that time.

Communication with Fans

It was the role of the creative director to lead game development towards something that would sell, and be well received by fans. The extent to which directors took an interest in fan reception varied depending on the individual. While Square’s Yasumi Matsuno acknowledged that fans were posting on bbs boards and personal websites reviews of the games he made, and that he wanted to make those fans happy, Sega’s Tanaka showed little interest in fan communication on the internet. When I asked if he ever went on bbs boards to see what fans thought of Skies of Arcadia, he said he had visited Sega’s official bbs boards occasionally. He said that he had seen other bbs boards too, but that fan comments posted online didn’t influence his ideas when developing other games from then on.

It was the role of the PR and marketing departments to sell games to players and to gather information on player reception. A major instrument for gathering this information was through customer surveys, taken from postcard-sized questionnaires included with games and from online questionnaires accessible through the Dreamcast itself. In the case of Skies of Arcadia, the latter received too few responses to be statistically significant, but the former indicated an audience mostly in its teens and early twenties, with only 16% of the players female - Tanaka supposed that if the game had been titled, ‘Tales of’ rather than ‘Eternal’ or ‘Skies of’ then the audience composition would be closer to 30% female, implying a comparison with the popular Tales series of RPGs. These statistics were acknowledged by Tanaka to be limited in value, but he did indicate that these figures were considered when thinking of who was playing Dreamcast games.[51]

Skilling

In 1999, the authors of introductory textbook Konpyuuta geemu no tekunorojii (Computer game technologies) gushed optimistically about the future of gaming, remarking on the possibilites that next generation consoles presented for the creation of richer, larger, more open game worlds.[52] This indicates the vision that game developers had of the future of their profession in the late 1990s. Their job was to use new hardware technologies to create more immersive and spectacular software, with specific focus on the game world as playground and spectacle.

One common issue that arises in retrospective interviews with game developers working in the late 1990s is whether the team possessed from the outset the skills required to make games for the next generation of consoles, and how they trained in those skills if they were lacking. It was uncommon for Japanese companies to headhunt expert designers and programmers who could bring a new skillset to the studio.[53] Instead, employees would remain on the payroll even while working on projects that might never make it to market, in order to develop the skills required to make later, high-budget titles. The designer of the wildly successful Mushiking games spent four years working at Sega without working on any project that made it to launch. While Skies of Arcadia was launched, it came out of an R&D project that had been abandoned, as Shuntaro Tanaka explained in our interview:

We didn’t have any experience of making large-scale RPGs,[54] [...] I hadn’t come in yet, but Mukaiyama was there from the start, and at that time [the console was] Sega Saturn. So for two years they were working with the Saturn. They still weren’t able to make anything out of it when Sega announced that [the console] wouldn’t be Saturn, but they were releasing some [new] hardware. It turned out that they were going to release the Dreamcast, so the plan changed - they weren’t going to make it in time for the Saturn, so they [decided] to make a game for the Dreamcast. I came in shortly after that, and since it was to be the Dreamcast, the hopes for the game and the story totally changed, so we started from scratch and it took another two years after that.[55]

Tanaka’s previous work had been in Sega’s tactical RPG and dating sim[56] franchise Sakura Taisen, and he was brought into the project when the switch to the Dreamcast was announced. From there on, any experience in gameplay development gained by the existing team from their two years’ attempt to create a ‘large scale’ RPG was applied to a new project, with Tanaka as creative director. Rather than hire someone from outside with prior experience in large-scale RPGs, Sega made use of the talent it already had in-house.

Even though institutionally, Sega focused on supporting the growth of its own talent, it is not unheard of for developers on Sega’s payroll to confer with other companies for advice, on their own time. Akio Setsumasa, an employee of Sega working in Phantasy Star Online studio Sonic Team, describes going to game developer Blizzard’s studios in America ‘for fun’ in 1998, to compare notes on the development of networked RPG games.[57] Setsumasa worked on the networking for Phantasy Star Online, and Blizzard expanded their range of highly influential games such as Starcraft and Diablo with iconic MMORPG World of Warcraft.

When discussing games like Vagrant’s Story, Skies of Arcadia and Phantasy Star Online, developers are prone to describing projects that led to published games as though they too were training exercises, perhaps particularly if they were not high-budget titles within large franchises bringing in huge revenue for the company. Matsuno recalls that although it was made for the Playstation, Vagrant’s Story was made with a view to building the 3D polygon design skills that would be required to make next-generation games on the Playstation 2. Polygon design meant creating three-dimensional objects as hollow shapes with many triangular faces, wrapped with texture maps that modified the surface appearance. In a polygon 3D world, these shapes would be loaded in real-time and viewable from different angles, rather than being shown as a background image.

We figured it would be the last game we make for the Playstation. After that, we would shift to next-generation consoles such as PS2, Dolphin [later known as Gamecube] and Dreamcast. So we thought rather than make a 2D game, we should get a 3D game under our belts. For this game, we gathered together a lot of people who had worked in 2D games, so Vagrant’s Story was the first time they had built up the know-how for polygon 3D games, for both graphics and programming. That was our starting point for the project.[58]

Matsuno later worked on Final Fantasy XII, and introduced to the franchise stylistic themes he had developed in Vagrant’s Story. Other members of the design and planning teams also attested to the fact that the biggest challenge in making Vagrant’s Story was developing skills in 3D real-time graphics.

Personally, I was interested in what we would actually be able to create graphically. A lot of people working on this game had been making games since way back. I wondered what they would be able to do when we were making graphics for the Playstation. By gaining some know-how in that area, we might be able to further advance real-time graphics when hardware capacities go up a notch with the Playstation 2.

[...] This was the first game I had made in full polygons, and I realised that everything I had learned making 2D games would still help me. Expressing things in very few polygons, reducing the number of colours to increase processing times, things like that had us using the same skills that they were using when they made dot images for the Super Famicom. For example, even with the Playstation 2, there will still be limitations on memory and processing capacity, so at the end of the day what determines the quality of our work is our prior experience.[59]

The suggestion here is that by developing an advanced game within the technical limitations of the Playstation, they would be better equipped to make maximum use of the superior hardware capabilities of the Playstation 2 in later games with larger budgets and greater expectations, such as Final Fantasy XII. When it came to 3D polygon-based design, there was a similar sense of being on the cusp of a great technological leap, but the designers interviewed focused on the ways in which their existing skills allowed them to make this jump successfully.

Everyone made polygon models and also made dot images, and I think that’s how we were able to make a game like this. In the end, when it came to character expressions and scenery, we were making those polygons using the same techniques that people working with dot images had always used... I like to have technical constraints... drawing something in three dots that you would have drawn in ten... without technical constraints, its not as interesting.[60]

Skies of Arcadia has a very similar backstory. The 3D polygon-based aesthetic that Tanaka first worked on here was later applied to his more successful project, Valkyria Chronicles. Clearly, at both Sega and Square at the end of the 1990s, there was a sense that polygon-based 3D worlds would be very significant for future games development, so projects were taken on that would allow design teams to build up the necessary skills. At Square, the skills developed while working on Vagrant’s Story were put to use in Final Fantasy XII, and at Sega a similar training process led from Skies of Arcadia to Valkyria Chronicles.

Shenmue was a recipient of skills and technologies developed for other game projects. As a high-budget project headed by a hugely acclaimed director, discussion of the game’s development often focuses on the application of existing skills and talent. At his GDC keynote, Suzuki even described the use of motion-capture technology in the context of his existing experience using it for Virtua Fighter more than five years earlier.

This offers one explanation to the question of significance - technically significant games trained developers in the skills required to make later games that become prolific. Because Japanese games companies tended to train their existing talent rather than hire from outside, this explanation is particularly useful as a comparison between games created by the same developers.

Not just the development process, but the role-playing gameplay itself was also construed as exercises in skilling. A major game mechanic of the genre is gaining skill-points by defeating enemies, and then applying those points to develop the abilities and attributes of the playable characters. An analogy to social practices such as work and education in a Japanese context was made by Yuji Horii, the producer for the Dragon Quest franchise, when asked why RPGs were so popular in Japan and less so in the US.

Japanese are very skill-motivated and easily drawn into processes, including games, where tireless diligence is rewarded. But in the US, for example, people tend to get irritated if the desired results are not immediate.[61]

Through interviews, postmortems and design practice, game developers in Japan in the late 1990s were spreading a discourse about skilling across the network of video game development and consumption. They transferred their own experience of upskilling their staff into their games’ designs, and sometimes generalised that outwards into Japanese culture as a whole.

GD-ROMS

When following ideas and agencies around Dreamcast games’ networks, it’s worth bearing in mind that the actual traded object on which the whole commercial endeavour rests is GD-ROMS. They were the central focus of marketing efforts, and were the gateway by which players would access Arcadia, Ragol and the fictional Yokosuka of Shenmue. The role of the GD-ROM is historically significant. While there was a small amount of downloadable content available through the Dreamcast network for Skies of Arcadia, the distribution and play of the game were all dependent on the state of the disc on which it was stored. No digital back-up could be created, no digital distribution could be downloaded, and the amount of extra content that could be downloaded was limited.

The ‘G’ of GD-ROM stood for ‘gigabyte’, indicating the fact that GD-ROM discs had a higher density than CD-ROMs and could hold over a gigabyte of data compared to the CD’s 700 megabytes - an increase of almost 50%. They were developed by Yamaha, and patented as a solution to piracy - genuine GD-ROMs could be identified visually by a black ring separating the high density and low density areas of the disc, and the drivers and firmware required to read and write them were closely protected at the time.[62] In addition to Yamaha’s disc format, Sega employed a proprietary ‘packet interface’ for compressing data. Another major advantage of the GD-ROM format was that it didn’t require proprietary hardware to be played - a regular CD drive was programmed to spin discs at half the normal rate to read them as GD-ROMs when required. Focusing on prioprietary software and firmware, rather than developing proprietary hardware, contributed to the relatively low price point of the Dreamcast, as off-the-shelf components could be used without leaving the device more vulnerable to piracy than it would have been otherwise.

While the GD-ROM limited the hardware cost of the Dreamcast for players, it contributed to development costs for games studios because of the expensive, bulky and unreliable hardware required to burn demos. Sega’s proprietary packet interface and the unique data density of GD-ROM discs meant that disc writers had to be produced in small quantity at high cost - and that cost was passed on to the developers who had to buy them in order to make discs to test on and give to publishers for approval. The material cost of the machines, which ran into triple digits in Europe, was accompanied by a high cost in terms of labour time that was spent minding the machines as they were used - a single disc took around two hours to burn, and a slight knock or vibration would cause the entire process to fail.[63]

The GD-ROM format influenced game design in several significant ways. Disc writing aside, physical distribution affected the labour costs that had to be spent before the release of the game because the game had to run as close to perfectly as possible before the discs were burned; bugs could not be fixed later with downloadable patches. The later release of Skies of Arcadia for Gamecube was perceived by fans to include fixes to problems with the Dreamcast release such as the high encounter rate with random battles and slow loading times.

The constraints of physical distribution also affected how games were marketed, because the game would have a limited amount of time to be prominently displayed in high street stores, requiring that promotional efforts focus on building up hype towards a release date. This was achieved with many strategies, including releasing a free demo disc in advance to build anticipation. Particularly important for the design of the game was the effect of the GD-ROM on how the game was to be used, since partway through the storyline players would have to switch from disc one to disc two.

Because game assets are to a great extent tied to game-world locations, there was often a natural switch from one story location on disc one to another on disc two. Yokosuka harbour in Shenmue is not accessible from disc one, so the plot transition that takes the protagonist to that area has a physical analogue in the player’s need to get up, go to the console, remove one disc and replace it with the other.

When the Dreamcast was released, it was already clear that other formats for games distribution were about to be introduced. The PS2, announced in March 1999, won Sony a format war with Matsushita regarding DVDs. The ability to play DVD movies was one way to justify the exorbitant cost of device, because it was not just a games console but also an entertainment centre. DVDs had a considerably higher density and were therefore able to store much more data, allowing for larger games to be released on a single disc. When digital games came to be distributed on DVDs, the need to switch discs to continue to progress within a game has faded away, and games’ geographic narratives have changed accordingly - either by having all areas of a game world accessible at the same time to give players a sense of freedom, or by providing extra regions as ‘downloadable content’ or DLC.

Even more hotly anticipated than the DVD was digital distribution of entertainment media over high-speed internet. In the late 1990s this prospect was primarily explored by music companies, in response to online piracy, and it is no surprise that Sony contributed considerably to research and development in this area. Internet distribution of games was also anticipated, and Sega announced an online PC-gaming platform in October 1999. While internet connectivity was a major selling point for Sega’s Dreamcast, the anticipated change in distribution format from CD-ROMs and GD-ROMs to DVD and digital download dated the Dreamcast’s technology, making it seem like an unwise purchase to wary consumers during what was in Japan a time of enduring recession.

Development tools

Development tools are a part of the network that is not directly perceived by the player, but are extremely important to developers. They are part of a string of firmware and software agents that allow game designers to communicate with hardware in a way intuitive to them. It is this string of agencies that allowed developers and designers to communicate with console hardware.

Tool development was arduous and costly. Studios who wanted to make a new kind of game would first have to build an engine that could deal with the requirements of that game - for example, a 3D first-person shooter would need a different kind of engine than a 2D platformer. Studios would make a bet on what game genre would be lucrative in the long-term so that they wouldn’t have to make a new engine from scratch every time they started a new project. Third-party, pre-built engines were rarely an option, because they lacked the flexibility to accommodate new gameplay features - and a game without innovative features would be unlikely to interest publishers.

The Dreamcast, like the Playstation, could be programmed through software libraries provided by the local Sega branch - this meant that rather than speak directly to hardware, game developers simply had to make calls to a pre-created software layer that communicated with the hardware on their behalf. This limited the cost of development tool creation, but also limited the extent of innovation that was possible and caused a certain amount of processing bloat. Sony phased out this use of libraries for the Playstation 2 (2000), which made it possible for developers to fully optimise their game’s performance, but added to the cost of game development. The advantage to studios of having built their own engines - particularly if they communicated directly with console hardware - was that any faults, bugs and quirks in the engine’s programming would be familiar to the development team, because it was their own creation. External libraries and third-party engines divorce developers from this information, which can slow development when the tools fail to perform to standard.

The development tools for Skies of Arcadia were originally built for the Sega Saturn. When Tanaka was brought in to spearhead the project’s change in direction for the Dreamcast, the engine was remade to speak to the Dreamcast’s libraries and run a fully polygon 3D game-world, but retained the gameplay logic that had been developed for an unpublished RPG project. The engine for Shenmue was created relatively late in the development process, after the music had been composed, the scenarios and characters designed and built with 3D design tools, and an artistic direction had been firmly established. Shenmue 2 was possible in part because of the ability to use the game engine and tools again - after the demise of the Dreamcast, the potential cost of another sequel was much higher, because the tools would have to be remade for other platforms.

Development tools, as the main line of communication between consoles and developers, have a great deal of agency over what games can be made and what features can be implemented. They are an extremely powerful non-human actor in the network.

The Camera

Game developers and fans both report a relationship with an in-game camera. This is a particularly unusual node in the actor-network, because not only is it non-human, it is also immaterial and unseen - yet everybody knows it is there. The camera is a software construct used to make sense of the display of polygon 3D worlds. In 2D and isometric perspective, reference to a camera is not always necessary, but when navigating a world made up of polygons there needs to be a floating ‘eye’ through which players are able to see the world. As one of the staff working on Vagrant’s Story remarked:

As far as events went, we had this big premise of 3D, so the first question was how we would move the camera. When I say 3D, what I mean is, while Final Fantasy games had a lot of movies, this game would be set apart by bringing in elements that come out of the screen at you, to give an American comics kind of feel. One of our initial thoughts was that we wanted this game to not feel very ‘Japanese’.[64]

In 1993, new media theorist Lev Manovich wrote about cinematic and virtual space from the point of view of the camera. Ordinarily we associate technological progress with modern ideas such as speed, mobility and freedom of movement. For open-world gaming, freedom and mobility have continued to be a key theme and concern for designers and critics. Writing in the early days of 3D arcade machine graphics and virtual reality programs, Manovich turned this interest in freedom the other way - he claimed that the virtual camera created passive subjects, fixed to a single spot while the world moved around them.

...the spectator is placed at the best viewpoint of each shot, inside the virtual space. This situation is usually conceptualized in terms of the spectator’s identification with the camera eye. The body of the spectator remains in the seat while her/his eye is coupled with a mobile camera. However, it is also possible to conceptualize this differently. We can imagine that the camera does not, in fact, move at all, that it remains stationary, coinciding with the spectator’s eyes. Instead, it is the virtual space as a whole that changes its position with each shot. Using the contemporary vocabulary of computer graphics, we can say that this virtual space is rotated, scaled and zoomed to always give the spectator the best viewpoint.[65]

3D games, particularly open-world scenarios, give players a sense that they are in control of their movement and their view on the game world. This notion that the virtual camera actually has a pacifying effect on players is counterintuitive, and the opinion Manovich expressed in 1993 might have seem to limited value to us in 2012.

However, user reviews from the late 1990s show that the camera did have a great deal of agency. Reviews of Skies of Arcadia by players reveal that some people experienced motion sickness as a result of the movement of the camera.

The camera work is bad, particularly when changing maps or shifting to first person view, and the camera suddenly spins 180 degrees. That sudden spin gave me 3D sickness [...] When moving in a ship or in narrow spaces is was generally fine, until I moved up or down, when the camera would flip around and give me 3D sickness.[66]

As the ship turned around to change direction, my stomach turned with it.[67]

Motion sickness tends to occur when feedback about our body’s movement from the inner ear does not correspond to visual information. The easiest way to avoid it when travelling is to be put in control of the body’s movement, for example by driving a car rather than being a passenger. Motion sickness with 3D games is rarely experienced nowadays, and it’s not clear whether this is because games are better designed or players have become accustomed to it. I’d argue that it’s probably a combination of the two - game developers know not to allow sudden unexpected camera movements to happen, and players have come to intuitively expect cameras to move in a certain way when playing 3D games.

The camera in early polygon 3D worlds was therefore not simply a window on the game, but a pivot point allowing the world to approach the player as viewer in a direct and dramatic fashion. The intended effect of this may have been drama, spectacle and technical flourish, but for some players, the camera induced nausea and disorientation.

Where are we now?

This chapter has sketched out the historical context of the Dreamcast games studied in this book, not just focusing on hardware technology or the games’ authors, but also looking at the instutional structure of Sega, how agencies within the game software itself challenged the agency of players, and how some of the constraints of physical publishing affected game design and gameplay.

The rest of this book will explore the relationship between players and games and the wider world. Those explorations will include how gameplay was affected by the physical spaces of gameplay, how the virtual play spaces of games connected with ideas and relationships in the real world, how those virtual spaces were co-created by gameplay. I will be focusing in on specific game spaces, but overarching the whole journey is a bigger question: where do games come from, and who creates them?

Skies of Arcadia

At the end of 2009, Jeffrey Fleming, writing for Gamasutra, lamented the demise of the Japanese RPG (JRPG).

At the start of the decade it was easy to imagine Japanese RPGs taking over the world. Titles like Final Fantasy X and XII, Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne, Xenosaga, Shenmue, Shadow Hearts, Skies of Arcadia, Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker, and Phantasy Star Online were just some of the highlights of a time when another new JRPG was added to the stack faster than we could play them.[68]

He identified an ‘emotional currency’ in JRPGs: unapologetic sentimentality, nostalgia, wistfulness and longing. These adjectives hint at a stereotype about Japanese cultural products that might not hold up quite as well in Phantasy Star Online - personally I find it hard to be wistful with a giant, neon broadsword in my hand that shoots lazers out of the end.

However, few players could fail to sense the nostalgia and sentimentality in Skies of Arcadia, a saccharine game set in an innocent world teetering on the brink of total destruction.

Nostalgia is about change and loss. So what has been lost in Skies of Arcadia? And what had been lost at Sega when the game was being made? As the games industry entered a new generation, what did it worry about leaving behind?

Pushing frontiers

Everything about Skies of Arcadia would have you believe that this is a game about exploration. From the beginning, NPCs tell the player character about the varied and diverse world in which the game is set. The player characters of Skies of Arcadia are pirates. They live on a small, green island headquarters called Pirate Island and sail the open skies attacking the ships of ‘bad people’ such as imperialists and ‘black pirates’. ‘We rob from the rich and take the gold,’ says the main character, Vyse, ‘And we use the gold to help people’.

The game begins when the pirates save a mysterious girl from the ‘armada’ of Valua, an imperial civilisation that attacks its weaker neighbors. This opening scenario sets up a contrast between the innocent, explorer pirates who set out to do a good deed, and the evil, imperial Valuans, who tried to kidnap her and then go on to air bomb Pirate Island.

Arcadia is divided into, powered and defined by six moons. Each moon drops moonstones onto the world, which are sources of power. The basic conceit is that just as in the real world major civilisations grew around rivers, in Arcadia they develop around moons. The differences between civilisations can be explained by geography, abstracted down into the elemental feature of each moon. Each civilisation also has its own moon crystal, and each crystal is used to awaken a terrible, gigantic, man-made monster similar to a golem called Gigas. The characters must find each of these crystals before they enter the hands of the Valuans, who want to use the Gigas to rule the world.

The division of the game world into six elemental geographies creates a fragmented universe composed of separate cultural entities. This diversity is followed through in architectural, vehicle and character design, making the game an interesting 30-50 hour journey for players. The fragmented nature of the world is a key thematic point; space design produces narrative depth. All six civilisations are isolated from contact with the rest of the world, either due to politics or geography, so another contrast is drawn between the well-travelled pirates and armada and the isolated islanders.

This anti-imperialist narrative is common to Japanese RPGs, and has a long history in post-war media products such as the original Godzilla movie. But it’s not just imperialism that is being contested here; it’s tourism. The tourist ‘blue pirates’ and the imperialist Valuan armada both assume the privilege of being able to travel wherever they please into other people’s lands, but while the armada wants to bring the whole world under their command, the blue pirates want to see the fragmented bits of the world remain inidividual and authentic, regardless of their intervention.

Skies of Arcadia isn’t just about exploration. In the game’s narrative, the nature of circulation and the preservation of ‘placeness’ are contested.

Pirate Isle

One of the earliest parts of Arcadia discovered by players is Pirate Isle. After saving a mysterious girl from the Valuan Armada, Vyse and the rest of the crew go home to his childhood home, stowing the flying ship away in an underground base that is accessed through a giant secret door that opens on the lower side of the island. This is an area that players will return to on several occasions, and for the first part of the game it is the characters’ main base. It exists to introduce many aspects of the game’s scenario and gameplay - while combat and movement were introduced on the Valuan ship, here players will learn about magic, elements, potions and the history of the game world.

Elements and materials

As in many RPGs, the elements are a major feature of Skies of Arcadia’s gameplay and scenario design. So it makes sense that the materials invoked by the textures used in architectural designs would be connected to the game’s narrative.

Pirate Isle features a lot of wood textures as well as natural greenery such as grasses and trees. There is also plenty of earth and mud, particularly in the underground base that hides the ship and all piracy-related paraphernalia. Similar textures are repeated throughout the game in areas that are relatively safe and friendly, such as the jungle town of Horteka and the Little Jack airship. The Little Jack in particular becomes a second home to the main characters for a large part of the game, and its material similarity to Pirate Isle emphasises this common homeliness shared between the two places.

The design of ships mirrors scenario design in the use of materiality to express the atmosphere and narrative of the six civilisations. Wood is used in the ships of ‘good’ characters, most notably in the Little Jack. Its wood textures are set off by tarnished brass, mirroring the character design of its owner, Drachma, who has a brass prosthetic arm. This design feature is a charming contribution to the narrative. It creates an intimacy of place by linking the Little Jack to Pirate Island, even though the character himself behaves in a stand-offish manner. It’s one of the narrative cues that reveals the character’s hidden affection for the adventurers.

In the game’s official elemental scheme of six moons, Pirate Isle is element-less - it is not officially located under any single moon. The moonstone which falls on nearby Shrine Island is green, which would explain the material connection between Pirate Isle and Horteka - both take the green moon as an energy source. However, according to the fan-maintained wiki, Pirate Isle is considered to be under the domain of the Silver Moon, and according to the game’s manual, it is under the domain of the Red Moon.

Pirate Isle is a kind of hybrid region, not clearly or entirely belonging to one element or another, even in a game with an explicitly stated narrative that all of the world is divided between six moons - a narrative that is first introduced on Pirate Isle itself. This is, however, fairly fitting as a setting for pirates. On the edge of three major civilisations, belonging to none but taking on the cultural attributes of any or all of them, is a natural place for pirates to thrive, like the islands off the South-Eastern coast of China or the Caribbean in real-world history.

Three-dimensionality

Just as three-dimensionality dominated the technical changes happening in the industry around 1998, in games such as Skies of Arcadia it had a pivotal effect on scenario design. Director Tanaka was brought in after the announcement of the Dreamcast to transform a standard sword-and-sorcery RPG into something fresh and unique that would demonstrate the three-dimensional graphics processing power of the new console. With ships that travel up and down in the open sky, and floating islands viewable from any angle, the Laputa-esque world of Skies of Arcadia was designed for three-dimensionality from the beginning — Pirate Isle is one of the player’s first encounters with the art style and level design of the game.

Pirate Isle’s design highlights the 3D graphics that Skies of Arcadia was tasked with demonstrating. Varying ground elevation and the inclusion of ladders and poles bring the on-screen character’s movement upwards and downwards, with little extra effort on the part of the players. The ground elevation of Pirate Island is arranged almost as a corkscrew; the lowest part of the island is an underground secret base, which contains three floor levels that are scaled by a variety of ladders, ramps and poles. A door from the underground base leads to the outer edge of the island, where a path circles up and around the outside to the main village buildings and further up and around to the top floor of the windmill. These are connected to a wooden mezzanine that leads upwards to two separate, small islands; one acts as a jetty for small ships, the other is used as a lookout post. This arrangement makes the island a fully three-dimensional structure with three-dimensional routes of movement.

Illustration 1: Pirate Isle in Skies of Arcadia, ©Sega 2000

The three-dimensionality of Skies of Arcadia is not simply a natural result of the construction of the world from polygons. More complex issues of game design make the game feel more three-dimensional than previous RPGs rendered partly from flat images.

The mezzanine floors of Pirate Isle emphasise three-dimensionality not just by allowing players to take the on-screen character upwards in space, but by providing pockets around wooden pillars that the character can run around and behind. These kind of spatial pockets were being put to use in the level design of games that were not even fully three-dimensional - isometric RPGs made using the Infinity Engine, such as Baldur’s Gate, made extensive use of landscape features that characters could move behind to give the impression of three-dimensionality on a flat, hand-painted level map. In polygon 3D games, this effect was often given a greater sense of reality by the ability to rotate the camera manually, so that all sides of a landscape feature could be seen. This also brought added convenience, as the player’s view of the on-screen character no longer had to be broken just to give a three-dimensional effect.

Three-dimensional game design was not just led by technology, because it was not just about graphics. It was about routes of movement and styles of play. Level design plays a major role in the feeling of three-dimensionality in gameplay, and this takes dimensionality partially out of the hands of the Dreamcast’s hardware, and puts it into the hands of game developers. Polygons did not immediately make a game three-dimensional - game designers had to employ design strategies that made a game feel three-dimensional from the players’ perspective.

Skies of Arcadia looked, felt and technically was fully three-dimensional, putting it technologically ahead of Baldur’s Gate and stylistically more skilfully executed than the relatively flat Final Fantasy IX, then its relative commercial failure compared to these two competing games indicates that technology was not enough to ensure the success of a game or console. Game reviews, development and marketing in the late 1990s may have emphasised 3D as an appealing feature, but wider network effects such as platforms, brands and marketing efforts may have been more important to a game’s success.

Verticality

So the shift to 3D gaming is not really about polygons alone. It’s about paths of movement, a more subjective, sited and fluid thing that cannot be entirely contained in the design of the software itself. Players will determine their own paths of movement and their own spatial interactions, but level designs determine the dynamics of mobility. In Skies of Arcadia, verticality is skilfully employed in architecture to emphasise the three-dimensionality of the game-world and contribute to game narrative. In that narrative, mobility is the major issue at stake in the face-off between imperialism and tourism.

Height is used in architecture to narrativise the political differences between civilisations. Under benevolent regimes such as Pirate Isle and the rainforest land of Horteka, it is easy to travel vertically by climbing ladders and poles. Horteka feels particularly playful, as many of its buildings are treehouses. Wood textures are used on Horteka and Pirate Isle to evoke a sense of freedom and paidia — play as exploration as opposed to ludic, goal-oriented play. However, more controlling regimes such as Valua restrict the characters’ movement, particularly along the vertical dimension. Valua is divided into the upper and lower city, and the upper city is restricted to only those of a higher social class. Forbidden routes through Valua are achieved via the underground ‘catacombs’, which are populated by monsters that the characters must fight in order to pass through. The use of underground architecture for subversive action is first established on Pirate Isle, where all buildings and objects that relate to piratical activity are located in a secret underground base.

This equation of height with power lends itself to a reading of Arcadia’s architecture as panoptic, a term that suggests ‘all-seeing’. The idea of ‘panoptic structures’ began with the design of prisons in the 19th century; surveillance towers make prisoners aware that someone could be watching them from above at any time, so they check their behaviour accordingly. In some ways Arcadia is panoptic. Valua features many electric searchlights that glare down on the characters from above, at one stage in the game actually posing a real threat as being caught in the searchlight generates a battle with a set of deceptively powerful robots. The sixth civilisation’s location in ‘upper sky’ above the rest of the world is reflective of their aloofness and ultimate power to destroy the rest of the world in an instant if they see fit.

However, both in terms of the storyline and the game’s artificial intelligence, there is actually nobody behind the searchlight watching the characters. They are able to spend the whole game travelling the world freely, and when they do run into Valua they fight ship to ship as equals. Valua and the sixth civilisation attempt to hold a panoptic gaze and total power over their spheres of influence, but in this saccharine, nostalgic, infantile story the underdog is bound to win. Searchlights can be dodged, underground routes can be forged, and the good guys can find a way through. In such a scenario, vertical structures have been specifically designed not to be panoptic. Prisons are not normally built to be escapable.

Pyuramis Shrine and Daccat’s Island

Circulation

Town maps like Pirate Island use circulation to demonstrate the polygon three-dimensionality of the game and the Dreamcast hardware, and to put in place a narrative of freedom, movement and exploration. Dungeons like Pyuramis Shrine and Daccat’s Island take this theme of circulation further by making players disorientated and setting up major spatial challenges.

In the 1990s, circulation was subject to major social and economic changes. This idea is given particularly interesting treatment in a book called Mobilities written in 2007 by Sociologist John Urry.[69] By the year 2001, he explains, the world had become extremely mobile, both in terms of physical movement and the movement of information. Circulation of people, goods and data was easier, cheaper and more essential to daily life than ever. There were one billion internet users, more mobile phones worldwide than landlines, and at any one time there were on average 360,000 people in flight in US airspace.

Mobilities, Urry wrote, presuppose systems that ‘provide spaces of anticipation that the journey can be made, that the message will get through, that the parcel will arrive.’ Maybe Skies of Arcadia was one of many games made for an audience that was in transit, more mobile than ever before: an audience that was waiting to arrive, both in the sense that the new console generation and the new millennium had not yet arrived, and in that the target age group was young people in their teens and twenties, no longer children but yet to reach adulthood.

Skies of Arcadia makes frequent visual and narrative reference to another time identified by Urry as a global advance in circulation. In 1840 the first postal service was created. In 1839 the first railway timetable was published, and the first telegram cable was laid. The telegram is surprisingly influential to Skies of Arcadia’s design. References are made to the stories of Jules Verne, particularly in the form of a giant whale that references 1000 leagues under the sea. Verne’s fascination with the deep ocean was likely inspired by the laying of the first transatlantic telegram cable - prints from the time illustrated the adventure of the atlantic cable missions with whale figures.

Illustration 2: Watercolour of H.M.S. Agamemnon by Robert Dudley, lithograph copy from p.28 of The Atlantic Telegraph by W.H. Russell, 1865

The 19th century saw the creation of a tourist gaze that is ever present in Arcadia’s exotic locations. It was at that time, Urry claims, that Paris was rebuilt for the tourist gaze. In 1841 the travel company Thomas Cook launched the first ‘package tour’.

As well as thematic references to Jules Verne, Skies of Arcadia manipulates architecture and space design to emphasise modes of circulation. Just like Verne was referencing advances in trans-oceanic travel and telegram communication, these references in scenario and level design reveal the influence of developing modes of circulation.

Mazes and labyrinths

One remarkable design feature of Arcadia’s architecture is the numerous ways that the landscape narrativises the existence of maze structures. In a game like Skies of Arcadia, which sits outside of the typical sword-and-sorcery worldview, the term ‘dungeon’ takes on a broader meaning, to indicate any space with random encounter battles, mazes, spatial puzzles and limited save points. Only one of the game’s dungeons is actually a prison, so their disorienting structure often has to be justified in other ways.

The Temple of Pyrynn and Daccat’s Island are both designed to appear like high-security vaults with elaborate puzzles intended to keep intruders away from the central treasure. Pyrynn is a pyramid that contains the red moonstone at its center. Its design heavily references Indiana Jones and the Tomb Raider games. A major theme of the building’s design is animated rock. Huge boulders roll down narrow corridors and crush the character if players do not move him out of the way in time. Large halls contain sunken geometric puzzles to be solved by rolling stone barrels along the floor. If completed, they will cause the floor elevation to shift to make the next part of the temple accessible. The architecture therefore tests the physical and mental strength of intruders so that only the worthy can access the crystal.

Daccat’s Island, literally ‘Treasure island’ in the original Japanese, similarly, features animated stone structures, in the form of rotating stairways, but here the mechanisms that move the building’s interiors are shown as giant wheels and taps, all fitted with cogs. While Pyrynn is a magical dungeon created by forgotten historical figures, the creator of this dungeon is known to be the famous pirate Daccat. The mechanisms may be his maker’s mark. The walls are rough-hewn, in contrast to most other dungeons in the game which are highly finished with detailed patterns. Here too, the spatial puzzle is a test of mettle so that only the worthy can access the treasure. In this dungeon, the team splits into two groups, and the puzzle can only be completed when both groups activate pressure pads at the same time. At the end of the maze, a large, ornately decorated treasure chest is housed infront of an impressively back-lit wall engraving. Upon opening it, the chest is empty but for a single coin and a note, explaining that the dungeon gave the characters the greatest gift of all; understanding the value of companionship. This subverts the precedent set by other RPGs such as the Final Fantasy series, in which virtual material rewards feature prominently as a motivator for player behaviour.

The disorientation of dungeon space encourages a sense of play; the trial-and-error effort to make your way through the space is made more enjoyable because even travelling the wrong way brings its own rewards in the form of hidden items which are located at dead ends. This is a common theme of RPG gameplay, exemplified by a sexist joke image (see illustration 3) which circulated at the end of 2011, when many gamers were playing the RPG Skyrim: it compares a shopping mall and a dungeon, claiming that women dawdle and explore in shopping malls while men walk straight to the shop they need, and that the opposite is true in dungeons. This parallel between dungeon crawling and shopping sheds light on the tactics of disorientation and consumption evident in both spaces’ designs. The use of the unfair and hurtful stereotype of women as as inferior or less avid gamers here is used to demonstrate that while dungons do present spatial challenges, skilled gamers will choose not to navigate the space quickly but will instead try to find every corner of the maze, looking for treasure. Mastery is performed through masterful circulation.

Illustration 3: Skyrim joke image

The Sky

Explorative architecture

The sky is another major site where players demonstrate their mastery over circulation. Navigating the open sky relies on the use of landmarks. There is no mini-map in the corner of the screen, which is a significant spatial aid in town and dungeon levels, though there is a compass which is of some use when there are no landmarks or the player is in unfamiliar territory.

Since Arcadia is made of floating landmasses, each part of the game world has an external as well as internal architecture. Its external architecture is part of what makes the sky navigable; the islands have to look distinctive from the outside.

Many islands and landmasses take delicate sculptural forms that are clearly recognisable from a distance. Pirate Isle’s wooden mezzanines and lookout platform, Crescent Isle’s eponymous shape, and Yafutoma’s large waterfalls, can all be instantly recognised. All are positioned at the end of a stretch of open sky, most notably Yafutoma, which is reached after a long journey across a deep blue open sky and crossing the Great Wall.

Different sections of sky are differently coloured and clouded, depending on the element of their moon. Valuan sky is covered in deep black storm clouds which occasionally flash with lightning, the element of Valua’s yellow moon, while the skies near Horteka are always scattered with green leaves blown by the wind, implicitly from the rainforests that populate the region’s islands. Lighting effects contribute to this effect, particularly in the dark Valuan skies.

When flying into another civilisation’s airspace, this change in colour and lighting is accompanied by changes to the background music. When in the sky, the main theme of the background music is determined by the kind of ship being flown; the Little Jack, a small ship used in the first half of the game, has different background music to the Delphinus, a huge, metal ship taken from the Valuans later in the game. However, the instruments accompanying the main theme change depending on the airspace being flown through; Nasr, for example, introduces sitars to the background music.

These geographical identifiers encourage and reward travel in the game world, providing a fanfare for players’ arrival in new areas. They also act as visual and auditory tools for spatial mastery; players who are able to use landmarks to quickly and adeptly find their way around the world may feel a sense of pride and accomplishment. In more recent years, some players have recorded their gameplay and uploaded their videos with commentary to YouTube. There are many motivations for this, but some players like to show their level of familiarity with game worlds such as that of Skies of Arcadia.

The sense of pride gained from spatial mastery has become more than just a part of the motivation-reward cycle within a single-player experience. It has entered a wider network of social sharing across platforms, a phenomenon that is now a major concern ingame development and marketing strategy. Social marketing was not a design concern when Skies of Arcadia was being made, but aspects of the game’s design makes it suited to social sharing today. The significance of game designs have changed as the social context of gaming has shifted.

While the sky appears open from the point of view of the player, it is in fact fundamentally similar in structure to a dungeon. A ceiling and floor constrain the upper and lower bounds of the sky for most of the game, and ’sky walls’ divide this contrained space into rooms, directing players’ movement across the world to create a navigation challenge, to make exploring the world feel like a major achievement, and to control player movement at early stages in the game. Like a dungeon or a text-based role-playing game, different rooms present different scenarios, represented by the visual scenery, background music and species of monster that attack the ship.

This application of the spatial language of dungeons to the sky shows that although the sky is a meta-structure for containing and connecting towns and dungeons, it is therefore also a play space in and of itself, allowing different modes of play through battle, collecting and navigation.

Spatial challenges

The sky presents a number of spatial challenges that make navigation a non-trivial task. Making the journey by ship from one landmass to another does not simply bridge dungeon-based quests together, but brings with it other game play mechanics that pose problems and reward players for finding solutions.

Sky walls prevent access to certain areas. They resemble walls of cloud and mist, and direct player movement so that the world unfolds at a set pace and in a set order. The starting position of the game, Pirate Isle, is surrounded by a circle of sky walls that prevent players from accessing areas to the East or South too soon in the game: events must be completed to the North before moving on to other areas.

Sometimes, passage to the area where the next plot point will occur is only possible through a partly hidden tunnel. For example, early in the game the journey from Pirate Isle to Nasr involves an area lower in the sky, where the bottom of a landmass is recessed upwards to provide a tunnel leading from one side of the landmass to another. Similarly, the entry to the sky dungeon Sargasso is a small hole in a huge, black sky wall.

So far I have described a number of architectural features that make navigation difficult. In addition, there are sections of sky that are hard to navigate due to their lack of features. The East Ocean, which resembles the Pacific, is such an area. There are no landmarks, so players must rely on compass directions to guide their movement.

Finally, there are areas in the sky map that are difficult to locate due to their elevation. Shrine island is not far North of Pirate Isle, but it is difficult to find because it is much lower in the sky, and tends to fall outside of the field of vision of the player, unless the ship is moved lower in the sky.

Controlling ships

The gameplay features of the sky map require skillful maneuvring of the ship. One particularly challenging optional gameplay feature is fishing; players have to direct the ship to fly into the fish in order to catch them. While the first ships piloted in the game do not feel conspicuously slow to respond, there is a significant change in ease of response when the characters come into possession of the Delphinus. While the Little Jack is unable to follow fish that have swum behind the ship, due to a slow response time, the Delphinus can spin around very rapidly, making it possible to catch fish with greater speed and accuracy than before.

This kind of detailed simulation of control systems was an interesting issue for Dreamcast games at the time. A Dreamcast release in the Gran Turismo series, a successful franchise of racing games made by Sega, used the processing power of the Dreamcast to offer supposedly realistic simulations of the experience of driving the models of sports car with which players were able to play. This notion of realistic simulation was taken further with the release of steering wheel controllers for the Dreamcast. The notion was that core features such as steering response, acceleration, brake speed etc. were accurately trasferred into algorithmic properties of the cars featured in the software and then fed back haptically into the controllers.

In Gran Turismo and other racing games, player progress is rewarded by unlocking more advanced cars and more exciting tracks. The goal of the game is to win races with inferior cars in order to be able to participate in better races with faster, more responsive cars. These games distil the challenge-reward mechanism of game design in a much simpler form than the sprawling, multi-layered gameplay of RPGs; a variety of challenges are made available to players, designed to feel difficult but achievable; players select a challenge, and if they complete it they win more challenges and more tools that they can use to complete those challenges. An important factor here is the players’ sense of agency in their choice not only of challenges, but of which rewards to apply to solve the individual problems posed by each challenge.

Of course, the flying ships of Skies of Arcadia were not designed to be realistic simulations of what it would be like to sail a ship in open air. However, a similar logic of technical impressiveness was applied to air ships in Skies of Arcadia to sports cars in Gran Turismo; quick response times were impressive features designed to wow the players and serve as a reward for progress in the game.

The technology said to determine the capabilities of ships in the game world are able to be installed as interchangeable hardware of the ship itself. Different cannons can be bought or won and used to increase attack power in battle. Other hardware allow the ship to sail through reefs of rock or sky walls. Here the same logic that is seen in racing games is again applied to the ships of Skies of Arcadia; players are rewarded for their success in ship battles with superior hardware, and they then have the choice of which hardware to install before attempting the next challenge.

Challenge space

All of these spatial challenges rely on the camera position being just behind the ship in order to be effective. Because the point of view of play is constrained to the position of the object being controlled, players lack a broader perspective that would allow them to see what is beyond the nearest mountain, around the next corner, or past the horizon. Many of the spatial challenges rely on the three-dimensional structure of the sky map for their efficacy: most notably, areas hidden by their height.

Georgia Leigh McGregor, an academic at the School of Media Arts of the University of South Wales, deals with challenge spaces in video games and different ways that space designs create play. She gives the example of the treacherous 3D architecture of dungeons in the Tomb Raider series.[70] Fireballs, swinging axes, and plummeting boulders are all fatal threats for the main character Lara Croft. The first Tomb Raider game was released in 1996 and was a great commercial success. Many players of Skies of Arcadia would have memories of the underground Egyptian labyrinths in Tomb Raider, and this memory gives meaning to architectural features of Pyuramis shrine, such as flying fireballs - although they are inert in this game, they would remind many players of their experience desperately trying time and again to dodge similar objects in Tomb Raider, adding to suspense and drama.

Skies of Arcadia was released at a really innovative moment for action games. Tony Hawk Pro-Skater, a sports game where players control an on-screen skateboarder performing tricks in a real-world city modified to become a skateboarding paradise, was released in 1999, to massive commercial success. Pro-Skater and other performative sports games like it such as outlandish snowboarding game SSX Tricky, set up a relationship with game space. Sometimes this relationship was presented as combative, and at other times it was a cooperative relationship. One tag-line for the SSX series has been ‘You against the mountain’, but when players achieve mastery over an action sports game’s mechanics, landscape features and the laws of physics can enhance performance, enabling huge leaps through the air and impressive tricks. As one SSX Tricky character screams when players are doing well, ‘gravity is my friend’. Jet Set Radio, a rollerblading game, was released for the Dreamcast at around the same time, and required that players not only perform tricks using urban features such as railings and passing cars, but also that they tag the scenery using spray paint. Mastery over architecture and urbanism was a key feature of action gameplay in the late 1990s.

Skies of Arcadia resembles these games in visual style - the polygon 3D world, and the camera’s position behind the main character, and the vibrant colours - but the affordances of the environment are significantly constrained. The main character, when travelling on foot, can only run or walk. He will not fall from the edge of any building or walkway. This limitation of affordances was never mentioned in reviews of the game, because players carried with them assumptions about gameplay engendered by past experience with RPGs.

Discussions of jumping and constraints on play possibilities highlight the importance of mobility when discussing challenge space.

All design is space design

One area of sky, named the ’south Ocean’, presents an interesting example of how all the design elements described above were combined to contribute to space design.

Before accessing the South Ocean, non-playable characters speak in dramatic ‘cut scenes’ about how difficult it is to cross, and how nobody has ever managed it before. The South Ocean is made difficult due to strong winds blowing in the opposite direction of travel. In this sense, and because of its location on the world map, it is comparable to the South Atlantic, which Portuguese sailors of the 15th century found extremely challenging due to the Benguela and Agulhas currents, which impede travel down the Atlantic coast of Africa.

In terms of architectural design, the impression of a difficult to cross ocean is given by swirling, tornado-like structures that stand like pillars between the ceiling and floor. These pose no real danger, and simply exist for visual effect to represent the strong winds. The spatial design of the South Ocean is in fact mostly achieved through the gameplay itself.

When travelling from East to West in the South Ocean, the ship’s momentum is limited by a programming feature that simulates a strong wind. However, random encounter battles with sea monsters happen at the same rate that they normally would, meaning that more battles occur per unit of distance travelled than in other parts of the sky. The effect of this is not only to hamper the movement of the ship, but also to force players to use their resources more wisely. Damage dealt by enemies in battle can only be cured using potions or magical spells, both of which are a finite resource. If players do not have enough potions to get from one side of the ocean to another, they have to think of a battle strategy that will limit the amount of potions required, or else lose their progress by returning to an earlier save point in the game to try the route again with a greater supply of potions.

Monster design also contributes to this challenge. Many of the enemies faced in the South Ocean are able to ’summon allies’ during battle, so that if a group of monsters is not eliminated quickly enough, it will grow in size as the battle goes on. This can cause a huge amount of damage to the party’s health, which will then require a lot of potions to repair. Players have to find a way of killing all the monsters in a group within one or two turns, to limit damage to health.

The effect of this is that the RPG conceit of random encounter battles is used to simulate the challenges of a long ocean journey. The need to gather resources and save time makes the situation analogous to stocking up on food and trying to complete a voyage before supplies run out. Procedural features of game play and enemy design are here skilfully employed to act as a metaphor for health challenges that are not explicitly included in the RPG system.

The narrative and spatial design of the South Ocean is therefore achieved not just through architectural and visual effect, but primarily through procedural features of the programming.

In Mobilities, Urry suggests that ‘unforced movement is power’. ‘The more that a society is organised around the value of ‘circulation’, the greater the significance of network capital within the range of capitals available within a society’.[71] If mobility is about network capital, then there is a parallel here between Skies of Arcadia and Sega’s own attempt to wrestle with the challenges of a more mobile world.

Illustration 4: Train in Skies of Arcadia, ©Sega 2000

Illustration 5: Train in Final Fantasy VII, ©Square 1997

Illustration 6: View of Nasrad in Skies of Arcadia, ©Sega 2000

Illustration 7: Trademeet in Baldur’s Gate II, ©Bioware 2000

Towns

‘[W]e are condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach’[72]

Virtual worlds produce virtual histories. Many video games present an internal temporal rhythm, with changes in the world occurring in dependence on players’ actions. Events do not unfold after a set amount of time has passed, but happen if and only if that stage of the storyline is unlocked by players reaching a certain geographic point. This produces a past with which the player has directly engaged, a history both personal and environmental, and a flow of time marked in the players’ constant accumulation of ever-more items in their inventory and ever greater access to new areas of the game-world.

Arcadia is a world that carries the signs of an almost-forgotten history. The real-world ancient histories referenced in Arcadia’s ruins are often taken from tourist sites in Europe, the Middle East and South America, further exoticising the distant past. Pyramids, lost cities of gold, ancient worlds buried in the depths of the ocean... All these images and stories are familiar, but for players and characters alike their relics are being unearthed for the first time. The treasure is gone, the meaning of the highly detailed wall finishings lost, but the surface signs of the old world are still reachable, the magical architecture still working and ready to be manipulated.

The purpose of referentiality in Skies of Arcadia is rarely to explicitly remind players of a particular text, film or game. Instead, references fill the game world with familiar signs that tell already half-heard narratives. One area that is particularly rich with referentiality is Valua, the civilisation of the yellow moon. Valua is a perpetually dark place, due to the constant thunderstorms caused by the lightning energy of the yellow moon. However, yellow moonstones contain the power of electricity, allowing Valua to power electric lights and huge, metallic airships. This theme lends itself to a cyberpunk aesthetic, and one plot sequence references the opening scene of Final Fantasy VII, which features a train pulling into a dark, dirty city with neon lights. Valua is split into a poor quarter and a rich quarter, the former looking like a typical Dickensian film set and the latter set in a palace that, from far away, closely resembles the Disney castle, but lit up in purple and yellow neon. From the inside, the rich quarter is brightly lit and sparsely populated, and the sumptuously dressed non-playable characters will, if asked, talk with pride about their lives of leisure.

Valua features such a concatenation of referential images and cartoonist depictions of its inhabitants, it is constructed more like a thought-association exercise than the setting of a storyline. It is a feature in a virtual theme park; a setting for play and adventure. Like Disneyland, the narrative power of this flat layering of cultural reference is to give the impression of having travelled great distances and seen many things. It makes the game world appear more diverse.

Towns and dungeons are strongly thematically inspired by other Dungeons & Dragons (D&D)-based RPG universes. One useful comparison would be between Arcadia and Amn, the world of Baldur’s Gate II, another RPG published in the same year from American studio Bioware. Since these games were developed at the same time in different parts of the world, the design elements they share are highly likely to be owed to a common thematic heritage in the games’ genre as opposed to inter-referentiality between the two games. Arcadia’s Nasrad, an Indo-Turkic style area, features strikingly similar complex geometric surface textures to Trademeet.

Similarly, the rainforest of Horteka in Arcadia is an archetypical area, which is included in D&D-based worlds as places where druids practice their art and magical beings live among nature. Arcadia doesn’t feature druids, as magical power is not tied to class type, but the principle is the same; while D&D druid magic comes from the lush nature of the forest, in Arcadia and many other Japanese RPGs the lush forest is symptomatic of a rich source of ‘life energy’ type magic. Power is fundamentally tied to geography.

Thematic similarities between game worlds associate them and the general conceits of the game with familiar conceptions of magical power and cultural organisation. This lessens the burden of new knowledge placed on players and makes the logic of the world more readable. In fact, referentiality is a powerful tool used by game designers to make their worlds more immersive.

Magic space

The navigational map of Arcadia is clearly based on the real world; Valua and Nasr are located to the West and East respectively of the middle of the map, Horteka is to the South West, Yafutoma to the East; their relative positions are analogous to the real-world locations to which they refer. The picture resembles a fragmented version of the real world, with unrepresented chunks of the planet omitted, left as open air.

The fragmented nature of space in Arcadia is further developed during battle. When a battle occurs, either in a dungeon map or in the world map, the game teleports to a battle screen. As in earlier RPGs, the majority of enemies in Arcadia are not shown on the map, but only on the battle screen, so the player doesn’t know exactly what they are fighting against until the battle screen loads.

Battle screens are designed to look similar to the area being explored by the characters when the battle occurred, but adapted to suit the requirements of the battle animations. In Skies of Arcadia, the similarity is striking. The map used in battle screens varies to suit not only the scenario in general, but the main features of the particular part of the dungeon map players were in; bridges, lamps, walls etc. are all included and properly located in the battle screen. The difference lies in subtly changing the dimensions of the dungeon map to fit a battle arena; bridges are made wider, lamps are further away, etc. So the design of the battle arena itself is intended to limit fragmentation and maximise continuity.

This continuity suddenly disappears whenever a character performs a magic spell or a special move. The norm for RPGs is for magic to be represented by an animation on the ordinary battle screen - a fireball appearing out of the air in front of the character and zooming into the enemy, for example. In Skies of Arcadia, the unique decision was taken to make the entire polygon map vanish altogether, and be replaced by a magical space for the length of the animation. The magical space is a huge, black void, and the spell itself is represented by masses of coloured light taking a form appropriate to the spell. During these animation sequences the camera quickly pans around around the magical space, zooming into the character casting the spell and then out again to show its effects on the space. The camera never zooms close to the enemy being attacked, but shows the spell engulfing its victim and overwhelming it. Once the animation is complete, the void recedes and the battle screen returns to normal.

There are dozens of spells and special moves that players can choose to use in battles. Lambda burst, a special move of the character Aika, is one that can be used to eliminate large groups of small enemies as quickly as possible. As the background fades into darkness, and the ground is replaced by a glowing red surface, Aika spins her weapon around her head, leaving behind it four copies of the weapon made of red light at four equidistant points. These then fly outwards in opposite directions, and the surface is cut in a grid to become many separate blocks of ground floating in space. Fire bursts out of the spaces between these blocks, with a flamethrower sound effect. At the point the camera, which has been panning around the scene, zooms out to reveal the amount of damage done to each enemy, and the battle screen returns to normal.

This sudden and brief transportation to the magical space could be read similarly to a special effects sequence, theorised by Scott Bukatman as kaleidoscopic perception.[73] The dramatic movement of the camera here, as in science fiction cinema, puts the spectator - and during these sequences the player does become a spectator - ‘in motion relative to the world onscreen.’ However, while Bukatman claims that special effects in cinema introduce haptic knowledge to the viewer, in Skies of Arcadia the effect is different - for once, movement of the camera is unrelated to player action, so haptic knowledge already gained is disregarded. While the player ordinarily pulls the world towards them by pushing the on-screen character forwards, here their perception is suddenly propelled through space by the event sequence, and they are powerless to bring it to a halt. The on-screen action overpowers the players, forcing them to sit back and be wowed by the spectacle.

Silver Shrine

At the end of the game, having been to five of the six civilisations, it emerges that the sixth civilisation is not a landmass, but a huge ship floating above the world. The silver civilisation lives aloof of the rest of the world, in a place that is not land, but a ship that no longer travels. This is a place where circulation has come to a complete stop.

The design of this area is heavily referential of 2001: a Space Odyssey, giving the impression of a people who lack groundedness, nature or culture. The eeriness and loneliness of this super-clean, white space are important signifiers of plot, indicating the arrogance and lack of humanity that precedes the apocalyptic disaster about to occur when the final Gigas is summoned.

The evocation of 2001 is poignant in a game released in the year 2000, and Sega were not the only entertainment or technology company referencing it at this point. Apple opened their first high-street store in 2001, using clean, white, plastic modernism to stand out from ordinary computer stores. The apocalypticism of 2001 was perhaps not a concern for Apple; the point was to show that their computers would bring consumers the comfortable familiarity of a future as it had been imagined in the good old days. For Arcadia, the 2001 look may have represented a long heritage of technological ambivalence; future technologies are impressive, but also frightening.

Illustration 8: Unusual gravity and planet on the silver shrine in Skies of Arcadia, ©Sega 2000

Illustration 9: From 2001: a space odyssey, ©MGM 1968

Illustration 10: Sleeping pod on the silver shrine in Skies of Arcadia, ©Sega 2000

Illustration 11: Sleeping pods and unusual gravity on board the Discovery in 2001: a space odyssey, ©MGM 1968

The Gigas produced by the sixth crystal is not simply derived from it, but is created by uniting all of them. In the cut scene when the sixth Gigas is awakened, beams of light shoot from moon to moon, and a great beast is awakened from a deep, secret underworld. The sixth Gigas is a weapon that encompasses every moon, every element and every part of the world - the weaponisation of the geography of Arcadia. While is it never referred to in the game as an ‘ultimate weapon,’ this storyline follows in the footsteps of Japanese RPGs dating back to the 1980s at the latest, which have all featured an ‘ultimate weapon’ either as a core plot point or as a side-mission, or both. The Final Fantasy II ultimate weapon is the Juggernaut, a massive airship that the imperial forces are constructing in order to subjugate the world. In Final Fantasy VII it is a spell called ‘meteor’ that can cause mass destruction.

Ultimate weapon storylines in Japanese RPGs often, as in Skies of Arcadia, tell a story of mankind’s folly in playing god with technology, by trying to unmake the evil in the world with a ‘great flood’ style disaster. For example, in Final Fantasy VII the supervillain Sephiroth intends to use magical technology to attack the planet, so that the lifeforce within it will rebuild a better world, intending to fuse with the lifeforce and become god. This event causes all the warring factions of the world to join together in order to prevent the cataclysm Sephiroth tries to bring upon the planet. Skies of Arcadia echoes this basic plot, similarly creating a scenario in which all difference the world is equalised under the threat of totalizing destruction.

Skies of Arcadia is not simply about exploration. There were numerous ways the ultimate weapon could have materialised, and something along the lines of the Juggernaut would have been an easy choice in the game’s setting. The decision, instead, to opt for an ultimate weapon that brings total destruction through absolute unification changes the theme of the game, to the tension between fragmentation and wholeness, between diversity and imperial unification. Resistance against the unification and thereby destruction of the world is an interesting story to tell in a game on the theme of pirates, because it lauds individualism and regionalism in defiance of a structuring global order.

This is a curious narrative for a Dreamcast game. The ultimate weapon encompassing everything seems to parallel the universal connectivity provided by the console’s built-in modem. The defense of the world against imperial conquest and total destruction focuses on the values of regionalism in a fragmented world. This may hint at unease about the global changes that were anticipated during the dot com boom. The significance of dramatic changes in telecommunication is reflected in the game’s sub-plot about a giant whale, as well as the exploration of ‘deep sky’ later in the game, both of which are references to Jules Verne’s 1,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which was written around the time that the transatlantic telegram cable was being installed. Perhaps the role of this game was to give voice to the meaning of offline game design just as networking seemed about to transform the medium forever.

The Nostalgia Cascade

Skies of Arcadia was designed to feel nostalgic. Kurt Kalata pointed out in his review[74] that the game was released in the same year at Final Fantasy IX, which was also designed to play on the nostalgia of fans. In his view, while the latter attempted to use the heritage of the game franchise to evoke nostalgia, but failed to create a meaningful game world, Skies of Arcadia works because it doesn’t rely on fans’ memories of previous games. Rather, the world itself is nostalgic, layered with historical signs.

The word ‘nostalgic’ came up frequently at the end of my interview with Shuntaro Tanaka and Toshiyuki Mukaiyama, as together we looked at concept drawings from the early design stages of the game. They were talking about their own sense of nostalgia for the fun they had developing the game. The nostalgic theme of the game design itself was reflected back in the developers’ memories of its production.

This fractalisation of nostalgia is not just an isolated incident, but an example of a much larger phenomenon that affects most RPGs, that could be called the nostalgia cascade - layers upon layers of nostalgia collapse upon one another, created by memories of things that are themselves composed of historical memory.

The worlds of dungeons and dragons and the roleplaying games that followed it are almost always historical. By representing adventures in these archaic worlds using numeric systems, the implication may be that the old world was simple and mechanical in a way the new world is not. Role-playing games with contemporary settings are not as popular. This implication of a simpler, mechanical time before the complications of the modern world system is reflected in the use of steam- and clock-punk imagery in many games, including Skies of Arcadia in the form of cogged wheels and brass instruments. There is a transparency to the mechanical and magical systems represented in role-playing games. They can be seen, known and understood, because they are uncomplicated and archaic.

A few years after a game’s release it becomes the subject of nostalgia. This is then capitalised upon through porting and limited edition re-releases, as well as quotation in other games. All digital RPGs reference older RPGs, both digital and paper-based. They construct a lived memory not just of the history referenced, but of the references and simulations themselves. Meanwhile, novel features introduced to game mechanics often stimulate a discussion about the good old days, when the programming was simpler and the pace was slower, reflecting nostalgia for the historical periods referenced in the setting of the games.

The Dreamcast itself is an object of nostalgia for gamers because its life was so short yet so full of promise for the future. Game developer Will Luton said in an email correspondence:

I think that the Dreamcast offered a short glimpse of an alternate path, a history that never was [...] it was wholesome and naive in an age when the industry was beginning to open it’s eyes to sin and adult pleasures, to real violence and hatefulness. This was embodied by the Grand Theft Auto series and symbiosis between lad and club culture and the Playstation. That’s not to say it was childlike, just ephemeral and otherworldly whilst the industry was masculine and sneery. Had it been our history and prevailed it wouldn’t feel as romantic and tragically neglected.[75]

The tragic memory of the Dreamcast is made all the more romantic because its games are perceived by Luton to be so naive and innocent. Nostalgia for the Dreamcast resembles the very nostalgia for high modernism evoked in its minimalist packaging and in the sixth civilisation of Skies of Arcadia. Layer upon layer of nostalgia piles upon games like Skies of Arcadia, some of it present by design, some of it an accident of history, but lived historical memory itself reflects the design strategies of Arcadia and the Dreamcast itself.

The nostalgia of Arcadia’s architectural design contributes to its narrative that the diverse, fragmented world must be preserved against the totalising technological forces that could destroy everything. Nostalgia was perhaps all the more powerful at a time when dramatic technological shifts were hotly anticipated to transform the social life of digital gaming. Just as the frontiers of Arcadia constantly shift over the course of the game’s storyline, the frontiers of exploration in the medium were expanding too. It was Tanaka’s job, brought in to direct the project after the announcement of the Dreamcast, to bring an existing RPG project in line with the technological goals of the company. The architecture of Arcadia may have been designed as a way of looking back thematically, as well as looking forward technologically to a future of three-dimensional game design.

Dreamcast games and Paris

‘Volume and surface are the elements through which architecture manifests itself.’[76]

At the time that Le Corbusier first made this statement, he was the most famous consultant in the world. His job was to espouse a theory of how buildings and spaces should be designed. He told people how to make their cities beautiful and survivable even as the urban population boomed and transport systems changed the world after the Second World War. Seeing the chaos and overcrowding of the slums of Paris, his goal was to cleanse cities of filth and poverty using scientific rationalism: Fordist manufacturing, modular minimalism, and golden ratios.

Like the game developers at Sega in the late 1990s, Le Corbusier loved technology and science. In the 1920s, he imagined an urban future full of towering skyscrapers navigated by millions of motocars, a civilised world full of clean, minimalist apartments and enormous walls of glass, not because any of these things were necessary, but because they were technically possible. He foresaw that technology would create a more connected world, and sought to plan cities that were ready to facilitate those connections by devising rational transport systems and clean, organised residential blocks.

Le Corbusier’s influence can be seen in most major cities of the world in the form of concrete, glass high-rise apartment buildings, and colossal intercity freeways. In many ways, the future he imagined did become a reality. But his technocratic designs have contributed to urban isolation, the breakdown of local communities and the bulldozing and whitewashing of communities and cultures.

The problem was that networks often break some connections even as they facilitate others. The freeways that Le Corbusier designed went over or underneath his high-rise tower blocks for the urban poor, without any entry or exit points on the way. In his scheme, the freeways were to allow the middle class suburban residents to commute into their city jobs. Separated from the bustling economic hubs to which those freeways led, unemployment grew in those high-rises.

Le Corbusier must have known that poor people had to get to work too, just as Yu Suzuki must have known that Shenmue had to make more money than it cost. But both designers were more focused on what the new technologies of their day allowed them to build than how they actually connected to other. Yu Suzuki wanted to build the technological marvel that the Dreamcast was capable of, not acknowledging that the Dreamcast didn’t connect his game to enough consumers for it to have any hope of making enough money to be commercially worthwhile.

There is more to game spaces than the clean, scientific theories of computer science and video game studies can lead you to believe. Game spaces have people in them, and even though they can only act through limited rule sets and hardware capabilities, those people are still needed for those spaces to exist. Without a player pushing their on-screen character through a game level, it’s not a game space - it’s just code.

What is game space made of?

Polygons

Computer game 3D graphics are basically composed of polygons and texture maps. In Le Corbusier’s terms, polygons give objects ‘volume’, while textures give them their ‘surface’.

Le Corbusier was concerned with how the world is built and designed, but the idea of ’surface’ was also used by someone who was concerned with how the world is seen - James J. Gibson. He theorised that we perceive the world around us through media, surface and substance.[77]

The same principle can be applied to players’ comprehension of game worlds. The surface is the projection of the game-world that players see on the screen. The medium is the game hardware - the console, the controller, the TV and the speakers. It enables movement, vision and other sensations in the game world, as the air permits movement, the radiation of light and the permeation of sound in the real world. The substance is the properties of different objects in the game-world, as created by algorithms - this includes, on the most fundamental level, the collision detection that prevents on-screen characters from being able to move through a polygon - without this, a polygon’s ‘volume’ is meaningless.

Game code is designed to create a three-dimensional world that can be perceived by players in a similar way to how they perceive the real world. This means creating polygons and texture maps to mimick the volumes and surfaces that constitute real-world architecture, but it also means writing algorithms that give substance to those surfaces.

Dimensionality

Three-dimensionality had been a profitable gimmick in arcade gaming since the 1980s, but in the early 1990s, when Sony began building hype for the Playstation, it became a major selling point for big publishers. The next generation of consoles - Dreamcast, Gamecube and Playstation 2 - competed heavily on the basis of their capacity for three-dimensionality. Sega believed that the Dreamcast’s early entry into the market, and it’s capacity to render 3D graphics impressively with relatively cheap hardware, would make it highly competitive. In-house game developers were asked to make three-dimensional RPGs with large game-worlds to show off the capabilities of the hardware.

The meaning of three-dimensionality goes beyond the fact that a game is made up of polygons. When describing digital games, dimensionality is often used as an umbrella term covering visual effects as well as the number of control degrees of freedom available to the player when moving a character and/or camera around the world.

A world made of polygons is three-dimensional from a visual point of view, but the control degrees of freedom can range from one - for example, if the game world were to automatically move past the character, and the player could control only whether to jump or duck - up to six in, for example, a helicopter simulator in which the players could control movement along three axes and the tilt, roll and yaw of the vehicle itself.

The three games studied here are made either mainly or entirely from polygons. However, players are only able to move on-screen characters along a maximum of two degrees of freedom at any given time; while on foot they can move the character forwards and back, right and left, and while on a ladder or pole players can only move the character up and down. So the world is three-dimensional, but the control degrees of freedom are no greater than can be achieved in a two-dimensional game-world. Players are also able to sometimes move the camera, along another two degrees of freedom: up and down, and left and right.

This is common for RPGs, and could be compared with action games such as games from the Tomb Raider franchise, which typically give the players six control degrees of freedom; Lara Croft can be moved forwards and back, left and right, up and down (by jumping, crouching, climbing and falling), oriented right, left, up and down to face different directions, and even made to turn upside down by cartwheeling. This is a key differentiator between RPG and action gameplay, and makes different demands on the players’ skill.

So if three-dimensionality is about movement, then one thing to look out for in three-dimensional game spaces is how level design encourages movement along a greater number of degrees of freedom. All three of the games studied here use three-dimensional movement with varying degrees of success, but ultimately it wasn’t enough. Demonstrating technical excellence did not make up for the Dreamcast’s poor reception among consumer and third-party developers who were far more excited about what Sony might be about to release in the Playstation 2.

Screenness

Hardware

The way that the screen is bounded and contained is significant, and the housing for any computer game’s screen is effectively part of the game’s environment.

Play space doesn’t just exist inside the virtual world on-screen. The physical world can be important to play space as well. Microsoft‘s Kinect and Sony‘s Eyetoy and the Nintendo Wii accessories have dramatically altered the spatiality of games, bringing spatial play out of the virtual world and into the physical world.[78] I don’t want to dismiss the hand-held controller, the furniture of the living room, and the form-factor of cathode-ray tube televisions in the 1990s as unimportant to the spatiality of game-play on the Dreamcast. Physical spatiality is important to gameplay, but it is harder to trace than the virtual. Virtual spaces continue to be stored on GD-ROMS - the physical spaces of the 1990s have largely vanished.

When thinking about the spatiality of Skies of Arcadia, it is worth considering Cupil, the companion animal that is always visible as an animated figure on a small screen located inside the hand-held Dreamcast controller when playing Skies of Arcadia. The choice to place this charismatic character inside the cradled hands of the player, rather than on the television screen, is clearly a significant design decision that makes the character more sympathetic.

Shenmue employed a similar feature, putting instructions for button-presses in on the VMU screen inside the controller when Ryo received martial arts instruction and learned special moves. There is a logical reasoning to relocating the instructions for button presses into the hands that are operating the game - but beyond that, moving the instructions away from the virtual world of the screen and into the little, personal screen of the VMU gave the information conveyed an air of secrecy and mystery. The buttons that the player needed to press were not explicitly stated to Ryu, a clumsy tutorial method that often breaks immersion in video games.

Graphical interface

Along with the hardware of the screen, the user interface design of three-dimensional games presents a layer of screen features that do not belong to the game world itself. As well as the polygon landscape of the game world, players are able to see other on-screen features that aid comprehension of the game space. This can be a mini-map, a compass, contextual information about extra interactive features, or information about how to complete quests.

So much for the tech

Sega possessed a great deal of engineering and design skill, and was able to make impressive strides in spatial design from a technical point of view. But understanding how to manipulate space on a technical level was not enough for them, and it’s not enough for us. To understand how game space is really constructed, we need to stop relying on a technological reading of it, and put the people back in. How do people access spaces? How do we find meaning in them?

Drifting in Space

Game space as theme park

Theme parks, shopping malls and game worlds all share in common ‘place’ for entertainment purposes. ‘Any geographical, cultural, or mythic location [...] could be reconfigured as a setting for entertaiment.’[79],

Game worlds are not representations of the real-world, but playgrounds where teenagers and adults spend their leisure time. Like Disneyland or the Disney-themed RPG Kingdom Hearts, the game world is a ‘metaverse’ - it contains a variety of barely connected styles and moments under one place name.[80] The fun lies in the variety, but for this variety to make any kind of sense, the design of the game world has to provide a structure and narrative.

Theme parks can be thought of as simulations of an aimless stroll through a cosmopolitan city. They feel accidental, leisurely, and adventurous, but in reality your journey through a theme park has been carefully planned and programmed - just like the level design of a video game attempts to structure your movement in a predictable way, to prevent breakdowns in the design. ‘There is no discovery that one is not led to, no resolution that has not already occurred.’[81]

Aimless strolling through a fragmented urban landscape was theorised, valorised and turned into a rebellious artistic activity by the Situationists, a radical Parisian group started by Guy Debord in the 1960s.

Guy Debord was partly motivated by an opposition to the kind of urban existence that Le Corbusier had contributed to creating. Yet they had some things in common — both worked in the context of the French art world, and both thought absurdly highly of themselves — Debord described his book Society of the Spectacle as ‘the most important book of the twentieth century’. But while Le Corbusier saw connections between people and places as a technological problem, Debord saw it as a cultural issue. Recognising the alienation of urban life in Paris, he theorised that this was caused by the ‘spectacle’ — “a social relation between people that is mediated by images” consisting of mass media, advertisement and popular culture.

The dérive — aimless wandering through the city — was Debord’s way of changing the meaning of urban space in order to reclaim it and regain autonomy within it. By wandering aimlessly, instead of using the city in the way its designers intended, the Situationists were performing an anti-capitalist, rebellious gesture.[82] The point was to break down the invisible boundaries created by the society of the spectacle.

Guy Debord wanted to make the way that people move through the city playful. As he saw it, play would free people from authoritarian control.

Illustration 12: The Naked City, Guy Debord 1957

Guy Debord’s 1957 map of Paris, The Naked City (see illustration 12), represented Paris as a series of movements between fragmented and separate spaces. These fragments of Paris are intended to enable ‘the discovery of unities of atmosphere, of their main components, and of their spatial localisation.’[83] The Naked City highlights distinctions and differences in opposition to the homogeneity portrayed by conventional maps of the city.

In the 1960s, Debord was representing a fragmented city in order to challenge the invisible boundaries that controlled its residents. But by the 1990s, fragmented worlds had become mainstream in video games - persistent, open, connected worlds were the goal of game developers, but technical constraints meant that games had to be broken up into several small areas that were easier for processors to cope with. Shenmue, while considered an early example of open-world gameplay, was a clear example of this. The four gameplay areas are connected by a limited number of portals, one of which is represented by an entire bus journey through an urban space that the player is never able to see.

The Skies of Arcadia game world is closer to a psychogeographic map than a cartographical survey. Arcadia is a set of seven entirely separate civilisations, connected only by the open sky. The world is defined by the differentiating factors of the six moons, with common global history lost in antiquity, and the present state of diversity headed for destruction through unification. This fragmentation is intensified by the structure of the world as separate, floating landmasses which abruptly begin and end against the backdrop of a blue sky, not unlike the clear white of The Naked City.

Phantasy Star Online is even more fragmented; players continually return to the same ship in between quests, and a new play space is procedurally constructed each time they take on a new challenge. The world is made up of a huge number of unique little walled gardens, and movement from one garden to the next is only carried out through the controlled mediation of the ship.

Like Le Corbusier and other urban planners, game developers create not just the structure of the world, but also affect the possibilities and limitations on movement within it.

Debord aimed to challenge the limitations on urban movement and give people back the control over the meaning that they took from the spaces in which they lived and worked. He contributed to a revolutionary movement that aimed to liberate people from the psychological control of governments. But his own chunk of that movement - the Situationists - eventually collapsed because of his own authoritarian control over its members. Aside from being an art theorist, Debord was a belligerent drunk, and he expelled most of the movement’s few members whenever they disagreed with him.

It’s not enough to just build a space out of polygons, texture maps and algorithms; the movement of players within that space creates its meaning. To understand the creation of meaning through movement, we have to understand video game space from the user’s point of view.

Human computer interaction

User agency has been studied in software more generally since the 1980s. Three works have come to define thought on human-computer interaction and user experience. All three of them were written for an audience of designers, and all three of them advocate design that considers the user, enables them and puts them in charge of their experience - rather than trying to control their behaviour through restrictive design.

Michel De Certeau’s 1988 The practice of everyday life[84] offered the idea of the ‘user’ as an alternative to the ‘consumer’. To refer to people as consumers, he argued, made them passive recipients, and ignored their ability to subvert and re-integrate rituals and objects into their own practice. By looking at the user, it became possible to study how rituals‘ and objects‘ meanings change as they are reappropriated in people’s daily lives.

Lucy Suchman’s 1987 study for Xerox, Plans and Situated Action,[85] and cognitive scientist Donald Norman’s The design of everyday things,[86] published in 1988, both in some sense argued that the design of objects and technologies must consider both the agency of users, and the agency of objects to communicate adeptly or poorly with them. Norman gave numerous examples of how the design of objects makes human error unavoidable, and that human error should not be blamed on users but on bad interaction design.

Two notions the Norman coined became particularly influential; affordance, and user-centred design. Affordance, taken from James Gibson’s The ecological approach to perception,[87] refers to how the form and appearance of an object communicate its function and manner of use. User-centred design was proposed by Norman in opposition to ‘self-centred design’. Design should, Norman argued, consider the needs to the user, rather than the interests and concerns of the designer.

Norman’s work had a significant impact on computer science, particularly the field of human-computer interaction, and to this day it is not unusual to hear game designers discuss ‘affordance’.

Affordance is about making objects and buildings in the game world communicative of their function. But an additional implication of affordance concerns signs, and inherited expectations associated with RPGs. For an RPG fan, it is common sense that the character would not be able to harm themselves by jumping from a bridge, but that they would be able to buy goods from merchants and enter the houses of complete strangers and take items from any treasure boxes they lay their eyes on. In an action game, the opposite is true; players expect to be able to jump from bridges for amusement, they tolerate not being able to enter buildings, and do not expect to see treasure chests at all.

Le Corbusier wanted to make urban spaces more rational, but in the end his designs oppressed and controlled their residents. Guy Debord wanted to free people to find their own meanings and uses for the urban spaces Le Corbusier had designed. But he failed, because he wanted to control the organisation of people advocating for that freedom. Decades later, user experience and human-computer interaction studies have aimed to make objects and spaces that serve the people that use them, rather than making uncomfortable demands on them. Yet the very language through which software speaks to its users can best be read by those privileged enough to be educated in their history - experienced gamers. Just like the residents of a city, the behaviour of gamers is controlled not just through the mechanics of the software itself, but through the history of its symbols and signs.

Phantasy Star Online

PSO is one of those Dreamcast games that defines the Dreamcast.[88]

Phantasy Star Online, made by Sega spin-off Sonic Team, could have been a console-selling title. PSO Producer Yuji Naka and Director Takao Miyoshi had both worked on Sonic games in the past, and PSO would continue the Sonic the Hedgehog series heritage of making consoles look flashy. Just as the high-speed gameplay, soundtrack and graphical flourishes of Sonic made the Megadrive a competitive offering against the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, PSO would show the impressive capabilities of the Dreamcast’s graphics processor and modem by creating a game experience that few gamers had even imagined before: fully three-dimensional online gaming with players from all over the world, on their games console. In the end, the game wasn’t enough to save the Dreamcast, but it did have a significant impact on how the Dreamcast is remembered.

PSO wasn’t the first massively multiplayer online RPG (MMORPG) but it was developed at a time when online play was at the forefront of design change in video games. Sonic Team intended to bring two new offerings to the world of online gaming; to bring it away from the PC-gaming niche into the world of console gaming, and to introduce beautiful 3D graphics. While the game was heavily influenced by Diablo, and members of Sonic Team visited its developers Blizzard in the US,[89] they were keen to make the game look very different from existing PC online games. A great deal of importance was given to the art team, to make the game stand out from the ‘cheap graphics’ of what was on offer at the time.[90] PSO’s graphics were highly praised in reviews. One contemporary review on RPGfan.com remarked:

Graphically, the environments in Phantasy Star Online are nothing short of amazing. From the waterfalls, with the rainbow-like effect you see in mists within the caves, to the reflection of the walls on the floors of the machine center in the mining area, the Dreamcast is definitely pushing some great eye candy.[91]

The beautiful graphics and console platform both played a similar role in the game’s reception; they seduced an audience that was new to online gaming into becoming MMORPG players. PSO as a virtual world was significant for its online connectivity. Its spaces were designed to inscribe particular forms of player-player communication. In this chapter I will use interviews to analyse how far the game’s space design succeeded in inscribing the kind of communication desired by its creators.

Siting online gaming

Oral history

Phantasy Star Online is playable offline, with the same dungeon generator and tiles as the online game. But the experience of being in those game spaces is different offline, with the world emptied of people. There are spaces in the architecture left open for other player-characters to fill with their unique personal avatars and the textual chatter of conversation bubbles. The official servers have been discontinued, and while fan servers are still maintained so that the game is still playable online, I felt concerned that they wouldn’t capture the social atmosphere of the original game experience. So the only way to retrace PSO’s game spaces as they were in the year 2000 is to interview people who played it when it was first released.

The people interviewed in this chapter responded to a call I put out via the email list of backers who supported my crowdfunding campaign. Most of them have gone on to do work in or related to the games industry, and their memories of PSO often reflect their personal interests in the craft of video game design. This is testament to how influential PSO was, and the interviews hint at how the memory of PSO has affected game design long after the servers were shut down.

The strength of the interviewees’ voices as game creators and critics makes these interviews a remarkably different kind of source to the mostly anonymous player reviews I cited in the chapter on Skies of Arcadia. Rather than generalising their voices out to anonymous representatives of ‘players as a whole’, I will try to make clear who is saying what, and where appropriate, how it relates to their own work.

Multi-sited play

The connection between physical space and online space was signficant for the spatiality of gameplay itself. It connected the physical and the digital in new ways. Because the console needed to connect to a network point in order to run online features, in many households this restricted the choice of which television set the console could be connected to. Connecting the console to the internet presented a new set of logistical problems. How a household chose to resolve that problem affected how much privacy players had. Merritt Kopas had to play in the living room:

[...] My Dreamcast was hooked up to the television in our living room. When I did go online and play with folks online, it was a big hassle trying to figure out how to set up these connections that I had never really had to do before.[92]

While Sean Kelly was able to play in the privacy of his own bedroom:

We had just moved into a new house. It was a new house that had two phone lines: one of the offices, and I’d moved into the other room that had a second phone line. My parents knew that I was a tech and I would probably want to do ‘the internets’. There was definitely not a second phone jack in the family room with the TV and all the other consoles. [...] I suddenly had the place to plug in, and I had the internet, and it was the first real internet-enabled game console.[93]

The idea of playing with people from all over the world was extraordinarily exciting for interviewees, almost all of whom recalled how impressed and thrilled they were about being able to play online. If they were playing in a relatively public space then passers-by might remark on it too. Ken Barnes was playing in university dorms:

A roommate of mine came in, and this one girl shows up and starts looking at me and the screen, me and the screen and goes, ‘Are you are you talking to people? Are you actually interacting with other people? And they’re in other places, right?’[94]

It was such a mind fuck; the notion that there’s you, and there’s also telepresent people. I think the concept was really powerful.[95]

PSO was part of an incremental shift from physical to digital. This is a shift that we can still observe today in the closures of businesses that relied on bricks-and-mortar commercial spaces. We also see it in the unstable, rapid growth of companies that respond to the opportunities and challenges of digital distribution in inventive ways. Back in 2000, this shift was in a much earlier stage; while game play was moving online, game distribution was almost entirely physical, and the dissemination of information about games was also still largely rooted in existing physical networks. Merritt Kopas found out about the game through Dreamcast Magazine:

There used to be a Dreamcast Magazine that was published in US and Canada. There were screens, in-progress commentary and coverage of it, and it looked really fascinating. I’d never played an MMO or anything like a lot of online games, so I was really interested in it. When it finally did come out in the US, I got it as soon as possible.[96]

And so did Drew Onia, who was drawn to the cross-cultural experiences promised by the game’s online play:

The first place I found out about it was actually an official Dreamcast magazine [...] I remember seeing ads for it and previews for it. What was the tag phrase? ‘Now you can scream like a little girl in four different languages’, or something like that. It was talking about like how you could translate Japanese and English all together, so all the players could play together. I thought it was really cool, because I was looking forward to playing with people from all over the world.[97]

Dissonances between physically and digitally co-located interactions produced some people’s early lessons in how to talk to strangers on the internet. For independent game developer Saleem Dabbous, who grew up in Kuwait and now lives in Montreal, the virtual presence of players living in different parts of the world formed part of an intercultural education in social etiquette, leisure and privacy.

It was my first experience of a lot of Western culture, I guess. I had gone to an American school at the time but there were a lot of cultural things that I didn’t understand. I’d be playing with people and they’d be talking about something, and I said ‘What is this?’ ‘What is a rave?’ I had never heard that word before. [...]

We would just start talking, and this guy would be telling me about how he was depressed. I would push them on why and he goes, ‘oh well, my wife and I just got a divorce’. We were having these really personal conversations, and then my friend would call me on the house phone — which would sometimes disconnect me, because we were on 56k at the time — and he would be like, ‘Hey, I don’t think you should be asking people about their divorce’.

We were trying to figure out how to do the social etiquette with people that live vastly, vastly different lives than we did. I feel like it exposed me to a larger world out there, and I think that feeling will always stick with me.[98]

Ken Barnes is a game developer working at a company that specialises in online ‘live games’ for consoles. He played PSO when it was ported to the voice-enabled XBox. When his roommate’s friend started interacting using the headset, the sudden presence of a woman in a male-dominated virtual space produced uncomfortable interactions.

She insisted on grabbing the headset and putting it on and communicating with the other people while we’re playing. Today I would kind of expect more rudeness or more joviality or more... anything. At that point in time there was stunned silence. All the other three players just kind of shut down and went to ‘yes,’ ‘no’ and ‘ok’ answers. After she left there was just mass boy confusion. ‘What was that? I don’t know what happened, somebody was on the chat, I don’t understand’. It was out of their frame of experience entirely.[99]

Barnes mentioned to me that this tension around gender continues to exist today; in fact, he felt that it was far worse now, with more overt hostility in online spaces today than there was in Phantasy Star Online. Richard Lemarchand remembers it being much more severe, as someone who took a particular interest in combating harrassment and prejudice in gaming:

I remember in particular encountering an enormous amount of sexist, racist, homophobic speech on PSO. It seemed to get worse as time went by. I’m the kind of person who finds it hard to not comment. Whenever I encounter sexist, homophobic or racist speech I want to speak out against it, I want to counter it. I remember doing so a lot and I remember getting into frustrating arguments with people who were presumably just stupid kids somewhere in the world mouthing off who may or may not have deep-seated sexist, racist, homophobic beliefs.[100]

The interaction between players in virtual spaces was not left to chance by Sonic Team, but carefully considered in PSO’s design. Sonic Team designed the setting and storyline to have all players work towards a common goal, so that the relationship between them would be one of camaraderie rather than opposition. In an interview with Famitsu Takao Miyoshi said:

At first, we had to think of how the people using the ’net will be communicating among themselves. Once we started to think about it, we realized that everyone playing will be all strangers at first, so we had to think of a method to go around that. So in the end, we decided that everything will be tied together into a common goal.[101]

This notion permeated everything produced in connection with the game, including the promotional slogan: ‘Heroes are not alone’ (eiyuu wa hitori ja nai). The game’s spaces reflect this cooperative orientation of the gameplay, by inscribing a navigation of game space that involved always returning back to a common area (the ship) to deal with bureaucratic organisational matters before accepting a new quest and embarking on a dungeon crawl.

Player-characters are members of a larger organisation that gives characters quests from their base on a space ship. Characters are transported from the ship down to the surface of a planet to fulfill quests, and are beamed back up when quests are finished. Back on the base, they report in at a desk, get paid and take on a new quest. Where most RPGs have a heroic main character pushing against a frontier to explore all corners of the world, PSO simply keeps on creating procedurally generated dungeons for players to visit; though these were rudimentary and led only to a small number of possible variations, it imparted a sense that the whole world will never be completely discovered. The space ship is the organisational centre of the game world, and procedurally generated dungeons form an infinitely unfolding periphery.

In the late 1990s, this spatial structure neatly mirrored the spatiality of internet access; mobile web was still in its infancy, and the Dreamcast was intended to be not only a games console but a young person’s main internet access point in the home. This goal was not achieved, partly because the interaction design of accessing the internet through a games console was uncomfortable; televisions did not have high enough resolution to show text clearly, and the keyboard and mouse were sold separately to the main console. The conceit that players would be accessing the internet from fixed access points held true until featurephones made internet access ubiquitous and immediate.

The design of the ship itself, floating above the planet and housing facilities provided by an overarching organisation, suggests a bureaucratic system of labour management, the kind of organised strength that is mostly absent from RPGs created in the late 1990s. This is not the ad-hoc freelancing of Final Fantasy games of the same era, in which player characters travel from one place in the game world to the next on a larger, personal quest, with smaller quests to fulfill along the way. This is not about individual heroics in an undiscovered world. It is about a group of people coming together to solve a problem. However, this cooperative design of the gameplay, storyline and spaces did not create wholly congenial or collaborative online communities.

PVE and PVP

Online play brought its own hazards and troubles that Sega and Sonic Team were not fully prepared for.

Sonic Team didn’t know what to expect from an online game after launch, right down to how long they would have to maintain the game for. Assuming that gameplay patterns would reflect retail sales, which trail off very quickly following an initial spike when the game was released, they expected to only have to maintain the servers for a few months after launch. Takao Miyoshi explained in an interview for a fansite, ‘It ended up becoming an operation lasting more than five years.’[102] Today, such a long running time is expected and desired for an MMORPG. Speaking at the Game Developer’s Conference in 2012, Björn Book-Larsson of MMORPG developers Reloaded games said that they expect a game to reach its peak audience size only after four years.[103]

It wasn’t just the life cycle of the game that took its developer and publisher by surprise. Phantasy Star Online is a Player-versus-Environment game; players do not compete against each other, but work cooperatively to clear an area of monsters and collect loot. However, many online games already available at the time, such as Quake, were player-versus-player, and many gamers enjoy the experience of besting someone.

Despite the cooperative design of PSO, the urge to beat another player crept in, and manifested itself most disruptively in a cheat that enabled players to kill other players’ avatars and take their items. Affected avatars would revive as if they had died in a normal battle, but they would lose any weapons or items that they were carrying. Kelly experienced the brunt of this:

There was obviously some level of hacking that the game was definitely vulnerable to, if you encountered the wrong people at the wrong time. There was this thing where if you get hit you get killed and drop all your cash. I don’t remember how much cash I was carrying at the time. Someone killed me, and then they apologized profusely over the messaging. I rose and then they killed me again and then they apologised profusely. At that point I just logged out.[104]

Onia had a similar experience, as well as on a separate occasion falling victim to a hack that relied on persuasion and deception rather than physical force:

I joined a game and didn’t really clue into what was going on. There’s two other people in the game and one guy wasn’t talking at all, but the other character, for some reason he was screaming and yelling at the silent person calling them all these names. As soon as I went from the space station into the first dungeon, this other player that had been silent came up and just hit me with the sword and stole all my stuff. I had no idea how he killed me, because you can’t kill other characters, but he managed to do it and he took all my stuff. That’s why the other guy was so mad.

Another time this really sketchy guy joins and he’s like, ‘You have something for me in your bank’, and I was like ‘I don’t think I do’, but being the idiot I was, I was like, ‘Okay I’ll go check,’ so I went to the bank, and I saw all my money just disappear. And then the game froze. When I loaded it back up, my character had been replaced with this little, fat, purple, dwarf guy wearing a hat.[105]

Even without using hacking, players were able to exploit other players’ vulnerability when playing in a party together if the other character was killed in combat. Although the character would simply be revived automatically, some of the items they had with them in the dungeon would be dropped and left behind. This led to some players simply taking the person’s items and running away. Kopas changed her social behaviour to protect herself from this:

If you died, you dropped all of your equipped gear. So playing online there was this phenomenon: players would just join groups and wait for it to happen and then swoop in and grab stuff. If you’re going to play online that’s like a risk that you have to take. You know that there are people who are going to be doing that. So if I’m going to be online I’m going to be really careful. I don’t think that was intentional but it really changed the experience [...] I think I did have a few people that I played with, people who were trustworthy or who would pick up your stuff as a preventive measure to stop other people from grabbing it.[106]

It wasn’t just violence that concerned players; a lack of honour in trading partners was a problem that particularly worried Saleem Dabbous:

Finding the rare weapons felt super super awesome, and the trading element did too. But when you traded with somebody, you didn’t know if the item was legit or not. I can’t remember the name of the weapon, but there was this really rare weapon that had this sort of spray shot that could hit multiple enemies at the same time. Everybody who found it was raving about how it was so awesome and super rare. Then someone came up to me and said ‘Do you want one of these?’ I was like, ‘Wait, did you actually unlock this, or did you just cheat your way to getting it?’ and he was like ‘no, I totally cheated’. It doesn’t feel special to get it that way, and that was a really disappointing experience. I think cheating was pretty rampant for a long time. I don’t know if the game ever escaped that.[107]

Sega tidied up the issues that had led to these exploits in version 2 of the game, a subsequent edition that had to be bought separately in physical form. Reissuing a game to deal with bug fixes was an uncommon and unnecessary practice for console gaming up until that point, and this laborious and expensive procedure demonstrates how important software ‘patches’ were to the subsequent success of online games. When Phantasy Star Online was released, internet connections were too slow for it to be possible to make all players download software updates that would repair problems with hacking and exploits. The Japanese version of the game ran on a 28.8kb dial-up modem, and lacked a hard-drive on which game patches might be stored. Many players never bought version 2, so their experience of the game remained tarnished by other players’ poor behaviour. It wasn’t until high-speed internet became commonplace and consoles came bundled with hard-drives that game developers were able to issue these patches, which are now accepted as a necessity for all videogames, even single-player games played offline.

The sociality of the game spaces in PSO reveals two things: first of all, that Sega failed in its attempt to inscribe a cooperative mode of interaction in the game’s spatial, narrative and systemic designs; and secondly, that while Sega saw itself as a tree-like structure with directors at the center and players at the periphery, player action in PSO fed back directly into the nature of gameplay experience itself, challenging that traditional view of the position of players in the network.

Trees and Rhizomes

Before online multiplayer, cheating would only affect one player’s experience of a game, rather than affecting the experience for other players too. Game developers too wouldn’t necessarily know or care that players were using cheat codes on their game, because their relationship with the product often ended after launch. With online games, the process of creating the game unexpectedly bled into the months and years after launch, as developers could see player actions and behaviours changing the nature of the game itself. A new feedback loop was created in the network of production and consumption, in a place that previously had been just an extension of a long tree reaching from CSK holdings execs, through the ranks of Sega, through the console to the players. The more networked the world became, the more the shape of the network structures in that world shifted.

The tree structure was mimicked in the center-periphery-based design of the PSO world. The players belong to a bureaucratic, tree-shaped organisation; this structure was perhaps employed as a way of making the game less individualistic than single-player RPGs, and emphasise cooperation.

This contrast between the tree-shaped structure of the game world and the feedback loops introduced by online play reflects a shift identified by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in 1987 from tree-like structures of knowledge to rhizomatic structures.[108] Rhizomatic is a specific way of talking about a networked structure. A rhizome is a web structure where points link to each other in any direction, rather than the single-direction branching links of a tree.

Rhizome structures have emerged in many areas, from the ecologies of jungles to wikipedia, and they are also an interesting way of thinking about level design in video games. Clara Fernandez-Vara identified rhizomes in game design as an alternative to maze and labyrinth structures. Labyrinths are winding paths, mazes are branching paths, and rhizomes are paths that both branch out and link back.[109] Rhizomes are hard to picture, and linking from one part of a space to another seems impossible. Unless you’ve played Portal, a game created almost ten years after Phantasy Star Online, in a highly networked world, by a company that has explicity rejected hierarchical models of organisation[110]. In Portal, 3D, physics-based puzzles are completed by creating ‘portals’ that join one point in space to another. Rather than unfolding before the player progressively, in Portal space links back into itself. If Phantasy Star Online was a tree-shaped game made by a tree-shaped company, Portal was a rhizomatic game made by a rhizomatic company. But the new feedback routes of online connectivity re-directed flows of information, and made PSO’s network more rhizomatic.

Nobody knew what to expect from Phantasy Star Online after launch. Nobody knew what online console gaming, or MMOs in fully 3D worlds, were going to feel like. In the end, networking shifted the entire network of gaming into a more rhizomatic structure, with unexpected linkages and a less tree-like structure, but the design of the game world itself didn’t reflect that. It couldn’t, because it was designed before this shift had taken place.

Character creation

This book was supposed to be about architecture and landscape design. As a result of interviews with fans of the game, and looking at how the game plays, it’s become clear that Phantasy Star Online was not just made of polygons; it was made of people. Richard Lemarchand described being ‘very concerned with how I presented in the space’. The sociality of the space affected player action within it, and added a new set of concerns regarding how one’s player-character appeared to others.

For retro gaming writer Drew Onia, character creation was one of the most exciting things about starting Phantasy Star Online:

The first time I bought it actually was when I was on summer vacation. It was torture, because we were out camping. I went to the local game store, I bought it, and I just thought about it for the two weeks we were on vacation; about the character I was going to make and everything. [...] I couldn’t wait so I had to buy it on holiday and just think about the character I was going to make and everything, throughout my holiday.

[...] It lived up to my expectations for sure. I kind of wanted this anime fantasy adventure and I was really into anime and stuff at the time, so I loved the character creation. I think that first character, I tried to make it look like Sailor Moon. I don’t think it really succeeded that well, but it was a lot of fun. I remember making a whole bunch of different characters and just trying to make them unique or modeled after as many different characters as I could.[111]

Onia wanted to replicate other Japanese cultural products that he enjoyed, and spent a great deal of time engaging in the challenge of crafting characters with particular designs in mind using the challenging tool of the character creator. Sean Kelly also valued the character creator as an important part of the game that he returned to time and again:

I think a large part of that replayability was getting back to the character editor. You could come back to it after a long time, start fresh and then do something that you hadn’t done before. It took about five years to really get through everything I wanted to do with the three base classes.[112]

Testimonies like this show that the character creator was as important as any dungeon to the experience of the game, a more significant driver of replayability than the procedurally-generated dungeons, and for some people more anticipated than the game’s worlds. However, it was the sociality of the game that brought new significance to character creation in PSO that was missing from other RPGs, as Kelly pointed out:

Probably a lot of memories of it are from around the sheer detail in the character creator. It was the first create-your-own-avatar, let alone create-your-avatar-for-a-social-context, game that I ever got my hands on.[113]

The enjoyable process of character creation contributed to the significance of the game as a performative social experience. PSO’s intricate character design tool allowed players to construct avatars that either represented themselves, or represented fantasies about ways of being. The characters displayed in the multiplayer world represented the most diverse and intricate visual details of the game. For Merritt Kopas, PSO and other games provided a way of exploring gender roles that were barred to her at the time.

I like the idea of role playing games that let you create your own character and explore a space more or less on your own. Games that let you create a character and let you occupy that in some like other fantasy space. In retrospect I think I really liked those kind of games because they let me like play with presentation and stuff in a way that I wasn’t able to at the time. [...] You can create your own character and create yourself this world, which was really new.[114]

Experiences like these have influenced Kopas’s work studying and creating games with a focus on gender performativity. Her work includes autobiographical games about her experience moving through the world as a queer trans woman. She details some of her experiences relating to character creators in an essay entitled Gameplay, Genderplay,[115] in which she draws attention to the social pressures on players to conform to gender normativity even when playing in virtual spaces. (http://mkopas.net/2012/12/gameplay-genderplay/) In our interview she described in detail how the game design surrounding player characters affected her options for self-expression.

I think it was the first game that I played that actually had that robust a character creator. Although looking back it doesn’t offer that many possibilities. You can manipulate facial features a bit, try out a few different hairstyles. For each character the clothing is pretty much locked, you can just change the colors. You can mess around with body type and height a little bit. But I think I spent a lot of time creating characters that I actually never played. It was really neat to me that the game would let you create your own character rather than having a pre-generated one.[116]

She goes on to describe settling upon a genderqueer avatar as her main character:

[...] I think the original PSO had some kind of limitation on how many characters you could actually create or save or something. It had some bizarre limitation, one character per vmu or something like that, I’m not sure. I do remember I played with one character, my primary character, the one I used the most. It was like this uh... the elf characters — Newman I think they’re called? It was a male force user in a very flamboyant dress and big glasses and shoes, kind of goofy-looking. I spent a lot of time trying to tweak and like figure out how I wanted my character to look so I got really attached to it.[117]

It wasn’t just Kopas who found the character creator an interesting site of explorative play. Sean Kelly also played with some female characters, but for him this was gender play outside of his personal gender identification — as he called it, ‘crossplaying’.

It was the first time I’d encountered, or had to grapple with, the moral implications of cross playing in a multiplayer social game. Was it okay to I, as a guy, log in with a character who is female. Most of the time I think I did play as my male first character primary, but I did have a few females in the roster. I don’t remember whether I ever manned up [sic] and went online with one of them.[118]

Lemarchand described experimenting with different kinds of female characters to explore hate speech and discrimination in the game, using the physical appearance options provided in the character creator to change his experience of social space.

I remember that she was a physically small female Newman force character that I played with quite a lot. I think that is when I started trying to develop that healer/support role in the battles. I continued using that character to speak out against hate speech whenever I found it and I remember that that character was given a harder time by the other players than the white male hunter had been. [...] I created a tall female cast ranger. This magnificent Amazonian robot whose character design was restrained, which was clearly female and she was sturdy. She was not a kind of waiflike female character.[119]

Later on, Lemarchand admitted that this second female character he created was also not well received, musing, ‘I don’t think the other players were very keen to engage with a moralistic robot’.

While in-game genderplay was part of Lemarchand’s exploration of social roles in the game, for Kopas her perceived cross-playing became too problematic to sustain. This is perhaps because of the widely different contexts of their game play in terms of physical space and age; Lemarchand was playing as a 32-year old in the privacy of his own room, while Kopas was a teenager playing in her family’s living room. In Gameplay, Genderplay, Kopas mentions that not long after PSO came out, she stopped playing female characters in games because it was socially uncomfortable to do so.

I had learned that playing as female characters invited questions that I didn’t want to deal with. If playing a male character meant that I could easily neutralize one potential site of harassment in my life, then I would do it gladly. After all, it was such a small thing — hardly worth being hassled over.[120]

She goes on to write more generally about the question of men playing with female characters, addressing the suggestion posed to her that men use female characters as objects of sexual fantasy. She questions this, highlights the intersection between fantasy and identification, and posits that female avatars as male sexual fantasy are a possible face-saving cover for gaming behaviours that actually exist as a form of gender transgressive self-exploration. In her conclusion she reflects:

Certainly, we do use games. But games affect us in return. Our relationships to games are complicated and often change us in ways that are impossible to predict or control.[121]

Character creation in PSO did affect the players I interviewed. Interviewees looked back on character creation as a form of exploration. The meaning they gave to this exploration varied depending on their own perspectives on gaming. Some saw it as about personal identity expression, others about varying the gameplay challenges or about total completion of the game content. The core question that underlies character-focused exploration of the game is, how does your avatar affect your experience of telepresence? How does a space change depending on the nature of the body occupying it? And given the choice to be anything at all, why do we so often opt for stability?

To address that last question: from what I could gather in my interviews, most players created more than one character. Yet they almost always ended up with one character that was their primary avatar. This could be understood as being about personal identity, but it is a form of identification that is mediated by the mechanic of acquisition; acquiring rare items and special abilities, that create a materialistic attachment to the character as well as a personal connection.

Kelly was mooting entering the online version of the game with a particularly fetching female character he had created, but decided not to because it would feel misleading in the wider social context to ‘crossplay’ as a female. Onia and Kopas spent hours experimenting with the possibilities for character creation, but only really played for any significant length of time with one character. Yet nobody described their relationship with an avatar as ‘this one felt like me’. It was about commitment to a particular character, rather than attempting at an accurate representation of the self. Because of this, I’m hesitant to use the term ‘avatar’ — that character on the screen is not the player. It’s a toy, albeit often a highly valued one.

Character creation was explorative, but also strategic. It was socially strategic, as described so poignantly by Kopas, but also strategic for gameplay, as hinted at by Sean Kelly.

Players also had to develop social gameplay strategies for working out how to find parties to join in order to explore dungeons. The simple system of just finding an available group and joining in could lead to undesired subversions of the game’s mechanics, such as deliberate theft of their character’s items or being gifted rare items that had been acquired through hacking. This meant that social spaces such as the lobby or dungeons had to be navigated with care, so that some vetting could take place to determine who was worth playing with. For some players, it meant not using the game’s social spaces at all, instead turning to personal connections created through fan forums to organise meetups in game with reputable players.

Lobby

‘Lobby’ is a spatial metaphor now used widely in MMOs to represent a system whereby players search for a group of other players to join with before starting a quest or mission. While the word lobby can be used as a purely linguistic signifier, in Phantasy Star Online there was a space called the lobby on board the ship where players could take their avatars, communicate with each other, and informally group up into parties for quests. The lobby was essentially a chat room given three-dimensional visual form.

The spatial experience of the game as a whole rests on the sense that the game is made of people. Yuji Naka explained in a Famitsu interview:

For me, my main goal was not to make an RPG that had cool movies or pretty graphics but rather a game that you’ll have fun playing with other people. I wanted to be able to make my own story, to adventure with my friends.[122]

The importance of people to the game space is most obvious in the way it mediated players’ experiences of the lobby. In terms of how the game spaces are arranged, the lobby is highly accessible. No special pass is required to access it, and there are no battles to be fought there. It is accessed through a teleportation pad in the main concourse of the ship. But the experience of being in the lobby was strongly coloured by the presence or absence of other players.

With no other player-characters occupying the space, it was just an empty lounge, much like the lobby of a hotel. As RPG narrative expert James Wallis pointed out in our interview, this is somewhat at odds with the notion of a quasi-military organisation. He experienced the game only in offline mode, so when he accessed it there were no other player-characters present.

I enjoyed the aesthetic of the lobby a great deal. It looked a bit like a hotel. It felt weirdly like a hotel. It was kind of uh, ‘this is a hangout space!’ rather than the core centre of where these space marines are going to go down to the planet’s surface.[123]

Interviewees reported that with other player-characters occupying the space, the atmostphere was very different indeed. Some players enjoyed this purely social space in the game, spending a lot of time there and enjoying the novelty of socialising in a purely virtual space. Kopas was playing in her living room, where family members and visitors noticed at a glance that the virtual space on screen was unusually highly populated and social:

I’m sitting my living room and playing this game with people from Japan. It was kind of public, I think. Other members of my family would be in the room and be like ‘What are you doing?’ and I was like ‘I’m playing this game with people from other countries’, and I think that was really new to them as well. [...] a big part of the game wasn’t taking place in a ‘game’ context, it was more in the lobby conversations. If you just see a bunch of characters standing around with chat bubbles coming up above their heads, you think, ‘what is this? it doesn’t look like a game’.[124]

Lemarchand also spent a great deal of time in the lobby, and it constituted the main structure for his socialisation in the game:

I mainly would hang out in the lobby. I want to say that there were a few friends who would usually be playing at about the same time as me [...] It’s possible that my friend Kurt was playing or did play a little bit but didn’t get that into it. I don’t think I did really have IRL friends. I think that there were just some people online that I would see regularly. I don’t recall organizing a social life for myself, mainly I would just pair up with strangers in the lobby.[125]

However, for players like Onia without a keyboard it was prohibitively difficult to take part in the conversations.

Because I didn’t have a keyboard I was never one of the people who could hang out in — I forgot what it was called — the space station where everyone would just kinda hang out in make groups and form games or just hang out chatting but I obviously could never do that.[126]

In addition to this sense of socially-mediated accessibility, there was also a sense of how to play safely when other human beings were involved in your game. Players who wanted to play safely and legitimately had to navigate the game’s spaces carefully. In order to take proper precautions, many players ended up bypassing the official social space of the lobby altogether. By using external sites to meet other players, Kopas and Dabbous both ensured that they only interacted with trustworthy people.

[...] I’m sure there were community systems of shaming. I seem to recall on GameFAQs there’d be forum topics such as, ‘here’s a list of players who are known to steal equipment or use hacks into character files and things, so don’t play with them’. So there was community policing.[127]

After getting into PSO for a bit I actually started going onto a forum that had a pretty big PSO community and so we would arrange games ahead of time, so most of my time was actually spent within like the actual dungeons. I believe people had come to meet and play through the forum. [...] I used to really enjoy actually finding strangers to play with [using the lobby]. After [I encountered cheating] I only wanted to play with my friends.[128]

Player-controlled characters deeply affected the spatiality of the game by bringing in issues of safety and comfort in social spaces. The lobby was for many players either a place where they spent a great deal of time socialising, or an off-limits area if they found communication difficult because of hardware limitations such as not owning a Dreamcast keyboard. A player’s experience of that space was determined by their ability to interact with the other player characters occupying it. An inability to interact led to a sense of being left out of the conversation, which was unpleasant enough for the entire area to be not worth visiting.

For many players, the lobby failed as a social space, due to hardware barriers and untrustworthy participants. In spite of this design breakdown in how the game managed social interactions and controlled player behaviour, the game is remembered fondly for its social atmosphere.

Dungeons

In fact, for many players, the dungeons were a highly social environment. Even for James Wallis, who was playing offline, the dungeon spaces were pleasant and relaxing:

The first time you were on the planet it was this amazing, luscious green. It feels alive. It feels like a very vibrant place, in a way that Sega at the height of its powers did so amazingly well - you get it in the early Sonic games as well. It doesn’t feel like a game, or it’s almost deliberately playing against the whole ‘game’ idea to be naturalistic, or, I’m not sure if organic is quite the right word for it, but it feels like wild terrain, it feels like a wild place.

The other thing that you picked up very quickly playing PSO is that it’s not this wonderful world environment. It’s actually a very scripted environment. But it’s still great fun to explore it, finding a way around the paths, finding the way that the chunks of the environment had been put together this time.[129]

As a PvE game, Phantasy Star Online was a piece of software designed to provide challenging spaces for players to overcome and conquer. The dungeon generation system provided an endless series of such challenging spaces. By shuffling a series of tiles into a new arrangement before every quest, the software supplied new dungeons on request, with items and enemies scattered across the map.

Wallis mentioned the sense of wildness in the environment as if it were apart from the procedural generation of the levels. But maybe that wildness was bolstered by the procedurality of the dungeons’ creation. Just like how the growth of landscapes in nature is outside of human control, scripted environments partly shift the agency for design from level designers to non-human entities inside the console.

Nevertheless, for Lemarchand the forest did not look wild enough, which he attributes to technical limitations as well as the need to keep the spaces navigable.

I think it would be quite natural to end up with spaces that looked quite tended like a garden or a theme park. Also from a level design point of view, I know from my experience on the Uncharted games that levels that look very wild and overgrown make it very hard for players to find their way through them. I wouldn’t be surprised if simply keeping frame rate up and keeping the polygon countdown was a reason for the art direction in PSO.[130]

The dungeons of Phantasy Star Online are primarily labyrinthine. A couple of short, branching paths lead to dead ends, but the bulk of the journey through a dungeon is made up of one long, winding path. The spatial challenge of mazes or puzzles is not operative in this game. Spaces are not challenges in themselves, but settings for quests, as Kopas noted:

I remember enjoying the level layout thinking that it had a good sense of place, that the levels were well organized. You couldn’t get too lost in them but neither were they too simple. They seemed to be well posted with paths forwards, the various branches were always quite clear.[131]

The labyrinth gives players a space to always move forwards into, without leading them anywhere in particular. When one battle ends, players can move forwards to find the next battle, until eventually the quest is complete and they can return to the ship.

The spaces of Phantasy Star Online were comforting places where players could relax, socialise and forget the stresses of daily life. Some people were finding an escape from an isolating social position during their teen years, others were working off the stress of a major life event such as a divorce. For most of the people I interviewed, PSO was not just a game they played once, completed and never touched again, but an experience that they returned to time and time again over the course of a few months or years, whenever there was no new hit release that interested them. In a way, people talk about it like they would talk about a favourite pub; a social space, a place to relax, the sort of place you always find yourself coming back to because it feels familiar and safe.

The design of the dungeons contributed to the game’s role as a space to unwind, socialise and forget the stresses of life. The labyrinth shapes meant that players could move forwards for as long as they liked, but they could also stay right where they were, and nothing would trouble them as long as they didn’t move onto another tile. This use of the dungeons as a relaxing social space is particularly well captured by Drew Onia’s story about spending New Year’s Eve playing the game:

I remember I spent New Year’s eve 2001 or 2002 online with Phantasy Star Online and it was really fun, because we weren’t really playing so much; we just ran out wandering around the dungeon and chatting. Everyone was in different time zones, so you got to wish each person Happy New Year and an hour later, for someone else, it would be their Happy New Year.

It was a really fun New Year’s experience. I know that sounds super nerdy, sitting at home playing games on New Year’s but is just one of those things that really resonated with me and it’s probably my happiest memory of the game; just sitting there, having fun with people and getting to wish them happy new year across the planet, because that’s what was so great about Phantasy Star Online.[132]

James Wallis reflected on how the game space captured his needs following a ‘traumatic divorce’.

The idea of most games is progression: you move through the game, you progress through the game. Yet Sega was amazingly good at coming up with games and game elements where it’s just nice to be within the game’s first couple of levels. [...] I can replay them endlessly and i just love being within them, exploring the levels trying to find things I’d never seen before. And then the enemy mobs such as the Rappies, these little yellow birds, their attack patterns were painfully obvious, they were very slow, and they were not particularly threatening.

[...] Especially after a very traumatic divorce, it’s nice to be in a space where you know that you can affect the world, because you have a big weapon, but you also don’t particularly have to.[133]

Even the climactic end to the game presented only a gentle challenge to the highly levelled player, and left its strongest impression as a social experience rather than as an epic victory.

When I finally got strong enough to do that final dungeon I was with three other people. I can’t remember where they were from or anything, but it was a really fun last dungeon.

[...] It wasn’t as grindy or repetitive as the other levels in the game. I felt like there was a surprise in every room. It was really dark, and the music I remember was really haunting and slow, so it really built suspense. Then you finally broke through and got to the boss, which wasn’t as climactic as I’d hoped; maybe it was just because we were so strong but we were able to take it out in ten seconds.

At the very end of the game this picture comes up with you and all the other people in your party. I still don’t really know how they did it, but Sonic Team managed to make a really cool portrait of your character plus everyone else’s character, just this little poster. It would stay there for a few seconds and then go away, once you beat the game. That was really cool; probably one of the most memorable quests from the game was the ending.[134]

It’s worth noting however that the players’ subjective sense of how menacing an area was depended on their route through the game until that point. Drew Onia had made sure he was a high enough level before he entered the final area. Merritt Kopas entered the final area when she was following another group of players into there, and was unprepared. As a result, her experience was markedly different.

The final area of the game was called ‘ruins’, I think. It’s this really dark, creepy, evil cave, and I think that all the monsters are mutated versions of the things you see earlier on the game, so they’re all corrupted and freaky. I had never seen that area because I hadn’t progressed that far. I think at some point I must have jumped into a game that was on that area and so I was just trying to keep up with people. I was probably way under-leveled and not really doing so well. We got to the final boss and I think I died once. I was like I am not going back in there, this is really ridiculous and like kind of creepy.[135]

Aside from level design, another contributor to the relaxing atmosphere of the game space may have been the relatively understated approach that Sonic Team took to plot exposition. While there was an underlying drama that unfolded through conversations with non-player characters, this was presented in an unobtrusive way; dialogue scenes were opt-in, rather than opt-out, activated by means of items found strewn across the environments. Interviewees remarked that they were unsure what was actually happening in the storyline, but rather than responding negatively to this lack of clarity, described the game as ‘enigmatic’ and ‘mysterious’. Richard Lemarchand, who a few months before the interview had started work as a lecturer at the University of Southern California in part to work on ‘environmental narrative’,[136] was particularly positive about the game’s attitude to storytelling.

I do remember kind of understanding the setup of a second colonization party going in search of a first colonization party that had mysteriously vanished. That seemed like a great narrative setup, it’s the kind of thing that you can describe in a couple of sentences. Like many of the best video game narratives, you want a relatively simple premise that you can then build on over the hours of game play often times through environmental story telling rather than exposition, which I think PSO had a lot of.[137]

For other players, the lack of narrative elements, like the lack of PvP combat, were a limitation on the game’s appeal. Saleem Dabbous found the narrative structure of the game disappointing, but thought that its sociality was a fine replacement for conventional storytelling:

I think actually my disappointment with the sort of dungeon-crawler structure always stuck with me. I always was expecting a much more narrative-based approach. I had never played a game like that so I wasn’t really sure what to expect. I had also never played Diablo, which I guess it’s often compared to. I had no prior expectations. I was really thinking it would be much more of a narrative-style game, with action and fighting with other people. It never really had that story-based element that I was looking for. But the ‘playing with people’ part always made up for it.[138]

More recently, game developers have hotly debated the role of story exposition in game design. At one end of the spectrum of opinion on this topic, some strongly defend the idea that games are a good medium for storytelling, even arguing that without storytelling a game is less expressive and interesting. At the other extreme end, some argue that there is no place for storytelling in game design, and that developers should focus on creating compelling mechanics. The testimony of interviewees, most of whom encounter and contribute to games industry discourse, shouldn’t be separated from that wider discussion; it is not a disinterested description of what they remember of Phantasy Star Online, but a reflection motivated by an interest in ‘good design’ in games.

With that caveat, it is interesting to note that when talking about Phantasy Star Online, interviewees did not complain about the presence of dialogue scenes or describe the game as being purely mechanical. They remembered Phantasy Star Online as an intriguing middle ground between the two extreme approaches to narrative game design. And in fact, interviewees had plenty of stories to tell from their adventures in the game; but those stories were social experiences that emerged from the network of players, rather than plotted by the game’s writers and passively consumed by players.

This light-touch approach to story exposition made space design all the more essential as a carrier of the all-for-one narrative. Players weren’t being told to work together for a common goal; they had to feel it.

The test of time

Phantasy Star Online was a unique MMO experience. Because of the relatively low distribution of the Dreamcast, PSO had a small community of players. It was less crowded and less anonymous than the enormous MMOs that followed it, such as World of Warcraft. People who felt at home in PSO found it difficult to settle in a new MMO afterwards. It was hard to find another place where they felt equally comfortable. Dabbous highlighted his social experience of Phantasy Star Online when explaining his difficulty taking on another MMO.

I had this nostalgia for Phantasy Star Online as the only MMO I could ever get into, because it was a much smaller scale and a lot more intimate. You were only questing with three other people. Over the course of an hour or two you got to know these three people and work with them and become friends. Or hate each other, depending on how it goes. I would try other much more massive MMOs, and it felt impersonal, because I’d approach it with that expectation.[139]

For Lemarchand, his experiences in Phantasy Star Online set up a particular set of social desires for online gameplay, which he sees represented in character design. He was initially attracted to PSO because its visual design seemed egalitarian, with very little sexualisation of female characters. His encounters with hate speech in the game disappointed him, because he wanted the game to be as egalitarian in practice as it appeared at first sight. He finds what he describes as ‘sexist character design’ in current MMOs alienating — they do not inspire the same hopes of egalitarianism that he read in PSO, so they do not match his social interests.

As PSO aged, the community became even more welcoming, as newcomers were more rare and harder to keep hold of. One interviewee recalled being given rare items for free, just as a welcome gift from another player who wanted to keep the social experience alive. When Sega shut down the official servers, dedicated fans set up private servers that are still in operation today. PSO became a space that people worked hard to preserve.

It also continued to be well-remembered for its graphical excellence:

I had some gripes with the Playstation One, where all developers tried to jump in and do 3D without really thinking about it, and a lot of the artwork would trail off really quickly in quality. Final Fantasy VII was blow-you-away graphics when it came out but ‘blah’ graphics nowadays. A lot of the N64 stuff was the same way. Ocarina of Time blew you away when it came out, but every time they’ve re-released it they’ve had to up the graphics quality to keep it current. I have seen re-releases of Dreamcast games that I don’t think have been upped all that much at all, so it held up.[140]

In terms of visual design, PSO has managed to stand the test of time in a way that most games released at around the same time have been unable to. Its uncompromising approach to full-3D polygon dungeon design, enabled by the resource-saving device of procedurally generated maps, gives it a richness, depth and maneuverability that is missing in less than fully 3D games.

PSO was a place that people loved to return to. Through ports to PC and Xbox, it came to have arguably a longer life than the Dreamcast itself; Sega pulled the plug on the console years before they shut down the PSO servers.

The sociality of Phantasy Star Online contributed to setting an agenda for design changes in video games in the 2000s. Over the next ten years, social gaming would grow to an enormous industry in its own right. Today, online forms of sociality are arguably better catered for in AAA development than physical co-presence; it is more common for multiplayer features to make use of a console’s internet connection than its second controller. Online multiplayer was unknown territory in 1999, but now it has become the status quo.

This agenda wasn’t only set by game designers. It was set by players too. The need for patches was made clear by player feedback. When alternative online social spaces were needed, players created them. Even PSO’s life cycle was in the end determined by player engagment as much as by the decisions of execs at Sega.

Genre

In March 2000, Peter Molyneux strided briskly onto a huge stage at the Game Developer’s Conference in San Jose. Dressed head to toe in black, he could easily have been mistaken for Steve Jobs. He stepped up to the podium, authoritatively cleared his throat and declared:

I consider this one of the greatest highpoints of my career, introducing a true legend and hero of the computer games industry. He has eaten my dollars in arcades, and he has inspired me over the years when I’m creating games. Most importantly, six months ago when I saw a first glimpse of Shenmue, I saw the true inspiration of a genius. Please welcome, Yu Suzuki.

Suzuki had gone to GDC to present Shenmue to an international audience. Through translators, pre-recorded videos and a contrived, pre-rehearsed ‘interview’, the design process, vision, gameplay and future of the Shenmue series were displayed for an audience of game developers and journalists. That intended future never materialised; what was supposed to be a seven-part epic series was cancelled after the second game.

At one point, a trailer for Shenmue II was shown. It opened on a shot of an absurdly tall, brutalist housing block. The camera panned up and down dramatically as if it were an architectural wonder, like a medieval fortress or a space elevator. A passenger jet passed by overhead, and then the video faded into a black screen with golden Japanese text - ‘RPGs are changing’ (RPG ga kawaru). The implication was that RPGs set in this kind of landscape would have been unimaginable a short time before - and yet here it was, colossal, three-dimensional and proudly on display at the largest games industry conference in the world.[141]

The RPG genre is to this day associated with Tolkienesque ‘sword and sorcery’ themes, with a special place set aside for post-apocalyptic atom-punk titles. That opening image of gritty, concrete urban structures exemplified a goal to which many developers at Sega aspired in the Dreamcast era - they wanted to broaden the horizons of what an RPG could be.

Sword and Sorcery

Many Japanese games developers working in the late 1990s were ambivalent towards ‘Sword and Sorcery’ themed RPGs. While the roots of the genre lie in Dungeons and Dragons tabletop RPGs, Japanese RPGs had been drifting away from these origins in the 1990s, most notably in the Final Fantasy series, which had introduced elements from Japanese myth and legend and cyberpunk aesthetics. A graphic designer for Vagrant’s Story said with a note of pride that he ‘...wasn’t familiar with the sword and sorcery look,’ so his enemy character designs looked unconventional and fresh.[142]

Until 1997, Toshiyuki Mukaiyama had been working on a traditional ‘Sword and Sorcery’ themed game for the Sega Saturn. When the Dreamcast was announced, Shuntaro Tanaka joined the team and introduced a new theme of sky pirates, and the team began to work towards the game that would become Skies of Arcadia. There were two particularly important factors influencing his choice of this theme. One was his belief that a game world inspired by Miyazaki’s Laputa Castle in the Sky would appeal to the target demographic of teenagers and ‘people who like anime and manga’.[143] In addition, he believed that the theme would make it possible to show off the polygon 3D capabilities of the Dreamcast, since airships could view landmasses from any angle.[144]

In reviews of the game, fans responded very positively to the game’s scenario, particularly enjoying the ability to fly through the sky in a ship and engage in ship-to-ship battles.

This leaves a slightly different impression than other RPGs. Landmasses that float in the sky, and the joy of discovering them. The story is strangely refreshing.[145]

I wished I could adventure in the sky like that[146]

The thing that surprised me was the worldview. The motif is the age of discovery in real world history (in the midst of which it was proved that the world is round) but just by changing the ocean for the sky, they were able to raise the visuals to create a fresh surprise. And then, it is not simply that the world is large. Even just in a planar sense the world is so large that you feel like giving up, but in the middle of the game you come to fly in an ‘upper ocean’ and a ‘lower ocean’ and layers are added above and below.[147]

Coeval with the push to demonstrate the new hardware features of a next-generation console was perhaps a notion that a next-generation game should push frontiers artistically as well as technologically. Therefore, the game world had not just to be large enough and three-dimensional enough to impress players, but it also had to have a refreshing setting to garner real attention. The turbulence and power games of an age of empires and piracy may have been evocative of the exciting state of the industry in the late 1990s, as game designers looked forwards to a new age of networked, fully three-dimensional, open worlds for virtual roleplaying. This was a time when many game designers were developing new technologies and skills in anticipation of the next generation of games. It was a new world of empire and piracy — corporate entertainment empires funding the same information technologies that fuelled copyright piracy. This optimistic sense of being on the cusp of a brave new cyberworld would have been supported by the euphoria of massive economic growth in the software and IT industries during the dot com boom.

In spite of these factors pushing developers to search for novelty, divergence from the sword and sorcery tradition was limited. Skies of Arcadia battles primarily focused on the elemental designation of swords and other weapons, and the use of magical spells and special moves that the characters learned as they became stronger. The elements, a staple of the RPG genre, informed the basic geography of Arcadia. Many fans responded well to the way the game reminded them of other popular RPG games while adding the unique setting of the sky.

If Legends of Zelda: the Wind Waker was an ocean journey, this is a sky journey. The protagonists adventure in a ship that flies in the sky. It‘s a bit different, and it‘s nice[148]

Shenmue, similarly, was not quite the divergence from gaming precedence that Suzuki claimed at GDC. Its core gameplay features were not dissimilar to existing 2D adventure games, focused on finding the right characters, having the right conversations, and finding the right items in order to move the story onwards. The visual composition took a great deal of precedence from third-person action games such as Tomb Raider - although 3D game worlds were still a technical marvel, many stylistic conventions had already been set, such as the location of the camera behind the protagonist at slightly above head level and the wide angle of view.

One could argue that high-tech industries are always focused on innovation. However, when you consider the three games studied in this book in a wider network of professional, commercial and technological interests, it’s clear that there was a tension between innovation and tradition, a need to balance novelty and nostalgia.

Geography

Arguably, the purpose of the divergence in scenario design represented by the three games studied in this book was not to radically change the nature of RPG gameplay, but to introduce novel design ideas that would visually set the game apart from its predecessors, at a time of utopian speculation about the future of gaming. These design ideas were to be grounded in an artistic re-imagining of real-world history and science fiction, to give the games a sense of place. For Tanaka, this meant constructing geographical explanations for cultural histories.

This is a conceit of mine, but for me the period setting of the game is created by all the townscapes and cultures. In Arcadia there are six moons, and I created this history of the civilisations that developed on the bases of those six moons. In the real world, with the Egyptian civilisation for example, there was the river Nile [...] and around that river was a civilisation. So in this world, there are those six moons, and under those six moons rocks fall from the moons, and the civilisations have developed with the energy from those rocks.[149]

Clearly a key part of the developers’ conception of the game world is rooted in their historical world view. Some teams developing in the late 1990s were given funds from the company for research trips abroad - the Vagrant’s Story graphic design team travelled to France. Tanaka said that it would have been nice to make such a trip, but the budget was not available for it. The graphic design team relied on books and collections of images for design ideas, particularly requesting more detailed images showing textures and wall patterns.

I came to study video games from the perspective of Japanese history, so for me, this raises questions of authenticity and representation. But that’s just me; for fans reviewing the game, it does not seem to have been an issue. While historical reference is acknowledged, the main point of the game world seems to have been to have an exciting variety of new things to explore - it was perhaps the sense that a very large world was accessible, regardless of whether that world was based on real locations.

The open feeling of flying in the sky, from villages to forests, the particularities of different countries...[150]

‘What will the next town‘s dungeon be like?’ you excitedly wonder. You hardly ever get the sense that you just have to go somewhere because it‘s necessary.’[151]

Open-world game design

Shenmue was one of the first open-world games. Open-world games allow players to freely explore towns and cities, interacting with any element they choose at any time, within limitations imposed by the natural order of the game world such as time and social constraints. Through the early 2000s, a huge number of highly successful games were released with an open-world structure.

When online reviews of Skies of Arcadia written throughout the 2000s praise the open feeling of a gameview, they are at least in part reflecting a trend in game play that began in the same year that Skies of Arcadia was released, and was being developed by game designers at the same time that this game was in development. Skies of Arcadia’s design and reception were both influenced by the trend towards freer movement and progression in digital games, at a time when ‘open world gaming’ was a source of speculation and anticipation. The landscape of open world game spaces is analogous to the ever-widening virtual world of the internet. Massively multiplayer online games such as PSO often relied on an open-world structure in order to accommodate a huge number of players synchronously. In this way, even though Skies of Arcadia and Shenmue were offline games, the growth of the internet was absolutely crucial to their design and reception.

Phantasy Star Online avoided the need for a true open-world structure by instead generating unique gameplay maps using a set of pre-rendered three-dimensional tiles. This meant that the game could be played for an indefinite length of time, because every quest would be set in a slightly different map to the ones the player had experienced before. The game did not have the sense of a sprawling world at their feet - rather, characters took on quests from a ‘ship’ floating above the planet on which the game’s events were set, and every time they descended onto the world from the ship they found themself in a new and unique landscape.

The sense of reality in Phantasy Star Online’s game world did not come from its geography, but its community of players. It was in an almost literal sense a ‘floating world’ — a bright, neon wonderland that felt completely unreal, but was given stable ground by the real people that populated it. Shenmue, in contrast, replicated a real-world location - the Japanese city of Yokosuka - both according to its real geography, and the developers’ memories of the 1980s. It was a single player game with no real people in it, but its setting was grounded in a remembered reality.

Realism, openness and role-playing seem to be common threads that hold the three games studied in this book under a common genre. But the meaning of those words is fluid, adapted by the unique design strategies and historical context of each game they are applied to.

Remembering Shenmue

Eleven years after his presentation of Shenmue at GDC, Suzuki appeared at the Toulouse Games Show, to be interviewed by a room packed full of Shenmue fans. He reflected on how the process towards creating Shenmue had first began.

At the time, Sega was working on the Dreamcast, and they needed a ”killer title”. A big title RPG was needed. Nobody wanted to do it, so I decided to make one myself.

Of course, Suzuki was not the only one at Sega developing RPGs. Sega believed that the genre could bring the company to new heights as a console maker by attracting players to the Dreamcast. In the end, innovative RPGs were not enough to save the console, and the low console sales limited the audience for its games. But the RPGs developed for the Dreamcast have been fondly remembered by developers and fans ever since, and have had a fundamental effect on the directions that the genre has taken today.

Shenmue

The world of Shenmue 1 and 2 expanded outward.[152]

Expanding outward

Opening world

Shenmue was billed as an open-world game, but the game’s maps are connected to each other in a linear fashion: house leads to village, village leads to town, and town leads to harbour. Exploration of the game’s spaces lacks the rhizomatic openness of other open-world games such as the Grand Theft Auto series. In this chapter I’m going to argue that instead of representing the zonality of metropolitan urbanism as those games do, Shenmue acts as a virtual childhood, as a game intended to be the first in a seven-part series. The progression from home to harbour is Ryo’s flying of the nest.

On top of the goal to be an open-world game, producer Yu Suzuki wanted Shenmue to advance what he saw as video games’ progress towards the expressive and dramatic power of the cinema. The game had to push the boundaries on games’ openness and interactivity, while also demonstrating how cinematic and dramatic games could be.

The attempt to accommodate both of these goals produced a game that alternates between two extremes; on the one hand, every little detail in the world seems to respond to player action. Items can be moved, opened, and viewed close-up. Every character talks to you. Time passes by in absolute terms, rather than simply in response to game events as in RPGs such as Skies of Arcadia. The sun sets, and day turns into night. Every non-playable character has a unique routine and movement pattern. Every establishment has its own opening hours, its own staff and its own plot event.

On the other hand, the complex storyline is primarily told through cut scenes. To make the cut scenes interactable, they featured ‘quick-time events’ (QTEs) - timing-based challenges in which symbols appear on the screen and players must immediately press the corresponding button.

This wide variation in interactability is the main axis on which the game moves over the course of play time. There are only four maps in Shenmue, even though the game takes dozens of hours to complete. Variation is not created by the architecture of the game’s spaces, but by the spatial experiences that are permitted at any given time. Shenmue was not an open world at all times. It was opening and closing continuously as gameplay unfolded.

Conflicting myths

Producer Yu Suzuki has been credited as the ‘mother of video games’. He is the subject of game development legend, and like most legends, the facts are hard to pin down. Accounts vary, even different accounts told by Suzuki himself.

To begin with, where exactly was Shenmue made? A making-of documentary shown at GDC in 2000 showed AM2 working in a large, open-plan office.[153] Yet in subsequent interviews, Suzuki has said that he had the team moved to an apartment building in another part of Tokyo, so that his bosses at Sega wouldn’t fire him for doing things his own way — for example, for turning up at the office later than 8.30 in the morning.[154]

At a much-repeated figure of $70 million, Shenmue was thought to be the most expensive game ever made until that point.[155] Yet Suzuki disputes this figure, claiming that $47 million is more accurate and suggesting that the technology developed for Shenmue was applied to other projects.[156]

Then there’s the question of when development work on Shenmue began. In an interview for gaming website and magazine 1up, Suzuki said that the game was originally destined for the Saturn console in its early stages, and was switched to the Dreamcast part way through,[157] like Skies of Arcadia. In an interview at the Game Developer’s Conference in 2011, he told a different story, saying that the Dreamcast had already been announced when work on Shenmue began.[158]

Nevertheless, a picture emerges of an ambitious designer demanding a high level of polish from his subordinates in spite of the consternation of his superiors. Suzuki recalled in the 2011 interview that Sega head Hayao Nakayama had wanted to ship games as soon as they looked good on a screen. To enable him to continue polishing games after this point, Suzuki installed a button under his desk that would occlude the graphics whenever Nakayama was nearby.[159] In another interview, main programmer Tak Hirai said that the hardest challenge in making Shenmue for him was programming the movement of the phone cable, an item which, he hastened to point out, was never visible on-screen: ‘The phone cord wasn’t even showing up on camera, but [Suzuki] insisted on making it look realistic’.[160]

Time

This devotion to accuracy carries through into the way that time itself is represented. Time forms an integral part of the spatiality and worldiness of Shenmue. Time passes in absolute terms, at a rate of about one in-game hour for every real-world ten minutes, rather than only passing in dependence on player action as in most RPGs. The actions and events required to complete the game must be finished in seven in-game months, or else it will fail and the player will have to start again. Even the changes in weather, which affect the response to player interaction for objects relating to certain side quests, are scheduled for particular dates according to meteorological data from the years 1986-1987.

While this kind of absolute time perspective is rare in even open-world games, among the games studied in this book it happens to constitute the majority of the games studied. Skies of Arcadia is a conventional RPG in which time is event-dependent, but Phantasy Star Online, as an MMORPG, had to have absolute time because the game was played in the context of multiplayer interaction.

Phantasy Star Online and Shenmue both share a kind of temporal persistence; in both, if you put down the controller and walk away, time will continue turning. While Shenmue was probably not deliberately modeled on an MMORPG, the fact that it coincidentally shares the absolute temporality of an MMORPG adds to the reality of the world inside the screen.

The Japanese home

A house is a site, the shelter for a household, the bounds and the focus of a community. It is also an artefact, a product of human manufacture, a material extension of its occupants’ lives.[161]

Ryo Hazuki’s house, like all buildings in Shenmue, is created only virtually, by game designers rather than architects. The concerns that the house’s design addresses are about human-computer interaction, gameplay and plot, rather than about rational domestic life and fostering familial relations. It visually and spatially communicates unspoken narratives that are important to players’ understanding of the game.

Shenmue begins in Ryo’s home, a large house on an expansive plot of land partway up a hill in suburban Yokosuka. He lives there with his housekeeper Ine and live-in martial arts student Fuku, who was being taught by Ryo’s father until his death in the opening cut-scene of the game. As the game progresses, other areas of the world become accessible; first the suburb further down the hill, then the town centre, then the harbour.

As part of Shenmue’s intended role as the first in a long series, the spatiality of the game simulates the movement from childhood into young adulthood. The spatiality of Shenmue could be compared to pedagogic principles behind education in Japan; home, village, town and harbour reflect the notion of ever-widening circles of individual, family, town, country and world that informs the Japanese theory of ‘heart education’ (kokoro no kyoiku), which was becoming influential in the 1990s. The syllabus for moral education in Japanese public school follows the following structure:

Love your family

Love your school

Love your hometown

Love your country

Contribute internationally[162]

In heart education, familial relations are seen as a gateway to relations within ever widening circles, culminating in the development of positive internationalist attitudes.[163] The process begins in the home, extends through the hometown and eventually reaches the world outside of Japan.

Ryo always has to return home at the end of each in-game day, though throughout the game he ventures further and further away from this anchoring point. At the end of the game, he finally sets sail for Hong Kong, and is unmoored from his childhood home to pursue his quest to avenge his father. In this coming-of-age story, Ryo becomes an adult by leaving home and taking responsibility for his father’s troubles. The first game is his preparation for that larger quest.

For foreign players, Shenmue presents an endearing glimpse into Japanese life from the point of view of a resident. The experience is like a virtual vacation to Japan, but one through the eyes of a young person being socialised into Japanese life. The locals know your name and are eager to help out, and you have a wonderful home to go back to every night that is equipped with a handsome traditional dojo. It’s a fascinating culture study, especially for those with a particular interest in Asian culture.[164]

Domestic spaces do not often appear in video games. Unlike the jungles, deserts, tombs and catacombs of Skies of Arcadia, which were much-repeated spatial tropes in video games and tabletop roleplaying games, the representation of domestic space has few precedents. The Hazuki residence is a rare example of a video game space that does not seem to rely on imagined memories experienced through other media representations. It brings a real-world space directly into the virtual. Nevertheless, this image of the real is highly mediated, in particular by gender and by conservative notions of what constitutes tradition.

While the curved roof, blue tiling, wood beams, tatami flooring and shoji doors all signify the Japanese architectural tradition, the layout of the Hazuki residence reveals that it is in fact quite a young building, designed to support and inscribe a modern nuclear family.

Until the 1920s, middle-class Japanese homes were arranged in a guest-centred fashion, with paths of movement through the house varying dependent on the gender of the resident. The frontmost room of the house, beside the porch, would be a guest room that the head of the household used to entertain guests. Other rooms at the front would also be used for housing and entertaining guests. The kitchen, bathroom and bedrooms for residents would be further back, with a lowered floor separating the kitchen off as an unclean space.[165]

The reform of Japanese home life into a private sphere for the nuclear family began in the 1920s, but took some time to settle into popular Japanese life. It was not until the 1960s that a home layout centred around the kitchen-dining and living rooms spread among the masses.[166] This reform made the home more feminine: by the 1980s, it was rare for Japanese men to socialise in each others’ homes, preferring public social spaces such as bars and restaurants.

The Hazuki residence in Shenmue is laid out in this newer arrangement. The centre of the house is given to the kitchen and a flexible living space with a TV set. Ryo’s father’s study is located off to a far side of the home. There is no guest room set aside for entertaining outsiders. The structure of the home, and the possible paths of movement, centre on spaces to be used by the nuclear family. In the tragic story that overshadows Shenmue, that family has lost its father and mother; Ryo is an orphan, his home shared with an employee and an intern. The family spaces are empty, except for those times when Ine-san is cooking in the kitchen.

While the Hazuki residence must be read as traditional because of visual signs such as tatami mats and shoji doors, the layout of the house clearly places it in the late 20th century, and makes it unlikely that in the lore of the game the house was built more than 30 years before the events of Shenmue. The cultural signs of tradition do not indicate historical age, but are signifiers of a conservative identity that marries cultural specificity with a family-oriented model of modern life.

The way the Japanese home is presented in Shenmue is also mediated by the way the camera movement and control scheme simulates the sense of being in a body. For me, it is very strange to experience the Japanese home from the point of view of a relatively tall and stocky person. The Hazuki residence reminded me of old Japanese houses that I had visited before, but from my standpoint at 5 feet tall with a small frame, the space felt different. I was able to comfortably move through corridors, slip past doors and I always had just enough space around me. In Shenmue, with the camera positioned just behind Ryo’s head, the ceiling feels low. There’s just enough space to accommodate Ryo’s broad shoulders and the camera floating behind him; not enough space to move or turn to the right or left. If Ryo runs indoors, he will usually overshoot the doorways he needs to access from the corridors. It feels cramped, awkward and uncomfortable.

The positioning of doorways forces Ryo to make sharp turns in order to get from the porch to his bedroom. The bedroom is the most significant and regularly visited part of Ryo’s house; at the end of every in-game day — at most 160 minutes of play time — he must go home to sleep, and the ‘save game’ menu can only be accessed from the bedroom. So the rapid, sharp turns from the bedroom to the porch and back again have to be repeated time and time again. Eventually this awkward set of key presses becomes habitual and automatic, bringing a haptic dimension to the player’s cultural immersion in the game world.

Many anthropological studies have argued that in Japan, enculturation is trained through physical actions repeated over and over again until they become second nature. This has been observed in a huge range of activities such as baseball, martial arts, primary school teacher-pupil relationships, and middle school extra-curricular activities. Anthropologist Dorinne Kondo’s Crafting Selves is a participant-observation study of a Japanese workplace. She reverse-engineers the pedagogic methods of a training retreat as being about letting ethics ‘enter the body’ (katachi ni hairu).

One first learns through imitation. Stereotyped movements are repeated endlessly; for example, as a student of tea ceremony, one begins with seemingly simple tasks such as how to walk properly, how to fold a tea napkin, how to wipe the tea utensils. [...] content is secondary to repetition of form. [...] Physical action can in fact be perceived as isomorphic with spiritual change.[167]

Kondo explains that the purpose of this retreat was to train the heart (kokoro) to be harmonious, so that employees would work sincerely and with humility. She raises a comparison between the workplace training she observed on the retreat and the importance of repeating forms or kata in martial arts, an activity that Ryo has to engage in as well in order to enhance his fighting abilities.

A counterpart to this notion of haptic enculturation in the world of video games might be Raph Koster’s ‘grokking’, a kind of mastery. Though it is as much a mental exercise as a physical one, it ties the haptic action of gameplay to a personal process of enculturation.

Robert Heinlein coined it in his novel Stranger in a Strange Land. It means that you understand something so thoroughly that you have become one with it and even love it.[168]

The choice of provenance in Koster’s neologism is perhaps suggestive of something tacitly understood about gameplay; skill is not universal, but sited. Grokking is a term used by characters who grew up on Mars, and comes from a story about foreign-ness and adaptation. Grokking is not about being good at gaming generally, or even at a genre of games; it is about understanding the haptic pattern of one particular situation. Understanding as grokking, like enculturation through the body, is situated and contextual. It relies on place. In Shenmue, the player masters a series of physical actions in order to maneuver through a culturally specific space. Ryo, likewise, is mastering a series of domains that open outward from the home, through the hometown, to the world beyond.

Clutter

In the early 20th century architects from Western Europe began to stereotype and idealise the Japanese home, writing much about its supposed simplicity and lack of visual noise. Inge Daniels shows in The Japanese House that perceptions of Japanese interior design were heavily influenced by third-hand readings of Japan in the modernist movement in Europe and the US. Influential modernist texts then fed back to Japan and continued to influence Japanese ideas of national identity. When the modernist fantasy of the minimalist Japanese home rubbed up uncomfortably with its often cluttered and inchoate reality, this was dismissed as a simple case of common people ‘lacking culture’ and being unable to use their homes in a tasteful manner.[169] In the readings that Daniels criticises, the fact that the reality of Japan contradicts stereotypes about it peddled in Europe and the US is not the fault of the foreign observer; it is the fault of the Japanese who fail to perform their Japaneseness to a high enough standard.

Daniels curated an installation on the Japanese home at the Geffrye Museum in London in 2011, to show in material form what her ethnographic study had detailed in writing; that real Japanese homes are often cluttered, with a mismatch of international styles and an abundance of bric-a-brac. The exhibition also featured tells that communicated tacit cultural expectations of how the space should be used; for example, by offering textual guidance that ‘Japanese people never walk on tatami with shoes on’ near the entrance porch. Visitors might choose to remove their shoes given this knowledge, or they might leave their shoes on but spend the rest of their time in the exhibition feeling embarrassed by their own rudeness. Daniels’s lesson about the Japanese home moved away from design theory and into lived practice.

Aside from the small spaces of the Japanese home, Shenmue also replicates some of the clutter that Daniels described. Not visually; the space is tidily arranged with lots of closed storage in a fashion that does echo the idealised designs of rational, modernist interiors. But every item of storage furniture can be opened, and most drawers and cupboards contain objects that can be interacted with; including an anachronistic Sega Saturn, which can be removed from the drawer under the TV, set on top and turned on. The player can then play vintage Sega games on the Saturn.

Impressive games-within-games are not where the level of detail ends. Every picture in the house can be removed from the wall to look behind it; one of them contains an item needed for a game quest. Sliding doors abound in the central rooms of the house, and every one of them can be opened. This abundance of interactive elements is a different kind of clutter to the visual clutter that modernist architects derided about the homes of ordinary people. The Hazuki residence toes the line of good taste, while also simulating the clutter of possessions that Daniels highlighted.

The high level of interactive clutter had me as a player believing for a while that every level of detail had been covered; the house wasn’t just a backdrop, but a fully simulated, lived space. But there is a clear curation present in the decision about which activities are possible for Ryo, and which are out of bounds. For all the time that the player can spend exploring the house, finding hidden objects in drawers, playing the Saturn and moving pictures from the walls, it is not possible to spend even a minute doing anything that might be considered domestic labour.

Shenmue is not a game that shies away from boring the player with mundane tasks. Far from it; later on in this chapter I will discuss Ryo’s work as a forklift truck driver, a part of the game that demands that the player spend many hours of play time on a repetitive task that simulates manual labour. As Daniels points out, in Japan women tend to have sole responsibility for all housework, regardless of their own occupational status outside of home life.

The conspicuous absence of domestic labour from Ryo’s possible set of activities makes the player’s interaction with the clutter of the Hazuki residence highly gendered, particularly in contrast to Ine-san, who is often seen working at the stove in the kitchen or sweeping in the garden.

Game design theorist Henry Jenkins identifies in the essay ‘Complete freedom of movement’ a parallel between the exploration engendered by many three-dimensional action games and 1970s sociologists’ observations of how far boys strayed from home when playing outside in suburban America. These studies highlighted a lack of domestic activity on boys’ play too: while girls’ play was interdependent with their mothers’ housework, boys tended to reject their mothers’ home activities. Boys ventured on average twice as far from the home as girls did. Jenkins argues that video games have to some extent replaced spaces outside the home for exploration and play, as urbanisation has eroded safe spaces for children in the real world. He suggests that the open-world model of game design is gendered, because it simulates boys’ play.[170]

Does Ryo feel at home?

As well as household work, another absence from the Hazuki residence is the bathtub. This is a key part of Japanese home life, and like tatami flooring, is closely associated with domestic relaxation.[171] Tatami rooms are accessible, as is a divan bed on which Ryo sleeps every night, so it is not that relaxation is absent from the game. In fact, despite being arguably an action game, Shenmue contains many reflective moments with slow pacing. Cut scenes are often a contrast to the relaxed pace of open play, depicting intense, fast-paced action with ‘Quick-Time Events’ (QTEs) that demand instant responses from players.

So if relaxation generally is not off-limits in the same way that domestic work is, why the absence of a bathtub? There is, notably, a toilet that is seen at very close quarters, so it is not that all spaces used for private bodily functions are omitted. Nevertheless, Ryo is not able to use the toilet, and it could be that a simple matter of decency kept AM2 from venturing too far into the bathroom.

Inge Daniels describes the use of the bathtub as an important way of feeling ‘at home’ in a Japanese house. If the player does not perform Japanese rituals to do with feeling at home, how does the game’s design make the Hazuki residence into a home?

Decency here could be considered alongside the comfort of the player. That the home doesn’t bring up any sights or experiences that cause the player discomfort is perhaps part of what makes it feel like a home. Indecency, or obscenity, immediately makes you feel out of place. In an Anglophone context, the word obscene may come from the latin ‘caenum’, meaning contamination or dirt, but it could also come from ‘scena’, meaning scene or space.[172]

As described earlier, in Japanese homes before the 1920s, clean and unclean spaces were clearly demarcated by floor elevation, a practice that continues at least to some extent today in the porches of Japanese homes. This division is bolstered by customarily changing footwear depending on one’s location; toilet slippers, house slippers and outdoor shoes. Obscenity and spatiality are closely connected, and the lack of a bathtub may be an important way of ensuring that players do not feel out of place in Ryo’s home.

Mechanically, the homeliness of the Hazuki residence as Ryo’s home is enforced by the obligation to return there every night. If the player makes Ryo stay out late, he will eventually stop moving according to the player’s command, his wristwatch will be shown on screen, and he will start saying as if to himself that it’s about time he went home, or else Ine-san would worry. Eventually, if the player does not return Ryo home voluntarily, the game fades to black and shows Ryo returning home to Ine’s polite yet concerned consternations.

In real life, it is unlikely that a place starts to feel like home just because one is forced to go there every day.A workplace doesn’t feel like home, for instance, and this is equally true for the virtual workplace of Yokosuka harbour that will be discussed later. The homeliness of the Hazuki residence relies on other design strategies. In addition to the architectural design strategies described above, the home is the only place that the player can save their progress in the game. Given the omission of rituals such as eating and bathing from Shenmue, it could be that this meta-game activity comes to take the place of ordinary Japanese home life.

Feeling at home is not about the same fostering of relaxation and ease that Daniels describes in her study of real Japanese life. It’s about goal-oriented patterns of movement, engendered by the demands of gameplay such as the need to return every day and the need to save the game in order to avoid losing the progress made in the current play session. These patterns of movement support the game’s plot by making the home the central circle in a series of widening areas of access, reflecting heart education theory.

The house and grounds may not reveal the historical roots of the Hazuki family, but they do reveal strong geographical roots. As in much of the developed world, ownership of a detached house in Japan generally indicates a stable residence in one place; occupants of smaller apartments such as those represented in the Dobuita area of the game are generally more mobile or transient, many having to move regularly at their employer’s behest.[173] The design of Ryo Hazuki’s home shows that he is rooted in Yokosuka geographically, and in conservative Japanese family life culturally, stablizing his coming-of-age as a spatial metaphor. His home is his childhood, and his adulthood will take him further and further outside of it.

Nostalgia

The transition from childhood to adulthood is an emotional topic. Shenmue uses a number of techniques to establish an emotional tone that matches the subject matter, in spite of the game’s violence-focused approach to problem-solving. Dobuita, the downtown area of Yokosuka represented in the game, presents a great deal of nostalgic historical details that may contribute to this tone. I argue that historical details are as much about tone as about accuracy because, for one thing, they are not consistently accurate. For example, the Sega Saturn in Ryo’s home is is anachronistic - the game is set in 1986, but Saturn released in 1990s. But there is a high level of detail that makes Yokosuka seem very accurately represented, and it is this impression of accuracy that contributes to the game’s tone.

The high accuracy of Shenmue’s Yokosuka gives the game a very stable rooting in both a fictional childhood and the real childhood of many Japanese players. Yokosuka is special because of the way it connects to the rest of the world through its harbour, but it is also very ordinary, and looks much like most other Japanese suburbs and small towns. For many players buying Shenmue on release in Japan, it closely depicted the site and era of their own childhood. Like a photograph, Shenmue captures a moment lost to time.

In the European tradition, nostalgia was understood by the ancient Greeks as a malady afflicting soldiers serving far from home, but eventually came to be seen as a positive form of emotional awareness in the early modern era. If you are nostalgic, you are poignantly aware of the sadness of the human condition. This idea was expressed as part of Kant’s reflections on the interactions between joy and sorrow in 1794 as his Observations on the Sense of the Beautiful and the Sublime.

Visual media technologies have changed the way that we relate to nostalgia. This change has been discussed in great detail with regard to photography. People have always used external things to aid internal recollections of treasured memories, be it by collecting objects that took on nostalgic resonance almost by accident (such as a baby’s first pair of shoes), or carefully crafting objects that preserve the traces of people or places that are far away or lost, such as jewellery made from the hair of past lovers. Photographs give us a way of instantly and deliberately creating nostalgic objects that aid and mediate our memories, with very little effort required.

Susan Sontag observed nostalgia in the way people relate to photographs in 1978.

All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.

[...]

As the fascination that photographs exercise is a reminder of death, it is also an invitation to sentimentality. Photographs turn the past into an object of tender regard, scrambling moral distinctions and disarming historical judgments by the generalized pathos of looking into the past.[174]

Constructing a three-dimensional, dynamic simulation of Yokosuka in the 1980s takes considerably more time and effort than exposing film, so it is not comparable to ‘slicing out this moment and freezing it’, but observing Shenmue’s representation of a time gone by is similarly nostalgic. Aside from the high degree of visual photorealism, it locates accuracy in processes managed by the software, such as the movements and dialogue of people on the street. It lends reality to the image by allowing the player to move into it by teleoperating an on-screen character. In that sense it invokes Sontag’s ‘tender regard’ of a past that was already lost at the time the game was made. Writing in 1980, Roland Barthes offered more clarity on this ‘tender regard’ in reflection on photographs of his recently deceased mother:

The photograph’s immobility is somehow the result of a perverse confusion between two concepts: the Real and the Live: by attesting that the object has been real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive, because of that delusion which makes us attribute to Reality an absolutely superior, somehow eternal value; but by shifting this reality to the past (‘this-has-been’), the photograph suggests that it is already dead.[175]

The Yokosuka of Shenmue is not a photograph. We know that it was reconstructed in the late 1990s in nostalgic regard of the late 1980s, and carefully designed with gameplay in mind, rather than transcribed from a real-life arrangement of objects and light into the image-plane. Yet the attempt to get as close as possible to photorealism references the emotional significance of the photograph, telling us that 1987 Yokosuka may feel present and tangible in the game, but it is also entirely lost and fictional.

In Japan, nostalgia has long been associated with poetry, seen particularly in the canonical literary work Basho’s Narrow Road to the Deep North (1689). For Basho, nostalgia was sited and encultured; mundane details about particular places take on emotional weight because of their depiction in famous poems of the past. In other poems, the sitedness of nostalgia is transparent without having to trace the intertextual references to Japan’s literary canon:

Even in Kyoto

— hearing the cuckoos cry —

I long for Kyoto

The Kyoto that is can inspire nostalgia for the Kyoto that was. Basho travels across Japan searching for connections to a time that is already gone, and writes poetry about getting close enough to that thing that was lost that the pain of nostalgia runs deeper than ever. Perhaps in those moments when Shenmue’s historical accuracy is abruptly suspended, a similar effect is achieved, as the picture-perfect simulation of 1980s childhood slips away.

Nostalgia and tradition collide with tourism in the semiotic work of John Frow. He points out that tourism and tradition both strive for contact with some authentic essence of a place or time, but to serve the desire for authenticity, deliberately constructed experiences are provided to the tourist. So by labelling something as authentic or traditional, you reveal the inauthentic and contrived work of labelling in the first place. But without labelling something as such, how would you know that it was authentic or traditional? Is the Yokosuka in Shenmue authentic? Is Ryo’s home traditional? By creating an approximation of Yokosuka as close to the original was feasible, Suzuki and AM2 were striving for authenticity while also transparently creating something entirely contrived, just as the style of house on which the Hazuki residence was modeled made reference to a historic tradition that it had in fact abandoned in pursuit of midcentury family values.[176]

Shenmue is not the first creative work to treat Yokosuka in this way. Yokosuka, especially Dobuita, has an interesting history as a subject of the nostalgic, photographic gaze. An oral history interview conducted by the Hong Kong-based Asian Art Archive with photographer Miyako Ishiuchi reveals complex issues in that photography.[177] Ishiuchi expressed a sense that photographers working in the 1970s, such as Shomei Tomatsu and Daido Moriyama, created an image of Yokosuka that didn’t represent her hometown. Both photographers were motivated to show physical and cultural damage left by the war and the US occupation, and Dobuita was an important photographic subject as a base for occupation forces after the war.

By focusing on Dobuita, they depicted a part of Yokosuka that Ishiuchi was brought up in the 1950s to understand as part of America, not part of Japan. There was a gendered restriction on access to Dobuita, a darker image of gendered difference in freedom of movement than that which Jenkins details with regard to suburban 1970s America; girls were urged not to go to Dobuita to protect them from being raped by American soldiers stationed there. The psychological ‘childhood imprint’ on the area prevented her from feeling able to approach the area, even after it changed into a safe place for women to shop. For Ishiuchi, Dobuita was not Yokosuka. Dobuita was not home.

Ishiuchi photographed Yokosuka in the 1970s, rejecting the Dobuita-focused works that cast the town as a foreign enclave and instead depicting something that felt to her like home. Yet despite this call to authenticity, she remained aware that her representation was divorced from reality:

I borrowed Yokosuka. It was the starting point. When I wanted to do something, I chose Yokosuka. There is no such grainy Yokosuka in the world. There is no such dark Yokosuka anywhere.

For Ishiuchi, this reclamation of her hometown from the gaze of outsiders was about finding something essential in both herself and her subject. The hometown is a core part of the heart educational theory that positions the individual in a series of concentric circles that stretch out to nationhood and beyond. Finding the self through the hometown is a retracing of developmental steps mediated by the larger context of a nation-building project.

In Shenmue, Dobuita forms part of Ryo’s adolescent experience of venturing further and further beyond the home. Its resonance as a place that is neither wholly Japan nor any longer occupied by US forces made it more significant as a frontier for an unfolding journey into adulthood. It also further gendered a genre of gameplay experience that Jenkins argues is based in traditions of boys’ play. Even in Shenmue, women walking the streets of Dobuita seem uneasy and uncomfortable and are often unwilling to talk to Ryo.

While it is difficult to retrace the accuracy of Shenmue’s depiction of Dobuita as it was in the 1980s, close similarities can be seen between the streets in Shenmue and their present-day, real-life counterparts. Photographer Daniel Boczarski visited Yokosuka in 2008 during a holiday in Japan, and captured images that resemble how the place is represented in-game. The grocer’s shop on the corner, the shop selling dozens of identical jackets, and the grey, winding streets are all closely similar in gameplay and Boczarski’s photographs. Even Tom’s burger stand is represented, albeit now in the form of a retail unit with a large, brightly-lit US flag. Boczarski’s visit to Yokosuka was made far richer because he treasured Shenmue:

In a way I understood why Yu Suzuki chose it as a location for Shenmue. It has a slightly different feel compared to the rest of Japan. Due to the military base, there is an intriguing presence of America within the streets, something that was noticeable even in the streetlight banners which were adorned by drawings of hamburgers.

[...] My visit made me appreciate Shenmue even more, as it confirmed that the game is a fairly accurate representation of Dobuita St. after seeing it firsthand. Shenmue was very good at making you feel like you were exploring a virtual Yokosuka, and to be able to confirm that so much effort was made by the developers to make a fairly accurate depiction of the locations was very pleasant to see.[178]

Illustration 13: Grocers in Shenmue ©Sega 2000

Illustration 14: Daniel Boczarski

Illustration 15: Jacket store in Shenmue ©Sega 2000

Illustration 16: Daniel Boczarski

These photos (see illustrations 13—16) might indicate that the Dobuita of Shenmue is a close replica of the original. Small architectural details in the game such as the curve of the street, the grey of the buildings and the electricity wires overhead all contribute to a sense of exact authenticity. But Shenmue was such a popular game that it could have in turn affected the way that Dobuita looks now; decisions about which aspects of the town to preserve, and even what new premises to set up there, might in part be informed by the image of Dobuita preserved in Shenmue and a desire to appeal to a tourist gaze that has been exposed to the game.

Shenmue and the real-life Dobuita may reflect a disconnected nostalgia that has little to do with the reality of what Dobuita in the 1980s was really like, and more to do with the act of nostalgia itself. Ryo is leaving home at the end of his childhood, while the mechanics of the game simulate the process of growing up as spatial mastery. The game is connected thematically to a childhood that is already lost, just like Ishiuchi’s photography.

Emotions

Large parts of Shenmue’s interactive elements provide purely emotional payoff - they don’t provide any benefit to progress in the game, but they make the experience richer in ways not covered by rule systems. In the pleasant suburb of Sakuragaoka, you can help a small child to raise kittens by feeding them tuna, or help a short-sighted old woman to find her neighbor’s house. In Dobuita you can buy a thirsty man a drink from a vending machine and play arcade games. None of these actions affect the outcome of the game except by providing a little bit of extra dialogue with the residents of Yokosuka, or a passing experience of enjoyable interaction with a kitten or a vintage game.

In this sense, Shenmue is a role-playing game and not a roll-playing game, a term used by tabletop game fans to distinguish between playing a game to tell a story and playing a game to find the optimal solution to a mathematical problem. Shenmue’s lack of many of the mathematical mechanics that define the RPG genre reflects an emotion-led focus in the game’s design. Part of these emotions is the game’s nostalgia for an imagined childhood in Japan.

Nostalgia as a design strategy and Shenmue’s theme as a coming-of-age story might co-produce each other; by siting the game in Yokosuka of 1986, the game is grounded in an imagined childhood, but at the same time, the fact that Ryo is leaving that childhood behind makes the location all the more nostalgic. Dobuita has a long history of being represented in photography as a Japan already lost to war and occupation, and the Dobuita represented in Shenmue was set in a time already long gone. Just as the 1980s were lost to players of Shenmue at the time of its release in 2000, so Ryo is on the cusp of losing that time and place as part of the game’s storyline. Nostalgia relies on loss, and Shenmue has Ryo right on the precipice of a loss that many players have already experienced.

Adulthood

To investigate a shadowy criminal organisation that may have been connected to the murder of his father, Ryo takes up part-time work as a forklift truck driver at the harbour. This is a clear step into adulthood; his first full-time job. By this point he has already bought a ferry ticket to Hong Kong. He knows that he will be leaving Japan to pursue his father’s killers. His journey through the concentric circles of childhood development is about to reach the final stage; the world beyond Japan. Yet with adulthood comes an immediate loss of freedom. As soon as this job is taken, the player is no longer free to choose how their own time in-game is spent. Accepting a job closes the world not long after it has just opened up. The player is forced to spend time during working hours driving a forklift truck around the harbour.

Oddly, the vehicularity of this section seems to have informed the control scheme for the entire game; Ryo’s movement is operated through the virtual gas pedal of a shoulder trigger key, and he will turn left or right with the arrow keys. Most 3D action games use the analog mini-joystick to direct character movement, without separate control of direction and acceleration. This might indicate that Shenmue shared basic engines with other games being made by AM2 such as their racing game Ferrari F355 challenge. The fact that the controls for the game are better suited to Ryo’s working life than his actual body almost seems to suggest that work is the fundamental essence of his existence.

Because of the nature of Ryo’s job, a parallel could be drawn between Ryo’s life and the much-studied ‘freeter’ lifestyle that was becoming increasingly popular in the 1990s in Japan. Freeters rely on casual work, such as Ryo’s forklift job, to sustain a carefree, consumerist lifestyle rather than following a stable, salaried career path. Ryo, like the freeters, is taking on this kind of work as a choice. He comes from a middle-class background, receives a daily allowance, and could go to university and get a stable, salaried job, yet he chooses not to.

Although much of the discourse about freeters treats it as a lifestyle choice, it has its roots in broader economic conditions; surveys have shown that most freeters would like to find more stable work but have been unable to do so, and that among the freeters who do not seek a salaried job, many of them indicate that with frequent ‘restructurings’ making roles that were previously considered ‘jobs for life’ redundant, there seems to be little point putting in the required commitment to a corporation that can no longer deliver a commitment in return.[179]

Ryo isn’t making the choice to take on casual work rather than finish school for the kind of reasons that emerge in studies of freeters. He makes the decision to do this work in order to avenge his father. Since he receives an allowance anyway, his opting to take this work seems more like a choice than for most of the real people with whom Ryo might be compared. Shenmue was released nine years after Japan entered recession, at a time of persistent youth unemployment and corporate restructurings. The widely different economic circumstances of 1987 Japan and 2000 Japan seem important to note: Ryo is not a freeter in the sense contemporary to the game’s publication, because the economic conditions that produced the freeter phenomenon do not exist in the game’s setting. His casual work is a choice he makes out of duty to his family, not out of the futility of traditional dutiful behaviour.

I began playing Shenmue, and began considering writing about the game, when I was studying for a Master’s degree in London in 2011. Not long before, the British press had been discussing the possibility that the country would enter a ‘lost decade’ similar to that which Japan faced in the 1990s. Writing this in 2013, five years into a period of intermittent recession and depressed growth, the outlook remains gloomy, but my own personal situation looks a lot more hopeful now than it did in 2011. I am writing a crowdfunded book, I have fulfilling and interesting freelance work, and I’m living in a sunny Californian suburb.

In 2011 I had no idea this would happen. I was terrified that I was about to graduate into a world with 25% youth unemployment, and untold levels of underemployment and unpaid work. I would soon realise that I had no hope of being able to continue to live in London to finish my degree with proper supervision. It was easy to imagine why one might choose to become a freeter in 1990s Japan, when in recession Britain entire industries that used to provide stable employment to young people had become closed to anybody who couldn’t afford to work for free. Not that every freeter in Japan was making a free choice.

The fact that as a player in Shenmue, I had no choice at all about whether or not to take on this awful, repetitive job on the harbour, galled and concerned me. I found driving that forklift truck boring and repetitive. A comparison with the workplace training that Dorinne Kondo described seems relevant; in order to become an adult and leave his hometown, Ryo first has to put himself through this repetitive physical task, and the player has to experience that repetition too. I was being drilled into repetitive work, even though I had spent a great deal of time on the game unlocking new areas to explore; surely my hard work getting Ryo to this point should have resulted in more freedom? Surely my hard work studying for a postgraduate degree should remove this uncertainty about how I was going to pay my way in life? Why does the passage into adulthood result in a loss of agency?

There was some effort made by the designers at AM2 to create play out of work. A day at work as a forklift truck driver begins with a race around the harbour against the other drivers. The maneuvrability of the forklift is based on real-world trucks, with undersensitive steering, slow acceleration, and low speeds. This makes racing a painful experience. Just keeping up with the other drivers is challenge enough, without the paralysing effect of sharp corners.

The forklift truck race is one example of the strange approach to realism that is taken in Shenmue. The forklifts themselves are very closely simulated, but work as a driver is ‘gamified’ through the daily races. Yet after the race is finished, Ryo still has to spend several in-game hours moving boxes before he is able to continue with his investigation into the criminal gang that killed his father. Ryo’s journey into adulthood seemingly cannot happen without some spiritual training through repetitive actions.

In the end, I came to the conclusion that the only winning move was to follow the example of the situationists, and ‘ne travaillez jamais’ — never work. Just leave Ryo sat in the forklift, put down the controller, and get on with something else until his shift ends. He’ll be upbraided for it by his foreman, and he’ll miss out on pay, but in a world without the need to eat, roleplaying as a middle-class young man in receipt of an allowance, this didn’t seem to matter. In a game where the only goal is to experience the storyline in the most rich way possible, refusing to engage with dull work seemed to be the wisest course of action.

The nostalgia for childhood that pervades Shenmue goes so far as to make what should be a gain — Ryo’s adulthood, his access to spaces far from the home, working on the frontier of the world beyond Japan — feel like a loss, as Ryo’s freedom to explore the city and use his time as he sees fit is lost.

Yu Suzuki started Shenmue as a project to make an open-world, cinematic RPG. But Shenmue ended up as an opening world and a closing one; spaces open to Ryo at the same time that his options close down. It was a coming of age story set in a dystopian image of 1980s Japanese urbanism that would probably be the worst nightmare of both Debord and Le Corbusier.

As I replay the game to write this book, there is something gratifying about putting down the controller, letting Ryo stage an uneventful protest, and getting on with the much more enjoyable work of writing a book. I feel like I have won, and Ryo has lost. For now.

Conclusion

At the start of this book, I mentioned working in a museum in Japan and feeling dissatisfied with the way history was presented there. I didn’t feel that the history of powerful men fully told the story of the objects on display there. If I see a suit of armour, I don’t just want to know about the military exploits of its wearer; I want to to why it looks the way it does, who was supposed to see it, and what was the intended reaction. I want to know who made it, and what effect did that activity have on their life and the lives of people around them. I want to know what it is made from, what was it like to work with those materials, and how the maker got hold of them. I want to know, what did people think about all of this?

Similarly, I don’t think that the story of Sega’s successes and failures tells us the story of the Dreamcast and its games. Nor it is enough to just focus on the heroic designers whose leadership is celebrated in the industry already.

This book is an attempt to take a step beyond existing histories of video games. Rather than allowing the story to be led by games consoles or business relationships, I have asked: who constructed the game world? Where does space design come from?

I think that both games themselves and their histories are network effects that play out in virtual and physical places. Everybody’s actions make games what they are, and everything combines to make their history; the players, the designers, and the writers of histories, as well as non-humans like places, consoles and software technologies.

This book has looked at three virtual spaces for traces of the network effects that played out there. Skies of Arcadia and Shenmue were studied from the design of the game world outwards, linking the spatiality of the games to the testimonies of developers and players and the broader historical context. Phantasy Star Online as a place that existed in the year 2000 is no longer accessible, so that place was reconstructed from interviews with players, and then compared to the stated design intentions of its developers.

There are more ways of networking out games’ histories. At the time of writing, online games are connecting to people’s social networking profiles to gather data on their tastes and preferences, their friendship and family networks, and much of their activity on other parts of the internet. If the same methodology developed in this paper could be applied to games like that, I could for example know not just that Nasrad mimicks the Taj Mahal, but also how many of the players are known to have visited the real-world Taj Mahal, how many players commented on the fact that Nasrad’s palace looks like the Taj Mahal, and what effect such recognition had on the length of time they spent in that area.

Whether or not games are a unique medium, they do present a unique challenge to historians. The feedback of players goes beyond moment-to-moment interaction with the object; the game only exists in dependence on players’ actions. Games challenge us to write histories that account for multiple agencies, to trace design change not just to heroic designers and technological advances, but to the decisions made by ordinary people. It’s not easy work, but I feel proud to have made a start.

Appendix

Appendix A: Theorising Game Spaces

Play and Games

Roger Caillois’s 1961 Man, play and games suggests two main types of play; paidia, explorative ‘playing’ such as that which a small child does in a sandbox, and ludus, goal-oriented ‘gaming’ such as chess. In addition, he offers four further play forms: agon, or competitive play; alea, or risk-taking; mimicry, also known as role-playing; and ilinx, or vertigo.[180]

This kind of taxonomy is problematic because it attempts to describe styles of play and styles of game at the same time - in reality, games and play are much less stable than that.

Let’s take Skies of Arcadia as an example. It is theoretically a game of alea and mimicry - it belongs to the genre of role-playing games (RPGs), and the success of battle strategies is partly probabilistic. The problem with this categorisation is that it conceals the more complex and ambivalent relationship that players may have with the game. While the success of individual attacks is probabilistic, this is cushioned by the fact that there is no true ‘fail state’ for players - the worst outcome is that the on-screen characters are ‘killed’ by an enemy, but all this actually means is that players are returned to the beginning of the battle to attempt to win again. The game is designed such that they will definitely win eventually. In reality, the risk is minimal, and the probabilistic nature of attack success simply functions to provide disappointment when an attack does less damage than expected, and thrill when it exceeds expectations.

The issue of mimicry is even more problematic - the moniker ‘role-playing game’ has more to do with the fact that the core game mechanics are inspired by Dungeons and Dragons and less to do with any actual role-playing engaged in by the players. Mimicry involves making decisions about your behaviour that match what you believe a given character would do. Children’s games of ‘Mums and Dads’ are games of mimicry, and tabletop role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons require that players narrate their imagined behaviour in the voice of their character, for example, ‘I swing my Damascus steel sword at the dragon, screaming “this ends now!”’

In a Dungeons and Dragons game, players must roll dice to determine whether their action succeeds or fails, and how much damage an attack deals. In Skies of Arcadia and other digital RPGs, the computer calculates this using a set of ‘random numbers’, but players are not required to choose actions based on what they believe the character would choose to do at the time. They must simply choose the best strategy to win the battle. The same goes for behaviour in town maps; players do not choose what to say to non-player characters based on what they believe their character would say, but they simply select what will make Vyse appear as heroic as possible. If anything, agency for playing a role is located in the game software itself, not in the players.

Caillois’ notion of mimicry suggests that players role-play within the boundaries set by Skies of Arcadia, but it is in fact known as a role-playing game because of a network effect - its relationship to a heritage of tabletop role-playing games.

While I want to bear in mind that taxonomies for games don’t ‘just work’ in an uncomplicated way, I find it useful to take from Caillois typology the broader categories of paidia and ludus. Certain game mechanics, such as collecting ‘discoveries’ in the sky map, encourage paidia play, while others, such as battles, engender ludic play.

This focus on play styles rather than game types is more successfully met by Richard Bartle’s taxonomy, first presented in 1990.[181] Bartle presents four player types, which, like personality types identified by psychologists, are all present to differing degrees in all people: killers enjoy being better than everybody else and defeating all opponents; explorers like to know everything about the game world and find rare artefacts; achievers like to own everything in the game world, or to complete checklists of tasks; and finally, socialisers like to interact with other people, and are motivated to play by the possibility of social interaction in a game. Bartle’s taxonomy was intended for online multi-user domains (MUDs), the text-based precursor to the contemporary massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPGs), and he has objected to its application to other genres of video game. Nevertheless, many game designers and theorists find his taxonomy useful for describing the play styles encouraged by different game mechanics, and I will be referring to Bartle’s player types in my description of Skies of Arcadia space design.

Many of the pleasures of RPG play are left out of the taxonomies presented so far. In Toward a Ludic Architecture Steffan Walz describes the Ph.D dissertation of Jurgen Fritz, which has not been translated from the German, and offers it as a more thorough list of play activities; contesting, risk-taking, leaving it to chance, amusing, pursuing vertigo, meditating, collecting, role-playing, savouring, creating, and problem-solving. This provides a better description of the kinds of pleasures that players might take from Skies of Arcadia: it is amusing, because the storyline and spatial features are often comedic; it enables collecting, particularly in the sky map; savouring, by enjoying the way the storyline unfolds; and problem-solving, by succeeding in battle and responding to spatial puzzles in dungeons.

Theoretical taxonomies are often complicated by their actual ambivalence in application. In contradiction to the maxims of user-centred design theories, video games like Skies of Arcadia sometimes make deliberate use of ‘bad design’ to complicate player interaction with the game world. Some affordances are visible, but hard to spot, such as the indication of a new ‘discovery’ to be found in the sky map - not in the polygonal space itself, but by the spinning of the needle of a compass in the bottom-right corner of the screen.

At other times, affordance is made as clear as possible. Players‘ progress is rewarded through the symbol of the ‘save point’ - a landscape feature that does not match the surroudings, but instead consistently indicates a spot at which progress in the game can be ‘saved’ to a file. As in many other RPGs, the save point glows blue and is waist-height to the playable character. Experienced players know how to read the implications when a save point is located in an otherwise featureless room in front of a large door - a dangerous battle that they are likely to need to attempt several times over. Other architectural signs in the landscape are similarly designed to be easily readable - the dark, black wall of cloud called ‘Sargasso’ clearly indicates danger and obstructed passage. The effect of this is to give players a greater sense of mastery, particularly players with previous experience of RPG architectural language.

Game design as spatiality

Espen Aarseth, an early advocate for the development of methodologies for game criticism as ‘cybertextual’ media separate to literary or film studies, declared in 2007[182] that digital games are defined by spatiality. Spatiality is a strange feature to pick out as definitive of digital games, because it is shared by so many other forms of design practice, not least architecture.

In apparent contradiction to his opening point, in the same essay Aarseth says that space defers to gameplay; spaces are always designed in order to support the gameplay experience. This subordination of space to gameplay indicates that perhaps space is a ‘defining feature’ of games in that it distinguishes game styles from each other, rather than distinguishing games from other media; dimensionality, perspective and the nature and extent of restrictions on movement may all be examples of how different games represent space differently.

Aarseth then further claims that as a result of games’ restricted topology, game-space is merely an illusion, because real space is not restricted in this way. A cynical critic might disagree; our movement in the real-world appears very much restricted when one tries to take a short-cut through private property, get back into student dorms after the curfew time, or hold a political protest outside the Houses of Parliament. If Aarseth is too optimistic about real-world space, it may be because “space” sounds like a innocent notion, a safe, aesthetic abstraction. It is easy to forget what an aggressive pursuit space can be.

In RPGs and other digital games, space is not just an aesthetic feature. Nor do game-worlds merely provide a framing for play. Space and worlds are the play objects themselves. Myst, an early game featuring an immersive, on-screen world, has also been described as a game in which, ‘the worlds themselves are the puzzles.’[183] Space as an object of play was theorised before video games. Guy Debord described the structure of Paris as a “great obstacle” that provided “tiny clues” to a future organization of life, interpreting the psychogeography of the real, live city through ludic play.[184] The tension between space as a play object and as an object of contestation and violence could be thought of as the heart of RPG narrative.

Game space as map

The word ‘map’ is used in several different ways when discussing digital games, which perhaps attests to the importance of navigation in game design and play.

Texture maps are images that graphics rendering software wraps around the blank polygons to create a surface appearance. The functioning of a texture map can be seen clearly in the game files of Maxis The Sims, where the faces of the characters are stored as uncannily flat image files, distorted with the outer areas stretched to fit the image and then shrunk once again as the rendering software wraps the image around the polygon of a character’s head.

Town maps and dungeon maps are the parts of the game world that are, by and large, traversed by foot. It is counterintuitive in a three-dimensional game to think of these areas as maps, since they feel like areas seen from the ground level. The term comes from earlier RPGs that were rendered in two-dimensional isometric perpective, whose areas were in fact flat images and therefore basically interactive maps. As a general rule, town maps are ‘safe places’ for trade and information gathering, while dungeon maps, so named regardless of whether or not the scenario is in fact a dungeon, are areas where ‘random encounter battles’ and puzzles occur.

World maps are generally considered to be the larger view of the game-world that players take when they leave towns or dungeons to travel longer distances. The world map is no longer seen in most games, as game worlds are now designed to be traversed from town to dungeon to town again, the ultimate goal being seamless travel without the need to wait for the computer to load the next map after leaving the present one. In most role-playing games that predated Skies of Arcadia, the world map was shown in distorted perspective, the playable character shown disproportionately huge in relation to the shrunken environment being navigated. When airships were used for longer travel, the character was replaced by a sprite of the ship, which moved across the map more quickly than the character could on foot. In Skies of Arcadia, the world map is reconceived as the sky itself, which can only be traversed by airship.

Mini-maps are small abstractions of town and dungeon maps, shown in a corner of the screen. Extra information, such as the location of the playable character and which areas have already been explored, is supplied on this map to aid in navigation.

In-game maps are also included literally as an image that can be brought up from the world map to show an abstraction of the entire world. While it was already common practice in RPGs for in-game maps to show how much of the world had been visited and, sometimes, to leave unlabelled those areas of the map that had not yet been discovered by players, Skies of Arcadia developed this further by increasing the size of the map as players completed more of the game’s story.

Reading spaces

Heterotopia

Walz suggests that game space could be read ‘as a heterotopian other, feeding from and mirroring the everyday’, referencing Foucault‘s 1967 lecture Of other spaces. In that lecture, Foucault identified two forms of ‘heterotopia’ that are particularly pertinent to this paper. The first was cinema; the other-ness and escapism of the cinema space is clearly reflected in a video game’s framing in a television screen. The second was boats. ‘The ship is the heterotopia par excellence’, Foucault declared, explaining that it is not only located in neither one place nor another, but also contains promise of wealth, freedom and travel to new worlds.[185]

As well as a meta-space, Skies of Arcadia is a heterotopia. It is a bounded space, separate from real life but that reflects the world outside. The design of images and views in the game world is, in Latour‘s words, heavily overtaken,[186] making use of references that have proliferated across the network already, and have taken on l yers of meaning nd memory for many players and developers. The overtaken nature of the design is a form of communication for framing the gameworld, not just framing as play[187] but as a particular type of ludic space, laden with the affordances expected of RPGs. Communication must be overtaken in order to work. It is heterochronic, with its own event-driven time schedule wherein the enemy only attacks after the players are ready, and night only comes when the players tell the characters to sleep. Foucault described the colonies of Puritans and Jesuits as heterotopia of compensation, ‘as meticulous and well arranged as our[ world] is messy, ill-constructed and jumbled’. Relentlessly cheerful games such as Skies of Arcadia could also be seen as heterotopia of compensation.

Narrative and architecture

Foucault opened his 1967 speech Of other spaces with: ‘We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein.’

Experience as network rather than arc was later reflected in Hiroki Azuma‘s 2001 literary theory of the Otaku as database animal.[188] Similarly, Jenkin‘s notion of embedded narrative posits that ‘...story is less a temporal structure than a body of information’, arguing that narrative is often embedded in the spatial design of a game rather than narrated cinematically.

Narrative is a controversial issue in video games. Although writers from the field of Digital Game Studies often refer to a debate between ‘narratologists’ and ‘ludologists’, in more recent years this debate has been less significant. In fact, a large portion of the writing on narrative in videogames seems to make a point of subsuming narrative under features that are considered to be definitive of the medium, such as interaction or mechanics. In Michael Nitsche‘s book Video game spaces,[189] he writes, ‘[The narrative] elements‘ task is to improve a player‘s experience and understanding of the game world’. This is a difficult claim to uphold in the case of RPGs such as Skies of Arcadia in which game play is fundamentally motivated by the desire to unlock the next part of the storyline. I would argue that for many games, the world, architecture and spatial design are tasked with the communication of narrative, and not the other way around.

In spite of this apparent privileging of game over narrative, Nitsche ably captures how narrative is communicated through spatial design. ‘Evocative narrative elements encourage players to project meaning onto events, objects and spaces in game worlds’. Like Walz‘s warning to designers that they are not designing experiences but frameworks in which experiences may happen, Nitsche argues that ‘the aim of narrative elements ... is not to tell a linear story, but to provide evocative means for the interactor to make the space and the experience of it more meaningful’. This is important to consider when thinking about the way that historical memory affects the meaning of game world design; signs and references in the game world exist as prompts or resources for the player to find meaning. Meaning is not created in a vacuum; it circulates across networks.

Appendix B: Actor-Network Theory

An analysis grounded in network theory is all about the relationships between people and technologies, and between actions and affordances.[190] My theoretical approach to games as networks takes a lot of inspiration from Actor-Network Theory (ANT). Awkward, controversial, and rhetorically disorganised, ANT is a great tool to use if you want to avoid facile storytelling and get a deeper, richer look at the processes that actually caused institutions and technologies to come about. It also happens to have its own interesting techno-social history; the meaning and reception of ANT was dramatically altered by the spread of the internet, a historical agent that plays a major role in the history described in this book. It changed people’s understanding of the meaning of the word, ‘network,’ from a changing array of actions to something synonymous with the structural entity, ‘web.’[191].

ANT was never supposed to be about webs or structures - it’s totally opposed to them. ANT is about action; it is an alternative to the ‘sociology of the social’ that states that human action is caused by ‘society’. People often like to explain things away as being caused by ‘culture’ or ‘society’, but no matter how hard you look you will never be able to capture ‘culture’, lock it up in a laboratory and observe its behaviour. It’s not a very useful explanation for things. ANT proposes that structures such as ‘culture’ are co-created by the actions of their constituent members, and so it aims to record and interpret those actions to understand their real meaning.[192]

In 1992, before we all got network fever and started unquestioningly seeing the world as a big, interconnected web, Bruno Latour and Madeleine Akrich wrote about ANT in terms of the ‘Semiotics of Nonhuman Assemblies’. They defined semiotics as the study of meaning in a ‘nontextual and nonlinguistic interpretation’ of ‘the study of order building or path building’.[193] In other words, ANT analyses how order is being created by the actions of humans and objects, to understand what it all really means without relying on what people actually say. The aim of writing a network study was to record ‘what the various actors are doing to one another’.[194]

The most well-known work in ANT was carried out in science labs; the test subjects were the scientists themselves. After doing a network study of scientists, Latour concluded that the meaning of scientific research was not really knowledge; it was authority. Academics are working to gain more authority, and the more authority they have, the better their access to resources that they can use to make more science.[195]

Tech trees and heroes make great stories, but there’s a limit to how much you can learn from telling the stories we’re already accustomed to. We need to make an uncomfortable transition, and attempt to find a new perspective. So let’s assume that tech trees, heroes and even games themselves are constructs; how did gamers, developers, consoles and software work together to create them?

There are three main maneuvres that make possible an Actor-Network study. The first is to ‘localise the global’, that is, to focus on action on the ground level rather than look for overarching structures. The second is to ‘redistribute the local’ by identifying how the local is constructed, in dependence on other localities.[196] In the chapter on Networking the Dreamcast, I use evidence gathered from my interviews in English and Japanese, and synthesise this data with reviews of the game published under pseudonyms on the internet, and market data published in Nikkei Weekly. Alongside these human accounts, I will also analyse game software and hardware, looking for traces of their action and agency - because just like I learned in that folk museum, objects have just as interesting a role to play in history as people do.

The chapters focusing on games continue ‘localising the global’ from a theoretical standpoint, looking for ways to describe spaces: what are they made of, and how are the constructed. In the final three chapters, I will ‘redistribute the local’ by describing game spaces as sites of action, and showing how action inside and outside the game-worlds constructed those spaces. The conclusion to this book will take on the third maneuvre: ‘connecting sites’, which means looking for the ‘plasma’ holding everything together, the agencies that we haven’t been able to record but which must be necessary for action to emerge.

My goal is to provide a description of the games industry, particularly Sega and other Japanese companies, around the time that the Dreamcast was released. My core concern is the worldviews that proliferate across the network. The conception and creation of a virtual world depends on worldviews, both in terms of views about the world and a view about how worlds work. What ANT basically means is that instead of giving ‘culture’ responsibility for those worldviews, I’m going to track them in the actions of people and objects.

Notes

Notes

[1]Reiji Asakura, Revolutionaries at Sony: The making of the Sony PlayStation and the visionaries who conquered the world of video games (McGraw-Hill, 2000)

[2]Martin Campbell-Kelly, From airline reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: a history of the software industry (The MIT Press, 2004), pp. 269-301

[3]ibid., p. 300

[4]Bernard Wolf, Mark & Perron, editor, The Video Game Theory Reader (New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 5-24

[5]Laurence King, Game on: The history and culture of videogames (Universe Publications, 2002)

[6]Alice Taylor, ‘Where are all the girl gamers?’, in: Game on: The history and culture of videogames (Universe Publications, 2002)

[7]Masuyama, ‘Pokémon as Japanese Culture?’, in: Game on: The history and culture of videogames (Universe Pub., 2002)

[8]Sega Overworks, ‘Eternal Arcadia’, Dreamcast, GD-ROM (2000)

[9]Sega AM2 of CRI, ‘Shenmue’, Dreamcast, GD-ROM (1999)

[10]Sega Sonic Team, ‘Phantasy Star Online’, Dreamcast, GD-ROM (2000)

[11]‘For Dreamcast, the serious game begins’, Nikkei Weekly (30th November 1998)

[12]Tom Szirtes, ‘Private interview August 2012’ (August 2012)

[13]‘Sega Dreamcast preparing for rollout’, Nikkei Weekly (21st October 1998)

[14]Tom Szirtes, ‘Private interview August 2012’ (August 2012)

[15]‘Sony gets financial jolt from electronics sector’, Nikkei Weekly (1st February 1999)

[16]‘Nintendo falls prey to powerful yen’, Nikkei Weekly (29th November 1999)

[17]‘Market Shares’, Nikkei Weekly (2nd August 1999)

[18]Nicholas Lovell, ‘Private interview December 2012’ (December 2012)

[19]‘Sega to sell games for portable machines’, Nikkei Weekly (31st March 1999)

[20]Andy Berkenfield, ‘Private interview October 2012’ (October 2012)

[21]Nicholas Lovell, ‘Private interview December 2012’ (December 2012)

[22]‘Restructuring at Sega no game’, Nikkei Weekly (13th December 1999)

[23]Bitmob, ‘Former Sega President on Dreamcast‘s failure’ ⟨URL: http://venturebeat.com/2009/09/11/qaa-former-sega-president⟩, Interview with Bernie Stolar

[24]Andy Berkenfield, ‘Private interview October 2012’ (October 2012)

[25]Masaki Takeda Hirose Miyazawa, Takashi Tanagihara, Konpyuuta Geemu no Tekunorojii (Iwanami Shoten, 1999)

[26]‘White is bright spot on product palette’, Nikkei Weekly (1st February 1999)

[27]This is a regional difference in standard framerates for televisions.

[28]‘Sony restructures ahead of the curve’, Nikkei Weekly (15th March 1999)

[29]‘Internel lessons offered for kids’, Nikkei Weekly (5th April 1999)

[30]‘Private sector helps kids get on the Net to ensure computer-literate generations’, Nikkei Weekly (11th October 1999)

[31]ibid.

[32]‘Borders explode in game industry as makers morph into global groups’, Nikkei Weekly (19th May 1999); ‘Sega, AT&T to put Dreamcast online’, Nikkei Weekly (9th August 1999)

[33]‘For Dreamcast, the serious game begins’, Nikkei Weekly (30th November 1998)

[34]‘Virtual stores finding actual sales on the web’, Nikkei Weekly (19th May 1999)

[35]‘Restructuring at Sega no game’, Nikkei Weekly (13th December 1999)

[36]‘Dreamcast ready for overseas markets’, Nikkei Weekly (19th April 1999)

[37]Bernie Stolar, ‘Console Keynote: Changing for the better: Redefining game and hardware development through evolution’ ⟨URL: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014851/Console-Keynote-Changing-for-the-better⟩

[38]Giles Slade, Made to break: Technology and obsolescence in America (Harvard University Press, 2007)

[39]VGchartz, ‘VGchartz Japan weekly game sales chart 15th October 2000’ ⟨URL: http://www.vgchartz.com/weekly/36716/Japan/⟩

[40]VGchartz, ‘VGchartz Japan weekly game sales chart 8th October 2000’ ⟨URL: http://www.vgchartz.com/weekly/36807/Japan/⟩

[41]I will be referring to game designers at Sega and elsewhere with Anglicised name order - that is, family name last, as opposed to the Japanese custom of putting the family name first. This follows the convention in English-language gaming media, it is how the individuals concerned refer to themselves around English-speaking people, and it is what tends to be written on the English side of their business cards. Romanisation will follow the same logic, observing where known the spelling that individuals use for international communication.

[42]Studio Bentstuff, editor, Vagrant’s Story Ultimania (Digicube, 2000)

[43]IGN, ‘Top 100 game creators 9: Yu Suzuki’, ⟨URL: http://games.ign.com/top-100-game-creators/9.html⟩

[44]Yu Suzuki, ‘The Role of Reality in Epic Game Creation’, GDC keynote presentation (March 2000), ⟨URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzEt6yZPVcY⟩

[45]Mike Jackson, ‘Yu Suzuki could get Shenmue license from SEGA’ (2012), ⟨URL: http://www.computerandvideogames.com/331117/yu-suzuki-could-get-shenmue-license-from-sega/⟩ – visited on 4th January 2012

[46]Tim Ingham, ‘Sega: Shenmue 3 requrests ’taken very seriously”, ⟨URL: http://www.computerandvideogames.com/304323/sega-shenmue-3-requests-taken-very-seriously/⟩ – visited on 2 June 2011

[47]‘Arcade, home games to be compatible’, Nikkei Weekly (22nd February 1999)

[48]An RPG series for Nintendo consoles that featured vehicle combat.

[49]Nanjyayo, ‘Review of Skies of Arcadia’ ⟨URL: http://gcmk2.net/rpg/eal.html⟩

[50]Anonymous, ‘Review of Skies of Arcadia’, ⟨URL: http://www6.ocn.ne.jp/~mumei/review/eta-naruarukadhiaL.html⟩

[51]Shuntaro Tanaka, ‘Private interview August 2011’ (18th August 2011)

[52]Masaki Takeda Hirose Miyazawa, Takashi Tanagihara, Konpyuuta Geemu no Tekunorojii (Iwanami Shoten, 1999), p. 45

[53]Given this, it is safe to assume that Sega recruited new staff immediately after graduation from university, like most other major Japanese companies.

[54]The term ‘large-scale’ was used in this conversation to refer to games such as Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, as opposed to tactical RPGs or smaller RPGs such as Pokémon.

[55]Shuntaro Tanaka, ‘Private interview August 2011’ (18th August 2011)

[56]A note on genres: tactical RPGs focus on the location and deployment of troops in a field, whereas standard RPGs focus on the combat actions of a small party of characters. Dating sims are dialogue-driven games that provide players with a series of multiple-choice decisions about what to say and do in an attempt to win the affections of the characters.

[57]Yuu Matsui, editor, Dejitaru geemu no gijutsu: kaihatsu kiipaason ga kataru geemu sangyou no mirai (Digital games technologies: the future of the games industry as told by key developers) (Softbank Creative, 2011), p.

[58]Studio Bentstuff, editor, Vagrant’s Story Ultimania (Digicube, 2000), p. 8

[59]ibid., p. 487 - Atsushi Minakawa

[60]ibid., p. 41

[61]‘Seizing the ‘computer-facilitated interactive moment”, Nikkei Weekly (8th March 1999)

[62]Hidetaka Owaki, ‘Electronic device for detecting selected visually perceptible indication information on an information storage medium for security comparison’, U.S. Patent 5627895 (March 1995)

[63]Tom Szirtes, ‘Private interview August 2012’ (August 2012)

[64]Studio Bentstuff, editor, Vagrant’s Story Ultimania (Digicube, 2000), p. 457

[65]Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (MIT Press, 1993)

[66]Anonymous, ‘Review of Skies of Arcadia’, ⟨URL: http://www6.ocn.ne.jp/~mumei/review/eta-naruarukadhiaL.html⟩

[67]Yu-10, ‘Review of Skies of Arcadia’ ⟨URL: http://www.amazon.co.jp/product-reviews/B000069TAB/ref=cm_cr_pr_btm_link_next_2?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&pageNumber=2&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending⟩

[68]‘2009 - The Last Days of the Japanese RPG?’ ⟨URL: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/117581/Opinion_2009__The_Last_Days_of_the_Japanese_RPG.php#.UG9f6RxWfzE⟩

[69]J. Urry, Mobilities (Polity Pr, 2007)

[70]G.L. McGregor, Situations of play: patterns of spatial use in videogames, in: Situated Play: Proceedings of the Digital Games Research Association Conference (2007)

[71]J. Urry, Mobilities (Polity Pr, 2007)

[72]F. Jameson, ‘The cultural logic of late capitalism’, in: Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism (Duke University Press, 1991), p. 25

[73]Scott Bukatman, Matters of gravity: special effects and supermen in the 20th century (Duke University Press Books, 2003)

[74]Kurt Kalata, ‘A Japanese RPG primer’ ⟨URL: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3581/a_japanese_rpg_primer_the_.php?page=16⟩

[75]Will Luton, ‘Email correspondence February 2012’ (February 2012)

[76]Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture (Frances Lincoln Ltd., 2008 — 1928), p. 102

[77]James J. Gibson, The ecological approach to perception (Boston: Haughton Mifflin, 1979)

[78]S.P. Walz, Toward a ludic architecture: the space of play and games (ETC Press, 2010)

[79]C. Crawford, Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling (New Riders Games) (New Riders Games, 2004), p. 16

[80]T. Whitlock, ‘Kingdom Hearts’, Space Time Play (2007)

[81]Scott Bukatman, Matters of gravity: special effects and supermen in the 20th century (Duke University Press Books, 2003), p. 23

[82]T. McDonough, Guy Debord and the situationist international: texts and documents (The MIT Press, 2004); L. Andreotti, ‘Architecture and play’, Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents (2002)

[83]T. McDonough, Guy Debord and the situationist international: texts and documents (The MIT Press, 2004), p. 248

[84]M. De Certeau, The practice of everyday life, volume 1 (Univ of California Pr, 1988)

[85]L.A. Suchman, Plans and situated actions: the problem of human-machine communication (Cambridge Univ Pr, 1987)

[86]D.A. Norman, The design of everyday things (Basic books, 2002)

[87]James J. Gibson, The ecological approach to perception (Boston: Haughton Mifflin, 1979)

[88]Drew Onia, ‘Private interview November 2012’ (November 2012)

[89]Yuu Matsui, editor, Dejitaru geemu no gijutsu: kaihatsu kiipaason ga kataru geemu sangyou no mirai (Digital games technologies: the future of the games industry as told by key developers) (Softbank Creative, 2011)

[90]GameSTM, ‘Behind the scenes: Phantasy Star Online’ ⟨URL: http://www.gamestm.co.uk/uncategorised/behind-the-scenes-phantasy-star-online/⟩

[91]Parn, ‘Review of Phantasy Star Online’ ⟨URL: http://www.rpgfan.com/reviews/phantasystaronline/Phantasy_Star_Online.html⟩

[92]Merritt Kopas, ‘Private interview November 2012’ (November 2012)

[93]Sean Kelly, ‘Private interview November 2012’ (November 2012)

[94]Ken Barnes, ‘Private interview November 2012’ (November 2012)

[95]ibid.

[96]Merritt Kopas, ‘Private interview November 2012’ (November 2012)

[97]Drew Onia, ‘Private interview November 2012’ (November 2012)

[98]Saleem Dabbous, ‘Private interview November 2012’ (November 2012)

[99]Ken Barnes, ‘Private interview November 2012’ (November 2012)

[100]Richard Lemarchand, ‘Private interview November 2012’ (November 2012)

[101]Famitsu, ‘Famitsu Phantasy Star Online Interview’ ⟨URL: http://www.rpgfan.com/features/pso.html⟩

[102]Phantasy Star Online World, ‘Interview with Takao Miyoshi’ ⟨URL: http://www.pso-world.com/phantasy-star-universe-e3-2006-takao-miyoshi.php⟩

[103]Bjorn Book-Larsson, ‘APB Reloaded: design and item monetisation challenges when going free to play’ ⟨URL: http://gdcvault.com/play/1015545/APB-Reloaded-Design-and-Item⟩

[104]Sean Kelly, ‘Private interview November 2012’ (November 2012)

[105]Drew Onia, ‘Private interview November 2012’ (November 2012)

[106]Merritt Kopas, ‘Private interview November 2012’ (November 2012)

[107]Saleem Dabbous, ‘Private interview November 2012’ (November 2012)

[108]G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (Burns & Oates, 1987)

[109]C. Fernandez-Vara, ‘Labyrinth and Maze’, Space Time Play (2007)

[110]Valve Corporation, ‘Employee Handbook’ (June 2012), ⟨URL: http://newcdn.flamehaus.com/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf⟩

[111]Drew Onia, ‘Private interview November 2012’ (November 2012)

[112]Sean Kelly, ‘Private interview November 2012’ (November 2012)

[113]ibid.

[114]Merritt Kopas, ‘Private interview November 2012’ (November 2012)

[115]Merritt Kopas, ‘Gameplay, Genderplay’ ⟨URL: http://mkopas.net/2012/12/gameplay-genderplay/⟩

[116]Merritt Kopas, ‘Private interview November 2012’ (November 2012)

[117]ibid.

[118]Sean Kelly, ‘Private interview November 2012’ (November 2012)

[119]Richard Lemarchand, ‘Private interview November 2012’ (November 2012)

[120]Merritt Kopas, ‘Gameplay, Genderplay’ ⟨URL: http://mkopas.net/2012/12/gameplay-genderplay/⟩

[121]ibid.

[122]Famitsu, ‘Famitsu Phantasy Star Online Interview’ ⟨URL: http://www.rpgfan.com/features/pso.html⟩

[123]James Wallis, ‘Private interview November 2012’ (November 2012)

[124]Merritt Kopas, ‘Private interview November 2012’ (November 2012)

[125]Richard Lemarchand, ‘Private interview November 2012’ (November 2012)

[126]Drew Onia, ‘Private interview November 2012’ (November 2012)

[127]Merritt Kopas, ‘Private interview November 2012’ (November 2012)

[128]Saleem Dabbous, ‘Private interview November 2012’ (November 2012)

[129]James Wallis, ‘Private interview November 2012’ (November 2012)

[130]Richard Lemarchand, ‘Private interview November 2012’ (November 2012)

[131]ibid.

[132]Drew Onia, ‘Private interview November 2012’ (November 2012)

[133]James Wallis, ‘Private interview November 2012’ (November 2012)

[134]Drew Onia, ‘Private interview November 2012’ (November 2012)

[135]Merritt Kopas, ‘Private interview November 2012’ (November 2012)

[136]Leigh Alexander, ‘Uncharted designer Lemarchand leaves Naughty Dog for USC’ ⟨URL: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/169358/Lemarchand_leaves_Naughty_Dog_to_teach_at_USC.php#.UQrsrr9QWE0⟩

[137]Richard Lemarchand, ‘Private interview November 2012’ (November 2012)

[138]Saleem Dabbous, ‘Private interview November 2012’ (November 2012)

[139]ibid.

[140]Sean Kelly, ‘Private interview November 2012’ (November 2012)

[141]Yu Suzuki, ‘The Role of Reality in Epic Game Creation’, GDC keynote presentation (March 2000), ⟨URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzEt6yZPVcY⟩

[142]Studio Bentstuff, editor, Vagrant’s Story Ultimania (Digicube, 2000), p. 487

[143]this long-winded appellation is probably an avoidance of the potentially offensive, ‘otaku’.

[144]Shuntaro Tanaka, ‘Private interview August 2011’ (18th August 2011)

[145]Nanjyayo, ‘Review of Skies of Arcadia’ ⟨URL: http://gcmk2.net/rpg/eal.html⟩

[146]Kirara, ‘Review of Skies of Arcadia’ (6 2005), ⟨URL: http://www.amazon.co.jp/product-reviews/B000069TAB/ref=cm_cr_pr_btm_link_next_2?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&pageNumber=2&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending⟩

[147]Nagayoshikawa, ‘Review of Skies of Arcadia’ (1 2007), ⟨URL: http://www.amazon.co.jp/product-reviews/B000069TAB/ref=cm_cr_pr_btm_link_next_2?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&pageNumber=2&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending⟩

[148]Anonymous, ‘Review of Skies of Arcadia’ (5 2004), ⟨URL: http://www.amazon.co.jp/product-reviews/B000069TAB/ref=cm_cr_pr_btm_link_next_2?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&pageNumber=2&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending⟩

[149]Shuntaro Tanaka, ‘Private interview August 2011’ (18th August 2011)

[150]Yuka, ‘Review of Skies of Arcadia’ ⟨URL: http://gcmk2.net/rpg/eal.html⟩

[151]Anonymous, ‘Review of Skies of Arcadia’, ⟨URL: http://www6.ocn.ne.jp/~mumei/review/eta-naruarukadhiaL.html⟩

[152]1up.com, ‘The disappearance of Yu Suzuki’ (2010), ⟨URL: http://1up.com/features/disappearance-suzuki-part-2⟩

[153]Yu Suzuki, ‘The Role of Reality in Epic Game Creation’, GDC keynote presentation (March 2000), ⟨URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzEt6yZPVcY⟩

[154]Yu Suzuki, ‘Yu Suzuki’s Gameworks - interview by Mark Cerny’ ⟨URL: http://gdcvault.com/play/1014723/Yu-Suzuki-s-Gameworks-A⟩

[155]1up.com, ‘The disappearance of Yu Suzuki’ (2010), ⟨URL: http://1up.com/features/disappearance-suzuki-part-2⟩

[156]Yu Suzuki, ‘Yu Suzuki’s Gameworks - interview by Mark Cerny’ ⟨URL: http://gdcvault.com/play/1014723/Yu-Suzuki-s-Gameworks-A⟩

[157]1up.com, ‘The disappearance of Yu Suzuki’ (2010), ⟨URL: http://1up.com/features/disappearance-suzuki-part-2⟩

[158]Yu Suzuki, ‘Yu Suzuki’s Gameworks - interview by Mark Cerny’ ⟨URL: http://gdcvault.com/play/1014723/Yu-Suzuki-s-Gameworks-A⟩

[159]ibid.

[160]1up.com, ‘The disappearance of Yu Suzuki’ (2010), ⟨URL: http://1up.com/features/disappearance-suzuki-part-2⟩

[161]Jordan Sand, House and Home in Modern Japan: Architecture, Domestic Space, and Bourgeois Culture, 1880-1930 (Harvard University Press, 2005), 1

[162]Katsutoshi Namimoto Teruhisa Horio and Hisao Ishiyama, Ima, naze kaeru? Kyoiku kihonho Q&A (Why change it now? The fundamental educational law Q&A) (Tokyo: Otsuki Shoten, 2003), 33

[163]Zoya Street, ‘Absent Fathers: Moral Education Textbooks in Postwar Japan’, in: Manga Girl seeks Herbivore Boy: Studying Japanese Gender at Cambridge (LIT Verlang, 2013)

[164]1up.com, ‘The disappearance of Yu Suzuki’ (2010), ⟨URL: http://1up.com/features/disappearance-suzuki-part-2⟩

[165]Jordan Sand, House and Home in Modern Japan: Architecture, Domestic Space, and Bourgeois Culture, 1880-1930 (Harvard University Press, 2005)

[166]Inge Daniels, The Japanese House: Material Culture in the Modern Home (Berg Publishers, 2010), p.28

[167]Dorinne Kondo, Crafting Selves: Power, Gender and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace (University of Chicago Press, 1990), 106–108

[168]Raph Koster, A theory of fun for game design (Paraglyph Press, 2005), 28

[169]Inge Daniels, The Japanese House: Material Culture in the Modern Home (Berg Publishers, 2010)

[170]Henry Jenkins, ‘Complete Freedom of Movement’, in: Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, editors, The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2006)

[171]Inge Daniels, The Japanese House: Material Culture in the Modern Home (Berg Publishers, 2010), 40-41

[172]Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (Basic Books, 2001), 313

[173]Inge Daniels, The Japanese House: Material Culture in the Modern Home (Berg Publishers, 2010), 67

[174]Susan Sontag, On Photography (Macmillan, 2011/1978)

[175]Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (Macmillan, 1981), 78

[176]John Frow, ‘Tourism and the Semiotics of Nostalgia’, October 57 (1991)

[177]Miyako Ishiuchi, ‘On the practice of oral history archives of Japanese art — Part IV: Interview with Ishiuchi Miyako’, Field Notes 2 (2012), ⟨URL: http://www.aaa.org.hk/FieldNotes/Details/1207⟩

[178]Daniel Boczarski, ‘Email correspondence january 2013’ (January 2013)

[179]Yuji Genda, ‘Who Really Lost Jobs in Japan? Youth Employment in an Aging Japanese Society’, in: Labor Markets and Firm Benefit Policies in Japan and the United States,  4 (University of Chicago Press, 2003); ?,

[180]Roger Caillois, Man, play, and games (Univ of Illinois Press, 2001)

[181]R. Bartle, Designing virtual worlds (New Riders Games, 2003)

[182]Espen J. Aarseth, ‘Allegories of space’, in: Space time play: computer games, architecture and urbanism: the next level (Birkhauser, 2007)

[183]D. Davidson, ‘Myst’, Space Time Play (2007), p. 49

[184]T. McDonough, Guy Debord and the situationist international: texts and documents (The MIT Press, 2004), p. 246

[185]M. Foucault and J. Miskowiec, ‘Of other spaces’, diacritics 16:1 (1986)

[186]B. Latour, Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory (Oxford University Press, USA, 2005)

[187]Gregory Bateson, ‘A theory of play and fantasy’, Psychiatric research reports 2:39 (1955)

[188]Hiroki Azuma, Ge-mu teki riarizumu ((2007))

[189]M. Nitsche, Video game spaces: image, play, and structure in 3D game worlds (The MIT Press, 2008)

[190]N. Contractor, P.R. Monge and P. Leonardi, ‘Multidimensional networks and the dynamics of sociomateriality: Bringing technology inside the network’, International Journal of Communication 5 (2011)

[191]B. Latour, ‘Networks, Societies, Spheres: Reflections of an Actor-Network Theorist’, International Journal of Communication 5 (2011), p.7

[192]B. Latour, Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory (Oxford University Press, USA, 2005)

[193]I told you it was awkward

[194]Madeleine Akrich, ‘The de-scription of technical objects’, in: Bruno Latour Madeleine Akrich, editor, Shaping technology/building society: studies in sociotechnical change (the MIT Press, 1994)

[195]B. Latour, Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society (Harvard University Press, 1987)

[196]B. Latour, Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory (Oxford University Press, USA, 2005)

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Gameography

Sega AM2 of CRI, ‘Shenmue’, Dreamcast, GD-ROM (1999).

Sega Overworks, ‘Eternal Arcadia’, Dreamcast, GD-ROM (2000).

Sega Sonic Team, ‘Phantasy Star Online’, Dreamcast, GD-ROM (2000).

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‘Borders explode in game industry as makers morph into global groups’, Nikkei Weekly (19th May 1999).

‘Dreamcast ready for overseas markets’, Nikkei Weekly (19th April 1999).

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‘Sony gets financial jolt from electronics sector’, Nikkei Weekly (1st February 1999).

‘Sony restructures ahead of the curve’, Nikkei Weekly (15th March 1999).

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Table of Contents

Dreamcast Worlds: a design history

Acknowledgements

Illustrations

Contents

List of illustrations

Introduction

Design History

The games studied

Motivations

The Dreamcast: networked

Sega

The Dreamcast

Professional networks

Direction

Communication with Fans

Skilling

GD-ROMS

Development tools

The Camera

Where are we now?

Skies of Arcadia

Pushing frontiers

Pirate Isle

Elements and materials

Three-dimensionality

Verticality

Pyuramis Shrine and Daccat’s Island

Circulation

Mazes and labyrinths

The Sky

Explorative architecture

Spatial challenges

Controlling ships

Challenge space

All design is space design

Towns

Magic space

Silver Shrine

The Nostalgia Cascade

Dreamcast games and Paris

What is game space made of?

Polygons

Dimensionality

Screenness

Hardware

Graphical interface

So much for the tech

Drifting in Space

Game space as theme park

Human computer interaction

Phantasy Star Online

Siting online gaming

Oral history

Multi-sited play

PVE and PVP

Trees and Rhizomes

Character creation

Lobby

Dungeons

The test of time

Genre

Sword and Sorcery

Geography

Open-world game design

Remembering Shenmue

Shenmue

Expanding outward

Opening world

Conflicting myths

Time

The Japanese home

Clutter

Does Ryo feel at home?

Nostalgia

Emotions

Adulthood

Conclusion

Appendix

Appendix A: Theorising Game Spaces

Play and Games

Game design as spatiality

Game space as map

Reading spaces

Heterotopia

Narrative and architecture

Appendix B: Actor-Network Theory

Notes

Notes

Bibliography

Gameography

Primary sources

Secondary sources