Lord of the Geeks

There is a moment early on in the computer game Dungeon Siege when, after fighting one's way through assorted Krug soldiers and lightning-shooting bats and zombie skeleton archers, you rescue the scribe Ulura. She volunteers to join your party. You gladly accept, equip her with your spare boots and gloves, hand her a bow and suddenly you are no longer alone in your quest to save the Kingdom of Ehb from evil. You are a member of a fellowship.

The moment is notable both for what it promises and for what it doesn't deliver. Dungeon Siege broke new ground in 2002 with spectacular graphics and an incredibly easy-to-use interface. It was the kind of visual breakthrough that instantly makes everything before it look hopelessly old-fashioned. I found myself spending time just zooming in and out and around the scenery, more entranced with the pageantry and surroundings than with the actual chore of slogging through hordes of demons to get to the next level. And I was just delighted when I began to pick up and hire companions whose character and abilities I could mold. Here was Tolkien's Fellowship evoked, not duplicated, and it was good.

As a story, however, Dungeon Siege is not quite so satisfying. It is generic fantasy, with no opportunity for nonlinear interaction and essentially no plot. Your ability to influence the shape of the game, as a player, is basically limited to dressing up your characters with cool armaments and deciding whether you want to rely more on wizard firepower than halberds or crossbows. Everything looks great, but after playing the game through to the end, you don't want to return to it, and it doesn't really spark the imagination.

A few other games released this year addressed different pieces of the puzzle. Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind offered vast possibilities for nonlinear interaction, along with a mind-boggling level of complexity in the various tactics one can use to play the game. But even though it looked good, it missed the sublimely easy-to-use interface of Dungeon Siege. Warcraft 3, a real-time strategy game with role-playing elements, offered a fun story line, but wasn't really that much of an advance on the scores of real-time strategy games that preceded it. The onslaught of massively multi-player online role-playing games has given anyone with an Internet connection the opportunity for more "fellowship" than is humanly consumable -- but such fellowship often seems to boil down to little more than a chat room where people speak in fake medieval accents.

All of these games share one thing, however. They all look great. But for some game designers, that's part of the problem.

Gamers have been arguing for years over whether true immersion requires perfect graphics, all the way up to as-yet-not-perfected virtual reality (think: Star Trek holodeck), or whether the industry-wide obsession with graphics has actually resulted in a decline in the quality of games.

Mike Singleton, a successful game programmer in the mid-to-late '80s, wrote one of the more popular early strategy games based on "The Lord of the Rings": War in Middle Earth. By today's standards the game looks silly, but at the time it was a revelation.

"Immersion can be many things," says Singleton, who notes that if you go back and look at accounts or reviews of his games that came out at the time, "you'll find the degree of perceived immersion was very great, despite the fact that the graphics were chunky, the soundtrack was often nonexistent, and [in some cases] there was absolutely zero real-time animation."

"Immersion does not necessarily require photo-realistic rendering at 60 frames per second and Dolby Surround sound," says Singleton. "Imagination can play a huge part, too. Witness how immersive Tolkien's books themselves are. In some ways, the lack of concrete images can be even more evocative. Readers of Tolkien each have their own different and unique mental images of Frodo, Aragorn and Galadriel and doubtless many of them were puzzled and disappointed by the actual depiction of them in the recent film, despite all the efforts of the director to remain faithful to the spirit of the books. In that respect, the BBC radio serialization of "Lord of the Rings" (with Ian Holm as Frodo, rather than Bilbo), enables the listener to keep his figurative imaginings but is equally or perhaps more immersive than more solid depictions."

Singleton believes that modern games, in general, are less creative in their storytelling and interactivity than older computer games. Ironically, advances in graphics are their own kind of straitjacket. "Another thing that has suffered somewhat is open-ended plot; so often we see linear plots and often this can be ultimately traced to the sheer cost of producing additional graphics that may not be seen every gameplay," says Singleton.

And yet who wants to go back to text games like Adventure or Zork, or even the legendary Nethack, after having been blinded by the dazzle of modern graphics? Criticizing the focus on modern graphics as coming at the expense of a true art is useful for pointing out an imbalance in the current creative process, but it's kind of beside the point. They're a fait accompli, and we can't go home again. Older graphics just look dorky, even if once upon a time they did a better job of creating a collaboration with the user's imagination than today's cinematic fireworks.

What I want is a game with the graphics of Dungeon Siege, the storytelling of Warcraft, the complexity of Morrowind and the spirit of Adventure. I want a Peter Jackson to emerge in the world of computer games who will seize the medium and give us something that doesn't require us to spend 20 hours killing demons to get to the end of the story, but still delivers to us an escape from this earthly realm into unexplored territory.

Because, when I look at the games that are being released now, for personal computers and consoles and even handhelds, it seems unarguable to me that the wizards of computing yore have, in truth, achieved their dream. Generations of programmers and engineers have built a tool that can and will deliver new experiences. Perhaps not qualitatively better than the epiphanies that result from reading a great book or watching a great film. But they don't have to be better. Just different. Different enough to require their own geniuses, who will, some day, create their own masterpieces. With or without hobbits.

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