Why I Am Not a Poet, Pt 2

There is a sticky note on my monitor
to remind me of Ohm's Law:

Voltage Equals Current Times Resistance (E = IR)
Current Equals Voltage Over Resistance (I = E/R)
Resistance Equals Voltage Over Current (R = E/I)

There is a sticky note to my left, stuck on the wall.
It reads: "The pain of changing paradigms"

Behind me, is a bookshelf, inadequate
to the volume of books in my apartment.

And to my right, a MIDI keyboard
and a tangle of wires.

Why I Am Not A Poet

 

Artification Pt. 7

I was back at the museum
admiring the Flying V guitar
crafted by that crafty Archimedes.^[1]
Weathered by millennia but somehow pristine
within its glass case, under its spotlight.

I won't be coy: it reminded me of you,
reader. I don't mean a "you", pluralrhetorically.
I mean the you, herenow reading.

[1] The story goes that Archimedes was playing this guitar when he was killed in the siege of Syracuse. Roman soldiers looted his belongings, including the guitar, which was believed lost until it was recovered in an archaeological dig near Lyon.

While some scholars dispute the guitar's authenticity, most agree that it is authentic. This is based on a careful analysis of the materials used and the design of the pickups, which are consistent with what is known about Ancient Greek electric guitars. If this piece is a hoax, then it is an expertly-made one.

AMBROTYPE

Image-making once meant preservation.
It took time to fix time.
To hold still and gather light
on a plate of wet glass.

Distilled to binary,
emptiness plus form
unite as keepsake.

And now, light only slips out
from under our fingers.

LOCKS, KEYS, AND LABYRINTHS

I’m not the first person to notice that “Metroidvania” is an awkward name for a genre. It’s a four-car pileup of English-via-Japanese coinages that conveys very little to the uninitiated. Compared to “First-Person Shooter” or “Horny Farming Sim,” “Metroidvania” is pretty opaque. I’m well aware that this topic has been hashed out ad nauseam in gamerdom, so please forgive me as I lace up my space boots and grab my vampire-killing whip. I’m in the mood to explore, and just maybe there are some paths yet untread here.

METROID

In 1986, two landmark action-adventure titles were released for the Nintendo Entertainment System: Nintendo’s own Metroid, and Konami’s Castlevania^[1]. Each title is a mashup of English loan words: Metroid coming from "metro" and "android," and Castlevania (which has the much cooler title Demon Castle Dracula in Japan) from “Castle” and “Transylvania,” though you probably don’t need that explanation.

From the start, Metroid was the adventuresome counterpart to the arcade-ier Castlevania. It was one of the first home console games to feature a seamless, non-linear world. On the alien planet of Zebes, players could reach the edges of locations yet inaccessible, but could not progress without revisiting places they had already been; this was mediated via an ingenious lock-and-key system of powerups.^[2]

Cleverly, Metroid’s whole structure is laid out in the first minute or so of the game: the player (in 1986 conditioned by games like Super Mario Bros.) is likely to move to the right for a few screens. They will eventually reach a passage which is too small for Samus, our bulky, spacesuited heroine, to fit through. This route being cut off, the player has no choice but to go back to where they started–and a bit further. There, they will find the Morph Ball item, enabling them to shrink Samus into a little rolling ball that fits neatly into the passage.

I was still womb-bound at the time, but I would have loved to have been there, in 1986, watching someone play Metroid for the first time, seeing the realization spread across their face at that moment. The Metroid series would refine this formula in later installments, but the core elements were there at the beginning.

These are the fundamentals, the Three Chords And The Truth, of the whole Metroidvania genre: move down a path, until you can’t. Then, traverse a different path, until you find the thing that enables you to continue down the first one. And repeat. Locks and keys in a labyrinth. Give the player abilities that are fun to use, and you’ve got something special, a template that designers are still iterating on in 2024.

-VANIA

That’s the Metroid half of the equation. What about Castlevania? Why don’t we just call these games Metroid-likes, since Metroid was first? For the first 10 years of its existence, the Castlevania series remained linear and action-focused, with the notable exception of 1987’s Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest. Simon’s Quest, like other Nintendo sequels of the era (Zelda II, the US version of Mario 2) was a departure.

In Simon’s Quest, you laboriously fight your way through an omnidirectional overworld of towns and wilds and dungeons, seeking Dracula’s various body parts. You see, Simon Belmont, hero of the first game, needs these to resurrect Dracula, so he can kill him again, because he didn’t kill him right the first time. This has resulted in poor Simon being cursed. The wilds are treacherous. The townspeople will lie to you. Every night (there is a day/night cycle) is a horrible night to have a curse. Simon also gains experience points and can level up, as in a role-playing game.

Simon’s Quest is a game I never made much progress in, playing a second-hand cartridge on a second-hand NES: a poor kid already knee-deep in the 90s. I just didn’t get it. It was too opaque, too cryptic for my child’s mind. But it stuck with me, as I know it did others. It was the first, tentative intermingling of the Metroid formula with Castlevania, an approach Konami would not revisit until–

1997

In 1997, Konami released Castlevania: Symphony of the Night for the Sony Playstation and the Sega Saturn. I couldn’t play it. Fate, and economics, had decided that we were a Nintendo household; the idea of owning more than one current console was unthinkable.^[3] Occasionally, when visiting friends and neighbors, I’d catch glimpses of other vistas: Jet Moto and Tomb Raider on my friend Tony’s Playstation, Doom on our neighbor Mark’s PC. Mark even had a 3DO, which was weird as hell. I don’t think I ever met anyone who owned a Saturn, which remains an object of mystery and fascination for me to this day. What if we’d been a Sega household?

Though I couldn’t play SotN, I certainly knew about it, thanks to issue 100 of EGM, November 1997. Not only was SotN among the best-reviewed games that month, it also made the same issue’s list of 100 greatest games of all time, coming in at number 12. I will admit that I didn’t exactly understand the hype at the time. In my defense, I was 10, and my developing brain was still high on the novelty of immersive 3D graphics. Any 2D side-scroller, no matter how well-regarded, wasn’t going to capture my attention at the time.

Still, SotN was filed under “classics” in my nascent understanding of the gaming canon; something I would need to reckon with one day, the way there are certain books that you allegedly need to read before you die (as an adult, I don’t fully agree. As a child, I didn’t know any better). Its reputation only grew as I spent more time on the Internet of the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, where the game was spoken of reverently, and its goofy dialogue affectionately made fun of.

2024

It is 2024, and I am 37 years old. My life is neither very wonderful nor horrible, though the world at large is filled with wonders and horrors which my 10-year-old self could never have imagined. Among the more banal of these: I own a digital copy of SotN on Xbox, which I’ve picked up a few times, never for very long. It’s a challenging game, and my patience for challenging games has never been especially high, unless they’re made by FromSoftware (yes, I am one of those freaks^[4]). As a birthday gift to myself, I’ve purchased one of those handheld emulator devices that looks like a mutant Game Boy. I decide to give SotN a try on this machine. This time, it sticks.

The game is still a bit of a challenge, but on the handheld, it feels right. Perhaps muscle memory kicked in from my time years ago playing some of the Game Boy Advance Castlevania titles (themselves the direct progeny of SotN). The fact that the emulator allows me to use save states probably helps, though the game is already generous with its save/health recovery rooms.

Still, I die enough to see SotN’s iconic game over screen numerous times. I love this game over screen. Its playful taunt never fails to amuse me: Let us go out this evening for pleasure. The night is still young. It’s not quite insulting the player, but it is a gentle ribbing through the fourth wall. It’s cheeky. I sense a tone of self-deprecation in it as well, as though the designers wanted to say, “we know you could be doing other things with your time, and why not? Games aren’t that important.” In 2024, when the video game industry is proliferating with subscription and microtransaction-based titles that desperately seem to want all of your time (and money), I find it very refreshing to hear a developer suggest hey, no worries if you go do something else. The game will still be here when you get back.

The irony, of course, is that I found SotN pretty hard to put down. It really is as good as its reputation suggests. It has its flaws, of course: the inventory menu is a nightmare; using healing items is awkward; nearly all of the “story” scenes are unnecessary and stop the game dead in its tracks; some of the abilities and weapons you gain are utterly useless. But it feels great, it looks great, it sounds great (I described the soundtrack as “buck wild” to a friend and I stand by this). This labyrinth is a pleasure to traverse.

ABOUT THE LABYRINTH

While traversing said labyrinth, I noticed a not-unpleasant sense of familiarity. I realized that what I was doing was not merely a pastime; it was a ritual. I would go as far to argue that all games are a kind of ritual, and all rituals are a kind of compulsion. Genres also are rituals. Within each of them, we pay homage to the fundamentals: in a Metroidvania, these are the convoluted maps, the treadmill of power-ups, the rhythm established by the traversal of safe and deadly spaces. The obligatory secrets. Rooms behind rooms. It occurs to me now that writing this is also a ritual, one that bears resemblance to what the player does in a Metroidvania: this whole time I’ve been going back in order to go forward.

There’s this irrational notion that has been a part of me for many years. It’s not exactly nostalgia, but it’s a close relative. The idea is that somewhere along the timeline, I lost something. What it is, I could hardly tell you. It’s not a concrete thing. But it’s important: I need this thing in order to keep moving forward: without it, I’m fucked. So I start hunting for it, in my own memories, and in the collective memory of culture. I spend hours combing through millennial detritus: commercial jingles, embarrassingly “edgy” magazine ads, weird music videos I briefly glimpsed at neighbors’ houses. Decades-old forum posts. All this media is easier to access than ever before. It seems like very little has been truly lost. Except this one thing, and it’s the one thing that I need.

So I continue to search through the past, because I lost something, or I missed something. Surely I must have. Otherwise, why would I be here? Maybe this is vanilla nostalgia after all, or a simple denial of the present. I don’t have to belabor the fact that the world is in a pretty grim state at the moment. On the other hand, it’s easy to argue that it always has been, but knowing this doesn’t make it any easier to live with. Maybe this ritual is a response to grief, and the awareness that the very real things (people, places, times) that we love and lose aren’t coming back.

Maybe (certainly) The Thing is just a psychic MacGuffin. The Search itself is what I’m after. Forget about treasure; it’s the labyrinth itself that calls me. I know I’m not the only one who feels that way. But it’s important to remember that the labyrinth can be a hazardous place. The castle is full of danger. Liz Ryerson discusses in great depth the dangers (and radical possibilities) of the online labyrinth in her recent piece “Let’s Play Life,” which I recommend taking the time to read. It’s very lengthy, and more than a little meandering, but worth it.

I keep searching and digging through a world that can feel as nightmarish and chaotic as Dracula’s castle.^[5] Sometimes, in the exhilaration of the search, it can feel as though the remedy for this chaos is just past the next boss fight, behind this next cracked wall. But it’s unlikely. Maybe a change of approach is needed, a change of perspective. Let us go out this evening for pleasure.

---

[1] 1986 also saw the release of the first The Legend of Zelda. Truly a wild year.

[2] Arguably, this is also how Zelda works, but it isn’t typically classed in the Metroidvania genre. For a thorough and enjoyable analysis of these mechanics at work in Metroid, Zelda, and other titles, check out Mark Brown’s phenomenal Boss Keys series of videos.

[3] The N64 had long called out to me via the pages of Electronic Gaming Monthly. I don’t remember which issue planted the seed, but I suspect the July 1995 issue with Batman on the cover might have been it. I was liable to ask my dad to buy me any publication with Batman on it during that time, and it so happens this issue of EGM not only had Batman on the cover, but also boasted “The First Pix of Nintendo’s Ultra-64!” Why the ample coverage of the Playstation and Saturn in the same issue didn’t similarly pique my interest, who’s to say.

So it came to pass in 1997 that I got an N64 for my 10th birthday, and for that generation we were a Nintendo household. I was having enough of a blast playing Wave Race 64 and Super Mario 64 and Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, and Goldeneye 007, and so on.

[4] FromSoftware being the developers of the Dark Souls series and its siblings, Bloodborne, Sekiro, and of course, Elden Ring. I am not the first person, and I will not be the last, to opine that these games are the true 3D successors of Castlevania.

[5] Bob Pollard once put it this way: “The hole I dig is bottomless, but nothing else can set me free.”

A true story of inappropriate laughter

I was desperate for a gig,
any gig.
It's no fun being 19 and broke
at least that's how I remember it.

Lucky me, they always needed bodies on the factory floor.

Day 1: I recall the great space full of machines
Big weird injection-mold ovens, plasticy air.
Creating insulation for giant underground cables.

They assign me to a guy.
He does his thing for a while,
demonstrating the use of hook and knife.

The insulation isn't born perfect, you see.
You have to pull it from the mold
and tenderly trim the excess plastic
before it goes to whereverthefuck.

It looks so easy, and I'm so bored.
I ask the guy if I can try it out myself.
He pauses a moment, then obliges.

Awkwardly, I yank the rubber from the mold
And, cradling it in my left hand,
begin to trim the excess bits.

I'm telling you--I was being careful.
Even when I was a restless kid,
I was still the cautious type.

I don't know how it happens
But my right hand skips a groove
somewhere
and the work knife

>>>plunges>>>

through the protective kevlar glove
(thanks for nothing)
into my left palm
(no tendons are cut)

We got the bleeding under control quick,
but my laughter--that took some effort.

Triolet for Vocoder

Attack Decay Sustain Release
It will take time to find a space,
as it takes space to broker peace.
|Attack|Decay|Sustain|Release|
Not asking for a golden fleece
(nor single thread of silver lace).
It will take time to find a space.
|Att|Dec|Sus|Rel|