I remember a glorious day in the formative years of my gaming life: my Dad called me over to the computer, and he laid out Leisure Suit Larry: Love for Sail on the desk. He said, “Son, I know you like these Larry games, so I got you a present.” I was thirteen or fourteen, and the prospect of cartoon boobs was pretty damn enticing to confused, adolescent Nico.
It was only a moment later that he dropped a massive stack of paper on the desk beside ol’ Larry Laffer. With a heavy sigh he shared a warning: “There are a lot of things on the internet, and I can’t keep you from finding them. You’ll see them one way or another, and I’d rather you do it carefully. Since I know you’re going to use it anyway, I printed off the walkthrough for you. But I bought you the game because I want you to play it, so do me a favour, and don’t lean too heavily on the cheats, alright?”
As I always did in those days, I started playing the game without reading through the manual. I knew there wouldn’t be much to it—certainly nothing new to such an avid player of adventure games. There were some neat flourishes in Love For Sail, of course: the CyberSNIFF 2000 still has a special place in my olfactory archive. But I just started playing the game, and I was quite able to play it—no manual, no tutorial needed. I mean… the walkthrough helped, but that’s because I suck at puzzles… not because I needed guidance through the interface.
This is kind of how genre works: when you read a mystery novel, the presence of certain conventions will guide you through the reading experience, while highlighting the subtle marks of originality; when you play an adventure game, the basic process is the same, but the conventions it draws on are not only narrative and thematic—they also include game mechanics. I knew I would need to click on everything, save early and often, leave areas and return with new items, and so on. The manual could teach me these things, but the genre had already taken care of it. What to do with the Venezuelan Beaver Cheese, however, was a problem of a different order, and thanks to my attempts to find out my Dad is still disappointed in me.
All of this is just preamble to what I really want to say about Jordan Mechner’s The Last Express. My recent gaming habits have centered around relatively new games: Skyrim, Minecraft, Fallout, Mass Effect, Minecraft, The Walking Dead, Portal, Dragon Age, and Minecraft. So a retrospective on a game that was a high water mark of design during my formative years, but which somehow I never got around to is, well, much more enticing at this point in my life than cartoon boobs.
But I was a little taken aback, I’ll admit, when I fired up Last Express and had no fucking idea what to do. I was baffled that I was baffled. I figured that by now I would have picked up enough gaming conventions to be generally competent, though certainly not technically good, at more or less any game. But it occurred to me that my recent gaming habits had conditioned me in a very particular way; I had grown accustomed to the narrativized tutorial. Skyrim and Portal are good examples. They teach you how to play as they introduce the player to the diegesis: to the game world and the characters that populate it. Minecraft, perhaps, is a strong counter-example, since the signature newbie experience involves a series of WTF moments followed by a race to the wikis.
Last Express, though, not only uses the manual to provide valuable story information (“July 24, 1914. The great nations of the world are poised on the brink of war…”), but also uses it to explain the game’s innovative mechanics: the egg, rewinding time, the context-sensitivity of inventory items, the importance of eavesdropping, etc. While Last Express shares many similarities to the adventure games that I know and love, it is different enough that the manual actually offers insights that would be otherwise hard earned.
That said, I didn’t read the manual until after I finished playing the game. And I don’t regret it all. I’m glad I was confused about how to play, because I knew from the title alone (referencing Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express) that I was in for a mystery. Why shouldn’t the narrative mystery be reflected in my experience of the mechanics? Of course, most of the time when people don’t understand how to play a game, they get frustrated and stop playing. I’m certainly one of these people, but with Last Express I was able to figure out just enough to keep me going forward through the story. And far from lessening the experience, I was all the more engaged.
I didn’t know if it was real time or if certain events cued advances in the journey across Europe to Constantinople. I didn’t know if there were multiple possible endings or if all tributaries converged into one authorized story. Could I die? Would I have to restart from the beginning? What would happen if I walked away while two other passengers were talking; would I miss valuable information, and be doomed to ultimate failure? Had I already doomed myself? Was I merely playing out a fate determined by some poor choice in the first few minutes of the game? Who was this character that I was playing as? What did he know? And, of course, why was Tyler Whitney killed?
So what’s the point here? Playing Last Express revealed to me just how much the games we play train us in how to interact with games in general. Mastering the mechanics of specific games is certainly one way to understand how they function, but just as valuable is reflecting on the way that games master us.
Perhaps what I’m getting at is even clearer when I try to play cooperative platformers with my partner. The mechanical conventions of the Mario universe, for example, aren’t something that I really know consciously… they’re something my body just seems to understand. All those hours spent bouncing from turtle shells to above-screen secret platforms were hours spent soaking up generic conventions. My partner, who spent a lot more time in the sunshine as a kid, would never think to look for a 1-up up there. It’s not so much a difference in skill; it’s a difference in culturally specific knowledge.
It’s the sort of knowledge that’s easy to disregard, because it functions unconsciously. But it is nonetheless operative in the way that games produce meaningful experiences. Accordingly, to play a game from a place of ignorance, strangely, is quite enlightening, because it forces those unconscious processes to the foreground of thought. So, to the bygone era of game manuals, I say: I miss you. I miss disregarding the information you offered.