What They Mean

MYST and DOOM unite form and function in the articulation of a world that challenges the participant to confront an uncomfortable and threatening degree of complexity – not just challenges in themselves, but challenges in the form of worlds, challenges that bring with their objectives and obstacles an immersive place in which to be presented.

It is important that MYST takes place on an island, or that DOOM takes place in 3D bases and hellscapes – rather than a more mathematical, flatter grid of squares. The place is part of the message, because it speaks to how we choose to view our own worlds, which are of course orders of magnitude more complex than the simulations, especially as the emergence of new technology makes the complexity more apparent and impossible to ignore.

And the divide in this case between the interpretation of this global complexity that MYST brings to the table and the interpretation DOOM brings to the table in turn speaks to a philosophical divide in how to approach this complexity – which is why the narrative really does progress through the culture. Lost and 24 are not its only scions – though I do feel in their ending something of this divide is closing – or at least some closure of it is being recognized.

The progression

The progression from MYST to Lost is pretty obvious. I’ve maintained pretty much since day one that Lost is basically MYST the television show – the weird hatches, the weird numbers, the flashing around in time, all the way to the Jacob/Man in Black stuff that I’ve heard tell about. Lost is basically MYST meats The Langoliers (watch the Bronson Pinchot miniseries version of this Stephen King work if you like – or don’t, no big loss).

And I do think this idea of a technologically advanced island where mankind confronts its gap of understanding with the underlying forces of the universe and the nonlinearity of time is stuck in our craw as a culture. It’s also at the cornerstone of, for example, Jurassic Park.

The progression from DOOM to 24 is less obvious, but it’s pretty clear if you follow video games. DOOM was the game that led to the creation of gamer culture and the gamer generation – which in turn demanded that realistic and practical, participatory violence – complete with tactics and specific weapons and blood flying “realistically” from wounds – be added to its entertainments. A culture emerged from DOOM (and from the Sega/Nintendo controversies around Mortal Kombat, released late in 1992) that wanted to express its improved perception of the complexity of reality by grounding itself in the purpose and storytelling qualities of violence, and it wanted this violence to be “realistic” – and relentless.

Watch a TV show that hasn’t been informed by gamer culture – like, say, Highlander: The Series, (which also started in 1992) which I’ve been watching a lot of lately. Surprisingly, there are a lot of gunfights in Highlander (why, I really have no idea) – they are rudimentary, and people gesture with the guns and there are sound effects – there aren’t even squibs. People just sort of half-heartedly duck behind things. Nowadays, this wouldn’t even play in a low-budget action hour on SyFy – action sequences must now reflect the attitudes about complexity and “realism” (in the sense of the necessary skill and specificity a hero must display in solving complex problems in a complex, but knowable world) that DOOM first fostered in our culture.

I don’t think this is a bad thing, and I despise the whole “think of the children” nonsense as an excuse to keep adults from freely enjoying entertainments that, at worst, have a statistical chance of possibly leading to social ill (which is of course not nearly reason enough to punish someone by law – sadly, people must be free to make mistakes, because the alternative is worse), and at best, are fun and fulfilling and perhaps even therapeutic – certainly they speak to people, and not just because of the blood.

“Real” time

For DOOM/24 ideologues, the causes and solutions to problems exist here and now. Complexity obscures them, perhaps, but this obscuring makes their underlying reality all the more important.

Because the world is so complicated – because there are so many aliens, so many terrorists, so many moles (really, there are a lot of moles) – it is all the more important that we know exactly where they are, exactly who they are, and that we pursue their defeat directly, persistently and expediently.

A pink demon does not give you a chance to consider whether it is the unwitting victim of a deceptive wizard in disguise – neither does a terrorist with a nuclear weapon – it is coming to kill you in seconds and you need to TAKE THE SHOT! DO IT NOW! DAMMIT!

But, you may have to figure out how to defeat forty or fifty of them coming at you in three directions at once for the better part of an hour, without missing a beat, with just a chainsaw. Good luck with that.

And this urgency plays out metaphysically – problems exist and demand they be addressed. As such, time is linear. We have confidence in our perception of the passage of time, and metaphysical arguments as to its flexibility are luxuries. Time is both a tool and a constraint. It does not matter whether the seconds on the clock matter to the gods or the spirits, because they matter to us, and they matter now.

Jack Bauer needs to save the President. Or recapture the nuclear materials. Or bake a cake – whatever it is, he needs to do it now.

It is far more likely we will be eaten by monstes than that we will prevail – but the stories that matter most – the Jack Bauers – are the runners and gunners who relentlessly grind from point A to B to C to D and take down the bad guys, regardless of the complexity or challenge of the situation.

I read once in Stephen Hawking, and it stuck with me, that our scientific models of the universe are tools – we must always remember their primary purpose is to be useful, and if they do not help us accomplish what we want them to accomplish, it is okay to discard them. “Real” time, despite its metaphysical weaknesses, is the tool we must work with. 24 or DOOM do little to refuse nonlinearity, they simply render it irrelevant.

Nonlinear time

For MYST/Lost fans, problems emerge from a murky history, where the present persists ignorantly, driven by the echoes of the past, and where the future and what must be done is as mysterious as how we managed to get here. History is like Job’s behemoth – we were not there to witness its creation, and even if we were, we would still have no claim on the provenance of events, and it is perhaps best for us not to delve too far into unsavory places – or the wrong static-filled book.

So, since what we are doing now might not be what is affecting that which is happening now – but in fact what happened before is the most important for the current time and need, then we must to an extent live with a concept of time that is flexible. As we bend time around the narrativization of experience – a necessary shorthand for creating from an overcomplex universe something comprehensible – it is time that bends first, not causality. We look for things happening in the reverse order, because perhaps that is the order that really matters.

Or maybe they’re all really inside a soup can or something. Hey, I didn’t watch Lost, and I could never really stand MYST for very long.

Conclusion

In DOOM/24 world, knowledge necessitates action, which necessitates an idea of time. In MYST/Lost world, action is the only certainty – something will happen, given time – its causes and effects are always less certain, and it is not necessary that you really ever find out anything about anything.

Why, then, are they both ending now? What has changed?

Well, I believe our society has adapted to the complexity presented to us by technology. We have instituted new ways of thinking about our relationship with information and trained ourselves in them so that they are second nature – the idea of Jack Bauer barking at Chloe O’Brien to look up a bunch of stuff on the Internet really fast from in the field is no longer exotic – his granddaughter could do it on her iPhone.

We have also formulated emotional frameworks for comprehending the complex wrong and ills that have befallen us in these last 17 years – economic ones, geopolitical ones, criminal ones, etc. They might not be robust, and they may not be right, but they are in place and they are functioning, for better or worse. So the idea of there being islands where crazy stuff happens isn’t exotic either. We practically expect it.

The narratives have served their purpose. We have learned the lessons of DOOM and MYST.

One thing I have been watching a lot of that I heartily recommend is the early 1970s BBC documentary series The Ascent of Man. While it’s fairly quaintly sexist at this point and out of date in a whole lot of ways, it makes one central point that I can really get behind — which is that people do culturally adapt into new circumstances. They reconceptualize on basic levels how they do things — they come up with new ways of living in and seeing the world, which in turn make new lifestyles possible.

Right now, I think we have adapted culturally to live with the seismic shifts introduced by early 1990s technology — at least enough that we can put two-faced Jack’s 17-year journey to rest.

Now we must look to today’s video games, perhaps, for expression of the cultural anxieties that will shape the next seventeen years. Perhaps there will be lots of horse thievery.