I am Jack's cultural progression.
The year is 2010, and two long-running television shows, Lost and 24, air their last episodes, one day after the other. They seem diametric opposites. Or are they?
>>FLASH, DIAGONAL-WISE!<<
The year is 1993, and a fantastic, two-part story has begun. A cataclysm – a rift in time and space itself, a clash of new dimensions – catapults a man from the world he once knew into not one, but two different strange and alien landscapes. To some, that man will be a nameless stranger. To others, he will be known as “Jack.”
One version of the stranger lands on a mysterious island, where time moves in unpredictable ways. Wandering a beautiful, dangerous, eternally puzzling place drenched in remembrance of things past and unknown, his journey of discovery brings him, in the end, to two long-estranged brothers playing with human beings like game pieces, vying for release from their prisons.
The other lands in a high-tech government facility, where time marches ever inexorably forward – where life is cheap, and speed matters. He is a soldier, always alone, always enraged, accomplishing one task of immense brutality and cunning only to be slammed by another and another without rest, doing the only thing he knows how to do – stopping the infiltration of his home, his unit, the very hearts and minds of his brothers of arms, by a heinous, foreign evil.
But, wait, why 1993? Lost only ran for six seasons. 24 only ran for eight. A long run, but not 17 years.
Because this story didn’t begin with the shows – it began with a cultural divide begun somewhere else – in two different visions for a new, more complicated, more observable, more technologically dense world.
In 1993, the nameless stranger’s island, which became Jack’s island, was called MYST.
And in 1993, the nameless stranger’s battle against infiltration wasn’t against terrorists, it was against monsters in a computer game called DOOM.
It's like a McDLT - hot on one side, cool on the other.
It Was a Very Good Year
Jack’s fantastic 17-year voyage came to a close this week, as the television juggernauts Lost and 24 aired their series finales on back-to-back nights. On Sunday, we left the island forever. On Monday, the waves upon waves of demons/terrorists/friends-turned-bad finally relented.
But it all began with a sea-changing moment – the expansion of computer gaming into the third dimension. The proliferation of the CD-ROM and the surging popularity of first-person gaming in immersive worlds with movement along three axes – three years before Super Mario 64 – reinvented in a fundamental way the frame of reference human beings have for the complexity of their lives, introducing new anxieties and new ways of thinking about time and space.
Well, to an extent, it reinvented them – and to an extent it was a signpost of a larger trend that informed the change – a trend of emerging access to more immersive and more sophisticated simulations of reality, available cheaply and widely, that brought the question of how we choose to bridge the gap between what we are capable of seeing and our minds can internalize and live with constructively.
The narrative parallels are fascinating. The way these stories flow from franchise to franchise – essential stories of our time, where the names and faces of the heroes often change, and often remain ambiguous.
It began the original “this island makes no goddamned sense, why is there this odd machinery here and these numbers, this is really frustrating, but if I allow myself to get into it I am sucked in forever,” a little game called MYST, – and the original “THERE’S NO TIME FOR THIS RIGHT NOW! I HAVE THE WEAPON! TAKE THE SHOT! DAMMIT!” — well, that’s DOOM.
Hey, who built this? Let's investigate and not find out!
Jack’s New Era in Exploration
I’m kind of astounded by the number of people I’ve talked to these days who don’t remember MYST. For the youngins out there, MYST was a very confusing but oddly peaceful adventure where you moved around this island and other “ages” clicking on stuff, manipulating it until other stuff happened, all driving toward a goal that you weren’t that sure about when you started the game. You had to read books in-game; as in, turn the pages and pore through of old vellum codices, finding the secrets of a great traveler or wizard named Atrus and his two sons, one friendly-ish, one more sinister. It was as much about discovery as about victory – the journey as much as the destination.
MYST was also the best-selling computer game of all time by a pretty big margin until The SIMS ousted it in 2002. If you bought a Mac or PC in the mid-90s, it may very well have come with MYST (my 486 did).
But when you got MYST, you generally got it on a CD-ROM, which at the time of MYST’s release was still a new and not particularly widespread technology. The CD-ROM allowed for the storage of what at the time was voluminous quantities of data. The CD-ROM was a huge, huge leap forward in our ability to do a lot of things, like read encyclopedias (ah, Encarta), have entire atlases of road maps available to click through for the first time (ah, Rand McNally TripMaker) or play games that were so far beyond what was previously possible that they sometimes didn’t know what to do with it (ah, Night Trap. Ah, Cosmic Osmo.).
The introduction of the CD-ROM is where the capabilities of modern home computers, laptops and smartphones begin to start looking somewhat recognizable. Beforehand, well, there were 3½” or 5¼” floppies, and to play even a really crappy game in the 90s, you sometimes had to install eight or nine of the little guys on your hard disk.
But enough about that nostalgia – the main point is that a CD-ROM was what really took the idea of computerized exploration and made it not so much possible as practical for the public. Beforehand, yeah, you had text adventures with a lot of depth, or dungeon crawlers that generated from a seed or went on forever, but the cognitive imaginative leap was considerable. With a CD-ROM, you could have free-roaming worlds in 3D with hours and hours of things to explore. Somehow a huge world could shrink down and fit on a disk. It changed people’s notions about how to conceive of the mutability of the universe.
OR …
Take the gun. Use it to get more cannoli.
Jack’s New Era in Combat
Most people I’ve talked to remember DOOM, probably because of the art film of the same name that came out a few years ago, starring the Rock and McCoy from the new Star Trek movie. The movie is a piece of crap, but it has this totally awesome scene in it, where our hero goes all super-soldier first-person shooter all over the place (WARNING: CHAINSAW-RELATED GORE):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpb13mDBP1I
If the whole movie had been like that, it at least would have been an interesting art object. Sadly, it has a plot. A very bad plot.
Back in 1993, in the DOOM computer game, you are a space marine (what a strangely specific thing of which our culture has provided so many examples), left behind by your buddies in a mission to check out a strange event on one of the moons of Mars. It turns out scientists, while experimenting with teleportation technology, have opened a portal to Hell by accident (which is also the plot of the awful movie Event Horizon). All your buddies die or are converted into demons or zombies by the surging evils of Hell spewing forth onto this moon. Armed only with a pistol – and about a zillion guns you manage to pick up that are just lying all over the place very conveniently, you must shoot your way through wave upon wave of Hell monsters, teleporting yourself eventually into another dimension, to make war on Hell itself.
Oh, and it looked like this:
Sure, HALO (what’s with all these capital letters and four-letter titles. Is somebody naming Final Fantasy characters?) is a lot fancier, but you can recognize the gameplay starts to feel contemporary, especially if you compare it to its mama, the first-person shooter (FPS) genre pioneer Wolfenstein 3D (WARNING: ROBOT HITLER).
Without the vertical movement, the game world is not nearly as fully realized – it feels much closer to old styles of maze PC games than newer FPSes.
MYST wasn’t the first CD-ROM world-exploration adventure game. But it was the great leap forward – it popularized the type of game.
DOOM wasn’t the first FPS to plunge the player into a world of guns and blood. But it was the great leap forward – it popularized the game.
And much like MYST was the greatest-selling game of all time in its day, DOOM was peerless. In 2004, 11 years after its initial release and a few seasons into the run of a little show called 24 that played a lot like a first-person shooter itself at times, DOOM was voted by GameSpy as the #1 greatest game of all time.
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.