Tommi's Way - Chapter 3 of 30
Tommi's Way - Chapter 3 of 30
Tommi's Way: The Video Game That Doesn't Exist - Chapter 3 of 30
The following is a series of chapters from the novel Tommi’s Way - The Video Game That Doesn’t Exist. Each chapter will be uploaded on pilleater.com until the novel comes out with everything in it (that also entails revisions and reformatting). You can catch up by reading the first or previous chapter. Otherwise, each chapter can be read as an isolated article with not context of the past and future. Reader criticism and influence plays a huge part in shaping this future novel. Just like Fantasy Flight’s “Living Card Game” model, this project is also a “living novel,” where the novel changes form as the reader base influences the author’s direction through comments and criticism until it is finished. This is what makes this work of art a true “novel,” where this innovative artistic device (i.e. the living novel) determines “the new” in the novel, akin to the reader’s gaze in Umberto Eco’s The Name of The Rose.
Chapter 3: Wetrix+ is Tommi’s Way
***
“Wetrix+” released for the Sega Dreamcast released in December of 1999 is the game I am actually talking about. And I say “game I am talking about” in that it isn’t clear that it matches with the other JRPG I saw. Wetrix is an important stop in my search for Tommi’s Way, because it can be the only proof of evidence that comes to matching Tommi’s Way in my mind.
My close high school friend had a copy of the game which I discovered in his collection. I also remember Wetrix+ being sold for the Dreamcast at the Toys R’ Us location in King of Prussia, which I would later work the night shift for a decade later. It just made sense that the same visions of ecstasy were exactly the same what I saw in Wetrix and later discombobulated into a game I thought was real.
This same kind of eclectic imagery would later influenced the way I think about art. Video games were ending that Tetris novelty about them, in that they were unique puzzle art toys. I miss that kind of technology and concept. I just want to play a video game like ZooCube or Klax because how strange they are.
It’s that kind of 1960’s objectification I tend to enjoy in design and art. They are, but not limited to; lava lamps, kaleidoscopes, liquid light shows, Rubix cubes, water marbling, Polaroid pictures, modular synthesizers, Cosmic Wimpout, stereograms, backlight posters, the art of LSD tablets (I don’t do drugs), Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, any trading cards or games attached to them, the Apple IIGS computer or any line of it, Amiga computers, science-fiction pulps, Moonpies, Magic Rocks, Hare Krishna new age stuff, Hanna Barbara cartoons, Super 8 Cameras, Marvin Glass toys, Dayglo paint projects, and so on. I love 1960s to 1980s hippy art direction. Somewhere along the way, those hippies got jobs in San Francisco and turned to computers, thus influencing games like ZooCube, Klax, and Wetrix.
This curation of objects does create a subculture, a brand new “micro-genre” in return. I don’t think it will ever have it’s own Wikipedia page, because consumer fads come and go. Like I said about the fallacy of materialism within creative writing and description, I will not resort to other outside forces to explain a form “as like that.” Rather, I like to role-play the idea I became friends with Wendy Yoshimura in the 60s and became a radical like her. I like to role-play the fantasy I attended Black Mountain College and met Ruth Asawa, starting an avant-garde insurrection of “psychedelic” art and activism. I like to imagine I created the things that now rule over my aesthetic curation rather then be dependent on them. By having control, I can speak for myself and understand what makes a lava lamp or video game work.
I see picture ruling our lives like forms do. The problem with comics is that they can't make arguments because they totally rely on ideological forms (pictures) and aesthetics to use instead of writing, which comics are an inferior medium with regards to writing and arguments. Even Vilém Flusser came to a similar conclusion when studying the effects on how images try to rule over writing. Comics can only do poetry or just display pictures next to incoherent and minimal words without explanation.
Wetrix is not just a video game, but a visual experience. However, there is immediate flaws to point out with non-gaming critics. I must digress on the common error the cartoonist gets wrong with art.
The art of Simon Bisley can't explain economics. Instead, it's about a rush of emotion; perfect for social control. Or, "children books for adults."To assume one art or cartoon form is the same as this analytical idea or concept is foolish. Great arguments are around 60,000 or 80,000 words, while comics are only 10,000, or 20,000 at a rare instance of multiple volumes (and printed paper) in collection. The third person dictation is subrogated by the first person forms. What’s left is disjointed speech bubbles without context. Instead, comic artists use cheap shots of emotions to push another subconscious ideology without explanation. Floating words become slogans without citations. So could they ever be considered “writers?”
Art criticism is about questioning the ideological origins of drawling and beginning the canvas. If something looks like anime, the artist is either Japanese or the artist envies something else (that we learn more about the artist then we do the medium). The problem there is that the argument falls through because of the subculture and ideology forms attached to the cartoons than the writing. Imagine if all the pictures are erased, the color white, and we just see words floating with context. That's the so called argument. It’s weak and absurd.
Jhonen Vasquez in his comic Johnny The Homicidal Maniac makes a horrible argument against René Girard in issue 7. His argument? To paraphrase, "I don't like it when they do that because I'm a bad person." Imagine that exact same line, but just floating tweets associated with pictures of angry emotions. If you have a limited language (such as expressing only in forms), you can't make sophisticated arguments. This is why we write in English!
Comics deliberately put down inferior language in favor of pictures, which the higher intellect takes and then instills meaning within, but not from the comic artist. It’s the same how film criticism works.
Sure, there may be a little in a big oil painting for a couple of comic blocks and I guess that's the "novel" form, then it's just a puzzle with a viewer playing with forms than there is text. Because it is text that is meaningful, like in the Chinese language. "Graphic novel" is corporate speak that fails to see how redundant and ironic the term is. The English language is already "graphical" in that we see it and read it.
The comic artist itself can only see and draw forms, contrasting reading and writing English words. Because drawing pictures is not writing; it's rather mimicry and emulation. The writing, if any in the comic, is very minimal, and something an elementary kid would write trying to learn English.
In addition to this error, you can't use Chicago-style citation as a picture. You can describe a picture, but you can’t cite the picture with a picture!
If I learned anything graduate school, the big secret is that writing, reading, and proper citation is the true mind of the artist because working with the English language means were working with true forms of sophistication and intellectualism that gets things done.
I am disturbed by the notion that there is a “Storyteller” in World of Darkness role-playing game than there would be a “Gamemaster.” Games are not stories, and to assume a game is a story fails to see what is a game. The so-called “graphic novelist” thinks the same way as it negates language with forms; assuming both are the same!
If we gather around the fireplace to listen to a story, obviously a game is being conducted in Johan Huizinga’s concept of “the magic circle.” Rules, play, goals, and uncertain consequences are subconsciously determined to make it a game. A story can’t do this. The “Storyteller” in World of Darkness is a Gamemaster. The cult of Narratology tries to assume “everything is a story” because they feel shame and weakness over the childlike nature of play and games.
The story rather constrains itself to the stranger yelling on a soapbox. We can listen to it, but why should we care? Do we have the time to listen to any 4-hour radio show in this internet age? What do we value out of it?
Some elite Trotskyist professor in some no-named college has the latest Spinoza-esque criticism on why culture matters over substance, and yet destroys everything to nothing. The novel genre of “Fratire” are just first person stories being told by the stereotype image of a college jock. It’s easier to read and digest that way, only if we understood these rules prior before reading. But is Fratire the same as the Trotskyist? Do both share the same status as being both writers, novelists, and storytellers?
Both can’t be dubbed as “writers” in subculture, as everyone must write to be taken seriously as either professor or actor. The Trotskyist is a college professor not aware he is writing a “novel,” while the Fratire author doesn’t realize he is writing anything “new.” The professor is not telling anymore a story, and the Fratire author could only “tell the story” like he imagines an old person would around a fireplace. The writer, novelist, and storyteller are not the same thing, nor should they ever be grouped together within these three terms. All independently represent their interest opposed to one another. Trotskyism or Fratire, they can’t be the same as the “storyteller” in a game.
Wetrix is not a novel or a story. There may be a story to a game, but the story is not the game. The story should rather be seen as a novelty to the game. The vast majority of card and board games don’t have stories (unless it is implemented within it’s design). It’s only video games that can possibly have stories.
Polybius is an urban legend. It’s an arcade game that does not exist, just like Tommi’s Way. “The Mandela effect” is a type of false memory that occurs when many different people incorrectly remember the same thing. The difference here is that I am the only one that has witnessed Tommi’s’ Way. I explain Tommi’s Way to my friend about how Wetrix fulfills this false memory I have. I remember him saying, “well if you care so much about it, why don’t you make it?”
People have made fan recreations of Polybius and how it should of been. I don’t have the effort to design Tommi’s Way because I interested in something else. I do design my own board and card games in private. To create a video game never occurred me. Design can live without computer programming, and it lives with board game design!
Wetrix has such a novel design, that maybe I could take that and put it in writing. But that’s ironic, considering printed words can’t do anything. There is no interaction between a wooden sign and a person! Why read a book when you can press buttons on a controller and simulate an experience looking at a screen? That’s why I’ve always tried to write a gamebook like The Warlock on Firetop Mountain. I tried to write 300 paragraph sections (or nodes), connect them with “paths,” and let the reader write down inventory and roll dice against stat comparison. The reader becomes a player, and the novel becomes a game. If two people joined in on this novel, then there would be real interactivity!
Two players can compete in Wetrix. If two or more players could shape a novel, interactivity would become novel. I have been fascinated with this kind of social idea and wish to implement it in my art. Wetrix implements this new art that I want to play in games. No story bullshit.
There was also something else about Tommi’s Way that made me feel peculiar as well. This, I remember telling to my friend who owned Wetrix.
…To be continued…
