Intention is often beyond reason, much like this article, which is not unlike The Narrative Hallway, and something you will understand only in part enough to create your own by the end of reading this.

Endlessly finite, to borrow from similar interior design methodology of traversal relevant to the topic at hand

With the current vibe of the day to day putting me in what feels like an emotional checkmate, I’ve spent more time thinking than gaming in the past several days. I was able to summon some insights detailing how engaging the new Prince of Persia was, and look forward to finishing the title, and I continue to randomly peer into the awesome nonsense being drip-fed out of Gamescom, but I’m definitely in low energy mode this week, which has demanded more of a meditative state from me, to maintain my sense of calm demeanor to get through my everyday.

I have to challenge myself occasionally in considering what I’m going to write about, sometimes confronting the reality I must conjure up on article idea out of the blue, not having any direct gameplay within immediate reference to something I’ve played recently, so the challenge can be a keen one. I honestly wish more gaming journalists and freelance writers would do the same, in forcing themselves to step outside of their box, and not just literally describing what they have recently done, but the conceptual standards or abstract systems that make up the notions of the reality that dictates them and the everyday. I’m not saying none do this, I’m saying I wish more did.

I think in what could be considered just another under-cooked idea that deserves far more time in the oven is “The MetaNarrative Hallway”, but since I only have so much time in an entire night before I have to go to actual work, and we are running on a time limit here, we will just have to enjoy licking the cake batter of an idea off of the metaphysical whisk, instead of enjoying the finished product of a more fully formed conceptual desert. Even in reference to what I think my idea entails with the notion of what “The MetaNarrative Hallway” entails, I think it can also be reconfigured to “The Abstract Tube of Fun” for gameplay purposes, and does beget the notion of simplicity winning out within the functionality of a design or system of structure.

In some strange way, “The MetaNarrartive Hallway” came about with me thinking in terms of open world design, or maybe more specifically, sandbox gameplay, which are two separate entities, but can be intermixed and blended depending on the game. Reading about developer House House’s new game Big Walk in Edge #412, and how much they were discussing Mario 64 got me thinking about design in general. One of the things that makes me laugh about Mario 64 is that in a lot of ways, and I’m aware the standards were different when the N64 launched , I was living during that era, as a reminder, is that some of Mario 64’s areas of play or exploration were barely covered up developer rooms, (dev rooms being places where developers use environments as test beds for the systems in-place for the games themselves, usually as a convenience to beta test a whole bunch of nonsense and to hide some of the most damning materials within), or basically just…kind of not covered up at all; barely disguised test beds with basically no explanation as to their layout or structure. Wet Dry World, level 8 of Mario 64, is probably the prime example of this, with the level itself basically having no justifiably cohesive thematic or narrative elements tying it together, and just the shit the Mario 64 dev team had lying around, thrown into a sandbox area with which to experiment with, and saying have it.

I guess I’ll take this moment now to clarify a few things, as sometimes I’ve had conversations with people who read my writing, that will have bizarre takeaways about what I’m referencing or the subject matter involved. Times where I’ve had exchanges with folks saying “I couldn’t tell if you liked this or not”, and I have to remind them that sometimes, life isn’t necessarily about liking or not liking something, it’s about having a reaction to a scenario that prompts a mixed sense of self or a complex thought process involving a wide spectrum of feelings that extends beyond a singular notion of “good” or “bad”. I’m aware for consumer products, of which games could be considered, most people want to hear something simplified, as most people don’t want to spend hard earned cash on “a confusing sense of self”, but anyone else lacking a sense of humor on that matter to see how positively absurd their dry, needlessly self important entitlement is in that moment gain no sympathies from me…their sense of preserving finance be damned.

This might sound…uh, daft? I guess might be a word one can use, but existence is in some ways, immensely complicated, and I think is beyond a singular notion of quality one could reasonably attribute to it. I think it would be disingenuous to say all of existence is either “meh” or a resounding metric of satisfaction, though in moments of boredom, I do often joke, in a reductionist sense, about existence being a 1 star Yelp review, with a simple “Would not recommend” review following shortly after. Other times, when I’m feeling more optimistic, I simply refer to existence as spilt milk, attempting to frame the entire affair as “not worthy of tears”, though all of this is common farce and obviously hyperbolic jest brought on by a reaction to the treachery of the hysterical malaise one is tortured with upon the realization of a fresh sun set, though all of it contingent upon a completely arbitrary and subjective interpretation, with no seriously logical explanation as to why it turned out the way it did, in a 1:1 microcosmic distillation of irrational madness metaphorically objectified (obviously).

What I just previously described is sometimes what “laughter entails”. In a similar sense, “laughter entailed” reading about an article involving the director of the new Donkey Kong game, Kazuya Takahashi, and about how they hope people don’t think too much about the reasoning that occurs in DK Bananza in why they included elements from the series past in a direct or more literal way (of cause and effect, related to space-time), instead urging players to just have fun with it, and not think about it at all. His comments act as catalyst in reminding me of my pseudo-half joking article involving being deeply worried about DK fans taking “The Great Ape War” too seriously, in framing the DK lore has some kind of extraordinary cohesion behind it.

All of those borrowed ideas should help to lend context to my idea of why I’m laughing at something like Wet Dry World, in Mario 64, cause in multiple senses, it’s absolutely fucking ridiculous, in one sense, but also totally sane in conceptual standard in another, this is all prefacing those who might possibly extrapolate ideas about it that just aren’t even there, and yet become irreversibly embedded within the context of the level thereafter. Wet Dry World comes off so much like a dev room, for those who would be familiar with the concept, that the obvious takeaway is the team threw a bunch of shit into a 3D environment just to see what it would do, and told players to go fucking nuts, without dressing it up with atmospheric cohesion or a narrative element. This makes me laugh in the no shits given attitude taken, as they released the game like this, and people looked at it and filled in some blanks way beyond probably what the creation entailed, and then that became the players newly constructed “MetaNarrative Hallway” they ran down. Others still probably decorated their own “MetaNarrative Hallway” in far more elaborate manners, in spite of the fact that there was no technical hallway in the first place. Ironically, both the ideas of “MetaNarrarive Hallway” (“Tube of Fun”) are both suppose to be literal and metaphorical, and technically not either at the same time, in a strange metaphysical reference to quantum states and principles relating to non-linearity, but I feel as if I’m basically done writing for today, so damn shame I didn’t have enough energy to get to the bit where the concept really starts to open up into its own little narrow, segmented area of spatialized reasoning.

Time enough for infinity later.

-Pashford