Here's one thing I didn't mention in the introductory post: I'm not JUST making this NES game because I want to.
I mean, don't get me wrong, making a NES game that I can actually flash to a ROM and play on an actual NES is something I have dreamed about for quite a while. However, it's not why I specifically took on this challenge right now. As it stands when I write this, on June 10th, 2024, I am currently a student studying at the University of Plymouth in Plymouth, UK, working towards getting myself a Master's Degree in Game Design. For our final semester, over the course of the summer, we have to complete a project, whether that be a business plan, a portfolio of work demonstrating our skills, a dissertation, or a PhD application. I opted to do the portfolio of work, focusing on one singular project: a NES JRPG, flashed to a ROM and playable on a physical console.
However, one aspect of all four project options for this final Master's project is that they need to have a research basis behind them. I figured this would be easy. I wanted to give my JRPG a cyberpunk theme, reflecting some current personal tastes and desires, and contrasting a bit with the mostly fantasy themes of my inspirations.
However, I drew a bit of a blank on what exactly I would research into that had a tie to retro gaming and cyberpunk, and how I could in turn tie those research topics into the project itself (as is STRONGLY recommended). Thankfully, I am not alone in my struggles. My program coordinator introduced me to a Dr. Andrew Prior, who would take on the role of a tutor for me, helping me seek out relevant themes and topics that I could research into for my project. And help me he did. From my first meeting with him, he introduced me to a number of very relevant topics, researchers, artists, authors, and other resources I could potentially utilize. So, for this dev log, I'm going to go through some of those, and give a brief summary or the topic, as well as how I might be utilizing it in the game to come.
Media Archaeology
In the shortest and most condensed possible summary, Media Archaeology can be said to be a field of research that looks to understand new and emerging media through the study and dissecting of the media of the past. However, even that does not do the field justice. As with any field of study, the amount of conflicting viewpoints and reasoning mean that each person is likely to have a different understanding of the topic. Jussi Parikka, for example, while analyzing the work of Wolfgang Ernst in Operative Media Archeology: Wolfgang Ernst's Materialist Media Diagrammatics (Parikka, 2011) mentions that even at the time there were two rather distinct camps of Media Archaeology theorists: The German Variant, which focused more on hardware media archaeology, and the Anglo-American Variant, which was more focused on the cultural aspects of content, users, and representation. She states that Ernst, through his work, explained "...that it is the machine in which the past gets archived as a monument and that is the true subject of technical media culture, not the spectre of the human subject idealistically looming between the words...". According to Ernst, through reverse engineering our technology, understanding the how and the why new technologies have been produced on top of the old, that we can view the cultural memory that has been articulated through its design (Parikka, 2011).
Funnily enough, the first four names I was provided by Dr. Prior were all mentioned in Parikka's article: Erkki Huhtamo, Jussi Parikka, Siegfried Zeilinski, and Workgang Ernst. However, with some of these names, I was provided other projects and works to look into as well, so lets take a quick look at those.
Siegfried Zeilinski - Variantology
Variantology: On Deep Time Relations of the Arts, Sciences and Techologies is a research project created by Zeilinski alongside several other researchers and institutes. Per Zeilinski's own website for the project, it was started as an international research project looking to analyze and reflect upon the concept of media across cultures and the role that the arts play in that.
While I have not yet had the opportunity to look into any of the published Variantology volumes yet, the concept fascinates me. Even within the gaming world, we see the effect that cultures have on the interaction with and acceptance of new media and technology. Why are some cultures fine with nudity yet abhor violence and vice versa? Why are certain consoles extremely popular in some regions (mobile phones and portable devices in Asia, PCs and home gaming consoles in North America), while others do poorly (XBox in Japan, mobile gaming platforms in North America outside of younger audiences).
Wolfgang Ernst
For Ernst, I was given three separate items to look into.
Ernst - Epistemological Toy and the Media Archaeological Fundus
While the word toy here may bring to mind child-focused objects, that is not the case with Epistemological toys. In this case, they are objects that provide an epistemological value: a value relating to knowledge and understanding. In this case, various technologies that are housed within the Media Archaeological Fundus, housed in the basement of the Humboldt University of Berlin. By picking up and experiencing these objects, how they function, it can give knowledge and understanding of the culture that it was produced in, and provide a perspective to inspire modern thinking about technology, per their own website.
Ernst - Digital Memory and the Archive
Published in 2012, it is a collection of Ernst's writings, edited by Parikka. While I have not yet had the time to sit down and read the book in its fullness, it sits on my to read list to contemplate when my schedule becomes a bit less cluttered.
Bruce Sterling - The Dead Media Project
A project sprouted out of Bruce Sterling's Dead Media Manifesto, Sterling wanted to look into the hows and whys of media death. When media managed to stick around for a while after introduction, they don't tend to die off quickly, if at all. As Sterling says, radio didn't kill newspaper, nor tv radio. It is here, in fact, that we get our first direct mention of cyberpunk as it used to mean: the expression of punk ideologies through the cyber medium of the internet: encouraging mutual aid, banding against current systems, etc. It was a call to action, to assembles notes and writings about dead media, to better understand our history better.
Other Resources
Of course, not all the resources that Dr. Prior provided to me were focused on Media Archaeology. We shall have to look at a few of those as well.
Garnet Hertz - Concept Lab: Outrun
As stated, while not directly focused on media archaeology, Garnet Hertz is a Canadian artist who is known for their works featuring electronic technology and their research into critical making. The particular project I was directed towards, Outrun, combines a car shaped as a classic arcade cabinet with a custom piece of augmented reality software simulating the 1986 game Outrun. The system would allow the user to drive around, with their environment being emulated in the style of Outrun, allowing them to experience a virtual, 8-bit version of their environment as they travel through it. It plays with the concepts of simulation and reality, and how we often mix the two in modern society without even realizing it through systems like GPS navigation.
Cory Arcangel - Super Mario Clouds
Another artist, Super Mario Clouds was an installation art piece in which all graphical and auditory elements of Super Mario were removed, except for the scrolling cloud graphics. While a bit less directly tied to media archaeology than Outrun, it still showcases that there is a drive to create art from older digital media.
Permacomputing
Permacomputing, per their website, is an "anti-capitalist political project", a concept and a pratice oriented around resilience and regenerativity in computer and network technology. Permaculture is the pratice of creating semi-permanent ecosystems in nature, and so permacomputing is about rethinking and working towards a similar function in computing. How can we reduce wastefulness and maximize not just hardware capabilities, but hardware lifespan while minimizing energy use? But these should not be capitalist. Permacomputing needs to be accessible, compatible, efficient, flexible, and resilient to survive.
William Gibson
Of course, we can't talk Cyberpunk without bringing up the grandfather of the genre. Author of Neuromancer, among many other pieces of literature, this man helped establish the Cyberpunk genre into what it is today. Neuromancer, meanwhile, is another book that has been sitting in my to be read pile for far too long.
So how am I going to use these resources?
This is the eternal question. To be honest, while writing this, I'm still not 100% sure. While I have some slight ideas so far on overall story beats I'd like to include within my game, I don't have anything concrete. The elements I have pinned down so far are thus:
Cyberpunk setting
Combination of human/humanoid and robot characters
Ecological devestation to the world
Loss of knowledge/recorded history due to focus on new technologies
The final point in particular is where I feel like I'm going to be able to tie in a lot of the media archaeology and perma-computing elements. How, I'm not yet sure. I need to do some more research, flesh out my design document more.
But, in regards to next steps? I have two.
One: Gaming Research. If I'm going to make a NES JRPG, I need to play some NES JRPGs. I need to experience how they made design decisions, see what they managed to accomplish given the constraints of the system at hand.
Two: Programming Research. I need to figure out how I'm going to bend NESmaker to my will. The best way to do that? Recreate an existing game to learn the ins and outs. My target? Final Fantasy 1. If I can re-create the opening Cornelia area to figure out the movement controls (and hopefully some of the other systems like the battle system), that will give me a starting point from which I can build the rest of the systems the game will need to function.
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