MASOCORE – The satisfaction of the struggle

It’s the strangest thing. The human mind is designed to work towards things that will bring it pleasure, mostly because we’re all treacherous hedonists, but generally because we like the feeling of accomplishment, so why the hell would we involve ourselves in an activity that deliberately crushes us, time and time again, with the knowledge that we’d most likely fail? The answer, dear gamers; we’ve become masochists. Alright, well that maybe a little bit extreme.

Back in the day where games, primarily arcade based or influenced, ruled the kingdom with their dinosauric presence, gamers approached these challenges with a different mentality, since their only possible outcome could be failure. Take something like Donkey Kong, f’rinstance; this game was comprised of 22 stages, and the average casual arcade urchin of the day would probably struggle to get past the first screen, but do you know what? It was extremely popular, in both simplicity and difficulty, and gamers would keep going back for more, stuffing these machines with every quarter they earned, presumably via a paper route if nostalgia is to be believed. This is where gamers have changed, it’s not necessarily a bad thing, but sometimes they need a awakening to the brutal challenges of old, now that games have evolved to a point where they’re continuous, flowing plots, and death is merely a hindrance; out of this softening is where I Wanna Be The Guy was born.

Last year, my tag team writing, game designing chum Jack introduced me to I Wanna Be the Guy. If I’d heard of the game, I would have seen his maniacal smirk burning through the WLM chat window, but I blundered on blissfully ignorant of my fate. The game started up and treated me to some poorly translated Japanese sci-fi story, and alerted me that my quest would be dangerous, yet I laughed at its petty warnings, and went on my merry way with a sneer. I started up the game, and first of all I headed downwards since I wasn’t yet aware that you could double jump. I leapt down into the pit and began running, my mind lazy and comfortable, unprepared for the wall of spikes that just turned me into a fine mist, and the rock guitar solo that blared in my ears. I was dumfounded. GAME OVER – PRESS ‘R’ TO RETRY. Alright, IWBTG, you’ve had your fun, now it’s my turn. This was sobering, I thought I was a great gamer until IWBTG introduced me to the harsh, monstrous reality of the arcade game, albiet a particularly frustrating one.

Once the shock had abated, I went back under Jack’s recommendation to play it on medium, now complete with a great big embarrassing pink bow tie in The Kid’s hair. Sigh. This time I decided to head upwards, and after roughly 15 minutes of screaming at the monitor, I’d managed to memorise the action of every death dealing cherry on the screen, and move on. I don’t recall how far I got on the following stage, but all I recall is that the death traps had it their way.

Although this style of nail biting, hair pulling game is harsh, it’s cruel because it loves us. It doesn’t want us to slip away from the roots of gaming, the influences that captured the imagination of the common man, and drove him to pursue the personal goal of high scores, or even making it to the next window to prove that you were the best. Sure, games have come a long way, and in some respects have a lot more to offer these days, they are still missing the essence of the struggle that was such a driving force back in the arcade hey-day, and this is something that we should thank I wanna Be The Guy for reminding us of.

Miles Newton – The Machination, Creative Director