Tuesday, June 14, 2011

The Persistence of Mercury (Harlem Globetrotters, Hatris)

The Harlem Globetrotters make an odd subject for a video game, given the degree to which their history consisted of kayfabe basketball. Not that there is anything wrong with this history. The Harlem Globetrotters were, by any reasonable measure, a celebration of numerous aspects of African American culture. But they were not basketball as such. Rather, they were a simulation of basketball designed to focus on the moments of maximum fun and trim out the others.

In other words, the Harlem Globetrotters are themselves basically a video game. That is, after all, what basketball video games are about. Trimming the boring bits and getting to the fun bits. It's basketball without tedium, at the frankly fairly low cost of also being without point. But given that sports are already kind of inherently pointless, this just isn't that massive a problem.

The process involved here, alchemically speaking, is one that we would associate with Hermes, also known as Mercury. His name is also given to a planet and metal. Or, rather, all three of these things share the same name because, for a period of thought during which quite a few linguistic roots developed, they were the same thing. The metal, god, and planet were all simply manifestations of a larger concept.

This concept, broadly speaking, was change, but change in a very specific sense. Mercury is not the change of the passage of time. Rather, mercury is change in the sense of creation. Mercury was viewed, classically, as essentially the stem cell of metals - the inchoate chaos from which anything can form, along with, crucially, the process of that formation. Mercury, in other words, is the act of creation itself.

We cannot survive in a world of pure mercury. Some system is needed. Neal Stephenson, among the most brilliant living writers in English, wrote an entire trilogy that ends up with this observation as its main conclusion. But we equally cannot survive in a world that is fixed. There must be mercury - inchoate moments of unfathomable creation. There must be sparks. This is what the various dunks and stunts of the Harlem Globetrotters are - the moments of inspiration and passion and beauty that make basketball worthwhile. They are pure mercury. But they are not the world.

Still, a video game based on it turns out to be kinda dumb. It turns out not to be possible to take something that is already a distilled simulation of an object and create a distilled simulation of it. All you get is a generic basketball game with a lone "stunt" that you can pull to get an automatic basket. There is nothing to it. All is fixed and determined, and there is no room for chaos.

There is not enough mercury in the world, however. Case in point, Hatris. From the creator of Tetris, Hatris is another falling objects game in which you try to stack sets of five identical hats with six columns to maneuver in and hats falling in pairs. It demonstrates a key facet of game design, which is that just because you came up with one brilliant concept it doesn't mean you can do it again. Hatris isn't bad, but it lacks all of the spark of Tetris.

Ironically, of course, hats themselves lack that vital spark of mercury they once had. For some time mercury was a vital ingredient in manufacturing felt hats, leading to lots of toxic vapors and the phrase "mad as a hatter." Broadly speaking, mercury in general is something we lack today. Where once it was something everyone encountered, whether in thermometers or toys, now the fact that it's horribly dangerous and toxic is used as a pretense to remove it from as many things as possible. The resulting lack of brain damage and death is, admittedly, nice.

But something is, as we can see in Hatris, lost in the conversion. There is no spark to the game. Which is a problem. The falling objects genre, after all, depends on the dynamic of the game slowly but surely spiraling out of control until you die. This requires mercury - a formless chaos to which you descend. This is the problem with Hatris. Death may be inevitable in it, but there is no sense of things getting out of control. Usually you die because there aren't enough slots for the hats - six slots and six varieties of hat means that it is basically certain that you will be unable to maintain a stack for each hat type. But this dynamic never feels like spiraling out of control. It just feels like bad resource management.

Tetris, as we'll talk about in the Ts, avoided this. The dynamic that kills you in Tetris is subtle. You don't quite know why you always die. Thus there is a sense of chaos. In Hatris, you know why you're dying, and get no opportunity to be driven mad by it.

Mercury will kill you, sure enough. But so will life. In the end, the cause of death is always inevitability. Better to live in a world where that fact remains strange.

1 comment:

  1. Basketball is the game which i play in my free time. In this game i love to so the trim and pass. It is a best way for get a fun to me.
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