Beneath the codes and puzzles and labyrinths is a surprisingly complex story, full of patricide, family rivalries, colonialism and Apocalypse Now-like riffs on Godhood and exploitation. You don’t know what might be significant to solve a different puzzle elsewhere on the island, and so you keep a notebook open by your keyboard, and scribble down strange symbols carved on the walls, or the number five popping up in odd places. You open steam valves and record musical note codes and collect keys. You move through a static world, like flipping through one matte painting after another. Unlike the fast-moving, pixelly platformers of this era, Myst and Riven relied almost entirely on clicking through still images of painstakingly drawn natural environments, making the most of limited ‘90s computer processors. Myst and Riven were revolutionary games for their time, and are still cult favorites today. I can only see a couple of decades out how Myst and Riven drove my own fixation on negative space in narrative, and showed me how it’s possible to tell a story in an empty room. The pop culture we absorb and obsess over has a funny way of shaping us when we’re not noticing. For those growing up in the ‘90s, just discovering the engrossing world of first-person computer games, Myst and its sequel, Riven, are a touchstone. In particular, I was a fan of Cyan’s original island-linking puzzler, Myst. I liked puzzle games, and the bigger the world to explore, the better. This meant I spent a lot of time alone, curled in my chair reading-but I spent nearly as many hours clicking and tapping on my mother’s beige, boxy computer, playing computer games. Nobody else I knew was simultaneously obsessed with learning HTML and parsing the sentences of F. In the 1990s I was a lonely, nerdy girl writer.
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