Looking for answers? Dianetics, The Secret, The Seven Deadly Foibles of Unrepentant Sociopaths? The revelations that you seek are in Ecco the Dolphin.

Produced by Ed Annunziata and developed by the international Novotrade International team (later Appaloosa Interactive), the first Ecco the Dolphin came out early in the age of Sega Genesis. Dolphins and whales in general were high on the mainstream consciousness through the 70s and 80s, with Songs of the Humpback Whale debuting in 1970, the first human-recorded sounds of whale communication, and going on to sell a multiplatinum thirty million copies in the following decades. The record burned through our hominid brains, a universal call for the sacred mysteries of nature, and it's a short hop from there to the illustrative work of Robert Wyland, whose depictions linking whales and far galaxies look like concept art for Ecco.

What makes Ecco really stand out, though, is that as a game it was so phenomenally well crafted. And, like most exceptionally well made video games, it contains the secrets of the universe.

I unpacked the Sega Genesis (not my family's original -- a used system picked up on ebay a couple of years ago) for a little book launch party this past weekend, and as inevitably happens when I'm left alone with a Genesis, when the party was over I fired up Ecco II: The Tides of Time.

I've played this game many times (though admittedly rarely all the way through). This time around I was struck by two things: 1) the flow and progression of this game is actually completely brilliant; 2) how in the world did they get away with shipping a game that was so incredibly hard?

Realization #2 is perhaps what Tides of Time in particular is so well-known for, which is unfortunate. The game is hard. But the best games are. The very best games are the ones that are brutally hard but don't allow you to put them down. This is a delicate, stunning balance, an invisibly momentous achievement -- the challenge pushes you to your absolute limit, but with every play you feel yourself getting just a little bit closer. You never, at any point, truly feel that you can't win. And riding that knife-edge of balance and challenge is wickedly difficult. How the team managed it in the wild west of this still relatively early console development I have no idea, but there is something magical about this period in game history, something that produced genius. Although Ecco II is my go-to has-everything game, if you put a gun to my head I'd still have a hard time telling you whether it, Phantasy Star IV, or Sid Meier's Pirates! Gold should be declared king of the Sega Genesis.

But in spite of all that, I couldn't help but marvel at how really rather absurdly difficult even the first few levels of Ecco II are. I cruised through the first two, marveling again at the challenge and simplicity of the vibrating-crystal puzzle in the third level -- and by the time I hit my first failed run at "Sky Tides", I was developing some serious respect for my twelve-year-old self for having the tenacity to beat the game. I was also astonished that I'd done it. I went up against the "Tube of Medusa" a round dozen times before I stopped, in astonishment, and wondered how in the hell anyone managed to push through these levels.

That was when I googled "Tube of Medusa" and found these brilliant play-through videos. I watched the end of the game first, partly because I didn't know that's what it was (it was the most popular video -- doubtless for the thousands of people who played but never finished the game). And then I went back and watched from the beginning, cackling to myself with glee when he thought the crystals puzzle was difficult. And when he thought "Skyway" was a pain. And when he died over and over again for the next entire video against "Sky Tides". And when he went up against the Medusa, died, and found himself rolled back to "Skyway" and completely lost his shit. If you've ever played any of the Ecco games you owe it to yourself to watch these videos.


The videos themselves are a tight illustration of this frustration-challenge-triumph progression that is so well done in the Ecco games (the first two anyway -- I loved the story of Defender of the Future, but just never quite bought the 3D interpretation of Ecco). The games drive you absolutely mad -- but you keep playing, not out of some deeply planted masochistic impulse, but because the game is persistently telling you: just a little longer. Just try one more time.

And this gets to the heart of one of the most powerful lessons that games as a whole teach.

Games, especially physics simulators like Ecco, are encapsulated constructions of our perception of the nature of reality. We simulate the rules of the universe in small packages in an attempt to understand how it works, how we work. The artistic insight and understanding achieved through games is therefore an insight that emerges from the process of experiencing the simulation -- a core truth about our experience of life itself.

There was no doubt in my mind that as a kid I absorbed deep and powerful things from Ecco. The sheer beauty of the game was an insight all on its own -- the way its music and physics feel and graphics lull you into this trance-like flow state. And this beauty and flow is emphasized again through the game's mechanics, which require such a precision of movement and reflex that it cannot be conscious. In playing the most difficult parts of Ecco, you will bang your head again and again if you are distracted, or too self-conscious. You succeed when you let go, when you let reflex take over, when you are absorbed in the game.

Ecco II could not be what it is without its incredible difficulty. And it makes me wilt a little inside to think that games like this would have an awfully hard time being made and published in today's market. Ecco's difficulty did repel many gamers, who weren't sufficiently hooked through the opening to rise to the challenges it offered. (To this day, if you google Ecco what you'll find are a lot of gamers complaining about how hard the game was, which they translate to "it sucks" -- and then wonder today why games are so much easier than they used to be [and then complain about that].) But another point of interest for me is that I often find that some of the most brilliant, creative, and inspiring young women I know today loved Ecco as a kid. It spoke to something in all of us, something so powerful that it made us beat a game that to this day is infamous in the history of stupidly hard games.

So here, in short, are critical lessons that Ecco teaches:

1) Fail. Fail a lot. Then win. Every success book will tell you this, but Ecco actually shows it to you. The problem with the books is that their message often reaches us as patently false. Sure, the people who "win" at various things in life almost always have a long string of failed attempts behind them. But so do the people who continually fail. The critical variation here is: fail a lot, but get just a little bit better every time. That is how you win. And that just a little bit better is the sweet taste of success that gives us courage in the face of failure.

2) Paying too much attention throws you off your game. You need to let go and release your intuitive mind. First you strategize, but when you perform, you let go. An astonishing amount of fail comes from over thinking.

3) Explore. Sometimes the thing that you're looking for is tucked away in a corner that you'll only find if you're thorough and meticulous.

4) Know your tools. Think ahead. If you take the time to map out your surroundings and develop a plan, you drastically up your odds.

5) Go slow. If you rush into the unknown you will almost always die. Going slow and keeping control -- cultivating disciplined patience -- gets you where you want to go faster than rushing, even though this is unintuitive.

6) Analyze your failure. You can sometimes brute force your way through a challenge by sheer luck, but if you stop, take a breath, and think, you can usually observe something about the way your environment is behaving in reaction to your attempt that will be the key to your success. There is always a key. There is always a secret. And the faster you acknowledge and alter your mistakes, the faster you succeed.

7) Master your emotions. The thing that makes most challenges seem unwinnable is your own reaction to the challenge. Adrenaline is only productive in certain situations. Most of the time it just gets in your way. Breathe.

These seem like simple things when they're listed and told, which is the nature of lessons. You can rarely effectively absorb them from a list or a collection of words. But a game allows you to experience the lesson, to perform the metaphor, and so many of our intrinsic learning systems kick in as a result that the realizations are hundreds of times more powerful.

If you listen through those youtube videos, you can hear Hidenozuke going through this process, which is fascinating and fun.

I do wish he'd do a run-through of the first game. Though any reasonable physician, I suppose, might not allow it.

I do live! According to recent reports, anyway. I've actually been trying to post this for a week, but am only just now getting to it. I have a lot of things to catch up on, and hopefully am getting to a portion of them this weekend.

The move, a high volume of chaos (and travel) that followed it, and then rocketing full bore into the new job have all conspired to eat my brain. Many things to catch up on, some of them sad, most of them happy. But since this is time-related, I'm posting that friend/editor/Homeless Moon co-conspirator scott_h_andrews's online fantasy magazine Beneath Ceaseless Skies is now live, with its first issue featuring work from Chris Willrich and David D. Levine. It's a beautiful issue, and the first line of Willrich's two-part story caught my attention in particular:

One storm-lashed sunset in the Eldshore’s antique capital, beneath Castle Astrolabe’s crumbling perch and near the Zodiac Coliseum’s bloody stones, Gaunt and Bone scaled Heaven’s Vault, there to make a hellish deposit.

A very pulpy but fun story.

David Levine's "Sun Magic, Earth Magic" is a complementary pairing, smooth and clean but distinctive. Check them out!

With these, sneaking in a few sale announcements that I've also been remiss on... "Stormchaser, Stormshaper", an Of Fire and Sea universe short story, to Beneath Ceaseless Skies. As others will tell you, Scott has very exacting tastes, so I was thrilled that he liked this story. After many exchanges, "Impress of the Hills" is officially sold to Spacesuits & Sixguns, and Mythic Delirium picked up "Beauty Sleep", a short poem/alternate perspective on a fairy tale you can probably guess.

I also twittered about this, but didn't mention it here, that "We the Gamers" went up on the Escapist last week. It picked up a mention on kotaku, and even got (so far) 617 diggs, though mostly, it seems, because of a single quote that was pulled out by one of the journalists along the way and got them thinking I was talking primarily about DRM. The subcultures of these places are interesting -- apparently "meatspace" is a word one does not use around digg folk. I wish I could even claim I'd been using it to be pretentious -- it's actually part of my common vocabulary, which, given where I work, isn't surprising, but possibly is sad depending on your perspective. ;) The comments vary, as they usually do, from RTFA-bait to insightful, but it does amaze me how many in the gaming community persistently dismiss anything having to do with MMOs. Obviously because of where I work I have a biased perspective on this, but at the moment I'm convinced that not only is the MMO, in one form or another, the dominant genre (with WoW's subscription figures alone there's little disputing this), it's simply the future of gaming, end of discussion. And yet clearly there's a talking-point dismissal of MMOs as subject matter in gaming circles, which leads me to believe that there is a market gap in a definitive news and discussion source for these millions who actually play online games (The Escapist, much as I love what they do, isn't it, by its demographics, and TerraNova is too riddled with academics [no slight on academics, I love them, I'm just limited in my maximum dosage]). But thoughts for another time...

So. Steve (the greenbottle fly, if you remember him) continues to persist. I think he's even gotten most of the coffee off of his body.

Brief update, mostly for a couple of links. WoW friends will appreciate this, courtesy wired_blogs: "From MMO to CEO", a rather belated article covering the transfer of leadership skills learned in online game guilds to the workplace. When I presented "Warrior Queens of the Cyberworld" at Immersive Worlds last year, one of the questions from the audience had to do with precisely this -- whether workplaces are beginning to recognize the immense leadership skills necessary in managing massive online guilds. It looks like they are. Future resumes will list typing WPM, educational training -- and how many wipes it took your team to take down Onyxia.

My last contribution to Inside Job at the Escapist went in last night. I think it's a good one. It's been a very interesting ride. Perhaps more thoughts on this on Friday, if I'm not dead (I think I may be picking up jsridler's cold).

Between Settlers, other writing commitments, work, and visa-related real life garbage, I managed to get into a serious crunch for about the past month, a side effect of which was aggravating the mild RSI in my left neck/shoulder. Saw a massage therapist for it on Tuesday, and am in for apparently multiple more such sessions, but after a couple of days of soreness I'm finally feeling a bit looser. I hadn't even realized how much mobility I'd lost in my neck. The therapist asked if I had trouble driving, with turning my head, and I said no, I didn't think so -- but my neck now turns significantly easier and farther than it did on Tuesday. Yikes. I think I am too young for this shit still.

leahbobet has posted eloquently on writing business and why stories like Michael Cisco's should be shared. Obviously, I tend to agree. This was actually the main reason I came over here to post in a timely manner, in case I'm reaching anyone who hasn't already read Cisco's account with Prime Books. I, too, have heard a similar experience with some of the folk there, and have been trepidatious as a result.

It's a complex thing. There is so much fear, in writing and in the games industry, of taking action that may threaten one's career. The thing is, and this applies equally to both, when you really get down to it, there are enough GOOD people working in both businesses that it is never worthwhile to hide or sabotage yourself in order to avoid offending a lousy employer. It is the Sanders thing in a new iteration, though certainly less clear cut. But the principle remains the same. Anyone telling you to shut up just for the sake of shutting up probably has a less-than-noble motive for doing so. Keeping lousy treatment (or, in yhlee's case, truly egregious coffin-nailing wackjobbery) silent because speaking up Just Isn't Done is a great way to perpetuate said lousy treatment. Kudos to Cisco for taking the uncomfortable step and sharing his experience, here's hoping that the full truth comes out. And for those who truly wonder whether speaking up can jeopardize a career, I can tell you that all it does is cut you off from people you really shouldn't be working for in the first place. I actually find it a rather excellent sorting mechanism.

We are all worth more than this.

It seems that the feminism issue rears its head on the speculative fiction blogosphere about once every six months, maybe more frequently if you follow specific blogs in question. I'd been meaning, with certain trepidation, to throw my hat in, and now seems an opportune time as I have found myself unwittingly participating in one editor's salvo in response to the issues -- with a poem that is very firmly a women's-issues poem.

I do support positive initiatives to broaden any industry (I'm using one of "Broad Universe's" flyers as a bookmark in Old Man's War at the moment, actually), but the problem with much of the discussion on the internet -- which, like all internet discussions, should be taken with a liberal dose of salt -- is that it seems to remain so resoundingly negative and resentment-generating.

I have a certain experience releasing pain-filled screeds onto the internet. That's probably why I get so bothered by these discussions. Since 2004 I have been working hard in the games industry to raise awareness and facilitate advancement away from problems that I highlighted, and a certain amount of it is out of a sense of penance for releasing something so full of negative energy into the world. But I certainly understand the value and the periodic need for such things. I just also understand that at a certain point you have to start talking about and then enacting solutions, or you start to harm yourself and your cause.

You also have to be reasonably self-aware, and aware of your position in the grand scope of the universe. I find that herbal tea often helps with this. But to further define my place in these things, I spend a lot of my time in the video game world and talking to people in related media, and boy howdy, does the spec-fic scene ever not have as much to worry about as video games or comics when it comes to the feminist cause. So this is another angle on my perspective and my rating on what deserves screaming into the ether and what is making sufficient progress on its own.

Lately, an angry black woman says that you shouldn't get a cookie for doing the right thing (though in fairness to her she does cite John Klima's Electric Velocipede 14 as undeserving of backlash) -- and I think this is recent evidence of what troubles me in the generally numbers-based quantification of the alleged bias in genre fiction toward publishing male authors. I think that if your primary goal is a sense of self-righteousness and reassurance of being in the Right on a particular subject, yeah, maybe you don't give cookies for good behavior. But if your intent is to elicit change, cookies are exactly what you need to give, and then on top of that you need to open your own damn cookie-generating bakery.

I'm on a women's-issues-based mailing list for the International Game Developers Association, and these issues find their reflections in every area in which women are in the minority and are attempting to claim their stake. I've written my share of public contributions and commentaries on the state of the industry in these subjects; I like to think I know what I'm talking about and have proved that I am sufficiently vested in the issues. And, as they do in spec fic (and anything having to do with fanfiction), these subjects attract a lot of attention and comment from a very specific subset of readers -- and also scare off a lot of the majority, who feel that they can't comment for fear of being attacked or denigrated. And that's unfortunate, and mildly hypocritical. I don't personally like the fact that John Klima and folk like him have to be delicate about explaining decisions they've made for their own magazines.

What we did find in video games, with the caveat that I certainly don't speak for all or even most women in the field, is that the most effective way to actually enact change in the industry was just to make the video games we wanted to see. Lamenting about their lack, which I have done my share of, has a certain purpose, but the more you repeat yourself the more you weaken your argument. Action must follow thought or the thought is impotent. In games this meant a couple of things: a) mentoring promising female developers and creating a safe haven for them to enter the industry, which there certainly has not always been; b) advocating for the awareness of games that did feature rounded, dynamic, enjoyable female characters; c) leaping outside of the existing boundaries of the field to create new audiences.

That third issue is why I still say that the militant sci-fi feminist contingent (and believe me that I am all about the 'militant' in issues for which I have passion -- I'm just for effective militancy) needs to create their own female-themed magazine. It would be nice if they did not engage in quota-meeting -- quotas are sometimes effective in extreme circumstances where brute force methods are necessary to leaven a field in a state of grave imbalance, but I don't think that's the case in speculative fiction (or video games, for that matter). There actually was an attempt at a feminist science fiction online magazine focusing on heroic female characters -- it was short-lived, and I wish I could remember its name, but I seem to have lost track of it since it went under. But I think it was very much on the right track. I understand why it hasn't been done -- for one thing, starting a self-sustaining magazine of any kind is wickedly difficult -- but I think for these issues to achieve relevance there needs to be an element of market proof of concept. And I think it could be successful.

Positive action is the key. And there certainly is a good deal of positive action from quiet individuals around the community -- but there is also this loud contingent of seemingly impotent anger. I think that the error is in a mistake in focus. It is possible, though difficult, to change someone else's views by screaming at them incessantly, or by quoting statistics at them. But it is generally easier, less enemy-generating, and better for one's blood pressure to expand the market rather than trying to brute-force alter the market. The problem here is not one of willful bias on the part of totalitarian editors; it is a simple vacuum in the marketplace, a niche that is not yet adequately filled. It is a potential, not an injustice; a prosperity engine waiting to be harnessed.

I'm not telling anyone not to be angry. People are free to feel as they choose to feel. But if change is the true desire, there are faster and happier ways to it. Me, I don't feel sufficiently disenfranchised in this particular corner to take action on it. I don't have trouble selling stories, at least no more than the average writing acolyte does, and I have more than my fair share of pet injustices to right in the world. And, uh, I like a lot of guy-oriented fiction, and I don't have a problem seeing a lot of male authors on magazine covers. But would I be on board and prioritize sending submissions to a magazine that promised (and delivered) women-oriented fantasy and science fiction? You bet. And I bet I wouldn't be alone.