More important – and this speaks to the central problem with Double Dragon – are the issues of surface versus structure, and inclusion versus exclusion. Double Dragon is the first major step down the road to a high-gloss realism that makes a shift from what Marshall McLuhan would call a “cool”medium to a “hot”one: “Any hot medium allows of less participation than a cool one... the hot form excludes, and the cool one includes.”+ Strip away this realism and the game boils down to beating the hell out of people, a fair-enough fantasy pastime...
But in cool games (Tempest, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Lucky Wander Boy), graphic minimalism goes hand-in-hand with the absorptive, World Unto Itself quality that makes these games special, and indeed, a measure of this quality extends to all Classic games, however basic in conception. When we play these games, the sketchy visual detail forces us to fill in the blanks, and in so doing we bind ourselves to the game world. Even more, we participate in its creation, we are a linchpin, a cocreator, crucial to the existence of the game world as it is meant to be experienced. Without our participation the Classic game is nothing, it devolves into exactly what the glossy-junky detractors see – and they see it precisely because they refuse to put forth the mental effort required to round out the vision.
They prefer games like Double Dragon, games that do all the work, premasticating the images, chopping them fine – but in allowing this to be done for them, they go from being to watching, as the degree of detail starts to make identification with the character impossible. In his McLuhan-inspired book Understanding Comics, comic artist and theorist Scott McCloud makes a deceptively simple observation: “The more cartoony a face is... the more people it could be said to describe.”
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Pp. 65-66 in the section on the game Double Dragon
D. B. Weiss
Lucky Wander Boy
2003, PLUME for Penguin Books Ltd.
+ [From Understanding Media (London: Routledge, 1994; 1st pub., 1964) Hot media: movies, photographs, the phonetic alphabets. Cool media: television (circa 1964), cartoons, telephones, hieroglyphics. Picture a seesaw, with Pong Seated on one side, some future first person shooter indistinguishable from high-definition video seated on the other, and Donkey Kong straddling the fulcrum.]
Original image from here.
3 redmarks:
It's Double Dragon, Red. Double Dragon! Must you be so critical? Give us something juicy. Talk about you two instead!
I want to know how your highfalutin will translate the feeling and the relationship. I am very curious.
Muahness from Pasig Cirehhh!
@Momel Haha, didn't know you were such a big fan of Double Dragon. Just to reiterate, these aren't my words. A quote, no less. Be careful, curiosity could be fatal. Hehe. To be fair though, I am in a state of blissful equilibrium. As for the hyfalutin part, does it have to be jargon-laden to instill profundity?
Nope. One of the most insightful books I've ever read, in all my life, had no highfalutin about its person. It was Mark Twain's Letters from the Earth, and it was 51 pages long. I was never the same Roman Catholic after reading that well-written book.
MFPC!
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