1:16 a.m. - 2003-08-06
duke part one
to paraphrase adlai stephenson: (stevenson?)
tonight, i'm not going to talk to you about the girls i like and how unattainable they are. i'm not going to talk about the trials and travails of my rock and roll lifestyle. i'm not going to talk about any fictitious musical projects i may or may not be involved in.
actually, i realized i can type these in notepad while the connection is choking its way into existence, so perhaps i'll ramble for a bit.
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It happened that around 1995 or '96, I became greatly enamored of the computer game "Duke Nukem 3D," a first-person perspective shoot-up-the-aliens-and-your-buddies game that by today's standards was rather cartoony and certainly of an older generation of games technologically speaking. Despite much internet controversy over whether it could compete with the grittier, more complex, and in my mind less fun game Quake, I truly had a love for Duke. This love was shared by my brother, as well as my sister (the latter of whom has continued to play the game up to the present, as far as I know). This should tell you something about our household. An occasional big, exciting undertaking was to take advantage of our then shaky and tentative household network of computers to play Duke 3D against each other. This process was fraught with bugs and inexplicable failures, and much coordination had to be accomplished - meaning, basically, running around the house to double check that everybody's computers were set up the same way, that we had all selected the right level to play, and so on.
These sessions occasionally lapsed into post-battle wrap-ups downstairs, with my siblings and I discussing the various exotic deaths we had inflicted on each other, and also the mechanics of the levels we were playing in. The Duke 3D game included among its various features a full-fledged level editor - the same software, in fact, that the game's creators had used to fashion all the in-game levels. As such, it was naturally very poorly-documented and rife with questionable workarounds that had the feel of glitches which the programmers had found it easier to work around than to fix. Thanks to the increasingly robust World Wide Web (and its increasingly obscure text-based predecessor, Usenet), fans of Duke 3D had been able to disseminate not only great amounts of advice on making levels, but also fan-made levels themselves! These levels provided the most fodder for Trip, Lila, and I's late night discussions under the fluorescent lights of our comfortably furnished basement. Just as we could almost smell the spent shell casings from our recent virtual conflict, we could almost sense the presence of a sincere human hand in the creation of the experience; we could recognize her or his aspirations and methods. This perspective lent itself readily to dissection: if these levels did not come from the hand of some unknown and mythical authority (the game's official levels bearing the seal of professionalism) (and, moreover, being created largely by a man who in public deigned to be reffered to as simply The Level Lord), then they could be flawed. And if they could be flawed, they could be improved upon.
And so it happened that I myself took the fateful step of loading the level editor myself...
(part ii to come soon...)
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