DreamWeb vs Metrocide: The Illicit Dreams of Adolescence

I made a recent return to Metrocide that reminded me of things that I had left half said the first time around. I originally had a bit about a game called DreamWeb in it, but I cut it out so that I could expand on it here instead of leaving something half said.

The story goes sort of like this:

There are certain key-phrases, attributes of the setting, and elements of presentation in Metrocide that reminde me of 1994's cyberpunk, top-down adventure game, DreamWeb. A game that was refused classification in Australia, which is something I wouldn't know until I read a 1996 article on Australian game censorship in PC PowerPlay. I'm fairly, but not entirely, certain about that. I remember the article, but we're reaching deep into the way back here. Regardless, it was at the time of consumption that I'd had the game for two years.

Had Australia had an R18+ rating for games at the time, I'm pretty sure that DreamWeb would've received classification, even though there are some aspects of the game that might even prevent it from getting classified under the new system.

While the violence is far less realistic than modern games, it is far more immediate. Far less removed from the world we live in. There are also some scenes of said violence, including interrupting a couple mid coitus so that you can kill one of them while the other hides under the bed, and performing a mercy killing on one of your victims that you've already fatally maimed, that might see it refused classification under the new system.

I should explain.

In DreamWeb you play as Ryan, who is either saving the world, or a serial killer who has a dysfunctional relationship with reality and/or sensory input. It's all kind of left open for interpretation.

I remember going back and forth on it throughout my two playthroughs. I remember a lot of the thought processes involved with the playing of that game. I remember the discomfort at the tasks at hand, and I remember trying to wrap my head around what was going on.

I also remember having this distinct sense of dread right up until the end of the game that I would be expected to kill Ryan's girlfriend. It seemed like the kind of thing that the game was going to ask me to do. It was already full of unreasonable justifications for some fairly appalling stuff, and I was genuinely relieved when the game ended, and it had never come up.

It is clear that the developers' intentions were to make the player uncomfortable.

In the prevention of the apocalypse, you're committing some fairly straightforward murder. You might be saving the world, but you aren't fighting most of these people. You're navigating their security systems, while they hide from you, because you're there to take their lives.

It's not the immediate kill or be killed scenarios that games normally present you with, and then there's the potential that Ryan's brain cut loose some time ago, and you're just riding his whole scene into the ground. You aren't a warrior. You're a killer.

Metrocide is similar in this regard, except your killings are less elaborate. You're stalking your 'contracts' with a much more mundane sense of purpose. You're not saving the world, and you're not going to extraordinary lengths. You're getting paid, and you're leaving them on the asphalt. It's less complicated.

This is something to which I am not desensitised. In either game. It's still a jarring experience. Well, I haven't played DreamWeb in close to two decades, but thinking about some of the scenes still makes me uncomfortable. Metrocide is a little more straight forward. It's easier to play. Right up until the game tells you that your mark is on their way home, and that they were carrying a picture of their husband and a carton of milk.

If you're anything like me, this is enough to turn you on the armed gangs in the area in order to achieve your goals, who it is much easier to hold responsible for the state of affairs in which you have found yourself.

Despite these similarities, the approaches are entirely different, and the genres reflect this. DreamWeb is a story and you're there to hit the beats. You're Ryan, doing what you're told, and you're only real choices are whether or not to keep playing. You're a witness. Metrocide gives you a goal and a set of rules, and then it leaves you to make your own mess.

In this way, Metrocide is more reminiscent of the early Syndicate and Grand Theft Auto games, which is a comparison I drew in the review. DreamWeb, on the other hand, is not like anything else that I've played.

If you're interested in playing DreamWeb, it is still illegal in Australia (it was never granted classification), but it can be downloaded for free from the ScummVM (which you'll probably need to run it) website. There are some other games available for free on the site, inclduing the incredible Beneath a Steel Sky, which is another amazing science fiction game.

Metrocide, if you're interested in that fairly excellent thing, is still available through Steam, Good Old Games, Humble, Greenman Gaming, Gamersgate, and the App Store.

Some free Dick!

So, Philip K is pretty much the literary boss as far as I am concerned. In so many ways he poisoned the well, forcing the rest of us to have to make do drawing our muse-water from other less impressive wells. This hasn't stopped people from trying to drink from the well he frequented, but we see the stains at their lips and the wet coughing that belies the weakening beneath the surface, though still soft, has begun to interfere with the smooth delivery of the message. The message in this case revolved predominantly around paranoia, fear, death, war, morality, the divine and the boundaries of self. PKD excelled, because he wrote about things that were true for him.

His relationship with the human machine, with all its whirring parts, dark haired girls and representative governments, was predominantly based on the extreme opposite of trust. Not that his approach called for revolution, but came closer to the approach that one might have toward gravity if one were to live their entire life in some kind of floating castle. You would take precautions, and perhaps only spend as little time standing right on the edge as was required. This relationship caused Dick a number of problems involving both copyright registration and taxation throughout his life. Due in no small part to this seemingly abysmal aptitude for submitting correctly completed forms to the government a handful of his early short stories and novelettes are now in the public domain.

There are a couple of lists floating about that range from eleven or so stories to nearly thirty. From what I can make out, there are definitely about twenty. Just less than. These free stories mostly come from his first three years of publication ('52, '53 and '54), but some include stories from right up until 1957. For the most part these stories are obscur early works that never really gained much recognition, but "Second Variety", "Adjustment Team" and "The Golden Man" are amongst them, which were adapted into Screamers, The Adjustment Bureau and Next, respectively. None of these were particularly watchable films (with the disputable exception of Screamers), but the source material is in each case a far better exploration and realisation of the concepts presented.

More importantly the list of free Dicks also includes "Beyond Lies the Wub", "The Skull" and "Piper in the Woods", which are far better examples of both his early work and of early salvos into the concepts he would go full scale on later in his career.

If you teach English or creative writing and you want to talk to your class about points of view and perspective, you need "Beyond Lies the Wub" in your life. If you want to behold the first ever published story of a giant of a genre, you need "Beyond Lies the Wub" in your life. It is a clean and elegant short story that is structured like a joke.

"Piper in the Woods" is a pleasant mix of 1950s science fiction and European mythology that you might catch yourself thinking about whenever you wish you could just go outside for little while and sit on the grass.

"The Skull" is Philip K Dick's earliest story about religion (particularly Christianity) and self-determinism vs pre-determinism. This early on we see him start to take steps into the territory that would later yield all his religion-in-a-box themes during the sixties and seventies and finally become the VALIS trilogy. While those specific elements aren't present in "The Skull", it still represents an approach to the topic that would allow him to write the way he did.

If you are at all interested in the man behind the stories behind Blade Runner and Total Recall, some of his stories can be found in a number of formats on Project Gutenberg, Wikisource and strewn about the interwebs.



For 10 points:
What is the most common name given to Dick's religion-in-a-box?

Everyone? Yes, everyone!

When I was a wee lad of about nine, or thereabouts, I read a few books from the Barsoom Mars series by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Though I have carried this around in my head ever since, it has been only recently that it was jostled to the forefront of my mind and I felt the need to say something about it. This is no doubt due in no small part to the ad campaign for John Carter, which hits Australian cinemas tomorrow.

I loved these books. I always thought that I got them from my cousin, who passed on many of his books to me. This may have actually been arranged by our parents and been without his knowledge, leaving him to wonder where all of his books were going. I believed that this was how I must have acquired the few Barsoom books that I had, but I recently discovered that he hasn't read them. I distinctly remember not reading A Princess of Mars first because it didn't sound nearly as interesting as The Warlord of Mars.

There were a number of reasons that the Barsoom series might be appealing to a lad of about nine, or thereabouts. It is full of sword fights, high adventure, amazing battles, ancient mysteries, fabulously monstrous aliens, and not a small amount of nudity. As E.R. Burroughs presents it, everyone on Mars is naked! The heroes don't wear pants, the princesses don't wear pants, and the giant aliens, whether they are green, red, white or kangaroo men, certainly don't wear pants. Discovering this made A Princess of Mars seem a lot more interesting, and it also made my reading them feel somewhat clandestine. I was starting to be curious about 'the ladies' and here they were. Naked. Naked in words.

I'm not at all bothered by the apparent lack of nudity in the upcoming film. I say apparent as I haven't yet seen it. Actually I know "a guy", he worked on it, and he swears there isn't any nudity. The aliens in the ads look pretty naked, but I didn't question him too closely on this. Perhaps Disney sees them like horses. No one ever wonders why the horses don't get pants. I would never expect a film based on this series to stay true to the original costuming, regardless of whether Disney was involved or not. It really would be a lot of nudity. There isn't really a point to be made here. I think some part of me just wanted to bring up the naked martians of my youth.

It is also worth mentioning that most of E.R. Burroughs' works are now in the public domain, a great many of which are available from Project Gutenberg, and many of them are also available free from the iTunes Store.

That is all.