Hacker Cinema
Myst
2019 · Film · short · 15 min
Directed by Narcisa Hirsch
"The world is a tarantula ... a big, dark tarantula, moving around weaving its own web." A journey into myths and origins of the world with the grand dame of Argentine avant-garde cinema. See the Earth as it really is: A marble spinning in a sea of eternity.
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4 comments on Hacker News
For sure. One of the big questions for me is "what does the viewer understand?" So much of modern film is very quick. There's low redundancy. So if you miss a look or a motion, you're lost. If you can't be sure where the viewer was looking, you create a lot of uncertainty about what they know. So look-anywhere entertainment will have to have a much lower information rate, much higher redundancy, or allow the viewer to control the pacing. That sounds a lot more like Myst than John Wick.
The game Myst was originally written in HC, and a game engine (Mohawk) had to be written for Windows to provide similar functionality in order to port it. There's a documentary about it: https://youtu.be/EWX5B6cD4_4 Definitely one of the rare indie game success stories. They really poured themselves into making it as awesome and expansive as technology would allow. IIRC, they're still writing games for fun.
My daughters are 6 and 8. One of the biggest questions they have before starting any new game is "can I be a girl?" Even in Minecraft, their favorite, they try to dress up the character as much as possible. They're terribly disappointed when where are no girl characters and offhand, they only bought/play one game without a girl character (GTA V, though we skip the missions which contain the questionable for kids content).
Even in Myst, they asked/pretend the main character is a girl (though the intro makes it rather clear that's not the case).
It's really surprising to me, since as a boy I often chose female characters and didn't really think about it. But game devs could easily be losing money by alienating so much of the market. (Though girl characters for purchase, so long clearly identified in demos or marketing materials, is probably a cynical way to fix the situation. Spending $5 to make my daughters enjoy a game is an automatic buy.)
And it extends further, too. When buying a ThinkPad for my 6-yr-old, she really wanted a colored one. Even when explaining it's a superior platform, how it'll hook into her audio hardware, etc., she was only OK with the platform after I said we could get one of those vinyl skins printed up for her ThinkPad, so it wouldn't be all black.
Maybe this is all well-known, but it's just amazing to see how strong the "feminine drive" is, essentially naturally, at such s young age. (We severely restrict the amount of shitty girls kid's TV shows, no Barbie, no Disney products, biggest toys are LEGO, etc.)
Well, there were plenty of graphics-based adventure games before Must, such as all of the Sierra games, like King's Quest, Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, etc. After that, there were all of the LucasArts SCUMM-based games, before Myst arrived on the scene.
Myst brought two new things to the genre - quicktime movies embedded in-game to make things come to life far more vividly, and the inability to pick things up - a constraint that generally lead to problems being more logical than had typically been the case for adventure games.