ESSAYS ON GAME DESIGN
Essay Five: The Tomb of Myth
A long time ago, in a world far, far away (it now seems), there lived countless milieus in which mythology thrived. In which history was understood, and woven into games like the threads of fate that composed the tapestry of what had come before. There were swords in stone, spears that shattered upon the hides of mythical beasts, shields that were shaken, men humbled and reborn.
Now, far too often in games, history is unknown, lore without mother, legend without meaning, and mythology is the lonely and isolated bastard of no name, and with no familia connection to anything surrounding him, not milieu, not background, not adventure, not ambition, not purpose.
At one time fantasy was birthed in the womb of myth and grew up silent ghosts from resurrecting graels, wyrms whose black ichor made the speech of wild things understandable to men, Gordian knots of wyrd circumstance, giants that contended with gods, dark labyrinths of monstrous chimeras, old and terrible beasts that haunted the wilderness of troubled dreams.
Now everything is a cartoon with superpowers, sprung up as if born from nothing, given birth by no one, restless to go nowhere, doomed to do nothing of any real account. Vapors replace substance, mists replace myth.
We have created a pile of uncertain and wandering loss, chained to a cleft of jagged contrivance, burning upon a pyre of misconception.
What then can you accomplish in a world of mere shadows, and how can you create a future absent anything like a past?
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