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A friend gave me this as a prompt to help me out of a creative rut so, I guess… Bananasaurus rex.

#art #digital art #illustration #bananasaurus rex

On the best video game of both 2012 and 2013.

Because it came out in 20121 and was then ported to the PS3 and Steam a year later, Spelunky holds a pretty solid claim to the title of "best video game of 2012 and 2013." Ever since it came out on PS3, I've been playing it. A lot.

Like, seriously. A lot.

While most challenging video games of the sort temper their difficulty with the possibility of memorization,2 Spelunky offers no such reprieve, as the levels are all procedurally generated, and thus essentially randomized.3 The only way to get better at Spelunky, thus, is to actually become better at it. This stands in stark contrast to basically any video game that features "experience points" or stat boosts or anything else to artificially change difficulty level.

Spelunky features a robust XP and leveling system, but it happens inside your heart.

— Ben Kuchera (@BenKuchera) August 8, 2013

This has certain advantages in its way, which I'll come back to in a bit. For now, though, let me direct you toward Polygon's fascinating writeup on Bananasaurus Rex's solo eggplant run, easily the most interesting moment of the year in video game news, but similarly the least obviously so.

I won't rehash the article, because it's already an outstanding piece of writing that explains everything you need to know, but the main takeaway is this: Lots of people play a game called Spelunky, and yet very few of them are playing the same game. The learning curve for Spelunky looks much less like a single-player video game or a puzzle than it does a highly competitive endeavor like chess, Street Fighter, or tennis.

In a way, this is because, more so than in almost any other extant single-player game of any sort, you are actually playing against the game. A beginning player will be playing a version of Spelunky wherein the main goal is simply to delay death for as long as possible, hoping, perhaps, to achieve a glimpse of the Jungle beyond the Mines. An intermediate player will still be playing against the game, but with the goal of making it all the way to the end, trying to finally win, rather than simply trying to not lose for as long as possible. An advanced player will have likely learned from someone, somewhere, that the end they'd made it to was only nominally so, and instead hunt down the obscure methods and steps required to make it through a much harder game, to a much harder ending.

Bananasaurus Rex, as demonstrated in his videos, is no mere advanced player. He is a Spelunky god — he is The One — playing not so much against the game but against the designers themselves. The game he's playing is as different from the advanced player as the one the advanced player is playing is from the beginning player. Not satisfied with simply finding what was planted there to be discovered, the solo eggplant run takes someone dedicated enough to discover errors in the programming and other oversights and to then incorporate them into a game plan. He has essentially found holes in the Matrix that can be manipulated to his advantage, allowing the previously thought to be impossible to become feasible (if extremely exciting and tense).

Seriously, go read that Polygon article.

Now, fans of roguelikes are no doubt familiar with the nature of this skill progression. Spelunky is arguably simply the most accessible roguelike, being not just fascinatingly complex as the genre tends toward, but legitimately fun, and this is of course a valid argument to make. It is also neither here nor there, of course.

The important thing is that Spelunky is accessible enough to serve as an introduction to the roguelike mindset, and there's a lot to learn from Spelunky.

You see, when you play a game of Spelunky, the levels are procedurally (read: randomly) generated on the spot. That means that there's no "design" to the layout. There's no — if you'll pardon the expression — intelligent designer's hand at work. Like certain tongue twisters,4 this is something that actually winds up being more of a tripping point the better you'd otherwise be at video games. Spelunky involves — requires — unlearning a whole host of assumptions you never even realized you held.5

For instance, it takes a new player a minimum of a few days to really grasp the fact that there is no guarantee of anything worthwhile, nor even safety, at the end of that path that branches off to the side, away from the path to the exit. It takes much longer to get into the habit of making sure you aren't on top of a jar when you whip it open, because often enough it contains not valuable gems, but instead a snake or a scorpion.

Spelunky, in short, can teach us about life. Nothing is ever guaranteed, players learn if they choose to. Good habits are developed through consistency, not through the choice to make a conscious effort when it "matters."6 Confidence without competence will ruin you. Proper use of limited resources is key. No matter how good things get, they can't last forever, and it rarely matters anyway unless you have a goal in mind. Don't mess with scorpions. Sometimes, there's nothing to be gained from not running away. Sometimes, there's a lot to be gained by building the skills to no longer fear what would otherwise be dangerous.7

Because Spelunky offers only a single chance in each run — no way to continue, and no way to save your progress — death is simultaneously cheap and yet painful, coming generally either due to immediately obvious player error or immediately obvious bad luck. It is willing to give ourselves as many second chances as we are willing to give ourselves. It is remarkably fair, but never actually kind.8

And if we choose to, we can learn to handle ourselves better in our lives by putting into practice what it teaches us. You can choose to beat yourself up endlessly for accidentally dropping onto spikes, dying instantly, despite having that jetpack and a fantastic $80,000 accumulated right before getting to the Black Market,9 filled with regret at a plan that very suddenly, through no fault of anyone else's, collapsed right when everything seemed to be going so well.

Or you can choose to pick yourself up, take a deep breath, and start again, a little wiser, no worse off, in the end, than just after waking from a wonderful dream.

Or at least the HD remake; the original version for Windows was and still remains free. ↩︎

Turns out that while I can't quite absolutely nail level 1 of Ikaruga from memory anymore, I can still do a pretty solid job on it after years of not playing it, as I learned several months ago when it showed up on the Nesica multi-game cabinets. ↩︎

The layouts themselves, rather, are essentially randomized, but after a few times around, players will begin to recognize reused set-pieces within the levels, but these are still connected by randomized tunnels and corridors. ↩︎

My favorite in Japanese is "surgery room," or "手術室" (shujutsushitsu). ↩︎

Which is what makes them assumptions, of course. ↩︎

Yes, I'm looking at you, everyone who can't be bothered to do things like basic punctuation and spelling on, say, Facebook. When you actually need to not look like an illiterate fool, like when you're producing writing of any sort that will be seen by anyone who matters to your future, it's really best that it come naturally without thinking about it, rather than being closer to "my cousin taught me how to drive stick one afternoon when I was in high school, so I think I should be able to handle this half-hour drive." ↩︎

After 150 seconds, or two and a half minutes, the Ghost will appear when playing Spelunky. It is, as the name suggests, a large ghost that will enter from either the left or right edge of the playfield, whichever is closer, and proceed toward the player character at a slowish but very consistent pace, passing through walls when doing so. Up to an intermediate level of gameplay, the Ghost presents a sort of implicit time limit, discouraging players from spending too much time and being overly cautious all the time. With practice and a bit of boldness, though, the Ghost can be taken advantage of: it moves slowly and predictably, and if the player avoids getting cornered, the Ghost can be more or less indefinitely avoided. More importantly, though, when the Ghost passes over a large gemstone (usually worth in-game money, used to buy things at stores), it turns into a diamond, significantly increasing its monetary value to the player. Consequently, high-level players will deliberately set up the stage to maximize mobility when the Ghost is around, as well as avoid picking up large gems, in order to pick them up afterward. Bananasaurus Rex's run in the linked article features this in a few of the earlier stages, with some fantastically dry commentary by the player in response to inexperienced viewers who may not know what he's planning ("Does anyone know how to pick up gems?" "If you walk over them, they disappear, so don't do that."). ↩︎

I'd describe it as a Libertarian video game, except that its world is internally consistent and makes some sort of sense when examined critically. ↩︎

Not that I am bitter. ↩︎

#Video games #Spelunky #Life lessons #Bananasaurus Rex #Overthinking