In the summer of 1995, when I had returned from a year and half in Berlin, I moved into an apartment in the Castro area of San Francisco – one that was big enough to hold all my books (just barely as it happened), but which I could nevertheless afford.
I didn't realize at first that the combination of those two elements meant that it was basically a dump – indeed that it had recently been a very real, very serious dump, a crack-and-speed house that had a new apartment manager who was trying to get the drug dealers to move out. In between the broken door, the yelling and the police in the middle of the night, the guy across the hall disintegrating and ending up on the street, and the poor schizoid upstairs who refused to take his medications pounding on the floor with his fists at night for hours on end, I ended up doing part-time secretarial work for that manager – a young lawyer, friendly and viciously calculating by turns (although he never seemed to realize he was being the second; some of the stories of how his family behaved to each other, a history cluttered with lawsuits, fights and festive get-togethers, gave me insight into a very different kind of family life than the one to which I was accustomed).
In his quiet office, sitting by the phone and not having much to do, I discovered the game Myst, which had been released nearly two years earlier. I hadn't played many computer games, and I certainly got an unrealistic view of the genre from this one – complicated, poetic, science-fiction-y-and-fantasy-like, with a quiet, shimmering soundtrack that encouraged meditation over its puzzles.
It was a huge success, as everyone knows. Oddly enough most of the gaming industry, when they tried to imitate it, were blind to its chief elements – intelligent and complex puzzles, slow and relaxed game play, aesthetically pleasing artwork, music and ideas. Or maybe they just couldn't imitate any of that; perhaps it's like the film and television industries – when something beautifully done is successful, the industries try to imitate various elements stolen from it, while seeming to entirely miss the poetry, the sensuality, the richness of the original.
I haven't played many games since; despite buying the ensuing series of games by its creators, I didn't complete the others, as I remember anyway. But Myst, in that scruffy apartment building, in a daily life that had suddenly become more miserable and even more shockingly dangerous than it had ever been for me, was the most fascinating of private worlds in which to hide....
And now it has been ported to the iPad and the iPhone, and with all these new screens in the house I can get back to it once again – having even found the little paper notebook where I kept the notes and maps and puzzles. Of course the graphics are not as polished as they would be now; the game was never really upgraded, there were too many vast shifts in basic techniques of computer and program design over the past fifteen years.
But, like art works and books in other eras, the memory of the experience is comforting – there will be a future, I suppose, when the same subtle aesthetic pleasure is attached to the memory of new kinds of virtual escapes....
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