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In 1993, Cyan published a game called Myst marooning the nascent gaming world onto a mysterious island whose parts interacted like some sinister engine waiting to re-stoked after countless years un-used. The cover featured a perspectival overview of the island, with a shadowy man falling down towards it. The island was the game, the player the shadow- a suggestive paradigm for the adventure genre of gaming in which the world of the game was something to fall into and become immersed in. Other games had immersed players in fantasy worlds before (since at least Zork! ) but none had used the state of the art 3d renderings that the Miller Brothers used for Myst. Today’s Avatar world owes some of its lush, fluorescent environment to Myst because Myst established the ideas that futuristic virtual worlds should be colorful and immersive.

Still from Avatar

Still from Myst (Compare with Avatar)

But none of this is what haunts me about Myst. Instead, I am suddenly awakening to Myst’s importance on a cultural semiotic level, where Myst becomes a sign for a series of changes in computer programming paradigms and societal ideas about the power of video games to be

1. literary
2. challenging, and enigmatic
3. a space of reflection on the very fabric of video games and computing that were essential for its construction

narrative decodes media structure

Like the cahiers du cinema’s belief that certain films had tropes which deconstructed the fabric (and thus ficitious engines) of cinema, I believe that Myst contained a focus on a trope- the trope of linking or hyperlinking- which in review reveals the very fabric of Myst’s player experience. In Myst, the player is allegedly transported by a link in a book to the world of Myst. Later we discover that this is part of a secret art- an art of writing books that build portals to new worlds whose attributes are controlled by the books author. The tension in Myst, is between two family members who have each abused this skill to isolate themselves from the other, attempting to gain control of the other by mis-linking their kin into an inescapable world. With intertextuality thus made a central theme, the player is invited to navigate the puzzles and “ages” of Myst as thought he were a reader, moving through lines of signs (textual and ludic) in this game space.

hypercards & hyperlinks

Reading Myst as a story of links brings us to the very construction of the game itself. At the time it was developed, Myst employed a cutting edge technology called HyperCard which essentially used still images of Myst landscapes in related progressions or stacks. Clicking one area of a two path fork for instance would bring the player into a new child stack of the fork image, creating a ludic structure not unlike Borges’ Garden of Forking Paths (and the critical reading of this short story for hypermedia by Waldrip-Fruin & Monfort). In short, the game was a series of images (which could be read as signs) which were really just links to other images- hyperlinks more specifically, which were gaining great importance to the computer world in e-literature and in data browsing (soon also in web browsing).

links as computer tactic made ludic

Thus a game about linking and making worlds within links and through links was also a game comprised entirely of links. We must wonder if Myst has any value without the inherent schema and structure provided both narratively and conceptually by linking. What, if any value should be assigned to the individual signs (images) which are only valuable as a progression from or to something else. In this reading, a classic conclusion of semiotics surfaces- that the meaning of any individual sign is co-produced by contextual signs (previous and future signs) which are all part of the signs that this image is not. The world of Myst cannot be represented by a screenshot, for it is always movement through the screenshots that gives the game its purpose and signature experiential mise en scene.