A Myst Fan Pleads: No More Biggering!

When my birthday rolled around this year I stunned the family by actually making a request for a specific present, thus sparing them the annual ordeal of figuring out what to get the man who has everything.

What I asked for was Riven, the long-awaited sequel to the revolutionary computer game Myst. Riven was hitting the shelves right about the time I was turning--well, it was available for a timely purchase, and I expected it to be huge. Myst, after all, is the most popular PC game of all time, selling 3.5 million copies and spawning a cottage industry in T-shirts, paperback novelization and other mass-market paraphernalia.

As a rule, I’m not a great consumer of computer games. Flight simulators and Quake-style shoot-’em-ups generally leave me cold. But Myst was different. From the first shot of its depopulated, enigmatic landscape, the game had me hooked. Everything else about it, especially the sinuous music and the confounding puzzles, only underscored the sensation of being drawn into a novel world through the prism of a rare creative mind.

Myst represented the most original exploitation yet of the computer’s ability to simulate, without faithfully reproducing, reality.

Riven on first glance seems to live up to all the hype engendered by the three-year wait since its precursor’s appearance. It’s certainly grander: Where Myst fit onto one CD, Riven needs five. Myst included a single long stretch of full-motion video (at the end, signifying the solution to the game) but Riven has two hours’ worth strewn throughout the story.

Where Myst’s landscapes were devoid of animate beings, Riven’s teem with full-bodied characters and creatures of the imagination. Above all, the first game’s flat surfaces have given way to an incredible wealth of topological detail. Even the swell of the sea has been rendered in superb 3-D.

So why is the game such a bore?

The answer, I fear, lies in a phenomenon most computer pros know as “second-system syndrome” but an engineer of my acquaintance describes succinctly as “biggerism.”

This is what happens when the designers of one successful computer get a crack at a second, and pour into it all the features they were forced to leave out the first time around. The result is a system fancier, fatter, fuller, slower and duller than the first.

Second-system syndrome doesn’t happen only in high tech, of course. It’s why writers follow up their smart, elegant little first novels with 1,200-page epics, or young filmmakers who funded their first independent features with credit cards squander their new Hollywood budgets on exploding helicopters and alien invasions.

Even ventures that start out big have a tendency to get “biggered,” until the whole creative process lumbers to a halt like a Humvee stuck in the mud. “Batman” evolves into “Batman and Robin,” and who wants to see that?

But there’s nothing like high tech for giving people the tools to bigger everything in sight. By the time any nifty program’s version 1.0 has been shipped, the average consumer’s desktop computer has accrued enough new hardware to absorb 3-D graphics and concert-hall sound and 40 new features. Sure enough, the version 2.0 upgrade of that modest program comes out loaded with all the new stuff and moves at a crawl.

The functionality race feeds the digital designers’ desire to play in new and better sandboxes without forcing them to give a moment’s thought to what really engages users in the long run.

One wonders whether the relative difficulty of cooking up a creative story line, as opposed to dressing a game up with digital graphics, is what accounts for the predominance of hyper-violent games on the shelves of Best Buy and CompUSA. These games don’t need a plot, only a pretext; the blood and gore do the rest. If they come in 3-D graphics and 16-bit color, so much the better.

It’s disheartening to see the creators of Myst, the brothers Rand and Robyn Miller, falling prey to the same mentality. Riven is Myst biggered to death. The animation is technically amazing, but it seems to have sucked up and overwhelmed the feel for drama that the Millers once displayed.

I hope I’m not spoiling anybody’s fun (if so, skip the rest of this paragraph) by revealing that at a key moment the action in Riven comes to a grinding halt so the villain Gehn can deliver a soggy and interminable apologia in full-motion video, sounding like the heavy in a James Bond feature just before he drops 007 into the shark tank.

In making Riven more like an action movie, the designers destroyed the qualities that made Myst unique. I doubt I’m the only fan who finds Riven’s puzzles less compelling than those of its precursor.

Riven entirely lacks the spooky sensation you got when trapped in one of Myst’s cul-de-sacs, with liberty granted only upon the solution of a cryptic puzzle. In the sequel, the puzzles have the perverse quality of being more elaborate and less important.

The creators were so eager to have players see their fancy virtual world that they made sure scarcely anything has to be solved to navigate around. But this is supposed to be a game, not a travelogue; there’s no fun in being reduced to a sightseer in a fantasy world, no matter how spectacular.

And what about that fancy rendering? Looking back, it’s clear that the computer graphics of Myst worked to enhance that game’s very mystery. The more “real” the textures feel in Riven, the less special they seem. Yet in pre-release interviews, the Millers and their staff talked mostly about their efforts to realistically reproduce boulders, tree bark and sand.

“So much more is possible,” Richard Vander Wende, one of the designers, dreamily told Wired. “Not everything in Myst was perfect.” (Uh-oh.)

Perhaps he and the Millers did not realize that it’s the very spectacle of creators struggling against the constraints of imperfection that gives great art, and great entertainment, its thrill.

That’s why sonnets have 14 lines, why “The Honeymooners” was staged on a single set, and why Stan Getz alone on his tenor sax is infinitely greater than some clown with a synthesizer sampling every piece in the orchestra.

But doing so much with so little is hard work, and why bother? It’s so much easier to crank up to 16-bit color, map in a few “realistic textures” and wait to be proclaimed a creative genius.

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Times staff writer Michael A. Hiltzik can be reached via e-mail at michael.hiltzik@latimes.com