"Essay Twenty-Nine: Conversation with Ryan O’Connor"

Serialized specially for The Well-Red Mage, based on the podcast by Wesley Schantz

 
 
 “The following is a contributor post by the Bookwarm Mage.”
Wesley: I wanted first to ask if we could set the record straight on something about your friend and mine, Steven Abel. What was his behavior like during the Double Dash games you guys used to play back in college? What’s your memory of that experience?
 
Ryan: I remember Steve being nothing but a fair and honorable competitor.
 
That’s his memory of it, too, if I recall. I don’t know his exact words, but they were along those lines. Well now that that’s set straight, how’re things going with you? Have you been busy lately traveling to Ireland or up to your cabin in the woods, or anything like that?
 
Yeah, Crystal and I just got back from Ireland a couple months ago! We did a walking tour of the western coast that was really awesome.
 
Is that one you’ve done before, or is that a new destination within Ireland for you?
 
No, it was a new destination. The Dingle Peninsula, which was most recently notable for its Star Wars fame, as it was the set for some of the new movies.
 
Is that where the Giant’s Causeway is, too?
 
No, Giant’s Causeway is up in Northern Ireland, on the northern coast.
 
OK but this one has got the old caves and stuff where they filmed some of the new Star Wars? That’s cool!
 
And some of the dry-laid stone buildings, they’re called beehive huts. We went to one, I think it was a church from the 700s or 800s, still standing… it’s pretty remarkable.

When we were in Dublin on our trip many years ago we didn’t do a lot of that sort of historical stuff as much as we maybe should have. Those kind of things are fascinating; it’s great you’ve gotten to go back since and connect with your family history there.
 
I can’t believe that you would not refer to pubs as being historical!
 
I guess they’re sort of quasi-religious, too, aren’t they? Everything sort of has that subtext when you get down to it… So I want to start with our history as friends. I remember I met you playing four square before school at Forest Oak Middle. By then you were friends with Patrick already somehow, and we became friends playing playground games and video games. And I think we had a few classes together at some point.
 
Sounds vaguely familiar…
 
You were one of the only people that I knew, at that school at least, who had actually played EarthBound, which was my favorite game growing up. I kind of forget now how I even found out about EarthBound. Do you remember how you did?
 
No, that’s something that I’ve long puzzled about. But I do have these distinct memories of living in Florida, before I move to Gaithersburg, and I was playing EarthBound. It must have been the mid-90s. And I wish I remembered, but somehow I got my hands on a cartridge and also the player’s guide.
 
So you got it very early on, then, if it was before the move up there to Maryland.
 
Yeah, and I remember immediately, I think, liking you because you also played EarthBound. I think you may also be the only person I have ever met who has played it totally independent of me.
 
Like without you telling someone else about it and getting them to play it? Yeah, it’s weird to try to–I remember I had neighbors of mine who were a few years older, who played video games like Tetris and Final Fantasy II (at that time I think that was the new one) and like Mario and stuff, and so generally I got into Super Nintendo because of them. But I don’t think they played EarthBound, either, and I don’t know why exactly. Did they actively not want to, or if they just weren’t that interested in it, or hadn’t heard about it? It’s such a unique game. So you’ve gotten other people to start playing it, then have you heard from them what they thought after they started?
 
I feel like most people fizzle out, I want to say like around Threed, or maybe just a little bit after that, when they get to Winters. I definitely think the earlier part of the game is the most interesting and fun and clever. I can’t think of anybody that I know who actually made it all the way through the end, of those that I’ve introduced to it. What about you, have you introduced anybody else and it really stuck with them?
 
I know that it hasn’t for Pat. We talked about this recently when I had him on the show, that he never got that into it, and he talked a little bit about why. Maybe it’s just not the kind of game that he generally gets interested in. And then my friend Steve. I think I must have known him before middle school–it’s all a little hazy right now–but we used to play it all the time, and I know that he really enjoyed it and all. To that about the early part of the game being the better part: do you think that there’s anything that you could do–maybe it wouldn’t have made sense as a kid, but now thinking about it–is there anything you could have done when introducing people to the game to have gotten them to keep playing it and get through some of the monotonous, the weird, like the monkey cave, and tedious parts? What could you say to someone to get them to keep playing, to get through to the end of the game?
 
I think you just hit on it with what you just said about Steve. I definitely think it’s a game best enjoyed in company. Despite it being only one person that can play at a time, it really lends itself to laughter and joking and observation. If you already have played it before and know what to expect and enjoy it, it’s really one thing to play it on your own, but if it’s something that’s totally new and it’s such an odd odd duck, then I think having someone else there with you to play with would help it to stick.
 
And sometimes–that’s the way that the game opens, too. You have this guiding figure in Buzz Buzz, who appears early on to set you going on your quest. So in some respects what you’re describing sounds to me like you would be the little fly or bee or whatever he is, buzzing around getting people to keep going with it.
 
 But hopefully not to get smacked by Pokey’s mom!

Well, that’s the danger, isn’t it? What would that be, then: your eagerness and your enthusiasm getting smacked down by the flabby hand of reality? Or something like that. There’s definitely a risk to be too–to show too much love about something. It makes you vulnerable. That’s my theory about why Buzz Buzz gets defeated so ignominiously, so dishonorably there.
 
He’s too real? 
 
He’s giving too much of himself. He’s put himself out there too much.
 
It takes a bit of yourself to travel through time.
 
That’s the part of the game I’m at now! So at the end of the game, you come full circle and you go back to Onett. You have to get the piece of the meteorite so they can finish the Phase Distorter so you can travel through time. And you remember what happens before you can travel back to the past? They tell you–Dr Andonuts gets very upset about this, he sort of walks off and you have to talk to him again–you can’t go back in your physical body. You have to be put into a robot. It’s sort of like… well, I don’t know exactly what to make of that! I was playing just today as my homework for this week, trying to do another episode since I’m coming up to the very end here, and it strikes me that there’s something about going into the past that you have to let go of a part of yourself. In Buzz Buzz’s case it makes him vulnerable. He goes alone (which I also found interesting) and becomes that guiding figure for you. What do you think about that?
 
He did travel alone, and he ended up getting squished. Thinking back to the end of the game, maybe that’s why Ness and his friends succeed. Because they can rely on each other, they have each other to lean on and support.
 
I like that theme of the game a lot, actually. The friendship between these complete strangers. It’s an integral part of saving the world, somehow. It’s always sort of been a little mysterious to me how people become friends, especially when you’re a kid, and trying to think back later it’s so long ago that you literally can’t remember. But then making friends later, like in college or something, it’s sort of a mysterious process, right? How does that take place? To me it’s something like this process of the future reaching out to interact with the present, somehow. It’s like you can tell there’s something about this person, that you’re going to get along with them, and that future state somehow has an impact on you in the moment. Do you think that’s possible?
 
I definitely think that’s true. At the beginning of our chat, you’d started to talk about your memories of when you and I first met, and the more I think about it, maybe it’s almost unreal. Maybe almost out-of-body, so to speak…
 
Well you know you change so much over time, in some sense you really have changed your body. You had a different physical form in the past from the physical form you are now, to go back to that idea.
 
Once you were some sort of robot, and now you’re fully fleshed out, I suppose!
 
I love the idea that Buzz Buzz with his coming from the future to the past in a sense represents that, too. So there’s friendship, I think we’ve got that; and then courage, the stick-to-itiveness we talked about a little bit; so what about wisdom? In what sense, if any, do you feel like this game teaches us something about wisdom?
 
… It’s a good question…
 
Do you feel like, as a kid, you were learning things from it as you played? Or you played it just to enjoy it and it was just fun?
 
Certainly when you’re a kid–I certainly appreciate EarthBound more as an adult, because you understand more of the references and the jokes, how some of the jokes have multiple layers. I just played it because I enjoyed it, I think. As for wisdom, I want to say there’s something about how, you know, you do travel the whole earth, right? I think that’s one of the cornerstones of wisdom, is perspective. You can gain a lot of perspective by traveling to far-off lands and meeting people that eat stinky sauerkraut, or point you to the pyramids, or in the big city, you know? So maybe there’s something there.
 
That’s the way that the player’s guide is set up, which I thought was really cool even as a kid. Like a travel guide, and there’s little newspaper clippings from each town that appears in the game. I totally agree, that part of the playing and just doing stuff, normally we don’t think of that as wisdom, but it is. That’s a good example, that travel–by going somewhere, by doing something, that’s the learning process happening.

While we’re on the subject of travel: I never bothered to look it up or found out or anything, but why do you think they selected “EarthBound” to be the English, western name for the game?
 
I know a little bit about the translation. I have this book, Legends of Localization, but I’d have to look it up if it’s in there about the actual title… You know that this is a sequel, right, it’s actually called “Mother 2”? But there was no “Mother” in America, and I don’t think that it necessarily would make much sense to translate literally even if there was. “EarthBound,” I’ve always found it to be a really evocative name. There’s a few different ways you can take it. Either as “you’re stuck on the Earth,” that’s how it’s usually used, but in this game it seems to be more along the lines of “you’re bound to the Earth.” You have this connection with it. In a way, it fits the real title Mother because that a pretty good description of the Earth. Obviously, it also has a more immediate meaning in the way the game progresses. Ness always has to call home when periodically he gets homesick, and his mom is the only thing that will get him back focused on his journey when he’s talking to her. That’s just one of the things that comes to mind about that. Back to the traveling element: definitely in the way that your journey builds on the Sound Stone, that’s the quest that you’re on at first, but ultimately that Sound Stone disappears. You get to a certain point and you have all the melodies, and then you have to go to Magicant in your mind, and when you wake up from that, the Sound Stone has disappeared, it’s gone somehow. I take that to mean that Ness has integrated that experience into himself. It’s no longer outside. Then the homestretch of the game: you do the meteorite thing, you do the time-travel thing, and then, well, then you’re at the end. Do you remember when you first got to the end of the game, did it freak you out? Did you know what to do?
 
I feel like the player’s guide tells you what to do, doesn’t it? It gives you sort of unusually precise instructions, is that right? I feel like as a kid I was probably let down a little bit. What is it that you do, just have Paula pray five or ten times or something? Right, not to spoil the ending or anything like that…
 
It’s cool, I tried to tell people up front that this isn’t going to be a spoiler-free podcast, so hopefully they aren’t too sad. But like you said, the player’s guide tells you what to do, yeah, yeah, but what do you make of it, that the way that you win against the final boss is not by fighting but by praying?
 
It’s almost like countercultural or subversive or something. That’s just not how video games end. With the final boss, you know, the final boss, you beat him down and stand on top of him and raise your sword or your gun or your baseball bat in triumph!
 
Right, your robotic hand raising the baseball bat in triumph. Right! But it strikes me that there is something kind of cool about– well, first of all, if you try to win by fighting, you can’t. You will lose. So anyone who didn’t have the players guide and didn’t know what to do, I think, would be probably really stuck, until out of desperation, maybe, they would try to pray. And then they would realize that they actually did that, they were actually sort of praying when they used the Pray option. Which I think is pretty wild… You remember when we played Metal Gear, right, Metal Gear Solid and its sequel, where it does that kind of meta thing to involve the player? But I think EarthBound did that in a really interesting way with various things throughout the game. A lot of them are kind of jokes, but this one hits home.
 
Yeah, it really suits the character of the game and the designers and what they were going for, right.
 
I think so. It’s intriguing to me that you gain power from the Earth and your travels, but ultimately what brings peace and saves the world is the connection that you’ve made with other people throughout your journey. All these people that you’ve met–
 
And also–I’ve only beaten it once or twice post-high school, or post-undergrad, or something like that– but I found that when I got to that point it was almost a relief to be able to stop bashing the attack button and pulling out Freeze Omega or whatever. There’s a relief to be able to put all that down and just embrace all the connections that you’ve made throughout the journey.
 
I think as a kid you might not notice that as much, but yeah! There’s a great value in going back and playing these games, at least EarthBound. I’m going to try to explore a few other ones, but I wanted to start with EarthBound because I thought it was the one that had the biggest impact on me as a kid. I’ve gone back and played it since then and I find it really rewarding. I just think it’s great, so I want to share it with people. That’s why I’m kind of curious, what do you think the best way to do that is, to bring more people into contact with this fantastic experience of playing this game?
 
I’ve yet to look a thing like this up, but I wonder– maybe in concert with this podcast, if you could somehow stream like on Twitch or something playing EarthBound and you kind of have a running commentary, running dialogue with viewers or participants?
 
That would be cool, that kind of live interaction element, which is what the podcast hasn’t got. Except when I get calls from my friends. It’s something that I would love to do more with, that live interaction. That is a good idea.
 
What games are you thinking about exploring down the road?
 
The next series I want to do is going to be on a book instead. It’s going to be Philip Pullman’s Golden Compass. I’m going to start with that to take a step back from games, but to look at that kind of in the same way but I’ve been doing with EarthBound and see what kinds of things I can dig into with that. But then I do want to come back to Xenogears for the PlayStation. That was one that I thought– as a kid playing it, I felt like there was a lot more going on in that game than I really could grasp. So I want to revisit it. And I never actually beat that game. I always got towards the end and then lost steam.
 
That’s the game with the mechs, right, the mech battles?

Yeah, it’s super over-the-top. It’s got very little of the humor that makes EarthBound so awesome, but it has got some very deep– at least, it makes some pretensions to have some very deep themes. So I want to see how it holds up on a second look. And with my friends Alex and Vince, we’re talking about Final Fantasy VII as a group right now. Every week we do like an hour’s worth of gameplay. So that’s going on concurrently. I find that game interesting and cool, but it’s not one of my personal favorites, necessarily. But I’m happy to get to discuss it with those fellows. For you, I remember that you always used to like Final Fantasy Tactics a lot. What was it about Tactics that was so enthralling to you?
 
I think it was how much thought you could put into a single battle. I guess the mental gymnastics of juggling all the different variations and how to optimize your way through a battle, stuff like that. I remember even as a kid really appreciating the difficulty. It’s a game that wasn’t impossible by any stretch of the imagination, but there were definitely battles that I had to restart two or three times because they were just hard. They’re hard to overcome for a variety of different reasons. It’s like chess, kind of the same thing that attracted me to chess growing up, too.
 
That’s what I was just going to bring up. This sounds like, the strategy of it or thinking down the line what will happen if you do this, sounds like chess.
 
And I did love, too, the setting. There’s definitely something romantic about knights and wizards and that sort of thing. I think that setting for whatever reason as well has always resonated for me, just being able to engage in that type of world.

So you take your interest in history, and you actually studied archaeology, right, and worked in the field a bit? Is that something that you still read up on and study now?
 
Yeah, you know I’m lucky to be married to an archaeologist, so I still get to engage with that half of my brain or whatever. I still volunteer and go dig with her once in a while and read articles along those lines.
 
How do you think that– is that something you consider akin to the fantasy setting? Is the past a kind of fantasy realm, in a way?
 
I think that’s a really good question. Yeah, I think to some extent the past is like a fantasy. That’s probably a good word. It’s definitely human nature to kind of airbrush out the crappy parts of the past and only remember the good times or whatever. I guess I don’t mean fantasy necessarily in a bad way; there’s stuff worth forgetting. There is some sort of parallel, I think you’ve hit on something.
 
I’ve been thinking about where games sort of fit into the traditional genres of literature. Like poetry and plays and then your various kinds of fiction and novels and all that. If you were to try to make a genre for this, does Final Fantasy Tactics really fit into the same genre as EarthBound or Final Fantasy VII and all those? Or is it kind of its own thing?
 
That’s kind of the hard part, right? Where does the game design part fit in with how you categorize it with elements of the story? I think Tactics has a similar focus on themes such as courage and wisdom and fidelity, but you’re right, the gameplay is so radically different that to some extent, do they belong in the same category as a work of art and works of game, or what have you?
 
If you look at really old historical documents, they’re basically like what we would consider fantasy. Imaginary. You get mythical elements and legendary elements all mixed together willy-nilly. I wonder if we’re sort of at that point in our game development, video games that is, they’re such a new thing we haven’t really hashed out the boundaries, maybe, between different forms. Working out what are the possibilities, what kind of stories can be told in what kind of ways? I never liked playing Final Fantasy Tactics as much, though I definitely was fascinated by the story that it has. There’s a betrayal thing going on, and in that way it’s very medieval, that was my fascination with it.
 
“Medieval” is definitely the right word for that.
 
 Is that one that you would want to do a podcast on, to talk more about at some point?
 
I don’t know. Maybe. That’s an interesting idea. I’ve always felt that the world of Tactics, Ivalice, was one of the missed chances for Square Soft to really explore more fully. I was always really disappointed that they didn’t make more games set in that world that’s got kind of more deeply thought out themes.
 
To allow you to explore more!
 
I have to chew on that.
 
Because part of what I do with this course, you know, is to try to get all my friends to make courses as well. There’s too many things out there for one person to try to talk about them all. So like with Ben, I tried to get him to do a Zelda one; with Steve who’s interested in these escape the room type games, the 9 9 9 series… Think about it!
 
Yeah. I definitely enjoyed you and Steph’s talk about Stardew Valley. A lot of what she was saying about it I could definitely relate to, because I think I had a minor Stardew Valley addiction there for two and a half weeks. It got pretty serious and I had to detox, go cold turkey.
 
That is the danger.
 
I was going to ask you, other than EarthBound and Final Fantasy, are you playing anything else right now?
 

My friend Ben sent me a game on the computer, Where the Water Tastes like Wine. It’s a computer game, so I have to sit at the computer and that always sort of feel like work for me, so I haven’t got too far, but I’m playing that soon. These days I sort of only play games if I can justify it to myself by saying that I’m learning something while doing it. I really think that it’s not entirely bullshit, but that I actually do come up with cool ideas when I’m sitting there really thinking about, it not just playing. It’s definitely a way to get around the feeling that I’m totally wasting my time. Like I said, there’s just too much stuff: too many books, too many things to do. Even totally outside of art and stuff, well you could go outside, or go out and hang out with people…
 
Go along the Spokane River! I’ve definitely played games as an adult for an hour or two, or three, and got to the end of it and been like, Man, I really wish I had that time back. So it’s good that you being deliberate with your game playing.
 
I’m trying, I’m trying! Well anyway, I certainly am glad that in some small way this has allowed me to reconnect with some friends I don’t talk to near enough. So I really appreciate your time, and please do keep sending your thoughts and questions and stuff in when you get the chance. It’s good to hear from you!
 
Definitely, thanks for having me on!
 
 

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