Life on the Edge

Let's say you get hit by a bus and you didn't even see it coming. One second you're thinking about school or work, the next you're not thinking at all. In the last instant before you die, you are totally unaware that your current thought is your last. You are about to cease to exist, and you have no idea. What's worse, once you're dead, there's no opportunity to realize what happened.

Now let's step back a little. Your brain consists of a mass of neurons all firing and sending signals along. Your consciousness, your current thought, can be entirely captured by taking a snapshot of the neural state and connection pattern of all your neurons at any given time. Each thought you have is succeeded by another and another in a stream of consciousness. Each new thought you have is the result of your current neural state, your current brain chemical state, sensory input you receive from the outside world, and internal stimulus such as hunger and other drives. Each new thought bleeds into the next creating the feeling of continuity of being.

I am going to make the claim that continuity of thought does not necessarily mean you are the same person day to day. In fact, a person's existence could be as fleeting as the duration of one's current neural state. In this case, continuity would be an illusion erected by the echoes of memory.

In other words, your current thought might be your last. You may be facing utter oblivion in the next nanosecond. And just like the bus victim, you wouldn't know it's coming. Under this scheme you are your current thought. You were born just a nanosecond ago, and you will die when you are overtaken by your brain's next thought. And with this new thought will be born a new consciousness to replace you.

Fortunately you can't fathom this, and you have all kinds of evidence to show that your consciousness does have permanence. All this memory floating around proves you've been around since you were born. Right? Unfortunately, the reason you know about your past thoughts is the same reason the bus driver knows that he hit someone. Unfortunately, you won't know you were hit. So enjoy your next nanosecond.

Green Mushroom Award: Death Gate

Death Gate is an incredible adventure game that immerses you in a rich, interactive fantasy world. Put out by Legend Entertainment in 1994, this game has the best story, the best puzzles, the best graphics and the best music of any other adventure game I've ever played.



The Death Gate story is based on the best selling Death Gate Cycle (a series of seven novels) written by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. A race known as the Sartans sunder (read: violently detonate) the world into five separate realms, one for earth, wind, water, and fire, and one used solely to imprison you and your people. Your goal as Haplo of the Patryn race is to explore the other realms and collect each land's magic rune in and effort to undo the damage.



You must pick up objects, learn spells, gather information, and solve puzzles in order to advance. The game plays like Zork, King's Quest or Myst, but features a much more in depth story. Many of the game's puzzles are solved by learning about your unfamiliar surroundings through character interactions. Information is also learned by reading ancient tomes, books and journals you discover along the way. Since each puzzle solution is based on the information you've learned in your travels, all the puzzles in the game make complete sense and are quite satisfying.



The game features a unique interactive spell casting system involving linking runes (magical symbols) together to form rune constructs which represent each spell. Spells range from heating and cooling objects to resurrecting the dead. New spells are learned by watching other wizards cast them, by studying written rune constructs or by adding more runes to known spells. It is often fun to experiment by casting spells on various objects and people and observing the results.

Death Gate shines with its detailed character interactions. When you meet a character, you may ask him a variety of questions, and for each question you will get a unique response. These responses may prompt additional lines of questioning where you can choose from even more conversation topics. Through these dialogs you learn vital information about the people, places and things in each realm.



The text of each conversation is accompanied by the voices of an entire cast of professional voice actors. There is literally hours of prerecorded dialog in the game. As an added bonus, each character's lips move in exact accordance to what is being said. All of this helps create characters that seem more real.



I am a big fan of hand drawn graphics, and this game has some of the best. Although nothing in the game is as good as Keith Parkinson's cover art "Fire Sea", the scenes and characters depicted in Death Gate are amazing. When you have still frames as this game does, 3D graphics can be detrimental. In my opinion early 3D adventure games like Myst don't look as good. There are a few 3D cut scenes in Death Gate which were state of the art at the time, but you can almost count the number of polygons on the screen.

This game holds the #1 spot in my list of best music in a video game. Although it is only midi, the composer is able to create a convincing mood of magic and wonder with over 50 different pieces that play on a variety of themes. That's almost one song for every room in the game!



When you put all this together and add in a fantastic plot you get one hell of a game. This is absolutely one of my all time favorites. It's only drawback is that, like all adventure games, it doesn't have much replay value. This hasn't stopped me from playing it through multiple times though.