A Measure of Mud

Hey, guess what game I'll be talking about in a few days!

Trudging through that dust-bowl brought to mind an old Sylvester Stallone movie titled Lock Up that I caught a couple of times way back when, and which has seemingly faded from everyone's memory. Not unjustifiably, either. Ostensibly a prison movie, but without much to say about justice or prison life, but nonetheless overstating everything it didn't have to say, every damn minute of every damn scene. Dialogue sounds like placeholder for an actual script. It belabored each and every shot and even the soundtrack somehow managed to consistently mismatch its mood. Aside from that it's Stallone flexing his way through a litany of manly cliches in quintessential '80s fashion: power tools, car, tossing a ball, body-slamming, punching, protecting his mate, squaring off against a standard-issue less-manly-therefore-bad villain. If you want a highlights reel, keep in mind they're not lying when they say those are the movie's best scenes. The flick seems to have flopped, badly.

 

Yet somehow I always held a modest soft spot for it. Maybe just because I saw it when I was twelve or something and didn't know better. Maybe its the pretty decent fights with lots of unsophisticated, grunting violence, the sort of which you've seen too little in the post-Matrix decades. But looking at those few scenes now, I think Stallone got upstaged by the real star of the show: that muddy prison yard! It squelches. It stretches across the frame. It encompasses the men's own drab inmate duds and the dun concrete walls. Characters slip and fall in it. It spatters and clings and sits heavy and implacable. This is your world, creature of mud.

Such drab beigeness can be doubly fraught in an interactive medium. Where a movie director can force action in the mud, a game designer risks the player stopping and looking around to ask 'what the hell am I doing here' every minute of gameplay. Indeed, I've bashed a few titles here on the blog for just such hollow environments. But I've more often praised the ones than manage to pull it off. A good designer always has an answer in mind for what the hell you're doing there. As above, he dangles a monument off in the distance to grab your attention and let you get your bearings. Or slopes and sweeps the terrain to make you wonder what's over the next rise. Or supplies suggestive wind/water/traffic motion carrying your attention across the landscape. Even if your immediate surroundings feel empty, you are made to think of something beyond the nothing, made to value the steps you take.

 

The Shawshank Redemption for instance had opera and a library to offset the mud. Lock Up lacked them.