http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/9713372/looking-back-game-myst-20th-anniversary
Much of the article wonders why these sort of games disappeared. Each of Myst's sequels saw fewer and fewer sales, and there were few, if any similar games from other studios that had any success to speak of.
"The story — which would eventually become so complex it would fill three companion novels — was almost an afterthought. "We're not game designers; we were place designers, so we just started drawing maps, and the maps kind of fueled the story," said Rand.
...
"It was this leapfrog kind of experience, where we would draw a building and say, 'What's in that building, and why is that in the building?' And it just so happened that it was much more satisfying as we built this space to start to build a story behind it. It wasn't necessary, but for some reason in our minds, if there wasn't a story, [the game] lost some kind of credibility."4 It seems ironic in 2013, as games are gaining critical legitimacy arguably because of their increasingly sophisticated narratives, to find out that the developers who had supposedly changed everything in 1993 had to force themselves to justify the addition of a narrative."
I think the answer is right there, like The Purloined Letter, hidden in plain sight. People didn't respond to Myst because of the story (for sure, I didn't, and I was obsessed - I ran off and created dozens of my own crude maps on paper of my own "worlds"). Myst was successful because people were responding to the aesthetic experience. The story is actually rather clunky (although I read all three of the novels and they were okay - especially the first one). But the aesthetic experience is remarkably rich (before you disagree, remember, this was at a time when CGI of this quality was rare). Not only were several worlds put onto the screen that people could explore on their own, but they weren't quite "right" - they were skewed, tinged with hallucinatory imagery - and I think the reason is right up above in that quote - they built the worlds to trigger an aesthetic response first, and added a story second. It sounds like I could even reference Malcolm Gladwell's article on Steve Jobs, where he advocates for the "tinkerer" over the "inventor" - artists have always overwhelmingly been tinkerers:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/14/111114fa_fact_gladwell
I suspect that all the games that followed Myst followed an inventor's mindset - setting out to recreate Myst, or a "better Myst", and not fumbled towards instinctively by a couple of "place designers" who didn't know what they were building. I am tempted to go so far as to say that Myst works because the formula could not be mistaken for something calculated.
One more thing worth mentioning - I think the music helped, too - so much so that I wonder what Brian Eno thinks of it, since it seems to confirm his theory of the role of ambient music in enhancing the experience of "place".
On an unrelated note: lost with effortless ease to the arcana of the past, Dewey Street Reviews was a forum to post reviews of anything and everything. It promised a million jokes within the framework of its single joke, and it died a quiet death after two reviews. It deserved more - this is my mistake alone. Regardless, Ted Wilson gives exercise to the same joke (and I'm sure plenty of others have before and since, as well - but I found this one) at The Rumpus:
http://therumpus.net/2013/09/ted-wilson-reviews-the-world-200/
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