For The Love of Terminals

(Spoilers for the classic Marathon trilogy)

One of my biggest complaints with the excellent Doom WAD Abscission was the missed opportunity in its use of text. Doom II, true to the (in)famous Carmack story quote, has only six locations with text. When one is working with the abstract brushes of geometry, lighting, and music, the directness of prose can exert a powerful steering force on the player's experience. Abscission could have done more with its limited opportunities, but I was surprised to find that the old Marathon trilogy offers a positive example of integrating text in this way.

The classic FPS level, with its bare geometry and fixation on the "kill" verb, has an mechanistic, artificial quality to it. The terminal, being in the literal sense a wall with a texture of a computer on it, shares that nature. Yet it serves as a bridge to the naturalistic world of written prose, a full state change accented by the text window taking up the entire screen. The interplay between these two modalities, mediated by the terminal, is what elevates both beyond the sum of their parts. ^[1]

Despite being broadly representational, as a 3D 90s game, Marathon's levels have a degree of natural abstraction to them. Text likewise operates in the theater of the mind, priming the player to apply the same mindset to the game world. When Durandal teleports you onto the Pfhor ship to see "what no human has ever seen," it's easier to see its winding hallways as alien geometry instead of just crusty old level design. ^[2]

The terminal is also situated in both time and space: thus the text is contextualized by and contextualizes its surroundings. Often this is for simple mundane utility, like a character explaining your objective at the start of a level. It can be used as environmental storytelling: a bunker contains a Pfhor work log describing the misery of the grunts stuck in the backwater swamps of Lh'owon. It can establish emotional parallels, as with the claustrophobic corridors of the Marathon and the rampant Durandal's manic taunts.

Terminals also help vary pacing. Finding a terminal feels like a reward after the monotony of a long level, and it gives you something to turn over in your head as you continue. A terminal's placement on a side path intrinsically suggests something unexpected and apart from the main plotline, like Durandal leaving you a funny comment, or a bit of lore which recontextualizes one of the many mysteries of the game's world. The underground lava level in Marathon 2 even offers a level-wide reprieve from intense combat in favor of reading terminals.

Of course, many of these functions have been individually done before with voice logs and NPCs, but a voice log can't hold a conversation with the player, and it would be odd to see a person tucked away in a random corner; ^[3] the terminal elegantly does everything at once. Terminal text can be dialogue, history, cryptic secrets, a fake newspaper ad, poetry, or simply nonsense. It can be short or long, and placed densely or sparsely. What's unexpected is that Bungie even has no qualms with going beyond a literal conception of the terminal as an in-lore entity. Structurally, it's simply "a spot in the level where you read text": the terminal can be put anywhere and the text can be anything, so long as it makes the game more interesting.

The famous example of this is the Gheritt White optional terminal. Reaching it requires a difficult set of grenade jumps using an invulnerability powerup, a technique with a distinct "video-gamey" quality that puts it outside of the game's usual representational framing. Likewise, the contents of the terminal stand outside of the game's normal textual world. Inside is a long, cryptic short story with no direct relation to the plot, bewilderingly unlike everything prior, yet containing tantalizing parallels to key characters of the main plot. Marathon Infinity runs with this idea, creating entire dream levels of abstract geometry whose terminals' text only exist to add variety, set tone, and comment on the course of the game in a non-literal sense.

And text itself is simply a good medium when paired with games. Text is flexible, easy to change, and can powerfully evoke feelings that the systematized medium of games struggles to. Its pacing is within the reader's control, melding well with the player-directed pacing of games where cutscenes often produce a jarring sense of discontinuity. Its contents can be surprising, while the structure remains harmonious: an effect difficult to achieve in gameplay alone.

Recently, I have found these silent, fundamental relationships of structure, pacing, exploration of space, and so on to be the most interesting part of games. Instead of relying on heavy-handed impositions from above, how can we arrange elements to guide the natural flow of player experience, and exert command towards artistic ends? A difficult and subtle question. ^[4]