Is it pretentious to subtitle a piece on gaming by one’s most recent save point? What better way to let everyone know exactly how far I’ve come? This one has the added benefit of a double meaning—a crane can be a large machine used to move heavy objects (like the subtitular crane in question), or a long-necked bird that symbolizes youth.
Ico is a game about young boy thrust into a situation slightly beyond his ken, being controlled by a player very much beyond theirs. I started playing The Ico & Shadow of the Colossus Collection on PS3 recently, partially because I never had the pleasure of experiencing either in their original PS2 format (I didn’t have a Playstation of any kind until I shrewdly added a PS3 to my wedding register three years ago), and partially because some fellow gamesters suggested we play through Ico together and share our thoughts along the way. You can find links to their initial pieces at the end of this one.
I’ve always been partial to child avatars. Children are great ambassadors to unknown worlds, and what is a player if not a newborn in a brave new one? Ico is a boy born with horns, which means he is set to be sacrificed for the good of his people, although we control him for a decent bit of playtime before he reveals that particular detail during a brief dialogue exchange. That’s the thing about Ico—it completely dispenses with the traditional tutorial level and throws the player straight to the wolves. (Scary shadow creatures, to be more precise.)
Daniel J. Hogan talks about this in his first piece, and I must admit reading through his preliminary thoughts gave me a real advantage during my playthrough. I knew before I loaded disc in machine there would be no in-game instruction, and I knew that some puzzles would require only the simplest gesture to reach a solution—reaching out to my permanent companion Yorda and giving her my hand.
It used to be this was always the way we traded tips and talked about games. I remember recesses spent whispering in a huddle about SMB3 warp whistles and the best times to use them. There were usually two strategies discussed: maximizing speed or avoidance of water/ice worlds in order to stick to the most pleasurable levels of the Mario brothers’ third outing.
I even remember passing a second-grade classmate a note with a detailed diagram on where to break through the ceiling in World 1-2 of the first Super Mario Bros. When she couldn’t make it work, she found another way to the game’s first warp zone and invited me to her living room to show me. These bits of word-of-mouth videogame advice and stories, these moments where we’d reach out and give each other a hand, are bright pieces of the mosaic of my childhood.
Maybe that’s why I like child avatars so much.
We still have the schoolyard in the internet, but we’ve lost some of the magic of swapping secrets with our schoolyard chums. Sure, we consult walkthroughs, post to message boards, and make “Let’s Play” videos, but I long for something a little more personal in the often impersonal online wilderness.
Welcome to Project Ico, where a group of friends will review the story of a horned boy’s escape from fate and maybe, every now and again, reach out a hand to help. Stay tuned.
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Read Daniel J. Hogan’s Playing Ico, Part 1: First Thoughts at Clattertron
Read Gavin Craig’s Project Ico: Fear and trembling at GavinCraig.net