The Fate of the Stalker: Roadside Picnic and Environmental Terror

One of my favorite movies of all time is a film by Andrei Tarkovsky, "Stalker" (called "The Zone" in its English release).  I stumbled upon this film while scanning cable channels late one night with my parents asleep. I first saw characters walking through a field of grass, tentatively, cautiously, stopping and throwing little objects to test the path. The reason for their caution was unclear, but the guide was utterly dedicated to it. He had little bolts with cloth tied to them that he would toss.  It was a slow film, but it intrigued me, and I kept coming back to it as it progressed.

One bolt the guide tossed sailed through the air – and made no sound when it fell. The characters tensed. Did the grass just muffle the sound? Or something else?

I highly recommend watching the film – it is an engaging story and beautifully shot. Tarkovsky was an incredible filmmaker, and the movie is full of gorgeous scenes from abandoned factories and overgrown fields and dilapidated Russian architecture.  For me, watching it is almost a meditative experience, as there are often very long, slow panning cuts, sometimes with narration overlaid. The dialogue and the characters are excellent, witty and biting, each character keeping their own reason close to chest for venturing into this strange place.

The movie was inspired by a piece of Russian fiction called Roadside Picnic, a story about an area of Russia that is suddenly designated "off-limits" due to a variety of strange anomalies and artifacts that appear overnight – perhaps left by aliens – and cause havoc for anyone who ventures within or brings the artifacts out.  As in the film, the word Stalker here takes a different meaning than is common today; it is used for those who regularly travel into the zone, learn its strange rules, and guide others through.  They are Stalkers – those who stalk the zone.

In addition to the film, another piece of entertainment was also spawned by the book – the game Stalker: Shadows of Chernobyl and its many sequels and spinoffs (currently discounted on Steam's Halloween sale).  Although the game emphasizes more of the fantastic elements of the original book than the film does, it also makes a pretty clear connection between the unearthly anomalies and the very real disaster that occurred at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor.  It effectively creates a link between the fear of radiation and the fear of the unknown, both threats that operate on a level beyond what our instincts have trained us to cope with – things we can't see, smell, hear, or taste, but which can kill us easily if we aren't careful. Frequently, in the game, you must avoid radiation hazards along with more otherworldly threats such as gravitational anomalies or mutated creatures.

Stalker is an excellent atmospheric shooter, a beautiful recreation of many of the areas in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, and an occasionally terrifying game.  It has some interesting RPG elements in resource and inventory management, and a lot of exploration in discovering and plundering abandoned sites.  However, there is something interesting about the actual history behind the book and the film that the title of the game glosses over quite effortlessly – a fact which is a bit hard to believe looking back at these works. In truth, both Roadside Picnic (1971) and Stalker (1979), fictions the game draws heavily on, were written and released before the Chernobyl disaster even occurred (1986). This is a strange thing to consider: Chernobyl and the surrounding area are even today still off-limits, due to invisible forces that are a threat to human life. In effect, humanity created the zone envisioned in Roadside Picnic.

In reality, no alien intervention was necessary; there is nothing mystical about radiation.  The science is mostly understood, its effect on humans is mostly understood, and its sources are mostly understood.  It only defies reason in the fact of its pervasiveness and persistence, its potential as a disaster that extends far beyond our own timescale – a disaster that we can create, but not stop, and not outlive. The strange threats observed in the original book – the Witch's Jelly that dissolves bone but passes through all other matter, the gravity anomalies that can catch and crush the unwary to pulp, the invisible, suffocating webs – they pale in comparison to what we are actually capable of.

And beyond this, in cruel irony, even before there was a Chernobyl zone, the actors in the film Stalker were themselves subject to the very real invisible terrors of environmental contamination. The factory many scenes of the film was shot in was an old chemical plan. Many of the environments and materials visible in the film were toxic or carcinogenic. As a result, a large portion of the actors who worked in the film passed away just years after due to a variety of health complications - including the director, Tarkovsky.

Yet these works are not without some form of hope.  All three of the fictional expressions of this myth have in common the idea of a Grail of some kind, the one artifact hiding in the zone that can fix everything, grant any wish. All you must do is find it.  In the book, it's a golden orb.  In the film, a room. In the game, a monolithic structure.  These places and things are what the Stalkers seek: they dream to be the one who finds the one artifact that can change the world or change their own life for the better. In this way, the fiction suggests that we can find a solution, if we can survive long enough.  The same power to destroy and corrupt can be used to cure, if wielded with knowledge and compassion (the compassion part is very important at the end of Roadside Picnic).

In reality, the stakes are indeed very high for us, as both individuals and as a species.  At this point, the damage we are able to do to the world may actually outlive those with knowledge of it.  We are entirely capable of being the aliens of the novel, the advanced race that left its toys behind quite accidentally, disfiguring the earth not only physically but almost metaphysically, creating fields and areas that are lethal and, thousands of years later, not understood by any living creature.  This could create ways of life akin to the stalkers', where the land is alive and unpredictable in new ways, where the only safe way is the careful, roundabout way, threading between unseen disasters.

Yet that vague hope exists that one of the toys left behind will be the key to fixing everything.  A foolish hope, perhaps, given that it is always easier to destroy than to create or repair.  Why would we leave things broken if we had the power to fix them?  Perhaps the real lessons that Roadside Picnic and its offspring can teach us are, first: that we must leave knowledge behind as well. We must always teach those that come after how the world works, how it is broken, and how it might be fixed eventually.  If we fall into the superstition of the Stalkers and those they guide, testing the next step only and living day to day, we will have forgotten why the rules are there and who made them.  If we seek only to survive that next step, then we give up on our ability to change the whole.  We can help the life that comes after us understand the messes we leave behind, and we can hope that someday, they will be cleaned up.

Second: don't litter.

Final Fantasy XI: The Penultimate Frontier

After the grind of EverQuest, and its ultimate letdown, you'd think I'd have learned my lesson. You might expect that I'd just steer clear of the entire genre of MMORPG's. Such was not the case.

What could have possessed me to dive into another one of these games? Clearly, I was getting something valuable out of the Massively Multiplayer genre, something that neither solo games nor life in the outside world at the time could offer. The ability to chat over text and voice with a group of people who were into similar stuff (video games), and who wanted to play together and work towards accomplishing shared goals, is an incredibly powerful draw – especially when you don't have a group like that outside the game.  For me, MMO games were in many ways simply a better context for social interaction.

Outside the game, I did have friends, but they didn't really need me in the same way that a low-level Taru White Mage running from a massive spawn of bandits did. The people I met online, they needed me simply because of the context of the game – it's always about the challenge of survival, against the environment or against other players.  There was a reason for us to work together, to learn about each other.  And this, apparently, is what my brain needed to help me be a more social person – a blank slate, and some context.

Plus, in FFXI, you could tame a big yellow chicken and ride it around. So there's that.

Final Fantasy XI did a great job of emphasizing that "work together" feeling -- sometimes too well, as I would find out late in my FFXI career.  The game world was just as dangerous as EverQuest's, with solo leveling almost impossible after a point very early on. In fact, at certain points, you were simply prevented from gaining any more experience until you completed the next "Genkai" quest, to "limit break" and unlock further levels. These quests required groups from small to gigantic and often required rare drops or travel to remote locations.  The final one even required you to duel a copy of yourself to the death, burning a rare "cannot carry more than one" tagged drop every attempt. Talk about punishing.

In its favor, Final Fantasy XI was catering to a specific kind of player -- players who had cut their teeth on games like EverQuest, Ultima Online, and even the Korean grind fest MMO's such as Lineage. These players were more organized and more hard-core about the game. They formed "static" groups with coordinated schedules, so they could level at the same pace throughout the game and quickly reach a high level.  They utilized FFXI's public character profile tool to detail all of their statistics, so that when looking for a pickup group people could see what you were about. And they paid damn good attention to those statistics, especially Accuracy – which often meant the difference between getting your powerful skills off and contributing to party damage, or just sitting there thwacking away with a wiffle bat.
 Unfortunately, I somehow managed to devote significant time to the game and yet still not be serious enough to keep up with those crazy players who chased the top-tier challenges – I was splitting my time between work, school, and the game, so many of the static group schedules didn't work for me.

I also had the misfortune of picking the class that I wanted most to play – a Shadow Knight – and not one that would be essential and always in tremendous demand in every party – such as a White Mage.  In theory, the game was balanced around the same "holy trinity" role concept as EverQuest -- tank, healer, and damage.  However, no one likes to play tanks or healers, because that's boring. So, at the exact moment in the game where leveling starts to require a well-balanced group, you suddenly see is a massive surplus of classes such as Shadow Knights, Dragoons, Thiefs, Explodey Magic Guys, and anyone else who focuses on sticking things with the pointy end. Tanks remain in high demand, while healers become a kind of rare gemstone or fantasy creature, like unicorns, the memory of which you treasure during hard times.

Of course, FFXI's developers also learned the lesson from EverQuest that it's important to design your game such that the relative hierarchy of class usefulness isn't obvious in the early levels, because otherwise you'll just drive off players who want to play a specific class. If you wait to spring this unfortunate fact on them until later, then they'll already be committed to their class and will likely keep struggling on. And struggle we did.

I did manage to glom onto a few consistent groups for a few levels here and there, but for the large part I was on my own. As I sat in the capital city, Jeuno, I would watch the airships fly in and out and wait for hours for a possible party invite.

I would sit there, regularly spamming my name, level, class, and the tag "LFG" (looking for group) in world chat. Sometimes I would log in on the weekend and sit for several hours without hearing a peep, or accomplishing anything of note. I revised my little paragraph of character profile text over and over again to try and make myself sound like a more desirable, friendly, and well-mannered group member, boasting about my various statistics. Comparing that profile to a dating profile would be apt – its composition was certainly as much if not more so guided by desperation.

On top of the class issues, the language barrier added to the difficulty of finding a group on your own. One interesting aspect of FFXI is that there was no service split across regions – Japanese and American and players from other regions throughout the world all played on the same servers. The game incorporated a "keyword" language system to help alleviate communication issues, allowing you to use predetermined chunks of language in chat that would be automatically translated to whatever language the viewing player was using. It was still exceedingly rare to actually play with people speaking other languages, though, since the keyword system was pretty limited.

However, on very rare occasions, the system would enable something magical. The rule was, if you ever got an invite that was composed entirely in auto-translated keywords, you took that invite. Because that almost always meant you had hit the jackpot… An invite from a Japanese group.

Oh god yes, pick me, pick me!

Japanese groups were FFXI's true target audience. Uniformly full of players dedicated to the game with complete mastery of all its mechanics (at least, that's how many of the US players saw them). The fact that they were inviting me, someone who at the time spoke no Japanese, was further testament to the utter confidence they had in their abilities. They just wanted an average player to round out their amazing group and contribute a little damage. This mediocre role was one I could fulfill admirably. I might even rise to the level of "above average random damage guy" if I worked extra hard, perhaps earning a future group invite!

These groups would kill monsters before I could even walk up to them, use routes and leveling areas that I'd never heard of, play with bizarre class combinations and skill sets that somehow worked amazingly well, and generally wipe the floor with the game. I was invited to maybe 3 or 4 of them, ever.

Sometimes these players could even work magic alone. I remember my friend the Red Mage very well. I had just joined a party that was almost full, at 4 of the 5 required five players, getting ready to go off and hunt lizards in a cave.  However, we had no healer. This was obviously a problem because of the whole Trinity thing. Naturally, we couldn't find a White Mage – so we were looking at imitation options, such as a Red Mage who was using White Mage as a subclass, which give them decent healing potential.

After 45 minutes of waiting, we finally found a Red Mage. He was Japanese. Perfect! The only problem was, he adamantly refused to use the White Mage subclass. He was using a purely damage focused subclass – a weapon-based class, no less.

None of us had ever seen this before, and we were extremely skeptical. We tried to communicate over and over that we needed healing, that we would prefer if he used a healing subclass to augment his skills, but he said again and again – through keywords – that it would be fine.

We thought about kicking him out. But we were desperate, and, after all, he was a Japanese player. How could he be wrong about anything? So off we trudged into the caves, with a Red Mage using a 100% weapon focused subclass, a Paladin tank who could sort of heal himself, and a bunch of damage dealers.

It turned out, we didn't need much healing, because this Red Mage ate lizards for breakfast. He had found a bizarre combination of weapon enhancement magics and skills that made him a lizard killing machine. He was doing at least twice if not more damage than any other single party member.  Lizard corpses littered the cave, and we showered him with praise for his unconventional and incredibly effective build.

Although I did have a lot of fun with FFXI, and met some great people, I'm still surprised at how long I persevered with the game. It was just so difficult to make progress, and yet it felt so satisfying once you finally got there. I completed all of the limit breaker quests and got very close to the maximum level; I amassed all of the rare weapon skills for my class, however useless they were; and I acquired all my class armor, and even joined a few high-level raids.

I think FFXI and EverQuest taught me an important lesson – when you're playing the kind of game that can become a lifestyle, you want that game to have some flexibility. You want to be able to enjoy it on your own or with a group. FFXI was great fun when the alchemy of the game created a balanced party, but it was god-awful unplayable alone, or if the conditions weren't right. And even if suffering sweetens the reward, you should never allow that to become the rule. We've at least got to drape a nice cloth over the Skinner box, right?

The Lost Scrolls of Gravok

Discovered in a waste-bin in the long-sealed basement of a forgotten city, these scrolls seem to tell the tale of a simple soldier's anger management issues, quest for revenge, and perpetual poverty. The scroll is awkwardly marked "GRAVOK" and is written in a dialect known to linguistic scholars as "Simpleton's Inoxian." 

The calligraphy appears to improve considerably in later reports; the writer appears to have been inexperienced with letters.

Gravok First Time Report

Tinker-man busy, so Gravok write report. Gravok write good for Inox, use big words like 'report.' This report about Rat-man, Tinker-man, and Gravok going to big water place, killing things, and taking stuff. 

First thing. In city we spend gold. Rat-man buy cloak of not-finding, Gravok buy shield. Then something happen: other (bad) rat-man try to steal all gold. Our (good) rat-man chase him and get gold back, and find even more gold, and smelly cloak. Now rat-man have TWO cloak. Tried to wear both (looks funny).

Second thing. We decide to go to broken boat on map. We go to land-water place to get not-broken boat to go there. On way, we find small dog. Rat-man say to leave, but Tinker-man say take care of dog, bring with on boat. Gravok like dog too, so we bring. Dog distract Tinker-man in fight, but make people like us more.

Third thing. Boat get to island with other big, broken boat. Very cold and windy. Gravok does not like. We fight big crab-things on beach. Rat-man fight well, make them stop while we kill them. Then we go inside cave, fight Frost Demon (hates fire, likes cold). Lots of walking, very long cave, many rocks. Then we go inside boat and fight more Frost Demon and many Living Shade. Living Shade very weak but very hard to hurt. Tinker-man and Rat-man pick up lots of gold. Gravok pick up two gold.

Last thing. We get to last room. Some Shades, lots of gold, treasure chest. Others pick up all gold. Gravok open chest and get shiny. Look weak and useless, but Tinker-man say very good. Let Gravok make things go where he wants. Gravok keep.

Gravok head tired now. We go back to not-water. Report over.

Gravok Second Time Report

Gravok write report. 

Party find Gravok in town and say, "We go fight big demon." Gravok say, "Ok."

Something happen in town. Gravok forget what. Not important.

On way to big demon, we see strange white birds. Gravok say not shoot birds, bad luck. We not shoot. Birds fly closer and we see they are not birds, they are big flying lizards. Everyone see how smart Gravok is. Also, Gravok feel we need telescope if big lizard look like small bird.

We get to demon place. Hot and cold and dark and light all at once. We can go left or right -- choose left-way. We fight every kind of demon just in first few rooms.

Then Gravok sees rat-man does not loot coins, won't touch them. Gets idea. Gravok sneaks up on coins. Loots THREE coins at once! Most ever! After, we find an empty room with treasure chest in it. Gravok is closest. Gravok loots that too. Gravok find neck thing. Very expensive looking. Cannot wear with helm. Gravok sell later. First, jangle in front of rat-man to make him angry! Can't loot! Ha ha!

Then we reach BIG demon. Bigger than Gravok thought. Gravok think rest of party die soon, but not worried. Gravok strong. Then, demon use funny table and Gravok can not hurt him, no matter how hard he swing. Have to hurt table instead. But table runs away! How? Gravok does not know.

We chase the table into the path that we did not choose, the right-way. Many demons inside right-way. Magic person say table move like clock-hand, will come to us if we go other way, so we run. Everyone but rat-man. Rat-man run towards room with many demons! Sacrifices self to make demons bunch up and slow down. Rat-man last long time, but finally have to run away. Gravok feel bad for mocking with necklace. Rat-man very brave.

Finally table comes to us. We try to hit, but table is fast! Goes right past us. We run to catch up, all very tired, about to fall down. Then Gravok hits table one last time and it breaks!

Big demon very sad, dies when table dies. All demons die. We loot many gold. Go home.

Report over.

Gravok Third Time Report

Gravok write report.

Before fight, dice man try to play with us. Gravok hate dice. We tell smelly dice man to go away. Others like us more.

We go into shadowy place in town because girl asked us to. Many cultists, and also hounds, bones, spirits, flame demons... and bats, and little fungus that moves, and lava golem, and two wolves (not hounds), and robot... why so many things? Gravok so confused. Which should he hit?

In last room we stop cultists doing bad thing, demons appear. Fire everywhere, but only hurts Gravok, no one else hurt. Why? Why is only Gravok hurt?

After finished, Gravok notice he has no coins. Others pick up many. Why? Why do coins hide from Gravok only?

Did Gravok use bad necklace too many times? Or maybe evil compass? Is Gravok... cursed? Doomed?

Gravok go drink now. Report over.

Gravok Last Time Report

Gravok write report.  Last report, Gravok done with quest.  Gravok not talk about quest before.  Gravok explain.

Bandits long time ago burn down Gravok's village.  Gravok want to fight them, but they run.  Wore purple stuff.  Coward purple bandits.  Gravok leave village, only one left.  Write in tree, "Gravok kill purple bandits."

Gravok go to Gloomhaven to ask where purple bandits are.  Meets tinker-man, rat-man (might be bandit, but good), scoundrel (definitely bandit, might be good), spell-maker, and others.  Gravok does work with them with shield and sword (mostly shield).  Gravok thinks, these ones like coin, they will find purple bandits.

Gravok right.  After much work, many coins found (not by Gravok), we find purple bandits in forest.  Rat-man, Tinker-man, Complicated-magic-man come with us.  We kill bandits and many other things. Kill bears and imps too.

[[Scrawled in the margin]] bears and imps live in house in woods, bandits live outside -- why?

One purple bandit have map to forest hideout.  We go there.  Many purple bandit.  Gravok angry, shouts "Kill, kill, kill!"  Friends kill very well, Gravok can almost not find bandits to hit with sword.  In last room, find magic-people tied up by bandits.  We fight with them and kill bandits.  Finally, Gravok hits last bandit over head.  Gravok lets magic-people kill last bandit.  Gravok get revenge, magic-people get revenge.

One magic-person thank Gravok.  Has big bow.  Name is too long, Gravok call him Doom-finder. 

Gravok understand now he not doomed -- Gravok is like new friend, makes doom for others.  We shake hand.  Good friend!

Gravok revenge done.  Tired of getting hit all the time, so Gravok stop doing work.  

Tinker-man stop also, done fighting.  Maybe he becomes big thing-maker, get very rich.  Maybe Gravok help make things.  Gravok cheap labor, used to low pay.

Report over.