Sitting at an airport departure gate last week, waiting for our budget flight to board, I found myself discussing with Mrs Laig the timing of when we should decide to guzzle our scalding tea, wolf down our overpriced sandwiches and take our places in the growing queue.
"There's no rush," I breezily commented. "They haven't deployed the Hurry Up Monster yet."
"The what?" came the cautious reply, knowing that the question might be the opener for another over-large can of explanatory worms. And indeed, it was during my over-long explanation of this particular pop-culture artefact to Mrs Laig that I came to think about its gradual disappearance from the computer game culture that spawned it and then to the manner in which it has gradually migrated further and further into our everyday lives.
So first to the history lesson that Mrs Laig was mostly spared:
The Hurry Up Monster (I won't abbreviate it to HUM) is a device that can be traced back to the days of the (relatively) early platform computer games. In the earliest days of gaming, when one's opponent was almost invariably sitting in the next seat, the impetus to maintain a good pace of play was as complicated as showing a scoreline at the top of the screen and letting competition (and elbows) do the rest. One friend of mine became so adept at competitive multiplayer subterfuge that he was able to unplug an opponent's controller using his toes in the middle of a game, giving rise to an unusual stipulation that only allowed him to play when wearing shoes.
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Hi Scores: The pressure comes from that douche who just knocked you off the #1 spot. Curse you, AAA!
Image: DonkeyKongBlog
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As graphics, computer processors and the gaming industry itself began to grow however, single-player platform games began to proliferate widely, offering a frenetic challenge to the lone gamer. One-player games allowed for competition to spill out of the confines of one's living room and into the wider world, with high scores and leaderboards that put gamers into competition with rivals across the world and spawned a profusion of tournaments and sometimes tempestuous rivalries. However, without an elbow-flinging, insult-spewing opponent to pile on the pressure, how to keep the solo gamer challenged and safely in the sweet-spot between comfort and frustration? Whilst PacMan and other such arcade titles were able to take advantage of early "artificial intelligence" to pursue the player around a fixed arena and others, such as Jet-Set Willy and Donkey Kong, placed the focus on careful planning and precisely-judged joystick-nudging, many other titles relied upon our age-old enemy: time. Space Invaders managed to cement itself as one of the most successful games in history by substituting even the most basic AI with the simple mechanic of "moving one row down and getting a bit faster", imbuing that last stupid alien spaceship with the seemingly supernatural skills of a lateral ninja as it zipped across the screen with the fatal and invulnerable inevitability of a shark in a swimming pool full of pigs.
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A Simple Plan
Image: Threadless.com / Design: NGee
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As games continued to evolve, players found themselves offered more choice in how to compete or progress, with multiple routes available, more complex enemies to outwit or score-boosting items to collect. How then to maintain the urgency? Some games adopted a ticking timer in which to complete a task or level, whilst others, most notably the Super Mario Bros. franchise, dispensed with the headlong rush or, in the case of Sonic the Hedgehog, continued to encourage it, but prevented undue dawdling throught the use of the "Invisible Wall", which followed the player through the world like the End of History, ensuring the the past (or at least the path so far trodden), once left behind, lay permanently sealed and inaccessible.
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Hurry up already! You only have a few seconds until your frog...starves?
Image: Retrogames.com
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I have always been a little bit of an explorer. Not so much a bold adventurer into new lands, but a delver into corners and little secret places, both in games and in places I happen to visit. For me, then, the Invisible Wall always felt like something of a cop-out. In blocking the way back it did nothing to demand more urgent play but merely served to frustrate my instinct to investigate the increasingly complex worlds that computer games began to inhabit. Walked past that cave? Want to know what was in it? Sorry pal, history's dead; maybe you can have a look next time you play this game through from the beginning. Now go chase some more coins.
So what was the alternative to a ticking clock or ninja aliens in a game that also allowed for some strategy or freedom of exploration? In my opinion, the device that did the best job of injecting truly primal urgency back into gaming, without the arbitrary nature of the Death Clock or the Invisible Wall was the Hurry Up Monster. My limited trawl of the internet for articles about this illustrious beast has come up inexplicably short. Inexplicably, given that mention of such a creature, albeit with gamers of a certain vintage, seems to bring instant recognition, regardless of what individuals may, or may not, have called it themselves.
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| It comes for us all. Image: badsneaker.net/ |
For me, my earliest brush with this noble enemy was in the single-screen bird-combat-based lunacy of Joust. For the uninitiated, Joust was an arcade (and later console) game in which the player (a lance-toting knight sitting atop an ostrich, blessed with limited powers of button-bashing-granted flight) spawned on a screen populated by similarly-attired, vulture-mounted adversaries, who could, by means of being hit from above (although rarely with the lance), be unseated and transformed into brightly-coloured eggs, which could then be collected in return for points. As the game progressed, these enemies would gradually improve in their tactics and speed, and the levels themselves would gradually become more hostile, as floors were gradually replaced by pits of lava that, in turn, eventually hosted bird-seizing infernal hands. Despite this gradual ramping up of difficulty, the game sought to challenge the player with more than just the prospect of carefully-waged mounted aerial medieval warfare. For behind the scenes a far deadlier foe lurked, awoken by that twisted hybrid of Mario's wall and Frogger's timer: the secret invisible alarm clock.
This sinister device would tick quietly away as the player(s) (for this was a game open to (semi)cooperative play) went about their wing-flapping, egg-collecting business until, with a screen-spanning HURRY UP! message, the Monster would be awoken. Unlike the flapping foes of the main game, this beast, unnamed in the game but known variously by gamers (as yielded from the few internet resources that I could find) as the "Dragon", "Pterodactyl", or just "Skel" would erupt onto the scene with all the supernatural speed of a final-row Space Invader, but also with the targeted malice of a vengeful hunter woken from its slumber with only YOU in mind. The effect of the Hurry Up Monster's heralding and imminent arrival (there was always a panic-window of a few seconds after the announcement) can be likened to players, locked in deuce at a tennis match, being told that "in 30 seconds the wolves will be released". Imagine how much more fun Wimbledon would become.
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Panic! When you're there, it's actually very threatening...
Image: MobyGames / Contributed by Servo (55902) / Credit: Williams
Link to video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO0AlvOlWUw |
At this point strategy would go out of the window and reflexes became all. Unlike the passive stolidity of the wall or the hopeless inevitability of the time-limit, the genius of the Hurry Up Monster was that beneath the panic there was the gossamer thread of hope that blazed into a fuse wire with every successfully-evaded pass. Because unlike the sands of the Death Clock, the monster could be cheated. Before each pass across the screen the beast would announce itself with a roar, then fling itself across the screen like a furious missile before leaving from the other side. Although winged death was almost a certainty as pass followed pass, with luck and skill escape was possible. There were even rumours that, if timed just right, it was possible to slay the beast, though I never met anybody able to claim that they'd succeeded.
Joust was not alone in invoking a roaring, unconquerable foe to harry the dawdling adventurer. Platformers such as Rainbow Islands (sequel to Bubble Bobble) and The New Zealand Story also encouraged exploration, strategy and thoroughness but ensured that dallying came with an adrenalin-hungry pricetag. This furious enemy brought to mind the terrible swooping beasts of legend, from Tolkien's Smaug to the great dragon of Beowulf; incalculably powerful weapons of flesh and scale defeated only through the ingenuity and charmed lives of the vulnerable heroes they sought to destroy. Here was urgency not as arbitrary line but as heroism. Not a death-knell but a gong of war. Not an end to history or a wound-down clock but a winged challenge to life. This was the Hurry Up Monster - if you want to keep playing, you'll have to fight or run.
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If you can see this, you're too slow
Image: Redbubble.com / Design: VortexDesigns
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I'm sorry, where was I?
Ah yes. Airport waiting rooms.
As I trawled the internet with a cursory search for an image or description to match my rambling on the subject of the Hurry Up Monster I found myself confronted by page after page of people expressing their frustrations or worrying about the timings of their important life decisions. As the landscape of computer gaming technology has developed and changed, computer games have diverged into processor-hungry worlds for players to explore at their leisure (the Grand Theft Auto franchise, MMOs such as World of Warcraft or beautiful "explore-em-ups", such as Gone Home, without points, enemies or even, some would suggest, any point at all) or else into throw-away apps that return us to the days of the high score board and the frantic headlong dash (Temple Run and Flappy Bird being prime examples). Whence, then, the Hurry Up Monster? It seems to have fallen between two stools; a relic of the joystick age in an age explored by mouse & keyboard or tackled by taps on a portable screen.
Or perhaps not. Perhaps the greatest trick the Hurry Up Monster ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.
During my brief hunt for information I tried searching for the specific phrase and found myself looking at the title of an article reading something along the lines of "How I beat the Hurry Up Monster". At first I took this to be some sort of play-through guide to Joust (possibly even detailing a strategy for achieving the fabled dragon-kill), until I read the first line of the summary and found that it was an article by a woman who felt that she had overcome the biological and societal pressures placed upon her to have a baby (ultimately by not having a baby - sorry for the spoiler). But this got me thinking: perhaps that metaphor, whether intended by the author or not, is a rather more apt one than it seems. We often speak about a "biological clock" ticking down as women age, but the whole problem with it is that there is no timer for us to see and race against. An invisible wall? Perhaps. But perhaps what we face is more like a slumbering monster, waiting to be awakened by a call that we won't hear, and this is what makes such decisions such a gamble and such a threat. Not to labour this particular metaphor too much further but the "biological clock" strikes me more as a "Hurry Up Monster" whose coming is inevitable, whose attacks we may evade, through skill and luck, but to whom eventual defeat is inevitable if we don't get on with it.
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| It comes for some of us. In a way. Maybe? Image: bigkingken |
Where else, then, do these societal and biological monsters lurk?
In a modern society we are surrounded by barriers that limit, guide and cajole us through our lives. Many of the stages of our early lives are defined by invisible walls that push us onwards and close the way behind us: from schooling to the period of general "neural plasticity" that creates polyglots, virtuosos and sports prodigies, and the biological staging posts of peak growth, vitality and general fitness that we pass in one direction, never to access so easily again. Time and entropy are the ultimate in Invisible Walls. In our adult lives we are constantly hemmed and harried by ticking timers that guide our priorities and shape our working days and our leisure: from deadlines to train times, holidays to TV timetables (although thanks to the rise of PVRs and on-demand viewing, this last one is coming back under our control). But it is in the personal decisions that shape our lives as a whole that the Hurry Up Monster lurks.
The Hurry Up Monsters of our real lives begin to appear, grow and proliferate as we reach and journey through adulthood; flexing their invisible wings and checking their alarm clocks from time to time as we more through our different life stages. Unlike the monsters in Joust et al, these monsters can't be seen and are clear to us only when we eventually fall prey to them. The first great beasts rear their heads even before we leave school, with choices that we must make about the subjects we study or where we do so that will determine the course of our higher education and later job prospects. From then on the Career Monster watches us carefully, diving across the screen as we choose qualifications, apply for jobs and pursue promotions in a bid to outwit it, always knowing that a misstep could leave us trapped in the wrong position or, worse, the wrong career, with little chance of escape. When is the time to choose? The point of no return? There is no counting timer or obvious wall, only the fear that dogs each decision, the exhilaration of a temporary escape and almost always the knowledge that the monster will return a year or two down the line to challenge us again.
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The Pterodactyl even turns up in the data for I/O latency in operating systems
Image: Brendan Gregg
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I'm currently going through the experience of trying to buy a house and have noticed how strong the Home Buying Monster has grown in recent years. In selling our current flat we were confronted repeatedly by vulture-riding estate agents who proffered access to hordes of gold and talked about the various strategies that they would use to "create the urgency": from arranging "open days" to pit buyers directly against each other at the viewings stage (the actual agents then able to act more as door staff than sales people; the competition doing their job for them) to encouraging sellers to continuing to book new potential buyers in for viewings after accepting an offer, "just to keep the pressure up". And of course it works. Each pursued by their own Hurry Up Monster, prospective home-buyers will offer whatever it takes in order to clear the sale before the beast strikes and it's too late; our flat was sold in less than a week. But now, with the Sold sign up and our buyer waiting, a huge "Hurry Up" has appeared in front of us and our own monster stirs as we are chased from property to property, with each disappearing as quickly as our own. Just yesterday a property we liked was sold the day before the Open Day, to somebody desperate to beat the Monster, even if it meant committing to spending the next 35 years paying for a house they hadn't yet visited. On we must run to the next viewing, flapping our little wings and hoping that we can find a place to land in time.
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"Creating the Urgency"
Image: SMH.com.au
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So, having identified this monster, can we ever be free of it? Aldous Huxley famously imagined a Brave New World, in which fear, instability and unpredictability had been bred, trained and medicated into insignificance. The price for this comfortable predictability is, of course, the very pursuits of true happiness that spur us on to face such beasts in the first place. Confronted by an outsider horrified by the bland existence lived by the citizens of the World State, one of the World Controllers explains matter-of-factly that: “Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand... In fact... you're claiming the right to be unhappy. Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer, the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind." So what are we all afraid of? If, rather that pursuing our various life goals we are instead fleeing from a vague yet oppressive fear of being "too late" in jobs, in houses, in children, in health, in life itself, do we know exactly what it is that we're running from? All around us are people happy with circumstances and lives that we would consider failures if our own. Yet our own lives are littered with goals and deadlines that we failed to meet and that, instead of to a final GAME OVER, have simply led us down different paths. For every decision that that we ever-after lament there are those for which we latterly thank our stars for leading us obliquely to.
Of course there are always those in life who are free from the beast. Those people who, whether by lifestyle choice or by circumstances beyond their control, have simply stopped 'playing the game'. If you are not on, or have fallen off, the career or housing 'ladders' (perhaps a familiar metaphor for lovers of Doodle Jump etc.), they present no monster to run from. Those people who find their 'niche' in a job that pays peanuts but makes them happy every day, who live light and who don't want, or know they can't have, children, are to some extend free from the urgent daily pressures of working towards them, or running from the imagined consequences of 'not being ready', or doing things 'too late'. Many of us envy these people in their freedom, but when it comes to decisions that could set us similarly free, we choose to continue playing. Because jobs, families and almost all of the life-consuming pursuits that our existences throw at us are ultimately choices. Just as for Mario, Frogger, Donkey Kong and Joust, they are games that we choose to play. Because for all the grief and anxiety it brings us, the Hurry Up Monster exists for a reason.
I never met anybody who claimed to have completed Joust. Nor Frogger, Space Invaders or PacMan. I've never met a person who has finished Flappy Bird, Doodle Jump or Candy Crush Saga (don't get me started on my feeling about that), although plenty of them have given up in frustration. And anybody who's completed a Super Mario game has just ended up getting bored anyway. But does it stop us playing, or recommending them (constantly, in some cases) to our friends? The draw of these things is in the thrill of the endeavour and possibility of advancement and reward, but also the constant fear of failure that pushes us ever on and keep us vitally focused on the present moment, with the bigger picture, all fangs and teeth, waiting on the horizon. Similarly in life, if we stopped to think about how few people play the various 'games' that we tie ourselves to and can ultimately claim to have 'won', we'd.... Oh, now I've started to get depressed.... So we don't stop to think. We keep on playing, advancing from one 'life-level' to the next, pursued through each by the various monsters at our backs.
In our pursuit of happiness, or our never-ending flight from disappointment, we are always striving to stay one step ahead of the Hurry Up Monster that chases us from one hurdle to the next. Perhaps he is our career, our fitness, our boss or our biological clock. Perhaps he is a pixellated pterodactyl on a static screen. Or perhaps, like Dumbo's feather, or that swordy-frisbee thing in Krull, the Hurry Up Monster was inside us all along. But just like Dumbo, Luke Skywalker, that dude with the beard in Krull, or the little knight-guy in Joust, we could turn our little ostriches around and go home if we chose to. If we really wanted to. But secretly, for all that we hate the monster and the grind of nearly identical levels that we must face, we all want to play the game and see what comes next.
I never met anybody who claimed to have completed Joust. Nor Frogger, Space Invaders or PacMan. I've never met a person who has finished Flappy Bird, Doodle Jump or Candy Crush Saga (don't get me started on my feeling about that), although plenty of them have given up in frustration. And anybody who's completed a Super Mario game has just ended up getting bored anyway. But does it stop us playing, or recommending them (constantly, in some cases) to our friends? The draw of these things is in the thrill of the endeavour and possibility of advancement and reward, but also the constant fear of failure that pushes us ever on and keep us vitally focused on the present moment, with the bigger picture, all fangs and teeth, waiting on the horizon. Similarly in life, if we stopped to think about how few people play the various 'games' that we tie ourselves to and can ultimately claim to have 'won', we'd.... Oh, now I've started to get depressed.... So we don't stop to think. We keep on playing, advancing from one 'life-level' to the next, pursued through each by the various monsters at our backs.
In our pursuit of happiness, or our never-ending flight from disappointment, we are always striving to stay one step ahead of the Hurry Up Monster that chases us from one hurdle to the next. Perhaps he is our career, our fitness, our boss or our biological clock. Perhaps he is a pixellated pterodactyl on a static screen. Or perhaps, like Dumbo's feather, or that swordy-frisbee thing in Krull, the Hurry Up Monster was inside us all along. But just like Dumbo, Luke Skywalker, that dude with the beard in Krull, or the little knight-guy in Joust, we could turn our little ostriches around and go home if we chose to. If we really wanted to. But secretly, for all that we hate the monster and the grind of nearly identical levels that we must face, we all want to play the game and see what comes next.
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| Hurry Up! Image: Impawards.com |
P.S.- And for a couple of really odd endings to games, check out these perplexing doozies:
Monster Party (NES, 1989)
Via: k-thor-jensen / Credit: Bandai
MDK (Commodore Amiga, 1997)
Via: Degan Veran/Cracked.com / Credit: Shiny Entertainment
