Myst and the Story of Me

[purplethebunny]

Myst was a transformational game, not only for the gaming industry, but for me personally. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, partly because I’m playing Obduction (also by Cyan), and partly because looking back at where you’ve been often helps explain where you are.

While I often say I’ve always been a gamer, the truth is I had limited access to games in my youth. My first “system” was a Game Boy, on which I played Joust and Donkey Kong. Our household computer ran DOS and had a Mahjong game. My grandmother had a handful of mysterious, creaky games on 5.25” floppies, and school had some classics like Number Munchers, Oregon Trail. My early library was nonexistant. Games were a fun thing I could do, but hardly had the attention grabbing, focus shifting, desire to fall into the world that books did. This kid was a Reader – one part childhood dissociation and one part encouragement to do something I was good at.

For three years, I lived with my other parent. This is before 2000. During that time, I had a PlayStation and access to the household computer. Everything I played in that window was formative — but Myst was something different, and I still

It was the first game I played that felt like a world — vibrant, complex, and self-contained, as if it had always existed and I had simply stepped into it. I had never experienced lateral thinking puzzles before. I had never encountered a game that portrayed its characters' moral decay so subtly and effectively. And no game had ever let me take my time to ponder, to observe, to fail without punishment, to experiment.

While I didn’t have the words for it at the time, Myst was the first time I experienced a game as art. It didn’t just change my expectations for what games could look like — it expanded what games could do. They could be more than story, more than action, more than beautiful. They could immerse you in a world as complicated as your own. And as art can, it can change you. Playing Myst was a nodal event in my life – as in, there is the time before, and the time after.

Games like Journey, Disco Elysium, and Morrowind have all carried that torch in their own ways — games that don't demand to be won, but invite you to engage, reflect, and discover.

Quantic Dream’s work, for all its quirks (press F to SHAUN), builds on the ideas Myst introduced for me such as fractured identity, unclear morality, choice without clear reward. Heavy Rain is the poster child, but Beyond: Two Souls hit me the hardest. It asked: What if you are not a hero, but many people? What if the choices you’re making are all impossible?

Games like Pathologic and Doki Doki Literature Club take that even further, turning the mirror on the player, destabilizing the boundary between fiction and reality. They don’t just tell a story, but they involve you in the act of shaping it, even at your own expense.

Myst is also part of why I love open-world exploration. The joy isn’t just in the loot, but in the act of looking, finding, seeing. I adore environmental storytelling for exactly this reason. Back when Skyrim first came out, I’d make a thread on the forum documenting every strangely positioned skeleton I came across. There’s no reward in game for finding them, but the entertainment was enough. On my first playthrough of Horizon Zero Dawn I was absolutley floored the first moment I realized I was walking on a path that used to be a highway. There is so much that can be ascertained about a world visually, and while games know this, some are more effective than others.

The game was quiet as so few are. That quietness invited reflection in a way most games still don’t. I think that’s why soundscapes are so important to my functionality today. (MyNoise.net is brilliant, by the way.) I really notice the background music and what it’s trying to do to me, in all forms of media and real life, specifically because I was invited into the quietude of Myst. There are many ways to build immersion, and intentionally choosing leads to a better game experience.

I mentioned my obsessive reading, yeah? I got in trouble every year of grade school (K-5th for Usicans, through Year 5 for UK) except 4^th grade, and that only because the teacher was what we’d today refer to as trauma informed. What I wanted for birthdays and Xmas was books. Myst’s central premise - that written words can create realities – was something I had already groked. Seeing it in a game was relavatory. The power of authorship, the ethical quandaries of creation, the dangers of inheritance and inattention, the necessity of compassionate honesty at least with yourself… it’s all there. Atrus’s books were worlds which he passed on. Any reader can tell you that a book is a world.

So many of the things that bring me personal joy in gaming either happen directly because of Myst (see: https://exhibits.americanwritersmuseum.org/exhibits/level-up/myst-doom/ ) or I find the joy because of my experience with it. It’s part biological – I was at that great pre-teen age where one’s core personality begins forming. (https://www.chconline.org/resourcelibrary/why-the-preteen-years-are-a-critical-period-for-brain-development/ ) As such, the effects are far beyond just my experience in gaming.

I use lateral puzzle solving skills almost daily in social work practice, although I often refer to it as “thinking around corners.” One of the rules is that we never take any option of the table. In a Leverage reference, I’ll say I have plans A-Q; it’s really just plans A, B, and C, and a variety of tools to apply for further down the line. I can integrate data effectively from one area of thought to another, applying the science of EMS to individual human experience, for example. I don’t get upset or experience cognitive dissonance when the rules change on me, meaning I delight in Fluxx and acclimate quickly to changing metrics. While I still struggle with doing it myself, deep and effective worldbuilding is fascinating to me. I understand that individual people have their own internal narrative structure; for some I am a key figure to be protected, and for some I am a quest giving NPC.

So when I say Myst changed my life, I don't mean it in a vague or nostalgic way - I mean it quite literally.  It changed how I think, how I problem solve, how I approach uncertainty, and how I understand my place within both fictional and "real" stories.  It taught me appreciation of silence, the importance of the question, and that authorship carries moral weight.  Myst didn't just show me a new world, but informed me about how I wanted to move through all the others I'd ever enter.

Myst is now 32 years old, and it’s showing it’s age. If however, you want a hit of that nostalgia or this writing makes you feel like you want to give it a try with new eyes, you can freely play it in your browser window at https://retroonline.net/Windows/Myst . If you do, let me know how your experience was. Tell me also, what was formative for you in this way?  I acknowledge I'm an elder millennial, so I don't expect every game discussed to be as old as dirt.