A Beach House in Onett November 15, 2009

From LargePrimeNumbers

There’s this house in the town of Onett. You see signs all around town, sometimes near signs like the one that says “Use the library more.” The signs tell you there’s a house for sale on the southwest side of Onett. It has a beautiful view of the lake, it says. Just inquire with the local real-estate agent, and he’ll sell you the house. If you go down southwest and find the house, you’ll see the blue-suited real-estate agent standing in the doorway. Talk to him, and he’ll offer to sell you the place for just $10,000. At this early stage of the game, that’s a hell of a lot of money. It’s earnable, of course. It’s just going to take some time. You earn money by fighting monsters. Kind of. Whenever you kill a monster, your dad deposits money into your bank account for a completely unrelated reason. Your neighbor Pokey claims this is possible because your dad borrowed a lot of money from his parents, “Maybe like a hundred thousand dollars, or maybe more!” You never find out how much it was your dad borrowed. However, the monsters in Onett aren’t strong enough for you to earn $10,000 without losing half your mind. Even so, what do you need the house for? You have a house — your mother’s house — up on the north side of town. The player who thinks within the game’s world will never have to buy the house.

It’s the breed of player most commonly referred to as a “gamer” that will need to buy the house. This gamer will come all the way back to Onett once he has enough money to buy the house. You can’t buy the house during the game’s ending, when you’ll no doubt have more than $10,000 in the bank, because the real-estate agent is gone and the door is locked. You can’t buy it past a certain point in the game, either, because once the endgame begins, Onett is invaded by aliens and plunged into eternal darkness until you kill the alien. If you want to buy the house, you have to come back at some reasonably early point in the game. When you buy the house, the real-estate agent takes your money and leaves the doorway. He runs all the way off-screen. You are then free to enter the house. When you go inside, you find that it’s a run-down shack with wooden floors and walls. A few boards are missing. With the power of its pixels, the game shows you that the mattress in the middle of the floor has a few springs popping up out of its fabric. The back wall of the house — the third wall, as it were — is missing, and we can see the lake in the distance. The fourth wall is already gone — that’s the wall through which we, the player, see our heroes standing in this dilapidated shack. We’re looking at, essentially, a house with two walls. This can be construed as what Itoi thinks of the videogame as a medium — it is a house with two walls.

Amazing.

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