In response to Thomas Grip and his minor remarks on Dear Esther’s lack of engagement
In a recent essay, Thomas Grip (he of Amnesia and Soma) wrote an interesting thesis on planning and its role in engagement (published on In the Games of Madness). I found a lot to be interesting in this essay but unfortunately Grip shortly poses a corollary which I feel does not show as much thought or reflection. He says about Dear Esther that “everybody agrees that the gameplay is lacking” and notes on the observation the game does not allow players to form plans that “we need to figure out ways of fixing this.” I cannot say I agree with either of these statements; primarily because I do not agree with the assessment that its gameplay is lacking, and secondarily because even it if is, I do not feel Dear Esther has to care much about gameplay.
In this response, I wish to argue that Grip’s implied position seems paradoxical and has some hints of an essentialist view of games, which, while not inherently uninsightful, may still curb our understanding of games as a whole in the long run.
I shall use the word ‘game’ rather than this blog’s more default ‘fancy’ to make the argument more congruous with Grip’s essay.
Grip’s essay focusses mostly on three words, which are planning (the central thesis), gameplay (hereafter ‘play’), and engagement. To paraphrase (and intending kindness), it is argued that the ability to plan is important for creating engagement with a game, as planning is at the centre of the human purposeful experience. We may juxtapose a simple linear journey with a complex, multi-faceted one and see that one does not require as much processing as the other. It does not, in other words, require planning, which means the world is less present in the mind. Play which requires planning in this thesis inherently has a higher resulting engagement, which is seen as a good. Planning also means there is ‘more play’, again seen as a good. A simple corollary of these observations is that Dear Esther, being linear and lacking planning, suffers for a lack of engagement and needs to be ‘fixed’.
In what way may we understand the viewpoint that Dear Esther needs to be ‘fixed’? We may say the fault of Dear Esther is that it lacks planning, therefore play, therefore engagement, and therefore it is not good. A rather big obstacle for this line of arguing is that Dear Esther has engagement. After all, its lush visuals, its well-voiced monologue focussing on an inability to accept loss, and the dream-like soundtrack has by many of its players—including myself—been cited as entrancing and consuming. I would say this game is satisfactorily engaging on many of my play-throughs. I cannot immediately believe that Grip thinks nobody could find Dear Esther engaging unless he believes I am delirious, so let us assume the problem with Dear Esther cannot be that it lacks engagement.
We may take a step back and argue instead that it lacks play. This would be hard to dispute. Specifically, it is hard to deny Dear Esther has ‘less play’ than virtually every other game on the market. Its path is linear, fences unnavigable, walking into the water leads to an abrupt set-back. This is all true. However, for us to say that lacking play is a fault, we must somehow argue that play is essential. It is unclear why that would be, following Grip’s thesis. After all, play leads to engagement, but Dear Esther already has engagement. If engagement is the goal, can it matter whether we get engagement from something that is not play?
We could argue that the engagement one gets from Dear Esther, not coming from play, must be a form of engagement which is not ‘play-engagement’. Play-engagement would be a specific form of engagement which we can extrapolate from Grip’s thesis; planning gives rise to engaged play which causes play-engagement. Nobody would with much seriousness argue that Dear Esther has a lot of play-engagement. As such our critique could be that it lacks specifically play-engagement, and that therefore it is flawed.
Is it fair to say that the flaw of Dear Esther is that it lacks play-engagement? I am not sure why this should ever be a flaw unless one claims some sort of monopoly on either the words ‘engagement’ or ‘game’. If we wish to vindicate Grip’s complaint, we must either assume that play-engagement is intrinsically, a priori, superior to any other engagement, or that games have to intrinsically, a priori, have to have play-engagement to be good. Both of these should not sound like unfamiliar arguments.
I cannot assume Grip sees play-engagement as intrinsically better; such a belief would make someone incapable of understanding why any person may read a book when there are games to be played. But perhaps the second option, that games need to have play-engagement, sounds plausible. In this view, something can be engaging, but if it is a game and is not play-engaging, it is wrongly engaging and ought to be engaging in the preferred play-engaging manner.
Perchance this view will resonate with those who did not enjoy Dear Esther, but it hardly explains why there are those who rather enjoyed it. Are these people who enjoy Dear Esther aware that they are enjoying the wrong type of engagement by being engaged with something which is not play-engagement?
We may also draw a somewhat different conclusion from Grip’s thesis: let us surreptitiously conclude that Dear Esther is simply not a game.
A game, it is implied, needs play-engagement to be good, and otherwise needs to be fixed. As we may assume Grip does not have a problem with enjoying media other than games we may assume that he grants (say) film a category of engagement which is not play-engagement. We might say: a film does not attempt to offer play-engagement, so it is a different medium. Then the corollary may be: Dear Esther does not attempt to offer play-engagement, so it is in a different medium. Following this, we cannot really say Dear Esther needs to be fixed, because in this conclusion Dear Esther falls outside of the model which was discussing it. As such, if Dear Esther is not a game, then why would one consider it in an article about planning in games? One may as well bring up goats in an article about horse-jumping and note that goats, lacking the body strength to support a rider, could really do with being fixed. How may we fix goats? To make them more like that which they are not, horses. How may we fix Dear Esther? To make it more like that which it is not, a game. At best, Grip ought to complain between the lines that Dear Esther is said to be a game, but on closer inspection according to his model it clearly cannot be such a thing and therefore it is not relevant to the thesis.
Our paradox: a model under which Dear Esther inherently needs to be ‘fixed’ could probably be simplified to say that Dear Esther is not a game: therefore the model really does not need to concern itself with passing judgement on Dear Esther—unless it also wishes to pass judgement on film, paintings, books and other non-games.
Do I then think that Grip’s error is mentioning a not-game within an essay on games? Perhaps. I do after all propose to drop the word ‘game’ and use ‘fancy’ as a wider, more encompassing word (as I argue in Apology for Saying Fancy). Nevertheless, I would sooner say that the deeper problem is the essentialism hidden within this whole set of arguments. This essentialism is not something I will assert Grip supports, but the hint of it has, I believe, far-reaching consequences.
Firstly, when we idealistically describe games as essentially having certain attributes and we say that Dear Esther ‘needs to be fixed’ or that it is not a game, we are condemning works such as Dear Esther to a form of oblivion. After all, the essayist is no longer responsible for explaining why Dear Esther is enjoyable to many; it has been stated to not be enjoyable. And if not a game, what is Dear Esther? Never mind; the essayist has done his job and moves on to something else. If Dear Esther is not understood in his model, then is not his problem and the artefact may as well be thrown to the wolves. It is essentially culturally lazy to refuse to account for Dear Esther.
Secondly, it may be said that an essayist who does not try to account for Dear Esther’s popularity fails to understand something about their own subject. Games, as I will forever argue, share many prominent qualities with other media, and yet often theory will try to assimilate those qualities under play. Ask, for instance, what people remember about Bioshock, and the answers not involving the gameplay will refer to the art deco environments, the characters and the plot twists—simply, a traversal of plot told in a stylish environment. To throw Dear Esther to the wolves also makes it harder to understand Bioshock, as one must have a bizarre model in which Bioshock, doing virtually the same thing as Dear Esther, is somehow intrinsically different by adding play. If we dig through Bioshock’s play, however, we will find no answers as to why people can still remember, to this day, the opening monologue. There is no clue in the nature of planning our journey through Rapture to explain how the big daddies and little sisters became part of online culture’s memes. These things were highly engaging, and yet they were not play. The popularity of this, I argue, comes down to what-ever it is Dear Esther also offers. The engagement with “I call it... Rapture” is the engagement we find in the opening lines of Dear Esther. To fail to understand why Dear Esther works puts you at risk of not understanding why the opening of Bioshock made such an impression: it means you avoid the conclusion that certain imagery, sound and narrative cues, traversed through with little to no play, can evoke great engagement, satisfying for its own sake, not needing another form of engagement to be added.
Essentially, I hold that you can never have a complete model of all the intricate and complex parts of what makes games engaging if you think a game without planning inherently needs to be ‘fixed’.
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It sometimes happens that at a première of a title the least enjoyable part of playing is the fancy itself. I have seen many audiences more interesting than the individual levels, and have often heard better dialogue in the foyer than I have in the audio-logs. At the Royal Gallery, however, this is rarely the case, and when the fancy is a fancy by Dan Pinchbeck and Jessica Curry, and among its exponents are Mr Briscoe and Mr Carrington, we turn from the gods in the gallery to enjoy the charm of the production, and to take delight in the craftsmanship.
The idea is such: we would pass through several hallways and appreciate a series of intricate, well-crafted paintings. All the while, a small group of musicians would play, and Mr Carrington would speak poetic lines.
It was a most interesting combination. As the sad, melancholic tones of Curry’s composition echoed, Mr Carrington gave us deep, strange words that, although confusing at first, drew out the loneliness and the sadness of these Hebridean isles. The grass on the cliffs danced in the wind and as we looked in the ravished huts there was a sense of loss and a reluctance of accept. A desire to understand.
This seemed the main motif in Dear Esther. As we moved from painting to painting, we came by drawings in the sand of spirals and chemical notations. It was ingenious of Mr Pinchbeck to have the story evolve in multiple variations and lines, so that we never quite knew what part of the elaborate tapestry we were listening to, and how much of it we ought to believe. Tales of passed legends, giving an air of the mythological, were at times contrasted with the every day; a man shaking his coffee mug. To the man who has lost so much, perhaps a saint who sails in a boat without a bottom is no more outrageous than the M5 motorway: and yet Mr Carrington, whose identity in the story remained unclear, seemed to have some semblance of knowledge of the real. The ghost story was that of a man’s mind.
The paintings mostly were exquisite. Every new painting brought with it some surprise. We passed round a corner and found a field of red flowers. We walked down a path with narrow wooden beams forming a impotent fence. We climbed through a narrow tunnel. These details were startlingly well-executed. The soft diffuse light manages still to find darkness where it had to, and break out in more open detail. Above all, the cliffs were magnificent, rugged, eternal, yet broken up by human hands and human ambitions.
In each painting, we approached closer towards an aerial, which constantly loomed over cliffs, a single red dot breaking through the haze.
Unfortunately the first inartistic incident of the evening was a particularly anxious man who desired only to walk on. As we were particularly engaged by Mr Carrington’s broody yet dulcet enunciation, and as I had just been struck by a sunbeam, painted diaphanously as it gracefully brushed the rough dark rocks, this anxious man had chosen to applaud these efforts by passing them by. Mr Carrington, although talented, struggled a moment as he clearly was prompted to elaborate on two events at the same time. What possessed this man only to walk on remains unclear.
Perhaps at times the narration felt a little incoherent or without a clear arc. But this also made possible a particularly dreamlike reality, where things happened because they were said, and where amidst the confusion, much like the aerial, one constant desire to finally understand it was clearly visible. Many things continued to touch upon some themes without ever embracing them. Just like its verbose manner, in many works this may be a flaw. But as I listened to Mr Carrington, I felt the pleasure was all in the elaborate words, the mystical elements. It asked us to enjoy the words and sentences themselves, which is rare in the current climate of highly functional writing, where all must advance some plot of provide some exposition. It is rare to do this, and even more rare to do it well; and this Mr Pinchbeck did, and I must say I marvel at it.
Unfortunately I must admit I was not as fond of the paintings of the caves. Although the narrative and Ms Curry’s sumptuous score continued to be excellent, they felt too romanticised, losing touch with the harsh reality. The attempt at beauty there became too apparent, perhaps, and what they call ‘sugary’. In good landscape work, nature does not invite us in; we forever trespass on its cliffs. The caves felt like they greatly desired to be seen, like a young person who wishes to be popular and in doing so becomes aesthetically vacuous. Perhaps shrouding them in darkness, with only a single spot of light as we would shine ourselves, would have given them the dangerous mystery such terrifying places naturally possess. Less fairy cave, more Toilers of the Sea.
As we saw a stunning painting, a vertical shaft of many waterfalls, I felt it was a shame such a grand set-piece was used so boastfully; and even then a form of boastfulness deprived of charm. It felt perfunctory, as-if we simply needed yet another great set piece. There was none of that charm of the earlier scenes, where the cliffs had all the craft a man puts in them; and yet all the uncaring harshness nature leaves in them. This trend continued and I must say as we advanced I grew less fond of the images themselves. It felt too definitive, too answered, too safe; all littered with candles which were roughly detached from their (probable) purpose as a vigil to guide and steer us. It not infrequently came close to breaking the spell.
That said, the final ascent to the aerial was beautiful, with its narrow paths, its soulless human fences, the painful depths below. And as Mr Carrington continued, I felt he found just the right form of pathos: never personal, never as if he personally came to the denouement: more that the denouement happened in his woebegone words without him even noticing. It was a thrilling conclusion for a sad ghost tale.
With a particularly poor sense of timing but a noteworthy sense of escalation another incident occurred. As we were just looking at the mist as it passed over a forgotten beach, a fellow made himself known by shouting “but what about me!”
Mr Carrington was undisturbed, and the musicians managed not to miss a single note, but sad to say I was not so professional at my appreciation and turned an ear to this disturbance.
“What about me,” the man said again, then wringing his hands and growling, “I have been walking through this gallery, looking at these works, listening to the music, but what about me!”
“Well,” a stout man muttered, “what about you?”
“I am not doing anything,” the anxious man continued, now turning circles around us and attempting to jump, even though clearly there was no need to jump. He started shouting louder, “I am not engaged. The first purpose of a fancy is to engage me! If it fails at that, it fails at being a fancy!”
A dreadful silence fell, as even Mr Carrington struggled a little at such boorish words. I spied Mr Pinchbeck in the background, exhuming a vague sense of tiredness.
“Are you part of the performance?” a kind lady asked, “are you the Bottom of all this?”
“How can I be part of this, if all I do is walk and look,” the man continued, just as Mr Carrington tried to resume his sad monologue, “you have such contempt for me! You’re not inviting me in! I was at another event, oh yes I was, and that was different and better, because it related to me on my own level, and it employed tropes which I am familiar with, instead of expecting me to be part of a broad and interesting, century-long tradition of the arts that requires just a small amount of effort to understand!”
At this the man stormed off and left an angry review on Steam.
The magic was broken a little by this. I offered: “it is good the man is gone for now, but it is a stern reminder of the philistinism of much of the people outside of these halls, and their continued force holding us back as we develop the great medium of fancies. It is sad that the best way to enjoy this great fancy is to imagine ourselves in a different context, in a different world, where instead of playing this on a computer, we imagine paintings, the most fitting context to understand it in. We all just lack the right capacity for understanding this work: we have lacked it for many years. It is so terribly hard to keep up and manufacture this capacity when so little truly evolves.
“Are we part of the previous artistic traditions? Is imagining Dear Esther as a series of paintings in a hall outrageous? Are we part of the new traditions? Is Dear Esther like Half Life without the shooting? How can we find out if we have so little to truly connect the old with the new, and if hostile buffoons continue to snarl at every new work?”
I grew exasperated and sadly muttered on, “I have lost track of how long I have been here, and how many visits I have made overall. I have run out of places to climb.”
Then Oscar Wilde passed by and shook my hand, most gracefully, and commended me on these words. It was particularly potent, given that I had been as a butcher, and he as the lamb, in writing this.
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On the Theory of Fancies & Games, Essay the Fourth: Harmonics, Polyphonics, Counterpoint
In order to introduce a method of evaluating fancies (see Essay Three), let us assume a view that is not unlike music theory. To wit: we may analyse a piece of music for various simultaneous rhythms and melodies, as well as features such as call-and-answer between instruments or a build-up to a crescendo. This does not divide the piece into separate ‘things’, rather we have a series of features we may try and recognise in any given piece; and can observe these shapes acting in differing relations to one-another.
This view on fancies may help to avoid an overly fissiparous view—commonly, seeing ‘narrative’ and ‘ludus’ as inherently distinct elements—by recognising a multitude of overlapping and interrelated forms. In addition, the musical language may prompt some noteworthy questions: can we recognise harmony within the elements we have? Could there be call and answer between elements? Do we arrange them into harmony, counterpoint, or simple polyphony?
This fourth essay focusses primarily on introducing this form of evaluation and on describing some of its noteworthy features. The analysis will be continued in the fifth essay in this series, focussing on elements in Half Life 2 and Homeworld: Cataclysm. This essay also assumes that we may make some broad statements about fancies, even when played by many different players (see Essay One).
Conceptually, we may isolate an element from a fancy which exists over time during play. This isolation can be seen as simply grouping things with salient features together. Although ‘narrative’ or ‘play’ could be an example of this, equally ‘music’ and ‘space’ could be isolated, or ‘stress’ and ‘cheeky banter’. By itself, one such ‘voice’ (to keep with music terminology) can yield some form of internal melody or rhythm. For instance, by this we may mean that the typical tropes of ‘play’ in a strategic shooting fancy—map, traverse, control, eliminate—are not homogenous; they rather vary over time and in this manner can be seen as rhythmic or melodious. One well-explored avenue in this is creating moments of rest in-between moments of extreme excitement to prevent the player from getting ‘battle fatigue’. This may be seen as a simple rhythm; subtle changes in balance of actions or types of excitement can also be seen as a melody.
We may add a second voice to our analysis if we take, for instance, the ‘sets’ in such a fancy. The nature of these sets can be seen as independent from the aforementioned play, seeing as we are merely isolating features and not describing inherent properties. The sets could follow well-known tropes such as the ‘factory’, ‘worn-torn city’, ‘old mining town’, ‘futuristic bazaar’, &c. The choice and rate of variation in these sets, along with their level of detail, lighting situation, suggested origins, and so on, again can be seen as a rhythm or melody.
Having isolated two or more voices, we may analyse how they co-exist. In the example of ‘play’ and ‘decoration’, the voices are conceptually different and we must by necessity think of them as polyphonic (as they cannot be monophonic). Despite this, their actual form could be harmonious in relation to one-another. The set of an ‘old mining town’ may coincide with the play focussing more on suspense or sudden effects, harmoniously forming a typical ‘horror level’ trope. If the sets and play are very related we may speak of an actual harmony, simultaneously making it harder to distinguish between the two voices.
A pleasant effect of this evaluation is that we can see the sets and play as related as well as patterns which internally may follow their own rhythm and melody. Much like the listener to a polyphonic composition may listen to several voices simultaneously, the sets and play can be processed simultaneously, whether they are harmonious or not.
Note that we can also consider different elements of play as voices. The enduring battles of a shooting fancy may be one voice and the concept of ‘upgrading’ the character another. The actual process of gathering ‘experience’ or ‘money’ and then ‘purchasing’ upgrades to some extent is unrelated to the actual shooting, though it is concurrent and mixed with it. In this manner we may regard this play as two voices. One arguably has a faster rhythm—the shooting—and the other has a slower rhythm—the building of capital and strength—which may allow us to conclude they are polyrhythmic with regards to one-another; though potentially harmonious.
Naturally we may also see parts of sets as different voices, for instance in the case of mixing styles, such as advanced technology in primitive situations. Beyond sets and play we may also consider such things as plot lines, characters, adversary types, and so on, as differing voices, which have different relationships with regards to rhythm, melody and harmony. The change in sets can be harmonious with a character’s change of heart; or the score can be homorhythmic with the pacing of action.
This is not to say that actual harmony (or homorhythm) is always desirable. It would be rather simplistic to think of the idea of ‘harmony’ as inherently a good thing. One of the beauties of polyphonic music is exactly that multiple voices can be followed simultaneously, without the requirement of a ‘definitive’ harmony or rhythm. We may see this as the equivalent of counterpoint; multiple voices with separate melodies and rhythm in a harmonious relation with one-another.
And yet this is also not to say any number of voices will work together. The contemporary success of the ‘audio journal’ trope may be explained by it being a cheap extra voice that easily creates some extra melody with some mild counterpoint—and yet the lack of coherence with the rest of the fancy is not infrequently noted. More successful harmony—or even counterpoint—would require a rebalancing of all voices, which would detract from the low cost of audio journals.
Another pleasant effect of this evaluation is that we may investigate how the relationship between the voices changes over time (changing the ‘texture’ of the fancy) and how this can be utilised to create interesting patterns, such as call-and-answer or a cadence. In a more far-fetched manner, we could analyse some fancies as-if they were motets; with their often reproduced cantus firmus forming the basis for polyphonic works. To wit; the cantus firmus could be the very basic building blocks reproduced in many fancies, such as in our examples the navigation and shooting. This may also explain some dissonance between the ‘basic blocks’ and the attempts of the creators to add different voices.
If the reader was eagerly awaiting the mention of ‘ludonarrative dissonance’, she shall now obtain satisfaction: indeed, within this view we can see it as we would harmonic dissonance—or more specifically, disharmonious voices. It may be the case that it is not the individual ‘notes’ of the narrative and the play that are dissonant; it is more that they fail to harmonise to the point that it unbalances the piece as a whole.
Essay Five shall continue this evaluation, focussing on the harmonics of power and control in Half Life 2 and Homeworld: Cataclysm.
The ‘walking-sim’ genre of fancies has quite taken off in recent years, showing an interesting development and increasing amount of recognition. Arguably still feeling ‘cult’ at the time of Dear Esther, the more homely Gone Home announced them to a broader audience, and the success of Firewatch shows that the genre is gaining momentum. They are contentious, but unlikely to fall short of recognition. The latest addition to this genre is perhaps the most daring and ambitious: R——.
Summarizing briefly, the inciting incident of R—— is the plea of a man called A—— who seeks your help in rescuing his wife: she is imprisoned by his father. They are trapped in a sort of distant parallel world called ‘R——’. Apparently, without A——’s continued dedication, R—— will collapse so he passes his task on to you: save his wife, trap his father, signal him. He neglects to mention how. He trusts you will figure this out. Perhaps, he trusts you a bit too much.
Magic plot devices aside, the world of R—— appears to be a series of islands in what seems like a tropical region. Paths riddle cliff walls, mechanical devices are spread out. You find a temple where food is laid before idols that are hard to place, iconography depicting situations you cannot recognise. Someone speaks to you in a language you do not understand: then he tries another language, which you also do not understand. There is a large chance you did not even realise he tried two languages, because the fancy makes no attempt at explaining any of this to you. Instead, it respects you and feels you will come to understand it by deduction.
It would be easy to describe R—— as simply beautiful or intriguing, even simply mysterious. But the real display of ambition and genius of it is that it is far less the usual carefully laid out mountainous paths, or the sequence of audio-log scavenger hunts. It is a world presented without comment that, nevertheless, seems to be built by its inhabitants, using their actual hands. The realism of the fancy is that in a bizarrely unlikely place, some people made their life. And some lives are not like others, and show a stunning personality in what they do to the world. Sometimes those personalities are a charade, a mask for another personality, and so on, so on. Everything had to be built for a reason: to conjecture at those reasons is the sport of it. The fancy, like A——, respects you enough to figure it out.
The genius of it is: R—— really expects you to be an archaeologist.
Even if the fancy frames your presence as necessary in the most stereotypical way (‘save the person, defeat the villain, magic’) most of it can be spent in looking at the way some houses were built on their wooden support beams. How some trees have their bark removed. How some creatures sunbathe on a rock. How a culture was changed by another one down to the little fancies that they play. Slowly you piece together what happened here, who A——’s father is, who his wife is, and what their relation is to this world. Then, an ominous piece of music plays while you walk through a tunnel where perhaps you simply ought not to be. You are an intruder who seeks to understand.
The world not merely offers this to you, it expects you to indulge in it. To stare at a metal walkway and realise it has a spot without rust where someone probably stood for a while.
If you wish to merely play through R——, find some audio logs that tell you ‘the stuff’ and then get on with it: tough. There is no ‘getting on with it’. The fancy wants you to look at sediment and think: ‘it makes sense that this would be here.’ The reward for careful examination is exquisite, unparalleled. At some point, you may catch yourself listening to the sound produced by an elevator and think to yourself, ‘it ends with a click and I understand how this mechanically works, so that makes sense.’
Not that the click of an elevator is important. It just shows a dazzling sense of detail we have not seen before. It tricks you into thinking about it as if it is real. The work that went into the modelling of the environment, the shading and the sound is at times unbelievable, yet feels right.
R—— advances on the walking-sim in several ways. The focus on the meaningful examination of the terrain gives it far more scope and range to work with. By presenting a foreign series of cultures to you it is far more challenging to read than Gone Home’s personalised rooms, it feels as-if characters have fewer secrets and many more layers. It also is a very densely packed fancy: there are no empty canyons that have to be paced through to get to some new bit of text. This is a two-part achievement: firstly, the fancy uses nodes, sparing you the slow proddy pace from location to location, allowing you to speed through the world if you so wish. It does not care to slow you down to purchase some extra minutes of play-time, it expects you to play it for the sake of the world.
It also never artificially drip-feeds you exposition, instead neglecting to use the genre’s typical audio-logs replacing them with very sporadic extensive journals. Nobody writes about their inner feelings and leaves the sheet lying around arbitrarily to create a ‘moment’. Finding a journal feels like a major step forward, not because you make ‘progress’ but because you feel you may finally get some confirmation about your conjectures. Of course, the journals themselves play the trick again: they just describe additional things to consider, more things to place in your mental model, and they clearly show the person writing it has his own view on the world. It is hard to think back to the other walking-sims, as their pacing suddenly seems so monotonously simple, so uncomplicated, so objective. On top of all this, R—— also introduces other people that are sporadically met. It is a simple, but good addition. The suggestion of life adds a lot to this loneliest type of genres.
And yet—perhaps R—— respects you too much. At times it feels like R—— would be the fancy we would have after several more walking sims, each building their world more, each working harder. R—— is a gigantic step that can be overwhelming. It expects you to gain an understanding about magical books, several cultures, their language, their issues, and then even more internally consistent things, while overwhelming you with details that are not even in the fancy itself. Occasionally it sort-of checks you, by expecting you to draw the right conclusions from this myriad of clues, and hissing: well then, how do you open this thing, you would know if you paid attention.
Make no mistake: like a zealous history teacher it tests you. Not in a ‘did you find the clue’ Gone Home-esque way, or a ‘get the axe’ Firewatch-esque way. No, by making sure you did your homework and you studied the world with an almost impossible eye for detail. If you just are not getting it, there is no hope for you.
R—— seems naive in not seeing that perhaps its expectations of you are too high.
Perchance this is not a bad thing: R—— expects you to be used to this, as if in some parallel universe we had been playing complex archaeological adventures for so long that we may just jump in, look at a spinning metal dome and say: ‘I know exactly what notes to make here!’ It is a flaw, but it is both player and fancy that are at fault: one is not good enough, the other expects too much. For now, finding someone who completed the fancy before and can help you may be a good solution.
All in all, the world of R—— is extensive. So extensive it is—like any new thing now—cross-media: The Book of Atrus offers unexpected insights into specifics of the world. Nothing to ‘explain’ it: for instance, it may rather inform you of a character’s choice of corridor in a certain place of the island. This absurd level of ‘probable detail’ is the level of dedication the developers aimed at and hit immensely. It is almost touching when developer Richard vander Wende humbly mentions that much more can be done with this: Heavens, Man! You give us such an unparalleled addition to the walking sim and already you admit it could be more?!
It is impossible to not frame R—— as both an excellent fancy and as the shape of things to come: a new era of walking sims, building on Dear Esther, building on Gone Home, building on Firewatch: and not about mere pictures and mere narratives: about full, extensive worlds where we can be an archaeologist, piecing together clues, ideas, and motivations. Where the major victory is not reaching point B, but is recognising what ‘that structure is doing there.’ The realisation is unlike anything: not a test we won, not an audio-log found, not a mystery solved. It is the realisation that we understand something about this world. A close, personal moment, in which it is our own mind that did the work, that understood, that sees the whole. Then the moment passes, the water hits the wooden bridge we stand on, and we walk on, wiser.
Riven is a brilliant new addition and promises much for the near future.
If I have one complaint, it is that for a fancy that presents us with such an enticing world, the resolution is very low. It is hard to understand that in 2016 it only offers a display resolution of 608×392. But I suppose we can forgive it; the quality of the renders is astounding, and of course Riven was made in 1997.
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Discourses: Reflecting on the A-word with Chris Bateman, Part Two
This is part of a conversation with Chris Bateman, this post responding to his prior ‘The Game of Art’ on Only a Game. The beginning of the conversation (part 1) may be found on the self-same blog as ‘The Love That Too Loudly Speaks Its Name’.
Dear Chris,
Your dissection is rather insightful. I must say for the briefest of moments I imagined I was being Mr Grangrind, growling that horses are ‘quadrupeds’ who may not appear on wallpaper, seeing as horses are not in reality vertically transposed; and that flowers on carpets are a fault as one should not walk on flowers in real life. I must change my footing a little for this game to continue, and make myself slightly better understood. I sympathise with the small sense of loss experienced by the folk “kicking the ball” when rules were formalized that made the sport football possible; the rules facilitating play at some loss of innocence.
It is interesting to note that not long ago I wrote Apology for saying ‘fancy’, which suggests to replace many usages of the word ‘game’ (or specifically video-game) with the word ‘fancy’. With some amusement I can note that the subject hinted at by the end of your writing has a rather different sound to my ears; “are games a—?”
Firstly I must say that dismissing a— is not so much a positivistic effort on my part as one part of your reply may be seen to suggest. I do not truly dismiss a— because quadrupeds are not vertically transposed ‘in reality’, i.e., I am not testing the idea of a— to reality in the sense of seeing whether it exists. I do wish to comment on your suggestion that cutting a— seemingly leads to a pandemonium, ending with cutting science (which we would then mirthfully call “s—” in cheeky games), not merely because I disagree in principle, but also because it may be a good road to take to my more proper opinion.
I do suppose “testing ideas against reality” could be formulated as seeking relation between patterns of neurons and patterns of behaviour of an observable, absolute universe. One could define some method A to compare and some value θ to use as a threshold. For some A and some θ, we could very well spare both ‘science’ and ‘a—’, and probably this will save ‘personal identity’, too. (The positivist test against absolute reality which one may be threatening to take could say that 0 < θ < n. Nothing would survive under the regime of such an irrational θ.) The question for the aspiring maverick who wishes to get rid of the a-word and yet seeks to spare science would be the formulation of the right A (which of course in itself would have to be tested to be representative of reality, ad infinitum). This might be some interesting line, and as tempting as it is to find a good A, this is not quite my goal. I do believe the a-word can be ‘demonstrated’ to clearly exist as much as science; and I am not looking for an A that will allow me to spare ‘beauty’ and kill ‘a—’. Similarly, I do not consider gods to exist, but I do not wish to dismiss the word ‘god’; and ironically your choice of ‘science’ as a word is closer to being like the a-word than ‘god’ in my thinking, for a reason that may be inferred from the continuation.
I must admit it is not easy for me to respond to Ranciere’s citation; in a way I feel drawn out of position by the usage of the a-word in direct relation to aesthetics as a subject. Let me try to differentiate between the essence of the words in three short considerations.
Firstly. Some discussion of aesthetics can easily be seen as a qualitas occulta, much like Dennett does not unjustly muse how mystical some discussions about the mind were, at various points. The “what a wonderful place is the mind, a palace of thought”-isms are not unlike some aesthetic discussions. I might sympathise with someone who might argue it has nonsensical assertions and vicious circles or that aesthetics might not even have a place in ‘proper’ this-or-that. At the same time, regardless of its true inner workings, the discussion of aesthetics may be had on a great many subjects. Aesthetically, I may in no contradictory manners observe a statue or a horse—at least, in definitions that allow nature, as I will now assume. The breakfast I made this morning, the trees in the garden, the sky above, the stars beyond, all may all be debated under the domain of aesthetics. Maybe some of this discussion will be on the basis of some occult method, some moralism or vagrant positivism, but the concept is an open-ended series of ideas. It places a painting by van Gogh in relationship with whirlpools of brown leaves in autumn; it places the touches of a lover in relation to Monteverdi’s compositions. Even if the discussion is on very undetermined grounds, it may be had about many objects.
Secondly, and very briefly, a differentiation of objects in classes in this realm is successfully done with words such as painting, statue, thinkpiece, performance, public, natural world, the Dutch cloudscape. It by analogy establishes an A and a value θ so that for most artefacts we may say ‘so-and-so is a statue, so-and-so is a shallow relief, this is a tea-cup and this is... quite odd’ in many discussions without serious repercussions to the object itself in most situations. It is benign in that a statue is not necessarily a good statue, and something can be a poor statue and a statue still.
Thirdly. Perhaps a— could be seen as combining these features, aesthetics and definition, ‘man-made’ or so, with some premise or another, such as ‘meaning’ or ‘of great importance’ or any such determinant. We may ‘play it straight’ in the sense that we could genuinely go and look for some true definition of a— with the intent of grabbing it tight, and holding on to it. A little weasel-game may also be played, where we may end up admitting that anything ‘made by humans’ is ‘really a bit like a—’ but then start dividing things in ‘high-a—’ and ‘low-a—’. In this straight sense (which I do not presume you are taking), it seem to be about the introduction of a sort-of format, moralism, or aesthetic idealism, but without admitting it. Most attempts at getting to definition a— also seem to invalidate a lot of things currently referred to as a—, by which I refer to ‘very important’ or ‘quite relevant to the human condition’ ruling out quite a lot of innocent genre and portrait painting.
If a solid system emerges, shared by a great many people, so it be, but it is not! And it is not, I think, the point of the a-word to be used in this manner, in part because actually defining a— would make the word as important as ‘tree’ or ‘natural treasure’; but also because as you say, the word itself is a game to play.
If it is used more like a game, as ‘the apparatus to render the various arts visible,’ I must say I find it not unlike the two friends, who truly have much to mirthfully share with one-another, playing chess and spending an evening mute except for the occasional ‘well you have me there.’ That is to say, I would see more worth in discussions of someone’s bare, unhidden moral interests, or perhaps someone’s feeling of political kinship and recognition. This interest may be reflected in the artefacts (paintings, performance pieces, &c) which they appreciate as well as in the food they eat, the sports they whistle and the horses they ride. Simultaneously, I would assume more of worth is in someone’s aesthetic views, in which I do not think poaching an egg has an unnavigable difference to a piece played on piano, a cunning joke, an elaborate sketch, or a longing kiss. If we were like some old muddy biologists truly intent on finding some extremely hierarchical class system, our classification would be on various terms which would not be obscured, but shared in axioms and debated in harsh, alienating light.
What discussions may be had on these grounds about games! Think of the comparisons between landscape painting and the cold climes of Dear Esther; the ebb and flow of a grand composition and the pacing of shooting and hiding in many a war-lusty game. And for this, the a-word is not needed. “Is it like this-or-that?” someone might ask of the work, and you may say “yes, it made me feel like so-and-so and I-know-not-what!”
But then you throw a spanner in the works. You introduce a word-game and it crumbles. “Does this game,” that one annoying voice breathes, “meet an arbitrary term that shall leave us mute about the subject itself?”
Gone! is the opportunity for comparing Dear Esther to your breakfast. We created a barrier where our best opportunity may be to say ‘well breakfast is sort-of a form of a—,’ by which we are truly debating aesthetics, moralism or some-such under by the proxy of the a-word, for no good purpose, as we might better discuss those subjects first-hand. And if we might not need to get to a— to compare Dear Esther, breakfast, or reach any of these subjects; then what is the addition of a— worth?
I feel you ended your letter warmly, and I believe we do share a great deal of thought on this very subject; and I must admit that as I lack your refinement, I have substituted it at many points with slightly bawdy and student-like thought. I may be young and roguish to think that if I am so mean to a— as to never even stoop to speak its name, it may set me free from the importance of getting games ‘recognized’. Yet, perhaps I truly do think that we stare ourselves blind on getting games to be seen as a—, when what we truly want is a medium that will reach and impress those who see a weeping willow at a pond and are impressed by it; visit the ballet and are impressed by it; wear pleasant socks and tread lightly on a rug as they drink from a pretty cup, and are impressed by it. They shall say ‘this fancy was truly well-made, I enjoyed it greatly. Sometimes a man-made wonder may rival blossoming trees,’ and they shall think about many subjects.
Honoured to read your writings and have mine read,
Jeroen
The images used in this article are for illustrative purposes only and are, in order of usage, The Artist’s Model (Killburne), Portrait of Luca Pacioli (traditionally attributed to de’ Barbari), The Art Lesson (Beda), Little Inferno (Tomorrow Corporation), Self Portrait, the Artist Hesitating Between the Arts of Music and Painting (Kauffmann), The Vegetable Stall (MacGregor).
Comments, as Chris Bateman wisely likes to remind all, are always welcome.
On the theory of games, Essay the Third: Apology for saying ‘fancy’
A small thought experiment goes like this: imagine we took Dear Esther, The Path or Gone Home and we transported these works into the past. For instance, we might take them to 1850, or 1900. What are the odds, being free of a modern context, that the people we show these marvels to will term them ‘games’—or more explicitly, term an entire medium game?
Of course this experiment somewhat ignores the whims and wits of etymology. To some extent, we came into this century producing these works without having an explicit word for it; and if we happen to have chosen to expand ‘game’ to fit, we might say that so-it-be and accept it for what it is. And, some say we should not. But it would be unimpressive to here recount the variable arguments around the word ‘game’. The very recounting has the risk of presenting ‘game’ as a polarised word, when instead the premise of this essay is that game is a rather agreed-upon word; or rather, it is two agreed-upon words.
These two words, both ‘game’, are not very relevant to one-another but in many debates are used interchangeably and confusingly. The first word concerns the questions of challenge, meaningful outcome, magic circles, &c. That is to say, it is a word which with a little sophism could have been convincingly used in 1850 or 1900 to discuss this field of study; the social mode; objects of the social mode, what-ever they may be. The second word (also, ‘game’), seems to mean many—but not necessarily all—artefacts engaged with in a virtual manner. This word refers to the usage of the medium that our advances in computers have made possible; things to be engaged with, or looked at in an engaging way. This word could also with some sophism have been used in 1850 or 1900, although it would perhaps require more sophism.
In both cases it is important to discuss the meaning of the word; but those discussions, in the view of this essay, can be had parallel to one-another without much cross-influence—under the condition, at least, that one understands which of the two words is being referred to by ‘game’. The first word ‘game’ can be used to debate the parameters of ‘game, like a game of cards’, the second word ‘game’ can be used to denote an artefact played virtually, ‘game, like Doom, or Proteus’. These concepts are not inherently related in this form, and if they were better distinguished would far less invoke one-another’s meaning. In a sense, the largest similarity between ‘game’ and ‘game’ seems to be that the words are identically written.
The idea of replacing one of the words ‘game’ with another word has already been proposed through some trick of etymology which supposes in some situations it was never ‘game’ to begin with, it was rather ‘video-games’, which then becomes the word which means the medium. That is to say, a situation arises in which it is ‘game, like a game of cards’, and ‘video-game, like Doom or Proteus’. Perhaps it might be said that hanging a meaning on the consequent prefixation of ‘video’ is not much better if one’s object is to be more clear; and one will need a steady supply of mental self-restraint to erase the connexion between game and video-game. Yet there is a more important matter, which is the implication of using ‘video’ to signify a medium.
One of the charms of ‘game, like a game of cards’ is that it as a word does not explicitly care whether it is used physically or virtually. That is to say, it concerns a mode of conduct which we may do on a field with a leather ball and physics, or we may do it through a CPU’s billions of calculations suggesting physics, or we may do it sitting at a table rolling dice to chance the outcome of physics. This is a useful word, as the salient part of it is in the behaviour, not in the implementation. Contrariwise, one of the drawbacks of ‘game, like video-game’ is that it can be a form of fixation on the medium, where something is qualified because it is on a computer. To show the contrast, football can be referred to as a game regardless of it being on a field or on a computer, but football would need the computer to qualify for being a ‘video-game’. (One at least might assume that most usage of the word ‘video-game’ at some point will involve a CPU.)
Outside of the strong qualifier of ‘CPU or not’, we may look at many activities and see them in both physical and virtual form. We may read a physical book, we may read a virtual book. We may play physical football, we may play virtual football. We may create physical model train set, we may create a virtual model train set. We may play a physical game, we may play a virtual game. It is slightly absurd to suggest that a virtual train set is somehow inherently different from a physical one; i.e., to suggest one is a train set and the other is a video game—yet this is exactly the implication of using the strong-termed ‘video game’, putting the qualifier more firmly on the medium than the content.
It is still tempting to frame the CPU as being central to a concept because many things one might play are impossible to imagine in physical form. Nevertheless, the prior understanding for engaging with said artefact may be understood in terms which have little to do with the CPU. Walking through gardens, reading poetry, and regarding landscape paintings all have some to do with Dear Esther. They do not cover Dear Esther, evidently, but they have more to say about it than merely utilising a CPU does. It is unlikely we may set up a house where we physically go to for the purpose of finding audio tapes, yet that does not make this hypothetical house too different from the fantasy of Gone Home. Indeed, perhaps we could have fantasized we were in the same situations as we see portrayed in many a ‘video-game’, except that it were rather hard to craft this illusion in a real world. Again, ‘video-game’ presses on the medium (video), and not the social mode (fantastical involvement), unlike ‘game, as in a game of cards’. This in turn obscures the continuation of existing human behaviour from the physical to the virtual forms.
We can retain ‘virtual’ as a qualifier which describes the non-physical form. The very question of ‘what to call it’, however, might be more wisely chosen to not explicitly give the form, and rather the behaviour. If we bar ‘video-games’ as a word, we have several behaviours which we have enriched and put together, for which there is no collective name, physical or virtual. To wit, what do we call fantasizing about walking around Hebridean isles while listening to reminiscences? What do we call pretending to be an assassin who in some way is friends with Charles Darwin?
To propose a word for these artefacts: a fancy.
As-in, ‘playing a fancy’, ‘downloading a fancy’, ‘debating a fancy’, ‘rating a fancy 8/10’, ‘being enthralled by a fancy’.
Fancy, here, comes from the mid-15th century contraction of ‘fantasy’. It emphasises inclinations, whims, and desires; going so far as to mean a fanciful image or conception. What are these things we play, if not the very essence of a flight of fancy? We fancy we are the Dragon-born, we fancy we walk over dark Hebredian isles, we fancy the Templar did us wrong. As we partake in these works what we let go of is reality. We for a moment have capricious illusions of being somewhere else, of something else mattering, of something to engage with. At the same time, like a small fantasy, we clearly know it is but that, our own fancying, and we may withdraw out of it at our leisure.
Let us stress three features of the word fancy.
Firstly, it must be stressed the word ‘fancy’ does not pose itself antagonistically towards ‘game, as in a game of cards’. The purpose of coining ‘fancy’ is not to somehow explicitly draw a division line. Rather, fancy denotes the gradient on which an artefact (which we engage with) goes into the realm of facilitating fantasy, which does not exclude it also being ‘a game’. In a sense it was always of great importance to Assassin’s Creed to mark what Dear Esther is. What Assassin’s Creed’s is or is not could never truly merely be dependant on the existence of a few elements which were ‘game, as in a game of cards’: and yet the double usage of ‘game’ made that desirable in many debates. We may now say; Assassin’s Creed is a game/fancy, or a fancy/game. Dear Esther is not a game and more explicitly a fancy. Whether this observation is correct, and what works may be termed what, is left to the reader.
Secondly, the emphasis of fancy lies on the behaviour, not the medium. That is, to fantasize, to form mental images, to picture and to see the unreal as real. The feature by which we recognise a fancy is not observation and to absorption; nor is it to be challenge and tests of endurance; rather it is to imagine and to play. This leaves room for framing physical behaviour as part of a ‘fancy’, much like physical ‘games’ exist next to virtual ‘games’. A physical fancy may seem an awkward proposition but the usages both facilitates the gradual invisibility of computers (a reduction in the difference between ‘virtual’ and ‘physical’) and accounts for fancies incorporating behaviour which is present already; as well as for some existing fanciful physical behaviour which never had an explicit term. (It would be wise to emphasise at this point that a thing can be both fancy and game; this is merely a description of when it is a fancy.)
Thirdly, although the word may seem overtly illusionary, the connotations of the word slightly stress the idea of a whim or caprice. One can play a fancy in a very meaningful way, or one can just engage with a small fancy capriciously. It may be a serious fancy, it may be a small play-thing. The further connotation as ‘fancy’ meaning superfine quality and amorous inclinations are of course pleasant, too. By some twist of fate ‘the fancy’ is an archaic term for a sport's deeply involved fan-base, which is a nice, harmonic sort of thought to end on.
In summary, it has been proposed that we have two words, both ‘game’, one of which refers to ‘game, as in a game of cards’ and the other is more commonly used to denote part of a virtual medium. The word ‘video-game’ has been proposed to mean the virtual medium but ‘video-game’ is unlike ‘game’ or ‘book’ in that it stresses the virtual element, not the behaviour. ‘Fancy’ is proposed to mean an artefact relating to the usage of the involved imagination, both physically and virtually. A fancy can overlap or coexist with ‘game, as in a game of cards’, as well as other qualifiers, and furthermore stresses the imaginary parts of what presently are called ‘games’.
This series will henceforth be known as ‘On the Theory of Fancies and Games’.
The images used in this article are for illustrative purposes only and are, in order of usage, Hearts are Trumps (Millais), Proteus (Ed Key and David Kanaga), OpenTTD (Chris Sawyer / OpenTTD Team), Gone Home (Fullbright), Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate (Ubisoft Quebec), Dear Esther (The Chinese Room), Dinner Date (Stout Games), Mountain (David O’Reilly), In the Realms of Fancy (Godward).
Reply, response, reproduction, and discussion is welcome, as always.
On the theory of games, Essay the Second: Playing at Frankenstein, (or:) the Horrible Consequences of Winning Alpha Centauri
As the reader will remember, there is a distinct turning point in Shelley’s Frankenstein. It occurs as the poor Victor finally completes the monster and awakens it by some hard-won method: Rather than feeling joy or pride at this difficult and unique achievement, his initial reaction is an abrupt, rude awakening. After months of hard toil, it immediately becomes clear to him that what he has done ought not be. It is too hideous, it is too perfect. He fails then, and of course for the remainder of the book, to either accept or destroy the monster.
Frankenstein is a tragic character. While he is responsible for much of what passes it cannot be said it was ever a fully conscious effort, as the act of creation seems to have been solemnly a manic obsession with achievement. Partially to prove to himself, partially to prove to the world, partially to simply have done it. In this, I seem to see an interesting correlation with an experience I personally had with a select group of games.
The similarity is thus. Let us see games as a combination of fiction and rule-sets. The fiction may give us a cause, the rule-set may give us means. Part of the common way of reading games is of course to simultaneously believe in the fiction and the rule-set, even though the two often are at odds, or at least uncorrelated. But this is not inconceivably different from real life. In daily life we have a hard, physical world of consequence, and our subjective (experiential, social, moral, &c) reality, which gives meaning to it. Sometimes these even are at odds. To pretend the world is purely objective is to ignore life, to pretend the world is purely subjective is to ignore sense. Even so, in both games and daily life the rules can be optimised in their own right while we ignore other concerns. We can finish a level faster, we can make a car which goes faster, we can make a machine which makes cars faster, we can speedrun a game.
I take the true moment of shock for Frankenstein to be when he, obsessed with working out the physical world, his suspension of subjectivity fails him, as it were, immediately realising the social and moral reality of his actions. This is analogue to playing a game to win, optimising one’s methods, and suddenly realising that what one has been doing is utterly horrendous in the fictional reality of the game.
A small amusing game to reference this to initially is Infinifactory. In Infinifactory the player is (comically) abducted by extraterrestrials and put to work to build entirely automated factories. While initially the factories mostly consist of transportation belts they quickly become more demanding and force the player to find ways to put together complex objects. After finishing sufficient objects the game shows the player a figure to indicate how fast his factory is, to wit, how much time it takes to produce an object. Eager players are wont to want to drive this figure down to the absolute minimum (which by itself has created a little on-line community of delightful obsessives all aiming to be the first to reach the absolute optimal form). Meantime, the fiction of the game, showing the troubled reality of abducted people whose only existence seems to be designing factories, slowly reveals what these factories are meant to do. Initially they may build a simple forklift truck, eventually the player is helping a seemingly aggressive species create guided missiles and tanks.
Of course to the obsessive player the fiction is all very poignant and all, but she has already thought to have found a method to reduce a few steps in the production process, thereby modestly improving her score.
In this I feel I can describe a form of moment of playing at Frankenstein. After long and arduous toil, one reaches a form of factory which can scarcely be improved. All the space available is utilized, small parts move to double-use space, or spring out of the way to allow other parts to take a slightly shorter route. As one puts it into motion, various conveyor belts move objects, arms move in to weld them together, things are lifted, turned, welded to other things, all in one smooth flow.
The game, as an optimisation problem, has been solved to what one thinks the best possible. The first item rolls out of production line into the designated target zone. Then another, and another. If the factory produces ten, that is considered a success. Effortlessly, it does. And so ten tanks, with many more to come, roll off the production line as fast as their construction materials can be delivered. In that moment, when the obsession with the tiny details of the factory suddenly cools off, the fiction rushes back in. You have created a factory which soullessly creates machines of war. When you leave and solve some other problem, it will still continue to produce.
You have created a means of production bereft of common hands, of conscious thought, of responsibility. Perhaps this ought not exist. Perhaps you ought destroy it.
A more serious game (and in the opinion of this author a very significant game indeed) which has a similar event is the Brian Reynolds-designed Alpha Centauri. In Alpha Centauri, humanity, after the desparations of the wars and ecological disasters of the 21st century, builds a space-faring colony ship, the Unity, as a hope for establishing humanity on the planet ‘Chiron’ in the Alpha Centauri system. Tragically, as they arrive the captain is murdered; and a reactor malfunction has the crew split in “seven distinct factions, divided not by nationality, but by ideology, and their vision for the new world.” The factions all land in separate locations on the planet, unknown to one-another. They are forced to make an inhospitable land their own, they are striving to live according to their own ideals, they are slowly expanding and growing in means.
This sets up a game which much follows the Civilization set of behaviour: explore, expand, exploit, exterminate. Unlike Civilisation, the factions have distinct reasons for eventually succumbing to open warfare; the ultra-capitalist Morganites quickly come to disagreements with the dreamy green Gaians; while a faction which claims to be the U.N. (it is disputable) is quickly at odds with the Hive, a faction seeking to move beyond individuality. All this is made all the more tragic by a hostile world in which the ‘mind worms’ terrorise populations and cause badly defended cities to self-annihilate.
To survive initially is a testament to your endurance, to even have your cities grow is troublesome. The dry voice-over which announces the discovery of even more ‘indigenous life-forms’ makes you claw at your eyes in despair.
All this is set to a foreboding science fiction text which combines quotes from the fictional faction leaders (and followers) with citations from philosophers and authors of our real-world history. The curious effect is that a form of credibility is given to the fictional quotes, and an alien form of poignancy to the genuine quotes. Making an advancement in social psychology is greeted with Republic's wish to “find a better way than office-holding for your rules.” Producing ‘recycling tanks’ in a city, in-game simply boosting its statistics, leads to a wry quote from the Hive’s leader, citing that “it is every citizen’s final duty to go into the tanks, and become one with all the people.”
Finishing a miracle in the Civilization games (generally providing some unique ability for your people, that is to say, an improvement in statistics) was always accompanied by some satisfying video—Alpha Centauri has a few appeasing videos, but mostly shows the reality of these miracles in videos which range from unsettling (the Hive’s citizens slowly dancing in trance-like unison after completing “The Ascetic Virtues”) to outright terrifying (the “Dream Twister” showing the effects of telepathic warfare).
The boon to your faction is always paid for by your soul. The game's use of citation and videos sheds some light on the living conditions and ideologies of the people and the ways in which they change. Given their desperation, attitudes to recycling humans may alter; given enduring hardship, populations may become ascetic in nature. But, of course, to the optimising player, there is no question but to make these. A bio-lab increases the statistics on certain units, after all.
As time goes on, the game continues to escalate in the duality between increasing statistics and the small cost of some new social horror. Before long the player can build units strong enough to defeat native life and so-called formers to create farms and mines. All this requires severe leaps in technology, from synthetic fossil fuels to genetic engineering, from lasers to ‘shard’ weapons, from energy markets to pseudo-atomic bombs.
Over time the power of the player is titanic compared to their initial state. The formers can now create mountains, drill to aquifers and build improvements which change rainfall patterns, irrevocably changing the shape of the map. Ships spread over the oceans, aeroplanes fill the sky, the ecologically disastrous automatic harvesters crawl the lands and satellites fly up in masses to fill space with botany bays, solar collectors and lunar mining colonies. Dozens upon dozens of cities glimmer on the previously uninhabitable lands. Where war occurs it is large, deadly and massive, with atrocities easily committed for the sake of odds.
The technology thus driven to enables cloning, virtual worlds, self-aware machines, biological lubricants, nanotechnology, the crafting neurological interfaces between mind and machine.
There comes a point in the game where the vast amount of cities, the vast amount of conflicts and the rapid pace of new technology becomes overwhelming. So many new things could be built that by the time one is complete it has become obsolete. The satellites create such an influx of energy, food and minerals that things which previously took years now are done in one turn; yet there is so much to build it never seems to help.
The new moral hurdles can hardly be passed before some new technology creates a new philosophical tragedy. Where the leader of the Believer faction initially had the most conservative, regressive quotes, she now seems like a lone voice of reason, though seemingly teetering at the edge of full mania, when she in the face of it all can only say “we must dissent.”
It is too late in the game for dissension or close examination of ethics, however. To hold back from the march of progress is to lose in any new conflict. And what could the player possibly do, faced with a map of cities needing organisation, armies needing orders, other factions ruthlessly attacking her belongings, and not least of all the effects of climate change creating new problems? Only optimisation remains.
Now that this world exists, there is only one solution to the problem: just finish the game and have it end. Or, really, focus on the optimisation of small factors and allow yourself to perpetuate a world of horrors. And for all your initial beliefs, at this point in the game, it is not such a problem to destroy the U.N., if they became a nuisance. And since the Gaians will not stop attacking you, say, you might as well wipe them out. One of the most troubling miracle videos shows a city automated to such a degree that a man vandalising a wall (scribbling this “we must dissent”) is found, locked in an alley and executed without human intervention. His ash silhouette is automatically erased.
The society you have created has become a monster, living its own life, with you merely a worker to it. The questions force themselves through your simple desires to win: why did I build all of this? Why was all this technology developed? Why was I so happy when small statistics increased? Yet now that it is here: what can I do? Perhaps your society simply ought not be. It is too hideous. It is too perfect.
Like Victor it is impossible to find a way back from this situation.
To win by warfare means to eradicate all forms of disagreement with your faction's ideology— humanity will lose its diversity of ideology.
Worse, the scientific victory means shedding what is left of humanity and becoming one in something vast and unknowable. To leave behind the last of what you know is, at this point, a relief. Perhaps we are going beyond the veil - but the endless stress will end.
Like Victor, the only way to win, in the end, is to kill the monster or to give up on life.
In this way both Infinifactory and Alpha Centauri touch upon a curious effect in games: that is, the effects of allowing yourself to focus on small-scale optimisation and not noticing, until it is too late, the monster you have created.
But I do feel I have to stress it is not quite so simple that it could be achieved simply by loading the dice. As far as I can tell there are two important factors which are required to have such an effect in a game:
Firstly, the game needs to have a set of mechanics which by themselves are enticing enough to ‘minmax’ and thereby give way to something larger than the sum of its parts. It cannot simply be part of a narrative that the monster is created; after all, the experience is as-if we are Victor, not as-if we are reading about Victor. The horror of Victor is the single act of creation out of obsession. As such, the mechanics in a perverse way need to be able to not have the moment occur. If any player is meant to see the moment happen, it is not an act out of obsession but simply a reality. Not every player will play at being Frankenstein; to volunteer to be Frankenstein is defeating the purpose of playing him. We might say (speaking with Essay the First) that in the hypersurface of the game, there must be a distinct path where mechanics (and fiction) lead to this moment, separate from the ‘normal’ playing of the game.
Secondly, the narrative of the game needs to set up the ethical questions. Victor is not haunted by the ‘physical reality’ of the monster, so to say, but by the ‘social reaction’. A regular game of Civilization does not produce the same effect because the fiction of the game is somewhat colonialist, and adding to that it rarely bemoans the progress of victory. In Civilization, in the end, progression is a familiar recognised ‘oh we did that yes, we got better’, rather than a terrifying step into the unknown. (It might be said that changes a little when the atomic age is reached; but consider that that might be a natural reaction to that era in general.)
Similarly, in FTL the player becomes increasingly powerful but never is a point reached where it is questioned whether that power is good, nor could it be said to have its own life. In an interesting contrast to Infinifactory, the game Factorio frames the creation of factories (admittedly at a far larger scale, too) as an optimistic, life-saving pursuit. The factory is in essence you, its only purpose is its survival. Through this it is not morally judged very harshly; one can for the sake of optimisation destroy stretches of forests and greens, but if the game does not give a piece of fiction it is up to the player to see the horror of it. We may surmise that the player needs to be confronted, like Victor, with the reality, not bring in an external reality judging the game world. The player needs to be suspending the ethical considerations for the sake of optimising the system, then suddenly fall through that form of denial.
I leave it to the reader to ask herself whether she has other games in which she played at Frankenstein, or whether such moments can be engineered more persistently than merely the moment of horrific discovery. I hope, at least, that the idea of it may contribute to the vocabulary of understanding games.
(Let it just be for me to add that Alpha Centauri was, of course, inspired by Frank Herbert and Bill Ransom’s The Jesus Incident, which itself was a sequel to Herbert’s Destination: Void. In the later novel, the crew of a ship attempts to create an artificial lifeform when their ship malfunctions, but they struggle with the potential consequences. The chapters are all headed by citations, many of which from Shelley’s tormented novel.)
On The Theory of Games, Essay the First: Narrative vs Mechanics, (or:) Narrative On A Hypersurface
The reader may very well feel some contempt in learning that I refuse to let the debate of ‘narrative vs mechanics’ die. But if that seems such a foul thing, it is only because the debate has been fought within a domain which all too often is concerned more with where boundaries are than how we fill in those grounds which we divide by them. Instead, I hope to think a little on what I consider the important question: what of narrative vs. gameplay on an aesthetic level?
I wish to frame this question by considering game narrative merely a more complex form of narrative in novels: from here we are able to consider to use the balance between narrative and mechanics on an aesthetic level.
A definition of ‘game’ is needed and for this I consider a game a set of rules which facilitates a specific form of behaviour, manifested by some manner of agreement on its conditions. We could make that narrow and say it facilitates behaviour which allows us to measure skills or strength (as sports do), and we may broaden it to include various forms of role-play, facilitating customs or banter between friends. Quite freely, this forms a range of possibilities, from strict rules to unspoken rules, from meaningful outcomes to social pressure valves. To curb this essay, I will assume we are speaking about video games, and specifically games which mostly are formed by hard computer-enforced rules.
What the debate of mechanics vs. gameplay commonly amounts to is the question whether we regard games as artefacts which are driven by rules (the ‘gameplay’), which give the player experiences, or whether it is a narrative which is in a way facilitated by rules. It is no great shame that specific debate is now in low regard.
But what might we, in any case, mean when we say games contain a narrative?
Let us consider a book: a dominant element of many novels is that they contain a sequence of descriptions which will leave the reader with an impression. If the reader shares these impressions with other readers they may not then agree on all accounts, but in broad lines they will agree on so-and-so having happened. This is what I shall consider a contained narrative: a sequence of events which is shared between readers. This definition subsequently leaves sufficient room for disagreement but shall suffice.
In considering this contained narrative, we could picture a reader like a raindrop rolling over a surface, the curvature of the surface compelling her to take a certain route over it. A book, then, is a surface curved in such a way as to compel a reader to form a certain impression. Another reader, as another raindrop, follows a slightly different path, though for most books they follow paths similar enough that when they converse they agree on many aspects. With sufficient amounts of raindrops, we may find a form of probability space: for any given point on the surface we may say, what are the odds of a reader following a path that contains this point? At the centre of this probability space is a line which is the highest probability: we agree Holmes is, if anything, a consultant detective. Further away, we may begin to see diverging ideas: we may say that Watson is an unreliable narrator. At the extremities, we see rare points not often visited by readers: some say Holmes is actually Jack the Ripper. (A point not often found in discussion but doubtlessly held by a few.)
Note that this is an accepted part of discussing literature. Not every soul will quite read the work identically, and hardly ever will we expect entire agreement with one-another. And yet, while we agree on divergence, we also frequently seem to consider a book a ‘contract’: we to some extent are willing to agree that there must be a singular truth in it. To question that, in some ways, is to break the unspoken rules. Here, I say, we see a form of play or game around literature (and other arts), a discussion of which falls outside the range of this essay, interesting though it may be.
It would have been thoughtless to suggest there is always one prime path in the probability field, or that this path is always the most important. There may be two paths, with clearly separate domains, or a broad range of wildly scattering paths. After all, some books were expressly written with the intent to confuse its readers or to cause disagreement between them, which in itself is a form of engineering of the novel’s surface. I also see no reason to suggest that the most probable path is the best one; perhaps what we may (by virtue of some ideology) consider a novel’s true meaning is hardly found by most readers, and so perhaps some dark eras may interpret a work far more basely than a more enlightened era. Entire generations may mostly follow one path, subsequent generations favour another. And perchance over time paths may be so ingrained they do, as if it really were water, wear away the surface and form entrenched paths, with future works being written about certain interpretations and hoping to change the way the very same words, sometimes millennia unchanged, may be read.
So much for the considerations of literature.
To change this argument to games, we may consider a play-through of a game, too, a surface for a reader to find a path over. This would lead to an identical theory, were it not for a disruptive quality of games: they do not function identically for each player. To take the still broad description of games posed earlier, perhaps all we may agree on is the existence of the computer-enforced rules, not the outcome. So where in a book we had fixed pages, even fixed word-counts, we now have mixed pages and altered word-counts for all readers. With this continued line of thought, if we wish to consider games as a probability of narrative, then we need in some way to agree on its surface so that we may chart probability on it.
When a game is being played, its entire existence as a mechanical moment can be described as a state. We know this, seeing as we run the game on a computer which has a finite set of states; it after all has finite memory and that finite memory has a limited amount of combinations of 1’s and 0’s. In fact, much foolishness comes from not regarding this as a mechanical truth to computer games; all the majesty of the finest game, and the most gratifying set of actions, is in the end still a finite set of instructions altering a finite range of memory. That is not to say there are few states; but still we may regard them as finite.
An important matter which arises from considering it as a state is the following thought: a game which merely offers a player a choice between two paths will need to store only that information. Its memory, as far as what the player can influence, contains a single bit which will, after the choice, say which path the player took. Any amount of static consequence may be given to that; we may say that while the surface of the ‘book’ ran singularly up to this point, it now it is torn into two paths, depending on which the player took. If then there are more splits, or other such binary decisions, all we must do is tear the surface into more strips, each representing a distinct path. An alternative to such a binary choice is describing an aspect of a game as a variable with a great number of states; such as the position of an avatar in the world, in coordinates. On some theoretical level, we could say that there is then simply a large number of surfaces; but many games would have thousands, or millions, of aspects described in such variables. We cannot then chart the game world as a form of branching book.
Instead let us consider the resulting game itself also as a form of potential. We may say that for any given state in the game, no matter how many there may be, there is a certain probability that it may occur. To render this less abstract, we may say there is a probability the player may travel through a location, a probability as to how often, in what order she visits a number of locations, what was done there, and such. While this is partially metric data which merely describes a state, it is also made far more complex if we take into account the player’s inner considerations at those moments: the same-single state may cause different sensations to a player having different thoughts. This I would consider as a hyperstate, where we cannot merely describe the state without also, in a sense, ‘collapsing’ what it might mean by our interpretation. The statement ‘the player nearly fell off a ledge’ is not a state in the game but an interpretation of a state given by us. The code, so to say, does not care, but we cannot see the information without an interpretation.
Saying, again, that every state in the game, even though existing in a hyperstate, has a finite probability of occurring, we may then say that certain situations are more often occurring then others. Much like the raindrop following its path on a fixed surface, so there is a chance that any given single surface may occur when the raindrop is traversing it. Another raindrop may find itself on a slightly different surface, some may have a wildly different one. In a sense, a raindrop does not traverse the surface merely, it also traverses a probability space of all possible surfaces. This we may consider as a singular hypersurface: a set of all possible surfaces, each considered with their probability of occurring and their own probability of paths contained within.
The resulting paths on the hypersurface, then, describe statements about the game which players may agree on. Nearly all players will agree on some things: the main character can walk. It may be probable, still, to say: the main character fell off a ledge. Some statements will be improbable: the main character fell off a ledge a thousand times. And within these statements, we find the same divergence in opinion on the facts as in a book; to say that the main character ‘can walk’ is as to say ‘Holmes is a consultant detective’. There is heavy agreement that the main character can walk in the sense that to our opinion what we see constitutes walking, and there is a similar agreement that the player can control the main character in what we then call walking.
For any given surface within the hypersurface, we would mostly agree on the particulars. That is to say, a recording of a game (f.i. in a Let's Play) to some extent poses a form of narrative which, like a book, heavily suggest a particular narrative. A play session, in that sense, is simple, the game itself is complex.
Let us stay well away from the interesting (though expansive) consideration that from here we may say the term ‘main character’ is an interpretation, as is ‘game’, as is existence itself. Etcetera, I say, ad nauseam.
I argue that even though the set of paths is on a hypersurface, we can still say it is not overtly different from a set of paths on a regular surface as found in a book. Much like we may ask what set of events we can agree on in a book to form a narrative, we may also ask what set of events we commonly agree on in a game to form a narrative. In this we may find that one traversal of the hypersurface may be wildly different from the next, so even between two experiences of the same player we can see similarities and divergences. This leads to a discussion which is not as singular as with a book, truly; we cannot rely on events happening in the same order, some events are considered as ‘possible to happen’ rather than ‘has happened’, and some events almost always happen and are considered as ‘happened’. In some games, we may agree on a few elements which are more setting or conditions than narrative, in some games we may agree on everything except the exact particulars or timing.
I would not dare hide my excitement in saying that, as far as game criticism goes, we have barely created a self-sustaining method of discussion of this, compared to what we have with literature.
So, then, I will offer four considerations, before presenting our question of gameplay vs. narrative in an aesthetic light.
Firstly, a question of convergent and divergent mechanics. We can say that by augmenting a mechanic, we change the probability of a certain state occurring. In that sense, we can design our game to contain mechanics which either are convergent or divergent, that is, create a space in which most players end up with similar states, or end with differing states. A right ‘bump’ in the hypersurface may drive players in all different directions, or a pretty vale may compel many players to enter it. This goes some way in arguing whether mechanics convey a narrative at all; we may say that if a mechanic has a reasonable expectation of letting an event happen, that event is acceptable as a narrative ‘mechanical’ element in the game. The event can be so commonplace (i.e., Sherlock puffing his pipe or not) that it may be discarded for most discussion of narrative, or it can be so momentous we can describe it as to be considered a cornerstone of the story. I postulate carefully that the more mechanics are active, the more any possible agreement on the resulting narrative will be in the abstract. From this, we may already create some rules about how we craft mechanics for specific purposes.
Secondly, consider that we, while considering our paths, are aware that it is one of many possible surfaces. We then form an idea of what the relationship is between these different surfaces in the game. A book may show us, once and for all, that stealing a loaf of bread leads to the gallows; a game can at any given point, by an emergent effect of its systems, have a high probability of surfaces in which theft (in the abstract) leads to the gallows (in the abstract). We can then disagree about the particulars, but agree about the correlation. This form of interaction with the hypersurface is interesting as it in a sense creates a shared narrative which by necessity contains disagreement; we may agree about causality, yet not the particular events. Here we may distinguish between a narrative, a setting or a condition, while also considering an overall agreed narrative which may become clear from traversing the hypersurface many times.
Thirdly, it is perfectly possible to have interaction without a ‘wide’ hypersurface. Much like a book can describe some bonnie procession passing by, there can be whole segments or parts which exist merely for the sake of gameplay and have no meaning on a narrative level. This is not a fault; much like the book, we can enjoy reading about a procession, then agree it happened, but not have much to say about the way in which it occurred. There is joy in being and I do not think ill of it.
Fourthly, when designing the game with narrative elements, we have a choice as to what elements to convey through a book-like single surface, and which through gameplay. This has important repercussions not merely for how the game is perceived, but also for how it has to be designed. A character speaking a certain line in a certain moment is, by all means, such a complex element that in order for it to take place we have to remove much of the hyperstate and collapse everything into a simpler surface: in its extremity referred to as a ‘cut-scene’. This design challenge results in a difficult task: we may wish to create divergence in the possible surfaces, but also wish to have a line of dialogue spoken in the right moment. Until the days when computers may generate audio on the fly based on rules, much like we now generate movement on the fly based on rules, we cannot always maintain a hyperstate. I will return to this subject in another essay.
To conclude, we can describe ‘narrative vs. gameplay’ not as a purely antagonistic question, but rather as a form of coherence. We can, and must, accept that not all types of narrative work well with all forms of mechanics. That is to say, if the end result needs to be a very precise set of surfaces, we may not employ any mechanics which spread the hypersurface too wide. If the end result needs to be a certain type of mechanics purely, we must remove some of the narrative designs we have to make divergence possible. We must be aware that some design choices mean we collapse or expand the hypersurface at different points; and consider the question of what is the best and most refined way of doing so. It is not so much a question of which has to have the dominant position, but rather in what conditions what arrangements please us; and where in our current arrangements we may find faults to solve in some manner.
We may find a better way of understanding (so-to-say) hyper-narratives, and we may find a better way of playing with mechanics which more readily allow the hypersurface to remain as singular or divergent as the author wishes.
Therefore I say: this debate is worth having, in the domain of aesthetics, where we may find, if you will forgive the recursion, our own paths of larger and smaller success, and may yet find some rules which describe how to increase the level of our craftsmanship within this youngest-yet-oldest medium.
In this Indievelopment 2013 presentation I discuss the Lie of the Grandfather clock:
A 'clock' that forms when (often violent) high-consequence interaction is alternated with passive storytelling in the hope of making both part of the same mental space. The specifics of the types of interaction (fuzzy and linear) are discussed with their requirements and suitability for action and storytelling. However, the requirement for this clock is found to be a lie that comes from an audience demanding 'high consequence' interaction; we can see consequence is an illusion and acknowledge that games can offer illusions other than consequence. Indeed, we are stuck with the clock, but only while we do not ask players to treat our games differently; asking a player to treat a game like 'acting' or purely with 'presence' means we may do many things that the clock cannot.
As sometimes the sun suddenly breaks through endless clouds, and all that was drab and heavy with rain suddenly gains little beaming pearls, with the ferns growing a little taller, the birds chirping again, the very air gaining a calmth and contemplation that prompts a man to tread the grass and smile to himself; with such a charm entered Thirty Flights of Loving the otherwise reasonably bleak 2nd half of our year 2012. And not unlike the sun breaking through, it felt but like a kiss before it was gone again - and some sad souls perhaps may see in such a brief apparition the confidence that we may have the patience to hold out our winter; some merrier souls may see in it another early lark of spring.
The remarkable state of games at the moment is such that when I think of the games which interest me most, they all seem to be of the same kin: The Graveyard, Dear Esther, The Stanley Parable and now Thirty Flights of Loving all greatly help age one specific button. That is to say, they all wear out one’s ‘w’-key. They take the convention of WASD-control in gaming, for better or for worse, and build something remarkable on top of it. The Graveyard is like the first blush of a medium showing some form of adolescence - with all its growing pains not unaccounted for; yet realizing it never quite is about superficial interaction and rather about its character and depth. Dear Esther lets its interaction become invisible in one’s traveling through its forlorn Hebridean islands - the rugged landscape sculpted with a loneliness that, perhaps, would not have been lost on the sensibilities of Ruskin. The Stanley Parable makes light of the very form of interaction: the greatest joke it plays is to not merely convince you that you are trapped in a maze, the confounded trickster convinces you it is possible to escape the illusion of a maze if only you follow the illusionary paths it laid out for you. And, oh!, that dear Thirty Flights of Loving, meantime, seems to describe a bold arch through this essay and crashland its plane into this paragraph, ending it with a sudden jump-cut.
This game, too, makes light work of interaction. One presses ‘w’, except for the moments where one, briefly, does not. Scenes pass in rapid succession, at least by game standards, and the only change of interaction is, mostly, that one can walk or not. The jump cuts even consume more control, with the position and orientation of the player at the mercy of the author. And with this, the game manages to capture that spirit and direction of a well-cut film. It jumps through the story with a manic zest, using juxtaposition not merely in imagery, but in interaction, tasking the player to go from a charming ‘do what you will’ opening scene, then to exposition, to action, to contrastingly calm contemplation, then to following, then to watching and realizing the finer corporal interests of the characters, then to chasing, then to running away, and on, and on, it runs with all the relentless momentum of a heavy industrial train, bonjouring you out with such severity at the end it can only be forgiven by its deliverance of a sweet-scented peck on the cheek. It continuously requires us to be present in a scene and to find out what is going on within a tenth of a second; and just as this task becomes clear and we engage in it, a new cut lands us ahead of ourselves into another scene. And while we are thus engaged, the game gives us those little jokes, those little winks, it frivolously flirts and tugs our cravats, dancing about us and playing its gay tune. Where some games may sit you down and point out where the facilities are, Thirty Flights of Loving has no such patience with you - it expects you to understand, in the same way a contemporary film will expect you to understand what used to be spelled out: we need not see someone walk through a door to know that he did.
It is this faculty that made me see in Thirty Flight of Loving something I had forgotten I craved. I have been enraptured with the beauty and melancholy of Dear Esther, certainly, and I have felt painfully outwitted by The Stanley Parable (‘press a button to eat’), and Thirty Flights of Loving quite has no such excellence in wanderlust or irony. Rather it excels in a different area: rapid jumping and usage of jumping to create or relieve tension, making or breaking a context, juxtaposing or unifying, and all so dearly like a young director realizing tempo. And how painfully obvious it suddenly seems to me that so many of my game memories, no matter how fond they are, lack any form of such strong tempo or authorial design. Endlessly walking through those tiresome hallways; endlessly fighting hordes of something which I cannot be bothered to describe; endlessly walking about as characters discuss things. Why, I now ask myself, did those games never cut from those calm discussions into the battle? Why did they not create dramatic tension by juxtaposing my walking hither-and-thither with some other feat? Where are interactive crossfades? Why has it, most insultingly, taken games decades to produce a nigh-on perfectly placed cut that goes from a party to a drunken chase, conveying with the cut everything we need to know by not showing it?
Evidently all the trailers for games are cut in the most exciting, knowledgeable way of cinema. But when it comes to the actual game, so many games cut to cinema rather than cut like cinema. It seems as if many developers are caught in some manic Rope homage, where they desperately try to hide all the cuts rather than use them for drama. It is all very well, very clever indeed, but by Jove, it took cinema years to get away from the ‘watching a play’ style of storytelling; only for a large share games with an absurd deification of ‘immersion’ (what-ever that is) to return to it.
That Thirty Flights of Loving might be accused of taking away too much control from the player and becoming a cutscene (and accused it was) indicates not that the game has failed to deliver to its audience, it shows that the medium has failed to progress. We are still at that very same point where I believe we have to cut the gangrene of ‘meaningful interaction’ (what-ever that is) merely in order to breathe. Ardent souls may leap up and say we need interaction to replace it - I concur, and I hope you are having great success and that you will break through the Great Impasse of 21st Century Gaming that already has cost me more pipes than I care to admit. Yet until we are there, I believe that in all other subjects advancements may be made - if only we amputate that dead flesh we are dragging after us and give life to the rest. Some people may miss that toilsome blackened skin that makes every moment slog relentlessly into the next (cutting takes away control!) and some may yet still miss the clammy death-fever that tasks us to shoot everything that moves and collect what remains (I want to do something!). I hold that when we have a healthy body, with a clear mind, which again may contemplate rummaging about in happy fields, we can easily work on that prosthetic which will be the Nouvelle Interaction; and indeed it will find its use in what by then is a wholesome and articulate manner of making games.
What I write here is not simply meant to throw a punch at certain games or their defenders (though a punch it is, and yet politely far above the belt), it is rather again a reminder that incredibly great and exciting things happen every time we let go of a lot of the archetypical interaction. When we let go and give control to the author, for our relinquishment we gain a hundredfold in artistic genius.
I would not wish the reader to assume my opinion on Thirty Flights of Loving is nothing but positive. But then, I need not like everything; quite etcetera; and ‘twas ever thus. But for me this endearing game brings with its joy-de-vivre, its mannerisms, its style and its wit a unique quality to games which the serious-faced The Graveyard and Dear Esther had not yet done. It delivers us a way out from ‘long take’ gameplay, it shows us juxtaposition in context, imagery, story and interaction, it breathes some fresh air of creativity into a stale room. It reveals to us that the palette from which we may paint our games is considerably larger still.
So, dear designer, you had, of course, considered that a scene in your upcoming game needed be played quite so - but had you considered some witty juxtaposition?
One may purchase Thirty Flights of Loving via the Blendo Games website.
If, in order to be intelligible, I appear to degrade art by bringing her down from her visionary situation in the clouds, it is only to giver her a more solid mansion upon the earth.
From the ‘Seven Discourses on Art by Sir Joshua Reynolds’, discussed in this post.
Some three months ago I summarized Arnold Bennett’s ‘Literary Taste: How to Form it’, and I thought I would similarly point out some features I thought interesting from a different (but not dissimilar) source: the discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Born in 1723, Sir Reynolds was one of the founders and first president of the Royal Academy in 1768 – after King George III personally wished to promote art and design in Britain. Bundled on Gutenberg one may find ‘Seven Discourses on Art by Sir Joshua Reynolds’: The first pronounced at the opening of the academy and the others following with the distribution of prizes, these discourses show both a strong intellectual mind determined to advance art and the enlightenment-driven determination to make no allowances for opinions, only facts.
(The paintings used in this post are for decorative purposes only.)
In my view, one of the most salient features of Sir Reynolds is that he does not believe in genius. That is to say, he does not believe that one man is particularly blessed with a gift for producing great work. What he rather believes in is two things, one of which I will argue gladly for him, the other I am finding hard to follow through upon.
Firstly, Sir Reynolds believes all art draws from a common pool from which artists draw and to which they add, causing a progression throughout the centuries. This is almost analogue to scientific conduct, where generations discover means and measures.
Yet, secondly, Sir Reynolds also believes that there is a ‘direction’ for art. He believes in an ideal beauty, a natural ideal, a common trait. He believes in a monolithic idea for the progression of mankind, and, moreover, he believes that any man can study and uncover this specific view.
Let me first focus on the former, as I find his thoughts on derivation incredibly inspiring. He dryly notes:
He who begins by presuming on his own sense has ended his studies as soon as he has commenced them.
Like the aforementioned Bennett, Sir Reynolds believes that a student must be humble in first learning. The student constructs himself based on who is considered great, even if he does not understand why yet. The reason why these works are great is (mostly) given as historical:
The work of those who have stood the test of ages have a claim to that respect and veneration to which no modern can pretend.
Indeed, Sir Reynolds holds, in his first phase the student must focus on the ‘grammar’ of painting, and in his second phase the student must simply collect ideas to express. This is again akin the academic first learning how to read papers under a tutor, then spending his days reading that which is written on his subject. In his third phase, the student may add his own imagination (analogical to conducting original research):
Comparing now no longer the performances of art with each other, but examining the art itself by the standard of nature, he corrects what is erroneous, supplies what is scantly, and adds by his own observation what the industry of his predecessors may have yet left wanting to perfection.
The essence of why derivation is important to Sir Reynolds seems to be that he believes ideas to be costly. Crafting and perfecting an idea to the point of being worthy of artistic representation costs multiple generations. By copying an idea the student has spared himself a lifetime’s work. And once he is capable enough, his own ideas may prove fruitful for future artists.
Some modern minds may argue that the whole goal of art is originality ('ever since we freed ourselves'), but Sir Reynolds seems uninterested in ‘novelty’ art. All that matters to him is that art is good – high quality requiring refinement. It matters not that humanity has made a dozen, a hundred, a thousand times a Venus. His aim is that one day an artist will recombine the right ideas into the ideal depiction of a subject, a depiction so intensely profound that it took hundreds of years of refinement. Leading to a strange premonition, the 18th century speaking on the 20th:
If we were forbidden to make use of the advantages which our predecessors afford us, the art would be always to begin, and consequentially remain always in its infant state; and it is a common observation that no art was ever invented and carried to perfection at the same time.
And reflecting less abstractly:
A student unacquainted with the attempts of former adventurers is always apt to overrate his own abilities, to mistake the most trifling excursions for discoveries of the moment, and every coast new to him for a new-found country. If by chance he passes beyond his usual limits, he congratulates his own arrival at those regions which they who have steered a better course have long left behind them.
Even simply saying great art is caused by genius, Sir Reynolds argues, will damage the courage of young students, who feel they can never measure up against ‘divine inspiration’. Minds should be free and eager to learn and share ideas, thereby achieving cultural advancement.
Invention is one of the great marks of genius, but if we consult experience, we shall find that it is by being conversant with the inventions of others that we learn to invent, as by reading the thoughts of others we learn to think.
Having commenced a study in the history of art, I relish in Sir Reynolds’ view. Going through the ages, one can see elements invented which have repercussions for centuries – seeming obvious ideas, such as contrapposto, but also a certain emergence of lively subjects in 18th century art. One can see how works depend on one-another in a striking evolution. But this is not truly why Sir Reynolds hold this opinion – my observation is historical, that ‘it has been thus’; but Sir Reynolds’ views are idealistic. Art, in the mind of Sir Reynolds, must not debase itself by adhering to passing trends, or in depicting what is lacking in a ‘species’, or depicting mere nature; and he lashes out at the French painting of his era, which dresses up historical figures in their contemporary clothes, and at Rubens, who, it is said, dresses up things too much in general, at Rembrandt, who is ‘natural but not in good taste’.
The works, whether poets, painters, moralists, or historians, which are built upon general nature, live for ever; while those which depend for their existence on particular customs and habits, a partial view of nature, or the fluctuation of fashion, can only be coeval with that which first raised them from obscurity.
The notion of ‘taste’ is the key to Reynolds’ particular version of naturalness. Taste, it is argued, is all too often used when the speaker lacks understanding – and we may far better use it in more exact (nigh scientific) ways. This attempted ‘demystification’ of taste would go well in line with seeing ideas as evolutionary. But it is simultaneously suggested that there is a ‘natural taste’ and that ruthless exactness, when acquired, would produce something not wholly unlike Sir Joshua Reynold’s own preferences.
I see in Sir Reynolds’ painfully hopeful suggestion, that we may scientifically work towards the rules of beauty and ‘naturalness’ (meaning, a singular set of rules), the old Aristotelian fault: argue well, hide your axioms better. The idea of ideal art survives with certain schools (Ruskin and Rand come to mind) and always presupposes its own conclusions, leading to routines like this:
Whatever pleases has in it what is analogous to the mind, and is therefore, in the highest and best sense of the word, natural.
The continuation of this statement may be seen if we follow Isaiah Berlin’s reasoning and predict there will be an argument that some things are only ‘pleasing’ to the ‘base’ part of the mind and thus not wholly natural (e.g. Rand’s entire ‘man qua man’ line of reasoning), in effect using ‘the mind’ as the fork with which we can weed what-ever happens not to meet our taste from an otherwise infallible statement. We may observe how Wilde’s conduct was considered a century and a half later, although one can only presume it was of sumptuous pleasure to him.
If I wish to sidestep Sir Reynolds’ entire aspect of idealism, I feel inclined to reason the goals for art may be, like the means, evolutionary. We cannot produce, in one generation, a new goal for art. There is not one singular and ideal goal, rather there are the ‘cultural fibres’ of the application of certain forms of art, and in an evolutionary fashion we learn how to apply better works for these purposes. The purposes themselves are not ‘natural’, apart from some being statistically nigh inevitable.
If we choose a school of thought and taste which already exists, we are ensured it is valuable to some and that we have an immediate guideline. And in this school, we may again be humble and submit ourselves to superiors, and achieve greatness within it; only to add to the school once we gain the required experience. To say we shall not pick any school because none is ultimately right steers us back into Sir Reynold’s rant on the unknowledgeable student. Rather, one may say:
There is no danger of the mind’s being over-burdened with knowledge, or the genius extinguished by any addition of images; on the contrary, these acquisitions may as well, perhaps better, be compared, if comparisons signified anything in reasoning, to the supply of living embers, which will contribute to strengthen the spark that without the association of more would have died away.
One may find the discourses on Gutenberg.
The paintings/sculptures used in this post, in order of appearance, are:
Self-portrait (Sir Joshua Reynolds)
Young Student Drawing (Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin)
I quite believe there are essays which I could never have read ‘when I was ready,’ as the only way to be truly ‘ready’ for some of them is to have read them already, a year or so before, and to then re-read them after gaining more experience. Arnold Bennett’s ‘Literary Taste: How to Form it’ quite is one of these. I did read this essay, a year ago, and consequentially started reading literature in a somewhat different way – and by doing this gaining the experience to be able to read his essay.
For those immediately enticed, it may be found on Gutenberg. The paintings included in this post are for decorative purposes only.
This essay is somewhat colloquially written, be it without directly sacrificing refinement, and exhibits the mark of the teacher who is hard on us in order to be kind. It has a strong body where Bennett notes not only that ‘great literature’ exists because of the strong passions of the few, he also observes, as quite few dare express, that in order to acquire a taste in literature one has to submit to works without having the presumption one’s own taste is in any way good enough to pass judgement on them.
But do not think Bennett wishes you to join his club of the elects. Bennett is not an elitist and rather writes as a caring aesthetic and pragmatic: he believes literature may greatly contribute to one’s manner of living; and in a moment of passion claims that unless one reads literature, one may hardly be said to be alive. Indeed, Bennett’s reason for entreating one to read more is for one to understand and appreciate life itself more – and what, if anything, is a more worthy cause for years of study?
Bennett quickly dismisses any pretence as to literacy being part of a ‘required’ gentleness: nor does he see it as merely a diversion or does he see an importance in being academic. Rather, he speaks of literature as being a requirement for enhancing, even enabling, the life of a conscious, sensitive person.
The makers of literature are those who have seen and felt the miraculous interestingness of the universe. And the greatest makers of literature are those whose vision has been the widest, and whose feeling has been the most intense.
I believe that while Bennett certainly does not express himself quite thus, we may hold that he holds that art teaches one concepts and how to regard concepts; and through gaining more concepts that are beneficial one will experience life more splendidly.
For the benefit of our learning, Bennett attacks our capacity of reading and does so with a strong hand.
Even your case, though you are genuinely preoccupied with thoughts of literature, bears disturbing resemblances to the drab case of the average person. You do not approach the classics with gusto– anyhow, not with the same gusto as you would approach a new novel by a modern author who had taken your fancy.
This builds up a strong line through Bennett’s work which he delivers with a playful strength: to understand these classics, one must have read classics with the knowledge that they are good, and that our own taste is not to be trusted. Without this, reading classics is meaningless, as their true value is not clear to the uneducated palate. The true beauty of Bennett is that he writes as-if reading our minds, which is both amusing and confronting:
You do not smack your lips; you say: “That is good for me.” You make little plans for reading, and then you invent excuses for breaking the plans.
And later:
You feel that you are a bit of a sham. Something within you continually forces you to exhibit for the classics an enthusiasm which you do not sincerely feel. […] The truth is, you are a sham. And your soul is a sea of uneasy remorse.
Bennett sees us as inexperienced and weak. While having the desire to enrich life with the classics, we actually miss the required effort:
The enterprise of forming one’s literary taste is an agreeable one; if it is not agreeable it cannot succeed. But this does not imply that it is an easy or a brief one. The enterprise of beating Colonel Bogey at golf is an agreeable one, but it means honest and regular work.
The reason, thus, for us not enjoying literature as much as we might wish we did is simply that we wish to derive pleasure from something for which we did not do the hard work. This is a familiar sight – many will stop drawing because they say they do not enjoy it, whereas in truth they simply do not draw enough to be good enough for enjoyment; or they may claim they cannot enjoy mathematical puzzles while never learning how to solve them. Literature and art by some are seen as requiring no lesson or practice to understand, and thus when art does not please, it is liable to be blamed.
Sit down, Bennett commands us, and take regular hours. In present-day consequentiality, you may play less games or watch less television. So be it! Sacrifices must be made. We move on from Worcestershire sauce to more particular tastes by means of a mind determined to enrich itself, not because we are tired of Worcestershire sauce.
Bennett speaks before pluralism, but I do not think this prevents us from recognising the investment one has to make in any form of art. Pluralism, I would say, simply means we have to choose more carefully in which direction we develop our taste. As-if open for present-day interpretation, Bennett does have a blissfully simple explanation why classics are seen as classics:
The passionate few only have their way by reason of the fact that they are genuinely interested in literature, that literature matters to them. They conquer by their obstinacy alone, by their eternal repetition of the same statements. Do you suppose they could prove to the man in the street that Shakespeare was a great artist? The said man would not even understand the terms they employed. But when he is told ten thousand times, and generation after generation, that Shakespeare was a great artist the said man believes – not by reason, but by faith.
The passionate few have felt that wonder in literature: of course they cannot now be quiet about it! They have been touched by wonderful sensations and must, quite simply, share them. Bennett requires us to read classics as it is unclear whether present-day novels are ultimately good; or merely part of a swing of whimsical taste. In our ‘project’ of acquiring literacy (to use Bennett’s word), it is of importance that we use the right books to learn: sifting the wheat from the chaff in modern works would waste our valuable time.
Indeed, we must submit to the authority of classics: if we already had a taste for the classics, we would not need our project. But we do need our project, and as such we clearly need the guidance of established classics:
Modern works have to pass before the bar of the taste of successive generations. Whereas, with classics, which have been through the ordeal, almost the reverse is the case: your taste has to pass before the bar of the classics. That is the point. If you differ with a classic, it is you who are wrong, and not the book. If you differ with a modern work, you may be wrong or you may be right, but no judge is authoritative enough to decide.
When we struggle to understand we must not confine ourselves to one author – but we must dedicate ourselves until we do see the beauty of an author. Perhaps we cannot find the importance of an author, but then we are simply being dullards – and we are reminded of what happens when we ourselves encounter a simpleton:
We say things of which he misses the import; we joke, and he does not smile; what makes him laugh loudly seems to us horseplay or childish; he is blind to beauties which ravish us; he is ecstatic over what strikes us as crude; and his profound truths are for us trite commonplaces. […] In approaching a classic, the true wisdom is to place ourselves in the position of the mental inferior, aware of mental inferiority, humbly stripping off all conceit, anxious to rise out of that inferiority.
Perhaps Bennett’s view truly gains its greatest charm with the following:
Not even the greatest dramatist, not even the greatest composer, nor the greatest actor can prevent an audience from laughing uproariously at a tragic moment if a cat walks across the stage. But why ruin the scene by laughter? Simply because the majority of the audience is artistically childish.
Bennett gives us a glimpse of a matter of great importance: enriching our lives. He then is hard-handed enough not to give us any easy way in: we must forget our tastes and make sacrifices to an authority which we heretofore may not have recognised. But this is merely the effort we simply have to make to become proficient – to learn any skill we must face, firstly, that our present ideas are of no significance. And to my greatest delight, the development of taste, in Bennett’s view, is not exempt from this rule.
One may find Bennett’s essay on Gutenberg.
In the middle of the essay Bennett refers to a short story by Charles Lamb: this he commands us to read. I recommend to obtain this beforehand, as it may also be found in a collection on Gutenberg.
The paintings used in this post, in order of appearance, are:
The Reader in White (Jean-Louis Ernest Meissonier)
An Enthralling Novel (Julius LeBlanc Stewart)
Reading a Story (James Jacques Joseph Tissot)
Lady Reading by a Window (Thomas Benjamin Kennington)
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