Thoughts on Tacoma
[semi-spoilers below the cut]
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After delaying my playthrough of Tacoma by about a decade, I also finally got around to reading a bunch of decade-old reviews and analysis of the game and I was utterly astonished by the way that Ian's take was so much the opposite of mine, and yet perfectly parallel to it. I put this into a listicle form because it's really two essays, but I don't feel like it merits multiple posts.
Part 1: An “Additive” Model?
Ian views the game, fundamentally, as a vehicle for a story that, in his own opinion, is worthwhile but not great – and while I was perfectly satisfied with the story as such, his criticism of it is solid. For him, the main draw is instead the novel method by which that story is conveyed, a method that I considered experimentally-worthwhile but ultimately unsuccessful. He describes the hologram-scrubbing mechanic as allowing the game to “play around with simultaneity and atemporality in ways that are hard to do in other media”, and that this novel technique is what makes Tacoma’s design “additive” as compared to Gone Home’s “subtractive” approach.
And this is where I’ve got to fundamentally disagree with him – because as much as I love that Tacoma experimented a novel technique, I think Tacoma largely failed to demonstrate that hologram-scrubbing has serious value. To be clear, that doesn’t mean that hologram-scrubbing doesn’t or can’t have serious value, just that Tacoma isn’t the game that proves it.
In my own review, I likened Tacoma to a movie – but it isn't one: Fullbright didn't film the holograms with specific angles and shots, didn't edit those shots together to exploit the way that frames and cuts can help convey more information or enhance an emotional experience for the audience. Instead, Tacoma made me the cameraman and the editor, and I don’t know a damn thing about either of those. I am an objectively terrible choice for those jobs, and so my experience is made worse for it.
In the medium of games, it’s pretty typical to give players (who we do not assume are professional artists of any kind) direct control over things like cameras – but games replace cinematic techniques with gameplay techniques in order to achieve an equally potent emotional experience. Gone Home is thought of as the poster child of the “walking sim” genre, but it’s far more accurately described as a detective/mystery game, and it uses a whole range of mechanics and techniques from across mystery games, puzzle games, and even metroidvania games in order to influence the player’s experience. These are what make Gone Home just as compelling as any film or book.
But Tacoma erases Gone Home’s other mechanics almost completely, all in service of hologram-scrubbing – which, in its unadorned state, is just “cinema without proper framing or editing”. To me, no matter how you look at this, it can’t be considered “additive”. You’ve either taken the cinematic techniques out of a movie, or you’ve taken the gameplay mechanics out of Gone Home – the intersection of those two perspectives is unique, yes, but still necessarily less than either alternative.
Part 2: How To Fix Tacoma
Among Ian’s fixes are to extend the game dramatically, to create more time for exposition about the sci-fi setting, and to develop the cast of characters. He wants them to have dynamic arcs that relate to the central stakes, such that the characters can only overcome the crisis on the space station by also overcoming their personal flaws and interpersonal conflicts. It’s hard to argue with him, here. I may have liked the story, but I don’t doubt that those changes would be the sort of thing to put it into “masterpiece” territory.
Gone Home’s embedded narrative seems to prove his point: it features a (recent) historical setting that doesn’t require any exposition, fewer characters in total who each receive more development as a result, and it revolves wholly around their interpersonal conflicts. I don’t know that I found the embedded narrative dramatically more or less compelling than that of Tacoma, but it was undoubtedly compelling, and I certainly enjoyed Gone Home as a whole more than Tacoma.
The more important difference, to me – and the biggest point about which Ian and I are in total agreement – lies in the framing narrative. In Gone Home, player character Katie goes home from college to find her family missing from her childhood home. A powerful storm outside has stranded her and downed the telephone lines – and this being 1995, she has no cell phone – so she has no means of finding out what has happened except to start sleuthing. The player’s goals are aligned with hers, and the obstacles she faces become the gameplay challenges that drive the player’s emotional experience.
This is what’s missing from Tacoma. Player character Amy wants to access the space station’s computer core where the “ODIN” A.I. is kept, but her bosses won’t let her do that until she downloads the hologram logs on their behalf. She already knows the whole story – watching the logs is just a way to kill time while they download. As Ian eloquently puts it:
...for both Amy and the player, there’s no reason to actually engage with the game’s plot except that it’s there. And it’s a decent plot, one worth engaging with, but this makes it feel like nothing you’re doing or seeing actually matters.
There needed to be obstacles in Amy’s path that could only be solved by studying the logs. At a minimum, this would be escape room type stuff – passwords or the locations of keycards – but what she ideally needed was an open question, a mystery to solve, that would require the player to form an opinion about the events and personalities presented in the logs. Perhaps if she was trying to determine whether ODIN was somehow responsible for the crisis, or needed to evaluate whether the A.I. had become self-aware – some problem that can only be solved with the benefit of the holo-scrubbing mechanic.
