How can a game have issues and still be one the best gaming experiences ever? Welcome to SOMA. Thomas Grip, Creative Director at Frictional Games (Amnesia, SOMA), is a man very passionate about games as a story-telling medium. So am I, and my online dialogue with Thomas resulted in creating (Thomas did most of the …
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’.
Note, if you want to signal boost this post on Twitter, you could re-tweet my tweet.
The character opposition and balance is: One character is okay with it, one character is not okay with it. And the story is: You start off as a copy of a dead person. You end as being a soon to be dead person that gets copied. It is supposed to represent mortality and the cycle of life. As you progress to the game it touches on more subjects of that going towards a bittersweet progression. There's a nice sense of duality to everything from duplication to life and death. Structural brilliance! Couldn't of done it better!
...Oh and everything else is really well done too. The graphics and lore mostly.
SOMA - 22 DE SETEMBRO! Finalmente os caras da Frictional Games revelaram a data de lançamento para a desgraceira mais aguardada do ano! Ao menos para mim, claro. E para quem não tem ideia do que estou falando, trata-se do sci-fi altamente promissor dos mesmos criadores das séries Penumbra e Amnesia.
What a lovely day!
"Alien: Isolation is an interesting game. It is the latest entry in a lineage of games that I refer to as horror simulators. It does an excellent job at creating tension and uses a lot of the knowledge built up over the years to great success. But, because it has such a laser focus on a certain type of play, a bunch problems arise and other parts of the package suffer. It is a great game in many ways, truly excellent really, but there are some fundamental problems. These lead to – for me at least – a devastating flaw: At its core it fails to be a faithful emulation of the original Alien (1979) movie."
Found this an interesting read to ease my bleary eyes this morning - I haven't had the chance to play Alien: Isolation yet so cannot comment on the discussion wholly but the areas covered are indeed food for thought.
I hope to get my hands on it soon to formulate my own thoughts on its design.
