Dear Player: The Swapper and the Body-snatcher
We’ve all heard some of the origin myths of film – the audiences who closed their eyes and threw up their hands to protect themselves from oncoming trains. But where are the video game myths? Where is the moment of horror? Where is the body?
No crime has been committed, but a forgetting. Sometimes in playing a game we forget where and when we are. Sometimes we forget where our fingers end. But in experiencing the interface of body and machine there is exactly that – bodily experience. What that constitutes, what it means and how we feel about it however, are questions that often go unasked. But there are answers.
In the Russian epic Solaris, human characters engage with an ineffable alien mind – the only way communication is ‘possible’ is through the alien power making human memory into flesh. As the human minds collapse under the affective power of these uncanny bodily encounters, we ask ourselves questions about life, death memory and why in an interface between human and inhuman worlds such intimate and human ambassadors were so problematic. In Swapper we experience the body and the medium’s moment of horror.
Swapper’s conceit is to marry an immersive psychological horror with a puzzle mechanic. It’s genius is to twin our spatial problem solving with a rumination on metaphysics. If people are so prone to recommending we think outside the box when it comes to old problems like mind-body dualism, it’s refreshing to see a game that actually gives us one, a multi-sensory virtual space for meditation on more than its limits.
But perhaps ‘breaking the mould’ would be a better metaphor with which to begin. The plot premise is deeply entwined with the game mechanic, allowing for the twinning of the experience of affective play and semiotic narrative in elegant immersion. Marooned on a space station we encounter the truly alien, and our only means of saving ourselves is to problematise our own identity. Encounters with a truly alien alien, a distributed consciousness of sentient rocks, abused by human science, has opened the way for the Swapper gun – a weapon that allows the ‘swapping’ of consciousness between bodies. Now, by cloning our character and switching ourselves between bodies, we must make amends for prior wrongs, and through sacrificing and splitting our many clones eventually return the alien species to wholeness.
Graphically the game itself is quite literally hand-made. In the loneliest reaches of mute space, we press on through arbitrary and mechanically incremental puzzles – but all composed of lovingly hand-crafted clay. The intimacy of an indie designer’s claymation, each virtual artefact is also a very material one – the walls that protect our fragile space-person are fused, cut and impressed upon by real fingers. Just as we depress keys and swirl our mouse, the terrain is a pre-meditated bodily trace. And as in the medium of stop-motion, we feel intimately involved with a project that blurs the line between the animate and inanimate.
The central mechanic of the game is all the stronger for this visual resonance. We deal in bodies. A body-snatcher that’s loose with bodies. We work with concentration and sparingly deliberate touch. We clone our bodies and throw them away - the bone-crunching snaps of our falling fellows dogs us, their unthinking aping of our movements locking them forever in forgotten corners of a space-hulk. And I forget how many times I’ve asked myself ‘where is my mind?’ as I sacrifice the wrong clone and incinerate myself without a second thought.
We probe and test with our virtual prosthesis – our mouse and keyboard, but also our onscreen avatars whose duplication talks reflexively of the 3rd-person Video Game’s model of play by proxy. But as much as we work through the game by sensory exploration of its material constraints, this is also a game about thought and reflection. The forethought necessary for later puzzles involves taking a step back, a distance from play as we think through the possibilities, the solutions, at a pace faster than our finger-presses will allow. The game is built on the switching to and from the haptic – and so we become aware again and again of our avatar’s body and our own, as we take our fingers away from the keyboard . For an instant we reflect on our muscle memory as our fingers trace their way back to W-A-S-D. A groove that Qwerty’s inventor never anticipated – an emergent ergonomic. Swapper again and again calls our attention to the haptic nature of the interface, alternating between immersion and alienation as frequently as it switches from affective narrative to abstract puzzle. Our clones’ wilful duplication emphasises and redoubles the distance between us and the game, draws attention to our interface by figuring it in the game – the relationships between real and virtual bodies figured again between virtual bodies within the game.
As one the greatest examples of a recent trend in the production of puzzle platformers with atmosphere – from Braid to Limbo, even Immortal Defense – here we can see games at simultaneously their most abstract and their most affective. As a limit condition of gaming, the puzzle-game has recently become the site of meditation on the limits and potentials of play, and the very terrain it contests is the body. Our very means of negotiating the real and the virtual, the body always reasserts itself. As moving stories emerge from the most abstract genre, our affective responses are exposed at their most raw, most pure and direct. Where we engage with the virtual and mechanical at its most human, we find the body, the point of contact, the player’s universal device for input and output. For feeling.
In Swapper we try and communicate across an alien divide, we try to come to terms with a vast and extended mind and we do it by positioning our many bodies on buttons and orbs. By moving our ‘mind’ through different proxies we attempt to work out a primitive language in which to grasp the ineffably alien ‘characters’ of the game. And even as the game signifies these actions it affectively prompts us to another level of understanding. Simply, elegantly, we switch between our clones, a jarring relocation in space, but yet not. We are in multiple places, but not quite. We have moved but have not. All our proxies repeat the same actions, but our view point shifts slightly at the press of a button among our army of bodies. A shifting set of priorities follow suit as we time our identity-switches to fit our environment. We come to care differently about our identical pawns in an instant – if our directly player-controlled avatar dies, GAME OVER. And yet, do we even know who we are? Are we a single character that moves between its copies, or the group of copies acting in concert, deciding which of them will use the gun. In the very basic condition of perspective in the game, are we all or one?
Does a human even fit into this virtual space? As we switch between jarring and disconcerting states and approaches to this game of opposites – clay and pixels, reflection and immersion – do we even know what, how or if we are playing? Do we even know the win condition? Gradually in-game text realises that the ‘soul’ is a fiction, our mind is our body, our clones indistinguishable – so what does our gun do? Does it do anything? In a side-scrolling shooter the gun is the instrument of difference, an asymmetrical war-tool with which we annihilate everything NPC. Here the gun uses the body to problematise notions of player character – to question the ontology of the player.
Again and again we flinch at the raspy breath of oxygen escaping our fallen clone’s air tank, we wonder at the waste of countless bodies to cycle forward just a few feet towards yet more non-descript orbs. We ponder every click in our determination to win, but which of us wins, the first clone or the last?Swapper makes the respawn mechanic transparent, painfully present. Perhaps the most fundamental illusion of a game – its saves and its restarts that let us pretend that Player 1 is a persistent construct coextensive with our real selves – the respawn is laid bare as a string of disjunctions and suicides.
Yet at the very moment this narrative character immersion is broken, we feel our attachment to our virtual bodies all the more deeply and immediately. We live through their deaths – we see ourselves die and yet remain to deal with the loss in a lossless world. We cringe and sweat and tense and tap LMB. We search for fleeting moments of ‘rightness’, of apprehension, as we solve each puzzle, with Zen movements, precise and premeditated, but every time we do we don’t know what we lose when the protean clay of our astronaut goes limp.
Our character themselves is playing a game within a game, doubling our real body’s relation to its keyboard prosthesis. We convert our bodily gestures into keys, and our avatar dances, and then our avatar’s dance is copied wand adapts to its clones’ environs through our avatar’s own Swapper prosthesis. Just like our own, the translation is imperfect and powerful. The Swapper gun is no magic of the soul or mind, it’s a mouse. It’s the moment where our body becomes uncertain, cyborg. And in copying the interface within the game into a dizzying mis en abyme of prostheses, it blurs the line between body and game.
In the end we learn a little bit about games, about technology and about ourselves. We learn the uncertainty of its myths. Who are we in a game of chess? The hand that moves the piece or the piece that wins the game, the mind that plans the arrangement or the pieces without which there would be no game, the person who began or the person who finishes? In a game we are a body that’s too many, a body that doesn’t end.
Merlin Seller