Dear Player: Go From A to B
‘Play’, as generated by games, is an exploration of limits. Because of the assumption of space in the medium, a huge proportion of games involve journeys. For a lot this is a trip from point A to point B (and if you’re unlucky, a backpeddle to point A with object p). On the face of it this seems natural considering the media to which video games still look. Books, TV and film are (to crazy-generalise) traditionally sequential media with linear narratives. Not only are they littered with thematic journeys and notions of progressive character development, but they assume a uni-directional experience of both figured time and literal consumption line by line or frame by frame. But what happens to structures and tropes like these when they’re made literal? What happens in a game where you interactively walk/fly/drive to a finish line?
Examples are countless, but a strong reflexive tendency can be seen in recent affective games that choose to think about game mechanics through the trope of what I’ll call the ‘Path’. From Journey to Thomas Was Afraid, artists are thinking about what linear games mean. FTL questions the formula by combining a rigid drive with procedural generation and branching choice – left to right from an ever advancing threat without any reversion to save-points. BioShock Infinite taunts our very notion of ‘multiple endings’ by illustrating the intractability of game logic. The Path reifies its namesake by making its very object ‘straying’ from the set path. Here, however, I want to focus on just two pieces. Dear Esther and Passage are each humbling works of art, and inhabit opposite ends of the medium – one immersive and textual, the other minimalist. One is an hour in the Half-Life 2 engine, the other is 5mins of 8-bit magic, but both look critically at the idea of fixed ‘Paths’.
Dear Esther. The constant refrain of the hypertext that guides us, emotionally, through a landscape in every way its immersive and evocative counterpoint. As the title implies, the game initially reads as a sequence of letters voiced aloud by the player as they traverse a barren hebridean island. While they meditate on his lost love and his role-models, ‘Dear Esther’ is a veiled address to the player. Like the rest of the game world, every inch of this seamless journey is aimed at immersion and self-reflection on an emotional narrative.
We find ourselves on a rocky path in parts aggressively linear, but in others pregnant with a choice. The simplest choice. Left or right. But this is a choice between two paths that always arrive at the same place. While the text we hear changes its sequence with every play, it remains finite, and in every iteration describes the consequences of an accident. In a series of chapters we learn how to narrate a trauma that remains unalterable, by walking a fixed path punctuated at set intervals by evocative meditations. Yet, interestingly, in a game so pregnant with meaning it probes meaning’s very in-game nature.
In a game where we cannot diverge from the Path, what can we truly call incidental? When everything is submerged completely in a hud-less first-person narrative work, what constitutes a sign? Esther’s world is rendered as exactly that – a three-dimensional illusionist stage, which problematises the boundary between the mimetic and the iconographic. There are no competing interfaces, no fundamental shift in framing devices. If we see text in the game, it’s not an icon, it’s not a menu, it’s ‘paint’ on a ‘rock’. We walk under the crossed beams of a beached hulk – a choice, one of many angles of approach, and yet with the sun behind it, an allusion to the religiosity of the islands previous inhabitants and the ubiquitous narrative of suffering and loneliness. This loneliness is an essential condition of the game – an uninhabited island is a sounding board for the player’s thoughts, the journey of self-emancipation in the plot is one that inherently turns inwards.
In Esther, this introversion, this solipsism of a single player and a single path, is borne out by the landscape. The grand metaphor of the body, its broken rocks stand as broken bones, and as we progress through the chapters in our introspection we turn almost literally ‘inward’, descending into the cavernous organs of the island.
Dear Esther is rendered seamless. In so many ways the path is circular. The text and the landscape resonate with each other, our dialogue with ourselves. Our world is the reflection of the player’s character, the end inevitable and unalterable. Even as the premise of our journey is revealed, we see how the world is sui generis, or at least the sole object and creation of the player’s character. We retrace the steps our character has made before, walking through his ‘preparations’, the candles he lit along the way, the lines he wrote in the land, and in the final FMV we fly back over the journey. But when we fall over the edge, when we reach the end of the Path, this flight changes everything.
In joining our lost love in suicide the loop closes. The game changes. We see that now we can roam without constraint. In retrospect, in catharsis, our relationship with our love and our world changes. Rather than a traditional body moving through a level, the Path in Dear Esther comes from us and returns tous. In a game that deals proscriptively with time – linear, indeed a loss that must be reckoned with – in the end time changes. We are able to turn around, to fly back. After an hour of attempting to narrate a trauma, to order the unorderable, to relive a story of death that has already been lived, we find release by ending our monologue.
If Benjamin’s angel of history experienced time as trauma – a story of crisis after crisis only knowable in retrospect, blown back from an explosion their mesmerised by – here the angel turns around. Dear Esther explores the limits of the medium’s story-telling ability, in an artful and moving experience, and in the end prompts us to engage with the simulacrum of the game.
At its simplest, and at its best, it takes us back and forth across a path, and then pushes us off it.
Passage stands in contrast to Dear Esther in almost every way. Marked by its minimalism, it can crush a player in minutes with its unwinnable (unloseable) story. It’s wordless, it’s 8-bit, and the view is a restricted band barely 50 pixels tall – but it lacks nothing in emotional and affective power.
Victory conditions: none. Points: meaningless. The player walks through a land even more desolate than Esther’s island – the polychromatic garden of a Final Fantasy, but undeniably a side-scrolling monotony of blocks and the blocky. We walk a subverted cliché – our ‘princess’ is with us from the start, and our only enemy is time. If anything, our fruitless objective is to find a safe castle to return to. But the problem is, no matter what path you take, everyone dies over time.
That priceless moment when the player notices the character’s appearance change, and stops caring about the next cache of arbitrary points, that’s a moment that hits the player viscerally. Blood burns at the back of the head, the throat clogs as we notice ourselves age by proxy. At the right of the screen – ‘forward’ along the path – the future begins as a pixelated horizon that recedes as we approach. As we near the end it’s the past that fades out of focus. Though a starkly simple and seemingly banal game, it’s formal ‘hollowness’ mirrors the result of the affective encounter. When one of the in-game couple dies, we can continue to walk, but we already wonder: what’s the point? Not only does play seem meaningless now within its own terms – a simple exercise in drudgery – but on an emotional level we feel immersed in a narrative of existential depression.
It’s hard to resist talking by analogy – this flat, gaudy and arbitrary game empties us on an effective level. Walking along this path lets us feel something of the aching hollowness of loss in a way that a naturalistic fully-fleshed story never could. With nothing but a scree of pixels to project onto, we tenderly feel the rudiments of interactive gameplay, as if for the first time. In the visual language of what we think of as the most shallow and anaesthetising pursuit – an archaic button-bashing journey – we confront instead an affective power. A simple keyboard-controlled game, it’s nonetheless played with our body. In travelling solely along one axis, we still feel a bodily spectrum of emotion – attachment and sorrow, all the more powerful in their inevitability.
Like Esther, the world is closed. Passage is self-generating and self-eating like an ouroboros, and tells the tale of a lifetime from start to finish before restarting endlessly. It tells a tale, that is, but only with the gaps filled in by the player. Buried in Dear Esther, in the narrative of a man who retraces his steps over his self-annihilating preparations, in both we see the metaphorical rendering of the half of the experience the player brings to the game: their projections and their experience of the world. An interactive art form is only completed by the player, and in both games the traumatic repetition of life and death foregrounds the traditional existence of a game as lived experience for which recall and description are inherently lacking. But while Esther gestures beyond the game world in a catharsis where the player takes flight, in Passage this catharsis remains darkly mechanical. If the angel of history can turn around in Passage, and the future comes into view at the right of the screen, it merely reveals another barren stretch of pixels, and at the expense of blurring the past.
While Esther creates a ‘theatrical’ space (a multi-media poem-film-game) that confronts and transcends the medium’s logics of time, direction and self-generation, Passage cuts closer to the fundamentals of a game experience. In a sense, what Passage is showing us is that the body exists in all games, no matter how artificial and simulacral they seem. From the basic tactility of the key-press stems a power that can keep us awake for hours on end: attentive to stress, joy and sadness. But in its vision the body is also trapped within a game world that winks out of existence at the moment we get from A to B.
Merlin Seller