Dear Player: Performing/Platforming
In Defence of the Casual Game.
Imagine you’ve never played a game before. Imagine someone trying to impress upon you the joy of a platformer, justifying why you should play something two dimensional, why you should care about a monarch in a constantly deferred castle, why you should jump on people’s heads to make them disappear, and, heck, why double-jumping is the only way to handle a plumber’s commute.
Many of us writing about games are in love with the indie scene, and what we dedicate that love to is the impressive, the outlandish and the experimental. If you’re anything like me, you believe games are Art with a capital ‘A’. ‘No question’ you say, ‘look at Dear Esther, or That Dragon, check out Kentucky Route Zero or Proteus’. The list of ‘Art Games’ is pretty long, but it’s just that, a list - not an argument. Maybe we blush when people point to the vast morass of these titles’ peers. The games whose entire vocabulary is ‘headshot’, or the ones where you jump on people’s backs to get coins. But I argue we don’t have to hide from them. And we don’t have to hide our critical apparatus from the majority of the art form. We don’t have to retain a vanguard and dismiss the populist. We don’t have to repeat the same mistakes of the Old Media.
I want to camp on a spawn point and mount a defence of ‘Low Art Games’. I want to get us thinking about why games have massive and mass appeal - an industry that grosses more than film and music combined - and ask if we rehearse the institutional biases of the past by seeing this as a problem. Art Games aren’t exceptions that prove the rule - that saying never even made sense in the first place. Art Games are the tip of the iceberg.
So let’s go below the water line - to what I’ll refer to as ‘Deep Play’. Not ‘deep’ games, but the undercurrents of the medium. Where ‘casual gameplay’ implies a superficiality detested by Hardcore and Indie gamers alike, I will use ‘Deep Play’ to try and invert these associations and elaborate my counter-narrative. ‘Deep Play’ is the archaeological time of games - the deep drives and substrata, the unconscious of games. What I’m going to talk about are games that are satisfying, plain and popular as can be. I’m going to talk about something quintessentially and quirkily game-y: Platformers.
If gifs were the first native art form of the net, the platformer was the first unique genre of the video game. From games like snakes and ladders, the chance-based bastards of the boardgame world, gaming made something it could do uniquely - substitute chance for skill, and sequentiality for fluid linearity. The turn-based became realtime. And like the gif - stuck between photograph and video - the platformer was an accommodation, a compromise. It offered worlds which were barely worlds, paper-thin creatures, but ones which gestured towards the illusions of time and space. Where the gif met the limits of bandwidth, the Platformer met the limits of the screen.
Platformers were far from the first game. Pong had made gaming popular in 1972 long before the first true platformer Donkey Kong had arrived in 1981. But while Pong mapped air-hockey onto a VDU, the Platformer offered the first unique experience of the medium. One where the notional opposition players of the boardgame were replaced by an antagonistic environment. The player was left to their own adventure.
It is significant that the returns of the Platformer genre began to diminish drastically around the turn of the century, and the shape of its titles changed with it. Platformers have attempted to make the ‘jump’ to 3D, but with mixed results. Judging virtual space on a 2D screen becomes more difficult when reading depth, and while successful titles emerged, the formula of scaling obstacles and gathering points migrated to other more flexible genres. Three dimensions in an aggressively linear tale of point accumulation begins to look like only so much ornament.
Both the persistence of the 2D platformer, and it’s teething troubles with the third dimension, tell us something key about our experience of them. With action, adventure and FPS games, the accumulation of explicit, floating, shiny points starts to look like an immersion-destroying contrivance. What had been essential to the reward system and ‘flow’ experience of the 2D gameworld became instead an intrusion - the bricks and mortar showing through the cracks in the wallpaper. The 2D/3D rift in gaming is given especially deft critical reflection in the current gen masterpiece Contrast.
But this distancing - this rebuffing of illusion and traditional immersion - is a self-reflexive strength of the platformer experience. Like reading, left to right, 2D platformers run like the code they were written on. Like the ASCII games of yesteryear, each floating bauble hangs like a character, a sign. We jump through worlds gobbling code. A pure narrative without content, as if the very form of text per se.
The platformer never died - far from it. It remains, for us, as a means of losing ourselves softly/safely - an honest illusion in a deceptive world. It retains both a purity of feedback and an explicit statement of its own means. The joy of Rayman or Sonic is instant, their worlds unobtrusive, yet un-immersive. There are no ethical questions here beyond the consumption of time - no naturalism or problematic identification. Platformers bridge the detachment of an abstraction (like a game of solitaire) and the immersion of a ‘realism’ (like the totalising world of a GTA).
Our avatars are willing puppets, acolytes of the death drive, happy canaries plumbing a lateral mine: we die and rebirth instantly, while the world around us continues. Unlike the jarring respawn of an FPS - fade-to-black, ringing in the ears - there is no feeling of pain nor any temporal return to a chapter beginning. The world is indifferent to us, and we are indifferent to it. The world operates by regeneration rather than revelation: like flora returning with the seasons. There is no need to plug the player back into a narrative thrust of timed events or plot tension.
What we actively will for is a suspension of difference. Like dancing to a rhythm, we work towards a seamless choreography, one where there ceases to be a gap between ourselves and this alien world. Our frustration and joy come from trying to find the perfect experience of a world in its entirety. Platformers are games which have perfect, total solutions, like a puzzle, not a spectrum of outcomes like a sport. Our knowledge of the Platformer’s teleos feels like a weakness, a mechanicity, in light of the Art Game, but as a medium limit it allows for a fundamentally powerful affective experience.
The Platformer promises a potential ‘mindfulness’, a loss of self in material process impossible in the cognocentric Art Game genre. In Platformers I would identify two polarities - what I will call ‘Lyric’ Platformers and ‘Metric’ Platformers, which loosely divides the creative and relaxed from the technical and intense. Art Game responses to the genre have straddled both - the subversion of medium distinctions being the keystone of their strategy. Limbo attempts to marry the meditation of puzzle solving with the tension of horror, while Thomas Was Alone weds emotional attachment and precision logic. These are great games, but what these approaches can lose sight of is the fact that these fusions are already latent in the genre. This odd between-state, between opposites of detachment and immersion, is the affective strength of a genre with uniquely affective means.
In Deep Play for the majority of platformers the sequentiality of coins and points, of button presses and jumps, become one, become an analogue linearity. Like the fading of letters into words into phrases into images, our perception of discrete elements gives way to an experience of speed. What we are left with is an experience somewhere between playing a musical instrument and watching a movie, something probably better described as something we think as far removed from the sedentary practice of gaming - ‘dance’. It is perhaps telling that increasingly whole game modes and whole games in the genre have embraced a musicality. Rayman Legends offers players the chance to play through covers of songs, driven to collect points in synch with the melody, while in Soundshapes the player ‘creates’ the soundtrack which emerges from the points as and when the player collects them.
Soundshapes operates this on two levels - not only does it push creativity to the degree of level building and editing found in the emergent sub-genre of ‘creative’ platformers (Little Big Planet, Tearaway), but it also questions the gameworld by mapping sound onto space. Like the grid-assembly of new digital DJ-ing found in the Launchpad use and other devices, sounds register pitch in terms of height and sequence from left to right. Thus the player’s experience of the world temporally and spatially is fused and reinforced, while the linearity of the platform experience is converted to an all-over use of the visual field. Unlike Rayman, the player here drives the gameworld as much as vice versa. This more creative and patient game-type I call the ‘Lyric’ platformer
At the other end of the spectrum we have what I’ll term ‘Metric’ platformers, exemplified by Super Meat Boy and Super Hexagon. Here the player is not only driven by a rhythm, but driven to the limits of human response time. Rather than an interest in composition, these platformers are obsessed with execution. Rather than a dialogue with a game world, these games articulate a monologue without concessions. But the promise of the Metric Platformer as with platformers at large, is a univocity - a perfect player-game unity.
In Super Hexagon we rotate to avoid destruction, and yet embrace it every second. We slot into a gameworld governed by a repetition of its eponymous motif, but one whose superstructure alters with greater speed than the novice (myself included) is capable of reading. But its attributes, in their extreme distortions of play, also offer unparalleled clarity in viewing the genre as a whole. Negative and positive space are nearly impossible to distinguish in this monochromatic world. Do we avoid the notes or hit them? As the 8-bit music plays on are we warping through a tunnel or escaping an ever-shrinking plane? Its very soundtrack is chip music played with the sound-devices of ancestral game-consoles - its staccato stemming from an age where sound-effects and backing music were composed of the very same noise. This games simplicity is evident in a still, but when played its speed demonstrates a unique property of games - we are driven, but if we succeed we are rewarded with a near indescribable sense of completion. Like the blind expertise of habit, supreme concentration bleeds into a meditative loss of self.
In games where we can practically see the ‘bits’, where we read bare signs, success in a platformer is an act of translation. Translating the raw abstractions of a game into a legible world, and translating ourselves into that gameworld. In the platformer we are at home with binary - we are living in code.
This act of translation reveals the materiality of gaming - the rawness of process. Our thought becomes game logic, we think in action. Like a painter thinking in paint, there is a collapse of distinction. We lose focus on the buttons we press and instead embrace the adrenaline rush. In games predicated on precise units, we are taken over by an awareness of speed - ‘duration’ over ‘extension’.
This article is elaborate wording for an experience understood by every casual gamer. It is, in text, the description of an experience that can only truly be written in code. But writing and reading this experience is important in understanding the art form’s very importance. While some may caution against the addictive properties akin to gambling in this sense of player ‘flow’, this affective materiality of Deep Play is more than simple submission. While Adorno might well have cited Platformers to illustrate the Culture Industry where leisure comes to mirror the repetitive nature of work, we have seen how the genre actively works to overcome alienation.
Photographer: Christian Aslund
The Platformer embodies a complexity of experience that warrants further analysis, it reveals the ambiguities we encounter while dancing with our avatar, and the ambivalences of the death drive we rehearse. Code, machine code, offers a unity of experience much as it offers a united format for information. In code, in games, subject-object divisions are elided without anxiety. ‘Casual’ games are anything but.
Merlin Seller