Dear Player: 'Surface' in Games
I once found a paper crane on a train. Left there. Some ordinary magic. I didn’t imagine for a minute that I was the only person in the world to find such a thing. Quite the opposite, I thought about the other paper sculptures left as intimate treasures for all the world to hold. As if through them we could touch someone else’s thoughts. Think of all the involuntary sculptures we leave behind: the cue cards and post-it notes; the scrunched up receipts and crumpled crisp packets. Such were the subject of a series of Surrealist photographs by Brassai in 1933 - labelled automatist art of the masses, and traces of the individual unconscious.
When we think about the stuff we throw away like this, it appears marvellous. But I know that I can be jaded from time to time, and call a scrap a scrap. Holding on to those moments when the mundane becomes miraculous and the miraculous mundane, however, is important. These records of intimate musings are also just crumpled pieces of paper - elegant or not, they’re trash. How do we reconcile the magical within the banal?
Tearaway is a platformer from the artists behind Little Big Planet - a game renowned for its malleability and user-generated content. Tearaway stands as the greatest attempt to synthesise the strengths of mobile tablet/phone hardware with the conventions of dedicated gaming hardware. It’s a creature of the PS VIta, a hybrid platform perhaps not long for this world, and it makes of it a bridge between capacitive screens and hard-key buttons. What Tearaway achieves is one the most creative and elaborate elisions of game and reality – one not founded on illusion, but on the fundamentals of ‘play’ as both an immersive and critically engaging activity. It’s ultra-meta gameplay for ages 7 and up.
The game opens as a story, dual narrators reflect the duality of ourselves as protagonist. We play in this game as both our avatar Atoi/Iota, and ourselves: our face streamed through the sun, our fingers forces of nature. In its narrative, a paper world has been broken into by our own, a hole in the sun through which we stare, and through which the player’s world begins to infect the game. Our avatar begins as a letter, a message fallen from our world into theirs, which constitutes limbs from its paper surroundings. However, following it viral antagonists descend, pouring in from the portal in the sun - ‘scraps’.
From its beginnings the game plays with self-reflexivity. Our face in-game is the camera-feed of the front-facing camera - the hole in the sun maps on to the aperture of the camera. Photographic loops girdle the game, cameras unite both worlds. From projecting the player’s own face onto the sun, to the ability to take photographs in-game and in the real with the same camera filters, our fictive ‘paper camera’ is both the virtual lens of the software and the physical lenses of the hardware. In moments the player is even asked to source skins and textures for the game’s models from their immediate physical environment, and in these moments we transpose the real onto the virtual.
Augmented reality is gaining increasing traction - where overlays and virtual frames are added to our perception of reality. But what Tearawayproposes is the inverse - the ‘augmented virtual’. When the game asks us to give the stags a winter coat, what we in effect do is cloth the virtual in the real. We offer the real as a supplement to the virtual. In its play of malleable and interpenetrative surfaces, Tearaway is constantly wrapping ‘inside’ in ‘outside’.
Tearaway is a paper-thin world. Its greatest virtue is its ease of permeability.
Moreover, these forms of engagement are figured as empowering without eliding the position of player and protagonist. Instead, the world is the star of the show - the ‘body’ which bleeds out in all directions. The player is forever figured as an external entity, a helper and a secondary figure to the unfolding story-world. Our fingers literally penetrate the device, probing it from the rear touchpad, rendered three-dimensionally as in-game objects somewhere between an environmental forces and agents. NPC’s continually comment on their surprise – unable to understand what these alien 3D limbs are. When our faces are literally inserted into the game via live camera feed, they are framed by the sun – a window between worlds, and one the game characters treat with both suspicion and joy reflecting the ambivalent functions of the hole in their world. This is a hole which both bridges worlds and unravels them.
When we craft items from them by drawing on the screen, we are not limited to our own understanding of process. The NPC’s phenomenal experience is keyed into a thematic of surprise and delight, but also revealing of a completely different sense of time and space. For them, these objects appear from nowhere – their missing crowns, eyes and skins are returned to them instantaneously, to their joy and incomprehension. Upon reaching the Lab level, this knowledge gap becomes apparent. We push our fingers into their experiments, triggering alarms. But at its climax we also find common ground in a form of mediation: through technological translation we convey our sentience to the game world.
A researcher in the lab area asks us to take pictures of ourselves in different poses, and then sutures them together in-game into a gif they can understand. Our face as live-feed appears to them as a hole in the sun, a blind(ing)spot unintelligible to the NPC, but in treating our image as a still, choreographing and photographing our face, we are ‘converted’ as if into a paper flip-book. By converting reality into animation we communicate with NPCs -intermediality has been made into a game mechanic.
Moreover, these kinds of translation, as we’ve seen and experienced them, manifest multi-directionally. Everything in this game can be crafted from real paper, and their website offers step-by-step instructions. Virtual skins become real paper, real textures become virtual skins. Even the hard-keys are rendered as meta-objects in-game. Platforms and ledges in the shape of the Vita’s buttons move for us as we press them, while our avatarexpresses them as we press them. Alternately enacting its index and and its symbol, at intervals we press ‘X’ and a game-world ‘X’ descends while at the same time our avatar jumps, ‘ascending’. These motions are not always compatible, and the radical dissonance of player-game interaction is experienced as a kind of vertigo when the player jumps and in the same move eliminates the platform on which they hoped to land. It’s as if that in enfolding the real and the Game to a greater extent than ever before, Tearaway shows us greater separation than ever before. These different significations of the same input are so close to each other and yet so far.
While Surgeon Simulator and Flappy Bird stress the inadequacy of interface, and the distortions that occur between input and successful outcome, Tearaway’s intriguing split of player and avatar shows us the space that exists between player and play. Moreover, it is one we are made to feel from both sides - we want our avatar to succeed in their quest against us, we fight to overcome ourselves. Our face is the very source of the game’s enemies and its salvation, while in controlling both the Messenger and their environment we oscillate between both sides of a dialogue. As Foucault highlights in Magritte’s image/text games, the relationship between different signs, different media, different degrees of ‘reality’, involves a host of ambivalences. There exists a spectrum of similarities, of similitude, of representable positions between signifiers and signified, but also pitfalls and surprises, and almost impossibly different equivalences.
The game concludes with a moment of self-reflection - it presents us with a tour of all our in-game constructs, all our real world photographs and all the games manifold characters and environs. What our play has generated, in its final moment, is a virtual story-book, populated by our own imaging activities. In Tearaway, this heavy compacting of media and interface in a paper world also enfolds form and content. Indeed, ‘folding’ suggests itself at every turn as the only term that can adequately express what this game does for us. It is a work of art which engages the concept of mutability and translation - of medium indifference - in a world of paper. Physical space and virtual space are different sides of the same fold. Medium is message, to paraphrase McLuhan, and our end-point in the game is the rendering of gameplay and visual creativity as a fictive story-book. Our avatar is even a letter, addressed as ‘Messenger’, and delivers a story of their return journey to the player to the player. This letter, folded and collaged, becomes a living being, form and content inextricable. The same paper is both mundane and marvellous.
What Tearaway addresses so capably is ludo-narrative dissonance. What it reveals, with playful aplomb, is that the paradoxes of interface, of narrative gaming and of translation, are in essence ‘play’. None without its other, all articulated together. The ambivalences of gameplay are just creases in paper. Play is the faltering and fulfilling practice of folding, where there is no inside or outside, only embodied experience.
Tearaway bends. It folds and flexes under the player’s touch, but never truly tears. Its character, it’s pliability, and even its pretence of omnipotent play all combine to enthral us. We relate to it is as if with a living being, because it puts us in touch with ourselves. We press and probe the medium, and it responds. At a glance, all this magic is just so much crumpled paper, but when we play it we embody it. There is no point in talking about play without both ‘player’ and ‘game’. We live in the folds between them, and Tearaway lets us see around the corners.
Merlin Seller