Dear Player: Inaction in an Interactive Medium

Why choose when you can look meaningfully into the distance?

You're Batman. But you're not really feeling it today. Maybe something's caught in your gravelly throat, or maybe you're interested in playing a game, perversely, as a spectator to your own fate. What does it mean to reject both the power-fantasy and the responsibility of choice as the player of a game? What does in-activity 'mean' in the context of an interactive medium? Here I look at games playing themselves, different players abnegating their own agency and my own 'passive' play-through of a Tell Tales game.

The question may seem anathema in the field of games, and the more we laud the interactive nature of our medium the more this position might seem related to the 'walking sim' and alternately formalist or philistine critiques of narrative-leaning games. Yet in an age of increase video game spectatorship, the question of what's enjoyable about games, and indeed what constitutes play, needs to be addressed. As a player who loves both heavily narrative and heavily ludic games, my interest is in probing what we mean by 'interactive' and 'meaningful play' and asking how we might subvert it.

Sid Meier is said to have described a good game as 'a series of interesting decisions', can it also be a series of interesting observations?

There are different ways of going about this, and it is not my intention to collapse medium distinctions, or assimilate the position of all players to that of the 'viewer' or 'reader' - something Andrew Darley claims when speaking of players as broadly akin to 'spectators' of digital media. Theorists often fiercely defend their chosen definition of 'interactivity' - of which there are many. For Aarseth, games are effectively ergodic literature in that they require non-trivial effort to navigate, and others such as Greg Costikyan go even further in arguing for an exclusive definition of interactivity in games as unique, and more than that of 'interpretation' - but rather something 'crunchy', where player inputs have substantial effects and require requisite skill. More broadly 'meaningful play' is often deployed as a term of value in design to stress interactivity that involves problem-solving or depth of choice, and by extension places observation and interpretation lower in the food chain. Deleuzian game studies theorists such as Alexander Galloway and Colin Cremin perhaps most interestingly argue that games are a uniquely 'active' medium, that they 'become' through interaction, through doing - as Galloway puts it, while other media involve activity prior to their reception or as a element separate to the receiver, games uniquely involve the action of the player in order to 'be'.

While a broader view of participatory culture in a networked world may make these essentialist claims more broadly applicable (and we might suggest intimate theatre or improve comedy to Galloway as equivalents), games do suggest a very interesting contract with their users. They want something of us, they need us, we become part of them - but they allow us to participate in a variety of ways. James Newman is quick to acknowledge - indeed stress - that viewers are also part of the play experience. The friends on the sofa, the audience on twitch, these people are suggesting, reflecting and modifying game inputs, as well as clearly enjoying the spectacle in meaningful ways. In a direct critique of Aarseth's concept of games as Ergodic texts Newman outlines that we observe and interact with games in a spectrum of different degrees and intensities.

Twitch Plays Dark Souls

My interests here, and the reasons for this overview, are twofold. First, I think we should expand on our notion of the 'player' and consider more seriously the importance of the extended audience of games and those who watch rather than 'press'. Second, popular perception and experience of games' exceptional 'interactivity,' and the the game-player contract as one of active exchange, is itself interested and open to subversion, which brings me via myths and Paradox games to a passive play-through of Tell Tale's Batman.

Tell Tales games are often accused of having a lack of mechanics and trivial interactions, but what might we learn if we negated these meagre offerings entirely? What happens when players don't seem to play, what experiences follow from leaving the console on put putting the controller down?

You look away for one second and... I, I have no idea what happened here.

In Paradox's grand strategy series a player-headed state can alter global history or we can sit back as Switzerland and see the world go by. These games' deep political and economic simulation of world history makes for great spectacle, and the real-time nature of the game means that history unfolds regardless of your input. Such player input can often seem indirect or minimal, but the game is highly adept at playing itself. Like growths in a petri-dish, borders ebb and flow before your eyes - sophisticated systemic interaction is a joy to see. System crunches into crunchy system as the AI subdivides and eats itself. To watch this all unfold the player needs to nominally 'enact' a state, inhabit it as de facto leader even if we don't dain to lead, and navigate the game's map - but does this constitute play? The player of a Paradox game is always at the periphery, but simply speeding up and slowing down time might make you feel like a non-interventionist deity. The appeal of watching AI build and battle can be extended to PvP strategy in esports, where early audiences of Starcraft matches had to inhabit invisible and powerless factions in the game itself. To be audience to a game often means inhabiting it, while inhabiting a game also tends to involve an often problematic amount of 'watching' as an audience.

Little Computer People 1985

Games have a long history of dabbling at the edge of interactivity, of which the 'Walking Sim' and esport spectator-ship is only the latest horizons. The first 'console', the Magnavox Odyssey transparently necessitated the same input for all its games, transparent overlays on the screen being all that contextualised player action, and requiring subjective interpretation of the positioning of pixels in relation to a static sport-field/tabletop image. Interactivity (meaning, feedback and outcome) was dependent on imaginative reading and social contracts between players. Conversely, there is a long lineage of game design in which interactivity is deliberately minimised at the mechanical level. Little Computer People (1985) offered the player a digital dolls house, with an 8-bit man moving according to his own individualised whims and moods with little scope for player mastery. This kind of virtual pet-keeping continues in present design through the Sims franchise, and even games with awkwardly (and realistically) wilful companions such as The Last Guardian. At the current extremes of 'non-interactive' games we even have the early work of David O'Reilly to consider - his games are concerned with modes of being more than modes of doing, and his first work, Mountain, takes the concept of a rock pet to an extreme. After being asked to submit three drawings on different themes, all the player can do is watch and interpret.

What this quick historical recap serves to show is how interesting, fluid and popular the border of interactivity and in-activity is. Interactivity poses a tension between watching and being (spectating and acting) as well as that between being and doing. These games test the edges of agency empathy. Escapism can involve a rejection of responsibility and labour outside the Magic Circle, but is it not strange that so many players might step back in a situation of fun and want to reject choice in a medium Sid Meier famously described as a 'series of interesting decisions'?

In the deeper time of games, the medium has often had players negotiate what constitutes meaningful action. Ritual games of divination use chance procedures to reflect on the world and our place within it. Tarot is a system we participate in with the assumption that our agency is inherently limited and held hostage to higher powers. Ancient Egyptian Senet, 'The Passing Game' may (as we understand it, a minimalist version of snakes and ladders) have been a game that deliberately mocked choice and agency - a levelling effect intent on showing the triviality human machinations in the face of the Gods. As Thomas Malaby charts in 'Beyond Play' and his earlier anthropological work, in Greece games of chance are highly valued as being meaningful reflections of the wider world, and a space turned to by a working class which increasingly feels their agency is limited. Games of chance and automatism were played by Surrealists to reshape their worlds but also deconstruct themselves, unleashing the unconscious also involves undermining the ego. More recently, the comic experiments of Danny Wallace (real life inspiration behind the Jim Carey movie Yes-Man) explored affirmatory ways of living life by abnegating choice - rolling dice for every real-world choice or saying yes to every y/n question he encountered for a year. This led to a lot of adventures, but also a lot of insurance and subscriptions services.

Senet, a fancy faience version of rolling dice-analogues and moving counters

For all that we talk about games as empowering, as interactive, as exercises in mastery, challenge and skill, many people play games to remove their agency in different ways. Which brings me, finally, to my personal relationship to Tell Tale's Batman. The form of a Tell Tales game is meaningful 3-way choices amid a sea of scripted quick time events and cinematic sequences. The bulk of the game has the player 'offline,' in James Newman's sense (Newman 2002) - passive - but as anyone who has played The Walking Dead will tell you, the decisions the game does give you feel deep, affective and powerfully describe the character you enact. Yet distilled so closely to the essentials of interactivity in play these games afford unique spaces for subversion and rumination on the nature of medium and performance.

The Walking Dead asks the player to describe their performance and define their relation to the gameworld.

All the dialogue in Batman offers the player the option of silence, as with the studio's offerings, and comes too with a cheeky disclaimer which until now I have ignored - 'silence is always an option.' The pressure of play has so often put me in fear of saying nothing in these contexts that I've never opted for silence before - it felt like a matter of principle, of duty and challenge in the face of a diminishing timer. But part of me wondered why I should accept all the stress of moral responsibility in a game about a billionaire vigilante and cookie-cutter hero, and part of me wondered if and how I could crack the character's veneer. And so I opted for silence. I played as a quiet batperson. I let every choice time-out, I selected nothingness at every opportunity, and in the end I experienced Batman at both his most comically stoic and emotionally fragile.

Respect for all the quiet batpeople out there

With the cinematic cut, every inaction appears meaningful. Silent Bruce is pondering Bruce. Waiting before acting (when compelled to do so) breaks the rhythm of a fast-clipped plot. Where many narrative games use the pretence of urgency to motivate player participation, stepping back and considering Batman destabilises the imaginative space. In playing an action-adventure we pretend that, narratively, all the times we got lost or stuck on a piece of geometry never happened. We may have idled away time jumping on a character's head that they never notice and we quickly forget, but in Tell Tales inaction is noted. Characters were frustrated by my impassive face and frozen gob, and in a narrative afforded tension by the NPCs' constant provocation of Bruce to action this inaction thwarted many of the antogonists' plans

Like an Inspector Clouseau Batman solves crises unwittingly if no-one pulls the strings. With the visage and manner of Father Dougal from Father Ted, the character animations cycle between confusion and smugness without attachment to, or awareness of, the current situation. An accidental master of calm, half self-serious, half comic, an inactive batman is even more openly a vehicle for the player to project. But without and direction to draw on the projection fails, the signals are confused - the computer doesn't know whether to play august and imperious or demure and shy with the player in hiatus and so oscillates between them. This is what Galloway calls the ambience act:

"The ambience act is the machine’s act . The user is on hold , but the machine keeps on working . In this sense , an ambience act is the inverse of pressing Pause . While the machine pauses in a pause act and the operator is free to take a break , it is the operator who is paused in an ambience act , leaving the machine to hover in a state of pure process ." (Galloway, 2006)

When we leave Sonic or Geralt on their own they can tap their feet or brush their sleeves diegetically, but in the throws of time-dependant dialogue the ambience act becomes supremely uncanny. It unravels itself - at once openly a placeholder machine playing itself, and yet oddly open and vulnerable, like a child unable to decide. This hovering, this "state of pure process" tells the truth to the illusion which underpins most interactive fiction - narrative convergence. Over time, no matter how many decisions are made, the outcomes are necessarily limited. Moreover, in order to sustain a narrative arc, highly divergent choices meet in the middle, converging before splitting off, only to converge again on one or two possible endings. Our sense of interaction in games still involves the imaginative and social contracts of the Magnavox Odyssey. Whether at a macro level or a micro level, player-cause and game-effect are often disassociated - separated by chance procedures or narrative necessity and blended together by fiction and illusion. In the ambience act the machine seems to have forgotten its line, but it knows the play must go on, and when we take a step back we are reminded that the system, indeed the world, keep on moving regardless of our input.

Poor, repressed, Batman.

Players can opt for in-activity in an interactive medium for a variety of reasons, but there can be an incidental beauty for all of us in the stories that result. Sometimes in these moments of hiatus, where the game exposes it's artifice, the machine can feel most human. Stuck in a moment of indecision. In an oddly resonant scene, my 'quiet batperson', my blank Batman template, was faced with one movement to make but no player to press 'X.' To open the bat-cave he needed to move the black knight on a chess-board, but I must have left him staring at the fictive game of chess for an hour in the background while I did other things. The black king in this scene happened to be in check-mate - the game within a game was already resolved, its conclusion foregone. And for a moment that was both fleeting and impossibly long Batman seemed melancholy, human, aware of his plight as an empty avatar. As his eyebrows aimlessly shifted it almost seemed as if he were aware that his character's longevity depended on deferring the games conclusion indefinitely - as if he had finally worked out that the winning move lay in not moving at all.

Merlin Seller