Dear Player: Narrative Horizons

A game of big pictures and small.

Within Horizon: Zero Dawn we see a fictional world that reflects on the very consequences of generating artificial worlds. It also engages deeply with a conventional tension in Science Fiction as a genre between the world and its inhabitants, and asks us as players to consider where empathy, responsibility, interest and ownership lie in a work which would be monstrously complex by any other medium's standards. Presenting itself as a highly-polished, richly-detailed, systemically and narratively meaningful open world, Guerilla Games questions the nature of the Gesamptkunstwerk that is a modern AAA game. How does (how can?) such a baroque and totalising work of sights, sounds and experiences cohere as a world with a message? What can designers do with scale and detail that smaller works can't convey? I argue that Horizon uses its sheer scope to tell us something interesting about game design, genre and the future of the industry. {This piece, as usual, is heavy with narrative spoilers}.

Opera: the original total-work-of-art (Gesamptkunstwerk)

What worlds can we make in games? What limits or dictates their splendour and their depth? As a player and an academic I have a tendency to read the games industry like that of film or contemporary art - there's a lumbering and spectacular Hollywood/AAA that soaks up the glory and pushes forwards entertainment, and there's an indie scene that punches above its weight and 'truly' innovates and tactically changes the artform. There's the work with something for everyone and spectacle to spare, and there's the work for a niche audience that cares less about money and more about expression. There's the Turner prize/Oscar winning work that gets popular attention, and there's the Activism/Folk art/marginalised Avant Garde that get's critcal attention - and that acts as an experimental R&D department for the former. But as the last couple of years have shown, Indies are getting bigger and hitting mass markets, and AAA is also producing richer and more meaningful work. The boundaries between mass, pop, folk, low and high culture are getting blurrier as the ecosystem diversifies, and we're transitioning into a space where huge-budget games can be as spritely, elegant and conceptually incisive as smaller dedicated Art Games.

But what do they do with all the surplus resources? Thomas Was Alone could move me with simple boxes, The Passage could make me cry with a few hundred pixels, Journey could mesmerise with a couple of buttons and Unfinished Swan could ask deeply probing questions about phenomenal experience and loss in the guise of a monochrome kids book. Usually all £100million's worth of assets tends to get you is just some shinier cars, more mini-game distractions or more cinematic sequences to skip through. But what if you put half a billion dollars worth of resources behind a creative vision that was bigger than its in-game explosions?

Horizon bends the work of a huge AAA team towards a unified aesthetic end in rendering a beautiful post-post-apocalypse. It tells us more than Fallout's refrain that 'war never changes', or CoD's that 'war is always fun and American', and even narratively justifies robot dinosaurs. Its sublime landscapes bear the robot carcasses of the machines used to shape them - from vast broken limbs stretched over mountain peaks, to the tall necks which map the plains for small ungulate machines recycling the valley floors. The game obsessively dwells on the idea of crafting space, and populating it, both with sumptuous colour, texture and modular asset production, and with the theme of an Eden rebuilt after the Fall. Our interface is itself a piece of pre-apocalypse tech that can speak with the hidden programmes and codes building the world around our character. Instead of a nebulous 6th sense, our 'Focus' taps into the network - the ghosts of NPC footprints are patrol paths programmed into the world's robotic animals, not just a shorthand or practical convenience for the player - and the Far-Cry-like towers here are in fact creatures living in the world with a role in the ecosystem we co-opt, not just gamified minimap tools. There are a plethora of parallels and convergences between core and shell, systems and narrative, design and play. This is a game concerned with the harmony of parts. Its a game about game-making and meaning-making in games.

You can even do realtime in-game archaeology!

At the level of self-reflection on design and the production pipeline, this fictional world filled with iron-age tribes is narratively and literally the product of designers. Faced with an unfixable problem (killer-cannibal robots), the prelapsarian society decided to sacrifice themselves and wipe the slate clean, leaving god-like machines to rebuild and repopulate the world again and again until they get it right. Horizon's world, crafted by the Gaia and Hades AI's (and the Guerilla team) is based on the principle of failing upwards. In memorable sequences digging through ruined bunkers we effectively get introduced to a fictive development team, explaining the parts and the intended whole. Apollo is an AI built to preserve and impart pre-Fall cultural knowledge (environmental storytelling), Aether is built to detoxify the atmosphere (QA and bug-testing), Hephaestus is the cauldron-system producing machines designed to rebuild the world, like a game-engine or core system (and yes, apparently it builds robots with dinosaur phenotypes if that's what fits the task...). Horizon is a deeply self-aware game, that grapples with the complexity of creation on a grand scale, and it uses the scope of both its huge range of assets and voice acting as well as the thematic time of centuries to build an intensity of player empathy along with the problems of articulating a world and letting that world live.

How to make a world... or well, outsource it.

Fascinatingly though, Horizon also dwells on the gulf between intent and outcome - between these parts and the symphony they're meant to produce together. Systems court beauty but they also court collapse, and by the arrival of the player, the world's biosphere is becoming deranged. Gaia marshals multiple AI to create a living world, but its attachment to its creation can breed a cacophony Gaia is unwilling to redraft, while the Hades AI (by contrast) is a reset button that eventually gets out of control - narratively we are told that all creation involves destruction, but that these impulses can fall out of synch catastrophically. The friction that results is what generates and motivates the player - we are fictively the clone of the original human designer, brought to life by Gaia to resolve the contradictions of this world stuck between alpha and beta. We ourselves are part of a cycle of self-reflexive creation, and our successes are both temporary and dwarfed by the scale of time. This is more than a simple light vs dark struggle, it's a conflict of equally important prerogatives - to nurture and to let go. The problem of creation. And we as Aloy are both creator and created - in a broken and revised world we are player, play-tester and diegetic 'developer' (or at least someone involved in terraforming Quality Assurance).

It's a depressing job.

Moreover Horizon reflects on pedagogy: how we learn in the world and how that world reveals itself to us. The human dystopia in Horizon is the result of failed tutorialization, on a colossal scale. A difference of opinion between the AI-builders leads to Apollo's destruction. The person responsible for the Fall wants to be absolved from guilt, wants the world to forget what his associates want the world to remember. Apollo would teach future humanity about all the tools and ideologies that lead to its near-extinction - but the hope that humanity might be persuaded by history (as taught by its ancestors) is crushed by one madman's hope that innocence will save future humans from repeating the same mistake. Teaching, playing with information, can be like playing with fire - and the right information learned in the wrong order can lead to war, totalitarianism and superstition. But it can also breed creative innovation and synthesis if we learn to let go.

As players we are never shown Apollo's content, its programme, whether it leans Left or Right, whether it attempts objectivity, or whether it demonises some historical movements and valorises others. There is no simple 'pure facts' history, and so the pedagogy of Apollo (like the narrative of the game) is an ideology with an agenda - but it is also an archive with a huge volume of medical and technological data this world is now deprived of. What this means in real terms is that when the Cradles turn on and humans are reared from frozen zygotes, only the kindergarten AI is left, and as children turn into adults they are blocked from learning anything more advanced than basic arithmetic. When they go out into the world, the game implies that they consequently regress to tribal societies of different (and problematically) culturally-coded hues. {NB: there is a lot of problematic appropriation of First Nation tropes and aesthetics here that needs to be acknowledged, and more fundamentally we should question the assumption that Nora style hunter-gatherer culture is somehow 'natural' and would necessarily evolve from a ground zero population given AI pre-school education and a world filled with robots - this is both a stretch and a positivist modernist ethnographic perspective on progress and the idea that civilisation comes in 'stages'}.

Sylens: man of quite reasonable proposals

Within Horizon's terms, however, this is a grand epistemic experiment in a recycled and artificial world with interesting implications. Some of the new societies worship the terraforming robots, some demonise technology, others obsess over it, and the antagonists even try to skip past the Old World's knowledge in order to reach the weapons that destroyed it. As a game keenly aware of tutorials and didacticism, this world shows us how a partial world view could quickly lead to horror. As we explore bunkers we get pieces of the puzzle, but at every step we are surprised - there are many possible models for how the world died that occur to us, but without all the parts (and without the right order of revelations) we, Aloy, would guess wrong. If we as players had not been fed the knowledge of the past through staggered information and the guiding hand of another, Sylens (who has failed and learned the hard way), we might find ourselves on another path. Archaeology in this game (the cultists' project of digging) brings up killer robots first and cultural remnants later, while historiography (in the form of holograms in bunkers) dredges up affect and culture first, and killer technologies second.

Our character arc is what defines us morally, what aligns us with nurture over letting go, creation over destruction. The way we are en-cultured in the fiction, and the way we are given tutorials by the game define our world-view. This is perhaps the game's main statement on epistemology and pedagogy. It argues that we should learn on a human scale - that we should find a balance of satisfaction, and make-do with what we have rather than attempt to wipe the slate clean and start from scratch. It asks us to be wary of the Faustian bargains for information that Sylens has made, and to trust more in affective knowledge. Like Fritz Lang's Metropolis, its message is perhaps something Romantic - between the head and the hand we need to be the heart - but as a a heavily self-aware game, Horizon is far from naive - everything in this world is artificial, from the cloned protagonist to the robot animals to the sculpted landscape. Everything is cyclical in this world, nothing is original, and we have to be content with the imperfect iterations and harmonies we have.

One final thought before I conclude. There is a fascinating moment in the Cradle, where our character finally appears to have access to Apollo, to all pre-Fall knowledge, and she makes a choice which casts our own motivations and genre interests in sharp relief. Sylens, the 'rational' voice in our ear, becomes the personification of the player's super ego and confronts us with probing questions concerning our motivations and attachments throughout. At this moment he hits me where it hurts. Aloy finds the keys to all human knowledge, and her first response is - 'I need to get to the next room, to find out about my mother'. Sylens interjection is - 'you could have anything, know anything, save everyone, but all you care about is the mother you never knew?' It's a conflict of interest common in fiction - between relationships/characters and concepts/world. Science Fiction usually draws crude portraits and ditches most of the interpersonal richness of human experience in favour of grand statements on science and philosophy - world-building at the expense of the word's inhabitants - and at this juncture in Horizon, we're asked what we ourselves care about most. For my sins, I'm with Sylens on this one, but I recognise the value judgement I'm making, and it poses a fascinating question about value in a work of art more broadly: Do we care about the details or the big picture? Do we care about affective knowledge or abstract knowledge? Do we care about narrative or what the narrative conveys? Horizon argues that without both we're committed to a dark and blinkered path, and that the power of a work is a symphony of its parts.

This game world is the result of massive iteration, it's the opus of a huge human team both literally and thematically, and it dwells in fascinating detail on the problems of making a world and knowing it. Horizon is a game about nuanced and imperfect harmony, and it makes the case for the depth and power of huge spectacular productions.

Dr Merlin Seller