Project 2 Proposal

For my second project in this class, I propose to create an interactive piece.  This will be a videogame focused on giving the player a sense of exploration and of leaving the ordinary.

In my post about Superbrother's Sword and Sworcery EP, I talked about the idea of center/periphery in Legends.  One of the reasons I am fascinated by this idea is that the center/periphery structure is similar to the structure of certain types of games, specifically 3rd Person Adventure games (i.e. The Legend of Zelda) and Role Playing games (i.e. the Final Fantasy games).  Quite often these games begin the main character's home, and frequently in the character's bedroom.  Some event or another prompts the character to leave home and venture in to the world.  The farther from home the main character travels, the more he or she encounters strange and dangerous creatures.  At the end of the game the main character usually returns home and resolve whatever prompted his or her journey.  I would like to explore this journey into the unfamiliar in videogames.

I found inspiration for this project from Neil Gaiman's poem Instructions.  The poem lays out what to do if you find yourself in a fairy tale.  It mentions several ways to travel away from the familiar world to another world, and in the end, you can return home only to find it has changed.  I plan on setting my project in a space that is familiar to me: the backyard in my childhood home.  My backyard had a pathway through some overgrowth.  There was just enough room for a child to climb under it, and it lead to my friend's house.  Our parents did not like us to go through this path, in large part because it meant cutting through a neighbor's garden.  But we did travel through it quite often, and it always felt like a daring journey.  In my videogame I would like this path to lead to a strange place with its own odd rules.

I am also inspired by the First Person Puzzle game Antichamber.  This game similarly has a safe beginning space, from which the player ventures into a bizarre world governed by unique logic.  Throughout the game the player frequently returns to the beginning space, which is changed slightly by what the player uncovered in the main part of the game.

The Problem of the Combat Metaphor

It would be a bit odd to talk about reading books or watching films in terms of combat.  For example, at least in our society, we never use phrases like "I finally beat that book" or "I just won that new movie" unless we are being literal (perhaps we won a book in a contest).  However it is not especially odd to describe our experiences with videogames in these terms.  To prove this claim, I did a quick experiment   A google search for "I beat the Legend of Zelda" returns 105,000 results, whereas a search for "I beat Life of Pi" returns zero results.  In case that was simply too high brow of a film, I also did a search for "I beat Taken 2", which also returned nothing.

So, why does it matter that we talk about videogames as though they are combat?  For my thesis research I've been reading Metaphors We Live By.  In this book, Lakoff discusses how our every-day metaphors shape our perceptions by emphasizing certain aspects of a concept and deemphasizing others.  When we consider videogames in terms of combat we emphasize the competitive aspects of gaming, and privilege difficulty over artistry and mechanical challenge over emotional or intellectual stimulation.  This limits our imaginations in regards to what videogames are and can be.

What's more, there are a growing number of games that do not fit the combat metaphor.  Dear Esther is an especially good example of a game where the combat metaphor fails us, and as a result we don't know what to make of it.  Both supporters and detractors are unsure if Dear Esther is a game or not.  There is no challenge of any kind, and the end does not evoke the feelings of triumph we associate with winning.

If we can manage to put aside our VIDEOGAMES ARE COMBAT metaphor for a moment and look at Dear Esther with fresh eyes we may see that the style of interaction in Dear Esther is the same as interactions in first person shooter videogames.  First person shooter interactions typically consist of the following: 1. first person viewpoint (looking through the player character's eyes), 2. an inability to directly manipulate the environment, 3. inability to climb in the environment except for possibly ladders, 4. small and largely unimportant jumping, 5. narration from either disembodied recordings or nearby nonplayer characters, and of course 6. Shooting.  There are occasionally other mechanics such as taking cover or crouching, but many first person shooters do not include those.  Dear Esther contains the majority of these interactions.  I contend that Dear Esther is in fact a videogame in the tradition of first person shooters.  If we weren't so hung up on the fact that players do not shoot anything over the course of the game, more of us would see the parallels and understand that a videogame can be more than our combat metaphor suggests.

The Witness

I've been following the production blog for The Witness.  This morning I was surprised and happy to see that they've finally released a trailer.  On the production blog it is suggested to watch the trailer fullscreen in HD, and I would also recommend that.  This game is exceedingly pretty. You'll want to see every pixel that you can.

Supernatural Pixels

Superbrother's Sword and Sworcery EP

Superbrother's Sword and Sworcery EP deals heavily with the supernatural. We are introduced to the game world by a Jungian Archetype who explains that we are entering a mythopoetic experiment. We guide the Scythian on her woeful errand through a strange land. The game makes it very clear that the player is not the Scythian, but rather a divine influence over her. We accept that we are to the Scythian as the Fates are to us. The jagged pixelated graphics come to indicate all that is Earthly and natural.

One of my classes this semester is focused on legends. A concept we have been discussing is that of center/periphery. The center is your home, and the farther into the periphery you go the more likely you are to encounter the supernatural, and the stranger things get. Sword and Sworcery uses this idea of center/periphery in two ways. The fact that the Scythian is referred to by where she is from (Scythia) and not her name (which we never learn) indicates that she has already journeyed far away from her center. Within the game itself there is also a center/periphery relationship between where the Caucus mountain people live, and Mingi Taw where the Scythian must venture to complete her errand.

In Mingi Taw the Scythian encounters a deathless spectre known as the Gogolithic Mass. The Gogolithic Mass is drawn as a smooth black gradient with blocky pixel hands and horned skull. The smooth gradient looks out of place in the otherwise 8-bit world, but it is hardly the only high resolution graphic in the game. The sky, and especially the moon are rendered with gradients, as are the Sylvan Sprites that the Scythian releases.  Even the shine on the Scythian's sword (shown above) uses a gradient. At first I did not much care for this mix of pixel graphics and gradients, but as I played the game I came to realize that just as the pixel graphics represent the natural, the gradients represent the supernatural. Let us then consider the Gogolithic Mass.  The deathless spectre is a liminal being, neither completely natural nor fully supernatural. The Gogolithic Mass haunts the Scythian throughout her errand, and serves as a constant reminder of the threshold between the Earthly and the supernatural through which she travels.

I've been reassessing my relationship to the supernatural lately. I was brought up in a secular household and have always held scientific reasoning as a value. I generally don't believe in ghosts or Bigfoot (then again, who am I to contradict Jane Goodall), but I am beginning to think that the literal existence of the supernatural is entirely beside the point. Believing in supernatural beings has an importance beyond objective scientifically provable reality. There is a truth to Bigfoot, even if he's not coming to a zoo near you.

Ghost in the Game

This weekend I went through a pile of papers that had been collecting on my desk.  Among the old bills and flyers I found a program note from Evan Meaney's Epilogue: The Well of Representation that I saw at the Wexner Center's the Box last semester.  Epilogue was probably the only piece I've seen in the Box that both drew an audience and that the audience seemed to actually enjoy.  People were even dragging their friends in to see it; usually telling them that "it's like a game".

Given that the Wexner Center describes Epilogue as elegiac, and the film does center on death and decay, it may seem a bit odd that the audience seemed to have fun watching it.  I believe the enjoyment comes from the fact that it is very much like a game, and has a dark humor element to it.  The program note compares the film to the classic adventure game The Legend of Zelda, but it actually bears a closer resemblance to Japanese role playing games such as Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior.  At one point the "player" character dies, and the "game" is restarted.  The "game" restarts with the character rising as a ghost at his funeral, although we would expect the character to simply restart at the point before death.  The film plays with our expectations of how a game should progress.


A Better Ghost [interview w/ Evan Meaney] from Nick Briz on Vimeo.

At several points the "game" crashes, and we spend what feels like a rather long time watching the screen glitch out.  I suspect these glitches are meant to be the heart of the work, but it never became clear to me why the glitches matter.  They tended to be tedious, and felt oddly staged.  In interviews Meaney likens his work with glitches to seances.  Seances are, in fact, staged events created through the use of explainable techniques.  To an extent, the contrivance spoils the mystery.  Glitches can be interesting.  The click and drag on the floor glitch from one of my first interactive experiments was the most interesting aspect of that project.   However, something about actively creating glitches and overly dwelling on them, feels false to me.  This falseness is similar to seances which present stage magician's tricks as supernatural.

When I was watching Epilogue, I couldn't shake the sense that I was watching someone play an interesting game.  The problem with that is that a game is always more interesting to play than it is to watch.  I'm finding it difficult to be motivated about my current project despite my interest in the style and subject matter.  I'm afraid I feel the same way about my project as I felt about Epilogue.  It could be a good game; unfortunately it's a film.