Invisible Harnesses

Last week a friend and I decided to spend an afternoon on an elaborate obstacle course suspended by ropes and cables from trees. We shimmied across platforms circling tree trunks, balanced on suspended logs, climbed a cargo net, and slid across several zip lines. The physical actions required to complete the course reminded me of the platforming and set pieces of the Uncharted games and the Tomb Raider reboot. After finishing the Tomb Raider reboot last month, I thought that those sections failed to provide tension despite entire architectures crumbling and rock structures caving in all around Lara. Escaping from a burning monastery just felt like going through the motions to me. But walking along the tightrope on the course with ropes to hold on to and harnesses hooked to a safety cable felt pretty scary. Obviously, a physical simulation of traversing a dangerous environment is going to be more frightening than a virtual simulation in which you sit on the couch with a controller in your hand. But I think my experience on the course reveals how these games try to compensate for the mundane safety of your own body by putting your virtual body in spectacular danger. Sadly, this contextual approach of raising the stakes to create tension doesn’t always work because harnesses more foolproof than those of the obstacle course are baked into these games’ design.

It seems that the physical game and the virtual one must aim for opposing aesthetics to make each experience fun and engaging. Because the obstacle course involves risk, however minimal, of injury and death (according to the waiver we signed), the course needs to feel safe in order for people to comfortably zip across 250 feet of cable several stories from the ground. Bright red landing pads indicate the platforms you zip to and soften the impact if you’re unable to break properly, carabiners on your harness clip onto red safety cables throughout the course, instructions and tips litter each platform, and guides follow you on the course to make sure everything goes smoothly. The course in its reproduction of actually hazardous environmental conditions has to compensate by reassuring you of your safety. The course unfortunately only accommodates able-bodied people of certain body types and also failed to reassure my friend who is a bit more scared of heights than I am and who chose to get down after the first zip line. Videogames like Uncharted and Tomb Raider need to instead make players on their comfy couches feel like they’re in danger and that they need to take urgent action. The games rely on visual spectacle and dramatic scenarios to try making holding up on the analog stick and pressing X more intense and interesting, like this:

Source: venturebeat.com

I think Uncharted 2 was my first photorealistic AAA action game, and I was very impressed by this scene and all the other climby bits back in 2009--the bombast of the visuals, the way the ledges and platforms crumble and disappear the moment you jump to the next, and Drake’s great animations and weighty kinaesthetics. But after playing both Among Thieves and Drake’s Fortune a few times, the illusion started to break as I became more aware of the harnesses. By the time I played Uncharted 3, these set pieces still looked remarkable, but they didn’t really offer any surprises or true moments of tension. I realized that every climbable ledge stands out in the environments because of its shading, there will always be a climbable ledge when Drake is in danger, and Drake can safely stand still in a burning ruin forever or hold on to a ledge without getting tired. Drake will always survive these perilous platforming sections because 1) such a death would be “anti-climatic” by these games’ standards and 2) game narratives built around controlling a singular protagonist can’t really afford their deaths. Drake will leap across impossibly wide chasms, as the game wills it. If Drake jumps on a platform that breaks, Elena will save him just in time, as the game wills it. If you, the player, mess up and deviate from the game’s script, and Drake plummets down a bottomless pit, the invisible harness will catch him, respawning him just a few seconds before the failed leap. You come to realize that not only is your own body always safe when playing Uncharted, but Drake’s body is ultimately safe too.

The physical strength and dexterity required of the difficult parts of the obstacle course are in and of themselves the course’s source of fun and engagement. But in the games all you have to do is move the stick in certain directions and press X at the right time or perform a simple quick-time event. To make platforming sections feel more like rewarding labor, the games emphasize the hazards, make the jumps wider and the stakes higher. While the obstacle course designers want to make their users feel safe, the game designers want to make their players feel in peril, and both sometimes fail. My friend was too scared of heights and too short to easily reach the wire to slow down when on the zip line. The platforming set pieces of Uncharted and Tomb Raider, with their toothless threats to your character’s safety, are often no more exciting than your local playground and jungle gym.

I think these action games are starting to realize that these set pieces aren’t very affecting. The Last of Us replaces most platforming with the frankly quite worse ladder puzzles, and Tomb Raider tries to go beyond Uncharted by forcing the player to watch needlessly gritty, horrible cutscenes of Lara’s death, often by impalement, perhaps to make players feel more pressure to perform well so as to not have to see such obnoxious, gross images. There is one sequence in Tomb Raider, however, that is fairly successful: when Lara climbs the radio tower. The scene requires the simplest interaction of all the set pieces--holding up to climb the ladder. But in context, this scene is essential to Lara’s character progression. Everything relies on this moment. Successfully climbing the rusty, extremely tall, and partially broken tower in the chilling wind not only means that Lara and her friends might be able to signal for help and safely get off the island but also that Lara can start to believe that she is capable of overcoming incredible odds in order to survive the toughest scenarios. The way the wind whistles ominously and the camera pulls away from Lara and back towards her suggests that this is a pivotal moment and that tragedy could strike at any point during Lara’s climb. Her palpable trepidation as she ascends the tower and her immense relief as someone responds to her distress signal at the top make for an tense, emotionally powerful moment.

via user TRStrider74

This scene in Tomb Raider is successful mostly because the action of climbing becomes significant to the character and the narrative context, which these set pieces rarely are. Platforming seems to be used primarily as a device for pacing. We scale a fortress wall to give us break from shooting dudes in the face. And that works for the most part; those sections lack the stress of combat, even though they should probably include the stress of physical exertion on our character. But Lara will never tire out climbing up a rope that she used as a zip line like I almost did on the course when I took the wrong zip and had to turn back. She’ll use a single climbing axe to scale rock walls (I’m not sure how that’s even possible), but there are no contingencies in which she slips or the axe falls out. These gameplay sections that would be incredibly difficult and petrifying to perform in real life are usually taken as a breather.

I don’t really have a solution to the problems of the platforming bits in Uncharted and Tomb Raider and other action games. Besides, they do work well to control the games’ pacing, and it can be fun to perform the acrobatics amidst the spectacle of things exploding, collapsing, burning down, etc. Despite their benefits to the games’ structures and how they always look incredible, they often don’t evoke much of anything and appear little more than excessive showcases of technology. I realize it’s not really news to anybody that an aspect of Uncharted has become rote and that the main purpose of whole parts of games is simply to mix things up for the player or show off a game’s engine. I just want to suggest that climbing, shimmying, balancing, and zipping could be actions that excite and engage players and provide a challenge that’s meaningful to the characters that players control. How, exactly? I don’t think I can fumble through armchair game design advice on this topic, but perhaps the radio tower scene from Tomb Raider is a start. Ultimately, though, I can only leave you hanging (sorry) with these observations.

On Minkomora

Kikopa Games’ Minkomora places you in a strange world of bright colors and abstract shapes forming a myriad of creatures, characters, and environments. You start in the small, modest home of your character and head out to explore. Outside your house is a message reading: ”Don’t be afraid of dying or missing out” and a hint to press Enter to find your way back home. This world is full of red triangular things surrounded by a squiggly red aura that affects the music while turning your character’s face red and distorting the screen when you stand near it. The world hosts plenty of other figures, some that seem to represent people, others that seem to represent plants, and others that represent…um, I don’t know--blobby things. Or at least I didn’t know what those blobby things were until I read the game’s digital manual.

Minkomora can be played in-browser and comes with a pdf download of a manual with instructions of the game’s controls alongside beautifully drawn art of the characters and a detailed map of the world as well as descriptions for each of the places you can visit and the creatures you can meet. The manual communicates the games values, which are directly in line with merritt kopas’s Soft Chambers, a design philosophy emphasizing warm introspection, emotion, and explorations of caring relationships. The manual gives life, detail, and meaning to Minkomora’s world, depicting the obscure, blobby characters of the game with clear shapes and physical attributes not seen in the game. You can identify immediately which characters correspond to what in-game representation, but the manual’s art fills in the gaps of your imagination. For example, we recognize the player character in the manual from the moon-shaped mark on its face that also appears in the game. But during play, we see the character wearing an ambiguous purple outfit, while the manual depicts the character in a sweatshirt-skirt combo.

I learn through the manual that the “red triangular things” are plants called Kitagona that emit heat that may feel pleasant to some and overbearing to others. I learn that each of the characters represents a intrapersonal or interpersonal temperament or behavior, and the manual suggests how these traits might make one feel and asks what I think and how I relate to them. The manual tells me I deserve care, reminds me that some creatures need time to develop trust in others, and asks me how extreme dedication to a task can be dangerous.

I’m too young to have any meaningful nostalgia for videogame manuals. The only manuals that I have a memory of looking at are Sonic Heroes’--you know, the one that describes Eggman as a feminist--and Jak and Daxter’s fold-out map and guide that I ripped because seven-year-old boys have no patience with folding. But Minkomora’s manual invokes such a nostalgia, as Leigh Alexander and Mike Joffe note. The game, however, doesn’t incorporate nostalgia to indulge in past gaming memories, as Joffe also mentions, but rather to subvert our expectations by providing a guide for a game space that is safe and welcoming rather than one that is hostile and demands to be mastered or conquered.

Minkomora is much like the original Legend of Zelda. In both games, you play as a silent protagonist thrust into a strange world with distinct areas that you’re free to explore. You encounter indecipherably designed creatures with weird names and have to figure out how your character relates to them. Of course this is where the two games branch off. In the Legend of Zelda your relationship to the strange creatures is one of aggression, in which the crude sprites attack you and throw shit at you on sight. The solution to their assault is to fight back, you find, since pressing A causes you to thrust out a sword. Your relationship to the game world, then, is based on mastery of the combat so that you can navigate the environments safely, discover new areas, and face more challenging foes. Minkomora, in implicitly acknowledging its similarities to Zelda, lets you know up front (even without the manual) that in this world you don’t need to employ the violence you’ve been habituated to use in games. “Don’t be afraid of dying or missing out.” You cannot be killed in this world, and you can always come back. You can’t thrust out a sword or throw bombs or shoot arrows; you can only walk and sit. Minkomora only asks that you take in the sights and sounds of a place and that you think about how that place makes you feel.

Unfortunately, on my first run, I didn’t know how to feel about Minkomora.

The game’s itch.io page reads: “You can read the manual first, keep it with you while you play, or play first and compare your interpretations with those in it later.” I tend to want to dive into a text with as little influence from what’s outside the text as possible, aiming for a “pure” initial response that can be challenged through reading reviews, criticism, and other examples of what I recently learned is called paratext after engaging with a piece of media. For example, after finishing a game, I often type its title into the search bar of Critical Distance to look for pieces that either articulate and clarify abstract feelings I have about the game or provide a perspective I haven’t even considered. Though I couldn’t and didn’t want to avoid the paratext of Minkomora’s web page, I decided to avoid the manual at first because it involves direct interpretations of the game world and the objects represented in it.

The first time I took my character out of its home was a confusing experience that left me anxious and disappointed in myself. While roaming around the world of Minkomora was somewhat pleasant with its bright colors and cute music, I was unable to meaningfully engage with the game because I was too wrapped up in finding a meaning to the objects in the space that I could test against the manual’s interpretations. I wasn’t emotionally connecting with the space because I was looking for an immediacy to the answers about why the characters exist and the reasons for their designs, and I didn’t want to rely on the authors to give me those answers. I wanted to come up with them on my own and have my own thoughts, at least before reading the manual. But the focus on this self-indulgent, shallow end goal of “figuring out” Minkomora in order to feel smart damaged my experience with the game. In my impatience to understand the game’s meaning, I failed to heed to the latter part of the game’s message, “Don’t be afraid of...missing out.” 

In both my schooling and in the criticism I read, I am told patience and visiting works multiple times are very important in engaging with art and in meaning-making, and while I’ve definitely gotten better at working slowly towards understandings of works, my experience with Minkomora shows I still have a long way to go. I still sometimes feel an urgency to know what a text is saying and doing without taking the time to put the work in. Part of this impatience is certainly caused by critical inexperience and immaturity, but I think another part is pressure in critical spheres to be the person who can consistently say the Smart, Interesting, and Correct things about art--a pressure that you must always be on the ball and have the answers and wisdom ready to be imparted onto others, especially readers. This pressure can motivate me to go for the A in class and try to get more pageviews for this blog, but I think it also prevents me from not only enjoying art but also from developing a healthy pace to think through difficult or more obscure work and from thinking about how a work makes me feel.

I’d also like to tackle another reason why I didn’t read the manual before playing: the idea that the author’s intent should not matter to the player, who can and should form the meaning of the text on her own. While I still believe that an audience member’s interpretation that diverges from the author’s intent is 100% valid, to dismiss the author’s words on her own work entirely seems just as arrogant as the author irritated at her audience for not “getting it.” Shutting out conversations between authors and audiences only seems to limit our understandings of what we create and what we engage with. My fear was that Minkomora’s manual would try to dictate the game’s meaning to me and spoil whatever my personal experience would bring to the game, but the manual’s writing couldn’t be any less didactic. The manual constantly asks how you feel about the game’s characters and its spaces and wonders contemplatively about them rather than mandates concrete meanings. While I’m sitting here fretting about what these horseshoe-looking shapes are, Minkomora’s manual wants to foster a friendly, relaxed discourse about a world surviving on care. 

For me, reading Minkomora’s manual turned the game world from a disorienting space into one I actively want to inhabit and explore. I’ve returned to the game several times after having read the manual, and those experiences have been much more enjoyable than the first time I played the game. I like hanging out with Kotnakon, a spider creature who carries me around the map out of its love for helping others but needs to rest after working too hard for others, reminding me of my plans to focus more on myself next semester. I like swimming alongside Nurek in the lake, though I never manage to lose myself so completely in my strokes as it does. The game’s manual gives me a way to relate to its world in a beautiful way that I probably wouldn’t have found even if I did have the patience to thoughtfully engage with Minkomora’s imagery on my own. The manual shapes my view of the game’s world as a friendly and mysterious place while at the same time letting me come to my own conclusions about how my character relates to the others and the areas outside its home. The manual is cute, charming, and opens up Minkomora’s world, and the game is certainly better for it. Next time I play an artgame like Minkomora, I just need to swallow my pride, stop worrying so much about my interpretive abilities, and stop being afraid of missing out. I'm never going to have all the answers, and I'm probably not even supposed to.

On Virtual Bodies, Aspirational Projection, and (Kin)aesthetics of Power Fantasy

[This post contains mild spoilers for Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance]

[TW: discussion of violence, references to depression, homophobia, sexual objectification]

Talking about games as “power fantasies” is certainly a rhetoric that videogame critics have indulged in for quite a time now. The context for labeling games as such often involves criticizing the overabundance of AAA games centering on violent modes of interaction and simplistic narrative tropes with conservative gender politics (e.g. the powerful male hero defeats other men in combat to save the damsel in distress). Critiques invoking “power fantasy” often go along with calls for games with warmer, more pedestrian stories and a diversification of authors and subject matter. “Power fantasy,” for good reason, is often a derogatory term to describe a game that doesn’t engage with anything outside of typical, thoughtless, and often masculinized systems of violence that the mainstream game industry consistently regurgitates at us. But lately, instead of outright dismissing power fantasies, I’ve been thinking about how even though a focus on violent power fantasy limits games, their aesthetics of violence can be quite diverse, and categorizing all power fantasy as worthless and homogenous is reductive. I’ve been thinking about how individual players react differently to different kinds of power fantasy and what that might say about our relationships to games and our desires and ambitions. And no, I’m not talking about some primal lust for violence or other such nonsense. Luckily for me, last month (as I was finishing up Bayonetta), smart critics were exploring similar threads.

Kaitlin Tremblay wrote about different motives for choosing character classes in videogames, including how we as players see ourselves or want to see ourselves in the real world. Tremblay says that she plays “loud, boisterous, overly hulked up man characters”--Brick and Salvador in the Borderlands series--because they “unapologetically take up space,” something Tremblay strives to be able to do in her own life. She says that in real life she tends to stay out of people’s way as if invisible, but in games, Brick and Salvador present a power fantasy that allows her to assert a presence and strength that she aspires to. For Tremblay, playing big bulky men allows her to perform a physicality and personality that she doesn’t typically experience in real life. And that’s just what power fantasy lets players do--perform what we don’t or can’t in the real world in a controlled environment in which the consequences for “fantastic” behavior are mitigated.

Like Tremblay, I too tend to stay “small” and out of the way. I feel like I’m always the person waiting in a line in a cafeteria or dining hall who people walk in front of to get to the hamburgers on the other side of the line. But unlike Tremblay, in videogames, I tend to identify with characters who coincide with my smallness or my short and skinny body. Playing the huge characters with brute strength often doesn’t feel “right” to me; their typically slow movements and largeness means they’re more vulnerable to attack. Even though these types of characters are usually able to take more damage than other classes, I prefer feeling safe in smallness or the ability to escape or avoid danger.

My favorite character in the new Super Smash Bros. is the Villager (particularly the girl with pink hair and sparkly eyes). She’s a tiny, adorable, harmless-looking cartoon who destroys fools with pedestrian objects like gardening tools, umbrellas, and turnips. Her attacks with strong kickback and good range subvert the expectations of her cutesy aesthetics. Part of the power fantasy is this aesthetic subversion; I like the idea of disrupting people’s expectations of me based on past behavior. I resent my social anxiety and shyness mostly, but I sometimes get to surprise people for it with some enthusiastic outburst or intense drunken dancing. A lot of people were surprised when I dyed my hair pinkish red because my “small” behaviors similar to Tremblay’s description of her own led others to believe I wasn’t “outgoing” enough for a distinct appearance. On the Gaur Plains stage, I like to play the small, quiet Villager standing on a platform right below the top of the screen and jump up to whack unsuspecting or distracted opponents with my turnips. Dirty, I know.

My other strategy with the Villager is pretty damn cheap. I tend to spam Lloid rockets at my opponents while dodging behind a tree I plant as enemies get close. That “FUCKING TREE,” as my friends call it, does incredible damage when I chop it down and let it fall on an opponent, launching her across the screen. It’s a lot of fun frustrating my friends with the rockets and punishing them with the tree if they dare get too close, all while the Villager sports that morbidly innocent grin. It’s also probably unfair. Over at Offworld, Aevee Bee wrote about a similar playstyle using the character Ramlethal in Guilty Gear who keeps opponents at bay with huge airborne swords that allow her to become “someone who controls the conditions of touch.” For Bee, the power fantasy Ramlethal provides involves the power “to hurt but not be hurt” as a metaphor for protecting her gains towards “being happy in a human body” while the stakes are so high as long as everyone threatens to invade either physically or emotionally. My own practice with the Villager represents to me my need born of anxiety to create a comfort zone that pushes people out and my ire at those who would threaten that comfort by getting too close. This power fantasy, unlike Tremblay’s choice of Brick and Salvador, is not an aspirational projection. I don’t like this behavior of mine. Without my knowing, I made someone I thought was nice and cool think I hated them. Even some of my best friends say they’ve wondered if I even like them. My one friend calls me “cactus-y.” My strategy with the Villager represents some of my current problematic tendencies rather than ones I aspire to.

Aevee Bee’s great piece was the first that helped me understand how violent power fantasy can craft a language in which we project our emotional struggles of real-life interpersonal conflict on to the physical struggles of virtual bodies. The aesthetics of the characters we embody and the enemies or obstacles we face, as well as the kinaesthetics of combat, piece together some warped mirror that reflects back some aspect of ourselves, an aspect we wish to see in ourselves, or a mix as Todd Harper's "Lady Boss" character in Saints Row 3 does for him. While the Villager is a more reflective power fantasy for me, my aspirational ones involve a unreal physicality that can perform speed, nimbleness, and perfect acrobatics. With characters like Sheik, Fox, Zero Suit Samus, and Meta Knight in Smash, I like to maintain an aggressive unpredictability. These characters can run across the map, deal out damage in swift combos, and dart away once things get hairy. Their attacks and movements display a mysterious and unreal dexterity that allows them to juggle opponents with ease and dodge their attacks. There’s a chance that these characters can be perfect in their performance, as Bee says: “untouchable.” The big, slow characters like Ganondorf and Bowser will necessarily be hit, but they can take it (Ganondorf can charge his warlock punch through enemy attacks), while the characters I usually play should be dangerous forces that gracefully avoid other dangers. To look at games outside of Smash, here is another example of this physicality: 

The first time I saw this cutscene I thought about how cool it would be to be able to perform that sort of physicality in real life--to perfect this deadly dance of flips, kicks, dodges, sword slices, and various contortions. Near flawless skill in the face of danger. A few years after I first played Metal Gear Solid 4, I was able to perform this physicality in a virtual body in Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. Now, I’ve already talked about how aesthetics in character design and kinaesthetics of combat affect how we perceive the power fantasies we consume. But we also can’t neglect the importance of narrative context in shaping our understanding of why we use such powers in a diegesis.

Metal Gear Rising invalidates the “coolness” of the power fantasy by having Raiden self-categorize as a monster whose only skill is hurting people. The pain of his past as a brutal child soldier and his guilt at his continued violent tendencies makes him a somewhat uncomfortable character to inhabit, especially after he embraces his “Jack the Ripper” persona. He resolves to save others, especially children, from turning into killing machines at the hands of tyrants like he was. It’s a self-deprecating sort of power fantasy about feeling worthless--like some inhuman cyborg--while trying to redeem yourself by preventing others from experiencing the same pain. Raiden performs a perfect physicality of precise movements and strength so that no one else should have to. He’s a Christ figure of sorts who instead acts as a negative example to his followers--he reprimands George for wanting to be a powerful cyborg like him. (I don’t know consume much superhero media, but I could guess that this sort of thing is a trope for the genre.)

Much like the average videogame player (presumably), Raiden has a problematic relationship with violence (virtual in the player’s case), but genuinely cares about the world and the people he is close to. As Aevee Bee concludes in her Offworld piece, “It’s not that I want to really hurt anyone. I just want to speak with the language of that power.” Raiden seems to think that physical violence is the only language he can use for his purpose--to keep people safe--just as the videogame industry often appears to think violence is the only way to let players interact with games. While I don’t know if Raiden has a feasible alternative to violence, I know that videogames can give players a language other than violence to interact with their worlds and build meaningful experiences. But as myself and other critics have made clear, violence in games can be an effective way to explore ourselves and project our conflicts onto situations in a controlled environment.

Lastly, I want to talk about Bayonetta. Bayonetta is, as Todd Harper suggested after reading Bee’s piece, another example of an “untouchable” character. In between punching, kicking, shooting from her stiletto heels, and occasionally turning into a panther, a crow, or a group of bats, she does tumbles and flips around enemies. At the precise moment before being hit, she can dodge out of the way, slowing down time to recover and dole out swift combos summoning demonic appendages made of her hair. Her acrobatics are flashy, graceful, goofy, and famously (or infamously) sexualized. She flaunts her body at the camera, teases characters in the cutscenes, and exudes a cool attitude and nonchalant swagger, all while beating the crap out of fascist angels.

The power fantasy of Bayonetta resonates with me as I struggle to come out as bisexual to my friends and family. Besides a simple desire to be able to feel sexy, snarky, and mysteriously powerful, I project my aspirations of confidence in my sexuality onto Bayonetta. I want to be able to express my sexual identity casually, with a boldness that is threatening--like how many perceive Bayonetta’s own sexuality as “threatening”--to those who might throw emotional abuse my way. I want to feel comfortable about myself in an arrogant way that scares people who would threaten my comfort by invalidating my feelings and trying to reshape the narrative of my identity, like the hierarchy of angels planning to usher in a new world order by remaking the universe in their liking. I’ve been wanting to take on this attitude for months, but I’ve only been able to enact it through Bayonetta.

But I feel uncomfortable with my indulgence of Bayonetta’s power fantasy. While Bayonetta lets me play as a sexually arrogant character without an annoying hypermasculinity (such as Dante’s in DmC: Devil May Cry) as this metaphorical power fantasy of partial liberation from the closet, some women find the character an example of harmful sexual objectification. I have no intention of interpreting the game’s gender politics because they are very complicated, and I have no stakes in the conversation. But my enjoyment of inhabiting Bayonetta’s body remains in the face of that same body being upsetting to others. Todd Harper, again, wrote about the same discomfort regarding his enjoyment of women avatars in general, including Dragon Crown’s problematic female characters:

“In a way, it worries me that the gaming bodies I often feel most comfortable in are exaggerated and sexual stereotypes of women, because I don’t identify as a woman, or as having a woman’s body, and that puts me in the uncomfortable position of arguing for characters that I enjoy even while recognizing their potential harm to others. To put it another way: can I only enjoy these characters because for me as a cis man, the rhetorical stakes are so low?”

A full-fledged discussion on “consuming media responsibly” in regards to inhabiting virtual bodies different from our own is beyond the scope of this post, and I just don’t have the tools to think about it. The oversimplified, vague answer is to think about everything with nuance, and maybe that's the right thing to do, even if leaving different experiences and opinions in contradiction feels unsatisfactory.

The violent power fantasies of videogames can provide us an impactful way of thinking about the conflicts in our lives. But I don’t know if we can or if we should even try to reconcile the value of virtual violence with our general distaste of violence in the real world, especially when, for some people, violence feels inescapable everywhere. Games have done valuable things as power fantasies (even “male” ones), but games can be and are more than empowerment through violence. And I don’t know how to negotiate the way certain virtual bodies can be gratifying and empowering for some and hurtful and triggering for others. All I can do is speak to the truth of how I project my own experience through the language that games provide.

Thoughts on "Post-cutscene" and Ludonarrative

So a recap of This Week in Games Twitter features lots of talk from critics about critical approaches regarding the alleged separation of “mechanics” from narrative in games. You should essentially read this storify of the conversations and this piece by Lulu Blue, as well as this. Basically, the discourse was framed around exasperation of essentializing “mechanics” and “systems” in games while ignoring or trivializing the other more abstract or “non-ludic” elements of games in an approach Austin Howe called ludocentrism and an ideology Stephen Beirne called ludo-fundamentalism. I agree with Stephen Beirne in that a ludocentric approach is not really the problem as much as the idea of valuing the “game” parts of games over everything else is, because, as Lana Polansky says, these parts are all “inseparably bound by context.”

So an example of ludo-fundamentalism is Chris Franklin's video essay on The Last of Us, an otherwise really good critique that criticizes the game’s “oil and water” structure of separating gameplay and cutscenes in the way that AAA games have done for years, suggesting that The Last of Us thinks that story and gameplay “have nothing to do with one another.” He says this even though he acknowledges that the gameplay is consistent with the game’s aesthetic and tone:

“Resources are scarce, punishments are swift and harsh, you feel a little underpowered, and the gun sway and clunky animation driven nature of melee combat all intentionally convey a sense of tension and of desperation. It’s actually a really cool use of mechanics to build texture in the narrative, but unfortunately that’s really all they do for the narrative.”

The mechanics of The Last of Us complement the characters’ context in a harsh, brutal world with combat that is harsh, brutal, slow, and methodical. I did not find playing The Last of Us fun; I found it stressful, coinciding with the stress and tension shown by the characters in the cutscenes. Franklin and I would probably disagree on the fundamental merit of The Last of Us’ combat because I don’t believe it plays anything like Uncharted. But Franklin’s problem is that the “powerful...quiet moments...only really exist in the cutscenes.” I would firstly disagree with that (a scene that shows Ellie’s childlike excitement that Joel can hardly keep up with), and I just don’t buy that every interaction needs to build the characters or progress the story. I think that a cohesion with context does the job no matter the method of storytelling and avoids *sky darkens* ludonarrative dissonance *lightning strikes behind the window*. There are different methods for storytelling and narrative structure, and cutscenes can be useful.

This leads me to Zolani Stewart’s recent thoughts on defining a recent trend in AAA games he calls "post-cutscene," which he defines as:

“[rejecting] the ‘game->cutscene->game’ structure of mid-2000s AAA, instead strives for the ‘seamless’ experience”

So here are games opposed to the structure of games like The Last of Us (though it’s significant to note that The Last of Us does have post-cutscene bits, including the scene I linked as well as exploring abandoned communities and collecting artifacts). It seems that the kinds of games Zolani is talking about are games in which the narrative (generally) “happens” (even though the narrative is always “happening”) while you are still in control of either the player character or at least the camera. These games can also tend to have a heavily controlled aesthetic that works towards cohesive “environmental storytelling.”

Games like Bioshock, Portal, Half-Life 2, and even Skyrim and Dark Souls fit this bill.

I argue that the “post-cutscene” design ideology can work wonderfully for some games and some situations and fail miserably in others. In games like Bioshock and Gone Home, post-cutscene design works well with the sense of mystery those games evoke. Poking around environments slowly fills you in on details of the game worlds as you try to piece together what exactly happened to Rapture and where everyone went in the Greenbriar house. Environmental storytelling is great for building a sense of intrigue in places where important events already took place, but please, no more obvious graffiti.

Post-cutscene design also works when dialogue comes from disembodied voices or unique characters who are moving individually and separate from you. Again, Bioshock, Portal, and Half-Life 2. It also works in stealth games like Dishonored, in which you feel very clever and sneaky for eavesdropping on conversations from vents and keyholes. The problems and limitations of post-cutscene design seem to arise when designers populate an area with non-essential NPCs to add texture to an environment. Yesterday I started playing Bioshock Infinite (I know, I’m so sorry), and the beginning section when you explore the July 6th fair before the first gunfight is just a mess. I walk up to citizens, triggering set dialogue in which the NPCs talk amongst themselves. Once the dialogue is finished, the NPCs stare idly and loop through their animations, not acknowledging the player character’s awkward proximity to the group during personal, private conversations. Rarely an NPC would say ‘good morning’ to me, but after one did, his unblinking face would simply follow my gaze until I walked far away enough for his animation to reset. In a corner behind some stairs, a man stands legs crossed and leans in to kiss an uncomfortable, frightened woman who pushes him back. I get real close to them, but the animation just repeats. They don’t notice me as I’m on top of them, and I’m unable to stop this creepy scene from playing out again and again. It’s a frustrating and also freaky effect. On top of that, you can trigger dialogue from far away and not hear it well or know where it comes from. In the main square where tons of groups of people enjoy the activities and demonstrations, you have know idea where to turn, and subtitles just make the area more confusing by displaying what’s being said from far away rather than what’s close.

Games that employ post-cutscene design ideology tend to be marketed as “immersive experiences” with “living, breathing worlds.” Bioshock Infinite is not a living, breathing world; it is a flashy museum with freaky animatronics (and literal animatronic horses). Skyrim suffers from similar problems, but at least it acknowledges the player. Again, it’s not a living world, but it is a fun playground that you can poke and prod at, whereas Infinite is a museum that might as well have signs reading “don’t touch.”  

  

Zolani Stewart went on to say that post-cutscene is a response to ludonarrative dissonance. But The Last of Us doesn’t really suffer from ludonarrative dissonance; it simply separates gameplay bits from story bits (sorta). And Bioshock Infinite creates its own dissonance (not ludonarrative) in its poor attempt to tell me that people live in Columbia, that it is a lively city. And of course, we all know the claims for Bioshock's ludonarrative dissonance. So this movement to “seamlessly” integrate mechanics and narrative is false in its ludo-fundamentalism. I think that games should continue to experiment with the way they’re structured, and there are some excellent AAA post-cutscene games. But adopting this design ideology solely because a game must be a game first is not going to make better games. Designers should attempt to figure out how to structure games and their “systems” in a way that best coincides with context: when it’s appropriate to use cutscenes, when to use exploration, and when to use text.

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I’m sorry that I used “ludonarrative dissonance” in this post. I’m sorry that I talked about The Last of Us and Bioshock Infinite in this post, because the world totally needs more words on those games… Have a nice day.