Games That Exist

You know, Roger Travis got me thinkin’ when he said “[George R. R.] Martin plays the stories of the Starks, the Lannisters, and the Targaryens, and I play Skyrim.” For me, gaming and writing scratch a similar itch. Maybe these processes have more in common than I had previously considered. I just started A Feast For Crows, the fourth book in Martin’s gritty fantasy series, A Song of Ice and Fire. Travis’ article struck a chord with me, but Martin’s writing makes me think of a different game than the Elder Scrolls‘ admittedly engrossing epic. It makes me think of Dwarf Fortress. Now you may be thinking I’m just looking for an excuse to talk about Martin and Dwarf Fortress in the same breath, and you may be right, but you may also be a bit presumptuous, and at least I’m not the first person to try and pull this shit.

Though I’m not completely caught up on Martin’s series, I can already tell that it shares more than a medieval fantasy backdrop with the titan of freeware titles. Both Martin and DF audaciously embrace mortality and impermanence. Martin isn’t afraid to kill off characters. Dwarf Fortress isn’t afraid to have those dwarves that you’ve spent weeks looking after slaughter each other because you temporarily ran out of booze, and it’s not afraid to kick over that cool castle you just built because it knows you’ll come crawling back anyway. There’s a shared fixation on the idea of meticulously setting up a chessboard only to knock the pieces over. Both Martin and DF understand that death can enrich a narrative journey. It takes an ending to bring about new beginnings, and it is only through loss that we learn to appreciate what we have.

Dwarf Fortress, understandably, has drawn the attention of academics. In his 2009 Masters thesis, Dwarf Fortress Gathers At The Statue And Attends A Party , Joshua Diaz discusses the “narrative architecture” of the simulator and draws attention to the communal narratives it has produced. Diaz calls narrative in Dwarf Fortress an “organizational strategy.” It’s something the player actively uses and pursues during gameplay, in order to process the game. Diaz also compares play with authorship: “…gameplay is both distinct from but related to the act of reading as well as the act of writing . The creative investigation and exploration, the forming of goals and strategies, and the dependence on material and technical affordances for their execution, are qualities that apply to players in both ludic and narrative frames.” The only reward that matters in Dwarf Fortress, with all of its complex simulation algorithms, is narrative. It is this potential for a compelling player narrative that drives the gameplay. When you play Dwarf Fortress, you’re given a deep geographical and cultural setting to work with, but it’s up to you to tell a rousing tale.

I can’t really imagine anyone playing and enjoying Dwarf Fortress without first consulting this article, but then I’m not someone who was familiar with its predecessors, Rogue and Nethack. I would have had trouble comprehending the Wikipedia entries that are about the game, had I not first consulted that specific article. DF is maddeningly opaque, to the point that you almost can’t play the thing without first consulting the literature that surrounds it. The very things that make DF maddening make it so utterly engrossing and relatable. Not relatable in the sense that you can relate to it, but in the sense that you can (and want to) narrate your experience with it. At this very moment, I’m resisting the urge to tell you all about my first fortress, Orbsstilled, now 125 strong. Sure, I want to tell you all about the road I’m building, and the stonecrafts I’m crafting, and the bedrooms I’m furnishing, and the mines I’m digging, and the militia I’m training, and the goods I’m trading, and the economy I’m building, and the animals I’m slaughtering, but I WON’T. I will not allow this site to devolve into the meaningless minutiae of my foray into a procedurally generated fantasy realm, just so I can play Dwarf Fortress forever and tell people “I’m writing about it.” (As of yesterday, I’ve started keeping a private journal to document the most pertinent happenings of Orbsstilled. I’m writing it in the voice of the current mayor, Kikrost Ustanmorul, who may or may not be a reliable narrator.)

Martin has said that he likes to mine history for the good bits. Dwarf Fortress simulates a fictional history and tells the player to do this very thing: “Strike the earth!” What Martin does with literary devices, DF does with a bunch of complex algorithms and a significant chunk of player authorship. I never liked math in school because I preferred stories. Dwarf Fortress has proven that math and humans can co-author compelling narrative. DF doesn’t just generate levels and loot like many of its predecessors. It creates “entire continents, including geographical, historical and social information” (Diaz, 17). And it does it with an experience that is strangely intimate and personal.

When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. When you play Dwarf Fortress, you just die. Or more specifically, you try to die spectacularly. DF invites you to present failure as something beautiful. Since you know you’re going to lose, you’ll want to orchestrate the most elaborate loss possible. This is how the game inspires engaging player-created narrative, like Boatmurdered. As your fortress becomes more sprawling and elaborate and you become more attached, your anticipation of its inevitable fall grows. The game builds you up only to knock you down. Martin does a similar thing with emotional attachment. He allows you to become invested in certain characters, only to erase them unceremoniously just as you start to view them as permanent fixtures. 

I guess you could, theoretically, “win” at Dwarf Fortress by playing conservatively, maintaining a subsistence economy, avoiding expansion or exploration. This approach would probably discourage migrants and allow you to survive on a really small harvest. But I think this is the only way you could really lose at Dwarf Fortress because you would kill everything that’s interesting about it. The game encourages you to push boundaries and overextend your reach. Storytelling is what makes DF compelling, and it is placed largely in the hands of the player. The game gives you a history to work with, but it’s up to you to mine its potential and make it interesting. In this sense, narrative is DF‘s most important game mechanic. I don’t yet have my own beautiful failure to boast of, but I plan to press on until I do. I’ll continue to strike the earth until the gods strike me down, and when they do it will be a most glorious demise. Winter is coming, and when Orbsstilled falls, the bards will write songs.

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Freeware is freedom. Its resources are limited, but its only master is design. If a freeware game is bogged down by excessive content, then this is a product of its own vision, not consumers’ pocketbooks or executive greed. Freeware is the Cave Story that a man fawns over in his spare time for five years. It is Dwarf Fortress, challenging, rather than stymieing the potential of the human imagination. It is Cart Life, an empathetic artist‘s heartbreaking, yet hopeful, realism. These developers, nay artists, deserve to be paid for their work. But one of the reasons their work excels is they have made games that needed to be made rather than sold. They carried on, though they were never guaranteed a dime of support. There are so many component parts expected of modern games—music, art, writing, oh yeah and the “game” part—I’m surprised anything coherent ever gets done. A freeware game of substance is nothing short of a remarkable triumph of the human spirit.

Most commercial games would have greater impact (and would probably be more fun) if they took a fraction of the time to play through. I spent some time reviewing Triple A games, and in that span of time I reviewed some clunkers and some gems. My experiences, regardless of each game’s competence, all shared a common thread. As soon as I got whatever it was that the game wanted to say to me, its message was dampened,squashed even, by hours and hours of excessive content. I still play Triple A games (currently enjoying Final Fantasy XIII-2 in a terrible sort of way), but I don’t often write about them anymore or even play them all the way through. In general, commercial games are bogged down by more content than they need because that’s the standard.

The music industry’s loudness war is a similar phenomenon. Consumers expect music to maintain a consistent volume across an ever-increasing variety of devices, and publishers want their tracks to be just a bit louder and have just a bit more punch than the other songs on any given playlist. To keep up, sound engineers are forced to use more compression, so they can continue to boost volume and sell albums. As a result, music production, in general, has grown louder but less dynamic over the years. The commercial games industry’s equivalent of the loudness war is a sort of “hours war.” Commercial games are expensive because games are becoming more and more expensive to make. Since big-budget games are so expensive, players expect them to take up a certain, quantifiable amount of time. It rounds out to about a fifteen-twenty hour (or thereabouts) minimum time slot for a sixty-dollar price tag. But even that isn’t enough, really. According to consumers and critics, a game should ideally feel infinite and unlimited. In order for you to get your money’s worth, it should have the potential to take up more time than you have. Fortunately, the loudness war seems to be losing steam, but I’m not so optimistic about the hours war.

At first the idea seems strange, but the appeal of purchasing content we might never see is understandable. We’re just trying to stretch out the time that Electron Dance appropriately deemed “those honeymoon hours,” in which a game still feels like an exciting expedition into the unknown. Skyrim is one of those games that seems like it’s meant to be played forever. Isn’t it strange that we expect games that are meant to be played forever? It’s kind of exhausting to think about from a consumer’s point of view. And from a developer’s point of view, it must be pretty limiting in an “arrow to the knee” sort of way. Why should a game spend a ton of resources on wearing out its welcome instead of just ending and probably making a more meaningful impact? Skyrim fills its world with a staggering number of locales and NPCs. It takes a few minutes to remember where you are and where you should be going, about an hour to get your bearings in any given play session, about a day to make any discernible progress. Much of this time will be spent rifling through an inventory screen.

On the other hand, a strong argument can be made that games provide experiences that aren’t meant to be finished, as they allow us to continuously pursue expertise in a certain skill set. Playing Dwarf Fortress, a freeware title by two brilliant brothers, is sort of like pursuing fluency in an alien language. When you first look at the screen, you don’t see what you’re meant to see. After hours of patience and persistence (and access to the internet so you can get to the game’s wiki), the setting and its inhabitants gradually start to seep into the mind’s eye. Dwarf Fortress is another game that has the potential to be played (and possibly developed) forever. Nonetheless, it has a clear beginning and end. In fact, with its gigantic procedurally generated fantasy realms, it provides endless beginnings and endings. Because no matter how many clever strategies you implement, you will lose, and your fortress will fall. Dwarf Fortress is a phoenix of a game, with the capacity to enthrall over and over and over again, thrilling a player’s devoted imagination in fresh, wondrous ways with every rebirth. This game exists because two visionaries have devoted their lives to it. In a commercial setting, with a mandated development time and release date, it would have been an entirely different entity. By dismissing modern graphics, the developers have freed themselves to focus their attention on the game’s capacity for simulation. The result is a new standard for game mechanics and the transformation of keyboard characters into a sort of high art. Dwarf Fortress is an ever-evolving creature of artistic energy and technical prowess. It is a life’s great work.

It is worth saying that independent game development has already offered an answer to the time-sink problem by providing smaller, more thoughtful, titles at a lower price point. In addition, indie titles are practically given away periodically, bundled together and sold at a minimum as low as a few dollars. Similarly, mobile games offer an opposite end to the fifteen-hour minimum spectrum, but this development market has its own limiting burdens to bear. Mobile game developers are encouraged to provide instantly gratifying experiences that can be picked up and put down in a matter of seconds, so tons of people will throw a dollar their way. Of course, there’s always room for an explosion of innovative flair (like Sword & Sworcery EP) that transcends expectations.

It is important to purchase games, if one can afford to, because it is important to support those who make games for a living. Freeware compliments and enriches the commercial games industry, but it cannot displace it. However, it is also important to experience art for art’s sake, and freeware is just that. Paradoxically, it is both easier and more difficult for freeware to reach its audience. We inevitably engage with purchases differently than we do with something that simply presents itself to us. By spending money on something, we have already committed the time of our labor. To match this commitment, we feel an obligation to spend an adequate amount of leisure time before we dismiss this purchase and move on to something else. A freeware game, on the other hand, has a smaller window of time in which to prove itself. Without the prior monetary commitment, the player feels no obligation to enjoy it, so it is more easily dismissed. Sometimes it’s important to step back and remind ourselves that there are things worth paying attention to that won’t cost us anything more than a bit of our time. We are so unbelievably lucky.

(As for supporting developers, Bay 12 Games constantly works on Dwarf Fortress and accepts financial support. Newer versions of Cave Story are now available on multiple platforms. Cart Life has paid versions that contain additional content.)

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Games with moral agendas can be hit or miss. Sometimes a game simply wants to be played, but other times it wants to tell you something explicitly (see McDonald’s Video Game). This approach can be counterproductive. If a game gets too wrapped up in its own perceived importance, it can neglect the subtlety and awareness it takes to communicate an effective message.

In Unmanned, you play as a man who remotely operates an armed aerial vehicle, capable of dispensing explosive death from a comfortable chair and a safe distance. The game opens with two scenes presented in a split-screen fashion. On the left is a sleeping man with blonde hair. On the right, you control a waking version of this man with mouse clicks as he runs across a sparse, brown field littered with goats.  As he runs, angry people chase him: a man with a dark beard, a figure whose face is covered, a child with a stick. If they catch up to the blonde man, they physically assault him, and he covers his head. If you manage to stay out of reach, the man begins flapping his arms, turns into a plane and flies away. Soon the dream ends, and the sleeping man wakes. Now, you’re standing in front of a mirror, shaving (don’t cut yourself!) and deciding how you feel about the approaching workday. Does “Another day” equate to “another terrorist dead,” “another dollar,” or “another step closer to my grave?”

Unmanned uses cutscenes, or non-playable narrative, in a way that I’m surprised more developers haven’t thought of. Instead of trying to make cutscenes more gamey by adding QT events, they simply allow the scene to unfold next to a separate, but related, minigame that reinforces whatever point the scene is trying to make. You’re often asked to switch between two screens, performing some menial action on one side and switching to the other to advance the story. This process caused me to cut myself shaving more times than I’d like to admit.

A sort of dramatic irony emerges from the way these scenes are arranged. Later, after he gets off work, the man plays some modern military shooter with his son. Here he is, unwinding after a day of controlling a real-life killing machine on a screen by killing fake people on a screen. You control the avatar in the game they’re playing, which mimics shooters like Call of Duty in a point-and-click fashion (pretty meta, eh?), while a conversation about death, weapons and war plays out between the man and his son.

One of the things I found most interesting about Unmanned is that it doesn’t so much focus on the larger political and ethical implications of UAVs, though it touches on them. The narrative is centered on a single character, and most of the conflicts are presented as internal manifestations. The game is poignant and provoking, and the simple split-screen presentation cleverly illustrates the blurring discrepancy between thinking or talking about something and physically making something happen, a tension that is very much at the heart of the game. Unmanned raises some dark questions: What is a man thinking or talking about while he controls a machine that can end human life? How does it make him feel? What is killing like when most of the physical sensation of the act is removed?  In one of the dialogue trees, the man describes his day as “boring,” and most of the game’s interactive components are intentionally monotonous. The protagonist is obviously conflicted about doing his killing from a safe distance, but would he feel better about it if he was actually sitting inside of the plane? I can’t say, but I can say that Unmanned left me feeling like there’s something cold about the distance.

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Tagged as modern warfare, UAVs, Unmanned, unmanned aerial vehicles

I’m a bit of a failure when it comes to point-and-click adventures. I didn’t grow up with them, so the interface usually confuses me. I’ll always using my hands when I should be using my feet or using thoughtspeak when I should be using wordspeak. Many of my sessions with adventure games dissolve into frustrated click-fests with no rhyme or reason to them. I turn into a caveman, banging my fists against a wall, hoping it will move.

Even as far as adventure games go, I found the mechanics in Donna: Avenger of Blood oppressive. In fact, everything about it–the environments, the color palette, the puzzles–it’s all oppressive. I got stuck on the first puzzle. THE FIRST PUZZLE. A few minutes in, and I was already trying to find a walkthrough. I’m ashamed to admit I failed at that too. Needless to say, I was discouraged, but I was also irreparably curious and intrigued. Say what you will of Donna, but she leaves a striking first impression. Mental screenshots kept haunting me: Donna’s pale form, standing naked against the dark backdrop of a seedy alleyway; the jagged edges, jarring animations and bleak grays of some city in Eastern Europe. Avenger of Blood had stirred something inside of me. I would return to her, and damnit, I would persevere (For a while, at least).

There’s this overbearing theme of disgust that hangs over the writing, the aesthetic, even the puzzles. In the first few minutes, Donna lures a rat from a dumpster with a dead pigeon someone left hanging outside of their door. Then, she eats the rat alive to regain a bit of health. Upon examining a telephone in a sleazy motel, Donna muses “I bet the receiver smells.” Then, when she examines the bed sheets, she considers the “gallons of semen” that must have been left by previous inhabitants. Donna is disgusted with society. Society is disgusted with her. There’s this almost glitzy portrayal of vampires in modern, pop interpretations of the genre. Donna and the world she inhabits, on the other hand, have a striking beauty about them, and a compelling, sensual energy. But it’s a dark, fearsome sort of beauty, and there’s definitely nothing cute or glitzy about it.

You’re given hardly any indication of what you’re supposed to do when you start out. (I’m almost beginning to expect this of my favorite freeware games.) Donna has an entire skill set that I was completely unaware of at first because it hides behind an unobtrusive tab in the inventory menu. Basically, Donna is capable of just about anything, but only in the right circumstances. She can read minds, manipulate and eavesdrop. She’s superstrong and superfast (for a human, not for a vampire). But you can’t use any of Donna’s skills if her thirst for blood is too powerful, and you will inevitably be put in a position where she’s running on fumes but doesn’t have any immediate access to fresh blood. Donna’s skill set provides an interesting juxtaposition, as you’re given this extremely capable protagonist, but you don’t feel very capable because the odds are so completely stacked against her. Playing as Donna, I essentially had superpowers, but I still felt powerless.

Avenger of Blood was in development for a decade, and it shows in the exhaustive sense of detail. The care that has been taken in Donna’s characterization absolutely melts my heart, and in spite of all its darkness, the writing has a sense of humor about it. You can look up words or phrases in a Bible you find in the motel Donna uses as her headquarters. If you search “vampire,” Donna thinks “Nah, I’m sure there aren’t too many good words about us in the Bible.” If you select the “talk” command and click on a screwdriver in the mall shop, you don’t get some mundane text like “I don’t think that will work.” Donna simply says “Hello screwdriver.” If you examine a poster bearing political propaganda, it makes Donna anxious, and her anxiety prevents you from progressing.

Donna likes to have a smoke as she considers her next move. You could purchase the lighter and cigarettes with the money you found in that safe, or you could just use vampire Jedi mind tricks and make the clerk give them to you. Smoke a cig, and you’ll be awarded a hint (For other games that use cigs well, see Cart Life). The narrative often alerts you to significant events by offering close-ups of Donna’s face. At the park, she roars and bares her fangs as she cuts down her prey in the black of night. Alone, in a shitty hotel room, Donna blinks a few times. A tear runs down her cheek as she allows herself a moment of weakness, remembering her dead sweetheart. Later, I examine a necklace that I found in a safe and discover that Donna doesn’t like wearing things on her neck.

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Tagged as adventure games, Avenger of Blood, Bible, Blaze Dzikowski, cigs, Donna, failure, glitzy vampires, point and clicks

The Cat That Got the Milk starts you off in a straight-lined, sight-seeing expedition and eases you into this wondrous, colorful cacophony of jutting geometric walls and claustrophobic corridors. You are a tiny shape in a sea of bigger shapes. You control movement in two directions. The game is fast-paced and brash. The transitions between levels happen quickly, and the delay between failing and restarting is almost nonexistent. Later in the game (about eight minutes), levels become challenging and demand repeated restarts. In The Cat That Got the Milk, there is no real opportunity to observe your environment as a static entity. You are constantly in motion, so your impression is of a thing that is alive.

In Burn, you are a phoenix, flying down an endless corridor towards death. Blue barrels slow you down, red barrels speed you up. Burn doesn’t limit controls to the same extent The Cat That Got the Milk does, as you can move in four directions, and you’re allowed three different power-ups. But the spirit is similar, and the lose condition is the same. When you stop, you fail. Burn quickly speeds up to a blistering pace, once you manage to get on a good run. In addition, it’s fairly difficult to stop completely because the corridor becomes easier to navigate as you start to slow down. The game encourages you to maintain motion. Drums increase to a fever-pitch when you reach top speeds and reduce to a solemn stomp as you slow your pace. There’s no score, per say, though a number keeps track of the distance you’ve traveled. But I didn’t really care about any numbers. The aesthetic is what pushed me to continue. I wanted to see the strange, alluring corridor rushing past. I wanted the drums to speed up again. I wanted to achieve perpetual motion. I wanted to describe the experience to you in dramatic, first-person statements. I’ll stop now.

Most games I play these days assume I want control of every aspect of the protagonist’s movement, but in this day and age, a bit of limitation is a wonderfully refreshing thing. In pretty much every Triple-A console game I can think of, I have to control the character and the camera simultaneously just to move around, and if I stop moving the sticks around, the protagonist stops moving as well. The Cat That Got the Milk and Burn assume some sense of motion regardless of player input, and they limit the player’s control. You would think that a game constantly in motion would have trouble bringing its aesthetic to the player’s attention. But in these two examples, I found that the aesthetic demanded my attention because it was so closely entwined with the gameplay. In both of the aforementioned games, you work against the game environments, in a kind of yin-and-yang fashion, to create a specific aesthetic experience that is much more powerful than it would have been if the mechanics allowed the player to stop moving.

These games remind us that obstructing certain elements of control augments the significance of the control the player does have, and constant motion forces the player to consider game aesthetic as something dynamic, rather than static. I find that I’m much more capable of taking in the architecture of neighborhood houses or the colors of changing seasons when I’m riding in the passenger seat than when I’m driving. By remaining in motion, but relinquishing control of every aspect of motion, you absorb your environment differently. In Burn and The Cat That Got the Milk, the environments hurl themselves at you. They are friendly obstacles–explicit aspects of gameplay. Screenshots have no chance of properly conveying the artistic dynamism of these games (nor do my own words). Go play.

Notes: The Cat That Got the Milk was done by Ollie Clarke, Jon Mann, Chris Randle and Helana Santos. You can buy souvenirs from them to show your support. Burn was created by Benn Lockyer, Sunny Koda and Jarrod Lowery for The Global Game Jam in one weekend, in response to this theme.

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