Daniel Benmergui and the Gulf of Execution

In the study of human-computer interaction, a user's uncertainty about how a system will respond to her actions is sometimes referred to as the "gulf of execution," in Donald Norman's phrase. In useful software, of course, a designer tries to narrow this knowledge gap as much as possible, and the same is true of many videogames. But Daniel Benmergui seems to be generally interested in aesthetically exploiting it. In the three short art games he released this year as a package, he widens the gulf of execution in subtly different ways, and with varying effects.

In Storyteller (2008), your manipulation of the characters in each the three segments of the story results in unexplained changes to the other segments. It's left to the player to infer the narrative rules at work, an inference which is forced by a player's natural inclination to understand the rules of the game she is playing. The proposed set of storytelling laws the player uncovers, it is implied, may be inferred from other fairy tales if the reader puts the effort into it. In this case, the distance between action and result is mainly used as a prompt to the player's imagination. This effect is not an unusual one in games; indeed, figuring out why doing this should have caused that makes for much of the enjoyment in god and tycoon games.

A more idiosyncratic use of the gulf of execution technique is at play in I Wish I Were the Moon (2008). Unlike in Storyteller, the interaction method in this game is itself highly indirect. The "movable snapshots" metaphor introduces another level of uncertainty to the relationship between action and results, since it is not only unclear what your actions will do, but also which of your movements may be considered actions. Some objects can be moved with the camera, some can't: you can move stars and people, but not boats or moons. A single object, the shooting star, can actually be multiplied with the camera. What can be done is unpredictable, as well as what will result from what you do, and whether anything will result at all. The gulf of execution is vast in this small game, giving the player a direct experience of the distance and frustration felt by the characters.

Today I Die (2009) partially adopts the direct manipulation of objects present in Storyteller, but adds a different kind of indirectness by introducing text as a special kind of game object. Essentially, the text allows the player to manipulate the game's environment as well as its objects. The gulf here is not as wide as in I Wish I Were the Moon, since the interaction is more immediately responsive, but in a sense it is broader; your actions continue to be leaps in the dark, but now they can affect the entire environment. This gives Today I Die an unusual sense of instability.  

The real elegance of the game comes from the alternation of global and local actions: you manipulate objects to get a new word, using the new word gives you new objects to manipulate, and so on. The rhythm of great and small leaps that results lends the game a sense of nervous exuberance. I suspect that this control of rhythm - not an easy thing to achieve in games - has much to do with the frequent description of Benmergui's games, Today I Die especially, as "poetic."

Triptych (2009)

In Stephen Lavelle's brief but dense Triptych, a decontextualized internal monologue similar to those he used in Mirror Stage (review) is broken to pieces by two intrusive elements.  First, there is a quasi-adventure game-style series of actions the player can take to explore a room.  The feedback for these actions is interleaved with the sentences of the monologue.  The actions you can take are inconsequential, and you soon run out of options.  There is also a set of related, emotionally loaded words that gradually replace more and more of the words in both the monologue and the room exploration, so that by the end of the game (which is no longer than a minute or so) you only see these words repeated in random order.

There are six different monologues, two different rooms to find yourself in, and at least nine sets of emotional words.  (The word sets are difficult to count reliably since there seems to be some overlap among them.)  The combination of these three elements - monologue, room, and word set - is chosen at random at the start of each playthrough, a combination which may be the triptych referred to in the title.

There is no obvious underlying theme to the pieces of content being thus combined.  The monologues share themes of weather, loss, external pressures, and memory, but in a variety of different contexts.  The two rooms are spare and uninteresting.  The word sets, which range from pleasant (honey, sunlit, gleam) to trivial (teamwork, strategy, management, cooperation) to alarming (rape, body, other, dirty), seem like they might correspond to some taxonomy of emotional states, but are otherwise unrelated to each other.

Like Lavelle's other work, Triptych is strongly reminiscent of a psychological experiment.  Are you meant to read the framing monologue and your interactions with the room differently if the word set is happy, frightening, uncomfortably sexual, etc.?  Or are they merely meant to startle and distract you from the narrative aspects of the game? 

While the word set has a clearly obtrusive effect, it took me many playthroughs before the separation of the monologue and the room interaction was obvious.  Up to that point I tried to read them as continuous, with the monologue representing my character's thoughts as she did things in the room.  The resulting stories made no sense, even before being overtaken by PHALLIC PHALLIC LABIAL and so forth, but my brain made the best of what it was given.  

The game encourages this kind of over-interpretation by including numerous points of connection between details in the monologues and available actions.  One room has a window, and several monologues describe the weather outside, which either leads you to open the window or explains what you see if you already opened it.  A monologue about lost keys mentions a bedroom table, which is visible in one of the rooms.  One concerned with errands that need to be done may prompt you to choose a "leave" command which doesn't actually work.

Having a narrative and a space of player action that are functionally indifferent to each other, but not obviously so, creates its own kind of friction, and could make for an interesting game on its own.  But of course, the intrusion of the emotional words eventually obliterates this friction.  The two streams of text lose what distinction they have as they move closer to gibberish.  This could evoke the dominance of emotion over rational thought and decision-making, or perhaps a violent disinterest in the relationship between game and narrative.  Whatever you take away from this movement from subtle cognitive dissonance to unbridled nonsense, Triptych is at least remarkably efficient in making you feel strange.

A familiar debate about empathy in videogames

Peter Suderman, a film and culture writer I quite like, had a short post yesterday at The American Scene of the familiar "videogames can't really evoke emotion" type.  I doubt I can contribute much to this old argument, except to say that it seems dreadfully premature to be making pronouncements on the capabilities of the medium when it's barely out of diapers.  I think that it's dangerously easy to look at a new medium and see only the points where it differs from an older medium to which you are more attached, and to try and build a case about what the new medium can and can't do based on that catalogue of differences.  But that's a style of analysis that too easily misses the forest for the trees.

EDIT: Oops!  I accidentally linked the wrong article above.  Sorry, here's the Suderman piece.

EDIT: Woah, where's my head at today?!  The real piece is here.

The Flower of Prolonged Failure

Well, after 27 minutes, I was finally able to kill myself in High-Resolution Tetris.  I thought this might be easier than actually clearing a line, but I was surprised at how excruciating the endgame got.  What you see here is that it's pretty easy to stack the pieces until you get about 4/5 of the way up the game board, at which point you start having problems getting the pieces over to the center fast enough.  (New pieces appear on top at a random point along the horizontal axis.)  Even worse, once you actually build up to the top line, you're stuck waiting for a piece to show up right at the point where it can collide with one of your pieces instantly.  So I started just trying to get pieces to the center as fast as I could to build a bigger platform, which resulted in this flowery structure - the more distant the piece's initial starting point, the further down the stem I could eventually hook it.  I find the result quite attractive.

Signifier (2009)

Interaction in games can be roughly divided into two major parts: the actions that can be performed and the control scheme used to trigger those actions.  Intuitively, we often consider the ideal control scheme to be one so natural that it becomes invisible, so that your intentions lead to in-game actions without any thought spared on the process in between.  Forgotten fingers, as Michael Abbott puts it.  And indeed, games of this kind - Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaeil's Aether or Jenova Chen's Flow, for example - can create a particular sense of calm freedom which is uniquely pleasurable.

But that's not to say that there are no pleasures associated with difficult or unnatural control schemes.  To use an oft-cited example, the frustration associated with controlling the horse in Shadow of the Colossus goes a long way towards establishing him as a character rather than a transportation mechanism.  And unnatural control schemes are an integral part of both the style and meaning of Stephen Lavelle's Signifier.  

Like his earlier Mirror Stage (review), Signifier is a disorienting, evocatively ugly piece with psychological themes.  In this case, the game is concerned specifically with perception and action, and how we learn to do both through social conditioning.  The game, which is very brief, takes place on a series of simple tiled levels, each of which contains some walls, other characters, or objects.  These are originally represented by graphics, until your mother teaches you to see them as words.  

She also starts teaching you how to interact with these representations of objects, at which point Signifier's very strange control scheme comes into play.  You move around with the arrow keys (no WASD option), click through dialogues with the spacebar, and perform various demonstrative mouse gestures that represent social actions.  This is a pretty untenable control scheme on a standard keyboard/mouse setup, and forces regular shifts in your hand positions as you go through a level.  It would be fine without all those mouse gestures.  But each time you move, you have to announce which direction you're moving in; you have to announce via gesture when you move away from another character; and you get a few other one-off gestures that would normally be handled via some context-specific "use" button (such as the spacebar you're using to click through dialogue anyway).  

But this is the point, after all.  Social signals, such as the pleasantries that end a conversation, can be considered as functionally useless and taking up a lot of unnecessary energy, distracting from the more essential business of moving around and getting laid.  Embodying them as an annoying piece of interaction is a clever metaphorical use of the control scheme, a part of games which doesn't get to carry meaning all that often.

My First Visit to D.C. Since Playing Fallout 3 (2009)

Pretty trippy!  The poor weather of last weekend severely diminished the usual crowds, and the unusual emptiness of the National Mall added to the weird effect of my many inappropriately overlaid spatial memories.  I found myself somewhat more alert than usual heading through Metro stations.  This is excellent; I demand more first-person perspective games set in surreal versions of real-world locations.  No other medium can infect your sense of place like games.

Mirror Stage (2009)

Stephen Lavelle's Mirror Stage is a trim and elegant little piece about exploring kaleidoscope patterns.  While there's not much more to it than that on paper, the aesthetic effect outstrips the simplicity of the premise by a surprising amount.  The game builds up a lot of appealing disorientation through the design of kaleidoscope levels full of weird angles and unsettling transitions from tiny spaces to giant ones.  It's not a pretty or smooth game, with its Logo-esque graphics, eye-searing fonts, and awkward world-rotating controls, but its weird style adds to the disorienting atmosphere.

It is also similar to Coil (review) in that it sets up a feeling of dissonance by alternating short games and vaguely related bits of text.  Mirror Stage is separated into chapters, each telling a different story made up of a series of episodes which pair a piece of introductory text with a short level.  Unlike in Coil, these bits of text have the more straightforward function of hinting at what your objective is in a given level: avoid an enemy, explore all the segments of the level, find an exit, and so on.  

There are a limited number of these objective types, but the text interprets them in any number of ways.  One story is about a marriage, one is about a person leaving home for the big city, one is just a collection of brief sense memories.  Having come up with a simple, abstract game concept, Mirror Stage goes to town with all the different ways you can use that concept as a metaphor.  It's a very playful approach to game narrative, and I wonder why it isn't more common.  Why should a game have a single story throughout?  Why aren't there more anthology games like this, with a single set of gameplay mechanics applied to a variety of contexts?  In Mirror Stage, at least, it proves to be an effective way of exploring what the mechanics can mean.

4 Minutes and 33 Seconds of Uniqueness (2009)

Petri Purho has come up with a brilliant border case of a game in 4 Minutes and 33 Seconds of Uniqueness, the most memorable entry from the recent Global Game Jam.  Inspired by John Cage's 4'33", a musical composition without sound, Purho made a game of the same length with no interaction.  You win by running the program for the entire time span without anyone else in the world starting it up.  There is nothing you can do with the game other than begin it.  Even ending it seems to have no effect - your execution stays on the clock until someone else starts up.  

The original experience of the game is quiet and tense.  You watch a large black progress bar inch its way across the window until, without warning, the game shuts down.  I have not been able to complete a playthrough and suspect this may be impossible until some time after the release date.  Your defeat is a capricious and startling moment.  It momentarily evokes the knowledge that some far-off player beat you, but the fact that they started the game at that moment is the only thing you know about them.  This lack of both information and control is a novel and weirdly exciting sensation for a game, and the strangeness of 4 Minutes and 33 Seconds of Uniqueness makes a good case for Purho's implicit argument that interactions are to games as sounds are to music.  

An entirely different experience of the game is provided by Jonathan Basseri's Google Maps mashup, which shows you where the IP address of the current player originates and how long it has been winning.  Suddenly your ephemeral opponents are fixed in space and time, and you can see how well they do after defeating you.  The game suddenly becomes a battle!  For the past two hours at least a player in Chicago has been stubbornly fighting off challengers from New Zealand to Argentina, without ever getting any further than 50% through the game.  I admire Chicago's diligence, but worry that I may be admiring a script.  The less interaction there is in a game, the more difficult it is to tell the difference between a human player and a bot.  

Coil (2008)

In my review of The Graveyard, I implied that I'm generally unsatisfied by the most basic style of game storytelling: perform an action, get a cutscene, repeat. What I neglected to address is that there are some significant variations in this particular structure, some of which produce unusual narrative effects. One variation is to make the cutscenes more interactive, a popular trend in recent game design. A less common variation, employed to striking effect in Edmund McMillen and Florian Himsl's Coil, is to break the linear connection between the game segments and the cutscene segments altogether.

The game weaves together two parallel threads: a series of small games about absorption and separation, using metaphors of embryonic development, and a somewhat abstract textual story about a woman's relationship problems. The story gives some broader metaphorical context to the games, pushing you to see them as representing emotional growth as well as physical growth.

There's some awkwardness to this parallel structure. But overall, it lends weight to the thematic consistency of the games; they deal with wrenching apart things that are entangled and entangling things which are distant, themes which are attacked from various angles throughout the game. While the games are fairly easy to figure out, interaction and control is often frustrating - another nice metaphor for the painful relationship issues described in the text.

What's interesting about Coil is that the framing story and the game story are both relatively concrete, but they don't agree with one another. There are strong thematic echoes, but you can't interpret the story of the embryo as a literal continuation of the story of the woman. The game is doing one thing and text is doing another.  It's the combination of these two separate strands that gives the game its emotional heft.

This counterpoint style is an intriguing alternative model for incorporating linear storytelling into a game. Games don't tell stories in the same way that fixed media like text and film do. There will always be a disconnect between the story in the cutscene and the story in the game. Why not exploit that disconnect?

The Graveyard (2008)

Auriea Harvey and Michael Samyn's The Graveyard is a spare little game with only one functional object besides your avatar: a bench that plays music when you sit on it. It will start playing music anytime you sit on it and will stop when you stand up. The game takes place in a graveyard, and you end it by leaving the graveyard. This makes for an extremely minimalist implementation of the most basic narrative game structure, in which you perform some scripted action and get a cutscene as a "reward."

An unusual element of The Graveyard is the pay structure. The game is free to demo, but you can pay for a full version in which your avatar, an elderly lady, is able to die unexpectedly. While this strikes me as a clever art prank, poking fun at the priorities of gamers, it means that the most interesting thing about the game is not really part of the game text, which is just another cutscene trigger.

In an interview with IndieGames, the designers make it clear that they aimed to make a game about death, specifically one that treated death in a less trivial way than they see it treated in games. Whatever noble ambitions the designers may have had, the result feels more as though themes about death have been awkwardly grafted onto a game about listening to music. Execution (review) also sets out to treat death more seriously than games usually do, but it does so by having code that treats death seriously. The Graveyard does so by making the graphics and sound design (both very pretty) resemble a serious movie. And with the pricing scheme, though I still hesitate to include that as a part of the game text per se. And with the bench song, which is a plinky Flemish member of the "here are some people who died" genre. (Perhaps the lyrics have been translated poorly. Still, given the designers' stated desire not to trivialize death, it's a startling choice.)

In general, the designers of The Graveyard tend to resort to elements which are not code in order to get their effects across.   There's no reason that games shouldn't be enriched with non-game elements, of course.  Perhaps this is just the vanguard of an "Oscarbait" segment of indie games, one which combines conventional structures with moving themes and appealing production values.   However, the flatness of the underlying structure in this case makes for an artistically unsatisfying piece. 

Gravity Bone (2008)

Recently I found myself wondering what a surrealist game would be. It's a bit of a funny question, because all videogames are pretty surreal. There's weird logic, weird environments, weird constraints on your behavior - everything in games is kind of like reality, but a bit off. You jump, and it's kind of like jumping, but you jump way too high and can change direction in midair. You're kind of in control of yourself, but not totally. And the rules change with every boss battle. If surrealism in art is about capturing a dreamlike atmosphere, well, most games are pretty dreamlike to some degree. It doesn't make sense to talk about a specific game being surreal when the whole medium is.

But the description seems to fit Brendon Chung's Gravity Bone. Perhaps this is because Gravity Bone is kind of like other games, but a bit off. It's using the classic Quake engine, so the mechanics are really familiar, but you use them to do ungamelike things, like looking at a business card. And while the graphics are displayed in classically lit 3D, they recall 8-bit design in their awkward blockiness. And you're pursuing missions by following steps, like in a normal game, but the missions flagrantly make no sense and there aren't enough of them for you to get the hang of the game's rhythms.

Reviewers of Gravity Bone have expressed disappointment at the game's short length, but that abrupt ending has a lot to do with the strange feeling the game leaves behind. And of course, it's one more way that it's kind of like a normal game, but not. Evoking videogame conventions without carrying them through normally is what Gravity Bone does, and what makes it so pleasantly disquieting.

Seven Minutes (2008)

Previously, in reviewing Execution, I mentioned that gamemakers seem to be concerned recently with the issue of choice in linear game design. That is, while gaming seems to be all about agency and free choice on the part of the player, this freedom is constrained by the fact that gamers will always make a choice that progresses the game. Developers can easily force a player into a desired behavior by making it the only way to move forward.

Execution attacks this problem by making quitting into a meaningful action. A different but related strategy is at work in Tuukka Virtanen's Seven Minutes, which makes inaction into a meaningful action. The game initially seems to be a straightforward platformer with a seven-minute time limit. You move through a series of increasingly frustrating and death-prone screens while a giant head follows you around screaming about what a disappointment you are. This is, obviously, fantastic. Your reward for reaching the end is death, but only after more haranguing from the giant head, who is furious at your futile desire to explore and move forward.

If, on the other hand, you stay on the first screen and wait out the seven minutes with nothing to do but impale yourself on spikes over and over, the giant head rejoices and rewards you by making you a giant head as well.

Like Execution, Seven Minutes screws with probably the most basic assumption of gameplay: you have to do something to win. The effect in Execution is to make you feel guilty; why do you try to progress in a game at any cost? Perhaps this is a fault in your character!

Seven Minutes, on the other hand, has the effect of confusing the issue of exactly what it means to progress. If you sit around in the first room, you're told that you won. But you didn't do anything! If you go all the way through, you lose - but what weight does that have? You applied your platforming abilities to a number of challenges and succeeded in completing them. Does a character in the game have the authority to say that you failed, despite all evidence to the contrary? In its weird way, Seven Minutes unpacks the frustration that results from games where the story and the gameplay are disconnected or at odds with one another, although it plays this frustration for mostly comic effect.

Oh Awesome

Crayon Physics Deluxe releases on the exact same day that my Tablet PC breaks.  Excellent.  

Execution (2008)

Jesse Venbrux's Execution starts with three statements that could be thought of as some implicit artistic assumptions of videogames:

Your actions have consequences.
You either win or lose.
Do the right thing.

The game goes on to examine these assumptions in a minimalist style. All you see is a prisoner tied to a stake, and your only input method is a gun that you can move around and fire. The implication is pretty straightforward: you can only proceed by shooting the guy.

This kind of forced-choice scenario seems to be something that concerns gamemakers recently. In a medium where the player supposedly has the freedom to do whatever she likes, she will nonetheless almost always do what she has to in order to progress through the game; otherwise she'd have to quit. The great turning-point scene of Bioshock had a memorable play on this problem. Having been told that all your actions up to this point were driven by mind control, you might be inclined to rebel against the next instruction, which is clearly not to your benefit. But the game gives you nothing to interact with but the switch you've been commanded to hit, so what can you do? Game design itself, the scene implies, is a kind of mind control, in that it can trick you into thinking that an action forced by your environment was your own decision.

Execution takes a grumpier view of this scenario, by giving special status to the option you disregarded from the start: turning off the game. If you hit the Escape key before shooting the prisoner, you're treated to a "You Win" screen, and the game closes. If the game gives you no desirable options, this suggests, you shouldn't play it at all; either do the right thing or do nothing.

More interesting, though, is what happens when you shoot the prisoner. In this case you get a "You Lose" screen, and the game ends, but not before surreptitiously writing a small amount of data to your registry. Any subsequent attempt to restart the game gives you a disapproving message that "It's already too late" and a view of the already-dead prisoner. The title reveals itself as a bit of wordplay; the execution of the prisoner was also the only execution of the game's code that you're going to get. Thanks to the registry key, not even reinstalling the game will help. Your actions have consequences, as the introduction states.

The slightly unsettling effect of Execution comes from this questioning of one of the basic abilities of traditional gameplay, which is that you can always reload or start over to see how things might have turned out if you'd behaved differently. Execution suggests that consequences are meaningless if they don't have a lasting effect, so this aspect of gameplay clashes with one of the implicit artistic goals of gaming.

It's a provocative statement, as it's by no means obvious that temporary consequences are not really consequences. And while the inability to replay Execution may be startling, the consequences in this case aren't exactly permanent either; you can always install the game on a new computer or delete the registry key (if you absolutely know exactly what you are doing).

This isn't meant to be a nitpick, but a reminder that there's a reason games tend to be replayable. Videogames are art made out of code, and the ability to repeatedly execute a set of instructions under different conditions is the reason code exists. In trying to find a loophole in this basic property, Venbrux calls attention to it, and to the artistic assumptions it challenges.