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.