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.

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.

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.