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.