Games Night! - 11/07/15

Game Over.  Return of DOS.

ashetan maryam, ethiopia

2013

In Kentucky Route Zero Act II Shannon asks Conway, "Are we inside or outside?"

Shannon's line is a reference to Gaston Bachelard's "The Poetics of Space" written in 1958. Earlier in the game the character Lula Chamberlain opens a rejection letter from the "Gaston Trust for Imaginary Architecture" which is a direct reference to the French philosopher's work. Bachelard's "Poetics of Space" is probably the most important book that most game designers have never read; it explicitly connects architecture to how people will experience it, rather than the trend in 1958, which was to treat architecture like spectacle. Bluntly speaking, Bachelard said back in 1958 that games are not just graphics. They are architecture that create an experience. He would have made an excellent level designer.

In the chapter "The dialectics of inside and outside", Bachelard writes, "Outside and inside form a dialectic of division, the obvious geometry of which blinds us as soon as we bring it into metaphorical domains. It has the sharpness of the dialectics yes and no, which decides everything. Unless one is careful, it is made into a basis of images that govern all positive and negative."

Bachelard goes on to argue that we should abandon the idea of the diametrically opposed 'inside and outside', that we should continually think instead of how they both serve the poet, the human experience, and are unified in this way.

[...]

Kentucky Route Zero concertedly removes the player of the binary. The focus is on how the structure of the narrative, and the composition of the art on screen, evokes a feeling of being both inside and outside at the same time. At one point in Act III you are invited to play Xanadu, a text adventure that is a metanarrative of Kentucky Route Zero. There's a crude television screen showing lines and shapes, and a printer next to it prints out the text line by line. You become confused about being inside or outside the narrative. Will choices in this metagame affect the game's storyline? Are the character's choices outside of the metagame working in the same way as the textual choices in the metagame?