#ungame

“This is a game about passivity”

Eso fue lo primero que leí al adentrarme en lo nuevo de Edu Verz. ¿Un juego sobre la pasividad? Esa pregunta se quedó grabada en mi cabeza durante toda la partida. ¿Qué significará? ¿Si me quedo quieto cambiará algo? ¿Qué son esos números al final del periódico? Mi experiencia seriamente afectada por una sola frase.

Y aún así, ese mundo me mantenía atrapado: levantarme cada mañana, ir a picar a la mina, ver como poco a poco muere la gente a mi alrededor... siempre vigilados por ese maldito perro con pistola.

“This is a game about passivity” - Ya entiendo.

No definiría F SB como divertido. Aunque tras jugarlo, me llevé algo puesto en la cabeza y, para mí, eso es a lo mayor que puede aspirar cualquier forma de arte.

Os recomiendo que juguéis al juego antes de seguir leyendo mi reflexión final :)

Podéis jugar a F SB en newgrounds.

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Al acabar mi partida, sin embargo, el juego me pregunta:

¿De qué crees que va este juego?

Values Market: Do you feel differently towards rich people than poor people?

Parking Lot: Who has a problem? Ricky's teacher feels bad because Ricky is doing badly in school.

Pleasure Place: Share a time where you had "Good Luck."

Changing Stage: Your grandfather is confined to a wheelchair. He will be visiting you for a month. What are three ways you can change the furniture to make him more comfortable during his stay?

Sharing Table: Some parents expect too much from their kids. What kind of problems can this cause?

Speakers' Corner: Talk about a topic of your choice for 360 words or more.

Rest Area: How do you like to relax?

Dynamite Solutions Juice Bar: One of 3 ways to solve a social problem is to find a solution that makes everyone happy. Share a time you helped solve a problem in such a way that everyone, including yourself, was happy.

Feelings Fruitstand: What does being a good friend mean to you?

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According to The Atlantic, Mountain “invites you to experience the chasm between your own subjectivity and the unfathomable experience of something else.” It “hypnotized” the Los Angeles Times, and The Verge called it "the only experience that has ever made me feel sad about a geological phenomenon." Meanwhile, on Steam, user reviewers are gushing: Mountain is “worthless,” “just a screensaver,” and “a fucking joke.”

There are positive Steam reviews, too, but many are facetious. Some customers are irate. Why the hell is the media so fascinated by this $1 game which advertises “no controls"—a game about a mountain that listlessly spins and talks about its feelings and collects detritus with little regard for the player? How is that interesting, or even a game, or worth any amount of money?

I’ve been running Mountain for two days now, and I’m not spilling over with praise for its ambient melancholic introspection. It’s not brilliant, but I like it. I like it because it can’t be described as “solid,” “visceral,” or “deep.”

Those words are ugly shorthand writers use when they’re tired of describing complex things, or don’t understand them. Controls are “solid,” combat is “visceral,” customization is “deep”—I’m sure I’ve been guilty of using them all (shame on my family). It isn’t good writing, but sometimes it’s hard to get excited about the umpteenth iteration of ‘the sniping mission.’ In a state of fatigue, limp clichés are easy and comforting. “Look, we all know what this is,” they say, “So let’s just agree that it’s fine and move on.”

Simulation versus stagecraft

People who are interested in the inner life of the player are going to tend to prioritize signal that excitates the player. People who are interested in the inner life of the object are going to be interested in signal about excitation within the object. We have terms for these.

When a game object is ticking over, turning, tumbling, moving, living, it’s called “simulation.”

When a player is ticking over, turning, tumbling, moving, living, we usually call it “thinking” or “reacting” or “cognitive processes.”

When a game object is not actually exhibiting much of an inner life, but the player is getting a signal anyway, intended to provoke a player’s inner life, we call it “stagecraft.”

Critics and thinkers who are interested in the inner lives of the game are often disdainful of stagecraft. It’s “faking it.” You’re talking to the dead, after all. Now, nothing is entirely “dead” in that sense (everything has some amount of inner life) but there’s a threshold there where they see themselves betrayed. They can tell at a glance that the apparently static output of a Mandelbrot set has a rich inner life, and that Conway’s Game of Life does too, and that a Hardy Boys novel has less.

On the other hand, designers who are more interested in simulation are often accused of “ant farming,” of non-commercial work. They frequently fall into the trap of making games with rich inner lives are are opaque to the player:

It has to be visible and responsive to players. This includes exposing causality. Otherwise, it might as well be random.

- UO’s Resource System, part 3

Because of this, it is usually considered best practice to make sure to have the right amount of stagecraft present to get across the inner life of the object.