Can a Surreal Videogame Exist?
Dictator:
You descend, admiring a mural along the wall of a manatee in a powdered wig, presiding over a fastidious courtroom. You feel the decayed limestone banister. Rococo carvings adorn everything with faces, angels, sea life, and sculpted bronze waves. They cling to the lobby’s contours in an indecipherably specific drama.
Moth:
I stop to feel the banister more closely.
Dictator:
The ship pitches on a great wave, listing to port—you fall against the banister as the mural cracks—the manatee breaks loose, plummets—passing judgement upon you for trying to decipher the indecipherable. You have five seconds to react.
Moth:
No. I accept this judgement.
Surrealism is a cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists depicted unnerving, illogical scenes and developed techniques to allow the unconscious mind to express itself. But you can also read the Wikipedia page on it. This kind of newsletter is more interested in bringing a big [citation needed] to the discussion, so here's mine: surrealism is one of the most wildy misunderstood art movements. Or perhaps, more precisely, it's the movement that's most misunderstood by people who earnestly believe to understand it.
My attempt of a source for this will be a 2012 Lindsay Ellis video on Freddy Got Fingered, the bizarre Tom Green longform film that was exactly what one would expect a Tom Green longform film to be like, full of nonsensical passages and a climax that involves Green's character cheerfully masturbating an elephant (yeah). At one point in the review, Ellis calls for the assistance of Kyle from the Brows Held High series, asking him if the movie is, in fact, a neo-surrealist art film. Kyle's response, condensed, is that it's not, because it makes too much sense.
Sure, it's a movie in which the main character ties sausages on pulleys to his fingers and receives his father singing 'daddy would like some sausages?' while playing a tiny keyboard, causing sausages to dangle freely around the house. But the main character is still the main character, and so is the father. Surrealism isn't just things that are weird or strange - or even Weird and strange; it's things that lack any sort of logic, even internal.
I've recently listened to two works that can fairly claim to be game-based surreal works. One is the short narrative podcast The Goblet Wire, from whence came the quote opening this newsletter: a story in which people play a bizarre role-playing game, one on one, over the phone, with a mysterious entity known as the Dictator. The other one is Joel Guerra's ENA webseries, which is remarkably more difficult to describe, and involves a lady-shaped double-hued entity having misadventures in worlds clearly inspired by poorly understood old videogames. Both works rely heavily on the language of games - but they aren't games themselves.
Which led me to think: can a surreal game even exist? Anna Anthropy famously described games as "an experience defined by rules". That's not an uncontroversial description - I, myself, find it curious that it also describes driving - but it is, by design, wide enough that it covers all experiences one may describe as a game. Conversely, surrealism is defined by a complete lack of rules. The two modes seem intrinsically at odds.
The general confusion between the regularly strange with the surreal certainly doesn't help us solve this conundrum. If pressed to name a surreal game, I'm sure many would spring to mind: the feverish dreams of ACE Team, the bizarre Garage: Bad Dream Adventure that was lost for over a decade before resurfacing on Steam, and many of the bizarre fare that one can see on Alpha Beta Gamer's channel. Still, by and large, these are all weird coats of paint on games with known and knowable mechanics. Like Freddy Got Fingered, they still make too much sense.
I was going to make a joke about how the solution to many old-school adventure games are pretty surreal on their own... but then realized that I was actually getting somewhere. The complex puzzles in old adventure games were meant to portray how brilliant their protagonists were, but they had the opposite effect of making players feel dumb. What if this effect was deliberate and cultivated? What if a surreal game is just a series of inexplicable milieux, in which we must apply cat hair to a duct tape forever, for reasons that are unexplainable to us? It wouldn't even be that revolutionary - it would merely be the application of Problem Attic's design ethos to an adventure game instead of a platformer.
That was where I intended this article to end, with a call to action to my brave readers, but at some point I realized the game I describe already exists, and it's thecatamites' Crime Zone. In fact, thecatamites' larger body of work even pushed that to new heights, with Magic Wand, for instance, containing the mechanics of an action adventure game remarkably unburdened by any actual use for it, besides having your little guy walk from place to place to listen to inane dialogue.
But I don't know. Maybe even the game in which you are all of the cops and pee on yourself still makes too much sense.
Hiatus Announcement
It is a truth universally aknowledged that a cultural work carried on by a single person for no reason other than that they want to do it will eventually enter a hiatus of unknown duration. I'm sad to announce that such a time has arrived for this newsletter.
I'm very happy to have delivered quality (?) game analysis (?) every month for over a year, but lately I feel this well has ran dry, and I need to take some time for it to refill. How long will it take? Maybe a month; maybe forever. Until them, you can still follow me in the cool hipster social media sites below.
To all those who have been with me until now, thank you for your eyes and ears, and I hope to assault them again in the future. Take care.