Game Analysts Do Need to Grow Up (But Not in the Way You Think)
I was tricked by Kurt Vonnegut once.
One of his most famous novels, Slaugherhouse-Five, begins with a preface in which the author describes the circumstances that brought him to writing the book. In a very touching moment he is talking to the widow of a man who died in World War II, and who is very wary of the author's reasons for writing a book that takes place in the same war, being very tired of its depicition as a righteous, heroic combat instead of the literall hell that killed her husband. The author, who also fought in WWII, gains her trust by explaining that his point of view, and therefore that of the book he's writing, matches that of the widow's, and he promises to name the book The Children's Crusade. (Hence the book's full title: "Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death".)
Later, I was reading the Wikipedia article on the book - in case you're wondering what it is that friendless introverts do instead of joining book clubs - and was shocked to learn that the character in the preface, while very obviously based on Vonnegut, is also a fictitious character, and, to quote that very article, "there is no reason to presume that the first chapter is not also fiction". (Which is why I talk about 'the author' in the above paragraph instead of naming him as Vonnegut.)
I was shocked. I shouldn't have been; there are very obvious indications that the author is a character himself, including a moment in which a side character is explicitly called out as being the author, which would mean that either Vonnegut was writing an extensive account of a real man's life (up to his death, some ten years after the book's publication) or that the 'narrator' is fictional. Instead, I believed that Vonnegut's preface was literally true, and the author's actions in the book had also been literally true. Which is, in my defense, quite a solid reading, especially for someone who was still quite green on post-modern fiction.
It's curious how the way fiction is read and intepreted changes. Moby-Dick was released in 1851 - a century and some years before Slaugherhouse-Five, which is from 1969. Here are some century-and-a-half-old spoilers: at the end of Moby-Dick, the ship they are on dies, sunk by the devilish white whale and/or their captain's obsession. The sole survivor is the narrator, "call me" Ishmael, who is rescued from the wreckage by a boat they had met earlier in the story, and thus lives to tell his tale. However, the first US edition supressed the final chapter in which it happened, leaving no indication that anyone survived, to disastrous effect: critics were angry at the ending, claiming that there was no way that this story could be told if the main character died, and thus the whole thing made no sense. A century and a half isn't that long of a time; and yet, nowadays, it's completely normal to think of a novel as a relay of a character's experiences, with no thought relayed to the material ways in which a story is told. A character that dies at the end is common enough nowadays to be considered a trope; and what could we say about stories that take place in secondary worlds, or in distant futures?
Skip forward to about a decade later. I had just played The Beginner's Guide, a brilliant game by Davey Wreden, half the brains behind The Stanley Parable. Much like Slaughterhouse-Five, the game uses the author-as-character trope, although to a much higher extent: the game is wholly narrated by Wreden, and it purports to present the work of a developer named Coda, with whom Wreden had a peculiar obsession for years. Without wading too deep into spoiler territory, the game ends with Coda very clearly berating Wreden for interfering with the way the work is meant to stand; but, as we are being guided by Wreden, we see only his point of view, and he fails to realize what Coda asks of him even when it's literally spelled out in the level.
This was one of my favourite games of its time, and quite probably one of the few games with a twist ending that give a second playthrough not only greater intellectual depth, but emotional as well, as the ways Wreden changed Coda's games to meet his own expectations of what they should be like become painfully apparent, and the reasoning behind choices that are obfuscated by Wreden's own limited perspective become obvious. So, after I finished playing it, I went after articles and podcasts discussing it - in case you're wondering what it is that friendless introverts do instead of playing games with their friends.
I had one hell of a surprise. Nearly everything that I saw covering the game in depth assumed that the fiction of the game was real - that Coda was a real person, and that the fictional Wreden that narrates the game was the real Wreden. Some of them did say they didn't think this was the case, but made a point to say that it'd be very bad if it was - a disclaimer that's useless if you don't think there's at least a fair chance of something being real. The worst part is that even very clever analysts - the kind willing to look deeply at games as artworks, and not as mere toys full of shiny graphics that sometimes tell you a funny story as you play - were doing this.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool everyone at the same time for something that's blatantly obvious... shame on everyone.
Let's be clear. My mistake with Slaughterhouse-Five was borne out of inexperience. I wasn't used to post-modernism at the time, and the other Vonnegut books I'd read hadn't leaned so hard on fourth-wall breaking. This case is completely different. Other than the fact that Wreden had used his own name for his character-self - something I'll admit muddles a simple analysis, but the simplest literary analysis will explain - it's absolutely impossible for the game to exist in its current format if the fictional Wreden was the same as the real one. Let aside the very obvious signs of Wreden's obsession that surface at the end, that are so obvious that they are obviously part of a written work. If the story was true, the entirety of the game would consist of works made by a third party and published without their consent. What publisher would agree to this?
I don't find myself to be a particularly insightful game analyst. (Strong words from someone who runs a monthly newsletter on the subject.) I certainly don't believe my abilities to be greater than those of most people who do it on the regular. Which is why I was suprised to see an entire community collective commiting the same error I had commited a decade before, except in a much more obvious occasion. The Beginner's Guide has excellent themes of alienation, expectation and obsession - but only if you see it as it is, as a fictional story, since real stories don't really have themes. If analysis is unable to even see it for what it is, what hope have we got?
December's Link Roundup
Oldest Written Sentence Found Inscribed on Ancient Head-Lice Comb
The statement written in a tiny comb, dating from the 17th century BC, is awesome in its mundanity.
Did Martin Scorsese direct Goncharov 1973? Tumblr fiction debunked
While most of the world was busy watching men kick balls, Tumblr created an entire movie based on the tag of a pair of off-brand boots. This article presents a passable summary of what the hell happened.
We Sent a Dick Pic to the Moon—And We're Doing It Again
Well, it was made by Andy Warhol, who claims it's just his initials. You're free to believe it. But how could a tiny repisotory of Earth art skip this inescapable suject?
Who Said It: Elon Musk or Mr. Burns?
I got a surprising low 42%.
This month's video is a pretty weird animation on anime girls and robots fighting.
