Touché, bitches!

It’s a pet topic of certain authors on this blog to talk about a so-called postmodern turn in contemporary games. After reading about postmodernity in gaming on this blog, a fellow reviewer and journalist recommended that I play The Chinese Room’s Dear Esther. As she saw it, Dear Esther incorporates many of the conclusions of postmodernism much like The Path. I played it and agreed with her. But what was it that made her—and me—think Dear Esther would add interesting elements to the pomo argument? It wasn’t the genre-challenging nature of the game. Nor was it the inherent intertextuality. Dear Esther slots nicely into the postmodern argument because it is built around a highly polysemous narrative. In other words, the story is amiable to multiple—if not infinite—interpretations. I’ll begin with a quote from the developer about the game:

‘The user [of Dear Esther] navigates the environment, triggering audio fragments of a narrative which, together with visual clues and codes embedded in the world, build to create a story which is inherently constructed around the innate slippage of meaning and fragmentary nature of interactive experiences.’

Obvious in this quote is that the game was built around this idea of polysemy. In Dear Esther, the player—or ‘user’—is not given a cogent or even seemingly sensible narrative. Via audio of someone reading out letters to Esther and environmental cues like things written on walls or figures in the distance we are delivered fragments of something what we assume is a broad narrative. These snippets are fragmentary and discordant, so much so that the game fails to deliver a pre-determined plot. But this is the intention. Let me quote a commenter on Dear Esther’s Moddb page:

‘Lol. Im to scared to find out the secrets of this island, Can someone please tell me what all the writings are about [sic]’

The discordancy of Dear Esther’s ‘narrative’ is genuinely scary. It’s not because the island setting is grim and deserted. This isn’t enough to scare most gamers. What makes it so scary is our own minds; the way we interpret the cues we’re given in the context of someone wandering a deserted island. I should add here that we don’t know from whose perspective we’re playing. Is it Esther; is it the sender of the letters; is it a ghost; or is it someone/something else?

Anyway—back to postmodernism. Dear Esther is, as discussed above, completely polysemous. Like The Path, there is no set meaning to the text as a whole. Also like The Path, it doesn’t resolve the central ‘plot’ tenets. As such, any reading you give it is correct. Welcome, Postmodernity. Dear Esther successfully utilizes this postomdernist idea of polysemy to create an interesting and absorbing experience (see abiove). It also challenges the taxonomies that be: what is ‘game’; what can first-person games be; can games be art; and what is an ‘interactive story’ as opposed to a game? When you play it you’ll see what I’m getting at and I’m not going into these idea here. I’m going to posit something instead—games bereft of narrative conclusiveness are gaining prominence and postmodernism in gaming can be observed at some level across many modern games.

The Path, Dear Esther, Blueberry Garden, Mad World and many others provide the player with input that we assume is narrative-related. But we aren’t told anything conclusive and thus mould said inputs into something useful. As such, these games are polysemous. Postmodernism is a framework that’s overlaid on texts and not something necessarily inherent in their creation. But what these games do is bring the ideas of postmodernism to the fore and it should be noted that many of these games have other postmodern traits. And it should be noted that by implementing a polysemy in games, developers are acknowledging a dialogue that exists between them—the artist—and players. In other words, they acknowledge that how art is read is not entirely up to the creator and that it is often a compromise between inherent components in the work and the reader’s (player’s) interpretation.

I think it’s interesting how the medium is used to analyze the textual polysemy argued for by postmodern scholars. But not only do I think it’s interesting, I also think it’s very important. These games investigate the ideas scholars have thus-far only alluded to in books, film, music, architecture and art. From an academic-theoretical perspective, this helps to modernize the medium of games and forcibly bring them up to speed with other medias. I’d argue that this pomo turn in gaming is a reaction to the games as art issue—can games be considered art like other mediums? Of course they can. And these games demonstrate this by incorporating features of other types of text.

I encourage anyone who reads this to tell us about any other games that fit this description. I also highly encourage you all to play Dear Esther. It’s an enlightening and fascinating experience that none of us here at Touche will be forgetting soon.

I recently read this post at Sexy Videogameland which made me think about all the old games I played. Consequently, I went around to my parents’ and dug up all the old boxes that belonged to an array of PC, Game Boy, SNES and Playstation games. And this got me to thinking: many of these boxes, particularly PC game boxes, are well designed, embossed, large A4 and look good on a shelf like books do. These days I just download games through Steam or WiiWare or buy it in a standard plastic case. The transition happened without me noticing. So where did the boxes go and why don’t I mind that they’re gone?

There is a debate raging in dorky niche-blogs all over the internet about the death of the book. Not in the video-games-and-movies-are-destroying-books way, but in the e-books-are-cheaper way. People everywhere are worried that e-book readers like Kindle, e-books themselves and print-on-demand services will ultimately result in the demise of the book as an artifact. There seems to be a high value placed on books as objects and I for one can understand why—there is nothing quite like a beautifully designed and printed novel. Here is one example and another.

While there was a similar reaction when music started going digital, there seems to have been no fuss when video games did with the advent of services like Steam. I mean, think about it—books, music and games all manifest in ways that transcend the objects by which they are delivered: books in stories played out in the mind, music in aural and thoughtful stimulation and games in images, narratives and thoughts delivered through the screen. Almost gone are the days when you could buy a game in special edition packaging with embossed titles and shiny foils designed to move more units. I mean, they still exist, but they’re catered to hardcore consumers and have smaller runs than the old Starcraft special edition boxes did. That being said, almost all new games come exclusively via download or in plastic cases pioneered by the DVD and not actual boxes.

Why is this? Why do people on one hand fear the demise of books, records and CDs but barely bat an eyelid when some games become available only online [1] [2]? What’s the difference in these medias that facilitates this?

I personally think all these questions can be answered by considering this last question. Let’s start by comparing books and games. Books as we know them have been around for well over 4oo years when Jonathan was only a twinkle in great-great-great-great-great-great grandpa Blow’s eye. Books, as such, have a heavily ingrained set of traditions and practices associated with their appearance, their production and their societal values and people understandably don’t want to let this go. Once books go E, the printing press will all but disappear, designers will struggle for work as more people use open source layout tools to do it themselves, in lieu of reduced revenue publishers will cut costs resulting in lower quality books.

Video games on the other hand have developed in parallel with the technology that’s said to dissipate the book. Many of us, I’m sure, have downloaded demo games before buying their full-version boxed form. And after all, the packaging is secondary to the game itself. Also, video games are delivered in the same forms either by the internet or on a disk whereas books seem to be damaged by this sort of transmittal.

So why then the fuss about CDs? These arguments made about games surely translate there. Well, we musn’t forget that as music went digital, people weren’t sure about how a variety of other technological factors would impact: e.g. internet speeds, availability of media players. In other words, the associated technology was in a state of flux.

Video games, by comparison, quietly go download-only without anyone worrying about it or caring. It happened gradually as internet speeds went up. Also, gamers are generally young and are quite comfy using the internet. They understand that the media is more useful to them when stored remotely: you can’t lose it and it can’t be damaged or stolen. And I personally would rather see a healthy list of games in my Steam client than boxes on my shelf just as I’d rather see my iTunes library carefully organized than my CD cabinet alphabetized.

Like we’ve seen with CDs and even vinyl, we’ll still be able to find most games in stores and I don’t think any of us will live to see the day when bricks-and-mortar bookstores are boutique. But it is an interesting thought—that games, due to their nature, are manifest in something completely transcendent of their associated artifacts whereas books seem not to be. I argue this is to do with the cultures around them and not the objects themselves. As I mentioned earlier, special edition packaging was used to sell more copies of a game, but perhaps the gradual disappearance of such things suggest that gamers never valued these things like readers prefer a hard cover. That is, it’s a different culture with different prerogatives and a different understanding of the impacts of technology. Finally, I’ll leave you with a question not addressed here:

• How do collectors of cartridge-only games fit into this discussion? Are they analogous with readers? How might Virtual Console and the like affect said people?