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.