Touché, bitches!

And so the debate rages—is The Path a game or not. Judging from several recent blog posts, people demand that it be one or the other.

See, I don’t agree with this. In fact, I think The Path is so freakin’ postmodern that its whole purpose is to challenge classification. And, therefore, whether or not it’s a game is irrelevant. Let me explain…

We’ll begin this by considering some of the ways The Path differs from “traditional” games. Well, firstly, the game sort of lies to you. You’re told to go to your grandma’s house and stay on the path, but if that’s all you do, it’s GG; you must do the opposite. Secondly, The Path has no clear, overarching narrative. As you explore the woods, gather memories and encounter a “wolf”, you notice that there is nothing clear tying these occurrences together.

So as you can see, there is a tension in The Path between the purported aim (get to grandma’s house; stay on the path) and what you actually have to do (leave path, gather memories). Similarly, its title (The Path) implies some linearity, but there is none—so we can assume, at least, considering there is no apparent cogent narrative.

This tension highlights the boundaries by which players will define The Path. A game, intuition tells us, gives us coherent objectives or, at least, leads us to find them. Likewise, games will tie certain points together and give us some indication of how to make sense of the connections. The Path throws these out the window and challenges our complacency with them. By drawing our attention to how we read and define video games, the contradictions in The Path deconstruct the category “game”—a hallmark of postmodern texts.

Upon playing The Path, no longer can the player take for granted what is and isn’t a member of the category “game”; they must objectify and reconsider. And this, I believe, is a major concern of the game. The developers refer to it as a game thus bringing this notion to the fore: we expect it to be a game and, upon playing, question why it is or is not a game. It is designed to raise a set of specific questions, or at least it does so very well:

• Is the notion of “video game” changing; in the wake of The Path, does it need to change?
• Are our assumptions about “the game” wrong?
• Where are the definitional boundaries of “video game”?

My arguments are supported by the fact that The Path has stirred such a debate. Whether or not I think it is a game is irrelevant, but following on from my arguments above, I don’t think it has to be either—it depends on how you define “game” and interpret The Path itself. And this is the brilliance of The Path—it has involved gamers in a critical debate about video games and forced them to question and justify their own classifications.

So debate-on, my fellow bloggers! I look forward to the weeks ahead.

A demo of The Path is available for Mac and PC. It’s brand new and not actually part of the full version. It’s a prologue.

http://tale-of-tales.com/ThePath/

I’ll begin this by saying something that I know will make many of you scoff at my gaming cred. For many years my main computer-gaming platform was a Mac. That’s right—an Apple Mac! And I loved the beige beast.

“But SystemShock was never released for Mac! How could you possibly know games?” I hear you say. Well, frankly, you can shut up. I also had a PC, but I played more games on Mac because the games had different aesthetics; different priorities. As a young gamer forming his ideas about games, I found the dichotomy between the games on the two platforms fascinating. Plus, I found the simplicity of many Mac games liberating from dungeon-trawling in Baron Baldric: Mystic Towers (1994).

Coming from this background, it strikes me as odd the the debate about games as art has seemingly ignore games developed solely for Mac OS. For me at least, this gives rise to a somewhat hollow debate—simply put, we’re neglecting a part of gaming history.

Granted, Macs were never good for gaming. They lacked power, upgradability and, considering the age of the average gamer, affordability. I think these factors all generated something of a—now institutionalized—Mac-phobia amongst gamers. Even though I run a PC as well, whenever I tell gamers I own a Mac, I get questions like “You heard of this game called Counterstrike? It’s like Virtua Cop but completely different.”

That said, however, most Mac owners weren’t gamers: the people buying Macs were graphic designers, web developers and desktop publishers. But even designers—yes, designers—needed distractions.

Because most Macs were used for work, games made for them had to function as temporary, short-term distractions (at home Mac users were reading Doug Coupland and watching I’m Alan Partridge). The upshot: games developed for Mac had to cater to an aesthetically conscious, casual gaming market. And indeed, many Mac-exclusive games were visually impeccable.

Maelstrom: time for some ‘stroid grinding!

Developers catered to this audience by using the principles of existing games—largely arcade-style games from the 70s and 80s and DOS games from the 80s and 90s—and treating them as a canvas onto which they could build good visual ideas.

A buffet of games emerged that, while simple, looked great. They had lush textures, colorful character and environment design and smooth motion mechanics comparable to many current games.

Nanosaur: in-psycho-credible!

An example of this is Maelstrom (1993) made by Ambrosia software. Flying through sparse space environments shooting asteroids—what more could you want? In the Space Invaders-esque Apeiron (1995), instead of playing a spaceship shooting down alien things, you’re a green spinning cone shooting a caterpillar as it closes-in on you. Oh, and there are mushrooms in your way.

Apeiron: Space Invaders if made by CS Lewis.

With all the talk these days about backup carts for the DS, mods for Wii and PS3 and the oh-so-crunchy innovations from the world of bitpop, it’s easy to forget (or not know about) the stalwart modders who do other interesting and innovating things with platforms. For example, some people build build tilt sensors into their Gameboys. Welcome to tilt-controlled GB tennis:

Others do far more awesome stuff. I don’t know if it’s just me, but I’d rather this to a tilt sensor or even a fully-modded Wii!

Similar to the above example. This guy has routed a SNES controller into his DS. Again—pure awesome:

A dream come true, is it? Four controller-ports in a SNES. Yeah, boi!

Okay, fine—anything about modding is incomplete without a mention of bitpop. As anyone familiar with Gameboy modding for bitpop will know, a lot of people have linked oscillators to the Gameboy chipset to alter the sound. Some have done it more eloquently than others:

On the more rudimentary side of things, casemods—which, as the name implies, are modifications to the unit’s casing—are also popular amongst a certain kind of modder. Often, the results are tacky and needless and I wouldn’t really call this modding. However, I do want this guy’s Batman NES (he offers his services, so consider it, guys!):

And finally, a well-known example of a weird and sorta wonderful Gameboy mod: the tongue-controlled GBA. An external tongue-touch pad has been routed to the central chipset allowing users to control the GBA d-pad.

Image from Techeblog. Well worth checking out! Discusses some other great mods.