Ugh, Passage. Ugh.
Are people seriously still convinced that Jason Roher's Passage is a brilliant artistic work? Like, seriously, it's late 2008 and we still believe this?
I'm actually sick of most "art games" in general--there have only been a handful that I've actively enjoyed. Mighty Jill Off is perhaps the best of them--it manages both to make an interesting parallel between a queer/lesbian SM aesthetic and the inherent concept of "games as a hopefully-increasing challenge put upon us by a higher authority" and somehow it's still a hell of a fun game. That's an exception.
The La La Land series, heavily recommended by MJO's author, I found to be completely incoherent and unplayable--to the extent where there were goals and controls, they were actively unfriendly. I dimly understood that the author was making some sort of comment about game goals and game controls, but it was made with such carefully-studied ineptness that whatever he was trying to say was lost. I've used programs such as Game Maker before and I know it takes a lot of talent to suck so much at design.
Rod Humble's games (The Marriage and Stars Over Half Moon Bay) are also cited as textbook art-game examples, and both are terrible--too abstract, too fuzzy and unclear.
But Passage is the worst of the lot. There's the old playground joke about Sonic the Hedgehog that Nintendo supporters would say--in Mario, you get to explore and shit. In Sonic, all you have to do to win the game is hold right and you'll be at the end of the level. Well, in Passage, that's pretty much what you have to do to win. You're in a very simple maze and you have to get to the end. Your character starts off as a child on the left side of the screen and by the time you finally make it to the end of the maze, you're an old man. There are tiny little diversions--you can get a wife, who follows you for the entirety of the game until she dies of old age, and you can get little treasure chests which do nothing. That's the entire game. If you hold right, with the exception of a couple of roadblocks which you navigate around, you will get to the end.
I know, I know, not the point. It's Symbolic. The maze symbolizes your Journey through Life. Many "players" (I use the term loosely since I'm not 100% sure it's a game, but I don't want to get into that argument today) report tearing up when the wife died because she's with you the entire game and then...not. The treasure chests represent random goals that you can achieve.
I do find this an extremely nihilistic interpretation of life. The characters are given no characterization whatsoever--I'm not so much upset with that per se. Cutscenes would be inappropriate. [Though it's not like games have been unable to convey emotion without words and cutscenes. ICO is the gold standard for this--most of the characterization of Yorda (and Yorda and Ico's relationship) is done wordlessly, through the way the two interact; Roher seems to be unable to do this--partially because he has chosen such a simple and retro style which does not physically allow for much interaction.] But as it is, the wife is just a sprite. And the protagonist is not me--I'm not heterosexual or married, and I don't feel interested in doing the work to mentally substitute "male partner" for "female wife" in my mind--I do enough of that crap when listening to music. So ultimately the game seems to be saying that marriage is meaningless--there is no benefit to having a wife. Fact is, in traditional game terms, it's a disadvantage--it slows down your character speed, and certain paths with treasures are unattainable. Even getting those treasures is pointless. Some of the chests are empty, symbolizing, according to the author's statement, that "not every pursuit leads to a reward---most of them are empty"--but there is no particular difference between getting every reward and getting none at all. In other words, there's no point in accomplishing anything. He who dies with the most toys still dies.
But I'm not living a life, much as Roher would have me believe. I'm doing something similar to playing a game. Videogames' most obvious inherent trait is their interactivity (I'm convinced that bit is completely grammatically wrong, but if Roher can throw out all the rules of videogames and get acclaim, I can through out the rules of grammar), we all know this, and the point of games is to convey delight through that interactivity. While many games do have cosmetic awards--unlocking an alternate costume for your character if you kill enough monsters, for example--that can be successful, games are at their best when they reward in a system of gameplay advantages and disadvantages. (I'd go to say that cosmetic awards are the lowest form of reward--altering the sprite with no particular gameplay advantage or disadvantage. It just gives you something different to look at.) Mighty Jill Off rewards good progress by making its levels harder--which fits its theme (masochism) perfectly--the more pain a bottom takes, the more a good top will respond by increasing that pain; a masochist will find that pain pleasurable, and dammit, we do to when playing the game: the difficulty spikes every level and gives the impression of, yes, now I have to use all of my reflexes here, now I have to step up to this challenge that's been given me. Most good games do this ramping in difficulty; while the balance isn't always as good in MJO, a well-crafted game will teach you to play itself. It'll present you with a challenge that you have to solve; the next level will be harder and you've got to apply what you learned in the last level plus come up with some new techniques. If the character's moveset is static throughout the game, this is the best way of giving reward to the player.
With a dynamic moveset, you've got a few more options--namely, giving more toys to the player. Zelda and Metroid work this way--you do a challenge, and you get a new weapon, or more energy or ammunition. Obviously this can tie in with cosmetic rewards and difficulty ramps--sometimes learning a new technique proposes its own challenges. In its best incarnation, which is the Spinner from Twilight Princess (a toy so awesome that my best friend and I were moved to dub it The Coolington), it provides a new technique, shows you a cool picture, and gives you a new type of level to worry about.
Passage attempts to give all of these and fails. Having a wife in tow is a cosmetic award, but since the sprites are so stripped-down (I'll get more into that later) and since it conveys a strong disadvantage as far as pure gameplay goes, it's not that great of one. It attempts to ramp up the difficulty--it adds more roadblocks as the game goes on--but it's neither challenging nor pleasurable, it just means you have to tap up or down a little more often than just tapping right. And it attempts to give you toys--the treasures--but since they don't do anything, what the hell is the point?
Many art games are done in a retro pixelly style [partially to tap into nostalgia, partially because they're generally made by one person and simple sprites are easier to do without a graphics team], and Passage is no exception. The problem is Roher's art is just plain ugly to me. It's like he's trying to tap into the Iconic--as Scott McCloud and several papers I wrote in grad school will tell you, the more stripped down an image gets, the more likely you are to identify with it--but failing greatly. I'd go to say the graphics are too stripped down. McCloud identifies two dots and a curved line--the clasic smily face--as the most iconic you can get within cartooning; a single large pixel (remember Atari 2600 days?) is the most iconic you can get within videogames. But there's such a thing as too iconic--when something gets to that level of abstraction, it stops being something to identify with and starts going to be a symbol. That dot represents an adventurer, Roher's art represents a man on a life journey; both are too roughly-drawn to do the work of being a shell to put ourselves into. If he's trying to create empathy, he's failed: it almost seems like he's drawing in his style because That's What Art Games Do rather than because it helps his theme. The Marriage features geometric shapes as its "characters"--and we see them as geometric shapes rather than the types of people he's making a comment about. It doesn't work; it's about as emotional as an Excel chart. Facade, which features distinctive characters (except for the protagonist, who's first-person and faceless and designed to be an avatar of the player), manages to create more empathy because it gives you something to hang emotions on. Passage is alienating.
I'm just the most familiar with Passage, but the same could be said about most Art Games, and it's a damn shame, because there is a need for more sophistication in videogames. But it just seems they concentrate too much on the "art" and not enough on the "games." A game is fundamentally interactive and the joy comes from that interactivity. Story, we have found, can be incidental to an excellent game--"save the princess" was the cliche of 80s and early 90s gaming, and the games were often fun--but gameplay cannot--there's a reason that Interactive Movies failed. Using interactivity to tell a story and create emotions and empathy has been done before many times--we wouldn't be playing games if this weren't the case--and Passage most emphatically does not do that: it's an exercise in tedium and pretentiousness with no point to back it up.
So guys, stop getting hysterical about how "great" it is.
I'm actually sick of most "art games" in general--there have only been a handful that I've actively enjoyed. Mighty Jill Off is perhaps the best of them--it manages both to make an interesting parallel between a queer/lesbian SM aesthetic and the inherent concept of "games as a hopefully-increasing challenge put upon us by a higher authority" and somehow it's still a hell of a fun game. That's an exception.
The La La Land series, heavily recommended by MJO's author, I found to be completely incoherent and unplayable--to the extent where there were goals and controls, they were actively unfriendly. I dimly understood that the author was making some sort of comment about game goals and game controls, but it was made with such carefully-studied ineptness that whatever he was trying to say was lost. I've used programs such as Game Maker before and I know it takes a lot of talent to suck so much at design.
Rod Humble's games (The Marriage and Stars Over Half Moon Bay) are also cited as textbook art-game examples, and both are terrible--too abstract, too fuzzy and unclear.
But Passage is the worst of the lot. There's the old playground joke about Sonic the Hedgehog that Nintendo supporters would say--in Mario, you get to explore and shit. In Sonic, all you have to do to win the game is hold right and you'll be at the end of the level. Well, in Passage, that's pretty much what you have to do to win. You're in a very simple maze and you have to get to the end. Your character starts off as a child on the left side of the screen and by the time you finally make it to the end of the maze, you're an old man. There are tiny little diversions--you can get a wife, who follows you for the entirety of the game until she dies of old age, and you can get little treasure chests which do nothing. That's the entire game. If you hold right, with the exception of a couple of roadblocks which you navigate around, you will get to the end.
I know, I know, not the point. It's Symbolic. The maze symbolizes your Journey through Life. Many "players" (I use the term loosely since I'm not 100% sure it's a game, but I don't want to get into that argument today) report tearing up when the wife died because she's with you the entire game and then...not. The treasure chests represent random goals that you can achieve.
I do find this an extremely nihilistic interpretation of life. The characters are given no characterization whatsoever--I'm not so much upset with that per se. Cutscenes would be inappropriate. [Though it's not like games have been unable to convey emotion without words and cutscenes. ICO is the gold standard for this--most of the characterization of Yorda (and Yorda and Ico's relationship) is done wordlessly, through the way the two interact; Roher seems to be unable to do this--partially because he has chosen such a simple and retro style which does not physically allow for much interaction.] But as it is, the wife is just a sprite. And the protagonist is not me--I'm not heterosexual or married, and I don't feel interested in doing the work to mentally substitute "male partner" for "female wife" in my mind--I do enough of that crap when listening to music. So ultimately the game seems to be saying that marriage is meaningless--there is no benefit to having a wife. Fact is, in traditional game terms, it's a disadvantage--it slows down your character speed, and certain paths with treasures are unattainable. Even getting those treasures is pointless. Some of the chests are empty, symbolizing, according to the author's statement, that "not every pursuit leads to a reward---most of them are empty"--but there is no particular difference between getting every reward and getting none at all. In other words, there's no point in accomplishing anything. He who dies with the most toys still dies.
But I'm not living a life, much as Roher would have me believe. I'm doing something similar to playing a game. Videogames' most obvious inherent trait is their interactivity (I'm convinced that bit is completely grammatically wrong, but if Roher can throw out all the rules of videogames and get acclaim, I can through out the rules of grammar), we all know this, and the point of games is to convey delight through that interactivity. While many games do have cosmetic awards--unlocking an alternate costume for your character if you kill enough monsters, for example--that can be successful, games are at their best when they reward in a system of gameplay advantages and disadvantages. (I'd go to say that cosmetic awards are the lowest form of reward--altering the sprite with no particular gameplay advantage or disadvantage. It just gives you something different to look at.) Mighty Jill Off rewards good progress by making its levels harder--which fits its theme (masochism) perfectly--the more pain a bottom takes, the more a good top will respond by increasing that pain; a masochist will find that pain pleasurable, and dammit, we do to when playing the game: the difficulty spikes every level and gives the impression of, yes, now I have to use all of my reflexes here, now I have to step up to this challenge that's been given me. Most good games do this ramping in difficulty; while the balance isn't always as good in MJO, a well-crafted game will teach you to play itself. It'll present you with a challenge that you have to solve; the next level will be harder and you've got to apply what you learned in the last level plus come up with some new techniques. If the character's moveset is static throughout the game, this is the best way of giving reward to the player.
With a dynamic moveset, you've got a few more options--namely, giving more toys to the player. Zelda and Metroid work this way--you do a challenge, and you get a new weapon, or more energy or ammunition. Obviously this can tie in with cosmetic rewards and difficulty ramps--sometimes learning a new technique proposes its own challenges. In its best incarnation, which is the Spinner from Twilight Princess (a toy so awesome that my best friend and I were moved to dub it The Coolington), it provides a new technique, shows you a cool picture, and gives you a new type of level to worry about.
Passage attempts to give all of these and fails. Having a wife in tow is a cosmetic award, but since the sprites are so stripped-down (I'll get more into that later) and since it conveys a strong disadvantage as far as pure gameplay goes, it's not that great of one. It attempts to ramp up the difficulty--it adds more roadblocks as the game goes on--but it's neither challenging nor pleasurable, it just means you have to tap up or down a little more often than just tapping right. And it attempts to give you toys--the treasures--but since they don't do anything, what the hell is the point?
Many art games are done in a retro pixelly style [partially to tap into nostalgia, partially because they're generally made by one person and simple sprites are easier to do without a graphics team], and Passage is no exception. The problem is Roher's art is just plain ugly to me. It's like he's trying to tap into the Iconic--as Scott McCloud and several papers I wrote in grad school will tell you, the more stripped down an image gets, the more likely you are to identify with it--but failing greatly. I'd go to say the graphics are too stripped down. McCloud identifies two dots and a curved line--the clasic smily face--as the most iconic you can get within cartooning; a single large pixel (remember Atari 2600 days?) is the most iconic you can get within videogames. But there's such a thing as too iconic--when something gets to that level of abstraction, it stops being something to identify with and starts going to be a symbol. That dot represents an adventurer, Roher's art represents a man on a life journey; both are too roughly-drawn to do the work of being a shell to put ourselves into. If he's trying to create empathy, he's failed: it almost seems like he's drawing in his style because That's What Art Games Do rather than because it helps his theme. The Marriage features geometric shapes as its "characters"--and we see them as geometric shapes rather than the types of people he's making a comment about. It doesn't work; it's about as emotional as an Excel chart. Facade, which features distinctive characters (except for the protagonist, who's first-person and faceless and designed to be an avatar of the player), manages to create more empathy because it gives you something to hang emotions on. Passage is alienating.
I'm just the most familiar with Passage, but the same could be said about most Art Games, and it's a damn shame, because there is a need for more sophistication in videogames. But it just seems they concentrate too much on the "art" and not enough on the "games." A game is fundamentally interactive and the joy comes from that interactivity. Story, we have found, can be incidental to an excellent game--"save the princess" was the cliche of 80s and early 90s gaming, and the games were often fun--but gameplay cannot--there's a reason that Interactive Movies failed. Using interactivity to tell a story and create emotions and empathy has been done before many times--we wouldn't be playing games if this weren't the case--and Passage most emphatically does not do that: it's an exercise in tedium and pretentiousness with no point to back it up.
So guys, stop getting hysterical about how "great" it is.
posted by R. Goodness at 6:22 AM
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