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Every Day the Same Dream? Social Critique through Serious

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EVERY DAY THE SAME DREAM? SOCIAL CRITIQUE THROUGH SERIOUS GAMEPLAY

Alina Petra Marinescu Nenciu, Cosima Rughiniş Faculty of Sociology and Social Work, University of Bucharest, Schitu Măgureanu 9, Bucharest, Romania [email protected], [email protected]

Abstract: Recent years have witnessed an increase in the visibility of the so-called ‘art games’ both in the gaming community and in academic reflection. This label applies, as a rule, to relatively short indie games that appear to have a message about the human condition, life, psyche, society and, often, also about the game genre, in a self-referential loop. Depending on game topics and rhetorical approach, commentators have advanced a variety of tags to describe them, including ‘experimental games’, ‘news games’, ‘grave games’, ‘existential games’, or ‘not games’. Scholarly literature has discussed their rhetorical specificity with a focus on procedurality and players’ creativity. Games are seen essentially as an ensemble of rules and mechanics, working in conjunction with a narrative layer, inviting players to interact and thus to (re)create meaning. There are two dominant controversies that structure game studies: (1) whether and how games can be studied as narratives and (2) what is the relative importance of procedurality versus creative gameplay. These debates obscure another specific element of game rhetoric: the message of art games is substantially elaborated in the community of players, through comments, reviews, and comments to reviews – amounting to a large cloud of textual, interactive, online reflection. Players engage in the game but, often, also read and write comments and reviews, thus confronting their experience with others’ and exploring a larger spectrum of interpretations. Games propose a time for gameplay and also a time for conversation. Therefore, we argue that the rhetoric of art games relies not only on procedurality and creative gameplay, but also on the distributed, multivocal reflection of an online community of players. Art games are embedded in a plurilogue through which they are interpreted and re-interpreted as art objects and social critique, and their message is formulated in text. In this article we explore ‘Every Day the Same Dream’, an that has elicited a variety of gameplay experiences, emotions and assessments. We examine player comments and reviews and we discuss their role in interpreting games and formulating their messages.

Keywords: serious games; art games; procedural rhetoric; distributed cognition

I. INTRODUCTION

Video games are increasingly used as a medium for ethical statements, for example reflections on human existence or critiques of social arrangements, from various ideological standpoints. Casual art games are an evolving sub-genre, consisting in short video games that advance a message about human life and society. They typically last for a few minutes or dozens of minutes, are created by independent developers, and are free to play. Some of them may aim to be entertaining as well, while others – so-called ‘grave games’ [1] – make their statement precisely through refusing pleasure, or by challenging other conventions of the game genre. These games are serious – not by honing skills or conveying information, but by commenting, from a distance, on our daily life [2].

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Casual art games cover a vast array of topics. Some of them point to existential issues in individual lives – from aging and mortality (‘Passage’, ‘The Graveyard’, ‘I am a brave knight’, or ‘Home’) to love, loss and memory (‘But that Was [Yesterday]’), psychological distress or disorders (‘Loneliness’, ‘It’s for the best’, ‘Perfection’, ‘ALZ’, ‘Fixation’ and ‘The company of myself’), or specifically depression (‘Depression Quest’, ‘Elude’, ‘Actual Sunlight’, or ‘Prisoned’). Other games aim for topics pertaining to social life. For example, La Molleindustria has developed a series of games addressing aspects of war (Unmanned), organized religion (Operation: Pedopriest), copyright regulations (‘The free culture game’) and capitalism – from alienation (‘Every Day the Same Dream’) to criminal behaviors elicited from businesspeople (‘McDonalds Videogame’) and condoned from business partners (‘Phone story’). Video games that aim to comment on social issues can be productively compared to political cartoons [3], in order to identify their distinctiveness as a medium. A relevant difference is that while political cartoons have, as a rule, a rather unambiguous meaning, often conveyed through both image and text, this is not necessarily the case with games. There are several sources of ambiguity in games: firstly, players have a considerable role in shaping the gameplay story and deciding the message for themselves. Secondly, games may have several possible endings, requiring an interpretation that takes all of them into account. Thirdly, some games make little if any use of language, requiring players to rely solely on visual, musical and actional hints to interpret the story and the message. The minimalist graphics characteristic for many art games means that the characters, objects and events may be visually under-specified. For example, in Every Day the Same Dream, players must decide whether the character from the final scene is the playing character or somebody else (and, if so, who could he be). This ambiguity means that an exploration of alternative interpretations may enrich the gameplay experience, and players are often looking for others’ thoughts on the game. In the growing field of game studies there is increasing attention to the rhetoric of video games – analyzing resources and strategies through which games create emotional experiences, convey meaning, and persuade players. This issue is very much relevant for casual art games that aim to convey messages, incite emotions or stir reflection about the human condition, in brief lapses of play: How can we interpret such games? Where can we find signs, indicators for their point? Where do other players find them? What are the rhetorical tools deployed by game developers to formulate social critique through gameplay? Who else contributes to the emergence of game messages, besides developers and players? In this paper we examine La Molleindustria’s game ‘Every Day the Same Dream’ [4], comparing it with three other games that approach work and corporate life with a critical touch: ‘Inside a dead skyscraper’, also from La Molleindustria [5], ‘off to work we go’ by Bart Bonte [6], and ‘One chance’ by AckwardSilenceGames [7]. We primarily look into the large body of textual messages that accompany these games on various platforms on which they are published (Jayisgames1, Kongregate2, Newgrounds3), and we discuss the role of these conversations in making the games playable and meaningful. For reasons of space, we present here only a brief description of the four games. ‘Every Day the Same Dream’ is ‘a little art game about alienation and refusal of labour’ [4] which takes about 20 minutes to play. The player controls a male character who wakes up, gets dressed, has a cursory interaction with his wife, drives to work, and then works in a cubicle – all in the background of a repetitive, yet energizing soundtrack by Jesse Stiles. After a couple of identical replays, it becomes clear that something needs to be done, or else the game is simply boring. It is the task of the player to explore the small game universe and discover the consequences of breaking the routine. The game includes only a few lines of language, no explicit message, and its ending is surprising and open for multiple interpretations. ‘Inside a dead skyscraper’ is ‘a music video game’ [5]. The player controls a flying character in a hazmat suit, exploring the Twin Towers in what appears to be September 11, 2001. The player may use a device that allows him or her to read the thoughts of other characters in the scene, and also

1 http://jayisgames.com/ 2 http://www.kongregate.com/ 3 http://www.newgrounds.com/ 2 briefly interacts with a non-player character that comments on the situation. All these actions accompany the song "The building", by Jesse Stiles. The game is quite linguistically rich – including music lyrics, the dialogue of the flying character with the NPC who advances some explicitly philosophical ideas, and the thoughts of the other characters. ‘off to work we go’ is a game submitted to the No Future Contest 2013 on the given theme of ‘Au travail’ / ‘Work it’. The player controls an invisible character who explores a mysterious landscape and an even more mysterious building: ‘You find a work facility on a lonely island. But what happens next, is it a strange dream or corporate reality? Work it!’ [6]. The games includes no text or talk. ‘One chance’ is ‘a game about choices and dealing with them’ [7]. The player controls a scientist who has created a cure for cancer which is inadvertently going to kill all life on Earth, in six days. The scientist goes through the days and confronts several choices, which lead to one of multiple possible endings. Still, the notable game mechanic, anticipated by the title, is that by design players are not allowed to replay the game in any given day: that is, a player has only ‘one chance’ (per day) at completing the game, literally. The game includes dialogues between characters and other textual information, but no explicit message.

II. THE RHETORIC OF VIDEO GAMES: STORY, PROCEDURE, PLAY, PARATEXT

Games are composed of multiple types of resources. They may involve imagery, sound, text or voice, a fictive universe including characters and stories, a set of more or less open narratives available for players to enact, and, specifically to the medium, a set of mechanics through which players interact with the gameworld. Each of these elements may be minimally incorporated or even absent in any given game, with the exception of interactivity, which distinguishes games from other cultural forms such as movies, videoclips, music, literature, cartoons etc. To put it bluntly, no interactivity, no game. The emerging meanings of a game depend on a large extent on game narratives – including the characters, their actions, and overall plots created through graphic design, music, voice and text. Still, games are not stories to be read or listened to [8]: they invite players to chose and to act in the game world. Given the interactive specificity of the videogame medium, much research has been devoted to exploring the distinctive role of procedures and for the creation of meaning in games. The concept of ‘procedural rhetoric’ [9] refers to the use of rules for action in the game world in order to advance messages. Players act in the game universe, and their actions are both enabled and constrained by game mechanics: these define what actions are available, what outcomes they may have, and how success or failure may be obtained. Players experience the game world by choosing, acting, succeeding or failing in sequential scenes, and repeating actions in order to find and reach the game goals. If the game claims to somehow represent the real world in which players live (which is the case in our selected games), players are also invited to draw lessons, through gameplay, about their lives and societies. Game-based learning is action-based, experiential – thus opening a new type of rhetorical resources for social critique and existential reflection [10], [11] [3]. The conceptualization of ‘procedural rhetoric’ has been an important direction in clarifying the specificity of games as a medium, underscoring their difference from narratives [9]. A second direction consists in highlighting the playability of games. That is, players are those who, ultimately, formulate game messages [12] – which may be multiple, unintended, ambivalent, or implicit [13], also depending on players’ orientations towards the game [14]. Still, the focus on game mechanics and play experiences may lead to a relative neglect of the role of illustration, music, voice and text in advancing a message and making player experiences possible [15]. The challenge for game analysis consists, then, in conceptualizing the assemblage of these heterogenerous resources in combination with mechanics, rather than in counterdistinction from them [16] [17]. Moreover, it is critical to take into account the agency of players, observing their role of co-authors of game messages. This co-authorship becomes even more clear if we examine game ‘paratexts’ [18], the rich ecosystem of forums, wikis, videos, reviews, walkthroughs, markets in which players actually play. Consalvo discusses paratexts in relation to players’ ‘cheating’ and the ensuing avatar identities and play strategies, which emerge, step-by-step, through players’ decisions on whether and how to use 3 these resources. The experience of a game may incorporate other players’ thoughts, as they have been formulated (inscribed) on various platforms. For casual art games, it is even more the case that players will infer its meanings in dialogue with the other players who have shared their questions and answers. Thus, we may examine paratexts not only in relation with players’ gameplay identities and strategies, but also in relation to their interpretation of the game. Through players’ voices and their ‘first impression’ accounts of the game [19], video games become talkative [20]. Paratexts are rich rhetorical resources of the gameworld, and game developers may take into account the emergence of this cloud of textual traces of play when designing a game. In this paper we focus on one component of game paratexts: players’ comments on forums associated with game platforms. We ask: what is the contribution of this resource to the emergent formulation of game meanings?

III. THE GAMEPLAY PLURILOGUE

Players’ comments on game platforms appear as a plurilogue, in which tens, hundreds or thousands of players share their concerns, opinions and extended commentaries about the game. Comments may express emotions, events or opinions. They may stand alone or may address preceding remarks or questions, but dialogue is typically short, limited to a question-reply couple. We can see in Table 1 that the body of comments varies widely in size: the most discussed game, among the four that we have selected, is ‘One chance’. It is also clear that even these small, non-commercial, indie games are played thousands of times, presumably by thousands of different players (as they do not invite more than a couple of replays) and thus they may address a considerable audience. Online discussions ‘Every day the ‘Inside a dead ‘One chance’ ‘off to work we same dream’ skyscraper’ go’ Newgrounds Nr. of comment 198 24 831 N/A pages Nr. of views 357.731 48.413 3.128.588 N/A Jayisgames Nr. of comments 172 114 112 18 Nr. of game votes 612 - 2611 99 Kongregate Nr. of gameplays N/A N/A 468.031 12.085 Nr. of comments N/A N/A 1652 61 Table 1. A comparison of selected games, with information available on February 11, 2015 3.1. Functions of players’ messages Players may do many things on a forum; some typical functions of messages are: - Clarifying the walkthrough: addressing bugs, giving advice for overcoming challenging sections; - Evaluating the game, typically in relation with: gameplay, music, graphic art, message, players’ emotions and overall experience; - Expressing one’s current emotions, or telling about past gameplay emotions; - Making fun of the game – from benevolent humor to irony and satire; - Clarifying the game narrative: interpreting the characters and their actions (who is who, what is the meaning of an action or an event, what is the proper chronological order in which the game should be played and interpreted); - Formulating and discussing more general lessons about life and society derived through gameplay, the equivalent of a game ‘morale’.

4 On a page with reviews for several games: http://jayisgames.com/archives/2010/07/link_dump_friday_174.php 4

Depending on the game, one function or another may emerge as dominant at a certain moment, attracting players’ attention to the expense of other possible functions. Yet, as a rule, any given page of comments will include a mix of the above-mentioned player actions. For example, ‘Inside a dead skyscraper’ has been extensively commented on Bart Bonte’s web site5. There are a couple of discussions about one of the possible endings, which is more difficult to find – but the dominant theme is clearly evaluative: it refers to whether the game is appropriate or not, since it seems to involve the September 11 tragedy. Less is said about the game message. The game itself does include some explicit, textual ‘punchlines’ in its endings, which could kindle discussion about individual agency versus social constraints, or about individuals’ capacity to grasp the big picture of their lives, among others. Only a few comments explicitly address these ideas, while the vast majority of messages center on its possible connections to 911. Music lyrics are completely ignored – although they are clearly audible, related to the game, and they could be interpreted and discussed as social critique. Comments about ‘One chance’ are focused on clarifying the walkthrough by exploring alternative choices, and discussing the possibility of replaying the game in spite of developers’ constraints. The theme of ‘one chance’ dominates players’ interpretations of the game morale – as illustrated by selected comments in Table 2. Yet, the game can also be read as commenting on the tension between work and family life – further complicated by a situation of crisis. Players discuss only rarely the game attribution of success and failure for various combinations of choices, and what this could mean. Two comments on Jayisgames propose alternative interpretations (Table 2) – but such attempts are infrequent among the hundreds of comments on Kongregate or Newgrounds. Platform Message Page Kongregate ‘I love how the game is literally only "One Chance" no more turning back, no more 1 rewinds, no undos, no edits, that's just it! That's really how life is, what you do will be there and you can't erase it no matter what you do, even if you erase it, the guilt will stay with you. Sad, but true. This will go into my favourites, because it teaches people that life doesn't have any reset buttons, and whatever you do, it will be with you for the rest of your life, like scars.’ (Gabriela J, 1.09.2011) Kongregate ‘This is the first game that has hit me with the emotional consequences of my actions so 2 effectively. I worked dutifully, trying to find a cure for the disease I inadvertently created. When I found my wife in the bathtub, I started forming tears of regret, but I soldiered on. When the caption at the start of the day read "You had one chance.", they came like a flood. It was all for nothing. I killed the entire world.’ (TenTonTrucker, 20.01.2015) Jayisgames ‘So the game is a protestant "you have to work, work, work" ideology? I would've 1 found it more poetic if the mechanics were more like, its over in 6 days whatever you do - spent the time with the ones you love at least’. (fuzzyface, 16.12.2010) Jayisgames ‘Well, not when your work is finding a cure to save all life on the planet. I think the 1 "moral" is more about not giving up, and sacrifice for the greater good, than about zealous workaholism’. (ViciousChicken, 16.12.2010) Table 2. Messages about the meaning of ‘One Chance’ on two different platforms ‘off to work we go’ is quite an explicit critique of work life – yet comments center on clarifying the walkthrough, discussing the problems of the Unity plugin, and praising the unexpected ending. One player in 2015 takes notice of the virtual absence of discussions about the game message and attempts to make it explicit: ‘Did anyone else notice the subtle symbolism? People who work boring jobs at factories/offices spend their live doing repetitive tasks and soon they are so used to their boring work that they end up being stripped of their individuality and spit out as just another product of the company they work for’ (Extreme Z7 on Kongregate, 16.01.2015) – yet it has remained a solitary attempt at formulating an explicit interpretation. This is not necessarily because other players ‘did not notice the subtle symbolism’, as the game ending is not ambiguous, having a ‘punchline’ style. It simply appears that players are not concerned with drawing such explicit lessons in their messages. Unlike ‘off to work we go’, which has a surprising yet clarifying finale, ‘Every day the same dream’ surprises its players with an ending which is difficult to interpret and, for many, disappointing or frustrating. Gameplay also raises some challenges, and therefore a large proportion of comments

5 http://www.bontegames.com/2010/07/inside-dead-skyscraper.html 5 provide advice for players about how to successfully achieve the five required steps. Many players also offer their interpretation of the finale. Besides making the game playable by walkthroughs, the dominant function for comments on Every Day the Same Dream consists in clarifying the game narrative – particularly the game ending. At the same time, most messages that advance an interpretation for the final scene also propose, implicitly or explicitly, a meaning for the entire game. There is a surprising variety of the ‘lessons learned’ from playing the game. For example, several such lessons advanced by players are (spoiler alert): - Contemporary life is alienating through routine; individuals should break this routine, pursue meaningful moments and escape the wear and tear of daily existence; this is the dominant interpretation, which has two variants, depending on whether players consider that the game ending indicates a successful escape or a failure; - By trying to escape the routine of work, we undermine the very foundations of our prosperity and we fail our families and co-workers; - In order to achieve real change in one’s life, one must let go of everybody and everything that meant something in her or his previous life; - When we are overwhelmed by the meaninglessness of life we forget that other people too are confronting the same challenges as us; - No matter how difficult and meaningless life may be, it can always get worse; - The entire game represents the character’s dream; - The entire game represents the character’s posthumous existence, after suicide; - Suicide means renouncing all that is dear and meaningful in one’s life. Given La Molleindustria’s typical concern on critiquing social arrangements, it is interesting that the vast majority of player interpretations for this game center on individual choices and actions, rather than on a critique of systemic conditions of present-day life. There are a few mentions of ‘modern life’ and ‘the system’ that point towards structural constraints, but players mostly read the game as a reflection on individual choice in current times. As Soderman [15] notices, that players center on the ‘alienation’ keyword from the game tagline, while completely ignoring developers’ mention of ‘refusal of labor’. He chooses to read the game not as advice for individuals to enhance their lives (which is anyway implausible given the game’s bleak ending), but rather as a critical commentary on capitalism and its evolution in the last century. While such a structural focus of the game message is plausible if we take into account the other games developed by La Molleindustria, it is safe to say that players have dominantly read the game through an individualistic, rather than a systemic lens. This individualistic bent may be a result of the game mechanics that focus players’ actions on the playable character’s actions, with little notable interaction with other actors or entities. Since games privilege players’ actions and focus attention on characters’ choice and agency, it would be an interesting topic for future research to consider what rhetorical resources sustain game interpretations focused on constraining structures and social arrangements, rather than individual choice. 3.2. Message display and the emerging meanings of the game Players do not only write, but, of course, they also read entries – and there are people who read the forum without contributing. The experience of reading the plurilogue is therefore an important element of the gameplay environment. This experience is shaped by the display of messages, which follows a forum structure. Readers may rate players’ messages, for example as ‘Helpful!’, ‘Useless.’ or ‘Abusive?’ (on Newgrounds), ‘bad’ or ‘good’ (on Kongregate), or ‘vote up’, ‘vote down’ and ‘report’ (on Jayisgames). Therefore, readers have access to a metric indicating the average score for each comment, and, on Kongregate and Newgrounds, they can opt for sorting messages chronologically or according to rating. Whatever the sorting choice, readers will be faced with a page aggregating heterogeneous messages (see the illustration in Figure 1). Some will be short, emotional evaluations; others will ask for advice, still others will offer walkthrough hints. Some comments will propose interpretations of the game, either clarifying what different events may mean, or discussing the overall message and morale. Readers must therefore scan comments rapidly, in order to find what they are interested in.

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Figure 1. Player comments for One Chance, displayed on Kongregate (sorted as ‘Best’, Feb. 12, 2015)

The forum structure, with its message heterogeneity and limited possibilities for sorting messages, has several implications for players’ forum actions and for the type of knowledge available for them in this setting. Firstly, examining the Kongregate forum for ‘One chance’, we see that it has a ‘here and now’ orientation in addition to an archival function. Even in 2015, players ask for advice on how to play again the game – an issue which has been clarified ad nauseam in previous years. There is a large degree of redundancy from one page to another, as players reiterate similar concerns, event descriptions, evaluations and opinions. Of course, what appears as redundancy to us, academic researchers interested in analyzing the game, is not necessarily a problem for participants on the forum, interested in gameplay and socialization with the fellow players of the moment. Secondly, messages that discuss the game meaning and relatively rare, in comparison with evaluations, advice, brief descriptive reports of game events, and other types of entries. To illustrate, one would have to go through several pages of Kongregate comments for One chance, in order to make an impression of what players took away from the game. There is an interesting exception to this pattern, which may suggest design options. Since Jayisgames organizes comments in tabs, advancing left to right from the oldest to the more recent, this means that players first have access to the earliest comments (which are visible on the first tab), and they can read early advice about how to finish the game. For example, in Every Day is the Same Dream this means that more recent posts are almost entirely dedicated to commenting the game ending, clarifying what that ambiguous event meant for the player and how it sheds light on the overall game narrative. This emerging structure of the message corpus stands in contrast with the more evenly distributed messages from the pages of Newgrounds and Kongregate, which as a default option put forward the most recent posts, respectively the ‘Best’ ones.

IV. CONCLUSIONS

Video games that aim to stimulate ethical reflection are often ambiguous, and players have a decisive contribution in formulating their possible meanings. Therefore, the game paratext – especially the ensemble of player comments that can be found in forums, game reviews and, occasionaly, in scientific papers, are part and parcel of the rhetorical equipment of the game medium. Forums archive 7

a diversity of messages, with multiple functions. Two types of posts contribute to the emerging textual appearance of game meaning: (1) players clarify the game narrative, and, implicitly or explicitly, (2) they propose lessons-learned or game ‘morale’ messages. Our analysis has focused on Every Day the Same Dream and three other comparable games addressing organized labor. For the selected games, we observe that narrative clarifications appear more frequently than explicit formulations of the game morale. Therefore, it may be that art games encourage a narrative formulation of players’ reflections (what they think happens in the game), rather than an explicit, ‘lesson-learned’ style reflection on game messages about life and society. Social critique through gameplay seems to rely mostly on players sharing stories and emotions. We also observe that message display options on gameplay platforms shape players’ types of contributions and the emerging game knowledge. Different opportunities for message classification and sorting, or a different organization – such as a dedicated wiki [21] – may be needed if posts that comment on game narratives and messages are to be more visible among the plethora of walkthrough advice, momentary emotions and cursory evaluations. Given players’ focus on the playable characters’ choices and actions, it is possible that their interpretations of political games suffer from an individualistic bias, focusing on personal choice rather than social constraints. Further research could highlight the procedural and narrative rhetorical resources used in games that successfully generate public critiques of social arrangements.

Acknowledgement This article has been supported by the research project ‘Sociological imagination and disciplinary orientation in applied social research’, with the financial support of ANCS / UEFISCDI with grant no. PN-II-RU-TE-2011-3-0143, contract 14/28.10.2011.

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