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Every Day the Same Dream? Social Critique Through Serious Gameplay

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Every Day the Same Dream? Social Critique Through Serious Gameplay See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275331408 Every Day the Same Dream? Social Critique through Serious Gameplay Conference Paper · January 2015 CITATIONS READS 4 75 2 authors: Alina Petra Marinescu Cosima Rughinis University of Bucharest, "Danubius" Universi… University of Bucharest 12 PUBLICATIONS 4 CITATIONS 43 PUBLICATIONS 59 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE All content following this page was uploaded by Cosima Rughinis on 22 April 2015. The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. All in-text references underlined in blue are added to the original document and are linked to publications on ResearchGate, letting you access and read them immediately. The 11th International Scientific Conference eLearning and software for Education Bucharest, April 23-24, 2015 10.12753/2066-026X-14-000 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 art game 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]. 1 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.
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