Pony Island & Gamic Action

Healy | Game Design | 1 Castaway Name: Pony Island Designers: Daniel Mullins, Simon Jenkins Publisher: Daniel Mullins Games Platform: Windows, OS X, Linux Released January 4th, 2016 What it is Pony Island is a meta-fictional game that is difficult to define, by design. The game sees the player trapped in limbo, stuck playing an arcade game named “Pony Island”. Over time, players start to work around the game, collaborating with an all-knowing former player of the game, named H0peles$0ul1, to hack into the devil’s operating system, delete the core files, and free all the souls trapped in the game. The game’s ludic actions come in three parts: pony-platforming, hacking, and a large set of other activities I’ll refer to as ‘GUI stuff’2. The pony platforming, the central mini-game of the experience, is a simple 2D side- scrolling runner, also named “Pony Island”. You control a pony who must jump over hurdles. Eventually additional elements are introduced, including a giant laser coming out of the pony’s mouth that you use to shoot demonic sprites out of the sky and wings that sprout out of the pony’s back to let you glide over large distances. The goal is simple; avoid the obstacles, shoot the bad things. In the game’s fiction, this is a game designed by Lucifer himself. Hacking is where the game gets interesting; this sees the player reaching beyond the titular game and into the game’s pseudocode to break its intended functionality. These hacking sequences resemble sequences of real-life assembly language with the player placing jump commands in order to manipulate variables and reach the end of the code segment. Many games use pseudo-programming as a game mechanic better than this3, but it is still the most engaging of the consistent puzzle systems in the game4. ‘GUI stuff’ is where Pony Island shines, primarily in creating inconsistent and unpredictable puzzle systems. This is when the player interacts with a simplified windows-like operating system on which the Pony Island game is running. The player chats with H0peles$0ul over an AIM-like instant-messaging client about how they are going to destroy the game before Lucifer butts in and tells you not to talk to anyone else, closing your chat window with your new ally. Later in the game, you log in to Lucifer’s account and search through his desktop, playing previous versions of the Pony Island minigame, one as a text-adventure and another from a first- person perspective. This is the outer shell of the experience Pony Island has to offer: the user and the interface struggling against each other. What it tries to say Unfortunately, the primary emotions Pony Island elicits for much of its duration are boredom and frustration. The pony platforming mini-game is tedious even in small doses and 1 Even in limbo, the plain ‘Hopeless-soul’ username was already taken. I’m almost surprised his name wasn’t Xx_h0p3l3s$0ul_xX69. 2 For the uninitiated, this stands for ‘Graphical User Interface’. 3 Shout out to Tomorrow Corporation’s Human Resource Machine and its sequel, 7 Billion Humans. 4 Also, it’s very far from the worst hacking mini-game I’ve seen in a game; this one didn’t require I connect any plumbing or do any twin-stick shooting. Healy | Game Design | 2 excessively outstays its welcome. The game is cold and unrewarding5; it’s a game canonically designed by Lucifer, who is canonically not a very good game designer6. Levels end with flows of experience points and leveling up, as if that feedback system is supposed to substitute for fun. I am not saying the pony platforming game should be more fun; games don’t need to be fun and the exaggerated feedback system tacked onto the end of a lackluster experience is itself an interesting statement on the cynical world of ‘gamification’. My problem with the pony platforming is that its tedium does not serve the larger themes or plot of Pony Island. The second act, especially, sees the player going through platforming segments that are canonically filler-content made by the devil to waste time, clearly reflecting the designer’s own methods7. Pony Island would have been a much better game if it had less Pony Island. Much of the demon-centric narrative of Pony Island never comes together to form a coherent statement. Why is the devil making games? Why is the player character a crusader who lived and died a millennium ago? How does this person know how to operate a computer? Why are we on a computer that is also an arcade cabinet? Why does this arcade cabinet have a horizontal monitor instead of the much more common vertical monitor? Why does this arcade cabinet dispense tickets like we’re at a Chuck E Cheese’s? These questions are never really answered. The depth of the game’s lore doesn’t matter; no matter how hard you search, you won’t find a system that makes sense. Pony Island is a big dumb game that knows it’s a big dumb game and is full of things that big dumb games have, and that cynicism is what the game is about. What it’s about To really understand what Pony Island says, as a game that questions the boundaries of what games are, we need to understand what those boundaries are. I’d like to turn to Alexander Galloway’s Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture, one of the foundational works of game studies. In the first essay of this short book, Galloway defines what he considers the four forms of gamic actions, or the sources of action that can exist in a game, to exist at the intersection of the axis: diegetic/nondiegetic and machine/operator. So, we have actions that are diegetic machine actions, which are produced by the code of the game and exist inside the world of the game; this is simulation. We have diegetic operator actions, which are produced by player input and exist inside the world of the game; this is the player manipulating space or expressing themselves inside the game environment. We have nondiegetic machine actions; this is the machine presenting you necessary ludic elements that cannot exist within the game’s world, like a heads- up-display, high-scores, pause menus, etc. We have nondiegetic operator actions; this is when players interact with these non-diegetic game systems presented by the machine. 5 I find the marketing for the game particularly cringy for this reason. The game markets itself as “a suspense puzzle game in disguise”. This is a ridiculous label. For one, this is a quote from the first line of the game’s Steam page, assuring no one would ever see the apparent disguise as reality. The disguise itself is also completely nonexistent; from the start of the game, the Pony Island you play at the very start of the game is cold and unfeeling, clearly not meant to be the kind of game the title suggests, never confused for PonyIsland.net. If anything, the tedium of the platforming just disguises a good game as a bad one. 6 When you go through older versions of the Pony Island, you find what seem like adolescent ramblings of Lucifer complaining that no one likes his games. I found this self-awareness somewhat frustrating; if you know this part of your game is bad, why make us play so much of it? 7 It’d be inappropriate to fully blame the designer for this. The bland content filling much of the game is clearly just to extend its runtime, appeasing the immature Steam reviewers who think runtime equates to value. Healy | Game Design | 3 Galloway presented these four types living on a continuum: the four sectors of a grid. At the depths of non-diegetic operator action, we see the stat-filled systems of Final Fantasy X and at the heights of diegetic machine action we see the immersive simulations of Shenmue; there’s a whole world of games in between. What it says Pony Island breaks from the simplicity of Galloway’s world. All actions are both completely diegetic and completely non-diegetic: often machine actions but with a machine that bends to the will of the operator, and operator actions by an operator under full control of the machine. We, the operators, control the machine. In the options menus, we fight for new options; we alter the machine so that it presents us opportunities for action. As we hack, we alter the game system, while participating under the restraints of the larger game system; yes, hacking alters the software but it’s also a mini-game in the software. The machine takes control of us. Our windows close for us; our mouse pointer is moved for us; the machine starts Pony Island for us. Everything the operator can do is only possible because the operator lets it happen, even when the operator feels particularly creative. The machine and the operator are obviously distinct actors, but no action is purely machine or operator; gamic action is cooperation. Everything is diegetic. The struggle through the options menu exists within the world of the game, as does playing the game a second time or uninstalling the software; the interface itself, may it be transparent or reflective, is diegetic. We see this most clearly in the ‘boss fight’ with Asmodeus.exe when the game fakes Steam messages at the bottom right corner of the screen, impersonating someone on your actual Steam friends list8 and plays tones of Facebook message notifications, trying to get you to move to a different window.

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