Playing Fiction:

On the Literary Video Game

By James C. Moore

A senior thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts

Princeton University Princeton, New Jersey April 7, 2015

Acknowledgements

Thanks to:

Zahid Chaudhary, for advising me for the past year, for helping me figure out what I’m actually saying, and for making sure I actually finished.

Diana Fuss, for her help on the junior independent work that became the basis of this thesis.

All of the video game developers and commentators who inspire me, including but not limited to Jordan Mechner, Edmund McMillen, Brad Borne, Raigan Burns and Mare

Sheppard, Lucas Pope, Derek Yu, Jenova Chen, Greg Kasavin, Fumito Ueda, Shigeru

Miyamoto, Ben Croshaw, and the Extra Credits team.

And especially Jim Sterling: thank God for him.

Joe, Scot, Daphna, Miriam, and all of my friends for getting me through college.

Everybody at Theatre Intime for making me feel welcome and at home.

Tom and Erik, with whom I hope to always play games.

Lola and Woodhouse, for being the best dogs.

My mom, dad, and sister, for all of their love and support. For realizing before I did that this was something I wanted to pursue throughout my life. For listening to me ramble about video games. For playing games with me instead of sports. For being consistently amazing. And for getting me a Nintendo 64 for my sixth birthday.

Table of Contents

Introduction: “Press Start”

The Origin of the Literary Video Game.....……………………………………….3

Chapter 1: “The Price You Pay May be Heavy Indeed”

The Video Game As Literature………………………………………………….17

Chapter 2: “Do You Feel Like a Hero Yet?”

The Video Game As Critic………………………………………………………44

Chapter 3: “…”

The Video Game and Storytelling Through Play………………………………..69

Conclusion: “Game Over”

The Future of the Literary Video Game...... ………………………………….92

Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………….100

--Introduction--

“Press Start”

The Origin of the Literary Video Game

An example: three times a year, a “game jam” called Ludum Dare is held. The organizers announce a theme at midnight, and for the next 48 hours, amateur and professional video game developers create games based on that theme. This “Accelerated

Game Development Event” challenges designers’ creativity and endurance.

Interpretations of the themes vary wildly. Designers interpret prompts in ways other developers never would have imagined. The wide variety of submitted games shows just how diverse the video game field has become; individuals with passion for game design can create small experiences unlike any other entry to the game jam. One such entry came from independent developer Hannes “Crabman” Flor. In December of 2012 he made a game called The Day the Laughter Stopped in response to the theme “You Only

Get One.” Among video game genres, The Day the Laughter Stopped falls into the category of interactive fiction, meaning players simply read a story and at various points pick between two options of how to proceed, leading to different endings. If you have a working internet connection I encourage you to go play The Day the Laughter Stopped now.1 It’s short, and I’m about to tell you what happens, but like all games, it’s meant to be played.

The Day the Laughter Stopped only has two elements. The narrative element is delivered via white text on a black background, and it tells the story from the perspective of a fourteen year old girl who wavers on the edges of a romantic relationship with an

1 Even if you’ve never played a video game before, you can play an interactive fiction game. The Day the Laughter Stopped can be played for free online at http://hypnoticowl.com/theday/play/ 3

older boy. The interactive component comes throughout the story, where the player chooses how to proceed by clicking on one of two buttons, each labeled with a different course of action. These two elements collide during a horrifying scene in which the boy rapes the female narrator. Throughout the assault and the aftermath, the game continues to offer the player choices as to what to do, but now one of the options will not work. The player can press the button to “push him away” or “tell them what happened,” but the game does not register the action. Eventually, the player must click the button marked

“stay still” or “stay silent.” Choice, which was initially offered to the player, has secretly been taken away.

This small game showcases the power and effectiveness of a story that is carefully combined with interactivity. The game presents a story and a set of rules, then changes one to upset the other. Despite its limited interactive scope and overlong narration, The

Day the Laughter Stopped succeeds because of its focus on how players experience the story. The developer generates a response from the player through the execution of a single interactive metaphor that informs the purpose of the story. As Flor wrote in a blog post about the game:

The whole point is obviously that you have zero control over that because it’s the guy making it happen. But even this tiny bit of interactivity makes you part of this story, and that makes a huge difference… it makes you feel powerless and out of control, which is not a very pleasant feeling. You’re getting a glimpse into what it’s like to be a victim. It’s empathy.2

The Day the Laughter Stopped tries to share one person’s experience in an original manner not just by describing or showing that experience, but by making the player take part in it. In doing so the game aspires to raise questions in the mind of the player. It is a

2 Hannes Flor, “The Moment the Choices Stopped,” Hypnotic Owl, December 22, 2013, accessed March 15, 2015, http://hypnoticowl.com/the-moment-the-choices-stopped/ 4

methodology worth thinking about, analyzing, dissecting, and questioning. It is art worthy of criticism. It is a literary move.

It is this union of story and interactive gameplay that I want to consider.

Where We’ve Been

Interactive fiction did not begin with video games. Of course, people have been sharing and interacting with stories personally for thousands of years. On a mass- produced scale, however, the most basic application of interactivity to storytelling appeared in the Choose Your Own Adventure series of children’s books. The concept is simple: take a story, insert branching paths, and allow readers to pick where the story goes. Readers essentially create a manual version of the interactive fiction game. Edward

Packard came up with the idea for Choose Your Own Adventure from his experience telling stories to his children: “He often told his kids bedtime stories, and whenever he couldn’t figure out how to resolve a story, he asked them to weigh in with options. He soon realized that they enjoyed the stories more when they helped choose the endings.”3

The series launched in 1979 and succeeded almost immediately. The series was not only fun for children; it also played an important developmental role, as co-author and former teacher R. A. Montgomery observed in an interview: “Experiential learning is the most powerful way for kids, or for anyone, to learn something.”4 The additional level of engagement offered by these books also helped children expose themselves to new experiences, both fictional and real: “The reading happened because kids were put in the driver’s seat. They were the mountain climber, they were the doctor, they were the deep-

3 Jake Rossen, “A Brief History of ‘Choose Your Own Adventure,’” Mental Floss, April 10, 2014, accessed March 16, 2014, http://mentalfloss.com/article/56160/brief-history-choose-your-own-adventure 4 Ibid. 5

sea explorer…They made choices, and so they read.”5 The fictional impact of the story interested children in the act of storytelling.

While R. A. Montgomery clearly appreciated the effect these books could have, publisher Bantam had a different focus: “To capitalize on the momentum, Bantam decided to roll out one title a month.”6 Choose Your Own Adventure books began as children’s books, and the angle the publisher took essentially insured that they remained that way. There was a value to the series; it touched on an untapped desire for people to experience fictional universes, to imagine themselves in impossible places, but that desire was not explored beyond its most basic principles. The initial run of Choose Your Own

Adventure books included hundreds of titles, plus various spin-off and tie-in books, its success showcasing the unique value that an interactive story can have. The format may not make for traditionally great literature, but it begins to unlock the potential of the interactive through the way children responded to the stories.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, games and stories have coexisted as well.

Dungeons and Dragons is the most noteworthy example of player-led stories in games.

Originally designed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in 1974, players in this pencil- and-paper role-playing game spend some of their time rolling dice to fight imaginary monsters. However, the real heart of the game is less about numbers and fighting and more about a shared storytelling experience. The “Dungeon Master” outlines the story and objectives for an individual play session, but the other players get complete control over how to proceed as the game progresses. In his book Of Dice and Men, David M.

Ewalt writes, “Players are both audience and author in D&D; they consume the [Dungeon

5 Rossen, “A Brief History of ‘Choose Your Own Adventure.’” 6 Ibid. 6

Master’s] fiction but rewrite the story with their actions. And as authors, they’re free to make their own decisions.”7 Dungeons & Dragons can be the breeding ground for an infinite number of stories. Anything that the players or the Dungeon Master can imagine can come true in this fictional realm, and flexible rules govern how the players’ inventions fit into the world that the Dungeon Master designs.

This limitlessness makes Dungeons & Dragons fascinating, but it also poses significant obstacles to any claim to the game’s literary significance. When the Dungeon

Master is invested in the fiction, “setting up a role-playing game becomes something like writing a screenplay or novel.”8 The problem is that this story is not experienced like a film or book. Instead, a Dungeons & Dragons campaign must be played:

All this free will can wreak havoc with the game’s continuing story. A DM might spend weeks designing a complex network of caverns to explore, filled with clever traps and new monsters to fight. But if the players stop at the mouth of the cave and decide they’d rather go back to town and get drunk, they are free to do so—and they’ll derail the story in the process.9

The Dungeon Master may have a literary goal in mind, but the game is too open ended to guarantee the fulfillment of that vision. The freedom that makes Dungeons & Dragons enjoyable also makes it unpredictable and transient. The players of a particular game might have a powerful emotional experience as part of a campaign, with tantalizing moral choices designed by the Dungeon Master having lasting consequences on their world and characters.10 But these moments exist only between the players; they are temporary, personal stories. There is no way to share the story beyond the play session that the group experiences, because the story must be experienced. Freedom makes Dungeons &

7 David M. Ewalt, Of Dice and Men (New York: Scribner, 2013), 7. 8 Ibid., 6. 9 Ibid., 8. 10 Ibid., 6. 7

Dragons a unique storytelling medium, but it also makes it virtually impossible for the game’s stories to be studied and shared as literature.

Video games would eventually fill the gap between the narrow scope of the

Choose Your Own Adventure novel and the limitlessness of a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, but they did not do so at their inception. They began as simple experiments. In

1962, an MIT student named Steven Russell worked with the Digital Equipment

Company PDP-1 computer, which was one of the first computers to output data to a screen instead of printing results on paper.11 Russell took advantage of this technology and built a program that let users control simple spaceships rendered on the screen.12 He developed the game in collaboration with others: “Pete Sampson added a program called

Expensive Planetarium that displayed stars as a background. Dan Edwards did some very clever stuff to get enough time so that we could compute the influence of gravity on the spaceships.”13 This project became Spacewar! The final product featured two spaceships, each controlled by a separate user, which could shoot at one another and were effected by gravity. The game had no story. Spacewar! couldn’t even be marketed because the computer it ran on cost over one hundred thousand dollars.14 But the beginnings of the video game existed then, in the experimentation and raw creativity that produced a fun, engaging product.

Its foundation in experimentation forms the basis for the eventual emergence of literary storytelling in the video game. In her article “Popular Culture as Play,” Janice

Radway presents an interesting theory on how creative expression develops within a

11 Mark J. P. Wolf, ed., The Medium of the Video Game (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 36. 12 Ibid., 36. 13 Ibid., 36. 14 Ibid., 37. 8

medium. The basis of her argument is a linguistic theory, which says that humans express themselves in two ways: language expressed within the linguistic system and language expressed outside of its system.15 The latter form leads to words taking on new meanings, as speakers and artists find ways of expressing themselves that are not built into the language, but that they have created by expanding on language.16 Radway argues that this concept stretches beyond linguistics: “Creative speech, then, does not merely transform a preexisting thing into another more unusual version of that same thing…Instead, it secretes that which has never before been intended.”17 The secretion of the unintended, the creation of new meanings and forms, played an essential role in the development of the video game. Spacewar! began as a hack; the PDP-1 was not designed as a video game system, but Steven Russell found a new application for an existing computer. Likewise,

Russell’s creation was not meant to be a new narrative medium, but the same “secretion of the unintended” resulted in the video game medium expanding and developing in previously unimaginable ways.

Video games grew from the humble beginnings of Spacewar! into a technologically advanced form capable of a wide variety of gameplay experiences, from puzzles to fighting games to simulators, but plot would pose a challenge to developers for a long time. Even as the first games became available to the public, technology hindered the scope of their stories due to computers’ memory limitations and poor graphical capabilities. Instead of being able to relate plot in game, designers had to rely on

“extradiegetic narration:” stories outlined in instruction manuals and blocks of text at the

15 Janice Radway, “Popular Culture as Play,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 22, no. 2 (1980): 139. 16 Ibid., 140. 17 Ibid., 141. 9

beginning of the game.18 The plot, if present, was separate from the gameplay. But as technology improved, developers began to be able to incorporate stories in a variety of ways, not just through exposition. With more computer memory and power, complex worlds could be rendered, creating an engaging backdrop for the protagonists’ adventures. Dialogue could be fully voiced by professional actors. Cutscenes have perhaps seen the most change; these video segments interspersed between gameplay sections have gone through many iterations and forms. Entirely absent from early games, they now serve as the most common way of delivering story, “in which the player is a captive audience, much as when viewing a movie.”19 Today, game designers have additional freedom in how they develop these cutscenes, even using motion capture to recreate the performances of actors in games. These scenes allow the plot to be conveyed without breaking the immersion visually. This growth became possible because of advances in technology, both in what computers can do and who has access to these computers. The more open the technology becomes, the more people can experiment with it and push it, like Russell did to create Spacewar!

The important result of this technological growth is not that game stories can be more realistic or more cinematic, though they can, but that designers can make their games’ stories part of the interactive experience. Video games have developed to the point where they can offer a natural synthesis between earlier forms of interactive storytelling. Choose Your Own Adventure books focus on telling a specific story with an interactive gimmick, while Dungeons and Dragons focuses more on the freedom of its game mechanics. Video games, meanwhile, have matured to the point where interactivity

18 Wolf, The Medium of the Video Game, 101. 19 Gordon Calleja, In-Game: From Immersion to Incorporation (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2011), 122. 10

can flourish within the controlled parameters designed by the creators. Their stories can be directed toward a thematic purpose while also incorporating player feedback. Every player experiences a game slightly differently. Depending on the game, this difference could be as small as the amount of time spent on a particular level or as huge as a choice leading to a completely different conclusion. Video games offer players a space to explore, to create, to have fun, while also being carefully guided toward an intended conclusion, the impact of which will vary based on the player’s individual journey. Video game designers can carefully craft experiences that still allow and foster freedom and experimentation while also driving the experience in a certain way. Designed well, games can make players completely invested in their fictional worlds. When the element of player choice is added to this mixture, the possibility to challenge players’ thinking flourishes. Designers can introduce the world, draw the player into it, and then task them with making difficult decisions within that world. The resulting art form tells an interesting story and tells it in an entirely new way. The literary video game thrives in the complete union of interactivity and storytelling.

Where We’re Going

The narrative potential of the video game does not necessitate that all video games become literature. The medium is still very young, and storytelling within the medium is younger still, so many games and game developers are still figuring out how to tell stories and how to approach storytelling. This process of discovery positively impacts the industry overall. Developers are telling a wide range of stories through equally diverse techniques. Today, players can experience adventure capers inspired by

Indiana Jones (Uncharted), gangster stories that place them in the seedy underbelly of

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New York City or Los Angeles (Grand Theft Auto), and space operas that let them save the universe (Mass Effect). Games can be philosophical (BioShock), they can be horrifying (Silent Hill), or they can be ridiculously silly (Goat Simulator). They can really do anything.

Yet though these varied stories, and ways of telling stories, are rapidly appearing in video games, the conversation about video game stories has not caught up with the reality of how fascinating video game stories have become. The emergence of the form is often examined, the new sophistication of its stories lauded, but critical analysis is largely missing. And when people attempt to critique games, too often their analyses are misguided. These critics ignore discussions of how the games accomplish their literary work, what arguments the developers make, and instead simply label game stories “good” or “bad.” This failing ignores the value of this new form of storytelling. As these game stories grow, the quality of discourse needs to grow, too. A traditional literary work is not judged on plot points, but on the meaning that underlies the plot. So too should it be for video games. Critics and fans alike should be exploring what games are actually saying, what their stories aim to accomplish. Video game narratives have developed to the point where they are accomplishing truly fascinating literary work in a brand new way, and it’s time for critical discussion to catch up to the medium.

The need for a greater critical focus on the literary merit of video games relies on two parties: literary critics and video game players. I will direct my argument toward both groups in this paper. For people who have little to no exposure to games, it can be hard to understand how video games function, both on a technical and literary level. They accomplish their work in a new, strange manner which is far from inclusive; the difficulty

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of actually playing a game poses a greater barrier to entry than watching a film or reading a book. Even if many people never have and never will play a video game, I want to expose this large group to the merits of the form by breaking down how games work, showing the tactics that can be used to drive narrative development through user interactivity. At the same time, I want to develop new critical tools to put additional onus on the video game community to think about games critically. I want to start the conversation, bringing literary analysis to an industry that largely lacks such introspection. A focus on the narrative elements in games is growing within the gaming community, and I want to encourage it to move in a literary direction. There will always be a place for discussing the fun of a game, commenting on graphics or multiplayer modes, but the discussion can and should be expanded to include conversation about what games actually say and how they say it. In detailing the merits of the literary video game, I hope to encourage a new interest in the literature of games from both parties.

People who have never played games before can see the merit in interactive stories, and perhaps might even be convinced to pick up a game and give it a play. Those who already play video games can be pushed to adopt a new critical lens, reexamining games that they have played and forgotten about with a fresh eye toward how they function as literature.

The goal is not to completely reinvent how people see games, but rather to encourage everyone to take a closer look at the underlying messages present in a flourishing medium.

To this end, this paper closely examines three video games that exemplify different aspects of successful video game stories. Shadow of the Colossus is an action- adventure game that tasks the player with slaying mythical monsters. The game works as

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a classic tragedy, showing the protagonist’s fall from greatness to his ultimate death.

Because the player assumes the role of the tragic hero, the player experiences the protagonist’s ultimate fall with unique immediacy. Spec Ops: The Line is a third-person cover-based shooter that mimics popular games and story tropes in order to offer a critical look at video games themselves. Its story is introspective, undermining its own narrative moves to provide a commentary on the medium and the potentially harmful ways that it can portray war and heroism. Finally, Journey takes a brand new tack, exploring human relationships through a connected online world. It functions as a piece of interactive art more than a traditional video game, the poem to the standard video game’s novel. Journey offers a new take on how video games, and video game stories, work, drawing on the innate storytelling potential of the act of play and motivating that play into a narrative arc. Ultimately, all three games share a synthesis of narrative and gameplay mechanics. Story and play do not exist side by side, but merge. Each game tackles this union in a unique manner, leading to very different narratives. Together, they highlight just some of the literary possibilities that this new interactivity can offer storytelling.

There are a wide variety of games and game genres that I am not touching on in this thesis. Ironically, I am not focusing on games that are often considered story-driven.

These games can offer great narratives, but very often separate gameplay and story elements. Noteworthy titles like the Final Fantasy series and the Uncharted franchise feature well-written, professionally-acted stories, but the significance of the story is not heavily informed by the gameplay. These stories and games have their own merits, but the synthesis that makes video games unique is largely missing. On the opposite end of

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the spectrum, I’m also eschewing games that give players large amounts of control over the narrative. Games such as Bioware’s Mass Effect and Telltale’s The Walking Dead have carefully crafted stories that allow players to choose the direction the story takes, rewriting the entire story based on the player’s decisions. Here, too, gameplay and story are often separated, pausing the action to offer multiple choice options to the player to choose how the story will continue before resuming gameplay. This type of game represents an unpredictable and unwieldy beast when it comes to the literary significance of a narrative. These games can end in dozens of ways. Not only is there no one narrative arc that we can study or understand, there is no intended conclusion. On an individual level they can deliver an effective, moving story, but to expand this discussion to a larger audience would demand developing new tools and basing the argument in all of the possible outcomes of the game, rather than the narrative’s singular arc. And then there are games that don’t have a significant story component at all. I do not mean to suggest that these games are any lesser for not having a literary narrative. Saving the princess in Super

Mario Bros., fighting with friends in Call of Duty, or exploring caves in the cartoonish

Spelunky makes for a fun enjoyable experience. All of these games are wonderful, unique, and worth playing. They just aren’t the focus of this study.

Instead, all of the games that I’m going to be looking at focus on the union of gameplay and storytelling. The resulting narratives still require us to develop some new tools in order to parse them, but since these games are more focused on a literary mission, they more closely mirror traditional literature. What sets these games apart? How do they build their worlds through interaction and immersion? They provide enough standard narrative to give the experience purpose while using interaction to deliver the brunt of the

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message. It’s a delicate balance, keeping the player engaged in the action while also ensuring that the game conveys the purpose of the story in a compelling fashion. As a result, these kinds of games serve as a great starting point for a larger discussion of the literary video game. They provide a mode of storytelling that is impossible in any other medium.

I want to share my belief in the value of video game storytelling in this paper, and

I want to challenge it. Recognizing and understanding the potential of video games has merits for both literary critics and game developers and players. The video game industry is growing rapidly, and it’s only just beginning to scratch the surface of what the form can accomplish. The more we pay attention to how video games actually function, the more these games’ stories might be developed and studied on the basis of their message and purpose instead of their barebones plot elements. A new direction of video game studies would help games achieve their potential, benefiting their players and critics. It will produce something of value. A meaningful video game story asks questions of the players through their immersion, potentially providing an experience that changes how the player sees the world. Our experiences in these fictional spaces matter. They can inform our actions outside of them and change our perspectives through experience. The discussion of stories in video games should focus on how video games work, how they can act as literature, how they can critique entertainment, how they can unlock the innate storytelling power of play.

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--Chapter 1--

“The Price You Pay May Be Heavy Indeed”

The Video Game as Literature

Not all video games work as literature, nor should all video games attempt to be literary. Similarly, not all elements of literature should be addressed in interactive media.

However, there is an emerging and growing area in which these two fields overlap, and both literary scholars and video game fans would benefit from an examination of that overlap. The goal of this chapter is not to argue for a revolution in either the worlds of literature or of video games, but rather to examine the literary video game and to show how it functions.

To this end, I want to look at the manner in which some video games choose to tell their stories. As the medium has evolved, so has its capacity to tell varied, interesting stories. Video games have grown to the point where they are able to recreate or retell any classic story. But literature does not rely on plot for its strength. The merit in literature comes from the ideas that underscore the plot, that point to larger questions for the audience to consider. Video games achieve this literary strength through the marriage of traditional storytelling and the game’s interactive nature. To examine how video games can tell not just stories, but literary stories, I want to look at one game in particular,

Shadow of the Colossus, developed by Team Ico and released in 2005. Shadow of the

Colossus serves as an exemplary case study for how video games can tackle complex literary traditions, in this case tragedy. By looking at how Team Ico combines story and gameplay, we see the unique tools that video games possess for relaying story. The games weaves narrative and gameplay intrinsically together, forging a relationship

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between player and protagonist that makes the protagonist’s tragic fall feel personal.

Shadow of the Colossus does not reinvent the tragedy, but it rises to the challenges of the genre, following in the footsteps of other tragic works while adding a powerful interactive component to the narrative, showing how video games can make classic literary themes their own.

Plot vs. Alterbiography

The growth of plot in video games plays an important role in our discussion of video game literature. Literature does not hinge on plot, but the two often overlap heavily, particularly in many contemporary games. Too often games and game criticism mistake a story for literature: “At present, the often simple narratives found in many video games are a far cry from the complex and detailed ones found in other media.”20

But the stories exist, an existence that would not have been possible before the technological improvements that led to contemporary video game design. Spacewar! and the games that followed it for many years—arcade games like Pong and Space

Invaders—could not tell any kind of simple story, but now games have a great deal of narrative potential. The freedom offered by advances in technology allow developers to present stories through video cutscenes, narration, and even within the gameplay itself. In his book Seven Basic Plots, Christopher Booker outlines a series of story structures with which, he believes, all stories can be classified. Video games now encompass all seven of these plots. The medium has achieved a flexibility that allows the entire narrative canon to be tackled through interactive media. In the evolution of the video game story, the ability to portray varied plot structures serves as an important precursor to the thematic

20 Wolf, The Medium of the Video Game, 93. 18

development and subversive undermining of those structures that make some games literary.

Some of Booker’s plots dominate the video game space. These storylines fit easily into a playable narrative. Stories like “Overcoming the Monster,” which involves the protagonist defeating an antagonizing force,21 or “The Quest,” in which the protagonist must go on a journey fraught with obstacles,22 are fundamental video game stories. Requiring only initial motivation, these plots could be portrayed in games like

Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda with only an inciting incident delivered via brief extradiegetic narration. The bulk of the gameplay follows that one story thread. As video games have advanced technologically, so has their capacity to relate Booker’s other plots. These plots require greater development of the protagonist, whether it’s the growth of the protagonist in the “Rags to Ritches” story,23 the redemption of the protagonist in the “Rebirth,”24 or the replacement of the protagonist’s physical journey with an emotional one in the “Voyage and Return.”25 Cutscenes changed the stories that games can tell. The game and the narrative can develop side by side, allowing plots to progress in unexpected ways over the course of the game. Before cutscenes, the number of plot points or changes were limited by the technical limits of the game. Today, however, game designers can portray any kind of journey for characters within the game using familiar cinematic techniques: dialogue, exposition, camera movements, and videos. Be it the story Nico Bellic’s rise up the ranks of organized crime in Grand Theft Auto IV,

21 Christopher Booker, The Seven Basic Plots (London: Continuum, 2004), 22-23. 22 Ibid., 73. 23 Ibid., 56. 24 Ibid., 206. 25 Ibid., 100-101. 19

Booker DeWitt’s quest for redemption in Bioshock Infinite, or Nathan Drake’s epic journey in Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, it can be told in a video game. This flexibility allows Booker’s more emotionally complex plots to flourish in games.

Both video game structures and Booker’s analysis focus on the protagonist.

Booker orients his understanding of plots around the protagonist’s journey, and video games are oriented around their playable characters. Video games “involve the audience in a uniquely direct manner, making the viewer into a participant or player, by allowing the player to control (to some degree) a character in the game’s diegetic world.”26 The active presence of the player makes video games unique as a storytelling medium. Even in a storyline directly based on one of Booker’s plots, the narrative extends beyond the explicit plot. Gordon Calleja describes two different ways that video games tell stories:

“the alterbiography, referring to the story generated by the individual player as she takes action in the game, and the scripted narrative, referring to the pre-scripted story events written into the game.”27 Games can recreate all of Booker’s plots successfully through their scripted narratives alone, but the alterbiography brings players closer to the protagonist at the center of these plots. Games develop the protagonist’s struggles not just through the straightforward story but through the interactive, emergent experience of playing the game. Because the player is interfacing with the protagonist who is in turn the focus of the plot, narrative development is strengthened by the introduction of interactivity: “interaction generates, rather than excludes, story.”28

26 Wolf, The Medium of the Video Game, 93. 27 Calleja, In-Game, 115. 28 Ibid., 115. 20

The strength of the alterbiography lies at the heart of successful video game narratives, and so a more complete understanding of the concept will help guide our study of the video game as literature. Calleja offers his own definition:

Alterbiography is the ongoing narrative generated during interaction with a game environment. It is neither solely a formal property of the game nor a property of the player’s free-roaming imagination. Our challenge is to account for this form of narrative generation without broadening its scope to game experience in general. Alterbiography is a cyclical process afforded by the representational, mechanical, and medium-specific qualities of a game, and actuated in the mind of the player.29

The alterbiography exists between the traditional storytelling elements of the game and the pure play elements that aren’t directly related to story. As Calleja notes, the alterbiography is difficult to study because it deals so closely in the user’s individual experience. From a literary perspective, however, we can see how the alterbiography conducts its work. The alterbiography functions as a synthesis of narrative and play.30

Our analysis must function in the same way; it must consider not just the user’s subjective experience, but also how the game directs that experience. Developers of literary games write interesting stories, but more importantly design the games to encourage a particular reaction from the player; a response generated not just by the narrative but by the experience of participating in that narrative. This element of the video game story offers something new to literature, a new mode of building a powerful narrative experience. The relation between the alterbiography, the traditional narrative, and the player drive the literary potential of games.

Video games have grown from the pure experimentation development of

Spacewar! to a simple storytelling medium to a unique mode for relaying complex plots.

29 Calleja, In-Game, 124. 30 Ibid., 128. 21

As games have developed, they have forged a relationship between in-game protagonist and real-world player, and this connection not only forms the heart of the story but also acts as the source of the game’s literary merit. Games’ abilities to relate the personal endeavors of their protagonists to the interactions of the player can instill new significance in classic storylines. The tension between the game’s designed story and the player’s own input creates the personal experience of the video game. By exploring and challenging how players react to this tension, developers can create unique experiences that echo classic themes while also thrusting their conclusions onto the player and imposing a strange new responsibility on the audience. The alterbiography forces the player to complete not just the game, but the literary work that the game aspires to complete.

Shadow of the Colossus does such literary work.

A Faithful Literature

Shadow of the Colossus tells a tragic story in an interactive medium through the marriage of classic narrative and the interactive. Its success highlights many of the strengths of modern interactive literature. It achieves the demands of the classical tragedy, not just on the plot level that Booker discusses, but on the thematic, emotional level that has defined the genre since it was outlined in Aristotle’s Poetics, and continues to be discussed and explored in works such as Dorothea Krook’s Elements of Tragedy.

Shadow of the Colossus’s story succeeds not because of a complex plot or exciting new characters, but because it forges a connection with its audience and uses that connection to make the story’s tragic end uniquely personal. In so doing, Shadow of the Colossus exemplifies the strength of games in the unique way that it tells its story. By building the

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story primarily through the alterbiography of the gameplay, Team Ico immerses their audience—the players—in the story and world of Shadow of the Colossus. The developers then execute the tragic fall by subverting that alterbiography and directly undermining the players’ expectations of their own heroism. Shadow of the Colossus succeeds as a classic tragedy while also showcasing the interactive tools unique to video games.

Shadow of the Colossus tells the story of a young man named Wander’s attempt to save the life of Mono, the woman he loves. Before the game begins, Wander and Mono live in an unnamed village. The townspeople sacrifice Mono because they believe she has a “cursed fate.”31 With only his horse, Agro, as company, Wander steals a magic sword and flees to the Forbidden Land with Mono’s body. In the opening cutscene, before the players can even interact with the game, Wander reaches the heart of the Forbidden

Land—a vast, empty country populated by sparse plains, deserts, lakes, and forests— where there stands a temple. Here, Wander meets Dormin, an enigmatic god who speaks with two voices: one male and one female. Dormin promises to revive Mono if Wander first slays the sixteen colossi that roam the land. Now the player assumes control as

Wander and must kill these mythical beasts by finding them, deducing and planning how to defeat them, and then executing that plan. Yet as Wander defeats the colossi, some unknown force begins to escape and steadily corrupts his body.

In Elements of Tragedy, Dorothea Krook outlines four components of tragedy: shame, suffering, knowledge, and affirmation.32 Shadow of the Colossus follows these same guidelines for tragedy, and in the process guides the player through Wander’s tragic

31 Shadow of the Colossus (PlayStation 2 version), Team Ico (Sony Computer Entertainment, 2005). 32 Dorothea Krook, Elements of Tragedy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 8-9. 23

fall. The divisions between Krook’s four distinct elements of tragedy often blur; the tragedy unfolds naturally rather than in explicit sections. According to Krook, the first element, the shameful act, “directly precipitates the spectacle of suffering.”33 Krook makes an important distinction about this act; the shame must be derived not just from circumstance, but from action. The hero’s actions incite the suffering, rather than act as a response to suffering.34 The resulting suffering, the next element of tragedy, intersects heavily with the third element, knowledge: “what makes the suffering properly tragic depends intimately on the kind and quality of the knowledge it yields.”35 Suffering destroys, often leading to the hero’s death. Ironically, it also stems from the hero’s own

“fully conscious” choices; the hero is to blame for his own suffering.36 Knowledge, the next element, “springs from suffering in tragedy.”37 This knowledge can take multiple forms; while it may be hero’s personal revelation, it can also be more universal, never recognized by the protagonist but imparted on the audience.38 The final element, affirmation, stands in contrast to the other three elements. While shame, suffering, and knowledge break down the world that we see at the beginning of the narrative, the tragedy also offers “the affirmation or reaffirmation of the dignity of man and the worthwhileness of human life, which in great tragedy issues from the spectacle of suffering itself and the knowledge the suffering yields.”39 Thus tragedy must not simply depict a dismal failure on the part of a fallen hero. It must give us something in exchange to help us draw meaning from the hero’s mistakes. This final component makes the

33 Krook, Elements of Tragedy, 10. 34 Ibid., 10. 35 Ibid., 11. 36 Ibid., 12. 37 Ibid., 12. 38 Ibid., 12-13. 39 Ibid., 14. 24

tragedy meaningful beyond the confines of the story, demanding a personal response from its audience. The video game can reframe and retell all of these components, but thrives on the player’s ultimate response due to the game’s structure and the use of the alterbiography.

All four of Krook’s elements of tragedy function and build within the context of

Shadow of the Colossus. Wander’s shameful act forms the bulk of the game. He willingly murders sixteen mystical creatures in exchange for the life of one person he loves. Many of the colossi are docile, content to walk, swim, or fly around the world without attacking

Wander. The few that do threaten him only do so after he tracks them to their homes.

These creatures appear majestic and unique, with rocky, earthen bodies that suggest their connection to the natural world, and Wander slays them one by one. He sacrifices the lives of others, exterminating the colossi, in the hope of saving one girl, his personal love.

Wander’s shameful act produces personal suffering, first evidenced in his physical appearance. After Wander defeats each colossus, shadowy tendrils emerge from the monster and stab through Wander’s chest. Darkness literally invades and corrupts

Wander. His body deteriorates: fresh faced and innocent at the game’s outset, as time passes Wander’s skin turns a sickly yellow, his hair loses color, and veins stand out black under his skin. Krook calls death “the ultimate form of loss and deprivation in the human experience.”40 Wander also experiences an ultimate loss, but not just in his death. This facet of his suffering can be split into three components: the loss of his body, the loss of his life, and the loss of his love. After Wander defeats the final colossus, the darkness completely consumes the young hero. A climactic twist reveals that Dormin merely used

40 Krook, Elements of Tragedy, 12. 25

Wander as a pawn in order to regain a physical form, with Wander himself serving as the vessel for Dormin’s rebirth. As Wander’s physical corruption worsens, warriors from

Wander’s home town attempt to stop him. They shoot him and stab him through the chest, mortally wounding him. But Wander suffers less in death than he does upon seeing

Mono’s continued mortality. As his life collapses around him, Wander crawls toward

Mono, but he falls before he reaches her, and he never learns if she returns to life. As his life fades, Wander remains committed to a goal that he never sees realized.

Its conscious quality makes Wander’s suffering more tragic, which directly relates to the game’s message to players. Dormin explicitly warns Wander of the risks that he faces: “the price you pay may be heavy indeed,” the god says, but Wander responds “It doesn’t matter.”41 He consciously chooses to break nature’s laws to save Mono.

Wander’s suffering stems from this choice; his fall results from that decision. With this tragic suffering, knowledge enters the tragedy. In knowledge, the tragedy exits the stage or the game and interacts directly with the audience: “what matters in tragedy is not that the tragic hero, the vessel of the tragic suffering, shall receive the knowledge issuing from the suffering, but that we, the readers or audience, shall receive it.”42 Wander never learns to change his ways—he still tries to reach Mono at the end of his life—but the audience sees the waste in Wander’s conscious, destructive decision to sacrifice the lives of innocent creatures on behalf of his personal love. Shadow of the Colossus uses

Wander’s suffering to challenge the player’s understanding of sacrifice; the reward may not be worth the cost to you or to your world. The game does not present a definitive argument about how Wander should have acted, but it does question the heroism of a

41 Shadow of the Colossus (PlayStation 2 version). 42 Krook, Elements of Tragedy, 13. 26

blind, destructive devotion to a single, personal goal. Shadow of the Colossus presents an ethical dilemma through Wander’s actions and we, as participants in the game, must draw conclusions of our own from the tragedy.

It is in the final moment of affirmation that the game asserts its literary argument.

After Wander’s climactic fall and the destruction of Dormin at the hands of villagers from Wander’s home, there is a lull. Then Mono rises from her altar, alive once more.

Dormin manipulated Wander into giving up his body, but the god did not lie. In spite of the destructive actions of Wander and Dormin, they created some small amount of good.

Mono’s renewed life may not justify the cost of reviving her, but her survival nonetheless suggests some hope for the future. As Mono explores her surroundings, she finds an infant: Wander’s destruction did not end is his death, but reverted him to his birth state, albeit with a pair of horns now growing on his head.43 The game’s final image of Mono, alone in a strange world, taking care of a child, says that though much has been lost, perhaps something has been gained. In its reaffirmation of the value of human action,

Shadow of the Colossus seeks to show that even tragic actions can positively impact the world. The player is left to decide whether or not these benefits justify their cost.

A Personal Literature

Shadow of the Colossus relies on the player to interpret much of the game’s final act. The success of the game’s finale relies on the player forming a direct connection with the actions of the protagonist. This connection changes how the player relates to the tragedy on the whole; the story no longer details an event happening to a character, but an

43 Team Ico’s first and only other video game, ICO, released in 2001, tells the story of a young boy who is born with horns. In the fiction of the game, all boys with horns are exiled and left for dead. Shadow of the Colossus, then, by introducing a horned child, likely serves as a prequel to ICO. Wander’s wicked actions might directly lead to a line of descendants who are marked by his actions and are punished as a result. 27

event happening to the player’s character. Wander’s suffering is the player’s suffering, his foolish persistence in his goal shared by the player who also persists through the game. The knowledge that Wander gains too late to save himself directly touches the player, who guides Wander through the final moments of the game, who pushes him too far. This process showcases the alterbiography at work, offering a new dimension to

Shadow of the Colossus’s player-focused tragedy.

Shadow of the Colossus clearly follows the narrative beats that characterize tragedy. Its structural success alone makes it an interesting study in the strength of video game stories. But stopping our discussion here would be failing to consider the most important element that distinguishes video games from other literature: how the audience derives meaning. In games, the audience is the player, “the human agent, or agents, that engage with the game system.”44 So how do these narratives speak to their audiences?

Krook, in writing about tragedy, says:

it seems, moreover, at least theoretically possible that a successful tragedy could be written in which the tragic hero’s consciousness of his suffering was completely inarticulate, that is, nonverbal, and the task of articulating the meaning of the suffering and thus making it intelligible to the audience was left entirely to some other element in the drama, like…a symbolic machinery.45

The theoretical “symbolic machinery” becomes reality in the way players interact with the video game. Shadow of the Colossus uses the tools of interactive media to immerse the player in the experience, making the “meaning of the suffering” apparent through gameplay. While they make us of some of the same elements as theater or film, video games transform these elements by relying on the player. Interactivity opens up entirely new aspects of narrative development: “the video game screen predominantly simulates

44 Calleja, In-Game, 11. 45 Krook, Elements of Tragedy, 48. 28

perceptions of space and objects that are present to the senses, but they can be influenced by actions.”46 The player interprets, but also informs, the narrative. This exchange again ties into the alterbiography described by Calleja; the story develops not just through the script but through the player’s actions. Team Ico builds an interactive world based around a few core mechanics, which allows the player to identify with Wander. These mechanics can then be subverted, upsetting the player’s understanding of the plot and the game world, directly involving the audience in the tragedy. “At the heart of madness language is the verb,” Ruth Padel claims in Whom Gods Destroy.47 At the heart of madness video games is the gameplay.

The gameplay works to build “immersion,” which serves to invest players in the game world so that they do not just play as the protagonist; they identify with him.48

Team Ico takes advantage of the player’s immersion to both thrill and challenge the player. Consider, for example, the battles with the colossi. Wander completes impossible feats, scaling massive creatures with strength no human could possess. The players could never recreate Wander’s actions, but they nonetheless connect with him through the immersive process of controlling Wander during his battles. Because Wander is a tragic hero, the player can still relate to him on a personal level as well. Wander is not “the average man: not ordinary, commonplace, undistinguished; not like the fellow next door or a girl like me. What he represents is the furthest reach of human possibility…Thus,

46 Torben Grodal, “Stories for Eye, Ear, and Muscles: Video Games, Media, and Embodied Experiences,” in The Video Game Theory Reader, ed. Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron (New York: Routledge, 2003), 139. 47 Ruth Padel, Whom Gods Destroy: Elements of Greek and Tragic Madness (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 22. 48 Alison McMahan, “Immersion, Engagement, and Presence: A Method for Analyzing 3-D Video Games,” in The Video Game Theory Reader, ed. Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron (New York: Routledge, 2003), 68. 29

paradoxically, the hero in tragedy is representative of all humanity by being exceedingly unlike common humanity.”49 Through this identification, the game invites the player to experience the battles with Wander as a human agent in a new world.

The immersion is furthered by the player’s control over the game’s visuals. On the surface, Shadow of the Colossus looks and sounds like non-interactive media, but its artistic design changes to take advantage of the game’s interactive nature. The visual and audio elements of the game must adapt to the player’s choices. By responding to player choice subtly and cinematically, the game fully immerses the player in the experience.

On a basic level, Shadow of the Colossus plays out most like a film, since it exists on a screen. But the player does not perceive environments in the same way that an audience watches camera footage. This difference stems from what Calleja refers to as the “Player

Involvement Model,” or the way in which players become immersed in the game’s fictional environment.50 Here, “Kinesthetic Involvement,” the player’s movement through the space, and “Spatial Involvement,” the player’s recognition of the space, are particularly relevant.51 Shadow of the Colossus takes place in a vast yet empty world that emphasizes a sense of loneliness. Visually, this can be conveyed without interactivity.

The game features an unsaturated color palette, wide open spaces, oppressive canyons, and abandoned architecture that towers above the player. The colossi themselves provide the only clear evidence of life in this world, but they too look unnatural: alien beasts made up not only of flesh and hair, but also of bones that protrude from their skin and of seemingly man-made structures, designed to unsettle. In game, however, these elements

49 Krook, Elements of Tragedy, 37. 50 Calleja, In-Game, 33. 51 Ibid., 43. 30

are not purely visual. The Player Involvement Model gives the player an additional sense of control: “Players experience a double awareness in third-person perspective games.

First, they are aware of the surrounding environment as portrayed by the camera. Second, they are also aware of the space as it relates to the avatar.”52 As the player rides across the world, they choose what to look at, what to focus on, where to go. The player has control of Wander and of the camera that orbits around the protagonist.53 This allows players to observe the world freely; they can ride straight to their destination or explore rocky outcroppings and ruined buildings out of personal curiosity. This strengthens the player’s Spatial Involvement. Shadow of the Colossus, like many games, offers “players geographical expanses to inhabit, interact with, and explore.”54 Regardless of where players choose to go, they will find themselves alone when they get there; none but the colossi live in this world. The loneliness that defines the world seeps into the players’ experiences as they interact with the game’s physical space. The visuals respond not to a director’s vision, but to the players’ desires, letting the audience move through and experience the world as they choose. Wherever they choose to go, they go there alone.

The game’s music also responds the players’ input, changing to match the players’ actions. Shadow of the Colossus features a full orchestral score composed by

Kow Otani that is similar to a film score.55 Otani employs few sound effects; as the player explores the world, no background music plays. The player hears only the sounds

52 Calleja, In-Game, 67. 53 Shadow of the Colossus employs a very common control scheme. Players control Wander and the camera through the use of two analog sticks; one moves Wander through the space, and the other moves the camera around Wander. Buttons on the controller allow for additional actions, like jumping or swinging the sword, as well as special camera movements, allowing the player to focus their attention on a colossus or zoom in on a far-off object. Wander’s and the camera’s movement can be controlled simultaneously, granting the player a great deal of control over how they see the world as they progress through it. 54 Calleja, In-Game, 74. 55 Shadow of the Colossus (PlayStation 2 version). 31

that Wander and Agro make. This emphasizes the feeling of isolation and contrasts sharply with the colossus battles, where the music enters dramatically to underscore the dramatic combat and plays throughout the fight. However, unlike in films or plays, there is no way of knowing how long the battle will last and how long any one song will need to be played. Thus songs must be able to be repeated indefinitely. Shadow of the Colossus not only addresses this issue through composition, but it also creates a way for music to respond to the player. During battles, the player’s proximity to the colossus influences the volume of the music. As a colossus gets closer, threatening the player, the music crescendos, dying down again once the player distances himself from the monster. The looping tracks also switch when the dynamic of the fight changes. When Wander begins to counter-attack, climbing and damaging the colossi, the music changes from more ominous, brooding tracks to songs with a grander, epic feel. In this way, the game’s music responds to the player’s choices. The static becomes active, reflecting the player’s actions in real time while maintaining the cinematic feel.

The responsive gameplay, visual, and audio elements work to incorporate the player in an aspect of the storytelling from which they would otherwise be isolated. In a film, the action and artistic design are static, conforming to the director’s vision and not to the player’s. By adding interactivity, Shadow of the Colossus immerses the player in the game world. The identification with the protagonist that forms a fundamental part of the tragic storytelling mode gains renewed strength when the player directly relates to the protagonist through the game. The alterbiography works to build this relationship, allowing the player both to watch Wander’s story play out and to become a participant in that story. This immersion bridges the gulf between the players’ and Wander’s actions,

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drawing them into the otherwise alien world. Team Ico uniquely poise themselves to deliver the tragedy to the player through the manipulation of classic visual devices and an understanding of significance of the audience’s relationship with the protagonist. They follow through on this delivery by challenging and subverting the immersion that they previously offered the player, stripping away control to conduct literary work.

A Productive Literature

Much of the focus of game design works to ensure that the player identifies with the protagonist. To make the tragic conclusion resonate with that audience, Team Ico subverts this immersion and, in so doing, strengthen Shadow of the Colossus’s tragic argument. As the game draws to a close, many gameplay elements made familiar over the course of the experience change drastically, undermining the gameplay experience and advancing the player’s understanding of Wander’s personal tragedy. A perfect example of this device comes in the form of Wander’s horse, Agro. Agro exists mainly to help the player complete the game. Riding the horse, the player can cross the vast distances between the colossi quickly. Agro also helps the player in some of his battles, offering speed that Wander alone does not possess. But Agro is not a blank slate that exists solely to advance the gameplay. She has a mind of her own: she will steer away from steep cliffs, avoid colossi, and flee if the player attempts to attack her. Players receive subtle hints about the strength of Wander’s and Agro’s bond throughout the game. When out of battle, the player can make Wander call softly to Agro.56 In one of few mid-game cutscenes, Agro mourns for Mono on her own, and Wander strokes her comfortingly.

Agro and Wander are friends. They serve as each other’s only company as they roam

56 During gameplay, pressing the “X” button causes Wander to call to Agro; if the horse is far away, he will return to Wander’s side 33

across the Forbidden Land in search of danger. They share in each other’s grief and in their bravery. Agro is just as fearless as Wander when fighting the colossi. Her speed and intelligence are essential for slaying some of the more animalistic beasts. She bears her fair share of the brutality of these endeavors. Agro can fall in battle just as easily as

Wander, braying in pain when struck by a colossus’s attack. When fighting a colossus,

Wander calls to Agro sharply, his voice panicked. In times of peace, loneliness, and violence, Wander and Agro travel together.

For the first fifteen colossi battles, the game does not challenge the dynamic between Wander and Agro. Team Ico lets their relationship build quietly through the gameplay. Just before the final colossus battle, however, the game drives their bond to the forefront. While the pair cross a bridge on the way to the final arena, the bridge begins to crumble. Stumbling, Agro launches Wander forward, saving the protagonist by sacrificing herself. This moment works because it moves seamlessly between gameplay and plot, making the event viscerally real for the player. Although the player initially controls Agro as she crosses the bridge, at some point the character hits an “event trigger,” a specifically constructed moment when a preprogrammed script secretly overrides the gameplay to allow a narrative event to occur.57 The player believes they still have control as the bridge begins to break down, but in fact the game controls everything.

By the time Agro throws Wander to safety, the game enters a cutscene, during which the player has no control. While some argue that cutscenes prove that “narrative and gameplay are completely distinct,” Shadow of the Colossus preserves the relationship between these two elements in this moment, using the cutscene to inform the gameplay

57 Sebastian Domsch, Storyplaying: Agency and Narrative in Video Games (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 41. 34

and shocking the player by removing control.58 When Wander screams after Agro’s falling form, we hear the exact same scream that Wander uses to call to Agro during colossi battles. The audio cue resonates with the player as familiar, tying the cutscene directly to the past hours of gameplay. The scream, once controlled by the player, now triggers automatically, again underscoring the lack of control that Wander and the player have. They cannot save Agro.

The final, and greatest, effect of this device comes after control returns to the player. Wander can continue to his destination, but must do so without Agro. Wander has lost his only companion, and the player has lost a valuable gameplay asset. This shift reinforces the emotional loss. Our identification with Wander becomes stronger in this moment, as we have lost a companion just as he has. The journey, from now on, will be longer and harder. The inherent sadness of the scene continues to foster a connection with the player, but the game goes further by conveying the long term results of that loss to the player by pairing Wander’s emotional sadness to a real, technical loss that the player experiences.

Shadow of the Colossus employs another, similar move, this one related to

Wander specifically, through the use and subversion of the stamina meter. Wander’s stamina, a feature relatively unique to Shadow of the Colossus, plays a central role in the battles with the colossi. To defeat the colossi, Wander must reach and destroy one or more weak points on the colossi’s bodies. Navigating to these spots requires the player to climb and sidle across the colossi’s bodies and hold on when the colossi flail in attempts to dislodge Wander. In gameplay, the player accomplishes this action through the stamina

58 Domsch, Storyplaying, 33. 35

meter. When the player holds the R1 button, Wander holds on to the colossus. Wander will not fall as long as the player holds the button, but as he clings to the colossus, the stamina meter depletes. If the meter drains completely, Wander loses his grip and falls.

This provides one of the game’s core challenges. The player must hold on when threatened and judge carefully when it is safe to release the R1 button to continue forward or rest and recharge the stamina meter. Yet the stamina meter also does work beyond its core gameplay function. It provides a reminder of Wander’s mortality, his capability for weakness and failure. Throughout the entire game he completes impossible feats, but always within limitations: as Aristotle describes, the tragic hero must maintain a “likeness to human nature in general” while still being exceptional.59 Wander’s strength surpasses any real human’s, but it is not unlimited. Thus, the stamina meter draws a relationship between the hyperbolic world of Shadow of the Colossus and the real world that humans, like the player, inhabit. Shadow of the Colossus depicts the true gravity of

Wander’s endeavor in gameplay through the stamina meter.

As with Agro, the developers of Shadow of the Colossus do not leave the stamina meter as a simple gameplay component that enriches the experience. In the last instance of player control in the entire game, the game subverts the stamina meter to illustrate the ultimate futility of Wander’s quest. They force the player to make a personal and moral choice. At the end of the game, a magical force literally pulls Wander away from Mono, the sole object of his desire. As Wander slips backwards, players can grab onto a stairwell, holding the same R1 button that they used to grab hold of the colossi. But this time, the player cannot triumph. The stamina meter depletes as Wander clings to the

59 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Gerard F. Else (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1967), 43. 36

stairs with no way to move forward. The player must either let the stamina meter drain completely, or let go of R1. Two key elements are at play in this moment. The first is the notion of futility. Wander has always been able to move forward, to defeat the enemies that stood in his way in the hopes of saving Mono. Here, he cannot progress. Not only is he literally dragged backwards, but the mechanic that we associate with his triumph proves useless.

And this brings us to the player’s role in this final moment. Every person who plays Shadow of the Colossus faces this choice: to hold on until Wander’s strength fails, or to let go. From a gameplay perspective, the player has “incomplete information.” The player does not know if there exists a way to complete the sequence and save Wander.60

But from our identification with Wander, we have a great deal of information from which to make a personal choice. This decision making process closely parallels Greek experiences of theater. Greek theater often sought to trigger an emotional response in the audience;61 our close association with Wander over the course of the game all but demands that our decision be motivated by emotion. But the Greeks also wanted to inspire debate.62 We may be close to Wander, but given all the problems his actions caused, our allegiance to him may be morally wrong. The game asks the player if it is time to let the story end. Wander has spent the entire game holding on too long, destroying things around him because of his refusal to let go of Mono. In this final moment, the player must grapple with the revelation of Wander’s destructive nature and choose whether to continue to fight, to hold on until the last moment, or to accept defeat,

60 Domsch, Storyplaying, 114. 61 Eric Dugdale, Greek Theatre in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 152. 62 Ibid., 153-154. 37

to realize that the battle is lost, to let go. The result is the same, but the experience is unique, offering two different thematic morals determined entirely by the player.

Shadow of the Colossus crafts its story by combining the traditional narrative and the alterbiography. Visual and audio elements build immersion by responding to the player’s interactions, making the player feel part of the cinematic world. The gameplay that could have been purely mechanical is manipulated to make the game’s tragic ending speak directly to the player. Plot changes are underscored by gameplay changes and vice versa. The players respond to Agro’s fall, to Wander’s death, and to Mono’s resurrection with their own feelings that the game helps them develop. On the surface, the story of

Shadow of the Colossus always ends the same way. Wander will always suffer a tragic fall. The players gets to decide for themselves, however, whether Wander’s story ends in him losing hope or persisting to his fatal end. Shadow of the Colossus is an emotionally charged personal journey disguised as an action-adventure game, where the true strength of the story lies between the player’s and Wander’s every action, and the development and delivery of this subtle story proves that the game can function as a literary tragedy.

A Developing Literature

Shadow of the Colossus delivers a story with the complexity of a classic tragedy through interactivity. Team Ico’s success is just one example of how a video game can work as literature, not just in terms of its story, but in the meaning behind that story and in how the game conveys that meaning. However, the game’s story falters at times. The technical nature of the video game prevents it from being an accessible form of literature for everyone, and the flexible nature of interactivity can be just as much of a hindrance to storytelling and world building as it can be a boon. Studying Shadow of the Colossus also

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reveals gaps in its literary nature, ways that the story could have been strengthened that the developers missed. This points not to a need to discredit video games as a literary medium, but to continue to analyze and challenge them. Understanding concepts like the alterbiography and player immersion help us to understand what video games do on a literary level. But we also need to understand how the technical aspects of games can undermine their success as literature. By continuing this form of analysis and challenging developers to minimize the flaws and take full advantage of the tools available to them, we can work toward a critical but productive stance on the video game, a stance that will allow literary development to flourish.

Games have a unique issue that makes it harder to consider them as literature in that they require skill to complete. Difficulty must be balanced in order to give players all of the tools and information that they need to progress while also offering enough of a challenge for victory to be rewarding and, in the case of Shadow of the Colossus, thematically triumphant. This feeling of success relies heavily on repetition; by repeating an action that was once unfamiliar, we gain mastery of it and feel accomplishment.63 At times, Shadow of the Colossus does not appropriately manage difficulty, making the repetition a hindrance rather than a benefit. Obscure solutions to puzzles and overly aggressive colossi can make some battles more frustrating than rewarding. This frustration removes the player from the gameplay experience, breaking all identification with Wander. The player must focus on the more technical elements of winning rather than the ideas represented by the combat. At this point, the repetitiveness breaks out of the game world.

63 Grodal, “Stories for Eye, Ear, and Muscles,” 148. 39

When it functions properly, repetition allows players to identify with Wander as they learn how to tackle each new colossus using knowledge from the previous battle, and making the long journey toward Mono’s recovery feel genuine. But if the game stalls, becoming too repetitive or difficult, we can see that “repetitive activities are felt as less serious, less ‘real’ than activities like tragic stories that represent irreversible processes.”64 When players realize that they are repeating themselves, rather than progressing in a real world, immersion collapses. By experiencing the difficulty of

Wander’s battles, we gain a greater appreciation for the lengths that he is willing to go in order to rescue Mono. Our identification with him and his quest builds through immersion, but that immersion can be torn down by moments in gameplay when the technical elements of the game override the thematic ideals that the game presents.

Narrative momentum breaks down when the player loses that sense of immersion. Not only can the difficulty of games prevent certain portions of the population from enjoying and understanding them, they can also keep game players from having the desired experience.

The technical nature of games can also break their literary development. While the players’ experiences of narrative through gameplay strengthen their identification with Wander and his quest, the nature of the interactive medium brings its own problems.

Most prominently, errors that interfere with the intended progression of the game invariably hinder video games. Glitches and bugs can significantly undermine the player’s immersive experience. Another piece of Calleja’s Player Involvement Model is

“Shared Involvement,” through which he argues that players perceive other actors in

64 Grodal, “Stories for Eye, Ear, and Muscles,” 140. 40

video games as “social beings” rather than computer-controlled programs.65 We naturally expect, as players, for programmed digital characters to behave as if they have minds of their own. When errors reveal the artifice behind the gameplay, we cannot maintain this expectation. At one point when replaying Shadow of the Colossus, for example, one of the colossi encountered a pathing error and could not move toward Wander appropriately.

I had to run in the wrong direction to get the colossus unstuck before the fight could resume properly. The process of Shared Involvement that seeks to immerse players in the game can break down and instead push them out of the experience. Similar problems can occur if the player simply chooses to do something that the game does not expect at the expense of their own experience. Looking away while a plot point develops elsewhere or not noticing a visual motif can cause the player to miss out on important experiences.

Team Ico and other developers design their games to lead players toward the intended experience, but the player could still fail to realize they could grab the stairs at the end of

Shadow of the Colossus, and then the moment’s literary resonance is lost. By allowing for so many different player experiences, games also run the risk of allowing players to push games in directions that break the games’ designs.

Perhaps the greatest failing in Shadow of the Colossus comes not from any inherent flaw in the medium, but from what the game simply does not do. For all its success in delivering story through the alterbiography, it largely ignores the traditional storytelling tools available in language. Shadow of the Colossus’s decision to forego language and instead let the gameplay carry the narrative works except for the instances when the game relies on spoken exposition as a crutch. The game’s opening features lines

65 Calleja, In-Game, 102. 41

like “Thou possesses the Ancient Sword” and “I need you to bring back her soul,” that deliver important plot information, but little more.66 The dialogue wavers between boring and trite, and it has no literary subtext. It cannot be analyzed to derive a larger meaning, for there is no meaning in the dialogue beyond its simplistic bearing on the plot. Shadow of the Colossus creates an oppressive, lonely, immersive environment through gameplay, but the language is just a shell. The game suffers not because the language is necessarily bad or wrong, but because it ignores language’s literary strengths.

Language in games does have potential, however, and Shadow of the Colossus approaches interesting ideas with its language at times. The names of the characters, for instance, tie strongly into the themes of the game. Wander’s name underscores his role as the lone tragic hero; Padel associates the tragic hero with an enforced self-enforced isolation characterized by wandering.67 Agro’s name seems to suggest his natural role,

“of or belonging to the field,” in contrast to the alien world in which the game takes place, while Dormin’s title implies dormancy, an interesting form of foreshadowing in which the awakening of the god is hidden in its name.68 Dormin also calls itself “we,” and speaks with both a male and female voice, evoking the ways in which the Greeks would depict gods with unique, often contrary personas.69 Most prominent is Mono, the one singular object of Wander’s intentions and desires. She represents the essential selfish goal of the game, a point emphasized not just by Wander’s motivation and by her resting place in the center of the game world, but by her name itself. The harmful implications of valuing one person above all else emphasizes that Mono is, literally, “the

66 Shadow of the Colossus (PlayStation 2). 67 Padel, Whom Gods Destroy, 99-100. 68 Merriam Webster, s.v. “agro-,” accessed May 2, 2014, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/agro 69 J. Michael Walton, The Greek Sense of Theatre (London: Methuen & Co, 1984), 29. 42

one.” Yet Shadow of the Colossus does not take full advantage of these ideas: Wander’s and Mono’s names are never even said in the game. Their names can be found in the credits listing their voice actors, but nowhere else.70 The strength of the game’s naming conventions could not be more separate from the player’s experience, unlike the carefully integrated elements of gameplay discussed earlier. Shadow of the Colossus could have used language to enhance the themes of the game, but instead it largely falls by the wayside.

Despite these shortcomings, Shadow of the Colossus is very much a piece of literature. It is also very much a video game. By understanding how it works, we see how interactivity can breed narrative depth. We see the strengths and limitations of the medium, the incredible things it has accomplished and the failures that still need to be remedied. Above all else, we can see potential in the union of play and traditional storytelling through the alterbiography, potential for players to gain something deeper from this relatively new form of entertainment. The more ways that meaning can be incorporated into the game, the more flexibility there exists to deliver a complex literary tale. The literature of the video game can only become stronger as the ways in which literature is tackled are expanded. We may have games that constitute literature now, but there is still much room for them to diversify and grow in how they approach literary storytelling, so we must critique them.

70 Shadow of the Colossus (PlayStation 2 version). 43

--Chapter 2--

“Do You Feel Like a Hero Yet?”

The Video Game as Critic

Shadow of the Colossus illustrates how games tackle literature, how they can use the tools of the interactive medium to replicate and modify the tragic form. It also demonstrates the tremendous potential of games: to tackle any genre, to retell any story through the use of the alterbiography. Our focus on the burgeoning field of interactive literature, however, should not be derailed by the strength of its storytelling alone. The importance of literature lies not in telling an array of diverse stories, but in making those stories significant outside of the play environment. Shadow of the Colossus works as a terrific tragedy, and ideally it has an emotional impact on the player, but its scope is small, focused on the game world and the classical elements that populate it. Games have the potential to become social critics, using the same storytelling devices as games like

Shadow of the Colossus but applying them to address a societal problem. In these games, the alterbiography still works to invest the player in the game world and its narrative, but it also acts as a method of criticism. Gameplay challenges ideas developed by the narrative and vice versa. The gaps in the logic of the game space work as indicators of the larger issues that the game tackles. Through play, the player experiences this disrupt, granting the criticism a uniquely subversive and immediate quality that distinguishes this narrative style from its traditional and interactive peers. The story is still told through the alterbiography, but its application is more nuanced, deliberately creating problems to force the player to grapple with them.

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One game that functions as a critique is Spec Ops: The Line. Created by Yager

Development and released in 2012, Spec Ops’s plot draws heavily on Joseph Conrad’s

Heart of Darkness. Though the specifics of the story are changed, it follows a similar narrative thrust for much of the game. Before Spec Ops begins, an opening cutscene provides the initial exposition. Dubai has been ravaged and destroyed by constant sandstorms, resulting in significant casualties and leaving many civilians trapped in the city. In an effort to help the city’s people, and in direct defiance of orders from the army,

Colonel John Konrad and his soldiers, the “Damned 33rd” Infantry Battalion, organize an evacuation of the city. The attempt fails, and Konrad and his men go silent. It is presumed that they rule what remains of Dubai under martial law, and they are condemned by the U.S. Army. When a transmission from Konrad is heard from outside the city, a reconnaissance team is sent to investigate. Players take on the role of Captain

Martin Walker, a Delta Force operative who leads two fellow soldiers, Adams and Lugo, in an attempt to determine the source of the transmission. The mission is supposed to be quick, but the trio ends up being drawn deeper and deeper into Dubai, entering into a bloody conflict with the Damned 33rd that changes their primary objective. The new mission: find Konrad.

The parallels to Heart of Darkness are immediately apparent. Walker plays the part of Marlow, Konrad assumes the role of Kurtz (his name a deliberate reference to the novel’s author), and Dubai replaces the Congo. Marlow’s journey upriver in Heart of

Darkness becomes, in Spec Ops, a voyage deeper into the decimated city. Yet Spec Ops:

The Line does not conduct its work as an adaptation of Heart of Darkness:

Although a work of fiction must admittedly undergo many superficial alterations in dialogue and plot when it is transformed into a movie, these changes must not

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depart in any significant fashion from the basic intent of the original author. The faithful screen adaptation, then, is one that remains essentially true to the original author’s personal vision; that is, the latter’s basic view of the human condition, as expressed in the work to be filmed.71

Yager Development cares little for Joseph Conrad’s “basic intent.” The designers draw on Conrad not to engage in a discussion with his material, but to use it as a reference, a citation, as shorthand to assign gravitas to their story. They deliberately put their game into a superficial grouping alongside Heart of Darkness and the 1979 film adaptation

Apocalypse Now, establishing it, before the action even begins, as a dark exploration of global conflict. This citation is not a flaw in the game’s conception, but rather an important precursor to the critical work that Spec Ops conducts. Indeed, Spec Ops cites many different sources to lend its story, and its audience, an undeserved feeling of importance. Then it sets to work unpacking and tearing down that importance for the player. The game is set in the Middle East, but in a country in which no actual conflict is occurring. At a glance, Spec Ops appears to be tackling important issues like America’s involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, but instead it makes up its own conflict so that it does not have to deal with complex political issues. The reality of war is also conveyed through citation, with Spec Ops adopting the tactics developed by other modern military video games. From visual style to enemy behavior to technical gameplay, Spec Ops apes the big budget, wildly successful shooters of the contemporary era, deeming its game experience important and immersive while only relying on trends set by other companies.

These citations render Spec Ops: The Line a facsimile, a sketch of what a game about the horrors of war in a foreign land might be like with none of the body to

71 Gene D. Phillips, Conrad and Cinema: The Art of Adaptation (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1995), 10-11. 46

constitute a real exploration of that idea. The game’s critical work, however, dismantles this facsimile shortly after it is created, giving the player the brief sense that they are a war hero before tearing down the façade. This is how Yager Development delivers its argument. The designers expose the gaps in modern games’ capability and willingness to tackle challenging real world issues by creating a game that shares these same problems, but exposes the flaws for what they are. Spec Ops: The Line is not a war story. Rather, it’s a critical expose of how modern military games fail to portray war faithfully, opting to imply importance and complexity rather than actually portraying it.

Introduction Through Citation

As a game, Spec Ops: The Line questions portrayals of military heroism. The clear establishment of the simplistic, problematic version of militarism that, all too common in video games, plays a crucial role in the game’s development of its argument.

Yager Development uses citation to create a false perception of their game, luring players into what the developers advertise as a standard experience. The game bills itself as part of an entertainment canon, drawing on multiple sources of inspiration in a relatively bland, straightforward fashion. At their core, the characters and setting work as a citation, implying real-world significance by employing Delta Force operators in the Middle East.

At the same time, they avoid real-world responsibility by portraying fun, easy-going soldiers in Dubai instead of a place with a real conflict. The gameplay also works through citation. Spec Ops: The Line physically plays very similarly to other games of its genre— third person cover-based shooters—and as a result does not challenge players’ understandings of core gameplay mechanics. Finally, the plot draws on Conrad’s Heart of

Darkness, using the story structure of Marlow’s search for Kurtz as a guide for Captain

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Walker’s hunt for Konrad while also lending the game a sense of exaggerated importance by its relation to the famous text. Yager Development roots the game firmly in the familiar, making the world look and feel like it belongs alongside other popular military video games. This careful, unsurprising process of world building plays the initial and ultimately crucial role in setting up the game’s message for the audience, creating a world from a perspective that will soon be inverted.

The developers of Spec Ops want to make clear that their game is the same as other popular military shooters. They assure their audience that their experience playing

Spec Ops will be the same. This work begins before a player even starts the game. Spec

Ops is not actually an original intellectual property, but is in fact the eleventh game in a series that debuted in 1998 with Spec Ops: Rangers Lead the Way. The previous game in the franchise, however, was released in 2002, and the series had been defunct until Spec

Ops: The Line was released ten years later. Spec Ops: The Line bills itself as a reboot, a modern reimagining of a series that looks like it aims to compete with industry frontrunners like Call of Duty and Battlefield. Indeed, the billing of Spec Ops as a reboot seems to mirror the Medal of Honor franchise, another military series that was previously set in World War II, but which featured a 2010 reimaging that sets the game in modern day Afghanistan.72 The trend of rebooting a property to capitalize on another’s mainstream success is common in the video game industry, and Spec Ops: The Line integrates itself within that world. This integration also extends to the game’s public artwork. Military shooter video games have largely homogenous artwork: a lone soldier,

72 Medal of Honor (Xbox 360 version), Danger Close Games (Electronic Arts, 2010). 48

always male, usually white, brandishing a weapon, stands isolated against an abstract background of military action:

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Spec Ops: The Line shares this same style of artwork. It does not just sound like every other military game on the market since 2007; it looks like them, too. Yager

Development goes out of its way to make Spec Ops: The Line appear to be nothing more than an industry copycat, following on the heels of trends set by more popular competitors.

At the same time, Yager Development wants players to feel welcome and comfortable with their game. Spec Ops first fosters a sense of familiarity in the opening moments. Part of this work is accomplished through dialogue; the Delta Force operatives crack jokes with one another as they enter the city, such as in this early exchange:

Walker: Command wants us to look around, we look around. Lugo: I dunno. Sounds like a waste of three stone-cold, ruggedly handsome Delta Operators, such as ourselves. Adams: Think of it as a paid vacation. Lugo: Well, for future reference, I prefer my beaches with a 3-to-1 Sexy Lady:Dead Body ratio. Walker: Lugo…do you ever actually hear the shit comin’ outta your mouth? Lugo: No, I do not, sir. I find it messes with my rhythm.74

73 Box artwork obtained from the video game retail website GameStop (www.gamestop.com). Compilation created by the author. 74 Spec Ops: The Line (Xbox 360 version), Yager Development (2K Games, 2012). 49

These early moments establish a sense of camaraderie, not just amongst the three soldiers, but with the player as well. They introduce Walker and his companions as funny, easy-going men with whom the player can relate. The soldiers welcome the player into the warzone by establishing a feeling of familiarity, assuring users that the game will be enjoyable. This process may be effective at drawing the player in, but it deliberately misrepresents the real political situation. It assures the player that comedy is more important than the actual severity of the conflict. This makes the difficult situation easier for the player to enter; to these soldiers, war is not a horror, but a game, and so the player can enjoy the fight as a game, too.

The physical setting also draws the player in through familiarity, though in a different manner. Spec Ops once again taps into the mainstream ideal of modern military shooters, using the Middle East as a setting. However, the game takes place in a fictional version of Dubai rather than in a hotbed of actual conflict. This trend is common among military shooters; Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, which set a lot of the trends games are still following, takes place in an unnamed “small but oil-rich” country in the Middle

East.75 These games deliberately associate themselves with real conflicts while avoiding the ambiguities and controversies that surround these wars as well as the responsibility that art based on those conflicts must carry. This allows the game to relate tangentially to ongoing modern conflicts while avoiding the ambiguities and controversies that surround those wars.

Spec Ops fits this mold with the sandstorm-ravaged Dubai and its occupants.

When the game’s enemies, local insurgents, appear, they too are are familiar compsoites.

75 Call of Duty 4: Modern Wafare (Xbox 360 version), Infinity Ward (Activision, 2007). 50

These men wear keffiyehs, speak to one another in Farsi, and do not trust the Americans when they first cross paths. At the outset, these Arab men are the nameless foe, to be fought by the player without question, a trend too common in military shooters. The enemy does not need to be real, but simply “other.” To a North American target audience, making the enemy a foreign person of color creates a feeling of separation, an offensive shorthand that nonetheless helps the player feel justified to engage in combat. Games go to great lengths to create this nebulous, imagined “other” to serve as the foe. 2013’s Call of Duty: Ghosts, for instance, features an imagined group called the Federation, in which all of South America has merged into a single country and attacked the United States.76

As long as the enemy is not North American, these games say, it is okay to fight and kill them. Spec Ops: The Line adopts these troubling trends, building a world that implies conflict and populating it with people that imply enmity.

The familiar feel of the game extends beyond the characters and setting to the actual interactivity of the game. Spec Ops’s gameplay is incredibly standard. The game falls under the category of a third-person cover-based shooter, and this label aptly summarizes all of what the gameplay has to offer. Players take cover behind conveniently placed half-height walls, aiming around the cover with one trigger and shooting with the other. If Walker gets shot and takes damage, he can hide behind cover for a few seconds and regenerate his health. The player can carry two guns at a time, throw grenades to flush out enemies, and shoot explosive fuel barrels to quickly dispatch targets. This is a well-worn formula, and anyone familiar with the third person shooters would find

76 Call of Duty: Ghosts (PlayStation 4 version), Infinity Ward (Activision, 2013). 51

themselves perfectly comfortable playing Spec Ops.77 A few bells and whistles attempt to distinguish the gameplay. Shooting pieces of the environment can cause miniature sand slides that crush enemies, and players can command Adams and Lugo to attack specific targets using their own unique skills. These additions do little to separate Spec Ops from the masses of other games that fit into the same gameplay category, but do add a piece to the familiarization process. The game is like many we have played before, with a couple of original mechanics thrown in for good measure. The effect is that the gameplay appears perfectly normal, an attempt to make minor improvements on an established formula. The set up works so well that the game was actually criticized for its overly standard, poorly updated gameplay,78 a criticism that is ultimately off base, as the derivative design is as intentional as the derivative story, characters, and setting.

The game’s most prominent citation, though, is Heart of Darkness. While

Conrad’s novel clearly serves as the basis of the plot, much of the story’s ambiguity is lost early in the game. Instead, Spec Ops: The Line opts for an apolitical reading of the novel with a simplistic version of a protagonist. Much of this difference stems from the opposing ways in which the two works introduce and handle narration. In Heart of

Darkness, Marlow tells his story to the narrator, rather than narrating it to the reader himself. This allows for a great deal of obfuscation of Marlow’s character. From the outset, “Marlow is identified through difference,” Anthony Fothergill notes.79 Conrad clearly distinguishes Marlow from all of the other crewmembers by not giving anyone

77 Miguel Sicart, Beyond Choices: The Design of Ethical Gameplay (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2013), 112. 78 Chris Watters, “Spec Ops: The Line Review,” GameSpot, June 27, 2012, accessed March 30, 2015, http://www.gamespot.com/reviews/spec-ops-the-line-review/1900-6384776/ 79 Anthony Fothergill, Heart of Darkness (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1989), 18. 52

else a name. Conrad’s description of Marlow also feels alien: “Marlow sat cross-legged right aft, leaning against the mizzen-mast. He had sunken cheeks, a yellow complexion, a straight back, an ascetic aspect, and, with his arms dropped, the palms of hands outwards, resembled an idol.”80 Marlow is simultaneously at peace, unhealthy, foreign, and idyllic.

He does not fit amongst the ship’s crew. And yet his viewpoint dominates the novel. This creates a nebulous dichotomy that forms one of the novel’s core methods of work: “That

Marlow seems, at moments, not to know what he is talking about, is almost certainly one of the narrative’s deliberate strengths.”81 The storyteller is an anomaly, unbound and telling a tale full of confusion, both his own and Kurtz’s. The narrator provides the reader with a lens through which to interpret Marlow’s tale, to attempt to make sense of the man and his experiences. Through Marlow, Conrad deconstructs any absolutes that may be thought to exist within the Congo.

Spec Ops: The Line does not feature a frame narrator. Instead, it tells the story from Walker’s perspective. Walker assumes the role of both narrator and protagonist, with the player following and controlling the action through his eyes. The multifaceted viewpoints of storyteller, narrator, and reader are compressed into one, as Walker and the player share the roles of these three agents. From this perspective, the dynamics of the story change: “Taking the framing narrator at his own word, though, history is a glorious tale. So Heart of Darkness, we may start to think, will be an appropriately adventurous and glorious history, easily available to ‘us.’”82 This “glorious history” is ultimately proven to be nonexistent in the novel, but Spec Ops seems to still believe in it. The game

80 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (New York: Modern Library, 1999), 4. 81 Harold Bloom, ed., Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987), 3. 82 Fothergill, Heart of Darkness, 16. 53

tells a one-dimensional version of Marlow’s story, letting Walker and the player act as the heroes in their story. Walker’s perspective shirks the ambiguity of Marlow’s narration. Instead, all of the plot points are presented earnestly.

This simplification extends to the roles that the “villains” play in the two stories.

In Heart of Darkness, Kurtz works through ambiguity to provoke questions: is he an

“aberrant renegade from the European norm rather than [its] culmination?”83 Spec Ops does not ask these questions of Konrad; his role is not challenged. He is simply the goal, a target for Walker, the game, and the player to move toward. The unfortunate result of this retelling of Heart of Darkness is that it seems to lose the literary significance of the story. Conrad’s novel is wondrously divisive: “Heart of Darkness has been read a powerful assault upon imperialism. It has also been attacked, especially of late, as being offensively racist.”84 These readings can coexist because the novel is written to provoke these questions, to deal in uncertainty. In Spec Ops, however, such diverse readings do not fit with Yager Development’s methodology for incorporating the player into their game world. Instead, the player must assume the role of the hero, with clear objectives and clear moral superiority, so Walker must provide a simplified, easy to understand reduction of Marlow’s complex and challenging narration.

From this description of the game’s citations, Spec Ops: The Line appears to be a poorly-conceived, generic, derivative, and troublingly xenophobic game that does no real work, but rather mimics the work of other literature and games. And at the outset of the game, this is true. Yager Development carefully designs the game’s opening to be as commonplace as possible, fitting the standards of the genre. This decision serves two

83 Fothergill, Heart of Darkness, 61. 84 Gary Adelman, Heart of Darkness: Search for the Unconscious (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987), 89. 54

primary purposes. First, it makes the game immediately accessible to video game players who have played other modern military shooters. These players will not be surprised by anything that Spec Ops’s opening has to offer, so they will accept the game’s premise.

They will be lured in and ready for a tale of military heroism. Since the game’s ultimate literary objective speaks directly to these players, Yager Development wants to insure first and foremost that their target audience is playing the game. The game’s standard nature also puts it into direct conversation with other members of the modern military shooter genre. The ties are unmistakable, from the combat to the setting to the protagonists to the box art. To consider the role these kinds of games play, Spec Ops becomes one. Spec Ops: The Line engages in a process of citation and standardization that places the game exactly where it wants to be; in the hands of military video game fans, alongside all the other military video games. From here, Yager Development begins to challenge and invert their citations within the game itself.

Subversion of Citation

Yager Development’s generic third person cover-based shooter becomes one of the most unique games of its kind through an active deconstruction of the citations that previously set the tone for the game’s early moments. Spec Ops: The Line breaks down its story, setting, and gameplay, intentionally revealing the flaws highlighted in the above section. The setting changes, making the player uncomfortable as familiar elements fall away and are replaced by troubling doppelgangers. The gameplay takes innovative turns, not in the core shooting, but in how it addresses player choice. Yager Development forces players to make difficult choices, often choosing between two wrongs with no clear vision as to what is morally right. And as the plot drifts further and further away from

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Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the fallacy of the initially apolitical reading of the novel becomes clear. All of Spec Ops’s citations work subversively, their true meaning lying hidden until the player has been completely drawn into the world. Once Yager

Development starts to tear down the foundation on which they built their game, the whole conception of the war game as entertainment begins to crash down around it.

Spec Ops: The Line begins to muddy the waters of the military shooter through a change in tone that disrupts the characters and their setting and alters the player’s relationship to these elements of the game. The first major signal of this is the shift in enemy combatants away from Arab insurgents. Early in the game, Walker and his companions encounter the Damned 33rd, and a misunderstanding causes them to fight one another. For the rest of the game, the American soldiers of the Damned 33rd are the enemy to be gunned down. The false comfort of being able to fight against the “other” is lost; instead, American soldiers fight American soldiers. The player joins this fight, putting the cost of life in a new light. What was surprisingly normal for a video game is made abnormal, drawing attention to this strange double standard. Yager Development forces a similar recognition through the visible effects of stress on the player character.

Early in the game, Walker barks commands to his squad mates authoritatively, giving simple formal commands to “take out targets.” When in hand-to-hand combat, he dispatches his enemies quickly. As the game progresses, however, his composure degenerates, and with it his behavior in gameplay. Instead of referring to enemy “tangos,” he’ll shout orders like “kill the fuckers,”85 and when fighting in close quarters, he brutally beats his opponents far past death.86 The dialogue has no effect on the gameplay, the

85 Spec Ops: The Line (Xbox 360 version). 86 Sicart, Beyond Choices, 116. 56

melee attack button still has the same in-game result even if the animations are different, but the tone changes drastically. Playing the game becomes uncomfortable. The player’s willingness to kill nameless swarms of enemies, to identify with an increasingly violent protagonist, is challenged as Spec Ops’s details change over the course of Walker’s mission.

The most significant moment of defamiliarization comes near the middle of the game. To clear out an enemy encampment, Walker uses a mortar to fire white phosphorous. Viewing the battlefield from above through a thermal camera, the player aims at the glowing white enemies and fires at them. This perspective is common in military shooters, particularly as a set piece to break up the action. Yet the distinction here is not just the controversial nature of the weapon being fired, but also who it is fired on. As the players take out swathes of the glowing white enemies, they also kill a group of hundreds of innocent refugees. People that looked identical from the distant, detached camera are seen horribly disfigured, civilians unnecessarily murdered because of the player’s actions. In this moment of shock and shame, Spec Ops: The Line definitively declares the horrific cost of war and shows how easy it is to perpetuate that horror.

Yager Development does not just introduce distressing scenes into their game; they also force players to respond to the events as they occur. They accomplish this through the expert implementation of choice in the game. So called “moral choices” are not uncommon in video games, but they often suffer because of how they are employed.

Miguel Sicart describes the limited scope of these features:

Many games are marketed as having deep moral systems and have unambiguous “choose your own adventure” branching narratives in which the choice is between good and evil. Making a game more ethically relevant by using a simple set of

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rules to evaluate the outcome of a choice by the player ignores the question of who plays and why. It is instrumentalizing play.87

Ethical decision making in games is too often condensed to a binary. Players have little real choice, and what choice they have is “unambiguous.” These choices are also, more often than not, extrinsically motivated. Many “choices” present explicit outcomes for each of the player’s choices, and generally force the player to follow a single path (that is to say, always picking the good option or the evil option) through the game. The player cannot make a choice based solely on the story context because the game demands that a choice be made in terms of in-game reward. In this way, attempts to present moral dilemmas fall flat: there is no dilemma in terms of gameplay if there is an optimal solution.

Spec Ops: The Line avoids this pitfall because choices have little to no effect on the gameplay; they just define another element of the story. When faced with a choice, nothing motivates the player’s decision beyond the plot itself. This allows the players to have their own, intrinsic response, and it forces them to make a true choice. There are only a half dozen moments of real player choice in Spec Ops, but each one puts a great deal of weight on the player’s shoulders. Do you save the military commander, or a group of civilians? Do you put a wounded man out of his misery, or leave him for dead? Do you shoot into the mob that lynched Lugo, or let them be? Each moment forces the player to evaluate and define Walker as they perceive him. These small choices lead to a climactic final choice, in which the player must decide whether to commit suicide, surrender to the army, or keep fighting to the death. In that moment, the game asks outright: how much harm have you caused? Then the gameplay forces the player to make a decision. Spec

87 Sicart, Beyond Choices, 67. 58

Ops: The Line does not simply present a series of difficult moments to the player; the player must acknowledge the difficulty of these moments, and make a choice on how to proceed from this new perspective.

The dark, uncomfortable turns that the setting and gameplay take might be explained away if the story were to support Walker’s journey. The earlier, basic reading of Heart of Darkness could provide this motivation. In this simple reading, Marlow

“deferred moral judgment, and had used Kurtz to justify his mission.”88 From this perspective, Walker and the player would be justified in the hunt for Konrad, to catch and stop a villain, not to attempt to understand him or themselves. But Yager Development’s interpretation of the novel does interesting work at the game’s conclusion, straying further from Heart of Darkness while also revising past events to relate to the novel on a more personal level. The ending of Spec Ops markedly departs from Heart of Darkness.

Whereas Marlow eventually reaches Kurtz and returns down river, Captain Walker never finds Konrad, because Konrad is dead. The man that Walker has been communicating with throughout the game is a voice created by his own subconscious. Marlow reaches the man he is looking to blame, but Walker realizes that he is the one to blame. This change upends the notion of blame. An apolitical reading of Heart of Darkness divorces

Marlow from all accountability, shifting it to Kurtz and never questioning the actions and motivations of the man narrating the story. Spec Ops rejects this shift in blame and redirects it onto one man, Walker, and the player he represents, who have both chosen to enter an unnecessary battle, taking lives for no reason. In this final move, Spec Ops once again takes full advantage of the tools afforded to it as an interactive vehicle for

88 Adelman, Heart of Darkness, 72. 59

storytelling while also drawing additional value from its subversion of an existing tale, using adaptation to surprise the player even further.

In Spec Ops: The Line, Kurtz’s alter-ego, Konrad, does not serve an ambiguous role. Within the story and in its resolution his purpose is clear. Konrad is a target, and a hostile one. Like Marlow, Walker’s goal is to find Konrad, who Walker comes to blame for the ever-escalating events in Dubai. As the game progresses, this blame becomes more pointed and ferocious. Walker no longer wants to find Konrad; he wants to kill him.

Konrad’s existence seems to serve a clear purpose in the story. As a human being responsible for the tragedies that the player witnesses in Dubai, Konrad stands in for the

United States’ military’s failure overseas. The game understands, however, that such a simplistic notion does not make sense in reality. No one person can be at fault for a crisis of this magnitude, and even if they were, killing that person certainly would not solve the problem. So Spec Ops: The Line reveals Walker’s line of thinking for what it is: a fantasy. The Konrad that Walker speaks to throughout the game is unmasked as a hallucination, a device that Walker created to make sense of the crisis in Dubai and his own role in it. The real Konrad has been dead for weeks. In this way, Spec Ops veers away from Heart of Darkness in the way that it handles the ultimate goal, the object of blame that Marlow and Walker seek. For Conrad’s reader, the role of Kurtz is ambiguous, residing in the complexities of the colonial system, both an agent for it and a rebel against it. But Spec Ops’s Konrad is not ambiguous because he does not exist.

There is only Walker.

The change in Konrad’s role as the motivator of the story allows Spec Ops to develop an original argument about the people that play video games and their

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motivations. The game’s final scene breaks the fourth wall to deliver its thesis. As

Walker speaks to Konrad, now revealed to be a figment of his imagination, Konrad says,

“The truth, Walker, is that you’re here because you wanted to feel like something you’re not: A hero.”89 As the video game analysis web series Extra Credits notes in their episode on Spec Ops, this line is directed at the player, attacking their motivation for playing the game.90 The player enters the game space looking for entertainment. They want to play the hero and defeat the villain. But in Spec Ops, there is no villain, and the hero is ultimately responsible for all of the story’s stereotypically villainous actions. Spec Ops takes the ambiguous conclusion of Heart of Darkness and turns it into a pointed one, directly attacking the player with the outcome of the argument it spent the entire story developing. Walker is not a hero. War is not a game. The game then asks the player how they feel about this reveal, giving the player the option to end their life or keep on fighting to the death. Thus players not only have to grapple with the revelation that their actions have all been horrendously misguided; they also have to make a decision, as a timer counts down, about how they interpret the game’s ending. Spec Ops: The Line shifts the focus of its story at its conclusion, distinguishing itself from Heart of Darkness and demanding that the player understand and respond to its final, darkest turn.

Spec Ops’s conclusion works because it is decisively unexpected. It subverts the simplistic, apolitical reading of Conrad’s novel that provides early motivation for the game’s characters and players. In Heart of Darkness, Marlow tells the story, but Kurtz is the central character, dominating the narrative even as he is mostly absent. Spec Ops

89 Spec Ops: The Line (Xbox 360 version). 90 Floyd, Daniel and James Portnow. “Extra Credits: Spec Ops: The Line (Part 2),” YouTube video, 9:28, presented by Penny Arcade TV, September 12, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJZIhcCA2lk. 61

makes no attempt to hide its relation to Heart of Darkness, and in doing so casts Konrad as the central character of the story. Walker is, theoretically, just a vessel through which the player experiences the game. Yet this conception is undermined when Konrad is revealed to be an illusion, Walker having made all of his decisions for himself, with the player’s willing help all along the way. Konrad is not the central character, nor is he even a significant part of the story. He provides impetus for Walker; everything else that happens Walker does to himself. The reveal is challenging because it demands that the player reconsider the entire story. Every action that Walker took, every moment in which he believed he had no other option, is revealed as a personal choice. Players are eager to help Walker when it is clear that there is an enemy who must be stopped; once that enemy evaporates, players must see that they have been supporting the actions of a mentally unstable man. Players are forced to confront the reality that they are not hunting the villain; they are the villain.

Spec Ops: The Line works against its own citations relentlessly. They are all employed with definitive purpose, a purpose that is hidden at first to lure the player into the game world. Slowly and steadily Yager Development reveals the artifice for what it is, making the player understand the fallacy of the game’s world. The argument develops quietly, underneath the surface of the game, and the point at which players realize they are not playing the role they thought they were may vary widely. The gameplay and story work off one another, dismantling themselves and each other relentlessly. Spec Ops argues against the current status quo in video games by masquerading as part of that homogenous pool of games. As the game challenges its industry’s standards through the deconstruction of its citations, it forces players to challenge theirs as well.

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Critique from Citation

Spec Ops: The Line drives its argument further, and more directly, through an additional takedown of Walker’s, and in turn the player’s, failure to do what is right.

Walker’s internal struggle forms the bulk of the plot, a story told by making the player part of that story. But Yager Development takes the opportunity that the game’s structure offers to create an additional target: video games themselves. Every moment of uncanny familiarity, of shame on behalf of the military’s actions, of doubt, works to attack not just the mentality of the American army, but of the average American who innocently plays.

Sicart writes that, “Playing the game is the wicked problem. The more that users play, the more entangled they become in the narrative of the soldiers’ madness and in their own willingness to be complicit with these actions so that they can continue to play.”91 Spec

Ops challenges the notion that such play is harmless, drawing the player’s attention to the horrific spectacle that they are supposedly enjoying. The developers accomplish this feat by adopting standard shooter tropes but breaking them down to the point that they cease to be fun. As mentioned earlier, they also toy with the fourth wall, consistently pulling the players out of the experience rather than immersing them in it, as in most games. Just as the game forces the player to take a decisive moral stance, it also forces the player to acknowledge this hypocrisy that it touches on throughout the game, as the finale tears down the division between game and reality completely, directly addressing and accusing the player of supporting and perpetuating the game’s violence. Spec Ops: The Line does not just question the unfortunately common details of its genre; it challenges the entire basis of military-focused video games.

91 Sicart, Beyond Choices, 113. 63

Viewed as a whole, video games could be primarily defined by fun. A game is a piece of entertainment that is played, a description which implies user enjoyment and fulfillment. Spec Ops: The Line, by contrast, is decidedly not fun, both in its core gameplay and in the set-piece moments that surround it. As previously discussed, Spec

Ops’s gameplay is deliberately commonplace so as to fit neatly into the canon of modern

Middle Eastern military shooters. Yet unlike other games, the action is intensely monotonous and boring. As Extra Credits points out, enemies spawn in predictable locations, moving into the battlefield in waves for the player to mow down.92 The game is entirely linear. It never offers the player much choice in how to address a situation: “The game does not have any remarkable puzzles or any other form of gameplay. It is a purely violence-driven narrative shooter.”93 It repeats again and again. The only breaks from having to shoot waves of soldiers with assault rifles are the moments when you shoot waves of soldiers from behind a turret. It is in the set-piece moments—special, carefully crafted dramatic moments outside of the standard gameplay—that this monotony could be broken and replaced with satisfying progress. Instead, the game uses these moments to horrify the player. Firing white phosphorus on civilians, blindly following a CIA agent to destroy the last of Dubai’s water, and watching Lugo die at the hands of a lynch mob are the special encounters that the player gets to experience. The core gameplay is a hyperbolic realization of just how tiresome this entire genre can be, and the moments that stand out against this backdrop of monotony are characterized by disaster and loss. No good can come of the time the player spends in the game world: “Players never have a

92 Floyd, Daniel and James Portnow. “Extra Credits: Spec Ops: The Line (Part 1),” YouTube video, 6:58, presented by Penny Arcade TV, September 6, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjaBsuXWJJ8. 93 Sicart, Beyond Choices, 112. 64

real choice except to stop playing.”94 And yet, the game demands completion. It demands that the player endure and be complicit in its horrors.

Spec Ops continues its critique of the strange world of video games through its manipulation of the fourth wall. Again, this task is accomplished using standard game tropes and altering them to reveal their superficiality. The character of the Radioman does much of this work. A former reporter who has taken over Dubai’s radio waves so that he can play disc jockey to the remaining survivors, the very concept of the Radioman’s character is ridiculous. Instead of making the dramatic elements appear real, Spec Ops deliberately makes them seem fake, out of place in a real military setting. In one noteworthy moment, the player flees from an attacking helicopter while the Radioman plays Guiseppe Verdi’s “Dies Irae” and sings along to it. Reminiscent of the “Ride of the

Valkyries” scene from Apocalypse Now, the drama of the helicopter attack is undermined here by the laughing voice of the Radioman singing the bass line as the player flees. It’s a ridiculous moment that deliberately breaks the game’s immersion. It serves as a reminder that this is the entertaining version of war. The Radioman furthers this work during a sequence in which the player engages in a long-range battle across rooftops with a group of enemy soldiers outside the Radioman’s base. As the player kills enemies, the

Radioman offers quips about the soldiers’ lives, like “He had a wife and kids!” or “You shot that guy? I liked that guy…”95 The moment straddles a strange line between the real and the absurd. The Radioman’s delivery is comedic, but the truth behind his dialogue is nonetheless tragic. The scene continues to expose the hypocrisy of making a horrible reality the subject of carefree entertainment. At one point the Radioman says of a fallen

94 Sicart, Beyond Choices, 116. 95 Spec Ops: The Line (Xbox 360 version). 65

soldier, “He had a…dog…maybe? I didn’t really know that guy.”96 The game cannot be a dramatic expose of the horrors of war, because it is too preposterous of a notion to try to grant a human face to the cannon fodder enemies that grant the game its gameplay. At the same time, it is a reflection of a real world tragedy. Spec Ops: The Line does not seek to create a war game that matches the horrors of real world, but rather exposes the ridiculousness of that concept to the player through its glimpses past the fourth wall.

The game also breaks the fourth wall outside of gameplay through messages directed at the player in the loading screens. When the player dies, fails to complete an objective, or returns to the game after a break, the game must reload from the most recent checkpoint. While the game loads, the screen displays an image with text underneath to occupy the player while they wait for the action to resume. For much of the game, this text offers hints and information to the player to help them progress, another example of the game adopting an industry standard in order to later subvert it.97 As the game progresses and the madness increases, these messages change. Instead of gentle guidance like “See sand falling from the ceiling? Shoot it to drop sand on your enemies and stun them,” and “You don’t need to hold down the button to keep sprinting,” messages at the end of the game say things like, “We cannot escape anguish. It is what we are,” and “If

Lugo were still alive, he would likely suffer from PTSD. So, really, he’s the lucky one.”98

These messages both assert the player’s connection to Walker and further incriminate

Walker as a villain. It lets the player inside Walker’s mind, with the protagonist’s thoughts escaping the game proper and invading external spaces. The messages can also

96 Spec Ops: The Line (Xbox 360 version). 97 Many games, both shooters and otherwise, offer tutorials or some other form of information on loading screens to keep players interested while the game boots. 98 Spec Ops: The Line (Xbox 360 version). 66

be contradictory. For example, the loading screens might say, “This is all your fault,” or they might say “You are still a good person.”99 The struggle between these competing ideas is part of Walker’s damaged psyche, his cognitive dissonance made a real part of the player’s experience. Yager Development relentlessly pursues the player, promoting again and again their conviction that their game is not fun, that the consequences of war are real. By speaking directly to the player in a manner that flits between accusatory and consolatory, the game inserts the player into the conflicted world of a tortured soldier, a world that they cannot escape even when the standard gameplay has paused.

The goal of Spec Ops: The Line is to make this game about war not seem like a war, as other games strive to do, but like a game, making the player uncomfortable, perhaps for the first time, about the idea of trivializing militarization for pleasure. The game’s straightforward approach to the player provides an avenue to address this original, contemporary concept, and the video game form lends itself perfectly to self- criticism when employed with that intention. The specific setting and gameplay elements of Spec Ops make it a brutally vicious takedown of the unspoken rules of military video games. The pattern of audience investment and subversion allows Yager Development to intertwine this objective with the game’s narrative and make it effective for players. Spec

Ops succeeds not because of any particularly exceptional gameplay or story elements, but because it understands how these concepts can combine to develop and deliver an important message. This understanding derives from a keen sense of how the player approaches and experiences this game, and other games like it. With the knowledge of its

99 Spec Ops: The Line (Xbox 360 version). 67

players’ preconceived notions in place, Spec Ops: The Line can then work to change the way players willingly accept the viewpoints offered by other games.

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--Chapter 3--

“…”

The Video Game and Storytelling Through Play

So far we have examined two games that do traditional literary work within the medium of video games. They use gameplay elements to tell familiar stories in new ways, granting new significance to both the game and the story. Shadow of the Colossus and Spec Ops: The Line succeed in their literary missions by merging narrative and gameplay in a cohesive, productive way. The stories in both games have a clear plot with a definitive purpose, either reframing an existing story in a new light or offering a critique of a medium. They use interactivity to add something original to an existing narrative form. But games have the potential to create stories that are entirely new, built around a complete understanding and manipulation of gameplay mechanics, designed to deliver a narrative experience entirely through play. These games are not necessarily better than games like Shadow of the Colossus or Spec Ops, which do considerable work to push video game literature further, but rather provide something original, employing the “symbolic machinery” of user interactivity to showcase the inherent storytelling potential in the pure act of playing. One such game is Journey, which challenges all assumptions of how a game should be played and how a story should be told. Developed by Thatgamecompany and released in 2012, Journey deconstructs the video game, discarding rules about length, exposition, control, and multiplayer cooperation. The resulting game tells an entirely unique story, a story that could not be told in any other medium, or in a more traditional game, because it is told entirely through the actual playing of the game. Journey relies on the emotional connections and fleeting

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relationships that the game’s careful design encourages the player to make as they play, and in the process drives the player to consider the significance of the play experience as it develops into a narrative.

Journey is a game about walking toward a mountain. And it’s a game about human relationships. Both of these descriptors are vague, but Journey is a vague game.

At the game’s outset, a shooting star streaks across the sky and down into a desert. There, a humanoid figure covered entirely in a bright red cloak appears. The player controls this character and must guide her toward a mountain that stands out prominently on the horizon. No explanation is given for this mission; it is simply the goal. On the most basic level, this is the game’s story, a classic quest with very few challenges along the way.100

The player cannot die, does not need to fight any enemies, and can complete the game in a single sitting. Yet Journey uses its unconventional design to explore something entirely new, tapping into the video game’s potential in a way few other games ever have.

Thatgamecompany builds a uniquely artistic world and tells a story through emotional response rather than explicit plot points. To this end they incorporate multiplayer gameplay in an original fashion, encouraging partnerships with complete strangers to trigger yet another emotional response in the players. Players are encouraged to respond to the world around them, and to the people they meet in that world, and Journey embraces and manipulates those responses to make a literary argument out of the experience.

The work that Journey does within its simplistic setup could not be done in any other medium, nor could it be accomplished in a more standard video game. While the

100 Booker, Seven Basic Plots, 73. 70

themes that the game tackles are not new—it addresses loneliness, loss, the beauty of the natural world and of human connection—they are evoked and addressed entirely through the interactive components of the game. Journey goes further than other games in just how reliant it is on play. The narrative does not function as a story given interactivity, but emerges entirely through that interactivity. In using play to build a narrative, Journey furthers our understandings of what play can mean. Through its focus on the strength of play, Thatgamecompany crafts an original story that thrives, and could only be told, as a video game.

An Aesthetic Experience

Journey concerns itself primarily with narrative, but most of the usual narrative elements of a video game are missing. Instead, Journey tackles narrative design through an original approach to, and manipulation of, its game design. While we might compare the standard video game story to a novel or film, Journey more closely mirrors a short story, poem, or piece of static visual art. The game is short and, in theory, simple. It takes approximately 2-4 hours to complete Journey, which is very short for a video game, and the player’s only goal is to reach the mountain on the horizon. It’s a mostly linear experience with a clear beginning and ending. But the game is also decidedly abstract. It provides the player very little context, both in terms of the story and in controlling the game itself. Journey makes players discover its rules on their own. It is through this process of discovery that the game truly thrives. It offers players a new world to explore and experience. At the same time, this experience is tightly crafted to elicit an emotional response from the player. Journey’s story does not rely on plot points, but rather on emotional beats generated by the act of playing the game, which will be explored in

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greater detail later in the chapter. It balances its gameplay to help the player experience the story in an emotionally resonant manner. Journey opens the door to allow the player to engage with it, and then builds on the emotions that the player invests in the game.

Rather than creating a game story with strong thematic elements, as we have examined earlier, Journey is pure theme. The game thrusts its artistic endeavors to the forefront, and it wears its commitment to this new emotional endeavor on its sleeves. The player must make the decision to engage with the game, but Journey promotes that engagement through its gameplay.

Tone plays a key role fostering this artistic engagement, investing the player in the abstract play experience. The tone creates a simple visual and auditory code that draws in the player. When the sensory tone changes, it denotes an emotional change in the story that the player will experience if they have adapted to the game’s artistic language. The visual design of Journey helps set the tone. Minimalistic art with cel- shaded graphics provides high levels of contrast. The desert sand is an endless sea of vibrant orange, against which the player’s red cloaked figure stands out sharply. The desert and the player character complement and contrast one another. The colors are warm and the player’s cloak flows naturally about her like the sand and the dunes, but the player is still detached, a distinctive red against the orange backdrop, a human against the vast emptiness. Throughout the game the designers manipulate these levels of contrast, the color and feel of the world shifting as the player progresses. The sun moves through the sky and the gentle reflections of light become long, ominous shadows as it slips toward the horizon. The player finds herself in a cave with hard stone walls, where the gloom transforms the sand to a dark blue. The visuals feel out of place, and the players

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should feel this way, too; their avatar does not belong here, and is hunted by a monster. It is comforting, then, to return to the light, and the safety it represents, when the player enters a bright tower, even if it’s only for a short while before the game’s final moments on a blue, frigid snow-covered mountain. Journey’s visual style is breathtakingly beautiful, but it is also motivated, using complementary and contrasting colors to generate competing feelings of comfort and fear.

The game’s audio amplifies the tone established and manipulated by the visual design. Composer Austin Wintory enjoys several advantages over other video game sound designers because of Journey’s narrow focus and short length. In many games, composers have to develop pleasant tracks that play on an endless loop because they have no way of knowing how long players will spend in any one area. Journey’s score, however, works more like a classical music piece, with different movements moving from one to the next as the player progresses through the game’s narrative. Journey’s music resembles a single composition, an hour-long piece of music that moves through different styles and tones, evoking different moods based on the sounds used. These moods complement each environment that the player enters: the desert hums mysteriously; the caves emit an ominous rumble. Working with the visuals, the score helps to define each moment to assert a feeling for the player’s current place, both physically and emotionally, in the journey to the mountain.

The impact of the sound design is improved through the game’s use of cinematic language. In calm moments, the camera is still and the music silent, drawing attention to the emptiness of the world and the sound of the player’s footsteps. The absence of music and motion create a unique feel. Contrast this to the music in climactic moments, where

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the camera sweeps past the player at a breathtaking pace, zooming in to draw the player’s attention to the setting sun or ruined scenery. In these moments the music swells, matching each new set piece with a new track. The player is caught up in the moment as well, propelled forward by the discovery and excitement that the music evokes. Other times, the game uses an old theme as a reprise, drawing connections between the current scene and earlier ones to remind players of where they were and reinvigorating the tale where they are now. The music defines how players should interpret the game world.

Though its visual and audio components work beautifully and effectively,

Journey is a video game, so it must have a gameplay component. What’s fascinating about Journey’s gameplay is how different it feels to play. The game continues the process of immersion not by feeling familiar, but by feeling strange. The player’s hooded avatar controls oddly. Some normally common actions feel difficult or unwieldy, and at the same time entirely new movements become possible. Thatgamecompany discards common assumptions in game design of how a game character should control in terms of momentum and mobility. Journey’s cloaked protagonist slides around the world, slipping over the sand just a bit out of the player’s control. Jumping is another staple of video game mechanics. In games where the player can jump, pressing the corresponding button should cause the player to leap into the air. Shadow of the Colossus, for example, features a jump button, while Spec Ops: The Line does not allow jumping. But Journey creates its own, original rules for jumping. There is a jump button, but the player can only jump with the help of a magical scarf. Jumping depletes the energy in the scarf, the player must recharge from other scraps of cloth scattered around the environment. As a result, the player is often stuck on the ground, particularly early in the game when the scarf is short

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and the player can only jump briefly before needing to recharge. Journey takes other games’ commonplace mechanics and makes them strange, and frustrating, giving the game an off-kilter feel when played.

But Journey does not just break down these commonplace gameplay elements; it builds them up into something new. Thatgamecompany reinvents the movement system in the game, making physically moving through the world a challenge, but a thrill as well.

Players can slide down the game’s sweeping sand drifts, gaining speed but losing control as they do. Early on, this is a fun side effect; players trudge up one side of a dune, then get to enjoy sliding quickly down the other. As players get more comfortable with the sliding mechanic, the game emphasizes the freedom and exhilaration that the movement system can offer. In one sequence, as the sun sets, the player slides down a massive hill, steering between ruined buildings and leaping off ledges into the air. It feels like a sport, and the player truly feels exalted and in control, moving within the environment gracefully and effortlessly. The game compounds this feeling by giving the player the ability to glide. After leaping into the air, players can float delicately downward or even spiral upward if they have more energy left over. At first, this just works as a simple way to cross gaps and get around the environment, but as the game progresses and the player’s scarf gets longer, it becomes a thrilling form of free movement. Players can take to the air and practically fly around the world, riding air currents to their desired destinations.

Coupled with the sliding mechanics, the player becomes an unstoppable force of graceful movements; scale one side of a dune in a single bound, then slide smoothly down the far side. It takes a great deal of getting used to, and it does feel uncomfortable and frustrating at first. This discomfort, however, plays a role in Journey’s developing, immersive play

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structure. It deconstructs the very idea of moving in a video game and creates a system that makes simply moving through the world fresh and fun. It makes a rote mechanics engaging, giving the player physical pleasure from being part of this world. Journey’s barebones plot focuses on moving toward a mountain, but that simple quest becomes a thrilling adventure as that act of movement becomes challenging, rewarding, and beautiful.

Journey does not just present these elements in parallel. The synthesis of the visuals, the audio, and the interactive make Journey a complete, compelling artistic experience. The players’ smooth slides down dunes leave a small wake in the sand behind them. When airborne, the protagonist animates with an extra sense of joy, twisting and rippling in the air as the player guides her. One of the more striking visual elements of the character, her long flowing scarf, is directly controlled by, and in turn informs, gameplay; the player increases the length of the scarf by finding scraps, and the scarf itself serves as an indicator of how much the player can jump, with glowing markings indicating the remaining energy. Song is integrated into this design. Players can make their characters sing, one of the few ways they have of interacting with the world. By singing, players can unlock doors and recharge their energy, so physical progress and sound design intertwine. Conversely, if the monster in the caves catches the player, it tears her scarf and a loud, jarring sound plays. In this instance, all of the game’s immersive elements converge. The player has failed to avoid the creature, producing an abrasive audio cue and a permanent visual reminder in the shortened scarf. Journey constantly responds to user input. The game’s artistic elements are informed by the player’s actions and in turn inform what the player should do next. This process leads to a

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kind of feedback loop, with the game world feeling real and responsive while also showcasing an individualistic artistry.

For all its artistic merit, however, Journey seems to be lacking any real form of story, much less a literary one. Though there is a cinematic feel to the game, the narrative does not gain significance, or even exist, through plot. Instead, Thatgamecompany uses the act of playing their game to define a narrative outline that players fill in for themselves. This process begins with the incorporation of strangers.

A New Kind of Multiplayer

Unlike Shadow of the Colossus and Spec Ops: The Line, Journey is not designed as a solely individual experience. When connected to the internet, Journey randomly pairs players, letting them experience the world together instead of alone and encouraging them to collaborate to overcome challenges. Cooperative gameplay is not an original concept in and of itself. Video games have incorporated multiplayer since the beginning, before single player experiences were possible. For example, Spacewar! required two players, since artificial intelligence was too demanding to program.101

Multiplayer takes two primary forms in video games: as a competitive or collaborative gameplay option to enhance the player’s enjoyment, and as a social tool to invest the player in a fictional world. Journey upends both of these forms. Instead of choosing who to play with, players are merged seamlessly into a game with someone else. The game also lacks any way of talking through text or video; players can only communicate by singing brief musical notes to one another. These limitations exist on purpose.

Collaboration with another player serves not to increase player enjoyment—though that

101 Wolf, The Medium of the Video Game, 36. 77

may certainly occur—but instead to expand on the play world introduced by the game’s solo experience. Journey offers a complete reimagining of how multiplayer can work in video games, using it as a fundamental force in game design that straddles the line between a social experiment and a personal, emotional experience that creates the game’s ultimate narrative.

Mike Schmierbach, Qian Xu, Anne Oeldorf-Hirsch and Frank E. Dardis published a study in 2012 which offers an informative glimpse at the strengths and limitations of how many multiplayer games effect player experiences. Their study compares user enjoyment when playing a game—in this case the American football game Madden ’08— competitively against another user, when playing collaboratively with another user, and when playing alone.102 Although the researchers hypothesized that both competitive and cooperative play would lead to greater enjoyment than solo play, the results surprisingly showed that cooperative play proved less enjoyable than solo play.103 The researchers present some possibilities for why this might be the case. They suggest that competitive play is likely enjoyable because it “provides a particularly effective type of competition, which is often connected with game enjoyment, and it offers a social context.”104 Conflict between the players enhances the experience; the challenge is heightened because two real players participate in the game, and the social experience is made better by the presence of a real opponent. The opposite occurs during cooperative play:

It could be that cooperative games are problematic because players are interdependent—that is, the success of one depends on the skill of the other.

102 Mike Schmierbach et al., “Electronic Friend or Virtual Foe: Exploring the Role of Competitive and Cooperative Multiplayer Video Game Modes in Fostering Enjoyment,” Media Psychology 15 no. 3 (2012): 363-364 103 Ibid., 365. 104 Ibid., 367. 78

Players may have felt unable to fully control the game when they had to rely on a partner, and this may have led to an increase in conflict between partners.105

The difference in control and skill that makes competitive play enjoyable becomes a source of conflict in cooperative play. Although the game in the study was designed to support collaborative play, players could not forge a connection with their partners. This shortcoming may be alleviated when friends, instead of strangers, play together: “it may be that enjoyment of cooperative game playing relies on interacting with known others, reinforcing existing social relationships.”106 Cooperative gameplay, then, does not seem able to build new relationships from a random pairing of players. From the standpoint of empirical player enjoyment, games do not lend themselves as naturally to collaborative play as they do to competition.

Journey does not stand in contrast to this study, but rather stands beside it. The game’s multiplayer component capitalizes on the random relationships that make other cooperative games suffer, while also rewarding players for working together. The game’s ultimate narrative arises out of these uncomfortable unions. As players wander through the deserts and caves of the game world, they encounter other players making the same voyage to the mountain. This new companion is anonymous; players have no names and only slightly different markings on their cloaks. Users cannot deliberately play with their friends. If the two players separate or one quits the game, the single player experience resumes without interruption until another random partner connects. The multiplayer system is floating and mysterious, not bound by any competitive or collaborative teams found in other multiplayer games. It builds directly on the game’s single player

105 Schmierbach et al., “Electronic Friend or Virtual Foe,” 368. 106 Ibid., 368. 79

foundation, as the appearance and disappearance of strangers echoes the mystical, ever- changing environment in which Journey takes place.

The gameplay encourages the player to explore these relationships further, making the experience of collaboration—not just the result—a key focus of the game.

Though Journey can be completed alone, working with a partner makes obstacles considerably easier to overcome. Many other games have similar cooperative modes, but players face potential frustration, as mentioned in the above study, when they cannot work together productively, particularly when they play with strangers. Journey tackles this issue by doubling down on it, making communication part of the challenge and the experience. Players can only communicate by singing notes at each other. The notes are triggered by a single button; holding the button down longer produces tones of different pitches. Pairs have to develop their own language in order to attempt to communicate with one another. Singing also serves as the primary way in which players can help one another. When a player sings near another player, it recharges their ability to jump and glide, so the game encourages players to sing with one another in order to spur on their progress. Journey’s multiplayer experience is unlike any other because it is designed to be entirely random and procedural; the players control how the collaborative relationship works.

Journey’s method of bringing two players together works paradoxically in that it mirrors the struggles of real world human collaboration, yet uses the design of the game to turn those struggles into play. Players might be uncooperative, struggle to find a reliable method of communication, act deliberately contrarily, or simply suffer from network connectivity problems. Part of this tension is alleviated by the free-flowing

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nature of Journey’s multiplayer design, which allows players to separate themselves gracefully from undesirable partners, or to travel entirely alone. Yet Journey does its most significant multiplayer work within these potentially frustrating interactions. As a game, it is not built around enjoyment. Multiplayer does not exist for fun, but rather forms the core of the game’s narrative mission. The challenge of connecting with people that exists in the real world is echoed in the game space. Finding a common ground can be frustrating or impossible, which can lead to a negative experience, but these negative experiences exist to complement positive ones. When players succeed at working together, the game becomes an even greater thrill to play. Since each avatar derives power from the other, working together effectively allows players to soar through the world, moving with a synchronized grace that makes the single player experience of controlling the game more enjoyable. This enjoyment in gameplay derives from forming a successful with a stranger. The players inform one another’s experiences, crafting individual stories based on the strangers they happen to encounter. These stories are not just reiterations of the same successes; the failures bring with them their own stories.

Being happy to see a person go is just as much of a valuable social experience as being sad about a travelling companion’s absence. The game is designed, however, to let players experience success together, to feel the rewards of playing with another person, sharing energy and responsibility along the way. It makes a game out of the difficulty of collaboration, encouraging and rewarding responsible, selfless behavior. Journey circumvents traditional problems with cooperative multiplayer by making the very struggle to work together a piece of the gameplay, distilling communication to a single

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button and weaving the resulting interactions, positive or negative, into the game’s tale of mysterious travelers in a strange land.

The strength of its cooperative gameplay, and the gameplay’s focus on interactions with other human players, puts Journey in conversation with the vast array of social video games. Socializing in video games takes many forms, from formal teams that compete in popular eSports games like League of Legends and CounterStrike to smaller games that tap into existing social circles, particularly through networking sites like

Facebook.107 However, where games have offered the most for social interaction, and where the majority of academic study has been focused, is in massively multiplayer online games (MMOs). In these games, players have the freedom and flexibility to make social connections with people from around the world. These connections are not limited to simply making friends; the games’ worlds are shaped by the interactions between players. Leadership roles reminiscent of real-world leadership positions are required, as examined in a study by Timothy C. Lisk, Ugur T. Kaplancali, and Ronald E. Riggio.108

Entire economies form and “effectively mimic real-world economies because the market is influenced by tens of thousands of actual people.”109 The benefits to the robust flexibility of MMOs are clear:

All games and instructional simulations are virtually risk-free environments that encourage exploration and trial-and-error actions with instant feedback and therefore stimulate curiosity, discovery learning, and perseverance. Triggered by immediate feedback, simultaneous learning on multiple levels can be expected through games.110

107 Schmierbach et al., “Electronic Friend or Virtual Foe,” 357. 108 Timothy C. Lisk et al., “Leadership in Multiplayer Online Gaming Environments,” Simulation & Gaming 43 no. 1 (2012), 134. 109 Ibid., 139. 110 Ibid., 138. 82

MMOs have made a space for players to experiment with leadership positions, economies, and social interactions. These environments do not force players to interact in any way, but allow players to develop their own modes of interaction. The interactions are related to, but do not follow all of the same patterns as, social interactions outside of the game space.111 Most MMOs create spaces for players to explore freely, and the resulting social interactions are genuine and fascinating because of this freedom.

Journey has a different project in mind, and so despite being focused on social interaction, it limits freedom and imposes constraints on the social environment. Similar to how researchers and educators use MMOs to create specific testing and training environments,112 Thatgamecompany has created an environment in Journey in which to explore how the social can inform narrative. Journey works as much as an experiment as it does as a game. The aesthetic single player experience establishes the groundwork for this experiment, which is perpetuated by the way the game limits social interaction.

Thatgamecompany creates an environment, but the gameplay experience is left up to the players. They craft their own, shared story by playing together. The balance between control and freedom makes Journey unlike other social games. It’s a small, tightly crafted, simple story. Players can only interact with one another in limited ways. Yet the experience of the story itself is informed by the unpredictable actions of the players. How strangers adopt and adapt the tools offered to them is in fact the game’s subject. Narrative and social freedom merge in this space, and the result is an experience that is genuinely individualistic and artistic. Journey explores questions that have never been touched

111 Lisk et al., “Leadership in Multiplayer Online Gaming Environments,” 144. 112 Ibid., 139. 83

before in games, eschewing traditional multiplayer design and player freedom for an examination of how interpersonal relationships can inform a narrative experience.

As with Shadow of the Colossus and Spec Ops: The Line, Journey solidifies the value of the social interaction that the game offers by destroying the players’ relationship at the game’s conclusion. As the players make the final climb up the snowcapped mountain together, they become increasingly weak. Their songs fade, and their bodies begin to freeze. Players can struggle to keep one another warm by singing, but it is an increasingly tenuous warmth, and players steadily decline in mobility. This moment demands cooperation more than any other part of the game. The players need to be incredibly close together in order to receive help, and in doing so must also give help. It’s a moment designed to elicit cooperation out of pure desperation, and it conveys that desperation through how the players begin to lose control over their characters. The mobility and freedom that made Journey fresh and unique disappears, and now only by clinging together with a stranger can players preserve any of that mobility. Journey goes further, however, and breaks this connection to create tangible loss. The final climb is in fact endless, and players will eventually collapse and seemingly die. This may happen simultaneously, or one of the players may die first, leaving the other to climb alone, now with no one to help them. The gameplay emphasizes this loss, since players no longer have the help of their partners, but Thatgamecompany intends it to be an emotional experience as well; a companion that you relied on is gone, and now you are alone. As players continue to climb, they too eventually succumb to the harsh environment. The final climb in Journey stands in stark contrast to the rest of the game, as players lose freedom, mobility, and friendship, before finally losing their lives. It’s a striking scene

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that undermines all of the elements that define the game. Tying these elements to a human companion makes their loss, and the loss of a partner, visceral.

To end here would be making a strong, albeit somewhat pessimistic, statement, but Journey does not end with the player’s demise. Instead, it concludes with a transcendent celebration. A seemingly heavenly body lifts the player character into the sky and transports her to a world above the clouds. Colors are more vibrant than ever before, the music is joyful, and the player has a freedom of movement never before allowed in the game. Players can fly infinitely through this realm as they move gracefully toward their final destination without worrying about the scarf’s energy limits. It’s a moment of pure relief, a reward for the player for their hard work and sacrifice. To play it is to experience that relief and joy through the visuals and gameplay. Yet still, this final moment is tinged with sadness, as the players seem to be in an afterlife, their voyage almost over, time spent together soon to end permanently. Journey alleviates this loss with one final turn; at the very end of the credits, the game breaks its own rule of keeping your partners anonymous. The final text displayed on the screen reads, “Companions Met

Along The Way,” followed by a list of the real usernames of the player’s partners.113 This moment reads almost as a gift; the game now offers the information that it once withheld, and players now have the ability to reach out to the people they met along the way.

Whether more permanent connections are formed or not, however, is not particularly relevant. The list of names serves as a reminder of the events of the journey and the people encountered along the way. It focuses the players’ attention, at the end, on the interactions they experienced. As this brief game draws to a close, it reasserts the

113 Journey (PlayStation 3 version), Thatgamecompany (Sony Computer Entertainment, 2012). 85

importance of perseverance and interpersonal relations, rewarding the player for struggling to the top of the mountain and celebrating the time spent with complete strangers who might not be considered strangers any more.

Just as it reimagines gameplay, Journey completely reinvents the very concept of multiplayer. Simplicity and complexity merge to create a multiplayer experience that is simultaneously retrograde and revolutionary. From this experience, a narrative emerges.

The events that occur as the two players struggle to work together become a story, with low points when interaction fails and high points when it succeeds. The game wants players to think about how connections between individuals are formed and how these bonds can be strengthened or weakened. This exploration plays out as a simulation, allowing players to experience the game’s narrative moves with an endless number of strangers, each of whom will bring their own personality into the mix. Reflecting on that simulation, however, forms a coherent story with real characters, a story that will be different each time the game is played. Journey presents a unique opportunity for social engagement and then comments on it, stretching and breaking the relationships that are formed and then celebrating their fleeting existence. The game lets its players play so that they can find the story for themselves.

The Potential of Play

Journey serves as an interesting case study in narrative game design because it thrives on the element of play while also using play to build a narrative. In so doing,

Journey represents a substantial reimagining of play’s potential, both in the context of video games and outside of it, while also showcasing the emergence of a new form of storytelling. In his book Homo Ludens, J. Huizinga defines play as:

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a voluntary activity or occupation executed within certain fixed limits of time and place, according to rules freely accepted but absolutely binding, having its aim in itself and accompanied by a feeling of tension, joy, and the consciousness that it is ‘different’ from ‘ordinary life.’114

Journey clearly fulfills Huizinga’s basic definition of play. The game exists within a confined space, and playing it is a deliberate action. But a tension also emerges between the emphasis that Huizinga places on play and the dramatic heights that Journey reaches.

Journey does not redefine play, but capitalizes on it, using its common elements to tell its story. The resulting narrative emerges through play alone, using the freedom of expression that games allow and the new tools for social interactions that modern technology offers to evoke a narrative. Without the play element, Journey would not have a noteworthy story. With play, however, Journey showcases a kind of storytelling that is only possible in the video game—play directed toward a designed narrative result— showing the potential for further creativity and experimentation, both in game design and storytelling.

In Homo Ludens, Huizinga examines many definitions and ideas of play as they appear in culture. Journey, and video games at large, expand on many of his ideas, showcasing a new value in play as a result of the new medium. Huizinga begins his book by calling play a “significant function,” but he rejects the “assumption that play must serve something which is not play, that it must have some kind of biological purpose.”115

To Huizinga, play’s value exists in and of itself. His argument does not attempt to devalue play, but rather asserts that play has inherent significance, not bound to any outside force. Thatgamecompany uses that innate significance and expands on it, seeing

114 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens, trans. R. F. C. Hull (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Limited), 28. 115 Ibid., 1-2. 87

how they can spin their audience’s natural experience of play into a designed experience.

Though Journey might be a brief game, the intent is to draw the story outside of the play experience, to break past the limitations of the game space and create a deliberate, lasting impact. This process requires changing what limitations play invokes. Consider, for example, the question of confined space. To Huizinga, instances of play are “temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart.”116

Journey is certainly confined to a temporary world, existing only while the user actively plays the game. But it toys with the edges of these two worlds. The real world actions that occur in the game are unlike those in traditional play; there are no fouls, no clear rules for how the players should interact, so the play world is stronger, not at risk of a

“collapse.”117 Journey is an environment for social play unbounded by the rules of play.

Huizinga notes that “a play-community generally tends to become permanent even after the game is over.”118 Journey makes such permanence impossible. The play-community is deliberately temporary, constructed for the purposes of that one game and then erased.

Journey’s focus on emotional storytelling grants an outside motivation to its substantial play component, while the game’s technical detail challenges previously inherent elements of play to surprise players.

Journey also supports the relationship between culture and play that Huizinga focuses on in Homo Ludens. Huizinga’s conception of play extends beyond game forms that are commonly associated with play. For example, he argues that “it can hardly be denied that these qualities are also proper to poetic creation.”119 Poetry has the same

116 Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 10. 117 Ibid., 11. 118 Ibid., 12. 119 Ibid., 132. 88

freedom of expression and exploration that play offers, and games like Journey promote

and encourage. But poetry’s function extends beyond the play capacity that Huizinga

believes it is “born in,” as the form is incredibly diverse as a mode of cultural

commentary.120 Poetry and games may both be rooted in play, and therefore have a direct

path to commenting on culture since culture is, in and of itself, an important element of

play. Huizinga in fact argues that play is the primary cultural force:

It is through this playing that society expresses its interpretation of life and the world. By this we do not mean that play turns into culture, rather that in its earliest phases culture has the play-character, that it proceeds in the shape and the mood of play. In the twin union of play and culture, play is primary.121

If Huizinga is right and play is a primary force in culture, then a self-aware form of play is uniquely equipped to make a commentary on culture. This next step is exactly what

Thatgamecompany hopes to accomplish with Journey. The game aims to inform culture, rather than simply be informed by it. It makes an active statement about the value of human relationships in a context informed by the current state of video games. Huizinga also notes that “with the increasing systematization and regimentation of sport, something of the pure play-quality is inevitably lost.”122 By changing tropes that are common in the video game industry and creating its own set of rules, Journey rebels against this regimentation, reinvigorating the play element in the game. All of this serves to create an atmosphere for culturally-significant play.

Journey’s story is informed by the cultural context in which the game is found; an interactive experience that uses contrasting elements of freedom and limitation to tell a story. The narrative that emerges as a result is one that could not exist in any other

120 Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 122. 121 Ibid., 46. 122 Ibid., 197. 89

medium. Journey relies on the free exchange of ideas, letting players explore the world and interact with one another as they see fit before shifting tone and focus to spotlight the emotional connections that are being formed. Other media can discuss these ideas, but interactivity makes this exchange immediately apparent to the audience. Games alone can discuss experiences by providing that experience. Journey does this well by making the experience heavily informed by the presence of an uncontrollable outside agent.

Thatgamecompany is in a sense making a bet on how people will act when they encounter each other online, constructing a world and story based around how these strangers might interact. Again and again the game returns to the idea of exploration: exploring the world, exploring relationships, exploring your personal response to the events around you.

Allowing players to truly explore provides an unprecedented platform for a story about exploration to be told. This is not to say that Journey’s mode of storytelling is better than any other medium’s. Instead, Journey is important because it does something different. It tells a personalized story that can only be told by experiencing it—because the experience creates the story—and in doing so Thatgamecompany highlights the potential that the freedom of video games, play, and interactivity have to offer narrative work.

Journey stands out as a challenge to the games industry. It dares to try something different, discarding years of tradition in an attempt to find new value in interactive entertainment, and it works. On its own, Journey is a beautiful game that tells a powerful story with an original narrative voice, but in the context of literary video games, the work it is doing is even more important. It showcases the potential that is hidden behind habit, and it is just one example of how a new experience can be created when trends are eschewed and replaced by a personal narrative mission. Journey shows that developers

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have only just begun to scratch the surface of what video games can do, and it lays the groundwork for the development, and critical study, of a new breed of literary video games.

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--Conclusion--

“Game Over”

The Future of the Literary Video Game

Shadow of the Colossus, Spec Ops: The Line, and Journey have very little in common. Visually, they look nothing alike. From a gameplay perspective, they occupy disparate genres. Narratively, their stories have wildly different goals that the games tell in different fashions. The significance of these games lies in this variety. These three developers experimented with the video game form, driving its literary devices further through unique fusions of story and gameplay. There is no one way to make a literary video game, no instruction manual to be followed. Instead, it is a free-flowing world of mechanics, characters, and plot points that can interact in endless ways. As analysts, we must try to understand how each game conducts its work. What gameplay tools do the developers employ? What control does the player have over the narrative? What work does the game do in conversation with the player, and what development occurs behind the scenes, out of the view of the audience? Studying video games poses a challenge because all of these tool sets are new, so we have little to which to compare one game when discussing its significance. Vocabulary, too, poses a challenge: how do we describe the act of play, of scaling a colossus or flying across the sand, to readers who may not have played video games? If the study of video games as literature flourishes, however, a common language can emerge. We can talk about games doing their work through genre, like Shadow of the Colossus, or by subverting gameplay and story citation in Spec Ops, or through multiplayer interaction in Journey. In these three examples I have just begun to scratch the surface of what the medium can accomplish, but perhaps an understanding

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of how these games work can advance the discussion of the literary quality of games and their potential to change the way we play. We are at the beginning of this process.

All that I have described and argued about how video games conduct literary work comes with this caveat: everything is changing. Shadow of the Colossus, Spec Ops:

The Line, and Journey, all released within the past ten years, are decidedly contemporary games, using modern gameplay devices to tell their stories and subverting those devices to make them resonate with audiences. These devices work because they are commonplace to players today; shifts in their usage matter because of how players understand their general implementation. Earlier video games had a different language, a language based around coin-operated arcade machines and high scores. The stories of those games did not work in the same way as contemporary stories. Arguments have been made for arcade games working as literature, but they are far more metaphorical and less concrete. For example, the critics at Extra Credit have argued that the 1980 game Missile

Command acts as an allegory for the Cold War.123 Games today have a new language that relies on traditional story telling elements, through dialogue and cutscenes, and amplifies them by the act of play. Designers are learning how to make unique experiences with these tools, and the results include the games that I have devoted this paper to discussing.

But these tools and devices will inevitably change as well. So the language used to analyze games must remain flexible, focused around how each game and genre conducts its work rather than forming rules and classifications, allowing our discussion to encompass gameplay modes of the past, present, and future.

123 Daniel Floyd and James Portnow, “Extra Credits: Narrative Mechanics,” YouTube video, 6:52, presented by Penny Arcade TV, March 19, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQJA5YjvHDU. 93

New ways of interacting with games on a technical level present a possible change to the video game medium. The 2006 release of the Nintendo Wii, which featured a motion-sensing controller, allowed an easy way for people who have never played video games before to pick up and play more intuitive games. In Wii Sports, for example, players need only hold the remote and mime swinging a tennis racket or throwing a baseball to make those actions occur on-screen.124 Microsoft’s Kinect camera works similarly, recording the player’s actions and allowing them to interact with onscreen elements without any kind of controller. And there are a broad range of games that use additional peripherals, such as the fake instruments in the wildly successful Guitar Hero and Rock Band games, which provide an additional feeling of immersion by letting players imagine they’re playing real instruments. Playing through a song while strumming a plastic guitar is not the same as actually playing a guitar, but it does create an additional feeling of being part of the game; you get to be the musician. None of these ways of playing are any more real than using a controller, but they open up a world of new possibilities and new audiences. They allow people who don’t traditionally play games an entry point to the medium, and they give even long-time gamers new experiences.

A bigger change looms on the horizon: virtual reality. At the 2015 Game

Developer’s Conference, there were four different virtual reality headsets on display, some already available to consumers, others coming soon.125 Headsets like the Oculus

Rift and Samsung’s Gear VR transport players directly into the game world. Screens in

124 Wii Sports (Wii version), Nintendo (Nintendo, 2006). 125 Ben Kuchera, “The five things you absolutely need to know about VR right now,” Polygon, March 9, 2015, accessed April 1, 2015, http://www.polygon.com/2015/3/9/8172311/virtual-reality-sony-oculus- valve 94

front of players’ eyes allow them to see a digital world in 3D, and the headsets respond to players’ looking up and down or side to side so that players can look around the world in real time. These headsets have a powerful effect on players, offering a wildly different experience than contemporary games. There are still many limitations that result from the headsets’ relative youth: the screens have low resolution, the headsets can feel bulky and heavy, and some players experience motion sickness. The biggest hurdle, though, seems to be interaction. While players can look around and explore digital worlds in a way that feels surprisingly natural, there does not yet exist an immersive way of interacting with that world. VR games either simplify the gameplay to such a degree that players only interact through where they focus their attention, or require the player to use a controller or keyboard to perform actions in a manner similar to more traditional video games. Still, the technology is advancing so rapidly that it seems unlikely that some new mode of interaction won’t emerge in the coming years. The HTC Vive, for instance, boasts two small cameras which track players’ positions, allowing their movements in real life to be replicated in virtual reality.126 With these changes on the horizon, the way people play video games, or at least some video games, could be radically altered.

A fundamental change in the way people play video games would also lead to a change in how video games convey meaning. As I have argued, literature in the video game comes from the union of play and narrative. If the developers transform the way we play, the literature is transformed, too. If players enter virtual realities fully, not just through the process of immersion, then games will conduct their work in completely

126 Ben Kuchera, “Hands on with the HTC Vive, Valve’s crazy, beautiful VR system,” Polygon, March 4, 2015, accessed April 1, 2015, http://www.polygon.com/2015/3/4/8148265/htc-vive-vr-valve-hands-on- impressions 95

different ways. This not only means that developers will have to relearn how to perform literary work; it also means that scholars will have to understand how this work is being done. The narrative elements of the video game could also change, though this does not seem as imminent. However, if narrative games become flexible enough to free players from a limited selection of possible paths designed by the creators, then we would also be facing a revolution in terms of how the narrative component works. Games like

Minecraft, an open-world sandbox game, lack defined structure: players create objectives and tasks for themselves based on what piques their interest. Minecraft does not have a narrative, but if story-based games were able to adopt this user-defined mode of play, the entire way we understand games’ stories could change. They would lose the designed narrative and, in turn, alter how the game works as literature, if at all. These potential changes would not erase the significance of the literary work I have discussed, but if they were to become predominant then contemporary video game literature would lose relevance and the focus of the study must be ready to shift to the new standard of game development. Scholars need to stay abreast of how developers design, and players play, games in order to continue literary analysis.

I structured this paper as a look at three different games because of the fleeting nature of this moment in video game design. I want to show that even now, with a relatively standard, established way of playing used by most games, Shadow of the

Colossus, Spec Ops: The Line, and Journey all rely on different literary tools to accomplish their goals. These three games alone change our understanding of gameplay and narrative for each new gameplay experience. And these are just the games that I selected because of the way they address player interactivity and narrative design. There

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are many games that do not fit my ideal model that may very well be considered literature; they simply have their own literary techniques. We should be ready to study these games as well, to compare them to games like the ones to which I devoted this paper. We are working with a new medium, and that makes the source of literary merit unpredictable. The next great game could come from anywhere, and it could work as literature in a manner that no one previously foresaw. Therefore, it is essential that we constantly evaluate and reevaluate how games work as literature. Until the medium reaches a point where there can be a long-term “standard” for how a video game works, we must be ready to constantly redefine the literary when it comes to interactive media.

Yet I also want to highlight these three games to show that we do no need to wait for any further developments before we talk about the literary in the video game industry.

Video games are working as literature right now. Yes, they could go further, and we should encourage their development. We should be prepared for the standards and methods of game design to change. But fulfilling literary games exist already. We get to play these games, to experience their worlds, to gain something from them. Shadow of the Colossus lets us feel the tragedy with newfound immediacy. Spec Ops: The Line makes us feel uncomfortable and makes us question our assumptions about play and war.

Journey offers a one of a kind experience, letting us form brief connections with strangers, encouraging cooperation and rewarding us for overcoming our differences.

These games, and others like them, accomplish literary work. Their successes deserve understanding, analysis, critique, and appreciation. And of course, they also deserve to be played.

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At the time of writing, there exists an unfortunately vocal subsection of the video game community calling for a decrease in critical oversight and analysis of the literary themes of games. Under the Twitter hashtag “GamerGate,” these people argue against what they deem “politics” in video games: greater diversity of protagonists in terms of race, gender, and sexual orientation; storylines relating to outside social issues; and critiques of tropes that commonly go unchallenged in games. Video games, GamerGate argues, should be about fun and fun alone. Games should not attempt to address larger political issues. As someone who loves playing games for fun, who spent much of his time when he should have been writing this paper playing Mario Kart and Spelunky— games with no literary messages—I am disappointed by the argument set forth by

GamerGate. We are just now beginning to tap into the incredible potential of the video game. A new art form is emerging, and we get to be the first ones to thrill in it and to analyze it. We should be pushing it further, not holding it back. The discussion of the literary video game on a large scale is important now because we all benefit from the continued development of the medium. Shooters, racing games, and sports simulators will always be around, but games also have the opportunity to draw in newcomers, to relate to people on new levels, to share experiences that previously only people who lived those experiences could have. Something positive is happening in video games. Let’s hold onto their literary merit, not throw it away.

Video games offer something new in literary storytelling. Through play, games can transform the way we experience a story. They make us active agents in the story, investing us in the journey of the protagonist, creating emotional response by testing our relationship to the game world. By relying on play, video games are able to create

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involving narratives in a way no other medium can. With more critical analysis from both academics and gamers, hopefully we can encourage an increase in both literary video games and the study of literary video games. Recognizing their potential, not just for play, but for creating great narratives, may drive developers to push their games further, to continue to unlock new and exciting ways to turn the interactive into literature.

To find out what comes next, I guess we’ll have to play some more games.

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I pledge my honor that this senior thesis has been written in accordance with University regulations.

James C. Moore