Losing Your Grip: Futility and Dramatic Necessity in Shadow
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WELL PLAYED 1.0 To accomplish this, games use an interactive trope that I call futile interactivity. NICK FORTUGNO 170 LOSING YOUR GRIP: LOSING YOUR GRIP: FUTILITY AND DRAMATIC NECESSITY IN SHADOWNICK FORTUGNO OF THE COLOSSUS In Shakespeare’s masterpiece Hamlet, Ophelia must die. There is no possibility that Hamlet’s unfortunate lover can give up on Hamlet and walk away, nor can Hamlet realize the harm he’s committing on her. A core part of the arc of the play is her degeneration and her death. Of course, the play spends a good deal of time getting us to care about Ophelia, and to feel bad for her doomed relationship with Hamlet. This naturally leads us to not want her to kill herself. But because the play’s plot is that Ophelia kills herself, all of our desire that Ophelia endure is hopeless. It is this tension that creates the tragedy – the audience develops expectations and hopes that the story’s plot will necessarily dash, and the futility of that hope is what gives the story an emotional power. We call this tension dramatic necessity, the power that stories of artistic media create by constructing desires and expectations in the audience that the narrative will then inevitably subvert and betray. When it comes to the medium of games, however, the possibility of dramatic necessity has been repeatedly challenged. Theorists and critics as varied as Umberto Eco1 and Roger Ebert2 have denounced the possibility of interactive media such as games ever reaching the emotional power of plays or film. They argue that the very idea of agency undermines dramatic necessity, and without a sense of dramatic necessity, a game can never reach the emotional impact of other, more fixed kinds of narrative art. Let’s take our Hamlet example again. If the play was instead a game, the argument goes, then you would imagine you would have some kind of gameplay control over the important parts of the story. So, to continue our example above, a user could have the choice of whether to have Ophelia kill herself or get over Hamlet. Of course, if one really did sympathize with Ophelia, one would probably choose to have her not kill herself. This fulfills the audience’s hopes, but it eliminates the tragedy by not having that hope dashed. On the other hand, a user 171 WELL PLAYED 1.0 could also choose to have Ophelia kill herself, but simply knowing that one could have chosen have her survive undermines the power of the decision to have her commit the act. The problem is that as soon as you add agency to the story, the story is not determined, and without that tension between the audience’s desire and an inevitable outcome, the story loses its emotional power. But is it true that agency invalidates the possibility of dramatic necessity? Isn’t it possible that agency in an interactive narrative can be used to create the tension between expectation and inevitable outcome? I argue that several games have attempted, and a few have succeeded, in using control by the user to construct this tension between desire and outcome. To accomplish this, games use an interactive trope that I call futile interactivity. To demonstrate this trope, I offer Shadow of the Colossus, a game that is a triumphant example of how agency can be harnessed to a necessary end, and how a game interface, system, and interactivity can be used in concert to create a genuine tragedy. Warning: The following essay contains many spoilers about theme and plot of Shadow of the Colossus. If you have not played the game, and have no information about the game’s story, I highly recommend that you postpone reading this article until you have finished the game first. Reading this article before playing will deeply compromise the power of the game. For those interested but concerned about Shadow’s difficulty and time commitment, there are several good walk-throughs available on the internet that can accelerate your completion of the game. Hunting the Colossi Shadow of the Colossus, developed by Team Ico under the vision of Fumito Ueda, begins with a warrior (Wander3) riding to a distant temple carrying a dead woman (Mono), presumably a lover from the dedication the warrior shows her. After destroying a set of shadowy enemies, the warrior is contacted by a distant voice that identifies itself as Dormin. Wander indicates that he wants Dormin to bring back the woman’s soul, which Dormin explains may be possible, but only at a great price: the destruction of the 16 colossi that are the incarnations of the idols in the temple, using the special sword the warrior carries. The warrior is undeterred by this challenge: DORMIN: In this land there exist colossi that are the incarnations of those idols. If thou defeat those colossi — the idols shall fall. WANDER: I understand. DORMIN: But heed this, the price you pay may be heavy indeed. WANDER: It doesn’t matter.4 172 LOSING YOUR GRIP Even in these early moments, Wander displays a kind of fatalism and almost apathy that is atypical in a hero. But, as we will see, there are many ways in which the warrior that the player controls is not typically heroic. From here, the game proper begins. Each colossus that the player is tasked with killing is, in traditional game terms, a boss. Eschewing standard level design, Wander faces no preliminary opponents in his quest. Instead, the player begins by searching the largely empty environment for the next colossus. Once the colossus is found, the player must figure out how to find and attack the weak spots on the monster’s body. In this sense, each colossus is a puzzle that the player must solve. The puzzles take a number of different forms: simple, instructional puzzles, such as the first colossus “The Minotaur”5, where the player learns the basics of climbing and finding the weak points of the colossi; strategic puzzles, such as the fourth colossus “Equus Prime”, where the player must figure out how to access the climbable parts of the colossus that are here too high for Wander to reach; timing puzzles, such as the fourteenth colossus “Destruction Luster”, where the player must time a number of jumps and climbs of different ruins to get to a safe area in which to kill the lion; and combinations of the above. But despite these differences in the types of puzzles, the core emotion of the play is similar throughout the game, in that the player must experiment and explore each colossus in a difficult and at times frustrating process, and that the reward of play is the sense of triumph that comes from having struggled against the complexities of the problem and figured out a solution. This presentation of a challenging puzzle which leads to a sense of triumph upon completion is a standard mechanic in digital games, one that extends back to the early text adventure games such as Zork and Planetfall. However, Shadow is not content simply to allow the player this feeling of success. The troubling of this mechanic begins with the ride to find the first colossus. The player is not tracking down a monster terrorizing a village or threatening the world. The colossi are hidden away in caves and grottos, deep canyons and forgotten cities, and as the environment is almost devoid of life (living things beyond Wander, Agro (the hero’s horse), and the colossi consist of a handful of lizards, birds, and turtles), it’s hard to see what harm the colossus could be doing. In fact, the more colossi Wander finds, the clearer it is that they are all sequestered away from anything they could harm, so that Wander’s mission feels a great deal more like a whale hunt or a safari than a world saving quest. Beyond their isolation, many of the colossi themselves seem to be relatively harmless. While some of the colossi attack Wander as soon as the warrior arrives, many entirely ignore Wander until he engages with them. The most striking example of this is the thirteenth colossus, “Trail Drifter”. When the player arrives in the desert realm, the colossus is flying in lazy circles, with no awareness of Wander at all. To engage Trail Drifter, the player needs to shoot it down from the sky by puncturing 173 WELL PLAYED 1.0 its air sacs, and then ride up to its wing to jump on to its body. After Wander stabs at its weak spots a number of times, Trail Drifter dives into the sand, knocking Wander loose. But when Trail Drifter resurfaces, it returns to its lazy circles in the sky, completely ignoring the warrior once again. Trail Drifter never, ever attacks the player, and so the player must repeatedly assault and eventually destroy a creature that means Wander no harm. Trail Drifter is the most extreme example of this in the narrative, but several of the colossi follow a similar pattern, simply ignoring the player until forced to defend themselves when the player invades their space or makes the first strike. This creates a troubling feeling that if the player had just left the colossi alone, nothing bad would have happened. Despite the size and destructive power of the colossi, it’s hard to shake the feeling that Wander is the aggressor, and that the player is the monster, ruthlessly hunting down and killing innocent beasts in the barren wilderness. This troubling sense is then reinforced by the visual decisions made about how the death of a colossus was depicted.