Since playing The Beginner’s Guide, I’ve continued to wrestle with the various definitions and boundaries of just what a game is, considering the ever-expanding sphere. Even if I think only of recent releases, there are games without fail states, like Submerged, and that also have no real win conditions, like Her Story. Games that play like confessional poetry reads, like Nina Freeman’s Cibele, games that strongly push a message of advocacy, like 12hrs. Games, like The Beginner’s Guide, that feel more like an essay or lecture than anything else, and much like the narrator of TBG, I’ve been obsessed with hunting for answers, as though I might unlock the real definition of game, the one true idea, and forever put the question to rest. But is that even possible? With interactive fiction and hypertext creative works taking on more gamelike aspects in some cases, with indie games investigating all sorts of issues, with VR on the horizon, finally I wondered: will we ever have one working definition? To encompass all of this, and all the other possibilities, it would have to be so broad as to be almost practically useless.
That’s where I was stuck: observing the sprawl of possibility, and then it occurred to me then that maybe I didn’t have to try to answer that question. That maybe there was another line of inquiry that was just as important: maybe instead of worrying about the boundary lines drawn around play and games, I should be concerned with identifying some of those vast possibilities of games, labeling them, and exploring their usefulness and viability in various situations.
This brought me to a different, but similar question: just why did TBG feel so ungamelike to me? Once I stopped feeling certain that an essay couldn’t be a game and started asking if, hey, maybe it could be, everything shifted. Of course an essay can be presented in the form of a game, and in fact, that may just be an incredibly effective way to do things. In TBG, you must listen to the narration before advancing. You can’t skim or skip pages and while sure, you can turn things off and walk away, the buy-in is different. It’s a short game. You might as well finish. But more, the familiar has become unfamiliar, and that’s intriguing. Why is this world here? What’s being done with it? What does the narrator have to say?
When familiar forms — essays, PSAs, confessionals, more — are suddenly presented in unfamiliar ways, we might just be more inclined to pay attention, and a lot of indie games are capitalizing on that. What’s more is that games can provide something else, an experiential aspect that cannot really come to the page. A flash game like Freshman Year, also by Nina Freeman of Cibele, gives players the chance to make choices, but no matter what, the main character always suffers the same fate. It’s unavoidable, and though the game makes no real larger statement on any universal ideas of assault, there’s a message there all the same. Freshman Year is a memoir with a twist, and that twist pulls the reader (player) inside the content and puts the message right in front of them. This is the character’s truth, and in playing, you’re placed squarely inside of that truth, embodying it, confronted uncomfortably.
Consider, too, Anna Anthropy’s dys4ia. The flash series of microgames not only manages to demonstrate the hoops and complications, the surprises and discoveries, the pains and the small victories of hormone therapy and transitioning, but it does so in a manner wholly unique to both gaming and its subject. While the creation itself draws from a similar well as the lyric essay (a form that combines poetry, research, essay, and memoir), dys4ia is an experience only possible in gaming, and one that packs a powerful messages even when it’s funny.
If no other form of media could produce dys4ia, then along those lines, I’m not sure any other form could translate the inability to act when spiraling as well as Depression Quest — which literally grays out certain options, demonstrating what should be done, but also how those actions are just not quite within reach for some. Really gives a deeper meaning to the horror of being told “just cheer up! Just put yourself out there!” in moments when mental health blocks that entirely, a message that’s been written hundreds of times, in hundreds of various essayistic forms on depression, and demonstrated in films and television, but there’s something entirely different about being in the familiar situation of a choice-based narrative and having a choice denied. Marked out. The familiar, now unfamiliar, and the player confronted again. The player, who wants to choose the “right” option, to win, now cannot — and is forced to consider the concept of depression from a new angle. Game, or essay? Perhaps we’re at the intersection of both, doing something new and visceral, and that’s part of the magic of the whole thing. Maybe that’s part of what keeps us coming back, slipping again and again into new experiences.
