The Vanishing Secrets of Video Games

Growing up, I believed hidden spaces were inherently magical. My favorite stories were about closets that opened into other worlds, secret passages that wound through gothic castles, revolving bookcases that swung open at the twist of a candelabra. When I started playing video games in the late ’80s, they felt like magic too. Where all the surprises in books were inevitably laid bare by the final page, games had to be reconnoitered; they were happy to withhold secrets in the cavernous recesses of their code, to keep their rooms of treasure forever sealed to the unobservant.

There was an almost cabalistic sense of mystery permeating games in the pre-internet era, when the closest thing you had to a walkthrough was a ragged issue of Nintendo Power and some apocryphal rumor about how to make the hero naked. “That’s one of the reasons that games were so resonant back in the ’80s and ‘90s,” game developer Jim Crawford tells me when I call him on Skype. “Every game was mysterious, even games you never played and just saw as a screenshot in a magazine. Especially those games.”

Crawford has spent a lot of time thinking about the dwindling sense of surprise in modern gaming culture, not only because he gave a talk at the 2014 Game Developers Conference titled “Preserving A Sense of Discovery in an Age of Spoilers,” but also because he created Frog Fractions, one of the weirdest and most surprising games in recent memory.

The most important thing to tell someone before they play Frog Fractions is nothing. Nestled in the prosaic shell of an educational browser game about math, Frog Fractions inspired instant, feverish praise from nearly everyone who managed to finish it — one critic even suggested it “might be the greatest game of all time” — but unless you’d played it, no one would tell you why. In the end, it found an audience of millions almost entirely through word of mouth, passed from person to person with one cryptic set of instructions: Don’t ask. Just play it.

Frog Fractions

The disparity between its banal exterior and the zealotry of its fans felt almost like a promise: There had to be more to it, some great and thrilling secret buried just beneath the surface. At a time when hordes of fans stand ready to skeletonize, catalog and stream the secrets of any game within days or hours of release, the collective restraint of the Frog Fractions audience imbued it with an aura of mystery, one that was all the more potent because it felt like a relic of a bygone era.

If Frog Fractions fans were determined to seal the game behind spoiler-free glass, perhaps it was because the pleasures it contained felt so rare that they needed to be preserved: the frisson of surprise it triggers as you tumble down its rabbit hole, the feeling that absolutely anything could happen next.

In the Kickstarter campaign for the sequel, Frog Fractions 2, Crawford confirmed this was pretty much the point. “I created Frog Fractions explicitly to evoke the air of mystery that all video games held in the 1980s,” he wrote, “before the era of endless preview coverage and official strategy guides took that feeling away from us, seemingly permanently.”

Although hand-wringing about the habits of a younger generation — and the lionizing of your own — is usually a clear sign that you are O-L-D and possibly deserve to mocked, I admit to a certain melancholy at the idea that the mysterious spaces I once loved in games have been slowly burned away by the magnifying glass of internet transparency. Although it’s not impossible to insulate yourself from spoilers, it can be difficult to feel like a game is truly veiled in mystery when all its secrets can be obliterated with the click of a button.

“In the modern era, people can eat up mysteries and secrets instantly by simply looking something up on a Wiki page,” says Toby Fox, creator of the much-beloved roleplaying game Undertale. “The hardest cookie, though, is that if you make a secret very, very difficult to find, chances are that dataminers will discover it before it ever gets discovered legitimately.”

If video games are magic, then datamining is the ultimate method of pulling back the curtain to reveal the magician’s secrets: a method of combing through the game’s data files to surgically extract its surprises, including mysteries still unsolved or undiscovered by fans. For developers who spend months or years crafting elaborate mysteries only to have them instantly exposed by people with no interest in actually solving them, it can be a frustrating and deflating experience.

The mysterious spaces I once loved in games have been slowly burned away by the magnifying glass of internet transparency

When the game Binding of Isaac: Rebirth came out in 2014, its community of fans immediately started crowdsourcing clues to unlock its biggest secret — only to have a dataminer drop the solution in their laps before they could complete it. “We were like ‘let’s do it, it’ll take months, [but] some people won’t find this for years!’ Nope, one week,” said Binding of Isaac developer Tyrone Rodriguez later. “They swallowed a hundred dollar steak in one bite.”

Undertale

For Fox, whose enigmatic Undertale became one of the surprise hits of 2015, the sanctity of secrets proved equally elusive. Although he initially asked players not to spoil the game or go digging in the code — one patch for the game included a hidden message that said “it’s impossible to have mysteries nowadays, because of nosy people like you” — it didn’t stop a community of dataminers (known as Underminers) from poking around anyway. More than a year after the game’s release, however, his attitude has grown more sanguine.

“As a ROM hacker myself, I completely understand the drive to do it, so I don’t have any ill-will towards these people,” says Fox. “But the truth is that if you want your game to have a secret that’s discovered legitimately, the amount of time that it takes for regular people to find it has to be less than the amount of time it takes for people to take it by force. And depending on how your data is stored, that can be a very, very short timer. So in terms of actually hiding secrets for a long time, there’s little you can do — without being more creative than me on the engineering side, anyway.”

And much like the kid on the playground who never stopped insisting you could jump over the flagpole in Super Mario Bros, some fans won’t stop inventing mysteries of their own no matter how thoroughly a game has been stripmined. “I still get emails from kids that ask how to unlock things that aren’t in the game,” says Fox. “Or see people speculating about certain nonexistent paths, or eating up rumors that are blatantly false. The truth is, if you create something with an aura of mystery, speculation will persevere despite evidence to the contrary.”

Nor is self-delusion the only way make games feel mysterious again. While the internet is unlikely to stop being the internet, Crawford thinks its firehose of information doesn’t have to mean the death of secrecy — only that developers need to approach the idea differently. “My reaction is that this is a design problem, and you need to figure out how to [make games] in a way that anticipates players working against your secrets,” he says.

Although there’s no way to stop a swarm of fans from burrowing directly to the center of a game if you put all your secrets in one place, Crawford suggests hiding them in what one might think of as multiple horcruxes — secrets added after the fact in patches or woven through the internet and the physical world via alternate reality games.“You can literally make it impossible to cheat by holding certain things back,” he says.

He should know: For the last two and a half years, he’s has been running an ARG that promises to lead players to the long-awaited Frog Fractions 2. Its intricate and bizarre breadcrumb trail has corkscrewed through spectrograms, an Obama shaving simulator and a live-action abduction by “time travelers”; more than 30 months later, it’s still beckoning players forward with two tantalizing questions: Is Frog Fractions 2 already out there, waiting for us to find it? Could we be playing it right now and not even know it?

“You need to figure out how to make games in a way that anticipates players working against your secrets”

Since Crawford has already announced the sequel won’t have his name on it or even be called Frog Fractions 2, it’s turned every obscure game on the internet into a suspect and inspired its own subreddit — r/isthisfrogfractions2 — where players post “suspicious” links to games that could be more than they seem. Although it’s impossible to know if the sequel will live up to expectations, the journey itself has managed to pull off the same feat as the original: creating a possibility space as vast and weird as anything those old-school games conjured in my mind as a kid.

“I’ll give you this exclusive reveal,” says Crawford confidentially. “There are no fractions in Frog Fractions 2… This new game is very different. It’s the same to the extent that it comes from my personal design sensibility, but a lot of people who loved the first game so effortlessly are going to have a lot of difficulty with the new one. It’s a lot more demanding, in several different senses. But that decision came from notion that people who want sequels actually want games that make them feel like the original did, not literal copies.”

In a way, that’s what most people mean when they rhapsodize about the transcendent joy of their old games, many of which were unpolished, half-broken and mercilessly unfair by modern standards. What they want isn’t more games that look how they used to look, or play how they used to play. What we really miss about them — what we really want — is how they made us feel.

They were games that turned us not just into adventurers but into something even more exciting: magicians who could see the invisible seams in the world, and open doors in solid stone just by whispering a secret code. That’s what I’d always thought magic was—a world more thrilling and full of possibilities than our own, glimmering just beneath its visible surface. Games made me believe that if only I knew the right words to say, the right places to say them, I could reach my hands into those hidden spaces and draw them back again, dripping with jewels or crackling with power.

I didn’t know how many secrets were hiding beneath the digital floorboards of the games I played as a child, or how to find them all. No one did. So we combed through every blade of grass, opened every door and wandered down every lonely road driven by a sense of curiosity that sounded almost like an article of faith: that the world we could see was not all that there was, and that everything else was waiting for us.