Earlier this year I wrote an essay called Art of the Impossible about Fragments of Euclid (Antoine Zanuttini, 2017) and William Chyr’s as-yet unreleased Manifold Garden. In classic Electron Dance fashion, I ended on a throwaway thought that bore closer inspection. I moaned about the tendency for beautiful art games to rely on what you might call “tried and tested” mechanics to drive them. I don’t think of them as tried and tested, more like “unambitious and disappointing”.

Find a key, unlock a door. Touch the hotspot. Memorise a sequence.

Does this sound familiar?

Outside of small, free stuff, the first game I can remember that triggered this type of stomach-lurching disappointment was Sword & Sworcery (Capybara Games & Superbrothers, 2011). Sure, it had Twin Peaks references and occasionally you got to manipulate the environment in interesting ways but then there was a bit where you had to find invisible hotspots floating in the air and hit them in the right order. This was the great Sword & Sworcery? A few memory games? I even felt a twinge of dissatisfaction in my beloved Kairo (Locked Door Puzzle, 2013) which had a sequence puzzle among its earliest challenges.

I tried playing Tengami (Nyamyam, 2014) with the children a few months ago which we eventually abandoned out of boredom. While it is dressed up in a beautiful papercraft look and some of the pop-up book interactions are fun, it suffers from an aggressive case of banality. Not only were there sequence puzzles but the player spends most of the time walking, very slowly, from one point to another. There is no justification to any of this, no value-add to be found in this meditative-going-on-coma pace. You cannot help but see the sequence puzzles and speed as padding to make up for limitations of the pop-up theme.

The idea of using mechanics invented in 1917 to flesh out a game is not unique to arthouse indie fare. It’s rife in AAA titles, but less noticeable as they cram in a lot more 1917 mechanics to provide the illusion of modernity. Open-world titles are full of collectible hunts and simple fetch quests.

A particular hate of mine is the quick time event (QTE), where you jab the right key or button when you’re told to otherwise your character faces the vicious consequences of your tardy button-pressing. The first time I encountered them was in Dead Space (Visceral Games, 2008). Oops you didn’t press F quickly enough, so the creature stabbed you in the brain! A lot! I suppose there’s a purity to the quick-time event as what is an action game other than an exercise in pressing buttons at the right time?

I condemned myself to work through the tedious Minecraft: Story Mode (Telltale Games, 2015) for the love of my children, a point-and-click adventure riddled with QTE rot. My son enjoyed Costume Quest (Double Fine, 2010) despite the combat being sculpted from QTE. I don’t really want to be that guy who whines “but he doesn’t know any better” but he doesn’t know any better.

Time to complain about something else. Suppose you’re only allowed access to the first paragraph when you click on this page. After you read it, the second paragraph unlocks. Now you must read the second paragraph twice to unlock the third. And it takes a bit of re-reading of both the second and third paragraphs to unlock the fourth paragraph. And then to proceed--

God I hate upgrade ladders. Far too often they feel like synthetic design grafted on to eke out the good stuff. I remember playing a recommendation from Free Indie Games many years ago which initially seemed fun, but then I wasn’t allowed to progress in the game until I had cleared out the previous levels. But to defeat those levels was impossible with the poor arsenal I had been kitted out with so was forced to grind through failures to get enough cash to upgrade. Imagine if Stephen’s Sausage Roll (Increpare, 2016) had made the sausages heavier as the game progressed and forced the player into sausage-pushing workouts before they could take on later levels.

This design bleeds out into respected titles. Whether No Man’s Sky (Hello Games, 2016) is respected or not depends on your point of view, but in its classic formulation you must continually collect resources to maintain forward momentum. I was also upset that the fun, loveable Alphabear (Spry Fox, 2015) was much more about an upgrade ladder than being clever with words.

Nonetheless, it would be unfair to omit that upgrade ladders continue to make addicts of players thus commercially-minded developers have little motivation to drop them. The template for Alphabear was the clever multiplayer game Panda Poet (Spry Fox, 2011) which is essentially the same game sans upgrade ladder. Panda Poet did not share the success of Alphabear. Spry Fox Chief Creative Officer and all-round nice guy Dan Cook wrote in the Electron Dance comments:

Panda Poet is an interesting counter example. It is quite pure with minimal grinding and highly skilled positional play. There’s an extremely tiny group of highly educated players that really enjoy it. Everyone else bounces off it like it is the [most] vile poison ever created.

I’m really here to raise an eyebrow about the arthouse titles, though, which hope to be appraised as something unique and special - but then bolt on “a vector of gameplay” like a few puzzles with some locked doors. This is a broader version of the Chekhov Collectible paradox where meaningless collectibles are distributed to provide exploration with meaning. Developers attempt to justify player participation through the addition of effectively meaningless mechanics which are incongruous with a game’s core design philosophy.

Here’s a game for you, reader. Go find me an essay that contends that art needs to be justified with dull mechanics. Attempting to jazz things up with some well-weathered gameyness risks the relationship flipping around, with the game presenting as boring busywork justified by art. My pessimistic summary of Fragments of Euclid was “just another game about pressing buttons and unlocking doors”. We may have clutched pearls over Brian Moriarty’s accusation that games had not yet delivered sublime art, and I definitely include myself in this “we”, but who can blame him when art games themselves contributed to this impression. Mind you, Moriarty has been softening of late.

I’ve heard all the complaints about how the master race of alt-ludology extremists are coming to formalise game design and tear down art. But take a quick dip into some of our arthouse titles and you’re sure to come up against the crudest game design patterns you’ve ever seen in your life. The memory games, the locked doors, the collectibles. TIMEframe (Random Seed Games, 2015) metamorphosed from a curious exploration-against-the-clock prototype into a timed collectible hunt in the commercial version. Thank you, mechanics, for providing a sense of steely “closure”. There’s no ludologist here defacing these works.

It is possible to succeed without bolt-on gameplay. Gone Home (The Fullbright Company, 2013) and Verde Station (Dualboot, 2014) are games that largely take place inside your head. Bernband (Tom van den Boogaart, 2014) asks nothing of you except to witness the world. Matt W suggested in the comments that Fragments of Euclid could actually work without goals because navigation is difficult in itself, which then recalls Miasmata (IonFX, 2012) a landmark title about the player as cartographer. I haven’t even started on purely experiential works like Proteus (Key & Kanaga, 2013), Metamorphabet (Vectorpark, 2015) or Panoramical (Ramallo & Kanaga, 2015).

Mechanics are not bad, but need to gel with what the game is attempting to project. Cart Life (Richard Hofmeier, 2011) and Papers Please (Lucas Pope, 2013) are full of tedious little chores that absolutely nail those games’ themes. When I dabbled with the prototype of If Found, Please Return (Llaura Dreamfeel) at EGX Rezzed, I was aware this was just a branching story game, but the method of navigating the story - erasing the displayed imagery - made it so much more.

In an article called No Alternative, I asked several developers if they wanted a different term to use instead of “game” but no one was seeking new labels or categories. Three years later, I can finally articulate what was bothering me at the time.

While a new breed of developers had plotted to create art that changed what “game” meant, I suspected the influence might have gone the other way. An art game sometimes felt like art infected with the word game. If you gaze into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.

There is another way to view this without getting mired in negativity and dissatisfaction. We have been progressing through a period of gentle change, during which artists were nudging back the boundaries of “game” until our Dear Esthers and Verde Stations and Cart Lifes could flourish. I might have disliked Tengami, but it was helping to clear the path for others. There are still lingering influences as you can see with a work like Fragments of Euclid and practically any game wearing the badge of “walking simulator” - but we are not where we were a decade ago. We are more like where we were 35 years ago, when there were no established game design patterns to constrain the creative output of developers.

Arthouse developers are becoming increasingly honest with their work; if they cannot find some interesting mechanic to play with, they won’t offer one. But I’m realistic - I understand the financial stakes for some. Minus game-like affordances means it might be minus game-like revenue; I refer you back to Panda Poet vs Alphabear. However, decent developers are wary of becoming an art game hustler, wasting people’s time and money with the equivalent of glorified collectible hunts.

I can’t tell you what I want. And even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you, because if you dig into these arguments too deeply, you will unearth true madness. You will find yourself carving an unholy pentagram in the ground which circumscribes what is game and what is not-game, what is art and what is not-art.

Give me lines and I promise to ignore them. And that’s what I expect of you, too.

Alternative Viewpoints