games pour rien

I’m trying to think of a better analogy. Say you have a car – you take off the hood, and it still works. You take away the doors, and it still works. But now somehow imagine that you remove the wheels and it still works, you take out the engine, it still works, you remove the frame, it still works… when nothing’s left, but something’s there, and importantly when it still works.

In the early 2010s it sort of felt like there were two movements happening simultaneously, a rejection of gameyness and the reintegration of the same. Games as things that didn’t necessarily involve score, death, danger, action, puzzles… and then games which reincorporated those in their most sawed-off and abrupt form, without the carefully rounded corners of their vestigial ‘00s industry equivalents. This latter movement meant pulling from then-neglected genre byways – from Rogue and roguelikes, the punishing opacity of the Wizardry tradition, masocore platformers. And my impression has been that while the two tendencies co-existed, the former seemed to fade as the next grew strength.

Mechanics-lite artgames were treated at first as something close to money (or free aesthetic effects) on the table – new territory opened to explore once you stepped over the old limitations. And then the feeling dried up a little, since it turned out there were still limitations, difficulties, just different ones, the cowboy fantasy prairie turning out to be a vast and ambiguous swamp… and at the same time, oh shit, here was Dark Souls. Hotline Miami, the Spelunky commercial release, many other things fresh in the very directness with which they foregrounded their own gameyness… but Dark Souls in particular seemed to be taken as a standard bearer for the idea that the existing territory of gameyness had barely been explored, that there were whole and hidden worlds there to discover.

Which is of course still true, even now the excited rediscovery of procedural generation and “-RPG” as genre suffix might be a little less exciting to us all by now. The ungamey itself is a set of imaginary histories to choose from. Sound novels, odd PS1 experiments, ICO and Seiklus and Knytt and Proteus, Dear Esther, Gone Home... But I think one reason I feel drawn to it is that I started out making adventure games, in fact am probably still making adventure games. And adventure games to me represent another tradition in which people gradually, without any particular direction in mind, started taking away elements of the car, and found that it still functioned. No score? No time limits? No unwinnable states? No death? “Verbs” slowly pared down further and further until they became the barest of contextual gestures, “look” and “use”, eventually down to one click, the prod of attention itself? And then m-maybe even no puzzles, that last terrifying boundary, which the genre always seemed to keep getting closer too and then pulling back in confusion from… sometimes strolling across it like it wasn’t there, as if it wasn’t all that big a deal, in hypercard decks, multimedia experiments…

You take away the very last thing that you’re certain makes a car and find that it keeps going after all. But should it? Surely there’s been a mistake? Maybe the universe hasn’t quite caught on to what just happened, maybe the thing just keeps functioning due to some cosmic version of coyote time..? For a field of earnest programmers it may have felt downright unethical to build entire functioning software products around such an eerily unfounded effect, the kind of thing you might expect to vanish when you prodded at it, or even recompiled. There’s something horrible about the idea of building a machine and then finding out you didn’t, that you put parts around the shape of a different machine, one that functions through some set of rules you can’t anticipate or see… Reduced to a member of a cargo cult, or someone rubbing graphite on a paper sheet, registering indirectly stray dips and channels of the surface underneath.

An artificial cultural form is what we make of it; each addition changes our sense of the things that came before, everything we make now will be transformed into dim precursor by later generations baffled that nobody around it seemed to notice what was CLEARLY the most important development of the time, saying instead like Pilate in the Anatole France story, “Snood? I don’t seem to recall the name.” So I’ve never been that interested in definitions of videogames. But I remain entranced by anything that tries to take the wheels off the car, to pull something load-bearing from the depths of this imagined form and find with surprise that it still holds, that we ourselves are making it hold. An aesthetic of removal in art tends to circle around ideas of necessity that have no place within videogames, bastard and gratuitous offspring of the funfair and the army. And I doubt attention alone can sustain the 80 hours now synonymous with value for commercial products. Maybe that’s why it still feels like a surprise, a delight, to push absently against some wall and pass right through it. To brace for pushback or rebuke that never comes, that taut attention suddenly unmoored, loosed through the air and rolling away somewhere under the couch.