i admire the use of collage in games: the kind of structure that borrows different game vocabularies and rules as suits individual scenes. christopher whitman’s run is such a game, one which draws on a learned history of game systems to comment on a strange irony of digital games. there are some enormous human experiences – farming, for example – from which most of us have become so alienated that we only relate to it in a detached, abstracted, incentivized videogame form.
it’s interesting that this game uses a conceit that i didn’t like in gregory weir’s silent conversation. i think it’s more effective here for a few reasons: because the text on the screen is less dense, and so the rate at which words are revealed better mirrors the pace of reading them; because the game makes a stronger effort to use platform vocabulary to characterize those words (i think this is partly a consequence of there being fewer words); and because there’s no grading mechanism to distance the player from the act of reading and comprehending. but gregory is still the brave laika that we shot into space.
19 comments
gorgeous game, and the designer comes from that part of Canada where the citizens are very much like (and vice versa) West coast Washingtonians & Oregonians :3
I liked this. I really dig how the symbolism of the “sunlight” gets developed and reinforced as you play. My only nitpick is that the game was a little long for me. I think if it had been shorter the closing statement would have packed more of a punch (but maybe punch-packing wasn’t the intention there).
wow you walk on words in a boring platform enviornment while reading a middleschooler’s attempt at a fantasy novel
this is art my monocle just popped
@Alex: got any favourite movies?
my favorite movie is “hard candy” i really identify with the male lead
i am a pedophile.
@Alex : how very Catholic/Jewish of you :3
MKS: eh?
On the game, I definitely agree that the pace and layout makes it easier to read these words than in Silent Conversation; on the Lovecraft levels there I was platforming but not reading, and I usually read much faster than I platform. But the writing in Run seemed like it committed lots of the usual sins of game writing.
@MATT W: their post was edited after I made my post…
Thanks for the kind words, Anna!
I think it’s totally fair to say that to some extent my reach exceeded my grasp on this one. It was a super long and difficult development for such a short game. But!
OK, I’m totally with Emily Short on her analysis of Braid, and I agree those problems are symptomatic of a lot of indie game writing. The issue is people trying to write when either A. they are too young (or too socially withdrawn) to understand that you abstractly feeling feelings is not interesting for others to read about, or B. they are not readers, and so they don’t really grasp how to structure language in a readable way (witness Braid’s prose constantly stumbling over awkward rhythm).
Run is a speculative exercise. It’s an attempt to explain the culture surrounding our contemporary media from the position of someone who, referentially, has a limited knowledge and vocabulary. It’s an awkward juggling act (and I could easily rattle off a list of authors who do it better than I do), but there’s a logic behind not just calling a screen a screen. It’s trying to get at a new way of looking at these things using imagination and metaphor.
The writing is certainly weaker in some areas than others, but I did make an effort not to be obtuse about simple things just for the sake of seeming deep and intense. Whatever failures it has are honest failures.
I’ve thought that indie games have an ongoing antagonism between reflexivity and accessibility–the form is at a point where most of the popular designers are people fascinated with video games, and people are still trying to figure out what an authored game can and can’t do, so most games with a single author are to some degree concerned with the history and nature of the video game. This is important territory that develops the form, but it reduces accessibility for players not raised on video games. And meanwhile, video games are becoming a popular, universal expressive form–everyone is redefining what it means to make and to play games, and that’s really really good. Frustratingly, I generally see hacking an established cultural platform versus developing a new one to outmode the old as important movements in video games that are unfortunately mutually exclusive. Run was exciting to me because I think it manages to reconcile the two–it is intensely involved with the forms and meanings of other video games, but it addresses a universal audience, all of whom have been affected by video games (and computers in general), whether or not they have actually played them. This comes through in design, too: the game vocabulary is entirely that of other popular games, but the player is always well-instructed and the difficulty is never prohibitive.
WOW that was supposed to be two or three sentences of exposition. Here’s what I actually wanted to say:
While Run has a lot of other things going on, so far as my interpretation of it goes, its prose is a real problem. The highly allusive prose harshly limits access–how many people who haven’t read their postmodern Spinozans are going to get anything from a line like “they spread their organs across the body of the city?” Passages like this aren’t only guilty of cleverness for its own sake: they assume mutual understanding in precisely the context where the player’s understanding shouldn’t be assumed. Likewise for the game’s fantasy/sci-fi trappings. Run is a wonderful game navigating complicated thematic territory gracefully and intelligently, but it needs to lessen its cleverness and improve the expository side of its storytelling if it wants to be both an effective treatise on games and a valuable game in its own right.
dude you dont have to be an academic to think that THE IMAGERY OF ORGANS BEING SPREAD ACROSS A CITY IS RAD AS HELL
thats totally clever for its own sake stop brow beating you turdathon
(i thought the writing of the game was pretty boring but back up off that line cuz it was good)
a biiiiiiiiiiiiiiig pedophile.
@daphny Nothing wrong with cleverness for its own sake, it’s just lousy when it gets in the way of trying to tell a good story.
@alex That’s exactly what I meant to say–the writing made me feel talked down to the whole time, and when I did happen to catch a reference it didn’t add anything–it just pointed and said “hey, we both read this once.” I don’t think that kind of writing is good, and I don’t think that the game’s problem is that it’s TOO SMART TO BE ACCESSIBLE or something–I think its problem is that it thinks looking smart is enough to make it valuable.
woops should’ve reread the earlier comments and remembered who alex was
okay i feel you there pete, but i think your post reads exactly the same way you’re complaining about the game reading……… COINCIDENCE OR CONSPIRACY
@CHRISTOPHER WHITMAN: do you have webbed feet yet?
Okay, obviously I didn’t get what the writing was aiming at the first time, and now I can follow the prose a bit more. But I do think the prose is more obscure than it needs to be to convey the ideas it wants to convey.
(FWIW, I relate to farming through the medium of children’s books and playsets.)
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/598602
post a comment