It's amazing how easy it is sometimes to forget that a text is not a story. What I mean by that is, when reading a book, or watching a movie, or playing a game, one can miss the forest for the trees, so to speak ? get so caught up in the story that one misses the larger work. Take Halo, for example. The Halo universe is huge, spanning books, comics, games, etc., but when playing the game it is easy to forget this and see the experience as merely playing Master Chief. In a sense, this kind of immersion is the goal, where things like grunts interacting with each other or Marines cursing out Covenant are not unnoticed, but do not draw attention.
In his book Gaming: Essays on an Algorithmic Culture, Alexander Galloway describes these moments as "diagetic machine acts", or those instances in which the machine acts within the game world. When these occur with player action, he calls them ?ambiance acts?. These actions help sculpt a game world which exists without the player, in a sense. Yes, the player is necessary in that the game is not possible without them, insofar as the game must, at the very least, be turned on by them. However, when I refer to a game world that exists outside the player, I mean the player avatar. The vast majority of games construct such a world to some degree, where, for example, it is assumed that the survivors are living their lives in the safe room while Frank West is dressing in women's clothes in Dead Rising. I bring this up, ironically, to talk about a game with almost no ?ambiance acts? ? namely, Limbo.
Yes. Limbo, a little ?indie? game on Xbox Live Arcade. Noted mostly for its color palette of black and white, child protagonist (who is horrifically killed quite often), and overall oppressive atmosphere, it was met with almost universal acclaim at its release. There exist many jokes about how to make a critically acclaimed ?x?, one just needs an intensely depressing or emotionally draining story, but honestly it is hard to do that well. It's not enough to just make a movie or write a book based on country song lyrics ? one has to really work to draw the audience into the experience. That Limbo did this is even more impressive in that the game features a silent protagonist and about two sentences of story in total. The oppressive atmosphere and sense of isolation and dread do the job entirely, and are shining examples of what video games can do when explored as the action-based media they are without recourse to other storytelling methods (film, books, etc.).
The reason I talked about ?ambiance acts? in the beginning of this article is because it illustrates the importance of looking at a game as a whole rather than simply as the player's avatar, a lesson I contend is necessary for understanding Limbo. Limbo is ostensibly a game about a child journeying through limbo to find his sister. ~Many who have played this game complained of the fact that calling the story paper-thin is an insult to the third dimension and the ending is as fulfilling as opening a DVD case of Batman: Mask of the Phantasm and finding a note saying ?Batman punched some people.? I would argue that they are right and that is the point.
Having the player's avatar be a child is really the only reason to care about his well-being at all. There is something disturbing about watching a child be decapitated by a bear trap, but there is no scream, obvious penalty, or indication that we should care about his death at all. In fact, the player typically respawns about two steps away from the trap which killed them, rendering the death almost pointless.
If the protagonist wasn't a child, there would really be no reason to care about death in this game at all. However, if we aren't meant to care about the death of the protagonist, then a whole world of possibilities is opened up. If the deaths are merely instrumental in helping guide the player through the game by moving past traps, then the game is no longer about the child, but the game itself. Essentially, the game is about the journey through Limbo.
If we accept this reading of the game, then the actual progression thematically takes on a new meaning. The game begins in a forest, and what constitutes roughly the first section of the game is forest, animals, a giant spider, and other (primitive and dangerous) people. Eventually, clearly designed traps become more common in the form of bear traps, swinging boulders, and even a fake spider. Moving on, more complex traps become prevalent, such as crushing ceilings tripped by buttons and tripwires. The forest gives way to basic housing, eventually incorporating electricity in a hotel sign, before abandoning any humanizing characteristics. In the final section of the game, survival is concerned with complex puzzles and traps, using electricity, anti-gravity machines, sewer systems, factory machinery, and more. The entire last section of the game seems to take place in a giant, fully-automated factory. If the journey itself is the narrative of the game, then there seems to be a very clear pattern to this evolution of the game world, namely that this journey is the journey of human development, and the search for the sister may be nothing more than a plot-driving MacGuffin.
Given this, however, there is one final yet essential point. The protagonist is the one who moves through this growth of human society, constantly being assailed by, and overcoming, the dangers of each ?era?. If we are not meant to care about his numerous, gruesome deaths, this seems to say something about how death is treated at the hands of progress.
What if this isn't the same child the entire time? What if each death is merely a way to move forward and learn from those avatars which died before? In that case, the deaths of these innocent children are what allows movement through human history, and history made up of countless deaths sacrificed to progress. Given all this, I contend that Limbo is not the story of one child, but of human death and sacrifice as necessary for the evolution of human society.
Games like Limbo which embrace a format of allowing the game to end rather than trying to extend playtime at the expense of rich content, or allowing the entire game to tell its story rather than relying on sections of cutscenes, bring to the forefront the fact that video games are open to the same kinds of deep analysis that any other art form is given. Games are not the story of a protagonist; they are the entirety of the game and all its elements, and ignoring this causes one to miss all that any game truly has to offer.
Read more like this over at theanalyticalcouchpotato.com
In his book Gaming: Essays on an Algorithmic Culture, Alexander Galloway describes these moments as "diagetic machine acts", or those instances in which the machine acts within the game world. When these occur with player action, he calls them ?ambiance acts?. These actions help sculpt a game world which exists without the player, in a sense. Yes, the player is necessary in that the game is not possible without them, insofar as the game must, at the very least, be turned on by them. However, when I refer to a game world that exists outside the player, I mean the player avatar. The vast majority of games construct such a world to some degree, where, for example, it is assumed that the survivors are living their lives in the safe room while Frank West is dressing in women's clothes in Dead Rising. I bring this up, ironically, to talk about a game with almost no ?ambiance acts? ? namely, Limbo.
Yes. Limbo, a little ?indie? game on Xbox Live Arcade. Noted mostly for its color palette of black and white, child protagonist (who is horrifically killed quite often), and overall oppressive atmosphere, it was met with almost universal acclaim at its release. There exist many jokes about how to make a critically acclaimed ?x?, one just needs an intensely depressing or emotionally draining story, but honestly it is hard to do that well. It's not enough to just make a movie or write a book based on country song lyrics ? one has to really work to draw the audience into the experience. That Limbo did this is even more impressive in that the game features a silent protagonist and about two sentences of story in total. The oppressive atmosphere and sense of isolation and dread do the job entirely, and are shining examples of what video games can do when explored as the action-based media they are without recourse to other storytelling methods (film, books, etc.).
The reason I talked about ?ambiance acts? in the beginning of this article is because it illustrates the importance of looking at a game as a whole rather than simply as the player's avatar, a lesson I contend is necessary for understanding Limbo. Limbo is ostensibly a game about a child journeying through limbo to find his sister. ~Many who have played this game complained of the fact that calling the story paper-thin is an insult to the third dimension and the ending is as fulfilling as opening a DVD case of Batman: Mask of the Phantasm and finding a note saying ?Batman punched some people.? I would argue that they are right and that is the point.
Having the player's avatar be a child is really the only reason to care about his well-being at all. There is something disturbing about watching a child be decapitated by a bear trap, but there is no scream, obvious penalty, or indication that we should care about his death at all. In fact, the player typically respawns about two steps away from the trap which killed them, rendering the death almost pointless.
If the protagonist wasn't a child, there would really be no reason to care about death in this game at all. However, if we aren't meant to care about the death of the protagonist, then a whole world of possibilities is opened up. If the deaths are merely instrumental in helping guide the player through the game by moving past traps, then the game is no longer about the child, but the game itself. Essentially, the game is about the journey through Limbo.
If we accept this reading of the game, then the actual progression thematically takes on a new meaning. The game begins in a forest, and what constitutes roughly the first section of the game is forest, animals, a giant spider, and other (primitive and dangerous) people. Eventually, clearly designed traps become more common in the form of bear traps, swinging boulders, and even a fake spider. Moving on, more complex traps become prevalent, such as crushing ceilings tripped by buttons and tripwires. The forest gives way to basic housing, eventually incorporating electricity in a hotel sign, before abandoning any humanizing characteristics. In the final section of the game, survival is concerned with complex puzzles and traps, using electricity, anti-gravity machines, sewer systems, factory machinery, and more. The entire last section of the game seems to take place in a giant, fully-automated factory. If the journey itself is the narrative of the game, then there seems to be a very clear pattern to this evolution of the game world, namely that this journey is the journey of human development, and the search for the sister may be nothing more than a plot-driving MacGuffin.
Given this, however, there is one final yet essential point. The protagonist is the one who moves through this growth of human society, constantly being assailed by, and overcoming, the dangers of each ?era?. If we are not meant to care about his numerous, gruesome deaths, this seems to say something about how death is treated at the hands of progress.
What if this isn't the same child the entire time? What if each death is merely a way to move forward and learn from those avatars which died before? In that case, the deaths of these innocent children are what allows movement through human history, and history made up of countless deaths sacrificed to progress. Given all this, I contend that Limbo is not the story of one child, but of human death and sacrifice as necessary for the evolution of human society.
Games like Limbo which embrace a format of allowing the game to end rather than trying to extend playtime at the expense of rich content, or allowing the entire game to tell its story rather than relying on sections of cutscenes, bring to the forefront the fact that video games are open to the same kinds of deep analysis that any other art form is given. Games are not the story of a protagonist; they are the entirety of the game and all its elements, and ignoring this causes one to miss all that any game truly has to offer.
Read more like this over at theanalyticalcouchpotato.com