Imagine you’re a well off kid in the late 80s or early 90s. It’s Christmas, your parents have bought one of those new trinkets called video games, something called a NES (Nintendo Entertainment System), with a pack-in-game cartridge to boot. After waiting for them to get some scissors to cut open the custom cardboard box and set up those incomprehensible cable things (AV cables + AC adapter + RF adapter), you plug the D-pad, pick up the cartridge, blow some air into it (you heard it makes the game run better, it doesn’t), insert it on the slot and press the power button. The screen flares up and you decide to play some game called super mario bros (there's some other game in the menu called duck hunt but who cares?).

Now, assuming you would have never played a game before, nor heard about it, or just waited a couple of seconds in the menu to watch the demo, you’d have no idea of what to do. All you can see is some sort of landscape with a little man-thing in the left corner. So you press the directional buttons and he starts moving, nice. Then you start exploring your surroundings: you try going to the left but there's an invisible wall stopping you, so you go to the right and the screen starts sliding as you go along. That's until some weird brown creature exits from the right corner of the screen, it walks straight to you, but you have no idea what to make of it, so you ignore it. That is, until it touches and kills your little guy, who dramatically falls off from the screen. Two lives left. Damn.

So you start playing again with your newfound knowledge that the little brown thing means bad news. This time you start experimenting with the right side buttons (B & A). You press the left one (B) but it has no apparent effect, so you press the right button (A) and, blam, your little fella jumps. So you advance confidently to where the brown thing is, but instead of walking right into it, you just jump across it. Phew. Now that you can actually advance you see a couple of floating blocks with question marks, curious. You jump on the first block and a coin comes out with no apparent effect, then you go to the next one and a mushroom thing comes out. It trails to the right until falling from the platform’s edge and changing direction by hitting a pipe, coming right towards you. You try to jump but the block above you won’t budge, so the mushroom reaches you and… your guy grows bigger? Nice, so this other mushroom actually helps you, though you have no idea how being bigger does any good besides looking cooler. So you keep advancing to the green pipes: the first one is small enough that a quick button press will get you above it, but the next one is taller and requires a slightly longer press. Ok, so the little guy’s jump height varies depending on how long you press the button. Looking beyond, below the pipe there’s one of the brown guys, but the distance seems just right so you can reach the pipe on the other side by jumping. So you jump while pressing as long as you can, but it isn’t enough and you land exactly atop of the brown guy, ouch. But wait, instead of dying you squash him instantly. Nice! So you can remove enemies by jumping atop of them. So you climb the next pipe and glance to the right and yep, more brown guys, two this time. But you know how to deal with them, right? You jump but this time you slightly misscalculate and land before the enemy. He touches you, but instead of instantly dying, your character gets… smaller? Of course! The mushroom thing makes you bigger, which essentially gives you one more life. But wait, did you forget there were two guys? Why is it that the first guy hurt you while the other passed through harmlessly? You see your character flashing and realize that after being hurt the game gives you a window of opportunity where your character is invulnerable so you can get away from danger. The flashing effect decreases gradually so you can naturally grasp on how much time you have left to reach a safe spot.

Of course, this was a platonic play of mario 1-1. You might as well figure out you can jump from the get-go by experimenting with the buttons. Or ignore the mystery blocks. Or successfully evade the power-up mushroom thinking it’s an enemy. Or never discover you can kill enemies by jumping on them. Either way, what’s important is not that you uncover every basic game mechanic straight away, but that the game allows you to discover new ways to interact with the world without holding your hand. It doesn’t need to show you, but subtly guides you to learn naturally by experimenting with the level design. It set the standard for what good level design ought to be like.

It’s a great experience, tailored specifically to the player. Every block, power-up and enemy is implemented based on how the player will interact with it in a specific way. And the designers can be sure of how you are going to interact with the world: mario can only advance to the right screen (besides pipes and vines), which makes for a mostly linear, manageable experience. As the player gradually familiarizes themselves with the levels, the element of surprise is gone and the experience, though entertaining, turns predictable, which is why even relatively simple AI can learn to master a mario level: it just needs enough attempts to find the best combination of buttons to get across an unchanging obstacle course.

This player-focused design philosophy also affects the game’s mechanics. Mario’s universe is relativistic: everything revolves around the player. Though each level may be loaded with a predetermined code for the entire level, its elements stay inactive until the player comes close enough to interact with them. This can be best exemplified by the spawning (and despawning) of enemies. In super mario bros, enemies spawn in a fixed spot, which is only activated when the player reaches a certain distance from it (which happens slightly offscreen). They may be allowed to exist offscreen as long as they stay close enough to the player character, but the moment they stray too far they disappear entirely. However, since the player can’t progress through the left in super mario bros, this mechanic is usually imperceptible. It’s much more evident in future games, like super mario brothers 2 and super mario world, which allowed players to backtrack and respawn enemies by returning to the left side of the screen. In these cases the games would recognize which direction the player came from and turn the enemies against them, even if most basic mario enemies are unable to automatically turn around to face the player (you could say their life is predestined from the moment they spawn). This is not because the developers did not have the means to stop them from respawning: though enemies always respawn in super mario 2, the map’s items do not, while in super mario world the enemies do not respawn if directly killed by the player since they reward the players with coins once killed (mario 64 would change this by allowing them to respawn without giving rewards beyond the first kill). In some games, like most metroidvanias, this respawning mechanic is crucial to ensure players can replenish health or ammunition dropped by enemies, which usually respawn after re-entering a room. Though the mechanic sacrifices diegetic verisimilitude for gameplay, it feels as if most developers either realized that having enemies spontaneously respawn on-screen would be weird or perhaps unfair. Except for the devs of ninja gaiden, of course, which famously (AVGN is still famous, right?) had the spawn zone set in the corners of the screen (which also meant you could despawn enemies by aggressively outrunning them and letting the corner-of-doom do its job).

One side effect of this is that most mario enemies are basically moving traps. They will completely ignore mario and – unless killed – proceed in their way, until they eventually stumble into a wall, another enemy, fall from a ledge or (more likely) are despawned by going offscreen.

But imagine a different super mario bros, where the player is not the center of the universe. Discard the linear map; have a branching cluster of rooms, with many entries to different worlds, whose acessibility would only be limited by player skill. Imagine if as soon as you loaded up a world it would immediately come alive in its entirety. Where every enemy, from the starting point until bowser’s castle, was constantly existing, even way beyond the reach of the player character’s screen zone. Furthermore, assume every one of these enemies had agency and competed for available resources in the map with themselves. Assume every enemy had a specific identity which the game would keep track of, including their death. Imagine if every one of these enemies had a relationship with your character and could remember how you treated them previously. Sounds utterly insane, right? Contradictory, deranged, self-defeating game design. Only a madman could dream of it. Well, these madmen are called Joar Jakobsson and James Primate; theirs is one of the most amazing games to be released in recent years.

Rain World is one of the few games I “recently” played (what do you mean it has been SIX YEARS!?) which made me think of a “copernican” approach to game design. To turn design postulates and preconceptions on their heads. To be unwilling to compromise originality for a set standard. To challenge what a game ought to be and a player's role in it. Whereas previous platformers/metroidvanias were supposed to be centered on the player as a protagonist, as a means through which the world is experienced, rain world lets its own world take center stage while the player feels like one singular detail in a vast mosaic.

Let’s return to old-schools games. You remember how in these games the existence of npcs depended on the current position of the player character? That even though every spawn point was set, they were only activated as the main character approached them? How enemies would disappear from reality if you stayed away long enough? Well, in Rain World's world (made up of major "regions"), as soon as a region is reached, each of its denizens is spawned and starts acting. The game keeps track of each individual creature, its relationship with other creatures and with the player. You feel as if the world is larger than you, as if it exists independently from you. So that even if you were to be gone it would linger on.

Sounds way too good to be true, right? And in a kind of way it is: one single room in rain world is composed of many objects and particles, besides the creatures which are really moving ragdoll clusters of different body parts with a programmed behavior which is based on their senses. You combine all this with the knowledge that rain world's regions consist of tens of rooms and you start wondering how the game specs do not require a nasa computer.

Like any good magic trick, rain world's is accomplished through a sleight of hand: everything in the current region map exists in two states: abstract and realized. The realized state is the game as you know it: with ragdolls physics, complex path-finding and particle effects. But much like in old-school games, the current position of your character affects how the world around them is rendered. The current room you're in is "realized", as are the neighboring rooms and typically the neighboring room's neighborings rooms (though if you are playing with very low configurations then only your current room is realized). But if you stay too far away the world becomes "abstracted": the possible map paths are simplified and objects are not rendered, though their position is stored. For abstract creatures, the body is not rendered anymore, the pathfinding and AI is simplified, as are interactions between npcs which, instead of being the result of complex ai choices in a dynamic environment with physic effects, are instead based on probability. [1]

So I guess it was all a lie, smokes and mirrors right? Let's not get too carried away: though creatures are abstracted, they are still existing entities: they migrate, do things and interact. Their current agenda is still simulated, even if in a very simplified way: if a wounded lizard starts retreating to its den and has to cross abstract space to do so, it (probably) keeps its current objective and the game simulates the action (probably, because though abstract AI is similar to realized AI, its parameters differ slightly, which may alter creature behavior). All of which is different from an old-school game, where other entities just stop existing altogether if you're far away from them.

One result of the fact that creatures are constantly moving behind your back is that rain world's "deck" is always being reshuffled. A rain world region is similar to an old-school map in that both have predetermined spawn points for npcs spread across them. But whereas old-school entities are only doing things for brief moments of on-screen existence after spawning, rain world's critters are constantly migrating ever since you enter a region. This gives rain world an uncertainty factor; even a veteran player who knows the map like the back of their hand does not know the current locations of creatures or which of them are alive. The fact that the next rooms are “realized” with all the complex actors and effects playing out means you always feel like you’re approaching a situation in media res, as an independent space with independent actors already set in motion. This forces the player to play more cautiously as the world always feels greater than them and beyond their control.

I mentioned creatures spawn and respawn in rain world, but how does that differ from a typical slide scroller? We already know the “region” the player is currently in is simulated, even if mostly in “abstract” state, so the critters start moving as soon as you enter. The starting point from where they move from is a den, the creature’s lair, where it retreats to if it retrieves food, is injured or if raindrops start trickling down. These dens are set in specific spots of the map (except for certain creatures like vultures, which have an abstract unreachable lair), which spawn or respawn creatures. Now, rain world is not a true ecosystem simulator like Species or Bibites, so creatures don’t have a real life cycle, reproduction and the possibility of going extinct. What happens is if a den is vacant, each game cycle will have a chance of spawning a critter in it (which is meant to represent the critter finding this lair and inhabiting it). Depending on the den stats, the next possible critter may be the same subpescies of creature or a different one. If the spawned creature belongs to a different subspecies then there’s a slight chance that the same process happens again with different creature types. Most often this means in-game dens go through different kinds of lizards/centipedes/vultures in what is referred to as the “lineage system”. One of the consequences of this is that if the player kills too many normal enemies, they may trigger the spawn of tougher kinds of enemies through the lineage system.

Another thing rain world is famous for is its critters. In a typical pixel art game you have a cluster of pixels making up a shape, a “sprite”, which are attached to hit/hurt-boxes. These pixel sprites are set to change position and swap to different sprites to give the illusion of doing a continuous action, like walking or jumping. Rain World looks like a typical pixel art game, but its entities are less like mario pixel sprites and more like Gmod ragdolls. Creatures have bodies made of different parts with physical characteristics like length and weight. If a creature wants to get somewhere, it needs to move these parts to get there. Since “animation” is procedural, all sorts of unexpected things may happen naturally: a creature may get stuck, trip over or accidentally fall from a ledge. All of which gives the impression of a real being struggling to use its body instead of an automatic slide scroll.

What sets all these body parts in motion is the AI. First off, AI perceives the game world through its senses: eyesight and hearing (depending on the creature). Eyesight works like a cone-shaped ray that the creature projects from certain spots of their bodies (lizards only see wherever their head is pointed, whereas centipedes are able to see on both ends of their body). The length and accuracy depends on creature type, the environment around, the specific spot of their vision and the regarded object type. Generally the eyesight is better on the center of view while being worse in the periphery (which means every frame you’re in the eyesight radius, there’s a lower percentage chance of being perceived in the periphery compared to the center). Its radius is limited by the environment type: aquatic creatures can see well in the water whereas terrestrial ones have their line of sight broken by it. Another factor is the regarded object: moving around as the player makes you easier to notice, whereas crouching gives a lower chance of being perceived.

Once a creature perceives something it has to identify it: should I ignore it, eat it or run away from it? Also, how many other things are in the room with me? Are they a threat in some way? Are they a resource? Yet, the creature's intent must be comprehensible and clearly communicated to the player. This is what Joar defined as "trickability"; the AI needs to have a complex enough set of faculties to appear "dumb", to be foolable:

"Trickability - This is the thing - the problem that needs to be solved. The idea is that you want the AI to be smart enough so that the player can trick it and get satisfaction out of having outsmarted it. When it comes to Rain World AI, this is the holy grail I'm pursuing. Every amount of complexity on the AI's part should generally fall back on this; this is why the AI is complex. An NPC that just moves towards a target on visual contact isn't smart enough to be tricked. RW AI needs to be smart enough to come up with a simple plan and carry it through, so that you can have anticipated that simple plan and act accordingly." - Joar [2]

This makes for dynamic gameplay as every interaction is the result of a plethora of factors. You can distract an oblivious lizard by throwing a rock and leading it to investigate the noise, but a lizard that has previously seen the player will try to reach their spot regardless of minor distractions. But if a vulture swoops down, it will try to hide in the nearest hole. Then, if it grabs you, it will try to take your body to its den, but it might be attacked by another lizard intending to do so same thing, or be harassed by a “neutral” animal, like a squidcada or scavenger, that views it as a possible threat, all of which might just give you a window of opportunity to escape from its jaws.

Every rain world creature is also an individual. In some cases it’s evident: many creature types have unique cosmetic features so that you can tell individuals apart. These individuals have a relationship value with you. Though initial value might define them as neutral or hostile, your interaction can alter their behavior: start killing scavengers and they will send death squads to take you down; feed a lizard enough and it will stop regarding you as prey and fight for your life. Besides the individual relationship, there’s also an universal one for species, so if you act nice towards one member of a species, it will slightly improve your standing with all of them (which fits more social animals like squidcadas or scavengers than lizards but I digress).

Remember when we were talking about super marios bros? Remember how it is tailored specifically to the player, how it’s meant to intuitively teach the player, which is made possible because mario’s world is very predictable? But if rain world undermines that predictability, then the brakes are off, fairness is thrown out of the window. You might die of a stray spear because a scavenger missed a lizard from the other side of the room. You might die because you crossed a pipe and there was a lizard waiting for you on the other side. Eventually, you accept it as part of life, just like a wild animal might die from lightning or a stray cat be run over by a car. What you can do is minimize risks, be cautious, don’t expose yourself. Act like a survivor.

This also applies to level design: old-school level design is made to adjust to the player. Every platform is placed to either help you or give you a specific challenge. But rain world levels are made to feel uncomfortable or inadequate somehow. There are all kinds of narrow structures or labyrinthic passages. You feel as an intruder who must adjust to the present circumstances instead of having each tile designed for your personal use.

This inadequacy also extends to the level's aesthetics. Though almost all levels are set in post-industrial ruins, their exact purpose is left beyond the player's comprehension:

"first and foremost is that we wanted to create a world as seen through the eyes of something slightly below human intelligence. the slugcat is smart enough to recognize that there is probably some purpose to the structures around it, but not comprehend their meaning. same with the use of "language", letters and characters, etc. the idea is to create a kind of dreamlike atmosphere where the player projects meaning into the structures they see, creating their own expectations about what they might be for and where they might lead, and we play with resolving those expectations quite a bit in the region / world map layout.

similarly, we wanted any specifics about the previous cultures of rain world to remain vague. the player might assume "human" by default, but thats not necessarily the case and we dont want to feed into that reading too much. whats important is that they were there, they built these structures, and now theyre gone.

also important is that the slugcat operates among the in-between spaces of these industrial ruins, like a rat in the subway or a squirrel on a rooftop. you'll sometimes see those overtly designed I.M. Pei vistas, where the structures seem to line up in some grand plan, but most of the time its a ditch filled with garbage and a pipe sticking out, or the crumbling basement of a building. so even if it werent some fantasy alien world we were working in, i think we'd still keep the overtly human signifiers to a minimum." - James Primate [3]

"Yep, we have thought about more recognizable architecture, but we gravitated away from it. For a few reasons, the main one definitely being that one James mentioned. If you can recognize too much in the environment ("That there's a fire post", "that there is a roof drain pipe") the environment wouldn't feel alien anymore. As the creature you play is supposed to not really grasp what's going on in the world around it, the player should be in on that impression. We are going for a thing that's more abstract or expressionistic - what's displayed on the screen is supposed to serve an emotional narrative, and that emotional tone has "not quite understanding what's going on" as a very important center piece." - Joar [4]

Another important game mechanic is "karma". There are ten different karma levels. You can increase your current level by surviving a “cycle” or lose a level in case of death. Crossing each region requires going through a "karma gate" (imo, one of the most immersion breaking features), which blocks you if your karma is too low.

If you read the game’s lore (or already have since this is spoiler tagged), you can see karma is tied to its history: every living being is stuck in the state of samsara, a cycle of eternal rebirth, much like the player. Though ancient monks could reach moksha/nirvana through asceticism (the hard way), the slightly less ancient industrial civilization discovered the world’s “core” to be made up of a sort of anti-matter substance known as “void fluid”, which can be used to ascend automatically (as long as your karma level isnt too bad) and is how you can achieve the game’s legit ending.

Now, a game having its respawning mechanic as a diegetic lore feature (e.g. cosmology of kyoto, planescape torment, dark souls, undertale) is nice but hardly original these days. Rain world’s lore is interesting trivia that may be discovered or ignored at the player’s discretion. Which begs the question: was this major mechanic implemented because of the lore or was the lore at least partly built around it (partly, since you could have samsara without karma levels/gates). Let's hear the devs:

"The karma system is the solution to a problem we noticed when connecting the entire world. It shows that what was driving player motivation wasn't survival, but exploration - the treat you're looking for is seeing new environments and new creatures (which is natural as humans are curious). This is all good, but it incentivised a pretty destructive play style. Instead of trying to survive, you would throw yourself out into the world as far and quick as you could over and over, not caring if you survived as long as you had the chance to reach new areas. The key problem here was the not caring if you survived part - that is very contrary to the mood we wanted to create, which should be all about survival. We're making a survival platformer after all, and want to create the feeling of being an animal in an eco system - which should be all about staying alive. Also as James said, players could move very quickly through the world just blazing through the carefully crafted environments and situations. Basically, a way too high movement to survival ratio.

Another problem was that any cycle that you didn't manage to reach a new shelter felt like a complete waste. I actually had one person on a convention floor, that had after much effort managed to make it back to the starting shelter with enough food, ask me "what did I gain from that?"

We needed to skew the main incentive away from movement and towards survival, making survival the main objective and movement the secondary. The solution we came up with was gating movement with survival - if you don't survive, you don't get to see new areas. A nice side effect of this is an automatic smoothing of the difficulty curve - you're only let into the next region when you're able to handle the one you're in, making sure that you don't randomly end up on too deep waters without any way of making it back." - Joar [5]

The karma system usually succeeds in this role. The fact that I could not only lose my life, but my karma level, meant I would act even more cautious in the ecosystem. In a sort of way, it made me value my “life” somewhat like a real animal would, even if not to the same degree. Gatekeeping new players from certain regions is also a good idea (no one wants to go from outskirts to drainage system in their first playthrough). But all that happens when the karma system is at its best; sometimes it acts as a double-edged sword, forcing you to spend entire cycles “karma grinding” and stalling the sense of freedom you get by exploring the world at your own rhythm.

Another of rain world’s forte is the music. Besides some genuine bangers in the soundtrack (bio-engineering, kayava), it’s also worth of note for being procedural in its own way: the game’s threat music will adapt depending of the danger level you’re in, so the proximity or greater number of predators will add a greater number of instruments to the score. All of this is meant to immerse the player in the slugcat’s perception of reality:

"When I first saw rain world, i had a very very clear concept. for me, a huge strength of the game is your emotional connection to this lone, cute white little creature in this crazy death filled environment, and i wanted the aural experience to amplify that. sound effects would essentially be extensions of the emotion and instinct of the character; a subtle "fly sense" when prey is nearby, an unsettling feeling when lizards are close, an impending sense of dread when the rains begin to come. Even much of the music was to be an extension of the character: the beating of the heart, blood pumping through veins, hunger in stomach, etc." - James Primate [6]

Video games are often described as a means of escapism, with the player's goal being to run away from a bitter/boring reality to a more exciting fantasy. But I feel that most tell very unconvincing lies, their cracks are too easily seen. Whenever I load rain world the feeling is different: everything seems to move regardless of my presence, the world presents itself in its grand indifference to my pettiness. And although I know its tricks I am still encaptured by the mirage.

"In the end I think my goal is to create the illusion that these things are alive. I'm fairly certain that I share this goal with most people making games, as it's an important factor in immersion. Working with behaviour to create that illusion is a path I think is worthy of experimentation - and rain world is my take on such an experiment." - Joar [7]

_______________________________________
[1] https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=25183.1860
[2] https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=25183.1880
[3] https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=25183.msg1213832#msg1213832
[4] https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=25183.msg1213832#msg1213832
[5] https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=25183.msg1232162#msg1232162
[6] https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=25183.720
[7] https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=25183.msg947694#msg947694

spoilers for Planescape: Torment below

We like to view ourselves as monolithic beings. Each of us has their own name, body and (according to certain religious sects) a soul. A person might have different inclinations, ideologies and occupations, but these are mere appendages, never lessening the image of an unified whole.

But although we view ourselves as unitary beings, with a specific agency, we often find that we do not act according to our own standards. Thisproblempuzzledpeopleevenbeforetheyfiguredmaybeyououghttoseparatewordsinsentences: according to a guy called Aristocles (nicknamed by his contemporaries as Plato, ancient greek for big chungus) the soul/psyche can be thought of as a flying chariot, pulled by two pegasi: the good one being virtuous while the bad one is self-indulgent, with the charioteer (reason/logistikon) responsible for restraining the bad horse while giving rein and guiding the good one towards the heavenly World of Forms. Millenia afterwards, daddy Freud would change the scheme slightly: this time the charioteer/ego had to find equilibrium between the instinctual impulses of man-as-an-animal (id) and the imposed norms of society (superego). In the 60s a guy called MacLean would propose that this inner conflict boils down to our brain being composed of different parts respective to different stages of our evolutionary history: pure survival/sex drive instincts were regulated by the ganglia/“reptile brain” (from the times of tiktaalik, when synapsids (you, me, rats, whales) and diapsids (pigeons, iguanas, tortoises) hadn't split off forever), the limbic system provided emotions and sociality (this appeared when mammals were still scurrying beneath the feet of archosaurs in the mesozoic, before tasmanian tigers split off from actual tigers) and sophonthood (laws/logic/culture) was only achieved when hominids refined the placental neocortex (disco acknowledges this by having your “ancient reptilian brain” and “limbic system” act as occasional side characters whenever harry slips into the unconscious).

As for the idea of an unified absolute self: it is a historical phenomenon and in no way an universal consensus between human cultures. The ancient Egyptians did not conceive a single soul, but many constitutive parts which made up a living human being and split off after death (the ba, the ka, the akh, etc.). If you ask a follower of Siddartha Gautama (the guy we use to call the the buddha), the self is an illusion produced by the different faculties of a human being (skandha): i.e. not that you do not believe/feel to be a conscious/continuous entity, but that what we view as a “self” is just the succession of different states of being experienced in the same impermanent body; it has no continuous substance/essence.

But if any field has been truly successful in breaking the illusion of the unitary human being, it’s neuroscience. The advent of the scientific revolution entailed to not only the desacralization of “nature”, but also of what we previously thought of as the "soul". Our identities stopped being seen as the incarnation of an ethereal rational principle instinctively guided by the virtues of metaphysics; to byproducts of a complex set of physicochemical laws regulated by an unfathomably long and wholeheartedly indifferent experiment of game theory.

So we started sending x-rays and radio waves through the brains of mice, chimps and people to see the neural pathways and electricity running through the synapses. We paid attention to how intracranial injury impaired the mental faculties of TBI survivors. We discovered how every aspect of our cognition is shaped by the different parts of our brain. We realized that to eliminate or damage certain areas of our central nervous system is to take away parts of our own being.

Human experience became a sort of jigsaw puzzle. You can take away motoric skills and the ability to react to sensory stimuli by damaging the parietal lobe, with worst case scenarios leading to the complete inability to perceive certain areas of the body. The ability to recognize faces of family members or even recognize the general characteristics of a human face can be erased by injuries to the temporal lobe, with other side effects leading to difficulty recognizing words or objects. Damage to that same temporal lobe, which is also responsible for our perception of time, can also result in an individual living in an eternal present, unable to recall memories from before or after the accident, or being unable to imagine themselves in a future scenario. Even our personalities did not stay intact: damage to the frontal lobe, the area responsible for planning, selecting and executing patterns of behaviour, may lead from sainthood to sin, transforming the previously “well adjusted” into impulsive, erratic and confused persons. Subjective experience too can be molded by changing the amygdala (part of the instinctual “lizard brain”). Scientists have managed (through an arcane witchcraft technique known as optogenetics) to induce predatory behaviour in mice by triggering the amygdala with lasers. The reverse effect follows as corollary, with other scientists managing to "tame" wild monkeys by removing the amygdala itself, resulting in the absence of aggressive or fearful behaviour.


The primacy of consciousness itself was put into question. We figured that the automatic processes of our brains added another layer to our perception of reality, constantly playing tricks on us. Remember how damage to the parietal lobe can make someone completely unaware of a region of their body? Well, they might be consciously unaware, but still have their bodies instinctively reacting to sensory stimuli: say, pulling an arm away after being pinched while being unable to feel pain in that region or to be aware of the pinching sensation. Vision itself can be thought of as a very elaborate illusion. You do not have a “crystal view” of this text. Your brain is constantly creating an ideal image: it turns your vision upside down and left to right to adjust it to your preferences; feigns that there aren’t two blindspots in your field of view; pretends that the rod receptor cells in your peripheral visual field can detect colour just as well as the cone cells in your visual field center; removes blurry images created by jerking motions of your eyes by pretending time has stopped during the transition. It also makes mistakes sometimes: it will try to predict objects and patterns in your eyesight and create an impression of a thing, but if it realises that the updated pattern is inconsistent with the original prediction, it will swap to a better fitting model and automatically convince you of it, leading to a bunch of optical illusion tricks. But at least you’re aware that you are seeing something and logically you can only react to visual stimuli if you are at least visually aware of it, even if it’s distorted, right? Well, not exactly, because though most information travels from your eyes to your visual cortex (which makes you aware of seeing something) before reaching the amygdala, some of it takes a shortcut and goes straight to the amygdala. People with only the amygdala shortcut have a condition called “blindsight”: they are incapable of consciously seeing and identifying things, but can instinctively react to things their brains identify through their eyesight but do not make them consciously aware of. Or, to be more accurate, every human being with this neural connection (which makes for most of us) has blindsight, an unconscious capacity to view and react to objects without being aware of them. That much of our reactions are unconscious or automatic is reinforced by experiments with wild rhesus monkeys which only had the left or right portions of their amygdala removed (each of which deals with input from its opposite side of the body), with the result being that the monkeys would act placidly when viewing humans from the non-amygdala-connected eye, but aggressively when vision included only the amygdala-connected eye or both eyes.

Ok so, what the fuck does any of this have to do with video games?

Though (respectively) religion, philosophy, psychology and neuroscience have been challenging the view of humans as singular beings for thousands of years, video games seem to (AFAIK) have completely missed this development. You could argue that most games, like first-person shooters and platformers ought have no reason to be bothered with psychological mechanics instead of “objective” gameplay, but even role-playing video games did not make much headway for simulating the human mind: in RPGs you mostly control an unified individual; they might have different ways of interacting with the world and a outer personality, but their mind stays as uncharted territory. Role-playing games are also seen as being all about player agency (though free will in philosophy is another huge can of worms): these games are all about influencing the world, making your own choices and seeing the result. The way different characters or character builds see the world is mostly the same: a botanist and a lumberjack view a forest the same way, but the botanist has a special ability to discern edible fruit, whereas the lumberjack has a skill for refining timber. In a way games let us play the ultimate fantasy: that of the completely subservient automaton contained in the purely objective universe.

So what does Disco Elysium do? It does its own sort of ludic “copernican revolution”: “I think that there’s an entire layer of our perception of reality that has not been simulated at all” [1], affirmed Kurvitz. There’s an outer layer where Disco is very similar to other rpgs: there is a player character, npcs this character can interact with, a system for skills/attributes and checks for the successful use of these for achieving specific outcomes in the narrative. But what sets disco apart is the willingness to simulate the inner layer of the mind as an active element of gameplay. Your character’s mind has its own cast of “skills” (which are aspects of your mind/body), each of which has a specific personality and their biases on what elements of reality they care about. They are not only used to pass checks: they also work through “passive checks” by intervening in conversations (this sometimes applies for failed passive checks; e.g. to misjudge someone by fucking up on empathy) regardless of player agency. Their output changes the possibilities of player input in interactions with npcs/objects. In a way you feel as if you’re the driver of Plato’s chariot, but instead of two there are twenty four horses; your main choice is deciding which of them will you nourish the most for an increasing amount of psychological leverage.

Another interesting thing are the skill checks. There’s nothing inherently revolutionary about them, but disco handles most of them well by embracing failure. It seems to me rpgs often are afraid of having the player fail interactions for two reasons: they are afraid of upsetting the player and losing their trust (and money) or they fail to see how failure can be used as a means to advance the narrative and develop characters. Some of the funniest interactions of disco elysium are caused by failed checks. Hell, some of them may lead you into their own side-quests. This is not to say I consider every check to be equally good in this regard: disco’s checks are at its best when failure is an option just as valid as success, leading to new and unique narrative avenues. It’s at its worst when checks just gatekeep you from important areas or unique interactions.

There's another thing disco's checks do, one which is a big no-no in rpg design: they sometimes take away player agency. One of the game's iconic moments involves your character calling Saint Kim Kitsuragi, your beloved companion, a "yellow monkey fucker" (the heresy!). This goes against all the pre-established rules of role-playing: it's rail-roading, the game is putting words into your characters mouth based on an arbitrary skill check. Rpgs are all about agency: being able to do what you want when you want it. Sure, there might be an option to call someone a racial slur, but that depends on player input, on what kind of character the player wants to roleplay. So, bad design, right? But think about it, think about all the automatic functions of your body you have no control over, think of the freudian slips you blurted out in the wrong social context or that time you hurt someone you hold dear but "didn't really mean to". Sometimes we act instinctively, impulsively, and most of all should someone like harry, a legendary alcoholic who has been putting his prefrontal cortex (the part of your brain responsible for censoring your speech) through the grinder for decades, have difficulty controlling his urges in certain situations ("I want to have fuck with you"). It's a bold decision, but it does very much fit disco's intent to simulate the inner human being, as Kurvitz put it: “In reality we do not have control, or complete control, of our minds. Just like our body, it is something that we give – not even commands – wishes to, and we hope it’s gonna do it. We hope it’s not gonna break down... we hope it’s not gonna rebel against us.” [2]

Ok so, what about setting? Disco might be set in a post-modern universe, but setting is nothing more than a glorified form of set dressing, right? You just swap the horses for cars, swords for guns and carrier pigeons for radio waves. Well, not quite, because though history keeps on rhyming, its semiosis changes. We might have the same basic needs and face very similar struggles to previous generations, but we do not view ourselves, society or the universe in the same way. Elysium’s modernity is holistic and deals with capitalism, nationalism, racism, fascism, communism and liberalism (of the economic and political kinds) besides ignition engines, plastic bags and analog computers (though the writers have a keen interest in even the most miscellaneous of minutiae, just max out the "encyclopedia" skill to check it out). All of this happens in a distinct universe which, if not identical to ours (why should it be?), developed similarly in a kind of sociocultural case of convergent evolution. And although Elysium’s “current century” is very much modern, its past lingers on, fossilized in the streets of Martinaise:

“So we took the previous, discarded versions of Elysium – the bronze age and the age of sail and the industrial revolution, even the medievalism – and turned them into historic periods within the setting: Palm & Pine, the Franconigerian century, the LGM (Last Glacial Maximum). This allowed for distinct aesthetics, which in turn informed each other. Across two centuries the oily black gold of Franconegro melted into the cream of Dolorianism. The bright colours of Palm & Pine are still visible, faded underneath Modernitas – the present horizon of Elysium.” [3]

In a kind of way this game is also a postmodern take on Planescape Torment. Which is funny, cause years ago everyone was hyping up tides of numenera (which I havent played so this might be a disservice) as torment's successor, but then disco comes along and just blows every other rpg out of the water. For thematic parallels, there's the amnesiac protagonist trope; in torment your identity is based on not having a name (being the nameless one) while in disco you don't know your name nor your appearance during the beginning of the game (eventually you learn you're called harrier du bois… probably because you just had a hangover… gueule de bois… get it?). Then there's your relationship with your unknown past: in torment you're this legendary hero trapped in a cycle of metempsychosis and are plagued by the effects of your previous lives, whereas in disco you must deal with the actions of who you forgot to be. This also means both games are filled with relevant npcs whose lives have been negatively affected by a previous version of yourself, it's just that in torment you enslaved a poor sod for all eternity and committed extradimensional genocide while in disco you ruined the police department's spending by crashing a car and made a poor sod paraplegic for property damage.

Then the prose, oh boy. Disco's prose can get so purple it could claim inheritance to the byzantine empire. You max out your "shivers" skill and get all these extensive descriptions of your surroundings straight from literary realism. But to say the prose is boring and tiring is to do a huge disservice to the game. First off, dialogue is usually very dynamic because of the intervention of the "skills", which are constantly shifting the center of your attention. Also, though the descriptions can get fancy, characters (including most skills) always speak according to their cultural lingo which is typically much more mundane; you get used to going from thesaurus to urban dictionary between two sentences in the blink of an eye. Then there's the HUD, which takes the form of a column set in the right corner and filled with relatively short bursts of ascending text, purposefully made to mimic addicting social platforms like twitter. Combine all of these factors and the result is that I almost never felt bored reading disco's more than a million words : the sentences were almost always dynamic, funny, touching, evocative, but not boring at all (which is a must for a game that depends on its writing).

One thing disco mostly avoids is combat (which is technically just a glorified skill check), which is actually a good thing. Some blokes out there really think disco is not a true rpg. Why? Because there's no traditional combat (I guess rpg is an acronym for riposte-parrying game now, so nidhogg and 3rd strike are classic rpgs). Lengthy paragraphs might be boring, but you know what's exciting? Grinding in the same area because your character did not have a high enough level to advance to the next section. If you read the old blog posts you realize the developers probably wanted combat to have a greater (but still secondary) role. In a way combat should be characterization, with your own skills influencing your tactics and possible outcomes. Had ZA/UM not met such unfortunate circumstances, the devs would probably expand the role of combat in other games.

As a roleplaying video game inspired by tabletop rpgs, disco has its own alignment system, but instead of the good-to-evil/lawful-to-chaotic spectra there's four main ideologies: communism, fascism (which some argue is not genuine fascism though I think it generally fits Griffin’s “palingenetic ultranationalism”) and liberalism (of the economic and political kinds). It is to disco’s credit that, though the writers very much have their political views, I never felt like the game was intended to be a sermon or a piece of propaganda; instead, disco’s themes revolve around how ideologies shape our identities and our cultural milieu, including how often our ideological labels fail to take into account ideologies as a manifestation of inner psychological complexes. Take reactionarism for instance; plenty of characters in disco can be classified as right-wingers, but they differ in how their beliefs relate to themselves: for René reactionarism is his only means to stay linked to his lost past (and at the same time, his loyalty to his past imprisons his romantic inclinations for his best friend); for Gary it fulfills his needs for a strong authority figure to cover his own weakness and to make him feel secure; for the racist lorry driver it is a way to weaponize his envy of others; for Jean-Luc/Measurehead it is a means to deny his status as a nobody and to declare himself as an übermensch.

So, five stars… do I think disco is a perfect game? Not really: the thought cabinet was a very good idea messily executed; some failed checks just block you from importants bits of the game without giving much in return; the clothing mechanics were interesting in theory but mostly serve as a means to powergame in practice; those rat-ass shareholders ensured the game would never be completely (though it’s almost so) voice acted in their stunt to fire Hindpere. Disco isn’t perfect, but it punches waaaay above its weight. It does so by innovating; by having some of the best game prose I’ve ever read; by the richness of its world building and characters; by being a genuine work of art; and most of all, because no game manages to scratch quite the same itch. It is a wonderful genuine thing and I’m glad it came to be.

Notes:
- I also think Measurehead is an interesting take on how subaltern groups can adopt/adapt pernicious power structures or ideologies to oppress other subaltern groups. This was prompted by a certain twitter interaction I saw recently, with some very racist remarks towards the Igbo people. What surprised me was that the person who wrote that was not a white supremacist, but identified himself as a “yoruba nationalist”. His claims of Yoruba “superiority” were surprisingly western: the Yoruba ought to be seen as superior because they produced “superior” art (when I write superior, replace it with “realistic”) and (supposedly) wore more clothing (seriously), with the guy even employing racist wojak memes to denigrate the Igbo (any similarity with a terminally online white supremacist is mere coincidence). This harkens back to measurehead: though he claims to be a semenese supremacist, his ideology is very much “occidental” (elysium’s equivalent to “western”): the semenese ought to be seen as superior for fitting in the standards of occidental phrenology/racism, for avoiding occidental “decadence” (the cyclical history “fremen mirage” trope) and because they descend from the mythical aeropagite übermenschen (translatio imperii as a racial origin myth).

- Klaasje’s relationship with Lely (the hanged man) was very nuanced. Though Lely and the rest of the PMCs are some of the worst human beings in the game, disco avoids the generic option of sexual violence to acknowledge that erotic relationships are complicated things and one’s sexual attraction acts regardless of one’s own personal ethics. I also liked that although Klaasje was hardly a “damsel in distress”, the game never villainized her for being engaged with a bad human being.

- another subject whose execution I liked was nationalism. We subscribe quite strongly to our “national” identity, even in our pluralistic age. But where does one’s national identity lie? In birthplace, language, customs or phenotype? Kim is one of the most “nationalistic” characters in the game, in the sense that he genuinely cares about Revachol and strongly identifies with it, but his phenotype and ascendancy inhibit him from ever being considered a true “revacholiere” by many of his compatriots.

- Another way in which Elysium is similar to Planescape is in the metaphysical power of cognition. But whereas in planescape thought is a creative force, with belief being able to create planes and pantheons (and “change the nature of man”), in Elysium thought is a negative force, with its side effect taking the form of the “Pale”: a kind of geographical blindspot which will consume elysium itself in the 73rd year of the “current century”.

- I’m saddened by the current status of ZA/UM. I very much agree with Hindpere that Kompus & company used workplace issues as a kind of casus belli in their coup to take over the IP

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[1] https://youtu.be/9X0-W5erEXw?t=755
[2] https://youtu.be/9X0-W5erEXw?t=800
[3] https://thoughtgained.tumblr.com/post/694215013077041152/i-went-ahead-and-scanned-digitized-robert

The sixteenth century was a busy time. While talented guys like Da Vinci and Michelangelo were working on the Mona Lisa or the sistine frescoes or whatever, rich people, the Valois and Habsburg dynasts, the members of the venetian senate and heads of christendom, are trying to convince poorer people that there might be something worthy in serving as a reisläufer/landsknecht/condottiere/aventurier and spilling blood for them. Meanwhile, an angry ex-augustinian friar with a piece of parchment, a hammer and some nails managed to end Catholicism's virtual monopoly on religion in Europe, a spark in the European bag of powder that would result in a bunch of people meeting their end at the sword or the stake (and some of the rich dynast guys getting richer by figuring out you can just rob the slightly less powerful clergy of their states).

Meanwhile, the Iberians (soon to be followed by the Dutch, English and French) just figured out you can sidestep the whole venetian-muslim monopoly on precious spices by getting your ships across Africa. Oh, and there's an entire previously unknown continent. This sets off a domino effect that would result in the sociocultural decline/genocide of practically all amerindian cultures, from the Yahgan to the Nahua to the Inuit; the mass deportation of African peoples as forced labour to (mostly) west and (also) east; what I like to call the end of the "golden age of the steppe" (the era when some people in the eurasian steppes could just team up and conquer the biggest empires of their day (Ottoman/Mughal/Qing) instead of being subjected to sinicization/russification by nation-states) and the creation of /pol/ (the 4chan board).

Throughout it all it is difficult to remind oneself of the life of the average man or woman, simple peasants who bothered mostly with gathering enough produce of wheat, rice, maize, yam or millet to last the entire year: the rule of life before the green revolution. We have great simulators for the history of institutions and wars (EUIV, Pike and Shot Campaigns) in this era, but not so much for what it was like to be an average human being. It's as if history in video games has stayed mostly stuck in the nineteenth century, without the insights of Febvre/Bloch/Thompson/Ginzburg.

Pentiment answers this by setting you up (initially) as an average person in Tassing, a small bavarian village/town in the (not) Holy (not) Roman (technically not an) Empire.

Your character is a guy named Andrew, the Painter, who (unsurprisingly) works as an artist in the neighbouring abbey. After the introduction, the game becomes a murder mystery, where you must figure out who murdered the local noble jerk and be swiftly and publicly subjected to lex talionis.

But the game is much more than just a detective game (though it does handle the detective bits very well). Actually, it is bold enough to have you never figure out who committed the the main murders of the first two acts. It does offer you a pool of possible prepetrators, but the focus of the narrative lies not in solving the mystery, but in the social backlash of capital punishment: how a community reacts to having one of its own members forcibly cut off in a violent display of power.

At its core, it seeks to explore how communities are formed and how history is made, reminisced or manipulated. It achieves this by having the main characters explore the local communities (Tassing + Kiersau, the secular and ecclesiastical worlds) throughly, by fleshing out each of the local actors and by being structured in three acts, each of which is separated by a timespan made of decades, which lets the player experience the long term consequences of their actions.

The main "antagonist", the perpetrator of the crimes, ties perfectly with the game's themes on history and memory. In the climax of the third act the main characters learn that Tassing's foundation myth was built atop of "pagan" roman/celtic/paleo-european mythology (much like the town is set above strata of many previous settlements). To cover up this fact, the local priest, a guy named Thomas, planned the murders of whoever got (conscious or unconsciouslly) close to the truth.

I was very satisfied with Father Thomas as an antagonist. He's a plausible perpetrator of the crimes, so the reveal does not hurt the plot's internal consistency. But what I found most compelling was his reasoning. Medieval(esque) media has been overdone with the tropes of the cynical/fanatical priest (e.g. Hugo's Frollo/Eco's Jorge) for quite some time. And though the trope can be charismatic or evocative, it has ran out of most of its creative fuel. What I found compelling in Thomas was the willingness to commit (or more appropriately in his case, to incite) murders without religion as a façade for sadism, to orchestrate a murder while regarding it as a sinful act. As a learned man in an era where religious myth is slowly beginning to lose sway over humanity, Thomas has to choose between preserving the comfort of myth or unleashing the harsh confusion of historical truth, he chose the former, whether due to his own ideological cowardice or unwillingness to place the souls of the faithful in Pascal's wager.

All of which plays into one of the games main themes: the conflict between myth and history. The meaningful mirages we conjure against a reality composed of the continuous reshuffling of atoms. And although ideologians struggle to cover up that great panorama of reality, its details still remain. One only has to look closely enough with the right tools to perceive what once was, now as palimpsests or pentimenti.

Notes:

- this game reminded me of mrbtongue's (old youtuber) criticism on violence in video games. The problem lying not in mediatic violence being seen as inherently taboo (the old conservative view before young people tried to make being conservative rad and cool), but in violence being banalized. In pentiment, violence is never taken for granted, most of the game is set in a (relatively) comfortable environment with (mostly) agreeable people. When violence comes (from above or below the social strata) it is sudden, brutal and therefore memorable. Even when death happens off-screen, its consequences lingers in the minds of the witnesses.

- Pentiment is also a lesson on how historically accurate fiction can combat racism. Although the goal is commendable, some media often mess up in their attempts by introducing anachronisms or inaccuracies with the goal to create an anti-racist myth (e.g. Netflix's Cleopatra). Josh Sawyer is more experienced than that though, by being familiarized with the history of sixteenth century Europe, a place that was not far away from North Africa geographically and whose inhabitants' worldview was not affected by the byproducts of "scientific" racism (thanks, Linnaeus). So Sawyer knows just what kind of historically accurate/plausible (history more often works with gaps) data can be reasonably employed to upset a white supremacist. As such Tassing's patron saint is a legendary African soldier (Saint Maurice), one of the most interesting NPCs is Sebhat, a Christian Ethiopian priest (drawn in Ethiopian style!), Andreas' idealized symbol of royalty is the African version (contra Marco Polo) of Prester John and a few other side characters are not lacking in melanin (Vácslav).

- this is a game deeply in love with medieval art. From the marginalia to the employment of handwriting (or the use of print!) as characterization to the transition of canonical hours to mechanical clocks (humanized vs ahuman time), it all comes across perfectly

- Andreas had a wonderful arc of being wildly passionate about the world and art, until reality kicks him in the balls which leds to disillusioment and escapism until he can grapple with his inner demons in his mindscape. In a way I feel it corroborates with his possible relantionship with Lorenz, a well learned man who knows much about the interesting ideas being debated in the Renaissance and how exciting the times are, later revealed to be an absolutely despisable human being (this also goes for the Renaissance/Early Modern era in general, wondrous and cruel at the same time). Magdalene's arc was cool, a nice change of perspective from the usually patiarchal perspective of the era, but it didn't really take the spotlight quite as much due to the limits in time and scope.

- Unlike some reviewers, I did not really find the third act weak for a number of reasons: it initially desemphasizes Andreas to clearly establish Tassing as a community as the game's focus; it emphasizes the transition of time with Magdalene, whom we saw as a child in the second act, acting as a protagonist, and as such we get to play and witness the next generation of Tassing; it further develops the mystery of the murders; it shows the consequences of the peasant revolt; it shows the struggles women faced to establish themselves independently in a patriarchal society through Magdalene, offering a feminine perspective to a male dominated genre; it finishes Andreas' arc very well; it ties perfectly with the game's themes on history/memory.

- I loved the choice of having Illuminata being adamant on destroying Porete's Miroir manuscript. On one hand, Illuminata clearly spouses protofeminist (à la Christine de Pizan) views on patriarchy. On the other, she's a devout Catholic who is willing to censor heterodoxy in the name of her church. This results in the apparently contradictory scenario where a "feminist" woman is willing to help a (mostly) patriarchal institution to censor another woman (whose harsh condemnation might as well be due to her being a female heretic). It's a nuanced take on how our present criteria can be misleading for different cultures.

- the entire game was a masterclass in social storytelling, from discrepancies in cuisine, topography and literacy, the game shows how power structures affect and denigrate the lives of those set in the bottom of the social order. It takes a special kind of heartless individual to not empathize with the peasants' plight