There’s a story I heard from an excerpt of Béla Balázs’ Theory of the Film. The story goes that a Moscovian’s cousin was visiting from Siberia. It was the early days of cinema, and she had never seen a film before. They had taken her to the cinema to watch a burlesque movie.

“The Siberian cousin came home pale and grim. ‘Well, how did you like the film?’ the cousins asked her. She could scarcely be induced to answer, so overwhelmed was she by the sights she had seen. ‘Oh, it was horrible, horrible!! I can’t understand why they allow such dreadful things to be shown here in Moscow!’

‘What what was so horrible then?’

‘Human beings were torn to pieces and the heads thrown one way and the bodies the other and the hands somewhere else again.’”

She had never seen a montage before. The hand, the head, the bosom, disjointed by time in the image, the Siberian girl had seen them as disembodied. The ability to mentally situate the montage and its subjects in time and space is not an innate skill. To understand a montage, you have to learn to reassemble a body.

We are privy to something similar in Immortality. We reassemble a body of work, that of Marissa Marcel. We must do it through an understanding of the movements of cinema. The central movement in the game is the match cut, and it’s story is unveiled through the process of navigating a complex web of them. A cup, a stool, a cross, a kiss, a rose, wings, water, windows. Move through them. In a sense, the player becomes the editor, but without real control over it. These images are broadened, too. A cup may also be a bathtub, smoke may also be static. A similar thing is done in Sam Barlow’s other recent games. The Her Story system does something a lot like this, but with language. Enter a word into the search bar, it shows you five videos with that word, no matter the context. In a sense, these games are about understanding relationship between context and sign. In Immortality, however, we navigate through the image. This is why the game is made of match cuts.

When a film makes a match cut, there is typically something meant. Something is always meant with a cut, but the match cut often has its own specific meaning. With this magic trick, we signify a relation between the object and it’s corollary. In Immortality, these cuts are dense and the correlation is often superficial. A cup may be a bathtub because they both hold water, but not because “cup” means the same thing as “bathtub”. It is direct, and that is felt. You can line up every single picture of a rose, every single picture of a microphone, every single crucifix. Unmoored from context, grafted into the network of images. Metaphor melts away; through the network of cuts emerges a symbolic différance, crude and indistinct denotation. Meaning is transfigured and debased. Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.

A more defensive approach would view this as decay in the visual language of cinema, but it is a strength of Immortality. A character in the game briefly speaks of cubism, saying that he finds it a shame to reduce a beautiful woman's body to a bunch of squares. Immortality is sort of a cubism of the cinema, splaying out its forms. The absence of the typical cinematographic structure, both in editing and in image, challenges the immediate response we have to the image. I’m not so sure the game is fully up to embrace that project, but maybe that’s more appropriate, since I don’t know how many people will take up that challenge. The narrative and the image of these games are dismembered like the burlesque show. There is a story here about many things. There are lots of things I could have written about instead of this: masks, religion, the frequent primacy of sex in cinema, lost media fascinations, the archetype of the Wandering Jew, the purpose of storytelling. Other stuff, I’m sure. That in and of itself will be a challenge, and now, anchored to the network of match cuts, we are challenged in the same way. You cannot avoid being a structuralist. Both in image and in text, Immortality asks you to engage meaningfully and directly with the act of making meaning. The Siberian girl must learn how to watch a montage, and then she must learn how to make one.

Honestly whips so hard. Easily one of the most enjoyable mobile games I've ever played. Simple, elegant, gratifying. I could get into the little tricks of design brilliance and all the ways this game just works that come together so cleanly, but I feel like I'd devolve into video-essay-level self-congratulation. So I'll leave it at that: Poinpy whips. Enormous shame that it will probably be ignored by a lot of people because why the fuck is Netflix publishing games? The US needs better trust laws. I just hope this game gets a second wind when Netflix inevitably drops the game stuff and this can (hopefully) get published on its own. Love this little green guy and the big blue monster. Feed big mouth the froot drink!

Composed of a million little frustrations. Wanna control where you shoot? Nope, the crosshair bounces around the screen like a DVD player logo. Well, maybe that'd be okay if your gun had some spread, but nope, it's a laser that shoots straight on ahead. It would be nice if it could kill enemies in one hit, but nah, it's actually kind of weak and you need a few seconds of sustained damage to kill anything. At least you can spray and pray- oh what's that? Nope, you have limited ammo and you have to recharge it by standing in the area around the bouncing crosshair. At least you can upgrade ammo and damage and stuff. Well, sometimes the game lets you. You only ever get the choice to upgrade one of two stats. What's that? You want a bomb that'll save you? That's cute; anyway, here's a bomb that covers a pitiful area and only goes where your crosshair goes. But at least the enemies are pushovers. Just kidding! Nope, they're annoying and confusing, shoot bullets, and even some will pester you by slowing you down and yanking you around. But there are powerups to help you. Except, you only get to use them once. Ever. Use them once and then never again. Good luck with those boss battles who spawn ads!

Honestly every single part of this game is infuriating, but I don't even hate it. I plan on giving it up, sure, but it's an exercise in design ethos. I find it kind of fascinating how uncompromising and inconvenient it is. Bennett Foddy would be proud. Now, I need to delete this from my drive before I get a migraine.

"Worries go down better with soup than without it." This is a Yiddish proverb. I am told, at least; my relationship with Jewish culture is a little messy. But I think of this saying often. Soup holds a kind of venerated position in Ashkenazi cuisine. Kreplach, matzo balls, mushroom barley, all that. It’s a staple. My dad, who provides my Jewish half, ironically, doesn’t enjoy soup much. He finds it boring. But the simplicity of a good soup is often it’s appeal. When we say “soup”, what do you think of? There are cold gazpachos and hot and sours, of course, but I think most of the time we think of hot, salty broth. The soup is clear but heavy, simple but filling. Soup is a potent food when it comes to meaning; it immediately conjures care, home, nourishment, warmth. Soup is hot, soothing, healing. Bad times with soup are better than bad times without soup.

In Below, knowing how to make a good soup is essential. After all, it is a game filled with worries. Soup will save your life. Each time you make it to a campfire, you get the chance make more soup, something that will carry you further into the depths. I won’t go as far as to say that the campfire feels like home. It, like your own little character’s life, is fleeting, and trapped in a dungeon. You constantly grow hungrier, thirstier, colder; you are creature of temperature and appetite, and you must abide by your bodily needs. That decay is a constant that defines Below. While you may know where the next campfire lies, you never know what lies between you and it. You have to be weary of each step and prepared for each sword swing. But for a moment, when you’re next to the fire, you can stop, breathe and nourish yourself. The campfire is an opportunity to replenish your supplies. To take a breather. To warm your bones. To make more soup.

There is a tragedy to Below's legacy. Generally, folks have seemed to be either underwhelmed and annoyed with it. It had been in development for over 5 years, announced during the bright and hot summer at E3 2013, and it was released in the cold winter nights of 2018. As it lead up to release, I got the creeping sensation that it was going to flop. And I think I was right. In an interview with Newsweek, Kris Piotrowski (Creative Director at Capybara Games) said “It's very important for there to be some people who make something very specific. And maybe you're not going to like this. But somebody else will fucking love it.” I think it is pretty clear that it will be divisive from it’s first moments: the first thing you see in the game is a long, slow zoom on a single little ship in the ocean, for several minutes. For me, I adored every moment of this crawl, but I think others will immediately shut the game off.

I’ll call it an unsung masterpiece for a specific reason: there are underrated masterpieces out there that I love a lot, but Below doesn’t even really have a ride-or-die fanbase. It released to tepid praise and hasn’t had a second wind. Part of the issue is that Below lacks a lot of character. That’s not to say it is not impressive. It is visually stunning to look at: the tilt shifted camera, the muted tones, the geometric geography and architecture. And the sound design is some of the best I’ve encountered in I think maybe any game. No, the issue isn’t a lack of presentation, but a lack of flair. There are so few discernable qualities. There aren’t any memorable characters, no flashy boss battles, no unique settings. Even mechanically, there is little that stands out about Below. I can give you the high level pitch, of course: it’s a procedural death labyrinth with survival elements. But will that pitch actually sell anyone on the game? I doubt it.

Which is a shame, because despite that lack of character, Below is expertly crafted and pretty beautiful.

If I had to use one word to describe Below, it would be “dread”. Every single surface of this game is covered in dread. Each sound, each inch of dirt is both beautiful and eerie in the same breath. Below’s environment is incredibly dark, often necessitating the use of a torch or the lantern. The game is set to a distance from your player character that dwarfs them; there’s this tilt-shift effect that makes everything seem minuscule. I found myself hunching over (more than usual) to squint at the darkness surrounding me. Shadows cast against the floor, the glowing eyes of beasts, prey in your periphery. The soundtrack by Jim Guthrie often sounds less like music and more like the groans of the earth itself. And if it’s not an ominous hum, it’s a somber, thoughtful ambiance, the wind brushing through the grass and the waves crashing on the shore. Sounds echo through the caves, scrapes of stones and trickles of water, the chitters and growls of something hunting you. You crawl into dark, terrible and ancient sepulchers, lined with death and sorrow. The distant scrapes and dark corridors become a canvas on which to paint your deepest fears.

Every time you die, you hear this sound. It’s a strange, sinister bellow, a deathly horn. And when you respawn, a new wanderer drifting onto that same rainy shore? That same haunting bellow sounds. As if to say, “This will happen again.”

Below is a difficult game. At times to a fault; there are a few death traps in there that are genuinely cruel. You’ll die a lot, and it’s a big part of the experience. You play not as a single adventurer, but dozens of them. Each death is final, and you play as a successor to the poor doomed soul who met their end in the caverns below. Below is an incredibly slow kind of difficulty. Combat is a deliberate, punishing affair. Sprinting through a room will often lead to a swift death. Your inventory space, too, is incredibly limited. You have sixteen slots for food and sixteen for materials. Personally, I am an inventory hoarder. I will maximize the use of every pound I can carry. But Below, in its limitations, has liberated me from this curse by forcing me to get rid of anything I truly don’t need. Any slot with an unneeded stick or stone is taking up space that could be taken by arrows or bandages. Be careful what you pack. Often you may die because you didn’t have enough materials on hand. Many deaths are deaths by attrition. Many players, I imagine, are going to feel these deaths are overly punishing. I certainly did, at times. But I also recognized that it was core to what the game was doing. It is an easy mistake, I think, to assume Below would be better if it wasn’t a Roguelite. There are lots of games like that nowadays, where the proc-gen structure seems more to be a mechanic on a dart board rather than a deliberate choice. But Below, really, can only be a Roguelite. Because structurally, it isn’t about beating the game. Having to delve even deeper with each death just to make progress can be intimidating. You’ll often lose a lot of materials, too. You can find your body with its wares still on it, now only a dry skeleton. How long has it been? Months? Years? I couldn’t say. But only take what you need.

At its most tense, Below’s dungeon crawling is either a desperate sprint or desperate struggle. On certain floors, you’ll sprint like your life depends on it, because it quite literally does. At the same time, you’ll have to be careful to dodge attacks or not to trigger any traps. So these marathons begin to ebb and flow from trepidation to a frantic sprint. At other times, Below puts you up against the wall. You feel surrounded, outmatched, overwhelmed. I wanted to flail in retaliation like a wild animal had leaped up against me, please, God, anything to get this thing away from me. But you have to be patient. Put up your shield. Wait to parry. Dodge their attacks. At these times, you need to be careful and patient, but also keep moving. Your hunger and thirst aren’t going to slow down. No matter which of these modes you end up playing in at a given time, Below’s most suspenseful moments are at the middle of a tug of war between a need to rush and a need to be as careful as possible. There is a specific area in the game (Floor 14 onwards, for those who know the game) that is genuinely one of the most dreadful levels in any game I’ve ever played; every single time I step foot in that place, my heart starts pounding, a frantic and desperate crawl through the darkness, pulled between the tension of needing to go slowly but needing to go faster. It’s dreadful. But I persevere. I make it through. Eventually.

Success in Below is not overcoming a mountain. It is about going deep down. There is no dragon in Below. No corrupt king, no great sea serpent, no devils or demons. There is nothing here for you to conquer. There are maybe one or two things I would call “boss battles”, but the biggest obstacles in Below are impossible to even scathe. Below is not a game about accomplishment. It’s a game about mastery. The game teaches you almost nothing about how to play; most mechanics have to be discovered by the players. And if you make it far enough, you begin to realize the goal is not descent, but the collection of these items called shards you discover with your lantern. And suddenly, it clicks into place. Succeeding in Below does not come from a single fell swoop, but a series of knicks. It comes from a series of successive runs. You stand on the shoulders of a thousand dead wanderers who you will join soon enough. By the later hours of Below, your player character(s) will not become any stronger. But you have learned so much. You know where to find the materials to make bombs, or how to make bandages, or how to get to the deepest pits of the island in only a few minutes. You begin to realize that you actually don’t lose much with each death. Sure, you might lose a hefty sum of crystals, or a stockpile of arrows and bandages, or a piece of gear you were saving, but there are ample ways to farm materials, and you can always find that gear again. Your goal is not to descend deeper, but to collect these shards with your lantern. And acquiring those shards is far less about slaughtering and spelunking, and more about knowing and understanding the cave systems of this island. You gain mastery, gain an understanding, of the world of Below. You find comfort in the little rituals you develop, of going and gathering picking supplies and hunting for materials, of making soup. It is a game about, despite all the insurmountable dread, finding a way forward anyway.

Again, there’s little I can say that will sell you on Below. There’s no big twist or hook to pull you in. It is just a nearly-perfectly designed game. Like a good soup, Below doesn’t look like much on the outside. But it’s a product of profound craftsmanship. It’s a stew of mechanics which compliment eachother precisely, a perfectly balanced mixture. And maybe once you’ve taken a spoonful, you’ll find that you think it’s a little boring. But give it time, pay close attention to it, understand it’s balance, and you might find that it grows on you, and you can recognize it as a rich and masterfully made experience.

“They’re just lines of code.” That’s what my friend tells me. I wasn’t allowed to play Halo. It was too violent, and my parents, either in spite of or because of their relative progressiveness, did not want to allow or encourage me in playing violent video games. I remember googling about Red vs. Blue and my dad informed me that I “shouldn’t be looking at that.” I was a kid, after all, not even in my teens at the time. It’s not like I wasn’t able to get my hands on violent games; my crusade to play violent games, though, is a story for another time. The point is that our house never had Halo in it. And when, on that rare occasion, I did get to play Halo at a friend’s house, I was very careful not to tell my parents. So, in my mid-teens, I was at my friend’s house, in their thoroughly air-conditioned basement, with the lights off, and we played some Halo. I’m sitting close to the screen in an awkward chair. I’m awful at this game; I only know how to play these games on a mouse and keyboard. I see a grunt, fleeing with its arms in the air, and say, “Poor guy.” That’s when my friend chuckles and says, “They’re just lines of code.”

Interactive Buddy was a mainstay for any kid looking for ways to goof off in computer labs. This is what you see: four gray walls, a gray background, and a chubby little figure made six gray balls. That’s the buddy. You use your mouse to nudge and move the buddy around, generating a small amount of money. You use that money to buy new tools and what not: bowling balls, fire hoses, Molotov cocktails. And in doing things with the buddy, you can acquire more money to buy more weapons and tools. You can choose to play with the buddy and be kind, and you can choose to torment the buddy and be cruel. Cruelty usually wins.

This is how Interactive Buddy is remembered: a torture chamber. The buddy seems to be modeled after other programs like Bonzi Buddy or other digital pets. Its UI conjures up images of Windows XP. But while a virtual pet usually exists to be cared for, the buddy has no needs. You can’t feed it, and it doesn’t want food. So what is the buddy’s reason for being? The game has an opinion. The buddy exists to be hurt. The game description instructs you to beat it up. It’s more like a Bobo doll than a pet. I would venture to say that the vast majority of players used the game as a sadistic time-waste and little more.

The internet in the 2000s was rife with violent Flash diversions. Madness, Whack Your Boss, Happy Wheels, these jubilees of juvenile hyperviolence were everywhere. Interactive Buddy came out during that time, and it shows. For one, the game is filled dated and niche reference humor (how do you even explain StrawberryClock?), but it also has a fascination with violence. This was in the wake of things like Jack Thompson’s lawsuits, after Columbine and September 11th, where the notion of violent video games still felt a little transgressive. The developer of Interactive Buddy is literally called Shock Value. It revels in violence intentionally. And hey, why not? It wasn't hurting anybody, after all. They’re just lines of code. But our attitudes (or at least mine) have shifted dramatically over the years.

I’ve seen others comment that they feel guilt for what they did to the buddy, that it was cruel to harm the buddy. And truly, the buddy did nothing to deserve this, right? It merely exists, a floating jumble of orbs, and we come in and brutalize and beat it. The buddy expresses fear and dislike for the explosions and drubbings it’s put through. It doesn’t like “boom!”, and it’s mood gauge will slowly become a frown. It is clear that the poor thing is suffering. That would make it cruel to abuse it this way.

So that’s the obvious corrected position, right? That hurting the interactive buddy is bad, and you shouldn’t do it? Well, I’m not quite convinced of that, either.

See, to adopt that position is to take up a pretty serious assumption: that a simulated action correlates directly to a real one. We suppose that the buddy is harmed, but the buddy cannot experience pain. It’s a digital object. It’s just lines of code.

It is false to say the buddy dislikes pain. The buddy doesn’t like or dislike anything. The buddy is not an animal. It has no desires. It has no consciousness or qualia. It doesn’t breathe or even bleed. It is a simulated object with simulated movements that imitate that of fear, pain, and joy. When the buddy recoils from an explosive or shakes as it is tickled, these are only animations, programmed and procedural gestures that bear a likeness to animal behavior. As far as we can tell, there is no real suffering occurring. There is no evidence of a computer having consciousness, probably won’t ever be for a while, and certainly not the buddy. Even a Kantian would struggle to find an argument against it; after all, the buddy has no rationality to which we are to hold ourselves to respecting.

There is therefore no harm in hurting the buddy, nor is there a duty to be kind to it. All there is is a symbolic charade of a hedonistic dichotomy. The simulacra of pain and pleasure, entangled with each other as a binary pair. It is an imitation. It’s just lines of code. It is in fact less than an imitation of pain, not of the sensation, but only an abstract impersonation of the response to pain, the superficial choreography. A simulacra, of Baudrillard’s third or fourth stage, which signifies either absence or deference to other signs. And to accept the simulacra of pain and pleasure as equivalent to their corollaries in reality is to accept simulation as reality. At what point does the magic circle give way to our realized actions, then?

It should not be said that causing pain in Interactive Buddy is in some capacity related to causing harm outside of it, then. As such with pleasure, too. To do so is to open the floodgates; any digital harm must be condemned. Is it ethical to shoot aliens in Halo? Is it ethical to kick turtle shells in Mario? Is it ethical to eat ghosts in Pac-Man? Is there any virtual action in most video games that does not carry profound guilt? This is the necessary extent of this argument.

So, that’s my conclusion then, right? That it’s okay to hurt the buddy, and you should feel free to remorselessly bully and mutilate any digital denizens you encounter, because they’re just lines of code? Not quite. That doesn’t really work for me either.

Even if they are just lines of code, these are lines of code that have been given faces. Scott McCloud created this pyramid of representation: the realistic, the abstract, and the iconographic its three corners. You might be able to argue against this model, but let’s adopt it for now. The buddy is abstract and iconographic. Again, by default, it’s six orbs floating in a blank room. But the absence of realistic features does not mean it is no longer representative and recognizable. Its orientation and movements imbue these orbs with a humanity. While the buddy is so iconographic to be merely six floating balls, it is still immediately clear to most that it is a chubby little humanoid. You can call it pareidolia if you want, I guess, but that’s lying by omission. Pareidolia is the recognition of a sign (usually faces) in nebulous stimuli. These video game characters, on the other hand, were sculpted with the intent to invoke this response. We recognize a level of humanity in them, and that’s why we have empathy for them. This is what Jesper Juul might call the game’s fiction. The fiction of a game contextualizes its action and engagement. Without it, they really are just lines of code; floating points and vectors in a fog. But the fiction condenses the mist into a concrete, intelligible, and recognizable form.

When I saw the grunts fleeing in Halo, I did not see an array of code and polygons. I saw a creature fleeing in fear. My mirror neurons responded. And so my body and my mind instinctually, if only a bit, felt sympathy for it. It may be a computer generation, but I am able to recognize the simulacrum of a soul. Once again, it is important to know that these are only representations, but how we respond to representations still could mean something. We engage with signifiers in a simulated world. Does how we engage with them signify something, too?

There is not much evidence as far as I’m aware of that being exposed to violent media makes you more violent, nor that enacting violence within a digital space does, either. But the effect of media on our behaviors is something that has bothered people for years and years. Rap music, hard rock, comic books, television, even theater are all of a family of reviled media. Well before Mortal Kombat’s moral panic and Jack Thompson, Plato expressed the opposite skepticism about drama and poetry as mimesis, as imitation. Aristotle agreed that poetry was founded on imitation, but considered the disjunct between art and life to be a strength, too, and not just a weakness. And is it not, on some level? Despite the moral outrage, violent video games have not heralded a sharp rise in violence in the world. Anecdotes, maybe. Heightened aggression, possible. There is no real empirical evidence that I know of that shows violent art encourages violent behavior. So what unnerves us still?

With his name still in our mouths, let’s refer to Aristotle again with virtue ethics. Virtue ethics frame ethics as a product of one’s character. This may be the key to unlocking the modern controversy of violent video games: the virtue of simulated violence. Harming the buddy may not produce any real negative consequences per se, but the fear is that it produces or is produced by a vicious player.

The question is then not a matter of ethical utility, but of motive and virtue. It is quite literally a question about virtual reality.

What is it that purpose of harming the buddy? What is its virtue, its vice, its extension? Even outside the confines of Interactive Buddy’s torture engine, there is no shortage of cruel ballet in digital worlds. The subjects are not harmed, and as far as can be told, it doesn’t seem to have any broader implications for the ethics of the player. It affects nothing. All we see is mimicked anguish. There is nothing, good or bad, that comes of it. So why do we do it? Why do we want to see depictions of violence at all, let alone participate in them?

The cliche answer is that there is some immutable darkness within humanity which feeds on suffering. This is the kind of answer you’d hear from a Jordan B. Peterson or whatever Freudian charlatan. I’m not sure whether to call this most significantly naïve or presumptuous. I suppose it is both. It is presumptuous because it assumes this aesthetic tendency is universal, something that we all experience. It isn’t, and there are plenty of people who do not enjoy violent art. It is naïve because it implicitly posits that this correlates to a desire to enact the imagined actions and not merely fantasize about them, just as discussed. That the simulated darkness is in direct relation to a real darkness. So what does that mean? What makes a simulated darkness?

They are fantasies, but why do we strive to blur the line between this fantasy and reality? There has been a race towards the most realistic blood and guts we can find. Even if we want and need the magic circle as a boundary between reality and game to enable our violent impulses, there is also a culture of delight in hyper-realistic blood pouring out of our screens. We may have grown bored of it, sure, but the remnants are there. An example? Interactive Buddy gives you an option. For a price, you can make the buddy bleed. It changes nothing other than flecks of red appearing on the screen. So do you choose to? Do you choose to make the buddy’s pain feel more real to you? Do you make the fantasy more real? Why?

There’s an example from Slavoj Žižek (I’m sure you can find it somewhere, I’m not sure if it’s been written down) where he offers an interesting inversion. He presents the cliche of a gamer who in real life is meek, milquetoast, and bland man, but within the world of a game, he is brash, a womanizer, a marauder. The typical interpretation is that the real life person is the real person who lives out a fantasy in the game, but Žižek asks: what if it is the meek version of him is the one where he is pretending, and in the game he is truly himself?

It’s an interesting twist on the thought. It’s undeniable that virtual spaces offer ranges of expression which we desire in the real world but can only access there. This is one of games’ many powers: not just a lusory attitude, but an attitude of realization is possible. The boundary between game and reality is what enables this, that allow us to inhabit new and foreign attitudes of any kind. This extends to violence. The initial deconstruction Žižek offers asks us to consider that the truer nature is one of cruelty that is merely suppressed by the context of society. But games are games, and their disjunction from reality is freeing because it is a disjunction. It is precisely the division between game and reality that allows the average person to engage with this sadistic charade. Should the digital world become reality, how many players would actually continue the abuse? Would they become a marauder? Would you? I doubt it.

You might at first compare it to the way an actor speaks and moves as a character, but does not become them. Like Plato and Aristotle before him, J. L. Austin recognized that the act of speech was transformed by the stage. Austin wrote on the concept of speech act, things we can say that perform actions in and of themself, and highlights this. While the actor’s monologue is quite literally a performative utterance in one sense, it is not in the sense Austin uses that term. The speech does not, and cannot, perform an action it could otherwise; it is not intended to be taken in the same way as when the actor is off the stage. This is sometimes called the etiolation of language. It blanches the language; it is understood to not have the same seriousness behind it. This notion has been properly interrogated by jolly old Derrida, who in turn was interrogated by Searle -- that whole scuffle. Regardless, it is essentially of intention, of what action is intended or unintended by the use of language. A similar thing happens in games. The lusory attitude we adopt not only changes the actions we perform, but also changes how they are received and understood. But we don’t just speak or write in games. In fact, we mostly make movements and perform actions. What is etiolated, then? A gesture.

The question of how one engages with Interactive Buddy is a question of gesture. What is the extension of these actions, and their meaning?

When philosopher of communication Vilem Flusser sets out to define “gesture”, he begins describing a scenario in which he is punched. He initially defines a gesture as “a movement of the body or of a tool attached with the body, for which there is no satisfactory causal explanation.” What Flusser means by causal is specific. His project is to establish foundations for a study of gesture’s meaning, elaborated to a wide range of sociological phenomena. The causes of a movement that are physiological or even psychological are not satisfactory for a gesture. The gesture has a component of meaning which Flusser does not view as fulfilled by those explanations. He then goes on describe being punched, and his arm recoiling in pain. This motion is one he declares a gesture, because it is representation of something: “My movement depicts pain. The movement is a symbol, and pain is its meaning.” This is seen in the buddy, but only as a simulation.

Let’s return to McCloud’s pyramid. While this system identifies images, it does not identify the images in motion. What of images’ gestures? Animation, too, could be put along such a pyramid. The motion of this buddy is what lends its verisimilitude. Lines of code parodying behavior. The buddy’s movements have an adequate causal explanation in the game itself, but when we extend this question to the programmer, it becomes a gesture. This is the intent of the designer: to communicate the concept of intention and interiority. We may recognize the buddy as just lines of code, but we still recognize the buddy’s behavior. Their gestures, while mere imitations, are recognizable as those of pain and of pleasure. But when we play Interactive Buddy, are these communicative gestures? When we express through the game, express through actions on the buddy? The buddy may communicate to us; maybe it’s more accurate to say that the designer communicates through the buddy. The buddy is a puppet of the code, the meanings expressed therein designed by a programmer. But in our engagement with the buddy, as we poke and prod at it, is this communication? If so, to what are we communicating?

Play may not necessarily be communicative, but when we make the choice to interpret it as such, and as gesture, we butt up against an issue. Communication, generally, implies at least two people. A person who transmits, and a person who receives. Communication theory also recognizes the store of information, such as in a diary, as a form of communication, as well, as it communicates from the past self to the future self. But in a game like Interactive Buddy, the movements we make ephemeral. They cannot be saved and cannot be retrieved. Like speech, it is uniterable and impermanent, eddying away in the wind. If a movement is neither made for communicate, nor capable of being retrieved, is it still a gesture, or just a random convulsion? Can a gesture be non-communicative? Or, is it possible that in this gesturing--or speaking for that matter, anything ephemeral and solitary--that the action itself is communicative to my own immediate experience? Do I gesture to myself, then? Is that what it means to entertain yourself? When we play a game on our own, are we gesturing to communicate with ourselves? What am I trying to say to myself then?

Consider a diary. When I write in a diary, I communicate to myself through written language. When I doodle in that same diary, I communicate to myself through images. The constraint of the medium informs what I communicate to myself. In some ways, the constraints are what create the possibility for immediate this self-communication to exist at all. When I open up Interactive Buddy, I communicate to myself through my gestures within the game. The buddy is just lines of code, but my way of interfacing with it is also made up of code, too. The tool of gesture is not just the mouse, not just the computer, but also the buddy itself. Flusser later defines “gesture” as a movement which expresses freedom (and even later, paired with the freedom to conceal or reveal). The cause of the gesture is the desire to make it and the freedom to do so. But any movement is going to be constrained in some capacity, the gesture by the body, the diary by the letter, the soliloquy by the spoken word. My freedom of communication is necessarily, to some degree, interpellated by its medium. In a game, this is the entire conceit of play. The constraints are what make this self-communication possible. The game's unique limits then directly inform what I am capable of communicating to myself through it. I am only allowed to express what the game allows me to express. My gestures are limited.

When we say that the buddy didn’t do anything to deserve this pain, what do we mean by that? The buddy does do something to deserve it: it exists. Let me explain. Video games are full of teleological universes. In most games, everything is instrumental. The platform exists to be jumped on, the enemy exists to be killed, the coin exists to be collected. Everything has a purpose. It is incredibly difficult to make a truly nihilistic game in a mechanical sense, because to do so is to weave between any instrumentality. It’s possible to tell a story about nihilism, or that lacks meaning, but its mechanics will have bespoke purposes. The universe of the game has a rhyme and a reason.

The world of Interactive Buddy is constructed for violence. Not in an architectural sense, but in a cosmological one. When Jacob Geller describes worlds designed for violence, he is describing the architecture of digital spaces, how they create affordances for violence, what they look like in the real world. The archicecture of Interactive Buddy is never more complex than four grey walls. Instead, the make-up of its reality is designed for violence. That is the destiny of its teleological universe. The buddy, of course, has no free will (and thus cannot truly gesture in the sense Flusser uses), for one. But the buddy also has a destiny. The buddy has an infinite capacity for suffering and cannot die. It’s lines of code that respond to what we do. By hurting the buddy, we gain more money with which to buy weapons to hurt the buddy. Its suffering is a tool of its own propagation. Even pleasure can be instrumentalized in making the buddy hurt. That is the monad of Interactive Buddy’s world: pain.

It is not only reasonable, but entirely predictable that players would abuse the buddy. When we begin to play Interactive Buddy, we enter a playground designed for the express purpose of violent gestures.

But did it have to be this way? Immediately, there is an ambiguity: the open hand. That’s what is equipped to your mouse at the start. What does an open hand do? It can touch and hold, and it can strike. In the closing of a hand, one can either grasp or form a fist. The open hand is a pharmakon, an undecided gesture, which the player disambiguates in their choice of what to do with it.

We will always be left with more questions than answers. By what virtue do we harm the buddy? Since it is not a true act of harm, what is the extension of the act that it is gesturing towards? What is the precise purpose of this gesture? What does it signify, and to whom?

Games create virtual realities. In them, we inhabit virtual bodies and disembodied forces. We inevitably make gestures with them. It is not merely the etiolation of gesture. The machine is made not just a tool of gesture, but the system of parameters that limits our gestures, too. Its confines yet also create, as a segmented reality, the possibility of new and alien behaviors and expressions. Their unreality is what defines them. They are virtual in every sense of the word. They are not just gestures, but gestures towards.

Whether or not to hurt the buddy is not really a question of ethics at the end of the day. The suffering of the buddy was a foregone conclusion. It was borne into a world that was made for torture. But that’s okay. Because it can’t be hurt, not for real. There’s no harm in it. They’re just lines of code. But why do we do it, anyway? What drives us to these fantasies? I don’t know, and I’m not sure I ever will truly understand the impulse. All I know for sure is the question we ask ourselves: do you choose to hurt the buddy? And why? It's not a question about ethics. It’s a question about virtual realities. It’s a question of what the gesture of the open hand means to you.

https://link.medium.com/rYQbDiTDjrb

A valiant effort. Xenogunner wears its love of Alien Soldier on its shoulders, which is exciting, but also makes comparisons inevitable. It’s a difficult standard to live up to. Nothing quite has the oomf, every sound effect or animation or song is just below what it’s gunning for. The game feel is good enough, but play lacks that delicious loop that made its predecessor so iconic. Boss design (which makes up the majority of the game) shows ingenuity and craft, and there’s at least one boss in this game that is absolute cosmic brain GOAT material. It’s trying its damnedest. Xenogunner is a valiant effort, but it will always be stuck in the shadow of Epsilon Eagle.

The comparisons are too easy to make. A narrative driven independent game with lush prose that dabbles in magical realism and science fiction as it confronts visions of both the future and past. It also happens to be set in a version of our world (in this case, the American South) that has been skewed, deals with themes of labor politics and the plight of the working class, and draws on and reinvents design philosophies from decades year old games. The comparisons make themselves. That’s why I am doing my damnedest not to say those games’ names, because to do so robs Norco of its own, distinct identity. It’s torture not to draw line after line between its constituent elements to its counterparts for the sake of preserving that identity, maybe especially because I think Norco is experiencing an identity crisis of its own.

Let me be unequivocal: Norco is a good game. I think it’s worth playing. There’s a part of me that feels bad for offering an emphasis on criticism, as if I’m kicking down a darling indie game. So I’m trying to be particularly explicit here: I think Norco is a good game. It’s filled with beautiful writing, unique characters, and potent themes of grief and politics. It has things to say. But I’m not sure Norco is quite sure what those things exactly are.

I have biases, and two in particular that I arrive at here: I care disproportionately about endings, and I care greatly about “aboutness”. Norco’s ending fell flat for me, and I struggle to know for sure what it’s truly about. These are my biases. As I’ve just said, there are so many reasons to love this game. That’s not what I’m going to write about here. I’m going to write about what keeps me from truly loving Norco.

I think I disproportionately weight endings in narratives because they are what stories leave you with. When you walk out of the theater, the thing that is mostly immediately carried with you is the last frames before the credits rolled. Games, historically, do not have great endings. I don’t mean mechanically; there are lots of games with great final bosses and all that. But the narrative ending, the last moments, these are usually unnoteworthy, and it’s usually brushed off. With narrative driven work, however, this is a little harder to forgive. Of course, everyone likes different kinds of endings. I am picky with my endings, I’ll admit, but I try to have a nuanced understanding of what does and doesn’t work with me in an ending. Enter Norco.

Norco’s ending, by which I mean the exact final moments before the credits roll, feel rushed and incomplete. It is in desperate need of a denouement. It’s ironic, because the climax of this game is flanked, quite literally, with two beautiful moments on the left on the right, one of which is perhaps the game’s most beautiful sequence. I will not spoil it, but it is an ethereal, melancholy, and haunting image of memories and home. I almost wish moment was positioned as the Norco’s last moments, because this potency is immediately undercut by the climax, which felt bereft of catharsis. And I think the reason this climax fell so flat for me is because it relied on the motives of the main character, whose identity and desires are opaque and indistinct.

Kay, the protagonist, never feels like she is given the opportunity to become a character of her own. Blake, her brother, almost feels like one, but is mostly off screen. The companions you encounter feel like characters. They have motives, interiority, likes and dislikes, quirks. Catherine, Kay’s deceased mother, who you play as in flashbacks, gets to be a character, too. This is welcome; rather than just being a grief object for the protagonist, Catherine gets to be a person. So rarely are stories about grief as much centered on who we lose as how we lose them. But what about Kay? What are Kay’s feelings? What does Kay want, need? What does she like or dislike? I’m not sure I could tell you anything about her, despite having spent hours in her shoes. I felt more empathetic and understanding of its side characters by the end. All I know about Kay for sure is that she is detached.

A detached character is obviously not a bad thing, and detachment serves an important role here. Kay’s detachment, as I read it, is representative of a response to what feels to many young people like the slow march into a catastrophe by modern industrial society. It is very intentional, and the rare moments where Kay’s detachment is overtly characterized, it is felt strongly. But when a game builds up to a climax which centers on the characters goals, motives, and desires, her own specific relations and history, all of which are deliberately muted and blurred… I struggle to be moved by that climax and its ever brief ending.

Kay is neither a cipher nor a character you roleplay as. I don’t know what she’s supposed to be. She’s not me, but who is she? I can neither imagine myself as her or imagine her as someone else. Like the game itself, the player is in a crisis of identity.

Norco is kind of a mess, both narratively and mechanically. It’s modeled after classic adventure games, but the puzzle design is a far cry from that old school style -- which is not something I’m exactly mourning. Those puzzles were notoriously arcane and absurd, an ethos that has aged in quite a way, and it wouldn’t have worked here. Norco’s puzzles are relatively straight forward and signposted heavily, and you can ask for advice. But Norco also has a combat system. And it has mini-games. A lot of them. Most of these mini-game puzzles are fine. Nothing exceptional, but nothing horrible. There is one bit I did think was excellent and well executed, which I won’t get into again for spoilers, but involves a boat. But I truly have no idea why this game has combat. It’s not fun and just feels silly. And this lack of cohesion is also seen in its thematic underpinnings.

The themes are easy enough to identify: the struggles of the working class, religion’s social role, messianic myth, the desire to find meaning under late capitalism, ironic middle class hipsterism, the ever-extravagant machinations of the bourgeoisie, and so on. But these themes are neither explored on their own fronts nor are they unified by any central theme. The “Mind Map”, which is an interior display of the lore and relationships in Kay’s life (again, trying not to make the comparison here) is dense with connections but not with cohesion. There is some fascinating world-building and cool ideas in here. But where do they lead to?

Obviously I don’t think it’s necessary that a “message” be had in art, but when you neither pose questions nor offer answers, it can begin to feel more like these themes are props. Norco mostly acknowledges and maybe comments on its phenomena. Again, that’s not intrinsically bad, but I have my preferences, and the absence of direction doesn’t work for me here. All of it is cool, sure. But I don’t know what to make of it, and not in a way that fills me with giddy curiosity. I didn’t leave Norco with any questions, for either its world or for my own.

Again, I feel guilt, “damning with faint praise”, but I seem to be in the minority here, which is nice, I guess. It makes me feel a little more comfortable offering criticism. After all, I can find plenty of ecstatic analyses of Norco, but not as much where I’m coming from. I see why others have fallen in love with it. But I never got that far. Maybe I’ll grow more fond after reading criticism and other’s feelings. But this was my initial response, and that counts for something.

Norco, at its core, ends up as a collage, so scattered as to almost resemble a pastiche of itself. It’s soup full of scoopfuls of ideas that have been lightly emulsified. Collages can be good. And Norco is good. Its lack of thematic and structural direction does not nullify all the beauty therein, but it is why I don’t think I’ll ever get goosebumps when I think about it.

fuck, croc, i was rooting for you. i really was. you deserved better.

the story goes that croc was originally pitched by argonaut games to nintendo as a yoshi game, as what would be the first ever 3D platformer: Yoshi Racing. miyamoto was apparently enthusiastic about the idea, but nintendo turned them down. argonaut had previously had a very close working relationship with nintendo. they helped make many of their first 3D games on the snes, including the original star fox. but things started to seem iffy when nintendo decided not to release star fox 2, which was already completed. when nintendo turned down argonaut on their yoshi project, argonaut forged forward with the idea and ended up making croc. and nintendo? well, whether or not they took the idea directly or not, they made super mario 64, a game with a similar premise and with a legacy that continues to endure, while croc has faded into obscurity and argonaut fizzled out in the 2000s. jez san, the founder of argonaut, said miyamoto himself apologized to him for how nintendo handled the situation, and that at least croc was doing well for them. but jez san felt that the bridge had already been burned a long time ago.

this firmly solidifies croc as an underdog, a scrappy and ambitious game who had its thunder stolen by one of the biggest gaming companies of all time. we all love an underdog story, i'm sure. but underdogs aren't always good at their job. and croc, frankly, isn't.

it's all so rote as to be asinine to describe: croc consists of running and jumping between FOUR COLORFUL WORLDS and collecting FLOATING ICOSAHEDRONS and saving these little fuzzy critters called "gobbos", which i can't take seriously at all, partially because its a silly name, but mostly because i once stumbled into some erotica about lesbians turning into goblins that was very intensely into body odor fetish and she referred to herself as a "gobbo" and that's all i can think about when i hear it now. the levels are trivially short if you don't go for the collectibles, which at least can make completing this game less painful. but i don't even like 3D platformers that much to begin with, and this game is maligned even among those fans.

i'm sure there a bunch of reviews on youtube or whatever that go into the particular design failures of croc. i don't really want to get into it too deep. but a note on tank controls: i think tank controls are fine. i like them. they do need to exist in a context, though. croc is a 3D platformer, which usually shouldn't have that, but i do genuinely think you could have a decent 3D platformer with tank controls. but this isn't it. controlling croc doesnt feel great, but it could be a lot worse, it's better than bubsy 3d. honestly the bigger issue is his tailwhip attack, where he yells "kersplat!!" or "kaboof!!" or "kapow!!" and pretty much never hits any enemy and dies because the hit detection in this game is terrible. for me the problem of game feel is exacerbated by everything else. it has this classic 3d platformer design, the same kind that underwhelmed me in spyro and crash, and in fact the extension of design in the mascot platformers of the previous era, a game of just "Stuff in Places". its far from the worst example of that design, collectibles are usually framed within some particular challenge or puzzle, but it’s just not enough. everything is forgettable. it instills this sense of meaninglessness to these objects and it doesn't help that along with that, moving croc around never feels great.

i know people have nostalgia for these kinds of games, but there is a very good reason mascot platformers have died out. they were always banking on the likability of their funny animals, but there's only one mickey mouse. there are some great ones, sure. but do you like mr nutz, kao the kangaroo, donk the samurai duck? probably not, and if you do, you probably stan gex ironically. because when you're banking on the character, you're not really spending much time on everything else. i dont know what most of these enemies are supposed to be, the levels mostly look the same, couldn't hum you any of these songs. but that doesn't matter. just look at the funny animal, go through 8 levels in green grass forest place collecting MAGIC GEMERALDS and then 8 levels in the sewer and then 8 levels in ice world and then the end of the game. these games lack so much personality even though that's the exact thing they're trying to cash in on. croc, my friend, i'm trying to give you a chance, i'm listening to you when you say "kersplat!!", i want you to be the clumsy yet triumphant underdog, but theres so little to care about, i dont care about the secret jewels, and every single time i save one of these little gobbos all i can think about is that goblin lesbian porn i read. how did i even find it? i can't even remember, but it was about a virus that turns people into very stinky goblins and orcs. ive got no problem with the green lesbians, i respect and cherish them. but i have so many questions. why "gobbo"? is that seriously sexy? why was it so clearly a reference to covid-19? with quarantine measures and such? how would a virus even change your bone structure? maybe it can, im not a doctor. and why did it then frame the virus as something that would project into social standing? it constantly highlights prejudices and judgements cast on those who become smelly goblins. are there unanswered issues with racial politics within its fantasy? why was it also very deliberately using an epistolary style, as if on reddit? are cockney accents for goblins supposed to be sexy? why was the stinkiness so important? are goblins and orcs particularly stinky? they were always talking about the smell, i'm not even sure what smell i was supposed to imagine. i know that's a fetish but like why? is reading about the odor enough to illicit a response? i'm not even really disgusted by it i am just trying to process it. there are so many weird twists and turns with the interiority of the characters that we see, how they respond. stinky gobby girl and her big giant smelly orc gf. im happy for them but also what. is it supposed to be a metaphor for something specific? queerness, transness, disease, disability, racism, classism, something else entirely? who is all this even for? is it for me? did i like it? i don't THINK i liked it, but i definitely found it somehow, and i definitely read it to the end, and i definitely am still thinking about right now when i'm trying to play croc: legend of the gobbos and i’m definitely considering reading it again

hmmmmm... something's off...... i don't know........ whats goin on here.... somethin aint right.... something's going on...... hmmm.... somethin just aint right..... i don't know..... there's some funny business i think....... whats goin on here...... somethin aint right........... something's going on........ somethin just aint right....... i think there's something funny goin on.... hmmm................ somethin aint right............. what's goin on here........ hmmm.................. something's off...................