Throughout the course of the Indie Nation series, I've highlighted action games, text adventures, art games, platformers, and everything else I could get my pretentious, elitist hands on. However varied and unusual those games may have been, however, they shared at least one thing in common: I thought they were good.
The Graveyard, developed by Tale of Tales, infuriates me. I think it's a pretentious, ineffective waste of the interactive medium, and I hate it.
Whether I like it or not, that makes it extremely important.
Any intelligent discussion of games as an art form, or the potential of games as an artistic medium, must include some reference to at least one of Tale of Tales' games, just to examine what the hell they're trying to do (and to my mind, why they shouldn't be doing it).
Download it, play it (it's very short), and, if you like, hit the jump to find out why I detest it despite (or because of) its importance.
The Graveyard infuriates me because it isn't a game. The creators think it's a game, of course. They think that by making a game which includes no choices, rules, or goal they are expanding the medium and redefining our understanding of what a game can be, but they're really just spinning wheels. Games, by definition, include rules and goals. To make a game with neither is not expanding the definition of what a game is, but simply making quasi-interactive cinema.
Have you played it yet? Did you download it and try it out before reading this? If you haven't, it will probably seem like I'm exaggerating the game's content or just trying to be a jerk, but really -- The Graveyard is, as a game, completely pointless.
The player's input means almost nothing. The interactivity itself is completely irrelevant to the plot of the game, and what it is trying to say: rather than my actions driving forward the narrative, or exploring the theme, all information is delivered to the player via a noninteractive cut scene wherein a song plays, essentially delivering the theme ("This game is about the odd nature of death") through subtitled foreign lyrics. The Graveyard might be a fine short film or music video, but there is literally nothing about the game that necessitates interactivity, and to try and call it a "game" is to insult the work of people like Rod Humble, Jason Rohrer, and others who are actually attempting to convey meaning through rules and interactivity.
Whether or not you like Rod Humble's The Marriage, you have to admit that its goal was completely admirable: using only gameplay in the most minimalist way possible, the game attempted to convey the dynamics of a marriage. We can tear The Marriage apart in a dozen different ways, but Humble's goal is the exact sort of thing that steers the medium forward. By refusing to rely on the mechanics of other art forms (text, cut scenes, narrative), Humble tried to explore what games were uniquely capable of.
The folks at Tale of Tales, however, begged to differ, saying:
"game rules are only capable of expressing a very specific story, a story without layers of meaning or freedom of interpretation... Because of their extreme abstraction, game rules are only capable of telling this very specific story in very general terms. When you do that, all poetry gets lost and with it all depth and aspiration to universality."
Though these statements are somewhat absurd in and of themselves (anyone who claims The Marriage doesn't leave room for interpretation doesn't know what they're talking about), they inform the design philosophies behind The Graveyard and, subsequently, what's so wrong about it.
I felt like writing about The Graveyard after reading their postmortem a few days ago. One specific passage caught my eye. While explaining why they chose to remove activities for the protagonist like bird-feeding, smiling, singing, and so on, their rationale was, "the gameplay distracts from the story."
This is one of the most ignorant things I have ever heard relating to game design. The Graveyard gives the player control, but very begrudgingly: you can only move on a single set path, your actions have no effect on the environment, and you're even told exactly what to do and when to do it in the pause menu. Tale of Tales thinks a "specific" story needs to be handled in specific terms, and nothing's more specific than refusing to give the player any choices or control. Rather than trying to explore what game rules can mean, and how the player's choices and exploration of those rules can be conducive to meaning and discovery, The Graveyard is nothing more than a short film that the viewer has to hit a few more keys than usual to watch. I don't particularly have anything against making this sort of pseudo-interactive art, but the developer's constant claims that their works are games, and the incredibly self-congratulatory tone of the postmortem, make The Graveyard all the more offensive.
While Jon Blow and Ian Bogost are trying to see what games can do on their own merits, Tale of Tales intentionally abdicates whatever potential interactivity may have, opts to copy other art forms instead, and then congratulates ithemselves for misusing the medium. Hell, even being a narrative-driven experience The Graveyard doesn't even utilize the game-specific methods of delivering story (environmental exploration a la BioShock, consistent viewpoint a la Half-Life): the entire game is literally one big cut scene with barely interactive portions at the beginning and end.
As a game, everything about The Graveyard is bad. As an attempt at expanding the medium as an art form, it's downright disgusting. But for a medium in its artistic infancy, these are the growing pains: artists will try to reach out in every direction, searching for the limits of the medium, exploring what is and isn't possible with their artform's specific mechanics. I'm sure that in fifty years, The Graveyard will be looked at as an abortive jump in the wrong direction.
Contest:
7:47 PM on 11.07.2008
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I felt that the themes of the narrative and "gameplay" meshed beautifully.
I felt what the author was trying to get across was the hardship of old age and the loss of friends and relatives when your the last one left. Its a hard this to understand when you've only been alive a quarter of a century like i have but when i was controlling the old woman, who was going at an agonizly slow pace i started to ponder what it would be like to only be able to move that fast. To long for death to come because you've got nothing left. I agree that the gameplay was minimilist and frustrating but i think thats exactly what the 'Author' was trying to portray - in the simplest and most crass possible terms - how being old and crippled is like having bad controls.
Good article Anthony, Cheers
For all their talk of traditional gaming rules and structure hindering the experience of a story, they then proceed to drop their message into one of the most rigid, unfriendly structures imaginable. I thought it a little ironic that they talked about their aim of focusing on being, rather than seeing while they restrict us to only seeing what they want us to, qquite the opposite of being a part of the game.
They talk about exploiting the potential for immersion and simulation and then throw most of the tools for achieving that out of the window.
This is exactly the type of thing in gaming I dislike. Video Games are all about interactivity - if you take that away you are no longer playing a game.
I may have experienced the game exactly as they intended, as was their aim, but I certainly didn't become invested in it or relate to it because of the presentation.
Look, I understand that this is meant to be a non-traditional, interactive medium (I will not call it a "game"), but this was nothing more than a demo as in "from the demo scene". I've seen demoz back in the Commodore 64 days that were far, far more interesting that this was.
And they expect people to pay $5 for this? Wow.
But don't you think those themes would have been better developed through actual gameplay, rather than a long cut scene with lyrics that essentially explain that whole thing about being the only one left? I agree that the movement controls are kind of nice (other than the fact that you can't control when she sits down), but you've got nothing to do with those controls other than move from cutscene to cutscene.
Har har har bork bork.
She dies.
/notspoiler
But the lack of this thing called 'gameplay' makes the concept pointless.
Passage did it right....
Completely agree this is serious *artists* getting in the way of anything resembling entertainment or art. Although their screensaver was rather nice.
It's also far, far, far less pretentious than The Marriage.
This is the stupid equivalent for extreme narratologists of the stupid argument for extreme ludologist "the story distracts from the gameplay ."
If you remove gameplay from a game you basically kill what makes it a game. It's just some kind of "interactive", and I use that word loosely, fiction without any real game rules, meaningful player input or reward.
I appreciate the effort of justifying games as art but this is not even a game so I guess it kinda misses the point.
Sorry for double posting but, are you telling that games that uses these themes as a main narrative background can't be meaningful. COD4 showed the futility of war in a brilliant way.
"It's more like an explorable painting than an actual game. An experiment with realtime poetry, with storytelling without words."
I think when looked at through that lens it succeeds in what it sets out to do.
Did you spend the $5 so you can see the woman die?
I pondered this sad sight for a bit, thinking about all that we lose over the course of our lifetimes, and that, in the end, it is ultimately the release of death that gives our lives their meaning. Then I realized that, unbeknownst to me, a gamepad was plugged in and wedged under the couch, and after unplugging it I could steer the old lady around with the keyboard. I gave up on it shortly after that when I finally navigated her over to the bench and she stood there forever without sitting down.
Score: 9.5
Plus chainsaw bayonet on cane. Totally.
Ok, now that I've got that off my chest, the game is neat.
I like the pointlessness and user-unfriendliness of it all.
Thats for damn sure.
Neat, but too frustrating to ever go through again.
http://tale-of-tales.com/
If you have played the CoD4 campaign a lil more than half way through, then u know about the awesome LEVEL after you get shot down out of your helicopter. You walk through the wreckage, repeatedly falling down, seeing dead comrades, all very cool thing in their own right, but it is the feeling of near helplessness. Your pushing the analog stick foward, but still only limping at a turtles pace, you want to discover everything around you because u know your gonna die soon.
This "game" reminds me of that one LEVEL in CoD4, one of my favorite moments in a game ever, and (IMO) a good Memory Card.