Wednesday 1 January 2014

"Do you play games?"


Imagine looking at a gorgeous painting in a gallery, only after a few moments you realise you're not standing in the gallery anymore: you're inside the painting and it's all around you.

There are various paints to colour a painting; pastels, oils, watercolours, many others more and we can add to them the pixel. What I've just played felt like being inside an impressionist painting. The things I saw weren't photo realistic copies of everyday life. That's what the technology obsessed clamour for with their 'next generation graphics'. No, the game I just played could have come, in purely visually terms, from the early 90s. But there was a living, breathing world there, made of visibly blocky squares of colour that only hinted at what they represented, and yet at the same time captured their essence in a way high-fidelity visuals often cannot.

Imagine you're inside a beautiful painting, and you can look around it. Paintings are static, aren't they? But this, this is alive. The bushes shiver to the touch, the lake trickles past slowly, its movement just a handful of pixels moving to the left and repeating in a cycle, and yet wanting nothing. Ambient sound works in concert with the pixels to transport you there. When I touched those bushes I don't think I saw any leaves fall to the ground, but the way it trembled, and the rustle it made - I could just fill in all the gaps myself. It made me want to be in a real forest, beside a real lake.

So you're inside this beautiful painting, and you can look around inside it, and it moves as though the whole world is alive, and the world is even reacting to your touch. After you explore a little, taking your time because everything looks and sounds so magical, you come across people. They're just archetypes; a shepherd girl, a woodcutter. Fairytales are only ever populated by archetypes. They don't talk, instead the narrator speaks for them. You're in a beautiful painting, you can look around inside it, and it moves as though the whole world is alive and reacting to you, and the painting is of a fairytale.

You carry on exploring, looking at everything so you don't miss a detail. Not because the detail might impact your quest - although that's important too. But because the detail might remind you of a small thing in the real world that you haven't enjoyed the pleasure of in too long. Soon you face danger in the form of a wild animal. The best fairytales have peril. It attacks you, but you have a sword and shield. After defending and defending again its advances, it tires and retreats, and you didn't have to strike it once with your sword, and later you realise you're glad of that.

You're looking around inside this beautiful painting, which is alive with movement and sound, and populated by fairytale characters, and you are the hero. This is a fairytale written and painted for you, it's about YOU. You get excited, and feel fear when you're in danger. But it's a different kind of fear than when you read, because here you have control, and whether this tale has a good or a bad ending depends on you.

The woodcutter takes you up a mountain. He has to stop and wait often because for you the journey matters more than the destination. Each time you round a hill a new painting rolls into view, a new painting to walk through and touch and feel and hear. At the top of the mountain there's the entrance to a cave. The woodcutter goes no further, and the dog, the woodcutter's dog that's been leading you since the very beginning stays too. You're alone for the first time, wandering through hidden and dark places, and your eyes rove when they spy suspicious movement. Even when the painting is a dark forgotten cave, it's alive. This time it's just a bat. Eventually you come to a spacious hall under the mountain and the object you came for, an ancient book of unknown significance, rests underneath a pitch dark shadow looming tall, above that an antelope's skull.

You take the book. It's what the hero would do, though you know it will probably be a mistake. The hero gets a free pass to do something stupid once, so as to redeem himself by the end of the story. And it is a mistake. The shadow comes alive, the skull floats horribly towards you, faster than you run.

You're looking at a painting from within, it's a horrific painting, its imagery drawn from nightmare. The painting is alive with a movement that makes the skin crawl and there's sound, horrible, chilling sound. It's not a fairytale anymore, but a real horror story, and it's a bad time to be the hero. You feel the horror, and you panic. You fumble your movements and trip up, like a horror movie character, but there's nobody to shout at and call stupid because the character is you and everything the character does is because you made them do it.

You run back the way you came, trying to remember all of your steps in advance because that might let you gain on the shadow. It's an extremely close call, but you make it out of the cave alive. The shadow doesn't follow you into the daylight. And - Yes! You still have the book!

The woodcutter and his dog are waiting for you, and never have you felt so much like hugging a collection of pixels, such is your relief. With a brief note of foreboding, the narrator echoes your emotion, in effect giving his consent for you to feel triumphant. An ominous rain starts falling, and supernatural guardians watch you from the cave. But as you descend from the mountain the soundtrack kicks in. It's the first time you've really been conscious of the music in this story, and it has a direct line to your soul. It speaks to you because it's the theme tune of your very own triumph. It's your song. Right now it's the best music you've ever heard.

You're within a beautiful painting, and it's alive with sound and movement and music. It's a painting of paintings really, a gallery within a painting. The paintings inspire in you different emotions. One painting might feel like an exciting adventure. one might be a horror. Another drama and even comedy. One is triumph. What the paintings have in common is that they are all about you. The artist, with his friends the musician, the writer, the storyteller, the director and producer have put on a performance. They've combined everything they do well in their respective arts together; arts you appreciate separately have joined into something that's greater than the sum of its parts. And they've put you at the centre of the wonderful maelstrom to direct yourself in this, your starring role.

Why wouldn't I play games?

The above post was inspired by the author's first 30 minutes experiencing Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP