Well Played 1.me

My Masters alma mater, the Entertainment Technology Center, just put out a compilation of video game essays, titled Well Played 1.0. I've taken a look, and there's some thoughtful stuff in there.

But I'd hardly call it complete. Here's a brief essay be me that didn't make the cut for Well Played 1.0. Why not? Oh, lots of reasons. Favoritism. Politics. The fact that I just wrote it today. Anyway, here it is:

Quickly Retrieve Victory from Adversity: Imagination and Transcendence in Problem Sleuth

Problem Sleuth is a web-based faux text adventure with images, drawn and authored by Andrew Hussie and driven by reader suggestions. It begins with a private detective named Problem Sleuth locked in his office, and grows exponentially into an epic cosmic battle. In each update of Problem Sleuth, Andrew Hussie collected suggestions for the actions of the player characters and drew more panels representing the suggestions he chose. Problem Sleuth is in one sense a collaborative story, but also certainly a game.

The world of Problem Sleuth initially delights in denying satisfaction to the user. For dozens of pages, literally nothing the player does through Problem Sleuth succeeds(besides picking up objects). When he tries to use his phone, it is broken. When he tries to punch through the door's glass panel, the "glass" is revealed as a piece of paper taped to the door. When he tries to pick up the gun from his desk, it transforms into a key.

Similar failures mount up, similarly improbable. The game's patience for stymieing the player seems inexhaustible. But then something changes.

One reader, whose name is lost to time, suggests that Problem Sleuth build a fort from his desk (which was recently revealed to be constructed of boards and cinderblocks), and one reader suggests that he uses his imagination to play make-believe. Inside the fort, Problem Sleuth imagines his perfect life: an unlocked office, a working phone, two steak dinners...

Then the phone rings, waking him from his reverie. The call itself is fruitless, but, having dreamed and woken, Problem Sleuth immediately begins discovering new avenues of exploration. His office's window is revealed as a portable portal to another place, he finds a way to see into the adjacent office, and he discovers a key to a secret room. Seemingly, his imagination is what makes these things possible; he's now able to stay one step ahead of a world of nonsensical rules and unfair obstacles.

This kind of transcendence is the same thing we see in many well-designed game experiences. Not all of them, certainly; the player can get one step ahead of Tetris, but Tetris will catch up and win every time. But in single player games with "campaign modes," which is to say any mode of play wherein the player moves from a beginning to an end, a good game slowly feeds knowledge of its rules to the player, letting the human player's single advantage over the game - imagination - compile that knowledge into mastery. Through imagination, testing, and learning, the player comes to know the game world, inside and out.

Think of the experience of playing Super Mario Bros. for the first time. Unlike the opening of Problem Sleuth, it's not designed to frustrate, but the rules are still strange. Why can Mario jump so high? Why can I only attack enemies from above? Why don't my fireballs work on beetles?

Then imagine watching a skilled speedrun of Super Mario Bros. Or performing one, if that's your thing. The player has transcended the boundaries of the game and composed its rules into a perfect, victorious symphony. The rules of the game are no longer restrictions, but tools. The game's destiny, its life cycle, is to begin as the master and, by degrees, hand mastery over to the player.

This same kind of victory is exaggerated gloriously in the culmination of Problem Sleuth, when the final frustration is overcome. With the help of his allies, Problem Sleuth takes down the final boss, Demonhead Mobster Kingpin. DMK, in a panic, conjures hundreds of new life meters for himself (after Problem Sleuth expended considerable effort to drain two such meters). This final affront to fairness is met not only with righteous fury, but with more imagination: rather than deal more damage to DMK, Problem Sleuth smashes the life meters themselves, tearing through them in seconds. Finally, after all this time, there is no trick the world can pull that Problem Sleuth, and the readership that guides him, cannot overcome.

That experience of transcendence is what games create, at their best. And they teach by example, asking the player to believe in a world where nothing is hopeless, and the rules can be learned and mastered.