I want video games to be more than that just entertainment. I want them to be art. I think most gamers do, if only to see their favorite hobby legitimized in the eyes of the mainstream public. If you made a poll asking the citizens of the Internet whether or not games should be considered an art form, I think the answer would be almost unanimously “yes”. In fact, Roger Ebert have conducted an unofficial version of said poll when he stated he did not personally believe games could ever be considered an art form the way the movies are and gaming community collectively lost their shit. Roger, how about this one? we said. You haven’t played this one yet. This one is surely art! You MUST agree.

Gone Home doesn’t usually use loading screens, but when it does they look like this. And by that I of course mean amazing. How come we don’t have more games with 90’s nostalgia crap in them?

I honestly don’t know why we have cared so much what a guy who wasn’t really knowledgeable about games, and did not understand or care about the interactive storytelling thought about the medium. But we did. We dug our heels in, and stood our ground: games are not just entertainment. They are a storytelling medium. They are not just about shooting dudes, leveling up and rescuing princesses from the other fucking castle. They can be used to examine human condition. They can be used to tell compelling human interest stories: both grand in their scope as well as mundane and trivial. Games can make you laugh, cry and empathize with the characters and get invested in their story and care for it’s outcome even if it does not lead to better gun upgrades or unlock new vehicles or give you Steam achievements. Games can do all these things that make literature and cinema into art forms, and more.

But that was a long time ago, and we have forgotten. So we are back to doing that thing when members of the gaming community take it upon themselves to police the industry by judging which games are actually “true games”, as opposed to some bullshit casual crap that is so offensive their creators need to be doxxed and sent IRL death threats post haste. How dare one release a game without enemies or monsters in which you don’t even shoot anyone or level up. That’s not a game! That’s a walking simulator!

No, seriously: Steam recently rolled out a community driven tag system (guys, remember when folksonomy was a buzzword?) and Gone Home was promptly tagged as Not A Game and Walking Simulator. The Steam review section for this game is full of thumbs-down hate-posts and dire warnings how the game is not “worth the money” and not even a game at all. The community has decided that despite wanting more artful storytelling, more human elements, more character driven stuff, they didn’t want this. The choir of amateur reviewers is there in Steam review section, shrieking in unison: We didn’t ask for THIS! while pretending to wear Adam Jensen shades.

Mature and emotionally detached “le sir” posting a scathing critique of a non-game that offends him by it’s mere existence.

Silly gaming community, you may think to yourself, they probably don’t even know what art is. They have forgotten games were supposed to be art. They are on Steam, reviewing games like “products” and because this one has no achievements, skill trees, guns or even Amnesia/Slender style freak-out monster moments they have hypocritically judged it inferior. But that’s actually not why this game gets so much hate out there. Oh no!

You see, there is an older game on Steam which is also a “walking simulator”. It’s called The Stanley Parable and it is sort of an experimental video-game deconstruction. It doesn’t really have a plot or story, and there is no “win” condition. The object of the game is to either follow, or refuse to follow the instructions given by the narrator and explore the relationship between the player and the linear game narrative as such. It is well made, quite funny, really clever and very, very meta. It is the sort of thing that your average Call of Duty player would probably not appreciate because all you do is walk around. Was this game tagged as Walking Simulator? No, it wasn’t. It was tagged as Unique, Art and Must Buy.

For all intents and purposes, Stanley Parable is less of a game than Gone Home. It is actually shorter (most endings can be reached in less than 10 minutes, and there is about a dozen of them), less interactive and has less of a cohesive story (it’s more of a number of loosely related skits and variations on the theme). And yet the review section is full of praises and thumbs up. So it is not that the gaming community can’t appreciate a non-violent game without guns, enemies, kill streaks or upgrades. It is perfectly capable of enjoying a clever meta-deconstruction and satire of the medium dressed up in stripped down FPS mechanics.

So what happened here? How come so many people feel compelled to shit all over another game that tries to use similar mechanics to tell a different kind of story? Perhaps these reviewers are not objecting to the mechanics but rather to the content. Perhaps these reviews are simply an attempt to de-legitimize and marginalize a narrative their authors object to out of prejudice, internalized homophobia and/or sexism.

That said, some gamers reject Gone Home on a principle. That principle being that every game should deliver 600+ hours of straight-up shooting dudes in the face. Anything else would be waste of money. Which is why all indie games are obviously trash.

There was one post on the Steam community page for this game that caught my eye. Some poor soul posted a question: I really liked this game. Are there any other games like this out there? hoping to get some recommendations. It got only one reply: “kill yourself”. So you know, not really helpful. But it really made me think, because honestly, there aren’t any other games like Gone Home. I have over a hundred games in my Steam library, and only two titles in there have similar focus on non-violent, exploration-based storytelling: The Path and Dear Esther. While they are both wonderful in their own ways, I must say that neither one is as accessible and engaging to the player. The Path is triply, abstract and riddled with dense metaphors and symbolism to the point of being cryptic and requires the player to make a conscious effort to unravel its mysteries. It is more of a performance piece than a story – one you experience, reflect upon and discuss with other people. Dear Esther is contemplative and beautiful, but it has a very slow pace and somber mood. It’s like walking through a sad poem. Gone Home on the other hand is incredibly interactive. It offers you a wonderfully immerse playground to explore, and fiddle with. The mechanics draw you in, and the story then goes about delivering what the Internet refers to as “feels” in an easily accessible, bite sized pieces. It is direct and engaging in the way the aforementioned games simply aren’t.

But Luke, says random gamebro from the back row, if this game was not about lesbians, no one wouldn’t even pay attention to it.

This is probably true. If the game did not broach the thorny subject of homosexuality, it probably wouldn’t gain so much exposure. Much like The Path, Dear Esther and Stanley Parable it would just be an artsy, alternative game mostly talked about by video game connoisseurs, enthusiasts and critics but mostly off-the-radar as far as the mainstream audience is concerned. The fact that it does contain this one specific theme, did give it a lot of notoriety and exposure. Now, ask yourself why is that? Why out of all subjects, this one makes people notice it? The answer is: representation.

If you can’t relate to the love story even a tiny little bit on a human level, there is a chance you might be a Ferengi.

Look at your game library: how many titles you own feature a named character who happens to be gay? Out of these titles, how many don’t use their gay character as a joke, comic relief sidekick or a token and instead make him or her integral part of the “main” story? How many of those characters have a non-trivial romance plot? How many of those characters are women? How many of them are women gamers? Your tally should probably be 0 unless you own Gone Home in which case you should be at 1. That’s really the long and short of it: video games don’t pass the Bechdel test and don’t even involve women in roles other than damsels to be rescued or upgrade vendors. Games tell very few stories about women, and even less about gay women.

It should not be notable that Gone Home features a lesbian love story. It is a big deal, mostly because no one else is interested in telling stories like that. It’s sad but true. To be an art form, games can’t limit themselves to just exploring the heroes journey theme over and over again. Especially heroes journey of a white, heterosexual, brown haired male protagonist. They need to explore all kinds of other stories: especially the ones that are mundane, unremarkable but very, very human.

Gone Home is exactly that: a story about two teenage girls who bond over their love for Street Fighter, become BFF’s while playing Nintendo and watching X-Files and then fall head over heals in love with each other. There is nothing particularly remarkable about it other than the fact it is cute and relatable. It is just a slice of life – an exploration human condition presented to you in the form of an interactive experience.

Guys remember when you had to get your combos and codes from, like, actual magazines? For that matter, remember when games had actual cheat codes?

In my review of Shelter I griped about the disconnection between the mechanics and the story. The game play in that game simply didn’t do a really good job of conveying the story it was trying to tell. I think that this is a really important point to stress: even when you are making a contemplative game which does not feature shooting dudes in the face, or jumping on their heads to obtain coins, the mechanics are still important. The actual game play is how you communicate with the player, and deliver the story and if it doesn’t work, the story suffers. It breaks the immersion and takes the player out of the experience.

For example Dear Esther had these breath-taking vistas, and these thoughtful narration pieces, but to get from one of them to the other you had to suffer through like 5 minutes of slow walking through a grass field, with nothing but ambient wind sounds to entertain you. Gone Home however nails the game play aspect. It uses the familiar FPS format, and populates the game space with hundreds of little objects you can pick up, and interact with. There are doors, cupboards, cups, utensils, scraps of paper, documents, folders, notebooks, lockers and etc. Pretty much everything you see can be interacted with, picked up or fiddled with. In fact, this is the core game play mechanic: here is a room full of random shit, now go full on Cole Phelps on every single little thing.

If you really want to, you can make the house a complete mess (and then presumably blame it on your sister). Or you can build a shrine out of soda cans and solo cups. The game won’t complain at all.

But unlike LA Noire objects which are either considered a clue, or random bullshit garbage, just about everything in Gone Home has some meaning. Some items unlock audio-journal entries which convey the “main” story, which is the adorkable relationship between Sam (the de-facto narrator, shy, introverted bookworm who loves video games, science fiction and pirate stories) and Lonie (a punk rocker chick with Ramona Flowers style ever changing hair, pro-level Street Fighter moves, who wants to tear down the patriarchy and join the army – though not necessarily in that order). These two are very different people, but their relationship works.

They not only like the same weird shit (which as you know from that one movie is not necessarily a basis for a relationship), but also understand each other. Lonnie brings Sam out of her shell and teaches her to be more social and confident. She introduces her to feminism and takes her to rock concerts, but at the same is totally on board drawing pictures for Sam’s dorky fan-ficiton or trying to hunt down the ghost of her dead uncle. Sam on the other hand grounds Lonie, and helps to balance out her wild side and keep her out of trouble. At the same time she is fiercely supportive – even though she doesn’t understand Lonnie’s obsession with the army, she admires her determination. Their relationship is sweet, heartwarming and at times sad. The game takes you through all the paces: the awkward first kiss, the initial infatuation, love, making plans for the future, heart breaking goodbyes, etc..

Someone on the Steam community hub built this little shrine to Sam and Lonnie’s love. Every item there is meaningful and has a story attached to it. They are all found at different stages of the game.

At some point I found this, which was so incredibly dorky but sweet at the same tike that it made me smile. Lonnie actually drew costume designs based on Sam’s silly pirate fiction, then they actually made them, and were planning to totally LARP it up on Haloween. If agreeing to dress up as the first mate to your girlfriend’s Marry Sue fan-fiction character isn’t a sign of true love, then I don’t know what is.

Sam, marry this girl immediately.

Sam’s journal entries just give you the big picture, and the detail is filled out with incredible environmental storytelling. For example, when in school both girls communicate via hand-written notes they put in each others lockers so you get to read their dorky jokes, opinions about Pulp Fiction or how 90210 is terrible, but has to be watched (for science). Sam obsessively hoards ticket stubs and fliers from the concerts they go to, scribbles on the margins of her notebooks. Lonie makes mix tapes and draws cats on motorcycles and other silly stuff.

Sam and Lonnie discuss pulp fiction.

The game takes place in the 90’s so the environments are jam-packed with visual nostalgia. You can for example go through Sam’s VHS tape collection to see what movies she likes, what books she reads and etc.

Sam has pretty good taste in movies and TV.

Oh, and yeah – Sam is obsessed with X-Files. There is so much X-Files shit throughout the game that it is not even funny. Then again, I kinda remember being really into that show back then too. I think we all were. I didn’t have the internet when the series was at the peek of it’s popularity so I missed the invention of shipping and slash-fics by a few years. In fact, few people had the internet back then, which is in part why the game is set in the mid 90’s. Because it was probably the last decade in which human communication was still mostly analog, and left paper trail. If Gone Home was set today, then the game would probably just involve reading Sam’s timeline on Facebook and raiding people’s laptops for clues. Which probably sounds more interesting that it would be gameplay wise.

There was a time in the 90’s when I wanted to believe too.

But Sam and Lonie are not the only characters you learn about. By exploring the house you actually learn a lot about Sam’s entire family. For example, the parents are extremely well fleshed out characters even though neither one of them is voiced or described in the audio journals. Same isn’t really that much interested in her parents private lives, but as part of your investigation into Sam’s disappearance you learn all about their careers, their hopes, dreams, fears and troubles. You even get to see what books and movies they like, and what music they listen to. You never really see them, but they seem so real. You really don’t get that sort of attention given to side-characters in video games.

I especially liked the father’s sub-story and his struggle as a washed out pulp fiction writer fallen on hard times. Just by snooping around his study you get to learn how dissatisfied he is with his day job and how desperate he is to catch another big wave and redeem himself with another book. You get to see the tenuous relationship and resentment between him and his own father – a successful fiction writer and literary scholar – to whom he is a great disappointment. You can also almost feel his fear for Sam who is eagerly following in his footsteps considering pursuing a creative writing major at a university. There are also clues that point to the fact that he might have been abused by his uncle, the previous owner of the large house the family moved into, as a child. Terry Greenbriar is basically a mess, and he is barely holding it together, and he is hitting the bottle a bit too much than he perhaps should…

Portrait of Grandpa with the face cut out.

The mother has her own thing going, though she seems in a much better place: she seems to enjoy her job very much, is successful at it, receives a big promotion and enjoys affection of a younger, attractive coworker. While Terry’s story is about pulling out of his nose dive, and overcoming his mid-life crisis, hers seems to be more about figuring out what she wants to do with her life. She is torn between staying faithful to her husband and accepting said promotion that will move her to a new location, or staying at her current post to be close to the man she kinda fancies.

These two are so layered and complex it is actually kinda hard to hate them when they (predictably) have a little meltdown upon discovering their daughter is dating a girl, and decide the best course of action is to ground her (because that will surely work). They are not really the stereotypical gay hating parents: they are just people who don’t even seem to have a a good grasp on what homosexuality is, and have their worldview a bit skewed by religious dogma (there are sooooo many bibles in that house – there is like one in every room). They make some bad decisions which result in Sam and Lonie making a few bad decisions of their own, resulting in the empty house when your avatar, Kaitlin arrives.

It’s amazing how the game manages to flesh out these people who you never meet or see. Sam’s parents are actually much more well rounded and developed characters than all of Lara Croft’s sidekicks in the new Tomb Rider combined.

Personally, I really enjoyed this game. It had a good, relatable story, interesting characters and mechanics which were both engaging, and conductive to the narrative. You don’t save the world or fight any monsters in it, but I think that’s actually a good thing. We definitely need more games that tell these kind of small, low-key human stories. That aim to tug on your heart strings rather than fulfilling your empowerment fantasies. We need more games with female protagonists, and more representation for members LGBTA community.

Gone Home is just a good love story. Not the greatest, but certainly better than Twilight for example.

If you are interested in games as a storytelling medium, or if you are a game developer who wants to become better at visual and environmental storytelling, I highly recommend playing this game. That said, it is important to acknowledge the fact that we all play video games for different reasons. There is no such thing as a monolithic “real gamer” template. Some people play for the stories, other for the thrill of overcoming challenges, others do it as an empowerment fantasy or escapism. We all get different things from different titles, but dismissing some of them as Not A Game is pointless and benefits no one. It is a way to maintain status quo and preventing this medium from branching out and trying new things. If we as a community punish every game developer for trying to think out of the box with banishment and exclusion, then how can we ever expect gaming to evolve?

Shelter – a game about badgers.

Shelter is a game about being a fucking badger, doing badger things. You are an adult specimen of the species, and you have a rut or a litter or pups who you must feed and protect. The object of the game is… Well, it is not entirely clear what you are supposed to do. Most people actually get stuck at the tutorial stage and have to consult internet forums in order to progress.

Picture a following scenario: you are a badger mom stuck in a tiny burrow with a litter of your pups and a turnip. One of the pups is sprawled on the floor, and either sick or dead because it is not moving like the rest of the litter. The exit from the cave is guarded by invisible force field, because FUCK YOU, this is a tutorial. What do you do?

This fucker ain’t moving.

First you will probably try to interact with the sick pup because that’s probably what a mother would do. Unfortunately the pup has no scripted interactions, so the key to solving this logical puzzle is probably the turnip. You grab it in your mouth and you drop it in front of the sick little dude…

One healing turnip / force-field deactivation vegetable coming up.

Nothing happens. You re-position the turnip a few times to no avail. You bark at all the pups in turn. You carry the turning around the cave. Drop it on each pup’s head in turn. Eventually you even try to place it on that protruding stone in the corner hoping it is a pressure plate that will disable the force field… Eventually you hit up the forums and realize that you need to:

• Pick up the turnip
• Align your badger with the sick pup in a straight line
• Drop it 3.5 pixels from the pup’s mouth

If you do it right, the pup will snap out of it’s comma, devour the turnip and somehow deactivate the force field so you can get outside and start the game proper.

The path out of the starting area and into the sunlight is about as long and windy as the endless Deep Roads sequence in Dragon Age Origins.

Shelter is a low budget indie game, so I don’t really want to shit all over it for minor mechanical flaws. But the fact that there exist about a dozen forum threads out there, started by people who can’t get through the first 5 minutes of the game is probably a good indication that something went wrong here. It is a combination of a mechanical flaw (too small trigger area for the turnip placement) combined with the design flaw (no instruction provided to the player).

The worst part is that on paper, the design is entirely sound: you are a fucking badger. Badgers don’t have instruction manuals that tell them how to take care of sick pups. They kinda just figure things out on their own. So it stands to reason that a game about living a badger life would involve little to no hand-holding and instruction. You just show the player a sick puppy and a turnip, and see if they can figure out the game mechanic. And it it would have worked perfectly, it you did not have to drop the damn food with pixel-perfect accuracy.

Once you get outside, things are rather pretty… And cramped.

To add insult to injury, once you get out of the cave you can just drop food anywhere on the ground and your pups will find it with no problems. Apparently each pup has it’s own food intake counter, and when they get hungry their fur fades and becomes lighter. I only know this because I read it online. None of my pups ever faded. The food was simply so plentiful, and the path-finding skills of the pups were so bad that simply dropping the food on the floor where I found it kept all my pups satiated throughout the game. Every few steps I would find a turnip, a carrot some berries, a rat, a frog or an apple.

Mercifully the game did show me how to harvest apples via a picture-prompt because I would have never figured it out. You get apples by ramming apple trees with your skull. You know, just like real badgers do, apparently.

This is the only kind of tutorial prompt thing you get. Why didn’t they do this in the cave to indicate that, yes, you need to feed the fucking pup, is beyond me.

The first thing I wanted to do after leaving the cave, was to look around the gorgeously designed badger forest with soft rubber apple trees. To the left of me was a small elevation that seemed like a nice vantage point from which I could scope out the area. Unfortunately I was unable to climb it because my path was blocked by three very stiff blades of grass, and some very firm air. I turned my badger around and decided to explore the environment to the left, but it was in turn blocked by some sparse brush, mound of earth and a fallen log. My movement was restricted to a very narrow, linear corridor. I figured that maybe this was still part of the tutorial, but no. This was the entire game.

We can’t go through here. The air is to thick apparently.

Every once in a while the corridor would fork into two paths which would shortly re-connect, or maybe become wide enough to give you an illusion of an open field. But most of the time the area you were allowed to explore was narrow, and almost claustrophobic and bound by loading screens on each side. You basically run a few feet, pick up a turnip, drop it, run a few more feet and etc. Sometimes there is a bird overhead that tries to eat your pups so you have to make sure you pick up the turnips when he is not looking. Sometimes it is snowing or the forest is on fire, or the river is flooding or something. Other than a different color palette and environment animations it doesn’t really make a much of difference.

The levels were so narrow in places that they almost felt claustrophobic

There was also the night level, in which the pups would just randomly disappear. Granted, seeing half of your pups missing is not unusual, because they get stuck on lades of grass, get embedded in rocks or clip through trees. But if you wander off far enough, they typically Elizabeth their way back into the rest of the group. Except in the night level, in which pups that leave your visual radius get eaten by invisible wolves. I only know this because I read it on the internet. I was convinced my pups fell pray not to ghost-wolves but to path finding bugs.

After playing this game, I feel like being a badger is all about carelessly prancing forward through a shitty forest, while headbutting apple trees. I learned nothing.

Behold the night level where you can’t run. PROTIP: if your pups get spooked, run past them, and keep on running till the end of the level. You can only lose one per spooked event. Otherwise the whole thing takes like 3 years to traverse.

The worst part is that I really wanted to like this game. It is aesthetically gorgeous, has a very evocative music score and an excellent theme. It is trying to style itself as a game about motherhood, exploration and survival. A game that puts you into the mind of a small pray animal who has to navigate a dangerous world full of predators, and natural dangers while at the same time taking care of her offspring.

Unfortunately, the game mechanics do not help to convey the story. The narrowness and linearity of the levels break your immersion almost ass effectively as headbutting every single tree in your path to shake down some apples. Instead of being an omnipresent and random danger, the predators (such as the hawks and wolves) only appear in gimmicky special levels. Food is so plentiful, you never actually have to ration it, or choose which pup to feed. Every minute you spend playing Shelter you become more and more painfully aware you are in a game – and not even in a very good one.

It’s a shame the mechanics are so bad, because the are the sole storytelling tool the game has at its disposal. There is no narration, no cut-scenes, no prompts, instructions or even scripted events. The only way to make you experience the feelings the authors intended, is through the mechanics. For example, the loss of a pup is supposed to evoke feelings of loss and sadness. Unfortunately that doesn’t work. I lost three pups in the night level, without even realizing it. Later, when the game made me cross a big swath of open ground with birds of pray circling overhead, I instituted Operation Eagle Meat Shield – a tactic which allowed me to use surviving pups as extra lives I could spend to reach the final loading screen.

Operation Eagle Meat Shield is a success.

I know I was supposed to get attached to these little bastards, but the game gave me no reasons to do so. What was I supposed to do? Go “aww, look at that little guy getting adorably stuck between a blade of grass and a turnip due to a pathing bug”. To get attached to video game characters, you need to be able to empathize with them. This typically requires them to exhibit some sort of personality. Or barring that, it requires you to empathize with the protagonist and understand why she cares about said characters. Shelter provides none of that. In fact just about every mechanic seems to be custom designed to break the immersion, take you out of the experience, and force you to meta-game and think of your actions in terms of game-moves instead of experiences.

I don’t think the sandbox model is perfect for every game, but I feel like in this case it would be justified. A procedurally generated forest would add an exploration layer and replayability to what is a very short game. Uncertainty as to where predators might show up, and what food sources might be available in different parts of the forest would make your choices seem so much more meaningful. If you had a choice where to go, then you might actually end up feeling bad about taking your pups into an eagle’s hunting ground. When your only option is to walk forward, then the eagle becomes just an unavoidable obstacle you have to bypass using gimmicky mechanics.

At the end of the day, everything boils down to player agency. You either have to give player actual agency, and thus make him responsible for his own actions, or you have to design an experience that makes the player feel like he or she is making meaningful choices. The reason linear shooters like Bioshock get away with keeping the player on the rails throughout the entire length of the experience is that they have a story to tell. The twists and turns of the plot, and the plight of the characters distract the player from the fact he is not actually making any meaningful choices. The experience is linear but it still feels like you are a participant. Shelter provides the player with neither the agency nor a compelling story or characters to latch onto. As such it has very little to offer. Which is really sad, because it is such a good idea, and both the artistic direction and musical score both are top notch for an indie production. Absolutely everything about this game is perfect, except the core mechanics which are not broken, but simply wrong for this story.

There are a thousand ways to make player re-live a day in life of a badger mom. The third person, apple-tree head-butting simulator was simply the worst of all possible ways to make that happen.

Papers, Please – title page.

Papers, Please is a very odd game, because it does not seem fun at all when you describe it to someone who knows nothing about it. You play an immigration officer working in a tiny booth at a border crossing, and your job is to decide who is allowed to enter the fictional communist nation of Arstotzka. You do that by checking their passports and associated documents for discrepancies, and stamping their entry visa. This is not a joke – that’s literally what you do in this game. A person enters your booth and hands your bunch of papers, and then you have to go through them making sure they are not expired and that the names, pictures and other details are matching. Does this sound like fun? It seems more like a boring temp job, rather than something you would want to do in your spare time. And yet, I would count it as one of the more entertaining games of last year.

This guy game me his real passport along with his fake one.

Why is that? What happened here? How can you make a game about shuffling and stamping immigration papers into a fun and rewarding experience? It can’t really be the game play alone because there is nothing inherently fun about inspecting immigration documents. Jumping of a high glider and shooting a tiger with a bazooka is exciting and visceral experience, and stamping “denied” on someone’s visa can never even compare to it. And yet, once you start playing Papers, Please it is hard to stop. Why?

It is because this game is not about the game play. The game play is an interactive mechanic for telling human stories. And said stories are means through which the author builds up his setting, and sets the mood. The sum of all parts creates an interactive experience. It allows the player to feel how it is to live in a absurd, totalitarian society, even if only for a few hours. And it works:

Papers Please totally gets the sheer absurdity that is life under a totalitarian regime. It is right on point.

— Luke Maciak (@LukeMaciak) January 7, 2014

It would probably be inaccurate for me to say that I grew up under a communist regime. By the time I was old enough to comprehend the concept of national sovereignty, Poland was already a post-communist democracy trying really hard to re-integrate itself back into Europe. Communism was over, but it’s legacy was far from gone. The decades the nation toiled under the Soviet yoke have left its mark. The grown-ups were scarred by it – they carried it in their bones. Often an adult would pick up one of my history school books, leaf through it and nod approvingly only to inform me how lucky I was that I get to be studying The Real History™. All that boring stuff I took for granted was a hard won illegal knowledge they secretly read on faded leaflets, possession of which could land you in jail. It is one hell of a huge generation gap to live with: I have never experienced totalitarian state oppression, whereas my parents never experienced freedom.

Sometimes you have to diffuse a bomb. Not in your job description? Tough luck. Now it is.

When I moved to US, I was amazed by how much white people loved the police. I was shocked that suburban kids were taught at school to seek out a policeman if they got lost or if they needed help. This was inexplicably alien and bizarre. I was taught the exact opposite: the police was not to be trusted. Unless someone was actively trying to murder you, getting the police was just asking for trouble. Because that’s how it works in a totalitarian state: the police is the executive arm of the state, and as far as the state is concerned all citizens are guilty of something until proven innocent. Such a deep level of distrust in the governing authority does not go away overnight. When you grow up in a post-communist nations you pick up all the reflexes and defense mechanisms of oppressed people because your parents, guardians and role models have not shed them yet – nor do they want to, just in case the shit hits the fan again. Even though you have not lived through the oppression, the grown ups make every attempt to train you how to survive in such an environment. They give you the tools and knowledge to navigate an oppressive, totalitarian reality. So even though I never lived under soviet communism, I feel that I grok it. I have at least some first-hand experience with it. Which is more than most westerners have.

The regulations become more complex, and the list of required immigration documents entrants must have on them grows as the game progresses.

Americans love the totalitarian dystopia theme – especially for video game settings, but they seldom get it right. Most game designers to crib bits and pieces from Orwell’s writing but they rarely comprehend the subtleties. Their dystopian worlds are populated with characters with distinctly western, capitalist value systems who wouldn’t normally survive in such an environment. You very rarely see the distinct inversion of morality that is a taletale sign of an established oppressive regime: criminals are folk heroes while law abiding citizens are considered cowards.

This might be obvious, but I think it bears repeating, because writers and game designers very frequently miss this point. In an oppressive nation, laws are not made to serve and protect the citizens. The sole function of the legal system is to maintain the status quo and keep the current ruling class in charge while at the same time subdue and keep the general populace in check. They are not designed to be simple or enforceable: they are meant to be a maze that is impossible to memorize, navigate or follow. An average citizen will be breaking a dozen or so byzantine, arcane rules every day without meaning to do so – and this is by design. This way, everyone is guilty of something, and enforcement can be completely arbitrary. But the unspoken social contract is that if you keep your head low, do what you are told the police will turn a blind eye to your small transgressions. If however you step out of line, they will nail you fast and hard for all the illicit things you have already done. Breaking laws, and going against the state is therefore a tremendous risk. Anyone willing to bend the rules, even if only for selfish reasons is to be commended for their bravery. Anyone willing to break the rules to to help fellow citizens is a fucking saint. Criminal activity of any kind (regardless if it is smuggling, theft or political activism) becomes inherently admirable and heroic. Flowing the letter of the law on the other hand is cowardly and selfish. It is a strange, pathological kind of mentality in which hypocrisy and lies are crucial survival mechanisms.

It is a different kind of life: a surreal, strange existence because it is dictated and shaped by ideology that no one actually believes in, but everyone pays lip service to. It is a hard and sad life, but not devoid of humor. It is punctuated by dark irony the citizens grow to appreciate, or else it drives them mad.

Aww

Papers, Please gets all of this. It gets the sheer absurdity of life, and all the irony and silliness that comes with it. Playing it is a bit like diving head-first into Terry Giliam’s Brazil, sans the weird, psychedelic digressions. It is absurd, dark, witty, sad and highly amusing. It is a game about subtle nuances of life in a totalitarian state.

Take your booth for example: it was not designed for comfort or efficiency. It’s spartan decor, lack of space and convenience features are actually intentional. Managing your desk space, and minimizing clicks and mouse movements is actually part of the challenge. But it is not a bad UI design, because as the game progresses you are actually allowed to buy booth upgrades that fix a lot of the early game headaches (but you have to sacrifice your own savings). The sad state of your workspace however is a metaphor for the ineptness and pathology of the state. If they can’t design a silly little booth that isn’t a nightmare to work in, how can they run a nation.

You are absolutely terrible at your job. Here is an award. Hang it on the wall.

Every day the people who enter your booth will ask you to bend the rules for them. You will hear all kinds of stories, ranging from silly to heart-wrenching. But you can’t help them all. Your performance is reviewed by the authorities, and each time you make a mistake or turn a blind eye, your pay is docked. So if you choose to be a good guy, chances are your family won’t have enough to eat, or that they will turn off the heat in your apartment. But if you choose to always follow the rules you then are yet another cog in the machine of oppression, and you are helping to destroy the lives of innocent people.

People you help, at a great personal risk to yourself and your family are not always grateful. More often than not they are rude, resentful and just plain nasty to you. However some do genuinely appreciate what you did for them, and will give you tokens of their appreciation, bribes or try to help you in other ways. Being a good guy is rarely glamorous, easy or risk free. Being a bad guy is easy but leaves a bad taste in your mouth. That, and it also affects which ending you are going to get. Papers, Please has about twenty alternate endings, all of which depend on your decisions: which people you let through, who you turn away, which organizations and factions you decide to side with. Compared to say the degree to which you can affect the plot in Mass Effect games, this is quite overwhelming. Not all endings are good or even satisfying. Many are actually quite terrible. But that’s how games should be: you choose your path, and you reap the benefits or suffer consequences of your choices. This is an absolutely right approach to moral choice in interactive fiction.

One of the many endings. Ooops.

The game’s creator Lucas Pope groks totalitarian regimes. He got them so right, I actually looked up his background to see if, like me, he was born in one of the former soviet block nations. He was not, and that makes his understanding of the topic all that more impressive. He definitely did his research and immersed himself in that reality through literature, cinema and other source materials. All I can say is kudos. He also groks choice and consequences which is an extremely rare skill in the game design industry these days. Go get this game, play it and get all the fucking tokens because that’s the right thing to do.

That said, if you rephrase the question and ask whether or not the modern triple A mainstream releases are art, then no they are not. Or rather they are as much art as Michael Bay’s Transformers. They are commercial products first and foremost. They trade in the same distractions as Hollywood blockbusters: guns, sex and explosions. They are made to excite, titillate and provide the player with a quick adrenaline rush. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, but there is usually not much artistry involved. These games are to be consumed as entertainment, and if they do contain some deeper meaning, or give you reasons for contemplation it is usually just a nice bonus.

Dear Esther is a little bit different. While it costs money, it is not a mainstream commercial product. While it is interactive, it has no game play. While it tells a compelling story, it has no real plot. It is a non-game – an interactive virtual experience. And if it is not art, then I’m not exactly sure what would it be.

I bought it during the summer Steam sale for about a buck, and I thought it was a dollar well spent. If nothing else, the game is absolutely gorgeous. The developers of this title (which started as Half Life 2 mod, but then turned into a full-fledged game) have a very keen eye for color, composition and contrast. What they did using the Source engine is both impressive and breath taking at the same time. Here is a snapshot from an early part of the game, where you ascend a hill and see a small building in the distance against an amazingly well designed sky box:

Check out this sky box!

Not shown in this picture, is the blinking beacon that provides the focal point of the game. It is almost always visible from all parts of the island and provides both a visual cue that helps you to orient yourself, but also a final goal. As a player you are drawn to it, and the game implies that the beacon is where you should be heading. But it is not just that – sometimes the beacon is part of the scenery, providing bits of color and contrast. Consider this location for example:

Beacon provides contrast.

Note how the entire scene is dominated by deep blues, with the exception of the candle lit area on the shore, and the red beacon in the distance. These little areas of light provide focal points leading the player through the darkness. The developers chose to offer the player no traditional game play experience, but their masterful level design is a proof that they are no strangers to game play related concepts. The way they lead the player throughout the environment using visual cues such as buildings, colors, contrast and lighting shows they have spent considerable amount of time play testing and tweaking their levels. The game has no map and no compass and it features wide open spaces but I have never really felt lost because there was always something intriguing in my field of view.

Another example of a really good use of color and cintrast

Here is another example of a location that is not only picturesque and beautiful but also well executed. This game contains some of the best night environments I have ever seen. Note how the vibrant colors make this environment light up, and how at the same time they line up to create a visually interesting path for the player. And I’m not even showing you the caves, which are just… Something else. Something to be experienced.

Combine these masterfully crafted visuals with excellent, but subtle sound-scape and sparsely used music and narration and you end up with something rather extraordinary. The writing is good – eloquent, poetic and dense with meaning. This part love letter, part confession and part diary of a troubled man is not easily digestible, but it stays with you. As the narrator rambles on and indulges in digressions you find out more and more about the island, it’s mysteries and the protagonist himself.

The entire thing is about an hour long interactive story. On the surface it kinda reminds me of The Path which I reviewed back in 2009. But The Path actually had game-like elements – items that needed to be collected and secrets that needed to be found. Dear Esther is much simpler and much more streamlined but also more casual. Unlike The Path which required the player to invest time and effort into exploration, Dear Esther strings you along and leads you by the hand most of the time. But I think that was a conscious choice – The Path style exploration would not be appropriate here. The linear, scripted progression was exactly the right way to tell this story.

You see, Dear Esther is about immersion. The slow trek though the picturesque environments, listening to an unreliable narrator ramble about random things is a way to make you part of the game world. Whether you want it or not, you become intrigued by the strange markings on the walls, and the frequent mentions of the caves and the mysteries that lie within. You drink the world in, the mood seeps into your bones and then it delivers the really powerful imagery in the final act. I don’t know about you but I found “the armada” to be heart breaking, beautiful and poetic. It added a striking visual imagery to the narration, and it probably wouldn’t work without all work that went into immersing me into this reality.

This game is not for everyone. But if you want to see some really good level design, and listen to an intriguing, deeply sad story then this is definitely a good way to spend an hour and a few bucks.