The best video game secrets are the ones you’re not supposed to find

You have to follow a particular route to get to the top of the Forbidden Shrine (beat the game three or four times and squeeze in a run where find and eat every lizard), and then your reward is classic Shadow: a garden to nowhere, devoid of significance other than any you bring to it. Maybe you could infer this is a new Garden Of Eden that somehow leads to Ico.

It’s interesting, then, that the fruit you find there are poisonous. Wander consumes literally every living thing on the ground in his quest, but this quiet garden abode is harmful to him. At this point you’ve already sucked down 30 or 40 colossi and a million lizards. Here’s an alternate take: Maybe the fruit up there isn’t harmful. Maybe it’s purifying Wander, releasing that harmful need for power.

Digital Love

Also this week, William Hughes took the release of Christine Love’s latest game, Ladykiller In A Bind, as an opportunity to look back at Hate Plus, one of the designer’s most popular games. Specifically, William keyed in on a moment that presents a more honest simulation of romantic relationships than most games ever do, since it asks the player to take some actual time and effort to step away from the game and do something nice for the character you’re wooing. It wants you to bake a cake. BadNflu3nce thought, when compared to the Japanese dating games Hate Plus is riffing on, the demands it makes on players aren’t all that special:

I would disagree that Love’s game is the best at asking “Is your virtual relationship worth the bare minimum of effort from your actual, physical self?” as opposed to one of the “tacky ero visual novels” it pokes fun at. The best visual novels that I have played do a great job putting you, the player, in the character’s shoes and making you care enough to devote serious effort to your love. In Steins;Gate, getting the “true ending” with Kurisu Makise is quite hard. You have to devote effort to answering your phone (which doesn’t play out with automatic conversations like in Grand Theft Auto IV), putting the main game on pause, and talking back and forth with her. And after getting the Normal Ending, where Kurisu is very sympathetic and important to you but not saved, you want to go back through the entire game again and do it right this time.

Then there’s one like Muv Luv Alternative, which challenges you to go through an emotional gauntlet of stomach-churning events. You’re basically watching some of the characters that you have spent hours and hours getting to know and like get ripped apart by aliens. You’re taking on a serious emotional toll in order to get together with Sumika, your love, in the end. I had to get up and go away from the game—not to bake a cake—but to emotionally process what just happened. To crawl back to the game was serious effort in my book.

Another issue that this moment faces is the potential separation between player and character. Poot argued this makes all the difference:

But the romances inserted into games are romances between a non-player character and the player’s character, not the player themselves. Both of those are characters, both exist outside of the real world, and both are severely limited by all manner of omissions, shortcuts, and abstractions. I don’t want to invalidate the idea of breaking the fourth wall to make an artistic statement, but let’s not pretend like it would be perfectly reasonable for Liara (from Mass Effect) to stop the action and ask the player (as opposed to Shepard) to go bake them a cake. If instead we retreat to the more reasonable and consistent idea of Liara asking Shepard to bake her a cake, well then, that sounds an awful lot like a loyalty/romance mission, doesn’t it? And we have those all over the place.

What’s missing most of the time—but, notably, not all of the time—in BioWare’s games is a sufficient punishment to hammer home the significance of the time spent fulfilling a special request or the choices made to make the person happy. There is one character in Mass Effect 2 who demands you make a stark and obvious choice to gain his loyalty. If you stick to your goody-two-shoes ways, then that’s it. He’s not loyal. You failed the loyalty mission.

The challenge is making sure all of the game’s punishments and tradeoffs feel legitimate rather than arbitrary. That gets really tough to do when you, the player, are stuck with a set of extremely limited choices already plotted out by the writers. You have to choose not only your actions from their list, but also (usually without as much advance warning) the reasoning behind the choice and the explanations your character offers up to the NPCs. That brings us back to another of Hate Plus’ conceits, and I think it makes the game a much more trenchant critique of the limitations of current gaming technology rather than the human element the player is bringing into the mix (or can’t bring into the mix).

But Girard
points out, as William did in his essay, one of the game’s biggest focuses is a blurring of the lines between the player and their character:

Love’s games—at least the ones I’ve played—are pretty deliberate about blurring the distinction between the player and the player character. There’s a world of difference between sitting at your computer and using it to move around in third-person and sitting at your computer and using it as a computer to communicate with servers and AIs through a diegetic user interface. So it’s not terribly jarring when the game addresses you, the player.

That said, it seems like Love’s goal isn’t to admonish people to pursue “healthy” relationships with fictional anime characters that involve baking them cakes and so on. It seems much more clear, especially considering the dialogue, that the event is meant as a provocation. It’s meant to shake players out of the common pattern of the facile, gross “dating sim” genre and prompt them to think a bit more about the differences between real-world relationships and the kinds presented in those games.

It’s kind of like the post-level sequences in Hotline Miami, where you wade in silence through the piles of corpses you’ve created as you leave the level. The game isn’t telling the player to literally kill a building of people and wade through the gore to become a more empathetic and human person. It’s appending a reflective, provocative element to a common game situation to make you think a bit more about your actions within the game and draw connections outside the game.

That’s all for this week, Gameologians. As always, thank you for reading and commenting. We’ll see you next week!