Passage and Gravitation: Game Life = Real Life

March 29, 2012 By Leave a Comment

After speaking in class about the deeper meaning in such games like Gravitation and Passage, I had an idea to change my analysis paper topic from glitch art to this deeper analysis. However, I went to speak with Dr. Whalen in his office and decided that instead of changing my paper topic and all of my research over to this I would instead cover it in my blog post for the next checkpoint assignment, hence the following post was born.

I know that one other student has already written a post about Gravitation and Passage and the deeper meaning behind both; however, this post is not only designed to focus on the deeper meaning behind these two games but their real life applications.

In the game Passage the player must move around a maze and find treasure that helps to add to the game score. As in most games, the goal is to reach the highest score you can before time runs out or, in this game, you die. However, unlike most games, Passage has various elements that are not only important to the game but represent real life elements as well. For instance, in the game when you come upon a lady, you fall in love and she is with you until the very end of the game. This extra player comes as both a companion and a hindrance. As the sprite, you are no longer alone for the rest of your journey and, conversely, you have a life companion. However, your companion will not leave you and you can no longer fit into some the spaces that you would have been able to had you not met your companion. Also once you find her you are no longer able to move as fast. This is very much symbolic of real life. When you find a partner in life, you are no longer able to do some of the things that you would have been able to do before hand. Also, typically, you will be with that special someone until you die.

Passage, not only, serves as a game but also as a life lesson. Love is eternal and your partner is their until death. I also think it is an interesting quandary that throughout this game you and your partner age gradually. Like in real life, no one lives forever and your life is set to a limited time that no 0ne knows for sure. You, as the sprite, are encouraged to move through the maze while you still can. I feel this massage is also applicable to life; you must live your life to the fullest while you still have life. No matter what you choose, whether you choose a life of solitude or a life partner, the game always ends in death, much like real life, no one lives forever.

Just as much can be said of the game Passage, so too can be said of Gravitation. Gravitation also serves life lessons. The object of the game Gravitiaotin is a bit different of that in Passage. In Gravitation you are faced with a discision early on in the game. You can choose to play ball with a child and gain an energy boost that you need to reach the higher levels. you then use that energy to jump up to these levels and retreve stars that eventually fall back down tot he first level of the game. When you run out of energy, you climb back down to the first level and push the stars, that have now turned into ice blocks, into the fire. Once you have accomplished this you can choose to play with the child again and the cycle repeats. 

Much like Passage, you, as the sprite, are bound to the implications of your choice. You can either play with the child or you can choose not to. If you play with the child you get and energy boost that allows you to jump higher and collect more stars but, if you choose not to, you lead a very dull life. Much like real life, if you choose not to interact with anyone else you will lead a very dull, uninteresting life and you will not go very far at all. I feel that Gravitation serves not only as a fun game but also as reminder of life’s choices. You are encouraged to interact with the child, whom I took to be your child, and reach your full potential. Family is an important part of life and you have to interact with your family and grow those close bonds in order to make it in this crazy life. Gravitation is designed around this core moral, strong relationships are the key to a successful life.

It is true what they say, the best stories games are often more true to life than fiction.

 

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Passage and Gravitation- Deeper Meanings

March 28, 2012 By Leave a Comment

As previously stated, Jason Rohrer is the video game designer of both “Passage” and “Gravitation.”  While both games have almost no words involved in them with very simple controls, they include meanings that are far more deep and profound then many of the games that we have studied thus far. The two games are somewhat cynical metaphors for the journey of life and they both complement each other nicely.

During the game of “Passage”, the gamer starts out with a simple blonde sprite. There are simple controls to this game (up, down, right and left).  From the beginning, the player is confronted with what appears to be a female character.  It was mentioned in a previous blog entry, “Gravitation/Passage Analysis Paper” that the choice of companionship was a limiting as well as an enabling factor of these games.  In this game companionship is definitely a limiting factor with mobility.  A single sprite can fit through routes easily, whereas a pair could not.  Also, after an allotted amount of time, the companion will die and the single sprite will remain traveling until the time runs out.  In this game, relationships are portrayed as very limiting. The game raises the question: “What is the point of even joining with the female sprite?” And if players play a second time, they tend to play without the companion.

Not only does “Passage” have a rather cynical portrayal of relationships, but also on the notion of life in general.  Weather the player stands completely still the whole game, or they collect all of the stars they need to collect, they die at a specific time.  It has a very mournful tone, and leaves us with the message of no matter what you do in the game, death is inevitable.  This message is unique to most video games; in most other games the player has a sense of control…they can get extra lives, go on to new levels, and prolong their “life” as much as possible.  This is a startling concept to put into a video game, because most people cannot fully comprehend the inevitability of death in real life.

An introduction to the game of “Gravitation” is “A video game about mania, melancholia and the creative process.” This game begins and ends with the word “gravitation.”  This is significant not only because it is the title of the piece, but also because the meaning of gravitation is an unstoppable force that pulls all objects down to earth.  This is interesting because during the game, the player is given the option to jump to higher levels and retrieve stars.  These stars produce blocks of ice which are on the land; the player needs to move these blocks of ice into the furnace to increase their score.  However, to jump on the cliffs that lead to the top, the player needs to be able to jump very high. The point that the player can jump the highest is when the character hair catches on fire, and the point that the player can jump the lowest to the ground is when the screen closes in around the character.  Does this aspect of the game symbolize “gravitation?” I think it does.  This is an unstoppable aspect to the game, and it is limiting; just as gravity is limiting. I think there are multiple aspects of this game that express the theme “gravitation”.  Another aspect of the game that portrays this limiting factor is the child at the bottom of the screen that is throwing the ball.  If the gamer decides to throw the ball back to the child at the bottom of the screen, a big heart appears…and if they miss or do not wish to throw the ball back to the child tears spurt out of the character.  As in “Passage”, after an allotted amount of time, the child will disappear (as long as you are not standing right next to her.) This is also one of the many unstoppable forces of this game. The last unstoppable force that is similar to the concept of gravity is the time limit.  As in passage, the player will die (no matter what the score) at a specific time limit.  However, in this game you have the option of not dying alone.  If you remain on the ground throwing the ball with the child the entire game, the child will stay with you.

Both of these simple games have similar aspects and similar overall hidden meanings or messages.  These works in particular are excellent for literary criticism and analysis because there is so much that Rohrer leaves up for interpretation.  While “Passage” seems to be more about the journey of life and the dangers of relationships, “Gravitation” seems to be about the journey of life and the dangers of working.

Passage

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Gravitation/Passage Analysis Paper

March 28, 2012 By Leave a Comment

I decided after class on Monday that I wanted to write my analysis paper on the games Gravitation and Passage.  The two games are very similar.  Both were created by Jason Rohrer.  I am thinking about using a compare and contrast approach for the paper.  In my paper, I’d like to identify and dive into some of the themes that are present in both works.  By examining these two works together, I hope to gather a deeper understanding of the underlying messages that Rohrer attempts to convey in his work.

One of the elements of Rohrer’s games I can examine is the way the screen changes.

In Passage, the character you control (and his wife if you choose to marry) start on the left side of the screen.  You have the ability to move the character up, down, left and right through a narrow passage.  Regardless of how much the charater moves around, his orientation in relation to the screen will always move from left to right.  So even if you don’t move your character at all, he will still end up on the right side of the screen.  This is a way Rohrer depicts time.  It gives the player the sense that death is eminent and whatever you manage to accomplish during the game is inconsequential.

In Gravitation, the screen is very small, focussed only on the character you control.  By playing with the child, you can cause the screen to expand, allowing you to view more of the playable surface.  Unlike Passage, the Gravitron map goes upward.  The further upward you go, the more screen visibility you lose.  By playing with the child you can gain back that screen visibility.  However, if you stand still, the visibility will fluctuate regardless of the amount of time spent with the child.  Also, when the screen is small, everything is snow-covered and wintery.  As the screen expands, the snow melts and everything begins to look like spring. Also, at the climax of spring, the character’s head catches fire and gives him the ability to jump higher.  I would like to see what meanings I can draw from these elements of Gravitation using scholarly essays.

  

Another element I can examine for my paper is the way family/companionship enables/limits your performance in the game.

In Passage, you have to chose (almost immediately) whether you’d like to marry or not.  If you chose not to marry, you are able to navigate your character through smaller openings to get stars.  If you get married, those stars are unobtainable because the passages are to slim for two people to fit through.  If you chose not to get married you have the benefit of being able to collect more stars, however, you will eventually die alone.  Rohrer made the game this way almost certainly to show the limitations as well as the benefits marriage and companionship can give an individual.

In Gravitation, the limitations/benefits are more obvious.  By building a relationship with the child, you are enabling more of the screen to be viewed as well as improving the weather and increasing jumping height.  However, by leaving the child and going upwards to collect stars, you lose the vision, weather and jumping power.  The relationship is simultaneously enabling the game to be played further as well as restricting it from progressing too far.

Those are just a couple of themes that I plan to dig into with the help of scholarly essays.  The only roadblock I can foresee is finding Scholarly works on these two games since they are both relatively recent (’07 & ’08).  My favorite thing about Rorher’s games is how simple they are.  He doesn’t try to wow you with mesmerizing graphics or fascinating game play.  He really cuts it down to the bare essentials and forces the player to think about the deeper meaning behind the game.  That’s what I enjoy most about Rohrer’s work and it’s why I chose to analyze it.

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Paths and Gates

March 15, 2012 By Leave a Comment

For my first creative project I decided to created an IF game with Inform7. During the brainstorming process I kept revisiting the idea of creating an allegorical game such as Passage. I appreciated Passage so much for its simplicity and its message that I decided to create an IF that had the same qualities. I chose to create my game based on the outdoors and hiking because I enjoy them both so much. I came up with “Paths and Gates” and I feel that with the time I spent on it, I created something that was close to what I desired. I do not want to fully reveal the meaning of this work (as Jason Rohrer did with his game here), but I do wish to provide some insight for anyone who plays the game.

The overall message of the game pertains to life and the different “paths” that people take. These paths can be viewed as ways of life (excuse the cliché). I have boiled these paths down to three (the names of the paths are very important to the understanding of each path).  Also take note of the description of the trails on the signposts, and pay attention to the size of each trail. Frustration might occur regarding certain gates, but that is not by accident, it is part of the message I am trying to convey. The paths names, as well as their characteristics, are all carefully chosen to depict an aspect of that “path” of life. For example, there is a reason that two of the gates are at the end of the trail, and one gate is at the head of the trail.

The objects you encounter are also allegorical. The keys and the backpack play an integral role in the meaning of the work, namely when one seeks to open the Charis Gate. In the same regard, the point system is also set up in such a way to represent a truth about life (Ok I might have stolen Jason Rohrer’s mentality of the point system in Passage). When I say that these things play an integral role in the meaning of the work, I certainly do not mean that they are essential in winning the game.

Reaching the Summit is the ultimate goal of the game, and truthfully only one trail will take you there. The only way to lose the game is to give up, or to never try taking that trail to the top. Now here’s what I came up with. Happy hiking!

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Poking around in Passage

February 22, 2012 By 1 Comment

One of the first games we played in this class was Passage, by Jason Rohrer. In this post I’m going to take a look at the source code of the game as a paratext which can aid our interpretation of the work. This approach is heavily influenced by Critical Code Studies, from Mark Marino , and a continuation of work I did last semester on a different Rohrer game, Gravitation.

The code for this game can be found on Rohrer’s website. Download the Unix Source, and starting poking around with any text editor.

In the “gamma256/gameSource/” directory we find the meat of this particular game. Most of the files are supporting libraries for “game.cpp,” the main file for Passage, so in this post I will only deal with that file. Diving into a new code base can be intimidating, and I do not yet have a perfect way to understand what’s going on. In this case, I began scrolling down, reading comments and variable names, looking for anything out of the ordinary.

The first interesting piece I found was this:

Lines 524-526:

// track whether we ever met the spouse
// separate from World’s haveMetSpouse()
char knowSpouse = false;

 

The “spouse” is monumentally important in Passage, being the only character other than your own avatar. This seemed like a good starting point, so I searched for everywhere in the file with the word “spouse.” This particular code segment is two lines of comments, denoted by the slashes, and one variable declaration. The comments are somewhat like notes in the margins to remind Rohrer, or any other reader of this code, what the next line does. And what it does is keep track of whether you have met your spouse yet.

It is interesting to note that Rohrer calls this character your spouse, rather than partner, wife, girlfriend, or any other adjective we could think of. You are married to this person, immediately.
In fact, we can pinpoint where in the code that happens.

Lines 1203-1214:

if( ! haveMetSpouse() &&
! isSpouseDead() &&
distanceFromSpouse < 10 ) {

meetSpouse();

knowSpouse = true;

startHeartAnimation(
(int)( ( spouseX – playerX ) / 2 + playerX ),
(int)( ( spouseY – playerY ) / 2 + playerY ) – 2 );
}

 

This code segment looks much more intimidating, but is very straight forward. The first three lines are the logical if statement. The “!” can be read as “not”. So all told it can be translated as approximately “If you have not met your spouse AND your spouse is not dead AND you are less than 10 units away from your spouse” then the piece of code inside the curly braces is executed. If any of those conditions are false, then the computer skips the inside part.

The inside part of course, is where you meet your wife after the “meetSpouse()” function is called. We could go track down the particular logic of that function, but from the name it is clear what it does. Somewhere in “meetSpouse()” and “knowSpouse” becoming true, you are married. How romantic.

Being married does have consequences. Here is an interesting one.

Lines 1229-1234:

int spouseExploreFactor = 2;

if( haveMetSpouse() ) {
// exploring worth more
exploreDelta *= spouseExploreFactor;
}

After you get married, you get double points for wandering around. This is clearly a part of the message of the game. Rewarding you with points for exploring at all is a message, although it is up for debate how significant these points even are. ”Go West Young Man” and seek your fortune. In Passage, the act of seeking is its own reward and seeking with a partner is doubly rewarding.

There are of course emotional consequences for becoming married.

Lines 1167-1172:

if( age >= 0.85 ) {
dieSpouse();
}
if( age >= 0.95 ) {
diePlayer();
}

This is the most famous, emotionally manipulative part of Passage. Those six lines are basically the reason we study this game at all.
They are completely black and white. At a certain age, you and all of your loved ones will die, and theres nothing you can do about it. In Passage, no matter what you do, you will outlive your spouse.

There are some interesting consequences of this. Here are two seperate, but related pieces of code.

Lines 578-579:

// use to slow player motion after spouse has died
char movingThisFrame = true;

Lines 951-956:

if( knowSpouse && isSpouseDead() ) {

// player moves slower
// toggle motion on this frame
movingThisFrame = ( frameCount % 2 == 0 );
}

 
To me, this is exciting. It excites me because I have played Passage several times in the last several years, and never noticed that you slow down after your spouse dies. Perhaps I’m just not very observant, or perhaps I still get emotionally involved by her death, but by reading the code I learned something new about the game in question.

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Games are all about control

February 9, 2012 By 2 Comments

Of course that isn’t completely true, but many of the best art games I know of deal with the theme of control, typically at both the narrative and procedural level. In this post I’ll provide a few examples that try to back up this claim, and then try to figure out why this is true.

The word “control” is fairly embedded in video game culture. We play console games with a controller, ask friends which avatar they’re controlling, and tweak the control schemes of our PC games. In many genres (FPS, platformers, racing), responsive controls are critical for successful play. Indeed, if a player is not given choices to control the direction of the game’s narrative, the question of whether it is even a game arises .

The last game we played for this course, Judith by Terry Cavanaugh, has a narrative that is very explicitly about control. The character Judith is testing the limits of her husband’s control over her. The game design supports this by channeling the player to a single door each time, asking false yes or no questions, and by the end not even allowing a “No”.

Control can also be examined in Passage by Jason Rohrer, the first game we played. The control scheme of Passage is limited to movement in four directions, which in turn controls what you as a player can do in the game. This provides clarity to the procedural rhetoric, making it easy to interpret. It can also be read as contributing to the game’s message. Something along the lines of “Life appears to present limitless options to you, but you don’t really make any significant choices.”

The popular game Portal by Valve (and to a lesser extent Portal 2) has a narrative that is entirely about control.  GladOS is obsessed with controlling your progress through the test chambers, and at the “end” when you break free of her sanitized, controllable levels, she freaks out. Of course, then the real game begins. The interesting thing is, even post-test chamber your gameplay is severely restricted in order to create the puzzles. If you play through with the Valve developer commentary on, you can learn about the design decisions that they made to make players look at certain things in the proper climactic moment. Again, the illusion of control.

Many games could be looked at this way. Call of Duty games are sometimes criticized for being essentially on-rails shooters, where you make no decisions and have no control over the narrative experience. Of course, this is can also be read as a rhetoric about the life of a grunt soldier in a global war. So then, the interesting question: why do so many games, particularly the ones we think of as artistic or literary, address this one theme.

My tentative answer is that control is what game designers know best, so they “write what you know.” Crafting a compelling interactive game is all about limiting the player’s options to a few interesting ones. Puzzles are only interesting when they are difficult, with limited solutions. While a player expects direct control over their experience, it is really the designer who is manipulating your options at every turn who has an indirect control over the game.

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