Jason Rohrer’s Gravitation
Small words and short sentences
Jason Rohrer’s most recent games Passage and Gravitation are deeply personal and unabashedly autobiographical. Like Art Spiegelman or R. Crumb, Rohrer explores the theory of a new medium through truthful, moving glimpses of his own life.
As a game player, not designer, it can be hard to really pin down how great games work. Rohrer and I had a lengthy long phone conversation one evening that helped me cement some of the more ethereal ideas behind game design. Rohrer has a real tendency of doing that: clarifying large ideas into simple, elegant ones.
THM: You mentioned that you hadn’t played Shadow of the Colossus. Have you had a chance to yet?
Rohrer: I haven’t had time to play it more than a few hours, but my initial reaction, at least to the beginning, was, “Wow, that was a really long and uninteresting cut scene.”
I think part of that was like, uh, last-generation graphics are no longer interesting to watch in-and-of themselves like they were when [they were] released. It shows the guy riding a horse through some trees, past a river, some rocks, and whatever. It was not something that was impressive to me, not deep and profound like it was supposed to be. But besides that, why is it so long? Why is he riding the horse across the long bridge and not me?
From what I’ve heard about Shadow of the Colossus, people respect it as a work of art because it has this ethical dilemma of some kind. Like you’re killing these giants to bring this girl back to life. I went through one giant encounter and it was one of the most brutal things I’ve ever done in a video game—seeking it out, climbing up, climbing up, stabbing this thing in the head multiple times until if fell down. I felt strange about that, but so far I don’t see how this game puts an ethical dilemma in front of me. You either kill these things or you don’t do anything.
I think the reason people consider Shadow of the Colossus art is because, like you write about, it delivers its message through gameplay. Like you said, you feel like you’re doing something brutal when you kill the giants, unlike other games where the violence seems senseless.
Well yeah, but that’s the thing though, when you look at how the game is marketed, the box says “you get to go up against 16 huge giants,” exclamation mark! You know? the way it’s presented to you, there is nothing about it to indicate that this is even a weird thing to do to beat the game. [Fumito Ueda] as an artist, is he trying to make a statement about video game violence or is he just making a game with really cool boss battles? I feel like I’m a little bit disappointed by it and I don’t know what people are reading into it. I feel like he didn’t really do it on purpose.
Do you think games can express certain things better than other mediums?
I really do think video games are a more powerful way of communicating certain aspects of the human condition. There are parts of the human condition that involve lots of difficult decisions. In a movie or a book it would reveal something about that character because you can see the choices they made … But you walk away form the book or theatre thinking, “Wow, well what would I have done?” In video games, if you’re dealing with something that involves difficult decisions, you can hand that to the player and see what outcome those choices create. I think they are more powerful at dealing with things like that.
Are video games better at dealing with certain topics more than others? I think video games are not so good at dealing with aspects of the human condition that don’t deal with decisions. For example, making a game about the loss of a loved one. Most of the time there is no choice involved in that. Trying to make a game about that, you’re going to end up not having any interesting choice to offer to the player. We really need to learn which kinds of things we need to stay away from or what things it’s really good at.
A game that you made, like Passage, which, in a way I would say is about the death of a loved one, do you think that handles the message well?
Right, that’s why I say that. Because Passage is more than just about the death of a loved one, it’s about the passage through life and the choices you will make, and one of those choices is whether or not you will even acquire the loved on. That’s a difficult choice. How much of your life do you want to spend with a loved one, or [how much do you want to] walk alone. In a film, maybe The Notebook, you have two people that want to be together and go different paths and come back together and end up experiencing the end of life together. It presents them with the choices they made and that’s it. Then you have a film like Run Lola Run where it shows you the different choices the character can make. And still you’re very limited because you can only show so many branches before the film becomes incredibly long.
In Passage you can make those decisions. Am I going to find a loved one? Am I going to live alone? Am I going to go after these treasure chests? Will I try to see all the scenery? The death of the spouse, of course, is something that happens in that game. The experience is out of your control, but it modulates the rest of the game mechanics. If you get the spouse there is a brief penalty where you have to walk alone, slowly, until you die. I think it’s fine to have games where events occur that are out of the player’s control, but I don’t think those kinds of events should be main things.
I’m thinking back to when you mentioned Shadow of the Colossus, that’s an example where you have no control?
You mean where you’re just watching a movie?
Yeah. Do you need some of that to contextualize a game?
I would say Bioshock has none of that. It was one of the most powerful presentations for a linear story in a game I’ve ever seen. I probably played it halfway though, but it sets up the story with a plane crash, and after the plane crashed the control is in your hands. You’re swimming through wreckage, climbing up on a light house—no one is saying “Go to that lighthouse!” You look at the flaming wreckage and you know where to go. Like in Portal at the halfway point, GLaDOS is about to incinerate you. You’re about to go into this flaming pit, no on tells you what you have to do, but you look at your surroundings and see a doorway where you can shoot your portal to. I think that kind of setup in Shadow of the Colossus, even if you want to tell a linear story, its much more powerful if the setup is in the players control. Why aren’t we riding a horse or carrying a dead girl? Why aren’t we putting her on the altar? They wouldn’t even have to tell us what to do. There’s not any argument for cut scenes in video games.
I think people who are making games with long cut scenes, like Metal Gear Solid, I think they don’t really understand what they are doing, or how to make a compelling game. In Metal Gear Solid 3 there are plenty of places where the cut scene takes over, and soldiers come out, and Snake shoots them. He kicks a crate and does a back flip—isn’t that the primary game mechanic? That’s what I do in this game, I figure out how to engage in this kind of combat. And here is Snake doing cooler moves than I can do. It didn’t look cool, it looked over-done and flashy… If I wanted to watch that I’d be putting a DVD in my Playstation 2 and not a video game.
In your essay for The Escapist, “The Game Design of Art”, you say that the biggest part of the game maker’s toolbox is gameplay, and I thought that was strange. Especially when you cite a game like Rod Humble’s Marriage. It delivers a message through gameplay, but I think it’s missing some form of immersion to contextualize the meaning, or give the player a role. Only using gameplay limits the message. I think immersing the player is the other half of what a game maker should do.
Rod Humble’s game, I was thinking about that recently, it certainly doesn’t assign you a role. You’re kind of like this omniscient outsider to the marriage, you’re not really playing either spouse. Kind of a strange way to play a game about marriage because marriage is a very participatory activity. Marriage should be a two-player game, that’s the only way it truly makes sense.
Okay, so you’re saying… Pick a game like Bioshock: it’s immersive, it feels like a real world, you see everything from a first-person perspective, it is me. What I’m saying about Bioshock is that I think even if we are going to make games within that three-dimensional framework of virtual reality, we should have things you’re doing in that space somehow connected to what the game is about. Why doesn’t [Bioshock] have you trying to build a utopian city, or keep it under control, or exploring some of those Rand-ian principals … why don’t the game mechanics involve the individual versus the rights of society, as opposed to a game where you run through dark corridors shooting everything you see?
A game like ICO, it’s about companionship and care giving. There is a white, whispy girl and you have to lead her around, so they made puzzles based on that. Even the mechanic of holding her hand really helps to resonate what the game is about. I don’t think there is anything wrong with immersion or virtual reality, I think it limits the mechanics you want to explore. A game like Pac-Man, you have the abstract view of a maze, things synchronize across the maze—you get a pill and all the ghosts turn purple. You dont think about how the ghosts know you got the pill, it doesnt matter if it goes against relativity becase it is abstract. Replace that with a three-dimensional maze, all the mechanics dont make sense. Two-dimensional games free you to create mechanics that dont have to make physical sense.
When I say “immersion”, I don’t mean just virtual reality, I mean the role that is given to the player, the art direction, the narrative. I think these things affect meaning as much as gameplay because they contextualize it. Grand Theft Auto IV would be a very different game you were given the role of a priveleged white man instead of an immigrant.
You’re saying having more than blue and pink circles bouncing around on blank plane.
Do you think that’s enough to deliver a message?
That’s the thing, Rod created those parameters. It’s a test, right? Is it possible to create a game about marriage using just game mechanics? I don’t think he was saying all games should be like this.
A game like Passage, you would say, “Oh, look at Passage. The guy looks like a little guy, the spouse looks like a little woman, there is some nice scenery, there’s some moving music…”
All those things help to reinforce the meaning. I don’t think Passage would have been as good of a work had it just been two little squares moving along something. I believe in pretty bits, to use terminology from board games. I think playing chess with marble pieces on a handmade wooden board would be fundamentally different than playing with pieces of paper. I do think that stuff is important and I think it’s important to convey the meaning… but I still think it’s possible to convey a meaning without those things.
Also in your article, you say that games should be more accesible. I think the greatest works of art wouldn’t pay attention to the the audience’s cabability. Do you think video games should pander to everyone, or deliver messages to people who do undestand them?
What I was saying there was that… In all other mediums… You could say, does David Lynch care about accessibility? Do classical composers worry about, you know, who is really going to be able to sit through this peice? I say no. They are making works for any audience that is willing to experience those works.
However: reading is a pretty common skill in modern society. But video games put this enormous hurdle in front of people. It’s more than whether or not you can understand the work, it’s whteher or not you can experience the work. If you’re trying to argue for games’ legitimacy, how are we going to show games to people who don’t play games? Shadow of the Colossus is a great example of that, what it demands of you in controls, it’s challenging. This is one I wanted to show my spouse, but when I played it I was like, “Oh man. You get frustrated with this first cliff.”
I’m not saying we should pander in meaning, I’m saying there is not a reason the game should be a challange in the way it’s controlled.
Is there a time when playing complex video games will be as common as reading?
Hmm… I don’t know… I guess all I will say is that we aren’t there yet and we can’t act like we are. In reading, you either know how to read or you don’t. I guess the equivalent could be writing books that are full of long, really complicated sentences that are hard to parse. I’d say most people in the United States know how to use a computer. They are familiar with using a mouse and a keyoarrd. But the you hand them this task where they’re supposed to coordinate their two hands in this hard way to control something in this three-dimensional space. They are used to using a mouse and a keyboard, they have this kind of literacy—so you’re literate, but here is a really big word that you’ve never seen before and it’s going to confuse you more. Here is this really long, complicated sentence that you’ll never be able to get your head around.
There are people who have made great works of literature without using big words or complicated sentences. I guess I would say Mark Twain. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn would be pretty down-to-earth in those aspects, yet it’s considered one of the greatest works of literature… American literature, at least. So I don’t know… I guess, maybe because so many people don’t have video game literacy we have to learn how to speak with small words and short sentences first.
