Layton: Puzzles and Story

In an article over at GameSetWatch, Simon Carless criticizes the Professor Layton series of games, with a particular focus on the most recent iteration, Proferssor Layton and the Unwound Future, for awkwardly shoehorning the gameplay and story together such that the whole is less than the sum of its parts. This criticism seems to have two parts; that failure to integrate the story and gameplay leads these components to get in each other's way, and that it is incredibly contrived -- and disbelief reinstating -- to have the entire population of London chomping at the bit to offer you puzzles. I haven't finished that game, but so far the first part of his analysis tracks with my experience; I often find myself watching cutscenes which would be quite enjoyable if I weren't desperately wishing I was helping milkmaids equitably divide pastureland with three buckets and a bale of twine.

As for the second aspect of his criticism--that the transition between gameplay and story is awkward-- I am ambivalent. In the world of the Layton games, the most respected and brilliant man in the world devotes his life to the study of puzzles, presumably because this is something that people in this universe consider important enough to award PhDs (or DPhils, depending on where he matriculated). So it's no more outrageous that people in this puzzle-mad world give you puzzles than it is that random people in Chronicles of a Quest Foretold II: Dragon Community Center, to request that you murder the orcs that stole their mothers' lockets (clearly a proportionate response to petty theft). That being said, the criticism is not unwarranted, especially with regard to the last two games in the series, as the integration of the puzzles and story in Diabolical Box and Unwound Future could be just a bit more graceful.

By contrast, the first game in the series, Professor Layton and the Curious Village, combined the story and gameplay in a way I found to be a deceptively brilliant use of the artificiality and weirdness inherent in transitioning from story to gameplay. In the aforementioned generic RPG its actually kind of weird that random people ask you to run errands. We just don't notice because we are used to the conventions of the RPG genre, in which the story exists primarily to provide contexts for the battles.* Professor Layton, on the other hand, operating, as it does, in a genre which is usually devoid of narrative, has no choice but to make the difference between narrative context and gameplay extremely apparent. Instead of trying to hide this artificiality, Curious Village embraces it.

WARNING - when reading, watching or playing art, I tend to agree with those who think it is the reader, watcher or player's role to actively try and construct meaning out of the building blocks provided by the artist, rather than to simply be a passive observer. Some artists make this easy, generally by creating a work that lends itself to one interpretation, which is usually just the literal meaning of the work. Some artists make it harder to parse a meaning, generally through obscure symbolisms and the like (try reading Finnegans Wake, I dare you). The best artists do both: they provide layers of meaning that can be unpealed like an onion until one has found the layer that suits them best; one can enjoy the story and leave it at that, or one can probe further and find something else. One of the results of this approach is that I tend to have interpretations that, could be described as "interesting" if one is sympathetic, or, if one is not, as "complete ass-pulls."

Also there will be SPOILERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Anyway, back to Layton. As we play the Curious Village we may be struck by how odd it is for the townsfolk to be so obsessed with puzzles. This is because the townsfolk are odd and obsessed with puzzles. But they are not odd for just the sake of oddness, nor are they odd because they are just a mechanic for providing puzzles to solve. Why then are they so odd? Because they are clockwork; their mechanical nature -- each "person" is an artificial system composed of perfectly interlocking parts -- mirrors the hermetic world of a puzzle, in which every piece is a necessary component and all pieces work together to create the solution, just like the gears of a clockwork hearts. Morever, the townfolk are also components in an even greater puzzle - the town itself. The town, a labyrinth worthy of Borges, is designed to protect Flora, the puzzlemakers daughter and the solution to his last and greatest puzzle. A puzzle is solved by a person worthy of its solution, almost by definition. By solving this labyrinth, Layton proves himself to be the worthy protector of Flora, the final puzzle's solution.

Story and game can serve each other, not simply through smooth integration, where the story and gameplay are interchangeable simply because by playing one engages in every act that is part of the story (for example, Doom is the story of a man shooting demons), but through thematic resonance. What do I mean by thematic resonance? I mean that the gameplay elements and story can interact in ways that go beyond simply being literal occurrences in game. Puzzles can provide compelling metaphors for soul-searching in Braid (I think that Jonathan Blow sells himself, and games in general, short in this regard) and they can provide, as they do in the Curious Village, for a vital element of the story itself; what seems like charming eccentricity at first, grows into something more as we realize that the loving care put into the puzzle's construction is fueled, not simply by an odd obsession with puzzles, but by the love of a man protecting his daughter in the only way he knows how.**

* One of the many reasons I love Planescape: Torment is because it is such a complete inversion of this convention, something I am certainly not alone in feeling.

** I actually have a little more to say on this point, but not really enough to justify not ending on that last sentence. You know, stuff like: blah blah a father's love is like artists love for blah blah blah, and also Faulkner.

In Which I NIER-ly Use a Horrible Pun In The Title

Following up on my previous post which offered a quasi-mean-spirited attack on a harmless flower in the guise of a meditation on art, I will praise NIER with such crazed enthusiasm that Seth Schiesel himself will demand I be sentenced to remedial keeping-things-in-proportion camp by the conservative wing of the Supreme Court.

I love NIER. I love NIER so much that I actually cultivated the freaking white moonflower. I love NIER so much I will actually admit that I cultivated the freaking white moonflower in a forum where non-blood relative ladies might theoretically be present (that forum = this blog? Holla!).

If my love for the game were a cumbersome and unwieldy sentence, that sentence would describe how it feels like the designers, fueled by just enough booze to instill the agape of the bar (but not so much that they began insisting that they weren't drunk), and moved, perhaps, by a maudlin tale of ill-starred lovers, sat down to make their assigned hack and slash and couldn't help but fill it with an abiding sadness for the waste inherent in all violence (especially the violence committed by you) tempered with a sense of playfulness implemented with with enough grace to generally avoid trivializing the characters and which, at the end, evokes a deep sympathy for all of us sentient beings and grief for our inability to feel this sympathy when it really matters.

NIER succeeds by doing the exact opposite of what Flower did. Flower set itself a heady, serious goal -- being poetry -- and failed because the seriousness of the goal weighed down the proceedings. Its tone was was hushed and breathless, reverent in the face of the holy muse. Consequently, its ideas are as boring as church.

NIER -- although by no means perfect (the fetch quests come perilously close to turning a perfectly lovely murder simulator into boooooring jogging/boar piloting simulator) -- does the opposite. It starts from a trifling premise and somehow builds into the kind of moving narrative that could only be done in a game. Simply because the designers had something to say and they said it through a video game.


SPOILER AHEAD*


There seems to be a rough consensus that video games as art will use the interactivity unique to games in order to convey meaning. So interactivity becomes the meter, rhyme and metaphor of games. When following this path, there is a tendency to focus on immersion and, as a result, to think that a game must make you feel like you, personally, are the protagonist. In other words games are always thought of as being in the first person. Even when the camera is in the third-person, the narrative, from a literary standpoint is usually assumed be told with the "I" pronoun. A result of this is that it is always the player doing something, not a character in the story. I think this shuts down one of the most potentially fruitful avenues of gaming meaninfulness.

What do games do best? Games can make the player complicit in the actions of the protagonist. Instead of offering the facile Bioware choice between hugging peasants and curb-stomping puppies (which after all allows you to role play, to pretend you are good or evil), NIER shows you how a single minded devotion to an apparently faultless cause can nontheless leadto an otherwise good person to commit atrocity after atrocity out of ignorance. The game leads you to sympathise very strongly with the lead character and his companions as they slaughter the demonic shadows preying upon the remnants of humanity. Then, in the course of the lead up to the final battle, your character learns that you and every other person in the game are artificial, cloned vessels designed to hold the spirits of what is left of humanity; the monstrous shadows that you have been fighting for decades, maybe even centuries. Of course, this twist is not exactly paradigm-shifting; the potential moral ramifications of this revelation are minimized by the seemingly mindless aggresson of the majority of the shadows.

What really elevates the game is the second playthrough, where the player learns, through the addition of new cutscenes and the occasional translation of shadow gibberish into language, that the shadows are much more nuanced characters than we were led to believe, often with sympathetic and even noble reasons for fighting. In fact, we may be the bad guys. We did, after all, slaughter thousands of sentient beings during our first playthrough -- many of them children -- and we will continue to do so throughout the next three. Perhaps we might defend ourselves by claiming we were unaware of the shadows' personhood at the time, but really couldn't we have learned that this was the case? There were clues, after all. Remember the shadow in the library that refused to attack? What about the young girl with the shadow friend you slaughtered? But no, we were blinded by our preconceptions, the same preconceptions underlying countless atrocities; we are innocent of wrongdoing because we intend no harm and, therefore, those who attack us do so out of malevolence alone.

Or maybe you aren't the villain, or at least a villain in the way we tend to find in the traditional videogame narrative. After all you were attacked first; the shadows want "their" bodies back, regardless of whether their bodies agree. You needed to save your daughter from a shadow trying to save its daughter from you. No, no one is any worse than anyone else in this game. There is no evil intent and no villains to carry it out. But neither are there heroes; just tragedy when different forms of life collide.

In short, NIER is a murder simulator that will make you feel, if you let it, the full weight of murder.

* and behind, sort of. It might be oblique enough that what it reveals is only apparent after its already been revealed. Zen koan for the day: If a spoiler can't be identified as a spoiler until one has played the game enough to recognize I am revealing a twist, is it really a spoiler? Probably not.