Run and Jump: The Meaning of the 2D Platformer

[droqen]

66

The transition from inside to outside, or outside to inside, while similar to a cinematic cut, also differs in an important way. . . .
A cut does not suggest that the camera will return to the original shot, but a doorway does.

If a passage is bidirectional, then the interior is coupled to the exterior as a detour or bonus room. The freedom to go in and out poses the two spaces as distinct ways of viewing a linked world. . . .

if a door only goes one way . . . then the entrance takes on the quality of a forced alternative: either you take the path through the light world or the dark world, through the alleyway or through the streets.

In both cases, the associative logic creates a sense of anticipated return. If that expectation is thwarted, if the player never returns, then the frame tale remains unresolved and casts a pale light until its memory and influence fade.

[droqen]

I'm partway through this exercise and I don't like it as much as the first chapter's! I think it's theoretically interesting. But it isn't the kind of platformer that I want to make... hmm...

[droqen]

As with the last exercise or series of exercises, I chose something which, to me, appeared to push the boundaries of what the exercise was capable of handling reasonably.

Such reckless behaviour I allow myself to practice only because I temper it, too, with extreme thoughtfulness and openness of interpretation.

Here, now, I'm ready to answer as generously as possible the questions presented by McDonald of the exercise and my experience of it.

[droqen]

- I skipped the inside/outside portion of the exercise completely.
--> I think it fell too far outside my usual droqever-ing practice, although I did try to connect certain parts conceptually. Even this, I think I remember failing to some degree. Would it have been better? I'm not sure.
* I would like to play more with this indoor/outdoor connected feeling described in the book.

For each of
these outside areas, write a word or two about how they
should feel.

I wish I'd done this.

Discuss what elements of the story
survive the translation and which do not.

Did any elements survive the translation? It barely felt like a translation, I changed things and was not instructed not to change things. What did I keep, what did I, incidentally, happen to keep?

One of the more interesting parts of this exercise was actually breaking down such a vibey short story into elements, choosing a lens by which to understand it. I have read this short story a few times and I loved it but being asked to place it on a graph, to break it down into elements, to look for things that are repeated... I have an extremely different understanding of the story now. I wonder what it would be like to read it again? Now I think about the story as this graph that I made...

The book does not suggest I do this but I think I will have to read the short story while playing the game, to really see which elements 'survived' the 'translation'.

Off the top of my head some things are clear:
- not remembering (a common theme for me)
- a leaf
- stars

[droqen]

i don't think i succeeded at finding the right axis, but i did map the level to the axis in a way that i find satisfying, still. hm.

what survived? i'll have to think more about what can possibly be mapped to a vertical axis.

there is one more feeling that i think is definitely maintained, which is this feeling of helplessness, being tossed up and fallen down. you are in control sometimes but often it is forces outside of your control that push you up, that pull you down. and in play it feels fine, it feels good to me actually. it becomes something to look for and to master.

a very interesting exercise, in the end. i learned something for sure.

[droqen]

((notes from the subway this morning))

3   Philosophy of the Enemy
I'm extremely into this chapter already. It speaks of "the illusion of life" (82) and how technical elements (hello Boghog) break it, "flatten liveliness into function".

"As chapter 1 argues, action on a 2D plane is the language of platformers. Movement, force, and violence . . . Of all the objects that exist in a game space, enemies occupy it in a uniquely reciprocal fashion. . . . touch . . . collide . . . hurt . . . destroy . . . The player is passive in the same way an enemy is passive and active in the same way it is active." (82-83)

"A nonplayer character like Dr. Light speaks to Mega Man, but the player can never respond in kind. Other characters might sell an item or save the game, but the player rarely reciprocates these interactions." (83)

I am standing on the subway platform in a major city. The sadness that I feel reading these words is the sadness of living among people with whom I cannot have a meaningful relationship. It can be sad that, in platformers, the primary reciprocal relationship you can have with another being is with an 'enemy,' but perhaps this is simply a call to reframe my thinking about enemies. I LOVE this. I think of the drones in my fourth oubliette, the robot in my fifth. These are creatures with whom the player has a complex interactive relationship -- not symmetrical, but reciprocal.

NOT SYMMETRICAL, BUT RECIPROCAL.

"The platformer's generic emphasis on movement thus makes physical force into a medium of communication and exchange." (83)

I still continue to wonder on how to escape the medium's reliance on 'violent confrontations' over 'the proper uses of space'.

". . . fighting through hordes of robots reveals how these individual encounters belong within a complex system." (84)

--

"Games . . . treat ontology as a system. We never see the meaning of existence directly in an object, but rather
grasp its persistence as we
carry it around, or
see it age, or
bump it against something else.

. . . video games . . . novels . . . films, . . . establish their worlds by maintaining consistent rules across an entire work." (86)

---

"A traditional problem of epistemology is how we come to know that other people have minds like our own and, relatedly, whether animals and machines are conscious. . . . As coded, nothing in Mega Man X is intelligent. Yet these abstract patterns of movement on a screen coalesce into the feeling that we are dealing with another mind." (90)

Further on, there is a discussion of, more or less, the practical. An emotional viewpoint on what an enemy is feeling may provide a better way to foresee and therefore react to its behaviour. If knowing what the enemy does is a matter of life or death, the player pays close attention, and perhaps discovers the best way to pay close attention is to imbue them with life.

As a designer, there is perhaps a design goal to make that the case.

"Only across multiple repetitive encounters do enemies start to feel alive as the player is drawn to impute more agency to understand their actions." (91)

Multiple repetitive encounters. It takes time to get to know someone through the pattern of their movements and decisions.

---

an interesting note here. mcdonald describes the "economic" relationship the player has with enemies in Mega Man: you kill them and often get something in return. resources, a new ability, or progress. he says, "a health item simply sitting in the level inherits a little spark of danger and risk because it is so often part of encountering enemies." (95)

i pondered this and asked myself, is that true? Is it... and I can see it, right, it feels like a corpse, or i think about how i wish there had been a fight just before (say my health is full), or i reflect upon my lost health. These things have tentative relationships.

Then he says, "By establishing an economic relationship with the player's time and effort, the abstract pixels [that comprise an enemy] inherit a little bit of the player's own humanity." (97)

Boom, oof.

"this game economy seems cold and calculating. . . . the game seems to ask the player to treat the enemies as a utilitarian means to optimize . . . Enemies are no more inherently meaningful than the blocks of the landscape. . ." (96)

"Yet we can also see these encounters as producing meaning within [elements] that previously had no value for [or meaning to] the player" (96)

"the value of an enemy grows independent of the player and endows a virtual creature with life. If an enemy's life is worth only a modicum of health or space, that equivalence still connects the player's desires to the enemy's existence. The pure utilitarianism of game death contains the seeds of something else, where electronic life returns to confront the player as an independent force with its own demands." (97)

beautiful.

[droqen]

"Does the player find moments for growth or development?" (97)

[droqen]

"If the mechanics of jumping characterize a game's protagonist and level design builds a spatial narrative, then the enemies of a platformer embody its philosophy. A game frames its world in a particular way--excluding some kinds of beings, ideas, feelings, and values whole also creating others that have never existed in the real world. . . . Collectively, enemies form a semiotic system by relating things with consistency, necessitating creative leaps of abstraction, characterizing objects through relations, and establishing ideals." (102)

[droqen]

omfg it's exercise time i'm excited

[droqen]

"The following exercises are meant to bridge the philosophy of enemies with specific design choices about enemy abilities and statistics. They are designed to express a worldview. . . . Before you begin, brainstorm the problems and ideas you want your game to evoke"

[droqen]

wow dude goes straight into three examples that go hard
Panpsychism, Platonism, and Communism.
Then I will obviously go with anarchy? i won't describe here.

[droqen]

--previous process interrupted.

what are the basic bits of existence in a platformer? not the player's 'verbs' -- but consider the reciprocation that McDonald identifies as crucial to the depth of the player-enemy relationship. for this reciprocation to function, player and enemies must share some 'language of existence'. an objective value structure.

[droqen]

exploring anarchy -- or this particular take on it anyway:

"no individual has the right to coerce another individual"

-- perhaps requires an escape from mcdonald's list of platformer mechanics which involve aggression and indeed the label 'enemy'? at least, at a basic level.

[droqen]

but this is a negating principle, one that removes a concept (coercion) without defining a positive space, something to focus on.
in a platformer, the most basic facts of existence ("objective value structures") are position/movement and existence/nonexistence. a thing exists or does not exist; a thing moves this way or that way and is somewhere. the obvious interactions then involve every state change related to these basic parameters.

-> get faster
-> get slower
-> change position
-> change direction
-> 'collide'
-> begin existing
-> cease to exist

[droqen]

this book, Run and Jump: The Meaning of the 2D Platformer, accepts the basic facts of what it is to be a platformer...

i am not ready to do this. i am, instead, ready to redefine the set of what we judge to be valuable, in order to find a new genre in which the mechanical transformations individuals perform, and enact upon one another, are of thematic interest to me. and i suppose i am also ready to discover that mechanical transformations are fundamentally incapable of having thematic relevance, which is my unpleasant suspicion, but i do wish not to presume.