It’s interesting to ask how a videogame might be challenging like a book or movie, but I think it’s equally interesting to consider how books, movies, and poetry might be challenging like a videogame.
(droqen, in Difficult Poetry)
I love this!
I think sometimes poems are not straightforward, they are a bunch of playful words that sound good, that are nice ’cause they have some musicality (either explicit in a song, or just because they sound nice when readed). But they keep the meaning kinda hidden, they don’t point at it, they hint at it.
We discussed the game Gris with Stuffed Wombat and Mut the other day, and Mut quoted Anne Anthropy’s critique, where she said Gris talks about sadness and depression so metaphorically that it loses its meaning. But I think that’s just because it is like poetry. Not that far from your games Droq, or Wombat’s haha. Always Down (I just can’t stop thinking about that game) doesn’t use words, and the gamefeel is great; the musicality of the game is of a joyful, exploring-ful one (wonder-ful? lol). But the message behind it is very sad, and that is also conveyed through the mechanics, but it requires an active reading to get it. Just like a poem does.
Magical-realism writer Julio Cortázar talked about what he called the Active Reader, a concept that he came around when writing Hopscotch, a novel with optional chapters that you can chose to read or not in between the main ones, and starts with an prologue with an invitation to play (the title is no coincidence).
Literature is not an activity like those streets where cars can only go one way, that is, from the writer to the reader. It seems to me that in the 19th century romanticism tended to consider the creator as a kind of little god and the readers as the faithful who should receive the message of the little god. (…) Currently, between the writer and their readers there is, or may be, a dialectic, a very fruitful dynamic; in that sense you have to be careful that there is not a misunderstanding. It is not about writing for certain readers, because then you can fall into a didactic literature, (…) it is about writing with enough openness so that the reader is already a little bit in the book, is part of the book, has a responsibility as a reader in what they are reading. That’s what I tried to do in Hopscotch. It seemed to me that the reader I was interested in was a complicit reader, not in the sense that they should like my book (…) [but as a] reader that is a brotherly antagonist, a brother who I don’t know exactly who they are, but who is a bit fighting against me in the creative work.
(Julio Cortázar, in a TV interview, -Spanish in the original, translation by me-)
So, yeah, we need active and playful creatures. Because even if games demand interaction, you can totally be a passive player if you’re not willing to question the narrative in front of you. Having the game deliver you a meaningful meaning message is also an act of responsibility.
