Mastering the puppet

You’re a slave to love, the grind, or 
’80s metal, sure – but are you also a slave to videogames? It’s a familiar critique (“You’re not playing the game; the 
game is playing you”), but one that seems increasingly to the point. Take the fashion 
for motion control. If you are sprawled at princely ease, pressing small buttons to 
achieve dramatic effects, then you are in command. By contrast, if you have to use 
your whole body as the controller, you are 
a slave, just in the way that slaves in the 
ancient world were valued to the extent that they were bodies from which a certain amount of physical work could be extracted before their unmourned demise.

The Wii or Kinect or Move system dilutes one of the core pleasures of videogaming: amplification of input, the translation of tiny physical actions into complex or forceful virtual performance. Lara Croft, or that bland-faced sociopath who is the ‘hero’ of Uncharted: they are your puppets, performing impressive acrobatics for little cost of effort on your part; but if you had to imitate all their actions physically, you would be just as much a puppet as they are. Think of Jack Black in the Orange cinema advert, suspended on Lilliputian strings: “I don’t wanna do this dance! I don’t wanna 
do this dance!” Well, I don’t want to do that dance either.

In another way, it must be admitted that 
we are all slaves to (or in developed game economies, employees of) the Big Boss, the overarching design of a game that hauls us 
from one place to the other and decides how everything will end. So is it really a coincidence that the theme so many games, as well as a repetitive mechanic, is that of escape? Escape from a prison or a dungeon or an asylum; escape from one level or world to the next; escape from this arbitrarily locked area once you have defeated the achingly tedious monster that the designers, presumably drunk, thought it would be more ‘fun’ to fight if you had to hit its weak point 3,000 sodding times.

Yes, our favourite escapism is escapology. Dead Nation’s core delirious challenge is to escape from one part of a confined space to another while hundreds of zombies try to eat you, and then to escape to the next checkpoint and gun shop. LittleBigPlanet 2’s ready-made levels are nothing more than a series of pretty escapes. Most of the time, we are not so much adventuring or exploring as just trying to get the hell out. It is as though games are sympathetically acknowledging and gently satirising our plight as players, voluntarily enslaved in an imaginary prison. We are encouraged to be a million little Spartacuses, smashing our way out of the system of brutal entertainment that has become our home. The reward for finishing a game is, finally, that you can turn it off.

The genre that dramatises this paradox 
most effectively is the locked-room puzzler 
(or ‘room escape game’), as exemplified by a cult-classic quadrilogy from the middle of 
the last decade: Toshimitsu Takagi’s Crimson Room, Viridian Room, Blue Chamber and 
White Chamber. Simple point ’n’ click Flash games, they have the feel of weird short 
stories, expertly combining the mundane (a near-featureless hotel room; a white office that seems to be in an underground car-park) with the eerie. The sense of unease is even enhanced by the not-quite-perfect English of the text: the second game begins by announcing, starkly: “Successfully getting out of CRIMSON ROOM, you called yourself ‘ESCAPER.’ But, a person cannot escape from oneself.”

The player of these games is certainly enslaved, obliged to perform demeaning tasks such as pixel-hunting for the tiny patch on 
the screen that will open a new perspective 
or uncover a hidden device, and only ever able to combine objects in the one way that the designer has chosen beforehand. You only get out, in the end, because he lets you – and even then it might be a trick.

These crude clickers boast nothing of what we celebrate in modern videogaming: freedom, large toysets, emergent complexity and the rest. But it is worth being made to think about how open ‘openness’ really is by playing games that are so suffocatingly, claustrophobically closed. The one dimension along which you are free 
in these games (with the exception of a single puzzle that has become notorious) is time: 
there is plenty of time to look around and 
think, to solve the ingenious memory and number puzzles, and to meditate on the 
creepy feeling that you are not just accidentally locked in a room; you have been deliberately trapped there, along with the tools to get out, by an alien intelligence that is enjoying watching you squirm.

At least Crimson Room and its successors make it absolutely clear where you stand: 
you are a prisoner and a slave. In all too 
many other games, you might be both without knowing it.

Steven Poole is the author of Trigger Happy: The Inner Life of Videogames. Visit his website at www.stevenpoole.net, or read and follow his other columns on his topic page.