The Game Behind The Game
As stated previously, effective games must provide enough confusion to challenge, and enough order to bewitch the player into the belief that success can be achieved with enough persistence. Thus, the player must understand the rules and limits of the game before they begin. Nonetheless, placing a player in a game that is many games at once, without flooding him/her with rules, counter rules, and extraneous details, is possible. For instance, even if basic game play does not change with revisitation, allegoric landscape or architecture begs ongoing reinterpretation and reevaluation. As Julian Stallabras indicates in her essay “Just Gaming: Allegory and Economy in Computer Games:”
…In computer games, scale, complexity, the number of characters and the size of the playing area, are still celebrated as intrinsically positive points, partly because hardware and software restrict these factors, but also because of their allegorical aspect…
Moreover, as Jencks reveals: “This is an obvious part of the fun… Detective work, or playing the game of “Hunt the Symbol”, is one of the great pleasures of looking at symbolic architecture…” (30) Pushed further, a game might offer game play that changes, within subtle parameters, depending on how the player interprets their environment, either as virtual landscape attached to a specific storyline, as symbolic manifestation of a character’s inner turmoil, or as social commentary. Freeman confirms:
Another advantage to using symbols in game design is that games often offer an opportunity that films do not. In film, symbols, when used artfully, enhance emotional depth… when used in games, symbols can not only perform this function, but can also be used or given a function in gameplay as well.
In any case, games that go beyond point A, obstacle courses, or even the moral ramifications of navigation and interaction suggest something more: a game behind the game, a deeper reality beyond the virtual fireworks. Such a game could provoke questions about the nature of reality. They might inspire and enlighten. For instance, Murray Stein, in his book Jung’s Map of the Soul, describes how symbols and allegory wield incredible power over the imagination of both the individual and the masses: “Images and ideas powerfully motivate the ego and generate values and meanings. …the influence of archetypes leads to being caught up in big ideas and visions… the ego is taken over, possessed, and driven.” (100) On the other hand, Jencks warns: “We read everything we see for its significance and are frustrated when our environment does not fit together and reward our expectation that life is meaningful.” (35)
Of all games, Tim Schafer’s Psychonauts (2005) has pushed the psycho-symbolic potential of game environments furthest. The player assumes the identity of Razputin, or Raz for short, a ten-year-old circus refugee searching for acceptance at a top-secret summer camp for psychic children. As he explores the campus grounds, an unsettling conspiracy unfolds. Apparently a thief runs amok, and he is after the children’s brains. In order to stay atop the rigorous curriculum and unravel the plot, Raz must expand his psychic potential and infiltrate the minds of his professors, as well as those of the local insane asylum (Fig. 31). Thus each level is a new mind; each mind a new experience, possessed by its own architecture, aesthetics, and symbolism. For instance, the mind of Secret agent Sasha Nein is a massive rotating cube patterned with deco-inspired black and white circuitry (Fig. 32). His worst fears include gaudy art nouveaux lamps, which Raz must obliterate with fire-inducing thoughts. Moreover, Nein fears loosing control, which happens after Raz is instructed to shut down all of Nein’s censor “valves”. On the other hand, secret agent Milla Vodello’s mental realm is a perpetual party. Although there are few inner censors to quell, navigation is frustrated by loopy obstacles, curvaceous contours and a psychedelic light show (Fig. 33). Through allegorical forms, spaces, and landmarks, Nein is revealed a restrained and neurotically repressed individual, whereas Milla is revealed a haphazard and lusty one.
While the game is essentially an action-oriented third person shooter, it is nonetheless many games at once. This quality is apparent in the changing game play dynamics from level to level and mind to mind. In one level, Raz rampages Godzilla-like through the shrunken streets of Lungfishopolis, a symbolic manifestation of the mind of a mutant Lungfish (Fig 34). In another mind-level, Raz must shrink to the size of a chess pawn, and use telekinesis to manipulate figures on a toy battlefield (Fig. 35). But Psychonauts is also many games at once because it provides many levels of interpretation. On one level, it is a straightforward adventure, in which a hero must triumph over obvious evils. On another level, the environment requires the player, in a very dynamic way, to engage in an unfolding virtual metaphor describing the essential relationship between Raz and the individual whose mind he invades, or the relationship between the individual with himself or herself. For instance, Lungfishopolis reveals the truth of a common proverb: “It turns out the lungfish is more afraid of Raz than anything else.” (Goldstein) Through the metaphor of the toy battlefield, Raz interferes with the inner turmoil of a man tormented by delusions of megalomania and a debilitating inferiority complex.
Each mental arena isn’t just a pretty design… Schafer and company went in-depth with the psychology of each character. Everyone has some major mental hurdle they are dealing with and in order to proceed, Raz must solve these mental roadblocks. (Goldstein)
Although the rules of game play do not change with revisitation, revisitation is generally required, as every level, in addition to being an obstacle course, is a scavenger hunt. Raz must explore and collect dream figments, mental cobwebs, emotional baggage, and primal memories. In so doing, he cleans up messy mental states and provides therapeutic relief. This is a possible example of what Colin Harvey, in his Pop Matters editorial “Always Take The Weather With You”, calls:
Images, visual or audible, which convey more than simply plot information or characterization and which refer to the wider themes of the imaginary world playing before us. Think about it. Games where texture is about more than just texture mapping.
The game shifts from being a series of allegories describing the anxieties of certain eccentric individuals, to a game about self-improvement, with lessons that might be applied even to the player himself or herself. The game is thus a comment on human fantasy, on self-inspection, and on the human hunger for interaction and exploration. It provides a unique perspective on people, pain, and the transforming and supernatural power of compassion.
