Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Bioshock and Atlas Shrugged and minor spoilers for The Fountainhead.

"The creator served nothing and no one. He had lived for himself."

-Howard Roark, The Fountainhead^[1]

As the years go by, games date. They rust and rot, and what once seemed like a fluid system of interaction can decay into something clunky and shiftless. Touches that were revolutionary in their day become moth-eaten or discarded to the scrap pile of the medium's history. But now and then, a game comes out that doesn't just stand the test of time but also sets a bar by which other games angle their ambitions for years to come. To this day, there may be no other game that has expressed the history of its setting through design, audio logs, and world-building as deftly and vigorously as Bioshock. It's fair to say that Irrational's morbid dystopia of Rapture has left a mark, but as a political treatise, Bioshock has rarely been given its full due. Because the game's architecture, interior design, mechanics, and character design are transmitters for its politics, we can't understand the full triumph of Rapture until we understand its subtext. What's more, the most common interpretation of Bioshock, that it's a commentary on the relationship between developers and players, has never made sense. Let's start at the beginning.

Part I: Atlantis

At least two-thirds of Bioshock is a critique of Ayn Rand's philosophy of objectivism, with a particular interest in her 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged. Rand was born in Russia in 1905, and so, came of age around the time the Soviet Union was established (1922). She later emigrated to the US, where she spent most of her life, and became a vocal critic of big government and avid cheerleader for laissez-faire capitalism, apparently due to her experiences in the USSR. Rand used fiction as a vessel for these opinions, and perhaps her most famous novel was the dystopian satire Atlas Shrugged.^[2][3] In it, a railroad tycoon by the name of Dagny Taggart attempts to connect a near-future America by train, but encounters considerable resistance from union workers and an interventionist nanny state which keeps assuming control of successful companies' property.

Atlas Shrugged's world is buckling at its knees as its top minds vanish to parts unknown, but the people Taggart encounters dismiss difficult questions about current events with the rhetorical phrase "Who is John Galt?" Taggart comes to realise that the best and brightest have cashed out of the social order to retreat to a creator's paradise called Galt's Gulch. This utopia was founded by visionary millionaire John Galt and is chiming and sparking with technologies of our wildest dreams, including one that keeps it invisible to the outside world. The novel is also addicted to comparing the Gulch to the mythical city of Atlantis, with the most verbose instance being the following passage:^[4]

"John Galt was a millionaire, a man of inestimable wealth. He was sailing his yacht one night, in [the] mid-Atlantic, fighting the worst storm ever wreaked upon the world, when he found it. He saw it in the depth, where it had sunk to escape the reach of men. He saw the towers of Atlantis shining on the bottom of the ocean. It was a sight of such kind that when one had seen it, one could no longer wish to look at the rest of the earth. John Galt sank his ship and went down with his entire crew."^[5]

Galt is Rand's mouthpiece, with the novel including an infamous sixty-page speech in which he rattles off all of the author's views to the reader.^[6] This tract is part of the ending in which the egoistic geniuses emerge from Galt's Gulch to reclaim what they believe is rightfully theirs. The novel is reflective of Rand's idea that everything from our technologies to our art to our economies are possible due to extraordinary people realising personal visions: our Michelangelos, our Nikola Teslas, our Henry Fords, and so on. Therefore, any government attempt to intervene in their work is tantamount to throwing a spanner into societal progress, and risks pushing away the individuals we need most. Because of her belief that society rests on the backs of the most intelligent and driven acting according to "rational self-interest", she promoted "the virtue of selfishness" and was a fierce opponent of altruism. She wadded up all these ideas into a big ball we call objectivism.^[3][7][8]

Rand's ideas became influential for many libertarians, conservatives, and generally, supporters of free-market capitalism.^[9][10] There have long been right-wing and left-wing intellectuals and fiction writers, but there have never been many philosophers telling you that selflessness is bad and greed is good. For people who believe this, Rand is a figure of worship. She also found a seat in American capitalist spheres partly as a result of the Cold War. Here was a Soviet immigrant gazing back in horror at the system she emerged from while championing capitalism as doggedly as anyone could.^[9][11]

It's necessary to be mindful of the lessons that objectivism teaches because this isn't just an ideology that guys in tweed jackets are arguing about in dusty university offices. It's a model of society that's influenced some of the people with the most power over American and UK politics and economics. Alan Greenspan, the Chair of the US Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006, was famously part of Rand's inner circle and ushered America towards a laissez-faire capitalism consummate with her ideals.^[12] Ronald Reagan said he was an admirer of Rand.^[13] Paul Ryan, the former Speaker of the House and Head of the House Budget Committee, has described objectivism as formative of his worldview and says that Rand is required reading for all his staff. Three-time US presidential candidate Ron Paul and his son Senator Rand Paul were both inspired by objectivism.^[13] So was former CIA Director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Ex-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson named Atlas Shrugged as his favourite book. Donald Trump has recommended Rand's The Fountainhead before, which may not be out of personal experience; it's hard to imagine Trump reading for more than minutes at a time, but he at least knows that in entrepreneurial politics, that's the book you're meant to say you like.^[12]

Former UK Chancellor of the Exchequer and Secretary for Health and Social Care Sajid Javid, said that the film adaptation of Rand's The Fountainhead "was articulating what I felt." The same is true of billionaire and Paypal Co-Founder Peter Thiel, who is also trying to fund a private libertarian nation in the middle of the ocean.^[12] Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak said that Atlas Shrugged was "a guide" for technology pioneer Steve Jobs. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas loves Rand so much that he screens The Fountainhead film for his staff annually. In the UK, Ayn Rand was made compulsory reading for all A-level politics students. If Rand's worldview is as toxic as her critics claim, then there are people out there who are doing a whole lot of damage with it. Bioshock proposes that if Rand's proposals ever became a reality, society would fall into shambles. It believes it would be "Rapture": the end of the world.

Part II: Rapture

Bioshock first released in 2007, and the most important things to understand about it are that its sunken city of Rapture is Galt's Gulch and that the initial antagonist, Andrew Ryan, is John Galt. Due to Galt being a Rand self-insert, this transitively means that Ryan is also Ayn. They're both ideologues whose principles were apparently shaped by having the products of their labour taken away from them in Soviet Russia and who fled to America only to become concerned about the dangers of that country not being invested enough in deregulated capitalism.^[3][14] Ryan's forename rhymes with Ayn's, and Ayn Rand is a near-anagram to Andrew Ryan. Like Rand, Ryan believes that unregulated "rational self-interest" is what drives society forwards, saying:

"I believe in no God, no invisible man in the sky. But there is something more powerful than each of us, a combination of our efforts, a Great Chain of industry that unites us. But it is only when we struggle in our own interest that the chain pulls society in the right direction. The chain is too powerful and too mysterious for any government to guide."^[15]

Rand and Ryan also both believe in free-market competition as a constructive force that the government should not meddle with.^[3] When a businessman, Gregory, complains to Ryan about the company Fontaine Futuristics, Ryan retorts with:

"Don't come whining to me about market forces. And don't expect me to punish citizens for showing a little initiative. If you don't like what Fontaine is doing, well, I suggest you find a way to offer a better product."^[16]

Rand and Ryan are also united by their intolerance of state benefits and wealth redistribution.^[14] As Ryan rattles out in a couple of recordings:

"The parasite expects the doctor to heal them for free, the farmer to feed them out of charity. How little they differ from the pervert who prowls the streets, looking for a victim he can ravish for his grotesque amusement."^[17]

"What is the difference between a man and a parasite? A man builds. A parasite asks, "Where is my share?"^[18]

And from Rand:

"The creator originates, the parasite borrows. [...] The creator lives for his work. [...] The parasite lives second-hand."^[19]

For John Galt, these beliefs were the impetus for commissioning Galt's Gulch, while the same ideas moved Andrew Ryan to found the libertarian paradise of Rapture. Like Galt's Gulch, Rapture is a gated community for trail-blazing dream-makers to move mountains unimpeded by their peers or by religious or governmental authority. Ryan most famously summarises this vision in his opening speech:

"Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? "No," says the man in Washington, "it belongs to the poor." "No," says the man in the Vatican, "it belongs to God." "No," says the man in Moscow, "it belongs to everyone." I rejected those answers. Instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose Rapture. A city where the artist would not fear the censor. Where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality. Where the great would not be constrained by the small."^[20]

Just as the inventors under Galt use futuristic electronics to hide Galt's Gulch, the engineers serving Ryan do the same with Rapture. Rapture is a subaquatic city of gleaming skyscrapers sunken into the bed of the mid-Atlantic. Compare this to Atlas Shrugged, where Galt's Gulch is an analogue for an Atlantis of resplendent towers, said to have sprouted after Galt's ship sank in the mid-Atlantic. The difference between Rand's Gulch and Irrational's Rapture is that while the Gulch prospers, when we arrive in Rapture, all social order has disintegrated, and the city is locked in an unending interpersonal war. Bioshock realises what Ayn does not: that saying Galt "went down with his ship" implies a failed venture. The myth of Atlantis was always meant to end in drowning. The earliest sources we have mentioning the island are Plato's Timaeus and Critias, in which he describes it as a utopian island, first ruled by a king named Atlas.^[21] Atlantis amasses a vast wealth and superficially appears full of fine, upstanding people, but in truth, their riches had corrupted them. A natural disaster cast the island to the depths of the sea, with the Critias hinting that this was the judgment of the gods.^[22]

We enter Rapture as "Jack", a courier with no prior knowledge of the city whose plane came down over the settlement. Within, the halls and atria are overrun with Splicers, people who have undergone life-altering genetic mutation through the use of Rapture's revolutionary biotech products. They're well-armed, they can shoot lightning and flame for their hands, and the only way Jack can survive is to fight fire with fire. He warps himself biologically, loots anything not nailed down, and shoots anything that moves.

As Jack, we are as reliant on Atlas as a baby to a parent. Atlas is a working-class hero who knows Rapture like the back of his hand and who lends us his protection in exchange for us trying to save his family. Yet, the more time we spend trying to break the impregnable fortress of Rapture, the more attention we attract from Ryan, who makes it his personal mission to take us out. Over the course of the game, it becomes clear how Rapture fell, which is to say, that over the playtime of Bioshock, the game makes a case for why an objectivist society is doomed to discount the wellbeing of its citizens, and ultimately, implode because it does.

Part III: Happy New Year, 1959

As we collect audio logs, a picture forms of Ryan's free-market utopia failing to provide a foundation for its citizens' creative and business plans due to structural issues in its society. Bill McDonagh is the man who headed much of Rapture's construction, and when severe infrastructure issues arise, he brings it to management's attention, only to have his warnings fall on deaf ears. From the audio log, "Freezing Pipes":

"Steinman, I know Medical Pavilion is your manor, but you might want to cogitate on this: ocean water is colder than a witch's tit. You don't heat the pipes, the pipes freeze. Pipes freeze, pipes burst. Then Rapture leaks. [...] Once Rapture starts leaking, the old girl's never gonna stop. And then I'll be sure to tell Ryan he's got you to thank."^[23]

And from "Eden Leaking":

"The irrigation system in Arcadia is taking on seawater. I told Mr. Ryan when we were building this place, either you build her like a bathtub, or she's gonna turn into a sewer. "No, McDonagh," he said, "we're not gonna build no bathtub… We're gonna build Eden."^[24]

Disconnected from the manual labour class and serving as a purely abstract economist, Ryan is unable to deal with the fact that his city is a material place. He can only view it as a theoretical, something metaphysical that doesn't exist in the physical dimension: an Eden, Arcadia, or Atlantis. But if your ideology doesn't account for physical realities, it's not worth a damn. As Ryan fails to recognise that his city is somewhere engineered, it falls into disrepair, and everyone pays the price.

We should also note that Andrew Ryan tells us his metropolis is a place for the sharp-minded to capture their dreams, and McDonagh is obviously an intelligent man thinking about the city's stability in the long term. Despite that, he doesn't get to achieve his vision of working plumbing and strong walls because figures more senior than him control the resources necessary for his work. The game gives us another vantage point on this problem with Julie Langford, a botanist who grows for Ryan. Rapture needed a steady supply of oxygen, and so, Ryan hired her to plant a forest in Rapture: Arcadia. Ryan privatises the woods, against the wishes of Langford, but Langford knows she can't safely object to this takeover because Ryan holds power over her by paying her salary:

"Today Arcadia was closed off to all but paying customers. The man hires me to build a forest at the bottom of the ocean, and then turns a walk in the woods into a luxury. Ryan asked, "Should a farmer not be able to sell his food?" "Is a potter not entitled to a profit from his pots?" I started to argue with the man and then I remembered who signed my checks."^[25]

Is Langford also not a visionary who, contrary to Ryan's promises, doesn't retain the sweat of her brow? Ryan lording his position over McDonagh and Langford highlights a fault in how he attributes credit for creations. The founder refers to Rapture as "his city", something he built, and given that, Ryan figures that the city, or at very least, Arcadia, is his to do with what he pleases.^[26] But we never see Ryan with a trowel or a spanner in his hand. As dock worker, Peach Wilkins points out:

"He's up in Fort Frolic banging fashion models... We're down in this dump yanking guts outta fish."^[27]

Bioshock's observations about labour are at odds with how we generally attribute works. It's easy to write that the first automobiles were produced from the desk of a genius Henry Ford, but those cars wouldn't exist if it weren't for the men who formed, screwed, welded, and stitched them into existence. You might win a point in a pub quiz for saying that Michelangelo is responsible for the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but what about the people who mixed Michelangelo's paints or constructed the church that became his canvas? What about the workers who fed, clothed, and provided roads for those workers?

Bioshock acknowledges the reality that it's not just the guys they build statues of that have a hand in the most respected human endeavours. Gardeners, plumbers, the people gutting fish, and other workers lower down the totem pole left their fingerprints on them as well. This collective nature of human creation has two fatal implications for objectivism.

1. It's not just the "great men" in their studios and executive suites that make our grandest discoveries and constructions possible. Therefore, we can't say that civilisation must sacrifice everything at the feet of those men to be able to perpetuate and better itself.
2. In Randian ethics, creators of works should retain ownership of those works and any profit derived from them. However, if all these people beyond the commissioners and architects had a hand in them, then shouldn't those labourers be joint owners of the products and services? Rand's logic would seem to lead us right into the arms of the socialism she abhors.^[28] Stubborn in the face of these contradictions, Ryan uses his tremendous wealth to absorb other peoples' enterprises into his own. He becomes the pervasive appropriator of others' property that he and Ayn accuse their ideological opponents of being.

Even this inequality is still Rapture at its most just because we're describing the city pre-collapse. The end begins with Frank Fontaine, a shrewd businessman and head of the biotech company Fontaine Futuristics. One day, his researcher, Brigid Tenenbaum, discovers that a species of Sea Slug living near Rapture excretes a chemical they come to call ADAM. ADAM has the potential to reprogram human DNA. So begins a line of products, "plasmids", which grant people superpowers through selective mutation.^[29][30]

As we experience through the gameplay systems, ADAM is effectively a genetic currency that allows users to "purchase" plasmids into their bodies. As the demand for this mutagen surged, Tenenbaum proved that she could up the ADAM yield from slugs by implanting them in pre-pubescent girls. Fontaine effectively kidnapped subjects for this procedure by setting up a franchise of fake orphanages. The girls hosting the molluscs were called "Little Sisters", with the company recovering its genetic potion from them by inducing vomiting.^[31] The name of the Little Sisters is an inversion of George Orwell's "Big Brother". If Big Brother is the ultimate authority, then the Little Sisters are the ultimate victims of authority. They also play with the idea of the worker in a right-libertarian society being not just exploited but infantilised.

As it transpired, overuse of plasmids causes psychosis in its users, but Fontaine Futuristics pushed on, regardless, with the Little Sisters programme kept under wraps.^[31][32] As an increasing number of citizens were left impoverished by Ryan's cutthroat economics, Fontaine also opened up homes for the poor in an attempt to win the hearts of the hungry.^[33] When the market again dictated that the supply of ADAM sharply increase, Fontaine's biologist Yi Suchong worked out that he could psychologically condition Little Sisters to scavenge ADAM from dead bodies. Suchong grafted Splicers into diving suits, "Big Daddies", and assigned them the duty of protecting Little Sisters from anyone who'd kill a Little Sister to sup the ADAM within.^[32][34][35]

With the most prized resources and commodities on lock, Fontaine had created a monopoly that was eating Ryan's lunch.^[33][36][37] He'd also been running a side operation via the city docks, smuggling in contraband from the surface, which was really just any product from the surface. Ryan forbade contact with countries outside Rapture as it had the potential to expose the city and open it up to the regulatory processes he so despised. He instituted a controversial death penalty for smugglers, and later, ordered a raid on Fontaine Fisheries, causing a shootout which, to outside observers, killed Fontaine.^{[36][38][39][40]} In actuality, Fontaine escaped and established a new identity as Atlas, the leader of the anti-Ryan resistance. "Who is Atlas?" became a ubiquitous phrase around the city, just as "Who is John Galt?" did in Atlas Shrugged's US.^[41][42]

To reassert his control over Rapture's economy and fill the empty chair at the head of Fontaine Futuristics, Ryan assumed ownership of the firm. He did this against the best advice of McDonagh, who told him to deliver Rapture to Atlas's supporters.^[37][43][44] Ryan had turned a blind eye to Rapture's poverty and instituted capital punishment; the people were already losing sympathy for him.^{[16][27][39][45]} When he, as head of state, took Fontaine Futuristics, it was a betrayal of the principles he founded the city on, and it became the final straw. A faction became convinced that Ryan had nothing to offer the people, while Fontaine/Atlas promised refuge and empowerment.^{[33][40][42][43][46][47][48][49][50]}

With the business that manufactured ADAM under his belt, Ryan's eyes were opened to the secret of the Little Sisters. He was disturbed by this discovery but wasn't going to knock out the axles of the economy.^[51] When Rapture's best and brightest met at a New Year's Eve party in the Kashmir restaurant, Atlas's people bombed the establishment, lighting the touchpaper of civil unrest. On December 31st, 1958, a riot started in Rapture and never stopped.^[48][52] Because progress in the city stopped hard at this verge of the calendar flipping over, there's this theme of it being pregnant with a future that never arrives. As civil war gripped the city and plasmids became the weapons of that war, Ryan shut himself away behind a series of security measures that would respond only to his genetic code, creating a stalemate between him and Atlas.^{[24][44][49][53][54][55][56]} It was time for Atlas to trigger his ace in the hole.

Part IV: The Ocean on His Shoulders

Bioshock makes considerable use of irony to criticise objectivist ideals. In the Ancient Greek myth of Atlas, Atlas is a titan that holds up the heavens. In Atlas Shrugged, it is the captains of industry that embody Atlas: they carry a great weight on their shoulders. If they should ever shake off that weight, the sky would fall in on society, which is what happens: Galt and his ilk leave America to languish; Atlas shrugs. In Rapture, the sky also appears to be falling. The city is under water pressure in a similar way that it is under social and economic pressure, and eventually, its knees buckle, and it succumbs. Rapture's sky comes gushing in through the glass panes. Lots of video games have buildings with cracks and holes, but Bioshock draws attention to these fractures by having water spurt like blood from them and distort your vision if it enters your eyes.

In Bioshock, unlike in Rand's novel, the sky doesn't fall in because of the absence of elites or excessive shackling of them. Instead, it's because of the toxic exploitation of elites and the lack of any safeguards against it. In fact, the ones screwing together the tubes which held up Rapture's sky were the manual labourers like Bill McDonagh. It's similarly implied that Rapture's construction yielded to the ocean because big wigs like Steinman and Ryan didn't listen to McDonagh when he told them its pipes were bursting. This neglect mirrors Ryan's purposeful ignorance of the discontent in the city and how it comes back to bite him. In line with objectivist reasoning, Ryan thinks that as long as he placates Rapture's ivory tower, the wheels of the civilisation will stay greased. Bioshock points out that you need more than champagne for the upper crust to keep a society ticking over. It does that by showing that a society might implode because its leaders agitate the average joes to the point that they rebel.

That agitation is a triad of Ryan failing to shelter Rapture's most fragile, Atlas playing the poor off against Ryan, and Ryan's hypocrisy earning the ire of his former supporters. Now, maybe you could argue that another objectivist could stick to their principles over their greed and not swat the invisible hand of the market as Ryan does. But Bioshock indicates a conflict between Rand's belief in a free market and her belief that everyone must be able to pursue "rational self-interest". If you're an industrialist who wants to make maximum profit, it's in your interests for the market not to be free but to be forced to make the decisions that benefit you. If you want to maximise profits, your economic goal is in conflict with that of everyone else trying to do the same. At those divergences, one person must quash another person's ability to act selfishly.

Because altruism is forbidden, it's justifiable for you to use any means to pursue that profit, including the state intervention that objectivism rules out. It is in Ryan's self-interest to move into Fontaine's old business like a hermit crab and to overrule Langford's policy for Arcadia. If he didn't abuse his seat at the head of government to do this, he would violate the Randian prioritisation of rational self-interest. Yet, if he does bring the might of the state down on Fontaine and Langfords' heads, then he violates the Randian prohibition against imposing limitations through the government.

On the obverse side, Fontaine's business strategies show that charity and self-interest are not mutually exclusive. Fontaine, and plenty of other capitalists, invest both in products and in winning hearts and minds, giving them a bigger slice of the market. He provides another parable of irreconcilable conflicts in objectivism. Objectivism says Fontaine should pursue his interests, which involve integrating charity into his business, which is against Ayn's rules, but if he dropped the philanthropy, he wouldn't be selfishly pursuing his own ends, which is also what objectivism orders.

A few times, it's also the case that allowing go-getters to build the business that they want and permitting unfettered market competition are two diktats at odds with each other, even without the state involved. Promoters of free-market economics often say that market competition is the enabler of businesspeople, but in Rapture, we can see how that might not be true. Fontaine's monopoly blocks other entrepreneurs who wish to take a bite out of the market, and we hear that in the shopkeeper Gregory being run out of business by him. Later, the game opines that with a large enough sack of capital, even a Randian visionary like Ryan might be smothered under the weight of an economic competitor.

While Ryan employs a rabidly right-wing approach to economics, his reasoning actually starts with the same worry as many of those with radically left-wing economic stances. Looking in our rearview to the opening speech, we see Ryan is concerned about the appropriation of labour. He's worried about powerful people hijacking labourers' work and taking the products of it from them. He's scared of those products being stolen by the state, by the church, and even by the population. A statue of him appears at the entrance to Rapture, holding a banner that reads "No gods, no kings, only men". This is very similar to the old anarchist slogan, "No gods, no masters".^[57] Yet, unlike the left, Ryan never stops to consider that peoples' opportunity to work and possess the result of that work could be impinged on by other businesspeople. Bioshock says that it's this blindspot in objectivism, which means that Randian trailblazers can become the exact tyrants that Ayn is claiming to free people from.

Another irreconcilable conflict of Randian thinking: How do you reinforce objectivist behaviour if a lack of state intervention is one of the pillars of your philosophy? I don't want to caricature Rand; she wouldn't have approved of Atlas's use of deceit to summit Rapture's markets. Rand believed that lying was categorically wrong as, according to her, honesty is a virtue.^[3] However, it's not clear how Rand or Ryan would resolve the fact that the lies are part of Fontaine's entrepreneurial vision. And if you're going to rule out the possibility of government oversight or regulation, it doesn't matter how much you believe people should tell the truth or avoid inserting safeguards into a market; you don't have a way for the societal apparatus to check what companies are doing or to curtail any anti-free market behaviour.

Similarly, there's Ryan's conundrum of how to rule on Fontaine Fisheries' smuggling operation. If Ryan doesn't stop Frank's men, then perhaps the surface world finds Rapture and tries to insert some guard rails into its economy, which would violate objectivist guidelines. On the other hand, if Ryan does stop Frank's traffickers, then he's the governmental entity regulating the business of the country, which is also anti-objectivist. All these paradoxes demonstrate that the problem is not just that Ryan is doing objectivism wrong but that no one could do it right. Rand will never get her Atlantis, and Ryan will never get his Arcadia or Eden because these places are myths. As Ryan told us, he "chose the impossible"; he chose the end of the world.

Ayn and Andrew idolise the image of the CEO messiah who will deliver the market the product that revolutionises life in their society. In Bioshock, the Rand stand-in gets their dream, they get their Atlas, but far from this person bringing about a libertarian utopia, a real-life Atlas turns out to be their worst enemy. When Bioshock tests objectivism's ability to coexist with a radically successful owner of inventions like Galt, it fails that test disgracefully. Too late, it dawns on Ryan why market regulation might be helpful, and he is beyond the point of being able to implement it successfully. And, of course, once Rapture's civilisation has devolved into a rabble, there's very little opportunity to develop stable art, business, or anything else Rand or Ryan view as the golden apples of human struggle.

Post-downfall Rapture is particularly grotesque, because even in life, it was designed as a honeypot for ambitious egoists. J.S. Steinman is a surgeon who, without medical oversight, can use strangers as human guinea pigs. Sander Cohen is an artist who, given that there is no regulation on him, can kill and make corpses part of his pieces. The attitudes of opportunists like Cohen and Steinman during this wartime mirror the philosophy of the peacetime city. Even if these men weren't hacking apart their fellow Rapturites pre-collapse, they were still rewarded for taking what they wanted without regard for other people. By making Steinman and Cohen bosses (in the game design sense), Bioshock makes us confront that individualist attitude.

Bioshock has been accused of being a game featuring objectivism but not about it. We can mount an attack saying that the game's audio diaries and our few encounters with its antagonists are caches of philosophical content while the engine of the experience is a first-person shooter system which has nothing to do with its political polemicism. I have to disagree; the stock smash-and-grab loops of modern action games map disturbingly well to the animuses of objectivists. Ryan dreams of a society in which competition is king, money is made only through individualistic enterprise, and there are no protections for the vulnerable. He tells us that these societal struts will bring about a state of freedom and utopianism. What we do in Bioshock's gameplay is to also compete with other residents of the city, taking their share of money wherever possible and realising our goals through it. But this is not a path to utopia. It is a setup where people on the street who we might otherwise pay no mind become our sworn enemies as there is the chance to gun them down, and through that predation, earn a bit more.

The game also leverages the commonality of items to tell you what it's like to live in Rapture. Like most games with inventories, Bioshock is replete with containers that we can search for loot. Yet, where other titles using looting mechanics ensure that those containers cough up items regularly, it's surprising how many crates in Bioshock have nothing in them or only a few dollars. It emphasises that the bones of the city are being picked clean and reinforces the necessity of dominating other citizens to get the materials you need to survive. An economic feedback loop means that the powerful get more powerful, and elite individuals like Jack, Steinman, and Cohen control inordinate amounts of power within the country while everyone else scrounges in the rust or just dies off. And the accumulation of wealth warps them as people. ADAM, Rapture's genetic currency, mutates the body and defiles the mind.^[32] While violence is decoration in the bulk of games that use it, Bioshock employs gore to reinforce how wanton the concept of an intensively competitive society is.

The Little Sisters, too, have their part to play in this satire. Ryan's primary economic concern is parasitism, even while he and his peers feed off of the achievements of men and women below him. The Little Sisters are a literalisation of this irony: Atlas maintains his business empire by sucking the genetic currency from Rapture's citizens like a vampire and taking it from the Little Sisters, the workers who are the ones actually generating it. He's literally vomit-inducing. It's not that Fontaine didn't have a hand in the production of ADAM. However, under a Ryanist philosophy that credits products only to inventors and businesspeople, and that includes no worker protections, Fontaine receives almost all of the reward. In truth, he is the parasite.

The game gives us the choice to follow in Ryan and Fontaine's footsteps or to pave a new ideological path. When we accost Little Sisters, the designers ask us whether we want to "Rescue" or "Harvest" them. Rescuing consists of severing their bond to the sea slug, turning them back into human girls, and earning us a small ADAM reward. Harvesting means killing the child and showering in the vast store of mutagens inside, assuming Ryan's winner-takes-all philosophy. This, at first, appears to be a purely moral choice: one of whether you want to do the right thing or the profitable thing, but remember Bioshock's message that "rational self-interest" is often not the most lucrative motivation to pursue in the long run. Sure enough, if you rescue the Little Sisters rather than harvest them, you see only a minor drop-off in ADAM, and you get all sorts of bonus rewards like more First Aid Kits and the coveted "Hypnotize Big Daddy" plasmid.

These goodies come care of Brigid Tenenbaum, who had a change of heart, and post-apocalypse, makes it her mission to save the surrogate daughters she conceived. If you help her do this, she pays you intermittently. Feeding your greed seems like a fine idea in the moment, but alienating other citizens loses you their support and so, potentially the resources they could lend you. Although, as developer Clint Hocking famously observed, the game does somewhat betray its message by making repeated theft of the Little Sisters' profits sustainable. The broad message of Bioshock is that individualism is socially untenable, but in the play, it never is; it's just suboptimal.

Part V: Would You Kindly?

We're talking a lot about altruism and objectivism, solidarity and economies, but it's also Bioshock's reputation that it's a game about games. Even among players who weren't interested in ludonarrative analysis, a clear metaphor emerged from Irrational's FPS: it was laying bare game designers' ability to manipulate us and our slavish obedience to them. Because there is more to Jack and Atlas's story. Andrew Ryan impregnated exotic dancer Jasmine Jolene, and Jolene sold their zygote to Fontaine Futuristics.^[58] Fontaine then had his doctors, raise the fetus as an ubermensch conditioned by pokes with a sharp psychological stick. Whenever Fontaine would begin a request with "Would you kindly?", the boy would be compelled to carry it out. That boy grew into Jack, our protagonist.^[59][60]

It was Atlas contacting Jack with the "Would you kindly?" trigger that forced him to bring down a plane over Rapture.^[60] Throughout Bioshock, Fontaine uses the "WYK?" prompt before telling us to carry out various jobs, although the player is likely to dismiss the "WYK?" trigger as an incidental speech tick or may not notice it at all. The objectives we receive in-game often pop up after Atlas issues us a WYK command, and just to reinforce how irresistible this psychological urge is, an enormous arrow appears at the top of the screen, directing us to our next duty. Jack can be Atlas's solution to the stalemate in Rapture because, being Ryan's son, Ryan's genetic locks will open for him. It's about the time we reach the office of Rapture's dictator that we learn about our conditioning.

Once we're face to face with Ryan, he knows it's too late to save himself. We've pulled his drawbridge down for Atlas and his lackeys to cross, but Ryan can have his revenge by showing us that we lack free will. He asks to "kindly" kill him, and as we cave in his head with a golf club, he repeats his axiom "a man chooses, a slave obeys". This motto is a hair's breadth from a statement Rand makes in The Fountainhead:

"The creator stands on his own judgment. The parasite follows the opinions of others."^[19]

To underscore Jack's dearth of agency, this section is carried out without our control and cannot be overridden or affected through our use of the sticks or buttons. After we dispose of the big bad, Atlas reveals his deception to us. So, one read we could make of the game is that Ryan's false promise of economic liberation mirrors the false promise of video games, at least linear video games.

Ryan promises us a paradise where we can realise whatever plan we may want, but what we get is a state of slavery. Similarly, we think of video games as being driven by our intention. In interactive entertainment like Bioshock, we can choose the protagonist's inventory, abilities, and combat strategies, and doesn't that mean that we have control? Maybe not to the extent we'd think. While we have power over how we pursue our goals, those goals are set for us by someone else. We're slaves to the designers, who are played here by Ryan and Atlas. The designers' control is embodied by the WYK.

What's wrong with this interpretation is that after Atlas reveals his true identity of Fontaine, we are cured of the WYK but continue to be dragged along by the tow of the in-game objectives. Atlas attempts to sweep up Jack using armed forces and by psychologically manipulating him into danger, but Tenenbaum interrupts, helping Jack annul Suchong's conditioning with the hope that he can go on to kill Fontaine. Therefore the WYK cannot be a metaphor for designers instructing us. If there is an analogy behind this conditioning, we must find it by seeing what in the game is present when the mental trigger is active that is missing after it is expunged. The difference between our pre-deprogramming state and our post-deprogramming state is whether we believe in Fontaine's false persona of Atlas. It is almost the moment that the wool is pulled from our eyes that we are psychologically freed.

Part VI: Who is Atlas?

Our personal journey with Atlas and Ryan mirrors the city's history with them. Ryan sells us Rapture as a setting that will bring us liberty. He conjures the image of "The Great Chain" as a mechanism that pulls Rapture forwards, and we see that Jack is imprinted with this hieroglyph: he has a nautical "chain" tattoo across his wrists. But a chain doesn't just pull; it's also able to bind and imprison, which is what Ryan ends up doing with it. In Atlas Shrugged, the character of Hank Reardon, an industrialist, forges a chainlink bracelet for his wife, Lillian. He crafts this bracelet from the metal on which he made his fortune, but his wife does not share his value system.^[61] She describes the accessory as "the chain by which he holds us all in bondage."^[62] Rand wants us to side with Hank, but Bioshock wants us to sympathise with Lillian. Andrew Ryan, the man who starts off by telling us that he will give us the sweat of our brow, ends up screaming at us that we have no free will as we shatter a man's skull for our boss.

Yet, Bioshock's criticism of market economics goes beyond excoriating explicit objectivists and also stands alarmed at the damage a more insidious type of capitalist can do. Atlas finds us at a moment when we are vulnerable to Ryan's forces and the terror he has wrought on Rapture, and he claims that he wants to help us. We have no reason not to believe in his presentation as a working-class ally, and our interests seem to be aligned in our desires to defeat Ryan. Just as Fontaine appears to philanthropise through his orphanages and homes for the poor, we appear to receive free help from him through him guiding us through Rapture and dispensing cost-free upgrades at his "Power to the People" stations. All of Rapture's other vending machines charge for the products they stock.

Both we and Rapture are hoodwinked; Atlas works for no one but himself, and none of his "charity" is really charity when it's all in service of helping him grow his power. By the time the illusion is dispelled, we're beyond the point of no return; Fontaine has bled us dry and left us for dead. In many ways, Fontaine is more dangerous than Ryan. Ryan is a plutocrat who wears his evil on his sleeve, but Fontaine adopts the language and presentation of a man of the people while effectively feeding on the populace the same way that a despot like Ryan does. Such a serpentine capitalist is harder to identify as a threat, and therefore, harder to resist.

As dystopian as Rapture is, Bioshock still proposes an escape route from a free-market society. The person who rescues us from Atlas is Tenenbaum, the one closest to the Little Sisters: Rapture's most exploited workers. They've been conditioned to hoard the city's valuable commodities for their owners, and so, like us/Jack, were also robbed of their free will. We will confront Atlas at the end of the game, but in the period between him betraying us and that final boss fight, we spend a fair bit of time in the laboratories where the Little Sisters were created, getting to understand them and just how horribly they've been treated. We must undergo a radical transformation into a protector of these labourers, becoming a Big Daddy. Like most transformations, it is painful, but after it, we can gain the trust of the Little Sisters and have them unlock Fontaine's sanctuary from the inside.

There, Fontaine has used his genetic engineering technology to turn himself into a figure representing the mythological Atlas, as he appears on the iconic cover of the 35th Anniversary Edition of Atlas Shrugged.^[63] Seeing a human being twisted into this form doesn't make him appear as a superman; he looks like a caricature of masculinity, reflecting a belief that this amoral pioneer figure, which Rand sees as a hero, is actually an abomination. Jack softens up this living statue, but it's the Little Sisters who finish him off, us all sapping Atlas's ADAM with our syringes. Bioshock suggests that we can retake wealth from capitalists by turning the workers' tools and labour power against them.

Whether we get the "good" or "bad" ending to the story is contingent on whether or not we rescued or harvested the Little Sisters. In the event that we farmed them, we become a monster, surfacing to a voiceover that implies we go on to commit some sort of genocide. If, instead, we save them, we live the rest of our lives alongside the Little Sisters, and the final shot of the game is a dying Jack's hand being held by those of multiple (now adult) Little Sisters. One frame in this cutscene mirrors Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam, suggesting that for all the grand mythical invocations in Rapture of Atlas, Apollo, Adam, and so on, it's in this unification with the girls that we witness the creation of people. Bioshock believes in allyship with labourers to the extent that the difference between whether we are a ghoul or whether we are divine, whether we are an adversary of the rest of humanity or whether we are loved, is the difference between exploiting workers and aiding them.

----

Let's round this out. Bioshock cannot be an exposé on a manipulative relationship between designer and player because the metaphors that are meant to express that relationship do not endure for the whole game, even while the relationship does. Instead, Bioshock's horrors are socioeconomic. It deconstructs the violence and internal contradictions of the all-too-influential objectivism. It also extends past criticism of Rand's writings to reveal the danger of "benevolent" capitalism as a response to objectivism. Bioshock is an explainer of why we have businesses giving to charity and making supportive statements about the vulnerable instead of a bunch of workhouses shrieking, "I am going to leave you to die in the street, even if you threaten a revolution." You make more allies with a mask of altruism than you do by revealing yourself as a greedy tyrant. But Bioshock also says the current societal construction is not destiny. By coming to understand the exploited and turning the tools of tyrants against them, citizens can be set free, not just from a Ryan, but also an Atlas. Thanks for reading.

Notes

Some parts of Bioshock's backstory are evidenced partly or wholly by in-game audio logs or very brief monologues. It is easy to miss some of these expository sections or to lose track of which log or monologue evidences which story beat. Therefore, I provide a number of citations for "Bioshock" here, in which the exact source I am listing is an audio diary or other communication in the game. When referencing The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, I give a full reference to each work once, and each subsequent citation uses the edition in that initial reference.

1. Rand, A. (1971). The Fountainhead. The New American Library, Inc. (p. 680).
2. Ayn Rand by Brian Duignan (December 30, 1999), Britannica.
3. Ayn Rand by Neera K. Badhwar and Roderick T. Long (Jul 13, 2020), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
4. Rand, A. (1957). Atlas Shrugged. Random House, Inc. (p. 153, 633, 637, 701, 801, 812, 813, 921, 956, 960, 1002, 1003, 1057, 1096).
5. Ibid. (p. 153).
6. Ibid. (p. 1009-1069).
7. Rand, A. (1964). The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism. NAL Penguin, Inc. (p. Basically, the whole thing).
8. Rand, A. (1967). Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. The New American Library, Inc. (p. 29-30).
9. 114 Years After Her Birth, Ayn Rand’s Supporters Think Russia Is Ready for Her Ideas by Daniel Kozin (February 14, 2019), The Moscow Times.
10. How Ayn Rand Became Libertarians’ Sociopathic Pixie Dream Girl by Jill Filipovic (July 20, 2015), Vice.
11. Ayn Rand's Counter-Revolution by Jennifer Burns (April 24, 2017), The New York Times.
12. The new age of Ayn Rand: how she won over Trump and Silicon Valley by Jonathan Freedland (April 10, 2017), The Guardian.
13. One nation under Galt: How Ayn Rand's toxic philosophy permanently transformed America by Bruce E. Levine (December 15, 2014), Salon.
14. Rand, A. (1990). The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought. The Penguin Group (p. 42).
15. Bioshock. Audio Diary: The Great Chain, Andrew Ryan.
16. Bioshock. Audio Diary: Offer a Better Product, Andrew Ryan.
17. Bioshock. Audio Diary: Parasite Expectations, Andrew Ryan.
18. Bioshock. Audio Diary: A Man or a Parasite, Andrew Ryan.
19. The Fountainhead, (p. 681).
20. Bioshock. Opening Speech, Andrew Ryan.
21. Plato, Translated by: Taylor, A.E. (1929). Timaeus and Critias. Methuen & Co, Ltd. (p. 22-23, 117).
22. Ibid. (p. 23, 127-128).
23. Bioshock. Audio Diary: Freezing Pipes, Bill McDonagh.
24. Bioshock. Audio Diary: Eden Leaking, Bill McDonagh.
25. Bioshock. Audio Diary: Arcadia Closed, Julie Langford.
26. Bioshock. Hephaestus Radio Messages: Rapture Will Thrive, Andrew Ryan.
27. Bioshock. Audio Diary: Meeting with Fontaine, Peach Wilkins.
28. Rand, A. (1961). For the New Intellectual. The New American Library, Inc. (p. 43, 46).
29. Bioshock. Audio Diary: ADAM Discovery, Brigid Tenenbaum.
30. Bioshock. Welcome to Rapture Radio Messages: Genetic Code Rewritten, Atlas.
31. Bioshock. Audio Diary: Mass Producing ADAM, Brigid Tenenbaum.
32. Bioshock. Audio Diary: ADAM Explained, Brigid Tenenbaum.
33. Bioshock. Audio Diary: Rapture Changing, Bill McDonagh.
34. Bioshock. Audio Diary: Protecting Little Ones, Yi Suchong.
35. Bioshock. Audio Diary: Protection Bond, Yi Suchong.
36. Bioshock. Audio Diary: Fontaine Must Go, Andrew Ryan.
37. Bioshock. Audio Diary: Arresting Fontaine, Bill McDonagh.
38. Bioshock. Audio Diary: Fontaine's Smugglers, Brigid Tenenbaum.
39. Bioshock. Audio Diary: Death Penalty in Rapture, Andrew Ryan.
40. Bioshock. Audio Diary: Guns Blazing, Bill McDonagh.
41. Bioshock. Audio Diary: The Longest Con, Frank Fontaine.
42. Bioshock. Olympus Heights Radio Messages: The Charity Angle, Frank Fontaine.
43. Bioshock. Audio Diary: Fontaine Takes F Futuristics, Bill McDonagh.
44. Bioshock. Audio Diary: Genetic Arms Race, Bill McDonagh.
45. Bioshock. Audio Diary: Have My Badge, Sullivan.
46. Bioshock. Audio Diary: Atlas Lives, Diane McClintock.
47. Bioshock. Audio Diary: Meeting Atlas, Diane McClintock.
48. Bioshock. Audio Diary: Fontaine's Legacy, Bill McDonagh.
49. Bioshock. Audio Diary: Fontaine's Army, Bill McDonagh.
50. Bioshock. Audio Diary: Sad Saps, Frank Fontaine.
51. Bioshock. Audio Diary: Pulling Together, Andrew Ryan.
52. Bioshock. Audio Diary: New Year's Eve Alone, Diane McClintock.
53. Bioshock. Audio Diary: Mistakes, Andrew Ryan.
54. Bioshock. Audio Diary: Bathysphere Keys, Sullivan.
55. Bioshock. Audio Diary: The Vita Chamber, Yi Suchong.
56. Bioshock. Olympus Heights Radio Messages: Ryan's Flesh and Blood, Frank Fontaine.
57. Guerin, D. Translated by Sharkey, P. (1998). No Gods, No Masters: Book One. AK Press (p. 1-2).
58. Bioshock. Audio Diary: Pregnancy, Jasmine Jolene.
59. Bioshock. Audio Diary: Fontaine's Human Jukebox, Yi Suchong.
60. Bioshock. Andrew Ryan's Office Monologue, Andrew Ryan.
61. The Fountainhead, (p. 31).
62. The Fountainhead, (p. 43).
63. The Accidental Objectivist: Nick Gaetano by Christopher Herbert (December 7, 2011), Interview Magazine.

All other sources linked at relevant points in article.

Lo-Fi Plays is a series in which I look at short indie games made by single people or tiny teams. The releases I review don't receive a lot of fanfare, but almost every video game is doing something that merits attention. Usually, I feature six different titles here, but this week, most of the games are longer than the items I typically showcase, and I have more to say on each. So, this will be a five-parter. Some of these games, you can download for free, others are paid, but if you enjoy the "name your own price" projects, please consider chipping the developer a few bucks for them too. Without any more hesitation, here they are.

Dépanneur Nocturne

You know those spooky supernatural stories where some unsuspecting mark enters an emporium of cursed objects? Dépanneur Nocturne wonders what one of those occult antique outlets might look like in the modern world, pauses for a moment, and then shows you not a wood-panelled basement staffed by a caricatured creep but a convenience store overseen by an inviting goth. With its cool blue exterior and the soft gradients of its interior, Dépanneur Nocturne understands that late at night in the pouring rain, a corner shop can be a sanctuary. This is a place where you can luxuriate in the lack of time pressure. Slow down and find a gift for your beau at a speed that suits you.

Going to the off-license can also be a step into the Twilight Zone. Looking over some weird drink you got from the cooler can feel like studying an ensorceled trinket, accepting the sacred privilege of the bathroom key can feel like entering a forgotten dungeon. Dépanneur Nocturne is not an especially long game for $5, but like in The Norwood Suite, which we looked at last week, the mundane and mystical sit right next to each other on its shelves. The thought experiment of which superpowered curio you might pick, given the chance, is also a fun "what if?", especially if you can compare your answer to friends'.

Dépanneur Nocturne is $4.99 on itch.io or Steam

Toree 3D

There is not an unhappy bone in Toree 3D's body. Time warping back to the mascot platformers of the PS1 and Dreamcast, the game is a peacock of magnificent teals, candyfloss pinks, and toxic purples. It uses its dazzling colour palette to maintain a distinct visual identity even while freewheeling from windy seaside industrial zones to cyberpunk streets. Auditory details like the squeaking of the protagonist's shoes or the precious "hup" when they jump layer on some character, while the soundtrack apes some of the coolest video game music emigrating from Japan in the 90s. The synths can be gleaming and exuberant or thud away like The Matrix soundtrack, while the rock boasts a breezy, steely guitar. I've still got the main theme stuck in my head.

Toree 3D is like a Sonic Adventure filtered with more discernment. Sure, as a $1 indie game, it isn't anywhere near as polished as a platformer made by a full Sega studio. Still, it includes a bumping soundtrack and high-flying traversal without getting bogged down by Adventure's physics jank, occasionally disobedient camera, or questionable character portrayal. Levels often involve exhilarating roleplay scenarios, like jumping from one moving car to another or skiing down a mountain. The game expects you to have experience with primitive 3D platformers not just by trying to appeal to that aesthetic but also in its difficulty. All levels are doable in time, but the ranking system and checkpointing are strict senseis. For your one buck, you get plenty of bang, with the game lodging nine levels, each having its own collectable count and ranking to perfect.

Toree 3D is $1.00 on itch.io or Steam

The Passive Voice

Despite its exquisite lighting and professionally-rendered models, The Passive Voice requires some indifference to ugliness to get through. It is also relying on some intolerance of it in order to unseat you. A semi-biography of developer Ducky Elford, this diary is a record of discrimination, exploring the underserved horror topic of what it feels like to have anxiety-inducing everyday interactions. Frequently, the people that Elford talks to misinterpret neurodivergence as stupidity or incompetence and receive it as an invitation to lash out at Elford. There should probably be a warning in here for brief mentions of abuse. The conversation between the title of the game and its content suggests a character who is acted upon rather than acts or uses the literal passive voice out of a lack of confidence.

The methods of conveyance for Elford's experiences are Marble Madness-scented overworld tasks, blinks of avant-garde films, and pseudo-hand-drawn vignettes about self-appointed drill sergeants excoriating the protagonist. Marble Madness might sound like too playful a source of inspiration for a drama, but The Passive Voice uses imprecise movement mechanics to express what it's like to try and navigate a space where you don't feel like you fit. You need to lift and slam down your mouse again over and over to get moving, but once you pick up speed, it's hard to brake. That the scenes of others deriding you loop until you leave suggests that they cycle through the character's head as long as they let them. Oddly enough, the game reminds me a bit of the Pop Team Epic TV show, where the production-intensive sketches let you know that its creators are capable of beautiful artistic feats, but the cruder, chicken-scratch scenes act as a dadaist protest against them. There's a lot of suffering poured into this game.

The Passive Voice is free on itch.io

Working Tidal

Something less serious again. In Working Tidal, you control a submarine, which is a kind of mechanical fish. You're a salvager with a debt to offload, and the game is a soaking-wet easter egg collect-a-thon. Low-value strings of junk fill your appetite in between the meatier morsels of worth that have fallen to the ocean floor. Donut County-style, each good you dredge up comes with its own curious description. Reaching the credits means earning enough to reinforce your submarine for the murkiest depths. So, you must replay each level a few times, holding in memory the locations of the high-ticket treasures.

We've seen a storm of these PS1 demakes in recent years: entertainment in which aliasing and blocky models become assets instead of liabilities, but props to Working Tidal for taking it somewhere new. The sim is a game of two halves, and in the first, the graphics skew Wave Race, but the soundtrack likes to Ridge Race, importing chillwave for the menus but laying on a party of breakbeat bangers for the main event. The second half of the game is resolutely horror, and I don't want to give away too much, but when games do subaquatic terror, they're usually about test facilities gone disastrous or the terrifying animals that lurk in the deepest-set valleys. Working Tidal plays in the same waters, but its final act is more barren than that, and its ultimate endpoint more conceptual. It reminds me of Outer Wilds' depressive spells. With its cool urban soundtrack and fun acquisition in a capitalist-critical future, it's got more than a whiff of Umurangi Generation about it.

Working Tidal is free on itch.io

Promesa

Promesa is a narrative explorer told from the perspective of someone holding memories tight in their palm, even as they commit to slipping from their grasp. It's normal to want to conceptualise our memories as films of our lives, but the brain doesn't store moments in their totality as a camera does. Promesa is founded on the selectiveness of recollection and is not just constructed from what the character's mind saved but also what it's missing. Each playthrough is a montage of scenes randomly chosen from the game's collection. The game will miss levels out like an old man telling a story will miss out events.

Some scenes wrap all the way around us, but other times, areas outside the focus of the memory trail off into a void, we see objects divorced from context, or remember things that couldn't have happened. These thoughts can be figurative or literal, and some contain translucent, monochrome objects, the storyteller's mind apparently having recorded the geometry of them but not the material. White stucco walls and tiled floors deliver a traditional Spanish urbanity to the levels, each of them convincing enough that they could be based on places that exist. From a distance, the memories often appear holistically detailed, especially because they have all the little objects that would fill a street or home. Yet, as we edge closer, the pixelated textures betray imperfect recall.

There are memories that fade before we'd want to, but then there are others that linger, or maybe we linger in them. Untethered from physical limitations, we soar through some landscapes, but whether walking or floating, we move at a glacial pace. Perhaps this speed represents the protagonist's want to stay and soak in every detail of each place, but it could as easily be that in their old age, their body imposes this slog upon them. Their contemplation would be a result of them being forced to stay in the same rooms and alleys for minutes at a time. In nerd media, we tend to treat nostalgia as a purely jubilant thing, but that "algia" at the end of the word comes from a root meaning grief or pain. Even the memories in Promesa not explicitly linked to sorrow exude longing and loneliness.

Promesa is $6.00 on itch.io or Steam

___

I hope you've found something here that sounds worth playing. Thanks for reading.

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for The Norwood Suite and minor spoilers for Off-Peak.

I think of The Norwood Suite very differently now than when I first played it. A 2017 narrative adventure game by Cosmo D, The Norwood Suite is an outgrowth of his previous project, Off-Peak. Off-Peak's setting is officially a train station, but in practice, it's a gallery of hallucinogenic art unbound by medium. Its collection ranges from giant mushroom sculptures to Polish pop posters, from the covers of sheet music to trays of cookies. As I settled myself in The Norwood Suite, I thought of the adventure title as trying to transpose that absurdity and unpredictability into a functional space.

The game's single mega-level, the Norwood Hotel, has skulls in its fridges, levers shaped like human hands, and is fronted by a miniature Mount Rushmore with flood-light eyes. But in comparison to Off-Peak, there are more rooms modelled after places you'd encounter in the real world, and characters more commonly use rooms for their intended purpose. There's a quest to retrieve a book from the library, you make a sandwich in the kitchen, there's a man off the clock swimming in the pool, etc. The Norwood Suite employs the classic technique of juxtaposing the quotidian and surreal to make the strange seem all the stranger. You'll be walking along a roughly believable hotel hallway, squeak open a door, and see office blocks inside bouncing like jelly to an EDM floor filler.

This entry in the Off-Peakverse also shrinks the series' vision cone down until it includes just one medium. Cosmo's previous project was this carnival of paintings, sculptures, music, board games, food, everything under the sun. The Norwood Suite uses Off-Peak's disproportionate, goofy style, but its theme is music exclusively. It's ruminating on the duel for respect between the dusty but dignified musical old guard and the young, euphoric soundmakers nipping at their heels. The floorboards of the hotel bow under the accumulated history of the classical composition represented within, but in the basement, making itself heard loud, if a little muffled, are the underground rumblings of DJ Bogart. All of that is true of The Norwood Suite. Yet, after finishing it, I realised it's also true that the game is about people arranging themselves to find some comfortable position in the music community and wondering if that's even possible. It's about loving your instrument but being dissatisfied with the industry it serves and hesitating about continuing to play. It's about what it takes to be a star and who gets to be one.

The Norwood Hotel is famed for the long-time residence of genre-blazing composer Peter Norwood who mysteriously vanished one night years before your arrival. Your mission is to enter the rave under the establishment. To pass the bouncer, you need to put together one of Peter Norwood's aristocratic yet trashy ensembles, including a mask modelled on the musician. To get your foot on the ladder of music, you must act a part and conform to a singular vision of what a musician looks like instead of being yourself. The blossoming artist needs to get their image out there, but the question arises of how they're meant to do that when they're expected to wear someone else's face.

To build your outfit in the game, you must enter the composer's eponymous suite, which is easier said than done when the reverence for Norwood borders on the cultish. Talking to the staff and guests of the hotel, it becomes clear that the influence of Norwood is so pervasive that he can never be shut out of the musical conversation. Everywhere you go in the building, there are huge portraits and dioramas of the man, a volume of his etudes sits under museum glass, and the receptionists consider the Norwood Suite strictly off-limits. You have to play one of Norwood's motifs on a piano to open up a staircase to his roost in the attic.

The message is that the music industry is rigid and impenetrable, and it's intimidating to live up to the stature of a Mozart or Miles Davis type. Judging by the size of Norwood's footwear in his potraits, we literally have big shoes to fill. A woman in the hotel bar also struggles with the previous generations' expectations. While she tries to bring home the bacon by spinning ad jingles, her father insists she should be composing for a more grandiose purpose and chides her for writing with a computer instead of pen and paper. The game also asks whether Norwood should occupy the entire acoustic bandwidth when he's someone who hasn't been active in the scene for years. In the twist ending, we learn that an infirm and silent man we earlier saw hooked up to hospital equipment is Peter Norwood. There's a lot of fun to be had wallowing in the fandom of this guy who dresses like a kid's imaginary friend and writes piano and saxophone music inspired by turtles. But he's not speaking anything new into the world; he's kept alive on life support.

We get most of the clothing that we need to reach the ending from fetch quests that unlock secret passages in the hotel. Invading music's inner sanctum is a little about playing instruments or producing but mostly about making connections. It's a dance we can see other people in the business performing. DJ Bogart and a nameless band member both stand to be airlifted to greater things by a sponsorship from Blue Moose (a Red Bull parody). Bogart manages a Houdini-like escape from his agreement with the hotel by exploiting a loophole in it, while a Blue Moose rep encourages an up-and-coming rocker to ditch his bandmates in the pursuit of solo recognition. There's no logic in success in the industry relying on companies that have nothing to do with the medium, like energy drink manufacturers, but it does so anyway.

In the darkly comic final scene, DJ Bogart is revealed to be a robot before Norwood shambles zombie-like towards us. Even if Norwood's heyday is long behind him and there are new kids on the block, music as a profession is still about the powerful puppeteering the talent. Yet, like us, a person exploring the hotel's secret passages, the social climbers find sneaky back routes through music's halls. In the Norwood Suite, there is a mannequin: A humanoid blank slate that we could clothe any which way, but we are forced to dress it as Norwood. This is the outfit we will soon change into. As we fill in the missing vestments and the dioramas in the hotel fill in our knowledge of the composer, Peter Norwood slowly takes shape in front of us. Not Peter Norwood the myth, but Peter Norwood, the man. We naturally question whether we want to become that mannequin: a soulless outline of a person wearing a celebrity costume.

Behind the scenes, the tableaus of Norwood's musical escapades can be whimsical and larger-than-life. However, they combine with the gossip around the hotel to communicate that Norwood could be aggressive towards his collaborators, collaborators who remain nameless while the composer has become legend. There are also rumours wafting through the hotel that he took credit for other peoples' work. In Peter's abandoned bedroom, old letters from colleagues evidence the relationships that he frayed over the years. A sign above that book of Norwood's sheet music warns that playing it could be dangerous, and a man who performs it injures his hands. It's symbolic of the professional and emotional hazards of the music business, but also the physical strain that the repetitive movements of playing an instrument can put on the body. A music teacher in the hall finds her own frustrations, fruitlessly trying to pique her students' interests in the context of Norwood's compositions and not just the recordings themselves.

As funny and curious as The Norwood Suite is, its melancholy cuts to the bone. When you discover its chiming bowling pins, stave wallpaper, and search for a long-lost record, you get to share in its characters' infectious reverence for music. But the baggage of the music business has left those same characters weary. The Norwood Suite laments the possibility that you can dedicate years, even decades, of your life to a practice you love, only to realise that before you is a thicket of unfair expectations, shady contract law, personal sacrifice, and workplace abuse. Do you endure all that, or do you leave it all behind and disappear into the walls like Peter Norwood? In taking either option, you leave a little piece of yourself behind. Thanks for reading.

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for The Outer Worlds and moderate spoilers for Fallout: New Vegas.

Obsidian Entertainment's Fallout: New Vegas is one of the greatest RPGs of all time. It doesn't just challenge you with defeating enemies but also working out who your enemies are. Its faction system is not just a set of spectrums along which to gain and lose points but is systemically necessary for a game that takes its conception of allies and opponents not just from the developer but also from the player. Given that precedent, it's not surprising that Obsidian's 2019 sci-fi, The Outer Worlds, also contains a faction system. What is surprising is that, unlike New Vegas, The Outer Worlds doesn't make these factions strict alternatives to each other and that that turns out to be the right choice for its messaging.

Other RPGs implementing factions typically have them be philosophically incompatible, each of them vying to order the world by their chosen ideology. In New Vegas, for example, you have the NCR, which wants to rule the Mojave as an expansionist democracy, roughly modelling itself on the 20th-century U.S., you have Caesar's Legion, which wants it to be a fascist patriarchy, and then there's Mr. House who wishes to continue his presidency over a consumerist monopoly.

The factions of The Outer Worlds also sell themselves as alternatives to each other, mainly because the majority are corporations jostling for a spot in the public consciousness. They all have their signature products, slogans, and labels. But as the protagonist, we're not just a consumer of those products; we exist on the frontlines of manufacturing and resource extraction, able to see the effects of the companies' decisions on the ground. And those decisions and their consequences are all basically the same. Every business wants to create the best-selling product for minimal cost at the expense of their workers and the wildlife. They are political clones of each other. There is disagreement over who should get to sell the most tat but not to the extent that they are going to war with each other.

Wars are expensive, rebellion or outside regulation might not be impossible, and you can get more done by pooling resources. So, companies ally and maintain the rule of capitalism rather than divide and leave their industries vulnerable. Every company wants to sit on the throne of the market, but achieving that target means reaching a more fundamental goal: ensuring there's a market in the first place. Not that financiers always do what's rational, but it's why in competitive capitalism, economic interests still balkanise to form trade associations or international financial alliances. It's why the Consumer Goods Forum, the European Union, the World Economic Forum, and a whole bunch of other international entities exist.

In The Outer Worlds, it's the purpose of the Halcyon Holding Corporation Board. They're the free market equivalent of a state: something that organises all the economic power and intentions into a coherent structure and collective arsenal. There's a maximum to how adversarial one company can be to another when they're both entangled with The Board. Empires like the The Board's are inevitably tended by only the vastest corporate concerns because no one else has the capital to fund exploitation on an international or, in this case, interplantetary sprawl. Sometimes, a low droning horn in the soundtrack announces the arrival of this corporate royalty to the court.

If you want to see how interchangeable the firms are, look at the banks of vending machines in every bar, office, and spaceport around the solar system of Halcyon. The world is so desperate to induce consumerism that these are the first amenities you see whenever you land your ship. Each one is transparently the same bulky metal receptacle, just with the products, graphics, and jingles changed out. All companies are running the same fundamental machinery, just with different key art slotted into the front panel. It's The Outer Worlds' harsh rejoinder to the right-libertarian koan that unregulated markets breed freedom. In a free market, you might be able to gobble up different sweets or get your vodka in a different bottle, but when it comes to your labour conditions and the organising principles of your town, you get one choice.

It's not that the colonies of Halcyon don't have different aesthetics, but the local flavour is down to the climate, ecology, and industry more than the fashion and lifestyles of these work camps. Halcyon's towns are demonstrative of how capitalism curbs individuality and genericises culture, at least for a lower class that has little culture external to consumerism to draw from. The lifestyle of the labourers is almost always defined by the round-the-clock work their occupation demands, their ability to style their furniture and clothing is clamped by their low wages, and they consume only the products that the same four companies that run everything make.

Sometimes their planet is swampy, and sometimes it's rocky. Sometimes the workers keep food on the table by gutting fish and other times by running a power plant, but as long as they live in the imperial rim, those differences do little to change their concrete existence. Take their architecture. They mostly live in an unadorned style of cubicle housing that is consistent between all the colonies because it was cheap to mass produce and fast to drop onto planets. In capitalism, there are cost-effective pre-fab homes you can build, and there are cost-effective pre-fab cultures.

Diagraming out the currents of wealth in the economy, Obsidian Entertainment makes a show of the material dragnets of empire. Every planet or region of a planet has a limit to the commodities it can generate, every community has a maximum amount of labour power to give, and who wants to do arduous labour? If you crave more material wealth, you could rely on charity, but charity can be hard to come by, and it's hard to get rich off of it; people only extend it to the needy. You can trade for items that your society might not have the labour, technological, or natural resources to produce, but without duress, traders will want something of equal value in return. Those last two ideas get tossed around in a lot of grand strategy games. You could steal from neighbours, and many societies historically have, but this is a one-and-done deal. You get the commodities you can plunder from your victim and nothing more. It's not sustainable for keeping up a lifestyle of luxury.

If you want to maintain a position of wealth privilege, you need to keep other communities consistently extracting the natural resources around them, processing them, and passing them or the profits from them onto you. To colonise a country, or in The Outer Worlds, a planet, is not to turn it into a treasure chest, but a factory. And imperialism is not just a way for the imperial core to import material goods from the empire; it's a pipeline that pulls affluence from the outer worlds to the inner worlds and exports poverty and hardship from the inner worlds to the outer worlds.

In Obsidian's RPG, the Halcyon capital of Byzantium is the inner world. The imperial trade-off has blessed them with the tightest material security imaginable, but emotionally, it's made them a quivering mess. To achieve a state of utopia, they cut themselves off from the outside world with high walls, and they naturally disrespect the working class they exploit. So, they've taken to making up ridiculous stories of what life is like beyond the wall, so coddled that they imagine labourers as a braindead mob that might infect them with their uncouthness. In their city, there is an orrery of Halcyon. The rich have shrunk the worlds down so small that they practically fit in the palm of their hand, and yet, Byzantium's reductionist model of the system lacks the detail it would need to properly represent it. The wealthy's successful attempt to isolate themselves from all but their peers has turned most of humanity into an unknown to them, and that ignorance breeds fear.

Your ultimate mission in The Outer Worlds is to revive the frozen crew of the spaceship Hope, which was intended to be half of the original settlers of Halcyon. They could provide an alternative workforce to the one held captive by The Board that could purge corruption and greed in the system. The scientist working on this project, Phineas Welles, comments that The Hope crew are valuable not just because of their labour power and expertise but also because they hold a worldview untainted by life under The Board.

The game could do with more of the mindset from The Hope because it dehumanises many of its characters with the same coldness the Byzantines do. It hovers behind plenty of the poor, making devil horns with its fingers. Action games (that is, action in the sense of action films) need enemies: targets you can attack to achieve a success state and who, if you don't dispatch properly, will kill you, resulting in a loss state. The play must also feel fair and keep the pace up, so the enemies need to be quickly identifiable. Therefore, these games tend to hone in on this paradigm where there's a visibly subhuman outsider group only capable of violence which you have free reign to murder and perhaps loot the bodies of.

Even when that outsider group is fictionalised as zombies or orcs, the symbolism means these games recycle chauvinistic tropes about savage and inferior demographics, perhaps even indigenous people, that it's moral to eradicate and steal from. But the metaphor practically ceases to be a metaphor when you world-build as Obsidian does and make some of the enemies raiders who live external to towns or cities. The RPG is playing both sides of the court. It satirises the colonialist upper crust, who demonise everyone outside their economic bastion and view them as a resource piñata to be beaten open. At the same time, it imagines almost everyone not serving a colony is a monster and views them as a resource piñata to be beaten open.

For what it's worth, it is possible to found an anti-corporate community in this universe. The Iconoclasts are an enemy of private capital on the planet Monarch. Unlike the revolutionary factions in a lot of fiction, the Iconoclasts are not just generic anti-authoritarians. It can be difficult to pin down exactly what they believe, but at the time you find them, they're living a roughly collectivist existence. Their politics are fleshed out through a power struggle that asks you to choose between two leaders. Standing on one side of you, you have a diplomatic leader who prioritises promoting ideology over fulfilling his community's physical needs. On the other side, you've got a militant commander who keeps the pantry well-stocked, even if the printing presses gather dust.

The Iconoclasts are looking to overthrow Monarch Stellar Industries, the stewards of Stellar Bay: the one bustling town on the planet. Monarch Stellar Industries (MSI) is interesting. It is not one of the highly influential factions in this story but is trying to get promoted to one. Monarch was the original site of The Board's colonisation attempts in Halcyon, but after a bungled terraforming of its scorching deserts, they quickly pulled out and placed the planet under embargo. Through Monarch's story, The Outer Worlds treats successful terraforming as synonymous with successful colonisation, establishing a potential link between terraforming and colonialism. Colonists arrive on a shore and, rather than leaving the environment as they find it, quickly get to work reorganising natural and humanmade landscapes to be fertile for the economics of imperialism. It's a fairly conspicuous evil. Yet, we rarely question what it might mean to take a planet with its own ecosystem and reform it in the image of the planet where the capital resides: Terra, Earth.

MSI CEO Sandar Nanji espouses a concern for the residents of Stellar Bay, victims of the failed colonisation. Still, he is also trying to springboard his company onto The Board, to audition for the exploitation of imperialism. Throughout the campaign, Obsidian unpacks why people might volunteer for back-breaking dirt farming for a corporate demigod. The theme comes starkly into focus through the mounting tension between the Iconoclasts and Nanji's firm. Yeah, The Board are out to extract the maximum profit from you with no regard for human life, but that is where the work is. The corporations have had their claws in the colonists for so long that, as in our world, "salary" means survival to them. Meanwhile, as an anti-capitalist organisation, the Iconoclasts are unfamiliar to plenty of workers, and their future is uncertain. This particular collective has unstable leadership, and there are Monarchists who'd prefer the devil they know over the angel they don't.

Yet, for any player who agrees that siding with The Board is the pragmatic choice, there's the second-act twist in which we discover that the corporations have a plan to cryogenically freeze all the Halcyon colonists. The bourgeoisie's best-kept secret is that they know that agriculture in Halcyon has depleted the soil of its nutrients, rendering it unable to support plants. There's an imminent crop collapse coming. The Board's contingency plan is to kill everyone currently in suspended animation and freeze down the Halcyon labourers like hamburger meat. They will keep the Byzantines and a skeleton crew animated.

Research into sustainable farming practices is ongoing, but in the meantime, most food would be reserved for the rich. Assuming they can ride out the crisis, the rest of the colonists would be thawed in the future through a method not yet proven to be safe. And not only is The Outer Worlds' conception of a system full of brutal resource extraction not part of its fiction, neither is the idea that humanity is going to be dealing with the effects of soil degradation and crop collapse in the near future. That is, provided we don't change course.

If the initial impression The Outer Worlds gives you of imperialism is hellish, it's saying that's the system on a good day. The culture is stultifying, the work is relentless, and the choices are false, but even that status quo is maintained by a relative abundance of resources and labour opportunities. If you take up too many resources for the labour you produce or if the material basis for your work drops away, perhaps because of an economic downturn or ecological crisis, you become surplus to requirements. If there are fewer commodities being produced overall, it won't be the corporations who choose to sacrifice; they're going to pass that deficit down the line onto an already burdened lower class.

A balance of power that you might be able to endure one day can become intolerable the next. Thanks for reading.

In the legends of New Zealand's Māori people, Hine-nui-te-pō is the goddess of death. She dwells in Rarohenga, the afterlife, securing the souls of the dead in their eternal resting place. Hine-nui-te-pō's is also known as the Dawn Maid, and her home is shaded in the warm colours of the sunset sky above it.^[1][2] The Māori word for "red sky" is "umurangi".

Umurangi Generation is a 2020 shutterpunk game developed by Origame Digital, principally by Naphtali Faulker, a member of the Ngāi Te Rangi Māori tribe from Tauranga, New Zealand. The game slowly illuminates an apocalyptic future Tauranga, cast as the theatre of a war between monsters that can level entire cities and a dwindling humanity. But in Umurangi Generation, we're not a soldier, we're a photographer with a list of subjects to snap. For completing jobs, we earn new lenses and image processing features for our camera. Sometimes we turn our eye towards documenting the war, but other times, our film serves as a web in which we catch pictures of Tauranga's scintillating street culture. Because Umurangi Generation has us etch imprints of both military and civilian life, it makes us an anthropologist focused on art and performance in a time of catastrophe.

Some of the art you find in this city is propaganda or, at least, propaganda adjacent. There are unconvincing enlistment posters and adverts for high-budget action media glorifying gung-ho militarism. Perhaps you'd like to play a session of Indiscriminate SWAT Officer or tune in to Assassin Sniper Shooter Killer, "He's pissed, retired, and American". Given that the kaiju are pushing humanity to the brink of extinction, you might expect the game to support the army fighting them unconditionally. However, Umurangi has a more nuanced view of forces claiming to oppose existential threats. In this world, the United Nations combat the colossal monsters, but they do it while making urban population centres occupied territory. Graffiti, news reports, and posters suggest the UN has been negligent in its duties, leaving millions homeless, committing substandard repairs, and acting as a hurricane of collateral damage.

Other imagery suggests more ambiguous treatments of war and authorities. The documentary Let's Play: God calls for government oversight of a company conducting genetic modification to bring back an extinct species. And yeah, companies probably shouldn't be able to play fast and loose with DNA without some accountability, but the film is also making the case that extinction shouldn't be reversed, and there's no morally justifying that. The Day the Earth Died is a movie that could provide some helpful insights into the current apocalypse, but one quote on the poster says, "Basically I'm smart now". It informs us that some people are using the film to smugly posture that a couple of hours in front of a movie screen has made them experts on global catastrophe.

Streets and plazas further play host to signs stacked atop signs like you'd see in an Osaka back alley. Through these towers of backlit plastic, your senses are hammered by a strobing supercut of businesses. The city feels overstuffed with arcades and restaurants all vying for your attention, desperately trying to distract you from the hellfire above. And then there's the street art, some of which forms a kind of modern folk art. Young punks take a break from daubing the walls with neon dye to dance to murky hip hop. Gearheads lean against the dazzling wraps of their sports cars. Your friends have thrown some wooden palettes and tires into a swimming pool.

In contrast, the concluding level of the game is decidedly unmodern. It's called "Final Delivery", and in it, we trek through a rocky, half-submerged plain, souls rising into the air like heat. Starry ancestors stare up at the red sky, and a fearsome serpent sits on a pillar of stone far out in the water. We photograph it and exit to the credits, which say the game is "Dedicated to the Umurangi Generation. The last generation who has to watch the world die." The name "Umurangi Generation" tells us that the society that our friends and we are part of is intrinsically linked to the red sky and, therefore, a sunsetting and the goddess of death and the afterlife. We see what appear to be Māori spirits on the ground, and in the face of one of the destructors of the world, our last delivery is of our soul to the beyond. We are on our way to Rarohenga, or perhaps we're already there. The creature may even be Hine-nui-te-pō; legend says that the goddess made her home on one of the outermost islands of the world.^[2]

I think most of us don't imagine that there could be car meets, nightclubs, monster movies, or freelance photography at the end of the world. We think that media and parties are too frivolous to catch peoples' interest when armageddon is on the horizon, but Umurangi Generation argues for a different conception of how people respond to a crisis. Photography has long been instrumental in reporting war. Not to say it always transmits the unfettered reality of the conflict; states and media often have an interest in redacting details that cast them in an unflattering light. In Umurangi, you have your pay docked for snapping the tiny jellyfish strewn about Tauranga. These invertebrates are presumably connected to the monsters somehow, making their ubiquity taboo. But the point is we expel a flood of media, and both historically and in the modern world, even people in the direst and most threadbare circumstances created and played.

The recreation and art in this speculative New Zealand serve the same purposes they have everywhere and everywhen else: to garner support for the authorities. Yet, also to allow people a distance from those in power or from aspects of their lives they'd go mad over if they reflected on indefinitely. In the Macro DLC, there's a level set in the underground bar "Gamer's Palace". At some point, you're going to come up from the arcade for air, and when you do, there's no music, only a looping public announcement about lockdowns blaring out onto the street. The remorseless chyron of a nearby TV tells us that one billion are dead. It's a relief to return to our waifu bunker.

Art and performance also help individuals feel alive when their continued existence is not guaranteed. If you don't know whether you'll wake up tomorrow, you better make the most of life today. It might be that during the fall of a society, people would have more reason to dance, produce music, and draw pentagrams than ever. Additionally, these art forms are self-identification for people whose personhood is not respected. There are plenty of punks hanging out in this version of Tauranga, and it helps to remember that punk was not just a reaction to the increasing callousness of establishment politics. It was also about a youth that felt unseen styling themselves to be impossible to ignore. When society tried to turn away from a generation, that generation recaptured attention with coloured hair dye, spiked jackets, and casual vandalism. In Umurangi Generation, they do so again. In this game, we find fun and creativity to be a way to both escape conflict and reconnect with it.

We, the players of the game, are also people who have hobbies and luxuries during an era of mass extinction. Arguably, it's the same mass extinction as we live through in Umurangi Generation. An advert for the film The Melting Ice suggests that the kaiju were freed from under the shrinking polar ice caps. Umurangi's world ends due to climate crisis, and if we don't change course, so will ours. Antarctica loses an average of 150 billion tons of ice per year. Greenland, an average of 270 billion tons.

But there's only so long you stand paralysed, mouth agape at that carnage. Life goes on, and life includes dancing, decals, and DSLRs. And whether or not it's doomsday, you've still got to eat. The play reminds us of it with our delivery deadlines and pay that is algorithmically calculated per photograph. That dollar amount is always arbitrary; there's no maths you can crunch to tell you the emotional weight of a photo or how truthfully it explores its subject. The reward scheme satirises how the commodification of art necessarily means trying to quantify quality.

You end up in absurd situations where the programming must calculate whether a photo with a wide-angle lens is better than roughly the same one taken with a telephoto lens or if a landscape commands a higher price based on whether or not it has a tent in it. ART SQOOL similarly pointed out the lack of a sensible basis for "scoring" art, but Umurangi couches the observation within a socioeconomic context. Although, in this experience, neither your financial needs nor the war ever get in the way of your photography. Gonzo shutterbug seems to be a lucrative enough career in this future, and this is the flavour of game that expects you to go stumbling off a rooftop or into a pile of electric goop so often that it resets you without even a "game over" screen. Umurangi Generation is the kind of parent that would let its kids play in traffic.

It could stringently prescribe a code of conduct with harsh punishments if you deviate from it. But because it doesn't, it approves an extensive assortment of play styles. If you want to be a casual sightseer, finish the game, and never boot it again, you can do that. If you want to speedrun through wartorn Tauranga, finding satisfaction in turning in your deliveries when your commissioner has only just seen you out of the door, you can do that. If you want to take the largest slice of the photography work available and complete all the objectives, you can do that too.

Routing within levels is also highly malleable. We often get into the habit of describing the linearity of games purely through their top-down structures (e.g. Calling them open-world). When we do that, we forget that narrowness and openness also exist within stages and not just between them. For example, many open-world games still have levels with ordered objectives: that's linearity. "Linear" is not a synonym for "bad", and "open" is not a synonym for "good". And you can have a lot of meaningful options in a level with scripted and exclusive top-down goals. Still, Umurangi Generation is proof that a game can have the level order be designer-defined while the structure of the objectives within stages is player-defined.

The level design in Umurangi Generation has a glimmer of Tony Hawk about it. Both give us a list of goals, some of which we can complete through cumulative interactions with various level elements (e.g. "Score 10,000 points" or "Earn $80") and others of which we tick off by touching base with specific entities (e.g. "Grind the Molten Bucket" or "Take a photo with at least two cats in it"). Although, in Umurangi, even the latter kind of objective, we can often complete through multiple approaches. If a level has many cats in it, there are plenty of angles from which you can photograph two of them. If the Mauao mountain is visible from multiple points on the map, you have a choice about where you take your shot of it from. How could a game about art have one correct answer to its puzzles? Naphtali Faulkner, the lead dev on Umurangi, describes the software as following principles of "Respectful Design", a style of design devised by Aboriginal professor of Humanities and Social Sciences, Dr. Norman Sheehan.^[3] Respectful Design is a school that aims to achieve decolonisation in its field.

Colonialism is not just the act of creating and running colonies: it is the set of beliefs that motivates and is used to justify that invasion and domination. The ideology is as much a means to colonise as ships or governments are. Colonialism fundamentally denies the agency and worth of the communities it invades. It imposes an authoritarian outsider vision of how the society should be run by characterising the colonist's values as superior to the existing order. Umurangi hints that this is what the UN is doing in Tauranga, but you can also argue there are parallels between colonialist thinking and the popular design ethos in games. Video games traditionally involve a developer coming into our home and telling us what to value and how to complete tasks.

Using the Respectful Design template, Faulkner bucks this trend, providing a game that lets its community decide, in his words, "how they want to take photos and what is a good photo".^[3] This freedom to fold the game's paper into whatever shape you see fit is implied by the developer's name: Origame. Umurangi's fluid gameplay philosophy doesn't just accommodate general preferences but also, potentially, cultures. For example, if you adhere to a culture that tells you to work gradually and perfect your craft, Umurangi will validate it. But the game is equally validating of actions based on a background of quickly following instructions as they are designated. It also respects a desire to use it as a platform for creating art.

In the popular mindset, photography is about capturing what's already in front of you rather than creating an original image, but Umurangi makes the case that it's a bit of both. The photo you get is the sum of your physical positioning, lens, camera settings, and how you edit the image in post relative to the sights before you. Although the game doesn't mention it, even what we see with the naked eye is a result of our bodies' unique construction, including the nature of our eyes' lenses and how our brain interprets colour. It's why two animals looking at the same scene can see something different. So, there's no default version of any picture, meaning that not only can photographers make creative choices in their art, they must do so.

The game gives extensive thought to helping us make those decisions. The most ambitious photo modes in gaming include many of the features available on modern cameras and in professional editing suites. But with so many properties of an image to consider at once, I've frequently found it overwhelming to use these editors. And what's the point of an option if you never end up using it? Umurangi doesn't just include image editing features like white balancing, bloom, and saturation, but supports you in decoding its menu and working out what changes to images are meaningful to you. It introduces you to its photo options the same way most games introduce you to their mechanics: building them out a bit at a time. Because you start with one lens and only a few elements to tweak in your photos and add to your collection as you progress, you have ample time to experiment with each new tool under your belt. You get to learn what they all do in isolation before you put them together. You can even open up your gallery folder and get that realistic experience of deciding which pictures to keep or publish and which to axe.

Within the context of Umurangi's war, taking shots with an SLR rather than a gun occasionally leaves the exercise feeling ineffectual. In the level Contact, I found my friend clutching an assault rifle, crouched terrified behind an emplacement, and instead of grabbing a gun and hunkering down beside him, I just lingered there snapping pictures. But one of the game's lessons is that, in the long-term, photography can be means of empowerment.

In the real world, we can feel like we're helpless in the face of titanic forces destroying what we care about, that all we can do is stand and watch as our houses collapse. Umurangi Generation offers a hand on our shoulder and gently says that through photography, observation can become an active rather than a passive exercise. That just seeing something is an opportunity to make statements about how you perceive your surroundings and what kind of social environment you live in. Cameras have long been heralded for their power to freeze a moment in celluloid, and what better time to do that than when the world is about to end? The photography is control that evaporates like ethanol; it's not enough to live on. Nothing short of stopping the war would be justice, but with your photographs, you can say that for a brief moment, before it all came crashing down, you were here. Thanks for reading.

Notes

1. Best, E. (1982). Maori Religion and Mythology: Being an Account of the Cosmogony, Anthropogeny, Religious Beliefs and Rites, Magic and Folk Lore of the Maori Folk of New Zealand, Part 2. Government Printer (p. 63).
2. Westervelt, W.D. (2017). Legends of Maui: A Demi-God of Polynesia and of His Mother Hina. Petroglyph Press (p. 91).
3. Talking Climate Change And Maōri Culture With Umurangi Generation by Daniel Sims (June 5, 2020), The Indie Game Website.

All other sources are linked at the relevant points in the article.

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Manifold Garden.

After the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 A.D., Islam's political and religious leadership fell to a succession of men called "caliphs". Each caliph ruled over lands and a community called a "Caliphate". Historically, there have been five major caliphates, each effectively comprising a Muslim empire.^[1][2] In the west, we tend to think of the historical Muslim world as self-contained and mutually exclusive to Europe. Yet, at its height, the second caliphate stretched from Pakistan across the Middle East, through North Africa, and up the entirety of modern Portugal. It covered almost all of Spain and even a tiny bit of southern France.^[1][3]

The caliphates were a warm wind scattering Arabic art and architecture far from its point of origin. The most recognisable of this art to Europeans probably resides at the Alhambra, a magnificent palace in Granada, Spain, which dates back to at least the 9th century. One of the features for which the Alhambra is most prized is the intricate, tiling shapes painted on its walls and floor.^[5] While, in Christian and secular spheres, we tend to associate abstract geometry with modern art, it has been prominent in the ancient world across many cultures and often accompanied or been the lens for religion.

Fractal patterns were implemented in Hindu temple architecture as Hindus believed that individual parts of the universe were similar to the whole, and they observed that natural formations like mountains and trees were also made of repeating, iterative patterns. A fractal is an infinite repeating structure: if you zoom in on one section of it, that zoomed-in region appears identical to the whole. Therefore, you can magnify a section of that section, and it will also look like the whole, and a section of that section of that section will look the same, and on forever. Fractals do exist in nature down to a certain depth in rivers, snowflakes, coastlines, lightning, and more.^[6]

In a few eastern faiths, such as Hinduism and Buddhism, there are mandalas: circular and often symmetrical geometric patterns made to focus people spiritually. They can be pictures of the Buddhist cosmos, encouragement to seek truths about the universe, diagrams of the Buddha's journey, or another religiously significant image. Some are drawn with Gods in their centre.^[7] Also in Buddhist philosophy, Indra, the King of all divine beings, lives in a palace which contains a net: a tiled geometric grid. At each point in Indra's net, there is a gem which reflects every other gem in the matrix and reflects the reflections in them, and those reflections contain the reflections in the reflections, and on infinitely.^[8]

The abstract art of the Alhambra is similarly religious but has a somewhat different origin. The Quran forbids worshipping idols and gives God the title "maker of forms". The hadiths, a record of the sayings of Muhammad, tell painters to breathe life into their creations and threaten them with holy punishment. So, religious Islamic art has shied away from depicting living beings.^[9] With artists being unable to replicate people or animals, they filled holy sites like the Alhambra with carefully practised calligraphy and abstract geometry.^[5]

In 1922, a young Dutch artist, Maurits Cornelis Escher, visited the Alhambra. Escher had performed poorly in secondary education before enrolling in the Haarlem School of Architecture and Decorative Arts. The repeating shapes of the Alhambra awoke in him a lifelong interest in tesselation: the phenomenon of infinitely tiling shapes with no gaps between them.^[10] We actually see tesselation a lot in block puzzle games and even the meshes of models in 3D games:

While we associate Escher with impossible environments, it's this preoccupation with infinitely cloning patterns, more than any perspective-bending, that enmeshes almost the entire body of his work. After Escher's moment of enlightenment in the Alhambra, he committed to mathematical studies, which would become the basis of his art. He called his return visit to the palace in 1936 "the richest source of inspiration I have ever tapped". He and his wife spent days making meticulous drawings of the Alhambra geometry, and Escher said he was "addicted" to tesselation.^[11][12] Patterns very close to those in the palace reside in Escher's 1938 woodcut print Day and Night and his 1943 print Reptiles, while tesselation invades countless other Escher works: Cycle, Symmetry Drawing, and his series Circle Limit, Development, Metamorphosis, and Sky and Water.

This concept of a symmetrical pattern that repeats forever also appears in Escher's more famous art, like his 1953 lithograph, Relativity. In Relativity, each staircase and the world surrounding it is a mirror of every other, and the stairs are the same basic units looping forever. Bridging the gap between mathematics and art, Escher's pictures inspired geometers like Harold Coxeter and Roger Penrose. Coxeter and Escher started corresponding over a shared interest in the tesselation of spheres. Coxeter would include some of Escher's art in a presentation to the Royal Society of Canada in 1958. Escher then saw a tessellated sphere in Coexeter's publications and created his own version in the form of Circle Limit I (1958), a picture which appears not unlike a mandala.^[13]

The British mathematician, philosopher, and physicist, Roger Penrose was impressed foremost by Escher's Relativity. Interested in dreaming up something similar, he worked with his father of the same profession, Lionel Penrose, to write the academic paper Impossible Objects: A Special Type of Visual Illusion. In the paper, the two discuss impossible objects: geometric constructions that can exist on paper but not in the real world. The text outlines two objects which follow the principles of the staircases in Escher's Relativity: there's the tribar, which was also discovered in 1934 by the Swedish artist Oscar Reutersvärd, and the infinitely rising/falling "Penrose steps".^[14]

Escher read the Penroses' Impossible Objects and was inspired to create two more famous works: Ascending and Descending (1960), which shows monks climbing the Penrose steps, and Waterfall (1961), which depicts a waterfall that impossibly pours into the point from which it falls.^[15] Again, infinities and symmetries are at the centre of Escher's work. All symmetries can be said to contain infinities. If you look at a pattern that is horizontally and vertically symmetrical, then you can take one quarter from any corner of it, rotate it 90 degrees, and you'll have the next corner. Rotate that 90 degrees, and you get the next corner. There's no limit to the number of times you can do this.

The ancient Islamic artists inspired Escher, who inspired the Penroses and Coxeter, who inspired Escher, and Escher inspired a whole genre of art, including a lot of video games. Q*Bert, Marble Madness, Fragments of Euclid, Echochrome, and The Bridge are just a few of the titles spun off from the style of the Dutch artist. Some games, like Monument Valley, even adopt the Andalusian architecture that a few of Escher's pictures lifted from the Alhambra. You could even make the case that all entertainment software that bends space or includes surreal geometric sections like Hyperbolica, American McGee's Alice, or Induction exist downstream of Escher's drawings. But William Chyr Studios' Manifold Garden might be the most M.C. Escher game there's been.

Adapting Escher's images into video game form comes with the challenge that the artist's most famous works are impossible objects; players may not be able to view them from all angles or interact with them in a manner that makes logical sense. For example, developers can't have the player ascend the Penrose steps in first person or have a physics engine with a consistent direction of gravity when liquid moves as it does in Waterfall. Video game worlds are not the physical world, and so, are not bound by all our physical rules, but they do have to be software engineered and are generally made to be playable. Therefore, they have to conform to the limits of our hardware, mathematics, and perception.

The trick to Escher's 3D illusions is that none of them is actually 3D; they are real 2D constructs that appear like fictional 3D objects. This is also the nature of 3D graphics on a computer screen. Even if data in the computer describes 3D objects and you think you see 3D objects as you play, they are all patterns on a flat plane because that's what your monitor is. This provides one method that a developer might use to fold Escheresque illusions and computer graphics together. Echochrome is a classic example. It lets you rotate its stages in three dimensions. However, when the stage is still, the 2D image of it can create the visual illusion of an impossible 3D object. Depending on the appearance of the level, the logic of how your character moves across it also changes.

Afterlife, a management game in which you play superintendent to heaven and hell, uses a figurative, narrative approach. One of the punishments for envy in the great beyond is the "Escher Pit", in which sinners exist on a surface where they endure some torture. They can see neighbours on an adjacent plane who appear to be in relatively better circumstances. Periodically, each soul rotates to the next surface, discovering, paradoxically, that the following punishment is always worse than the previous. By telling a story that has the spirit of Escher's Relativity rather than literally having us run through it, Afterlife doesn't have to worry about the contradictions in Escher's geometry.

Manifold Garden is also based on Escher and replicates its surrealism by letting us experience multiple different gravitational orientations in the same space.^[16] We could compare Manifold Garden to Relativity or Escher's Another World (1947), which shows five planes, each with its own gravitational pull. Manifold's mechanics stay within the bounds of virtual possibility because they do not try to assert all those gravitational directions simultaneously, in the same place, as Relativity does. Instead, whenever we approach a wall, we can select it to make the world's gravity pull in its direction and only that direction. So, if I walk up to a wall and right-click it, that wall now becomes the floor, and my previous floor becomes the wall behind me. In isolation, the game's puzzles of placing cubes on pads and routing liquid to waterwheels aren't rewriting the book on brainteasers, but we can't get a complete understanding of mechanics by viewing them in isolation. Every time we use Manifold's hook mechanic of reorienting gravity, we change the nature of its space, and so, we change the nature of everything occupying that space, including the puzzle items.

Playing fast and loose with gravity like this could send us jetting off into oblivion at the drop of a hat. Imagine if you were walking down the street and gravity now pulled from in front of you instead of below you. But in Manifold Garden, there's always a net. The world tiles infinitely in all directions, so you can fall off of the bottom floor of a temple and land on its roof or step off of the east wall of a skyscraper and then land on the same east wall. I mentioned in my article on Superliminal that we're duty-bound to discuss all modern puzzle games in relation to Portal. Manifold Garden is a game in which the outer ceiling, floor, and walls of each instance are portals. You can stare at the bottom of the level and see the top, or look in front of you and see your back. Another way to think about Manifold Garden is as using the "screen wrap" concept, which was popular in early arcade and home titles such as Asteroids, but in 3D. It turns out that the depiction of impossible spaces goes back to the sunrise of video games.

It's through its sublime tesselation that Manifold Garden becomes not just an Escher game, but the Escherist game. It understands that filament that connects the artist's work and it develops his concept. If Escher drew scenes in which lizards, birds, and cubes tesselated, Manifold Garden is art in which the scene itself tesselates. As mentioned, the contents of a space are defined by the space itself, so to copy the scene infinitely is also to copy everything in it infinitely. The unique physics of Manifold Garden are also novel instruments with which to renew the Penroses' and Escher's more specific creations. Because water can drop off the bottom of a level and pour in from above, we can recreate the infinite waterfall in first person. Because Chyr suspends everything above and below itself, we get this neat remix of Penrose/Penrose/Escher's concept of simultaneously ascending and descending.

I don't want to give the impression that Escher and the Penroses were the only bright sparks drawing impossible objects. Earlier practitioners include William Hogarth with Satire on False Perspective (about 200 years before Escher) and Pieter Bruegel the Elder with Magpie on the Gallows (about 300 years). Oscar Reutersvärd, the Swedish artist I mentioned earlier, deserves a lot more credit for designing Escher-type illusions starting in the 1930s. Some of his structures pop up in Echochrome, and certain cross-shaped constructs in Manifold Garden resemble Reutersvärd's cubic space divisions.[16] Those cubic space divisions further share traits with Escher's Regular Division of the Plane, which was a particular inspiration for Manifold Garden.^[16][17]

Many of Escher's pictures and the media they inspired, especially Manifold Garden, visualise or systemise the link between theoretical geometry and the reality we occupy. Escher's Day and Night shows two flocks of geese flying in opposite directions over square parcels of farmland, but in the centre of the picture, the birds and the ground below melt into tiled patterns. In his Metamorphosis I, we see a city on the left side of the frame and people on the right, but the intervening space is filled with abstract tokens that morph from the shapes of the houses to the shapes of the meeple. It's as though Escher is slowly whittling away layers of detail to show the geometric abstractions that underly our world. By demonstrating that objects and organisms can be physically described as cubes, squares, and triangles, he celebrates the powerful descriptiveness of mathematics and the geometry that ties all things together.

Manifold Garden also uses stripped-back versions of recognisable entities. Buildings are vast polygons with no patterning, trees are clusters of cubes, and birds are paper cranes. Colours in the scenes are simplified as, like Escher, Chyr makes liberal use of black and white, and where other colours do appear, objects usually only use a single shade of it. But the game also feels representational in the lack of context for our actions and the objects we encounter. Remember that representational art was also replete in the Alhambra.

In Manifold Garden, we can plant seeds, grow the garden, and banish "corruption". However, the graphics render all these ideas vaguely, and there is no written or spoken language to build them out. There is minimal recognisable wildlife, and seeds only sometimes mirror their real-world counterparts. They're basically blocks that reroute water, sit on switches, or grow into trees. I get the sense that the "birds", "corruption", and "seeds" are metaphorical rather than literal. The game is trying to explain to us a reality we would find too abstract by using analogies we are more familiar with. It's like how mathematicians will use the term "seed" to describe a string from which we can generate random values or talk about "squaring" a number when they want to talk about multiplying it by itself. Yet, those mathematical abstractions also feed back into our understanding of reality because we know there are maths that can describe the flow of a river or the branching of a tree.

I wouldn't be doing my due diligence if I didn't also discuss the connection Relativity and its brethren have to the physical concept of relativity. We're used to thinking of the universe in absolutes. We can say objects are objectively travelling at a certain speed, exist at certain coordinates, or are certain distances from each other. In physics, relativity was the rejection of this rigid view of position, dimensions, and velocity. Imagine I'm standing on a train that's moving away from a station, I'm bouncing a ball in my hand, and you are watching from the station platform. From my perspective, the ball is flying into the air and then coming right back down where it started; it is moving on only one axis. From your perspective, the ball is moving across two axes; with the momentum of the train applied to it, it is bouncing in an arc.

You might feel the impetus to say that your frame of reference or mine might be the "correct" one in this experiment, but how do you scientifcally prove the "right" perspective? You can't; it's all relative. It's a philosophical point as much as a scientific one.^[18] Einstein's special and general theories of relativity (1912 and 1915, respectively) expanded that contextual conception of physical phenomena. His writings were evidence that even the length of objects or the speed at which time appears to pass depend on the observer's frame of reference. Likewise, many of Escher's pictures and Manifold Garden except the idea of absolute directions like a universal "down" or "left", or objects objectively existing in any one of those directions from any other object. Instead, it's all relative.

We could also read Escher's work and its children sociologically. Escher created his pictures in the period after WWII and on the cusp of the cultural upheaval of the 1960s. Ideas about the stability of European peace and the limits of atrocity capable on the continent had been blown apart. In the academic and pop culture spaces, concepts that had been taken for granted for centuries were under heavy scrutiny as new lifestyles, and new theories in various fields of study emerged. That never really stopped, and into that culture, Escher introduces these disorienting scenes in which reality is ripped apart and reformed. More than any other social development, pictures like Relativity or Ascending and Descending may reflect the increasingly popular concept of social equality. With the erasure of "up" and "down", none of the people on these stages exist above or below each other in a hierarchy; they are just all on their own paths. Depending on how they adapt Escher's work, various media cribbing from his style may replicate this commentary. Manifold Garden certainly does.

And then there's how Escher and co. describe the reality that does not exist. Mathematics persists abstract of the objects it describes, which means that we can do mathematics that only exists in the abstract and couldn't relate to real objects. In that sense, maths is transcendental. It can consider a pattern that tiles forever, a sudden shift of gravity without changes in mass, a waterfall that flows into itself. It exists in an imaginative space that is present in that ancient art, in Escher, and in games like Chyr's. Some less obvious references to transcendental mathematics in Manifold Garden include the higher-dimensional objects in the ending sequence, the mandala-like kaleidoscopes at the conclusion of each level, and the four-dimensional "God Cubes" that you must collect to enter the final area.

I'm not going to do that annoying new age thing where I claim that ancient worshippers had the same knowledge set as modern-day mathematicians or that STEM confirms the existence of the supernatural. That's woo. But the ancient Hindus, Muslims, and Buddhists, the mathematicians like Penrose and Coxeter, and artists like Escher and Chyr have all perceived the underlying code of reality surrounded by or represented through geometric patterns of infinities. In art, we often use "detailed" and "realistic" as a shorthand for "good", but by abstracting away from reality, mathematics and Escheresque creations find a broader descriptive and imaginative capability. In Manifold Garden, impossible buildings that resemble cathedrals and temples articulate that geometry describes celestial forces. Thanks for reading.

Notes

1. Kadi, W., Shahin, A.A. (2013). The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought. Princeton University Press (p. 81).
2. Caliphate by Asma Afsaruddin (July 20, 1998), Britannica.
3. Age of the Caliphs by Federal Depository Library (Date Unknown), Mapping Globalization Project.
4. Adapted from a photograph by Dmharvey. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported.
5. Tilework in the Alhambra by Dosde Staff (Date Unknown), Dosde.
6. Dhrubajyoti, S., Kulkarni, S.Y. (2015). Role of Fractal Geometry in Indian Hindu Temple Architecture. International Journal of Engineering Research & Technology.
7. Mandala by Joshua J. Mark (October 13, 2020), World History Encyclopedia.
8. Loy, D. (1993). Indra's Postmodern Net. Philosophy East and West vol. 43, no. 3 (p. 481).
9. Figural Representation in Islamic Art by Department of Islamic Art (October 2001), The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
10. Wall mosaic in the Alhambra by Erik Kersten (October 20, 2018), Escher in het Paleis.
11. The Regular Division of The Plane at the 'De Roos' foundation by Erik Kersten (September 12, 2020), Escher in het Paleis.
12. Maurits Cornelius Escher by J.J. O'Connor and E.F. Robertson (May, 2000), MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive.
13. Escher and Coxeter - a Mathematical Conversation by Sarah Hart (June 15, 2017), Gresham College.
14. Penrose, L.S., Penrose, R. (1958). Impossible Objects: A Special Type of Visual Illusion. British Journal of Psychology vol. 49 (p. 31-33).
15. The OMG moment of Waterfall by Erik Kersten (October 12, 2019), Escher in het Paleis.
16. Level Design in Impossible Geometry by William Chyr (September 19, 2016), YouTube.
17. Oscar Reutersvärd by Erik Kersten (February 6, 2021), Escher in het Paleis.
18. What is relativity all about? by Don Lincoln (January 24, 2018), YouTube.
19. Low resolution and cropped versions of Escher's artworks are used for critical and educational purposes under Fair Use.

All other sources linked at relevant points in the article.

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Pokémon Red, Blue, and Yellow versions, Pokémon: Let's Go, Pikachu, and Pokémon: Let's Go, Eevee.

Nintendo has a knack for publishing games that are such classics that even twenty or forty years out from release, their design can echo on with minimal modifications. There are not a lot of series you could say that for. Pokémon: Let's Go, Pikachu and Pokémon: Let's Go, Eevee are 2018 remakes of 1996's Pokémon Yellow Version, itself a permutation on that year's Pokémon Red and Blue Versions.^[1] This makes Let's Go, to some extent, remakes of three different games, and it is indicative of the staying power of early Nintendo design. But after twenty-two years, even an acclaimed retro game needs some updating, and Game Freak made some fascinating decisions in adapting Pokémon Yellow to the modern era. This article is not meant to be a full review of these titles but is me looking at the changes I find worth commenting on. It is also written so that you can follow along even if you've not played a Pokémon RPG in your life. A world of dreams and adventures with Pokémon awaits! Let's go!

Starter Balancing

The Original Design

If you're not a hardcore Pokémon fan, this one is going to sound pretty inside baseball, but hear me out. The difficulty in the Gen I Pokémon games (Red, Blue, and Yellow) was topsy-turvy. Broadly speaking, games should get harder as they go on, and a childhood adventure like Pokémon should not resist new users too hard. Pokémon Red and Blue Versions let you pick one of three starter pokémon from Professor Oak's lab: Bulbasaur, Charmander, or Squirtle. Each one should be an equally valid pick for a few reasons:

1. A new player won't have the experience to judge a pokémon's effectiveness, so expecting them to select the best pokémon from a list would be unfair.
2. You want to lend new trainers an early rewarding choice, one that they can make even before they know the rules.
3. You want players to feel confident in picking companions they think are cool or cute without taking a hit in attack or defence power. The visual design of the monsters is intended to be a large source of the appeal.
4. You want to give players the best shot at filling out their Pokédex. As they can only pick one starter each, they'll have to obtain the two others through trade. But if some of the starter pokémon are weaker than others, the trade "market" will become saturated with the stronger pokémon. Fewer people will want to trade for those creatures, so this will lower the amount of trading overall, inhibiting trainers trying to finish their collection. Meanwhile, the rarer starters will be harder for trainers to obtain through no fault of their own.
5. I'd argue it's a net positive to keep players having beneficial interactions with each other, which reducing the frequency of trades would limit.

In selecting your pokémon, type is a significant factor. Moves have typing, and so do pokémon. Use the correct attack on the correct pokémon, and you'll double the damage you do. Pick wrong, and you can halve the damage you cause or even inflict 0 damage. The same goes for your enemies. Pokémon generally learn moves of their own type. A dragon pokémon will learn dragon moves, a ground pokémon will learn ground moves, and so on. Overall, the most important factor when building a party is to consider whether they will have a type advantage against the gym leaders and Elite Four, the game's least forgiving foes.

Let's look at the wild pokémon you can sick on the game's gym leaders and Elite Four. In other words, the non-starters you can let loose on the game's bosses. The first gym leader is Brock, whose Geodude and Onix are ground and rock-typed. That makes them strong against almost all the pokémon between the start of your journey and Brock's native Pewter City. Onix and Geodude are resistant to the normal Rattata, the normal/flying Pidgey, and the bugs of Viridian Forest. In Pokémon Yellow specifically, you can find the poison-type Nidoran on Route 2, which is also no match for his rock stars.

The accepted method for beating Brock in Pokémon Yellow is to catch a Mankey from Route 3 and unleash its super-effective fighting moves against his dense duo. However, this is an uncommon pokémon (15% spawn rate) in an area that's unintuitive to enter because it's past Pewter City, so an inexperienced player is unlikely to discover this strategy. It's also not possible in Red or Blue version. And even after beating Brock, the rock pokémon you encounter in Mt. Moon can slow the stride of many fledgling creatures. The second gym leader, Misty, is less of a headache as everyone will capture warriors that are at least neutral against her water types. Players of all three original RPGs can also catch grass pokémon North of Cerulean City to gain a type advantage against her and Pokémon Yellow players can win a Bulbasaur in the city itself.^[2] Although, all of these take a little training up.

With wild pokémon on the back foot, you've got a lot riding on the efficacy of your starter pokémon, at least against Brock. These starters are doubly important because they're the students you'll have the most time to level up, and they come with some impressive stat sheets. Yet, those initial pokémon achieve wildly different success rates in the early game, depending on their type. All of them have normal moves, weak against rock, so it's their innate typing and non-normal moves that set them apart. The starters match up against the early opponents as follows:

Bulbasaur even shorts the electric pokémon of the third gym leader, Lt. Surge. So, there's very preferential treatment of the starters through the first few gyms. Charmander is miserable, Pikachu is a bit better, Squirtle is better than Pikachu, and Bulbasaur takes the gold. Keep in mind, in Pokémon Yellow, you don't get to pick your starter; it's Pikachu or the highway. So, it's a little mean that it can't hold its own against the initial big bad. You could argue that choosing your first pokémon is a matter of deciding whether you want to have a combatant that excels now or later. While Bulbasaur might kick the ass of the first three gym leaders, it shrivels under the gaze of Koga and Giovanni's poison pokémon and Blaine's fire-breathers. Although Squirtle might steamroll Brock's living stones, Surge's electric shockers and Erica's grass pokémon will leave you scraping it off the floor.

But even in the long-term, some starters have advantages against more bosses than others. Compare Charmander to Squirtle. Charmander only has type superiority against one gym leader (Erica) and is not strong against any of the Elite Four, the game's final bosses. It also struggles to damage the two last gym leaders (Blaine and Giovanni) and comes up short against two of the Elite Four (Lorelei and Bruno). Squirtle, on the other hand, is weak against two gym leaders (Surge and Erica) but strong against three, including the last two (Blaine and Giovanni). It doesn't have a type disadvantage against any of the Elite Four and stands up very well to the first two (Lorelei and Bruno). To be fair, the manual tells you that Bulbasaur is the easiest starter, and in a roundabout way, that Charmander is the hardest.^[3] Yet, you have to read through spoilers about Brock to get that information, and the player still can't entirely judge how helpful or unhelpful the starters are relative to each other, or how well non-starters will fill in for the functions of weaker starters. They also can't tell how much time and energy it takes to level pokémon to compensate for their shortcomings.

Your starters further have decreasing relevance as the game goes on because the more you play, the more time you have to collect and level up a wider range of types. We've already discussed how to pile on Misty with Oddish, Bulbasaur, or Bellsprout, but additionally, the rock and ground pokémon of Mt. Moon confound Lt. Surge's thunder pokémon, compensating for Squirtle's squishiness against them. Those early Pidgeys wrap back around to do 2x damage to Erica's plants, meaning that it matters less that Charmander could hold its own against them too. So, the greater emphasis on the performance of the starters through the first few routes and cities means they're not all equally valid. They really do tip the game one way or the other.

The Update

Pokémon: Let's Go, Eevee and Pokémon: Let's Go, Pikachu level the playing field with a couple of changes. Firstly, the games let you capture Bellsprout, the grass pokémon, in Viridian Forest, which has a type advantage against the first three gym leaders. If you're really lucky, you might find a Bulbasaur in the woods too. Secondly, the starters of Eevee and Pikachu can now learn the fighting move Double Kick, at level 10 and level 9, respectively. So, by the time you get to Brock, you probably have a relatively well-trained starter with a move that is strong to his typing.

If anything, the difficulty of Let's Go swings too far in the other direction for me. Not only are the early capturables stronger than in the original games, you get new affordances like being able to switch out your exhausted team members for any you've caught, even away from a PC, and not having to battle any wild pokémon. Random battles are replaced with passive catch encounters. But the opening chapters are overall improved. They have more forward momentum and are suitable for children and casual players.

The Emphasis on Hidden Machines

The Original Design

In the mainline Pokémon games, Hidden Machine moves are crucial. HMs allow you to teach an infinite number of pokémon high-damage attacks. The HM moves also have functions in the overworld, like letting you fast-travel (i.e. Fly) or pass through hard barriers (e.g. Cut, Surf, Strength). However, because the design ties these combat abilities to exploration abilities, you have less flexibility in what you can teach your pokémon. You don't just want the HM moves; you need them to get around the country of Kanto, which means you'll always have one pokémon in your party with Surf, one with Fly, one with Cut, etc. If you want to change that pet out of your party, then you're going to want to switch another with the same move in. The HMs are also a free, no-effort means to give an up-and-coming party member a powerful attack. So, the capabilities across all your pokémon become more homogenous, especially because a HM move will take a slot that another power would otherwise have filled.

The Update

The main fix Let's Go implements for that issue is to unlink the overworld powers of HMs from the combat powers. On the map, you can now use Fly, Strength, Flash, etc., whether or not you've taught them to a pokémon (even if Let's Go gives them different names than Gen I did). So, you can teach each animal battle moves suitable for them without worrying about how you will move around the world. There are a couple of more subtle refocuses away from HM abilities as well. Firstly, the insides of caves are visible even without Flash. This actually makes Flash virtually redundant, but it means that you can pass through subterranean areas without having to worry about that Hidden Machine.

Secondly, Technical Machines can be tapped infinitely. In previous games, TMs were much like HMs, but granted a new combat ability with no overworld application and were consumed after use. In Let's Go, the limitless reserve of TM moves is another hack by which the player may become overpowered. However, it means that you're not just installing one water or flying move on pokémon over and over; you have a variety of actions of every type that you can teach on an endless cycle.

Pokémon Encounters

The Original Design

Including both elements from Pokémon Go and the mainline console games, Pokémon Let's Go is the diplomatic link between the two. Both traditional Pokémon and the mobile app have top-of-their-class approaches to monster encounters, but Let's Go manages to combine their designs without getting the benefits of either.

In the classic Pokémon battle system, the player is spoilt for the actions they get to pick from. They carry up to six pokémon that know up to four moves each (that's twenty-four abilities), and those characters also have different type match-ups with enemies. Then, you have a buttload of items that can turn a battle in your favour. Each meeting with a wild pokémon is pretty meaty, but arguably, the core Pokémon games make encounters, to which they dedicate tens of hours, a potential annoyance rather than something you're always excited for.

You get a lot of similar fights in quick succession that don't incur a huge cost or pay big jackpots. Your fighters' HP is chipped away little by little, and XP comes in on a drip feed, as is the JRPG. When your party is low on health, the sudden and random nature of battles can make them annoying. You can sometimes run away to opt out of the scuffle, but that's an anti-climax. I don't want to go too hard on this point because there's a lot to be said for games that comfort through predictability and provide a slow, steady sense of progress rather than trying to get you hopping out of your seat at every turn. Still, I get why a designer or player might want to see their random encounters spiced up.

Pokémon Go is an augmented reality game you're meant to integrate with riding in vehicles or walking, during which you're potentially surrounded by distractions. So, fiddly UI manipulation and tasks that require intense focus are out. Encounters are simplified and shortened. They are a diet alternative to the higher-calorie matches of the full game. Despite that, their bite-size nature means you can blow through a bunch in a row with satisfying haste. The touch controls also connect you to the Poké Ball, modelling it as a light and aerodynamic projectile. The trajectory of the ball follows the path of your digit, making it an extension of your hand. Using different systems for battles and capturing, Go is able to make each a distinctive activity and casts you as less of an aggressor towards the wildlife, which is a positive when Pokémon is intended to have a warm air and make you a companion to its creatures.

The Update

Taking a leaf from Go's book, the encounters in Let's Go are slimline. But like the classic Pokémon face-offs, they also lack synchronicity between what your body is doing and what happens on the screen. To attempt a catch, you're either making a throwing motion with your Joycon or Poké Ball Plus, or you're aiming the whole-ass Switch at a pokémon like a camera and pressing A. In the former case, you're employing motion controls, but the arc of the Poké Ball does not extend from your hand, so you have a lack of kinetic immersion. In the latter case, you can't get comfortable as you normally would with a handheld console because you need to change position often to track pokémon. The view also jitters about as you act as the tripod for this weighty screen. You often have to pick the whole console up because, more often than in Pokémon Go, species drift left and right across the environment like you're at a cheap carnival arcade. You can argue that a lot of the design choices in this game that might be unpalatable to us make it more suitable for children. Yet, in this case, it seems harder for them to keep the device aloft and steady in front of them.

It's also mystifying that even a deft shot with the best Poké Balls leaves pokémon with a high chance of breaking out. The text on the screen might say "Excellent", but the results don't. I can't see how these unavoidable and frequent failures line up with Let's Go's goal of inviting a wider audience into the series. You have neither the option to wear down a pokémon's HP and put them to sleep that the original RPGs gave you nor the reasonable base catch rates of Pokémon Go. Because each catch attempt is more likely to fail, you'd want to be able to throw your electronic cages and access items at the tap of a button. But Let's Go lets you down there too.

In Go, a button on one side of the screen pulls up a short menu of balls, and one on the other side does the same for berries. Berries are items that can increase reward yield from pokémon or make them easier to catch. If you want to throw the ball, you just use the touch controls. In Let's Go, it takes longer to complete the motion that dispatches the ball, and every time you want to perform the throwing motion, you have to select a menu option to activate throw mode first. Entering your inventory to change balls or equip a berry requires a lengthy chain of inputs. You spend so much time communicating basic actions to the game and little time seeing the results of those actions, so encounters never get into a rhythm. Whenever a pokémon breaks out, it's a bummer because it means more time spent with the game's underbaked UI.

Inventive Encounter Rewards

The Original Design

The series' releases on Android and iOS came up with some inventive reasons for you to be on the lookout for specific pokémon. In the console games, capturing a pokémon rewards experience which is useful in general but gives you little reason to pursue one species or return to earlier areas. The optimal strategy is usually to keep encountering pokémon in whatever the appropriate area for your current level is. All encounters give experience, so you should seek out those from which you can get the most EXP for your current tier. However, in Pokémon Go, each animal drops candies specific to its species. Each species can only be levelled up, taught a new move, or evolved (where applicable) by feeding them enough of their species-specific sweets. In other words, you can't stalk just any creatures to develop your pokémon; you need to collect pokémon of a specific species. You must be precise in your catching and can benefit from widening the window of pokémon you're willing to scoop up.

The Update

Pokémon Let's Go attempts to carry forward this idea that rewards are more meaningful if you can't get them just anywhere. However, it can't incorporate Go's candy system while running base Pokémon's XP system. Both candy and XP are resources to level up, evolve pokémon, and teach them new moves, so one makes the other redundant. But Let's Go has another bright idea: most of the candies you earn aren't general-purpose boosts for your team. Instead, they augment a specific stat for any pokémon, like Speed or Attack, with monsters coming packed with candy for the stat they're strongest in. Not as many wild creatures are worth finding as in Pokémon Go, but on the plus side, you now have more control over how a pokémon grows without getting into the esoteric and hidden IV and EV determinants.

The New Ball Click Logic

The Original Design

There's this loose rule in game development that when there's a meaningful change in the game state that you want to be transparent to the player, that change should be accompanied by visual and auditory cues. The more bearing the change has on our potential success or failure (it can even be a success or failure), the brighter, louder, and bigger the cues should be. In modern fighting games, you'll often find that doing chip damage to an opponent results in slight popping animations and a quiet sound effect, but KOing your opponent could make them fly backwards with a huge "whoosh". A "KO" text plate may appear across the screen with a voice yelling out "KO". Or in the rhythm game BeatStar, the closer you keep your inputs in line with the song, the more points you score. Tapping a button close to the arrival of a note will cause the word "Perfect" to pop up in green but not much else. If, however, you hit the note dead-on for a "Perfect+", the announcement of your success will be accompanied by a bright green flash. The profile of the feedback matches the seriousness of the gameplay event.

For Game Boy releases from 1996, Pokémon Red and Blue were ahead of their time in using animation and sound effects to speak to events in play. Lots of games have these scenarios where we place a high value on the outcome of a semi-random process. You can see one in Pokémon, where we're waiting to find out whether or not a creature breaks out of a ball. The smart thing Game Freak worked out was that instead of blurting out whether you'd caught the Pokémon or not and then moving along, they could draw out this moment of tension. They could make it like watching the reels get locked into a slot machine or a roulette wheel slowly crawl to a stop. Their version of this casino drama was to have three beats on which either the ball containing a pokémon shakes (success) or breaks (fail). If the ball wobbles three times, you'll then get some combination of visuals and sounds that indicate you've caught the creature. Pokémon games later got into the habit of lengthening the catch sequence, and on a success, pausing after the third wobble and then having sparks fly out of the ball and playing a "click" sound.

But wait! This violates the development guideline I mentioned earlier. Passing the third check matters more to players than passing the first two because the first two checks only earn you another check, whereas passing the final check earns you a 100% A-grade certified pokémon. In fact, the first and second check only matter because of the value of passing the third. So, you'd think that succeeding at the first two checks would earn you a subdued animation, and succeeding at the third would result in one that's a little more explosive. Yet, the series has traditionally used this limp wobble animation for all of them.

There is the more celebratory "click" animation at the end of the capture attempt, but by the point we see that, we already know we've collected the pokémon from the third wobble: the tension has been released. We could think of that third wobble as a spoiler.

The Update

If we're following the rules, the "snap" should come at the moment the pokémon is caught. That's what Pokémon Let's Go does, using the gentler shaking animation on three initial checks but building up to a post-wobble moment of failure where the Pokémon punches out of the ball or success in which yellow shapes fly from it, and we hear a satisfying click. Tension is retained to the end of the catch sequence, and the animations and sound are consonant with the play.

___

One reason Let's Go proves the timelessness of the first-gen Pokémon RPGs is that some of its "updates" to them make it worse by comparison. Yet, when looking at a game as impressed on our minds as Pokémon Yellow, it can be hard to imagine it in any other state than the one we've known it in for upwards of two decades. Game Freak shows that it's possible to love a game while also being critical of its shortcomings and seeing where it might benefit from changes. For the gameplay design, at least, this is a net positive. Thanks for reading.

Notes

1. All dates are North American.
2. Thanks to Broshmosh for pointing out the Bulbasaur in Cerulean City.
3. Thanks to Ginormous76 for pointing this out.

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Unpacking.

We don't realise the absurd volume of possessions we own until we move, when we have to pull every shirt from its hanger and kitchen utensil from its drawer and ship them off somewhere new. On the other side of that move, we're faced with a daunting forest of boxes, one that seems so much larger than our storage space. But then something miraculous happens. Your new home reveals itself to be a non-euclidean space and cupboards and cabinets that must be bigger on the inside than the outside swallow your belongings up. For however much stuff you have, there are the containers to hold it.

Witch Beam's Unpacking is a blend of spatial reasoning trials, opportunities for self-expression, and storytelling, and is a reel of every time its protagonist had to stir together a new home and old possessions. I've known more than a few people who've compared fitting all their detergent into a laundry room or shoes into a closet to playing Tetris. Unpacking dispenses with the simile. It cuts right to describing moving in as a matter of maximising your use of space. It simultaneously asks you to find sensible placements for your items. Yet, because the appropriate home for each teaspoon and figurine depends on the positions of those around it, you can discover that your initial placement for an object is less than ideal and that you need to relocate it. Decorating is redecorating. This is especially true if you're pulling belongings out from their boxes one at a time. You can plan more effectively if you lay everything out on the floor before you start putting mats on tables and paintings on walls. Both setting out the items before you begin and winging your unpacking require no shortage of work, but because you can choose between them, the game gives you a choice about the kind of work you undertake.

You also have a reason to be thorough in your composition of the environment. Most games give you a motive to go above and beyond the primary goal: a higher score, extra stars, anything that says you did more than the compulsory. In these houses and apartments, your primary goal is to put everything away, but your bonus goal is to make the kind of home you'd want to live in. It's not an objective every gamer is going to be tempted by, but it is fetching to anyone already playing an interior design simulator. While visual customisation in games is traditionally seen as disconnected from challenge and play, in Unpacking, gussying up your space is the puzzle.

The game has explicit rules prescribing what goes where: you have to place the toothbrush in the bathroom, you can't leave your coffee cups in the middle of the floor, etc. But many of the mandates we follow are the implicit rules of home design rather than any edict enforced by the software. Decorating often consists of making stacks and islands of items with enough space between them to avoid our home feeling claustrophobic. We often aim to form those islands into pleasing shapes, but we're also trying to make their constituents match. That could be a match of shape, colour, material, or function. E.g. They're all warm-coloured items, or they're all cleaning chemicals. We also want to keep the average time to reach any one object low.

In Unpacking, we run up against these realistic hitches in which we can't clump together an island or satisfy multiple grouping criteria at the same time. That's always due to some combination of odd items out and space being at a premium. For example, we might have one sock that does not match the others or a plate that's not the colour of the rest of a set. We could have more toiletries than space on the shower shelf or more cutlery than would fill one drawer but not enough to fill two. These leftover objects force us into imperfect decorating, and it's in those imperfections that player actions are most likely to diverge. Give two homeowners a bookcase with twelve spaces and twelve books, and they'll both put the twelve books in the case. But give them the same empty area and thirteen books, and chances are they'll each find a unique spot for that orphan book. The more individual a decorating choice, the more sharply it represents us.

As a tree can spread its roots and make itself part of the woods, filling out our homes allows us to stretch our tendrils over a whole building. If fashion enables us to show our inside on the outside by wearing a coat or a hat, interior design allows us to state who we are by wearing a house. When you live with other people, it's also a means to retain close proximity with each other, even when you're not in the same room. Although, that can be a double-edged sword, as we'll see later in the game's first act. Neatly organising your space can further be a form of self-respect or respecting those around you. Being messy and leaving items in people's way can be a form of disrespect.

Games that excel at letting us personalise spaces usually do it by only allowing us to make macro-level decisions about settings but giving us heavy catalogues of goods to pick from. In Animal Crossing or The Sims, the smallest details we can determine are the patterns of kitchen counters and the species of house plants, but we are spoilt in the assortment of counters and plants we can pick from. In Unpacking, we can organise our belongings on a granular scale. We decide what items occupy every drawer underneath the counter. We choose how a child's toys are arranged in their cabinet. We, therefore, have a higher capacity to customise the world per square centimetre.

Where you place your stock doesn't just make a statement about your character's aesthetic preferences; how accessible you make each object has a bearing on their lifestyle. To decide whether you put the cookies next to the sink or on top of the cupboards is to decide your sugar intake. The book you leave on your nightstand is one you're probably going to read. However, Unpacking doesn't give us a say in the furniture we set down on the carpet and hardwood. By keeping its household items fixed, the developers can tell their own story about who the protagonist is, whereas Animal Crossing and The Sims assign that task to us.

Unpacking is like a colouring book with furniture; we're shading in a character's life through their belongings. We know they're an artist via their drawing tablet, easel, and markers. We can tell the countries they've travelled to via their souvenirs. Even how cohesive each box of items is tells you something about the character's ability to organise at their current point in life. In their earlier moves, they throw everything into the packs willy-nilly, so you'll find toiletries next to saucepans next to shirts. As they age, they get better at prepping each box for the room it will be dropped into. But what's not obvious from the outset is how many places there are to take Unpacking's central concept or how drastically the activity of unboxing could change with the home we're in.

From their family home, the protagonist lands in shared accommodation before cohabiting with a boyfriend in the city. That relationship won't last, and they will retreat to their birth home, but in the following chapters, find a place of their own. Then, a new partner moves in with them, and after, the protagonist will produce a child's picture book. They and their partner will commit to a long-term house, complete with baby room. That doesn't cover every home in the game, but we're hitting the major checkpoints. With each of these life milestones comes a new dimension to the art of organising a home.

When we cohabit for the first time, there are spaces left empty for us to place our toiletries, crockery, and other items. In those gaps, I saw welcoming consideration from roommates. Across the story mode, you experience friendly merges into pairings and other social groups as you place your towels beside other peoples' on the rack or combine your DVD collections. However, there's no shifting anything they've already got settled; that would be rude, so you do this dance of fitting your life around theirs. You must be mindful of them just as they were mindful of you.

The level in which we set up shop in our boyfriend's home comes with the freedom to pick up and move another person's effects. This mechanic represents our comfort and familiarity with our newfound partner. But despite this person making significant concessions for us in our decorating, there are still plenty of warning signs that the relationship is doomed. As in any failed relationship, those warning signs are more obvious in retrospect. Materials, shape, colour, and purpose differ between the possessions of our feminine protagonist and their masculine counterpart. The protagonist favours furniture that's made from natural materials, is blobby, is colourful, and is decorative, whereas their partner has built a handsome collection of commodities that are synthetic, hard-edged, monochrome, and utilitarian. Whereas the protagonist owns a lot of implements that help them create things, the apartment is full to the brim with instruments, grooming products, and coffee tables, suggesting someone who prefers to acquire things.

You could disagree with the idea that a person's belongings are a mirror of their character or that compatible people can't have different tastes. Yet, the symbolism remains: these two souls don't see eye to eye. Their personalities are worlds apart, and they want different things out of life. In solving this level, we find that there is not space for the artist in the materialist's day-to-day. Even if we can reposition our other half's items to clear space for our own, a copious quantity of appliances and curios means the home is always cramped. They've made more room for themselves than for us, and we always seem to be tip-toeing around their lifestyle.

Completing this puzzle requires arduous acts of contortion. I almost went mad trying to find a space for my character's diploma: the symbol of their personal achievements and promise of their career ahead. After a couple of sessions of play, I found that the game let me stamp the level complete if, and only if, I tucked it away under the couple's bed. In this bond, the main character struggles to find a place for their accomplishments and prospects of becoming a professional artist, and must eventually resign themselves to pushing them deep down inside. At the time, it was a relief to just stop fretting.

But this brings us to Unpacking's most obtrusive flaw. This confusion over where we're allowed to situate items extends beyond the purposefully anxiety-inducing apartment stage into the bulk of the game, in which the home is meant to be somewhere to relax and self-express. The rules for placement are too often arbitrary, and the UI won't tell us that we've made a "mistake" until we've hit the bedrock of all our moving boxes. I understand why I can't leave a frisbee in the bathtub or have an egg timer on my bed, but why can't I put my GameBoy in a closet drawer? Or my waste paper bin next to my desk? Even when we move in with our dream spouse, there's a little bit of me that feels like I'm living with a controlling parent.

Speaking of which, crawling back to their parent's house with their tail between their legs, the player is likely to feel a sense of failure, but again, we have the benefit of hindsight, and this time, it can put a positive spin on events. In the immediate, returning to the house we grew up in might appear to be a regression to a previous stage of life instead of closing proximity with independence and self-actualisation. However, sometimes you need to move backwards to move forwards. You can't find your dream home until you've moved out of the home you hate. You can't find the right one until you break up with the wrong one. That hope of a future reignites as we place our diploma back on the wall of our bedroom.

Soon, we're opening the door on a house of our own, and this level is a sunny reminder of the freedom and carefree mindset that comes with weaving your own nest. There are no roommates' belongings to worry about, and we aren't so boxed in that we're trying five different arrangements just to get all our crockery into the cupboard. But Unpacking also thinks there's something more rewarding than convenience and legroom. When our character's love moves in with them, they bring what the protagonist's ex didn't. Our lover's belongings are distinct from the main character's through their Japanese cultural bent. However, they do share the same breezy femininity as the main character's. This partner is their own person but one that has a lot in common with the protagonist.

There's a sense of responsibility in making a home for people the protagonist cares about that I don't get in ornamenting a space for myself. This is the chance to establish somewhere a child will remember forever as where they were raised, or our partner might spend the rest of their life. It's a common viewpoint that the home is somewhere we can leave our worries at the door and sink into the sofa, but Unpacking says that the work of building a home where you can feel calm is sometimes stressful. Therefore, our goal can't be to banish domestic frustration entirely; it must be to ensure those frustrations go into making somewhere worth cherishing. Thanks for reading.

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Off-Peak.

Video games are full of painstakingly painted and sculpted visual art that we never truly look at. There are so many instances where we get these gorgeous, detailed sprites or 3D models served to us that we can't zoom in on, that artists shove into the background, or that we blow right past. Cosmo D's Off-Peak is a game that gives us the motivation and the accommodations to stop and stare a little longer.

They say you should start as you mean to go on, but when a piece of media submits a misleading intro, that can allow it to rig a pleasant surprise. Off-Peak opens on a secluded pier, where a shady musician brings the good news that he's secured us a ticket for the nearby train station. But wouldn't you know it, that ticket got torn up, and its pieces scattered around the environment. As you approach the doors of the transit hub, the building towers over you. Red light bleeds out from behind its edifice, and a clock stares you down, ominously speeding through hours in the space of minutes. The building's walls reflect no light; they are as black as soot. In the forecourt, angry protestors make their voices heard while pale enforcers observe them from behind fashionable sunglasses. Then the gates groan open, and either side of you, there are two rich, minimalist, cool-as-fuck prints. You walk forward onto a balcony overlooking a noisy atrium of audacious and surreal exhibits, and it turns out this isn't a train station. This is a gallery.

Summarising what's in that gallery is impractical because it stretches across numerous forms, decades, and styles. There are Polish circus posters that forgo shading and use thick lines and high saturation to create cartoonish, blobby patterns. There's greyscale graffiti that uses precise edges and detached depictions of subjects to capture disaffection and pain. There's a tesselated profile of a man dressed as a cowboy with text above and below, realising the mythical Hollywood figure of the western gunslinger. There is a stained glass window tastefully depicting a peacock. There are plastic steer skulls illuminated from the inside so brightly that all their features are obscured. There is silver-age comic art of Doctor Doom, complete with Ben Day dots. And this is only scratching the surface. The only trait that most of Off-Peak's pieces have in common is being digestible and modernist. To find all the ticket scraps, you wander from the main hall into various side zones like the platforms, the abandoned subway, and the board game cafe. Off-Peak is a living example of how we get more viewing time with assets when the level routes us back to where we've been. These return trips prompt us to reexamine.

Games don't always afford you the best viewing angle on paintings, prints, sculptures, etc., but Off-Peak lubricates the viewing process by making a lot of its visuals enormous. Large props are not rare in the medium: Objects typically appear smaller on screen than they do in real life, so if you want the player to get a good look at them, it helps to scale them up. That's especially true if they're off in the distance or the player might be distracted from them or only glimpse them briefly. AAA games often go big with setpieces to draw your eye to them, highlighting entities that have a mechanical function or that serve as a landmark to help you navigate. And when the player character is optimised for covering a lot of distance quickly, designers need to super-size the world to compensate. Embiggening objects also has aesthetic and semantic implications: it makes them feel impressive and important, as demonstrated by the hulking golems of Shadow of the Colossus or the boundless map of Red Dead Redemption 2.

Like these other games, Off-Peak gives its art some serious stature for the purposes of visibility and grandiosity. In that regard, it's typical in how it uses size. What's atypical about it is how many large objects it packs into a tiny map and how many you can invade the personal space of, soaking in every metaphorical brushstroke. Then you have all these models and textures hanging over you or extending far above your eyeline. You don't look up a lot in first-person games; it would typically distract from the action, but there isn't action in Off-Peak, so it can keep you craning your neck in awe at banners and street art perched up where pigeons soar. Using the whole Y axis also allows the developer to fit more eye candy into less space.

There's further a fine reminder in here that some types of environments get more accessible when you situate them in a video game. In a computer game, many disabled people can glide through spaces that would fight them every step of the way in the real world, and even able-bodied individuals can explore them without exhaustion. Architects design spaces with bodies in mind, so freeing occupants from a physical form changes the architecture. If the player has the legs of a robot Usain Bolt, the architect can sketch up long corridors and steep stairs without fear that a visitor's muscles will give out on them. Free reign of a space then gives us free reign to what it houses.

There's one more catalyst that the game drops into the beaker in hopes of getting you to hone in on the art. This time, something invisible. We're encouraged to engage with Off-Peak's attractions via the context of an exhibition. I described earlier our tendency to blaze past visuals without taking them in. That isn't just something we do in video games; it's how we treat most sights. It's not often someone traces every wisp of the clouds in the sky or pores over all the stitches of a piece of furniture in their day. But people will drink in every square inch of a painting in a gallery. They'll look at the colour, the shape, the lighting, the shading, and the dynamics between all the elements. And in my experience, even when someone doesn't understand or like a piece of art, in a museum, they typically make an effort to respect it and meet it on its own terms. Off-Peak is encouraging you to do the same with the items in its collection. It's also bucking conventional wisdom about what constitutes art. People make pictures on and out of a lot of things, but there's always been a snobbish protectiveness about what receives the respect of the museum exhibition. Art made on canvas or plaster or out of marble gets it, but art made on beer labels, game boards, or album covers generally doesn't. Off-Peak's museum isn't that arrogant; its philosophy is that if it looks cool, it's worth displaying.

The round decals on Off-Peak's walls and the banners hanging over its main hall are mostly stickers from drinks bottles. It also includes a larger-than-life aquarium, books of cello music, and even food like cookies and pizza. If it sounds far-fetched to think that the game wants you to associate the food with the posters and paintings, there's a ramen cook who tells you bluntly that his noodles are art. And he is too. The characters' status as works in the museum is well demonstrated by a couple in the tower. Next to a macabre, flood-lit painting of a skull and spine, two men kiss. One of them holds a shiny cherry-coloured skull behind his back. He's being intimate with this man, but at the same time, guarding something morbid or internal from him. For another example, see the giant sitting at a piano with his shoes up on the keys. He is an absurd performance piece. The short physical distance Off-Peak establishes between its "high art", "low art", and what is traditionally considered non-art suggests a short aesthetic distance.

But is any of this any good? I'm talking about the noble goals of curating a video game art gallery, but if it's a gallery, shouldn't we leave it with some sense of whether the pictures and models are enjoyable to look at and whether they make incisive statements? Trying to review the work on display in Off-Peak reminds me of how little we close-read the art of games, and how rarely we describe video game graphics with the same critical basics we use for drawings or frames of films. For all the advancement in the last decade of games analysis, it's still a razor-thin slice of the critical pie that is turning to games with an eye for composition, framing, or the use of light and shadow in anything more than a technical sense. Not that I'm exactly a John Ruskin.

Nonetheless, there are too many items with too much diversity in Off-Peak to summarise. Most reviews of exhibitions are reliant on museums displaying works from only a few or one media, usually held together by some adhesive artist, period, or movement. But Off-Peak's curation endeavours to abolish that categorisation. Its theme is that it has no theme. The closest I can get to wrapping its assets up in a neat little bow is that it's got a caffeinated, thickly-layered soundtrack provided by Archie Pelago that gratefully snaps up cues from jungle music and jazz. It enmeshes it with visual art that has a big personality and that often skins, recolours, and mangles familiar forms to original ends. The game's sound and textures all have the refreshing, hip tang of the inner city. They make me feel like I'm somewhere thrumming with busy footsteps and bursting with new ideas.

If you were being harsh, you could say that the art has the hallmarks of local council-comissioned graffiti or coffee shop wall hangings. Most of the creations do not challenge anyone who has a slight stomach for modern art or leave an imprint of a particular worldview or experiences. I'm pretty smitten with the face Off-Peak wears, but there are some who would say your eyes swoop too easily over the pictures, that it all goes down too smoothly, and it's worth considering that perspective too.

The most obvious aesthetic criticism of Off-Peak overall would be that it's unfocused. That unbound from theme or creative prescriptions, it was always doomed to lack an artistic throughline. That there are so many artworks singing their own unique part that they're all drowning each other out, never able to harmonise. And I'm not going to tell you that assessment is wrong, but there is another vantage point from which to view the game. The background of co-developer Cosmo D is well-documented: he is a lifelong musician trained as a cellist and active in New York City's music scene. Therefore, Off-Peak's setting reads as an autobiographical environment.

The besuited man shopping for beginner cello music, the stand of jazzy albums, the playful improvisations on MTA signage, and the instrumentalist's nook on the subway platform are all refractions of Cosmo's life. It's not hard to imagine that tabletop sessions at cafes or steaming ramen bowls could fit into it too. Where Unpacking is a game that shows how a person furnishes a place to depict who they are, Off-Peak depicts who a person is by making them the place itself. And people don't live every moment of their life in the same style, mood, or medium. We might curate a brand for social media, or an artist might favour a filter of expression, but inside, we are all a messy overlap of drink bottles, book covers, subway signs, and local delicacies. If Off-Peak resists holistic analysis, it's because we all do. Thanks for reading.

Note: The following article contains significant spoilers for Bioshock, Virginia, and Paratopic.

The games community has had ahold of the phrase "environmental storytelling" for a good decade and a half. It was thrust into our lexicon in the late 00s and early 10s with launch pads like Bioshock and Gone Home: thrillers that immaculately married place and history. "Environmental storytelling" is often a misnomer, as readily used to describe a location characterising something or someone as performing exposition. It also wasn't a new idea, even in 2007. If you visit the palace in the JRPG once and it's pristine, then you return, and its windows are broken and valuables pilfered, that's environmental storytelling. If you approach a cave and there's a "Danger" sign on the path to it and a skeleton hanging out of the cave mouth, that's environmental storytelling. All the way back to the ancient text adventures of the 1970s, games used their worlds to scratch out the runes of narratives.

What was special about the era of Gone Home was that audiences and developers found locational text could carry a depth none of us had seen before. There became an invigorated interest in chiselling out the personalities of virtual worlds and characters with props, architecture, and interior design rather than writing. And it worked, up to a point. Bioshock and Gone Home's environments elevated their games' storytelling capabilities, and in projects since, including Control, Prey (2017), Paratopic, Little Nightmares, Off-Peak, What Remains of Edith Finch, and innumerable others, environments have narrated to flooring effect.

But we placed too much weight on environmental storytelling's shoulders. An entrenched problem for video games has been finding room to tell tales. Many fall into this layer cake format where you get a lot of play conducted in some environment, and then a little narrative is told through cutscenes, audio, or screens of text outside that environment. That's followed by a lot more gameplay, and you go back and forth between the two. At the time environmental storytelling was in the limelight, this structuring was especially prevalent.

So many games were struggling to pack in the exposition and dialogue that a compelling story needs. But if we're spending most of our time in gameplay arenas and those arenas tell the story, problem solved. Environmental storytelling would seem to prevent or at least limit the slicing of games into narrative and gameplay slabs that never fully integrate. It could make exposition and characterisation constant rather than pulsing it on and off. As a bonus, environmental storytelling cuts down on costly animation and voice acting.

Every major art form found a way to convey the ideas it wanted to in accordance with its unique faculties. Cinematography is a language that leverages the motion picture nature of films to make implications about characters, locations, objects, and events. Music theory allows composers to do something similar using pitch and rhythm. And video games have long sought an accepted and cohesive body of theory and techniques for doing the same. Computer games generally involve moving through spaces, so maybe the spaces were the conceptual carrier wave unique to the medium. Maybe environmental storytelling could be our cinematography.

But there were obstacles to having a game's staging narrate a sizeable portion of its story. There was no indicator that environmental vocabulary had all the words in it that you'd need to establish a language. English, Spanish, and cinematography were designed for expedient communication on any topic, but the way we leave clothes on the floor or decorate our rumpus room weren't optimised for the same. When writing with environmental storytelling, we have the vocabulary to say, "This train carriage was abandoned in a hurry", or "This homeowner is neat and meticulous", or "There were surgeries performed here", but how do you say "Alice slapped Bob", or "This grave was raided by pirates" or "Miguel is set to inherit his father's fortune when he dies"? How would you write Hamlet, Salem's Lot, or an episode of Frasier with an environment?

If you're anything like me, the first place your mind goes in trying to answer those questions is to written text. You place Miguel's father's will on a table or have Bob write a letter about Alice, and there's nothing wrong with that approach. Still, it's not environmental storytelling as we typically look for it. One of the reasons that we sought out communication through setting was to minimise the quantity of written text in a game; to get away from scenarios in which the player is turning away from active engagement with their surroundings towards a wall of monologuing or dialoguing.

Games have increasingly tried to reconcile the advantages of the text log and the environment by having characters graffiti their thoughts on walls, but it's not very elegant. It is firmly on the "tell" end of the "show don't tell" spectrum. Sometimes, inelegant is what you want. Many video game settings aim to scream danger, and blood smeared on a surface does that. But it's far from an all-purpose communication channel. We've all encountered pronouncements writ large on a video game wall and thought they were hokey or stretched the bounds of believability. Is your character really going to choose this as their notepad if they have other choices? What's more, to be a replacement for other forms of dialogue and plotting, a character would need to graffiti the same messages as the author would write. Are they likely to do that? And how much prose can you fit on the walls? Enough to tell the whole plot with asides for fleshing out all your characters? Wall text is a small speaker in a big concert hall. And gain, it's writing.

It's also worthy of note that many locational clues for plot events or character quirks fly under plenty of players' radars when not reinforced by traditional storytelling craft. This is apparent in Virginia and Paratopic, among other games. Paratopic has little dialogue, and Virginia has none. Forgoing the clarifications of written and verbal language, these games become enigmatic. Without explicit fail states, we could read them as non-challenging, but the challenge is there: it's in working out even the rough guidelines of the narrative. It's decoding the origin of the hospital bed in Ortega's house or the emaciated face on the bunker's TV screens. Virginia and Paratopic are brilliant in their encryption, and most audiences like a mystery, but not one so encompassing it shrouds the basic premise of the story. That's a niche.

Let's return to those examples of story beats from earlier: a train car being hurriedly evacuated versus Alice slapping Bob, a place being used as a surgery versus a grave being plundered by pirates. The difference between those narrative quanta we can voice through environmental storytelling and those we cannot is that the latter deposit no physical evidence outside of maybe documentation. A hasty exit from a train car might leave jackets and luggage and half-eaten plates of food. Surgery requires medical equipment and a lot of it. But an argument or being a pirate while graverobbing? There's no paraphernalia that uniquely identifies those actions or materials those behaviours produce. Without an object, building, or mark left on the environment, there is no substrate there for storytelling through setting.

To reword, some things you can tell about people and their world even when those people are absent from the scene. But there are other details that require the presence of those characters, in speech or conventional text, if not in the flesh. A gesture, words spoken aloud, a posture, a touch between two people: these are all something either someone makes a record of or you have to be in the room to witness. It's a reason why some games place ghosts or holograms in your vicinity. Even when studios can't spring for a fully-animated character, or it would suffocate their desired aesthetic, there are certain things they need bodies there to communicate.

For a few surreal wonders, this is where interpretive environments come into play: metaphysical dimensions wallpapered with the psyches of their dreamers. For example, the frazzled minds in Psychonauts, the ocean of depression in Sea of Solitude, or the Rorschach town of Silent Hill. It's a potentially sublime way to paint a setting, but it is not for every game. In the pirate example, we could imagine that maybe the thieves drop some gold coins in their frenzy, but that's only appropriate for a fairly cartoony experience. Sometimes an investigator identifies events or people from inconspicuous evidence like the tracks in a bootprint or the hair on a jacket, but that's going to be unsuitable outside of a certain genre. That solution also assumes something about the player's observation skills and the camera at their disposal.

Most of the time we interpret such clues in an investigation game, it's with the help of written or spoken language. In general, whether a player is going to notice environmental features depends on the nature of the play because you're going to place your attention where the design motivates you to, some UIs allow more overlays and unrealistic elements than others, and play affects how the camera can move. For example, if you are fighting enemies or in a fast-moving vehicle, you're not likely to perceive granular details in your surroundings.

And when we have to read peoples' actions from evidence in the environment alone, a game can only speak to character actions in the past (e.g. They dropped a bag of marbles on the floor or bought a new pet) or which are ongoing (e.g. They're building a treehouse or attending weekly church services). So, environments, by themselves, can't narrate actions in the present unless they're caused by someone in another room, like a person setting off an alarm in the chamber you're in. Technically, characters create a narrative in the present as they interact with a location. "I placed a blender on the kitchen counter" or "This soldier busted down a door" are bullet points in narratives. But I don't think this is what people mean when they say "environmental storytelling". The term is invariably used to describe storytelling by an environment alone, not a character storytelling through their interactions with the environment.

And if you're communicating primarily through the setting, you're pushing people, in their tangible form, into the background. A level in which no one is present but character actions and natures bleed from the walls often has a despondent, haunted feel. The same is true if your story is told in echoes and is far more past than present, which, as discussed, an environmentally-related story is going to be. Like a spirit, the plot lingers in the location, but you can't touch it.

By placing player characters somewhere alone, developers also tend to make statements about the player's viewpoint, the place they find themselves in, or both. Either the audience is somewhere where they can't get regular humanising contact with other people, or they're somewhere they can but are choosing to sneak around others. The player could even be dwelling in a location people generally wouldn't inhabit, like a cave or ocean trench, or an anthropocentric zone, but one empty of people. That could be a stranger's bedroom while they're out, but on a large enough scale, you have abandoned buildings, and on a larger scale than that, abandoned cities.

It's worth thinking about how many of the stars of environmental storytelling are set in uncanny spaces possessed by a colourful history. And how many of them live in places without humans, with a story thinking retrospectively. There is Tacoma with its vacant space dormitories, the civilisational remnants in Nier, the ancient aquatic ruins of ABZÛ, or the village in Everybody's Gone to the Rapture. Because environmental storytelling relies on the rifling of history, the teeth marks of past events, games keen on the method are frequently about a past that won't wash off a place: The ruins of the post-apocalypse, the ship left adrift by its crew, unfulfilled desires in the mental landscape, etc.

Then, for every Virginia or Tacoma, there's been a game that's complacent and uninspired in its environmental storytelling. There are the ubiquitous walls scrawled with menacing messages, and then there are the infinite corpses in their infinite poses, suggesting all manner of grisly murders. Not that writing on any surface can't be pithy or that there aren't artistic uses for corpses. However, we keep seeing games use environmental storytelling to tell the same story over and over: that "People died here", usually by predictable circumstances and without meaningful plotting around it. As indie developer Ben Esposito joked, ""Environmental storytelling" is the art of placing skulls near a toilet".

This is one of those points that is obvious once you spell it out, but if you're using your environment to actualise tone, theme, character, or narrative, then the tone, theme, etc., you end up with is a product of your game's setting. I think that video games keep going back to the same wells for their setpieces, firstly, because environmental storytelling is not that mature a language. At least, not yet. But secondly, because if your worlds are recycled from exhausted nerd culture symbolism or are largely thin justifications for action combat, then the environmental storytelling doesn't have a lot to work with.

The environmental storytelling in Unpacking, Gone Home, Little Nightmares, and every other game we've discussed that stuns at this craft tells a humanising story or radiates humanising detail because it's set in a humanising environment. It takes place somewhere people can live a life, and therefore, leave evidence of personhood. Even Bioshock's Rapture, which exists in a state of perpetual downfall, cursed to be frozen on the night of a failed revolution, is somewhere people lived and not just spawned in. Its buildings' art deco facades tell you its architects aspired towards an affluent mid-century utopianism, its leaky and creaking bulkheads are an artefact of the city's poor infrastructural maintenance even before the collapse. You might see corpses strung up in Fort Frolic, but they're immortalised in a collage, the residue of the abnegation of ethics in Rapture in favour of absolute creative freedom.

It's not a weakness to have violence in your world, but whatever storytelling method you choose, it's going to have all the depth of a paddling pool if that violence is not couched within a human and emotional context. People play games. Take the personhood out of the world, even if it's an oppressed personhood, and you probably take out what's interesting about it. The games that fall hardest when taking a punt at environmental storytelling tend to be those that strip the cultural and personal from their worlds to adapt them purely to mechanistic gameplay. Because of the symbiotic relationship between environmental storytelling and a game's broader sensibilities, locational storytelling cannot be a crutch for a game that doesn't otherwise have promising narrative prospects. Instead, the environmental storytelling must receive support through thoughtful development of the world, its characters, and its iconography that considers all of these aspects beyond their capacity for empowerment antics.

Gone Home and Bioshock also could not have laminated themselves as storytelling classics in the medium if they weren't aware of where environmental storytelling is in its element and where it's not. While these games may be remembered for characterisation through setting, they each use some melange of text logs, audio recordings, internal monologue, and even face-to-face interactions, alongside their locational communication. They use environments when they're trying to paint a background or impart eeriness but trot out their characters when they need someone supportive or confrontational. They're aware there's a lot you can only learn from how someone builds a city or decorates a room, but also aware that there are intentions you can only hear in their voice or interactions that require meeting with them.

Rather than a school or style of video game storytelling, environmental storytelling and characterisation are tools available to the creator. From the current evidence, it would seem that they don't have the universal applicability of cinematography or music theory, and are far from a panacea for video games' storytelling woes. Instead, a strong narrative or world has to emerge from more foundational development work. It is when intense care is taken with the narrative and character of a game and when environmental storytelling is understood as an often absent, past-tense mode of speech that the tool comes into its own. Thanks for reading.