Chapter

Introduction

Released in June of 2024, “Wherein She Completely Cuts Herself Off from Reality; A Parabolic Emotion from Recovery into Despair”¹ (referred to hereafter as Parabolic Emotion) is an anthology of three short, endless, poetic games. These games were created in the Unity engine, and are packaged together into one executable that features an interactive 3D menu and three additional written poems.

The anthology’s first game is “Prescription”, where the player loops through a handful of short, playful vignettes of a mundane day to day. The player takes a sheet of pills out of the box, pops some pills out of the sheet, and then swallows them. They then open the door, and are taken to work. At work, they heat up some food and begin to repetitively stamp papers. This repeats, and then their day ends. The game moves to the next weekday, and the process repeats. There are no weekends.

The primary drive of the gameplay is the pills - as players work through the sheet, their supply gets lower and lower, with the start-of-day messages hinting at a break from the monotony when their supply runs out. Once the player runs out, they will have to sit in a waiting room for 30 seconds. At this point, their pills are refilled and the day to day loop resumes.

The anthology’s second game is “Find the Main Character”, positioning the player with an overhead god view, providing a list of traits for their target, and explaining that the player must find a character matching those traits and kill them.

Each character the player may select is randomly generated from a list of pre-determined traits including colour, facial expression, name, job, and personality. There are an infinite number of characters, and killing them has no penalty. There is no main character - no character generated will ever match the given description.

The final game of the anthology is “Dressup”, a “paper doll” style dress-up game as popular between the 1990’s to early 2010’s. This is presented as standard for the genre - the player is given a posed mannequin, a wardrobe containing various types of clothing, and the ability to drag clothes onto the doll.

The main subversion present is a large number of stat bars on the right side of the screen, which are effected by the currently worn clothing. These bars are abstract enough to be meaningless, have no effect on gameplay, and exist entirely to pollute the otherwise “pure” player expression.

Motivations

Themes & Creative Motivations

When developing an anthology, you need some kind of cohesion between the games - a unifying trait. This doesn’t have to be too dominating over the design of the games but, at the end of the day, if they have nothing common then is there even a point of releasing them as an anthology? The theme I chose for these games was “alienation”, which ties into the design theories we decided to explore - specifically the experience of alienation of a subject through automatization, and the sharp re-discovery of it through defamiliarization.

With an overarching narrative theme set, I decided to also assign a mechanical theme, ensuring the games would feel cohesive both thematically and within their design. For this, I wanted to make “games without conclusions” or, rather, games that are designed in such a way that the player does not experience a satisfying resolution. In my head, I see there as being a distinction between an “endless game” i.e. a sandbox game like Minecraft where the player determines the length of play sessions to their own satisfaction, and a “game without an end” where the player is denied satisfaction and must instead give up and leave no richer in score nor enjoyment.

Because of this, it became clear to me that the games must not track score. Ever the feature of video games since their earliest inception, a score counter can radically transform a game from aimless to objective based. If you shoot an enemy and gain 1000 points, suddenly you have an objective: shoot enemies. The more enemies you shoot, the more score you get. The player’s understanding of their objective is shaped entirely through the presence of a digit display on screen. This meant that, while I could track player state in various ways, it must never be positive or guiding. Playing around with this became an enjoyable design challenge - such as the lowering pill count in Prescription which serves as a faux-score, guiding the player along before revealing a totally unsatisfying outcome and resetting their progress.

Ludonarrative

Within the anthology’s design, we worked with a foundational focus on ludonarrative - a term initially coined by designer Clint Hocking on his blog in a critique of the 2007 first-person-shooter Bioshock. Within this critique, Hocking establishes the concept of “ludonarrative dissonance” to supplement the idea that Bioshock’s narrative contract betrays the ludic contract it establishes with the player. The player is forced via the narrative to help somebody else to proceed, which contrasts with its self-serving Randian ideals.

Since its coinage, usages of ludonarrative have broadened, describing the full intersection between mechanics and narrative. Of particular note, work has been done to propose moving away from just viewing ludonarrative dissonance as something to be avoided (through the pursuit of ludonarrative harmony); ludonarrative dissonance may be used purposefully as a technique to achieve an intended response in the audience.

Game Poetics

One pathway of exploring ludonarrative design within games is through the employment of poetic interfaces within the mechanics. We decided to go for this approach for the anthology, aiming to achieve poetic gameplay. An unfortunate truth you run into very quickly with this goal is that there is no clear interpretation. As Magnuson puts it best, describing games as poetic can feel like “admitting a loss for words”.

In order to focus scope, we needed to work within one interpretation of video game poetry. Plenty exist! A “game poem” could be a game about poetry, a game featuring lots of poetry, a game with poetic qualities, even a game whose play elements are formed out of poetry such as Jim Andrews’ “Arteroids”. With a project focused on wielding ludonarrative techniques, it made the most sense to aim for a game where the poetic qualities are embodied through the mechanics.

Within the category of games with poetic qualities there are, again, a variety of routes one may take. Jordan Magnuson’s fantastic book centres around game design informed by the principles of lyric poetry, while Ian Bogost’s “A Slow Year” describes games as “Provocation Machines”: suggesting that the provocative elements within poems and games are the result of artifacts leftover in the work from where the author once resided. Alex Mitchell’s explorations of Russian Formalist techniques in games were truly fascinating, exploring the ways in which alienating techniques may be used to encourage reflection in the audience.

Defamiliarization, V-Effekt, and the Theatre of the Oppressed

The concept of defamiliarization originates with the Formalist Viktor Shklovsky, in his 1917 essay “Art, as Device”. Here, Shklovsky coined “ostranenie”, translated to “estrangement”, “defamiliarization”, or my personal favourite of “enstrangement”: a technique which aims to increase the “duration and complexity of perception”. When a process occurs over and over, we are familiarized to it: it sinks into the background and becomes mundane and, so, become alienated from it. Defamiliarization, then, is the effect where you suddenly become aware of it again - when your hand touches a hotplate, you will spend the next few months aware of it, making deliberate movements to avoid touching it every time you cook. Shklovsky states that “the goal of art is to create the sensation of seeing, and not merely recognizing, things”. To defamiliarize is to make the audience touch the stove and suddenly become more aware.

The German playwright Bertolt Brecht, at a similar point in time to Shklovsky, explored “verfremdungseffekt”, the distancing-effect or alienating effect. Brecht explored the idea of purposefully utilizing alienating effects in theatre to “achieve a concrete political effect in audiences and actors”. Contrasting to Shklovsky’s more general artistic theories, Brecht focused on the idea that an audience could be politically mobilized by intentionally drawing notice to the artificiality of the production, pushing them to engage consciously with the work and its meaning as opposed to merely accepting it.

Brazillian practitioner Augusto Boal explored another type of political mobilization through theatre with his development of the “Theatre of the Oppressed”. Within this framework, the audience are transformed from “spectator” to “spect-actor”, directly becoming involved in the proceeding of the play. Again, intentional techniques were used to force the audience to engage actively, rather than passively. Boal used the Theatre of the Oppressed to facilitate critical discussion and debate, again hoping to create political mobilization. Scholars such as Gonzalo Frasca and Holger Pötzsch have explored the applications of Brecht and Boal’s techniques within game studies and the creation of politically mobilizing games.

Considering these ideas, we focused on designing games that aim to create poetic gameplay through defamiliarization. The work of Brecht and Boal were still relevant to the design process but, as we were not aiming to create games that make the user grapple head on with politically challenging content, their work was less of a focal point than Shklovsky’s approach. In a sense, Brecht and Boal shared the desire to break down the accepted boundaries of the medium they worked within to create intentional effect, but their aims were very specific and different to ours.

Experiential Outcomes

At the point of beginning development, we knew the unifying narrative & mechanical themes, that our aim was to explore ludonarrative techniques within design, and that our design would be informed by Mitchell et al.’s preliminary categorization of poetic literary devices for games. For moving within a defined space, and to begin generating ideas, I like to turn to a very simple question and work backwards from my answer: “what should the player feel?” What is my intended end result - what kind of thoughts does my ideal subject experience? For a typical game, this can be easy to take for granted. A puzzle game should make the player feel challenged, then smart, ultimately resulting in enjoyment. A platformer should have tight controls and a slowly increasing difficulty curve, full of engaging level gimmicks. For more experimental designs, you effectively need to start from scratch every time because, depending on your goals, even the idea that your game is meant to be fun is up in the air.

For Parabolic Emotion, the easy part was that the player experience should be defined by our baseline theories. The player should experience poetic effect through defamiliarization, encouraging them to contemplate the games’ messages. Beyond that, I like to inject a degree of whimsy into games I work on. Elements of humour can be effective for conveying serious ideas - they encourage players to let their guard down and create brevity when paired with tougher subjects. I’m a particular fan of creating comedic moments where the joke is at the player’s expense without feeling cruel, such as a moment where they realise the game was purposefully wasting their time or misleading them. The ideal player feeling playing a game in the anthology would be “that really wasn’t what I expected, it makes me want to think more about what that game had to say”.

Laying Tracks as the Engine is Running

At the beginning of development, I found myself struggling with blank page syndrome quite severely. It’s very easy to spend too much time trying to create the perfect embodiment of your ideas at the cost of making any embodiment of them at all. With this in consideration, we went for an approach to design that sounds somewhat obvious on the surface: just make the damn thing. My guidance for development would be whatever design concepts I initially came up with and then a process of development and iteration - no design document, concept art, just working and hoping we land on something interesting by the end.

With retrospect, I can say that there are, indeed, pros and cons to this approach. The premise is the most obvious benefit: you do infact make the damn thing. A full-steam approach is great when there’s a short deadline (say, a month or two) and you want as much of a headstart on actual development as possible. No formal plans means no time wasted making documents that could be spent developing. You also end up with a lot of opportunities to iterate the design: there’s very little opportunity cost for switching things up, so you can let a design evolve from interesting idea to well-executed end product quite naturally.

The major downsides of this approach are also the inverse of these two major benefits. First, no plan can be catastrophic if you’re in the middle of development and suddenly realise you have no idea how to wrap an idea up. It tends to result in games with tonal or quality inconsistencies, too. You have no idea how important any one idea will be to the end product so you can end up with a game with lots of superfluous features that have way too much focus or important concepts that are completely underexplored. The second major downside is that sometimes the idea just goes nowhere or you figure out what it’s missing too close to the end.

Through the creation of these games I have discovered the reasoning why experienced developers tend to have a natural prototyping phase, and then use that to inform a more rigid design plan. It does a lot to help you grasp the context of common practice to brush up with the exact problems it was designed to solve.

Prescription

Design

Prescription focuses on alienation from your day to day life - taking medication, going to work, eating every single day. When you do something every single day, often at the exact same time, it begins to fade together. I often find that even while you are in the middle of actually doing something, it will just feel like noise and you will be totally checked out, almost as though you were removed from your body.

The initial idea for this game came from discussing my experience taking feminising hormone therapy. For years I spent desperately longing for the day I would make my way through the system and be allowed to begin, and I felt ecstatic to begin but the act of taking my hormones rapidly faded into the background of my life. I had also recently finished a job that had found me passionless and struggling to care about it in any way, which heavily impacted my performance, made me even more stressed, and continued the cycle. These two experiences congealed together in my head and I feel they perfectly represent a profound sense of alienation from two opposite sides of the spectrum. On one hand you have something you looked forward to fading into the background, and on the other you have something you don’t particularly care for consuming your life because you have to engage with it.

The element that tied this design together ended up being the way the game evokes an idea that the player is working toward a goal. The player is incentivised to play the same scenes over and over because of the tiniest hint that it might culminate in something different: the days of the week change, your pills run low, the UI hints that your pills are running out. I was very happy with this culminating in the most boring possible outcome: you sit in a dull waiting room, mesmerized by the pattern on a chair, listening to the buzz of an overhead light. Each game in the anthology has a joke like this - a moment where the player realises something they were doing was meaningless, automatizing the act of wasting time chasing a ghost.

Development

The aesthetic design ended up being quite vital to the game. Each vignette has a different visual character, incorporating mixed media, photographs, digital art, and 3D models. This presentation is important as it keeps the game feeling disjointed and incoherent - even moments that are close together in the day feel disconnected. I intended this to evoke the feeling of blinking and skipping ahead, feeling like your real life day is comprised of disconnected vignettes. This arose quite naturally as I worked ahead.

Evaluation

I was very happy with how Prescription turned out. In terms of representing a process of automatization and defamiliarization, the design is very elegant, if a little literal. I personally feel satisfied with a design when it feels cohesive - like every single choice was made purposefully and could not be replaced. For Prescription I find this to be the case, the mechanics, narrative, and aesthetics fit well together and all serve to convey the intended themes.

During playtesting, players responded positively to the game. It made me feel great that it were a variety of interpretations, but all picked up the central ideas I felt were important during the design process. I think this is one of the best outcomes for an art piece - knowing that it conveys your ideas, but not so rigidly as to limit interpretation of the themes. If one sees art as inherently conversational, a successful piece is one which inspires interesting conversation, so I consider Prescription a success at meeting its aims.

If I were to do it again, I would not change much. Part of me thinks it would be interesting if the waiting room scene involved physically moving around, if briefly, but I don’t think that would have meaningfully improved the design in any way. It would scratch the part of my brain that suggests adding more and more superfluous detail onto games but, if anything, it would just diminish the underwhelming feeling of boredom you get. When he was kind enough to play through the entire game around release, Jordan Magnuson suggested adding a small chance during the microwave scene to have to sit there for the entire user-inputted duration. I still think this is a fantastic idea and it’s honestly likely that one day I go in and update the game to add exactly this and nothing else.

Find the Main Character

Design

Find the Main Character had two primary goals: to focus on alienation from other people, and to critique solipsism. In a way, I believe that these are the same goal. While solipsism is a philosophical idea that has existed for thousands of years, I believe that it is one you can only really entertain as more than just a thought experiment if you are deeply alienated from other people in society. Expressions like “NPC” and “Main Character Syndrome” were TikTok’s phrases du jour around when I developed the game, and my irritation with them influenced the creation of this game.

The idea for the game came into my head almost fully formed, with me being able to picture it completely in my head. The only part I could not conceptualise was the resolution - I was considering having the game keep going once you find the Main Character, finding a new target, but this felt both inelegant and too much like an actual resolution, which defeats the point of the games in this anthology lacking satisfying conclusions. I presented this issue to Charlie, and he suggested that there should simply not be a Main Character. This was perfect, and became cemented within the design.

Development

Aesthetically, I was quite inspired by KIDS by Playables, a game I had played recently as of making Find the Main Character. I found the imagery of a group of featureless human figures standing in a totally blank space captivatingly evocative. It fits the dehumanization of others around you perfectly, rendering them faceless, thoughtless, and emotionless. Once you click on a character you reveal their inner world through making them brightly coloured, showing their facial features, and popping up a thought bubble. I was ecstatic to have such a strong visual representation of solipsism as brightly coloured figures surrounded by a blank, featureless crowd. The intended irony is, of course, that this is the case for the infinite number of characters in the game world.

Evaluation

When it comes to evaluating Find the Main Character, I think that there are a variety of angles you can look at it from. As an observation on the alienation of members of society from each other, I believe it does great. I think it conveys its messages very elegantly - while the usage of “Main Character” was influenced by cultural trends of the moment, I believe it fits the game and its use as common video game vocabulary means it won’t risk going out of style like a TikTok reference could otherwise. Playtesting helped confirm my feelings - players picked up on the themes and could understand what the game was trying to say.

If I were to do it again, I would aim to make the way that characters are generated slightly more robust, with a wider range of faces and other distinguishing features like clothing and accessories. I wish that the game was a little more robust a critique of solipsism. I think it is elegant as it is, but I feel like the critiques it raises aren’t anything that isn’t immediately obvious. With that said, a simple point isn’t necessarily a bad one, and I can’t really think of a way I could present a more thorough philosophical critique without sacrificing the elegant design of the game. Perhaps in the future I should try to make more games that illustrate philosophical critiques, and then present them together as a suite.

Dressup

Design

Dressup’s design aims to focus on alienation towards one’s own self and body through a subversion of the dress-up genre. Specifically, it emulates the style of “paper doll” style creation tools. These were popular from the early 90’s through to the 2010’s, progressing from standards such as the Kisekae Set System[@otakuworldBigKiSSPage1995] to a variety of predominantly Flash-based web games. Dressup games continue to be popular, but many modern iterations such as Dress to Impress[@dresstoimpressgroupDressImpress2024] tend to be more goal-oriented, introducing goals, ratings, and competition.

The design aims to subvert the typical paper doll dress-up format through the introduction of stat bars which change as the player adds and removes clothes from the doll. I had recently read Max Kreminski’s paper on hauntological effects in procedural generation systems[@Kreminski2023], and a particular takeaway for me was the idea of information availability effecting peoples’ perception of a game, its potential state, and what they can do within it. The way people act with paper doll dress-up software is unfettered by expectations or requirements - they simply dress the character how they want to. My hope was that the introduction of superfluous stat bars would provide a hauntological effect - players’ clothing decisions would now also be effected by wanting to change how their doll is perceived. In this sense, the stat bars would be representative of how self perception affects ones’ dress sense. In the same way you may love a crop top but feel it comes off too bold to wear out shopping, players would try to balance aesthetics with how they wish to be seen.

An additional change to the typical genre structure within my design was the introduction of some form of mechanical guidance. This wouldn’t be a goal to win like dressing for a fashion show in Dress for Impress but rather an almost life-sim like mechanic - you would be told what your character will be doing that day and then dress them accordingly, balancing self expression with what’s appropriate for the setting. This would turn the doll from doll to disembodied player insert - a literal manifestation of an alienated view of the player’s own body, in a sense. Due to time constraints this guidance was cut entirely, and the game instead maintains the open ended structure. This dramatically changes how the game comes across, especially in how it conveys its tone and aims.

Development

The aesthetic style of this game was chosen to evoke cheaply made, heavily compressed browser dress-up games of the 2000’s and 2010’s. This is achieved through a bishoujo manga inspired doll design, UI that uses simple shapes with strong gradients, and heavy compression on the background and music. Some elements of the design intentionally break this nostalgia, including features like a 3D wardrobe and a photograph for the background, mirroring the game’s intended subversions.

The human desire to feel nostalgia is undeniably strong and while personally I believe that intentionally trying to evoke it feels hollow, my intention was to create an “uncanny valley” effect. I hoped that through making the game look close yet distinctly different to a classic dress-up game, it could immediately gear the player to be in the right mindset to accept the subversions within the mechanics. I don’t believe this was successful in this instance - it’s a very fine line to walk, and I think that Dressup ends up feeling too close stylistically.

Evaluation

Playtesting the game led me to an interesting conclusion about making a genre subversion without overt mechanical guidance. In the absence of elements of the game making the subversive intent obvious, genre perceptions take over: most playtesters simply did not view the game as anything more than a typical dress-up game. The aesthetic style and simple mechanics are just too close to what an actual attempt at evoking dress-up game nostalgia would look like.

This is a completely justified reading. I feel like the aesthetic style is pleasing, but it is not effective enough at communicating “this is a defamiliarized dress-up game”. I would have liked to incorporate more mixed media elements (in this case, edited photography and 3D models) to sufficiently enstrange the presentation. The cut day-to-day goal mechanics would also have gone a long way to bolstering the perception of the design. This would do a lot both to inject stress into the gameplay experience, as well as to justify putting even more stat meters on screen (I grew very fond of seeing playtesters react to how much visual clutter is on screen). I also believe the number of joke stats was too high - a couple would work fine, but they’ve got to earn their keep. The “gender presentation” stat that randomizes with every change you make to your clothing landed every time, but I have decided that the comedy in this type of games works best when it’s subtle.

If I were to do it again, I think it is obvious that I would have implemented more invasive mechanics to prevent the players’ instincts of treating dress-up games as light, whimsical experiences from taking over. The cut mechanics alone would do a lot, but part of me wonders how many stressful, parasitic mechanics you could add before it would stop even registering as a paper-doll dress-up game. It would certainly achieve the goals of defamiliarizing the dress-up gameplay experience and representing an anxious alienation towards one’s own body if you had to micromanage an overwhelming number of shifting, vague, slightly obtuse mechanics relating to both internal and external perception, energy, personal finances, etc.

Conclusion

Unsure what specific direction to take this section. Review of the general efficacy of defamiliarization as a design technique? Thoughts on the games? My ideas for the future? A mixture of the three?