Amanita Design is a developer known for its charming little point-and-click adventures. The games are distinctive for their low-key surrealism and collage-like art style, but as games they tend to be very simple. You manipulate the environment by clicking on hotspots. Click them in the right order, and you can progress to the next screen. By including an avatar and inventory system, the feature-length Machinarium more closely approaches a traditional adventure puzzler. But Amanita’s shorter pieces, like the Samarost games and the recent Osada, don’t involve anything more complicated than pixel-hunting
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These are the kind of games that people are sometimes reluctant to call games. On the Amanita Design website itself, Osada is described as an “interactive music video.” Indeed, it’s not hard to imagine Osada working just fine as a Terry Gilliam-style animation with no interactivity at all. Just automate the clicks.
Earlier this week, Fraser made the case against this kind of thing in his piece on medium specificity. Good games are those that do things only games can do, the argument goes. Trying to imitate or adapt styles from other media leads to creative stagnation. A weird hybrid like Osada, by trying to be both game and cartoon, fails to be a good example of either.
I have a lot of sympathy for this viewpoint. I’m fascinated with experimental games largely because they’re so efficient at figuring out what games can do that other media can’t. At the same time, I think hybrids actually can tell us a lot about the differences between media, in a way that “pure games” can’t.
Take Osada. It might well work as a non-interactive animation. But would that be the same as playing it? I suspect it wouldn’t. Adding interaction changes how you view a scene. If you watch someone else play Osada, your eyes will probably focus on different things than if you play it yourself. Playing an Amanita game gets you looking for things that look like mechanisms or gates. When you’re passively watching an animation, you tend to focus on things that are moving. But in Osada, you look for things that could move; things that are already moving are out of your control, and therefore less interesting.
A baffling scene from Osada.
Osada, like the Gilliamesque cartoons it resembles, is a string of events that follow a surrealist logic. Causes lead to effects in a weird way. Some freaky sausage-plants grew, and then some bearded bees showed up. Okay! If you’re mostly following the things that move, you’re focusing on the effects: plants grew, some bees flew into the frame. You don’t have to think about the logic if you don’t want to. You can just perceive it as a series of odd things happening. If you’re looking for things you can click on, it shifts the emphasis onto the causes. Clicking on the ground made the plants grow. That made the bees show up.
The end result is that playing Osada, rather than watching it, directly teaches you the surrealist logic it operates under. For good or ill, you’re focused on why these weird things are happening. This isn’t a dramatic difference. But it is a difference, and it tells you something about what games can do better than cartoons.
Games that focus on being gamelike are absolutely vital to advancing the medium. But games that borrow from other media have their place as well. Whether they fail or succeed at being good games is almost beside the point. By reducing the amount of difference between games and another medium, these border cases cast the differences that remain in sharp relief. Something that almost isn’t a game can you a lot about what a game is.
Fraser Elliott says:
I think, contrary to what I wrote earlier in the week, I mostly agree with what you’re saying here!
I haven’t played Osada, but your discussion on whether or not the experience could be replicate as an autonomous animation struck a chord. Playing through Life Flashes By is effectively like watching an animation, or at least, it’s not “gamey” in the sense that I put forward in my previous article, but it made me seriously reconsider the relationship between myself and the in-game avatar/narrative progression.
Perhaps I should have limited my article to the permeation of film-narrative structure into video-games as you certainly put a good case forward for Surrealism within the medium.
I’ll have to check Osada out!
Line Hollis says:
Hey, thanks for the response! Yeah, I don’t think our positions are necessarily contradictory at all. The end goal for all game artists is to figure out what games add to art. But there’s a lot of ways to get there. Medium specificity is a really good one, and I wish it was something more mainstream developers thought seriously about. Here, I’m just making the case for border cases as part of the toolkit.
When I think about border cases, I think about La Jetee, the experimental film Twelve Monkeys was based on. It’s told almost entirely as a series of still images with narration over it. It’s almost not a movie: you could present the same thing as a comic strip with captions. But there’s one bit where the stills get closer and closer together in time, until just for a moment there are enough frames per second that persistence of vision kicks in. And it’s stunning. It makes you experience, at a gut level, the change from image to moving image: this is what film does. This is how it makes you feel.
I’m not saying a little trifle like Osada does anything like that. The closest I’ve seen to that kind of experience in a game is Stephen Lavelle’s Queue, and it’s not quite the same thing. Keeping border cases in the toolkit, though, makes it more likely that we might get a La Jetee in the future. Even if David Cage is kind of a dick about it (he is).