RobotGeek

When they released the 10-minute gameplay demo of BioShock Infinite last year, the main impression I came away with was that it was the most distinctively, amazingly weird and dreamlike thing I could ever remember seeing in a game. It had captured something of the surreal, irrational, rapid-fire, freefall nature and scope of dreams.

The world of Columbia in BioShock Infinite is not meant to be a dream world (not literally anyway), but it still has that feel to it. It’s the floating, bobbing islands; the fact things are kind of falling apart; the supernatural stuff with the Vigors and the crows and that guy on the bandstand turning all glitchy horror-weird; the people whose reactions don’t quite make sense; the rollercoaster rail thing. It’s the very definition of topsy-turvy, constantly subverting our expectations. And not to mention the creatures pursuing Elizabeth—how many of us have had the kind of dream where we’re trying to escape from something that’s bearing down on us like that?

I wonder how long this impression will last when we get to play the game for ourselves. When the sky-line becomes a regular method of transportation, the crows a fixture of our inventory, not always set up by a foreboding guy on a bench. When the logic of the world sets in, and we get used to it, what then?

DmC, the new Devil May Cry game also only in teaser status, takes place in an even more overtly dreamlike world. In one of the trailers, what is at first a very sunny, picturesque cityscape, much like Columbia, soon becomes a fairly twisted place: buildings distort and crush inwards to block Dante’s path, the earth gives way under his feet, platforms jump out of reach, and the whole place tilts and rocks, things crumbling and collapsing all around him. Malicious messages appear in luminous lettering, whispered by a not-too-friendly voice.

DmC’‘s naked platforming setup is much more obvious than BioShock‘s, noticeable in the very particular, squared-off way the floors and things get sheared away. It’s also possible that much of the weird stuff is just dramatic scenery, beyond the player’s interaction. But it still makes for an interesting platforming premise, keeping you on your toes because things may not be what they seem. Another of the trailers offers a dreamscape—again, not unlike BioShock Infinite—made of floating islands, only this time they’re fragmented bits of the city in a surreal arrangement in the middle of nowhere. It reminded me a lot of the ‘Distorted Dimensions’ level in Path of Neo, the one with the ants, fashioned after an M.C. Escher painting, and it’s probably a representation that will have been used in other places too.

It’s interesting when games attempt to create specifically dreamlike experiences, because they’re both like and completely unlike dreams. They can have that psychological weirdness and intensity, the player trapped in its midst, but they also require a certain amount of logical stability.

After the film Inception came out back in 2010, there was a fair bit of talk about how much the film evoked videogames, and I think part of that has to do with the fact that Nolan’s dream worlds are so aggressively, even reductively logical. The dreams all operate under the same set of rules (or have rules at all), working in a very structured, consistent way that maintains much of the integrity of actual reality (reliable physics, etc). Each ‘level’ is pretty much self-contained and you’re either in the hotel or at the snow fortress or wherever else. The subconscious manifests in very literal forms, be it men with guns, a freight train, or Mal. We can probably attribute some of this to the fact that the dreams are constructed by an ‘architect’, who is necessarily imposing some logic so that the conspirators have some control over it and are able to navigate it conceptually once inside.

The videogame parallels are obvious. Even something like the perceptual/architectural paradox, the Penrose steps, you can easily imagine as something very functional like a special takedown, a contextual stairwell move—which is practically how it’s used in the film. In a lot of ways, Inception evokes videogames more than it does dreams. Like games, it has that rigid framework, the logistical functionality needed to pull off what is essentially a heist movie. It’s not like Alice in Wonderland, which operates under the single law of ‘weird shit happens’—something that can actually be kind of a drag to those of us fully awake and conscious enough to think logically.

Inception is all big, heavy metaphor, lacking much of the subliminal, inconstant, irrational and maybe even deeply personal stuff of real dreams. I think The Matrix, even though it’s just as logical, did a slightly better job of this side of things, with stuff like déjà vu and just its whole tone and feel generally—at least until it gave us freaking vampires and werewolves. But even in The Matrix, everything was made to be something very tangible and definite: déjà vu, for instance, is a glitch in the Matrix because the Agents made some change to the construct. And if everything we see in The Matrix or Inception is structured in this heavily functional way, for games this is surely even more inescapably true.

The new BioShock, as a relatively brief, passively experienced trailer, manages to be the stuff of dreams. It swims along just beneath the surface of the wholly sensical like many dreams do. But as I wondered at the start, would this be upheld under the intensely rigorous logic of continuous, even repetitive gameplay once we get used to how the world of Columbia works? Not that it has to—that’s not really what BioShock is about, after all—but I’m still curious if it will, as it’s by far the most intriguing aspect of the game for me so far. Maybe if the gameplay is as emergent as the trailer promises, it will be.

Limbo (incidentally the third item in this article that references Limbo, with the city in DmC and the deepest level of dreaming in Inception also sharing the name) is another decidedly dreamlike game. It’s full of impressions, horrors, shifting landscapes, meanings not quite grasped. The weird grainy soft focus and acousmatic soundtrack. Most horror games occupy a kind of nightmarish space, but if I had to name a game I’d played that felt most like a dream, it would be this game. Except, as I’ve argued, the effect kind of wears away the more it becomes about the pure logic of its puzzles. New elements with new rules are being introduced all the time—reversible gravity, brain slugs, rotating levels—and these do make it topsy-turvy, surreal and intriguing to a point, but they’re primarily introduced as new logical elements, to be grasped as such; more game than dream.

As a contrasting example, there’s the nightmare level in Max Payne, which was aesthetically interesting but by far the weakest, most frustrating part of the game. It consisted of navigating a stretchy trial-and-error maze and a glowing, stylised blood trail in total dark nothingness that was basically like a tight-rope act. Sounds of Max’s screaming, pleading wife and crying baby, both murdered, are overlaid. It’s intense and alarming, and I guess you’re supposed to feel trapped and lost, but there’s a lack of solid, grounded gameplay, in that there’s either not much of a ‘game’ to the maze, or the same is true of artistic surreality of the blood trails and they’re also finicky into the bargain. So the sequence is visually and conceptually striking, but annoying for being somewhat unreasonable. As the imagery goes full steam ahead, the logical part, which you’re stuck with, drags behind.

The other way that I guess that games can be decidedly dreamlike is when they go wrong. A character model’s eyes bug out, their limbs misbehave impossibly, or they pass through the floor and into darkness. World objects might not do what they’re supposed to; glitches catapult things across the map or get them stuck in walls. These are all moments when the game logic suddenly gives way to nonsensical, unpredictable events. Sometimes it’s interesting or amusing; other times it’s just annoying.

So I’ve covered a few examples here. What games or gaming moments strike you as particularly dreamlike? Or when games intentionally try to represent dreams, how do you think they fare? Are there many that do it well?