an attempt at hope through Let's Plays
Oct. 10th, 2020 02:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rushthatspeaksI noticed that I'm watching Let's Plays of Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy again, which tends to be a sign that I am really, really looking for something hopeful about the universe in general, and then it occurred to me that Getting Over It is a fairly niche piece of art, and that discussing it might help explain the philosophy of hope that I take away from it, both to myself and to others. Which might be interesting both to people who are interested in video games, and people who aren't.
I have long had an interest in video games that are at the extreme edges of what the medium can do, in things that you might call conceptual art as easily as you might call games. The sort of game which modern art museums install as exhibits-- things like The Stanley Parable, in which the point of the game turns out to be eluding and then destroying the omniscient voice-over narration, or The Beginner's Guide, which I am not going to attempt to describe here, or the multiplayer aspect of Dark Souls, in which the concepts of time-looping and dropping in on other players' games are used to create a complicated, beautiful, and staggeringly intricate meta-multiverse.
However, I mostly don't actually play these, because I do not have the hand-eye coordination necessary, and, what's more, practice doesn't seem to hardwire it into me. I played all of Fez, which is a moderately easy platformer, and afterwards I was not only not any better at other games, I wasn't any better at Fez. If I picked it up again now, I would have to start again from skill point zero. I do okay at turn-based things, where you have time to sit still and think about your next move, but the people who make conceptual-art video games tend to want the exact opposite of giving you time to detach and consider. My boyfriend B. plays a lot of them, and I watch him play, or discuss things with him as he plays, which is how I interacted with, say, The Beginner's Guide. But there is a point of difficulty beyond which B. will not venture, which is completely reasonable of him, and it is precisely after that point that one finds Let's Plays of Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy.
You might be aware of Bennett Foddy if, back in the late '00s, you stumbled across or were shown a keyboard-based game called QWOP, in which each of the letters of the title is used to control a single limb of an athlete, and the object is to type them in a speed and rhythm that allows the athlete to walk, run, jump over hurdles, etcetera. QWOP went viral because it is extremely difficult, and because it can be very funny to watch other people be bad at it. QWOP takes a thing that most video games consider effortlessly built-in, an avatar walking, and by breaking that single thing down into micro-movements, basically Centipede's Dilemma's you into wondering how in the hell anything ever gets across a game console's screen at all. Of course, walking IRL is also a series of complicated micro-movements which are not effortless, not built in, and by no means universal-- and QWOP can actually be a pretty good tool for pointing that out to people.
Getting Over It is Bennett Foddy's follow-up game.
The concept is quite simple: the avatar is visible from the waist up, poking out of a metal jar or cauldron. We do not know whether he is stuck in it, or merely sitting in it. He has a two-handed, long-handled mountain hammer or mattock, which you, the player, control to pull him up onto obstacles, hook him around obstacles, or send him skyward like a pogo stick. There is a mountain in front of you: get the man up the mountain.
The thing is, the controls have been carefully, precisely, and mercilessly constructed to be fuzzy, difficult, and at times downright incomprehensible. You will not be able to get the hammer to go where you want it to go. You have no control at all over where the man bounces, only over the hammer. And the entire mountain is also carefully designed to be one giant series of overhangs. For most of the game, slipping even a little will send you, literally, back to the starting point, and it will not be easier to get back to where you were than it was to get there the first time. It is just barely possible, after a lot of work, and a lot of aggravation, to make scant and easily-destroyed progress into the unknown, which always turns out to be a more difficult and complicated obstacle. Getting Over It is an exercise in frustration. That is the emotional experience the game wants you to have.
And, what's worse, or better depending on your point of view, Bennett Foddy is right there in voice-over the whole time, talking to you about it. He plays old blues songs at you. He quotes Nietzsche. He mocks you when you make particularly egregious mistakes. He talks about why he designed certain obstacles the way he did, and about the numerous times he could have decided to make the game easier, but never chose to. And he talks to you about the philosophy of games, and the philosophy of failure.
Because that's the question, isn't it? Why would a person do this? Why would someone whose leisure activity this supposedly is sit down and expose themselves to an unrelenting parade of failure, aggravation, and mockery? What causes one person to get partway into this game and wander off, while another finishes it? Where is the division point? When does a leisure activity become so important that you will commit to it emotionally on this level-- or can frustration and rage become so unimportant that they stop being barriers? Is the appeal of this inherently masochistic? If so, is it solely masochistic? What bearing do these questions have on those of us who are watching others play it, so that it is not our own effort, not our own frustration, not our own rage? (And yes, Foddy explicitly considers non-playing watchers in his voice-over.) Is it helpful to the players and viewers to have something separate from their own lives, something essentially inconsequential that causes them to feel these emotions, or does the game merely increase the amount of negativity everyone is already living with? If the major goal of an experience, as stated outright by the designer, is for you to feel terrible and then walk away, can you even call that a 'game', as such? Is the dopamine hit when a player makes progress actually large enough to compensate for everything else that goes into that progress? What about the dopamine hit of winning? What about the dopamine hit of watching someone else winning?
There's a point, about halfway through the game, where there is a clear choice of two paths that the player can take. And Foddy pretty much tells you that if you take one of them, it will send you directly back to the beginning. But, he says-- but, if you are the kind of person who has wrestled with this object for so long that you have gotten to this point, if you are deriving enjoyment from this on some level-- shouldn't you, philosophically, just be happier if you go back to the beginning? You already know you like the struggle; well, you can have that, in a loop, as long as you want, and it's not going to get much easier. Whereas, do you actually trust him with an ending? Do you believe he will deliver you something else as enjoyable as you have already found this struggle to be? Does it matter if he does, as long as you 'win'? As long as you get to an ending that very few people reach? Would it matter more, or less if more people got there?
And if you choose to continue, shortly after that the voice-over ends, because after a certain point, you have to come up with your own reasons to go on, or not go on.
I have seen people break controllers, playing this game. I have seen people throw things across rooms, jump up and down, scream obscenities. I have seen people walk away from livestreams and just never come back. And I have seen people dig into themselves for wells of pure stubbornness they never knew they had-- and I agree with Bennett Foddy both that this is beautiful, and that the question of whether it is a good thing is complicated.
But the reason I keep placing this game in the context of a larger philosophy of hope, and the reason I keep returning to watching it (even though Bennett Foddy would strongly prefer that I play it myself, and I'm not going to) is... okay, it's a moderately complex thing having to do with Let's Play culture generally, and I assume some of the people reading this are familiar with it, but that many probably aren't. The kaizo block. The reason is the kaizo block.
So Mario Maker is a thing which exists, in which anybody who has the software can make, share, and play new levels of various Super Mario Brothers titles. There's a huge Mario Maker culture on Youtube and a huger one on Twitch. And of course people make levels that are much, much harder than the ones found in any of the actual games, levels poised on the line between doable and literally impossible. These are called kaizo levels by the community. The word kaizo means to reconstruct or restructure, and initially meant that the level had been created via hacking before Mario Maker was released. (I am pretty sure Nintendo got the idea for Mario Maker from the profusion of fan levels that propagated on the early internet.) These days, a kaizo level is one which throws out all standard principles of level design in the interest of creating a more difficult, yet still possible, gaming experience.
A kaizo block is a specific kind of trap in a kaizo level. It is an invisible coin block, which Mario can encounter only by jumping and bumping into it with his head, whereupon it will knock him back down. It will not become visible after being hit, and it cannot be stood on. The sole purpose of a kaizo block is to make a jump impossible which would otherwise be the logical move. The player just has to memorize where these blocks are.
Aggravating, right?
The interesting thing is that, if you watch enough people streaming kaizo Mario, you will find the streamers talking to the level creators: you know you could have had a kaizo block there, right? It would make this level so much worse. Why isn't there one there, or there? And, since at the upper skill echelons of kaizo Mario, all the best players and level creators know each other, the streamers also react with amused delight: you, the creator, know me, know my specific playstyle, so thoroughly that you put that kaizo block there just for me. It had my name on it. You knew I was going to hit that, and you knew just how annoying it would be. You put that kaizo block there because we're friends. (Sometimes you get confirmation from the level creators that this is, in fact, the case, too.)
And a kaizo block is a friendly gesture! I mean it about the amused delight, and it's not because of masochism. It's for the same reason I find Getting Over It so resonant. Both the creator of the kaizo block and Bennett Foddy have proved that they know us. The specific feelings they are reaching for in the audience, and trying to create, may be applicable only to a very few players and viewers, but they are real, deep feelings. What you get out of Getting Over It is, in fact, the mortifying ordeal of being known. And then the empathy of being understood. And, in fact, Bennett Foddy made the entire game, subjected everyone to the really unpleasant part-- and even if you enjoy it, no frustration is entirely pleasant-- in order to demonstrate that empathy. If you finish Getting Over It, you and Bennett Foddy understand one another very well, and could, in person, immediately sit down and have a long and fascinating artistic and philosophical discussion. (Which has also happened online on streaming multiple times, because he likes watching people play his game...) The entire game is the same sort of friendly gesture as a kaizo block. I made this, specifically, to cause this for you.
As it turns out, Bennett Foddy could, in fact, be trusted with ending his game in a manner I at least find incredibly satisfying, but the thing is, it would still be satisfying even if he hadn't pulled that off, because that empathy would still be there, and the only way to test whether the ending is any good is to get to it.
This reminds me of one of my favorite passages of poetry, from Carl Sandburg, "Choices", published in 1916.
THEY offer you many things,
I a few.
Moonlight on the play of fountains at night
With water sparkling a drowsy monotone,
Bare-shouldered, smiling women and talk
And a cross-play of loves and adulteries
And a fear of death
and a remembering of regrets:
All this they offer you.
I come with:
salt and bread
a terrible job of work
and tireless war;
Come and have now:
hunger.
danger
and hate.
This is the position those of us who want to make a better world so often find ourselves in, where all we can see ahead is the work and the hate and the fear of death and the pain and the exhaustion and the not knowing what the fuck we are supposed to do or whether any of it will be worth it. But we are a species which stirs the depths of failure and sadness and anger for fun. Some of us are willing to be horribly inconvenienced for the sake of art, and find it worth it. How much more, then, for other real human beings? Until Getting Over It, I really couldn't articulate why I have always found the choice in Sandburg so extremely obvious.
And, while there may not be an architect of the horrible situations in real life*, no cosmic Bennett Foddy patting you on the shoulder and playing Bessie Smith, there is also, as in the game, everyone else who is doing the work, and who is watching; there is the empathy of the task and the community of everyone who recognizes the need for the task. And there are the ones who can tell you when to walk away from the task, when frustration and sorrow and confusion are too much and too damaging. And sometimes, when you're on your own, in the silence, the part where you have to find your own reasons or not find them, you can remember that other people know about even that part, too, maybe not about your specific thing, but generally, and that even that we have put into artwork for the purpose of causing pleasure and delight.
You can always play the Bessie Smith on your own time, anyway. She knows what you're going through, too. Which is my whole point.
*YMMV and outside the scope of this discussion
I have long had an interest in video games that are at the extreme edges of what the medium can do, in things that you might call conceptual art as easily as you might call games. The sort of game which modern art museums install as exhibits-- things like The Stanley Parable, in which the point of the game turns out to be eluding and then destroying the omniscient voice-over narration, or The Beginner's Guide, which I am not going to attempt to describe here, or the multiplayer aspect of Dark Souls, in which the concepts of time-looping and dropping in on other players' games are used to create a complicated, beautiful, and staggeringly intricate meta-multiverse.
However, I mostly don't actually play these, because I do not have the hand-eye coordination necessary, and, what's more, practice doesn't seem to hardwire it into me. I played all of Fez, which is a moderately easy platformer, and afterwards I was not only not any better at other games, I wasn't any better at Fez. If I picked it up again now, I would have to start again from skill point zero. I do okay at turn-based things, where you have time to sit still and think about your next move, but the people who make conceptual-art video games tend to want the exact opposite of giving you time to detach and consider. My boyfriend B. plays a lot of them, and I watch him play, or discuss things with him as he plays, which is how I interacted with, say, The Beginner's Guide. But there is a point of difficulty beyond which B. will not venture, which is completely reasonable of him, and it is precisely after that point that one finds Let's Plays of Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy.
You might be aware of Bennett Foddy if, back in the late '00s, you stumbled across or were shown a keyboard-based game called QWOP, in which each of the letters of the title is used to control a single limb of an athlete, and the object is to type them in a speed and rhythm that allows the athlete to walk, run, jump over hurdles, etcetera. QWOP went viral because it is extremely difficult, and because it can be very funny to watch other people be bad at it. QWOP takes a thing that most video games consider effortlessly built-in, an avatar walking, and by breaking that single thing down into micro-movements, basically Centipede's Dilemma's you into wondering how in the hell anything ever gets across a game console's screen at all. Of course, walking IRL is also a series of complicated micro-movements which are not effortless, not built in, and by no means universal-- and QWOP can actually be a pretty good tool for pointing that out to people.
Getting Over It is Bennett Foddy's follow-up game.
The concept is quite simple: the avatar is visible from the waist up, poking out of a metal jar or cauldron. We do not know whether he is stuck in it, or merely sitting in it. He has a two-handed, long-handled mountain hammer or mattock, which you, the player, control to pull him up onto obstacles, hook him around obstacles, or send him skyward like a pogo stick. There is a mountain in front of you: get the man up the mountain.
The thing is, the controls have been carefully, precisely, and mercilessly constructed to be fuzzy, difficult, and at times downright incomprehensible. You will not be able to get the hammer to go where you want it to go. You have no control at all over where the man bounces, only over the hammer. And the entire mountain is also carefully designed to be one giant series of overhangs. For most of the game, slipping even a little will send you, literally, back to the starting point, and it will not be easier to get back to where you were than it was to get there the first time. It is just barely possible, after a lot of work, and a lot of aggravation, to make scant and easily-destroyed progress into the unknown, which always turns out to be a more difficult and complicated obstacle. Getting Over It is an exercise in frustration. That is the emotional experience the game wants you to have.
And, what's worse, or better depending on your point of view, Bennett Foddy is right there in voice-over the whole time, talking to you about it. He plays old blues songs at you. He quotes Nietzsche. He mocks you when you make particularly egregious mistakes. He talks about why he designed certain obstacles the way he did, and about the numerous times he could have decided to make the game easier, but never chose to. And he talks to you about the philosophy of games, and the philosophy of failure.
Because that's the question, isn't it? Why would a person do this? Why would someone whose leisure activity this supposedly is sit down and expose themselves to an unrelenting parade of failure, aggravation, and mockery? What causes one person to get partway into this game and wander off, while another finishes it? Where is the division point? When does a leisure activity become so important that you will commit to it emotionally on this level-- or can frustration and rage become so unimportant that they stop being barriers? Is the appeal of this inherently masochistic? If so, is it solely masochistic? What bearing do these questions have on those of us who are watching others play it, so that it is not our own effort, not our own frustration, not our own rage? (And yes, Foddy explicitly considers non-playing watchers in his voice-over.) Is it helpful to the players and viewers to have something separate from their own lives, something essentially inconsequential that causes them to feel these emotions, or does the game merely increase the amount of negativity everyone is already living with? If the major goal of an experience, as stated outright by the designer, is for you to feel terrible and then walk away, can you even call that a 'game', as such? Is the dopamine hit when a player makes progress actually large enough to compensate for everything else that goes into that progress? What about the dopamine hit of winning? What about the dopamine hit of watching someone else winning?
There's a point, about halfway through the game, where there is a clear choice of two paths that the player can take. And Foddy pretty much tells you that if you take one of them, it will send you directly back to the beginning. But, he says-- but, if you are the kind of person who has wrestled with this object for so long that you have gotten to this point, if you are deriving enjoyment from this on some level-- shouldn't you, philosophically, just be happier if you go back to the beginning? You already know you like the struggle; well, you can have that, in a loop, as long as you want, and it's not going to get much easier. Whereas, do you actually trust him with an ending? Do you believe he will deliver you something else as enjoyable as you have already found this struggle to be? Does it matter if he does, as long as you 'win'? As long as you get to an ending that very few people reach? Would it matter more, or less if more people got there?
And if you choose to continue, shortly after that the voice-over ends, because after a certain point, you have to come up with your own reasons to go on, or not go on.
I have seen people break controllers, playing this game. I have seen people throw things across rooms, jump up and down, scream obscenities. I have seen people walk away from livestreams and just never come back. And I have seen people dig into themselves for wells of pure stubbornness they never knew they had-- and I agree with Bennett Foddy both that this is beautiful, and that the question of whether it is a good thing is complicated.
But the reason I keep placing this game in the context of a larger philosophy of hope, and the reason I keep returning to watching it (even though Bennett Foddy would strongly prefer that I play it myself, and I'm not going to) is... okay, it's a moderately complex thing having to do with Let's Play culture generally, and I assume some of the people reading this are familiar with it, but that many probably aren't. The kaizo block. The reason is the kaizo block.
So Mario Maker is a thing which exists, in which anybody who has the software can make, share, and play new levels of various Super Mario Brothers titles. There's a huge Mario Maker culture on Youtube and a huger one on Twitch. And of course people make levels that are much, much harder than the ones found in any of the actual games, levels poised on the line between doable and literally impossible. These are called kaizo levels by the community. The word kaizo means to reconstruct or restructure, and initially meant that the level had been created via hacking before Mario Maker was released. (I am pretty sure Nintendo got the idea for Mario Maker from the profusion of fan levels that propagated on the early internet.) These days, a kaizo level is one which throws out all standard principles of level design in the interest of creating a more difficult, yet still possible, gaming experience.
A kaizo block is a specific kind of trap in a kaizo level. It is an invisible coin block, which Mario can encounter only by jumping and bumping into it with his head, whereupon it will knock him back down. It will not become visible after being hit, and it cannot be stood on. The sole purpose of a kaizo block is to make a jump impossible which would otherwise be the logical move. The player just has to memorize where these blocks are.
Aggravating, right?
The interesting thing is that, if you watch enough people streaming kaizo Mario, you will find the streamers talking to the level creators: you know you could have had a kaizo block there, right? It would make this level so much worse. Why isn't there one there, or there? And, since at the upper skill echelons of kaizo Mario, all the best players and level creators know each other, the streamers also react with amused delight: you, the creator, know me, know my specific playstyle, so thoroughly that you put that kaizo block there just for me. It had my name on it. You knew I was going to hit that, and you knew just how annoying it would be. You put that kaizo block there because we're friends. (Sometimes you get confirmation from the level creators that this is, in fact, the case, too.)
And a kaizo block is a friendly gesture! I mean it about the amused delight, and it's not because of masochism. It's for the same reason I find Getting Over It so resonant. Both the creator of the kaizo block and Bennett Foddy have proved that they know us. The specific feelings they are reaching for in the audience, and trying to create, may be applicable only to a very few players and viewers, but they are real, deep feelings. What you get out of Getting Over It is, in fact, the mortifying ordeal of being known. And then the empathy of being understood. And, in fact, Bennett Foddy made the entire game, subjected everyone to the really unpleasant part-- and even if you enjoy it, no frustration is entirely pleasant-- in order to demonstrate that empathy. If you finish Getting Over It, you and Bennett Foddy understand one another very well, and could, in person, immediately sit down and have a long and fascinating artistic and philosophical discussion. (Which has also happened online on streaming multiple times, because he likes watching people play his game...) The entire game is the same sort of friendly gesture as a kaizo block. I made this, specifically, to cause this for you.
As it turns out, Bennett Foddy could, in fact, be trusted with ending his game in a manner I at least find incredibly satisfying, but the thing is, it would still be satisfying even if he hadn't pulled that off, because that empathy would still be there, and the only way to test whether the ending is any good is to get to it.
This reminds me of one of my favorite passages of poetry, from Carl Sandburg, "Choices", published in 1916.
THEY offer you many things,
I a few.
Moonlight on the play of fountains at night
With water sparkling a drowsy monotone,
Bare-shouldered, smiling women and talk
And a cross-play of loves and adulteries
And a fear of death
and a remembering of regrets:
All this they offer you.
I come with:
salt and bread
a terrible job of work
and tireless war;
Come and have now:
hunger.
danger
and hate.
This is the position those of us who want to make a better world so often find ourselves in, where all we can see ahead is the work and the hate and the fear of death and the pain and the exhaustion and the not knowing what the fuck we are supposed to do or whether any of it will be worth it. But we are a species which stirs the depths of failure and sadness and anger for fun. Some of us are willing to be horribly inconvenienced for the sake of art, and find it worth it. How much more, then, for other real human beings? Until Getting Over It, I really couldn't articulate why I have always found the choice in Sandburg so extremely obvious.
And, while there may not be an architect of the horrible situations in real life*, no cosmic Bennett Foddy patting you on the shoulder and playing Bessie Smith, there is also, as in the game, everyone else who is doing the work, and who is watching; there is the empathy of the task and the community of everyone who recognizes the need for the task. And there are the ones who can tell you when to walk away from the task, when frustration and sorrow and confusion are too much and too damaging. And sometimes, when you're on your own, in the silence, the part where you have to find your own reasons or not find them, you can remember that other people know about even that part, too, maybe not about your specific thing, but generally, and that even that we have put into artwork for the purpose of causing pleasure and delight.
You can always play the Bessie Smith on your own time, anyway. She knows what you're going through, too. Which is my whole point.
*YMMV and outside the scope of this discussion
no subject
Date: 2020-10-10 12:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-10-10 07:46 pm (UTC)I am glad it exists for that if nothing else, although the rest of the everything else also sounds important. Love.
no subject
Date: 2020-10-11 02:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-10-11 02:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-10-11 09:31 am (UTC)This is the most strangely inspiring thing, derived from what I had previously only thought of as 'that game my flatmate swore at a lot before abandoning'. Thank you!
no subject
Date: 2020-10-12 03:11 pm (UTC)And, in fact, Bennett Foddy made the entire game, subjected everyone to the really unpleasant part-- and even if you enjoy it, no frustration is entirely pleasant-- in order to demonstrate that empathy.
That's just so cool. And yes. I would definitely agree that the thing that helps us stay in this is it being us, there being other people-- so many other people that we will never meet them all-- who agree that it's worth doing, and are doing it, and are suffering the doing it, and have found reasons for that, which means that those reasons must be findable, whether or not I personally can easily find them right this second.
Thank you. Love.
What a wonderful essay.
Date: 2020-10-12 09:53 pm (UTC)I've played Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy. I was massively frustrated at the same time I was delighted that someone had managed to translate the experience of living with an acquired impairment into a phone game.
no subject
Date: 2020-10-13 12:45 am (UTC)I am a person who played Getting Over It for ten minutes, said "Awright fine," and closed the window. But then I've watched speedruns. Not full normal-experience LPs, which I assume go on for hours, but the three-minute clip of someone beating the game in three minutes. A different thing, to be sure.
I don't know, not having watched much, whether Bennett Foddy starts talking about the dfficulty of writing and designing and pushing the boulder up *that* mountain. I assume he does, because we've all been at the bottom of that one. I'm glad you got up this one.
no subject
Date: 2020-10-13 02:30 am (UTC)Love,
Nine
no subject
Date: 2020-10-13 05:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-10-18 06:20 pm (UTC)