something that strikes me most while playing Sony's brand of cinematic action-adventure games is the insistence, in both mechanical and narrative terms, on "finding a way through." by which I mean: these games share a fundamental spatial ideology that i find as fascinating as i do troubling.
the last of us. god of war. uncharted. these games are, on a basic level, less about combat or stealth than they are moving through hostile spaces. these spaces provide combat, story beats, and navigational beats, but that inch-by-inch procedurality--how to get from point A to B, then C, etc etc until the credits roll at Z--is essential to their flow. this is true even in god of war's more open-ended design, especially during the core narrative missions. in these games, there's a certain kind of interaction that i see constantly, and that always gives me pause.
upon finding an obstacle, character A will say to character B something to the effect of, "Looks like we can't go that way!"
and character b will reply, "let's keep looking. there's gotta be a way around."
but does there? it's easy to imagine a situation where there isn't, in fact, a way around. where a desired goal is blocked irretrievably. where a weather event, or a building collapse, or the sheer indifference of natural geography renders a path impossible, a destination unreachable.
but, of course, that can't be the case in games like this. progression is the point. the goal is everything. these designed spaces have an ideology built into them, one of making space conform to your needs. a belief system built around teleology, around the idea that these spaces--if not space in general--exists to facilitate your movement through it. what do you do, in a game like this, if there is no door, no path, no way forward?
well, shit. you make one. you break things until you can get through. violence isn't just for people, or monsters. it's for walls and mountains and caves, too. stopping is unimaginable, impossible. the entire world is built against it. no one stops.
the more i think about it, the more i feel like this is one of the most insidious lies traditional game design quietly propagates. that you can always, always, always progress. a teleology of constant, irresistable, violent progression.
it's fun to imagine design that resists this, however. the example that comes to mind is pathologic and its sequel, both of which build the play spaces in deliberately confounding, hostile ways designed explicitly to combat the mythology of progression. there are dead ends everywhere. there are places you cannot go until someone lets you. there are places you can't go, period. it's explained that the architects concieved of The Town like this on purpose, to promote contemplation, growth. like it says in the sequel's artbook:
This is a game about boundaries. Humans transcending their own limitations, and the metamorphoses that may await them on that journey: a blood cell or an udurgh, a doll or a living creature, a slave to the circumstances or the setter of new laws.
pathologic conceives of change, growth, and progress as possible only because there are boundaries you cannot cross. i wish more games did.
