but it ended up being about, uh, a whole bunch of other things as well. ah well, it's fine! probably.
Buried Flower is, of course, the first game in the vextro community's latest game anthology, Gardens of Vextro!
(if possible i'd have liked to write something about each of the games... but unfortunately, i don't know if i'll have the time for that. so, go play them yourself! we poured our hearts into them!)
interactivity?
do people still say visual novels "aren't games"? i haven't been keeping up with mainstream games discourses, so i wouldn't know. but i do remember that being a common talking point years ago... and to my own embarrassment, i actually agreed with it! uh, not in the dismissive way gamers at large said it, mind. my reasoning was that "visual novel" isn't a genre of game, but rather an entirely separate medium altogether — so VNs not being games didn't mean they're worse, just different. and in the same way games can have prose or music or illustrations (or not), they can also use visual novel presentation, regardless of what they're about or which genre they're in. makes sense... right?
well, only if you have a very limited conception of what it means for something to be "interactive", i now realize. that's the quality that's often cited as what makes games different from other art forms; the one that makes them more involved, more personal! your choices matter! that means games are the best!!! ...lmao. the insecurity behind games exceptionalism is a topic beyond the scope of this post, but suffice to say, i think moving away from that mindset is already a plenty good reason for dropping the whole "so-and-so isn't a game" thing. i mean, who cares if something like umineko doesn't have as much gameplay as a shooter or a puzzle game? you install it like a game, and boot it up like a game, and use your mouse and keyboard to interface with it like a game, and that's close enough... right?
we're getting closer now, but this line of thinking is still missing the forest for the trees. because the thing is... visual novels do have interactivity! lots of it, in fact. it's just that those are the more mundane kinds of interactions, so it's easy to think of them as not counting, or not even realize they're there at all. but that doesn't make them any less real, or less capable of being used for meaning.
for this post, i'll be focusing on one specific type of interactivity found in VNs, but you can look forward to a post about another one after i finish SeaBed innnnnn... a few months?
visual novels!
alright, so what the hell am i talking about when i say "mundane interactivity"? simply put, it's the stuff you do in almost every game, often without noticing. things like advancing through text boxes, saving and loading the game, or quitting. "oh, come on", a caricature of a gamer that i invented in my head might say, "that's not gameplay! it's like saying that part of reading a book is flipping through its pages!" and to that i say: yes! it's exactly that kind of action, so fundamental to interacting with a medium that it's just taken for granted, and never used in any interesting ways. but, again: that doesn't mean it can't be used.
this is actually something i've been thinking about for a while now, because my friend lu (@winedark on here) centered his honors thesis on exactly this! specifically, on how joseimuke VNs use their most basic verbs to constantly reaffirm the player's consent — thereby allowing them to more safely explore sensitive subjects. as lu puts it, even something as simple as having to press a button to advance to the next text box
[...] means that the player is made to restate their desire to engage with the game again and again, at every single step of the way, and the game feeds back into this in turn. A player may exist in the game world within rules established by the text, but the process of gameplay is a constant, explicit reaffirmation of the player’s wish to participate.
the example used is Diabolik Lovers, an otome game with rather dubiously consensual situations between the protagonist and love interests; the value of constantly asking the player to reaffirm their desire to continue playing, then, should be obvious. and while advancing through text boxes is a small thing, things like presenting "meaningless" dialogue options before particularly difficult scenes (requiring the player to explicitly pick one of them to proceed), or being booted back to the chapter select screen after finishing a chapter (so the player has to willingly choose to start a new chapter) all work towards this same goal. these are the game's ways of momentarily bringing you back to reality, so it can ask "just to smake sure, you do want to keep going, right?" if you don't, then the pause in the standard flow of the game prevents you from continuing by accident, and gives you a perfect opportunity to save and quit. clever!
(lu goes into much greater detail in his thesis than what i'm bringing up here, so i'd suggest reading it yourself; i found it extremely fascinating, in case you couldn't tell. though, do mind the content warnings and caveats he notes in his post about it.)
so there we have it: a framework for looking at our non-diegetic interactions with the base form of a text as "gameplay". thus is it determined, once and for all, that visual novels are games! ...what's that? you're still not convinced, gamer caricature? well, don't worry! luckily for you, i have two whole examples of non-VN games that dabbled in this, seeking to establish "quitting the game" as a legitimate gameplay action. let's take a look at them next. first up, we have...
spec ops: the line!
yeah you knew this one was coming didn't you
Spec Ops: The Line was a pretty big deal when it came out... oh my god, ten years ago??? yeah, i guess it did spark one of the ur-game crit discourses. many praised its scathing indictment of war in general and jingoistic military shooters in specific, but others gave it flak for how it condemns protagonist martin walker (and by extension, the players) for his horrible actions — despite him (and the player) never being given the option to do otherwise. you made me commit these atrocities, game, so why am i the bad one here?? something like that.
of course, as the antagonist points out at the end, you had the perfect option available to you all along: quitting the game! stop playing, and it's like if walker... uh, walked away, after having enough of all the killing. it's a very interesting way to tie that non-diegetic action stuff into the narrative, and far ahead of its time, especially in the context of corpgames... buuut people didn't like that either. what do you mean, i should've stopped playing the game?? games exist to be played! it makes no sense for it to frame engaging with it at all as something bad! ...something like that.
i disagree with that assessment, obviously, and i think that part of the negative reaction to the idea might've simply been a matter of people not being used to thinking of that as an option. but compare spec ops to the previously mentioned VN examples, and it's easy to see that the shooter might've messed up a bit. the action gameplay keeps you focused on enemies and other immediate threats, leading to there not being many moments where the game can stop and make you think, even if briefly, about whether you should keep playing or not. even in moments of downtime, characters are still talking and moving forward; and the scenes that require walker to explicitly make a choice of some sorts not only work to obscure what options you have available in the first place, but are also timed, not giving you long to think.
ultimately, i imagine spec ops also saw players who play games without thinking about what they're doing in them as part of its criticism of modern shooters, so this might've been intentional — yes, you didn't consider not playing the game a valid option, but you should have. your mileage will vary on whether that part of the story works or not, but either way, it's hard to not think of it as a somewhat imperfect execution of the idea. still, it gets points for trying!
undertale!
let's solve the problem of spec ops condemning you for doing the only thing it let you do with this one easy trick! here it is: just give the player the option to not do the bad thing! simple! that way, only players who did do it will get called out, and... oh, hold on, i'm being told that this means you'd basically have to make two entirely separate games
yeaahhh, no wonder spec ops didn't do that. it'd be a huge amount of work, especially for a corpgame, so it'd only be realistic for a smaller game to pull something like this off... ok you saw the header of this section so you already know where i'm going with this. yes, Undertale's genocide route is spec ops, but done "properly"!
one of the first things the game's tutorial tells you is that you should talk to monsters you run into, instead of fighting; and indeed, while the sparing mechanic is explained in great detail, the action command that attacks use is never even mentioned. this, coupled with the lovable characters, funny writing, and really basically everything about the plot of the peace routes, makes it clear that undertale is a "make love, not war" kinda game.
...what if you do make war, then?
the crucial thing about the genocide route, i think, is how the entire game is telling you to not do it. a regular playthrough of the game will beat into your head that you should try to get along with everyone, of course... but even if you ignore that and fully commit to playing the game in the way most clearly signposted as the wrong way to play the game, you'll still have to endure the mind-numbing boredom of endlessly walking in circles to grind for monsters (a process that becomes more tedious over time due to the lowering encounter rate), as well as the absurd difficulty of the bosses that will require hundreds, if not thousands of tries to defeat. it's a frustrating and deeply unfun experience, the complete opposite of the peace routes. so, if despite all that, you still decide to do this route? well, then the game can be absolutely certain that its condemnation of you is warranted. why are you doing this? why murder all these characters who you got along with so well? just to "100%" the game? well, check this out: this route sucks ass. you don't have to do it. leave.
i find the genocide route to be a really elegant solution to spec ops' "problem"! on top of all the ways in which it pushes back on the player that i just mentioned, its inclusion alone makes the game's message sharper. because even if you're not supposed to take it, the mere fact that you could gives greater weight to the decision not to. and on a technical level, it's constructed very smartly, and in such a way that requires few new assets or fights. it's basically perfect.................. well, except for the part where people saw the impossible difficulty of the fight with sans and took it not as a warning, but as a challenge. whoops.
i think it's a shame that people ended up thinking of the genocide route as not much more than a funny I Wanna Be the Guy boss fight will cool music, because man, that really does defeat the purpose of the entire thing, doesn't it? if you ask me, rather than "just" really hard, sans should've been... if not straight-up impossible, then at least TAS only. (that sounds like the kinda thing he'd do, anyway.)
okay! there we go. three examples of games that present one of the most basic things you can do with a story – putting it down – as part of their gameplay. one uses it expertly for practical effect, while the other two attempt to tie it into their narratives, albeit imperfectly. this is already a lot to think about, but you'll notice that we're missing something: a perfect narrative example. what might that look like?
well, if you haven't played buried flower yet, i recommend you go do that now. it's pretty short, so it shouldn't take too long! once you're finished, feel free to come back and already know where i'm going with this.
buried flower!
buried flower is a deceptively simple game. it follows the unnamed player character as they descend into a cave, apparently "just to see a flower".
the writing makes a point to note how exhausting this expedition has been, and will continue to be. each screen takes only moments for a player to read, but represent dozens of minutes, or even hours, of the protagonist's time; while the talk of cramped passages, flooded tunnels, and steep drops makes it clear this place is not meant for humans. the danger is obvious, and the protagonist's sparsely-stated motive makes even less sense in light of it.
at the bottom of every screen, you'll find the option to Move forward, sometimes replaced with different commands depending on where in the cave you are. keeping clicking that one, and you'll get to the end of the story, no problem. however, just as omnipresent is the option to Leave — and though it starts off as an unassuming part of the writing, its continued presence as a whole 50% of the game's verbs takes a more puzzling tone the further in you go.
the aforementioned otome games will gently remind you that you're free to leave them, anytime you'd like. spec ops and undertale use horrifying acts and repellent gameplay to make you want to leave. but when, after every step you take, buried flower asks you "do you want to leave?", it's not clear what you're supposed to do. but that's precisely the point!
do we want to leave? the protagonist's taken so long to get this far, so they'd probably keep going. but this place is really dangerous, and it's only getting worse... is a flower really worth all this? what's so special about it, anyway? maybe we should leave after all — although, we might be almost there already, and if so, it'd be a waste to leave now. but on the other hand, we have no idea how deep this cave is, so it's just as likely that we're nowhere near our goal. is it too late to turn around and leave yet? is it too late? is it—
ah.
wow, if this isn't a distillation of the idea into its purest, most compelling form!
buried flower shows just how much of the potential of non-diegetic gameplay remains unexplored. it's such a simple story, but by taking the option to quit, which would've been there anyway, and forefronting it so plainly, the way you think about the game... no, actually the entire game itself, completely changes! everything – the protagonist's motives, the process of exploring the cave, the meaning of the flower – must be looked at a different light when, at every point, you're reminded that you could not be doing this. a theoretical buried flower without the Leave looming large in every screen would be unrecognizeable... and isn't that really fascinating and exciting to think about?!
in what other ways might the line between the diegetic and non-diegetic be blurred? what new kinds of games could be built with this blurring? what kinds of stories could be told? and, because i just realized i can tie this all back to what i was talking about at the start of this post: how might this change the way players interact with games?
(thinks about another reverie for 5 seconds while writing this) oh my fucking god
"wait, what do you mean by that, saori" you better play the games my genius friends and i made if you want to know!!
