Intermittent Mechanism

Ian here—

This is the second episode of my Shape Up! series of video essays about form, structure, and pacing in games. This time my primary focus is on Else Heart.Break(), which is one of the most ambitious games I’ve ever played, but also has what is probably the worst opening act of any game I’ve ever played. Bit of a meandering structure to this one, as I spend the first twelve minutes finding common ground with my dad’s frustrations playing games, and also dive into the varieties of irony games can use when conveying instructions to players—and the dangers of using it sloppily.

Full script below the jump.

Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Shape Up!—an ongoing series about form, structure, and pacing in games.

If you’ll indulge me for a moment, I’d like to begin this episode with a story.

It was 2020, the height of the pandemic. And my mom, like so many people, had decided to buy a Switch so that she could pass the time playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons. And it went great! Her island is really impressive—it’s astounding, really. Great job, Mom. But since Animal Crossing was hergame, my dad was looking for recommendations for Switch games that would be good for himto play.

The next time I was visiting them, I recommended he download Pikuniku, a relatively stress-free adventure platformer. I genuinely thought it would be a good introductory game for someone just getting into gaming as an adult. It’s a 2D game, with simple controls: there’s a button to talk to people, a button to jump, and a button to kick things. While it’s true that there are some jumping challenges, if you fail them you just start over again with no consequences. You can’t die in the game. The platforming isn’t too difficult, the puzzles aren’t too difficult, it’s short, and there’s plenty of bright colors and simple but expressive animations.

And my dad got stuck when playing it. Pretty quickly, actually: he couldn’t figure out the very first quest given in the tutorial town, and the game wouldn’t allow him to progress until he completed it. My dad was ready to give up on the whole medium of videogames, saying, “You always have a sense of what to do next in these games, Ian. I’m never going to be as good as you at figuring out what to do.”

I was curious about what I got wrong about the relative accessibility of Pikuniku to non-gamers, so I offered to help him. The task he was having so much trouble with was fixing a bridge. Right next to the bridge is a spider hanging from a web who says, “If you were a spider, which I happen to be, you could probably fix it with one of those sweet spiderwebs. But you’re obviously not. So good luck with that.”

And what you’re supposed to do to complete this task is kick the spider, sending it flying so that its web completes the bridge.

When I had played the game, I picked up on this so immediately that it didn’t even register in my head as a challenge. Why was my dad’s experience different? 

One explanation is that a lifetime of playing games persuades you of the value of, shall we say, “being a little shit,” using violence as the first attempted solution to any problem. My dad’s retired now from a long career in nonprofit work—he doesn’t have an antisocial bone in his body, and so was maybe resistant to the slapstick logic of the game.

But there’s another explanation that I find more compelling: that absent a lifetime of playing games, my dad wasn’t cued into the mode of ironic communication that games often use to convey what players should be doing next.

Before we continue down this path, a quick point about the meaning of irony. Irony is not just sarcasm—it’s not simply saying the opposite of what you believe. 

When some people think of irony, they think of the town of Zozo in Final Fantasy VI, where everyone lies. So when someone tells you “don’t you dare think about jumping between buildings!,” it means you have to jump between buildings to progress. And there’s a whole puzzle built around determining the correct time to set a clock to based on all of the incorrect information the town’s denizens have fed you.

There is irony at play in Zozo. But irony is not just saying the opposite of what you mean. It’s a more expansive concept. H.W. Fowler, in his Dictionary of Modern English Usage, defines irony as “a form of utterance that postulates a double audience, consisting of one party that hearing shall hear and shall not understand, and another party that, when more is meant than meets the ear, is aware both of that more and of the outsider’s incomprehension.” That’s admittedly a bit of a mouthful. But the key thing is: you have a literal meaning, you have a non-literal meaning, and somewhere you have an audience that understands the non-literal meaning, and also knows that understanding it places them in some kind of in-group.

In fact, beyond the town of Zozo, Final Fantasy VI is actually a great case study in a wide array of uses of ironic communication to convey instructions to players. And a quick aside that the points I’m about to make are heavily inspired by Patrick Holleman’s analysis in his 2018 book Reverse Design: Final Fantasy VI.

Final Fantasy VI was first released on the SNES in 1994. Like many 16-bit JRPGs of that era, it lacks a formal quest log. It also doesn’t place a marker indicating where you’re supposed to go next on your world map. The only way to determine where you’re supposed to be heading and what you’re supposed to be doing is to pay attention to character dialogue.

Sometimes, that character dialogue is quite straightforward: a character will effectively give you a quest, assigning you your next major task in the game. So, for instance, right after Figaro dives into the sands and Edgar joins your party, he announces that your next task will be to consult with Banon, and says “To the south there’s a cave that leads to South Figaro,” effectively telling you where to go.

But then, once you’re in South Figaro, no one actually gives you an explicit quest to go somewhere else. Instead, the NPCs inhabiting South Figaro say things like “Duncan made his son, Vargas, practice a strict martial arts lifestyle, Vargas resented it.” And “Duncan is taking his disciples to Mt. Kolts for meditation and training.” And “Mt. Kolts is to the east.”

Why are these NPCs telling your character this? Why does it matter that Mt. Kolts is to the east? In a literal sense, it doesn’t matter. At least, it doesn’t matter to your character. Because your character is not the real audience for this dialogue. You, the player, are. The dialogue is suffused with ironic meaning. It’s the game’s designers cueing you in to the game’s possibility space. 

In fact, the next thing you should be doing in the game is going to Mt. Kolts and fighting Vargas. If you do that, you’ll discover that Edgar’s brother Sabin was training under Duncan, has a beef against Vargas, and will join your party upon Vargas’ defeat. 

This is how Final Fantasy VI handles the recruitment of several essential party members. The game never explicitly tells you “this narrative will grind to a halt unless you recruit this next party member, so go do that.” Instead, NPCs will muse aloud about locations and people in vague terms, leaving self-motivated players to pick up on the ironic meaning being conveyed behind the rather dull expository literal meaning—namely, the ironic meaning “this is the next thing you should be doing.”

So when you later end up in the town of Mobliz, one NPC mentions mentions a kid who runs with a herd of beasts. Another character says a kid grabbed his dried meat. This is the game’s way of hinting to you that you should purchase some dried meat, then give it to Gau when you encounter him on the Veldt and he says he’s hungry. This is, again, not a task the game explicitly assigns to you. You have to glean it through ironic communication. Recruiting Gau is necessary, because he leads you to the diver’s helmet that allows you to traverse the Serpent Trench, but the game never outright announces it as a necessary step. You have to be aware that, in this dialogue, more is meant than meets the ear.

And—to get us back to our original story—it’s that reflex that my dad lacked when he was playing Pikniku. The reflex to always ask: Why is the game telling me this?

Every line of dialogue takes up precious bytes on a SNES cartridge. This character’s line about the location of Mt. Kolts may be uninteresting, but it’s not unimportant. If there’s not much to be gleaned from the literal words addressed to my player-character, maybe I should be thinking about ironic meanings being communicated to me as a player.

Similarly, why is this spider lecturing me about the usefulness of spiderwebs, while simultaneously being unhelpful? Probably because it’s comedic set-up, so that it will be funny when I kick it across the screen. Pikniku doesn’t have a large vocabulary of actions. Kicking things was among the first actions the game taught me. And this setup here is an invitation to use that action. I understood this intuitively, because a lifetime of playing games has placed me firmly in the in-group cued in to a specific mode of ironic communication. But my dad wasn’t yet a part of that group. He was still an outsider, stuck in realm of literal meanings.

These days, you’re less likely to encounter a big RPG that relies as heavily on ironic communication as Final Fantasy VI does—the genre has evolved, adapted to the needs of adult players with lives and jobs, and you’re more likely to find things like proper quest logs. But that doesn’t mean ironic communication has disappeared from games—far from it! Look back at the games you’ve played throughout your life, and think of how many times the place you’ve be been explicitly told never to go is quite obviously the next place you need to go in the game. Or touching the one thing your job forbids you to touch is quite literally the only action you can take to progress the game. Or all the times a boss boasting about their specific strength … [“Doesn’t matter! I’ve re-configured the shields!”] served to inform you about their corresponding weakness. Any time a game uses dialogue to call your attention to something and leave it primed in your mind—rather than expecting you to follow directions explicitly—you have some flavor of irony going on.

You can even build a game more or less entirely around an ironic mode of instruction. The Stanley Parable tells a story about free will and breaking out of controlled routines—but that story is only delivered to you in its entirety if you follow the instructions of a dictatorial narrator who tells you where to go and what to do at every juncture. [“When Stanley came to a set of two open doors, he entered the door on his left.”] This is obviously contradictory and self-defeating, so it motivates you, as a player, to purposefully disobey the narration. [“This was not the correct way to the meeting room, and Stanley knew it perfectly well.’]

This is how the game gradually reveals the nooks and crannies of its map: the narrator will tell you to do something … [“Stanley walked straight ahead through the large door that read ‘Mind Control Facility.’”] … which will cue you into the fact that you can do something else, explore in some other direction, and in doing so gradually uncover the game’s secrets. The act of oppositionally defying the narrator is the act of playing the game. He is there to act as a foil, to help you hone your exploratory impulse. [“Stanley walked through the RED door!”]

The Stanley Parable is ultimately an exercise in meta-critique that reveals the inner workings and inherent limitations of branching narrative structures. No matter how much “freedom” a game appears to give you in how you make choices, ultimately you’re still navigating a closed system, and some writer sat around writing all of these paths and endings. The game’s comedy foregrounds this raw labor of narrative design. This moment, for instance, when the narrator goes on a minutes-long rant if you enter the broom closet and refuse to come out … [“It was baffling that Stanley was still just sitting in the broom closet. He wasn’t even doing anything. At least if there were something to interact with he’d be justified in some way. As it is, he’s literally just standing there doing sweet F.A.”] It’s funny … but it’s also a little intimidating. [“Are you—are you really still in the broom closet?”] It’s an impressive demonstration of the amount of dialogue triggers placed into the environment, accounting a wide array of aberrant player behaviors. No matter how much you try to break the game and slip off the edges of the map, it always turns out that this, too, was all just part of the plan.

The Stanley Parable proves that ironic signposting can still take you quite far in game design. I haven’t exhausted it as a case study, and I intend to return to it over the course of this series. [“The moment he—”] But to close out this episode, I want to turn to one more major case study—one that brings us to the limits of ironic communication as a successful strategy.

Else Heart.Break() came out in 2015, and it remains to this day probably themost ambitious indie-developed game I have every played. Perhaps even the most ambitious game, full-stop. It gives you a city of several blocks in size to explore. The density and detail present is on the scale of immersive sims with many times this game’s budget and personnel. Most buildings in the city have an interior, which can be accessed through legitimate means or, if not that, then illegitimate means. You can enter peoples’ living spaces, rifle through their shelves, snoop through their trash, steal the floppy discs they left laying around. And on top of all of this, a wide variety of objects represented in the game are hackable. You can click on them, bring up a console, and not only examine but also alter their code. Over the course of the game, you progress from simple things like picking the locks of doors, all the way up to giving sets of movement instructions to objects.

There are a number of games that build their mechanics around coding principles—several of which I quite like, like Tomorrow Corporations’ Human Resource Machine and 7 Billion Humans. I think those games are great examples of how to use puzzles as pedagogy. But one downside of them is that they don’t really accurately model how one learns coding in the real world. 

Else Heart.Break() lacks the curricular cleanliness of something like Human Resource Machine. Instead of progressing through a series of assignments of escalating difficulty, you largely learn by examples drawn from the world around you. You can copy any bit of code from any object you find into your clipboard, then paste it into another object, and just start changing it. Sometimes the changes you make will break the code. Other times, they’ll work. And through this process of stealing, changing, and observing whether or not your changes did what you wanted them to do or failed to compile, you gradually learn how to code in the game’s language. It’s messy, it’s largely unstructured, and it’s absolutely how most people learn the first steps of coding.

So Else Heart.Break() takes this anarchic, kleptomaniac-style approach to teaching players how to code, and then welds it to the emphasis on exploration, experimentation, and ingenuity that comes with the general immersive sim philosophy. It’s not all that surprising that the end result is a game in which you can easily sequence break, discovering areas and completing quests before the game has officially doled them out. Frankly, the game must have been a nightmare to test—and from all available evidence, at a certain point they just sort of gave up. As astonishingly ambitious as the game is, it’s not one that I would recommend unreservedly. Playing it, you get the feeling that at a certain point they ran out of resources to keep playtesting it, and just kind of released it unfinished. It’s not that you can’t complete the game. You can, and I have. But I wouldn’t recommend trying to do so without a walkthrough and very frequent saving.

Beating up on a broken game isn’t sporting at all—and, on some level, that’s what Else Heart.Break() is. But on the other hand, some of its most prominent deficiencies aren’t technical at all, but are instead related to signposting. These are fair game to criticize, I think, and it’s in keeping with the themes of this video.

Else Heart.Break() opens with your player-character, Seb, getting a phone call telling him he’s gotten a job with the Wellspring Soda Company that will be taking him to the island city of Dorisburg. You take a ship over, you check into a hotel, and the next morning you’re told that just before you got up, someone—presumably related to your new job—was at the hotel looking for you, but just left. Your first real task in the game is tracking down this person. Now, like Final Fantasy VI, Else Heart.Break() doesn’t actually have a quest log. So you’re instead completely reliant on listening to characters’ dialogue, and maybe taking some notes on your own. First, you’re told that your contact may have gone to the local café. But when you get to the café, the barista doesn’t know who you’re talking about. He does, though, hint that maybe you should check another establishment, Bar Yvonne, later.

Now, here’s the thing: If you leave the café immediately after this exchange, your contact for Wellspring Soda is actually sitting right outside of it. He won’t flag you down, or identify himself in any way unless you engage him in some small talk first. He also might not be there, depending on how long you took to get to the café—the NPCs in this game have schedules, as time ticks by in the game’s simulated day/night cycle, so if you dawdle too long he might be gone already. But if you haven’t taken too long, then he does, in fact, spawn right outside the café. And if you talk to him and introduce yourself, he’ll take you over to a warehouse and give you a short tutorial on the task of selling soda.

So, there’s your job—the in-game reason you were given for traveling to Dorisburg. Except, it’s not really important, and the game doesn’t actually care if you meet this man. What you’re supposed to do is keep talking to people in the café, many of whom redundantly mention Bar Yvonne, and how going there is a great way to meet people. What the game actually wants you to do is ditch your stupid job and go hang out at Bar Yvonne. At 6:00 in the evening the first day of the game, a girl named Pixie will enter the bar and stand on its dance floor. Dialogue indicates she’s supposed to be dancing, but she doesn’t dance, she just stands there—sorry, I said I wouldn’t beat up on the game’s bugs. Anyway, you have to talk to Pixie, who Seb is apparently immediately smitten with. Pixie invites you to another outing the following night at Club Dot, and even though you have a dialogue option to turn her down, you should NOT do that. Instead, the very next night you should follow her to Club Dot. There, you’ll meet a DJ, do some dancing, and oh—be sure to talk to a construction worker and drink some of the grog he has.

If you do not do those things, in that order—go to Bar Yvonne the night of day 1, talk to Pixie, take up her invitation, go to Club Dot the night of day 2, and drink the grog—the game will become unwinnable. Well, probably not completely unwinnable. As I said, there are always plenty of ways to sequence-break and discover things out-of-order, so I imagine you could get back on track. But you will have missed fundamental narrative scaffolding that’s meant to introduce you to the game’s characters and draw you into its conflicts.

This is, hands down, maybe the worst opening to a game I’ve ever experienced. And it’s worth poking at why. 

The developers of this game have opted not to provide a formal quest log. That’s fine—a lot of games don’t have one. But it does mean that the burden is on them to use dialogue to communicate the relative importance and urgency of various tasks. And the game’s mode of communication in its opening hour just isn’t up to this task. 

You’re supposed to understand, early on, that the soda-selling job only exists to be abandoned. The company is disorganized. Your boss doesn’t really know what he’s doing. Like in The Stanley Parable, you’re supposed to take an adversarial relationship to him, avoid the drudgery he represents, and seek out greener pastures.

But here’s the thing: the Stanley Parable gives out clear directions. [“But eager to get back to business, Stanley took the first open door on his left.”] Which, in-turn, makes it equally clear how to not follow those directions. [“Stanley was so bad at following directions it’s incredible he wasn’t fired years ago.”] The game’s map is made up of just a few very obvious branching paths, and adopting a strictly defiant relationship to the game’s narrator will help you find every one of them. [“Coming to a staircase, Stanley walked upstairs to his boss’ office.”] Else Heart.Break(), by contrast, throws you into a whole city. OK, so: our supervisor’s kind of a dick, so we should probably ignore him. But this doesn’t clarify anything about what we should be doing in the game. And it doesn’t help that the game keeps mixing and matching different types of ironic communication. We’re supposed to defy our supervisor. But we’re supposed to pay attention to the barista who first tells us about Bar Yvonne—even though he initially tells us to go there to find our supervisor, who we’re supposed to defy. But then there’s also the DJ girl, who says we should go there to socialize and make friends, and this is not really ironic, at all—it’s one of the view times the game handholds us in a very straightforward way. The DJ girl tells our character to go to a specific location and socialize with the people there, and that is exactly what our character needs to do.

In the end, who we’re supposed to talk to, who we’re supposed to ignore, who we’re supposed to glean information from in an ironic way, and who we’re supposed to follow the directions of in a non-ironic way all comes down to genre tropes. This is a story about a young hacker in love, getting in over his head. You talk to Pixie in the bar the night of day 1, and agree to follow up with her at Club Dot the night of day 2, because she is a manic pixie dream girl. (I mean, her name is literally Pixie!) She is the Trinity to your Neo, you are going to follow her, and you are going to see how just deep the rabbit hole goes. At least, that’s what the developers had in mind. In truth, Pixie’s just another anonymous NPC, standing in place on a dancefloor—no more or less noticeable than the anonymous NPC sitting at the table outside the café, who turns out to be your supervisor.

So what overall lesson can be drawn here? Ironic communication can absolutely work as a mode of game signposting. But if you’re going to use it, it needs to be doled out in a manner that is proportionate to the game’s possibility space. In The Stanley Parable, disobeying the narrator is a way of testing the limits of an extremely small, self-contained map, in which there are contingency plans in-place for all sorts of player behaviors. [“Really?! I was in the middle of something! Do you have zero consideration for others?”] In Else Heart.Break(), by contrast, the map is large, you’re expected to take specific actions within relatively tight timing windows, and the game seemingly has no contingency plans in place if players miss key bits of instruction, or fail to show up for certain in-game events.

And you might say, “But what about Final Fantasy VI? Is that not a big, sprawling game, more like Else Heart.Break() than The Stanley Parable?” And the truth is … not really. The world map of Final Fantasy VI may appear large, but the first half of the game is largely on-rails. Where you can go is sharply constrained by geography, and only expands as you unlock new vehicles, one at a time, for plot-related reasons. So when someone suddenly says “Mt. Kolts is to the east,” apropos of nothing, it means our ear for ironic communication should be perked. Because there’s only so many directions we can go without hitting an impassible mountain range.

Else Heart.Break() is a love letter to the joyful and rebellious energies of youth—and playing it made me feel like an old person. Specifically, it made me feel like one old person: my dad, playing Pikuniku. You are not alone, dad: even your son still gets stuck playing certain games. Sometimes, even I don’t know what to do, or where to go.

And then I go and make a video essay about the whole experience.

That’s it for this episode of Shape Up. In the next episode, I’ll have more to say about that feeling of being stuck and feeling frustrated when playing a game—except I’ll be looking at games that cultivate that feeling on purpose, to deliberate ends. Stay tuned, and as always thanks for watching!