Intermittent Mechanism

Ian here—

This will be my last post of year year, slipping in the third episode of my Shape Up! video essay series before 2023 comes to a close.

Any longtime readers of the blog will know that I have a longstanding interest in what Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky has dubbed “the process genre,” applying her concept to games well before her book on the subject even came out. This is my first video essay to dabble in the subject, with a suite of all-new examples to chew over. (Be prepared for a surprisingly lengthy introduction about the historical reception of Jeanne Dielman for a video nominally about videogames.)

Full script below the jump. Happy (almost) new year, everyone!

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

I want to start this episode by telling you about the greatest film of all time. (At least, as voted by the 2022 Sight & Sound critics’ poll.)

In 1975, the Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman directed the landmark feminist film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Over the course of 3 hours and 20 minutes, viewers watch three days in the life of its titular character, a widowed stay-at-home mother whose life is a repetitive series of domestic tasks punctuated by regular appointments of sex work to support herself and her son.

Housework was a major flashpoint in 1970s-era feminism, and the aesthetics of Jeanne Dielman reflect the discourse of the time. The film uses duration as an aesthetic tool, with long, uninterrupted takes of Jeanne performing daily tasks such as meal prep, tidying, and shining her son’s shoes. The film is structured so that the first half gives you a clear understanding of Jeannes’ daily routine, which has become regimented and orderly over years of performing it. By the second half, small things start to go wrong, piling up until they disrupt more and more of her schedule, leading to a climactic scene of murderous rage—one of the few times we get a clear sense of this character’s inner psychology. Akerman’s stated intent for the film was to show how the rituals that are imposed on women become what keeps them going, and that rote, alienated labor can act as a thin barrier over a well of subconscious rage.

1975 was a long time ago, and feminist discourse has shifted in the interim. At this point in history, most Western women have entered the workplace. We’ve moved on to conversations about sexual harassment in the workplace, discriminatory pay, and the glass ceiling. To the extent that the drudgery of housework still has a place in the conversation, the issue has evolved to discussions of how chores and child-rearing get split up in two-income households with two working parents. There’s also an increasing awareness that that the earlier push to get women into the workplace had a second-order effect of re-distributing domestic labor away from wealthy, college-educated white women, and toward working class Black and brown women, who often end up still doing housework and child care—they just now do it as wage labor for other peoples’ families.

Jeanne Dielman remains well-regarded (as the results of the Sight & Sound poll attest), but it’s impossible to view it in the same context as it was first viewed in 1975. Part of that is because of these political shifts. But it’s also impossible to watch Jeanne Dielman in the same aesthetic context.

Akerman’s intention with Jeanne Dielman was to use the tediousness of the quotidian against the expectations of viewers. Beyond some experimental films by Andy Warhol, there wasn’t much precedent in 1975 for a film in which so aggressively little happened onscreen. But viewed from today’s perspective, we can now recognize Jeanne Dielman as an early example of slow cinema, which at this point been one of the dominant modes of international art cinema for decades. It turns out that in a fast-paced world in which people are expected to witness and react in real time to more things than ever before in human history, people relish the opportunity to slip into a quiet movie theater, turn off their phones, and watch people walking for minutes and minutes on end. Or crying for minutes on end. Or sleeping for minutes on end. In 1975, Akerman prided herself on “giv[ing] space to things which were never, almost never show [on film],” that were “lowest in the hierarchy of film images.” Today, art film directors have increasingly built careers around allowing the most quotidian of actions to take up more and more screen time, outdoing themselves with new each release. And viewers enjoy these films—at least, the types of viewers prone to seeking out international art cinema in the first place do. They enjoy the opportunity to enter into a contemplative state that contemporary life too often denies them. And Jeanne Dielman, when viewed in a contemporary context, also invites this type of spectatorship.

Beyond the phenomenon of slow cinema, the film scholar Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky places Jeanne Dielman in the history of what she calls “the process genre,” media that is all about watching human labor as people enact a clear series of steps in order to complete a task. This genre includes documentaries, it includes fiction films fascinated by human labor, and it also includes contemporary social media content. Some examples of the genre are explicitly intended to instruct—to show you, the viewer, exactly how to accomplish some task—although not all of them are. The real common thread is that these things are satisfying to watch: that as a basic social phenomenon, we experience a vicarious gratification watching human labor as people execute a process to achieve a desired result.

And that’s the aesthetic context we all watch Jeanne Dielman in if we watch it in the 2020s. A context of busy lives juggling too many screens, in which anything from a showing of slow cinema at your local arthouse movie theatre to a weird little ASMR TikTok might provide a temporary respite.

I don’t think that makes Jeanne Dielman ineffective these days—it’s just different. Speaking from my own experience, in repeat viewings of the film I find watching the quiet efficiency with which Jeanne approaches her tasks in the first half to be satisfying to the point of being soothing—which makes it especially frustrating when little things start to go wrong. Viewing the film’s second half is an exercise in escalating stressfulness, to a point that’s really skin-crawling. This is an effective aesthetic experience—but I don’t think it aligns with the political impact that Akerman was going for in 1975. Jeanne Dielman is supposed to portray more than just one woman going mad due to the things that go wrong in her routine. It was supposed to illustrate the soul-sucking monotony of women’s work, as a broader cultural category. I think it’s genuinely hard to recapture that as a spectatorial experience today, in our current media landscape.

So we’re about seven minutes in, and you may be wondering: what does all of this have to do with games?

To which I offer the following rejoinder …

… okay, that was trite, but here goes for real.

There are moments in which an artist may want to deliberately inspire feelings of boredom, of drudgery, of tedium in their audience. There are valid aesthetic reasons for doing this. Chantal Akerman had valid aesthetic reasons for wanting to do it with Jeanne Dielman. But boredom is, as it turns out, a tricky thing. It’s susceptible to the whims of socio-historical context—and not always in the ways you might think. The common assumption is that things that once seemed fast-paced and exciting will look tepid and boring to increasingly over-stimulated audiences. But on the flip-side, certain self-selected audiences will seek out deliberately slow-paced entertainment as a balm to their over-stimulated lives. This jumbles up our discussion of the aesthetics of tedium in the case of Jeanne Dielman, and it similarly jumbles up discussions of the aesthetics of tedium in games.

Try as they might, the world’s top scientists have been unable to find a form of human labor that is inherently boring and un-fun when it’s turned into a videogame. We have games about cooking meals for your kids, games about organizing your pantry and cabinets, and games about unpacking boxes after moving. There are games about being a mail delivery person, a warehouse worker, a forklift operator. Perhaps the greatest triumph of humanity in the modern era is that fewer than 75 percent of people need to be farmers in order for society to work … and to compensate for this wonder of human achievement, about 75-god-damn-percent of games these days have farming in them. The children yearn for the mines! There’s even a decades-strong, hugely successful franchise about pulling weeds and paying off your mortgage. There seems to be literally no form of human labor, no matter how nominally tedious, that can’t be made satisfyingly juicy by talented developers, and that won’t find an audience somewhere among cozy game enthusiasts. And—this is rather important for context—they cozy game enthusiasts were here first. This is their home turf. Unlike with Jeanne Dielman, where Akerman made a film that was supposed to explore alienation but in the intervening decades a whole cottage industry of slow-paced films sprung up, changing the media landscape, games that simulate labor in a fun way have been around for a long time. Games that simulate labor in an unfun way—that are deliberately trying to be tedious, uncomfortable, or thought-provoking to play—that is to say, deliberately un-cozy—are a much newer phenomenon.

So how do developers that are deliberately trying to make slow games do it? In the rest of this video, I’ll be looking at games that deliberately employ tedium as a way of commenting on human alienation, and pushing back against the tendency to only portray labor in games in the coziest of terms. I’ll be doing this via two pairs of case studies.

So: first pair of case studies. Always Sometimes Monsters is a game about living in an extremely precarious financial situation, trying to make moral decisions in an environment where all you have are bad options. There are a bunch of little part-time gig jobs you can take over the course of the game, none of which could rightly be described as “mini-games.” These aren’t meant to be fun diversions. They are ordeals to be endured as you make your way to the next story portion of the game, now with a bit more spending money. For my purposes here, I want to focus on a gig you can take in the game working in a warehouse packing delivery trucks.

The reason I want to focus on this gig, out of all the gigs you can have in the game, is that there is actually a very fun cozy game, Wilmot’s Warehouse, that makes for an excellent contrast point here. How does Wilmot’s Warehouse make the act of working in a warehouse fun? And then how does Always Sometimes Monsters avoid doing so?

One thing Wilmot’s does is introduce extrinsic motivation in the form of rewards. As you fill customers’ orders in Wilmot’s, a clock ticks down, and the more time you have left on the clock when you finish the task, the more performance stars you’re awarded. A lot of what makes us read a cozy game’s representation of labor as “fun” comes down to the audio-visual flourishes, and Wilmot’s is no exception: there’s a pleasing chime when you receive the stars, and the way they fly out individually gives you a pleasingly clear visual indicator of how well you just did at the task, adding another level of juiciness. And if that wasn’t enough, the stars are also used as currency to unlock upgrades in the game’s progression system.

The warehouse gig in Always Sometimes Monsters, on the other hand, rejects extrinsic motivation at every turn. There’s no reward for a job well-done. You aren’t being timed, nor are you being compensated for each box you pack. There is a counter in the warehouse that goes up as you pack more boxes, but unlike Wilmot’s there’s no denominator, telling you what percentage completion you’re at. Talking to your supervisor just prompts the same canned dialogue that there’s “a few more boxes” still left to be shipped—never any indication of how close you’re getting to finishing the task. Every aspect of the job is set up to refuse any sense of progress—and, ultimately, to make you so bored you walk off the job site in protest. (Which your supervisor fully expects you to do, because you’re a cheap, expendable temp worker.)

Along with its extrinsic motivation systems, the gameplay in Wilmot’s is also intrinsically rewarding. The central overriding activity in the game is not so much carting boxes around a warehouse as it is devising an organizational system for that warehouse. You’re constantly being given new types of inventory, each represented by a heavily abstracted icon. With each new icon revealed comes a new challenge to your categorization system, which you’’ll mutate and adapt as you adjust to the demands of shelving new stock. The act of categorization is itself cognitively satisfying, and in Wilmot’s that sense of satisfaction is enhanced by the strategic importance of what you’re doing.

All of this is to say that in Wilmot’s, you’re basically playing as the floor manager of a warehouse. In Always Sometimes Monsters, you’re simply a worker. No one invites you to make higher-level strategic decisions about categorization and organization. You just perform repetitive actions.

And those repetitive actions aren’t even fun to perform on a kinesthetic level. One of the first upgrades you can afford in Wilmot’s is a dash, which makes your movement through the warehouse quick and responsive. Your character controls slowly in Always Sometimes Monsters, and the warehouse is laid out to be as annoying as possible: the geography denies you an efficient line of movement from the conveyer belt to the truck and back. It’s a little insult, ensuring that the task of loading up boxes always grates on you a little bit. If you stupidly insist on continuing to work at the warehouse, waiting for some reward that will never come, over time just the act of moving your character will probably make you hand a little sore, adding injury to insult.

Now that I’ve used the Monsters/Wilmot’s contrast as a way of looking at the basic phenomenon of tedious games, with my next case study pair I want to go deeper into issues of unfairness as a way of breaking the cozy game mold.

The Stillness of the Wind is a 2018 farming game by Memory of God, a commercial remake of their earlier freeware game Where the Goats Are. Deciding which of the two to analyze in this video was actually tricky for me—they each have their strengths and weaknesses. Where the Goats Are is constricted to a single screen, which works for the actual scale of the game’s action. You can venture quite far away from your farm in The Stillness of the Wind, but it takes a long time, and there’s really no compelling reason to do so, so it’s a little annoying that it’s an option at all. The Stillness of the Wind fills in a lot of narrative detail about what’s going on in the world outside, which I think is mostly to its benefit, but there’s also something to be said for the pristine, fable-like simplicity of Where the Goats Are.

Ultimately, I did decide to use The Stillness of the Wind as my case study—it’s available on more platforms, it costs money, and it seems clear that it’s the intended final form of the project.

In both games, you play as an old woman tending a goat farm. (In The Stillness of the Wind, she’s named Talma.) In the early going, the game is a farm life simulation game, familiar if you’ve played any other similar game: you milk goats and create cheese from their milk, you plant vegetables and flowers, you raise chickens and gather their eggs. Each evening Talma makes a meal from the food she produces—but she isn’t strictly a subsistence farmer. There’s also an in-game economy. You start off with the bare necessities: you need to trade the cheese you produce for hay for the goats to eat. But as the game progresses, you learn to manage time a bit more efficiently, and amass a larger stockpile of goods to sell. This means there are more elaborate options for re-investing in your farm. It’s the usual gameplay loop of farm management simulators, and for its opening hour or so, The Stillness of the Wind appears for all the world to be a straightforward cozy game.

But there’s a twist. For one, the days are getting shorter. Your first day in the game is about seven minutes long. Day two is six minutes, forty seconds. By day ten, you’re down to nearly a clean six minutes. You’re unlikely to notice this immediately, because with each passing day you’re getting more efficient at your tasks, in a way that masks that lost time. By the time you do notice it, you may initially chalk it up to the changing of the seasons. But at a certain point, things start to get absurd. By Day 17—which is 3 minutes and 45 seconds long—the sunset looks like it’s in time-lapse, it’s going so fast. By the time things get to Day 21 (2 minutes 35 seconds long), you might revise your initial theory, and say “ah, so this is about aging.” Talma is facing the gradual diminishment of her physical mobility; she can’t do as much per day, and this is the game’s way of simulating that.

But things start to get weirder, and worse. Talma’s letters from her relatives in the city tell of people vanishing into thin air, entire neighborhoods emptying out. Your chickens start to disappear, faster than you can buy new ones. Wolf attacks at night become more frequent. The morning of Day 22, your entire stock of cheese goes bad at once, and your well goes dry. The sun barely comes out anymore. You run out of wood for your stove, and can no longer eat. What we’re actually witnessing is an apocalypse, filtered through the constrained view of one old farmer. There’s no winning this game—our farm, along with Talma and everyone she’s ever known, was doomed from the start.

Much like The Stillness of the Wind, Deconstructeam’s Behind Every Great One made a journey from noncommercial experiment to eventual commercial release. It was first created in 2018 as part of a Ludum Dare game jam, and later saw full commercial release as part of Deconstructeam’s 2021 anthology package Essays on Empathy. Out of all the case studies in this video, it gets us closest to an actual Jean Dielman simulator: you play as a housewife with a routine of daily chores and unresolved anxiety issues.

The trick Behind Every Great One pulls is pretty straightforward. Every day your character, Victorine, has six tasks she’s expected to complete—laundry, plant-watering, cleaning the bathroom, cooking dinner, cleaning the dining room, and doing the dishes. Each time you click to perform one of them, time advances, and it turns out you only have enough time in the day to complete four of the six total tasks.

At the end of day one, your husband Gabriel will make some passive-aggressive comments about the two chores that you didn’t get to. And you might think, “okay, so I’ll prioritize those tomorrow.” But if you do that, there’s still again going to be two of six chores you didn’t get to, so at the end of day two he’ll make a comment about those, instead. You can’t please him completely. Over time, this judgmental pressure causes Victorine’s anxiety to ratchet up, represented by the camera wobbling and closing in tighter, as the color palette shifts. Once per day, you have to find a private room to to cry in to relieve the pressure.

After the first few days, you’re joined by houseguests—first your in-laws, and then your sister and nephew, which means even more people can make snide remarks about the chores you didn’t get to. Sometimes they’ll even complain that you’re not doing a good enough job on the chores you did get to. With each new person that arrives, a new room gets occupied, making it harder to find a private space to cry in. At the climax of the game, lacking a place to cry, Victorine enters Gabriel’s studio and ruins his painting.

I want to be as generous as possible with Behind Every Great One, because I know it had humble origins as a game jam creation, and I do like Deconstructeam’s other work. So I’ll start with nice things. I like the character writing. Given the story the game is trying to tell, I’m sure there was temptation to make your husband overtly cruel. But not only is Gabriel not physically abusive, he’s not particularly verbally abusive either. He doesn’t yell at you for not getting things done, and he takes your side in conflicts with his parents. He affirms your potential, and encourages you to pursue fulfilling work. The game doesn’t need to portray him as cruel to make it clear that your dynamic is toxic. Gabriel is a self-obsessed artist, with no curiosity about his spouse’s inner emotional life. His attempts at encouragement come across as patronizing needling at best, active shaming at worst. And although he’ll do things like compliment the meals you make, he clearly has no idea of the day-to-day labor it takes to keep a household going.

And … neither does the game, really. This is my big complaint with it. As a system designed to procedurally represent domestic labor and anxiety, it’s stuck somewhere uncomfortable between abstraction and realism. The chores are clearly meant to represent the high-level idea that there’s never enough time in the day to complete everything that needs to be done—and that the anxiety caused by living with an unsupportive partner only compounds this problem. But they’re represented in the game as identifiable tasks, which causes some simulation strain. In the real world, it takes much less time to water ten plants than it does to make a home-cooked meal of coq au vin. And you generally don’t need to do laundry every day in a household with just two adults.

These might sound like nitpicks—and they are nitpicks! But they’re nitpicks that are too easy to make. They open up a simulation gap and reduce the game’s rhetorical effectiveness. Behind Every Great One wants to provoke ideas about unfairness in the world at large. But it’s hard for players to get to that level if they’re stuck on more immediate unfairness in the game, staring them right in the face. If it feels like an arbitrary restriction that it takes the same amount of time to water plants as make a gourmet meal, that’s something players are likely to get mad at the developer for, not mad at the patriarchy for. In an absolutely worst-case scenario, an especially ungenerous player might decide that Victorine’s mental health problems are her own fault, for being so bad at time management.

Now, The Stillness of the Wind is just as unfair as Behind Every Great One. It also puts you in an unwinnable scenario, hurtling toward a bad ending. But it successfully hides that fact in the early going—and that helps enormously with the ultimate effect. Behind Every Great One is not a long game—it only takes about 25 minutes to play through. But they’re a draggy 25 minutes, because the game plays its one trick early on, rubs your face in its unfairness, and then continues on in a monotonous register, without any mechanical escalation. Compared to that, The Stillness of the Wind is an emotional roller-coaster. The game has a genuinely satisfying reward loop in its first half. On day 11, I had saved up enough to barter for a billygoat, which impregnated my two nanny goats, and suddenly I had two new kids on the farm, which I could keep or barter—just that classic sense of satisfaction from successful re-investment that so many farming sims and management sims of all types offer. That evening, as I was working on my night cheese, I really thought I had a chance to make something out of this farm! By allowing you early success, the game saves up your goodwill, which it then spends very effectively. When the unfairness arrives, it’s of course dissatisfying from a play standpoint, but you buy it from a narrative standpoint, because of how invested you now are in this little farm, and how gradually the game has ratcheted up its sense of doom and futility. The Stillness of the Wind ends up being a very effective little slow-burn folksy horror story. It actually reminds me of The Turin Horse, Béla Tarr’s film about a father and daughter whose farm is cursed, plunging them into an isolated hell where the sun itself eventually refuses to shine. And given that Tarr is one of the masters of slow cinema, that’s high praise for an experiment in slow game design. I think the lesson we can learn here is that forced frustration and failure can work, but there are benefits to making the game first appear to be fair, as a way of hooking players.

The early 20th century German cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer has a short essay called “Boredom,” where he makes the point that, by all rights, people should be bored under the conditions of advanced industrial capitalism. Work in a factory or in an office is, in Kracauer’s words, a “tiresome obligation.” But most of us have been inculcated into a work ethic that tells us we should find it satisfying. And, in the age of mass culture, as soon as we leave the workplace we’re immediately thrown into an inescapable array of entertainment and spectacle. The modern world wants to insure that there’s no time left in our lives to be bored.

But if we want to, we can deliberately adopt boredom as an aesthetic stance. And Kracauer thinks that we should. Kracauer thinks we should try to be bored, if the opportunity arises. Being bored teaches us patience, and it teaches us what it means to have passion. In an age of mass distractions—which we’re certainly in even more now than when Kracauer first wrote the essay, a century ago in 1924—it is an act of aesthetic radicalism to allow oneself to be bored. And it might even open up the way toward political radicalism, because it begins to move the needle on our relationship to labor.

The obvious glib thing for me to say here would be something like, “cozy games serve as propaganda for the Protestant work ethic, by convincing us that work is satisfying.” But I don’t actually think that’s true. I think games like Fae Farm implicitly acknowledge that for most people, work isn’t satisfying, and that a tight correlation between labor and reward is a fantasy on par with fairies being real.

But the point I want to make about Always Sometimes Monsters, and The Stillness of the Wind, and even Behind Every Great One (despite my complaints) is that not every gamic representation of labor needs to have a satisfying loop. Not every game needs to light up those pleasure centers that come from executing a process and receiving the desired results. As both Siegfried Kracauer and Chantal Akerman would attest, boredom is a valuable aesthetic tool. Frustration is a valuable aesthetic tool. Dissatisfaction is a valuable aesthetic tool. I might not actually think that Fae Farm taken in isolation is propaganda … but when an entire medium seems to only be able to depict labor as fun, cozy, and immensely satisfying, that does speak to a stultifying lack of variety. (Which, ironically, is boring.) We desperately need un-cozy games to open up the aesthetic horizons of the medium—and dare I say, even the political horizons of the medium. We need more game developers out there who dare to be boring, boldly making the radical claim that work sucks.

That’s it for this episode of Shape Up. Stay tuned for the next episode, in which I get stuck in a loop.