Ian here—
I haven’t been having my students write blog posts for the past few quarters, which has left some significant gaps between posts. This has been exacerbated by the fact that I took a 6-month break from posting any video essays, which I’m returning from now, with the ninth video in my ongoing Shape Up! series. (With still more to come!)
Script below the jump.
Mouthwashing is a short horror game that came out last September. And it’s pretty good. The gameplay is nothing to write home about. You reveal some codes in the environment, and then type them in to unlock doors. You read recipes and follow them. You solve a couple gruesome puzzles, and there are two stealth encounters with specific rules you need to tease out. It doesn’t feature the most challenging or engaging forms of interaction ever devised, but where Mouthwashing really shines its its story, and in particular its story’s chronological structure.
The game opens with the character you’re playing as deliberately steering a spaceship into the path of an asteroid. From here, we flash-forward two months after the crash. The ship and its crew have survived, but are worse for wear. Emergency foam has flooded the ship, preventing decompression but also restricting access to key areas and resources. The crew has four months of food rations to sustain them over six months of travel. Painkillers are also running low, which is bad news for the Captain, Curly, who survived the crash but is mangled and requires constant pain management. The former co-pilot and now acting captain, Jimmy—who we’re playing as in this section—has some tough choices ahead. But before we can get around to making those choices, we flash back, to a week before the crash.
From here on in, the timeline keeps shifting, and you can never be quite sure when you’re going to be uprooted and plonked down in a different time.
Which is a bold choice! So let’s talk about it.
Most videogame stories operate on a straightforwardly linear level, animated by the simple question, “what happens next?” Your player-character has a goal, and the question becomes what new obstacle is going to be thrown in their way as they try to achieve that goal. What boss are we going to have to fight? What key item are we going to have to collect?
But there are other model of storytelling, with different sorts of question structures. You have mystery stories, in which some key piece of information has been omitted by the exposition. The primary question in a mystery story is not “what happens next,” but instead, “what did happen?” Who stole the precious artifact? Who poisoned the dinner guest? You have examples of these in games, as well.
You also have suspense scenarios, in the mold that Alfred Hitchcock made famous: there’s a ticking time bomb that the audience knows about, but the characters don’t. We do ask questions about the future in this scenario, but they’re more specific than just “what happens next.” Instead, we ask “will the terrible outcome we’re dreading, that at this point seems most likely, actually come to pass? Or will the protagonists discover the danger we know they’re in, and escape?” This type of storytelling has historically been quite difficult for games (at least single-player games), although you can find weird experiments along the edges if you know where to look.
The shifting timeline of Mouthwashing allows it to mix and match multiple modes of question-asking. Two months after the crash, when the crew discovers that the cargo they’re hauling is mouthwash with 14% ethanol content, we ask: What will happen next? Is the crew going to drink themselves to death, given the hopeless situation they’re in? Flashing back to six days before the crash, we know, in broad terms, what happens next: the crash happens. So now the question is a psychological one: what is going on with Captain Curly right now? Why is he going to crash the ship in six days? We’re playing as him right now—what’s going to befall us and push him over the edge?
Jumping ahead again to four months after the crash, our crew is in a nihilistic funk, soused on mouthwash and considering poisoning themselves with it. It’s getting depressing now to speculate what might happen next, so right here as things start to sag, the game throws a curveball in the form of a flash-forward to a third timeline, a countdown to “judgement,” in which the crewmember Swansea attempts to murder Jimmy with an axe. So now we have a new, more specific question: what’s going to motivate that? What’s Jimmy going to do? The game has found a new way to give players more information than the characters they’re playing as, generating new modes of question-asking and new avenues of engagement.
Critics liked liked this structure quite a lot, even as they grasped for words to describe it. Ronnie Barrier at IGN referred to it as “leaping back and forth in time;” Katherine Castle at Eurogamer called it “non-linear time-hopping;” Ed Thorn at Rock Paper Shotgun called it “converging timelines.” Personally, I would characterize it as a multiple narrative flashback structure, following Linda Aronson in her book The 21st Century Screenplay.
Aronson analyzes several films in which a turning point or climax of a story in the past also serves as the triggering crisis in a story set in the present, and we then flash back and forward between these two stories, making jumps at major emotional moments. In Aronson’s examples—Citizen Kane, Shine, The English Patient, The Usual Suspects, Slumdog Millionaire—we’re limited to two timelines, and we spend most of the film’s running time in the past, because that’s where all the answers to the interesting questions lie. Eventually, as we work our way through the past, we “catch up” to the present timeline: we reach the moment that we recognize as the triggering crisis we saw earlier. Having resolved the two timelines, these films continue on to the present-tense conclusion with no further flashbacks.
Mouthwashing is more ambitious than Aronson’s examples. It has three timelines rather than two, with the chronologically latest timeline being introduced before the flashbacks to the chronologically earliest timeline have completely resolved. And on top of this triple narrative flashback structure, the game also has several hallucinatory dream sequences that begin popping up before the final timeline is officially introduced, but that seem to reflect a character’s headspace during the events of that timeline. It’s impressively complex structure. To help guide us through the tangled chronology, the game makes smart use of its limited space. The environmental art is always easy to read at a glance to establish basic before-and-after moments: before the crash, after the crash, after Swansea smashes the main window screen with an axe. And we retread the ground between the lounge, medical bay, utility room, cockpit, and cargo hold so often that it’s immediately noticeable out whenever the ship’s layout shifts, and a room isn’t where it should be—always a clear sign we’ve transitioned into a nightmare or hallucination sequence.
I don’t really expect game critics to be read up on every screenwriting guru out there, so I’m not surprised that not everyone looked at Mouthwashing and said, “oh, yeah, that’s a multiple narrative flashback structure, of the kind Linda Aronson talks about.” But maybe critics should start coming up with a more consistent vocabulary for this sort of thing, because flashback structures have become more common in indie games in recent years. Hindsight begins with the death of your character’s mother, and uses the act of cleaning out her house as scaffolding for a series of flashbacks illustrating the relationship between mother and daughter. The Wreck starts very similarly—only this time with the hospitalization (rather than death) of our character’s mother—and also uses the occasion to string together flashbacks fleshing out family history. Both games even similarly use objects as synecdochic keys for specific flashbacks. South of the Circle moves back and forth between an intense survival situation in Antarctica and our protagonist’s flirtation with a colleague while a junior faculty member at Cambridge. And now we have Mouthwashing. While I can point to a small pool of examples of games with this structure prior to 2020—such as Rainswept, which came out in 2019 and simultaneously follows a young couple’s relationship and the police investigation following their violent deaths—I think the floodgates really opened following the release of The Last of Us Part II. Which is not a game I’m particularly fond of, but if its complex flashback structure ended up inspiring a new generation of narratively ambitious indie games, then I’m going to have to give credit where credit is due.
Because before The Last of Us Part II came out, the conventional wisdom was that non-chronological storytelling was a problem for game narrative. As Jesper Juul put it all the way back in 2004, flashing back and forward in games creates situations either where you give players too much freedom in the past to do something that renders the future impossible, or you end up highlighting how much player actions don’t really matter.[i]
For Mouthwashing, that narrative context is grim fatalism. At key junctures, you cannot make a choice—and that’s the whole point. At the very opening of the game, the navigational computer advises you to make a manual correction leftwards to avoid the asteroid, and yet the only interaction the game allows that will let you progress is to steer right. The game is telling a particular story that revolves around the question of whether we’re forever defined by our worst decisions, and in order to kick off that story we need to be locked into an inexplicably terrible decision, right from the get-go.
And it’s striking, playing through the rest of the game, just many of our actions consist of rote fulfillment of the game’s requests, how little room we have to make even the tiniest choices during gameplay. There’s one brief moment about halfway through, where Swansea, who’s a relapsed alcoholic, is becoming increasingly erratic. Playing as Jimmy and fulfilling a request for another character, I noticed some isopropyl alcohol in a supply cabinet that I could pick up and store in my inventory. It’s rare for Mouthwashing to let you pick up an item before you need it—typically they only become interactable at the moment the story requires—so I immediately swiped it. This might be a rare branching path moment, I thought, where Swansea’s behavior gets worse if he gets his hands on it. The game hasn’t offered any moments to make a proactive choice so far, so I’d better take advantage. Then, in a flash-forward, it’s revealed that Jimmy later deliberately gave the alcohol to Swansea. And, when the timeline caught up, sure enough, I, playing as Jimmy, had to personally serve the alcohol to Swansea, to progress forward with a puzzle. Given the rarity of being able to freely grab inventory items, I can’t help but conclude that the ability to pick up the alcohol here is an elaborate “fuck you,” driving home the thematic point of just how little agency you have.
Mouthwashing is nasty and brutish in its denial of player agency. That’s not a knock on the game—it uses its structure well, to reinforce a deliberate pessimist outlook. But it’s about as subtle as an axe to the face, so I’d like to supplement my discussion of it with another extended case study of a second multiple narrative flashback game.
South of the Circle, like Mouthwashing begins with a crash: a plane carrying our protagonist Peter has crash-landed in Antarctica. The pilot is wounded, so Peter must make his way to a nearby base and look for help. This will be our present tense of the game’s narrative, and we have some immediate and pressing present-tense stakes: Will Peter and the pilot survive the elements long enough to find help?
As we trudge toward a base beacon in the distance, the game performs the first of many absolutely swaggering scene transitions, seamlessly fading in new scenery to draw us back into Peter’s past. Mouthwashing handles its flashbacks and flash-forwards pretty simply: The screen freezes, the audio stutters, there’s a visual dissolve and sound effect indicating our jump. Other multiple narrative flashback games are more ambitious. The Wreck repeats a car crash during each flashback, with the different objects flying through the air serving as portals to memories. Hindsight doesn’t really have much gameplay beyond hunting for the next scene transition, but as a result many of those scene transitions are genuine triumphs of visual design. But still, even considering the competition here, I like South of the Circle’s transitions the best. On a technical level, they’re an impressive demonstration of getting everything to load just right. On a psychological level, they speak to Peter’s fraying mental state as he braves the extreme cold. And structurally, of course, this first transition raises a new questions for us to ponder: Why are we flashing back? What is the relationship of past to present?
The present-tense sections in South of the Circle cover a short time period—probably about 24 hours in 1964. (I’m not sure, it’s difficult to tell, given that Antarctica doesn’t really have days and nights.) The flashbacks cover a considerably longer period of time, with Peter working as a junior lecturer in atmospheric science at Cambridge, studying cloud formation and movement. So presumably his trip to Antarctica is for meteorological research purposes. But the flashbacks soon coalesce around Peter’s close professional and personal relationship with another Cambridge lecturer, Clara, who becomes his friend, collaborator, and eventually lover. So now a new question emerges—what happened between these two? Why did Clara not join Peter on this research expedition? And why is Peter re-playing these scenes as he trudges through the cold, increasingly sinking into delirium in his desperate attempt to find warmth and rescue?
To discover the answers to these questions, we’ll have to play through a whole lot of dialogue scenes. Which is an experience I quite liked, because South of the Circle has an excellent, if unusual, dialogue system.
Once upon a time, it was standard for dialogue systems to show your character’s entire response as you were choosing between options. With the advent of widespread voice acting, developers started streamlining things down, reducing onscreen text to only a general hint of what you’re character will say. You have your diplomatic and encouraging option, your badass “tough love” option, your jokey option, your flirty option. Reducing the amount of reading involved helps players make decisions quickly, but since we typically aren’t shown the suite of options until after our interlocutor stops speaking, video game dialogue still moves at a slow pace, broken by long gaps, without the overlap and back-and-forth characteristic of real-life speaking—or well-written and well-performed dialogue in movies and TV.
South of the Circle sports a radically simplified dialogue system. Your suite of responses features no written language at all—just visual symbols representing an emotional tenor. A green rectangle represents a strong, assertive, or forthright response. A series of green circles represent an honest, caring, and open attitude. A picture of a sun represents curiosity and enthusiasm. A red dot represents confusion, concern, or panic. A small purple dot represents shyness or a downcast demeanor. Each of these is introduced gradually, so that you can get a handle on the visual language and eventually navigate all dialogue using only shape and color. Your response options hover over Peter’s head before the other character finishes speaking, and you have a timed window in which to respond. Make your choice within the window, and the game will queue the relevant line, so that Peter responds with a very natural conversational cadence, avoiding both uncomfortable silence and unnaturally overlapping dialogue. Miss the window, and the dialogue will continue, but you’ll be at the mercy of whatever the game defaults to. But sometimes it’s worth delaying your input to the very end of the window, because the game unveils response options gradually, usually starting with the most negative emotion and working forward to the positive ones. The final presentation is astonishingly smooth, albeit with some tradeoffs. Playing the game feels like being a director on a set, steering an actor’s performance towards one dominant emotion or another. It feels less like you’re actually writing a character’s lines.
Which it turns out is fitting, because the story of South of the Circle is all about who has agency; who has power; who gets credit; and who’s just going along for the ride. Peter’s scholarship is stalled out when he meets Clara—he’s working on a paper laying out a method for predicting cloud movement, but motivation has been difficult because it’s nothing truly novel. Clara helps him see the project with new eyes, and together they realize that the same method can be used to track the origin point of atmospheric radiation—a handy tool for UK intelligence, it turns out, in efforts to pinpoint the location of Soviet nuclear testing. As the flashback timeline gets closer to its convergence point with the Antarctica scenes, Peter’s mentor pressures him to remove Clara’s credit as a co-author on the project. The motivation here is part garden-variety mid-century sexism, part red scare—and for the mentor, the two are seamlessly synthesized: he wants to keep women out of the university because he thinks they’re all communists. Clara is active in anti-nuclear protests, which has made her a target for investigation. There are multiple paths you can nudge Peter down here: Peter can attend a demonstration with Clara and her friend Molly, or he can avoid it for the sake of his reputation. You can forcefully advocate for Clara’s role in the scholarship, or you can throw her under the bus. But a sense of futility hovers over all of this. After all, whatever direction we nudge Peter in, the flashback structure means it’s always predetermined that Clara ultimately doesn’t accompany him to Antarctica. Whatever phase of his research this trip represents, she’s no longer part of it. These characters can’t escape that aspect of their fate.
And there’s also no escaping the larger historical and cultural moment. Clara’s friend and fellow anti-nuclear-proliferation protestor Molly is arrested and charged with being a Soviet spy. Burdened by this on top of the normal everyday challenges of being a woman in academia in the 1960s, Clara clings to Peter as a refuge from the masculine energies that dominate her professional life. But this is a sore point for Peter. Growing up, his father reprimanded him for spending his time reading, for losing fights at school, and for inadequate physical fitness. This has left him with a lingering desire for affirmation of his masculinity—and also a tendency to neglect the ways in which Cambridge is a boys’ club. Both of these cause tension with Clara. And then—as though it’s some roundabout way of proving himself to his father—Peter’s academic successes lead him to Antarctica, with its constellation of rival military bases and harsh climate where only the strong survive, his only companion a jingoistic pilot encouraging him to shoot any Russians on sight.
There’s a danger of this particular thematic thread becoming too pat. You could uncharitably summarize South of the Circle’s overall message as “nuclear war is the ultimate manifestation of toxic masculinity,” which sounds like a circa-2018 Jezebel headline. But I’m inclined to be charitable to South of the Circle. The transition points that serve as the hinges to its double narrative flashback structure aren’t just technically impressive: they also ground the game’s somewhat-overextended themes in the figure of a specific man, who has specific regrets.
This lens of regret is the best way to make sense of the game’s most frustrating moment, which I hated the first time I played but have since come to … well, not “like,” but at least respect. (And a severe spoiler warning for the climax of the game from here on in.)
At the moment the Cambridge timeline closes its gap with the Antarctica timeline, we witness Clara and Peter’s final argument. She brings up all the times Peter remained distant, avoided fraternizing with her to remain part of the boys’ club—didn’t sit in on her lecture when she invited you, didn’t go to the protest with her and Molly. But the thing is, her memories don’t reflect the choices you actually made as Peter. If you sat in on her lecture, she’ll say you skipped it. If you joined the protest, she’ll say you chickened out. She even gets the small, inconsequential stuff wrong. There’s a scene where the two of you fantasize about buying a house by the sea, and you have the option of choosing either a red or blue house. And in this final argument, she’ll insist you chose the opposite of what you actually did. The game shows you what all of your actual choices were right at the top, making it clear that this is a deliberate design decision, and not some mistake when tracking variables in your save file.
It’s frustrating. But I don’t think we’re meant to be like, “Oh Clara’s such a bitch. So up-in-arms about the patriarchy that she actively misremembers everything that happened between us, making up excuses to hate us.” (I mean, I guess you could have that takeaway, but it would be an odd one given the surrounding game.) I think the game is making a larger point about how proximity to power and prestige can be a potent motivator for self-deception. All of the events of the game have been filtered through Peter’s subjectivity, and Peter’s not necessarily a reliable narrator.
He’s not even particularly observant. In that very same scene where you choose the color of the house you want to live in, you can comment on Clara’s top. Peter insists that it’s the same sweater she was wearing when they met. Clara says no; she just got it. You can actually go back to the first scene and see that Clara’s model is, in fact, wearing the same top as she is here. But I don’t think we’re supposed to assume that this means Peter is correct, and that Clara is gaslighting him. It’s more likely that Peter’s not very good at noticing what Clara’s wearing. According to the model of her present in his memories, she wore the exact same top during almost every prominent interaction they had at Cambridge. And … I dunno, Peter, maybe you just don’t have the best recall for women’s outfits.
Peter’s Antarctic misadventure has him dwelling on the past, to the point of outright delirium. And in his retrospection, there’s one scene he keeps re-playing in his mind: the moment when he made his final determination of whether or not to give Clara co-author credit. It plays out four times over the course of the game, each time with clearer audio, and with clearer context. In the final replay, Peter can insist on giving Clara credit, if we actively fight against the default option. But why would Peter be playing this scene over in his head so many times, if not for a sense of remorse? Are we, as Peter, really advocating for Clara in this scene? Or are we, as Peter, merely retroactively rehearsing the courage he wished he’d shown?
So, no. I don’t think we’re supposed to take Peter’s side and think Clara’s misremembering everything in their final fight. I think South of the Circle is about wanting to be the hero in your own story, but being unable to escape the consequences of your actual actions—or inaction. And while it doesn’t cleave its player through the head with the theme of inexorable fate as immediately as Mouthwashing does, it similarly leverages its multiple narrative flashback structure to explore themes of guilt and responsibility.
The great filmmaker Robert Bresson once wrote, “THE SOUNDTRACK INVENTED SILENCE.”[ii] We call films made before 1927 “silent films,” but they weren’t actually viewed in silence. If you saw a movie in 1917, you’d hear live musical accompaniment: maybe a pianist, maybe an in-theater band. Whatever it was, it was provided by the theater—not by the film’s director. Filmmakers prior to 1927 were not in the business of making decisions about how their films should sound.
But then, cinema technologically changed, and they were. Suddenly, a whole suite of options was available … including the option to be silent. The development of sound cinema made the inclusion or the absence of sound into an aesthetic choice, in a way it hadn’t been before. The soundtrack invented silence.
We can say something similar about the game controller. Jesper Juul thought that flash-forwards were inadvisable in games, because they make the player feel like their actions don’t matter. But maybe that feeling is a feeling worth exploring. And you can’t get that feeling when you’re watching a movie. The absence of agency doesn’t sting when watching a movie, because it was never a possibility. You need a medium that accepts user input. Player agency invents its absence.
Because sometimes it’s worth playing a game where you have to deal with the fallout of a terrible decision. Or where you play as a coward. Where you inhabit a world where peaceful student protestors are being detained, arrested, and interrogated over spurious accusations that they support or are agents of a foreign adversary—and you lack the courage to stand up for a colleague and friend within that world.
These are stories I think games should tell.
[i] Jesper Juul, “Introduction to Game Time,” in First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004
[ii] Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer, trans. Jonathan Griffin. Los Angeles: Green Integer, 1997. Pg 48.
Intermittent Mechanism 