Intermittent Mechanism

Ian here—

Wanderstop had already been announced at the time I made my video on auto-critical cozy games, so it was already a given that I would play it (especially given the talent involved in making it), and more than likely that I would also make a video on it. So here it is: a sequel of sorts to Un-cozy Games. I also mention to slip in some analysis of my old favorite Walden, a game, which Wanderstop ended up reminding me of quite a lot.

More videos to come in the coming months—I’m finally pushing out a bunch I’ve been working on simultaneously for awhile! Script for this one below the jump.

Between 1966 and 1968, the conceptual artist John Baldessari made a series of paintings consisting of black words painted on an otherwise blank canvas. The words describe techniques of pictorial composition—some of them were taken from art textbooks—but there is no pictorial composition in these paintings. They’re just words, written in paint.

It’s fair to say that these paintings represent what many people hate about modern art. Speaking for myself, I wouldn’t want to hang them in my living room. But, when you’re walking through the Whitney, and seeing still lifes, and landscapes, and portraits, and abstract paintings with bold fields of color, and then you turn a corner and see this … in that context, it stands out in its very refusal to do any of the things that paintings are good at doing. It is perverse. You might get mad at it. But that anger can be a way of working through your own concept about painting as an art form. In its perversity, it clarifies.

There have been, from time to time, attempts to do this sort of modernist interrogation of game genres. Take military shooters, for instance. What are military shooters good at? They have engaging gunplay, they’re power fantasies … they excel at making their players feel like a hero. But what if you made a military shooter that refused to do that? Well, you’d end up with Spec Ops: The Line, a deliberately perverse military shooter. It yanks away your agency, puts you in the shoes of a character who makes decidedly non-heroic choices, and generally leaves you feeling like shit. Purposefully. Spec Ops: The Line refuses to do what military shooters are good at doing, and in that refusal it makes a point about the genre and its limitations.

But that was 13 years ago, and we can be more ambitious, right? Is it possible to apply this sort of perverse design not just to military shooters specifically, but to games as a whole? Can you make a game that considers all of the things that games are good at, and then systematically refuses to do any of them, as a way of systematically interrogating the logic of games?

Wanderstop, which came out this past March, is a game that seems tailor-made with this challenge in mind. So much so that I was impressed, and wanted to do a short video about it.

Wanderstop was developed by Ivy Road, which is a sort of indie game supergroup, including among its team Davey Wreden (creator of The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide), Karla Zimonja (who worked on Gone Home and Tacoma), and Daniel Rosenfeld, who composed the music for Minecraft. Thematically, it’s a game about burnout. This isn’t me stepping in as a critic and offering some high-minded interpretation: it’s right there on the surface of the text. Our character, Alta, ties her self-image to being the toughest warrior around. After some recent defeats, she’s spiraled into a crisis of self-confidence, and can no longer even lift her sword. At this point she meets Boro, the proprietor of a teahouse in a magical clearing, who gradually nudges her to stop defining herself so rigidly by her professional success. As Alta sticks around and works at the shop, you see similar themes among the guests she serves tea to: there’s the father who will stop at nothing to seem cooler to his son, the ultra-competitive proprietor of a rival shop, even an enlightened being of pure energy who transforms into a mundane businessman obsessed with hitting quarterly growth targets. The game’s developers have been pretty open about how the themes of the game are a deliberate reflection of their own anxieties working in indie gaming a decade after such scene-defining hits.

So Wanderstop is a game about learning how to relax and silence that inner voice that shames you for not being productive enough, for not living up to some imagined version of your full potential. And it’s a cozy game about running a tea shop, which on the face of things seems like a a good fit.

Except … the dirty secret about cozy games is that most of them are not actually about relaxing. They’re about getting the best harvest, or decorating the best house, or collecting all the best fish—basically, embracing the spirit of industriousness. They’re a leisure activity we engage in during the hours of the day we’re not working, while also being simulations of labor, where we launder our recreation through an appeal to productivity.

And this appeal to productivity, to making progress in something, is very deeply rooted in game design—at least single-player game design. Competitive multiplayer games offer the thrill of competition, fighting your way to eventual victory. In place of that competitive drive, single-player games rely more heavily on the satisfaction of achieving goals. You make incremental progress in the main campaign, you build up your base, you check off optional challenges if you feel like it, you collect all your little gewgaws.

So it’s a tall order making a game about burnout, in which the moral of the story is supposed to be that you needn’t base your self-worth on your perceived productivity. One might even say it is perverse: a profound mismatch between medium and message.

How does Wanderstop approach this task? There are four areas that are particularly interesting to me, and I’m just going to go through them.

Inventory

In Wanderstop, you have a basket to collect tea leaves. Often, you’ll be out picking tea, and your basket will fill up, even though there are still plenty of tea plants around. And that’s just it. There’s no point in picking any more tea. It’s time to deposit the contents of your basket inside, and wait for the leaves to dry.

You can also pick up other things—seeds, fruit, knickknacks, mugs—that go in other areas of your inventory. And this inventory fills up quickly, too. You’re going to get a lot of messages that your pocket is full. Just get used to it—it’s going to interrupt your flow a lot. You’re going to close major quests, and get rewards, and those rewards will sometimes end up on the ground because your pocket is full. It’s a frequent annoyance—but it’s a purposeful annoyance.

So many cozy games (and crafting games, and survival games) rely on a predictable gameplay loop: You explore to find resources. You exploit those resources to improve your farm, or your home base, or whatever, and also craft new items. With those improvements, you can now explore even further … where you find new resources, and the cycle continues. It’s a hedonic treadmill in which achieving a goal in one gameplay area suggests your next goal in another area, meaning any brief satisfaction you feel immediately gets subsumed into a new desire.

And usually these new desires are paid for with ever-increasing amounts of resources. So inventory expansion becomes one of the key elements of the treadmill. You start out with the backpack that can carry ten items, and it feels game-changing when you first craft that backpack that can carry twenty-five items. But as your resource-exploitation gets more efficient and demanding, soon that backpack feels constricting, so then you’re saving up leather to craft the backpack that lets you carry fifty items!

Wanderstop rejects this treadmill of progress, so it cuts things off at the knees: there’s no inventory expansion, ever. You can carry what you can carry. If you’ve filled your tea-collecting basket, then you’ve collected enough tea for the time being. Find something else to do while you wait for your tea stock to dry. Go play with the animals. Whereas other games force downtime on you as a way of enticing you to make an upgrade, Wanderstop forces downtime for the sake of downtime. You cannot become a more efficient tea-collector. So stop trying, and start valuing something other than efficiency.

Mechanical and Cosmetic Progress

Wanderstop is organized into five chapters across five seasons, and each time you transition to a new season your mechanical progress is effectively wiped. Most moment-to-moment activities in the game relate to fulfilling customers’s requests for teas with specific flavor profiles, which means maintaining a garden of fruit-bearing plants. And each time the season changes, you start over from scratch—your plants are gone. Cozy farming sims do similar things with the changing of the seasons, but to compensate they usually add some other economy: you’re continuously making money, or continuously upgrading your farming infrastructure—there are some goals you’re still working on, some plates that keep spinning, even when your crops die off. But Wanderstop doesn’t haven any of that. So don’t get attached to making linear progress. You have to accept the transience of things, and that effort spent doesn’t always result in tangible rewards.

And it’s not just the garden that’s reset—it’s also most cosmetic aspects. Each season you can collect a wide array of mugs. Come next season, they’re going to be gone. Same with the various knickknacks and bric-a-brac you can collect and use to decorate your shop. Same with the plants on the outdoor planters.

There is one cosmetic feature that doesn’t get reset each season: you can take photographs and display them in designated frames throughout the shop. Anything you display in a frame sticks around. But between the photos you take and the art that characters give you, you’ll eventually run out of frames. Boro acknowledges this, and says you’ll just have to curate the pictures you want to keep, with the others being irrevocably lost to time.

Now, if you don’t want to lose the lovely shop you’ve put together, you can simply decline to move the seasons along. They don’t change until you actively choose to move along, and you can postpone moving along indefinitely if you’d like. But if you postpone it, there’s nothing to do. No further customers will arrive this season to ask for tea. No plot threads will advance. So your options are self-imposed stasis, or accepting the reset that comes with the change of seasons. And no matter which you choose, both play into the game’s rejection of linear progress.

Story Progress

Speaking of plot threads advancing: I already mentioned some of the game’s characters. Each season has its own designated customers, who drop in and ask for a series of teas of increasing complexity. As you continue to serve them you hear more about their lives, which have noticeable resonances with Alta’s situation, until … they eventually all stop talking to you. That’s it—that’s how the game announces you’ve reached the end of their quest lines. There’s no three-act structure, no assurance that you’ve helped these people conquer their problems and transform into the best versions of themselves, no narrative closure. They just quietly stare in a disquieting way. And then Boro says its time to move on to a different season. It’s supremely dissatisfying, but again: the point is perversity. The game is stripping away as much extrinsic motivation it can from your engagement with it. Playing a game to see the end of a storyline is playing for the sake of making progress, no less than playing so that you can upgrade your farming equipment, or playing so that you can decorate your shop. Every design decision here is aligned against the idea of making linear progress. Wanderstop doesn’t want you to play for the sake of progress. It wants you to play for the sake of play.

Achievements

So, Wanderstop has achievements, which at first glance is weird. Achievements are often held up as the pinnacle of extrinsic motivation, to the point where they’re criticized as having a deleterious affect on game design, transforming the wonder of play into the tedium of box-checking. But Wanderstop’s achievements aren’t actually for doing anything. Several of them popped up when I was walking from one place to another, which made me wonder if there was like a step counter involved, where they pop up at a certain number of steps. But then I got one when I was in the middle of dialogue, so it seems that the secret is just that they each unlock after a set number of minutes. Everyone gets them in the same order, as long as the game is running. And best of all, if you look at their descriptions, several of them mock the idea that a videogame would ever give you a little chime and tell you you’re special for doing a thing. If you’ve got to have achievements in a game like this (and I don’t know—their publisher may have obligated them or something), this is a much better implementation of them than, say, tying them to finishing chapters or other story beats. Best to divorce them from player effort altogether, lest your players get the wrong idea.

Caveats

So what’s the final verdict? Is Wanderstop as perverse as it possibly could be? Does it ruthlessly clear away all extrinsic motivators? Totally deny its players the feeling of productive accomplishment?

Not quite. The game’s field guide is a sticking point. You have this book that teaches you how to hybridize plants to create new fruits. It gradually expands over the course of the seasons, meaning you’ll see new possibilities in gray that you haven’t discovered yet. But although it expands each season, the hybrids you’ve discovered are never re-set. So there is pleasure to be found in seeing the book through to completion. It may seem like a tiny thing—I mean, what game doesn’t have a list of crafting recipes—but I’m honestly sort of shocked they included the field guide in this form. It genuinely does undercut the game’s otherwise unified design philosophy, which is constantly telling the player that they should be undertaking activities only because they enjoy them and find them relaxing, never for the sake of completing a checklist. There needed to be some sort of guide to the flavor profile of fruit so that you could fulfill customer’s orders, but I think the game would have been even more thematically unified if had omitted the grayed-out versus filled-in aspect of this book.

And then there’s the fact that Wanderstop, well, stops. It ends. It concludes its narrative, and you see the end credits. Alta’s arc maybe doesn’t resolve 100% neatly, but the game doesn’t outright deny us that final narrative closure, the way it denies closure to the individual guest’s narratives. And … maybe it should have? Plenty of games have an endless mode in addition to their campaign. There are sandbox and toy-like games that don’t have a campaign at all. What if Wanderstop had somewhere over the course of its campaign gradually shifted into a procedurally-generated sandbox with endless customers and no narrative progression? Or in a final rejection of the pleasures of progress, what if Alta’s actions became more and more automated, so that you had less and less to do as a player? In its final phase, Wanderstop could have become something like David OReilly’s Mountain: video wallpaper in which you make no choices, pursue no activities, but are invited into contemplative engagement, with the full risk of boredom that that entails. I’m not necessarily saying Wanderstop should have removed all gameplay rather than reaching a traditional ending. I’m just pointing out that the game goes so far out of its way to be perverse that the remaining bits of traditional progression and closure seem like impurities in the resulting experience.

Thankfully, whatever small impurities Wanderstop may have, it’s not alone in its efforts. It’s among a handful of games that have come out in recent years that interrogate their medium’s structural reliance on players’ sense of progress and accomplishment. MOTHERED: A ROLE-PLAYING HORROR GAME, which I did a deep dive into as part of my ENIGMA TRILOGY video, leverages its players’ pestering of their quest-giver to weave a tale of familial horror. Last year’s INDIKA rendered a story of a young nun’s crisis of faith into videogame form, which is absolutely brilliant when you think about it. After all, what is spiritual crisis but an anxiety that the high score we’ve been chasing our entire life won’t actually count for anything when we die? I might go so far as to say that videogames are the best medium for telling stories about religious crises, and it’s a shame we don’t have more of them.

However, the game Wanderstop most reminds me of is a few years older: the USC Game Innovation Lab’s Walden, a game. This is a somewhat obscure pull, but hear me out.

Walden is an adaptation of Henry David Thoreau’s book of the same name documenting his experiment in ascetic living on Walden Pond. Early in the book, Thoreau lists four basic “necessaries of life”—food, shelter, clothing, and fuel—and these form your four survival meters in the Walden game. But Thoreau also warns of “becoming a tool of one’s tools,” of letting our possessions possess us—not just consumerism, but also the danger of over-valuing labor and under-valuing leisure, particularly leisure time spent in contemplation of nature. So, just like with Wanderstop’s inventory, the food, shelter, clothing, and fuel meters come with hard caps. Collect as much food as your stores can hold? Time to stop. Same with your fireplace fuel. This isn’t Animal Crossing; you’re not going to pay bells to Tom Nook to build the next expansion to your house. The point of Thoreau’s experiment at Walden was to work only for basic subsistence, not for the purposes of accumulating money and stuff, and replace that drive toward accumulation with a more contemplative life.

Walden, a game starts in summer, when upkeep is easy and berries and beans are plentiful, so you have plenty of time to do other activities that keep a fifth meter high: your inspiration meter. Inspiration is fed by walking in and listening to the environment, identifying new plants and animals, reading books and discussing them with Ralph Waldo Emerson. The higher your inspiration, the easier it is to find the arrowheads that, when collected, read out a passage from Thoreau’s text.

When winter rolls around, maintaining your necessities requires more labor. But still: if you work too long you’ll collapse from overexertion, dropping your inspiration to its lowest level. So it’s always best take breaks. Life-sustaining labor will be a necessary part of your daily rhythm, but you should avoid staring for minutes on end at a crafting interface. The collecting of arrowheads as a mechanical metaphor for writing the text of Walden is maybe a little corny, but I think it works from a design perspective. The game never tells you how many arrowheads you’ve found, which discourages thinking of it as collection for collection’s sake. Instead, the focus is on the passages themselves, which are often tied to a specific location, or time of day, season, or weather condition, or confluence of multiple factors. This rewards daily exploration and close observation of the changes the seasons bring. The game consistently pushes its players towards the activities that Thoreau himself valued, and away from those he thought were a waste of time. It’s a really astounding adaptation of philosophical themes by way of mechanics.

Anyway, if you have already played Wanderstop and enjoyed it, and are curious about other games like it, I definitely recommend Walden. We’re in something of a golden age of single-player games pushing back against the norms of their medium, challenging their players to free themselves from the traditional structure of goal-directed behavior. At the top of this video I characterized Wanderstop as seemingly having a “profound mis-match between medium and message,” but there’s another part of me wonders if maybe it’s not a mis-match at all. Maybe a medium in which we expect to be funneled into a structured checklist of objectives is actually the perfect medium to turn around and critique that notion.

But not every game has to be for everyone. I said earlier I wouldn’t want to hang one of John Baldessari’s paintings in my living room. I think the willful perversity on display in the design of Wanderstop and Walden brings some clarity to the medium, and exposes the crutches single-player games so often rely on as cheap sources of player motivation. But I also can’t blame you if they’re not your cup of tea. (Almost made it to the end of this video without making that pun, but couldn’t resist.)