by Nico University of Chicago MADD 25630: Games, Rules, Stories, Genres Winter 2021
One of my favorite experiences playing a tabletop role playing game is one called Monster of the Week. It puts a more modern spin on the typical fantasy genre, with characters using computers, guns, cell phones, and more to take down monsters in the present day. Character archetypes include tech savvy scientists, mysterious cultists, and my personal favorite: the hard-boiled detective. You get lots of cool detective abilities, like the ability to avoid lethal damage while you have a case on your hands, and the ability to detect when a criminal is lying. The character archetype is all about uncovering information, and sleuthing out the truth. This driving motivation is a common character trait detectives have across different forms of media, and games are no exception.
Enter A Hand With Many Fingers.
The player’s office
A Hand With Many Fingers is a “first person investigative thriller” according to Colestia, the developers, on their itch.io page. At first glance, this holds up; the game is in a first person perspective, and the main point of the game is to investigate a real world Cold War conspiracy using documents uncovered in a CIA archive. However, I believe that a more informative description of the game is “corkboard simulator.” This is because the main gameplay loop in this game involves updating two massive corkboards with information you uncover in the archive. Managing these corkboards is one of the best gameplay mechanics I’ve ever seen. It allows for so much freedom and creativity in the investigative process, and really makes you feel like you’re one of those hard boiled detectives uncovering a case bit by bit. And yet, with all the detective-y vibes that the main character gives off, we know almost nothing about the character you play as. There are neither mirrors nor reflections in the game that show us who we are controlling. No voice acting or inner monologue either; the main character is very much a silent protagonist. It’s assumed that the main character has some connection with the conspiracy they are trying to uncover, but there is nothing concrete we can pin down.
No reflections!
And honestly, that’s ok.
Who you play as in A Hand With Many Fingers isn’t important, what’s important is the actions that the character (and therefore the player) is able to take. It gives the player the ability to project whatever traits they want onto the main character, and leaves the story in the hands of the articles and photographs you find in the archive. The documents the player finds are created by the developers, who stitched together real world information to create them. There really was a bank called the Nugan Hand Bank in Australia. John Nugan, one of the two co-founders of the bank, was found dead in his car in 1980. There is a lot of shady, under the table dealings regarding this bank, and it’s up to the player to uncover what’s really going on here.
The first article the player gets from the game.
So… how does this game work?
There’s a simple gameplay loop that the player is able to follow. First, you have to find a person, place, and time you want to research. For example, when you start the game, you are given a newspaper clipping with the following details highlighted: John Nugan, Sydney, Australia, and 1980. Each important piece of information is highlighted a different color, red for names, yellow for locations, and blue for dates. Once you have all the information, check the card catalog for any possible connections. Any documents that connect all three pieces of information will have a reference number attached to them. Go into the archives to find the box that is labeled with said reference number. Bring the box up to your office, and unpack any articles, pictures, or other important pieces of paper. Then, you can place these documents on the corkboards in your office, to better organize your thoughts, and piece information together. You will derive new people, places, and time periods over the course of your archiving adventure, and will be able to repeat this process over and over to discover as much information about the conspiracy as you can. The game does not stray from this gameplay loop at all. There are no combat encounters, or chase sequences, just methodical archiving and studying. This is not a bad thing at all; the gameplay is extremely compelling by itself, especially the corkboard mechanic.
My final corkboard looked like this!
There are two big corkboards in your office, one blank one, and one with a map. The map automatically updates with any locations mentioned in any documents you find, and serves as an easy way for a player whose geography skills are somewhat lackluster (like me) to find locations easier. You can stick papers anywhere on either board, and connect related documents with red string. Any pictures of important people are affixed to the board with red push pins instead of normal blue ones. The boards do not allow for players to overlap or discard any documents you find. This makes it almost impossible for the player to lose, forget, or misplace information. Real archival work does not have a self-updating map, color-coded, pre-highlighted information you need, or pieces of evidence that refuse to be discarded. All of these serve to make this process more enjoyable, and less frustrating. They can make anybody feel like they have hard-boiled detective skills. You really are uncovering a conspiracy here, all by yourself…
…and there might be some people who don’t like that very much.
Are you being watched?
This is where the “thriller” aspect of “first-person investigative thriller” comes in. The archives are quite large, with tons of locked rooms the player can’t enter and a multitude of boxes that the player will never even touch. There are hundreds of names, each with their own reference numbers and documents attached to them. Over the course of the game, you will only follow 5 of these names. This helps convey a sense of scale, and makes the emptiness of the archives feel oppressive. There are other ways they conveyed this emptiness; one particularly memorable one was a small radio playing serene classical music on loop. I turned it off after a little bit because it started to annoy me, but then I realized the silence of the archives was much too unnerving for me to continue. This emptiness is carefully crafted, and when something breaks it, it can feel even scarier. A phone rings while the player is in the basement, but when they pick it up, the line is dead. A car idles outside the archives for a little while, and then leaves once the player stares at them for too long. You are being watched, and it’s incredibly unsettling.
The nice thing about A Hand With Many Fingers as a detective game is that despite all of the spooky atmosphere, the game is designed to make the experience of discovering information extremely palatable. The driving force behind detective stories in other media is a search for the truth. As stated earlier, this drive for truth is an important motivating factor most detectives have as an important character trait. However, in A Hand With Many Fingers, it doesn’t matter what the truth actually is, what matters is the journey to uncover it. If the truth did matter, the developers would not have designed each piece of evidence themselves, they would have simply used real world documents and designed the game around them. Chaining together pieces of evidence is extremely satisfying, and they wanted to ensure that this journey to uncover the truth was well paced and designed. It was always about journey, not the destination, and this is exemplified in the game’s ending.
“MARKED FOR DISPOSAL”
As the player progresses through the game, they start to find reference numbers stored in boxes that state that some boxes are marked for destruction. If they look in one of these boxes, they find a key to an unused annex of the building, where one final box awaits them. When they return to their office, they are greeted with a nasty surprise. The car from earlier has crashed into the office, and no one is sitting behind the wheel. Just like the phone call, there’s no one who responds to the player…
CRASH!
…and then the game ends! There’s no confirmation that what you’ve been working on all this time is correct. We aren’t given any information regarding the player character’s relationship to the Nugan Bank scandal. Just a fade to black when the player puts the final documents on the corkboard. This hammers home that the most important part of this story is not the conspiracy itself, but the journey that the player undergoes to find all of the information about it. While this does differ from most other detective stories in media, where the story is tied up with a pretty bow and the wrongdoer is caught, I believe that the experience A Hand With Many Fingers creates shows the joy of simply finding the truth.
by Oren University of Chicago MADD 25630: Games, Rules, Stories, Genres Winter 2021
Katawa Shoujo is defined by its official website as a “bishoujo-style visual novel set in the fictional Yamaku High School for disabled children, located somewhere in modern Japan.”[1]There are a couple of translations of the title circulating around the web, but the one that’s on the official website is “Disability Girls.”[2] While the game credits its development to a company named “Four Leaf Studios,” that’s actually a name for a coalition of 4chan forum users, who created this game over the course of five years based on an illustration posted there in 2007.[3] Even the game’s opening credits use the usernames of the 4chan users as opposed to full names.[4]
Before I continue, I want to acknowledge a few points. Firstly, this discussion will contain some major spoilers for Katawa Shoujo. Given how the game’s narrative is so tightly wound up with its mechanics, as I’ll discuss soon, it’s not really possible to meaningfully talk about Katawa Shoujo as a romance, comedy, tragedy, or even a game without spoiling things. Secondly, I am not an expert on portrayals of disability in media and fiction and can’t speak with any sort of proficiency to whether or not Katawa Shoujo’s portrayals of disabilities are realistic or not, or sensitive or not. (Or a mix of all of those, depending on which character and scene in the game.) Lastly, this game does contain adult content and sex scenes, although all subsequent content and screenshots below are safe for work.
Katawa Shoujo opens with Hisao Nakai, a high school student, meeting up with his crush Iwanako in the winter. He’s about to confess his feelings for her, when his heart starts to pound—and he suffers a heart attack and is hospitalized. During his lengthy stay, he is diagnosed with arrythmia, an irregular heartbeat, and finds out that even when he gets discharged, he’ll have to be under constant care and medication. His doctor and parents then decide to send him to Yamaku High School, a coed boarding school for students with disabilities that has around the clock medical staff and care. As Hisao adjusts to life at Yamaku—and to his newly discovered disability—he meets fellow students and staff members at the school, and he might just find love. Because this is, after all, a dating sim.
Or he might not. Based on how the player goes through the game’s ‘act 1’—and I’ll discuss the game’s mechanics momentarily—Hisao either begins dating one of five girls at the school or antagonizes everyone and ends up with no one. If he does start dating, then the game’s subsequent acts either end with a “happy”/“good” ending for Hisao and his girlfriend, where they stay together and work through their challenges together, or a “sad”/”bad” ending where they can’t overcome their disagreements and differences, and break up with each other. There is also an alternate path where, if Hisao alienates everyone, he ends up ditching a major school festival to drink on the roof with his dorm neighbor, Kenji (who believes that this school is a ‘feminist conspiracy’), and soon falls off the roof and dies. That’s the only ending where someone dies; the other “bad” endings are tragic due to the failure of Hisao and his partner to solve the issues in their relationships.
Gameplay mechanics
The gameplay mechanics of Katawa Shoujo are, seemingly, relatively slim—but they bring up some interesting questions of visual agency. The core of the gameplay is clicking (or pressing the space bar) to advance the visual novel’s text, which is either Hisao’s inner thoughts or dialogue between him and other characters. Most scenes are ‘viewed’ in the first person (except for some scenes), from Hisao’s point of view; the visuals include the characters in the scene layered over stylized photographs. (Yamaku High School is, reportedly, depicted by photographs of Brown University![5]) There is occasional motion, including when a deaf character signs, but the visuals are mostly static.
Where does player agency come in? Occasionally, Hisao—and thus, the player—are presented with choices. In an early choice, Hisao’s teacher Muto asks him if he wants to introduce himself to the class. You can ask “Why,” or say “Yeah, of course.”[6] It’s seemingly not a very high-stakes choice. In another choice during the first act, Hisao encounters Hanako—another student and one of the possible romantic interests—and the player can either choose “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you” or “Hi! I’m new here… We’re in the same class.”[7]
A later choice seems to hold more weight. Hisao is running with Emi, another possible love interest. Emi’s legs were amputated after an accident, but she has prosthetic legs and is a talented runner. She wants Hisao to push himself more, and the player can choose to “Take it easy” or “Go for it.” But remember—Hisao has arrythmia. While playing, I chose “Go for it,” and soon Hisao blacks out and needs medical care, and Emi blames herself.[8] The incident makes them closer to each other, however, and put me on the gameplay path to having Hisao pair with Emi.
With that said, there aren’t that many choices within the game. We get a lot of Hisao’s internal monologue and dialogue between him and other characters, but the choices rarely come up. Does this remove the player’s agency? Or does it actually add in more agency, perhaps, since it means every choice matters more? Once I looked at a choice map for the game (which I will not share here to avoid spoiling everything!), I saw how some of the seemingly innocuous choices have a major impact on which path(s) and which love interest(s) you might be set on or blocked from going forward. Based on the choices you make, Hisao ends up with one of five women after the first act of the game: Emi, Hanako, Shizune, Lilly, or Rin; or none if you alienated everyone and end up on the “Kenji” doomed route. In the subsequent act, the player’s choices determine whether or not the player gets a “good” or “bad” ending with the pairing.
“Behind the scenes” mechanics
Besides for the core gameplay of clicking through text and choices, there are a handful of “behind the scenes” mechanics that allow the player to move back and forth through the story more easily. For instance, you can go into an “Extras” page from the title screen that shows you what story scenes you’ve unlocked, which ones you’ve missed because of choices, and what percentage of the game you’ve completed. There’s also a very forgiving pause menu—you can pause at any time—which allows you to save in however many slots you want, review the text you’ve seen already, and to skip through text to make the game move faster. You can also scroll back and forth through text with the mouse scroll wheel during regular gameplay, although you can’t redo a choice on the same file if you’ve already made one—adding more significance, once again, to the player’s few choices.
With that all said, it does initially seem like there is so little player agency in this game. Hisao is an independent character; while I played, I was making some of his choices, but I wasn’t really playing as him—it’s more like I was just seeing the game from his perspective. Does this take away from thinking of Katawa Shoujo as a game? Is it even a game?
Understanding the Bishoujo visual novel
Fortunately, the same week I was playing the game, I was assigned a reading for a class on anime that deals directly with this type of game—the “Bishoujo visual novel.” Emily Taylor of the University of North Carolina writes,
The interactive portions of the game arise through options presented to the gamer, which are typically binary, although options with three choices occasionally arise. These options occur sporadically and often involve seemingly trivial choices, such as whether to go to a movie or art museum. Interestingly, any life-changing decisions in the game, such as whether the main character will donate a kidney, are often not decided by the game player. The game player takes advantage of options to manipulate the main character’s actions to bring about his desired result.
These results come in the form of endings, of which dating-sim games have typically ten to twenty… The only way to “beat” the game is to play it numerous times, experiencing all the endings. After playing through the game, players can go to the main menu and check their “status,” which shows how much of the game is finished. To reach a status of 100 percent, signaling completion of the game, all endings must be reached. Essentially, the only way to “lose” when playing a dating-sim game is not to get a bad ending but to get the same ending twice, since doing so prevents players from making any progress toward game completion.[9]
– Emily Taylor, “Dating-Simulation Games: Leisure and Gaming of Japanese Youth Culture”
This all lines up with both the relatively sporadic choices in Katawa Shoujo, its twenty-one possible endings, and the completion-meter ‘behind the scenes’ mechanic. What I think is important about Taylor’s perspective here is that I could have possibly critiqued Katawa Shoujo for not for not having a lot of player agency for seemingly putting the player on paths that don’t allow that many choices. But with this broader perspective, it’s clear that’s just emblematic of this entire type of games and their gameplay conventions.
Emi’s and Kenji’s paths
As I mentioned above, I played through Emi’s path (with different save files to get both endings) and later I used a choice map on the side to play through “Kenji’s path.” I’ll leave out most plot details so that I don’t spoil anything more than I have already, but suffice to say that Emi’s path contains much romantic comedy (including outright, exaggerated slapstick) as well as melodrama—the conflict that arises between Hisao and Emi centers around what happened when Emi was first injured and how it impacted how she relates to others.
If the player achieves the “good ending” for Emi’s path, then the game does seem to align with Tamar Jeffers McDonald’s genre-spanning definition of the romantic comedy: “a romantic comedy is a film [or in this case, game] which has as its central narrative motor a quest for love, which portrays this quest in a light-hearted way and almost always to a successful conclusion.”[10] Yet if the player’s sporadic choices lead to the bad ending, then the game becomes a ‘romantic tragedy’, so to speak, where the couple is unable to bridge the gulfs between themselves and ends up splitting up.
Kenji’s path—where Hisao gets together with no one and dies—is arguably not even a romantic tragedy, since there’s no real romance in this route. That route makes Katawa Shoujo into just a tragedy, where Hisao’s aloofness and pride leads to his fall. (Interestingly, Kenji also talks about losing the chance to make choices–just like the player no longer has the chance to make any more choices as well…)
Actual screenshot after Hisao’s fall.
The Knowledge Hierarchy
Yet I’d argue that even though the narrative of Katawa Shoujo can take on romantic comedy, romantic tragedy, or tragedy forms based on the possible routes, the game uses another key element of romantic comedy in order to provide more player agency.
When discussing the ode to Starbucks romantic comedy You’ve Got Mail (1998) and its mismatched romantic pairing of Joe Fox (Tom Hanks) and Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan), Geoff King writes,
The viewer stands at the top of the knowledge hierarchy. Even when [Joe] Fox [in You’ve Got Mail] appears to know everything, and takes advantage of [Kathleen] Kelly on that basis, the viewer is still in a superior position. Familiarity with the genre, with Ryan and Hanks as romantic comedy protagonists… and with popular Hollywood-style conventions more generally, enables the viewer to map an expected trajectory of outcomes at a level beyond the compass of those situated within the fictional world.
We know, with some certainty, that Fox and Kelly are likely to end up in each other’s arms, and so can safely enjoy the accumulation of intervening obstacles and complications typical of romantic comedy. It is this near-certainty of outcome that helps to sustain the comic nature of the film even in the moments of sadness and despair, located particularly in the closure of Kelly’s shop.[11]
– Geoff Kelly, Romantic Comedy
I believe that Katawa Shoujo place the player at the top of the knowledge hierarchy, just as the romantic comedy film does. The player knows more than Hisao the character does, or any of the other characters, because the player knows what choices will lead to after making them, and then can go back—using different game files—and redo those choices. The player also can pair up Hisao with different characters and unlock and revisit different paths and ending, even though Hisao the character (and the other love interests) don’t know that within the world of their narrative.
And so, even though technically Hisao is the protagonist, the player is at the top of the knowledge hierarchy and is able to craft a romantic comedy, romantic tragedy, or, or even just the tragedy and the ending where he fell falls off the roof and doesn’t end up with anyone. Katawa Shoujo thus uses this romantic comedy convention to add player agency even when the player isn’t making that many choices.
Whoops! I made sure to give myself enough time to finish this video by Halloween … but then I neglected to post the announcement here! Happy belated Halloween, everyone.
I really relished the opportunity to talk about Rule of Rose, one of my favorite odd little games that I’ve never written about in any fashion before. Unfortunately copies of the game have become real collector’s items over the years, and it’s sad to praise a piece of media that so few will have access to. But hey, I also write about experimental film, so I know the feeling.
The slow march of my video series on detective games continues with this, its fifth entry. For awhile I was afraid there was no reason to do this one, as I wouldn’t be able to top my students’postsandvideos on this game after I taught it last spring. In the end, I went with sheer length as my own particular angle.
group project submission, created by group leader Annie University of Chicago MADD 25630: Games, Rules, Stories, Genres Spring 2020
Introduction
Chuchel is an absurd, zany, surreal point and click game where you guide a character named Chuchel. You go through a series of puzzles and minigames with the goal of getting the object of Chuchel’s desire, which is a ripe juicy cherry. Chuchel finds himself in all sorts of ridiculous and silly situations, and his primary partner in crime/nemesis/pet is this cute little companion whose name is Kekel. It’s a very playful game with a lot of interesting interactions, sound, and animation, and is extremely slapstick in nature.
In this video, I’m going to talk about how the game Chuchel emulates traditional slapstick found in movies, shows, theaters, and cartoons. Made by Amanita Design and released in 2018, Chuchel is a great take on classic slapstick humor in a more modern, untraditional medium – that is to say, a game! I’m also going to talk about how Chuchel differs from traditional slapstick, but that comes quite a bit later.
The idea that Chuchel has a lot of slapstick comedy is usually quite obvious when you play the game – this ridiculously fuzzy, orange, temperamental ball named Chuchel constantly undergoes a series of physical mishaps — there are plenty of pratfalls, objects thrown, clumsy tripping and falling, and so on and so forth — and these mishaps are often accompanied by the sounds of squeaks, boings, squelches and plops.
What I really want to do here is articulate why Chuchel feels so slapstick-y, and explicitly explain how it embodies traditional slapstick. Recognizing that Chuchel is slapstick is one thing, but understanding the why and how of it is quite another .
What is Slapstick Comedy?
So, what is slapstick, in a more traditional sense? What might you see in more veteran mediums, like film or theater or cartoons? I’m going to mainly rely on Louise Peacock’s article “Slapstick and Comic Performance”. One of the definitions Peacock provides is the following:Slapstick is “a mode of performance that relies on broad physical comedy…derived from performed violence and comic pain and is likely to involve trips, falls, beatings, and throwing of items”
Live Performance
Let’s now take a quick look at the history of slapstick, starting with live performance: Commedia dell’arte, otherwise known as “Italian comedy,” dates back to the 16th century, and was performed by theater troupes from Italy throughout Europe. The performers often wore masks, forcing them to project their characters’ emotions through bodily movement and action, such as — leaps, obscene gestures, tumbles, and all sorts of physical performance.
Additionally, the characters were often meant to satirize Italian stereotypes, like the foolish old man, or devious servant. Peacock notes that the highly stylised performance combined with the masks worn by the actors discourage the audience from developing an empathic relationship with any of the characters.
There are clearly elements of slapstick present in Commedia dell’arte — the costumes and exaggerated movements dehumanize the performers and allow the audience to laugh, even when conflict or violence arise. The exaggerated caricatures of Italian stereotypes combined with an absurd comic frame give us something we can all point to and laugh at — the characters and their stupidity are recognizable, yet exaggerated enough so as to be foreign, as are the absurd situations and circumstances the characters find themselves in.
Circus clowning is another early form of slapstick, dating back to the mid-nineteenth century across the UK, Europe and America. Circus clowning relies mostly on physical gags, and similar to performers of Commedia dell’arte, the clowns perform with exaggerated movements, outlandish costumes, and face make-up. Peacock points out that such hyperbolized movement and appearance “go some way towards establishing an otherness about the performance that mitigates the appearance of pain.” However, unlike Commedia dell’arte, these characters are not satirizing stereotypes that can be found in reality; rather, the humor in circus clowning comes from the exaggerated movements and behaviors of the performers. The humor, then, is heavily grounded in the physicality of the performers.
Through their costumes and make-up, circus clowns become entirely “other”. The “gags” performed by circus clowns, further their ‘otherness’. The gags involve comic violence between clowns and dubious props, and are often of an excessive and unexpected nature.
The props used often take a spin on our expectations of those objects: for example, props might include a flower that squirts out water, or a Pringle can that actually contains a snake inside. They enable the performers to physically act in a greater variety of ways by offering more potential and surprising interactions – they can touch, engage, and react to the props with highly stylized and hyperbolized behavior. All of this ultimately contributes to the clowns’ “otherness”.
From these stage examples, we can see how important dehumanization is for slapstick to be successful. Through the usage of masks in Commedia dell’arte and the makeup of circus clowns, performers distance themselves from their characters and establish a lack of reality, which lets the audience know that the violence and pain being portrayed isn’t real. We laugh at rather than sympathize with them.
Of course, the dehumanization never goes so far as to render the characters and their actions entirely unfamiliar – rather, slapstick works by juggling between the real and unreal. Real enough that we can recognize the circumstance – unreal enough such that we can laugh. “Otherness”, established by masks or makeup, emphasize the ‘unreal’, but maintains the realness required to identify what’s occurring.
Props, too, also go a long way in enabling the performers to establish the lack of reality or a hyperbolized one through actions, as briefly explored earlier in circus clowning, what with the flowers shooting water and all…but we can really see how props enable slapstick performers in silent films, such that the lack of reality can be found in the hyperbolized stunts and interactions performers might have with the props.
Film and Television
Buster Keaton, for example, is an icon when it comes to slapstick, known for his silent films from the early 20th century. His films usually focus on his outrageous stunts, such as…jumping across the top of buildings, falling through awnings, or approaching Jean Claude Van Damme levels of flexibility. His stunts often rely on props in the scene, like a car that falls apart on its own, or pieces of lumber in the way of a moving train. The usage of props is vital to highlighting unreality in such films. Without quirky sounds to emphasize the action, the props combined with Keaton’s elaborate stunts provide the circumstances of some central absurdity.
Keaton’s performances with these props are often outrageous and risky. Peacock connects this risk to notions of excess, and points to the example of Keaton narrowly fitting through the hole of a window on the falling facade of a house. While we are aware that the facade itself is made of real building materials that threaten real harm to Keaton, this interestingly does not prevent us from laughing. The threat itself is so unrealistic that it lends itself to the characteristic nature of slapstick, which is to say: excess. We never really believe that something as outrageous as a falling facade would happen, much less hit the fictional character Keaton portrays.
Moving a few decades forward, Tom and Jerry is another classic example of slapstick comedy. What’s notable about this show is that it implements sound and is animated, which contrasts against the silence in Buster Keaton films and the genuine physical skill of Keaton. Nonetheless, the foundation of slapstick humor remains the same, despite the stark difference in auditory and visual stimuli. The show Tom and Jerry still seeks to establish notions of excess and a lack of reality, the same as Keaton films. The sounds that accompany actions in Tom and Jerry are often exaggerated and unrealistic; for example, the show makes use of slide-whistles when someone falls or gets confused, or cymbals when crashes occur. This auditory input adds to the unreality by further emphasizing the excessive nature of the interactions that unfold.
Additionally, the performers – aka, Tom and Jerry, are extremely malleable and resilient due to their animation. There are more opportunities for exaggeration and unexpected events; characters can shatter like glass or be flattened into a pancake. Obviously, stage actors cannot survive being pancaked the same way animated characters can, so the unrealistic aspects in slapstick can be exaggerated tenfold. Animation really opens windows for slapstick humor as the characters are no longer dependent on the skills, contortions, and acrobatics of the performers, but rather, the creativity and imagination of the animators, which significantly carry and enable more potentiality for slapstick humor.
Also, what sets Tom and Jerry apart from the other examples I have mentioned is its reliance on a central double act. While double-acts are certainly present in Commedia dell’arte and circus clowning, it isn’t always at the forefront, as it is with Tom and Jerry. Having two characters in conflict with one another not only sets the stage for hilarious situations, but also gives the audience some choice over whom to identify with. The main characters use just about everything at their disposal to mess with each other, leading to oodles of comic pain and violence. The absurd dynamic between Tom and Jerry is an ever-present source of conflict and hilarity, which nicely sets up absurd situations that add to the excessive nature of the show.
Elements of Slapstick
So what do these traditional examples of slapstick have?
Peacock identifies the following as essential elements of slapstick comedy:
A central double act
Comic pain and comic violence
Falling and tripping
Malicious props
Throwing of objects
And stunts and acrobatics
Going on to also mention the use of:
Sound
Excess and transgression
We’ve certainly seen some of these elements in the traditional examples we just examined.
Chuchel Slapstick
Double Act
So how is Chuchel traditionally slapstick? Well, it certainly has all the elements of slapstick! You have the central double act of Chuchel and Kekel, which is reminiscent of the double act between Tom and Jerry, though Chuchel and Kekel don’t antagonize each other as much. The dynamic between Chuchel and Kekel is primarily that between an owner and a pet, but of course, with that comes scenarios in which they are in conflict, and scenarios in which they are collaborative.
Comic Pain
There is plenty of comic pain in Chuchel, as is found in traditional slapstick. Comic pain occurs because of some accident or some type of incompetence, and you could see this in this example of circus clowning, where a clown accidentally drops a sandbag on his foot. So in Chuchel, you find many examples that manifest comic pain, particularly through falling and tripping. Chuchel here attempts to get the cherry, but falls over himself. Comic pain can manifest not just through the actions of the performers, but also through the use of malicious props. For example, we can guide Chuchel to press the red button, but shortly after pressing it, a heavy weight flattens Chuchel like a pancake. In this case, both the player and Chuchel does not expect this to occur from pressing the red button, and the red button acts as a malicious prop that causes Chuchel’s pain. Malicious props often subvert our expectations, as seen earlier in the example of a flower unexpectedly shooting water.
Comic Violence
Not only do you find a lot of comic pain in Chuchel, but you also find many examples of comic violence. Comic violence occurs when either one of the central double act attacks one another or when a third party attacks both of them. Comic violence is abundant in Tom and Jerry, as we can see here. Jerry throws a brick at Tom, who shatters like glass. In Chuchel, we can see comic violence occur in the double act of Chuchel and Kekel – they’re both in mech suits, punching and boxing each other.Additionally, it occurs when Chuchel and Kekel team up, precariously balanced on one another to hammer open an egg, which acts as the third party.
Throwing of Objects
When you think of objects that are thrown in slapstick, you might first think of the classic pie in the face or rotten tomatoes. In Spongebob, Squidward attempts to do an ‘interpretative dance’, which is unfortunately not received well by the audience, and gets tomatoed. Chuchel draws on this scenario in this particular example, where Chuchel gets an egg thrown at his face after he lifts his name up and flexes. He also gets a variety of objects thrown at him by you, if you are the player, as he is singing – and presumably, he’s singing poorly.
Stunts and Acrobatics
Stunts and acrobatics are also found in Chuchel, as they are in Buster Keaton films. Keaton obviously does things with his body that most people cannot – he can dangle upside-down on a rope, perched precariously by a waterfall and save a woman. And Tom in Tom and Jerry can fly through the air with flimsy-looking wings and bounce off a needley house, only to land perfectly in an inflated pool. Chuchel is like Tom and Jerry in that Chuchel is animated as a performer, and the things that he can withstand and do are also quite amazing and unrealistic. For example, Kekel can act as an object to be tossed to knock down a door frame of wood, and bounce off a variety of objects without accruing any actual harm.The exaggeration that can be created in animation is impressive. Bodies can contort in ways that even the best human contortionist could not mimic. Stunts and acrobatics, in animations found in Chuchel or Tom and Jerry, very much emphasize the sense of unreality required to establish a comic frame.
Sound
Additionally, one of the most important aspects of slapstick is sound. Unfortunately, Buster Keaton films lacked that, but we know of the unrealistic nature of the presented scenarios by context and the skill of the performers. However, other traditional forms of slapstick, like theater or shows that have sound, have that in abundance.
Chuchel also utilizes sound effects to establish distance from reality. The sounds are highly stylized and exaggerated, and reinforce the excessive nature of the violence. Chuchel has a lot of conventional punchy sounds that you might normally hear in slapsticks, like a fall or punch might be accentuated by ham-smacking noises and cymbals. But Chuchel has really amazing unconventional, unique sounds too, like jello creatures emitting synth noises, or birds singing like an alarm clock. These are really unexpected and add to the surreal, zany nature of the game, and heighten the sense of unreality that enables us to laugh at everything that’s going on.
Excess (Physical)
Excess is also important for audiences to derive satisfaction from slapstick performances. Physical excess involves stunts that would normally be physically impossible for the average person, as we can see here in this Buster Keaton stunt.
Excess (Violence)
Excessive violence is also commonly found, but it must be excessive to the point that a lack of reality is clearly depicted such that the audience doesn’t gasp in horror, but laugh instead. Tom and Jerry, for instance, has excessive violence, but it is so exaggerated that we don’t empathize with Tom, but rather, laugh at him. Chuchel clearly contains physical excess and excessive violence, like when he gets cut in half here.
Transgression
Transgression is also a vital component for audiences to derive satisfaction from slapstick performances, particularly, social transgression. Transgression is particularly satisfying because it allows the audience to get a form of vicarious pleasure and amusement from the action – Peacock describes slapstick as a “safe form of rebellion”, where we can enjoy the breaking of status quos without suffering the repercussions.
In Chuchel, Chuchel gets egged in the face, and normally this is a no-no in day-to-day customs, but here the player can break social custom without any judgment or fear of retaliation. Additionally, transgression can be seen when Chuchel pees on asnowman, and peeing in random places or anywhere you want is a no-no. This is meant to amuse and satisfy the player, as the player guides Chuchel to pee on anything he wants to.
Interactivity
This brings me to my closing remarks about Chuchel and gaming as a medium for slapstick. Interactivity adds a new dimension to the genre, and Chuchel gives you a variety of ways to participate, as it is highly interactive.The player participates in a way that a passive audience cannot.
You can not only guide Chuchel and act like his ‘God’, such that you practically interact as Chuchel, but you can also at times be the audience and interact with Chuchel. For example, you not only are able to guide Chuchel to pee, but you can also chuck objects at Chuchel.
This dynamism allows for a much greater, enhanced degree of vicarious pleasure that more traditional mediums don’t have – it grants the player a greater feeling of autonomy and variety. The player essentially experiences slapstick in a more intimate way, as the interactivity amplifies the vicarious pleasure he or she feels.
Other slapstick games, like Untitled Goose Game, or Octodad, also allow the player to choose how they experience the humor. Ultimately, I believe that interactive forms of media, like video games, provide unique opportunities for the genre. We can finally participate in the fun of slapstick comedy.
group project submission, created bygroup co-leader Kellie University of Chicago MADD 25630: Games, Rules, Stories, Genres Spring 2020
Return of the Obra Dinn is a distillation of the mystery genre that manages to make a player a true detective while adding its own intimate flair. Unlike many detective games that give the player god-like powers or modes to highlight clues and select the correct choice from a pre-written plot, the player must investigate environments without hand-holding. And it does this well. Many players comment on the way that the game makes them feel empowered, and this is the key to which Obra Dinn revolutionizes the mystery game genre.
How does the game do this? Roger Caillois states that the pleasure of reading a mystery novel is “not that of listening to a story, but rather that of watching a “magic” trick which the magician immediately explains. The author has set everything up in advance. The story opens on a rigged set; we do not even see the main event, but only its disturbing consequences” (4).
This is what Obra Dinn does well: rather than a single scene set up with clues whose mystery is resolved immediately, the vignette format lets players see the same characters in different settings and contexts, allowing them to build theories and confidence. Game tools of multiple formats, like the passengers’ log and the sketches, allow players to track and cross-reference clues. The stage is set. The player’s job is to make the journey from impossible to possible through deductive guessing; the player decides what is impossible in order to guess what is possible in a manner similar to Sudoku.
This is how the game creates a procedural system where players discover what they are “allowed” by the game to use as a clue. (Hint: almost everything.) Language can be used as a clue; dress is a good indicator of status, and is consistent; in fact, the hammocks’ number tags are also clues; these people who walk together often are probably related in status; the person who stands at the head of the seamen is not necessarily a seaman.
Clues are resources. As players discover more types of clues, they unlock increasing arsenal of resources, like a player character in another game might unlock new weapons or tools. This becomes a core loop of gameplay: finding dead bodies unlocks more dead bodies; finding clues to determine fates reframes the realm of possibility for the rest of the characters, so that clues in this new frame can be used to determine the fates of more characters.
Ultimately, this clue system celebrates not the cleverness of a pre-written plot or of sets of mechanics, but of players—your own cleverness. The satisfaction of the game is not to roleplay as a godlike detective who has special access to clues, but to become a detective whose powers unfold and grow as you as a player construct your sets of clues. If this were where Return of the Obra Dinn finished exerting its powers, it would still be a technically inspiring game, and a revolution for the genre. But it goes beyond: its clues serve for more than the mechanical, explicitly game-driven benefit of finding more clues and completing fates.
Clues and searching for clues give insight into the relationships, emotions, and attitudes of characters aboard the ship, which drive players’ emotional investment. With the fate of the midshipmen, we learn that the three of them were young officers-in-training who all died heroic deaths. Charles Hershtik throws up when he sees blood in his first vignette and another midshipman teases him, but he eventually sacrifices his life to kill a crab-riding sea monster. As Thomas is dying, his mind goes to his fellow midshipman Peter’s fate—Thomas tried to save Peter from being grabbed by the Kraken, but the powder Peter held exploded and killed him. The premise of the game creates a compelling tragic genre: tragedy is about the how, and what was accomplished along the way. The midshipmen grew from teasing boys to young men who cared about the lives of the crewmen and of each other.
To solve fates through finding small clues of why/how characters died leads to finding more about their characters leads to the larger narrative of the chronological order of events in the Obra Dinn. Seeing different characters in different situations grows our intimate understandings of them and reinforces our desire to learn their fate by exploring more vignettes. Clues in Return of the Obra Dinn form a game loop that keeps players motivated to return to the game to understand its tragic story. Finally, once players complete the game, there is not much replay value if they have determined all the fates. Yet, the emotional power of the game make players want to return to the Obra Dinn, and that is the lasting power of a compelling mystery game: it is not just a revolution of genre, but also a revolutionary experience.
See a separate post for more details about the mechanics of clues.
group project submission, created by group co-leader Albert University of Chicago MADD 25630: Games, Rules, Stories, Genres Spring 2020
“The contradiction? Elementary.” I say, before submitting every possible piece of evidence from the court record in a pathetic attempt to convince Ace Attorney I’ve been paying attention.
The difference between the puzzle of a traditional detective story, and the puzzle of a game floating loosely in that genre, is fundamentally set around the question of the audience’s relationship to the method of solution; the clue. In the traditional form of the puzzling story, the primary work expected of the audience is in interpretation. This is of course, because the story medium doesn’t allow the reader to discover things on their own. You can never truly see the scene of the crime as Holmes does.
Obra Dinn reverses this work. In the case of the gameified version of detection, the audience’s primary work is in that mechanism of discovery. The primary job of the player is to collect the information. Booking everything together and naming the crew is simply the end result of that identification process.
At an abstract level, Obra Dinn breaks its clues into two categories: Ludic clues, and given clues. These categories relate to the way that the information is presented to the player. By ludic, I mean information presented in wholly diegetic ways. This information is not explicitly discretized and given to the player, but is instead observed within the world. In broad strokes, the still sequences and audio presented through the Memento Mortem are examples of ludic clues. It is the job of the player to sort through those sequences to extract meaningful information. On the other hand, the information filled into the log book that the player is able to reference are “given”. This kind of clue exists to contextualize the scene. In a way, these given clues are the scaffolding on which ludic clues are built.
In broad strokes, the form of clues in Obra Dinn can be split between the world as presented in first person to the player, and information as is discretized and presented through the logbook. Ludic clues then, can take any number of more abstract forms. The way one character refers to another, the directions they face, their clothing, and other physical traits are all things that can provide information that is meaningful towards the end goal of identifying the members of the crew. Given clues are information that could not be obtained by mere observation. The player only accesses this information because the game gives it to them. It’s interesting to note that these given clues are necessary to allow for deduction even in the traditional form of the genre. Sherlock Holmes knows the basic details of a crime scene when he walks into it, and similarly the logbook allows the player to know basic details of each scene they observe. There is then a certain level of information that is expected of the game that cannot reasonably be gleaned simply through exploration of the environment. A more explicit example of these givens are in the glossary at the back of the logbook. Because you are asked to step into the role of someone who presumably has an understanding of how a ship’s crew would be organized, there is an expectation that certain information, like what exactly a midshipman is, be provided.
Most of the given clues examined previously are of the type that could sit comfortably in a more traditional representation of the genre as well. There are however forms of given clues that are specific to the gameified version of the genre that Obra Dinn represents. When you’ve gathered enough information to identify a member of the crew, the image of their face will become visible in image. This change in state is itself a clue, as it provides a context for the information that’s already been gathered, drastically narrowing down the total number of possibilities. This information set is an artifact of the need to par down the amount of information that the player and audience can reasonably be expected to deal with.
As a personal aside, I think that it’s interesting that, given how easily accessible information like the sort provided in the glossary is, it would be possible to create a solvable deduction based game that lacks context clues. It certainly wouldn’t be fun to constantly cross reference the internet to find relevant information, but it would be interesting.
The clues in Obra Dinn also serve a very strong narrative purpose. Piecing together the circumstances of death for each person aboard the ship in turn pieces together the larger narrative of the events that occurred on and to the ship itself. The player is never taken aside and explained at, the progression of the narrative is instead a product and function of the core gameplay loop.
By offloading the detective work onto the audience, or in this case the player, Obra Dinn is also able to unload a majority of the fluffwork that occurs in more traditional forms of the genre. Obra Dinn doesn’t need an extraordinary Sherlock figure to create intrigue because it has the time and space it needs to create a compelling history for each of the sixty people on board. This is true in terms of the larger narrative as well. Each time the player puts a name and cause of death to a face, they take another step towards answering the question of what exactly happened on the Obra Dinn.
I’d like to turn a bit towards the readings. Much of the above abstraction is hinged lovingly on Haycraft’s Rules of the Game, namely in how the shift in medium applies to them. The systems of Obra Dinn ask the player to step into the role of the deductive protagonist, and by extension give the audience access to precisely the information set that is typically only accessible to actors within the fictional world of the case. This also necessarily changes the way that clues are revealed. The traditional detective, abiding by the rules, can only present information that is in some way relevant to the problem of the story. Rodell says that “a good clue, then, is one which does in fact point in the right direction, but which seems at first to point in the wrong direction.” This misdirection happens because the audience’s interpretation of the clue is very heavily a product of the musings and deductions of the actors in the worldspace of the fiction. Without the ability to personally check against the scene, those deductions and assumptions become fact.
By giving the player access to the environment, this concept of a good clue isn’t entirely removed, but is instead slightly twisted. Misdirection isn’t applied through mal-deduction, but through the fact that the person who now sits in the deductive role probably doesn’t solve crimes for a living. In Obra Dinn, as has been stated, there is now the additional work of determining what information is meaningful, ergo a clue, and what information isn’t. In this case, the good clue is one that is hidden comfortably alongside other deductive noise.
As a final, tangential name drop (and space filler), I’d like to offer an opinion, that the form of clues in an interactive space is what allows the interactive, gameified version of the genre to transcend other traditional forms. Callois’ conception of the detective story as a game is harried by the fact of the distance traditional mediums put between their audience and their worlds. The clue is, in the traditional medium, a function of the cleverness of the plot. It is a challenge and puzzle to the reader, sure, but the readers job is not to deduce the solution to the case, but to try and put together the deductions presented by the plot before having it revealed to them. Obra Dinn reverses this. The player is the intellectual foundation of Obra Dinn, and the source from which clues and information stem. The traditional form of work purported by the detective story still exists, but it is layered on top of another subset of puzzling labor. While the reader is given the information they need to solve the case, the player is asked to first find the relevant clues on their own, and then piece those clues together.
To come back to the original topic, the function of clues in Obra Dinn is the same as any other form of the deductive narrative. Clues exist to piece together other forms of information, either a final conclusion or another clue. What is interesting then, is the form that clues take in Obra Dinn. Rather than points of intrigued marked by a third party, be it detective or say a button prompt, they take the form of physical information that the player must observe, sense, and interpret, taking on the role of the deductive protagonist who searches for information rather than backseating a godlike deductive figure a la Sherlock Holmes.
Final unrelated point, it was very clever of Lucas Pope to make us work in threes. Made it significantly harder for me to just guess things and I really didn’t appreciate it.
I hope next Lucas Pope makes a game where you have to do taxes.
One last post for September: I did indeed succeed in getting the second part of my new series on detective games out of the door by the end of the month. And it’s a long one, too! Long enough that I don’t feel bad about the dry spell that’s inevitably going to set in in October.
I’ve written about most of thegamesinthisvideo on the blog before, mostly for things like capsule reviews and walkthroughs. This is the only time I’ve done any sort of analysis of them, though. (Excepting maybe Gone Home.) In addition to being long, it’s also mostly brand-new material, which is not something I can say about most of my videos.
