Hi, folks. First-time poster on the new boards (eons ago, on the old forums, I used to post as Capt. Caveman. I’ve been out of the vidcons loop for a minute).
Anyway, I’ve had this thought circling around in my head about the structure of Gorogoa since I played through it several weeks ago. Namely, the fact that it is a narrative-based game where the player is outside the narrative. This is pretty unusual, right? It’s one thing to have an abstract puzzle game like Tetris where the whole concept of a player avatar doesn’t apply, but generally, where there’s a story about some characters, the perspective of the player is from inside the story.
In Gorogoa, there’s a story, but the player is on the outside looking in. This is not just metaphorically the case; the game’s whole UI is based on a shifting set of window panes (or tiles, but I have a hard time not seeing them as windows). I feel like this gives the game a very distinct uncanniness that I’ve not encountered playing anything else (to be fair, there’s a lot I haven’t played). Because there’s a story, I feel like the player must have some kind of identity within it, but the game totally ignores this notion. Who the player is, then, is a mystery.
I am stumped trying to think of another game that does this, but if there’s any group of people who could think of at least one, it’s probably y’all. Am I crazy for thinking Gorogoa is unique in this regard, or there other games that (explicitly, implicitly, to whatever degree) put the player outside the story?
In Baten Kaitos you, the player, are actually the protagonist’s guardian spirit. He addresses you directly and everything. Does that fall outside the scope of what you’re thinking about?
That sounds a little less abstract, since the player still inhabits a character central to the plot, but it’s all good; I’m more interested in having a broad discussion about how and why games do this kind of thing than building a list of games that meet a strict criteria.
I guess what unsettled me in Gorogoa is that the player has agency (as all players must) but no apparent identity. On the other hand, a case could be made that the player in Gorogoa really has no agency since after all there’s only one correct solution to the puzzles and path through the game (and this could be applied to every linear puzzle/adventure game ever). So maybe the feeling I had more to do with watching a deterministic story unfold, and feeling as though I could do something, but in fact being powerless? IDK.
i haven’t played Gorogoa (though it looks beautiful) but this sounds a lot like how the Myst games treat your player character. You have an important role in the story, but your actual character is completely undefined, and you have no degree of expression whatsoever in the progression of the story, other than the ending which is completely binary; Riven has a sort of bizarre ambiguity where you can choose to trap yourself in a bookworld for no reason, but every other game is “which guy to trust” or “uh oops guy killed me w/ hammer”.
You don’t even have a name or specific identity within the game, you’re at most vaguely referred to as some kind of stranger in Atrus’s journal in Riven. So a lot of those games feel like you’re playing a cipher more than a human. (and because of the atmosphere in at least the Cyan-created ones, it sings)
In Pavilion I think you just manipulate the environment and the protagonist muddles along on his own. I haven’t played it so I’m going on poorly remembered descriptions of the game.
I can’t remember if the entity you actually control is defined in any way in the story of the game, but Pac-Man 2 is pretty wild to think about in this context
also I guess Wonder Project J? I never played that
One of these days I’ll get around to playing Myst (or Riven, which the consensus seems to favor). I kind of had that feeling through Gorogoa like “oh, this must be kind of what Myst is like.”
Lemmings comes to mind, though I suppose that one doesn’t really have a story. I can think of other games in which the player isn’t clearly defined, such as Everything and Windosill. But those also don’t have enough of a narrative to separate them from other puzzle or sandbox-type games in this respect, even if they feel like borderline cases.
I can think of a game in which you control a character but it’s not the character you think it is, though I can’t name the game without spoiling the story. But that also is not quite the same thing.
What about Warcraft and Starcraft? I don’t remember the player actually being acknowledged as any character in particular. Though characters do address you directly, so you aren’t totally outside the story.
This reminds me of deadly premonition,where the player is explicitly separate from the player character, who addresses the player directly and praises their performance. It’s really interesting.
For a class on games I took a few years ago, I wrote a short paper about a sampling of Lemmings fanfiction. There isn’t much, but it was interesting to observe how many took the perspective of Lemmings caught up in some cocktail of fear and religious adoration for “the cursor.”
I would say 4x and/or RTS games don’t count because the outcome of the game depends completely on your actions, which gives you too much agency to get that “on the outside looking in” feeling. I mean your god-emperor is never really contextualized but they are obviously a “character” in the world, often the most important one.
Her Story is the closest thing I can come up with. You’re presented with a computer desktop that has a folder full of video clips on it, and you have to use an application to search through these clips and piece together a narrative out of them. There isn’t really any information about you as a player character, you’re left to guess whether you’re a cop, or a relative, or the criminal herself, but I don’t think it’s ever made clear. You could just as easily be some random, totally unrelated observer.
i’m sure there’s lots of indie games that do it tho psychosomnium is the first i played. it’s debateable whether a sequence of different player characters counts but i feel enough is made of the eerily uniform way control passes from one to the next without a break in the same scene to qualify.
will stop bringing up vasily zotov everywhere but one of the reasons stuff like space spy is interesting is that it’s so hard to tie back to any kind of consistent point of view. like technically a lot of games involve conflicting ui sensory organs but by manifesting them all in the same worldspace and mangling them in the representational hierarchy it really makes it harder to figure out exactly where you’re situated in relation to what’s happening even as observer.
feel like there must have been a lot of zx spectrum / zzt / knytt games that involved fixed narrative dioramas that you just sort of scrolled around as some kind of little ball guy who was basically incidental to the action / just happened to be the easiest way to get that stuff into game form. bitsy too i guess but no specific names come to mind
i’ve made variousjokegames that tried to goof around with this notion and i feel lots of other people have too, so wd be interested in more history of it !