Gregory Avery-Weir 0:00 Ludus Novus Episode 029: The Goalless Path of Bernband Gregory Avery-Weir 0:45 Welcome to Ludus Novus. I'm Gregory Avery-Weir. Gregory Avery-Weir 0:50 Bernband is a 2014 game by Tom van den Boogaart (with a remake in progress) where you wander around this incomprehensible alien city. You look at the folks who live there, you hang out in a bar where you can't understand anybody and just kind of explore. It's a classic representation of the sort of game people call a "walking simulator." Gregory Avery-Weir 1:14 "Walking simulator" is a complicated term. It originally came about sort of derisively as a way of dismissing things that were "more an experience than a game" or something like that. And it's sort of been adopted by people who absolutely wanted the kind of game that you see in walking simulators. Gregory Avery-Weir 1:32 Some big examples of things people call "walking simulators" are Dear Esther, Gone Home, Firewatch. They usually involve voiceovers or other dialogue that isn't directly controlled by the player. They involve moving around through a space and finding interesting things and they're usually described as lacking gameplay or interactivity lacking goals. Gregory Avery-Weir 1:56 But that's clearly not what people actually mean when they say "walking simulator." Gregory Avery-Weir 2:02 So let's take something that people don't call a walking simulator. Knytt is a little platformer game where you're controlling a little critter climbing around the world collecting a few spaceship parts in order to, A, serve as an excuse to get you to go around places and, B, in order to go home. Gregory Avery-Weir 2:23 But people don't call it a walking simulator. It's not first person, but it is about wandering a world. So does it not count because you can die in the game? Because there are occasional obstacles that you need to avoid? Does it not count as a walking simulator because of these MacGuffins, the spaceship parts you need to collect? Maybe. Gregory Avery-Weir 2:44 The distinction seems to be partly the first-person-ness, the fact that Knytt is third person seems to disqualify it from the status of "walking simulator." And I think the fact that there are these explicit goals also makes people not think of it as that. Gregory Avery-Weir 3:01 But like what about Gone Home? Gone Home is a game where you're exploring a space. You have to find keys and combinations and certain secret passages in order to progress through this space and solve a mystery. Gregory Avery-Weir 3:20 That sounds like a Myst. That sounds like an adventure game. It's got fewer puzzles than what we think of as a full game. But it's also a short game. So how do we explain the fact that Gone Home gets called walking sim despite being also, apparently, a first person adventure game? Gregory Avery-Weir 3:38 Maybe it's about challenge. The game designer Raph Koster has a classic book, A Theory of Fun, where he talks about how fun in games involves mastery over a system. Involves interacting with the system, trying to get it to do things, gradually building skill, and finally, achieving mastery, at which point the game has given you what fun it has to give, and you're probably done with it. And there's not really mastery, this feeling of of beating a challenge, in any of these games that we've discussed as walking sims: Dear Esther, Gone Home, Firewatch, Bernband. They all present you with a world that you go through an explorer. But unless you're very new to WASD controls -- to navigating a first person world -- you never really accomplish mastery over a skill. Gregory Avery-Weir 4:36 The pleasure in these games doesn't come from that mastery. It comes from the narrative and the aesthetics. So narrative is story. It's the stuff that happens, or the (often in walking simulators) the story that is uncovered through your discovery of artifacts and clues. Gregory Avery-Weir 4:54 "Aesthetics" here, I'm not using in the way that the formal game design framework MDA uses it. It calls aesthetics the kind of the evoked feelings that players have. But I'm using it in the way that game designer Jesse Schell did in the elemental tetrad, which is his deconstruction of what a game is, and how it works. Aesthetics are "how your game looks, sounds, smells, tastes, and feels" as distinct from the story which is the sequence of events that's portrayed, or that happened in your game. The story is what tale the game tells; the aesthetics are how it presents itself, visually, audibly, etc. Gregory Avery-Weir 5:36 You get a story by picking up clues, often, in a walking simulator. And you get aesthetics by looking at the architecture and seeing vistas and hearing cool music and good voice acting. So Bernband is interesting in that it is almost narrativeless. The whole extent of the story in this game is, A, that given by the setting. The weird alien architecture, that spaceport feel, the zipping aircars, the information portrayed about the world based on what a club is like, what a bar is like, what classrooms are like. And it's also this sequence of events that you engender as you play the game, right? Gregory Avery-Weir 6:34 The narrative in part is, I went over here, and then I saw a bar and then I went over here, and I saw a weird back hallway. And for some reason, there was this inaccessible bathroom. What was that about? And so that's the narrative. Gregory Avery-Weir 6:48 The aesthetics are the cacophony of city sounds; the music that gets played; the weird, blocky, pixelly, gritty, blurry view of the world you get; the oddness of these hands floating in front of your view as you move. And that is the joy of bernband is that uncovering of interesting places and that exploration there. Gregory Avery-Weir 7:20 But if that's what you're doing, then are you pursuing a goal? Last episode, I discussed how I think of games as interactive simulations with goals, and "goal" is such a funny, fuzzy word to define. Video game theorist and academic Jesper Juul has a great piece where he describes games without goals or games with optional goals as expressive devices. That means that there are ways that you can communicate through the events and the aesthetics. So you can show off a cool trick you did in Tony Hawk or you can play around with expressing your feelings about characters in the world of a Grand Theft Auto game by blowing things up or running people over with a car. Gregory Avery-Weir 8:13 But I think that this falls short of describing the situation in a walking simulator, like bernband, because there's not that feeling of communication. Or at least I don't get it from these games: they're not performative. When I play a walking simulator, I'm not thinking of how an observer or how a person I'm communicating with would interpret the things I'm doing. It's a very internal goal that I've got, an internal situation. They are about experiencing. Gregory Avery-Weir 8:44 So are they goalless? Like, if they don't have this direct edict handed down from high of a goal of "beat the boss" or "get points," and if they're not expressive, then where's the goal? Gregory Avery-Weir 8:59 Game essayist Joel Goodwin of Electron Dance has compared walking simulators to Japanese secret boxes, sometimes called puzzle boxes, saying that their goal is to uncover the narrative or aesthetic elements hidden inside. He writes in this piece, "Screw your walking simulators:" Gregory Avery-Weir 9:20 A game is not about walking from A to B, but about the things that happen to the player at A and B - a panorama, a conversation, a moment of madness... The act of walking is often vital to the experience, embedding a player inside the activity in ways that a static image or short film would not. But to claim it's about walking is as absurd as describing Half-Life (Valve) as a game about moving the mouse around and pressing some keys. Gregory Avery-Weir 9:47 That's what I mean by "implicit goals." The implicit goal presented by a walking simulator is to find what it has hidden. A walking simulator presents you with a world which is non obvious, where the narrative is unclear or unprovided, and where the aesthetics are not immediately accessible to you. So that implies this goal for you. And the fact that people respond to it means that it has successfully implied it. Gregory Avery-Weir 10:18 People want to explore walking simulators: want to find out what happened, want to find out what's in the next room, what's over the next rise, what's behind the stand of trees. Performer and video game producer and creator Pat Ashe performed an experimental talk called "Walking Simulator Simulator where he says: Pat Ashe 10:37 Maybe we do need a new word or a new genre. Or maybe we as a group of creators and players need to understand that interaction is everything from blowing off a space nazi’s face to save the universe whilst managing our RPGesque mechanics before making a moral choice over which kitten to stomp on to chasing a frog around an island. Sitting, walking, listening, looking, playing, just fucking being is interaction. Me and you in a room together is an interaction. You watching the clouds drift by as you walk around Clerkenwell is interaction. Breathing together in the same space, digital or physical, as other beings is interaction. Watching a mountain float through space is interaction. Everything you do in a game is interaction, you standing there is changing the system. You are forcing a change on the outcome as long as you are watching, standing and being. Even before you've started walking. Gregory Avery-Weir 11:40 The goal here is to have that experience. To interact. To embed yourself in the simulation and be complicit with it. You want to find out what is there. And the truth is that all games have this goal of "having an experience." The explicit goals of a game, the things that a game tells you to do, are encompassed by this implicit goal, "do what the game tells you to do." Gregory Avery-Weir 12:14 There's no reason why you should try to survive in a combat game, or try and rescue someone who's been kidnapped in the game unless you have this implicit goal of experiencing the game, this overriding meta goal of seeing what is there. And so in a sense, I see walking simulators as more pure forms of game than a game that writes out an arbitrary set of rules within its simulation. Gregory Avery-Weir 12:45 A prominent example of this is Her Story, which is a game where you're looking through an archive of interview videos by searching for certain keywords, and you piece together the videos in your head and try and figure out what happened. And in the game, there's a tracker of how many of the videos you've seen, and so that sort of provides a half-explicit goal of just, "see all the videos," but there's no win sequence, really. There's no indication when you're done. The creator has said you're done when you're satisfied. Gregory Avery-Weir 13:27 And that's really the case with all games. You are done when you are satisfied with what the game has provided. Or when you're sufficiently dissatisfied that you decide you don't want to bother with it anymore. When you play Bernband, you are exploring this space. You are seeking to find what story, what beauty, it has locked inside its secret box. And your goal is to see it. And you're done when you're satisfied. Gregory Avery-Weir 14:04 "Walking simulator" might be a useful categorization for finding similar games to ones you like, but I don't think it serves as a particularly distinctive category of games that are fundamentally different from other games. In the end, following the path that you choose through a game is at the core of all games and games like Bernband, give you an avenue to explore and take what you want from them. Gregory Avery-Weir 14:43 This has been Ludus Novus. I'm Gregory Avery-Weir and you can check out Bernband. There'll be a link in the show description and there is totally a remake being made. It looks beautiful and gorgeous, takes some of the same style, but I have the feeling is going to be expanding it quite a bit. Tom van den Boogaart has been working on it for a long time, and I hope to see something playable soon. But definitely follow it on Twitter @bernband. Gregory Avery-Weir 15:18 And you can follow me on twitter @gregoryweir and you can get episodes of this show at ludusnovus.net. I did something a bit new last time that I'm also doing this time, which is I'm putting these episodes on YouTube with some backing video. I think of it more as a visual aid rather than this being replaced by video. I still want to keep this an audio-first show, at least for the foreseeable future. But if you're interested in seeing footage of Bernband while I talk about it, you can check that out on YouTube. Gregory Avery-Weir 15:55 If you want to see more of this show more often, then you should know that it is supported by my patrons on Patreon. I haven't built up a large supporter base, but especially since I've recently had a long term contract gig end, it would be very cool if I could build up a way to at least support part time production of Ludus Novus and similar work. So if you want to check that out go to patreon.com/gregoryaveryweir and let me know if there are pledge goals that you think that I should have or patron rewards that are missing. I'm at a bit of a loss for deciding what those things should be. Gregory Avery-Weir 16:40 I'm also a cofounder of Future Proof Games which you can find at futureproofgames. com. We recently released Rosette Diceless, a cool consent-based GM-less role playing system for tabletop and live action and you can check that out at rosetterpg.com/diceless. Gregory Avery-Weir 17:01 I do a podcast with my partner Melissa called Audacious Compassion about how to be compassionate in the most difficult situations in daily life. That's at avery-weir.net/audaciouscompassion AVERY dash WEIR dot net slash audacious compassion. Gregory Avery-Weir 17:18 The theme music of Ludus Novus is "A Foolish Game (vox harmony adds)" by Snowflake, Admiral Bob and sackjo22, available on ccmixter under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. Gregory Avery-Weir 17:32 Talk to you later!