In an effort to get back to my roots, I’ve been picking up games and playing them randomly. In an effort to actually get away from my roots, I’ve been trying to sit down and write out some thoughts on the games instead of just forgetting them and letting the guilt of not writing fester. So, something old and something new. Almost ready to get married!
In all seriousness, it’s nice to get some brief things written, get back in the habit and retrain the muscles. Writing a dissertation or writing a book can feel like a marathon, and I have the urge after marathons to never run another one ever again. I know some people get addicted to the grind. I’m built different.
The way I’m built similarly, though, is in terms of how I like to go through stuff that isn’t mine and piece together a puzzle. This is true of most gamers, I’d expect, and honestly of most people. The same urges that lead us to watch or read a murder mystery or unpack potential governmental conspiracies can lead us to obsessively open treasure chests, read notes, and follow signs to unpack what happened in a video game. This isn’t even terribly controversial — most video games leave you with a sense of curiosity, and while stealing or killing innocent people in game is going to depend on your play style, unraveling those same innocents’ deepest secrets is typically fair game. Even in games that explicitly do away with lore or narrative like PUBG or Fortnite either add lore midway through to sate this appetite or are the subject of 8000 lore videos by youtubers desperate to determine why, in fact, the sign says “Open” instead of “Closed” on the looted convenience store in zone 3 of map 7.
And I don’t even blame the youtubers for this (I do blame them for some things which maybe is a different column), because it is fun and, even more important, deeply satisfying at a primal level to uncover secrets. I’m not sure why, and maybe I’m extremely prone to figuring out the mysteries an author wants me to, but it’s almost as deep a satisfaction as those classic physical ones like hunger or thirst.
But that doesn’t mean I always like what I find. In fact, I’d say that predominantly I don’t love what I find as a conclusion, that the conclusion itself is a far cry from the joy I felt in unpacking the mystery itself. The last 10 minutes of any crime procedural are what you’re chasing, but who is more satisfied by the reveal than the investigation? Outside of a few truly masterful Poirots and Sherlocks, I can’t imagine there’s many stories that have more fun revealing than dissembling. And I think that’s probably a fatal flaw in our urge to come up with mysteries to solve — that the solutions aren’t all that satisfying after all.
I came to this conclusion playing the very fun and engaging Simulacra, a game I guess that was popularized when Jack Septiceye played it, but as his name is the deepest my knowledge goes on JS-eye, I’ll just say I came in blind. And that’s a good way to play this game — it’s cheap and fun and engaging and just the right level of creepy that requires digging and creative hacking within the rules of the gamespace. You get a random phone delivered to you, and it appears its owner might be in trouble, so you imitate and break-in and lie and conspire to find the girl, letting some friends and lovers know it’s you while keeping others in the dark and avoiding the police. And it’s fun! It’s not like, difficult necessarily — there is a “bad ending” but even this is not particularly hard to avoid. And the “good ending” is more…ambiguous than good.
And here’s where I’m gonna do spoilers, so, if that bothers you please stop reading or skip a bit.
But the end of the game shows us that the girl we’ve been following has been spirited away by a malevolent AI who is trawling dating websites in order to better…cleanse flawed humanity of its flaws and usher in AI dominance? I’m not entirely sure, but it’s a metaphor for how we’re presenting simulacra of ourselves all the time and losing the real. The game quotes Baudrillard, so if you’re wondering, yes, it’s that kind of simulacrum.
But this conclusion feels so much worse than the search to me, in part because the observation the game is making as a meta text falls somewhere between a scold and a Theory 1 kind of observation. Not that either is bad on its face — in fact, I’m probably the worst audience for this sort of thing since I’ve read Baudrillard. If you catch someone who hasn’t, they’re gonna have a way better time. And lots of people haven’t. But even still, the dark and terrifying elements of looking for this girl who lost her phone don’t really…hit when you find out that a spooky data monster got her. This conclusion is very black mirror, whereas the search is more twin peaks, if that makes sense: the former show-turned-adjective is pedagogical and simple, the latter is ambigious and complex.
And ultimately, I think this is the problem mystery games, particularly locked phone mystery games of which there are many and many I want to now play, have in their execution. Ultimately we do not care so much about answers! What we care about is the unpacking of clues and suggestions, gained surreptitiously or stolen or interrogated away, that can then produce a kind of discursive avenue of truth. Trite as it may sound, this is the same thing we do when we tell stories or do literary criticism or make up narratives to structure our own lives. And in those cases, often enough, the end is not as good as the means.
I don’t think that Simulacra fails honestly; in fact I think it’s excellent as a game and I loved playing it. I think it was playing itself out to a foregone conclusion: that it’s much more fun to rifle through someone’s trash than to find out what the answer is when we piece together that trash. As much as I find endings to be fascinating, it is in large part because they usually fall very flat. Perhaps this is why: we love to steal or sneak. We hate to understand. We despise learning a lesson.
But there’s nothing wrong with that: that’s just the human condition.