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On the advent of "slow games"
Why slowness in modern game design is a good thing.
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My former professor at George Mason University, the venerable Mark Sample, gave a talk at the University of Kansas yesterday entitled "Playing without Power in Videogames." He focused on the pervasive trope of games as power fantasies, making the player-character more powerful as a game progresses. Professor Sample showcased a few games that reverse this paradigm by stripping power away or least twisting it in some way--JFK: Reloaded, Calabouço Tétrico, and Italian studio Molleindustria's new title, Unmanned.
Unmanned |
Unmanned is about a U.S. military drone operator working at a remote base in the (American) desert. Instead of blowing up terrorists, the player spends most of their time controlling the man's daily routine. Waking up, shaving, driving to work, flirting with the coworker, playing videogames with the son at home, trying to fall asleep. It's a commentary on the United States' drone strikes as well as on games as a medium. You can play it here.
It reminded me of another game by Molleindustria I played in Prof. Sample's "Videogames in Critical Contexts" class a few years ago: Every Day the Same Dream. Another quiet, pensive game about playing the routine of a middle-aged man's daily schedule to and from work. You can play it here.
Why this focus on slow-paced routines? Along with the stripping of power comes with the stripping of speed and action. We bemoan today's ADHD game culture; big-budget titles are about quick sensory overloads of gratuitous violence, and successful casual games are about playing in two-minute Angry Birds intervals. But beneath the surface, game design has seen a huge shift in the other direction. Maybe it's a reaction to the chaotic post-9/11 world or simply a product of better technology, but the past few years have been a boon for slow games. There have always been hints of slowness in games, from Cyan's Myst to Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda. But we're starting to see works where the slowness is the entire conceit of the game.
Shenmue |
One of the first prominent examples of slow gaming was Sega's Shenmue, ahead of its time in 1999. Alexander Galloway calls this "pure process" in the first chapter of his book Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture.
"One plays Shenmue by participating in its process. Remove everything and there is still action, a gently stirring rhythm of life. There is a privileging of the quotidian, the simple. As in the films of Yasujiro Ozu, the experience of time is important. There is a repitition of movement and dialogue ('On that day the snow changed to rain,' the characters repeat). One step leads slowly and deliberately to the next. There is a slow, purposeful accumulation of experiences."
The game took an unprecedented $70 million to create, and was a relative commercial flop upon its release--it didn't help that it was on Sega's doomed Dreamcast console. The sequel Shenmue II