Liz Ryerson’s Problem Attic does not ask players to overcome difficulty (both affectively and mechanically), but rather asks players to stay with that difficulty by embodying it. In the third act, players interact with the game world as what are earlier identified as a non-player enemy characters (the gray boxes and black and gray crosses) and also gain the power to traverse walls, effectively blending in with or becoming part of the hostile platforming environment. Beyond these somewhat diegetic[1] instances of embodying difficulty, I’d like to propose that occlusion and indirection are two mechanics that reinforces an embodied relation to difficulty.
Ryerson utilizes environmental elements to occlude the player’s vision, increasing the difficulty of the game. In most platformers, the player character remains at the “front” of the image. Objects can be jumped on, but not behind. Players are usually able to track their character through the level from start to finish (notable exceptions being Inside and Limbo) and platforms are generally visually accessible to the player. Problem Attic offers the player occluded maze-like paths that require experimentation and a fair degree of hope or faith that the box they’re jumping towards is solid ground. In some levels, notably Act 1, Level 4, the player character becomes occluded by elements in the environment, breaking any easy sense of identification between the player and their avatar. When the player is touched/crushed/assaulted by black and gray crosses, “screen shake” temporarily occludes the player’s vision while also communicating the urgency of moving away from the assailants, while simultaneously making it harder to break away. Occasionally, players need to endure extensive periods of screen shake when it becomes necessary to utilize the crosses to escape the environment. I suggest that these two techniques could fall under the category of occlusion, and capitalize on the embodied experience of blocked, blurred, or otherwise thwarted vision.
The second mechanic that reinforces an embodied relationship to difficulty is indirection: a lack of a one-to-one correspondence between player input and software output. Unlike in many games where movement is predictable (W will always move you forward, D to the right, S to the left, etc) Ryerson employs indirection in Act 1, Level 6. At what appears to be a randomized interval, the player’s commands fail to be executed by the game. Pressing the jump (up arrow) key may not result in a jump, potentially throwing off your progress up the flashing scaffolds to the top of the level. Indirection forces the player into a relation of uncertainty – Can I actually move forward? What’s the point of moving forward if I have no control over the situation? The inability to maintain control over the player, to maintain a simple one-to-one relationship with this software, is frustrating, and in my case, prevented my further progress in the game because my body/reflexes could not physically cope with the increased difficulties this mechanic imposed on the game.
I think back to Ryerson’s article, After Braid: “Even friends of hers couldn't make heads or tails of her game, and she didn't really feel like trying to explain something that wasn't meant to be explained verbally anyway.” I think one of the things games are particularly good at is forcing us to do things with our body – to process things without actions, not words. Problem Attic doesn’t so much make us think, as it makes us do. That doing requires us to physically endure what might be a difficult, though familiar sensation, or perhaps gives us insight on a new physical sensation, a new orientation to ourselves.
Links:
Ryerson, Liz. Problem Attic. https://gamejolt.com/games/problem-attic/15532
Ryerson, Liz. The Other Side of Braid. https://boingboing.net/2015/07/30/the-other-side-of-braid.html
[1] I say somewhat diegetic carefully here – what can be considered diegesis in this game? Should “the diegetic” properly refer to the properly textual elements? Does this game have a plot, and if so, what might be “extra-diegetic” in the case? Questions I won’t answer here but would love to hear other’s thoughts on!
Following up on my above comment, I think Mark Hansen's technical description of how we feel with our computers in the "Ubiquitous Sensation" essay we're reading for 10/23 may help clarify what kinds of technical and social-historical processes Problem Attic is intervening in as it raises this problem of "embodying difficulty." Following Hansen, I wonder if Problem Attic is remarkable in part because of how its visually and procedurally thematized difficulty seems to make sensible, cognitively commensurable even, the otherwise insensible and cognitively incommensurable affective connection we have with ubiquitous computing? In other words, does the game try to amplify and therefore represent the inaccessible but totally constitutive affects of ubiquitous computing? Of course, if we want to square this…
Ariana, I resonate with your close reading and like India am curious about the concept of "embodying difficulty" you introduce here. I sense a tension between the latter gerund term, with its connotation of active process and working-through, and the nounal term "embodied relation to difficulty" that you use at certain points. This nounal term confuses me, I think, because it foregrounds a redundancy. I understand "difficulty" to always already describe a relationship between a player's body and the practical requirements of gameplay. I find "embodying difficulty" to be more descriptive because its specificity seems to sharpen otherwise vague terms like "experiencing difficulty." I'm curious what you think of this conceptual blur between difficulty and embodiment?
Arianna, your comments on the little enemy crosses in this post and today in class were great to hear. I kept thinking about them and what is unsettling about them. Sure they track you, but oddly they don't have real material consequence? You don't really die in the game, you can't get hurt. As you said today, you just have to endure the shakiness. It's a difficult approach to "hurt," in the sense that we know (to some level) that our avatar is being hurt, that this touch is a problem, but can't really understand its consequences. This is just one of many opaque aspects of the game, and some of its indirection.
I really like how you point out the linkage between occlusion and difficulty. I even referenced your post in my post! :-)
Oh--the black and grey crosses. Occlusion is such a good work to describe my intense discomfort with these, as you put it, "non-player enemy characters," not only because of the screen shake that disrupts embodied visual engagement with the game, but also because of the disruption and blockage in traditional game logic. The game clearly signals that these crosses are hostile--their unfriendly, prickly design, their ominous and uncannily slow-but-steady pursuit of the avatar, and their tectonic effect on contact (occlusion also happens to be a dental term for contact between teeth--à propos, considering how much I gritted and ground my teeth at said contact)--and yet interacting with them is crucial to successful game play (not that "successful" is quite the…