In response to yesterday’s speculation on Problem Attic’s “aboutness,” I have what may be an overly precious two cents: I think Problem Attic is about “aboutness.” Rephrased: it explicitly deals with sense-making, with awareness. As someone else touched on in class, I think the main reason why we hesitate to apply the word “about” to Problem Attic (as opposed to, say, Braid), is the distance between game and player/creator the word connotes, which seems to go against Problem Attic’s urgent and all-too-intimate demand to do and feel, with seemingly no room for removed reflection or clear-minded understanding. However, I think Problem Attic vividly addresses and performs precisely the thorny act of distancing oneself from oneself and the contradictions and ordeals of this process. Right upon entry into the game, I was immediately trying to understand what it was about, and this urge only grew stronger and stronger as I continued to be bombarded by the crosses; I needed to have some explanation for the seemingly senseless and inescapable pain. And Problem Attic did offer such explanations, even as those very explanations also undermined understanding — for me, comprehension emerged disjointedly from the occasional text, the overt symbols (e.g. the female and male logos), and the mechanic logic of the game. So I feel a central concern of Problem Attic was how to make sense of senseless hurt, how to construct a much-needed: What is all this suffering “about”? Even if you can’t verbalize it (and this game certainly made me feel a lot of unspeakable things), I do think you can feel what something is about, and Problem Attic is very articulate in feeling and symbol. I do not see a reason why an argument (implied by the word “about”) cannot also be embodied and representational. In this sense, I believe Problem Attic makes a very eloquent psychological argument about trauma and memory through its mechanics, sounds, graphics — just about every element of game design I can think of, really.
Some other less cogent thoughts, roused by today’s section discussion: 1) Problem Attic is less about gendered relations (which is more a concern in Braid) than relating to gender. 2) Though Problem Attic echoes Braid in many ways, it seems to express a fundamentally different approach to the future. Braid acts as a willed and optimistic pursuit of the future (and then critique thereof), Problem Attic plays as a forced escape into the future(s) from an (many) unbearable present(s).
And for a complete change of topic, an unrelated and unsolicited game pitch: Can anybody make a spoof of Braid set in the late Qing dynasty during the Opium Wars?? Here, the braid would be the Manchu queue and the game would also deal with time travel (across Ming and Qing dynasties, "domestic" colonialisms, and western imperialist regimes), selective memory, and vengeance (maybe with some regret/guilt. Hah!).
Well put! When playing Problem Attic, I also had difficulty ascribing meaning to the game. I generally felt unsettled throughout the entire game in my search for meaning. The universal (though not uniform) sense of unpleasantness throughout Problem Attic is one of its defining aspects, and the mechanics of the game are designed around this. As such, I would argue that the game is especially distressing for those who are searching for meaning or "aboutness".
The crosses in the game seem to establish themselves as an apparent enemy early on, but the player's motivation to avoid these entities is somewhat unconventional relative to other games. While traditional 2D-platformers typically grant enemies the power to place the player in an explicit…
Your point has given me a lot more clarity on how I felt playing Problem Attic. Having played it before reading Liz Ryerson's writing, with the addition of being terrible at platformers, the game was immediately frustrating and made me wonder what the game was trying to say; it makes a lot of sense for this wondering to be a fundamental part of its gameplay experience.
Ryerson's own take on what Problem Attic is about is "a game about prisons, real and imaginary"; the level of abstraction to which she takes those concepts I think is what allows your own interpretation to be sound even though she has a fairly direct answer. Regardless of what she says it is about…
Now I'm struggling with the word "about," and I want to interrogate that notion of "aboutness." As you said, the player can be obsessed with this "aboutness" (something that I didn't really experience; I couldn't care less what it's about). But that's the playcentric experience: when players are presented with games like Braid or Hello, Neighbor or Limbo, there's this overwhelming aesthetic mystery coming from some offbeat world with scattered plot. These devices appear in books and movies, leaving fans wondering what Infinite Jest or Mulholland Drive or Pulp Fiction's suitcase is all about. But if one were to say, "Infinite Jest uses confusing dialects that make the reader feel confused and upset," we would say, "Yeah, that's what the…
I really like what you have to say about Problem Attic's "aboutness" and how the game has almost no room for understanding while playing it besides feeling a senseless hurt and I agree with you. I personally think that it is so much more rewarding when a video game explains through feeling than through text. There is much information in just the experience of playing a game. This allows for a variety of interpretations and reactions like it received from other classmates; some dismissed it fairly quickly while others couldn't stop thinking about it. This leads me to think about the future of video games as a media and what other inexpressible feelings can be conveyed in a game for…
Hi Siri! This is a great point, and it reminds me of an essay by Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation, which you might find interesting if you haven't read it already: http://shifter-magazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Sontag-Against-Interpretation.pdf
This might be a bit out there, but if I were to map this week's indie game designers onto two German-language authors that Sontag mentions in her essay, I wonder if Ryerson could be likened to Kafka (producing work that seems to convey something senseless and inexpressible and can't even fully be understood on a rational level by the creator) and Blow to someone like Thomas Mann (whose works seem to have a specific intended interpretation that readers/players need to carefully discern through intentionally placed symbols and hints). These…