When Patrick told everyone to pick a mod from Breaksout to specifically look into, I was excited. I wanted to play a mod that was fun, innovative, creative, and something I could potentially share with my friends. After looking through the list, I saw many contenders: “Shit Breakout,” “Breakout VR,” and “KoutBrea” all sounded particularly interesting. However, I had settled on “Eke out,” simply because I had never seen the word “Eke” before, and wanted to learn what it meant through the game. Very quickly, I kind (of) regretted my decision.
Eke Out changes Breakout by increasing the amount of blocks needed to clear the screen by a scale of at least 20. At first it does not seem as so, but upon hitting the first block, the player is generously rewarded with either .05 or .06 points. Additionally, the goal of the game remains the same: to break all the blocks.
The proceduralism of Eke out fits the essence of “eke.” The tiny progress shepherded by destroying blocks lengthens the amount of time it takes to finish the game dramatically. The lack of spatial destruction caused by the ball also makes it virtually impossible to do the usual trick: get to the top and let the ball bounce back and forth between the ceiling and the barricade. Eke out, places the time and labor of Breakout to an extreme, so much so, that I could barely get past 1% progress without wanting to quit.
I found myself not having fun.
Boluk and LeMieux, however, wouldn’t have been surprised that Eke out was boring. In analyzing the possibilities of mods as metagames, they claim that not all mods are really made out to be that fun. They assert that “When the metagame is no fun, it begins to expose the ideological avatar of play as just that, an avatar,” (284). Eke out is simply the possibility that came into realization, Pippin bar’s method of saying “I could, so I did.” Yet, I couldn’t help but feel disappointment if Eke out modded Breakout just for the sake of modding it. Was it really a waste of time?
Well, outside of writing this piece, I went back to play Eke out. In my second playthrough, I tried to find a pattern in the distribution of .05 and .06 valued blocks but to no fruition. In my third, I tried to power through and beat my personal best (tried and failed). In my fourth, I just refused to hit the ball. As I further internalized the feeling of barely making progress, Eke out became more of an emotional experience than a physical one. It pushed the math major in me to try and theorize and prove something new. It pushed the completionist in me to be more and more enduring. It pushed the gamer in me, because I didn’t want to just give up on Eke out, the game I had chosen. Eke out, despite not being as fun as I had hoped, still translated as a metagame. As Boluk and LeMieux would say, it created that relationship between involuntary operations and the player’s experience, which amplified the connection I had with the rules of Breakout and the emotions of Eking (285). In the end, I wouldn’t say it was a waste of my time. Through Eke out, I understood Pippin Barr’s motives and learned the limits of my endurance as a gamer, while at the same time, experiencing a new addition to my vocabulary.
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