Breaksout, a collection of 36 mods by developer Pippin Barr, features an array of amusing, odd, and frustrating versions of Atari's familiar game Breakout. The controls stay the same in each version of the game (left and right to move in the corresponding directions) as the player tries to keep a ball bouncing from a platform and into a wall of bricks. Breaksout initially caught my interest just because of the way that so many of the levels tend to devolve toward chaos. Though each mod included in Breaksout tends to be very different from the others, the mods that really stood out to me because of their similarities were "Ballout," "Ghost Breakout," "Recursive Breakout," And "Unfair Breakout." While playing each of these versions, I asked myself: What does it mean to create a mod of a game that is less playable and less interactive than the original game?
Let me be clear, I'm not saying that I hate Breaksout or think it's unplayable overall -- instead I find the unplayability of some of its versions something to look into. In "Ballout," the player is tasked with controlling the direction of the ball rather than the platform, as the platform moves in response to the ball. This creates such an interesting shift in agency for the player to where you feel the desire to be antagonistic toward the platform, wanting to make it miss the ball as much as possible (or, perhaps that's just me). However, it's almost impossible to make the ball not hit the platform, and most of the time you just end up futilely moving around the ball as the platform follows closely behind (or, not moving the ball at all and just letting an endless game of Breakout go on). This futility is echoed in "Ghost Breakout" where the platform is moved around by an invisible entity, independent of the player's control. The player can move against this invisible thing if they want, but will just get roped into a tug-of-war type of struggle -- and if the player loses this level, it's not their fault, their ghost just sucks.
"Unfair Breakout" and "Recursive Breakout" present two other mods in which the gameplay consists of not...playing. Or, at least, limited "play." The platform in "Unfair Breakout" is almost as long as the play screen, which gives the player no ability to move around and also means that there is no possibility to lose. In "Recursive Breakout" the player is able to move their platform, but each time the ball hits a brick, the screen zooms in until a new play-screen is opened up within that brick. It never ends. With both of these mods, I eventually resorted to gazing absently at my laptop screen as "play" happened.
This whole thing makes me wonder what I even mean when I say casually say "playing" video games. What am I doing in a Super Mario game, for instance, that I'm not offered in Breaksout that makes me question the definition of gameplay? Do games require a living, human player to interact with them, or, like in Breaksout, can gaming consist of a machine beating itself? Anyway, I found Breaksout to be a lot of fun. I certainly don't have answers to these questions, but I do find it fascinating to consider modding a game to make it...less of a game, in some ways.
I also felt this sense of futility that relates to how we might interpret “play”. I enjoyed “tragic breakout” and “social breakout” because of how “play” is unavoidably disrupted by an odd event. The humor in these Breaksout mods comes from the absurdity of their mechanics— tragically mourning for every brick in “Tragic Breakout” and being redirected to Twitter for “Social Breakout” is repetitive, but the variation in text seems to give the player enough material to be occupied with “gameplay”. The definition of play could involve anything around the player’s past experiences and historical context. I’m thinking of the mods within Breaksout as a performance of fun and while some are less "playable", they bring together an overall “performance…