To be perfectly upfront whatever conclusion I come to here will be my thinly veiled attempt to just rave about this experience with some amount of coherence.
Now that that’s out of the way, let me tell you why I enjoyed this beautiful nightmare.
I went into Problem Attic with absolutely no context at all except for a hurried comment overheard on my way out of class. When I started playing, I was taking it almost as a joke. While this is not the first time that I have approached games as more than just time wasters, the idea that something so complex could be conveyed with such a (frankly, crappy looking) game struck me as pretentious. At first, I pushed on and made off handed remarks about what I thought things may represent to my husband, going off in all kinds of absurd directions and making it very clear that I was exaggerating the significance of the game elements.
“I only have to play this silly thing for an hour.”
Except it wasn’t an hour. It wasn’t even two hours. I wanted to win.
I suspect the low expectations I had coming in caused the game to surprise me when I found myself feeling things while playing it. Every new room felt like a new challenge, not necessarily a welcome one but yet... The glimpses of context I gathered in every stage made me want to see more. The whole game felt like one giant “F You” but for every victory I felt rewarded with much desired "plot". It felt like the world was against me (grating, screaming, flashing and jerking) but that only increased my resolve to move forward. Combined with the relatively fast pace of the game I was fully prepared to painstakingly figure out what was trying to be said.
"rooms... rooms... rooms... doorways...hallways...prisons my life in boxes"
"I can feel the anger coming off you like steam silently boiling around the periphery of your being"
"I wish I could feel sorry for you but I don't feel anything"
“I don’t have the answers anymore..”
Any time I saw text, I felt sympathy. I wanted to help figure out where we were going and why. I wanted to know if we ever figured out our goal. We. Before I knew it, I was empathizing. The shaking, the insecurity of the platforms I stood in, the fear and expectation that something would be changed on me, all those frustrations slowly took on a different light.
Near the end of the game, I had to replay old levels with slightly different victory conditions. Instinctively, I attempted to complete each level the way I had the first time to get a lay of the land. After doing this a few times I was beginning to feel comfortable, then one of the false routes ended with a death and this screen:
It just felt wrong. Even before I could discern what was in the text sound had screamed in my ear. It was a very strange and effective way to say, “You thought you knew where you were going, but you were wrong.” The design choice to make me “replay” levels created an eerie somewhat contradicting feeling:
uncomfortable familiarity.
Insecurity.
Fear.
By the time I finally reached the end I was starting to believe the end didn’t even exist.
After I completed the game, I read what the game’s own creator had to say and realized how well so much of what she admittedly felt had transferred to me even without context. A lot of the stages took on a new light. It gave me much to think about.
The player character’s experience “finding themselves” and navigating through dark paths unreliably jumping from light source to light source.. It was clear it all meant something more than just a pretentious frustrating game to Ryerson. The level design was extremely careful. Every step (or misstep) meant something. It was rough, unfair and uncomfortable. The messages may not have been “clear” but strangely their ambiguity spoke of more general feelings than just Ryerson’s personal experience. Its lack of specificity made it easier to react to than something like Braid’s extremely deliberate and intentionally wordy message. The readable text was sparse and challenging, so when I saw it I read it. I quickly grabbed screencaps. The act of running through the books without reading would have made all my frustrations fruitless.
Problem Attic is by no means a perfect game. It is clunky. It broke multiple times. (I was very grateful for the foresight Ryerson had in making the game save progress) The unclear directions and goal would have driven anyone short of a masochist away long before the delivery was complete.
Problem Attic hurt me… but that’s okay.
You described having feelings such as fear, uncomfortable familiarity, and insecurity while playing problem attic. How do you think the way a game makes you feel translates into what you at some point call both "sympathy" and "empathy." In class, our professor talked a little about how the creators of some of these games are insistent that others cannot empathize with them and that claiming to understand their experience is a disservice to their story. I am not trying to accuse you of any of this, but I would like to hear your take on how you think you are able to empathize with someone based on this gaming experience, and also if you think this game, which is less…