Probably my last Play Journal. Hope you guys enjoyed this as much as I did!

The Last of Us is an experience unlike most other games that I’ve played. In most games, there is a disconnect between the story and the gameplay itself. But here — even after several playthroughs throughout the years — the story, the gameplay, and the emotions that arise from both all still felt like they arise naturally from the game and mesh together into one cohesive and powerful whole. I feel as stressed out in a gunfight as when something bad happens to Ellie or Joel in a cutscene. I question the morality of Joel’s character when he tortures someone in a cutscene or when I play as him taking out the doctors at the end of the game. The emotional interplay between the player and The Last of Us is what has set it apart from any other game for me. And it is this emotional understanding that the game has with the player that has cemented it as one of the most influential games of the past decade.

“Reception theory is a branch of literary theory that explores the experiences of readers as they interact with the texts”

Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al 184

Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al use reception theory in their Understanding Video Games book to explain how players interact with games based on the knowledge they bring to the table. They call this a “literary repertoire,” and it is essential that a player brings the right repertoire with them in order to “appropriately enjoy” the game (Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al 184-5). Yet 13-year-old me was able to fully enjoy The Last of Us without much of the “right” repertoire. I understood the idea of a zombie apocalypse, an action-adventure game, and a survival game, but I’d never played any of these types of games before The Last of Us. What I’m getting at is there was no need for a literary repertoire for The Last of Us. What was needed instead was that inherent in all of us: an emotional repertoire. This along with the presentation of the game is its greatest strength.

Shaw understood that “identification” required a “distanced connection” (Shaw 141). This means that what is inherent to video games, its interactivity, can actually make its characters less identifiable. The Last of Us dodges this problem of identification by simply doing as film — making its characters relatable and disallowing the player to influence their decisions. The cutscenes in The Last of Us do not lessen the experience, they enhance it. We are experiencing Joel’s and Ellie’s story: it is not our story. With this distance and with the game’s understanding of our emotional repertoire, we can being to understand how The Last of Us achieves its goals as a game.

Works Cited:

Naughty Dog. The Last of Us. Sony Computer Entertainment America, 2013. PlayStation 3.

Shaw, Adrienne. “Chapter 3: He Could Be a Bunny Rabbit For All I Care!” Gaming At The Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture. University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

Zirkky. “The Last Of Us – Full Walkthrough All Gameplay & Cutscenes (Movie Marathon Edition).” Youtube, 24 June, 2013, https://youtu.be/xaV5FbpEiKM.

Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Simon, et al. “Chapter 8: Narrative.” Understanding Video Games: The Essential Introduction. Routledge, 2008.

All images were found from online sources:

https://www.playstation.com/es-mx/games/last-of-us-ps3/

I’ve skipped the 3rd Play Journal, if you’re confused where that is.

Also, as much as I’ve tried I haven’t been able to upload video files onto WordPress. Therefore, I won’t be able to explicitly show off Journey’s beautiful soundtrack in this blog. I’ll instead be referencing a linked YouTube video by timestamps.

“Where hands, senses, bodies and the tangible
qualities of games meet, the aesthetic meaning of games
emerges.”

Simon Niedenthal pg. 7

Journey is a game which I believe embodies Niedenthal conclusion on aesthetics to the fullest. The controls are simple; the gameplay is easy and fun; the sound design acute; the music is moving; the visual art is beautiful. All these elements feed off and into each other, making the play experience a truly aesthetic one for the player. But what exactly is Journey‘s aesthetic experience?

I believe that every good story, regardless of medium, should start off with a beginning like Journey‘s; it highlights what the rest of the game will encompass. It shows that there is a theme of loneliness, with the barren lands and the lone cello. These can be hostile, as seen with some of the dust clouds and the gale-like soundscape. There’s also a specific goal — to reach the mountain-top — echoed in reaching the top of the dune, giving us a theme of perseverance. There’s an elegance and beauty to the game — reinforced by the visuals, music, and simple controls/mechanics — making the game serious, calming, and spiritual. The cohesion between all of the elements in this scene makes one feel as though this “journey” will be an epic one — all the more reinforced with the title reveal (IAmSp00n 2:20).

So the cohesion of its elements makes Journey an aesthetically epic game then? I believe so, but this “epic” aesthetic is not the only emotion that we get from the gameplay. One view of game aesthetics is that it’s “an expression of the game experienced as pleasure, emotion, …etc” (Niedenthal 2). There is an overarching feeling of epicness, but there’s also moments of fun, awe, loneliness, distress, and spirituality. Although the game’s cohesion brings Journey to the realm of the aesthetic, I believe that the music more than anything else elevates it to a colorfully emotional aesthetic.

Collins says that immersion in games is complemented by the aural “communication of emotional meaning” (133). Journey‘s generally “interactive nondiegetic” music allows for this communication (Collins 126).

Music is the voice of the soul; and the player character’s voice is represented by the cello. Seen above is an image from a “transitional” sequence, which starts at 30:20 and ends at 32:37 (IAmSp00n). When you are with the other creatures, a joyful theme plays with flutes and various other instruments. But as you glide along and see the mountain, you also happen to notice buildings of the player character’s long lost culture. Here, even though you are not separated from the other creatures, the cello plays at the forefront, echoing the theme of loneliness — and makes us feel a solitude deeper than we could have thought of.

To conclude, we see that the cohesion of Journey‘s elements led to an aesthetic guided by emotions, these being largely defined by its music. The gameplay experience for each player thus reflects this.

Works Cited:

Collins, Karen. “Chapter 7: Gameplay, Genre, and the Functions of Game Audio.” Game Sound. MIT, 2008.

IAmSp00n. “Journey – Gameplay / Playthrough (No Commentary).” Youtube, 21 March, 2012, https://youtu.be/bkL94nKSd2M.

Journey. Thatgamecompany, 2012. PlayStation 3.

Niedenthal, Simon. “What We Talk About When We Talk About Game Aesthetics.” Malmö University, 2009.

All images were found from online sources:

https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/product/journey/home

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Note: From this journal on I won’t be giving a summary of the games in question, like with Mappy. I’ll just delve right into the analysis and hope the reader has played the game already 🙂

Papers Please is a game that uses much to its advantage, thereby improving its gameplay experience. I’m referring to things like how there’s upgrades that allow the player to use the keyboard for certain actions (e.g. turning on the inspect mode) rather than having to rely on the mouse the entire time. This could shave seconds off a player’s inspections, which is crucial for a time-based game like Papers Please. But of course these must be purchased, and money is also a crucial resource that the player must conservatively use.

Without this interconnectedness of these and many other aspects of the game, Papers Please‘s “challenge would be significantly diminished, if not removed altogether” (Rouse 468). I quote Rouse because, much like Centipede, Papers Please is a simple game that understands what makes games challenging and replayable. It’s taken that essence of classic games and transported it to our modern gaming era. All the elements — how you move the mouse, what you check for first on documents, the ticking clock, your family — add to each other and give each play a slightly rising tension.

Huizinga states that play itself is comprised of such things as “tension, mirth, and fun” (Huizinga 98). We see the tension in Papers Please, but how do we get this fun feeling when the game is about working, and most of it is a serious ordeal? Huizinga points out that “play can be very serious”, and with his examples we see how seriously play can be (Huizinga 101). But that doesn’t answer the question. How is Papers Please fun? Let’s delve deeper to see.

Disclaimer: I’ve only played 2 runs (getting jailed at the end) and I’m currently on a 3rd run, so I’ve yet to see all 20 endings. While playing I noticed I was more inclined to do things if they ended up giving me more money than if not. Detaining people, working with Ezic, and avoiding citations are all things I did for in-game money, regardless of their morality.

Which brings us into the next topic: story. This is something that Papers Please and many other modern games have above those classic games of the past, both because of the technology and culture surrounding games today. But what does story have to do with morality?

For Papers Please, your (im)moral choices — which could be determined by your play-style — lend themselves to make the story of Papers Please come to life. Because the game sways players into not losing (having some money), this in turn makes most players conducive to certain play-styles (like mine). This makes the story unfold as the developers intended while feeling completely natural to the player. Thus the story itself is intrinsically intertwined with the gameplay, having as much of a feedback loops as any of the other interconnected elements.

All these dynamic tensions of elements, I believe, give the overall sense of fun that we get when playing Papers Please.

Works Cited:

Huizinga, Johan. “Nature and Significance of Play as a Cultural Phenomenon.” The Game Design Reader: a Rules of Play Anthology, by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, MIT Press, 2009, pp. 96–120.

Rouse, Richard. “Game Analysis: Centipede.” The Game Design Reader: a Rules of Play Anthology, by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, MIT Press, 2009, pp. 460–473.

All images/GIFs are taken from a recording of my own gameplay. Papers Please is owned by Lucas Pope and 3909 LLC

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Mappy lets you play as Mappy whom must recover the items that were stolen from Goro and the Meowkies. The setting of the game is Goro’s mansion, and in each level the player must traverse its many floors via trampolines. The input controls are a joystick to move and a button to open/close the doors on each floor.

The game is like most other classic arcade games — as defined by Rouse — in that it is simple and hard to master. Having played Mappy in my childhood, I was able to advance up to level 5 when I’d played it at the arcade. My friend was able to start playing quite easily despite never having played Mappy before, advancing up to level 4 after losing a few times in the first 2 levels. This I think exemplifies why these types of games have a high replay incentive.

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The levels aren’t contained to one screen but what’s on screen still gives the player a lot of information, like where enemies, items, and doors are located. This gives the player enough information to strategically traverse the mansion, while withholding both the position of items on a level’s first run and where off-screen enemies are. This withheld information, among other things, gives the player a constant sense of tension in trying to deal with the enemies.

This tension is the core challenge and fun of the game. As the levels progress, there is an escalating tension that only truly gets released until each level is finished. There are also smaller releases of tension within each level when a player reaches the trampolines, since they’re immune to the Meowkies there. There are some bonus levels in between the normal ones that help alleviate the player. All of this prevents the game from becoming too stressful as its main objective is to be enjoyable.

Much like Centipede, there’s an interconnectedness between all the elements of the game. For instance, the doors serve as weapons for the player. If a Meowky or Goro open a door from the doorknob side — or if a player opens it while they’re there — they’ll be knocked out temporarily. Players can leave doors closed in order to stun enemies, or use the momentum of closing a door (while right next to it on the doorknob side) to slide away from them, or use the “rainbow” doors’ microwaves to wipe out a group at once. The player can either play aggressively and earn more points to get an extra life, or simply stunt the enemies while they try obtaining all the items. As we see, the doors can be used as a means to an end. But they also have to be managed by the player, which can only be done by traversing through the floors via the trampolines (which each jump gives points). The “tension” between all the elements of the game in the end allows it to be a perfectly balanced experience.

Sources for Images/Gifs:

https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Games/Arcade/Mappy–277952.html#

Mappy

https://gfycat.com/discover/mappy-gifs

https://www.primogif.com/tag/mappy