Gameology 2.0

At what point does a cartoon become a videogame? I'd said in my review of Monkey Island 2 that I often felt I was directing a cartoon rather than playing a game. I got that same feeling on a much larger scale while playing the third game in the series, Curse of Monkey Island. Indeed, I doubt that someone would realize just by glancing at screenshots that this was a videogame rather than a traditional animated feature. The interface is minimalist and seldom obtrudes onto the screen. Likewise, the puzzles here are weaved carefully into the action and do not involve zooms or "cuts" to another game screen. I dare say that just watching someone navigate through this game would represent decent entertainment, though of course playing is much more so.

Like all LucasArts games, this one is highly self-reflexive. There are countless references to itself as a videogame, other Lucas Arts titles, and pop culture allusions. The player is constantly deliberately reminded that he is playing a videogame, often to humorous effect. For instance, in one scene the player can have the avatar stick his head out of a crack in the ceiling of a tomb. The screen then shifts to a scene from what looks like the original Monkey Island, complete with the lower-resolution graphics.

Another example is from the non-diegetic game options screen. At the bottom is an option to "enable 3-D acceleration." However, clicking it generates a message that there is no 3-D acceleration. Repeated clicks generate "No, really, there is no 3-D" and so on. The dialogue is also full of self-reflexivity. One character tells the avatar that at least his fiction "doesn't require thousands of dollars worth of hardware."

To make matters even more interersting for a new media scholar, the last chapter of the game is set in a theme park. Many new media scholars enjoy theorizing about theme parks. Marie-Laure Ryan uses the theme park to describe a type of interactive setup she calls the "action space," in which "the user is free to take any road, but when she reaches a site, the system takes control of her fate and sends her into a self-contained adventure" (255).

How interesting is this for a new media scholar: In the last chapter, the avatar must travel aboard a roller coaster from set to set with animatronic robots arranged in scenes from the previous Monkey Island games. The ride looks suspiciously like the Disney ride Pirates of the Carribean. The avatar even confronts an animatronic representation of himself. Coming to grips with these deeply layered remediations is enough to warp one's brainpan.

Anyway, I was reading Laure-Ryan's Narrative as Virtual Reality book while playing through Curse, which turned out to be a very enriching juxtaposition. Ryan has a lot to say about the type of reflexivity that's so prominent in the LucasArts games. One particularly interesting passsage is this one:

This is an intereting argument, particularly in light of the high degree of self-reflexivity in cartoons and the remediated cartoon (which is how I describe games like Curse of Monkey Island). However, I'm not sure I agree with Ryan. Indeed, I think the self-reflexivity of these games makes them more immersive. By frankly acknowledging and poking fun at their medium, these games help us develop new conceptual strategies for making the transition between the immersion of the traditional toon to the remediated one. Here, even the non-diegetic menu options screen becomes just one more gag (whereas in other games it would represent a clear break).

To put it simply, when you're working with a medium that asks as much from the audience as a graphical adventure game, ackowledging the medium is an essential strategy of raising its immersive potential. It's a difficult point I'm trying to make here, but I'm simply offering a counter-claim to Ryan's. Again, here is her perspective:

What I'm offering instead is that these moments of self-reflexivity do not remind us of the "real world" and thus block immersion. Instead, such moments increase immersion by encouraging a more playful attitude towards the game's ergodicity. In other words, we're able to immerse ourselves more fully because we can pretend that the interface and machinery producing the medium is itself part of the world we're trying to enter.

It's quite possible that the reason why the Lucas Arts games manage to retain their play-value after years of technological innovations is their skillful use of self-reflexivity to assist immersion.