The Jagged Edge of Perception [Editorial]

July 12, 2010

by Eric-Jon Rössel Tairne

In real life, the edges of perception are where everything starts to kick in. Across that threshold is where our minds and our emotions run away with themselves, struggling to fill in the missing details and so make sense of the world. This is the realm of the uncanny, where objects materialize out of blind spots and scare the wits out of us, where spirits and monsters threaten to live, where optical illusions and magic tricks make us question what we know of the world. It’s these moments that suggest to us that there’s more to life than we’ve been led to understand. How we respond to that notion depends partially on our own personalities, and partially on the context.

Likewise, even in the closed system of a videogame there is only so much that a designer can draw, and only so many variables that a designer can define. Even in the simplest games it’s tough to account for everything and simple for the player to find a thread to pick away at — say, a seam in the geometry or a weird bit of physics. And then the more possibilities that you suggest, the more that the mind will begin to drift and wonder what else is out there, what else is possible.

Technical limitations also play a role, in that they draw a certain line over which the world cannot possibly exist. When the game presses up against those limitations, as in a late-era console game — your Streets of Rage III, your Silent Hill — you get a certain crackly pressure. Subconsciously you can feel the game straining to make its case, due to the mismatch of the game’s idea of reality and the reality imposed on the game by the hardware.

The NES is a fun object lesson, as from the moment it hit US shores it was outdated, its games bending the rules all over the place just to exist. On its own the NES isn’t all that much stronger than, say, a Colecovision. Every new feature that came along — horizontal scrolling, vertical scrolling, cutscenes — meant more custom memory chips. By the early ’90s the average NES cartridge was practically a console in itself; the NES itself acted more as a copy-editor, checking to make sure the input made sense then passing it along to the TV screen. So for most of its life, just about every game for the system has an unnerving glitchiness just under the skin, threatening to break loose and disrupt its carefully argued reality. Sometimes, as in Metroid, those glitches become as much a part of the game as the intended rules, suggesting untold depths that perhaps nobody has ever explored before.

Where the Buffer Ends

Whatever might define the limits, in videogames there also is this threshold of perception. Cross that threshold and the player gets a shot of cognitive dissonance — a bit of awe and mystery and fear. How that frisson resolves itself — whether positively, negatively, or ambivalently — depends on where the phenomena lead, their eventual implications, and how this all reflects on the stability of the game’s overt reality.

This frisson all powerful enough when it’s incidental — whether a side effect of design or technology. When these boundaries are used deliberately, we arrive at some of the most profound stuff possible in the medium. Furthermore, this stuff is profound in a way both unique and specific to videogames. If you’re looking for the frontier of the art, here it is.

To go back to Silent Hill, the game’s power comes from its use of the god-awful technical limitations of the PlayStation. Instead of pretending the limitations aren’t there, and imploring the player to ignore the flaws — the paper-thin, wobbly geometry, the woeful draw distance, the shaky controls — it paints to the canvas it is dealt. It shrouds the environment in fog and darkness, and then hands the player a screeching radio to hint at all the terrible things beyond that fuzzy horizon. It paints a subtly warped, askew world where the faulty geometry renderer only adds to the sense of unease. It casts an unremarkable schlub as a hero — a confused single father who just wants to find his daughter and return to barely getting by in life. He’s untrained in close combat and has probably never held a firearm in his life. So if the controls map awkwardly, well, they kind of would.

Indie games often toy with this horizon, to an extent that commercial games do more rarely. Snowdrift studies the same rendering phenomenon as Silent Hill, and then wanders down its own expressive path. So to speak. Biggt’s games, particularly his La La Land series, toy with nightmarish disconnects between actions and presumed consequences; press a directional key, and you might flicker and reappear in a corner of the screen, or the game might seem to crash, or you might receive a random reward. Or you might just walk to the right. Other games, like Love+ and Hero Core, simply limit their canvas to focus their expressive point.

The Spaces In Between

Which brings us to a related issue, that being retro stylization and the apparent mystique of big, jagged, poorly rendered pixels and worlds where you pretty much have to figure things out for yourself over lushly rendered worlds with clingy tutorials. It’s easy to discount it all as nostalgic snobbery — which in some cases it may be — but it seems that more often this kind of technical limitation, even if just in presentation, is a statement of aesthetic preference. Somehow these games seem to just communicate more, more easily. And there is a solid conceptual grounding here.

Basically, limiting the technical canvas reels in the edge of perception and allows the brain to make up more material, which creates a built-in mystique. Yet that’s kind of a facile, handwavey explanation. This kind of limitation holds as much an expressive as an aesthetic component.

The smaller your bandwidth, the scarcer your resources, the more you need to get by on implication rather than exposition. Think of the weird phenomenon of Twitter. When it first appeared, it was to universal derision. How could a person communicate anything of value within just 140 characters? And then the culture exploded, and the form came to exhibit a secret, haiku-like elegance. Likewise, the limitations of NES hardware result in design shortcuts that in our minds create apparent, if often accidental, meaning.

Why do the rocks in The Legend of Zelda look like turtles? When you touch statues, they come alive. Do the rocks turn into Koopa Troopas? Why do Octorocks look like the urchins from Clu-Clu Land? Is there some relationship there? If any tree and any rock might hide a secret, and if in the second quest the recorder has new secret powers — heck, if there’s a second quest in the first place, with a secret code to unlock it — what else might the game be hiding? Could there be a third quest? If I found a burned just the right bush, would it take me to a whole new overworld?

Frogs and Shadows

Although on the surface it looks comparably lush, Riven: The Sequel to Myst sort of uses this phenomenon. The game is filled with secret connections and implications that become apparent only after you understand the culture and history of the fictional gameworld. Often the game hints those connections in several simultaneous ways, any of which an astute player might hook into depending on the way the player perceives things. That creaking wood sounds an awful lot like a whale; is that significant? Oh, hey, if you stand in this tunnel in just the right place, the negative space in the distance looks like a frog. Is that your imagination, or are you just reading into things?

Much as Silent Hill uses its limitations to make its point, Riven takes advantage of its laborious slideshow presentation to cast the player in the role of a forensic investigator, flipping back and forth through static information to observe and study and make connections. Our perspective is strictly limited, and anything outside of that view we have to extrapolate. The mentality that this presentation fosters is directly conducive to wonder and a sense of epiphany, which funnels right back into the game’s expressive goals.

A jagged, indistinct 8-bit presentation allows at least lip service to this phenomenon without the need for a big budget or a big plan. Clearly there is no reason for Zelda rocks to look like turtles; they probably only look that way to me, and I spend far too long thinking about nonsense. Yet that’s what a retro presentation brings to the discussion, and it’s the superficial promise of these moments that grabs the subconscious and reels a person in. It’s great that people have hooked into this, and that even in the mainstream games like Mega Man 9 bring with them a certain hipness. The trick is to get past the superficial or fetishistic aspects of this discipline, that just feed into gamers’ carefully-trained compulsive natures, and to seize that untapped uncanny energy for its true potential.