Present Tension 2

In the vast major­i­ty of cases, the gram­mar of narrative-driven videogames places them in the past tense.

Let me explain that a lit­tle more. Grammar is the set of rules which gov­erns the way any given lan­guage con­structs itself and pro­duces its mean­ing. Thus when I say, ‘I mar­ket to yes­ter­day go the,’ it is strange to you because it defies the con­ven­tions of English verb for­ma­tion and word order. With some effort you might decode my mean­ing, but the sen­tence doesn’t lend itself to easy com­mu­ni­ca­tion. ‘I went to the mar­ket yes­ter­day’ works much bet­ter, with­out actu­al­ly chang­ing all that much in the sen­tence, because it aligns with your expec­ta­tions.

To make sense of the above sen­tence we must refor­mu­late the verb ‘to go’ into its past tense ver­sion ‘went’ (a process called con­ju­ga­tion). Having done this, the sen­tence aligns more suit­ably with the adverb ‘yes­ter­day’. So, in gram­mar small changes we make to our verbs (‘go’ becomes ‘went’, ‘do’ becomes ‘did’, ‘play’ becomes ‘played’) loud­ly con­vey mean­ing to the lis­ten­er, or read­er. In this case the use of ‘went’ instead of ‘go’ tells us that what we’re dis­cussing occurred before the present time.

Most games have a story, or at least a sequence of events, along which we the play­er are guid­ed. Imagine, if you will, the pro­ces­sion of events in a game being like the pro­ces­sion of words in an (admit­ted­ly very drawn out) sen­tence. As things progress, more becomes clear. First we have ‘I’. Ok, the sub­ject is dis­cussing her­self. Then ‘went to’. The sub­ject is talk­ing about her­self and some kind of move­ment of her entire being at some stage in the past. Now ‘the mar­ket’, which gives us the des­ti­na­tion of the move­ment as well as assum­ing a cer­tain com­mon knowl­edge of just what this ‘the mar­ket’ is. We now have the sub­ject, the action and the object of the sen­tence. Our speak­er could stop there and have a per­fect­ly gram­mat­i­cal sen­tence, but she bless­es us with a lit­tle more con­text in ‘yes­ter­day’, just to give us a slight­ly bet­ter read on when this event took place. Gradually, word by word, the what, where and when of an event have been com­mu­ni­cat­ed.

Likewise, the mechan­ics and nar­ra­tives of story-driven games, (which is real­ly to say, most games) grad­u­al­ly con­vey more infor­ma­tion about the con­text in which their events take place. As with the sen­tence above, we will often first be intro­duced to the player-character, the sub­ject of events. Perhaps we’ll then be given some wider infor­ma­tion of what, when, where, how and so on. The options are as wide and var­ied as all the sen­tences of English. But an over­whelm­ing­ly com­mon fea­ture of videogames is that they sit­u­ate their events in the past. When you play a game you may, like the lis­ten­er to the sen­tence above, be expe­ri­enc­ing your first per­cep­tion of the event it por­trays, but the inter­nal sug­ges­tion revealed by its gram­mar is that the event is already a done deal.

Consider the hum­ble ‘Game Over’ screen, some­times sub­sti­tut­ed with ‘You’re Dead!’ or ‘Fail’ or the straight-to-the-point ‘Continue?’ What this mes­sage usu­al­ly sig­ni­fies is ‘You did it wrong’. There is a cor­rect nar­ra­tive in any given game; per­haps it’s, ‘Mario reached the end of the level and saved the princess’ and your ‘Game Over’ screen rep­re­sents your diver­gence from that pre-destined nar­ra­tive. The story does not go, ‘Mario got past the ris­ing fire­ball but his momen­tum sent him run­ning straight off a precipice. The where­abouts of the princess is cur­rent­ly unknown’. Mario DOES save the princess, just as soon as you stop fuck­ing it up. In many sens­es videogames carry an under­cur­rent of mean­ing which insin­u­ates that their out­come has already hap­pened; it is past tense. Our job as play­ers is to grad­u­al­ly unlock new seg­ments of the story, not to cre­ate it for our­selves.

Of course, there are games that have active­ly played with this aspect of their nature. Prince of Persia: Sands of Time is deft­ly set up as a story told by the Prince to Farah, his female love inter­est, after he trav­els back in time and vis­its her before the events relat­ed even take place. If the play­er diverts the nar­ra­tive from its nor­mal con­clu­sion, say by falling off a ledge or dying in bat­tle, the Prince’s voiceover cuts in to blame the diver­gence on his own mis­re­mem­ber­ing: ‘Wait, that’s not how it hap­pened’.

The Assassin’s Creed series’ Animus device is a sim­i­lar con­ceit in that it cre­ates a nar­ra­tive facade for the player’s mechan­i­cal fail­ures. The game’s avatar-within-an-avatar sys­tem makes a gamer out of Desmond, who inhab­its the bod­ies of his assas­sin ances­tors. Desmond has con­trol of the body of his pre­de­ces­sors but not of their des­tiny, which is already laid out in his­to­ry. Thus he, (and, by exten­sion, we) may act out their lives with­in the game’s bound­aries, but stray­ing from the set path by, say, pre­ma­ture­ly dying or mur­der­ing inno­cents caus­es Desmond’s game-within-a-game real­i­ty to lit­er­al­ly frag­ment and drift away. ‘Altaïr didn’t kill inno­cents’ it might say. You’re not play­ing it how it hap­pened. You’re telling the story wrong.

–

When it comes to Dark Souls there’s a lot to talk about. Let’s get this out of the way – Christ it’s fuck­ing hard. Good, now we can talk about some­thing inter­est­ing. Dark Souls is dif­fer­ent, in a hell of a lot of ways, one of which is that its gram­mar places it firm­ly in the present tense. In it one can find an accep­tance, if not out­right encour­age­ment, of the fail­ure state most games seek to rewind and rewrite. The game’s infa­mous, bru­tal dif­fi­cul­ty links into its ‘Prepare to die’ tagline to man­i­fest a game at home with the prospect of fail­ure and replay. Dark Souls pulls few, if any, punch­es. You will fail. You will die. You will try again. And again. And again. And even then you still might not get any­where. If you aren’t will­ing to accept those con­di­tions, this is not the game for you.

But if you are you’ll find that Dark Souls is fully, the­mat­i­cal­ly, mechan­i­cal­ly con­sis­tent in its approach. If death in most games is mere­ly a facade for the player’s fail­ure to progress cor­rect­ly, what are we to make of the fact that you start this game dead? Clearly it is out to shake up the estab­lished norm. Death in Dark Souls returns you to the last bon­fire you were at, an old school check­point sys­tem, but you will return Hollow, an undead ver­sion of your pre­vi­ous self. The check­point is a famil­iar gam­ing mech­a­nism, but your undead self is sug­ges­tive of the pre­vi­ous, liv­ing self; the nar­ra­tive after your death is the same one it was before. No over­writ­ing here, you are relo­cat­ed spa­tial­ly but not tem­po­ral­ly. When you are revived at the bon­fire you’ll find your inven­to­ry as it was at the moment you died, what you used up try­ing to sur­vive has gone. Also gone are the souls and human­i­ty (essen­tial­ly in-game cur­ren­cies) you had col­lect­ed until that point, but they haven’t dis­ap­peared like a col­lect­ed score, they remain with a blood stain where you died. The game forces you to med­i­tate upon your death, your fail­ure, and choose whether to return and face the har­bin­ger of your defeat or lose your ill-gotten gains. Learn or suf­fer. These fea­tures pre­clude the ‘go back and start again’ nature of the major­i­ty of story-driven games. In Dark Souls, death is expect­ed and accept­ed. The famil­iar check­point trope of gam­ing mutates into a present-tense, per­pet­u­al­ly evolv­ing moment, with your avatar expe­ri­enc­ing exact­ly the same death and renew­al as you. You do not restart, you regress.

But it isn’t so straight­for­ward. For you and I, time slips con­tin­u­al­ly for­ward as we bal­ance pre­car­i­ous­ly on the ever mov­ing pin­point known as the ‘present’. Behind us a grow­ing expanse of used ‘presents’ make up the ‘past’, while before us stretch­es the unknow­able vari­ety of pos­si­bil­i­ties that make up poten­tial ‘futures’. While Dark Souls adept­ly con­jures a liv­ing expe­ri­ence of the present it simul­ta­ne­ous­ly prob­lema­tizes our sense of the in-game past and future. When one rests at the afore­men­tioned bon­fire check­points to regain health, heal­ing items and save the game, every pre­vi­ous­ly defeat­ed enemy respawns in its orig­i­nal posi­tion. Likewise, return­ing to a bon­fire after death also respawns the ene­mies. Boss char­ac­ters don’t respawn, but die by their hand (claw/blade/dark sorcery/slathering maw) and when you return you’ll find them back in their start­ing state. Atop the Bell Tower of Undead Parish you’ll bat­tle an enor­mous Gargoyle which, once fought down to around half its health, will break your heart as it is joined by its equal­ly mas­sive twin. Die to them, return to the last bon­fire and make your way back to the rooftop and you’ll find one Gargoyle await­ing you, at full health, to be joined by his buddy once you’ve chopped him halfway down again.

Brendan Keogh has read Dark Souls as time­less, pur­ga­to­r­i­al. Perhaps he’s right. In this world, the sun’s rays break through the clouds, but it never moves, never sets, never rises. Non-aggressive char­ac­ters sit and wait for… for what? How long have they been here? Minutes? Millennia? Their voic­es are weary, hol­low, mad. I myself have watched syrupy hours seep past with­out mak­ing any true progress, only to burst through the bar­ri­er and dis­cov­er great stretch­es of new land­scape in min­utes. What mock­ery of the past is this, when the ene­mies I’ve struck down pre­vi­ous­ly stand before me again? And what muti­la­tion of the future, when I know the very enemy who stands around the next cor­ner, hav­ing fall­en to his strike before? This game pro­ceeds so deeply entrenched in the present tense it deletes the very foun­da­tions of the past and future.

–

The rules sur­round­ing the tra­di­tion­al Japanese poet­ry form ‘haiku’ are nowhere near as strin­gent as they are stereo­typ­i­cal­ly thought to be. A haiku need not be made up of three lines of 5−7−5 syl­la­bles, for exam­ple, but rather ought to be less than 17 syl­la­bles in total length. While the con­ven­tions sur­round­ing the struc­ture of haiku are flex­i­ble, more rig­or­ous focus is put on con­tent. To be at its best a haiku will usu­al­ly present a cer­tain image fol­lowed by a piv­otal shift to anoth­er image. This sec­ond image usu­al­ly com­bines with the first to give a rev­e­la­tion or dis­cov­ery, an ‘Aha!’ moment. The con­tent of a haiku is fre­quent­ly nature-based and usu­al­ly has a light-hearted gen­tle­ness which belies a med­i­ta­tive sense of inject­ed mean­ing. Consider Bashō’s sem­i­nal exam­ple of the form:

old pond …
a frog leaps in
water’s sound

Now I don’t know about you, but some­thing about the scarce detail, the intense focus, the famil­iar­i­ty of the themes means some­how… some­how I can almost hear the ‘plop’ of frog on pond. Haiku cap­ture moments like a pho­to­graph. Not an image laid out before us imme­di­ate­ly, but more like a polaroid that grad­u­al­ly reveals itself as we watch. Essential to a haiku is its use of the present tense, which sit­u­ates it firm­ly in the moment it looks to relate and there­by drench­es that moment with mean­ing. Indeed, the haiku ide­al­ly seeks to place its read­er inside the very moment it por­trays. In the very best haiku you find every­thing and noth­ing:

Just friends:
he watch­es my gauze dress
blow­ing on the line.
– Alexis Rotella (After an Affair, Merging Media, 1984)

at the height
of the argu­ment the old cou­ple
pour each other tea
– George Swede

the ceme­tery fence
is unable to hold back
white lilies
–Jane Reichhold

The use of the present tense endows haiku with both imme­di­a­cy and per­ma­nence in a very sim­i­lar way to Dark Souls, allow­ing us a slight­ly dif­fer­ent view of Dark Souls’ own use of it. There is no doubt that the game seeks to por­tray a night­mar­ish vision, but while a sense of pur­ga­to­r­i­al limbo is an aes­thet­ic result this is not the only out­come. Through forc­ing a focus on even small moments, the con­ceal­ment of its wider nar­ra­tive and a strong med­i­ta­tive under­cur­rent of replay, learn­ing and under­stand­ing, the game presents itself like a long inter­ac­tive haiku. Dark Souls’ dis­tor­tion of its past and future acts like the white­space around a haiku, delet­ing any sense of the before and after and liv­ing only for the moment with­in. As Brendan writes, ‘People have told me Dark Souls is about the jour­ney, not the des­ti­na­tion. I think this is more true than they real­ize. I can’t imag­ine Dark Souls even has an end­ing’. The game’s wide appeal in spite of its sav­age inac­ces­si­bil­i­ty speaks vol­umes for the sub­tle ways it envelops its play­er into the con­text and rules of its world. Its gram­mar is con­sis­tent and, impor­tant­ly, is manip­u­lat­ed to ful­fil its artis­tic vision. When one steps into the bro­ken tem­po­ral­i­ty of this game, every moment becomes some­thing to med­i­tate upon, every enemy a puz­zle, every sin­gle step a part of the story. There is noth­ing but the moment.