Q+A: Taking Physical Notes

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Series: Question and Answer

This is me playing the Golgo 13 arcade game from Raizing. Thanks to Heather for the picture!

DoodleDud asks:

Would you be interested in writing about players taking notes in games?

I’ll link DoodleDud’s other thread on this as well for context. It gets into this excellent, raw point about physical notes – that they can be completely wrong – when compared in-game systems, that will point players towards the right outcome or filter out extraneous info. In modern implementations this seems absolutely right; admittedly I haven’t played many games that would probably fall into this category, but it did instantly bring to mind this review from chump about Return of the Obra Dinn. I’ll let their words speak for me here:

…Or, at the very least, done away with automatic fate validation, which is arguably part of a bigger problem. On top of magically telling you when any three of your guesses are correct, your journal matches faces to pictures, reflexively records which crew members were present in each memory, and determines which lines were spoken by the victim before his or her death. Obviously, this was all done to promote convenience, but it comes at the expense of making you feel less like a detective. Most of the time, it seemed like my journal was playing the part of Holmes and I was just its Watson.

The first thing my mind ran to when I saw this question was why some people seem intent on games making you take physical notes as a bonus, or rather, the absence of a feature giving the game texture.1 The bounds between play and game here matter, where the game enables whatever your personal conception of play is, and the play is the way we engage with the game. If your primary “virtue” when it comes to game critique is that of the fantasy it provides, then you, in a sense, want games to provoke particular kinds of play that resemble the fantasy, not necessarily want the game to completely encapsulate the fantasy. Valuing rules over fantasy can actually harm the fantasy, as we see in this quote above. The fantasy that Return of the Obra Dinn provides – that of being a detective investigating murders upon a ship – is squandered by the actual rules of the game, which let the player compulsively guess to see if they’re correct and favor specific aspects such as presence of crew members and final words. Is this really what a detective does? The detective’s goal is to construct a plausible explanation of a case that will never be 100% minutely accurate to the happenings, as they will never be able to witness them personally.2 Leaning too hard into what the rules want you to do here doesn’t privilege that goal (and its associated fantasy), but rather promises a guarantee on accuracy with a limited and highlighted set of evidence. This case is especially interesting: would taking notes here actually solve this particular issue? What it would do is prevent the privileging of specific bits of information, making the evidentiary record messier, and elevating that aspect of the fantasy. That isn’t all of the issues, but it is at least a salve on the experience.

Above I posted a picture of me playing Golgo 13 on a real cabinet with an attached rifle down in at Arcadia Manor in Greensboro. These elaborate arcade cabinets represent what I think is an earlier method of highlighting fantasy: actual physical components to interact with. Steering columns, shifters, and pedals for driving games, yokes for flight games, light guns and dance pads and all sorts of other controllers custom-built to provide fantasy. Speaking in a very general manner, I think many cultural forces around gaming have collectively suppressed the virtue of fantasy in favor of others: virtue of decision-making, virtue of narrative, etc. Obviously it’s not completely dead, you can look at the reams of Simulator-branded games depicting mundane tasks and see that the virtue has been brought forward on a surface level. If you look at something like Powerwash Simulator though, beyond the lack of the bespoke controller, you can see other goals under the hood that deviate from the original arcade norm of fantasy. For that game in particular, the pacifying aspect of playing it directly contradicts the fantasy; Powerwash Simulator is light and boring and a glorious sleep aid, while actually power washing something requires you to feel the massive force of the water spewing out of a tool in your hand for potentially hours in concert with the noise. I’m not sure fantasy for its own sake really gets people moving if they view the game as “just a game,” something to sink time into or delve into the rules of or compete in. And I’ll admit I’m not someone who necessarily values fantasy highly, so I don’t usually mind when a game takes notes for me. I do take my own for puzzle adventures, survival horror, and dungeon crawlers, but I wouldn’t ding a game for including them (very generally, although I can see chump’s objections above being an issue to me), just as I wouldn’t ding a game for not including them.

The automapped version of Floor 4 of Wizardry Gaiden I. [src]

An example I do find interesting in the conception discussed in DoodleDud’s thread is the dungeon mapping in Wizardry Gaiden I, which I played most of recently.3 In this particular Wizardry entry, the game will automap tiles, walls, staircases, and the elevator. However, you have to use a spell (of which you have limited slots) to view it, and you can only view the current floor. Those are facets I like, first off. However, what’s pertinent here is what it actually visualizes. If you look at Floor 4 above, it looks pretty typical: large corridors on the outer perimeter, threads inside leading to individual rooms. However, these outer corridors are, for the most part, actually cursed with magical darkness, and there are multiple teleports in other pockets of darkness all over the map that will lead you back into the outer perimeter while seeming contiguous the whole time from the part of the player. Thus, the map shown here is a crude, “sensible” representation of the actual map, which seems to fold over into itself in space repeatedly. My notes for this all are about the teleport points and attempting to make sense of which inner hallways bleed into the outer perimeter on accident through trial-and-error. The in-game notes here are actually wrong, to some extent! So it does solve the issue that DoodleDud has identified here with regards to in-game notes and recaptures what makes handwritten notes compelling. Perhaps games need more spaces like these, specifically non-contiguous or with items that change function over time (or according to hidden dynamics) such that the game ends up lying about itself in order to present players with the conundrum of writing their own notes.

  1. I recently read Rancière’s What Medium Can Mean thinking about recent debate over games as medium vs. art (I think the distinction is a vast oversimplification to be honest). Like much good writing, it persists in my head because of how much I didn’t understand (maybe 70% of it, if I had to quantify it). He discusses ‘milieu’ as that where “the performances of a determined artistic arrangement come to be inscribed, but also… that these performances themselves contribute to configuring.” His focus is photography: the intersection of the technology itself (the instrument) and the art that arises from it, and specifically the artistic facets arise not just from this intersection but the cultural perception of the intersection. His example here is – pulled from Barthes’ Camera Lucida – a photo of a man in a jail cell, with the specific pang of pathos for the individual viewer (the punctum within his studium and punctum concept) being that the man is going to die. But this is a contextual knowledge unrepresented in the photograph, the viewer would have to know that this person is “Lewis Payne, sentenced to death in 1865 for attempting to murder the American Secretary of State.”4 Barthes’ (and of course, Rancière’s as well) point here is in illustrating the capacity of photography to hold death through depictions of life, which, furthermore, comes from the stasis of photography lending itself to a milieu of history and depictions thereof. The medium itself bears the duty of pulling context into what it produces just as it, in turn, decontextualizes literal depiction of events moving through time. Consider the execution of process (let’s call this the underlying action of the fantasy virtue mentioned later in this article) the abstract duty that the medium of gaming imposes on its players, the milieu dragged along by games through the conception of a “control surface,” or input method or your terminology of choosing. When I played Golgo 13, I’m interacting with the game indirectly through the control surface provided by the cabinet, which, if we consider the game to be the program itself and not the surrounding environment, is more a temporary vessel for the work rather than integral to it (hence why you can attempt to play it in MAME). This is aided by, as this article points out, the rifle is properly inert, and its scope only magnifies (as compared to the Silent Scope series, where the scope is an actual mini-screen, although this is still just a vessel of the game). The execution of process here then involves my actual handling of the gun, my minute movements, the weight of the gun, my position relative to the scope, and so on. That’s not reflected within the game itself, but rather through this external control surface; the game depicts the actual zoom of the scope, but nothing else. This is not to say that execution of process is the only milieu (or at least, conception of milieu), but rather that we can grasp these elements as theoretically part-and-parcel to the experience of engaging with gaming as a medium even if we don’t consider it essential to our personal experience across the board (as I surely consciously don’t). ↩︎

  2. Well, this is debatable in the era of mass capture and recollection through easy surveillance and smart devices, but you get my point. These still don’t preserve literal matter; see the footnote above! ↩︎

  3. Technically I played less than half, I’m on the final floor but technically to truly beat the game you have to play a second version of the dungeon that’s identical to the first but in reverse. But not gonna lie, not sure if I’m gonna stick around for that. ↩︎

  4. What puzzles me a little with my limited understanding is that this individual pang comes from universal knowledge (which is the studium, the universal consensus of the depiction). But perhaps Barthes is conveying the dialectical relation here of the studium and the punctum, where this universal knowledge has itself faded and, like all knowledge, persists only in the minds of the individuals who know. Thus, it creates specificity for the individual viewer. ↩︎

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