Wednesday
Mar042009
Don't Look Back
Wednesday, March 4, 2009 at 11:15PM Even though games have a potential to SAY things, uncomfortably few make a genuine attempt. This simple Flash game on Kongregate surprised me by having such a simple design (and no text) yet I felt it said something. Bravo.
Reader Comments (45)
I felt like it was going somewhere but then the first boss was frustrating and I stopped. I don't play games to be abused into following a pattern and i wish people would stop forgiving games that use that as their only source of motivation. I could give a crap about the story of a game when I spend more time repeating the same task over and over again then I do noticing the interesting things they do with the story. Interesting storytelling is all well and good but if you lock that story behind frustrating game mechanics that only appeal to a subset of the gaming culture that plays games to be 'challenged' then you've lost me outright. The person who made this game needs to 'find the fun' before he can catch my attention. Yes i'm aware it's supposed to be an old school throwback and the endless continues and forgiving checkpoints help mitigate the challenge to a level that many would deem acceptable but the entirety of the game i managed to sit through before the first boss was just trial and error so even if I am succeeding I could really give a toss. If at any point in a game I find myself sighing in frustration I tend to turn off the game. Especially if I didn't pay for it and could be doing something else.
SKIP THE UPCOMING TEXT IF YOU DON'T WANT THE GAME SPOILED FOR YOU. I am about to explain what this games means.
Meyeselph, you seem like someone who doesn't lik even the least bit of a challenge that you aren't able to immediately overcome. The dog is extremely easy to beat once you learn how to, and the game doesn't even take that long to complete in general.
As for people who are saying a story doesn't exist or there is no meaning, please just think about it first before saying that. You start off as a man who is standing at the grave of your wife who died presumably to a snake bite on your wedding day. You then decide to get her soul back so she can come back to life. You venture down to Hades defeating lots of monsters in order to finally get to her. Success! Now that you have her you are not allowed to look back or her soul will vanish and all of your hard work will have been for nothing. You climb your way back to the top back to the grave...
only to find yourself staring at the grave. The guy never actually went on the journey, he was just wishing with all of his heart that he could save his wife and bring her back to life. Once he realizes that has no way to resurrect her the illusions of himself and his wife vanish to nothingness just as his hope did. You can also draw a connection between diving into Hades as him going deeper and deeper into his self delusion only to finally climb back out to deal with reality.
It was linked earlier but this is based off of the greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.
I'm going to have to agree. While it was a bit trial and error, it was very tame. I was never frustrated playing the game, and only one or two screens took me more than one try to figure out what I needed to do. I'm also doubting you've played any "old-school" games.
I've played my share of older games and i know very well that if I had tried a little harder i could have potentially beaten that, but my skillset is not well suited to perfectly executing patterns so it takes me a few more tries then your average grunt of the gaming age. The point is not that I am claiming I can't beat it. The point is that I didn't want to. The game failed to keep my attention because the solution to the boss was to do something I wasn't good at over and over and over until i got good at it. and that bores me. So while you all may have had a more positive experience my experience was not positive and in that respect the game's creator messed up. When playing a game and heaping praise on it don't forget not everyone in the world has your dexerity or your tolerance for repetition. (my amount of either isn't THAT horrible either. I've beaten large chunks of N!) The game's basic mechanics weren't amusing enough to keep me trying the difficult stuff over and over. It's adherence to controlling stiffly like an atari game was it's downfall for me more then anything else. If it would have controlled like, say, mario or some other NES era platformer i probably would have been more forgiving.
Wow, absolutely loved that game. It was truly deep, I must say.
Interesting, I first found the thread from the developer on TIGS (http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=5096), then came here finding the same game mentioned.
Oh, and it's on kotaku as well (http://kotaku.com/5165708/dont-look-back-seriously-dont-look-back) .
Yup, nice game. Not that great as some say, just nice...
Thanks for the recommendation. Extremely well done game, Sirlin's original comment was spot on.
@Ceirian:
The problem is that this story is completely lost on the majority of those who will play it, and winds up being nothing more than some random Atari looking game. Certainly, for those who can extrapolate such a story from a textless game, it brings a powerful feeling for those who understand it, but the rest are left scratching their heads and asking why this game is so good. If someone else needs to explain the story to the player, that's a failing on the game's part.
A story with a powerful message certainly doesn't deserve praise when that message is completely lost on its audience. If it was placed somewhere with an audience with a better knowledge of greek mythology, then given the context, it would probably be passable. However, Kongregate is not likely to be one of those places. The game itself does very little to suggest anything to the uneducated player, and the ending leaves such a player thinking that he completely wasted his time with an ending that just wipes away everything the player just did, with zero explanation.
Response by Sirlin: I did not even know the Greek myth it referenced until afterwards. If you can't understand that it's a game with a mechanic where you can't look back, and then the end reveals that the ENTIRE series of events was the man at the grave looking back, obsessing about the past that he can't change...then it seems the failing is more with you than the game. Would you also use your same criteria for poetry, by the way? If Pzychotix cannot understand a poem, then it is bad?
Sirlin: you're rationalizing (and attacking a strawman). No amount of arguing that people _should_ have gotten the message can change the fact that many did not, and it would be completely incorrect to praise this game for delivering a message to those people.
It's not clear (to me) just how many people failed to get the message -- if it was a large proportion of players, (and those players were the intended audience) then that means that yes, the game did a bad job of delivering its message, no matter how obvious you think it was.
Response by Sirlin: Don't even claim strawman against me. Especially while claiming that I claimed the game delivered a message to people who did not get the message. (Obviously, be definition, you cannot deliver a message to people who don't get the message.) Again, if we use your standard of review on poetry, I guess like half the poetry considered classic is bad because I personally don't understand it. Ha. Back on point, you really should be able to grasp what this game is saying about the main character's entire journey being a thing that he was looking back on in futility.
I also reject your argument that a random game on kongregate needs to care even the slightest bit whether people can't figure out its (obvious) message. It does what it does. I get it. Sage gets it so much he thought the title made it too obvious! Really your entire comment is kind of absurd and you should replace with, "Hey guys, I don't get it, can someone explain it to me? That would be a reasonable statement rather than your attempt to condemn it (and all other?) messages that you don't personally get.
In the same vein, if you were critiquing one of those extremely abstract paintings that art collectors laud about, and it evoked no emotion for anyone else, could you say that it was good? I'm not saying the story/message itself is bad, but a great story is worthless if it does not send the message across to the audience.
The ending certainly doesn't state what you think it meant in any firm message. Even Cernian, above, stated that it was about a man who never took the journey, and lost all hope, grieving for his lost wife. I believe you stated that it was about a man who took the journey, but messed up, and the man we see standing at the grave is one who regrets his past mistakes. The ending is pretty ambiguous.
The majority of players (like some of the other posters within this comments section, and those on the kongregate comments section) will just not see anything within all of this. They may not even draw any or all of these connections at all between the man standing at the grave at the end being the player, or understand why that the player can't even look back at the ghost, aside from the ominous title name.
Response by Sirlin: You don't grasp the fairly obvious message. Great, ok. Next time I recommend a game that says something I'll specifically state that it's not intended for you, so that you can save us the trouble of posting multiple comments about how you don't get it.
Look, I'm just saying, just because it was easy for you to grasp, it does not mean that the vast audience will experience the same. You should be able to acknowledge this simple fact.
Response by Sirlin: I acknowledge that to be true of all forms of art and all messages an author could ever say. If you want to discuss what this game meant, fine. But further discussion about whether or not you (or others) get what it means seems totally pointless.
hey guys I didn't get The Departed why did it win the Oscar for Best Picture I mean WTF?
I didn't figure out that the first boss was supposed to be Cerberus until my second playthrough (which was after the badges and card had been added, one of the badges is DEFEAT CERBERUS). On the first play, I got distracted by something (playing at work, tsk tsk) right as I got to the ending and missed it - I was confused as to how I got back to the title screen.
I still enjoyed the game...took me back to playing Pitfall and E.T. on grandpa's Atari when I was a kid. I especially liked the rainfall in the outdoor section, I thought that was a nice touch.
Sirlin: I claim strawman when I see strawman. You are attacking the argument "I didn't get the message, therefore it's a bad game" when the argument people are making is "Many people didn't get the message, therefore the game did a bad job of conveying its message". (or, at least, that's the argument _I_ was making, conditioned on "many" being significant)
> But further discussion about whether or not you (or others) get what it means seems totally pointless.
Wasn't the entire reason for your blog post to tout a game for saying something? I would think discussing how effectively and accurately the message was (or wasn't) conveyed would be very much a main point of discussion!
Response by Sirlin: It didn't even occur to me that we'd discuss WHETHER the game conveyed a message. I mean obviously it does. And obviously I believed it did given my original post. I still think a discussion about how you can't understand obvious things is pointless. Surely you get that the main character was looking back on his whole imagined journey, wishing he could bring the girl back, but realizing that he can't. I find it very hard to believe that you played this game to the end and didn't realize this. The main thing you're proving is that allowing comments on my blog posts leads to bad comments that are a waste of my time and everyone else's.
As it stands, yes, it seems completely futile to argue with someone who can't grasp that there are two sides to every issue.
"Again, if we use your standard of review on poetry, I guess like half the poetry considered classic is bad because I personally don't understand it."
Of course it's bad. The poetry, as a medium for telling a story, is terrible if the entire meaning is lost upon the reader. That's not to say that the story itself was bad. There's a distinction to be made here: the story, and the telling of that story. If either one fails, the product as a whole fails. Just as an example:
"hey guys I didn't get The Departed why did it win the Oscar for Best Picture I mean WTF?"
Did you know that "The Departed" is actually a remake of the movie "Infernal Affairs", a Chinese film? What if, instead of presenting "The Departed" to US audiences, the producers were crazy enough to show the Chinese version to viewers, in its full chinese language and no subtitles? The film's story would still be good, but all the drama brought on through character development and conversations would be lost on the average watcher. The fact that some (chinese) people understood it still wouldn't stop the fact that it was a failure in this audience.
"I also reject your argument that a random game on kongregate needs to care even the slightest bit whether people can't figure out its (obvious) message."
Granted, the creator doesn't NEED to care about anything. Just like an artist doesn't NEED the world to see his paintings, and just like a writer doesn't NEED for his works to be propagated. But all these artists WANT them to be shared. At the very least, this author did, or he obviously wouldn't have placed it on Kongregate for the rest of the world to see it in the first place. And as such, he probably cares at least a little bit whether his audience understands his message.
"I still think a discussion about how you can't understand obvious things is pointless."
The simple fact is that there ARE players who didn't understand the message from the game itself, and I'm just in shock and awe at you, who would just say "@$%@ them" to those people. Just because it was obvious to you does not mean it was obvious to them, and the discussion about why those players couldn't understand what the game was saying is very important topic for discussion, when those players were the target audience.
"Really your entire comment is kind of absurd and you should replace with, "Hey guys, I don't get it, can someone explain it to me? That would be a reasonable statement rather than your attempt to condemn it (and all other?) messages that you don't personally get."
As a final message: If a player has to go outside the game to find the message, doesn't that mean the game has failed at sending its message? Isn't the game in some part to blame for this lost in translation?
You can't put something out there expected everyone to get what it means. There are some people who just don't think past what is obviously presented to them. That's fine, everyone has their own way of doing things. The games story seems made for people who actually want to put some thought into it. Leave it be and move on, I mean really do you expect everyone to grasp the meaning of a piece of art?
Again, some people get it (perhaps after an explanation, or pointing to relevant connections), some people don't. Best to just move on if it's not your cup of tea. Start a thread in the forums about how you would make a textless game that tells a deep story if you really feel the need to continue.
> I still think a discussion about how you can't understand obvious things is pointless.
I think a discussion on how it is possible that some people think something is obvious, while other people don't even understand it, is not pointless. For example, I also didn't get the message Sirlin was getting.
I know the Greek myth this is based on and was expecting the ending that that myth has: at some point you look back and lose the person you are guiding. There is actually one point in the game where you had a choice of going left or right, and I was expecting that at that point I had to go right and thereby ending the game by `losing'. However, since it did not have that ending, I was completely puzzled at the end. What is that other guy doing there? And why, even though he didn't look at me, am I still disappearing?
On this site I found the answer. Looking back has two meanings. Looking back in space and looking back in time. In Dutch, my native language, they are translated differently (omkijken vs. terugkijken). I was already conditioned to translate it with `omkijken', and therefore I was more confused than I should have been.
So reasons why people don't get some `obvious' message include having prior expectations and not understanding a language completely; the last one is even more important when the amount of language used is small. I can also think of examples where not having some prior knowledge limits the ability to understand some message. And for this game the inability or unwillingness to play these types of games also limits the message you are getting; if you stop playing before the half-way point, there is no message at all. It is just some old-fashioned-looking game.
Have people not understood the message, or found different meaning, for other reasons?
I didn't even finish the game, but thought about its title during the few minutes I played it, then asked someone what happened, because I knew the title was a GIGANTIC HINT. What you morons probably should have said was "I don't get it, can someone explain?" You should also stop ignoring Sirlin when he suggests that's what you should have said--are you conditioned to ignore intelligence when it happens to come from Sirlin because you don't like the way he makes it obvious that he's smarter than some of you? He doesn't make all of us feel that way, maybe you should accept your own shortcomings and try to learn something (he wrote a whole book on self-improvement, check it out). Because this is the internet, you don't bother being polite or asking others to share their wisdom. You just dispense with civility and let the whole world know how ridiculously and willfully ignorant you are. That kind of behavior gives me permission--almost begs me--to point out how ridiculously and willfully ignorant you are, so thanks for giving me that opportunity. And thank the coffee that made me a little less tolerant of stupidity this morning.
> I still think a discussion about how you can't understand obvious things is pointless.
I do too. Care to explain why you're the only one discussing it?
It's a false premise anyways; I looked up the ending, because I didn't originally plan on playing the game through. (That's how I discovered that there are a lot of people who didn't get it)
Response by Sirlin: Now you're being intentionally ridiculous. Count up all the comments (including ones from you) about whether or not people can understand the game and you'll see it's the most common thing discussed in this thread. Useless. Saying I'm the only one discussing it is the most trollish thing you could possibly have said. I invite you to stop posting in this thread.
At least two people actually discussed the message though. I urge others to ignore Hurkyl and other worthless posters (why do they keep writing comments like these?) and instead follow the lead of posters like Malvolio and Ceirnian who have attempted to actually discuss something of substance.
@ Malvolio: Here is the thread on the Kongregate forums discussing the ending:
http://www.kongregate.com/forums/3/topics/36322?page=1
The most prevalent alternative seems to be a few variations on "the player is dead too."
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This part is written assuming that "the game was just a dream sequence -- the fantasy of a guy dwelling on the past and wanting to rescue his loved one, but eventually accepting fate and moving on"
My assumption has been that even native English speakers are supposed to be tricked too. There are two "obvious" interpretations of the title, neither of which refer to the ending:
1. the one you saw, where the title refers to the gameplay mechanic, "don't look behind you",
2. "to look back" also has the idiomatic meaning of hesitation or doubts about a chosen course of action, and phrases like "don't look back" are often used to strengthen one's resolve
Both meanings would be quite at home in an action video game, as well as the Orpheus myth. The intent in the designer's mind is to get the player to accept one (or both) of these meanings, and reinforce it in the game, only to reveal the surprise third meaning at the very end, to leave a lasting impression on the player.
However, I think the problem that some are having is that the game doesn't offer any clues that it's a dream sequence. The journey itself is quite mundane (albeit very well-done) as video games go, it remains coherent from start to finish, no thought bubbles, fade-ins, fade-outs, et cetera. All you get is to walk into a repeat of the title screen, and then your character vanishes.
Not everybody makes the connection that the man at the grave is supposed to be you -- thus theories that the hero died when _someone_else_ looked at him at the end -- and some who did make that connection thought that the player _killed_himself_ by looking back, rather than opting to reject the reality of all the gameplay before it.
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Now that I've said all of that, I'm no longer convinced that Ceirnian's explanation is correct. There is an explanation that doesn't so completely deny the reality of the entire game, and fits better with the phrasing of the title: the game depicts what would be the successful outcome if the youth's daring trip through Hades to rescue the soul of his loved one -- alas, he never actually tried. (possibly because he was too timid, possibly because he was too busy reliving the past)
I wonder if the author will divulge what he really meant to say, or if the really did intend anything specific....
@ Sirlin:
> Count up all the comments (including ones from you) about whether or not people
> can understand the game and you'll see it's the most common thing discussed in this thread.
I was referring to how you were dismissing my comments by discussing how _I_personally_ didn't understand the game (and thus everything I said was just sour grapes). I thought that was, well, obvious.
> I invite you to stop posting in this thread.
(if that was meant as a command, please say so -- I would certainly be willing to comply with a demand to stop posting in a thread on your website)