Not Not-noise
Reading Droqen's thoughts on bluesky, I've been delving into the concept of noise and void. Gonna quote his thoughts here:
"i watched a film today (A Man Escapes) and i also played a game today (Splatoon 3). im thinking about the difference between these two experiences. i have played Splatoon 3 many times before and i knew what it would be like, roughly speaking; i envisioned in my mind the best experiences i've had with the game, and hoped that i would be able to achieve once more such a beautiful harmony with the systems, or with my partner, by contrast i had no idea what i was getting into when i watched A Man Escapes. but what is notable to me is the intentionality of the film over the chaos of the game... in playing Splatoon 3, i did not know whether that moment of synchronicity would occur, though i imagined it. setting aside the 'value' of the kind of feeling i can get from Splatoon 3, it's clear that it is a distinctly different experience; pressing the buttons and feeling things happen in response to my action is nothing like watching a movie. they both do different things. but at the moment i am thinking a lot about why it is that in a session of a videogame i am able to experience so many moments other than the one i am after. how much of is this intentional? desirable? just a consequence of the material involvement of my imperfect self? and it is not only moments other than what i am after, i also receive moments other than what the designer was after -- i assume? although in some cases a designer is excited to deliver a feeling of failure, in many cases it feels like something to accept & deal with -- for the designer too. this noise is troubling to me, as someone who wants to think about the work. that's all, i guess. the presence of noise, i understand. even wading through noise is not the worst. but it is the volume of noise over signal that makes me question the thing, kill it. who am i hearing speak? chaos?" (a bluesky tweet)
To which I replied SYBAU.
Of course I didn't. I'll use The Girl Who Kicked a Rabbit as a starting point. It is finished, yet has issues. Such is the nature of computer programs. So I amend those problems, and in that sense, it is only as finished as I'm willing to fix.
I've been thinking of a sequel that will most likely never be. Successful as I see the game, it is an earth shattering economic failure, and with no interest from outside, there's no way to ever produce such a work again with the time afforded to me.
Yet what kind of sequel would it be? Having made and finished an entire game, I can observe the concept of the game, and of its sequel to be in a new light. Or darkness actually.
Droqen compares a movie and a game, and notes how the game has a certain volume of noise, as in the moments that aren't part of the intended experience. Whether that be losing, frustrating situations, bugs, or poor performance on the players part, is left unsaid.
When I consider what kind of sequel I could make, I see two paths become apparent:
I could make it prettier, snappier, with fewer moments of frustration, give it smoother interaction, more interesting attacks and enemies, perhaps a more clever story, and an easier to understand UI. Do right by the fans (lol) and give them an even better experience of what they enjoyed before, and really convey what I wanted the first time. Less noise, a clearer vision. What's the point of a sequel if you don't learn and improve?
Or I could switch it all up. Maybe make it real-time, or not even focus on a single character, or multiplayer or a completely different kind of game. What's the point of a sequel if you don't make something new? The original noise was special and interesting, so if I make a sequel, I can't repeat that. It would be stale and pointless.
Would it though? The original's noise was raw, amateurish, and earnest. Ambitious and inadequate. If I made the first kind of sequel, the noise would be calm and calculated, experienced and content. It could still be ambitious, but perhaps in a less heartfelt, and more mature way.
Describing the noise seems like something that can only be done after the work is done. It's the shape of what isn't, made by the contours of what is. And yet, speaking to Roger Ebert in 2001, Hayao Miyazaki seems painfully away of the nothingness (https://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/hayao-miyazaki-interview):
"It’s called ma. Emptiness. It’s there intentionally. [...] The time in between my clapping is ma. If you just have non-stop action with no breathing space at all, it’s just busyness, But if you take a moment, then the tension building in the film can grow into a wider dimension".
Both words seem incorrect now. Whether unintentional (or unavoidable) like with The Girl Who Kicked a Rabbit, or with craftsmanship of forethought, the noise and the emptiness are clearly neither mere noise or nothingness. They are very important shapes of negative space, and possibly filled with the human touch of what was attempted, achieved, and blundered.
If I make a sequel and sand off the edges, I'm intentionally changing the noise, and thereby the picture as a whole. Consider a game like Death Stranding. While an original IP, the game design is built upon decades of direct and indirect experience. It has so much noise, but I dare say the noise is there by design. From the slightly cumbersome controls, to the clumsy way your character behaves, and from the off-putting dialogue and acting, to the wild juxtapositions between serious moments and childish silliness. Clearly, the negative space is neither random, noisy or empty. Perhaps the player should be expecting what the game brings, if they are experienced with previous works of Hideo Kojima, but I think many of us were delighted. With the sequel I've yet to play, I think we will still be delighted by the negative space, and less surprised, but it is still not the main gameplay, yet it shapes it.
It's a struggle to figure out the best word to describe this idea. The negative connotations of noise keeps people from understanding the actual good it does. Referring to it as emptiness or negative space, locks people's perceptions of it to physical space. It's such a counterintuitive idea to say "sometimes it's better if there's some aspects that don't work so well, or are pointless, or don't have anything."
My final paper for my BA was me trying to convey the idea of wabi sabi in some video games (I called it the wabi aesthetic and distilled it to the idea that it consists of the four attributes of suggestion, simplicity, impermanence, and irregularity). Though not the same, I definitely see the idea of play being deeper if certain aspects are only hinted at. In paintings, this idea might be the presence of a landscape where you only paint the clouds behind a mountain. In play, having controls that are hard to grasp, work against the player, or are only accessible through experimentation might relate to this. I understood Droqen as saying cinema doesn't have the noise of games, because every aspect can potentially be controlled. In two respects I disagreed. First of all, film production is hard to control and what ends up on the screen is what the creators managed to do and were allowed to do, but not necessarily what they wanted to do. Second, the ma that Miyazaki describes, is (I think) more than the space between moments, it's also the many moments that a director can't account for and the moments that build the world, but not the story. This is noise too. This is ma. And it's the "suggestion" aspect of wabi aesthetics. If I may prod Droqen, this is where gameplay exists in sequential media like books and cinema.
Struggling so much to remove useless elements and to refine systems to interweave probably removed a lot of the noise and ma from The Girl Who Kicked a Rabbit. And stretched development time to infinity. And alienated a lot of players. I shone a light on every detail in order to understand why such and such is done, and tried removing or changing all of it. Is it too grandiose to make a reference to dark matter, and call the noise of games "dark gameplay"? It makes up seventy percent of all gameplay in the universe, yet we can only observe it because players keep fucking up and dying.
I like that joke, but I'm not sure that term helps either.
Oh, right, I know. We're already describing games, their design, and how they work, with the least descriptive word ever: gameplay. And Droqen so kindly always suggests to "kill said gameplay", in a sort of reflection: because what is gameplay? How do you kill it? What do you mean by it? It's a reactive suggestion, and actively inflammatory. Provocative to players and designers alike. I love it. So I suggest the ma and noise of gameplay to be:
Otherplay.
What an absolutely idiotic term. The negative space of gameplay. the gameplay between gameplay. What you do, but aren't supposed to. The game that you DON'T play. The otherplay. Yes, yes I see it now. It's difficult to appreciate, runs counter to what good gameplay is from a modern perspective. It's often done well in Japanese games that aren't THAT esoteric. It's almost absent from most designerly board games. Players use the word gameplay as if they know what it is, and yet have to je ne sais quoi the fuck out of it when they get down to describing it. Otherplay is the extradimensional shadow of what you already can't describe, and it is the only thing that matters from now on.
The Girl Who Kicked a Rabbit has beautiful gameplay, but for all it fails at, it leaves an amount of wonderful otherplay. Oh how I'd love to one day drain, alter, and expand on that. With my so direct and boring sensibilities, it's unintuitive to me to design with otherplay in mind, but that's where the real playfulness exists, so that if the gameplay nudges you in a direction, the otherplay simply lets you stumble around and do your own thing. No, not delightfully surprising the designer with the toys they gave you, but having fun with the nails they forgot to remove from the carefully constructed playground. I wish I'd left more nails to stick out of The Girl Who Kicked a Rabbit. Kids love to step on them.