Subverting Trust

     Macromedia Flash Player is the most indie game development platform of them all. Flash games are made with the smallest teams, almost always on a zero-dollar budget for little to no compensation. Flash game developers are almost all hobbyists; their games get made simply because they want to make them and share them. This gives them total freedom to experiment.

     Not to say that the realm of Flash games is some kind of beautiful artistic paradise; far from it. Finding the really good experiments is extremely difficult, but playing them always makes me want to get a copy of "Actionscript for Dummies" and dust off my ancient, woefully underutilized copy of Flash MX.

     Such a game is Loved, by one Alexander Ocias. I recommend playing it before reading further, if only for a minute or two. Another benefit of Flash games is how easily you can do so.

     While the game is certainly an thought-provoking little creation that warrants replaying at least once, what earns it a spot in this post is that it talks back to you. The first moment of Loved is a choice that's routine to anyone who's ever played any kind of RPG. It then proceeds to shatter that routine by spitting on your decision. The benevolent tutorials and objectives - something that players trust as a sort of natural law in games - are replaced with a hostile, manipulative voice. It's like discovering that food poisoning is caused by chemistry being mad at you: the neutrality is gone. Naturally, this drastically alters the tenor of the game.

     This trick - playing with the player's implicit trust - also brings the game BioShock to mind, most notably in the pivotal confrontation with Andrew Ryan at the end of the game's second act. The twist is, of course, that the protagonist, Jack, has been controlled all along by a subliminal code phrase.

A slave obeys.

     But the larger implication of the reveal is that, just as Jack was controlled by the code phrase, so too was the player controlled by the game's structure: both are blunt, unquestioning instruments. Story-wise, Jack has no real reason to play along with Atlas when he arrives in Rapture beyond basic compassion; certainly no reason to fight his way across half the city to personally dispose of Ryan. But the player justifies these actions to himself - he'll convince himself that injecting himself with plasmids, hunting down Big Daddies, and assassinating Ryan is the right thing to do, because he trusts in the moral framework of the game. What the confrontation with Ryan does is pull that rug out from under the player: you didn't slaughter your way across Rapture because you wanted to, or decided to, or believed it was the right thing to do: you did it because the game said so, and that was all you needed. And then the game takes away control of your character - for the first time since the game began - to follow this realization to its logical conclusion: you kill someone you have no real business killing.

     Generally, gamers have come to trust these meta-voices of authority in games - things like HUD, tutorials, and mission objectives. What if a game just outright lied to us about these things? How long would it take for players to catch on? Obviously this isn't long-term, big-idea stuff (when you come right down to it, it's a fool-me-once sort of trick) but I'd be curious to see it handled well.

     It's more an expression of the larger concept of subversion, which I think is integral to most, though not all, good art. Subversion breaks through our expectations and makes us see things from a new perspective. It makes us question how we think about things. Watchmen asks us to reconsider what heroism means; Blade Runner asks us reconsider what being human means. BioShock, likewise, asks us to reconsider how we approach and think about the games we play. These are the sort of thought-provoking narrative twists that resonate with us after the film, game, or graphic novel is over.