On the use of crude symbols in narratives.
Marek Kapolka wrote some
https://marek-kapolka.tumblr.com/post/162567805247/july-3-2017
about saving the animals
The first time I played saving the animals I thought it was a super cute game with some macabre humor. After reading Marek’s thoughts on it, I went back to replay to find this clumsy severity that seemed to be the subject of the essay. It’s there and I’m a bit embarrassed that I missed it the first time.
The
thing I want to talk about is mostly inspired by Marek’s last paragraph:
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I think part of the appeal of these stories (the static speaks my name comes to mind, and binding of isaac moves in some of the same territory I think) is in the idea that all these mercurial, overwhelming subconscious forces can be conquered with a dry exercise in pattern recognition. Because these aren’t really stories about people with psychoses. In these games, psychosis is a vehicle to turn trauma into melodrama, and to imprint all these wounds onto a literal physical landscape. There are parts of the emotional tenor of save the animals that feel honest, but the frame is all wrong. The game of mapping individual mental phenomenon to lived events, 1:1, is doomed. The mind just isn’t that simple, and any work of art that tries to nail down meaning in that way kills any trace of human experience. The simplest image explodes with meanings, connections, emotions, from all the viewers, secretly within themselves and projected onto their facades, shared with each other & changing through time. Even if our past were just a video of everything that’s happened to us, we’d still need an extra lifetime of exegesis to make heads or tails of it.
From <https://marek-kapolka.tumblr.com/post/162567805247/july-3-2017>
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I think what is essentially being criticized here is the porting of human experience into an artistic medium or any text at all (especially when it is presented as a puzzling narrative). I may be misinterpreting what Marek is saying, but this is the idea I’ll be responding to.
I think we all realize that photographs are lies, not in the sense that the subjects are posing, but in the sense that a captured angle of a piece of time is misleading in the authority it gains just from our ability to focus on it multiple times. Not only is the context surrounding the subjects of a photo infinite and exponential in scope (never knowable), but looking at a picture tends to give us false confidence about our knowledge of the subject because we tend to think of it as the actual subject, rather than as a picture. My favorite example of this is photographs of famous paintings in school art-books. I studied textbook prints of paintings before visiting the National Gallery of Art and was stunned to fully realize that I had been looking at reproducible prints scaled down to ridiculous extents. The actual paintings don’t have a dpi and often have noticeable physical texture to the brush-strokes. The scale at which you witness paintings also feels like a powerful characteristic of the pieces; some of them are huge and others are tiny. I thought I had seen most of these paintings because I pictured them as 2-dimensional images and the prints of them were also 2-dimensional, but in fact I had never seen any of them. Think about paintings as arrangements of materials that reflect various colors, some portions of the 3-dimensional surface reflect particular tones of velvety red, other parts of the painting may have a metallic white like that on a car. So if photographs can’t capture paintings then of course we won’t be able to capture any human experiences in a Unity game, but we can evoke them.
The question Marek’s essay makes me ask myself is “What does the use of these simplistic symbols evoke from human experience?”. If the goal is to capture human experience, why not use audio of interviews with the people who were there and photographs of the places at the time? There are a lot of possible reasons, the most obvious being that the work may be fictional so that evidence doesn’t exist to collect. Another reason may be that the author wants to put some distance between themselves and the subject with the ambiguity of symbols so that they can feel more comfortable approaching the subject honestly (or they want to approach it with egocentricism they won’t need to apologize for). I often think of pervy Surrealists like Salvador Dali doing this. But I’m just getting these examples of possible motivations out of the way so I can talk about the one I suspect is relevant to saving the animals.
I very much like the point Marek makes about how the framework of the protagonist’s psychosis can be used by the audience as an intellectual distance from being empathetic with the emotions that a piece of art evokes. But for me, saving the animals feels more like a moment where a child is playing with their collection of dolls from asunder intellectual properties and the narrative of this one-person puppet-show starts getting kinda dark. That Darth Vader ends up being used as the baby in an improv about a nuclear family* leans the developing narrative towards an explanation of disastrous child-rearing. The tools start influencing the story and it becomes more and more gnarled, almost divinatory. saving the animals ends in tragic futility, but it begins hopeful in concerning circumstances. The encounters grow creepier and more sinister as the game progresses, but I’m not convinced that was the plan all along. And what I’m suggesting is that the methods by which this game was made, the materials produced and with which the game is composed, may have evoked memories of vulnerability and failure as it was being made. Furthermore, I wonder if that inherent bent towards imperfection was encouraged by the massive chasm between these compromises (simplistic symbols crafted crudely) and the infinite complexity of the reality which they may be attempting to describe. If Sam Mortimer had used hyper-realistic human models as characters and 3d-scans of actual environments, would the story have ended up more hopeful? I have no evidence, but I think so.
I don’t get the feeling that saving the animals is masking a difficult truth behind symbols or creating a puzzle that we can put together for a shocking realization; I think that the way it was put together and even the particulars of how we perform within it is providing prompts for reflection on some of our experiences (including how we may analyze them retrospectively or experience anxiety as we approach new situations).
*don’t get confused, Darth Vader is not in saving the animals. I’m just using it as an example of a similar type of thing as the use of the models, environments, and movements in the actual game.
