I’ve alluded to my love of this game recently and it’s really been a long standing milestone in my game playing life. It seems now is as good a time as any to talk about this game and what it means to me and to others.
Photopia is a text based adventure game that was released in 1998 as part of the Interactive Fiction Competition (IFComp) for that year. IFComp a indy scene, supported and brought to fruition by the dozens if not hundreds of IF developers that have existed since the ‘professional’ industry at large completely abandoned the gameplay technique.
Not to get off on a tangent, but it’s both baffling and completely damning of the video game industry that they did this. Text adventure games are to modern video games what books are to film. What was once abstract, cerebral activity has been turned simultaneously more active (time is now more deliberately managed) and passive (you no longer need to imagine the worlds, they are laid out plain for you). But while movies have become a larger industry than books, books still exist! How could the video game industry take what was their origin or once zeitgeist of gaming, and completely abandon it in favor of the new?
Anyway, Photopia won that year’s competition and people in the IF scene have been talking about it ever since. Why? Because there are so many layers to the story that many who dismissed or even embraced it at first glance later found more meaning, more depth beneath even their understanding of the game.
Photopia was released at a time when the IF scene was trying to shake off the trappings of the Zork and the rest of Infocom’s legacy. Not because they were particularly bad games, of course — Zork is still one of the more infamous games in the genre, and other Infocom games like Planetfall and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy will probably forever be remembered — but because they represented a limited scope of what was possible with interactive fiction.
Infocom made games mostly about plundering the treasures of lost civilizations and focused on the intricate workings of somewhat outrageously complex puzzles. But IF, like novels, can be more than just the adventure genre! So, slowly, as the indy scene got their hands into the inner workings of text adventures, they pushed the boundaries. They created games about other, less extraordinary things. Games about getting to work on time. Games about social constructs. Games about people (who were suspiciously absent in many Infocom games).
But even then, the games may have been about something else, but they were decorated with the same trappings. Puzzles were covered with disguises, so that a key-fetch quest was instead an information fetch quest, but still involved finding the bit of text you needed in another location and bringing it to the place where it would unlock the next section of gameplay.
Now, Photopia wasn’t the first game to step beyond these limitations, not in the least, but it was one of the better realized attempts.
Adam Cadre, the creator of Photopia, had impressed many in a prior year’s IFComp with a game called Interstate-0 (or I-0). I-0 was a very open ended game about a waif of a girl trapped on the eponymous highway after her car breaks down. All she needed to do is get help but there were a very large number of things she could do to get it (including take off all her clothes and sleep with just about anyone she meets, there’s no doubt some of the games popularity was sensational).
For Photopia, though, the idea was not to create freedom of choice and opportunity. In fact, Photopia is one of the least branching games that Cadre had or ever would make. But there was a reason for that, and the reason, it seems, is the first point of contention between fans and detractors.
Unfortunately, there is no way to discuss this game without revealing it’s content. In fact, even by the end of the first scene (the game is broken up into several brief segments distinguished by a theme color) you already have an idea that this is NOT your typical IF game. So, stop now if you’re reading this and PLAY THE GAME. It can easily be completed in less than an hour. Less than 30 minutes if you’re a fast reader. There are no wrong choices in the game, and it’s nearly impossible to get stuck (these were conscious design choices, in appears).
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Have you played it now? I was serious before.
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Ready now? Okay, good. Dry your eyes.
So, the story is unequivocally focused on Alley, as she is the common character in every scene (even in ‘RED’ as you unfortunately learn later). But what is it saying about her? Or about our interest in her? The game starts with a car accident and, as the saying goes, ‘we can’t look away’, no matter how gruesome it gets. And it does get gruesome, but not in the blood and guts variety.
In my opinion, Photopia has a message to deliver, and it’s damn subversive in the manner in which it delivers it. Besides starting off with the aforementioned car accident, the rest of the game is composed of neat, bite-sized segments that have clear objectives with easy solutions and emotionally vibrant rewards for completing them.
What do I mean by ‘emotionally vibrant’? Well, most video games present challenges to overcome, such as defeating an enemy, solving a puzzle, identifying the exit in a maze, and so on. The frequent reward for these challenges is access to the next challenge, or the ability to progress further in the story. The player is supposed to feel a sense of satisfaction from completing a challenge laid before him — i.e. feeling smarter or better than the obstacle that was overcome. Even in more plot heavy games where your reward for defeating a challenge is more of the story being exposed, those bits of plot are often just enough to get you to next challenge and not significant achievements in their own right. They couldn’t be in a lengthy game or the audience would get fatigued at so many plot climaxes occurring and they’d stop feeling like a climax.
Photopia is a short game, though. There are less than 10 scenes in total. Emotional fatigue is probably not going to be an issue for the player. Cadre takes advantage of that. Your reward for most scenes in the game is the accomplishment of something viscerally exciting. In ‘GRAY’ you find Alley drowning and you rush to her and through CPR save her life! Your reward is a the feeling of having saved your daughter. Other scenes proceed similarly. The boy who builds up the courage to ask Alley for a date. The father who stumbles onto a moment of wonder with his daughter. Even in the tale-within-a-tale you have the liberating moment of learning to fly and the paralleled life-saving moment when you feed the starving wolf.
Each scene is carefully constructed to believe that this moment, the moment in the scene, is one of the most crucial interactions that person will ever have with Alley. And it is, even if they don’t know it themselves. The boy will never forget asking Alley out on a date, both because of the rush of emotions from her acceptance and because of the missed opportunity of never getting to go ON that date due to Alley’s unfortunate end. The mother will never forget how close she came to losing Alley from right under her nose in that pool, partly from the emotion of her daughter nearly dying, and partly because she does die later in an environment where her mother couldn’t be there to save her. The little girl who Alley baby sits, and her father who tries unsuccessfully to drive her home, both of them will never forget their impressions of the girl because they were right there when it ended.
The game pulls us along using emotional strings at such a pace that it’s over in a whirlwind and the only thing we feel at the end is loss. Loss that the ride is over. Loss that a special life was snuffed out. Loss that we had control over the people interacting with her and yet we couldn’t prevent her untimely end.
So maybe a few people try again to play the game. Halfheartedly hoping there’s a better ending. One where Alley doesn’t die. But just like the people in the world Alley inhabited, once the event has passed there is nothing that can be done to undo it. Reliving the moments that lead up to her death does nothing bring into sharper focus exactly how special those moments of interaction were. Just like in real life, once someone is gone, all we have is our memories.
And this is, perhaps, why Photopia gets the careful examination it does from the IF community. Photopia isn’t just a game that has a character named Alley. Photopia IS Alley. These scenes are her life, stitched together in a way to show her best parts, to show us what was lost. When people go back and study Photopia, they’re not studying the game, they’re studying the character, who has become inseparable from the game itself. I think when most people ask “Isn’t this game pretty linear?” they’re not wondering about gameplay choices, they’re really asking “Why won’t you let me save Alley!?”
None of this would be possible without the care and skill Cadre used in creating the characters in this world or use of language. Technically the game is very accomplished, with nary a memorable spelling or grammatical error. The use of color is nice, and brings a unifying tone the piece, with just a little bit of justification in the final scene to help us remember that its not just game designers who make plans for characters they love. Parents do it too.
But to go back to the beginning of this article, what is this game trying to say to us or about us? I have long wavered on my opinion of this matter, seeing it mostly as a great game that touched me emotionally regardless of the message or intent of the author.
But I think I’ve stumbled — somewhat randomly — onto an explanation of the this game that I fully agree with.
Victor Gijsbers examined Photopia on his website (http://lilith.cc/~victor/?q=content/analysis-adam-cadres-photopia) and had this to say:
The received depth reading of Photopia is that its theme is the distinction between determinism and free will; and that its message is that freedom is an illusion, that the world will go its pre-determined course no matter what we try. The main technique that it uses to drive these messages home is the linearity of its plot, that is, the player’s inability to change the outcome.
[...]
[But] does the content of Photopia suggest or reinforce the idea that it is about free will and determinism, and specifically, the lack of the former?
Absolutely not. Just consider the scenes that make up Photopia. Going to Mars to find a seed; crashing in the ocean; walking along a golden beach where you find dirt; casting off your space suit to fly away; feeding a wolf in a forest by planting the seed; telling your daughter about astrophysics, the dinosaurs, and how she is more than just a collection of atoms; saving your daughter from death by drowning; telling a child bed-time stories — none of those scenes touch on the theme of determinism. [...] There is a plausible alternative out-of-game explanation for the lack of freedom in these scenes: pacing.
[...]
Faced with the choice of attributing to Cadre an unsuccessful attempt at speaking about determinism or a successful attempt at introducing pacing into his game and respecting the inner logic of the fictional world, we should choose the latter. The interpretation that Photopia wishes to convince us that freedom is an illusion does not do justice to the work.
[...]
Focus on the tale-within-a-tale that Alley tells to Wendy. It starts on Mars (or perhaps some other red planet), where among the debris of a failed attempt at colonisation, we find a single seed pod left undamaged. Through a series of adventures that take us to the bottom of the sea, a beach made of gold, and a crystal maze, we finally arrive in a dead and petrified forest. Here, we plant the seed in order to save the life of a wolf.In summary: the tale that Alley tells to Wendy is the tale of a seed taken from ruins, which then gives life to a dead world.
[...] The analogy between the real-life scenes and the coloured scenes from Alley’s tale is clear: both are about seeds that are planted and then come to fruition, literally in the fantasy story, metaphorically in the real-life scenes. Alley’s father’s words are seeds planted in her mind, that grow into bushes and then continue to bear fruit; one of those fruits is Alley’s tale to Wendy.
[...]
Although Alley’s potential is destroyed, she had already sown her seeds. Her potential lives on vicariously, in the minds of those who knew her; especially in Wendy, but certainly also in that of the boy who asks her for a dance, and perhaps in those of others as well. There it will continue to bear fruit. Far from giving us a message of despair, as the received reading claims, Adam Cadre gives us a message of hope.In fact, all of Photopia can be seen as a seed pod. Alley dies in the very first scene of the work–the word “Red” flashing onto our screen is her death. Everything that follows are memories of those who knew her; each one of them a seed, planted and watered, that may in time bear fruit.
That is what Photopia is about. Even if it wasn’t Cadre’s intent (though I believe it is), intentional fallacy says it doesn’t matter. As I and Victor have noted, though, there are several signs that this is what we were supposed to take away from the game.
We were given a story that, on the surface, is about snuffed potential, because this is a topic we are all too familiar with. Most people have experienced a loss of some sort, and everyone knows of others who have suffered through the loss of someone before ‘their time.’ Photopia couches its tale in this surface description because it can use it to get close to us. It uses the familiar as cover for something less so.
When I played this game, in 2004, I was engaged, and working at my first professional job. It affected me because I saw a kind girl who was patient with those around her and was glad to share and learn with them, and I watched as she sailed towards her unavoidable death.
Now, in 2009, I am a husband and a father, and the other message reaches me much clearer now. I will not live forever, but now I know someone who will probably outlive me by quite a number of years. Someone I care about a great deal. Will this person live on alone when I am gone?
No. Because I am not just what you can see and touch and feel. I am also contained within my actions and my influences. With each day I speak and interact with people, I am leaving behind the seeds of a future that will grow into the fruits for a new generation who will consume them and continue on to leave seeds of their own.
Forever.
I may not be sure if there is a god or a life after this one. But that doesn’t mean I don’t believe my soul is immortal.