Game Structure

Both in SUPERHOT and Ruiner, the game places a distance between the mechanical interactions of the game and the text occuring within the game world. In SUPERHOT, the gameplay revolves around performing actions which are not resulting as they are made, where actions are performed in the stilted, careful time of play, but then received back in a seamless, realtime fashion, the replay player is shown after death or completion, the “real” of what actions they were performing. In Ruiner and SUPERHOT, the player is divorced in the story from the character, with the player operating the character not in the name of the character, but in the name of some outside other, with both games taking time to remind the player their lack of control in their own actions.

In these instances, the nature of the game is broken down into its components. In Ruiner and SUPERHOT, the structure is such that the game is drawn into three separate layers of text, the Reader, the Mechanics, and the World. The Reader interacts with the Mechanical, performing the actions of the game, actions which are then interpreted from the player’s actions and then applied upon the world. In Ruiner, the player character has no free will, controlled by a hacker who mediates between the player’s input and the player character. In SUPERHOT, in addition to the ending of the story being the player killing the player character, the player performs actions which then produce a secondary product of the final replay. Of these, the Mechanics make the text function by governing the player’s interaction with the World and thereby making the World into a coherent text, putting it in some logical order. The Reader meanwhile is a position which must be fulfilled in order to make the text function, in order to experience the game, there must be some entity which the Mechanics plug into in order to deliver input upon the World. In Anodyne and SUPERHOT, the game requires actions which break the story and narrative, Anodyne in particular holding the entire second half of the game behind the player’s willingness to openly utilize glitches to boundary break to access additional content and secrets required for 100% completion. This boundary breaking has been a part of games, intentional or not, since the beginning of gaming, with the Mechanics asserting their dominance over the World, as the determiners of the World. The World is created anew in being broken, just as the Mechanics attempt to create the World in one form or another in their intended routes.

As I discussed in my commentary on Alice, game structure is not unique to works constructed purely as “games”. I only refer to it as such due to its most potent expressions being in games, just as I refer to its other-half as “novel” structure, that distinct by being a text which is driven by a central character, the text being structured around a reality being written in relation to this character. The game is distinct here, with the structure being of a world structured through the mechanics. The sitcom shows this duality interesting, with the cases of Bojack Horseman and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia as contrasts of being more easily read in the two categories. In Bojack Horseman, the sitcom as a character driven text works through the characters as the central components, the content of the show being towards writing a relationship of events and characters, with both affecting the other, and this spiraling relationship writing the text. It’s Always Sunny works in the opposite structure, where the characters are plateaus just as the levels in a game, and the content of the show is organized by the mechanical concerns, such as the episode’s topic and length, which dictates the characters interacting with each other.