Quest to Nowhere

Creating Our Own Story through Interaction and Abstraction

To What End is a game made for the 2012 Global Game Jam by Michael Molinari and Chelsea Howe. You should probably go play it before you continue reading; it should take you less than five minutes.

Finished?

Ok.

The thing that is most notable about this game is not how it manages to convey a story through the actions you make as the player, but rather how the game tricks you into creating a story based on your actions through the use of abstraction. There are scripted events of a sort as you lose NPCs, but the significance of that loss and any sort of personality or humanity you place on these shapes is merely of your own creation.

Now the reason this happens is because of something comic book artist/writer Scott McCloud talks about in his book Understanding Comics. Essentially the human brain is designed to look for faces, which is why when we look at : ) we can see a smiling face and not just a colon and a right parenthesize.  Now in comics they take advantage of this through the style the comic is depicted in.

Which is to say that the more realistic the character appears the more we think of them as another person, but when we see a more simplistic looking face we are able to see our own selves reflected in the character. Like the smiley faced emoticon we want to assign some sort of personality to it, basically to anthropomorphize it, so as to give it meaning and make it more real to us. This then in turn makes our connection to that character more personal, as you are to some extent creating aspects of the character.

Now when playing To What End this is what you do with the object you control, and with the other objects. They have no personalities, nothing remotely human about them, but in your mind as you play you construct a narrative through the patterns you see and experience (ie: the way they each hope a little differently, or how the cutout at the bottom of an object is the shape protruding from the top of the object to its left.) So you start to see them not as five shapes moving through a space, but as five friends on an adventure, or five people trying to get through life, or something else entirely but not just shapes.

Then as you begin to progress through the game world you create meaning to explain what you are doing, or what is occurring. Perhaps you chose not to leave one of the shapes behind, because you wished not to abandon it. Or maybe you made it all the way to the end with your one shape, and feel accomplished for doing so even though you left those other shapes behind.

And this is perhaps the true brilliance of this game, is that there is no one meaning to your experience playing the game. In fact the game itself really has no meaning to it at all, but instead the meaning of the game is created by you playing and experiencing it. This makes the meaning you come to at the end something very personal, and perhaps reflective of your personality, or how you see the world.  And this was all done not by giving the player a lot of choices, but rather because of the game’s its abstract presentation.