NONSENSE IN GAMES

In the past, I’ve had several experiences in which I’d come out of playing a game with the feeling of “I have no idea what any of that meant”. It used to be that this would bother me immensely and I’d immediately start scouring Reddit and the like for an “Ending Explained” thread. But more recently, I have become more and more comfortable with accepting the work as it is, and many of these experiences have turned into some of my most memorable gaming moments. Unfortunately, there isn’t much room for nonsense in popular games discourse and criticism. To be “good” or “interesting”, a game needs to have a clear thought-provoking metaphor¹. It cannot be muddled, contradictory, or vague. This isn’t necessarily the case for other art forms; it’s fine for a movie to be avant-garde, for a painting to be abstract, or for music to be noise. Dadaism, Theatre of the Absurd, and Fluxus are all movements that are revered and endlessly analyzed and discussed in academia. Yet, writing on game design often focuses on “meaningful” play and intuitive design, and rarely on nonsensical disorienting play. I propose that it should be fine for games, too, to not really make sense. I propose that games don’t need to have clear intentions. I propose that it is possible and powerful to find games compelling and valuable without “understanding them”. I propose that we make more games that resist interpretation at a first, second, and third glance. I propose that we let games be nonsense.

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What is the point of nonsense in games? There doesn’t have to be one, but what I have noticed is that nonsensical games have often provided me with emotions stronger and rawer than anything else I’ve encountered in other more straightforward games. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of things I’ve gotten out of nonsense:

LAUGHTER AND DELIGHT:
This is probably the most popular use of nonsense in entertainment, also known as surreal or absurd humor. Our brains are tickled when something flips our expectations. It was exhilarating when in Undertale I pet the Lesser Dog and it kept getting bigger out of excitement until it started wrapping around the screen.

ALIENATION:
In Producer (2021), a whacky graphic adventure novella, you are hired as a “producer” (a position that is never really explained) by a company who makes unknown products or perhaps services and are thrusted into the task of stopping the apocalypse. Not much in this game makes sense and it feels not too dissimilar to the alienation and powerlessness of surviving in a world of capitalism, global warming, and genocide. This had the additional effect of making me feel a little less alone in feeling like I’m going fucking insane.

DREAD:
This is the realm of cosmic horror. MyHouse.wad is a Doom mod that takes place in a house that expands, changes layout, and transports you to completely different environments. The transformations don’t seem to follow an underlying logic or reason, and that is what makes it terrifying; you cannot understand it and thus you cannot tame it.

ALIVE-NESS:
If you enter one of the buildings you can explore in 10 Beautiful Postcards, you may find three birds asking someone in a business suit “how many crypts [they have] killed today”, to which they answer “my friends, you bore me unspeakably”. This short conversation is never explained nor brought up again, but the sheer implications are staggering as it sets the player’s mind ablaze with questions: What are crypts? How and why does one kill them? In what kind of world does one come to the point of finding this boring? In only two sentences, the developer made this world feel more vibrant than most AAA open-world games. This open-endedness also allows the player self-expression as they can come up with their own answers to these questions.

DESPAIR:
losers lament opens with a photo of a bathroom with two blurry, small figures, one of which is controlled by the player. You can hear the other character (seemingly, a knight) crying in a high-pitched sob as well as a droning noise. If you talk to them, you can either ask why they’re crying or to stop crying. Either way, they will answer that they want to “spread peace and love… but no one will listen”. The game then ends immediately. I have no idea what was going on in the creator’s head when they were making this game, yet, I still felt a profound sense of sadness that I hadn’t experienced in a while, a sadness that resonated with the knight’s and was amplified by the unknowability and fuzziness of it all.

TRANCE:
In Hylics, the NPC dialogue is often detached from any context and strangely wordy, as if randomly-generated. While this initially confused me, it, along with the choppy claymation and the funky, chill music conveyed to me that this was a game that was less about story and more about atmosphere, and I was put in a psychedelic trance-like state unlike anything else I’ve experienced playing games.

• • • • •

It is regrettable and perhaps a little bit odd that nonsense is not very popular in mainstream games, especially since games are an inherently nonsensical medium; we attempt to simulate systems from real-life that will never truly match the real thing. In games, your health is represented by a linear bar, and you are completely fine and able until it reaches 0, at which point you die immediately. Defeating an enemy gives you “experience”, which makes you instantly stronger and capable of new unrelated feats. You can make characters repeat the same dialogue to you indefinitely and you can save and load a previous record if you’re unhappy with the current state of things. So why do we shy away from the absurdity of it all, and when we don’t, why is it mostly just relegated to “low-brow” comedy? Perhaps it is because games people want them to be taken seriously as a medium; nonsense is immature, and art needs to be intentionally meaningful and coherent to be “good”. When something in a game doesn’t make sense it’s easy for the average player to assume that this was not the intention, which means that the artist failed to properly convey their message, and therefore that their art is bad². If it is clear that the nonsense is intentional, they might then think that it is not worthy of engagement because there is nothing to “get”. These criticisms are limiting and flatten the artform into a boring and uniform shape. However, that doesn’t mean nonsense should be free of criticism. Just because you can do anything doesn’t mean it will be compelling. 

Here are a few guidelines I came up with to make nonsense that sort of makes sense: 

BE GENUINE:
High on Life is an FPS where your gun is a living alien who is constantly snarkily commenting on what is currently going on in the game. It is not enjoyable because it feels as if the game is ashamed of its own goofiness and is constantly trying to make up for it, in an overly-cynical fashion. Don’t do that. If you’re peddling nonsense, be proud of it. Be authentic.

BALANCE IT OUT:
Too much nonsense kills nonsense. If everything in your game is random then it becomes predictable and the impact is lost. Excessive nonsense pushes your player out. Something has to tie things together. The random bits shouldn’t contradict each other. The balance changes depending on the tone you’re going for, the pacing, the strength of the parts, and your intended audience (it’s fine if that’s just you!). Some of the games I’ve mentioned above are more nonsensical than others, and it works for what they’re doing.

HAVE THEMES:
Have your game be about things that excite, sadden, or terrify you. The Stanley Parable is a fun game, but it doesn’t really linger in my mind because it doesn’t feel like it’s much more than a satirical exploration of every possible way a game could end. Which is a fine thing for a game to be. But it could be more.

FOLLOW YOUR INTUITIONS: 
Explore what feels good or makes you curious or gives you a laugh. Your game doesn’t need to have a “message”, and if one ends up arising, that’s good too. Don’t worry about not being skilled enough to accomplish something. “Worse”-looking games can get away with bolder things because it feels like they have less to prove. 

REVEL IN FAILURES:
homem de negócios is a game about businessmen trying to collect all the coins. It also abruptly ended as soon as I got the first one. I later found out that this was initially a bug, but the developer decided to leave it in because he thought it was funny³. And it was. 

PLAY OTHER NONSENSE:
Play a game that the mainstream media hates. Play a game that your best friend hates. Play a game that you hate. Play a game that scares you. Play a game that confuses you. Play a game with no screenshots or description. Play a game that you make up in your mind. Play a game that you make up as you go.
If you struggle to enjoy nonsense, try to approach it with no preconceived notions. Let your mind do the work or leave it behind completely. There is no right or wrong way to play a game. It’s ok if you don’t get it.

DON’T FOLLOW THESE GUIDELINES:
Don’t

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¹ This is specifically about games with a narrative focus; for the purpose of this manifesto, I am leaving out abstract (but still popular) games such as Tetris, 2048, Scrabble, Football, Solitaire, etc.

² Of course, it’s also possible to enjoy games that are nonsensical but not (seemingly) on-purpose. See: kusoge. However, this usually requires a certain level of irony and that is not what this manifesto is about.

³ And, I presume, other reasons. This is irrelevant here because the author is dead. (figuratively)