The Patreon Letter - 7th April, 2019

Hi everyone, Em here with a new letter after our impromptu little bit of time off. Thank you so much for your understanding, we regularly exist on the fringes of burnout because two people can only do so much, but thankfully every one of you is extremely nice so we should be back on track without any real bumps.

I've been trying to combat my exhaustion with games lately by just going back to the styles of games I really enjoy: namely JRPGs and platformers. The JRPGs we've mostly got covered through the podcast, but platformers are one of those genres we don't really cover much because there isn'tmuch to say about them formally we haven't generally covered in prior episodes of Abnormal Mapping. Some of them are good, most are bad, they often have a hard time connecting their thematic material to the actual gameplay, and usually the physics-heavy ones are my least favorite. 

If you're a long time listener you've heard all this before.

Despite this, I still really like the genre, so I spend most of my free time with one game about jumping on stuff in my rotation. Lately, I've finished a couple entries, but two spring to mind as the epitome of the good and bad ways platformers are still the default mode for a certain type of game. Those two are Type:Rider and Unravel. 

Type:Rider is a game that should be perfect for me. I love fonts, I love history lessons packed into games, I like relatively chill platformers. The game unfolds as a series of worlds where you control the two dots of a colon across a landscape of letters, each world themed after a specific font, as you collect the characters of that font and pieces of a history lesson about why that font is culturally significant. From the printing press to Helvetica, the game offers a good primer in a dozen or so different character sets from the first written languages to the modern day. 

The lessons are nice enough, though I think you'd be probably better served just reading a wikipedia article. The problem is the presentation is a text screen in the menu of the world's most generic platformer otherwise. This game is the epitome of the default platformer, a game with no special mechanics past the fact that it's fonts. The educational lesson becomes a themed set of labors that aren't inherently rewarding because the game's mechanics are so mediocre. What if, before you could read the info plaque of a painting in a museum, you had to do five sit ups? Nothing hard, but just enough to be extremely annoying the third or fourth time you're asked to do it. 

In comparison, I cannot say enough good things about Unravel, a game that I remember everyone brushing off as 'another physics platformer' back when it came out. The emotional impact of Yarny at E3 aside, the reality is Unravel is a game all about your character being made of string to create one of the most compelling, interesting rope-focused games I've ever played. Building trampolines, creating pulleys, swinging from grapple hooks? These are all dynamic, exciting things to do in a platformer, and Yarny has you constantly surprising yourself with just how much you can accomplish with the several yards of yarn you have between checkpoints. 

The thing about platformers is that they are the original games about physicality a point obscured by our overtraining to see the matrix of collision boxes and progression triggers because of the genre's ubiquity. I can't think of a single genre as explicitly about your sense of manipulating a body to exert influence on an environment outside of motion controls. Often embodiment is a thing we associate with action, sports, or shooting games, but I've always thought about the most freeing activity games give us is to run, to jump, to swing.

These seem like really obvious movement verbs, but as an unathletic child and an adult now pushing my way into the creaky knees part of early middle age, I always found them a very powerful combination of activities. To navigate a platformer is to utilize being to overcome the world, which is a thing that I've never been able to do with my own body, constantly feeling at odds with the world. 

Which makes it so incredibly disappointing when games fail to offer anything other than a disconnecting feeling of traversal as you literally consume the content by rolling over it. A game like Type:Rider seems to primarily exist to offer up information and design, which is a noble goal, but I increasingly find myself asking why I'm asked to perform disconnected labor to receive those things? Why not just a space to walk through without the impediments of challenges? Why a game at all? Not everything has to be a game. Some things would be perfectly fine as websites, or youtube essays, or nice coffee table books.

And yet the Unravels of the world remind us that there is something to the simple act of getting from one platform to another that is vital and important. It's very easy, as critics and as consumers, to think of games as a means to an end. We play to see the story. We play to beat the challenges. We play to have finished the thing we started. These are all valid things, of course, but I also like to be reminded that ideally we play games to enjoy the act of playing a game, a heady state of enjoyment I'm sorry to say I don't really feel very often anymore. 

A game like Unravel, however, can soften even my stone heart not through the cute yarn person or the micro scale of moving over mundane objects scaled large (though both of those things, of course, are very charming) but through simply reminding me that to run and jump and climb is a freedom that I can be afforded even when I am incapable of such acts in reality. 

It feels like magic, and that magic is the whole point, and that's enough. It's worth holding onto such fleeting feelings and remembering. Playing to play is enough.