By Jordan Shapiro
Shovel Knight is hard to stop
playing. It is a super stylized tribute to the epic platformers of the video
game industry’s early days. My kids and I have been playing the game together
for the last few weeks. We sit on the sofa, handing off the WiiU controller and
navigating our way past witty characters and imaginative obstacles.
The thing about platformer games is
that they are all about style. After all, they are all essentially the same.
The avatar just keeps moving to the right. Sometimes there’s a ladder up. Other
times the passage leads down. All along, you avoid rifts and chasms. You hop
over obstacles. You avoid projectiles. You stay cautious lest something falls
from the sky or rises from beneath the platform.
The difference between one platformer
and the next comes down to storytelling and style. What story is laid atop the
essential mechanics? How well are the elements introduced? How do the
aesthetics align with the mechanics? And do all the components organize into a
unified and consistent system?
Platformers often have a quest theme.
They tend to borrow many of their dynamic narrative elements from the
archetypal hero’s journey–the “monomyth” laid out so well in Joseph Campbell’s
famous book, Hero With A Thousand Faces. Whether they are set in the
future, in space, on pirate ships, or in an urban wasteland, platformers
usually include some sort of heroic objective. The protagonist is always
ambitiously seeking an object.
This, of course, is precisely why
gender-conscious folks object to the damsel in distress narrative trope: it
turns the “princess” into an object. No matter how often misogynists make the
argument that the women must be respected because the whole point of the game
is reach them, nothing changes. The damsel is still a prize, a treasure, a kind
of property.
Of course, in hero stories the ultimate
boon need not be a person. It can be a chalice, secret data, a weapon, a magic
potion. He or she could even be a fugitive trying to get to a safe place (the
object is safety), or maybe a modern day Odysseus side tracked on the way to
Ithaca. Always there’s an object of desire and the hero is on a quest to attain
it.
The procedural specifics of the heroic
quest make it perfectly suited to video game design. The great French
mythologist Jean-Pierre Vernant explains that in classic myth the exploits of
heroes “are valid in themselves and on their own account, quite apart from the
hero performing them.” In a video game, too, any individual player can
drop in and control the avatar. This is why the best protagonists reduce the
thematic down to a common denominator, a smiley face–as general as
possible–allowing the largest number of players to identify.
Each level of the game is like a trial
of Hercules, self contained in its objective but also a piece of the whole. You
go from one boss to the next, compounding new elements and obstacles atop the
familiar. Heroic games work for the same reason heroic myths work.
The audience
can enjoy imagining themselves in the same extreme circumstances. They can
imagine proving their own heroism. After all, Vernant explains the mythic hero:
“He does not perform the impossible because he is a hero; rather, he is a hero
because he has performed the impossible.”
In the formative days of video game
design, the platformer quest was much more explicit. Dialogue was written in
pixelated text. There were ogres and villains, psychopomps, messengers, and
mentors. The game played like a choose your own adventure novel with expository
content crammed before and after each level. Eventually, most of the narrative
was eliminated.
Perhaps it was because Mario showed us we hardly needed the
story. We were content to learn Peach and Bowser’s motivation the opening and
concluding credits. Everything in between is just a procedural challenge. The modern
platformer is not like a novel, it is a myth. There is no character
development. There are only trials.
Regrettably, in the age of mobile
games, even more is lost. The platformer can be reduced to stick figures. Run.
Jump. Shoot. On tablets, the platformer is often just a generic side-scrolling
endless runner to which advertisers can apply movie tie-ins whenever and
wherever they see fit. The story is irrelevant, the characters meaningless.
Luckily, Shovel Knight, the new
indie game for Wii U and 3DS, steps in with a nostalgic homage to the
platformers of the past. Everything about Shovel Knight recalls the
games I played as a child. It feels like an platformer from the Atari 2600
suddenly fell into a time travel portal and arrived in 2014. Imagine what would
happen if we skipped everything in between then and now. If the games of the
past, without having evolved slowly, were just given the capabilities of
today’s HD consoles.
Shovel Knight’s music sounds like
the mono-timbre midi-sequenced beeps of the early game consoles suddenly got
released into a world where they are provided with techno accompaniment. The
old melody still plays lead, but now it is backed up with 21st century beats.
The art design utilizes the new tech but only to enrich the old-style graphics,
as if we had never imagined other kinds of design. The 3DS version of Shovel
Knight (when played in 3D mode), for example, has a beautiful layered
depth; but each layer remains flat like old style cell animation.
Because it makes the hero story
explicit, Shovel Knight allowed me to discuss the nature of the
platformer genre with my eight year old. I pointed out the narrative structure
and tried to explain to him that when success is defined by the deeds rather
than the person, we implicitly define dignity as the opportunity to climb the
backs of others to the top of a pyramid. Climb or be climbed upon.
I scrambled for the best eight-year-old
metaphors I could muster. “Imagine stepping on your friends because you are
racing to be the first one down the sliding board. Why not just take turns?
Share the fun with everyone?”
The ubiquity of heroic stories in our
culture leads to unchecked ambition, corporate growth disconnected from
humanity, standardized testing, and fierce competition. Heroism is useful in
many ways. But harmful in many others. Hopefully, I will raise boys who
understand when it is good to call on their inner Hercules and when it is not.
It seems like a complicated
conversation, but it was not. He understood completely. “That’s what I like
about Tomodachi Life, Dad.” He explained, “It is not about winning or
losing. It is about how all the Miis live together.” I smiled proudly.
I don’t speak Japanese, but I’m told
Tomodachi means “Friends.” That makes sense, the game seems to be about having
fun in community. I say “seems” because I do not get it. I have tried to play,
but it just does not resonate with me. Both of my kids, however, never seem to
stop playing. Perhaps this is because I was raised in the age of platformers
that didn’t even have coop mode. Perhaps I have hero consciousness; and maybe
they don’t.
I would like to think it is true. The
idea that new games can (and already are) teaching kids how to re-imagine
cultural priorities gives me hope for the future.
Jordan Shapiro is author
of FREEPLAY: A Video Game Guide to
Maximum Euphoric Bliss, and MindShift’s Guide To Games And Learning For
information on Jordan’s upcoming books and events click
here.
http://www.forbes.com
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