I was trying to play subversively the game, but the game played me
Metanymie, 23 January 2018
Playing Proteus aesthetically
Many forms of subversive plays emerge from a deep knowledge of a game. After having explored every nooks and cranny, people devise novel ways with which to engage in a game. I’m thinking of glitching games, or the Nuzlocke challenge in Pokémon. A funny one I have heard about is playing Dishonored but lay every incapacitated enemy in beds. Griefing, too, implies a level of knowledge of the rules and accepted in-game behavior. I set out to subvert a game that I do not know, Proteus: in an emergent fashion, I will be exploring its boundaries, according to Dan Cox typology of subversive play styles, and will reflect on my experience as it happens. I plan to start recording when I feel in the right direction towards subversion.
As I start the game, I notice that one of the few interactive things in the game, as in things that I can influence, are the animals. I decide to collect the animals that I can influence through my presence (not the owl then) and put them on the top of a mountain, trying to see how many I could collect. I encounter some frogs and two group of birds. During the play, this mountain and my attachment to it via the animals create meaning in the way, because I navigate the map always orienting or trying to orient myself so that I can find my way back to the mountain and bring more animal on top of the mountain.
Night falls, and the clouds are low. As I walk, the bells and clicking of chicken nearby, I follow them, try to circle around them to bring them in the right direction. But the clouds are too low, the fog has risen, and I am lost. I cannot find my way, the chickens almost fall in the ocean.I end up losing my chickens as well, in the mist. I find the house that stands at the bottom of my mountain, past the graveyard. The mountain and the chicken that I thought were mine were easy to lose and so was I. It is hard to make meaning of an environment when your reference points are lost.
I must not have followed the right path, and I get lost again. I try to get on a mountain, up high, to see further. I see pigeons - is this my mountain? I want to go grab a frog down from the mountain, but I only manage to push the pigeons further. When I bring the frog, it jumps on the pigeons, making them flee far. The mountaintop is too small for them to cohabitate. I cannot collect them there, I end up realizing. Maybe I can find another place to go. Meanwhile, I see in the distance a spiral of light. I go towards it, and then in its center. Many days seem to happen at once, now, the seasons have changed? Maybe I can find more animal to collect.
Arguably, most of the goals you can achieve in Proteus are aesthetic because the game doesn’t have explicit goals of itself. Maybe aside from changing seasons. Collecting animals wasn’t meant to be. The environment is very hard to navigate, and the animals disappear between seasons: going back to a castle where I previously left a frog, I found it empty. The game was showing me its limits, the ways in which it could not be subverted.
I wanted to have all the animals at the same place because when you approach them and make them move, they make these musical notes, and I wanted to trigger the musical notes of many animals at once, making a kind of music. The animals repeal each other, so the game wouldn’t let me pile them up nicely so that I could push them at the same time.
Having only heard of Proteus without having played it before, I didn’t know about the changing of the season and their different properties. When I started recording, I quickly trigger by accident the spiral that changes the season to fall. There are no animals for me to collect in the fall; the video is in a sense a memorabilia of my experience as I encounter and make sense of the limits and experiences allowed in the game in real time. How I realized that the game is playing me and my expectations as I try to control it and make it into what I want and cannot achieve. Having known that, I would have recorded earlier, but having known that, it wouldn’t have made for so pure a realization.
How much agency do I really have? Proteus is a powerful game. Even when you think you outwit it, aiming, say, for the mountains in the distance, thinking you will never lose them because of their sheer size, Proteus finds a way to subvert your sense of orientation with the clouds and the fogs. It removes your animals you thought you collected. It changes season through sudden animation. You learn as you make not mistake but steps, realizing that even if you will to go somewhere, the game decides what happens when you and other things move. You are the game’s toy.