In our in-class discussion, someone (who has since identified themselves as Isaac Berman; thanks, Isaac!) seemed to half-jokingly bring up the possibility of There is No Game having a wide variety of ‘good’ endings, in that the player can opt to stop playing the (non)game whenever the (non)game’s narrator prompts them to do so. It struck me as odd that the mere act of ceasing to play a (non)game should qualify as reaching some successful end state.
The case for surrender as an end state rests on the fact that perhaps the distinguishing feature of There is No Game is how it effectively trains the player to accept its expansion of its own magic circle to elements of the (non)game’s interface that would otherwise be read as diegetic. To make a point I’m sure has been repeated to death by countless authors in just the last few hours of this blog, the (non)game’s lettering, menu buttons, and a wide variety of other (non)game elements are used to solve the (non)game’s puzzles, expanding the scope of the (non)game and its magic circle to include nearly every possible method of interaction within the (non)game’s reach. So, then, why can’t the player take the final step of choosing to expand TING’s magic circle to include exiting the program when TING asks them to? As TING so frequently demonstrates, the magic circle has always been in the eye of the beholder, so why can’t it include quitting?
The case against surrender as an end state is that the ‘end state’ has long had a specific meaning in games, as Save The Date so effectively comments upon. An end state is official, irreversible and usually comes with some judgement of its quality (e.g. “Good Ending”). If you stop playing a (non-meta) game with an end state without reaching said end state, very few people would call that action reaching some end state. In addition, in that scenario, you could pick up playing the (non)game right where you left off, which is one of the key qualities of an end state. If it’s the intention to oblige the disembodied voice and stop playing the (non)game that expands the magic circle and triggers the end state, how do we know that that intention is permanent? It’s not just that nothing is an end state unless it has an ‘end state’ label stamped on it, it’s that merely giving up when asked doesn’t really match the way we usually talk about and interact with end states.
Or maybe it’s just that the idea of games that aren’t visual novels having official ‘end states’ is ill-defined, ultimately itself an overused trope, and kind of stupid, and it’s wrong to think about TING using that language.
Nah, these things are fun to think about, that can’t be it.
Hi, it’s me, I talked about quitting TING early to get a happy ending. I elaborated a bit on my interpretation of the diegesis in my own blog post, but that one’s a 1800-word mess of emotions about the The Witness so I won’t blame you if you skip it.
I wanted to continue this conversation by bringing in a quote from the author of Save the Date about the game:
“It’s easy to forget, but we already mess with the story ALL THE TIME when we’re playing. I’ll be playing ninja gaiden, for example, and the game tells me the story of “the ninja on a mission of justice, who totally hit a bird while jumping, and fell in a pit and died, the end.” And I’ll be like “no, this story is balls, I want to hear about the one where the ninja totally kicks everyone’s ass, including that bird who is a total dick” and so I hit continue. I’m actively rejecting the story the game told, and trying to get it to tell me another. Any time you reload from a save game after dying, you’re doing that.”
You claimed in your post that it isn’t an end state if you just walk away from a non-meta game. But he’s claiming here that there is a story here and it has a sad ending if you gave up on the game. I’m guilty of this myself (my personal story with Baba Is You is quite brief, quite sad, and it reflects poorly on my puzzle-solving skills), and I think it’s an important point that we don’t want to lose when we talk about the stories of games.
I definitely hear what you’re really saying. The discussion of “end states” as I’m taking it is very amorphous (just read my thoughts of The Witness if you thought this was bad), and I agree that we need much better definitions if we want any productive conclusions about the narratives going on here. But especially in the context of a game that makes meta its own gameplay and narrative, I think we need to at least keep these endings in mind.
Hey Isaac, thanks for claiming credit! I’ve updated the post. I actually mostly agree with you: it’s strange to talk about endings to TING this way, but we do it because it’s fun and it makes sense to us (the last line of this isn’t sarcastic). There’s some meaningful way to talk about this, I just felt it would be useful to impose the rigidly defined rules of visual novels and dating sims onto TING, which abhors rigidly defined anything.