What I liked about There is No Game: Wrong Dimension is the narrator’s insistence that the player is interacting with the game incorrectly – at least at first. When I first started the game, I had no idea what to expect, so it took me longer to realize that thinking unconventionally would be my greatest advantage for advancing through the game. However, as I quickly became accustomed to bypassing typical game conventions to solve puzzles, I realized just how contradictory the game’s premise is. The contradiction is this: the narrator of the game explicitly tells a player not to do certain things. Don’t click through the various screens. Don’t use a key to unlock a door. Don’t start the game. However, once the player discovers the character Mr. Glitch, the narrator’s protests of the player’s ability to “mess up” the system become encouragement. Now, you have the narrator giving players hints and saying that that must do certain actions to catch Mr. Glitch and prevent it from ruining the program. This made me wonder if you can ever truly decide not to follow a game’s rules or procedures. In the opening, while the narrator may be telling you not to do certain things, it’s clear from the reward of doing these actions that players are doing exactly what they’re supposed to. In fact, the opening sequence is a tutorial for how the player is meant to play the game later. Using alternative methods to solve puzzles in There Is No Game is precisely the point of the game. Perhaps There Is No Game critiques the metagame genre as a whole and the idea that players can ever truly go against a game’s wishes. Do we truly have free will or the ability to choose when it comes to games, especially metagames? Or are we simply making choices predetermined by game creators? Is not playing a game at all the only way a player can truly defy a game?
I loved this post, and the questions you posed at the end. I think there’s definitely truth to the statement that maybe the only way to truly defy a video game and its creators is to simply not play. It’s like you said – even when you’re “defying” the game by contradicting the narrator’s instructions, you’re still following a path intended by the developers through the very code that runs through the game. By the very nature of what digital games are, a person inherently agrees to a set of rules and contracts when they choose to participate in one.
However, I think there actually can be a bit of a gray area to this! You see it especially often when people speedrun games – they find ways to go out of bounds, duplicate items, and move at speeds normally unachievable through glitches and exploits that the developers overlooked. And while the end goal of a speedrun is still to reach the end of the game, the path to getting there usually looks very different from the “intended” experience.
If, instead of running around a mountain to get to the castle on the other side, a person performs a glitch that lets them noclip right through it, could that be considered breaking the rules? In this kind of situation, can it be said that the player is defying the game and its creators? From the game’s point of view, it’s simply following the rules and code that it’s given – to the computer, the software is running as it should. It only looks and feels weird because we know something is occurring that the developers likely didn’t account for. In this case, we’re definitely defying the game’s creators, at least.