When I was watching She Puppet, I wasn’t aware that I was going to come down with a cold soon, and I felt pressure start to build up behind my eyes. Watching the montage of Lara dying again and again, making the same compressed sound, filled me with a sense of unease, but also a sense that I had been here before. Lara’s clumsiness and constant failure, as well as the feeling that everything about the game setup was ‘wrong’ brought me back to a different time…14 years ago…
image credit u/Just-Call-Me-J
When I was 7 years old, I had a singular video game, which was Super Mario 64 for the DS. I didn’t know how to play video games. My parents also didn’t know how to play 3D video games, as my mom had only played Mario 1 on arcade games. Everything about the game was alien. Moving was odd, the musical cues reminded me of the X-files, a show my parents let me watch for some reason.
Failure was something that I quickly became aware of. I didn’t know how to catch the rabbit with my awkward Yoshi body. I didn’t recognize Luigi, Wario, Lakitu, or anyone. The only reason I knew Mario’s name is because he is identified in the title.
Once I finally caught the rabbit once and took the key to enter the castle, a horrifying string of music played through the speakers. Lakitu descended and then warned me: the paintings come alive!
So, once I received this forewarning, I would exit the game, delete my save file, and then play the rabbit-catching sequence again and again.
Why this strange anecdote from my childhood? Why was She Puppet so familiar? I think that the film’s strange, stuttered movements, as well as the almost loop-like montage of Lara’s deaths in the movie brought me back to a mode of play I hadn’t experienced in a while, and I think this is something that people who came to games later and on their own can relate. There is a mode of play that lives completely outside the bounds of what designers generally think about, which is a mode that can only be inhabited once. This is an affect that disappears quickly once movement and controls become second-nature, and patterns of gameplay are synthesized from design cues. It’s a mode of play that is stilted, awkward, like a small animal learning to walk.
I experienced something very similar with the game Pirates 101, it’s an mmorpg where you play as a pirate doing pirate things, the game was made by the same studio as Wizard 101, making them sister games. Just like Wizard 101 and other mmorpgs like WOW, you have to pay a montly subscription to access the full game, but f2p players can play up to a specific world/level. Seeing how I was around 10 at the time and couldnt convince my parents to cough up some money, when I would hit the cap, i would always reset my character and make a new one, playing that character until I hit the cap again, even when I had an opportunity to gain full access, I would still play how I used to despite it. So, i guess in that sense, that kind of play, which wasn’t intended at all, became my main method of play for that game for a long time.
I really liked the way you connected She Puppet to that “early-play” feeling (the kind of awkward, disoriented mode you only experience once before games start making sense). Your Super Mario 64 story hit so close to home. I remember having that same weird mix of fear and fascination when a game felt wrong… like the world wasn’t cooperating with me yet.
Your point about that mode of play disappearing once we get used to control schemes really resonated. There’s something almost nostalgic about watching Lara stumble around in She Puppet. It brings back a version of ourselves that only existed for a very short window of time. Really thoughtful post 🙂