Blog
RG1: Labyrinth of Someone Else’s Memory: Mother
NOTES
Article Discussed:
Labyrinth of Someone Else’s Memory: Mother
Winter Lake
http://nightmaremode.thegamerstrust.com/2012/11/18/childhood-women-and-heterosexuality-a-critique-of-mother/
Music:
“Yarn Ball” from Love ZZZV.
Support Zan-zan-zawa-veia at https://www.patreon.com/zzzv. Find out more about Zan’s music at https://zan-zan-zawa-veia.bandcamp.com or http://aanaaanaaanaaana.net/
Other Links:
The Cave of the Past and Mother 2 and Mother 3
Winter Lake
http://xmaslemmings.tumblr.com/post/58675845331/the-cave-of-the-past-and-mother-2-and-mother-3
Rough Script:
Labyrinth is crucial, to me, because it approaches a close reading of games authorship in a way that I have genuinely not seen replicated. It takes very seriously the fact that Itoi is the game’s author, and uses that to contextualize a variety of different elements in a very convincing way. This is an open question in games, which has something of a burgeoning critical scene invested in auteur readings but not a lot of critical framework with which to perform those readings.
I also want to say, before we get into the article proper, that I think this is an excellent place to start, given the personal aspect of this project. The piece was originally published on Nightmare Mode, a short-lived critical site run by Patricia Hernandez before she headed over to Kotaku. It brought together a bunch of really great writers near the beginning of their careers to do deep analysis on a bunch of stuff. I found it right as I was flirting with the idea of caring about videogames again in 2013, and it was what cemented me caring about them. It’s an excellent resource that briefly disappeared and is now archived at nightmaremode.thegamerstrust.com, so immense shout outs to them.
By way of summary: Labyrinth begins with a discussion of lineage and authorship. The first thread is fairly brief, while the second becomes the basis for the critique. The lineage laid out goes from tabletop wargames through D&D, early CRPGS, and Dragon Quest. I like the quote about lineage a lot, because it leads to this observation:
“The seed that lineage sprouts from is simulation: creating a fake scientific model that describes a fake world. Fake physics, fake biology, fake economics, fake magic, fake anything. Mother plays with the artifice of such authored systems in ways beyond its little parodic winks. The systems do not exist, as they do in many other such games, to invisibly lend the scenario a feeling of realism.”
Instead it discards that aspect of the lineage in order to be more explicitly authored. That happens through the opening credits, the existence of a “Mt. Itoi,” and does so, as Winter says, to prove the point that “someone wrote all this.” As Winter points out, this itself is an important claim. Young gamers especially have no real sense of their being people behind these objects, partially because they are obsessed with immersion and partially because there is no real conception of An Author. The piece describes Winter’s experience with previous games, quote:
“Games seemed to be at least partially authored by a sentient, impenetrable machine consciousness. They were bewildering and allowed the opportunity to probe the limits of constructed worlds, recover from fatal trial and error, enter extreme emotional states in isolation, with impunity.”
This observation leads to the next big point in the article: the way the game is constructed, both visually and mechanically, is about being a child who doesn’t quite understand the world and the kinds of things they project onto it because of that. For example:
“People wander aimlessly around the cities or walk in place behind desks when they’re “working.” They do this in Dragon Quest too, but Dragon Quest expends more energy implying its characters have lives and duties to perform beyond the visual sketch that’s depicted. Mother’s characters’ idle wandering and somewhat detached observations on their surroundings seem more a part of the naive, patchwork world they inhabit, which can imagine nothing better for them to be doing.”
This is pushed even further by discussing how the art style voids some of the abstraction available in games like Dragon Quest, where everything is clearly tile-based and meant to straddle a line somewhere between being ontologically true and representative of an ontology:
“A viewer is likely to understand that the boxy, open Dragon Quest room that contains two pieces of furniture shoved against the wall is not literally meant to be that; limitations have stripped details that were meant to be present.”
All of this feels crucial to me, someone who has never played Mother, even a full six years after it was published. The relative abstraction of a game vs its core influence is just not something I see getting worked through hardly ever, and it’s so crucial to this aesthetic theory. Winter doesn’t explicitly link this back to the question of genre film’s influence on the game – the period/gothic horror films of Itoi’s youth, Metropolis, & The Day the Earth Stood Still are all mentioned – but that juxtaposition doesn’t just fit it in “among contemporary films by Steven Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis, Joe Dante, and others,” but speaks to the ways that nostalgia interacts with politics and entertainment and produces variable meanings in and through abstraction, a core aspect of games in general and this style of games in particular. It’s this, I think, more than anything, that I really go for here.
There’s also discussion of the way the mechanics (specifically battles) relate to this, but I’m going to skip ahead a little here. The bulk of the last handful of paragraphs is about capitalism and gender, so, you know. Along with pointing out the way places of work and jobs are abstracted out of a childhood misunderstanding of what that actually requires of a person, Winter has talked throughout the article about Mother’s beautiful fantasy of shopping. It comes from the same place; eating fast food is fun, going to the mall is fun, being able to have an ATM card with which to do it must, therefore, be fun, and so it is used instead of the more traditional fantasy staples of gold coins and blacksmiths. But the game also presents the player with a place called Magicant, “where everyone gives everything away and gets all they need by transforming their garbage in the waters of a magic fountain.” But that’s not it, or not entirely. There are merchants there as well, and they are crucial to the game.
“They know there’s something illicit about what they’re doing–selling all this stuff that was lying around, free for anyone to take. It’s not literally lying around. You can gather weeds to make the magic herbs they sell, but it’s not so with their other items. You’ll find yourself returning to these shops throughout the game. The vague suggestion of unease with capitalism means little when shopping is essential, ever present, consequence-free, exciting and fun.”
This, I think, can get us to the heart of the thing. This essay is about Itoi’s authorship and how that both uses and breaks from the game’s lineage; it’s about how specific genre choices bolster the authorial voice and come to be meaningful on their own; it’s about how character moments and visual aesthetics and battle mechanics all school together to make this particular thing the particular shape that it is. Because, according to my reading of this argument at least, Mother is a game that manages to both be exemplary of, and to seriously allow for reflection on, the ways in which many games can be boiled down to engines of dissociation. They’re art objects to structure boredom, whether you’re a lonely kid with a long summer break or an adult trying to sneak an extra five minutes in the bathroom at work. Whether they’re hundred-hour grinds with loopy stories about killing god or “just one more round” multiplayer endorphin hits, this is true. It is also true that they are many other things. When I first read this half a decade ago, I was basically totally ignorant of any of my own gender identity issues. And I think my understanding of this essay will change as my understanding of myself grows. But I hang onto how I felt then, to some degree: even if Labyrinth is speaking to a specific, personal experience of gender as filtered through games, it does the critical work of being serious about the content of the game itself, and so becomes something both incredibly personal and capable of providing a lens with which to see games in general.
Before we move on from this essay, I want to read the third to last paragraph in whole. It’s where Winter hits on gender specifically, and I think it basically stands on its own. Here we go.
“Existing within Mother’s world means embodying the image of someone else’s childhood, his stumbling steps into adolescence, the expectations that have been inscribed onto his brain. I’m someone for whom attempting to exist as a good heterosexual boy was rather self-destructive, and part of playing Mother made the deep inscriptions burnt into my own brain light up. It’s the promise, repeated here as I saw it repeated a thousand times elsewhere, that understanding heterosexual desire is a gateway into adulthood. It’s the absolute inevitability of and my perfect, effortless entitlement to the care and adoration of women.”
I’ve largely stuck to the original post in this episode, but there was a follow up. It’s titled “The Cave of the Past and Mother 2 and Mother 3,” and is available on Winter’s tumblr. It’s an important piece in conversation with this one, that both expands on it and contextualizes it. I’ll keep this short, though: one quote, on the ending of Earthbound (aka Mother 2, the only of these that I’ve played), sticks out to me. This is partially because the ending of that game is such a triumph to play: you throw away the game’s abstracted battle mechanics in order to have it call out your own name, or whatever you chose as your name at the game’s beginning. It’s beat by addressing the player, bringing them into the fiction, and having that reinscribe the whole world. Because afterwards, you’re allowed to wander the entire world again on your way home, free of conflict and with new dialogue from every NPC. You’ve made a genuine difference and you get to actually see it. Most videogame worlds disappear the moment conflict is gone. Earthbound presents a little vision of the utopia you’ve probably spent a few dozen hours getting to. That’s the usual line, anyway. Reframed as a series about extrapolating from childhood and dissociating, Winter comes to a different conclusion:
“Giygas isn’t Ness’ fight, he’s yours. Only you can beat him. When you do, the TV shuts itself off. You’re done.
Then it fucking turns itself back on. Then, as a prize, it says: good job completing this journey with us, now stay in your fake bullshit pop art nostalgia theme park forever.”
Next time:
adventures in level design – Wolfenstein 3D, episode 4, level 3
Liz Ryerson
http://ellaguro.blogspot.com/2012/04/adventures-in-level-design-wolfenstein_27.html
