I’m Batman

I just fin­ished play­ing Arkham Asylum for the first time, and, to my great sur­prise, I think it has helped me to fall back in love with video games.

Axiom VII of the Fundamental Axioms I came up with when I first start­ed this blog (axioms which could prob­a­bly do for some revi­sion right about now) states that “If your writ­ing is bad, I don’t care how fun your mechan­ics are.”  This, I find, is one of the defin­ing fac­tors of how I look at video games.  A game with bad writ­ing tends to be bad art, and, per­haps because I am a writer, I tend to find poor writ­ing and sto­ry­telling very dis­tract­ing.  I used to worry that I didn’t like video games at all.  After all, if what I real­ly want are good sto­ries and well-written dia­logue, maybe I should just stick to films and nov­els?  Nearly all of my favorite games pri­or­i­tize story and dia­logue over flashy graph­ics or game­play mechan­ics, to the extent that some of the ones I value most are actu­al­ly very clum­sy to play.  (I’m look­ing at you, Torment.)

I say all this because Arkham Asylum is not the best-written, best-acted, or best-plotted game I’ve ever played.  It’s prob­a­bly not even in the top ten.  The plot is real­ly very silly, (why would the Joker need super-soldiers?) the dia­logue is ser­vice­able but large­ly unre­mark­able, the voice act­ing is com­pe­tent but large­ly not par­tic­u­lar­ly inspir­ing, (Hamill and Conroy except­ed).  It ends ter­ri­bly.

Imagine my sur­prise when, upon fin­ish­ing the game, I real­ized I absolute­ly did not care.  Sure, the game would have been bet­ter if they had addressed some of these issues, but that absolute­ly doesn’t mat­ter.  So, why do I enjoy this game so much?

Because you get to be Batman.

No, Seriously.  Batman.

That’s not a flip­pant answer.  And I don’t just mean that the game’s avatar is shaped like Batman, or that he’s voiced by Kevin Conroy.  The sim­ple fact that one is play­ing a char­ac­ter named Batman in the game is not what sells it to me.  It works because the game’s mechan­ics, com­bat sys­tem and physics engine allow you to actu­al­ly be Batman.  When you move the analog stick, the char­ac­ter moves like Batman.  When you punch a crim­i­nal, the char­ac­ter punch­es like Batman.  When you grap­ple onto a gar­goyle and then swoop down onto an unsus­pect­ing mani­ac, leav­ing him dan­gling from your perch, scream­ing and soil­ing him­self in ter­ror, you do it like Batman.

It’s the game’s rhythm, the way it allows you to calm­ly walk into a pack of fif­teen felons with crow­bars and know that you’re going to come out vic­to­ri­ous, that makes the game work.  It’s no sur­prise that it may orig­i­nal­ly have been planned as a rhythm game prop­er.

I had heard all of this before, but it’s one thing to hear about how a game real­ly makes you feel like Batman, and anoth­er to actu­al­ly play that game.  (Which may ren­der this whole post moot, come to think of it.)  It wasn’t until I played the game and gig­gled like a first-grader for hours on end that I real­ized how truly unique it is.

See, about the fifth time I entered a room full of armed felons and qui­et­ly dis­patched each of them with­out tak­ing a bul­let, the truth of the mat­ter hit me: Arkham Asylum is exact­ly what a cer­tain kind of video game does well.  What Arkham Asylum does is some­thing that video games may do bet­ter than any other medi­um: it allows you to step into some­one else’s shoes, and learn some­thing about what it is like to be a dif­fer­ent per­son.

Namely, Batman.

And Batman is kind of a big deal.  Who do geeks revere more than Batman?  If, in any argu­ment, you can prove that Batman approves of a par­tic­u­lar point of view, you win.  “Appeal to Batman” is a respect­ed rhetor­i­cal tech­nique.  If you walk up to a geek and say “think about some­thing cool,” he or she will think about Batman.

Comic is Zach Weiner’s at SMBC.

Loss of Self

I wrote an article with the title “Better Storytelling Through Loss of Self,” and while I was pri­mar­i­ly inter­est­ed in the way a good GM can reduce dis­tance between play­er and PC in a table­top RPG, the idea struck a chord with me.  The best works of nar­ra­tive art coerce you into per­fect sym­pa­thy with the pro­tag­o­nist.  They cause you to feel what the char­ac­ter feels, see what he or she sees, and, think how he or she thinks.  A great work can make you inhab­it, if only for the briefest of moments, anoth­er person’s mind– can make you leave your­self behind and tem­porar­i­ly become some­one else.

This is the art that can change lives, the sort of art that alters world­views, and video games might be unique­ly suit­ed to this kind of rad­i­cal shift in per­spec­tive.  It is one thing to read about a person’s life, and quite anoth­er to actu­al­ly live it.  This is not to say that video games will nec­es­sar­i­ly eclipse all other art forms — I am not one of those so fond of video games that he will refer to them as the apoth­e­o­sis of all artis­tic endeav­or.  Even in the realm of “media about Batman,” The Dark Knight and The Killing Joke are bet­ter art than Arkham Asylum.  These other works, in addi­tion to telling great sto­ries, let me imag­ine what it might be like to be the Caped Crusader, give insight into Batman’s psy­chol­o­gy, the myth sur­round­ing him, and the uni­verse in which he oper­ates.  But in Arkham Asylum, I actu­al­ly get to be Batman.  The dif­fer­ence is cru­cial.

So, video games can allow you to expe­ri­ence what life is like through some­one else’s eyes.  That’s neat, but why talk about Arkham Asylum, when I could talk about Torment?  Because Arkham Asylum lets you expe­ri­ence what it’s like to be a very par­tic­u­lar per­son.

Some peo­ple ask “Would it be as good if it wasn’t about Batman?”  Of course not.  Would The Once and Future King be as good if it wasn’t about King Arthur?  Would The Last Temptation of Christ be inter­est­ing if it wasn’t about Jesus?  Like these other works, Arkham Asylum doesn’t just “hap­pen” to be about Batman.  It is entire­ly about what it is like to be Batman.  If it wasn’t about Batman, it wouldn’t exist.

The Dark Knight Rises

So why is this good or impor­tant?  Does it just allow young men and women to act out the ado­les­cent fan­ta­sy of dress­ing up like a bat and punch­ing peo­ple in the face?  Well, sure.  It does that.  Certainly part of the fun of the game is final­ly get­ting to appease the 10-year-old that ran around the back­yard in a blanket-cape and jumped off of trees.  And it’s impor­tant to note that there’s absolute­ly noth­ing wrong with that.

In all seri­ous­ness, Batman is a lot more than an ado­les­cent fan­ta­sy.  Batman is a leg­end.  Tom Bissell put it best when he said “Batman may have come to us through the comic book, but he belongs to American mythol­o­gy now, and it is as hard to imag­ine him hav­ing been cre­at­ed by Bob Kane as it is to imag­ine Jesus hav­ing been cre­at­ed by Mark.”  Batman is a Hero, with a cap­i­tal H– a leg­end, a sym­bol of jus­tice and pro­tec­tion and good­ness in a way that even Superman isn’t.  Batman always has an answer for every sit­u­a­tion, can always tough it out through what­ev­er any­one throws at him.  You can try to write him off as “a dude in a bat­suit,” but you would be wrong to do so, just as if you were to say Robin Hood is “a dude in tights,” or King Arthur is “a dude with a sword.”

Why do we all want to be Batman?  Because he’s bril­liant, tough and strong.  Because Batman always beats the badguy, and he always looks cool when he does it.  Because although he doesn’t play by the rules every­one else does, he is hon­or­able to a fault.  He will never kill the Joker, because he knows it would be wrong to do so.  Batman is self­less when we are self­ish.  Batman is strong when we are weak.  He can sur­vive any­thing and beat any­one, but he is just human and bro­ken enough to be believ­able.  Superman is untouch­able because he’s from anoth­er world.  No one of us could ever be Superman, and so the desire to be Superman is always thwart­ed, but Batman — you almost think you could be Batman.  He’s just bare­ly pos­si­ble.

Why else do we keep com­ing back to him, almost eighty years after his ini­tial debut?  The Dark Knight is a pow­er­ful arche­type, an inspir­ing leg­end, the sort of Hero that res­onates with every per­son.

The Adam West Batman still exists, and so, sadly, does the Clooney one, but Batman as an idea tran­scends all of that silli­ness.  Everyone who ever boot­ed up a copy of Arkham Asylum brought an idea of Batman to the table.  Every sin­gle per­son who plays the game knows who Batman is, and even where they might prefer Nolan to Miller, or dis­agree about the specifics, they agree about the fun­da­men­tals of the Batman mythos, and the fact is that Arkham Asylum sat­is­fies all of those dif­fer­ent pre­con­cep­tions.  When you play the game, you are step­ping into the shoes of a leg­end, and there’s some­thing pow­er­ful and beau­ti­ful about that.

I don’t wish to over­state this: Arkham Asylum, for all I’ve just said, is prob­a­bly not Great Art.  It’s a fun video game, and I rec­om­mend it whole­heart­ed­ly, but it didn’t give me any great epipha­nies about human nature.  But what it did is cause me to remem­ber one of the rea­sons I love video games and find them as utter­ly fas­ci­nat­ing as I do.  The great ones allow you to briefly aban­don your own expe­ri­ences and take up another’s, to re-enter the real world hav­ing lived for a while in a dif­fer­ent one, and to be bet­ter for it.  For a short time, I was Batman, and while I still eager­ly await a game which real­ly exam­i­nes the psy­chol­o­gy of the char­ac­ter in a more mature way, it was beau­ti­ful and fun, and com­plete­ly worth my time.

So, play Arkham Asylum.  It prob­a­bly won’t change your life.  It’s unlike­ly to make you rethink the nature of human­i­ty.  You’ll prob­a­bly spend most of the time gig­gling mani­a­cal­ly at the newest ridicu­lous­ly cool thing you just did.

But you know what?  It’s beau­ti­ful, and spe­cial.

And it lets you be Batman.

Buying In

Over at Grantland​.com, Tom Bissell had put up an inter­est­ing review of L.A. Noire that is worth check­ing out; you can do so here. He also brings up some inter­est­ing ideas that I want to talk about regard­ing the expe­ri­ence of games, specif­i­cal­ly the notion of “buy­ing in” to a game’s struc­ture, nar­ra­tive, and cen­tral con­ceits. I encour­age you to read the arti­cle, but it’s pret­ty lengthy, so I’m going to touch on the most impor­tant points that he brings up on the topic.

His intro­duc­tion to the topic is here:

The story of L.A. Noire con­cerns a psy­cho­pathic cop named Cole Phelps, a man who inap­pro­pri­ate­ly com­man­deers cars from civil­ians, steals out­right any car that is left unat­tend­ed, fre­quent­ly destroys pri­vate prop­er­ty, and enjoys run­ning over civil­ians. Despite his reck­less­ness, Phelps becomes the most speed­i­ly pro­mot­ed police offi­cer in con­stab­u­lary his­to­ry.

At least, that is what L.A. Noire’s story can be about, if the play­er allows it, which nice­ly nut­shells the prob­lem of open-world games that give play­ers a large amount of behav­ioral free­dom while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly try­ing to tell a coher­ent, lin­ear story.

Video games can do a lot of things other sto­ry­telling medi­ums can­not. Their penance, how­ev­er, is to have to deal with things for­eign to other sto­ry­telling medi­ums, one of which is a unique­ly dam­ag­ing form of audi­ence dis­rup­tion. Just about every sto­ry­telling game employs var­i­ous mask­ing sys­tems that attempt to antic­i­pate inter­nal­ly dis­rup­tive play­er behav­ior.

 […]

At first blush, L.A. Noire would have you believe that Phelps is not an anti­hero. He is a cop and a war hero — an all-around “good man.” How good? Phelps can­not shoot his gun out in the open, which is prob­a­bly the most sig­nif­i­cant safe­guard the game’s cre­ators have placed on play­ers deter­mined to let Phelps go psy­cho. It is not much of a safe­guard. But there is some­thing admirable about how lit­tle L.A. Noire’s mak­ers appear to have wor­ried about ass­hole play­ers. A lot of games go to such lengths to antic­i­pate ass­hole play­ers that they some­times feel like a pool that has been pre­emp­tive­ly over­chlo­ri­nat­ed to frus­trate the one kid deter­mined to pee in it. Well-conceived mask­ing sys­tems can be things of real beau­ty, but they also squan­der pre­cious devel­op­ment time that could be spent on other things, such as mak­ing more inter­est­ing games.

I even­tu­al­ly restart­ed the game once I had fooled around enough, but while play­ing through the rest of L.A. Noire the fol­low­ing ques­tion was never far from my mind: How big of a prob­lem is it that play­ers can effec­tive­ly screw up video-game sto­ries? It is a ques­tion that is never far from my mind when I am play­ing any game whose fic­tion works in tandem with my deci­sions to cre­ate some­thing the­mat­i­cal­ly uni­fied and dra­mat­i­cal­ly sat­is­fy­ing. So, how big of a prob­lem is it? One answer to this ques­tion is: There is no answer to this ques­tion. Another answer is: Strong inter­ac­tive fic­tion will com­pel play­ers to behave in ways rough­ly anal­o­gous to how the inter­ac­tive fiction’s author intends them to behave. Another answer is: The whole pur­pose of inter­ac­tive fic­tion is to encour­age this type of cri­sis. Another answer is: This is pre­cise­ly why the video-game medi­um is incom­pat­i­ble with authored forms of sto­ry­telling. In the past few years, I have thought about this ques­tion a lot — maybe more than any other ques­tion, in fact. None of the above answers sat­is­fies me.

Bissell iden­ti­fies the dif­fi­cul­ties that come with try­ing to tell a coher­ent, lin­ear story inside a video game with play­er free­dom, point­ing specif­i­cal­ly to L.A. Noire, where the player’s desires to run folks over with a vin­tage car might hijack the nar­ra­tive. This is an inter­est­ing point. Cole, as the nar­ra­tive presents him, would not go on a mur­der­ous vehic­u­lar ram­page, but the play­er, when he or she has con­trol of Cole’s behav­ior, can choose to do things that Cole would not do, gen­er­at­ing incon­sis­ten­cies and, Bissell thinks, harm­ing the expe­ri­ence.

Is this an actu­al prob­lem? Bissell’s ulti­mate con­clu­sion is that play­er free­dom makes a tra­di­tion­al nar­ra­tive an impos­si­ble choice for good video game art; nar­ra­tive con­sis­ten­cy is too vital to the enter­prise of tra­di­tion­al nar­ra­tives, he seems to argue. But I won­der if Bissell is under­selling the abil­i­ty of play­ers to smooth over such hic­cups on their own.

Game Masters have been deal­ing with this prob­lem since the begin­ning of role-playing games. Most every­body who has run a game has encoun­tered at least one trou­ble maker who fol­lows his or her whims instead of con­tribut­ing to the groups expe­ri­ence. Their Phelps might be a wan­ton mur­der­er of pedes­tri­ans, just as their sor­cer­er is like­ly to burn orphan­ages and steal the magistrate’s hat. And as any GM will tell you, if you’re try­ing to run a com­pelling, mean­ing­ful role-playing game, you kick that play­er out of your group or con­vince him or her to shape up. What you don’t do is spend time wor­ry­ing about their inane actions, and fig­ur­ing out ways to mit­i­gate or ratio­nal­ize their behav­ior. I’m not con­vinced that video games should waste effort on those ends, either, and Bissell does refer to Noire’s assump­tion that the play­er won’t mis­be­have as “admirable.” Masking, as Bissell points out, is used by design­ers to smooth over nar­ra­tive dis­crep­an­cies; you may be able to shoot your essen­tial ally, but you can­not kill her. This is a some­what flip­pant respon­se, though. The fact is that, since there is a think­ing organ­ism in the narrator’s seat, any and all of the player’s behav­iors can be ade­quate­ly respond­ed to, or stopped when the GM asks, “Are you sure you want to do that?”, “Is that what your char­ac­ter would do?”, or “No. Stop it or leave.”

Still, I am not con­vinced that pour­ing time into mask­ing sys­tems makes much sense. Though Bissell seems to think that they are, to some extent, nec­es­sary (and I might agree with him to a short extent), I don’t think that inabil­i­ty to mask a character’s fool­ish behav­ior is a dire prob­lem. And I think this for many rea­sons.

1. It’s a pri­vate encoun­ter with the work in ques­tion, and dis­counts the abil­i­ty to par­ti­tion an expe­ri­ence with a work of art.

In role-playing games, total­ly sub­vert­ing the tone of the game is a prob­lem because it harms the expe­ri­ence for every­body else at the table. In video games, the only expe­ri­ence you’re harm­ing is your own; and once the play­er real­izes that an unsup­port­ed behav­ior is not a part of the expe­ri­ence that the game offers, he or she can get right back to explor­ing the expe­ri­ence that the game is meant to offer.

Moreover, I think that Bissell fails to account for the abil­i­ty of a play­er to gen­er­ate their own inter­ludes with­in a piece of art. Just as some­body read­ing a novel might close the book to day­dream about where the book is head­ed, or imag­ine how a char­ac­ter might deal with a hypo­thet­i­cal sit­u­a­tion, or some­one watch­ing a film might pause it to tell her friend how excel­lent it would be if Captain America were ALSO in this film, and wouldn’t that be hilar­i­ous, I’m not con­vinced that the expe­ri­ence of a video game is nec­es­sar­i­ly harmed by a play­er tak­ing a break from the nar­ra­tive by doing things that the game’s nar­ra­tive might not sup­port. Perhaps the play­er is capa­ble of par­ti­tion­ing the expe­ri­ence of wan­ton mur­der, sep­a­rat­ing it from the story he or she is oth­er­wise quite involved with. In fact, the game’s fail­ure to respond to such behav­ior might even rein­force the notion that the player’s choic­es are out­side the intend­ed bound­aries of the expe­ri­ence the game intends.

2. Not all play­er approach­es need be sup­port­ed.

When a play­er comes to a game like L.A. Noire and imme­di­ate­ly wants to run ram­pant through the streets, then they are doing some­thing wrong. To a greater or lesser extent, L.A. Noire is designed to offer up a speci­fic expe­ri­ence. (That L.A. Noire also tries to offer up a more tra­di­tion­al Rockstar Games expe­ri­ence is a bit of a prob­lem, but that’s out­side the scope of this dis­cus­sion). L.A. Noire should not be fault­ed for fail­ing to ade­quate­ly sup­port expe­ri­ences out­side of what it intends. All pos­si­ble play­er actions need not be antic­i­pat­ed; only viable options. This does cut down on play­er choice in the mid­dle of a nar­ra­tive (specif­i­cal­ly by remov­ing the choice to go insane and start mur­der­ing folks, become a thief or busi­ness­man, etc. etc.), but to some extent these choic­es might not belong to the play­er at all, but rather to the char­ac­ter, both to keep that char­ac­ter con­sis­tent and to keep the nar­ra­tive focused on a par­tic­u­lar sort of expe­ri­ence.

I also think that it’s per­fect­ly alright to declare that there is a “right” way to play a game, so long as the devel­op­ers don’t pre­tend like alter­na­tive meth­ods of play are viable options. Some games are not good at this, and even L.A. Noire has issues in that it makes vague motions toward being an open-world game but offers rel­a­tive­ly lit­tle of inter­est in that mas­sive world. That the game indi­cates to the play­er that it is offer­ing a dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence than it ought to and does is prob­lem­at­ic, and for that L.A. Noire should be fault­ed, but I’m not con­vinced that a player’s choice to delib­er­ate­ly sab­o­tage the nar­ra­tive should be held again­st a game.

3. Art can demand that a participant/viewer approach and expe­ri­ence it a cer­tain way.

For a bit, I was won­der­ing whether it was okay for a game to demand that its audi­ence approach it in a cer­tain way (with a cer­tain mind­set, for instance) in order to expe­ri­ence it in the way that the design­ers intend­ed. I ini­tial­ly thought that such an approach might demand too much, or at least might be seen as demand­ing too much; a quick com­par­ison with visu­al art, or per­for­mance art, made it seem pre­sump­tu­ous on the part of the artist, to demand that a view­er engage with it in a speci­fic way.

But truly, most art demands a speci­fic sort of engage­ment, espe­cial­ly when art requires par­tic­i­pants, as games do. Paintings in a gallery require that you encoun­ter them from a dis­tance, and pre­dom­i­nant­ly through sight and not, say, touch. Plays offer a much bet­ter exam­ple; the script pro­vides a base-line, but gen­er­al­ly speak­ing the actor who is par­tic­i­pant with the writer of the script does not have com­plete­ly free reign to inter­pret those lines how­ev­er he may like, or deliv­er them how­ev­er he may like. And if he does exer­cise such gross free­dom with the script, then peo­ple will begin to ques­tion his mer­its as an actor and wish that it had been per­formed dif­fer­ent­ly.

Is there value in see­ing the player’s role in gam­ing as sim­i­lar to that of an actor’s in the per­for­mance of a play? Certainly, the work does not exist with­out the play­er giv­ing it life (in both cases). Is there also value, then, in a game pro­vid­ing some sort of direc­tion to play­ers, indi­cat­ing cer­tain tried-and-true meth­ods of inter­act­ing with an expe­ri­ence? Would it be use­ful for L.A. Noire to say, at the begin­ning, “We encour­age you to play Cole as a sane, sym­pa­thet­ic war-hero, as this will give you the best pos­si­ble expe­ri­ence”? That isn’t the best exam­ple, but per­haps in games that get a bit more com­pli­cat­ed, this might be a wor­thy cause. This need not be overt, of course; a game can qui­et­ly point the play­er toward play­ing a game a cer­tain way, of com­ing to it with a par­tic­u­lar mind-set. Especially in cases where a game just works bet­ter if the play­er approach­es it a cer­tain way, or as a cer­tain sort of game, this approach could be valu­able.

What do you think? Is there any value in delin­eat­ing the “prop­er” way to approach a game? Do you think devel­op­ers might ben­e­fit from think­ing of games in such a light? I’m most­ly just throw­ing this con­cept into the light; I’d love to hear your thoughts about it, read­ers.

Tensions in Bastion

About two weeks ago, I finally managed to sit down and play through Bastion, an excellent indie action RPG developed by seven-person studio Supergiant Games that was released in 2011. It's an excellent game, and if you haven't already played it, you should. It's now available on both Xbox Live and Steam for about $15, and is definitely worth the price.  It's certainly not perfect, but nothing ever is, and it is definitely good enough that it can be recommended wholly without disclaimers or qualification.  Fundamentally, it's very good, and you should play it.  It's almost certainly better than what you were going to be playing anyway.

Since I was struck by just how darn good Bastion was, both as an enjoyable game and as an excellent piece of interactive storytelling, I was seized by about a dozen different ideas for blog posts.

What I have settled on to write about today is one of the ways that Bastion manages to be as completely unique as it is.  Much of what makes the game interesting is the way in which it unifies various disparate elements which might, at first glance, seem to be irreconcilable, and then uses that tension to produce a better work of art than they would have made had they chosen more obviously-compatible elements. To help shed some light on how this works, I'm going to draw briefly some from the aesthetic theories of Alfred North Whitehead.

First, in case you're unfamiliar with Bastion, watch this trailer to get some idea what the game is about:

(A Small Part of ) Whitehead's Theory of Aesthetics

I've mentioned Whitehead before on this website, in a discussion of scope, but in case you don't remember that, in Whitehead's schema, aesthetic value is derived from taking disparate elements (concepts, characters, musical tones) and working them into harmony with one another. A given work of art has more value (i.e. is "better") the more harmony it produces, which stands in direct relation to either how many different pieces are harmonized, or how wildly different the pieces in question were.

There is a great deal more to Whitehead's theory than this, but I think it's an excellent starting point for a discussion of Bastion, as I think that much of the game's unique appeal stems from its excellence in doing just this. To help show this, I'm going to look at three separate sets of apparently-contradictory elements which Supergiant Games managed to weave into a harmony.

The Tone

The first and most obvious thing is the contradiction between the game's art style and the maturity of its tone. The art style conveys a sort of childlike, fairy-tale, storybook quality tone. The characters (even the one with the mustache) all manage to look sort of like children, with disproportionately-large heads and rounded features, and the game's color palette consists almost entirely of very bright, warm colors. 

The art is certainly beautiful, but it stands in sharp contrast to the game's tone. It would not be reasonable to refer to Bastion's story as “dark” or “gritty,” but it is certainly very mature. It is, fundamentally, a story about what to do after a great catastrophe, whether one that is literally apocalyptic or, in a metaphorical sense, more personally so.  Further, the game is full of parallels with such weighty real-world themes as colonialism, exploitation of natural resources, and even the use of nuclear weapons.

This is a pretty sharp contrast. If you had only seen screenshots for the game, you would probably assume the game's story to be fairly straightforward good versus evil, relatively black and white, to match its storybook art. Similarly, if I described to you a game which managed to touch on the treatment of indigenous peoples by imperialist powers as well as raise questions about the nature of regret, you would probably assume such a game would have a more traditionally “mature” art style.

It would be very possible to make a game which tried to be both of these things and failed miserably, but something in Bastion makes the contrast between the art style and the tone wonderful and not distracting. Some of it may, of course, be the exceptional quality of both sides.  One might be a lot more willing to put up with cognitive dissonance if all the pieces are at least well-done.

Nevertheless, I would suggest that the real reason these disparate elements come together in harmony is not any individual quality of either element, but rather a third element which bridges the gap between them. I suggest that it is the game's narrator who provides a sense of continuity between the storybook art and the mature themes and plot.

The narrator, an old man named Rucks, is ubiquitous throughout the game.  Hardly 30 seconds go by without Logan Cunningham's wonderfully raspy voice commenting on something the player has done or advancing the story, and it is both the writing behind the narration and Cunningham's excellent performance that bridges the gap between the art style and the themes.

The narrator tells the story, and never shies away from commenting on the serious implications of the city's past, but he does so in a way that fits right in with the art style.  The narrator's friendly, colloquial manner of speech endears him to you and reminds you of listening to your grandfather tell you stories before tucking you in at night, even as he talks of serious things.  His voice hardens and becomes somber at times, but it never loses that storytelling quality, thereby ensuring that the game's apparently contradictory styles are brought into perfect harmony, making the game far more interesting and unique than it would have been otherwise.

Bastion's soundtrack, written by composer Darren Korb, has received a great deal of acclaim, and rightly so.  You can listen to and purchase the soundtrack here, and I strongly encourage you to do both of those things.  Korb rather eccentrically described the soundtrack as "acoustic frontier trip-hop," and if that doesn't sound like fun to you, we probably shouldn't be friends.

It works because Korb knows when to use which elements: when to quietly strum at a banjo, when to raise the stakes with low bass beats and a driving rhythm, when to emphasize Eastern or Middle Eastern harmonies or instruments, and when to do all of the above at the same time.

The soundtrack is fantastic on its own, but it's particularly interesting to look at in the context of the game itself.  A good soundtrack isn't just composed of a bunch of good songs, it actually serves to make the game better by creating the right feel and tone, and it is here that Korb's soundtrack really shines.

Korb creates a unique feel for the game by marrying all the different styles together.  It creates a feeling of both familiarity and foreignness, and flows freely between them, ensuring that the player is never complacent, since he or she is never entirely sure what is going to happen next.  Since this is also what the game itself wants, the soundtrack helps to reinforce the game's overarching themes.

The Kid

The game's protagonist is only ever referred to as "the Kid," a title of affection given him by the narrator, who, despite learning the Kid's name halfway through the game, prefers to keep it secret from the player.

Rucks' reluctance to tell the player the Kid's name indicates that the title is important, and I am sure it partly exists to lessen the distance between player and protagonist by removing the obstacle of a proper name. That said, I think the interplay between Rucks' insistence upon referring to him as “The Kid,”when coupled with the increasingly-weighty and difficult tasks he asks of him, points to another set of contrasting themes.

There are any number of places one could go with this topic. One could talk about the differences between Rucks and the Kid in terms of old age and youth, or of how the Kid can symbolize renewal for lands shattered by the Calamity, but all I want to talk about right now is how the title is, at first glance, fairly inappropriate, and how that apparent tension helps any and all of these possible themes work.

Rucks points out towards the end of the game how strange it is that everyone is waiting on the actions of a kid, and he's right. It is the Kid that pushes forward most of the game's narrative, that has to make the really hard choices towards the end of the game and suffers the most personal trauma throughout. So, why do Rucks and the rest of the characters allow the Kid to do all the heavy lifting?

Because he may be the Kid, but he's not really a child. If the game explicitly states the Kid's age, I missed it, but Rucks mentions at one point that the Kid served five years on the Rippling Walls as a guard, so it's unlikely he's really a child any more. Even if the Caelondian military accepted recruits as young as the British Navy once did, it's unlikely he's less than 18 or so. He may even be older than that -- Jen Zee, the artist, rendered all the characters with round, child-like features and large eyes, so it's difficult to tell simply by looking at him what his age is. But even completely apart from his physical age, the Kid isn't a child because of the way he handles the Calamity. This is the true source of the tension in the protagonist -- he isn't a child, but he looks like a child, and the narrator calls him such.

So, why does this work? Is it simply sloppy writing or the traditional video game trope where the main character happens to be a little kid as a holdover from when games were primarily children's toys?

I don't think so, because that tension allows for a number of beautiful and interesting moments and opportunities for myth and/or symbolism in the game.  It could, for instance, be interpreted as a general comment that old idea-makers (Rucks) can never be anything without the young go-getters at the front of their movements.  It could be interpreted as primarily local and character-driven, and could thus be understood simply as Rucks patronizing (in a pleasant and gentle way, to be sure) the Kid and failing to realize that it is the Kid that is truly the most mature.

But I think the interpretation I like the best is this:  If Bastion can be understood at least partly as being about how to pick oneself up and move along after a horrible personal Calamity, then perhaps each of the characters can serve a metaphorical role in that journey.  Perhaps Bastion ends up showing that after some horrible catastrophe, even if you have an excellent ability to reason (Rucks), a good heart (Zia), and the best intentions in the world (Zulf), it is only if you can summon up enough dogged perseverance and sheer stubbornness, enough desperate, bullheaded will to survive, that you will make it.That infuriating, desperate refusal to give up is the Kid.  He may make mistakes, and certainly does a lot of damage to the world around in him in his push for survival, but he makes it.  He restores the Bastion to safety despite being the Kid, and does more for the survival of those around him than any of the others.

I have no idea what, exactly, Supergiant Games was trying to say when they named the protagonist.  What I do know is that in so doing, they created a good enough work of art to support all, some, or none of the above interpretations.

Conclusion

That's the sort of thing that the tension between Bastion's elements produces: it causes the player to dig down deeper into the game.  It makes him or her want to spend more and more time with the game, thinking about how it works and why the developers might have chosen to construct a game out of so many diverse elements.

Each time the player is confronted by a collection of elements that would sound jumbled and confused out of context, he or she is drawn deeper into Bastion's narrative and atmosphere.  Each element of tension serves to enhance Bastion's unique style and to provide a great deal of food for thought.

Whitehead would have been so very proud.