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Meditation on games, art, the meaning of life, and lunar bases, January 18, 2023by ccpost (Greensboro, North Carolina) This game is richly multilayered, weaving together many different fascinating narrative and aesthetic threads, while remaining incredibly fun to play and engaging to read. Throughout a relatable story about a person struggling to find meaning while working a draining job, Glasser balances a romance plot, thought-provoking meditations on games as art, and a game within the game that the player interacts with along with the protagonist. These all work seamlessly together to prompt the player to reflect not only on this game but games more broadly and the various meanings they have in our lives: the social interactions and communities they foster, the aesthetic experiences they engender, the philosophical questions they raise, and the escape they provide.
The underlying story of the game is deceptively simple albeit with a scifi twist. You play as a tour guide on the moon, a well-paying but ultimately dead-end job, and you play games in your spare time. The designers of your favorite game happen to be the latest tour group, and it's up to you to smooth out some issues -- both major and minor -- that interrupt a potentially pivotal business retreat for the indie game studio. While the scifi elements are relatively subdued, the game posits a depressing -- but probably pretty likely -- scenario for the future of space travel: the moon will become a tourist resort for the wealthy. Some of the themes dealt with here remind me of Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars trilogy if on a smaller, more personal scale. Humanity's first inclination will be to pave paradise.
Integral to this main story are the threads mentioned above. The player character begins the game engrossed in the fictional game-within-the-game called Creatures Such as We, a scifi game of its own though more bombastic and action-packed. While I first found the sequences of applying the Choice of Games mechanics to choose my way through the fictional immersive 3D game played by the protagonist to be kind of detached, I got more and more into what Glasser was doing with these passages. These functioned almost like an autopsy of a game, using the choice-based game mechanic native to ChoiceScript to break down a 3D action game into discrete decisions. This has some weird effects with time, sometimes glossing over long stretches of playtime and other times allowing the player to linger over a decision that protagonist would need to make in a split-second.
In the interactions with the game designer tourists, the protagonist has the opportunity to engage in deep and wide-reaching conversations about game design and the aesthetics of games as art. Far from retreading worn out arguments about whether games should be considered as art or not, these sections of the game play out as interactive Socratic dialogues almost, with the interlocutors pushing you on your points and asking you to refine and clarify what you mean. While these decisions have essentially no stakes for the well-being of your characters, (Spoiler - click to show)in stark contrast to the nail-biting sequence at the end of the game in which the protagonist has to safely guide the tourists through an emergency evacuation of the base, I actually found these decision-points to be the ones I pondered and sweated over the most! These conversations really forced me to examine some of my own positions and beliefs on deep questions about why we play games and what they mean in our lives.
Finally, the player can choose to pursue a romance with one of the designers, the choices made in this most game-like aspect of the game for the real player immediately resonating with the philosophical discussions you have with the fictional game designers. I do not know the extent of possible outcomes with the romance aspect of Creatures(Spoiler - click to show) (in my playthrough romancing Diana, we shared mutual affection but also mutual recognition that the romance wouldn't come to anything as she left the moon base), but the romance seems designed to further the character development of the player character, providing prompts for self-reflection about what they're doing with their life and what life decisions they should make next. The game we're all playing...
The end I arrived at (Spoiler - click to show), on the moonbase, playing an updated version of Creatures online with Diana, was especially illuminating of the social role that games play in our lives, and did so in a genuine, moving way that somehow wasn't corny: we can be separated by countless miles but still connect over a great game.