Learning to Let Go: Time and Memory in Games

On Thursday at this year’s GDC, I attended game designer Yoko Taro’s talk “Making Weird Games for Weird People”. The Japanese director of Drakengard andNier first talked about his design process, but it was the latter half of the talk, where he began making a distinction between what games can and can’t do, that was the most interesting.

A light circle represented what games “can” do. The dark field around it, what cames “can’t”. A dotted-line circle within the light was, according to Taro, the perceived and accepted ideas of what games “can” do.

He labeled the area between the dotted line and the darkness “unknown”, and I love that division. That section where people who seriously ask but is it a game?” get uncomfortable and start to itch.

I’ve only played one of Taro’s games: Nier. Many games like Nier allow you to start them over once you’ve finished, keeping all your abilities from the previous playthrough. Nier messes with this formula. The second playthrough starts about halfway into the game and adds additional dialogue and cutscenes for the enemies. A few small additions make what was already a bleak experience even bleaker. Unlike games like Spec Ops: The Line, which tell you that what you’ve done is Bad, these scenes provide insight into what’s going on when you’re not around and explain the motivations behind what, in the first playthrough, seem like mindlessly violent monsters. It’s changed the context of your actions and hints at costs that maybe you hadn’t considered.

Taro used another example from the end of Nier in his explanation about creating emotions in the player. If, on a later playthrough, you meet certain conditions (collecting all weapons, etc), the player character is given a choice at the end of the game. If he sacrifices himself, he can save one of his companions. It’s not just a death, though: He is told that he will be erased from history.

Small potatoes for the player, though, right? The character doesn’t exist in the game anymore, but you can always load up the save and play again.

Except choosing the sacrifice triggers an in-game warning: To save your friend, you have to lose your save data. It will literally be like you, the player, never existed in that game world. The game itself will have no memory of you.

Which is terrifying, because in games, memory is everything.

Nier

Shadow of Destiny is an old PS2 game about time travel and paradoxes and a European city that changes a bit in the present depending on what you do in the past. Time Hollow is a later DS game written by the same person.

Well, they don’t change a lot, because neither one has a very good memory.

There are two kinds of time, when a story is involved: Myy time (as watcher, player, listener, reader) and the story’s time (you know, what the characters experience). Everything I see or read or play or hear happens in order for me. I’m no Billy Pilgrim.

But in a book, for example, a flashback in chapter four takes place before the events of chapters 1-3, but I read it afterward. But I understand it happened before chapters 1-3 because it doesn’t change what has happened in them. It might change my understanding of those chapters.

The present remembers the past, and not just in memory. I don’t have a memory of cutting my eyebrow on a coffee table when I was a toddler, but my skin sure does.

Do you know the difference between ROM and RAM? I’m going to force them into a metaphor here.

A book, or a film, is solely ROM. They don’t have any way to remember anything new after they have been fixed in place.

A game built on software, though, it can remember. It’s got RAM. Of course, it can only remember the things its code allows it to remember, which may or may not line up with what its code’s authors intended for it to remember.

Things that can be encoded in binary can be remembered. This is what progress in a game is: what the game remembers about what you’ve done. A book (well, one printed on paper) doesn’t dole out its later parts based on it remembering your reading of its earlier parts. You can jump to any page in a book at any time you want, read in any order you want (though it’s a little more difficult with certain ebook readers).

Frank talk: If you think a book is inherently a linear, narrative medium I’d say you think the message is the medium.

It’s funny, for all their championing as nonlinear media, there’s very little less linear than, say, Super Mario Brothers. You’re always trying to get it right, to make sure that Mario avoids or destroys the koopa troopa instead of running into it. A mistake is to be punished; the system’s built to forget everything that leads up to them.

The game forgetting what you do—resetting your score, making you start at the beginning—is a punishment. So if a narrative game doesn’t remember what you do and change its ending accordingly, is it kind of the same kind of failure?

Shadow of Destiny and Time Hollow aren’t built on systems with a wide array of possibilities. The rules don’t react to you and generate new scenarios, however brief. Mario has a relatively wide variety of ways to achieve his goal (getting to the right side of the screen); Eike and Ethan, protagonists of Destiny and Hollow, not so much. But where Mario’s failures are resets, the game willfully forgetting what you’ve done, Eike and Ethan have failures that move them closer to their goal.

This is a super-important distinction for what games can mean. There is so much trial-and-error inherent in goal-achieving games, ones that don’t know how (or don’t care) to remember your failures, in a way, say, the tries don’t matter. Only the one success does.

I used to think that games were unique in the way they could hold your time hostage. One mistake and suddenly all your progress is undone. The game forgets what you’ve achieved, and you go back to zero.

But that’s a narrow view, putting things in terms of the destination rather than the journey. Just because a game can remember some things doesn’t mean that what it can’t remember is worthless.

The past is what is remembered by everything in the present. Memory and scars and trace evidence, gained skills and lost flexibility. It’s not just the ending, not just the choices that marketing can sell you.

Peter Molyneaux’s promise that in Fable you could plant trees as a child and they would grow alongside your character, or the Bioware promise of choices mattering before apparently undermining them with a series-ending palette swap: These are consumer technofetishist at heart, a promise of technology that places meaningfulness on the “choice”, as if which brand we choose or which crew member we save is an insight into our essential being.

But when we can only choose the options we’re given, there are whole worlds of possibilities not offered. And if we try to say that what matters is only what can be stored in binary memories, well, what are we missing then?

Taro presented Nier’s save-game erasing as a failure to push the medium. It’s not. It’s brilliant.

To succeed, you have to let go. You have to accept that material proof of your progress is irrelevant. Players not being able to accept that was not a failure of the game, but a critique by it.