Machines for Getting Lost on Purpose: Kentucky Route Zero and the Future(s) of Adventure [Part 2]
This post is a lightly-edited transcript of a talk I gave of the same title at NarraScope 2020. It is adapted from a chapter in Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider. Read Part 1 here.
So now we’ve arrived at the present: what KRZ has to say about today.
As with the Xanadu story, I think a lot of the game works on multiple levels, commenting on both society at large while also being in dialogue with its genre and its past. But I want to start with one of the game’s most obvious layers. It’s a story about many things, but one of them, certainly, is debt and poverty.
Kentucky, of course, is Rust Belt country. It’s a region that hasn’t seemed to have caught much of a break in a long time. In Act I you explore an old mine tunnel and hear a story inspired by many true ones of miners paid only in company scrip, only able to buy things from the company store, never able to save enough to leave, and in fact only growing more and more indebted to their employers. A point the game makes again and again is that these abhorrent practices are not things of the past. Predatory loans, union-busting, the weakening of worker protections, recessions, wealth inequality, and many other ugly parts of capitalism continue to grind people down, and force them to struggle to retain their humanity in the face of the inhuman systems which Consolidated Power represents.
Across the game you meet dozens of characters, and almost all of them are all struggling to survive in the face of foreclosures, recessions, floods, hard luck. Conway, a recovering alcoholic on his last delivery for a closing shop and helplessly slipping into debt, ends up traveling with a kid whose parents abandoned him at a bus station, a repairwoman who only fixes analog TVs and who is two hundred dollars away from eviction, and two musicians who aren’t sure where their next meal is coming from. Co-creator Jake Elliott has said “it’s not a game about people who are in power. It’s definitely a game about people who have been disempowered by circumstances.” Laura Hudson had a lovely take in a article for Slate where says: “Although your motley crew has the look of adventurers, when you listen to their stories… you realize there’s another word for what they are: homeless.”
Adventure games have a long history of telling stories about outsiders and underdogs, although originally with a less serious bent. Many of the genre’s earliest protagonists were lovable losers. Characters like space janitor Roger Wilco, or Leisure Suit Larry, or Laverne in Day of the Tentacle, or Guybrush Threepwood. Maybe this was a result of the contrast that more intellectual puzzle-y games made with the power fantasies in more action-focused titles, and heroes like Lara Croft, Solid Snake, or Master Chief. Or maybe it said something about the kinds of people making and playing these games — and I say that with the maximum amount of love possible.
But as modern adventure games have struggled to recapture whatever it was that made the genre memorable in the first place, they’ve often turned to more serious stories about outsider characters and misfit heroes. Characters like Henry in Firewatch, a man struggling with the shame of running away from his dying wife, or Chloe in Life is Strange, or Mave from Night in the Woods, or Conway. As always, the slower, more contemplative pace of adventure games provides a stage for telling different kinds of stories than mainstream games, and centering other kinds of characters.
And I think the ensemble cast of Kentucky Route Zero fit right into this pattern. Overlooked people and marginalized identities fill up the game’s extended cast, where you can meet characters who are queer, brown, blind, orphaned, old, jobless, broke, or neuroatypical, each with their own stories to tell. To pick just one out of many examples: at a floating gas station along the Echo River, you can find an elderly divorcee waiting to meet a woman he met through his first ever online personals ad. He’s never met anyone through the computer before, and is terrified it’s not going to work, and he’s going to spend the rest of his life alone. He asks you for feedback on his ad, which reads, in its entirety: “I’m a good natured man, retired, and spend most of my time sailing the Echo River, riding currents of subterranean gas and that strange invisible wind that moans out of the small tunnels along the bank. Seeking a companion to map the river with me. I have two grown children but they live far away. No goofballs.” This is not the kind of character who gets to tell their story often in a typical video game.
KRZ’s characters are haunted by ghosts, sometimes literal but often figurative, and they’re filled with powerful yearnings for something they once had that’s since slipped away. Deep underground, you can meet the last telephone operator at an almost-forgotten switchboard, training the machines that will finally replace her: “Think of me when you dial zero,” she says. At the failing community-access television station, the producer muses: “We’re hanging on long past our expiration date,” just before a catastrophic flood that sweeps her and her studio away. Bats in the cave are dying and no one knows how to help them — something that’s also happening in real life. In a mine in Act I, Conway stumbles across an archive of reel-to- reel tapes, forgotten working songs of long-dead miners: since the old wires in the mine can only power one system at a time, the tapes can only be played in the dark. And in one of the game’s most powerfully human moments, itinerant musicians Junebug and Johnny sing a song to a near-empty dive bar called “It’s Too Late to Love You Now.” I think KRZ’s creators are drawing a parallel to the twin lost sparks of the American Dream and the potential of early computing. The magic of those early games is fondly remembered by many but has often seemed extinguished, unable to be recaptured, “too late” to love.
Some of the many stories you hear in KRZ are sad. But some find hope in the resilience of the human spirit, and that connects to another of the game’s dominant metaphors: its obsession with the technology dominant when adventure games were born. The game is filled with 1970s computers, reel machines and tape recorders, videocassette archives, CRTs, chattering printers: these were the world the earliest adventure games were written in, a period straddling the uneasy transition from analog to digital, and — crucially — from tech that can be easily understood, hacked, repurposed, and subverted to sealed devices and closed platforms that cannot. Our increasingly Consolidated real-world tech-makers are often hostile to outsider creators, preventing unlicensed software from being installed on their devices or content from being distributed except at their company stores. They want their angel’s share. Apple no longer makes anything like the Hypercard platform that enabled so many outsiders to create their own computer games, including Myst, still probably the best-selling adventure game of all time. Music purchased from Google Play in 2019 could not even be downloaded, let alone remixed, copied, or sampled. By the end of 2020, as you may have heard, you won’t even be able to play it any more.
Music is another running thread in KRZ, especially folk music and experimental sound art: music created for love, not profit. In Act IV, playing as orphaned kid Ezra, you travel the river for a while with a performance artist named Clara, who gives you an old tape recorder and asks you to find interesting sounds. Later, while a riverboat audience gathers to hear her play the theremin (another quintessential straddling of the analog/digital divide), she asks you to accompany her by choosing tapes to play, and how and whether to modify them by tweaking the volume, speed, or direction. I found this sequence surprisingly moving. There’s something in this old tech, the game seems to say at every turn, and our ability to own, modify, share, and remix it, that’s worth keeping around, that shouldn’t live only in the past.
This theme of reclamation and reinvention is another strong thread throughout KRZ that counters the gloom. Conway and Lula’s journeys both lead them to the Bureau of Reclaimed Spaces, tracking things displaced and places renamed, housed itself in a former cathedral. And across all five of the game’s acts you’ll find ad-hoc communities pulling together despite long odds. While its characters are sometimes sad and often struggling, they’re also surprisingly hopeful, resilient, and fearless in their quests to thrive outside the mainstream, remaking themselves in answer to the normative systems that cast them out. Many of the characters you meet have forged new identities out of the broken pieces they’ve been given, making art from noise, homes from ruins, feasts from whatever’s dredged up from an underground river. Wandering musicians Junebug and Johnny, it turns out, are mechanical people, built by a mining company for menial labor: they too found the old recordings of dead miners’ songs, and in them a spark of humanity that led them to escape their masters and rebuild themselves in a self-made image.
Driving the game’s backroads you can find many beautiful, optional vignettes, easily missed by those rushing through but profoundly important in aggregate to the game’s overall meaning. One of my favorites is when Conway finds an abandoned office building, the home of a rural electric cooperative swallowed up by Consolidated Power. The building seems ominous, a red glow coming from somewhere inside, but if you brave its dark hallways what you find is not death but a strange new beginning:
The handle is loose, and the door swings open easily. The hallway fills with warmth, light, and the smells of smoke and coffee.
About a dozen men and women sit around a campfire in the middle of a large room. Cubicle walls have been cut into pieces: some leaning up against the walls, and some arranged into stacks of firewood.
One of the women waves to Conway, and offers him an empty chair. It’s missing wheels, but it’s comfortable and easily adjustable to his height. Someone takes a pot hung above the fire and pours coffee into a Styrofoam cup. Conway accepts it, and they all return to watching the fire.
And that brings us to the futures of adventure. And this theme of reclamation dovetails nicely with another, maybe less obvious thread I see in KRZ about challenging norms and remaking old structures. Bo Ruberg’s book Videogames Have Always Been Queer talks about “deep-seated resonances between queerness and games,” and by that Ruberg means both queer games in the literal sense of representation — games by or about queer people — but also in the more conceptual sense that comes from the field of queer studies. Ruberg talks about how we can read “queerness as a way of being, doing and desiring differently… a term for a way of reimagining, resisting, and remaking the world.” Across the book they consider how modern indie games are challenging “the normative logics that traditionally have dictated how games are played and how they communicate meaning.”
KRZ isn’t a queer game in the representational sense, but this notion of challenging norms, experimentation, and inventing new futures resonates with me as a lens for interpreting it. It’s a game writhing with challenges to the status quo, both in terms of the plot and characters we’ve been looking at, but also in its mechanics and design. It’s filled with ideas about different ways stories might be fluid: almost every scene has some new twist on your mode of interaction, part of why the game’s become so beloved among interactive narrative designers in particular.
Just to name a few of these moments:
- You can visit a diner with a procedurally generated menu;
- play a scene where you’re controlling multiple conversations simultaneously with parallel dialog trees;
- get narrators reminiscing about the events you’re seeing from the future, or framing your choices as hypotheticals, not actual events;
- there are games within games (from a menu- driven interface to an arcade claw machine, to navigation minigames, to some of the playable recreations of early text games we mentioned earlier;
- and even games within games within games, as in the several instances where characters in an internal vignette find themselves, in turn, playing yet another nested interactive story.
In “Limits and Demonstrations” you can interact with a Lula Chamberlain piece that’s an homage to real-world video artist Nam June Paik, who among other things is credited with inventing the “superhighway” analogy for the internet. A maze of magnetic tape strips hangs in the gallery, and you manually move a tape head over them to hear a story — which turns out to be interactive, with choice points represented as instructions to physically move the tape head a certain number of feet and inches in particular directions.
This thread of experimentation carries through parts of the game outside its dialogue system, too: in one scene as you move Conway through a space with Ezra following, you eventually start to realize that you’re no longer controlling Conway, but Ezra. The exact moment your control switched is slippery. By the time you notice it, you’ve already missed it.
KRZ is constantly challenging our assumptions about what kinds of things dialogue options are supposed to control, about what our relationship to an onscreen avatar is meant to be. It rewards exploration and rejecting what’s flagged as the “straight” path through or the “right” choices to make. Like many classic adventure games, it contains dozens of unusual responses and optional scenes, often nestled in far corners of maps that can be larger than they first appear.
Ruberg has also talked about the idea of “permalife,” for games which not only include but center the notion of making death impossible. They discuss this originally in the context of walking simulators like Virginia, and note that permalife games are often made by queer designers, positing that quote “permanent living represents a particularly potent trope for expressing both hopes and concerns about contemporary queer life in the face of an uncertain future.” But Ruberg resists the reading of this mechanic as purely utopian:
In contrast to [the dominant] narrative of LGBTQ lives and histories “getting better,” permalife suggests alternative models for queer ways of living that persist in time: loops, endless flat lines, a constant entanglement with death (which, in these games, is always intimately entwined with life)… It also challenges us to look for the consequences of living in video games as well as the consequences of dying, to think about existing and not just surviving as difficult, and to identify places where life — and not death — is what gives video games meaning.
You can’t die in the traditional adventure game sense in KRZ, although you often lose control of the character you’re playing, sometimes permanently. Instead, the characters you play mostly have to go on living, no matter what choices they make, and as hard as that might be.
And to me this suggests one possible future for adventure games. Games like walking simulators have often been challenged for not offering the chance to divide players into hierarchical groups, to demonstrate the mastery so closely associated with traditional gaming. You can’t really get better at a walking simulator than someone else. There’s no way to divide elite from noob. And lest you think I’m just talking action games, adventure games do this too, branding players as either the clever ones who solved the puzzles or the dunces who could not. Permalife games, queer games, in the broad sense we’re been talking about, are one approach to breaking down these kinds of binaries. What does it mean to design games around other conceits than these, and how can we tell interactive stories about more complex concepts than choosing the left or right path?
One approach which KRZ often uses is to make the player’s choices less about controlling the narrative than about engaging with it on a more emotional level. While some of your choices are in fact quite impactful — you can see two almost completely different Act IVs depending on which characters you choose to follow — more often the game’s asking you to participate in a different kind of way. Reviewer Ansh Patel said this about the game’s choices: “Ranging from despondent, bitter to hopeful, each choice holds a mirror to the player, asking them a basic question that games rarely if ever bother asking: ‘How do you feel?’” In one scene along the Echo River, Conway’s crew visits a greasy-spoon diner with a table covered in shellac, perfectly preserving a long-ago half-finished meal. The husband and wife owners each have a different story about why the table is preserved: what it means to each of them. The game doesn’t care which of them is right, if one of them has a faulty memory or if both of them do. It asks you to think about what the stories mean to the people who tell them, and what they mean to you.
We’ve mentioned puzzles a few times, and I also want to talk about what KRZ has to say about them. It’s not quite true to say the game has none — in the opening scene, for instance, the way to find something that glows-in-the-dark is to turn off your light. But these moments are gentle and rare. The designers have talked about wanting to design “mysteries, not puzzles,” a distinction borrowed from an unlikely source. During the era of George W. Bush, political analyst Gregory Treverton (paraphrased in the quote below by Malcolm Gladwell) wrote about the changing landscape of world powers in the 21st century, where once-straightforward seeming problems were becoming anything but:
Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts are a puzzle. We can’t find him because we don’t have enough information… The problem of what would happen in Iraq after the toppling of Saddam Hussein was, by contrast, a mystery. It wasn’t a question that had a simple, factual answer. Mysteries require judgments and the assessment of uncertainty, and the hard part is not that we have too little information but that we have too much.
You can solve a puzzle if you find all the clues, but a mystery, to quote KRZ’s designer Jake Elliot again, “cannot be answered, it can only be framed. Puzzles are clearly more satisfying, but the world increasingly offers us mysteries.” The designers of KRZ found this an appropriate metaphor for their story drawing inspiration from the struggles of real people with no easy solutions to their problems.
This approach is thematically appropriate for KRZ but also suggests a new way forward for narrative games more generally: inviting the player to engage their own creativity and meaning-making rather than imposing a single correct outcome. Puzzles take much of their joy from a moment of inspiration where you suddenly see the correct solution, and that joy in turn is a key part of the pleasure of classic adventure games. But other kinds of revelations can be just as powerful. Porpentine and Brenda Neotenomie’s game With Those We Love Alive asks you, the player, to draw symbols on yourself at key moments of the story, as a ritual to help the game’s protagonist achieve increasingly emotional goals. The experience is intense because the game makes you relate its fiction to your own personal vocabulary of meaning and experience, and asks you to decide how much to open up and let it in. Another interesting example is Sam Barlow’s Her Story, where you’re exploring a maze of video clips via the words used in each one. Exploring this massively interconnected archive is so idiosyncratic that two players might have very different journeys and moments of revelation, because the focus is less on fixed challenge points than on discovering the sparks in your own understanding that connect one plot thread to another.
There’s another kind of mystery that has a pretty bad rap among game designers: the maze. There’s a great talk from KRZ’s creators called “How to Get Lost in a Cave,” where they call a maze “a machine for getting lost on purpose.” (You can tell I love that because it’s the title of this talk.) Mazes were a much-hated part of classic games, but in this talk Jake Elliott speaks of their potential pleasures, a place where “we can just focus on the feeling of lostness, the reason we’re there in the first place.” The sense of disorientation, frustration, and uncertainty of being lost in a maze, like the frustrations of being stuck on a puzzle, have often been designed out of modern games, rejected for not being “fun,” “juicy,” or addictively rewarding. But I think Elliot and Kemenczy are right when they say there’s something of value that’s lost when we streamline those moments of frustration and uncertainty out our design vocabulary entirely. Having spaces to get lost in is important. Having games games that ask us to work to engage with them is necessary.
So here I identify another future for adventure games: continuing to be weird, challenging, disorientating spaces, sites where players can explore material and mechanics outside their comfort zones. In their talk, KRZ’s creators offer instructions for how to get lost in a cave that might also be useful for game designers too: “First, establish a basecamp… And now, here’s the hard part: start walking away from the basecamp. That’s what it’s for. It’s the thing that you walk away from.”
Kentucky Route Zero begins with a sunset, and most of the game takes place across one long, underground night. Adventure games, too, have lived through a sunset and appeared to slip underground for a long time. Like Donald, many of us could be accused of huddling around our bonfires of dead computers, thinking only about the past, not the future.
But the underground is a potent metaphor. It can be a place to escape the light, but also a place to grow and thrive outside it. It can be where things go to die but also the place they emerge from, reborn. At the end of three decades of commercial stagnation, adventure games occupy a strange place in gaming’s cultural landscape: at once both a distant memory of a long-forgotten form and a vibrant, influential source of threads still active in mainstream design.
Sam Barlow, designer of Her Story, has observed that the continuing narrative of the adventure games’ demise hides a deeper truth about its role in gaming culture:
I think part of it comes from a certain self-consciousness and a certain desire for the medium to hurry up and grow up. Adventure games often feel like an awkward middle ground between the proper narrative games we aspire to and our cruder earlier attempts.
Adventure games are indeed, and always have been, awkward. They provide a stage to try out being heroes weirder than those in the mainstream, but maybe, also, with more truth inside them. They get us lost and ask us to find our own way out again, coming to a new understanding of the world, the way we think about it, or ourselves. Rather than a focus on mastery of skill and separating winners from losers, they can center the uncertain but tantalizing sensation of encountering the unfamiliar.
Near Kentucky Route Zero’s conclusion, at the end of Act IV, the enigmatic character Weaver Márquez offers not a puzzle but a mystery, in the close-captioning of a distorted pirate television signal:
Go underground, as deep as you can go. The air is cool and the earth is damp, and when you close your eyes you are surrounded by the dead. Remember where that is? You’ll find your way from there. I think this place is what you’re looking for.
I’m Aaron A. Reed. Thank you for listening, thanks to the organizers and volunteers of NarraScope for having me, and for your efforts to bring this conference back this year, and I hope you enjoyed the talk.
Thanks for reading! If you’re interested in my historical games work, subscribe to my project notification mailing list to get announcements when I release new major stuff (a few times a year).
