About lightness in games
Forse s’avess’io l’ale
Da volar su le nubi,
E noverar le stelle ad una ad una,
O come il tuono errar di giogo in giogo,
Più felice sarei, dolce mia greggia,
Più felice sarei, candida luna.
Canto Notturno di un pastore errante dell’Asia, Giacomo Leopardi
Maybe it takes a good dose of lightheartedness to start this with a piece of a poem. In Italian. From a poet often dismissed when studied at school because of his pessimism. And yet this fragment is a little tribute to lightness. Why am I writing about this?
Well, I was reading again Six Memos for the Next Millennium, a collection of posthumous essays (they were supposed to be university lectures) by Italian writer Italo Calvino. If you know me, you also know how obsessed I am by Calvino’s work, and how influenced I have been in my game design practice by his philosophy and way of seeing the world. I know I’m not alone in this.
The first essay is about lightness. Calvino makes a case for a lighter approach to things, and he evidences how, actually, it’s in a certain kind of lightness that we can find meaning. Today, reading this once more, I thought about games. And about how games are often made heavier by a parossistic need to add content. Games are often so deep down capitalistic that need to be measured in play time. It’s not the first time I think about this. How many times games are actually weighted down by an excess of content? How many times the delicate line that moves from I’m enjoying this experience to this feels like work is violated? I won’t make examples here, but it’s been hard for me to find a AAA game which doesn’t get to that point sooner or later.
And Calvino puts it so beautifully:
My method has entailed, more often than not, the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structures of stories and from language.
This subtraction of weight is still something our industry struggles with. We want opulence, content, more and more content. Doesn’t matter if it’s worth.
And yet.
Experiences like Depanneur Nocturne, a game that lasts just for the space of an evening, to me are often more intense than 100+ hours masterpieces which have so much meaningless content. But it’s not even a matter of playtime, and length. It’s really all about the content. About having something to say and saying it, being really honest and very clear.
Again, Calvino puts it in the perfect way:
Lightness for me is related to precision and definition, not to the hazy and haphazard.
Which to me is what game design should really be about. The lightness you get to through understanding and synthesizing. Through clarifying and precisely describing, distilling and removing what doesn’t belong.
When I’ve read that line I immediately thought of this game.
A Short Hike is a beautiful example of a game that has just the right amount of content. And it respect its audience’s time. Its lightness doesn’t just come from the beautiful flying model. It is embedded in a beautiful crafting, in a really remarkable job in finding and removing all the friction so you can almost dance through it with pleasure.
And it’s not to say that a light — in Calvino’s sense — game shouldn’t have a deep content. On the contrary depth is reached through that approach. This way of seeing lightness makes to me more sense than the easy label wholesome game, because it’s not about the content, but rather about the way that content is delivered. It’s about that beautiful meeting point of science, art and philosophy that to me is good game design.
One of the games I loved the most last year is Welcome to Elk. Triple Topping studio has managed to create something that so brilliantly talks about human as stories. Stories that may be dramatic, weird, sad. But the lightness of the game, the way its content comes through and it’s discovered, that’s what it makes it exceptional.
Just today I played the demo of the upcoming Toem, a game where you go around and take photos on a road trip. And again, that’s what I mean, it’s there, that vision, that will of simplifying so you get easily to the meaning. Or just to the entertainment. Lighthearted, pure entertainment.
And I like to think that this way of seeing games can save us from the product first, overly capitalistic approach that we keep seeing. But I’m an overly idealistic human so maybe don’t count too much on that. Or maybe do count on that and be light. Enjoy a translation of the starting fragment.
Perhaps, if I had wings,
To fly above clouds,
And count stars one by one,
Or wander from crest to crest like a thunder,
I would be happier, sweet flock of mine,
I would be happier, snow-white moon.
