this proteus game-thing and the allure of exploration

despite the fancy-sounding title, this post will be all about me gushing over a new game (or sort-of game) that i've been playing.

though, actually, i'm essentially doing that exact thing in my dissertation right now, so maybe the personal and professional dimensions of my life have finally just blurred into one huge hurricane of audience-unfriendly nerdom. oh well. at least i've got this three-day old, re-microwaved burrito. and proteus.

first thing's first: the proteus web site is here. not that it will tell you a lot because it's basically just some pictures right now and some mumbo-jumbo about exploring and feelings and being a game-that's-not-a-game (like seemingly all good games nowadays, it's on sale now but still just in alpha). but, if you're me (you're not, for the record) and you're currently writing a dissertation chapter on how minecraft leverages player agency to create emotional attachments to virtual place (i hope you're not doing this because if you are, we're going to have words, and those words are going to be "copyright infringement"), then you see a byline in your RSS feed about something called proteus being a non-game about exploration that seems pointless but captivates the fuck out of your favorite games writers nonetheless and you say "hell, this sounds stupid as ox shit in a palm tree, but it's five bucks so what the hell?" and you download it.

then you start up the game-thing, watch as the word "PROTEUS" appears and then slowly melts, commodore 64-stylee, off the screen, to be replaced by the opening of a single, blocky eye, an eye that opens on a multicolored, smudgy-looking, fog-socked island...and suddenly you realize that this cheap, tiny, poor-looking not-even-a-game has you by the face and is not going to let go until you realize that you've forgotten to eat dinner, go to bed or even change the pants you just pissed in.

so long, PANTS. i hope you like the taste of PISS.

exploring is fun. pretty much nobody will argue with that, except for perhaps the most extreme type a people (who, in a possibly abbey-esque way, i would argue aren't even really people in the traditional sense of the word). yet, you take that experience of exploration, transpose it into a video game world where quite literally anything can happen (you can, for example(s) fly, turn into a dog, swim for years or go on a murderous rampage without facing any consequences) which seems like it would make it even more exciting, and suddenly people refuse to believe that it can mean anything. because it's not "real", you're just pretending. as if that sofa fort you built when you were four and then cried like a ninny because your big brother knocked it over didn't matter. it did matter, and it's silly to pretend that we grow out of pretending. people cry at movies, at a hypermediated, two dimensional representation of some other person's fictional problems, and yet the idea that video games (a medium in which the player is, by default, naturally a fundamental part of the outcome of the story) can mean something is largely accepted as dumb.

well, enough with the rant. i know you don't believe me (i know it!), but i've played proteus a lot and it's awesome. and by "played" i suppose i mean that i've just loaded up the game a few times and spent awhile wandering around. because that's all you can do. just wander around, and take pretty pictures of the pre-8-bit landscape.

because it's there.

like this mountain. this mountain is not a real mountain (surprise!), and to climb it, all i had to do was hold down my "w" key whilst pointing my face mountainward using the mouse. yet climb it i did, because that same base part of my brain stem that screams "go up!" when i see a high thing in real life kicks in inside proteus as well. and, if you're feeling lazy, climbing a virtual mountain is way the hell easier than climbing a real one. is it as meaningful? not really, but it still beats the hell out of watching bear grylls do it on tv.

proteus does have some...i guess you'd call them "events". that is, occasionally while exploring you'll stumble upon something and something will happen and it will be cool because you don't expect it. however, these things aren't judiciously spaced out within the gameworld, or scripted, or really triggered by anything that i can tell. you just randomly happen upon them...or you don't. i've played for about 30 minutes 4-5 times now, and each time i find something i didn't find before, and some of the things i saw the first time through i've never seen again. occasionally there'll be a dry spell of sorts where i'll walk for 10-15 minutes without seeing anything interesting but i don't feel like this is unreasonable. i mean, i go on 20 minute walks all the time in "real" life and often the first 15 minutes are boring...that doesn't mean i kill myself before i get to the end. at least, not usually. so to reflect this, in proteus  i sit down and decide beforehand that i'm going to play for a certain time. invariably, by the end, it's been worth it. just loosening yourself from that cycle of expecting something to happen every thirty seconds is maybe something that is really good for video games right now. hell, it's probably really good for your actual life, if you live with that expectation of constant outside stimulation.

"when the moon hits your eye like a piece of bread that got crushed at the bottom of the grocery bag..."

oh, and in addition to being all explore-y and otherwise "pointless", proteus is procedurally-generated both topographically and aurally; that is, the island you explore is different every time you play, and the background music is made from various ambient soundscapes that are stitched together on the fly by a computer algorithm depending on your location in the world and what's happening around you. i was a bit leery of this second property at first, but last night while playing i had a moment that really sold me on it. while i was standing on top of a hill, watching a rainstorm blow inland from out in the ocean, the soundtrack (again, randomly) latched on to this particularly interesting bass groove, coupled with a weird reverb effect i hadn't yet heard in my two-odd hours of playing the game. it repeated a few times, each time modulating just a bit, until it had established a sort-of theme that somehow suited the aesthetic of the rainy landscape perfectly. it was, for lack of a better analogy, as if the landscape and the music were two jazz musicians who had just briefly, perfectly locked onto one another for thirty or so seconds and created an instant of music neither could have made alone. i've never had anything like that happen in a video game before, and it was worth my five bucks by itself.

hey, look! it's pullman in the winter!

anyway, proteus is a badass simulation about what it's like to be the spirit of a disembodied alien warlord trapped in the corpse of a cybernetic zombie rottweiler.

wait, that's not right.

proteus is a non-game about doing something we often don't even do that well in "real" life: taking a few minutes to appreciate the swell of a particular hill, or the graceful flight of a barn owl, or the way the light changes just before the sun hits the horizon. and that is, in a lot of ways, a more important and engaging challenge than slaughtering ten thousand space nazis in five minutes using your gun-chainsaw or whatever the balls passes for an "achievement" in most games these days.

okay. now i've got to back to writing real things about fake things instead of fake things about real things.