Outer Wilds
I’ve been playing Outer Wilds recently and it’s proved to be a fantastic device for thinking about the things I love and hate about video games. I love all kinds of media, and the comparisons continue to fascinate me: each medium offers certain things that no other can manage.
Outer Wilds is a mystery game. You start the game with no understanding of what will happen and the story is explained to you in-world with very little exposition. It’s set in a galaxy that’s trapped in a time loop. That’s pretty much the description on the Steam store page - beyond that I will try not to spoil anything here. If you’re interested, I do recommend trying to go in blind.
Pretty much every piece of progression in the game happens in the player’s mind: there is a cool in-game system for tracking the mystery as it unfolds, but what’s really helped me is scribbling notes in a cheap exercise book and thinking a lot. I’ve put a significant amount of time into daydreaming about this puzzle and trying to figure out what pieces I’m missing. That time feels as productive and enjoyable, if not more, than the time I’ve spent in game. This is rare: I’ve never felt that I need to keep notes about a game before, and I never find anything like this in other media: with a film, or even a mystery book, you know it’s going to be wrapped up in no time. The defining feature here is the challenge: no other media tests the receiver to see if they deserve to get to the next bit.
Challenge leads to persistence and perseverance. In games like this, it’s possible to play for hours and make no progress. This is frustrating and painful, and it’s a thing that sets games apart. Other art can be challenging, for sure, but not in the gaming sense that whole chunks of the experience are locked off to you without significant investment. It is the challenge that means I’m daydreaming about Outer Wilds, and the reason I keep coming back to it. I find it to be, in the right moments, an enormous boost to my mental health. During particularly tough times in my life I remember games providing a perfect opportunity to focus and forget my troubles for a while: Half Life Alyx was my alternative universe through the COVID lockdown, and the last bosses of Sekiro and Elden Ring provided me hours and hours of dedicated practice. This is an important thing to have in your life one way or another, and no other media can provide it in the same way. (Obviously other stuff does - sport, focused learning, etc etc - but I’m talking about the act of experiencing specific media here)
That practice takes time. A long film might take up 3 hours of your time, but a long game could be hundreds. This is unreasonable, and stops me playing most games. I just don’t have the time! Personally I think it’s hard to justify spending 100 hours playing one game instead of watching 50 films. Which contains more art? Of course, the question isn’t that simple, and you can’t compare the two, but I do think most games are a waste of time: they don’t value the player’s time well. Despite how much I do love about Outer Wilds, I do wonder if it’s in that category: did I get the “correct” amount of satisfaction from the experience, compared to all other forms of art? My free time isn’t something I want to spend hours trying to maximise, but it is in short supply, and I think about this a lot. I think ultimately, I go through phases: some days I want to “waste” my time. It’s nice to be aimless.
The puzzle in Outer Wilds is good because it leans on a thing that video games do better than anything else: the experience is non-linear. Outer Wilds gives you a whole galaxy to explore in any order you like, and you uncover things in your own order. When you discover things, some stuff goes to your ship log, and that does give you hints, but it’s generally unclear if you’ve found everything you can find in an area. The puzzle is put together largely in your head and it’s up to you to figure it out. My path through the story is probably different to the path that other players took, and I think that’s amazing: in games we can discover unique experiences.
This experience is type 2 fun - it’s a lot of work to achieve the goal. I had many evenings spent staring at my notebook, scratching my head, and that was a core part of the Outer Wilds experience for me. Like most media, video games can also just be fun. I don’t actually think Outer Wilds is very fun to play: it is a physics platformer, more or less, and the physics is mostly not enjoyable for me. I found much of the minute-to-minute gameplay in Outer Wilds quite frustrating, and if it wasn’t for the fact that the story is so compelling I’d have stopped playing long before the end.
And so it is not the easiest time I’ve ever had, and it’s all the better for it. I enjoy games that do none of these things, too, but it’s games like this, in which I struggle and fight and have my own unique experiences, that remind me what I love about gaming.