Irregular Verbs: A Critical Playthrough of Gabriel Massan’s ‘Third World’
Cratylically composed,[1] Jumpman preceded Super Mario as the player protagonist of Nintendo’s 1981 arcade classic Donkey Kong. Separated into syllables he divides to verb and noun, jump and man, and is quite literally defined by his primary ability. In subsequent adventures Shigeru Miyamoto would iteratively innovate his Italian everyman character, expanding the possible application of the verb and forming a philosophical position on game design. Double-jumps, triple-jumps, backward or side-somersaults, vaults, wall jumps, spin jumps, cap jumps… MarioWiki details 32 possibilities.[2] Nintendo games centre around a versatile verb.[3]
From a phenomenological perspective Super Mario, or Jumpman, is what Bruno Latour would term a compound entity. Whilst the jump may seem to be integrated within Mario, it is in fact external, located in the A button located on the controller located in our hands. It is a separate technology which has become sufficiently transparent to be understood as an inherent property of Mario and to determine his, and the player’s, experience of the world. We understand the Mushroom Kingdom as a jumpable local by the virtue of the jump verb being our foremost means of interaction.[4] Latour’s writing on the subject was informed by Heidegger, who in turn drew influence from Husserl and Spinoza. The classic example the German gives is the hammer, which through use disappears leaving only the nail and the task. According to Heidegger it is only when the hammer breaks that it is revealed as the technology it is.[5] It is only when we miss the platform that Mario’s jump becomes apparent, we recognise it through our own split-second misapplication.
Viewing Super Mario or any game avatar with these philosophical considerations in mind, we can begin to understand gaming verbs not only as actions but, owing to Husserl, as connoting certain values.[6] A game that centres on the jump is packaged with certain meanings. Platformers are typically more lighthearted than first-person-shooters, whose primary verb is the trigger. Verbs therefore contain a great power, binding play together with a world view. Their presence predicts the world and encodes values into it.
All verbs are optional appendages and it is the game designer’s responsibility to choose whether or not they are incorporated into the character’s move set. It is also their responsibility to choose how a skill is taught, unlocked, embellished and calibrated, as each choice and their interactions carry implications about our relation to the game world.
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I raise these points, lineages and philosophies to foreground a conversation about recent trends in the art world. Driven in part by the availability and ease of game development engines including Unreal and Unity, the past years have seen a dramatic rise in the amount of artworks billed as video games. By no means are these firsts — for example Rebecca Allen’s Bush Soul (#1) dates to 1997 though is typically called an ‘interactive art installation’ — though the contemporary expansion of the medium presents certain problems that are seemingly unsolved and maybe overlooked. Central to my concern is ‘poor grammar’, which might be best understood as the misapplication of verbs and how these impact the narrative message of the world being created.
As a case in point this text will critically dissect Third World: The Bottom Dimension by Garbiel Massan, which is currently debuting at the Serpentine North Gallery in London, and was developed by Serpentine Arts Technologies over a period of three years. The artwork is a third-person adventure video game that places the player in the corporal bodies of Funfun and Buburu, agents of a resource extraction agency who across multiple stages come to reckon with their involvement in techno-colonial extractivism. Thematically entangled with these concerns is a NFT souvenir system facilitated by Tezos (a cryptocurrency with a low carbon footprint), intended as a means of addressing the decentralisation of ownership and thus makes digital art ownership analogous to the redistribution of resources (think both productive and cultural) in a globalised society that tends to concentrate wealth towards the Global North. At the gallery, the game is played using an Xbox controller; at home, it is free to download.
Now, to explore the artwork from a phenomenological (meaning the study of experience) perspective, we are going to need to break down the verbs used by the player, understand how they mediate interaction with the game world, and determine whether or not they are supportive of the conceptual goals of the artist. Accordingly, this text will go level-by-level, verb-by-verb, and is based upon detailed notes of several playthroughs. It takes a player driven approach, drawing upon my experience and preconditioned video game experience, which may vary from other audiences with differing levels of priming. By which, I mean now quickly mechanics, verbs, are comprehended and optimised for ‘successful’ play.
Finally, before breaking down Massan’s game, I feel certain caveats about my critiques are worth identifying. Foremost, it is my supposition that many of my critical points stem from and centre around factors somewhat beyond the artist’s control. Though there exist small teams of indie game developers capable of putting together third-person adventure games, it remains the norm that these titles are produced by more substantiated studios with established cultures of development. Moreover, opposed to cinema, there are fewer auteur figures in the game’s industry. Peter Molyneux of Black & White, John Romero of DOOM, Will Wright of The Sims, Hideo Kojima of Metal Gear Solid, and the aforementioned Shigeru Miyamoto are amongst the most recognisable names, though if you are unfamiliar with them that is no major surprise. Alternatively, the artworld has historically traded in seminal figures and individual mythologies, it might therefore be assumed that less of a studio model and more of a service model underpins Third World: The Bottom Dimension. My conjecture is that collectively this amounts to a condition in which the artist’s idea (or factoring Massan’s involvement of principal artistic collaborators, ‘artists’ ideas’) may prevail over technical, pragmatic and ludic concerns. Story (or concept) surmounting gameplay.
This is to say, an inversion of Nintendo’s approach is taken and my assumption is that the organisational structures place verbiage amongst the final concerns and/or apply verbs to connote meaning, instead of allowing meaning to arise from their application.
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Level 1. Igba Tingbo
Designed by Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro — a visual artist, writer and psychologist — the first level of Third World comprises three separate episodes and follows the narrative arc of the Funfun avatar. Instructed by the Headquarters, players are tasked with exploring the environment and locating two artefacts, the ‘Bag of Infinite Seeds’ and the ‘Air Artifice’. Relatively aligned with Joseph Campbell’s notion of the hero’s journey, the narrative contained within this level feature a call to adventure, traversal into and through an unknown world, and atonement for the looting the cultural heritage of an indigenous people. Opting to return the artefacts you achieve the “Good Death” expressed through an extended cutscene.
Initially deployed with colonial intentions at the base of a crater in Tıuí the player must navigate their way up and onto the wetland plateau of Nlu, before rebelling into the subterranean caverns of Domí where away from communication with the Headquarters the player can complete the arc. Along the course of this journey differing levels of toxic air deplete the player’s health bar and necessitate you to either collect crystallised energy or extract energy from the indigenous inhabitants. This notion of exploitation becomes central to the spiritual journey of our proxy Funfun, however, the implementation of the mechanic is calibrated in a way that makes it unnecessary, thereby allowing us to bypass the emotional turn the narrative arc requires. Effective play undercuts the emotional resonance Massan has envisioned between the player and their avatar.
Alongside this principal issue, two secondary problems exist within the first level. The first centres on the lack of application of the jump ability and the second concerns the mixed values of two modes of mapping. From the perspective of play, all three areas are explored below, explaining how verbs are introduced and how they are used in ways that are misaligned with the artist’s intention.
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Episode 1: Tıuí
Climb up and out. I’ve been here before or at least somewhere similar. Immediately upon being deployed to Tıuí I am aware of my intended direction of travel, beginning a level at the bottom implies an upward trajectory. Symbolic ascent easily integrates into level design and aligns platforming elements with spiritual growth.
Without thinking, I run a sequence of buttons on the Xbox controller, B and B+B correspond to jump and double-jump. These are the verbs that the game does not deem necessary for explanation, they are the hereditary abilities passed down from a legacy of adventure and exploration, in a word, they are primordial. My lizard gamer brain anticipates a ledge, a leap, an element of precision timing. Yet, barring clumsily composed gradients there is no real platforming to challenge the player, all allusions to carefully choreographed vaults must be discarded. The first verb is something of a red herring, right now, in Igba Tingbo it helps me survey my surroundings through momentary elevations above the flora, but it’s close to inconsequential to the gameplay.
My sequence next stumbles upon the Right-Trigger, applied in relation to the direction left-analogue stick, I am cast into a dash. The momentum behind the motion recalls the trust dynamics of Asteroids. Momentarily, I am freed of fiction and as I am being propelled forward, I can spin on my x-axis. This tractionless means of travel immediately appeals, it at least triples my pace and from this point forward my default way of playing is to spam RT in any direction I wish to go. A strategy which combines well with a skill learnt a little later on…
But first, I have to A-button interact with the floating insignia directly ahead of my start-point. Positioned by Headquarters, the camera logo unlocks Capture Mode that serves duelling narrative and conceptual purposes. Within the story it is a coloniser’s tool used to report back to my commander, a means of assessing resources that feeds the planning of future expeditions. Beyond the suspended disbelief it contributes to an archive of images and videos held by the Serpentine, and upon exiting the gallery one of these per player can be turned into an NFT on the Tezos blockchain. More on this unusual dualism at the end of the essay, for now back to that hinted at skill.
As I summit the first ramp from the crater’s nadir, I encounter another insignia that this time unlocks an activatable ability. By selecting Up-DPad and then pressing the Right-Bumper button, I am now able to turn on the Navigation Power which manifests as a purple arrow approximately a foot above my head, compass rotating to follow an invisible thread that streamlines me through the landscape. From a metaphorical perspective, it would be easy to attribute this ability as being akin to the colonially framed Capture Mode we just acquired, however, according to an interview between Serpentine Arts Technologies’s Curator (Commissions) Tamar Clarke-Brown and Gabriel Massan this means of direction owes more to the indigenous people of the Third World. Symbolically, the tool might intend to evoke deeply internalised technologies of travel — the Aboriginal Australians’ use of Songlines spring to mind — however its hovering externalisation contradictorily recalls a Western perspective.
Nonetheless, I activate the power and continue along the threaded path it draws, now responding to its command with an increased sense of purpose and bypassing the vistas that appear along the concentric crater. Quickly, I collect the ‘Bag of Infinite Seeds’ and proceed up the final layer of the level, to exit onwards on the back of a winged animal, very Avatar.
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Episode 2: Nlu
Elevated to a wetland plateau, HQ informs the player of the thickening air toxicity. Whilst in Tıuí, the slow decline of health was imperceivable in part thanks to a liberal distribution of energy crystals and a highly linear route, then Nlu does present a greater level of danger by positioning us on the edge of an open arena with waypoints scattered across the swamp. Here, the depletion of health is notable and a sense of precarity successfully integrated into the overall mechanical picture, built upon this Massan and their team attempt to further draw the player into a colonial invader paradox by having our overseer deploy another power-up to assist our survival.
Activated by selecting Right-D-Pad and then hitting the Right-Bumper to use, the Taking Power manifests as a gloopy rifle that absorbs energy from the native NPCs (Non Playable Characters). Used for long enough, it will kill and vampirically restore energy to the player. Lacking subtlety (by which I mean other underlying mechanics which may for example alter how other NPCs react to you in relation to your murder spree[7]), the verb is intended to evoke a moral conflict in the gamer, to align us with colonial exploiters historic and current who kill to benefit, to take land and claim resources and infect the local populace with all encompassing fear. To subjugate them under the strong arm of advanced technologies.
What is intended may be compared to the tactical application of ludonarrative dissonance[8] artfully crafted in the 2012 third-person-shooter Spec Ops: The Line, to make the player aware of their own hypocrisy. Structurally inspired by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the game put players in the boots of Captain Martin Walker, a Delta Force team leader sent to recon a disaster riven Dubai. Over the course of the game, the presumed heroic logic of the third-person-shooter genre progressively erodes and the player’s own involvement in mass murder is brought to morally bear against them. By implication their actions in comparable games become ethically questionable.
Essential to this moral evocation, was that opposing forces actually opposed. Enemy combatants could not be bypassed by navigating around them, they were motivated to attack Walker and his team, to lay ambushes and fight. The text of the game made it necessary to kill and by pursuing normalised gaming actions the player was led down the path to moral conflict. What Third-World struggles to understand is the importance of intended play, expressed through the miscalibration of its verbs. Though we are led to the Taking Power it is actually a different combination of pacifist abilities that help us successfully navigate the plateau.
Amongst the amorphous trees of the wetland, a small but visually distinct energy crystals can be found, ensuring that agile players can time their traversal from A to B to C without inflicting damage on the native populace. With careful timing, this may be achievable at a walking pace. However, by applying the Navigation Power from Tıuí in combination with the dash we can move between the sequence of cut-scene moments with only the occasional detour to a source of naturally occurring energy. At its most streamlined, the episode can be played with the player’s attention almost entirely directed towards the arrow, ignoring the passing environment except for moments of interaction.
The compound effect of this optimised play is that the player also bypasses the moral pandering the game attempts to grammatically encode. By not using the Taking Power the cutscenes that play upon Funfun’s exploitation are dislocated from the factual reality of their actions and become less meaningful. Avoiding violence not only uses previously learnt verbs, the combination of these verbs is in fact faster and easier than adopting the new colonial mechanic.
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Episode 3: Domí
Towards the end of Nlu the protagonist Funfun undergoes something of a moral change, a Dances With Wolves moment and escapes contact with the HQ by going underground into the Domí cave systems. No mechanics are elaborated or introduced here. Guided through an interlacing set of tunnels, the player moves between sequenced cutscenes and at the end collects the ‘Dance Artefact’. Symbolically representing their immersion into a foreign culture. This, in turn — according to the narrative — allows for the level’s conclusion with Funfun returning the looted artefacts and through non-negotiable scripted dialogue the final ‘choice’ of the “Good Death” can be taken.
Constructing a narrative arc that permits player to combat ingrained approaches to gaming and exorcise themself of these predilections requires a highly sophisticated understanding of the videogame’s contextual layers. Aspects including the written narrative must coalesce with the environment as narrative and play as implied narrative. Play itself comprises the verbs we have been concerning ourselves with and their relation to one another, but also factors in the non-human agents within the game and decisions made around the physical properties of the game world. Without a holistic reading of all elements, the ‘choice’ made for the player becomes a broken reflection of their experience.
Unfortunately, Third World doesn’t sufficiently understand how to bring these mechanics together to serve its own objectives. Cutscenes serve as the primary vector for exposition, but are often overwhelmed with an affluence of new nouns that make it difficult to put the story together. Verbs are intended to mean one thing, but in application and calibration in fact end up serving opposite interpretations. Read from the perspective of optimised play, it is easy to reach the crescendo of Funfun’s arc without having assembled the emotive notes the symphony requires. A confusion of notes sound and then we are transposed into another avatar to start again.
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Level 2. Sòfu
Reset into the avatar Buburu, production of Third Worlds’ second level was led by Novíssimo Edgar — a Brazilian rapper and artist who produces multimedia sculptures and costumes for his performances — and accordingly acts independently from the first. Whereas the prior level attempted a complex moral turn, Edgar instead opts for a more straightforward narrative intent, allowing the protagonist to pursue the HQ’s colonial mission to completion. Accordingly the physical characteristics of our new protagonist match this agenda, more stockily structured their appearance and gait is more militaristic.
Travelling downwards, play begins on the levitating rocky terrains of Flaiden and Iubba whose draw-distances are limited by a hostile darkness akin to the fog of the Silent Hill series. Matching this environmental opposition, the levels themselves combined more difficult combatorial and platforming challenges, adding a sense of overcoming adversity as the player descends towards Bau Cotta. In this final arena, players are tasked with activating three Clearing Trees to detoxify the air and prepare the land for colonisation.
Despite certain positive developments in the gameplay, the Sòfu level is still troubled by a set of grammatical problems. Most evident of these is the uneven application of the ‘Passing Power’ gained at the beginning of Iubba. Aligned with concepts of privileged access in Brilian society, the ability is meant to make the game easier and therefore communicate the advantages centralised individuals experience in hegemonic conditions. However, in application the power either works too well and breaks the game or does barely works at all and therefore evades its own messaging. Paired with this issue is an erroneous duck ability that replaces Funfun’s dash and is essentially non-functional.
Following the same playthrough approach, the breakdown below accounts for how these misapplied verbs interrupt muddy the narrative thread of the game’s second half.
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Episode 1: Flaiden
Now as Buburu, the world I encounter is aesthetically oppositional, my perception is limited by an engulfing darkness and strobes of red lighting pierce the screen momentarily. Instinctively interpreting the tonal difference, I expect more combative play and for the game to test my abilities. Retrospectively, Igba Tingbo now reads as a training level designed for non-gamers, an experience adjusted for overall accessibility. Sòfu, I hope will finally offer a well balanced challenge.
Traversal is slower than before, instead of a dash, I can only duck (or crouch) and the lightness of Funfun’s jog is replaced by Buburu’s slow stride. These limitations work to exacerbate the impending mood of the level and help to draw out its much shorter length. Within a short time, I have activated a short cutscene and crossed the level heading towards a swirling red portal centred between a short rocky canyon. Entering this space triggers the closest thing to a boss battle that the game achieves, the guardian Iniko appears and my retreat is cut off by a temporary magic barrier. Statically positioned and rotating to follow the play, Iniko attacks by throwing boulders at the player’s current position. As long as I’ve not reached the edge of the constrained arena I have enough space to walk beyond their impact point and take no damage.
After the predetermined period, Iniko collapses into the ground and I collect the ‘Crystal of Life’ from where their body stood. From here, I progress between the canyon walls and through the portal onwards.
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Episode 2: Iubba
Hybridised stealth-platformers are a rare breed of game, both genres rely on timing though one leans towards methodical evasion of NPC sensory capacities and the other on successions of rapid precision moves. Early examples include the mediaeval Thief series that featured light-platforming aspects, and the cell-shaded exploits of racoon burglar Sly Cooper, more recent games including the Assassin’s Creed series and Dishonored have emphasised murder as a motive for the combination of mechanics. In all cases, relatively open-world level design is necessitated, allowing the player to plot a route through the world and to use the architecture as a platforming arena.
Characterised by a snaking route of mountainous pillars, Iubba does not conform to the multilinear environments of the stealth-platformer genre. Spatially the level design resembles early attempts at taking the 2D platformer genre into the third dimension, a rather literal linear expansion. However, within these confines the player is simultaneously asked to bypass two invincible opponents, the wolves and the birds. The apparent solution is the ‘Passing Power’ gained early in the level, selected via Down-DPad and triggered with the Right-Bumper it activates a temporary period of invisibility which should allow the player to sneak by the aggressive fauna. However, in practice this is not the case.
In regard to the wolves, my experience using the ‘Passing Power’ to bypass them was mixed, at times it seemed to stop them sensing my presence whereas on occasions they still made a b-line for my location. Worse, it quickly became apparent that the birds — whose attack is a scripted flight path triggered by an invisible threshold — were not affected by the ability at all. Landing on a new rocky outcrop, they would fly into me visible or invisible, requiring a quick restart and an adjustment to my landing location to trial-and-error my survival.
Ironically, the ineffectiveness of the ‘Passing Power’ in Iubba is complemented by an overpowered nature in the sub-stage that follows. Entering Griot Cavern, the player engages in a chase sequence tracking down an NPC character. Without the power activated wolves attack from hidden tunnels and progressively slow your pursuit, cumulatively causing you to lose your target. However, if you opt to turn on the power it will last the length of the chase and deactivate all the opponents standing in your way. A challenging chase is rendered a simple follow-scene more commonly associated with NPC allies than escaping enemies.
Differing from ineffective to God-mode, the ‘Passing Power’ fails to articulate the value ascribed by Massan and Edgar to the verb. In their interview with Curator Clarke-Brown, Massan notes that the power was meant to evoke experience of “navigation without being perceived” of “go[ing] around with your privilege” in contrast to the experience of Black Brazilians who face a constant awareness of their skin and what this means in a racialised society. Though this is an admirable experience to inscribe into a game, it is extremely complex to capture and needs to emerge from the verb itself, forming a framework through which we experience the game world. A good example of this would be in the Metal Gear Solid series, where completing the game (The Twin Snakes, Sons of Liberty and Snake Eater all included) whilst meeting certain conditions unlocked a stealth suite, permitting a high level of manoeuvrability in subsequent playthroughs of what could typically be a challenging stealth adventure.
By virtue of its unevenness, the ‘Passing Power’ as a verb stands for neither one thing nor another. It cannot become a framework for understanding because it alternates, both functional and broken, its essence escapes and its imagined metaphorical potency slips away.
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Episode 3: Bau Cotta
Having descended through blackened skies, I reach the surface of Sòfu and enter a desert region known as Bau Cotta. A broad arena opens up before and slopes from the circumference to the centre, though a dense cloud of particles obscures my vision. Present as distant silhouettes are stalagmite formations and lumbering entities. Only a scattering of energy crystals and NPC health bars punctuate the air.
Following instructions from HQ, I must activate three clearing trees that have been deployed across the landscape. These mechanisms at first recall air purification prototypes around the world — a 200 ft pollution filtering tower in the central Chinese city of Xi’an or the Smog-Free Tower developed by Dutch Studio Roosegaard — and with each successive activation the fog lifts, the camera pulls back and by our measures the landscape becomes beautified. However, these quality of life improvements they promise are solely for the HQ’s colonial advantage. Sòfu’s original inhabitants will be displaced if not exterminated by the change in atmosphere. In this light, the cocoliztli epidemic of 1545 to 1813 is a more accurate analogy.
Accordingly the game fights back, NPC inhabitants of Bau Cotta actively seek out the player pursuing them across the sands and forcing them to out manoeuvre or use the ‘Taking Power’ to defend themselves. Contrary to the inconsequential environmental opposition offered on the Nlu wetlands, the final arena forces the player to act as an aggressive colonial agent. Because of the pressured conditions of play, we more actively engage in the role of forward scouting party for the coming invasion. Pursuing our objects is aligned with our survival. It is consequently relevant.
Once all three clearing trees have been engaged, the air opens fully and in a short cut-scene a shallow oasis floods the lowland centre of the stage. Clearly visible all around the landscape has now been depopulated and the only remaining step is to enter the lake and take the Eye Mask, the final artefact. Contrasting with the frenetic race to activate the trees, the stillness of these final moments offer a small moment of reflection. An opportunity to retrospectively weigh our actions.
This is the closest the game comes to achieving the complex goal of empathetically embracing the player with the guilt of colonisation. Here at the end, the verbs at our disposal function as intended because of the oppositional conditions and the openness of the arena, which encourages a style of play reliant on tactical evasion and choice moments of attack. For the first time the NPC inhabitants seem desperate to combat the invader because finally the stakes have been raised to cataclysmic for their species. And because, unlike with Funfun, we see the colonial agenda to its end we can wallow in its cost when the game gives us pause.
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De-taggled from Buburu, I excavate myself from the gameworld and return to my immediate surroundings. A gaming chair wrapped in thick fake fur, red LED lights, silver panels, monolithic prop rock formations and a curved screen suspended in front of me. I hold an Xbox controller. Temporarily its interface of X A B and Y had become invisible, forming a fluid liminal space that fit snugly between two hands. Since its launch in 2000 and day long marathons playing Halo at my friend’s house, I have been intimately attuned with this configuration of buttons, triggers, bumpers, and analogue sticks. Twenty-three years later the muscle memory is still deeply retained.
Good game design understands the symbiotic relationship formed between player, controller and screen. Synced up the player enters ‘the flow’, an optimal state of consciousness where opposition is perfectly attuned with proficiency, a non-stop stream of challenges that are overcome by the thinnest margin. Aided by a flood of dopamine, this condition is a zenith level of Hiedeggarian technological unity. The controller — the tool through which they access their avatar — no longer exists, nor does the room around the player. They are FunFun, they are Buburu, they have trasmutated through pure concentration into a hybrid artefact, a compound self. Borrowing from Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman’s concept of the Magic Circle,[9] this is the moment when the walls between the external world at large and the internal world of the screen are at their most concrete.
The power of games as a vector for storytelling comes from this specific form of immersion. It is less about being subsumed, as if lowered into a gel that encompasses the body and restricts movement, and more about a cyborg assemblage through which our virtual bodies act with an exacting precision of corporal ones never could. No wonder sudden discoupling can trigger violent confusion. Without warning the magic veil is lifted, Mario misplaces a jump and plummets into an infinite sky, and we are left clasping a broken controller.
Because of this, games should be designed from ludic foundations before moving up into layers of environmental and non-human agents, and peaking into narrative. Unfortunately Gabriel Massan’s Third World: The Bottom Dimension inverts this pyramid of needs. More often than not it misunderstands the frameworks suggested by its verbs, and consequently the ludically narrated values differ from the conceptual exposition contained within the script. In this critical (and pedantic) playthrough I’ve accounted for my experience of these disjunctions, they range from the small-scale inconsequentiality of a double-jump, to a single verb whose dual applications make for a doubly-broken proposition. By unpacking these instances I hope to have cumulatively argued for a deeper understanding of game design, beyond the pursuit of aesthetic impressiveness and technological novelty.
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[1] Cratylic names — or speaking names — are those that correspond to the nature of the thing. In literature their decoding reveals basic tenets of the character’s character. In this case, he is able to jump and he is a man.; [2] You can see the full list of jumps here. ; [3] I borrow this term from Mark Brown’s (Game Maker’s Toolkit) video The Secret of Mario’s Jump (and other Versatile Verbs).; [4] This concept is explained in Labour, B. (2002) Mortality and Technology, as being the result of the transparancy of object, leading to its intergration into our sense of self; [5] In Heidegger, M. (1927) Being and Time: The Being of Entities Encountered in the Environment, the German philosopher explains that “The less we just stare at the hammer-Thing, and the more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does our relationship to it become,” effectively rendering it fundamental to us, only when the tools breaks do we disengage from the seamlessness of the relationship; [6] Whilst in Husserl, E. (1913) Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, related values are explored: “I simply find the physical things in front of me furnished not only with merely material determinations but also with value-characteristics, as beautiful and ugly, pleasant and unpleasant, agreeable and disagreeable, and the like”.; [7] Elaborating this note, a lack of sophisticated NPC reaction ironically renders the inhabitants of Igba Tingbo as appearing ‘lesser’ evoking a colonialist mindset of active and purposeful dehumanisation. Though in this context, it is the game designer who has through lack of development made the inhabitant readable in this fashion.; [8] Used as a tool for video game criticism, ludonarrative dissonance is when the actions the game expects the player to take create a disjunction with the narrative wrapped around the character. Play or ludic aspects of the video game are mismatched with the story unfolding, breaking a sense of immersion.; [9] The term ‘magic circle’ as applied to play originates in Homo Ludens (1938) by Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, though the idea is only briefly elaborated until it gained definition thanks to Eric Zimmerman and Frank Lantz in an article titled Rules, Play, Culture: Checkmate (1999) for Merge Magazine. Four years later Zimmerman and Salen would publish Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (2003), where again the concept was elaborated.
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Capture Mode, A Postscript
Earlier I addressed an “unusual dualism” regarding Third World’s Capture Mode, this postscript expands on that issue. To recap, the Capture Mode operates in the game’s narrative as a colonial reporting tool and outside the narrative it functions as a means of turning in-game memories into NFTs on the Tezos blockchain.
Upon leaving the gallery invigilators will offer you the opportunity to set up a wallet and have one of your virtual photographs minted. Without having to pay any ‘gas’ fees. This serves a very direct though unannounced purpose. It creates a positive relation between the player and Tezos, and actively ensures they have opened a wallet and have a digital reminder of the company’s generosity. Moreover, arguments could be made that aligning users with an ecological conscious blockchain is a social positive as it could draw them away from more computationally heavy chains, e.g. Bitcoin.
However, in their Twitch conversation Clarke-Brown and Massan elaborate a different conceptual rationale. Responding to Clarke-Brown’s prompt that the Capture Mode contributes to a “build up of perspectives,” Massan explains his vision for a global audience “being part of a whole ecosystem” and collectively creating an “organic map”. In effect, the narratively colonial tool is meant to act paratextuality as a communal navigation system. Again an echo of the songlines resonates.
Propositionally this is interesting, online forums where gaming communities exchange knowledge are common and especially relevant for the optimised habits of speedrunners. A precedent for images and video clips being used to collectively map exists. However, in practical terms the Serpentine and Tezos only allow you to mint one image per play, necessitating numerous replays to collectively compile this non-traditional map of knowledge.
Of all the verbs in Third World, the Capture Mode is the most stretched. To the narrative it means one thing, to Tezos another, and at a dubiously functional meta-level a third. For framing, for values, verbs should have a single undebatable meaning.
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Many thanks to Bob Bicknell-Knight for capturing the in-game images of Third World: The Bottom Dimension that are featured here.
