By Kasper Hartman
hotel |hōˈtel|
—n
temporary lodging; a surrogate for home
Video games have long been telling us stories. Not always the most innovative in terms of narrative content or narrative structure, the medium has generally been content to convey recycled myths through a mix of gameplay mechanics, level design, AI design, graphics, sound, and–with varying degrees of success–language. Today, these stories unfold to reveal ever more layers and levels of complexity. We are offered illusions of choice and attempts to balance different narratives, the ability to manipulate perspective and trump audience expectations are no worse than those of an airport paperback.
The experience of language in most games is akin to the experience of reading a trashy novel. The words exist to convey or reinforce a story, but the experience of those words is seldom pleasurable. The words are there because it was decided they have to be, though a discerning reader can’t help but feel there could’ve been less of them.
Over the years, scrolling intros and in-game dialogue bubbles have given way to voiced-over cinematics and branching dialogue streams. However, words continue to feel detached from the games they inhabit. Words, solicited to fill the narrative blanks, feel forced upon us. This is because no matter how sharp the writing is, or how seamlessly it seems to fit the game, a game’s real story is never the one written by the writer; a game’s real story is the one being told through the experience of playing and surmounting the game’s challenges. Writing well isn’t the greatest task of a video game writer: it’s knowing how to chisel the words and attaining ideal and innovative ways of spreading them across the pages of the game.
A game like Limbo could easily be terrifying to a writer. Where are the scrolling intros, the dialogue bubbles, the extensive character summary pages that give us a chance to orient players… and more importantly, give us something to do? In Limbo , language isn’t poured like syrup onto the game to convince us there’s a story, but that doesn’t mean language isn’t used or that it isn’t important. The game’s one perfectly placed word serves as both an interpretive key and a physical challenge. Moreover, it offers a powerful confrontation with the nature of language–its function as a complex and resonant system of signs, its promise of higher meaning, and, of course, its limits.
The task of navigating a collapsing word–HOTEL–illuminates and anchors Limbo ‘ s abstract narrative. A lonely child is born into a dark and menacing world. Language isn’t necessary to tell us that he seeks permanence in place of transience, friendship in place of hostility, meaning in place of miscommunication, and, most fundamentally, to feel at home. While these desires are innate and expressed in other ways, we do need language to fail us in order to fully appreciate the obstacles in our way. In the midst of our journey, the sudden confrontation with language is both meaningful and doomed. The narrative’s one word serves, like language itself, to orient and disappoint us. It offers us a key to understanding our surroundings while collapsing under our feet.
Everyone we meet in Limbo is either volatile or dead. Our attempts to communicate with our surroundings fail as symbols begin to mislead us. We navigate a dark, cold and complex system of challenges–designed specifically, it seems, to thwart us–because we long for something: a place of warmth and permanence, a moment when communication does not fail. Deep down we are certain this place, this moment, exists. We can make it out in the shadows, and this promise lies in the antonym of the one broken word we are given.
‘Hotel’ comes very close to representing what we are looking for, hinting at the kind of comfort and security we wish the world would offer. Ultimately, it’s a twisted reflection. A hotel is not a home. It can accommodate a stranger, but not a friend. Built to replicate something that cannot be replicated, it is modernity’s answer to the hearth. In the hotel life we are travellers passing through, and become fools the longer we stay. Everything is ticketed and temporary, and a life lived on its terms–consumerist and fleeting–cannot but deteriorate in time.
Limbo’s extremely sparse use of language does not offer clarity or respite. Rather, it serves to bring into stark relief the existential challenges we face: the people around us are not our friends, the machines we’ve inherited do not serve us, and the familiar words do not adequately represent the life of which we dream and seek.
So often in games words undermine our narrative experience: they are overwrought, trying too hard to tell us what we are feeling. Seldom does the voice of our character reflect our experience of existing within that character’s skin. The industry, still in its artistic infancy, is trying very hard to fill our need for narratives, but hasn’t completely figured out how to balance story-telling with the single most important element of any game – the experience of playing it. The story in Limbo –abstract and poignant–is never at odds with its modes of telling. It embraces ambiguity and encourages us to fill in our own blanks. Language is used simply and effectively to reinforce the sense of challenge and the plight of miscommunication. When we finally succeed, we do not feel that we have been told a story, but rather that we have gone through the experience of one.
Limbo ‘ s one word is pregnant with more meaning than a thousand words in a dozen other media because of how it was integrated into the experience and how it resonated within that experience. The hotel sign guided and betrayed us; it spelled out the first two letters of the world we wanted and, ultimately, through both meaning and experience, it brought into stark focus the world in which we live. When we finally traverse the cruel challenges of Limbo’s hotel life, it is an uncluttered moment of deliverance. No words are needed. But for that moment to exist, we need to confront language along the way and we need language to fail us.
Kasper Hartman has a master’s degree in literature and creative writing and is the recent winner of the CBC/QWF short story competition . He has worked as an English teacher, writer, translator, text coordinator, reviser, tester, poet, and cook. He has been in the video game industry for five years and currently works as a writer for Funcom’s The Secret World .
