Game designer artist Jason Rohrer has done some pretty neat things. I admire the ambition of Sleep Is Death, an experimental foray into two-person storytelling, even though it can be hard to get a networked game set up. Inside a Star-Filled Sky is beautiful to watch in motion. And the drama surrounding 2011’s Chain World was absolutely fascinating.
His most widely-celebrated work, however, is a game called Passage. It never fails to come up in discussions of “art games,” or of “smart games.” A “pixellated metaphor”, designed specifically to make gamers cry. This heavy praise used to just make me roll my eyes. Sure, I’ve played the game, but I honestly didn’t get the excitement. Then, after a while this reaction morphed into something more like… anger. I didn’t just feel it was over-rated, but, there was something about it that has always bothered me. It was a reaction I forced myself to examine.
If you haven’t played it, then you might feel a little lost now. It’s downloadable here. But, it’s basic enough to explain. (Spoilers now.) A small, heavily pixellated character, your avatar, walks from left, to right, on the screen. He can’t go back. As he journeys, he will be able to go down into a maze, to collect treasures that he finds, if he wants. He can also join up with a female pixellated character, who will then continue on with him. As he reaches the right side of the screen, he starts to slow down, and then he turns into a little tombstone. Game over.
This takes five minutes. If you don’t have five minutes, here is the same rough experience, in ten seconds.
If it was just that the game is too basic to get the reviews it’s gotten, I would be merely annoyed, rather than actually angry at it. So what is it, then? I think I’ve figured it out.
Sometimes, Kotaku finds an article on a personal blog it thinks will generate some hits, and brings it over. This article, posted earlier in the week, is by John Scalzi. He is a sci-fi author, but occasionally writes in his own blog about social issues as well. This article is about white straight male privilege. Given that this post generated massive comment traffic on his own blog, as well, and was almost-vaguely-video-game-related, it was bound to drive some hits to Kotaku. It also stirred up Kotaku comment controversy and lots of discussion elsewhere on the internet. Lots of people were offended. Most of those people were the people the article was about: straight white males.
Now that I’ve linked this article, I do find it a little problematic. Not because I disagree with Scalzi’s thesis, or even with his use of metaphor. But the article is still only able to preach to the converted. As is easy to gather from even a small sample of the comments, the straight white men of Kotaku are not receptive to a message about how life is easy for them. From their perspective, it isn’t, and they resent anyone who wants to tell them otherwise.
Here’s why I went there. It may just be my perception, but it seems like the sort of gamer who was oh-so-moved by Passage, its simplicity, its way of showing you “how life is,” is also a straight white male. The same kind of straight white male who was offended by that article about privilege.
Passage has few meaningful choices, but the important one is “do you take a woman with you or not.” At some point in your journey, you will encounter her, and you have the choice to walk past or to join up with her. If you choose to take her with you, she prevents your avatar from moving through parts of the maze below him. She increases your scoring potential, and people argue she’s just “nice to have,” but at the same time, she’s deliberately designed to be an obstacle and sort of annoying.
From the creator’s statement about Passage:
You simply cannot fit through narrow paths when you are walking side-by-side. In fact, you will sometimes find yourself standing right next to a treasure chest, yet unable to open it, and the only thing standing in your way will be your spouse. On the other hand, exploring the world is more enjoyable with a companion, and you’ll reap a larger reward from exploration if she’s along.
So: women. They get in your way, they’re not much help, but having them around is “more fun.” That’s how it works, right? When your avatar’s wife dies, if he had one, he will walk even slower than if he had never had a wife at all, hampering his progress. Burdensome. And no, it’s not her choice whether or not she will come with you. It’s just your choice whether or not you take her. She hasn’t got much say in the matter.
Passage, then. A game about a man, and a woman with no agency, who slows you down and holds you back, but sure is nice to look at, I guess.
While we’re at it, let’s more closely examine the fact that the wife always dies first. This certainly does not match the experiences of any of my female relatives. Nor does it match statistics. The wife dies first in Passage, because the story is about the man.
So, yes, I’m irritated by Passage because I am a woman. That’s the primary source of my anger as it turns out. I guess I’m just okay with female objectification in a game that tries to make that light and silly. And I’m less okay with it in a game that’s supposed to be deep and meaningful. But that’s not all.
Here’s short list of things you don’t have to think about, in Passage:
- When you will die. Conveniently, you die of a nice ripe old age every time. There’s no unfortunate accidents like being randomly shot, starving, or being just too ill to continue on into your golden years.
- Who you will marry. Congratulations, you’re straight, so no worries there. You will marry a woman, if you choose, and of course this is fine and acceptable.
- Your identity. How people will perceive you. How that affects the amount of walls that will be in your way.
- Anything inconvenient happening at all.
Am I arguing that Passage needs to be universal, to try to mimic everyone’s possible experience? No. I’m arguing that straight white male gamers need to stop treating it like it does. As a story about life, I feel as if it has very little to say, and what it does have to say actually upsets me.
And now that I’ve gone here, I’d be happy to hear your thoughts. Passage: was it moving to you? Did you notice the way it treated the female character, and was that bothersome or fine?
Email the author of this post at aj@tap-repeatedly.com.
Yes it moved me. Not enough to write about a post about it, of course. Shit. I am straight white male. Shiiiit.
You’re absolutely right, though. Whenever I ponder the ridiculous mechanics of “a wife stops you getting treasure” a small part of my spleen dies (it’s my auxiliary brain like the one in the climax of Flashback). Even if you are ready to assume it’s not making a gender argument but one about relationships – there’s barely any fucking relationship upside embedded in the game. At least a bang or two would have done the trick, I think.
But the choice was kind of superfluous for me. It wasn’t that at all.
Start walking from left to right and don’t stop – just trying to get as far as you can while picking up a domestic attachment, and this is what I see: two people growing old together and then, inevitably, one dying while the other goes on.
Somehow this is a trigger. I showed it to Mrs. HM who is neither white nor male as it turns out (straight, unfortunately) and she picked up the same vibe too. Passage, for us, was not actually about the journey, but about it’s end. That our time together will eventually stop and, for a while, one of us will go on without the other.
Cue sad panda music. It’s nowhere even near a Great Life Lesson. But it dug some emotion out of us and I won’t begrudge it that.
Holy cow.
I admit, I hadn’t played Passage, and now I’m disappointed (in myself) that I did. I was well aware of what the experience is like, but it’s one of those games I felt content just mentioning as though I had played it, you know, “games are art art art,” but I’ve never thought of any of the things AJ mentions here.
I’m a straight white male. And I totally see what Scalzi, and AJ, are saying – being a straight white male, and never having been anything else, I am almost certainly over-quick to dismiss the privilege that these factors bring me, simply because I am aware of, but have never personally experienced, the alternative. Thus my life seems rather unpleasant, but the truth is I rationally know how much more unpleasant it could be. And I should frankly probably keep that in mind more.
Your core point – that it’s so easy to assume things are universal when they’re not at all – is considerably more moving than Passage. It occurs to me that if the developers of Every Day the Same Dream had had more time, they could have easily incorporated a “character choice” at the beginning – male/female, straight/gay, nationality, etc. and still put the same game in front of it and it would have been just as disturbing because who you are is rather irrelevant in that game. In Passage, arguably the only actually genuine message is that we all eventually die. Having just played through it with AJ’s lens as a caveat, the rest of it seemed quite as… I don’t want to say offensive, but… you know, two notches down from offensive, as she suggests.
Nice work, AJ. I kind of wish I’d played the game before, so as to compare the experience of “then” to what I experienced after reading your work. That would have been a fantastic straight-white-male-sees-different-things comparison.
I didn’t find it as affecting as most but it certainly made me look at the format of games differently; they didn’t have to be sprawling experiences, they could be interactive vignettes that communicated simple things very simply.
That’s what I saw in Passage, a creator boiling down his life with his partner to a few simple mechanics and elements — the graphics for both characters are supposed to look like Jason and his wife as well, albeit in highly abstract form. The game space is also highly abstract — it’s a representation of time and your ‘journey’ — so meeting your partner isn’t like walking down to the grocery store and picking up a vegetable, it’s just a manifestation of your little guy meeting the love of his life at some point, which is likely to happen to most people sooner or later.
Sure, there could be no love interest appear, causing you to walk the long road alone; or there could be a chance that relationships wouldn’t work out leaving ghosts/memories behind; or your ‘life’ partner could leave you prematurely; or a bolt of lighting or car could hit you (or your partner) randomly, but I think these things could get in the way of the core message.
I can understand your reservations with the locked in gender and sexuality of your character though and how that in itself could be a barrier as well. But for me, like The Marriage, Passage is as much an appoximation of the creator’s view as it is anything else, and both of them were by straight white males. Perhaps Passage could have done with something else to make having a partner more… I dunno, ‘rewarding’ or positive.
Judging by your suggestions though, sounds like there’s room for a sequel. 😉
By the way, I always loved Raitendo’s Passage in 10 Seconds, in the same way I loved The Gutter.
@Gregg: Yeah, I understand Passage as personal, rather than universal, and I think it works all right in that sense. But it gets treated as more universal I guess than I am personally comfortable with.
As for it being about the death, maybe that would work better for me if who died first was random.
I’ve never been impressed with Passage. I said much of what I would say about Passage about Dear Esther a while back, so I won’t repeat it here, but I always did find it curiously unaffecting. I think part of that is because of how little trouble there was. Passage is almost like an approximation of the kind of life I dread having: predictable, go-through-the-motions, no excitement.
“I have to admit. Peaches is exactly what a lot of art games feel like to me… At some point I swear I’m going to write about Passage.”
Ahhh, mission complete. 😉
Look at it in the context of the game about the blocks of ice and the child; it’s about how forming relationships with people always holds you back, but also increases the value of what you do have. Yes, the “get wife” element is a little daft, but as Gregg said, in the context of “the right one” it makes perfect sense.
What would happen if you changed the game to be a female character with a male spouse? It would still explore the same dynamic of a partner who slowly comes to realise that their partner is inevitably holding them back from their various plans, but values them regardless. I personally think this idea that love will hold you back at certain things is important, as I see so many 20 something’s wrestling with it constantly. And that is the way it should be, because if at no point do your partners needs and desires stop you doing something, then they’re probably not having much say in the relationship. The message is enormously simple, but for whatever reason we don’t have much practice in our society talking about how relationships are simultaneously burdens and treasures, and that our lives together are temporary.
Anyway, passage is a victim of it’s own success; if it spoke to less people, we wouldn’t assume it spoke to everyone, and piss people off by emphasising their differences.
“it’s about how forming relationships with people always holds you back, but also increases the value of what you do have.”
But exploring with a wife only really increases your score, and who plays Passage to get a high score? One reason that I think Gravitation is more valuable as a game is that playing to get a higher score can be a rewarding experience. (I have no intention of elaborating on what I mean by “as a game.”)
I haven’t played it, and it appears that the website hosting it no longer exists, so I guess I won’t. 🙁
I’m a straight white male.
I have been searching, ever since I first began to view video games as an artistic medium, for a game that encapsulates the same discoveries of humanity as the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which I for a very long time considered my favorite movie, and perhaps the most artistic piece I’d seen in any medium.
At first glance, it looks like this game could’ve achieved that.
After reading your criticisms, it appears that the message of the game is too narrow, and does not speak to a broad enough section of humanity to be as artistic as I’d hoped.
Here are a few simple things to change to make this game possibly one of the most artistic endeavors of the medium:
1) Gender selection. Let the player choose his/her identity.
2) Spouse selection. Let the player chose a mate. Alternatively, make the in-game partner a genderless pixelated character. You could also do this for the first one, but then the meaning might be lost a little.
3) Have one randomly-generated scripted moment: the end. It’s 50-50 that you die before your partner or she/he dies before you.
4) Give in-game incentive to bringing along a partner. A strong desire for a partner early on. Perhaps the partner can give you infinite extra lives, perhaps certain other AI will treat you differently if your identity is tied to your spouse.
I think, with these changes, this game could’ve been something I’d use in discussions. Maybe we’ll see that game one day.
Thanks for visiting, Orion!
If you think that Passage would be right for you, find it and play it. Sure, I spoilered it, but it just takes five minutes, so see for yourself how you feel.
I have Complicated Feelings about Eternal Sunshine too.
I think it’s fair that Passage doesn’t let the player choose starting gender or the gender of the spouse, if we accept that the game is about one person’s experience rather than trying to be a universal experience. Autobiography is totally valid. It’s just a stretch for me to pretend I identify with it.
I do like the idea of making the death at the end random. It’s just… not fair (or very realistic) that the woman always dies first.
Orion — as a shot in the dark, maybe you’d like Walk Or Die? It doesn’t have any particular connection to Eternal Sunshine that I can think of, but if someone said to me “I’d like something kind of like Passage that doesn’t situate a straight white married male in an abstract landscape so as to present his experience as universal,” that’s what I’d recommend.
(Did recommend, kind of. Or maybe the game in that link would work for you — I haven’t played it because I use a Mac.)
Walk Or Die doesn’t involve a partner, though, so it might not be for you.
>And now that I’ve gone here, I’d be happy to hear your thoughts. Passage: was it moving to you? Did you notice the way it treated the female character, and was that bothersome or fine?
In case it helps, I found Passage extremely moving (I actually had to stop playing before the end and turn off the computer) despite never actually finding the ‘spouse’ at all – I read about it afterwards and was pretty surprised that the game I’d found so amazing wasn’t the one that most people played!
Reading this post (and related ones by Anna Anthropy etc) definitely made me realise that having ‘memento-mori’ be a shocking thought is a super-privileged position though.
Is it buffoonish of me to say I found Passage just … heavy-handed? I’m sure it didn’t expect to be clever (it isn’t), but I’d be lying if I said I found it anything other than pretentious.
Oh, I bumble around, waste my life, and before I know it I’m dead. “How did I get here?” Thanks, tips. I don’t know … *puts on bitter cap* … a lot of better works of art have managed to tell me that one human’s time is finite and I/you will cease to be, relationships are complicated et cetera, and at the same time managed to tell some other interesting story.
Ahh, a great read. And one more reason I can think a little less of Passage. Never saw the big appeal in it myself, as it always felt too vanilla and straight. Not so much in the white, straight, male perspective, but as the comfortable, well-to-do Westerner perspective of things (which, by way of popular western culture, is pretty white, male, and straight I suppose). I never really felt like I could openly criticize it either as so many friends have treated it with such relevance that to suggest I didn’t find it at all moving would be to insult their opinion or suggest I just wasn’t bright enough to “get it.”
“Passage? Yeah, I played it. It was interesting.”
[…] But in contrast my good friend Amanda Lange found it repugnant: […]