nightputrid’s interactive narrative piece, DON'T TRY, pulls the user into a claustrophobically tight gameplay loop, in which the lack of a win condition is both immediately obvious, and natural feeling. Its world is the one we know, but seen through the narrow peephole of our own head, trapped in a prolonged moment of life/work transition. Drifting, just above autopilot, and just below actual thought.
It’s the game we play with ourselves when we’re left alone with our thoughts, in the ambiguous zones between unavoidable labor and meaningless personal time. A game which is as desolate of actual gameplay mechanics as it is the possibility of escaping its recurrent, banal narrative of life under capitalism. It brutally drives home the reality of our times, and does so with an extreme economy that never feels the need to push its point to unnecessary extremes; instead remaining fixed within the listless frequencies of the reality it reflects.
It also perfectly enmeshes its narrative and mechanical elements, eliminating any trace of ludonarrative dissonance by being precisely as hopeless to play as the Neoliberal world it speaks to. For those who had something better to do in 2017, ludonarrative dissonance is a term which is applied to games, (almost exclusively of the video variety) in which the narrative and gameplay elements are in contradiction with one another, either formally or thematically.
The protagonist who, in a pre-rendered cutscene, can’t bring themselves to kill the man they’ve hunted down, because it would ‘cross a line,’ despite having just killed like eighty guys in the last gameplay segment. The elite counter-terror agent who has precious few moments to save the President, but can still spend five straight minutes fucking around with their inventory items. The prophesied fantasy hero, foretold to save the village through their noble deeds, who also routinely loots the villagers’ houses for anything not nailed down. Essentially, anytime the in-universe story, themes, or physical logics are in stark contrast to the actual content of the gameplay and the moment-to-moment choices it places upon the player, it can be described as ludonarrative dissonance.
DON'T TRY perfectly resolves this thematic/mechanical tension by doing away with the established narrative mask of contemporary capitalism, (and capitalism, especially Neoliberal capitalism, is most definitely a narrative venture) not through overt or didactic rhetoric, but simply by presenting the banality and dissolution of our world as we most often experience it. On the train, home alone after a tiring day, lying awake in bed at night, and all the other small moments in which we force our minds to simply coast. To not consider the larger picture, despite it utterly filling our vision already.
DON'T TRY is also deeply lonely, as have been many of the more recent additions to the archive. This isolation feels fitting for a single player narrative game, in which we’ve come to expect a singular experience and perspective; much as we’ve come to in the real world moments the game is speaking to. It also highlights an element of game theory which hasn’t been touched on quite so thoroughly as ludonarrative dissonance. That of ludosocial dissonance.
When the experience of the game, the actual inputs and feedbacks and pseudo-choices which must be made in order to play, are in direct contradiction with the social connections and networks which the game purports itself to operate within. DON'T TRY excels here as well, being an isolating game about isolation, perfectly pairing its user experience with its broader social implications. More mainstream games often don’t fare as well however.
MMOs frequently include guilds, or similar organizations, which are made up of dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of players, ostensibly banded together through a common goal, vision, or ideological stance within the game’s world. In actuality, the soul point of guilds, at a gameplay level, is the ability to enter game areas with a minimum headcount threshold. And of course to be able to compare rankings (i.e. fictional numbers) against other guilds. While some games, such as World of Warcraft, allow for a binary distinction between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ factions, (a distinction which would be laughably simplistic even if it had any gameplay implications) but these distinctions are nothing more than aesthetic. All guilds, regardless of alignment, perform actions that are materially identical to one another, even if slightly different character art or naming conventions are layered overtop of them.
The actual social structure and dynamics of the game, despite a thin veneer of online community and in-universe politics, amount to nothing more than a choice of group name and colour scheme. And while MMOs, with their pared down and overtly mechanistic goals and presentations, are one of the more visible examples of this disconnect, they pervade contemporary gaming. ‘Morality’ systems that balance the mindless acceptance of the status quo against cartoonish, baby-murdering acts of evil. Plucky troupes of adventurers, supposedly bound together through struggle and friendship, who are really just infinitely resurrectable bundles of slightly tweaked ability sets. Epic fantasy stories about overthrowing despotic rulers, only to replace them with slightly different despotic rulers with more brightly coloured outfits.
The fact that this dissonance between gameplay (interface and action) and social operation isn’t discussed, speaks to a deeply held cultural bias at work within our current networks. When we question the faults and discrepancies and harmful contradictions around us, we are conditioned to do so at a narrative, rather than a genuinely social level. Politics and ideology become merely story beats about governmental parties with as little material distinction as Horde vs. Alliance, or Player One vs. Player Two. We are urged, at every level, to accept a gamified version of our world, in which the most fundamental and impactful aspects of our shared existence are nothing more than cheap melodrama, or a way to score points.
We are not meant to look at the Neoliberal Game we play and take notice of the dissonance between its actions and outcomes and the social structures it operates within and takes control over. Because when we do so, we no longer see the game as a good or bad story, a satisfying or unsatisfying narrative that could use a few minor rewrites or a new creative team for the upcoming election season. Instead, we see it for the broken, isolating, externally and internally destructive network of banal and anti-human mechanisms that it is. We see it plainly, and we want to start playing something else.
DON'T TRY, despite its short playtime and extremely lean interface, does more than any mainstream game to rectify its mechanical, narrative, and social elements. And it does so not through escapism into a better world, but instead by extracting the mechanical reality of one small but universal thread of contemporary existence, and then allowing its narrative and social dynamics to match it. It rectifies the dissonances and purely aesthetic overlays of Neoliberal capitalism, and what emerges from that rectification is a small but infinite loop of isolation, despondency, and defeat.
Put simply, the game that’s been made of our world has no win state, and it’s time to stop plugging in quarters.