Dog walk, dog listen, dog lost

Ruins is a 2011 PC game developed by Cardboard Computer and can be downloaded here.

Self-pity runs deep through the cerebellum, rots the spinal cord to a few strands of disintegrating rubber, destroys everything outside of mind – other people, other feelings, limbs even that can’t be used to pull hair. At focus, in loathing, is the self and nothing more. This is why art games have simple controls. The player’s hapless fingers stay out and away from the artist’s vision because it’s sacrosanct or whatever. It’s generally pretty dull for us gamers.

Finding worthwhile art games is a great big gamble for this reason.

Fancy this then, that Ruins isn’t willing to shy away from this formula. I’m pretty accepting of intrigue in story and narrative just so I can look past blunders in everything else, but there’s nothing compelling about story here. I don’t care enough because it’s not very interesting. I don’t care enough because I, as the player (not viewer, not passive enjoyer) don’t matter. That’s the bottom line, that the blend between both narrative and interaction is homogeneous and in equal proportions, but only because there’s hardly anything to mix. Ruins is full of air and not much else.

***

You’re tasked, as a silhouetted dog, to explore. It’s posh. The world is a hazy dream populated by few dark trees, out of focus and glinting rabbits, and the ruins of reality.

Introductions aside, approaching the glinting rabbits initiates a conversation and the conversation advances the story. There’s a girl and her ex and his piano and their apartment (a breakup, you know), the ruins of which stand tall in the purple-aqua glaze. There’s the dog that you play as, absent from the real world, materialized in dream land to fill a void in the girl’s wakefulness and, here, in her sleep. The rabbits, creatures you scurry after habitually, reliving the history up to the present. Your name, Angie, a poetic misname for Agatha Christie, with some relevance I can’t imagine.

The story’s all there, I guess. Nothing’s missing, but there’s no challenge to reduce it and the emotions are dull. Every step peels a portion for what’s supposed to be an unfurling and expansive narrative, but what ends up being a prolonged rabbit chase and not much more. Everything is clear. The art content, pretty as it is, is just the mucked up result of spilled paint tins and the paint hasn’t yet dried. Maybe there’s not enough paint.

The game logic goes something like this, in linear fashion, always from one snippet to the next interspersed by travel:
1. Pick the story apart and start somewhere in the middle.
2. Slowly feed the player the future – what happens since the middle.
3. Let the player figure out the past and, if he can’t, spill it out for him toward the end.

This isn’t Michael Joyce. This isn’t Dear Esther. Electronic words (here, in Ruins, without substance, with poorly-developed and hollow emotions) aren’t all that’s needed to convey exaltation and defeat in the human spirit. This is a barely lucid sequence of events about a reality that might only be compelling to the inspiration itself. And, in what seems like self-mockery, Chopin plays airily in the background (as a lame excuse, a record of the past).

Characters of the story are hardly distinguishable. Everything is mixed into one, over-analyzed allegory. The player is the narrator’s dream avatar, but also the subject that talks to the narrator about (what else?) the subject. The player doesn’t even matter. What control he’s given is for the purpose of continuing the self-serving flash fictions of every rabbit encounter. And that would be fine, but…

In the end, there’s no proper balance between story and interaction. Rather, there’s not enough of either. Can’t they mitigate each other? Isn’t that a thing that developers do to even out the worth of their games? I’m perfectly fine in a hypertext fiction where my only interaction is to click a word and play, but where the words feel and sound beautiful and are meaningful. I’m also apt to play action-shooter fodder where narrative is laughable, but where greater emphasis is placed on player interaction. In Ruins, both aspects fall short. My choices, copied like cheap ploys from great games, mean nothing and the story means nothing to me.

Over and over, I had myself saying “this was never meant to appeal to me.” This isn’t for me. This isn’t for any player. And what’s relatable here – emotions of longing – isn’t enough to crater an impact. It tries too much with too little.

And I kept on saying “so I don’t like it,” and “I’m done with this.” And, enduring the remaining time, I was. I was totally done with it.