Dear Esther

Dear Esther is a game without challenge, a storytelling experience with only a vague narrative, and a new kind of interactive experience without much interaction. We sit down to discuss the time we spent with it.

 


Eric—

I’d like, if we can, to begin by trying to establish what Dear Esther is, and then what it’s trying to do.

Built originally as a Half-Life 2 mod, the game provides us with a three-dimensional world to explore. An island, unpopulated, with sparsely scattered signs of past habitation. Walking is the only thing you can do in the game. There is nothing to pick up, no way to interact with your environment, and nothing to accomplish aside from moving forward—through the space and, as a result, through the story. You can’t even jump.

It’s difficult, when experiencing something new like this, not to immediately reach for related experiences in order to understand it. We come to Dear Esther as to a game, it certainly has all the trappings of game, but what kind of game is it? (Whether it’s a game at all is something we’ll likely inevitably come to, but I hope when we do we can approach it obliquely, since the question posed head-on feels about as interesting a starting place as “…but is it art?”) We come to it as gamers, too. Trying to take past gaming experience and apply it to Dear Esther felt awkward right from the get-go, though.

Given that the player has no controls for interaction, nor even the ability to run instead of walk, it seemed unlikely that anything threatening was going to appear on the journey. This clearly wasn’t going to a twitch-reflex sort of game. The island setting and the abstruse narration reminded me a little of Myst, and adventure games in general, so at first I found myself keenly observing all of the little visual details—the names on the books in the first building, the arcane paint marks on the walls and rock faces, etc. But adventure games eventually test you on your collecting skills, forcing you to solve puzzles with the clues or objects you’ve managed to find. And again, this clearly wasn’t going to be a game that challenged the player in that way. I thought also of games of exploration, open worlds created primarily to be explored, the reward being in successfully finding some nook or cranny that contained treasure (in the literal or abstract sense). But continually my attempts to walk the less beaten path when offered the choice only resulted in a new vista (all beautiful, by the way). There was no indication that I would be rewarded for poking around in the darker corners; the bulk of the narrative was in the large set-piece designs and triggered narration.

In the end it felt like an exercise in atmosphere. And I think it executed on this tremendously well. Everything—from the foliage to the sound design to the sky to the way that the landscape kept unfolding perfectly, with each new view somehow containing detail in the foreground and the distance—everything said: “you are by the sea, on an island. And it was put here for you to walk it.” The act of walking is another thing I hope we can tackle. Walking as meditation, walking as on the Road to Damascus, walking as contemplative, walking as a part of the practice of landscape art.

There is an awful lot we can get into in regard to the story Dear Esther presents, but lets see if we can finish pinning down the formal elements first.

What were your first impressions? How did you decide how to ‘play’ the game?

Nick—

I’m not quite sure of the scope of writing that’s been done already, in the world, on the history of games in general and on video games specifically so I might be walking into familiar territory, but for what it’s worth  it’s new territory for me. All I could think while I enjoyed my time with Dear Esther was how this wasn’t a game in any of the ways that I had ever considered gaming, but also how underwhelming that reaction was. I’m biased based on the reviews I’d read prior to logging in, which all seemed to frame the experience as something unique and unfamiliar to the word of video games. So (unfortunate self-revelation) I was bracing for tedious boredom. I think there is an overwhelmingly facile and reductive tendency to relate all virtual experiences to games – to entertainment and play – and then to think of them at best as a form of leisure and relaxation and at worst as an irrelevant waste of time. Why do we do this?

The history of games aside, video games are such an amazing nexus of art, story-telling, puzzle, problem, physicality (digital [finger] physicality), etc., and I don’t really want to spend too much time thinking this particular aspect of Dear Esther through, but considering this rich convergence of human activity that comes together in video games it was very easy for me to let go of the fact that Dear Esther asks little more of me than to passively experience an artful series of landscapes and a beautiful, cryptic story.

While the category seems trite to argue over, the form of the experience itself is full of interesting complications. How much can we say about the relationship of Dear Esther to the whole history of Landscape Art, for example, which has been a focus of us humans since our species first stood up and started representing our experience of the world? I could spend hours staring at a Turner or a Constable or a Cezanne and not once feel any resentment towards the artist for robbing me of time with which I ought to be out sitting under a tree enjoying the sunshine. Yet every time I catch myself hours into a sublime gaming experience involving a detailed rendering of the “real world” I struggle with this guilt at having just passed up the opportunity to go outside and stare dumbfounded at an actual cloud. And that’s stupid. Dear Esther is a great example of what we might be in for in the coming years of gaming -  the chance to have very moving and real experiences of nature that have nothing to do with being in nature.  Dear Esther, like Skyrim, reminds me that nature is already just another invention of ours.

I like Werner Herzog’s gentle jab at nature when he calls it a base and violent thing, full of fornication and asphyxiation and screams of agony. I also think Edward Abbey, in Desert Solitaire, hit nature-loving humans on the head when he advocated for America’s National Parks (National Parking Lots) be protected by stopping the paving of roads into them,  preventing access to any but the most physically fit and intrepid of people. Nature, rather than a luxury to drive up to, park in, shit in, take pictures in, whatever, is something wholly alien and apart from who we are. Dear Esther does a great job and convincing me that, at least for the time being, this place that it has put me in is the best place to be. Why? I’m not entirely sure (and I say this having watched every episode of Lost, resisting the incredible apathetic weight I bear for strangers stranded on islands searching for clues beneath ominous radio towers, which suggests there is no why worth waiting for)  For me, the thing about Dear Esther isn’t its unique form or game play, it’s the challenge of working through whether or not playing it  constitutes some kind of  abhorrent perversion of my relationship with the natural world or whether it’s actually one of the most appropriate, gratifying, and satiating experience I can possible hope to have in it.