Super Nerd Sunday Presents: Bringing The Path Into the Discussion!

There are many games which lack explicitly formed or illustrated narratives, and many of the games which utilize narrative elements often utilize them so loosely that they could barely be considered narrative exercises. You could argue, for example, that Donkey Kong has a narrative: your girlfriend has been captured by a giant ape, and you’ve got to rescue her from his clutches. But the story itself, the dramatic tension and the enjoyment of the game emerges not from this overarching narrative, but the free-form play, which exists outside of it and is imposed by the player. No one pays much attention to the end goal, compared to the second to second barrel dodging that occurs within the game.

This is both where the idea of non-explicit narratives becomes critical and becomes problematic. Games like Just Cause and Far Cry 2 have loose narrative frameworks with large interpretive segments of play inserted within them, and as a result they don’t necessarily fall into non-explicit narrative frameworks, but they utilize the strengths of non-explicit narratives to realize their play. Even though they’re possessed of a quality of writing and plot, the plot is ancillary to the play itself. This generates an odd dichotomy within these games: the central plot is often absent, and disconnected from the play and, as a result, strong characters usually don’t form. There are characters who dart in and out of the narrative, each of them surprisingly well developed for the time they spend in the game. Some of these characters are women, and they’re given a respectful and equal treatment by the writers of the game, but they’re not prominent enough to merit much discussion.

Since play in these loosely framed games is established in opposition to narrative, rather than in conjunction with developing it, it can be tricky to think of character as anything more than an afterthought. Even as narrative is developed, the play itself involves a sort of solo-improvisation in the world at larger and, as a result, prevents the engagement of or development of any sort of meaningful characters beyond the player (in both of these cases, a male agent represented by a gun, a conventional phallic symbol) and the world (represented by dehumanized enemies, almost all of them male, and resources, all of them objects in the world without easily recognizable human traits). But once a game goes “whole hog” with its loose narrative and is simply satisfied to bookend play with narrative, we can see some more interesting elements emerge.

Take, for instance, the play of the original Mario series. Here we’ve got a largely non-narrative experience bookended by a highly gendered narrative with elements of masking and conventional gender binaries inserted within. There are some interesting elements to engage with: you’re constantly attempting to rescue a princess, you’re emasculating a giant lizard to do so, you’re foiled by a cross-dressing eunich with a mushroom, which could be considered a symbolic penis, on his head. We can investigate other elements of the play of the game from a feminist perspective, perceiving the sex of various enemies and the gendered nature of powers (mushrooms, flowers and stars representing male, female and neutral spaces along a gendered continuum with increasing effectiveness related to them) and we can find a gender-bending super-narrative structure threading through Mario’s play and its place within its larger narrative framework. Even though the explicit narrative involves rescuing a princess from a giant lizard, a seemingly male empowering storyline, the twists and turns contained within and the manner in which neutral and feminine sexuality are considered superior means by which to assault this task undermine the conventional ideas about masculine authority through play.

The Path takes this one step further, establishing an extremely loose narrative which establishes at best unclear conditions for success, inverts concepts of success and utilizes, to this end, an overarching structure with nearly no guidelines or limitations of play within the engine itself. The game focusing on retelling the story of Little Red Riding Hood from the perspective of six young women, each of whom must be guided to Grandmother’s House. Even this objective is questionable, and the parallel between game and folk tale muddy and implicit rather than explicitly illustrated.

The game opens on a room with its six protagonists standing in it, playing with various toys, reading books and generally killing time. Once the player selects a character the character then gets up and removes themselves from the room, depositing themselves at the end of a long path. The game instructs players to proceed to their grandmother’s house and informs them not to stray from the path. This is a totally valid way to play the game: if you simply walk to the end of the path you’ll arrive at your grandmother’s house quickly, without incident. You’ll walk through the house to your grandmother’s room and climb into bed with her, ending prompting the introduction of a scoring screen which will tell you in no uncertain terms that by following the game’s directions you failed. And really, who could disagree? By obeying the game’s prompts you’ve effectively avoided any kind of interesting or engaging experience: you simply obeyed the rules that the system explicitly asked of you and arrived at the end of the level without injury or incident. You’ve avoided experiencing the content of the game itself, the unnamed content that exists off the titular path in the expansive woods that flank in.

Within these woods the game itself unfolds, not in a manner which relies on any kind of narrative form but rather a manner which requires that players plumb the depths of these woods in order to ferret out nuggets of narrative. The woods are composed largely of, appropriately enough, trees. Sometimes detritus also litters the woodland, detritus which some characters see value in but which is not explicitly given any value. Occasionally within the woods characters will encounter a set piece which is recognized as being of some significance, more than the detritus of the woods. Characters will spout a line or two of expository poetry or prose and the event will be marked in the “inventory” of experiences which players will seemingly randomly be reminded of as they continue to explore. Play continues in this fashion, where players explore their surroundings until they either choose to return to grandmother’s house or they encounter their “wolf.” This “wolf” is largely a metaphoric construct: while some characters do encounter literal wolves, their wolves are more often simply figures who seem to play some pivotal role in their lives, usually a paternal, sexual or spiritual role. When characters encounter their “wolf” they’re treated to a brief scene which usually touches on one of these themes before being deposited just in front of grandmother’s house in a world drained of color, beset by rain. Your character, who used to trot about in a sprightly manner, now limps awkwardly, and progress is nigh impossible in any direction that does not lead to grandmother’s house.

Once players enter grandmother’s house after meeting their wolf, they’re treated to a new experience. What was previously a quiet space filled with pastoral elements of memory and life is instead replaced by a collection of grim imagery, an apparent reflection of the conscious, subconscious or memory of their character. As they traverse this space, rendered hostile through their interaction with the wolf, experiences become increasingly intense until characters are killed as they approach their grandmother. Players are then given a grade, based on their exploration, and notified of their success. Then they are returned to the character selection, where the surviving young women still sit and await their journey through the woods. Symbols of the departed young women litter the floor. This process continues until players “succeed” with each young woman, effectively guiding each of them to a literal or metaphoric death.

Meta-textual elements of the young women exist outside of the game’s structure itself: a series of blogs maintained by the young women, their grandmother, mother and a set of mysterious parties were hosted by developer Tale of Tales. These bits of metatext provide backstory for the young women of The Path, but do nothing to explicitly inform the narrative, or lack thereof, in the game. Instead they form a sort of external narrative framework which informs the play, but does not impact or affect it. The Path forms, with this framework, a remarkable platform for the introduction and formation of unique narratives imposed by the player. Sure, they’re all taking place within the spectrum of a set of acceptable outcomes that designers established for the game long before its formation took hold, but the spectrum of these experiences, their disjointed nature and the fluid concepts of success and failure that the game relies upon all combine to make a game where the player’s experience is wholly unique and open to multiple layers of interpretation.

It’s no mistake that this framework is applied to women. Young women who are entering a new stage of their lives who are, through the events in The Path, empowered and destroyed.