Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Examples of Narrative in The Path!

There are a number of ways we can investigate the narratives surrounding these young women. We can do so at a surface level, chortling at the fact that these young women each endure what could be considered a “tiny death,” a fact that is not lost upon Tale of Tales, who cast many of the revelations that these young women undergo in an explicitly or potentially sexualized light. But if we go deeper, we can see the structural elements assembled to convey the experience of each individual girl.

Because even as the player exerts literal control over the young woman he or she guides through the forest we can find concrete elements that players are encouraged or forced to interact with. The elements of dialogue unique to each young woman, the gestures that they make as they approach each element of the environment surrounding them, these are the framework that generate the effective poem of The Path. And through these objects we find a narrative structure not unlike that of a conventional poem.

Pacing substitutes for things like meter and line, the word choice for word choice, art and action for tone and style. If we have to establish a parallel of theme than our reader may, perhaps, be beyond convincing of the validity of games as an art form (I’ll grant you that writing in games is very, very different from writing in poems, hence my grasp at wit above) so let’s just agree for convenience that theme is readily apparent in both games and poems. My point is that we’re looking at a game and we’re seeing concrete, constructed elements provided expressly for us to interact with. Which is pretty effing cool in and of itself! But what’s really cool is that interacting with any of those objects is a choice, even if the choice is between interacting with an object and quitting the game (though that’s never the only choice with The Path).

And the elements themselves in The Path are fairly sparse: while the forest is an interesting place to play, there isn’t a whole lot to it when you really come down to it. Compared to many games, The Path is spare and, if you’re not willing to meet it half way, kind of boring. Poems, similarly, are often separated from prose by their sparse elements which require the involvement of the reader in order for cohesion to take shape. In this way the player of The Path becomes the equivalent of the reader of a poem: they become an agent of change in the game’s world, giving form and meaning to the elements of the game by choosing which ones to interact with and how.

And depending on your approach you can emerge from each of the vignettes that make up The Path with very different experiences. The actions you take during your journey with each girl has a profound impact on your outcome. One might guide Ginger, the tomboyish thirteen year old, through her travels with relatively little event, as I did, delivering her unintentionally to her wolf, a young woman waiting in a field to entreat her to an (implied) lesbian experience, and come away with a sense of tragedy afterwards. I spent so little time with this lively character and saw so little of the world with her and the moment of happiness she found seemed to fill her with such shame and dread that she had no means by which to process it except to drag her heels and return to her path, to the house where she was expected and find her quiet, literal death within the home of her family.

But another player, might have spent more time with Ginger. They might have explored the woods thoroughly and not found her wolf at all, instead eventually guiding her to her grandmother’s house after growing frustrated at her liveliness and excitement at the world around her. They might’ve taken some time to guide other girls through the woods before returning to Ginger’s vignette with a more complete understanding of the woods and their nature and the journey that each of these young women is on. And when they guided her to her wolf, they might’ve felt joy at the fullness of her experience and woe and frustration for her shame.

This is more or less exactly what I experienced with Carmen, the fifteen year old sister who is undergoing a more conventional sexual awakening. Upon my first attempt to guide Carmen through the woods I couldn’t figure out for the life of me how to get her to interact with her wolf. I figured out more or less where it was supposed to be, who it was supposed to be, but I couldn’t actually get the events to sequence correctly. I’d started the journey off thinking that Carmen was a frustrating ditz, and as it progressed that opinion was reinforced pretty thoroughly: Carmen was little interested in the sort of childish or profound play that I was looking for in the woods, she was far more interested in trying to fuck boys and drink beer which, in her mind, was the perfect way to realize her goal of fucking some boys.

She was the only girl I guided to grandmother’s house without first meeting her wolf, which was a strange experience. Knowing what I knew about her character from exploring the woods with her I found a kind of horror in the quiet of grandmother’s house, a sort of cruel repression that seemed to strip Carmen of what made her…her. And when I finally discovered her wolf (more accurately, how to get her wolf to pay attention to her and grant her the sexytimes that she spent most of her journey in the woods trying to find) I felt a profound sympathy for her and the world that her grandmother’s house had become. Spinning, pulsing steel and flesh consuming itself composed the house now, formless horrors of concrete physicality replacing the horrid quiet that had been there before. Carmen seemed to find the world after sex every bit as horrible as the way she’d seen it beforehand. I walked away from her scenario angry, not just as Carmen, but at Tale of Tales for making me relate to a character I hated so thoroughly.

If the game had been more structured, I might’ve been able to distance myself from Carmen’s journey. I might’ve been able to snort at her awakenings and ignore her set pieces as a construct separate from myself, a forced series of actions that I disagreed with.

But every action, even success or failure, is conditional in The Path, an event requiring the effort and intervention of the player. And when Carmen “failed” at dying, I had to come back to her, get a more robust sense of who she was and re-explore the woods with her to get her where she needed to go. I had to become the agent of narrative fulfillment required by every poem and, by most turns, every game. The only real difference here was that I knew I was doing that, knew how active I was in this process.

In the end, I was forced by the permissive mechanics and loose construction of The Path into constructing a more complex and engaging female character, a protagonist I could find meaning and resonance with. The formlessness of the experience forced me into generating a narrative and a suite of emotions in order to engage with the game at all. If The Path was just a series of linear puzzles that I had to “complete” in order to unlock the next scene, I might have found the stories of the characters within it trite. But because it forced me to construct my own meaning (by providing me with engaging set pieces to construct it from, of course) it allowed for the construction of a deeply nuanced treatment of gender, sexuality and the nature of womanhood, all rendered through a video game, a member of a medium often rightly reviled for infantilizing women, for casting them in parallel to masculine roles or for turning their sexuality against them in order to generate a sense of objectification or absurdity.

Take Lara Croft of Tomb Raider for instance: she was constructed as a “female Indiana Jones” rather than a character in her own right, an archetype of masculinity imposed on a feminine frame rather than a uniquely female protagonist. Even if she could be taken seriously as a character on a thematic level we’d never know, since her appear has been so ridiculously overblown, an exaggerated confluence of masculine and feminine images mashed together haphazardly. Just look at her, sporting two massive pistols and tremendous, absurd breasts that defy physics. She’ll climb up an ancient temple without breaking a sweat, kill dozens of men to get to her goal and then drown underwater and essentially have an orgasm as she twitches and dies, running out of air.

Even her serious moments are undercut by deliberate attempts to feminize her character and make her seem less threatening, less like a construct of power and more like an agent of a power structure who reinforces that structure even as she’s subjugated by it. Romantic subplots are injected, Lara is captured, a love of money sidetracks her attentions. To be fair, efforts are emerging to try and counter this pattern, even within the Tomb Raider series: Lara is being rebooted as a (normally bodied) young woman who is shipwrecked on an island and has to use her wits and her resilience to save herself. But it remains to be seen how well this attempt will follow its archetype, indeed if it will succeed at all.

But there’s reason to take heart and hope for a more progressive portrayal of women in games, even those with more conventional narratives. It comes from, among other places, the Portal series of games, and it’s going to be the subject of next week’s SNS, and hopefully tie this topic together. Thanks for bearing with me!