I had to go get a routine (for me) blood test recently. My insurance situation had changed, so I had to go to a new location, at a hospital that I’d exited once but never entered. So on my way there, on a hot and too-humid morning, I kept getting turned around on side streets, even though I had directions right in front of me. The street zig-zagged at one point, you see, so I didn’t trust my bearings. I live in Chicago, but suburban areas can feel downright rural just from the contrast with the heavier sprawl even a few blocks away. Even a familiar place, with the sun in your eyes, can be another world for a half a block.
When I finally arrived, I ascended the west tower of the hospital’s office building and went up to a tiny window, where they claimed I didn’t have the right paperwork. I wound up trying to broker an arrangement between my doctor’s office and this laboratory using myself on the phone as a go-between, only to learn that the person who had looked for my file had made a typo or something, and the paperwork had existed all along. And then the way back, a minute’s walk at best, because I knew the path.
This can be what Kentucky Route Zero feels like. It can also feel like something wondrous, the flight of a giant eagle over a Baudrillard map, a pedal-wheel spinning through a fourth-dimensional wormhole, or the flats of a stage production falling away to reveal the shadow world beyond its walls. The joy and terror of being lost, but also the banality, I suppose. It’s a story about debt; living with it, and in a world changed by it. It’s very funny, and also very scary. Or vice versa.
Kentucky Road Zero is a five-act episodic game for the PC, which also includes free “demos” which are in fact interstitial chapters. You can find it here at the site of developers Cardboard Computer, and it comes highly recommended.
Another fan of the game is critic Joe McCulloch, a friend, infrequent P:B contributor, and sometime bassist for the band Foreigner. You can find him writing every week over at The Comics Journal and having fun with manga over at his tumblr. Joe and I decided to dig in deep and hash out this extraordinary game series, which at the time of this writing has reached Act III. We talk about everything; KR0 being a game of discovery, that may be worth considering before you progress. That said, it is as always and honor and a pleasure to host - and to write with - Joe; and this was a subject with plenty of meat for both of us.
A poem is the password...
***
MP: In searching for a place to start, I’m left considering a personal note regarding my experience with Kentucky Route Zero.
In Act I, one of the major setpieces revolves around the tram system within the old Kentucky mine that forms a lot of the game’s backstory. As I shifted myself back and forth along the intersecting paths - guiding by landmarks that also dot the eponymous Route Zero itself - I noted with dry amusement the bent wire bird cage still sitting on the old tram. “They are trapped,” I thought to myself. It was actually a second or two before I remembered how obvious the need for coal mine canaries was - I was too focused on trying to suss out meaning, relating the atmosphere to the idea of a video game maze, connecting that back to early adventure gaming, as they’d just namechecked the “twisty passages” line and all - and I felt a little silly for getting ahead of myself. I was reacting, in part, to the landmarks and their incongruity - decorations, it was established, that cost the miners. Like tombstones marking debt.
Shortly after that, though, the character of Shannon mentions that the canaries and their purchase were how the mining company got control of her mother. In that moment, then, one obvious meaning transferred to another, and I essentially “proved myself right” as it were, as the utilitarian usage of the birdcage was long past by the time Conway and Shannon find themselves trapped in the mine - only the symbolism remained. And then Act III began, and the pair discussed the medication that Conway was now taking because of the injury sustained in the mine. The debt for that medication had marked him as, essentially, property of the Hard Times boys. And Shannon was telling Conway a story about ADD medication that she’d taken without prescription, and how she fell into a fugue state… thinking about her mother putting together a birdcage in the past.
Kentucky Route Zero owes a lot to theatre, and a lot to architecture, and a lot to literature - as any good video game should, in a way - but I think I may connect with it most as a hypertext; connections between moments and characters and ideas can be drawn in nearly any direction. We’re all of us walking through the museum of “Limits and Demonstrations,” the first sidestory, sliding along the magnetic tape at not-quite-random - like the roads of the Zero itself. When, in Act III, you enter the Hall of the Mountain King, a sort of tomb built to house a certain type of adventure gaming, and you begin to meet more stand-ins for the architects for this genre - I know Roberta Williams’ appearance had to have been meaningful for you - I half-expected to find Stuart Moulthrop there, telling Conway about the Victory Garden that he’d planted. Given Moulthrop’s pieces on the intersection between gaming and comics, though, that may have been too overt for you and I, now discussing the game here, and on this site.
JM: Really, it’s the theatricality of the enterprise which gets to me. It’s fitting that Jake Elliott (one of the designers) characterized the team as “very much amateurs” in regard to dramatic theory, as I get the sense of eager students excitedly applying everything they’ve learned to this project. If you want to get wooly about it, graphic adventure gaming loans itself well to Brechtian “epic theater,” which is to say theater that stokes the audience’s awareness of theatrical construction, as opposed to coaxing absorption into a simulacrum of life. The latter, as the theory goes, encourages complacency through the illusion of (temporary) (fraudulent) ‘escape,’ whereas estrangement from emotional engagement might provoke the critical perspective necessary to apply the lessons of fiction to the outside world.
As you know [Link to an old P:B article removed, may get it back up in the future - Ed.], I have *always* been estranged from the stories in adventure games; even a revered touchstone like The Walking Dead, with all its pretense of melodramatic ‘moral choice,’ becomes absurd once you’re backtracking from location to location trying to find your way through a fucking gate. That the game also endeavors to tell a fixed, television-like serial narrative while barking at the grave consequences of player choices is the struggle at the heart of ludonarrative dissonance.
KR0, in contrast, is ‘interactive’ in a way that draws ceaseless attention to the limits of interactivity. Paradoxically, I find this deeply affecting. The mechanics are laid out very simply at the beginning of Act I - what is the dog’s name? Answer: the dog’s name is what is the dog’s name. The choice you make to name the dog is not merely the choice you have made, but what has always been the dog’s name. Now - is Conway a recalcitrant man, or is he curious? Be warned that who he is, is who he is; not merely in terms of present-tense communication, but the very texture of his past.
In this way, the player is not simply made to inhabit an avatar by which to navigate scenes, but is burdened, horribly, with fiat. I found myself becoming manically paranoid while playing KR0, especially after I’d learn things about Conway’s physical state; I’d avoid any mention of dust, out of fear of the game’s reality leaping up to infect his bad leg, and I’d find myself watching for even the slightest suggestion of drinking, lest the man fall off the wagon - and anyone who’s played Act III knows where that kind of thinking leads you.
All of these devices, crucially, are at the very heart of KR0’s narrative. This is a story of fatalism, of recidivism, and of terrible abstract structures directing the fate of the common person - the limitations of a gaming engine running parallel with the economic forces and physical addictions which command the direction of lives. Act III’s Xanadu, a reference to both the doomed hypertext project and Coleridge’s hallucinatory reflections on creativity -- and maybe even good ol’ Citizen Kane and the risible meme it inhabits in gaming rhetoric -- is Cardboard Computer’s great metaphor of misplaced idealism, of seeking mastery of fate by recreating reality, perfectly: a mission KR0 places at the very conception of the adventure game genre. Colossal Cave Adventure, after all, was based on the real subterranean geography of Kentucky, and designed by William Crowther as a means of delighting his children after his divorce from their mother. The game was then revised and popularized by Don Woods; KR0 positions a “Donald” as overseer of Xanadu, an effort ruined, in part, by romantic strife, and from there we meet his subordinates, like “Roberta,” whose real-life analogue personally drew the first graphics to appear in an adventure game.
Naturally, Xanadu is utterly limited and user-unfriendly, and I’m pretty sure there’s no way to ‘win,’ but that doesn’t really matter; KR0 is not about ‘winning’ either, it’s about revealing information, and stoking the ugly idea that none of these characters can escape the grip of debt: the latticework raising the invisible architecture of their very lives.
I guess what I’m saying is: these men are dirty commies, Michael, and I say we take them down - with the American flag.
MP: Well, Joe, if you’re going to make a plea for democracy, let me shift gears to talk about a great elected president: that of the titular frog in Jim “Twinbeard” Crawford’s cult favorite Frog Fractions. There is a sequence near the end of that game where, having passed through a variety of game genres (including the text adventure), the frog is elected to the highest office, and the tenure of its presidency is marked by a text-based resources management simulator. There’s a certain feeling of having come full circle, because Frog Fractions wears the guise of the educational games a certain generation played on classroom computers, and the first resource management game that most of that generation ever saw was The Oregon Trail.
The management of insect pornography in Frog Fractions feels utterly pointless because that is an absurdist game; the reason I bring it up is because of its deliberate pointlessness; there have been many, many games of its type, but when the final sequence of Xanadu becomes a simulator in the same vein, Frog Fractions in particular happened to be what I thought of, because it is similarly pointless. But where the former game was reaching for humor, Xanadu is anything but. What feels at first like a wry Adventure reenactment (with maybe a hint of Zork as well) becomes a painful log of Donald’s history, instead; the simulator speaks to the months and years below the earth, huddled around a pyre of popping cathode tubes, trying to “play” a way out of a painful loss. At least cartoonist Tom McHenry’s Horse Master makes no bones about its path leading to destruction!
JM: I was discussing Act III a bit with Abhay Khosla, and he mentioned that he’d found the conclusion to be Orphic; that the characters are venturing deeper and deeper into the underworld, and that Hell is apparently a business sim. Does Cardboard Computer mean to parody the Will Wrights of the world? Witness the dichotomy between Xanadu, the impossible-to-finish logical reality simulation ‘maintained’ by Donald, and Sports Medicine Professional 1973, the semi-hidden text adventure on co-developer Joseph’s home computer, which spoofs resource management gaming via unpredictable and emotionally capricious outcomes; unlike Xanadu it’s quite easy to complete SMP73, which is fitting, given Joseph’s departure from the rest of the drama.
MP: I’d suggest that there is a parodic element, because in Act II, we actually visit a corporate environment, and we see plenty of riffs on it. I’ve noticed that a number of Act II reviews seem to dislike the Bureau of Reclaimed Spaces - the idea is posited that it’s out of place in Kentucky Road Zero, or that its riffs on the business world are too hoary. I’d disagree - part of it is the ties to the history of adventure gaming - from Douglas Adams’s Bureaucracy to Lucasarts’s Grim Fandango, there’s a consistent thread of this corporate environment as a Gordian Knot to be cut through to advance. It’s also centering - even on the Zero, the world remains the same. But more than anything, as you suggest, there’s a Hell component, and the Bureau serves as a sort of counterpoint to the Hard Times Brewery, which is the truest underworld yet presented. If anything, our travelogue takes us further and further “underground” - more Dante than Orpheus, in that respect, as we visit the mine, the Bureau, the Hall of the Mountain King, the Brewery, and who knows where next.
JM: I can’t imagine we won’t eventually find our way into the dread chambers of Consolidated Power - what a name for an aloof and monolithic electricity provider, its behavior the very converse of let there be light.
MP: It’s funny to discuss the religious aspect here, in fact, because in Act II the house of worship is literally taken over by the corporate Hell, and the sermon shunted off to a storage locker!
Of our underworlds, Xanadu’s placement as the center of the five-act narrative lends it a sort of gravity, so that a number of ideas seem to fall into its orbit. You joke about referring back to Citizen Kane, and rightly so; bringing that two word title in the vicinity of games can cause all sorts of problems. But stately Xanadu is where Charles Foster Kane died alone, in the dark. When Donald e-mails Joseph, he claims that he’s found his paradise; but Joseph’s game was played by others, Lula’s exhibit was seen by others; Donald’s grand ambition is covered in mold. I think it’s because Donald was trying to change the narrative, while the others simply tried to find the truth in it. How funny, then, that Xanadu wouldn’t let him. All twisty little passages end in the same place - where the lantern goes out, and you get eaten by something in the dark - just like Conway.
So, yeah, let’s talk about our impositions upon the narrative, or the lack thereof. The theatricality. I think “The Entertainment” nails how Kentucky Route Zero views and deals with the relationship between the player and the, er, entertainment, in the most cutting way possible. One of the KR0 free “demos” but also a crucial storytelling element on the way into Act III, “The Entertainment” is one of only two sequences in the game as a whole in which the perspective shifts from the omnipresent third person favored by adventure games to first-person. The other is, of course, Xanadu.
“The Entertainment” was designed with Oculus Rift support, which on one level is pretty hilarious, considering the sort of game that KR0 is. On another, it’s also hilarious for being so perfect. The player exists within “The Entertainment” - or rather, their POV is limited to the eyes of a single character we never see, which is functionally the same, if not literally so. “The Entertainment” is the culmination of an Act I sidequest-cum-subplot, regarding the performance of a play; this game (or game section) concerns nothing but the performance of that play, and the player is in the role of a silent drunk who is situated center stage for the purposes of either atmosphere or comedy relief, it’s a little hard to judge. You can view the play as it unfolds, you can look out to the audience, or you can find hotspots which let you glimpse the setting and sound notes, your script notes, or even the reviews of the play - and the reviews for your own performance are always uniformly terrible.
JM: I really want to emphasize that this is one of the best jokes in all of KR0. How many games do you see that rank you in terms of performance? B! A! S! SS!! Here, though, the game draws an exquisitely painful line between what you can do in a first-person game (navigate, ascertain objects, ‘interact’) and what is generally impossible, i.e. anything relating to bodily nuance, which is arguably the engine that drives much of genuine interpersonal communication. Unfortunately, the mission you’re supposed to fulfill in “The Entertainment” is a Beckettian mime which cannot possibly be accomplished with anything resembling verisimilitude through FPS-like means, even given the most extreme constraints on the actor’s performance; I don’t have an Oculus Rift, but I imagine the experience is all the more frustrating given the expanded field of vision. Of course, as usual with KR0, the real objective is to facilitate the reveal of information; not to ‘change’ anything so much as understand-and-thereby-activate what has always been.
MP: Indeed!
When I began KR0, I was unsure how decision-making would work in the game - does one play a role, attempt to inhabit Conway, behave as you feel Conway would behave? So much of KR0 is missed this way, and in my first experience I missed quite a bit; the Carrington subplot, the Strange Tourism locations. Or do you play from without, following the rules that adventure games have encouraged since time immemorial: exploring where you’re not supposed to, ignoring rules of privacy, sticking your hand into a series of fishtanks to see what happens...
Well, in the words of another [Link to P:B article on Metal Gear Solid removed - Ed.] (albeit perhaps accidental?) Brechtian game designer, they’re all role-playing games, and whether we’re inside of the avatar or outside of them is instead a question of aesthetic. We are the drunkard that stands in the center of the story being told and jerks their head around this way and that - I think of the sequence in Carla Speed McNeil’s Finder: Dream Sequence, in which the actions of a new player taking over a game avatar look, from the inside, like a demonic seizure - or the actions of a poorly-acting drunk.
JM: Oh yeah, haha: “He makes the longest, ugliest, most logically convoluted orchestrated fatuosities yet produced by modern man in the name of attempted entertainment.” Tim Rogers, in condemnation of Hideo Kojima, so as to deem Éric Chahi’s Another World the greatest video game ever made - as a means of additionally explaining, by analogy, why Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, “when viewed from the perspective of other clusterfucks, is a masterpiece for countless horrifying reasons.”
I don’t know if Rogers would much like KR0; if the criterion for superior gaming is to be “honest, humble, noble, and at the same time hugely artistic and expressive,” I cannot say this project reaches past even the first prong of the test. The true pleasure of KR0 can be found at the start of Act III, when, as Conway, you can optionally chase Ezra around the deserted Museum of Dwellings, and if you do it for long enough, the control unexpectedly (almost subliminally) switches to Ezra, and you then find yourself running *away* from Conway until, once again, you are Conway, the one doing the chasing.
There is a storytelling purpose to this trickery: Conway’s leg has been healed, and despite the eerie, skeletal glow of his limb -- foreshadowing the arrival of the Hard Times boys, and symbolizing the debts he is rapidly accumulating -- the very fact of ambulation is such a serene delight you cannot blame him for horsing around. In Act II, Conway’s gait had grown worrying and laborious - much like the broken form of Lester Knight Chaykin, the protagonist of the aforementioned Another World, who, toward the end of his game, is gravely wounded. When I was 11 or 12, I played that game on the Super Nintendo, under the title Out of This World, and seeing the man basically crippled was quite a profound shock; up until then, you could (and did) die, a lot, but I’d never considered that the player character could be badly wounded, yet survive. Like, Mario doesn’t lose a hand if a fireball hits him the wrong way. The ending was also very ambiguous; you’re lifted up by an alien ally onto a big pterodactyl and flown away, but are you ever healed? I was forced to consider the fact that Lester had died with finality in that scene, and that the whole of the game’s progression was not to *avoid* death, but to arrive at a ‘good’ death.
It only takes eyes to know that KR0 derives tremendous visual inspiration from Another World, and I wonder if the fatalism of its story isn’t also related to the complicated ‘success’ of winning Chahi’s game. But unlike Cardboard Computer, Chahi is also “honest” in a way that I interpret to mean “direct” - you control one character, with a limited, clearly-stated set of commands, and any shift in the game’s visual perspective is to better and more directly illustrate its lean, wordless story, without disturbing the continuity of the player’s control or the momentum of player progress through well-defined environments. In contrast, KR0 is “dishonest,” in that it constantly shifts player control, and dictates which characters in your rapidly-expanding party of adventurers get to enquire as to individual bits of information in any given situation.
But frankly, here in the ballsack’s shadow of AAA avarice, I say we can use a few good lies.
MP: I couldn’t speak for Rogers (whose essay on a different game I think about constantly when working on P:B), but I think he’d appreciate that it’s about a journey, rather than the destination, and in its commentary, genuinely performs differently than that on which it’s commenting.
In many ways, “The Entertainment” is the ultimate rebuttal to so many AAA games (as we’re haplessly forced to call them), where a pretension to commentary might be made, only for the avatar to instead run their vehicle onto the sidewalk to collect pedestrians as hood ornaments, or to shoulder their chaingun and mow through a series of drone-like ideological opponents. The reviews are in: your performance in this narrative sucked, and we couldn’t see the story with you in the way.
But what does that mean for Kentucky Road Zero, in which you might find yourself hopping between avatars over and over again in the length of a single conversation? I think it’s interesting that you frame it in terms of defining history, rather than the present; KR0 is so concerned with history; history in Kentucky towns, gaming history, personal history. The weight of history is oppressive. History and debt are inextricable in the world of KR0 - as Conway says (or doesn’t say) when asked about his debts, “I owe some people some apologies.”
It’s interesting for a game to be concerned with history, including its own medium’s history, when games have had such an awkward, uncomfortable relationship to their own history. For a while, games refused to acknowledge their own history - technology moved fast, and it was all considered disposable. Then the market changed, and history became a business model. Now Steam Greenlight is flooded by back-catalog releases constantly, completely upending its signal-to-noise ratio; games are released with poorly-crafted HD facelifts and redubbing, or even deluxe editions that contradict thematic messages of the game’s original design; the supposed classics are either discounted to pocket change or overcharged out of all proportion. We don’t necessarily respect our history more, we just deluge each other with it.
This is why, idly, I related on Twitter the synchronicity of Act III’s uncovering of “The Hall of the Mountain King” (in the original song, a place of danger), Donald’s cavern, where the old computer parts burn and Xanadu decomposes, and the recent landfill dig that uncovered the not-actually-an-urban-legend Atari burial site, including many copies of the E.T. game. As Leigh Alexander put it recently (and fictionally), “...you can bury something as a product, and more than thirty years later, dig it up as a feeling.”
Except that they also carry a feeling when they’re buried. Conway and Shannon don’t find anything in the old mine but death; the song recordings are a powerful memory, but the ghosts linger in the mine whether those tapes are played or they aren’t. The tapes, the E.T. cartridges, they’re a lesson when they’re buried, and the feeling is fleeting when they’re unearthed. An anecdote, a click, perhaps; a meme, maybe. Novelty, like a Kentucky flyover that never sees the secret places that lurk off every road. Weaver’s parents didn’t save Shannon’s parents by recording their songs. The Bureau of Reclaimed Places is full of bears.
And waking up Xanadu requires descending into the domain of the Hard Times boys.
But maybe I’m too pessimistic.
JM: I don’t think so; it’s an upsetting game, despite the laughs. Insofar as we have yet to discuss its Gorky/O’Neill strain of bitter reality usurping comfortable illusions, allow me this brief comparison:
Kentucky Route Zero began its life as a modest Kickstarter campaign, funded in early 2011. The project would change drastically in terms of visual approach prior to the start of its serialization, nearly two years later. This places it considerably earlier on the crowdfunding continuum than the infamous “Double Fine Adventure,” funded in early 2012 at a still-startling $3.3 million. This tremendous windfall -- and project head Tim Schafer’s place of honor in the hearts of many adventure gamers -- inspired a wave of new Kickstarter-powered adventure games: a Leisure Suit Larry remake; Tex Murphy and Broken Sword continuations; a whole studio for Jane Jensen; some damn thing from the Two Guys From Andromeda.
The fruits of the Double Fine Kickstarter just arrived recently on iTunes: the first episode of Broken Age. “They said adventure games were dead,” barks the app store description, “but then Broken Age punched its hand out of the grave and grabbed you by the wrist and you screamed just like in the end of Carrie except what you screamed was ‘I love adventure games so much!’”
There have been grumbles, however, that this resurrection is less Lazarus than Romero, and I don’t mean John. The game is apparently quite short, even for an episodic release. Puzzles are simple. The interface has been compromised to appeal to touchscreen casuals. It’s “[m]ore like TellTale,” sniffles one gog.com reviewer, “than LucasArts.” It’s easy to disregard this comparison as the bitterness of aging nerds; time, taste and business will inevitably change game design. But you can’t say the nostalgic triumphalism driving the project’s funding didn’t encourage it.
‘The good days are back!’ these games scream. KR0, in contrast -- though it is, notionally, a graphic adventure game, and though it is loved by not a few longtime adventure gamers, who bought LucasArts games in the big box when they were new, myself included -- is elegiac. It is a look back - with fondness, yes, but also with understanding of the limitations of this genre, this endeavor. It frames the scene fantastically, imbuing its history with more intellectual motivation than most any of the entertainment-minded problem-solvers in charge of development likely held at the time. It is not an accurate portrait, but an impression. God help us, it is a game about games, but its full ambitious are mercifully greater. Games here coexist with the classics of drama. They share space with intellectual art, and social theory. By the boundaries of what they can accomplish, they can endeavor to diagnose the challenges facing any number of its players: not grizzled men with guns, but older folks, non-whites, children, couples. If Kentucky Route Zero does not fasten itself to one character, it’s because gaming can and does appeal to virtually everyone: it is true mass art.
And so it imagines a magical world, where this always was. Does this place Cardboard Computer at the wrong table in the Lower Depths? Are they the Iceman, or need they await him? As if by merely selecting the option, a dog might be named!
“Blue,” naturally.
MP: We’re in agreement: anyone who named the dog “Homer” is an unholy monster.
I think something that sets KR0 apart, though, is that it knows it’s an inherently transitory thing; That book tells us that Conway’s story ends with him taking Doolittle’s place; and while it’s possible yet that such a fate might yet be prevented - though a different set of “role-players,” the Greek Chorus spirits who Conway glimpses in his very first underworld, the Equus Oils basement, and who continue to haunt him throughout without ever being tethered to his story, affirm at the beginning that the tale is presumed to be a tragedy - even if it’s possible, this moment in time isn’t frozen. Conway, Shannon, and Ezra aren’t likely to transition from surrogate family to a “real” one, for instance, at this tale’s close. Locations are “reclaimed,” people flee to the forest, and no matter how hard Donald tries, his time with Joseph and Lula is over. And one day Kentucky Road Zero will be taken out of the lobby of that museum and filed with all the others, found - if it’s found at all - in a well-hidden Easter Egg. Gaming history, American history, Theatre history, personal history, all of them are the same in the end, viewed through a certain lens.
One thing that’s far less transitory, though - though by no means is it, in the end, not so, as Lula and Shannon could probably tell you - is architecture, which other people have helpfully tied to KR0 once or twice. I think it’s interesting to see a game so obsessed with architecture independent of level design that still manages to give it more than aesthetic meaning.
I mean, what a game critic might call “level design” is on display here, despite the absence of “puzzles” or “mazes” in the literal sense, don’t get me wrong; take the hill leading up to Weaver’s place, which is meant to convey a different feeling before and after Conway is injured, and how that path is paralleled in the slopes leading to and from the Hall of the Mountain King. But architecture here has greater import. As the previous links explicate better than I could, Act II of KR0 has a lot to do with Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space and the dissolution between “inside” and “outside” spaces. This is of fundamental import to the discussion of video games as “art,” because video games are primarily about the exploration of virtual spaces - neither inside or outside. And while most game designers take their crib sheets from the Imagineers, focused on flow between setpieces (and that includes “open worlds,” which generally use smaller scale playground terminology like “sandbox,” rather than those of constructed theme parks, to differentiate themselves), you don’t need to be Frank Lloyd Wright - or Asterios Polyp, even! - to know that humans need to exist in more than one kind of space to survive and maintain their sanity.
(Scenes from Asterios Polyp, by David Mazzucchelli)
For that matter, when I glance at the cartography of Kentucky Route Zero - and there’s likely much to be said about abstraction, here - I also think not just of architecture, but urban planning. I own some Dolores Hayden books here, I own a copy of Edge City - we’re still getting our heads around how sprawl has changed us sociologically, how do we know yet how virtual spaces are rewiring us? I think it’s no coincidence that KR0 starts with a literal highway accident.
JM: Well, since we’ve established that Cardboard Computer loves 20th century anti-capitalist shit - that’s also Situationist, right? That’s psychogeography - which, at times, has carried both design-focused and experiential aspects. If we are to think of adventure game environments as less parks than cities, then to dérive -- to ignore the ‘mission’ of puzzle-solving and instead encounter new experiences from the architectural terrain -- is theoretically possible, much in the way that it is theoretically possible to create an environment which collapses art and function. KR0 is useful as metaphor in this regard: in comparison to other games of its 3rd person, point-and-click type, it diminishes the role of puzzles (‘missions’) to better encourage the process of information. Or, as you mentioned earlier, you don’t so much “inhabit” Conway as give special effect to the oldest instincts of adventure gaming: to explore, regardless of logical or narrative rationality. In a typical adventure game, this is how the mission is best completed, by your command of the protagonist, your avatar. In KR0, it’s just what you do, with the game frequently disrupting your ‘control’ of Conway to shift your perspective to other characters.
In this way, the player inhabits an analogous space to the characters: if, as your links suggest, the characters are both inside and outside of spaces, the player is both ‘inside’ a character yet frequently blocked from direct interface to allow inhabitation of another character. The illusion -- not an unsuccessful one! -- is that the characters retain something of a life of their own, beyond your purview; this is used with irony, though, to reinforce the notion that they are no more free from a greater, invisible designer’s direction than they might be free from debt, or fate. I agree with Magnus that KR0 observes Bachelard’s abandonment of “inside” and “outside” by making ‘reality’ and ‘fiction’ porous - in fact, I’d go further to say that the player is also both inside and outside, in terms of the agency allowed them.
I mean, isn’t it often said that you behave as both an author and an actor in the play of this game? At the end of “The Entertainment”... the big shock ending, where there’s a hum of feedback and you spin around to see the Hard Times boy standing there - I think that’s the same guy, Doolittle, who gives you the brewery tour near the end of Act III. “Doolittle” is a good name, because like Hugh Lofting’s Dr. Dolittle, he is capable of communicating with other (lower?) creatures - yet “Lem Doolittle” is also the author of the plays which comprise the [e]ntertainment you are watching! I think it’s not just Hard Times coming to claim the characters, but the damned author of the whole piece arriving to behold the molestation of his writings, and finally participate as an agent of destruction. If the notion of ‘player choice’ in KR0 hinges on determining what has always been, it only represents the porousness between reality and fiction present throughout the game: Junebug and Johnny providing the ‘real’ [e]ntertainment at the Lower Depths; Xanadu both recording and predicting the fates of everyone in its surroundings; the image on the monitor in Act I opening the Zero itself.
MP: We’ve barely touched on Junebug and Johnny! Junebug the Robot New Wave Julee Cruise is the Sensational Character Find of 2014, and I mean that sincerely. Junebug might be the ultimate expression of Cardboard Computer’s view of “art” as an ideology; as a robot who dares to contradict her programming for the sake of music, she’s this adorable little bohemian ideal, which is all the more precious for the dead, darkened museums that you pass by and through in your travels. It would feel cynical except that Junebug and Johnny’s performance - the true entertainment, as you said - no matter how inspired by Twin Peaks, is utterly transcendent as an experience. And no matter how well or how poorly Junebug things she’s denied her programming, here she is in the game, giving the lines that you feed her and the lines that Cardboard Computer have given her to say. Given that tension, it’s not surprising that she’s taken with Xanadu.
The artificiality of KR0 is so key to it; we’re coming to a close now, I think, but I want to draw attention to one more thing.
When you begin Kentucky Route Zero for the first time, Conway is aimless. Joseph points him in a direction, but when he arrives at Weaver’s home as directed, Weaver instead suggests he turn away. Until you arrive at the mine and meet Shannon, the game is aimless (and I mean this in the most positive way). Many players will find themselves exploring the backroads of Kentucky, visiting the TV repair shop or the museum or pulling alongside a musician that sits on the side of the road. But when you meet Shannon, everything changes (appropriate, then, that it’s the first time your words come out of another character’s mouth, though it isn’t the first time the viewpoint switches).
Shannon repairs televisions. Specifically, she repairs older televisions, the kind with tubes - and implicitly, older computer monitors as well. She has a number of tools for the job that she even carries with her, and she uses these tools more than once - in a way, she fulfills the “adventure game” role of applying her inventory to find solutions. And the first time she uses these tools is to define space. With Conway’s help, she’s able to determine the size of the mine tunnels using her TV gear, and thus give the game a shape. And in the doing of this, they collapse the mine tunnel, causing the injury that appears to have sealed Conway’s fate.
Shannon’s tools, as befit an adventure game inventory, are a powerful way of interacting with the world of KR0, but more than that, they’re inherently a set of tools designed to operate on antique (like Conway!) technology (like Junebug!) used for play (like Ezra!) - the interface that defines a virtual space, the screen. The separation between “inside” and “outside” and thus, the barrier to the Zero itself. Of course it would be the repair of an old screen (one that Joseph doesn’t need any more - speaking of Xanadu as much as this small TV set). So in Act III, when Shannon replaces Conway’s symbolic lantern with her degausser, it’s significant. The degausser doesn’t work well with Xanadu, but they are still holding it when they descend into the underworld of the Hard Times brewery, and the degausser tethers the lost souls long enough for us to see them and learn their stories. If Conway’s fate is indeed the brewery, it’s Shannon’s tools - it’s Shannon herself - keeping him in the world. And this metaphor only works by acknowledging the very artificiality of the game you’re playing, as KR0 often does; as played out in microcosm with the tilted old monitor in “Limits and Demonstrations,” the hardware stands in for the software to tell us a story.
As Wikipedia puts it, “Due to magnetic hysteresis it is generally not possible to reduce a magnetic field completely to zero, so degaussing typically induces a very small "known" field referred to as bias.” Well, yes, obviously. The tool keeps reminding them where they are, and what it would mean to be there forever. It’s hardly impartial.
Maybe “Bias” is a good word to end on. I’m in love with the damned game, to be sure, and while there’s still much that could be picked at, further down this road (if you’ll pardon it), we risk changing a dialogue into a monologue - a rave review and a summary. There are still two acts left in KR0, and possibly further interstitials as well. Conway’s package is far from delivered. Maybe we’ll return when he’s further along, and see what there is to say.
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