Designing for Land and Body
This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #187. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.
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Analyzing the digital and analog feedback loop.
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There are few game artists I respect as much as Kara Stone. Although a lot of her games are digital, they are not beholden to that format and sprawl out rhizomatically into different, often more tactile media. I have a mantra from Ritual of the Moon that Kara has inscribed into a little wooden ornament. Every time I hang this organic ornament anywhere, I think of how the game is about not just the Witch’s exile to the moon and how mantras can help her heal, but about the Witch’s responsibility to divert comets away from the distant earth. Both are fragile yet tangible. The game features animation that incorporates a collage of analog media like crumpled paper, foils, and text elements that are handwritten in what looks like chalk pastel. Stone’s games, in her words, are about “psychosocial disability, sexuality, and the environment.” All her recent work, whether it’s an interactive art piece or an experimental game, however, also emphasizes how the mundane stuff and actions that make up daily rituals are divine.
When I write divine, I mean this in several senses of the word: divine as in holy, though not specifically in the sense of a connection to a deity but to an existence that is more than human, more than individual. Divine as in the delight or at least comfort that a ritual can bring, a sense of closing a loop and acknowledging that purposeful movement or moment. Divine as in what we repeat becomes what we know, what we can sensibly predict or speculate could happen if we dedicate ourselves to a ritual long term. Rituals affect not just our daily private lives and their welfare; they can influence your broader communities that you’re networked into. Whether you are aware of this influence is irrelevant, because no one truly lives in isolation. Especially in the digital age.
Stone’s most recent game, Known Mysteries, which is part of her Solar Server games project, is a lo-fi interactive fiction that demonstrates how the rhetoric of any ludonarrative experience could be more expansive. Known Mysteries spiritually hearkens back to the Satellaview era of the Super Famicom system, where games like Radical Dreamers or Famicom Detective Club would be streamed via satellite during specific periods. Particularly for the latter example, streaming was used to experiment with episodic interactive storytelling as well. Known Mysteries also follows an episodic format on a streaming service, although run by a small solar-powered server and encourages downloading over streaming where possible. Unlike the Satellaview era, thankfully, Solar Server is accessible to most players via browser gaming from a website. Stone has discussed previously on the topic of the extractive and ultra-convenient mode of console gaming that she believes that constant access is a privilege we’ve grown to accept as the status quo. Stone’s statement to me when allowing me to playtest the game was that the goal was for the game to be as low-carbon as possible. “It has highly compressed images and video that utilizes found footage, a low frame rate” she explains, in addition to the small solar server run from her apartment balcony in Calgary, Canada.
In my opinion, the Solar Server’s limited yet accessible enough format is a smart way to situate the game within an ecopoetics of deliberation. Players could be forced on occasion to access the game only when the solar server is fully-functional, or the rate of gameplay may slow down depending on what browser one uses. The inconvenience and possible frustrations this friction may cause also calls to attention, by contrast, how inherently exploitative and entitled a lot of high-fidelity gameplay experiences can be. Game critic Marijam Did calls this contradictory phenomenon of videogames “the dictatorship of the console” in her book Everything to Play For: How Videogames are Changing the World. She cites, as one instance, Lewis Gordon’s 2019 investigation for The Verge which focused on the environmental impact of console development for the PlayStation 4. For the first four years of said development, Sony emitted the same amount of CO2 as one year of emission from Jamaica in 2017. Jamaica’s emission rate, of course, is likely exacerbated by decades of extractive practices many nations continue to engage in there.
I digress, but the point of the matter is that Stone’s framework for Known Mysteries is potent in its ergodicity. The narrative of the game is dealt with relatively simply and adopts a recent trend of decolonial or communist-themed games experimenting with the limits to a protagonist’s agency. Games like Disco Elysium, Lovely Lady RPG, The Archipelago, Keep Driving, Citizen Sleeper and more often explore how a protagonist’s bodily or material limits contribute to the dynamics of play and intentional friction. You play as pseudonymous Sorrow, a person returning to her childhood home in Arrow, a fictional Canadian launch town where people participate in a lottery to be launched to Mars. This program is the megacorporation (En)Launch’s technosolution to climate catastrophe, disregarding the supposedly necessary byproducts that are poisoning the land and its people.
A side-effect of these launches is an ailment called groundsickness, which causes the town’s inhabitants to sleep and experience chronic fatigue-like symptoms sometimes for weeks at a time. Sorrow’s return to Arrow from the city center of the Capital is precipitated by the mysterious and sudden deaths of her moms. Upon returning, she finds herself ruminating on three questions after a few months have elapsed. These questions are:
- Why did I come back here?
- Why did my parents die?
- Why won’t my fucking plants grow?
The player needs to search for meaningful answers to the above. There’s a journaling function built into the game’s three streamable chapters and at the end of each chapter, before another launch takes place, you can choose to write down your reflections. What’s lovely about this function is how you can mix your interpretation of the narrative almost seamlessly into Sorrow’s. You are also able to copy your journal entries to a clipboard and I took this opportunity every chance I got. There’s a sense, similar yet mostly implied with Ritual of the Moon, that the player should develop a reflective practice of some sort. The game invites you to inhabit Sorrow, in more ways than one. Sorrow is struggling with the effects of groundsickness and depression, which allows her only three actions per day. There are usually 7 days before each launch, which concludes each chapter.
At its core, Known Mysteries is a compelling expression of climate grief. But not just climate grief, solastalgia, a term coined in 2005 by Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht. Solastalgia is about our soul’s connection to our home environment. When we lose that connection or have it radically altered by climate change, we are caused distress that is akin to nostalgia despite still existing (or trying to exist) in our ruined home environment. Solastalgia, Albrecht discusses in a recent interview, is related to the physical and mental decline that indigenous peoples have experienced when enduring the destruction of their homelands. Sorrow speaks of needing to return home from the Capital as if her body and mind “had no choice in the matter.” She blames herself for not being a better gardener and initially perceives her moms’ deaths as inevitable. Over the course of the game, as you uncover more about (En)Launch’s politics and toxicity, it becomes clear that the degradation of Arrow’s environment is more complex and deliberate. Groundsickness also disproportionately affects marginalized and working-class folk and Stone illustrates this with an intersectional cast featuring sapphic relationships, non-binary and non-white characters, and characters situated on various parts of the political spectrum.
When I first encountered Kara Stone’s work, back in 2018 when I wrote my critical impressions of the earth is a better person than me a.k.a. earth person, I positioned Stone within an ongoing tradition of Transcendental and Romantic nature writing. I’d like to revise this statement. While I still believe that Stone’s ludic achievements are ones that challenge our notion of nature and our personal place within it, her perspective is specifically a Canadian one. Known Mysteries is part of a vibrant yet urgent CanLit that is currently reassessing its settler-colonial legacy and beginning to truly acknowledge all the diversity of storytelling that has always existed in Canada.
Climate grief and how we can act to mitigate climate catastrophe and build better systems are strong themes in recent works of CanLit. Landscapes, Christine Lai’s debut novel, deals with the violence of the archive, what we should save as our archives degrade throughout climate change, and how to incorporate care back into our personal lives and by extension our communities. Devouring Tomorrow tackles climate change from the intersection of food culture and sci-fi and is written by diverse authors including Anuja Varghese. Annick MacAskill’s recent poetry collection Votive includes pieces on noise pollution, how devotion can keep us aware of what’s precious to us, and how larger-than-life disasters are increasingly occurring in our backyards. The Land and Labour Poetry Collective, based in the prairie and western provinces of the country will publish an eco-poetry anthology later this year which draws from working-class traditions of writing. Canadian non-fiction is part of this movement too, with L.E. Fox’s This Book is a Knife: Radical Working Class Strategies in the Age of Climate Change coming out in May when I’m writing this, in addition to the earlier release of When the Pine Needles Fall: Indigenous Acts of Resistance which recounts vital activist history.
There are many more examples I could list, but suffice to say, Stone is one of the game designers to watch when it comes to designing in an eco-conscious manner. But they should also watch her because she is a master of crafting stories that entangle the mundane with the mythic. The familiar transmuting into the sublime. Sorrow’s tale is cyclical, like many things in nature, death and decay leads to new growth.
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Phoenix Simms is an Atlantic Canadian cryptid who is a freelance writer and the co-editor of The Imaginary Engine Review a.k.a. TIER. You can lure her out of hibernation during the winter with rare SFF novels, ergonomic stationery, or if all else fails, gourmet cupcakes. Or you can just geek out with her where skies are blue.
