![]() ![]() Moreover, his movement had to be intelligible and not disorientating for an audience which might well include non-gamers, and who would not be directly controlling the game themselves. Everything had to be paced to fit the format of the playthrough, which meant hurrying through the early stages in order to give the later ones more dramatic weight. ![]() For instance, he could not use the camera to look around very much because he only had 90 minutes to complete his run. It separated the game’s components rather than allowing them to flow together as they do when you play it more organically.īut when I contacted Pinchbeck after the show to ask about his play style, he explained how all of these quirks were deliberate decisions. He also tended to stop and wait while the narrator was speaking, which I felt gave things stilted and stagey air. That made sense, because he already knew everything there was to know, but it felt wrong for a game which depends on the exploration and witnessing. He seemed to move without curiosity – never turning the camera to probe the scenery around him, keeping it locked on the route ahead. During the performance I was often frustrated by the way Dan Pinchbeck chose to play his own game. In this most cinematic and theatrical of games, where so much of the player’s role consists of simply being and breathing in a space, how much would carry over into a concert hall? How closely would being immersed in its sights and sounds replicate the experience of directing my own path through them? How much would actually be lost if I wasn’t in control – and would it be just pale tribute to the original, or actually a different experience which could stand on its own? As the camera moved out across the island, and the orchestra struck up, and the narrator began to tell his story of guilt and injury, Dear Esther Live turned out to have three quite important lessons for anyone who is interested in how videogames work. But respecting this alleged non-game so much as to literally pay someone else to play it for me felt like a delightful act of doubling down – a statement of allegiance as well as an ironic salute to the not-a-game brigade who still stomp self-importantly around Steam review pages today.Īt the same time, I was also genuinely curious. I was never actually a devoted fan: to me, Dear Esther was an aesthetically stirring and formally interesting game somewhat weighed down by the portentious if alliterative waffle of its script. Its peaceful, non-violent gameplay gave birth to the term ‘Walking Simulator’, which has since transformed from a term of derision into a thriving genre. When Dear Esther was first released as a standalone title in 2012 (having initially been a mod for Half-Life 2), it attracted a great deal of criticism for having low interactivity, and was widely accused of not being a “game” at all. I’ll confess that part of my motive for going was a sense of sheer amusement in taking my habitual art-game hipsterdom to an absurd extreme. And beside them was its lead designer, Dan Pinchbeck, sitting at a PC playing through the game while we watched. In front of the projector, on stage, there were real musicians performing Jessica Curry’s soundtrack, as well as a voice actor reading out the game’s monologues. Taking place at the Barbican Centre, a sprawling Brutalist arts complex in London’s financial district, it was billed as an affirmation of videogames’ “musical, narrative and artistic” capabilities: one of those collaborations between games culture and high culture which are increasingly familiar to gallery- and concert-goers in big first world cities. This was Dear Esther Live, a staged playthrough of the game – which has just been re-released on the new consoles – accompanied in the flesh by an orchestra and narrator. It was therefore a little weird to see it filling a giant projector screen in a concert hall in central London last week as part of a live performance of the videogame itself. But it’s similar enough that areas which many find bleak and forbidding, if beautiful, instead strike me simply as comforting and homely. ![]() It’s a stylised version of what the Hebrides are like. True, its hillsides are steeper and its cliffs much taller than those of the small Scottish island where I actually grew up. ![]() The landscape of Dear Esther is the landscape of my childhood. ![]()
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