Talking Ico: Part 2 - Reluctant Explorers

2. THE CHILDREN MUST EXPLORE THE CASTLE.

I had to scrap the first draft of this section because while I was mulling over the castle's role I got too deep into gameplay and lost sight of the narrative. Then I lost the second draft also when my laptop got stolen along with all the writing in it. More to set my own thoughts straight in all the rewriting confusion than anything else I should like to begin with some very basic considerations. I think I set down pretty clearly last time that the castle is exceedingly important. Very well, it is important. But how precisely is it important to the story--rather than to the gameplay or the sheer visual artistry?

To answer that I want to consider briefly what a story is. It is a popular mistake to confuse a "story" with "fiction." The two are not synonymous. For instance if I said "There is water on the moon" that would be fiction insofar as I made it up, but it would hardly qualify as a story. On the other hand a biography of Abraham Lincoln would not and ought not to be fiction, but it would certainly be a story. Similarly when I say "This is a story of my life" I do not mean "This is a story which I made up about myself." I mean "This is how my life unfolded and became what it is now." To tell a story therefore means to give an account of something, whether true or imaginary. The act of giving an account usually requires that we keep track of three things. These are characters, setting, and conflict.

Characters are a set of actors, who need not be people necessarily, that we see more or less from the beginning to the conclusion of the story. Setting refers to the sum total of circumstances under which the characters operate--the times, the places, the conditions. The last ingredient, conflict, is anything which drives the characters to abandon inactivity and do one thing or another. Examples of conflict in fiction may include outright fighting or competition, solving a murder mystery, falling in love, or a Coke bottle dropping out of the sky. A biography of Lincoln is a story since it has all three ingredients. The gibberish about there being water on the moon is just that--gibberish.

Let me see how the castle fits into this scheme. I immediately recognize it as the key element of the setting since it provides the environment for the story. But it is also the apparent source of the conflict; the children want freedom, and the castle keeps it from them. And since the castle is the greatest obstacle in the children's quest, it is not a mere arena in which to confront the enemy: it is the enemy. It thus behaves almost like a character also, and a crucially important character at that. The puzzles are its means of keeping the children imprisoned. That is why I said the narrative would collapse without the puzzles. They are the substance of the main conflict in the story. And a story without conflict is like pea soup without peas. It is gibberish.

I think I am ready now to take up the second statement, which states that the children must explore the castle. In place of "explore" we might substitute "deal with" or "overcome." The children must deal with the castle if they are to be successful. They must overcome its cunning with their own. But I used "explore" because that word has implications which the others do not. To explore a place is more than simply to visit it. You may visit Grand Canyon as a tourist, but until you have invested time and risked bodily harm to wrestle with its wilderness you cannot say you have explored it. Similarly it would be ludicrous for someone to boast of having explored the canyon when in fact he has only dealt with a negligible fraction of its vastness. Claims like that belong to committed folk whose scope of exploration extends far beyond popular hiking courses. Now the children must explore the castle in that sense. They must; they have no choice about it. One might explore some great wonder because he wants to learn, because he is curious, or because he wants excitement. Our young heroes do not want to learn about the castle, they are not curious about it, and they are most certainly not looking for excitement. What they want is to get out of it as fast as they can. They do not want anything to do with this dreadful place, do not want to stay in it one second longer than they have to. They are on the run for their lives. Sightseeing is the least of their priorities.

Let us imagine ourselves now in the children's place. Suppose we really were trying to escape from a ghoul-infested castle. Suppose we just entered a courtyard. We are surrounded on all sides by beautiful and wondrous sights. Should we take a moment to explore and enjoy? Not unless we are very dumb. We see an exit in plain view. We should make a beeline for it. But we cannot. The pathway is blocked. We must find a way around the obstruction. We have no choice but to explore. That is, we are forced to investigate places we would rather bypass and fiddle with contraptions we would rather let alone. We want the quickest shortcut out of here--but what we are offered instead is an endless string of detours within detours. That is what the puzzles amount to: an elaborate, grueling succession of detours which will eventually take the children through each and every area within the castle walls. They could not care less about seeing each and every area. They want a shortcut direct to the exit and to freedom. There isn't one. If there were, the children would be happy but the story would lose its conflict. It would lose its peas--lose its taste and become insipid and uninteresting. The poor youngsters have got to do things the hard way, and all for our enjoyment's sake. This sentiment is at the heart of every adventure ever written.

At this point let me bring in a previous poster's comment as I promised I would. I mean about the puzzles helping us immerse ourselves in the environment. How do you suppose they do that? Well, I said already that the children want as little to do with their prison as possible. But the puzzles require that they become intimately acquainted with it whether they like it or not. Let me use the illustration of Grand Canyon once more. Millions visit that national park every year. Most of them go no farther than contemplating its majesty from a safe distance, much like enjoying the ocean from the beach. But if you wanted to immerse yourself in it, if you truly wanted it to come alive, you would not be satisfied with that. You would venture into the canyon and put your hands and feet, not just your eyes, into the experience. You would want to cover as much ground as possible so that you would be able to appreciate the canyon from on high, from deep below, from the east, from the west, from within, from the extremities, at dawn, at midday, at sunset. Now this is just what the puzzles make us do. They make us encounter the castle from all points. And we have to do this every time we play through the game; we cannot say "Oh, I already know what that place looks like, so I won't bother to go that way this time." The game will not allow us to complete it until we have turned the castle inside out.

I spent four years at the university where I graduated not long ago. You would think I am thoroughly familiar with the campus of my own alma mater. But in truth there are facilities there I would not be able to give you directions to because I never had the occasions to make use of them. If you asked me what our business school building looks like inside you would only get a blank stare from me. In four years I was never in it. I would bet most people have similar memories. That is, they develop a routine and as a result remain surprisingly ignorant about some fixtures in their lives. They may only frequent certain parts of their hometown so that they feel like strangers in a foreign country when they venture beyond them. Or, when asked the name of the middle school they have driven by every day for ten years, they may realize with a start that they never learned it. You get the idea. But the castle is an entirely different story. I have spent only a few hours "inside" it. Yet its memory is vividness itself. I know it like the back of my hand. How is that? Well, I have been everywhere in it. I have been to, and have had to contend with, every chamber, tower, bridge, courtyard and weather-beaten cliff. I left no stone unturned. The game would not let me proceed otherwise.

And leaving no stone unturned is just what the puzzles are about. They demand that we experience the castle to the fullest. There is exactly one spot we wish to be, but to get there we must pass through every other spot in the whole godforsaken fortress. This is true in our first run through the game and in our seventh. There is never any shortcut. That we already know the solutions to the puzzles does not shorten the distance we must cover. In this the castle differs from a typical maze. In most mazes there is one correct path and ninety-nine false paths. But in ICO there is to begin with a single excruciatingly long-winded path and no other. In this way solving ICO's puzzles is less like answering riddles and more like climbing a steep slope or crossing a deep canyon. No one solves the same crossword puzzle twice for the fun of it. But there is plenty sense in revisiting a summit one has already conquered, and in fact many climbers do just that.

You may think I am putting you on. Playing a video game is of course quite unlike climbing a mountain. We do not exert our limbs or risk our lives when we play a video game. It is Ico rather who exerts his limbs and risks his life. And we imagine that for him the labor and danger are very much real. We make the same concession whenever we read a book or watch a film. We know perfectly well that we are ourselves in no danger of falling as we watch James Stewart hang on for his life in VERTIGO. But we do imagine that the danger is real for his character, or the scene would lose all suspense. Now if we have seen the film before, we know how it ends. But while that reduces the suspense greatly it does not destroy it altogether; we know what happens but we still watch it with interest. Something similar is at work when I play ICO. The puzzles are at best minimally entertaining now since I have solved them before. But the impact of watching those two youngsters struggle against the pitiless environment remains potent. Knowing the answers to the puzzles has reduced my labor greatly, yes, but it has not reduced Ico's labor nearly as much--for his labor is physical as well as mental, whereas mine was never more than mental. Though all is plain and easy for me now, it is not so for the children. Every time we play we put them through a fiendish ordeal. That is the great illusion the game weaves in our minds--an illusion I have not seen reproduced nearly as convincingly in any other games. And for me that is how the game continues to command my attention, if to a somewhat lesser degree, when the puzzles have ceased to present challenge.

So we now understand why things like realistic lighting, an accurate sense of scale, height and distance, and complex character animation are crucial in ICO. Aside from giving the game its pretty looks, their job is to create an illusion that these are real children in a real place and consequently in a real trouble. Is it silly, I wonder, to sympathize with computer-generated characters? Perhaps it is. But then it ought to be equally silly to sympathize with Disney's Bambi or his ill-fated mother; they are also mere pictures after all. The only way we can put up with animated characters is by imagining--that is, by pretending--that they are real after their own fashion. ICO is no different. It is an experience which rewards an imaginative audience.

In summation the puzzles force the children to explore every nook and cranny of the castle, which is akin to keeping them in constant clash with their archenemy. Do not be confused by the term archenemy here. Some of you are thinking "Isn't another character entitled to that role?" By archenemy I mean the enemy the heroes must deal with the most. Palpatine may rule over the empire, but one doesn't have to know much about STAR WARS to see that the place of archenemy belongs to Darth Vader. He is only a subordinate in the grand scheme of things, but he is the pain in the neck the heroes have to deal with at every turn. That is, he is immediate unlike the emperor who is usually beyond sight and reach. The castle too is immediate. It is always in your face. It is the presence you cannot ignore, the hand of the real foe who as yet remains unseen.

I will treat the third and final statement on the puzzles next time.