By

Clemence Follea

Published on/by

[in]Transition

Accompanying text

Creator’s Statement
Season: A Letter to the Future (Scavengers Studio, 2023) is a narrative exploration game where discovery is dissociated from accumulation, conquest, and domination. But at the same time, the game cannot perfectly be defined as a so-called “walking simulator”: while its gameplay certainly is not premised on facing challenges and growing skills to achieve a win condition, Season does give its players several “tools for interacting with the game world beyond walking,” truly allowing them to “improvise creatively, [and to] play” (Juul 2019, 202; original emphasis). Indeed, whereas Season allows much room for aesthetic contemplation, it does so without removing “the ludological . . . aspects of the game,” and without completely forbidding players from “act[ing] upon the world and . . . modify[ing] what is seen” (Atkinson and Parsayi 2021, 520). To put it differently, players of Season certainly won’t feel a strong sense of “ontological interactivity,” in the sense that none of their actions can “cause events that bring lasting changes” to the virtual world (Ryan 2015, 162); however, neither will they feel completely reduced to an impression of purely “exploratory interactivity” where all they can do is “loo[k] at what exists,” with no options to do anything else that feels substantial or meaningful (Ryan 2015, 162).

Season’s gameplay is based on remediation: it invites us to play with “prior media forms” (Bolter and Grusin 1999, 260) which are embedded or simulated in the game. The player controls a third-person avatar, Estelle, who is equipped with a camera, a recorder, and a scrapbook, and who is tasked with discovering the world on her bicycle and gathering “the sights and sounds of this season” before it is wrecked by a mysterious impending apocalypse (Season 2023, Caro Village). Thus, whereas players have no power to stop the impending cataclysm and cannot affect any “lasting changes” on the virtual environment itself (Ryan 2015, 162), they do have the ability to create media objects that embody their own personal encounter with it. Season’s simple—yet present—mediation-based gameplay invites us to engage with the game through a posture that is at once relaxed and proactive, contemplative and keen. Moreover, as we play with the tools at our disposal, the game keeps shifting the parameters of our visual and interactive experience: this creates a reflexive configuration, inviting us to question our relationship with what lies on the other side of the simulated lens, the screen, and the controller, “making us aware of the complicated imbrication of our bodies and our devices” and “productively confus[ing] the distinction between subjects and objects” (Anable 2018, 58, 68; see also Grusin 2015, 129). The play with mediation in Season can therefore affect our position as playing, seeing, and knowing subjects, decentring us and inviting us to approach mediation as an affective encounter with the virtual environment, rather than only as an effort to capture or control it. As a result, the game creates a sense of “ecological entanglement,” inviting us to consider its world as a “shared environment” where “everything, including the subject, is fundamentally entangled with everything else” (Heijmen and Vervoort 2024, 745).

While this play with mediation creates a strong sense of intersubjectivity—between player, avatar, and non-playable entities—it is important also to bring out its possible dangers and limitations. Even though “play/games do not have the full weight or impact of regular nongame activities” (Juul 2019, 194), a playful approach can appear “as deeply misguided, or as in poor taste” if it “ignores or erases historical violence or present-day privilege” (Patterson 2020, 57). With regard to the play with mediation in Season, this danger emerges especially during a black-and-white filmic sequence which abruptly interrupts the game’s animated graphics. This is one of three sequences featuring FMV (or full-motion video), i.e. pre-recorded video or film footage temporarily replacing the game’s computer-animated graphics. The video footage, recycled from a Super 16 mm movie project shot a few years earlier by the game’s creative director Kevin Sullivan, is used to embody memories left behind by people fleeing the impending apocalypse and magically materialising in the mind of passers-by. One of these sequences is triggered as the avatar abruptly “remembers” another person’s childhood memory: while the filmic footage shows a pair of white hands in close-up, the black avatar narrates in voiceover that she “remember[s] watching [her] dad make shadow puppets on the wall” (Season 2023, What is the Dig Site For?). Whereas there is no logical issue here (we know the avatar’s father to be a black man, but this filmic sequence is meant to embody a memory left behind by someone else and does not feature the hands of the avatar’s real father) this can still be an uncomfortable moment, because it resonates with the lack of socio-cultural background provided for the avatar’s racial identity, making it sometimes feel as if the game’s characterisation could be “appropriating real culture and removing it from context” (Hetfeld 2023).

Exploring these questions videographically not only allowed me to better illustrate the play with mediation that happens in the game by directly showing and juxtaposing its different elements, it also made it possible to embody this playful approach in the video essay itself, thus directly experimenting with what happens when mediation is transformed, truncated, and played with. Embodying the play with mediation in the video essay itself meant not only creatively transforming the images and sounds from the game, but also integrating a variety of—sometimes unholy—formal combinations. Thus, the essay brings together different types of audiovisual content, and, most importantly, different types of authorial interventions, with digital text presented in two different fonts (one very basic, one very unusual), handwritten text captured through a webcam, a Paint-drawn pause button, as well as a voiceover sequence. While my training at Middlebury video camp taught me to beware of mixing different types of presentation—avoiding for instance an alternation of voiceover and written text to structure the video essay—I tried leaning into multimodality and unpredictability as a way to play with videographic mediation, and thus to make my discussion of the game more “affective and experiential” (Grusin 2015, 132). Similarly, whereas my videographic work so far made a fairly linear and explanatory use of the voiceover (Folléa 2023), I endeavoured in this video essay to have a voiceover that would feel disruptive as much as it is explanatory (see Drăgan 2021, 114), to again embody the playful approach to mediation and experiment with its ability to destabilise our position as knowing subjects. Finally, the video essay format allowed me to clearly position myself as a white player and author, in a way that feeds into the reflection on the possible dangers of the playful approach to mediation: my footage of Season and its black avatar is almost always juxtaposed with thumbnails of my white hands using the controller, making it unambiguously clear that the risk of “ignor[ing] or eras[ing] historical violence or present-day privilege” (Patterson 2020, 57) should be carefully considered not only as it exists in the game itself, but also in the process of play, and of scholarly work.

All in all, I hope the essay’s playful approach succeeds in eliciting reflection on the effects of playing with mediation, both in a videogame and in a video essay.

Note
My thanks to Kevin Sullivan for providing the information about the game video footage shot on Super 16 mm and for allowing me to share it here.

References
Anable, Aubrey. Playing with Feelings. Video Games and Affect. University of Minnesota Press, 2018.

Atkinson, Paul, and Farzad Parsayi. “Video Games and Aesthetic Contemplation.” Games and Culture 16, no. 5 (July 2021): 519–37. https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412020914726.

Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation. Understanding New Media. MIT Press, 2000.

Drăgan, Cristian Eduard. “Foregrounding the Digital Medium: Self-reference and Metareference in Video Essays.” Ekphrasis 2 The Essay Film as Self-Representational Mode (2021): 111–127.

Folléa, Clémence. “Everything (2017): Aesthetics and Politics of Re-Scaling as a Video Game Mechanic.” Interfaces 50 (2023). https://doi.org/10.4000/interfaces.7408.

Grusin, Richard. “Radical Mediation.” Critical Inquiry 42, no. 1 (Autumn 2015): 124–148.

Heijmen, Nicky and Joost Vervoort. “It’s Not Always About You: The Subject and Ecological Entanglement in Video Games.” Games and Culture 19, no. 6 (Sept. 2024): 743–760.

Hetfeld, Malindy. “Season Review: Atmospheric Road Trip Game with a Muddled Message.” The Guardian (26 Jan. 2023).

Juul, Jesper. Handmade Pixels: Independent Video Games and the Quest for Authenticity. MIT Press, 2019.

Marks, Laura. The Skin of the Film. Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Duke University Press, 2000.

Patterson, Christopher B. Open-World Empire. Race, Erotics, and the Global Rise of Video Games. New York University Press, 2020.

Ryan, Marie-Laura. Narrative as Virtual Reality 2. Revisiting Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015.

Scavengers Studio. Season. A Letter to the Future. PC version. 2023.

Biography
Clémence Folléa is an Assistant Professor at Université Paris Cité, where she teaches literature, film, and videogame studies in the Department of Anglophone Studies. In 2016, she completed a PhD on the afterlives of Charles Dickens’s novels —a topic on which she published several articles and a book chapter. Her more recent research examines how video games can open up possibilities for narrative, aesthetic, epistemological, and political experimentations, as well as ethical experiences. She recently started delving into videographic criticism as a way to explore questions of immersion, agency, and mediation in videogames.