Can You Keep a Secret?
Deltarune came out! Weirdly, that’s kind of a problem? People who care about the game have this immediate need to stay off social media so as not to be spoiled. There is a rush to for anyone who ever wants to play the game to do so immediately, because if you don’t the Internet will ensure you don’t get a blind experience. You’re forced to binge it or be spoiled.
I was just thinking about chapter 2, and how I would’ve loved to have found the secret twist for myself, even though it was hidden away a little. If the game has indicated there was something to find, people would have found it on their own. Instead, I’m willing to bet the experience for the vast majority of people was finding out online first and then reproducing what they saw for themselves.
Narrative spoilers
But this is not a Deltarune thing. For any narrative media, the experience depends on the work presenting the narrative flow it intends to. This includes reveals, this includes pacing, this includes characterization.
Getting information out of turn spoils the game. It does this so aggressively that breaking narrative flow has become one of the definitions for the word “spoil”, as in “ruin”. I have a much longer piece I want to write some day about information filtering in general, which is maybe the hardest problem ever?
For games like Deltarune, it’s taken for granted that people have at most a week of courtesy before the Internet is flooded with information. And of course there are some people out there who are eager to get that information as soon as possible; it is not universally true that people want to experience narrative as intended.
Except sometimes we care a lot
But is this a little silly? Is narrative purity so reverential that information should not flow through the normal channels by which ideas are pushed to us, like social media?
Here’s what piqued my interest about this today: gaming does have a reverence for not letting experiences be spoiled. It’s just very selective right now. We see this absolute demand that knowledge not be leaked, that games be allowed to communicate information to the player on their own terms. But beyond extremely new releases, we see this almost exclusively with regard to knowledge-based games or metroidbrainias, where knowledge is the gameplay mechanic.
These are games like The Outer Wilds, Tunic, The Witness, Return of the Obra Dinn. Games — often freeform open-world games — where the main gameplay mechanic is the knowledge the player has about the world and its mechanics. Jumps in player ability come not from being given a new ability or opening a previously-locked door, but from reveals about how the world works and what you can do in it.
Spoiling these — even long after their release — is seen as crossing a line, in a way talking about Undertale isn’t.
Distinction
But isn’t this a strange distinction? What is it about brainiovania games it drives people to protect the experience in a uniquely extreme way?
People talk about metroidbrainias as uniquely un-replayable, but this clearly isn’t true. You don’t get the same experience if you play it again, but that’s true of all stories.
Mechanical fetishization?
So where do we find the distinction? Is it really just that the thing being spoiled is the mechanic of the game, rather than the story? In both normal story games and metroidbrainias the experience is different on a subsequent playthrough, but in metroidbrainias the challenge is also uniquely removed, or so it seems. Is the deciding factor that knowledge determines what routes are available to you rather than knowledge determining your experience of the narrative? Is mechanical purity being elevated in importance above story?
Taxonomy
But how do you even draw a line between metroidbrainias and any narrative game? It seems like the opposite of a metroidbrainia is a “mastery” game, where the question is just how good you are at the game.
But is there even such a thing as a “true” mastery games? When I try to think of the platonic ideal of a mastery game, the first thing that jumps to mind is UFO 50’s Magic Garden, a simple-but-hard score challenge. The game teaches you the controls, drops you in, and the only question is how well you execute and how quickly you can react.
Except… there’s strategy. When you start, you don’t know what’s effective. The most effective way to score points is to collect a line of oppies, turn them to enemies, and cut through the whole row like pac-man championship edition. The game does not teach you this move.
So what does that even mean? The structures of games rely on knowledge for mechanical purposes to varying degrees, with mastery games on one side of the spectrum and metroidbrainias on the other. But there’s also a dimension of the importance of story, which is another way games rely on knowledge to deliver an experience. And when it comes to resisting the urge to spoil games we’re better about visual novels, where the story eclipses the gameplay entirely.
At some point on that scale is a cutoff for what’s socially acceptable to talk about openly and what isn’t. Arcade section? Free-for-all. We love talking about these, we love sharing techniques, we love the community aspect of mastery. Speedrunning is often about forcing a dynamic of mastery on games that aren’t designed for it just to enjoy this community dynamic. The Metroidbrainia section? In my experience, very carefully defended. People who play the games value the experience and want to share that with others, and communicating too much about the details doesn’t share that joy, it ruins it.
But the importance story has to the social acceptability of spoilers is weird. Spoilers for story details of extremely narrative-focused games like visual novels are generally kept out of public consciousness but still readily available, in a book-club way. But when a game has a story but also some mechanic other than story, the importance we give to the purity of the narrative flow seems unfairly reduced.
Fandom
But here’s the thing: I don’t think this is due to fetishizing the value of mechanics in games over narrative intent. I think the answer is much simpler: stories have funny little guys in them.
We want to talk about the guys. We want to talk about how cool the reveals were. We want to make memes.
We take it for granted that we desperately want to talk about the story, and that everyone has seen it already. So now the task is to strike some sort of balance between that drive and the need to keep the experience available for new players, depending on how much weight we give to that.
Have you ever seen — in the wild — a meme about the spacial relationships between the orbital patterns of celestial bodies in the outer wilds? About the rules of the line patterns in The Witness? I haven’t, and I don’t think it’s because those secrets are more secret than the big twist that you get to fight Sans. I think it’s because they’re just not fun to talk about.
So here is a strange dynamic. Internet fandom culture has baked into it this temptation to cannibalize some of the value of stories by sharing too many details too widely, because stories are just so fun to share with people. In contrast, metroidbrainia games are kind of incompatible with modern fandom. The details that are there to spoil aren’t the kinds of things people want to talk about.
Fake Twitter accounts
people who know more than me talk about Epic acquiring Bandcamp
