NO CTRL

Curated by Yasmine Batniji March 24, 2023

NO CTRL’s central theme was games that had little-to-no player control due to environment, narrative, and/or gameplay. I chose this theme because of games' unique ability as a medium to provide agency and control over themselves. Games are meant to be controlled and imply a god-like relationship with the player. What if we subvert that relationship, creating and exhibiting games that are meant to be out of our control? Games that can create a relationship with the player, but without the player being the main focus or central point of the gameplay? I chose six games that I thought fit and exemplified NO CTRL’s theme well. These games were One Last Game, Soil, Mondays: A Sisyphean Typing Game, RE: Imagine the Character, Dumber Dwarves, and Two Minutes. These games show varying degrees of control or lack of control, either conceptually or through the gameplay.

One Last Game

Goose Ladder The first game I chose, and the game I created the theme out of, was One Last Game by Goose Ladder. I had been interested in this game for a while but did not understand why exactly until I had to extract a theme from it. In One Last Game, you play checkers with an NPC, but as you move the pieces around the board you have increasingly less and less control over where the pieces land. The point of this game is not the game of checkers, but what is happening around you. The setting is grim, everything is in black and white, and your opponent has a sad look on his face. In the background, you can hear bombs going off as you try to play. The player loses control over the checkers, the bombs keep going off, until the game abruptly cuts itself off at the end. We added a physical checkerboard and a mouse made to resemble a giant checkers chip to match the game's theme and create a more immersive experience.

Soil

bubolka In Soil, most of the keys on the keyboard are mapped to little yellow circles nestled in the dirt. These circles eventually emerge as yellow people and begin running. Pressing any two keys on the computer keyboard creates a chain; if a yellow person crosses it, they are returned to the soil. The objective is to prevent the yellow people from escaping the soil as much as possible. This becomes extremely overwhelming as you try to stop more and more of them from emerging and running. We heightened the experience by giving the player two keyboards to play across. We took half the keys off of each keyboard, mounted them together, and glued soil and keycaps around them. Our intention was to extend the game feeling outside of the game and into the physical world to create a more overarching experience. This a more direct feeling of player control than the other games. The player can try to reign in the soil people as much as possible, but they are inevitably overpowered, losing their ability to control the people leaving the soil.

Mondays: A Sisyphean Typing Game

Alex and Max Robins

Mondays is a typing game where you have to get every letter, comma, and space correctly for Sisyphus to roll his boulder up the hill. Makle a single mistake and Sisyphus rolls back down the hill. The player types in emails full of corporate language that must be executed flawlessly. We used modeling clay around an old monitor to create a stone-like appearance matching the ancient Greek myth. We also paired it with an old keyboard and mouse to give it that beige, dry, corporate look. This game shows the theme of NO CTRL in two ways. It replicates the lack of control workers have in their daily lives, having to use corporate language perfectly, with no expression or control over their words or lives. Secondly, playing as Sisyphus, no matter how hard he tries, he fails. The player cannot win, and the game goes on forever, stuck in a corporate hellscape of typing where they feel as if they have no agency.

RE: Imagine the Character

Mut RE: Imagine the Character is a game that spins the classic Mario games, where the player has full control of Mario to a game where the player has virtually no control over Mario. Mario just stands in the left corner of the screen as the player clicks around him and his surroundings change. The player is intended to imagine Mario moving to all of these different surroundings, and to imagine getting to these different locations playing as Mario. This game denies player control the most: the player is just helpless, unable to force Mario to do anything. All one can do is change Mario’s surroundings and imagine him moving through them. We showed the game on an old CRT television with an NES controller, to give it a more authentic Nintendo feeling.

Dumber Dwarves

Deepnight Games In Dumber Dwarves, a bunch of dwarves are running around and the player cannot directly control them. The only thing the player can do is throw chicken to direct the dwarves either towards the gems or towards the goal. You can also slap the dwarves if they try to pick up a bomb by mistake. Instead of controlling the Dwarves as one would expect, Dumber Dwarves subverts that expectation by only allowing you to guide them. We displayed this game on a large monitor with a mechanical keyboard and gamer mouse so the player could feel like the ultimate gamer while playing.

Two Minutes

Far Few Giants Two Minutes exemplifies both a literal lack of control over gameplay and a conceptual lack of control. The world is ending, and the player has only two minutes left to experience the end and complete the game. Exploring a desert-like area, the player can have a short conversation with a group of two people, or with a person sitting alone away from them. Beyond that the player is helpless; they can experience these final few moments of conversation or simply take in the atmosphere, contemplating the end of the world and of the game. If the world really was ending, how much control could we have over our lives? What could we do but have final moments of conversations with others? The game abruptly ends, leaving the player unable to do anything about the world ending around them.