Hi!
My name’s Hamish Black and welcome to Writing on Games.
Whenever I'm tasked with looking after my four-year-old nephew, his first words are
always "Can we play a game?"
He sees my gaming PC as a gateway into other worlds - an interface between his rampant
imagination and the systems that can represent it in a visual form.
The problem is that even with seemingly simple, kid-friendly games like Minecraft, even inputs
like walking forward, jumping and mining require us to internalise standards of how controllers
work, for example.
Games like Rocket League, that are aesthetically captivating to him, simply don’t work when
he gets a controller in his hand.
We, as people who have been playing games for a long time, know that hitting forward
and A means jumping forward, or how holding down B whilst accelerating with the right
trigger whilst using the left analogue stick will allow you to boost in a desired direction.
For a toddler though, memorizing and executing on these actions can be incredibly tricky.
As such, and as is often the case with my nephew, this leads to frustration.
There exists a disconnect between the value that I as an adult can take from a game and
that he can take from it.
One only needs to look to Pixar to see examples of multi-layered writing, in which adults
can take just as much from the film as children can, without the children being talked down
to in any way.
My experiences playing games with my nephew got me asking the question “why can’t
games implement a similar kind of multi-layered system with their mechanics?”
Well, as it turns out, a recently released game managed to prove that they can – that
game is Abzu.
Not only is it non-combat focused and educational in an unpatronising way, its mechanics allow
kids and adults to take different things from the game, with one experience remaining equally
as valid as the other.
For those that don’t know, Abzu is a game in which you explore an underwater world,
and that’s pretty much it.
It gets compared to Journey a lot because, well, it basically is Journey in a different
setting – down to the fact that Journey’s art director (Matt Nava) and the composer
of its, frankly, stunning score (Austin Wintory) are both present and accounted for here.
Aside from aesthetic details though, Abzu flows in a very similar way to that game,
with a loose narrative telling something close to the Hero’s Journey.
Exposition is relegated to detailed but hard to decipher cave paintings which, again, in
a way very similar to Journey, seem to describe a civilization once prosperous but brought
low by some means.
It’s all very vague and somewhat less effective than Journey’s more focused approach to
companionship, for example, but it does subtly subvert its own simplicity by introducing
elements of magical realism into things like the environments and fish you encounter later
in the experience.
The question is, though, why should this game make us re-evaluate the way we approach games
for kids?
Why was my nephew able to enjoy actually playing this game to a similar degree that I could?
Well, for starters, on a purely mechanical level, he was able to control it.
The game uses a very simple variation on tank controls, in which you hold a shoulder button
to move and then aim your character with the left stick.
Now, this is a similar control configuration to something like Rocket League that I mentioned
earlier, but the key distinction is that in Abzu, the joy doesn’t come from mastering
a precise set of skills or achieving any particular goal – in many ways, it’s the complete
opposite.
The joy instead comes from the way even imprecise movement is rewarded with, at the very least,
beautiful, fluid animations that really evoke the feeling of being underwater.
The narrative pull is there, and the game has a very linear path to its progression
that I was able to navigate pretty precisely, but my nephew was able to ignore this completely
and simply remain in one area, steamrolling into schools of fish causing them to scatter
in a whirlwind of bright colours.
He was as curious about the somewhat empty areas as the ones bustling with colour and
life.
The attention to detail in these environments keeps the game from feeling bland or repetitive,
but also doesn’t become exhausting.
For me, the jetstream sections that take most of the control away from the player at once
acted as an exhilarating change of pace whilst also allowing me to sit back and appreciate
the scenery I was being guided through.
For my nephew, they made his experience more focused (if for only a brief time), breaking
up his play time in a way that sidestepped the very prevalent issue of a youngster’s
short attention span.
The rocks which allow the player character to sit and meditate perfectly fulfilled that
function for me – allowing me to feel like a small part of something bigger, whilst highlighting
the fact that this, for me, was a break from the mechanically intense games I have been
playing a LOT of recently (on an aside, if you want a game that’s actually meditative
without being broken like No Man’s Sky is in a lot of ways, check out Abzu).
For my nephew, however, these rocks allowed him to remain as cognitively engaged with
the environment and creatures around him, but allowed him to make observations from
a fixed position rather than worry about focusing on something and accidentally hitting a stick
and suddenly changing his perspective.
All of this highlighted to me just how different my experience was to my nephew’s, but also
how his experience was equally as valid as my own.
All of this is why I think that, if examined in the right way, Abzu could represent a change
in the way we view games for kids, even if it wasn’t deliberately designed to be one
itself.
Not simply non-combat, potentially educational mechanics and systems (although those help)
– I’m talking about basic methods of control, and how they can potentially communicate different
but equally meaningful things to kids and adults alike.
Games for children shouldn't simply be licensed shovelware designed to distract and patronise
kids - instead, they should be designed from the ground up as equalisers between youngsters
and their grown-up counterparts.
My nephew was able to get the same things from Abzu that I could - perhaps paradoxically,
an exhilaratingly meditative experience that at once energised and relaxed me, but he was
also able to take things from it that I couldn’t.
The fact that the game allowed this for a four-year-old is not a criticism of the game's
simplicity - it's a testament to the universality of the game's vision.
So there you have it – my thoughts on Abzu.
This is a game I thought perhaps didn’t get the attention it deserved at launch because,
as I hope I exemplified in this piece, there are some ways in which it is potentially very
important.
Now I’d just like to take this opportunity to thank my Patrons whose names should be
on the screen just now – I say this every week but this show really is made possible
by your generous pledges.
If you’d like to see your name here, or get access to the scripts and music for the
episodes (all of which I make myself), then if you’d consider pledging it would mean
so much and would help both financially and personally.
Also, the channel is nearly at 5000 subscribers which is utterly insane to me.
Thank you all so much for watching, commenting, sharing and talking about the videos.
You’re the absolute best.
With that, I’m Hamish Black and this has been Writing on Games – thank you very much
for watching and I’ll see you next time.