All Games Are Zero-Player Games

Only recently have I learned there is a whole cohort of people who, like me, draw imaginary lines on the floor and avoid stepping on them for no reason. It can’t be any line, of course: it must extend from an object or geometry that rests on the floor in some way, and typically only the outermost lines of an object count. This means I will probably step over the imaginary line between the corner where a hallway ends and its opposite wall, but the inner lines projecting from a table’s leg will be too bothersome to avoid. It’s easier to either count only the lines extending from an equally imaginary polygon of which the places where the legs meet the floor are inner corners, or simply not count tables at all. Carpets, as it turns out, are ideal objects for this game: they are polygons with a definite number of sides from which lines can be drawn with your mind, and they happen to protect you from lines extending from other objects (like couches) while you are walking on them.Only recently have I learned there is a whole cohort of people who, like me, draw imaginary lines on the floor and avoid stepping on them for no reason. It can’t be any line, of course: it must extend from an object or geometry that rests on the floor in some way, and typically only the outermost lines of an object count. This means I will probably step over the imaginary line between the corner where a hallway ends and its opposite wall, but the inner lines projecting from a table’s leg will be too bothersome to avoid. It’s easier to either count only the lines extending from an equally imaginary polygon of which the places where the legs meet the floor are inner corners, or simply not count tables at all. Carpets, as it turns out, are ideal objects for this game: they are polygons with a definite number of sides from which lines can be drawn with your mind, and they happen to protect you from lines extending from other objects (like couches) while you are walking on them.

These are, all things considered, my rules. I can’t speak for anyone else who avoids imaginary lines on the floor when walking. I’d be a terrible representative for the community I just found myself to be a part of, anyway, as I’m not even that diligent. Even though I start playing this little game unconsciously, I don’t always do it. And, like I said, I don’t count lines projected by table legs simply because they would make walking too cumbersome, but I can’t justify why I’m allowed to dismiss them, formally speaking. If a new object is brought to the room, I have to adjust whether it “counts” or not as an object that extends lines, too, so I’m constantly reevaluating the game itself. Not that it matters. There are no particular consequences attached to it, in any case — although stepping on a line makes me “lose”, nothing will happen if I lose. Unlike real lines, which cause your mother to suffer horrible, acute low back pains if stepped on, so I avoid these too.

I would like to believe all of us play at least one of these absentminded games, as a pet artifact of consciousness. A game like this brings some sort of neurotic beauty to the world by assigning meaning to static objects and making a walk from a bedroom to a kitchen just a little bit less straightforward than its purely transportational utility. It’s certainly not pleasurable in a strict sense. Even if I don’t really want to play it, I can’t quite control it, and it seems to be the case for the majority of the players. It’s kind of like a kinesthetic version of The Game, in that it requires no consent and it’s impossible to win.

These were the kinds of things I thought of when I read Alexander B. Joy’s On Zero-Player Games. It’s a delightful read, at the very least because it reminds us of the moments of pause we find in life that engender new cognitive frameworks. The rain, the water stream, the campfire, the screensaver Joy describes as zero-player experiences all allude to moments of pause and, ultimately, contemplation. Not contemplation of any kind, of course: it has to be a way to fabricate a particular inner world for a moment, that projects itself onto our shared reality, superimposed. One that anticipates, bets, speculates and creates stories that will all vanish when the car ride ends, or once your parents finally find the movie they were looking for to watch on a Saturday night.

Naturally, the zero-player games Joy describes are different from the zero-player experiences he mentions, and all of them are different from the single-player mind game of arbitrarily deciding not to step on infinitesimally thin lines in space, or even projecting them to begin with. But there is a fissure in how Joy describes the four core tenets that make up the zero-player game experience: no player input, a sense of logic or rules, a sense that there are different outcomes and a sense that some outcomes are more desirable than others. It’s the word “sense” that sounds really interesting to me, because it suggests a construction, an interpretation of something rather than just passively receiving an autonomous structure. This sense emerges from observation and discernment, but it doesn’t cease to exist with more than zero players. Input from any player alters the understanding of what counts as logic or outcomes, but is ultimately informed by this sense. The mental construct of the game is a precondition for input, but not the other way around. So zero-player games actually hold a secret: if it’s possible to playfully acknowledge something before it can acknowledge you, and this is an ongoing construction, then all games are zero-player before they are single or multiplayer games. There’s a cognitive framework that’s necessary for any game to be played, but this framework, in itself, already is play.

Let’s talk about an activity that satisfies all of Joy’s conditions: making sense of a fictional story. Paul Auster describes the protagonist of City of Glass, Daniel Quinn, as an enthusiast of mystery novels, but not being very selective about which ones he reads, because:

What he liked about these books was their sense of plenitude and economy. In the good mystery there is nothing wasted, no sentence, no word that is not significant. And even if it is not significant, it has the potential to be so—which amounts to the same thing. The world of the book comes to life, seething with possibilities, with secrets and contradictions. Since everything seen or said, even the slightest, most trivial thing, can bear a connection to the outcome of the story, nothing must be overlooked. Everything becomes essence; the center of the book shifts with each event that propels it forward. The center, then, is everywhere, and no circumference can be drawn until the book has come to its end.

(AUSTER, 1985. p. 14-15)

Auster, through Quinn, here understands reading a mystery novel as an active cognitive exercise in solving the story, even as one knows it won’t be solved until the end. It’s speculation as an inherently playful aspect of the human experience, capable of selecting objects and phenomena and, like the imaginary lines one must not step on, assign meaning to them, whether that meaning is true to the text or not. Now I’m a bit more radical than Auster, or at least Quinn, on this matter. I tend to believe the sense of plenitude and economy manifests itself in basically any kind of reading. As we decode text, we still construct meaning by surmising what it’s about, how we believe it’s going to go forward, and whether it makes sense or not to us. And we use surrounding information about the text itself, such as the author, the material on which it’s engraved, the calligraphy etc. If I know I’m reading a romance novel and the main character starts dating someone, but I also know I’m still halfway through the story (because I’m holding half the open book in my right hand), I will predict this is absolutely not the person that main character will end up with. This will in turn influence how I feel about this relationship, and I’ll look for the false love interest’s red flags that much more attentively, opening myself to be surprised if that is the true pairing of the novel in the end and establishing a sort of reading subroutine, looking for confirmation or dissolution of the conclusions I took.

This is an experience that fits well within that of a zero-player experience as described by Alexander B. Joy. Identifying and connecting objects, information and rules to create meaning is at the heart of the “playful attitude” that’s needed to not just watch a paper boat sail downstream, but do it attentively enough to imagine little paper sailors unsuccessfully trying to steer it, injecting drama where otherwise there was none. And as the paper boat crashes or tumbles or even swims gracefully, to adjust the story — which is needed even before we decide when is the time to declare it unusable and release another boat on the stream. It’s an ubiquitous mode of observation, but it’s not any observation: it’s one that gives us a stake in reality: it can construe contingency. The capacity to recognize a cognitive gap, fill it and test it as one that carries us through a novel, selects a favorite raindrop that should be able to reach the edge of the window first, or traces the path of a DVD logo to bet on whether it’ll hit the corner or not are the same, in that they establish a transaction with the object. Rosenblatt formulates the core idea at which we’re arriving:

The reader's attention to the text activates certain elements in his past experience-external reference, internal response-that have become linked with the verbal symbols. Meaning will emerge from a network of relationships among the things symbolized as he senses them. The symbols point to these sensations, images, objects, ideas, relationships, with the particular associations or feeling-tones created by his past experiences with them in actual life or in literature. The selection and organization of responses to some degree hinge on the assumptions, the expectations, or sense of possible structures, that he brings out of the stream of his life. Thus built into the raw material of the literary process itself is the particular world of the reader.

ROSENBLATT, L. (1978), p. 11

Rosenblatt’s idea of an exchange between symbols, associations and references that creates “an active, self-ordering and self-corrective process” (as she puts it) more accurately expresses what is the “sense” of logic, “sense” of outcome and “sense” of desirability. In fact, you could apply the transactional model to games cleanly. The interplay between reader and text, or in our case between observer and observed, player and game, binds them in a shared system of meaning production. Before making a choice, pressing a button, selecting members for a party, shooting the digital representation of a man or other such activities, we must be able to understand what any of that is for. Before acting upon a fictive world, we must first let it act within us. No longer are we looking at the fire consuming wood: we’re looking at a world, bound by the confines of a flame, populated by wood, ash and time, destined to crumble and acknowledged as one on which we can impart our will, even if it doesn’t bend to it. And, by doing so, we have already transformed it. This is how a plastic bag fluttering in the wind becomes a ballerina; this is how a crowd in a stadium celebrates a beach ball entering the goal, even as the actual football match happens on the other side of the pitch. This is how children determine whether they’re still playing tag during recess or whether they should move on to something else. The first aesthetic experience of a world is that of separating it from everything else, and containing it.

So it’s attention mixed with the intent of seeing something through. It becomes important to us that an event resolves in a certain way, but we get to determine the scope of that event, and what validates it or not. We can think of this containing process as a sort of cognitive membrane that frames space, time or events to give them life. Or, at least, makes them legible as rules, outcomes and, ultimately, a play space. I say membrane because that space isn’t completely closed off, and has to be continually updated: if two raindrops in a race collide and merge, are they a new racer, are they excluded from the race or do we think of that as a collaboration or two racers uniting to win? Does nudging a plastic bag in the direction of where the wind is blowing more strongly constitute cheating, or are we simply making the game continue? If a new object enters the room, does it project lines on which I can’t step too, or only the original ones count? We make up rules as we go, so the framework where the experience happens is, itself, riddled with these little doubts and decisions as new information arrives.

But the rules we establish for these artifacts of consciousness can’t be any rules, after all: they have to frame the events we chose to frame in such a way that it keeps the game going. Even traditional games (especially traditional games) are full of such moments. Let’s take any turn-based RPG as an example. The RPG isn’t actually turn-based — only the battle system, a sub-game within the larger progression system, is. But even within a battle, I may come to the conclusion that only one of my moves has a chance of killing the enemy this turn, which I absolutely need to do if I don’t want said enemy to wipe my party out in their turn. The fact that I don’t really have a choice of movement makes this moment decisive, so it contains a dramatic component where every other move was strategic. The space between my forced choice of a move and the result is where superstition seeps in — where I and any other observer can only hope the outcome favors me (or the enemy, if the observer hates me and wants me to suffer). Assuming it works and I do kill my enemy, another zero-player game can start right after, one where I hope I get the loot item I wanted. If, instead, I get an item that I had never seen, then I will wonder what it does.

To understand what it does, I have to make a mental model of what is possible, and try to fit this new item within the realm of these possibilities. Which is why I really love the example of the ruler in Earthbound, which is described as an item that can even be used in battle! And multiple times! As a game in which the characters use toys and other everyday items as weapons, you’d expect the ruler to do something magical or practical in that context. But using it yields just the message “Ness (or whoever else, really) used Ruler! Now, he can figure out the length of things easily”, and nothing else. That’s the joke: in a world where regular items have an actual effect in the rules we understand to pertain to the game, there’s an item that sets you up to expect it but doesn’t do that. And in doing that, we have to adjust the field of possibilities we had thought of before — so that it contains the possibility of an item doing nothing. A player might not be satisfied, wondering if there’s some situation in which it’ll do something different. But this has nothing to do with the structure of the game itself: it’s simply an experience of contingency that sits within the larger world of Earthbound, its actual rules and what’s perceived as being its ruleset.

Which is why the idea that games need any sort of agency from a player to be so feels wrong. The formal architecture for said agency to take place and make sense already begets play before the actual input, because it has to convince a person to look at that world and put a piece of their soul at stake. The establishment of the connection between subject and object becomes that of two subjects, and that’s the most fundamental form of play: it’s the magic that turns a sphere into a ball, a mask into its representation, a state machine into a game.

There’s a title that perfectly illustrates this in Cave! Cave! Deus Videt, a visual novel by Italian duo We Are Müesli whose Episode 0 was released in 2013. There’s a segment in which the protagonist’s shrink (or psychotherapist, as he would rather be called) asks him to locate evil thoughts in the Triptych of the Temptation of St. Anthony. A thought is described, and Hoodie, the protagonist, must (through you) locate its representation in the painting.

Here the formal architecture forces a certain interpretive lens onto the painting — the game asserts there is something to be found to begin with, and only certain objects can be selected. You must first “zoom in” as a voice tells you whether you’re closer or further from the intended piece — but it’s ultimately a simulacrum of simply browsing the painting with your eyes in search of the painting’s symbolisms, history and circumstances. Physically going to the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga in Lisbon and looking at the triptych can elicit the same kind of question: what, after all, is the temptation? The vices are all on full display, but the sins may not be where you would typically look first. The difference is that this zero-player game is encapsulated in a single-player visual novel instance. The containment processes are analogous, but only one is inscribed in a system: in Cave! Cave! Deus Videt you have to do this in order to proceed within a certain informational and narrative structure, but the (sub-)game of finding the temptations across the painting does not hinge on a specific structure.

Each of the searches are a world within the painting, because they will evoke a certain sin or set of sins you know and can identify, opening a world of sin only you know, which is crucial in affecting the senses as they unveil more of the very concept of temptation in front of you — as well as informing what Bosch’s own interpretation of the religious scenes is. In Cave! Cave! Deus Videt as in simply looking at the painting in Lisbon, the aesthetic experience is framed by the interpretive lens, and the understanding of the painting is informed by the aesthetic experience of it. They are one and the same, and can’t be cleanly separated. The “single player game” is simply directing you towards creating these worlds for narrative purposes.

The cat will prepare to attack the shoelace we provocatively dangle right in front of them in a very specific and familiar way. It will draw its claws out, sit like a sphinx and wiggle its butt a few times before attacking. But it doesn’t need to actually go for it to be playing with the shoelace. It’s the flaring up of the eyes, before all that, which indicates play has begun. Similarly, our mental process of entering a “play state” that will shape our next actions is already bound by rules and premises, even if we never act upon them with the rest of our bodies.

So it’s important to distinguish actions made within the space with actions that hold up that space as different kinds of play, but very much play all the same. Two players who know tic-tac-toe can play regardless, even though it’s impossible to win or lose. Every perfect tic-tac-toe match is a draw, but in this scenario, players play the perfect moves not as a test of endurance, not even as competition to see who plays exactly to fulfill the script of perfect play. I play a move not to see what’s yours, but exactly so you can play yours, and in doing so they recognize and prop up one another. Now they are actors, playing the part of players so that the game can continue, not unlike two children idly passing a ball to one another. Actors say their lines not only to incarnate a character, but so that others can incarnate theirs too. My line can’t be said before yours, or the play as a whole falls apart. We see this kind of play in nursery rhymes: the child repeats and follows the instructions in the song not because they don’t know what will happen, but because they do: it’s a ritual exercise in belonging, and being able to participate is the purpose of participating. In this sense, the nursery rhyme and the solved game are not at odds with games at contingent spaces, because both become sacred. The act of playing is, after all, an act of consecration.

Which is why making a game isn’t consecrating itself, just asking very nicely for the player to do so — which it does with the promise of a good story, the allure of beautiful art, the sounds in an Attract Mode. But, ultimately it’s a negotiation, and that is the first mode of play we go through before any input happens. The traditionally held idea of gameplay (which involves pressing buttons) always has to be renewed, and this occurs in several steps not bound to the game object, nor to the game session instantiated when we boot it up. The zero-player games inside the single or the multi-player games are what keeps us coming back to the world, because we co-created it alongside the several set of structures that ask us to consecrate a soace: the game console, the arcade machine, the bells signaling the start and the end of recess, a PRESS START button, a GAME OVER screen… and the very idea that there are invisible lines on the floor, extending from the objects lying around.