Games are virtual. When you turn on the console, a world appears; when you turn it off, no trace remains. Except for the achievements you earned -- which fortify your Gamerscore and self-esteem, blip by blip. The Underachiever tracks the productivity of one gamer playing to catch up to his peers. What do games feel like when they're used for work?
Lights, Camera...
I'm racing Pigsy to the top of some scrap heap when my pessimism finally wins out. As a technology, a piece of mechanical recreation, Enslaved: Odyssey to the West feels not unlike a broken toaster. It's a lot of fiddling around; the annoyances of sticky controls and spaces littered with crap are just barely compensated by having the pieces fall into place.
The platforming could barely be called that. Monkey has a lot of grace, or so you're led to believe. In reality you need to prod him from handhold to handhold. I'm supposed to be racing Pigsy, a smarmy ball of a man who knows the terrain better than me and benefits from a grappling arm that lets him zip skyward, past handholds and platforms. The idea, of course, is that Monkey can still beat him -- because he is a coiled, muscular athlete who can scale the scrap in seconds, like his namesake. But when I have control of him, Monkey can't see where to jump, scrambles back and forth uncertainly, gets hung up on ledges. He's no Ezio Auditore. I'm impatient for this to be over, and for the obligatory achievement points to ring out, because that is what they are now: an obligation. This is busywork. The reward for 15G: You Swine is literally that, 15 arbitrary points added to my virtual Gamerscore. My satisfaction for actually beating Pigsy is nonexistent.
Cue cut-scene. Monkey doesn't look too delighted himself; he remains stoic as ever. But you can feel his satisfaction. Pigsy sounds wounded. He's humiliated by his defeat, dashes off some excuses. "I lost on account of my bad arm," he mutters, which also says a lot about his thinking -- and he won't make eye contact, either. Monkey doesn't say much, because he's a man of few words. Each meaningful pause builds his character, too. And this is what makes winning worth it: simply being able to observe their interplay. I tried racing Pigsy once earlier, and lost. The points didn't matter; I'd been racking them up for the past five hours and had no clue what they were for. I wanted the win scenario because I wanted to see how Pigsy and Monkey would act.
The mechanical aspect of racing Pigsy is meaningless. The achievement is a throwaway diversion, a loud reminder that I am playing a "game," like film grain reveals I'm watching a film projected from a reel. The process of running takes effort, but it doesn't feel like a real activity. And yet I did feel that I was "really" racing Pigsy.
When I see Pigsy running next to me, I don't see a pathfinding NPC: I see Pigsy. He waddles left and right. I can almost see his rolls jiggling; I can almost smell his sweat. The camera is behind him, but I keep picturing the look on his face. My whole experience of Enslaved is mashing buttons while thinking about the last cut-scene and anticipating the next. The script by Andy Garland and the dramatic direction by Andy Serkis -- those are the real game. The game I physically play is filler. Gunplay and stick-fighting pass the time between moments of acting. Enslaved is a paragon of the interactive movie with bonus gameplay. But it works. It's just inside-out: I'm rewarded by what I don't do, and my interaction is what I need to skip through.
Enslaved shoehorns achievements into its basic structure. When you finish Chapter 1, you get 10 points. After Chapter 6, our reward goes up to 15 points. Then it's 20 at Chapter 9. After a time, the achievement blip sounds like an irritating tic. By chapter's end, something that seems real and human has transpired, the scene fades to black, and the points pop up and ring very hollow. These stand for a kind of meta-play that has a hard time fitting in among the game's very old-school, time-tested and proven methods of storytelling. Writing, vocalization, gestures, facial expressions, close-ups, cuts. Even the shaky-cam that frames Monkey from behind as you narrowly make a jump is transported from the cinema, looking oddly out of time, if thrillingly effective.
It's appropriate that Enslaved's gameplay is almost obnoxiously conservative. As Monkey, you have to press buttons, fetch items, and kill bots. But each instance of button-pressing and item-fetching is loaded with gravitas. In 2010, I shouldn't so much as raise an eyebrow when Trip says, "Monkey! That's a power cell!" But I was miraculously excited. One midgame extended puzzle -- involving four levers and eight interlocking metal bridges -- feels like a Professor Layton reject. It's saved, though, by the reason behind Monkey and Trip's participation, and by the things they utter as they run to and fro.
Enslaved gives off the distinct impression of professional dramatists invoking Drama, and that's what makes it so quietly radical. Its platforming and battle scenarios contain zero emergent meaning. I'm not the one who acts in this game; that's a job for the actors. Enslaved isn't my story, or your story. It's Monkey's story, and it's the writer's story. It doesn't leave room for your achievements.
Achievements earned: 14
Points gained: 190
Ryan Kuo is an editor at Kill Screen Magazine, and a freelance writer and artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Find him on Xbox Live and Twitter as twerkface. And please don't laugh at his Gamerscore -- he's working on it.