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?
Generation Press X When I Say So
About halfway into the warp zone, I realized no other game in 20 years had pulled me out of my doldrums. This thought was put on hold because I was dying at a rate of five times per minute. Forty minutes later, I unlocked 10G: The Kid, granting me permission to use the Kid -- the wishful hero from I Wanna Be the Guy -- in Super Meat Boy. As the game puts it, the Kid is "not the guy." He wears a cape, but he's doomed to die. He has a slick double jump that, for an instant, lifts the weight from his heels.
These 80 dying minutes were a rapturous experience. The levels were air-tight, the final runs cathartic. They kind of, sort of, felt poetic. It's hard to say; so much of that time was spent fumbling and falling and I made so many mistakes. I'm not sure that games can be reliable poets. I saw a faint glimmer of light in Red Dead Redemption's burning sun. And Passage conjured the passing of the seasons, when it wasn't simply passing from left to right. But games, like poetry -- like all artificial things -- can only attain the beauty of nature through elaborate contrivances. Some focus on physics, or bodies, or a sense of choice. But this one?
When I spoke with Super Meat Boy designer Edmund McMillen before the game's release last year, he said that to design a game was to be a teacher. How do you show, not tell, a person how to play a game? Super Meat Boy, like many games before it, has no tutorial, no arbitrary point at which it decides it has told you enough about the controls, the rules, and the combinations thereof, and hands things over to you. Super Meat Boy, from level 1 to level 430 (or whatever number they're up to now; Team Meat has been updating the downloadable hub on Xbox Live with big and wonderful new chapters, as planned), is an instruction manual frozen in time. In the empty spaces between the razor blades are all those imaginary connections you might make or miss, forever showing off and being shown.
This is nothing new. This is something old that has been forgotten in the era of "Hey, player, did you notice that those bad guys are standing right under a big stack of logs? Now the camera will take you there, in case you missed it. Try pressing X right now to make all the logs fall down and hurt them. Right now. Now. Next time you see this blinking button, you can press it. Not now, later. Don't worry, I'll remind you later."
Everyone will be amazing at Super Meat Boy, McMillen said, by the game's end. They only need to play it. This isn't the teacher in Stand and Deliver, with his blind faith that dropouts will learn calculus if he could just find a way to inspire them. Super Meat Boy is the magic pill that makes them smarter. The game is written with the answer staring you in the face; all you have to do is spell out that answer. It's very hard to spell, unlike the letter X.
This also isn't new. For a lot of people, it is what a video game is. But it is new to me. I was born in 1982, and my schoolmates adored Nintendo. I understand 8-bit nostalgia. But I only played Super Mario Bros. because it seemed like the right thing to do at the time. I liked the music, but I never really liked the game. I never felt betrayed that the princess was in another castle. I never bought the fantasy of the princess. That's because I never had the patience to pass the first castle, much less finish the game. I wanted instantaneous gratification. I've always felt guilty about this.
Consider how Team Meat has updated the platformer for modern times, for the Angry Birds generation that has no time to wonder, but all the more time to wedge into modern life. If I wanted a princess fantasy, I could still chase that dream from chapters one through six in countless AAA hits, pressing X to spell the script, unraveling the game. But here, I can see everything at once. The princess is there, in a corner of the screen. My eye wanders from her, back through the maze, where multiple stages of platforms, pits, and pitfalls are collapsed into one. I can trace a line with my eye, from me to her. I have to make my fingers do it, too. I have to try X, practice X, learn X, achieve X. No fantasy is here but an instruction, a course of study.
My piano teacher taught me to learn a piece by practicing first with one hand, then the other, and then putting both together. Surely, over a period of weeks, the two would form a piece. Each day I ran through the system for hours. Each mistake was a momentary collapse, an infinitesimal death. And each recovery was a human instinct. When I played, I learned how to learn. This is what Super Meat Boy captures, like a poet -- a small shard of a facet of our nature, our ability to achieve. When you play the game, and are confounded by the game, and your flaws come to the surface, you can feel your own nerves growing.
In the Kid's warp zone, I run out my failures at an accelerated clip. I comb a hundred generations of the Kid through the spikes, and I gradually, as in a flickering film of grass growing, see him creeping forward centimeter by centimeter, until he gets the girl. The longer I play, the more I realize this is certain to happen.
Achievements earned: 1
Points gained: 10
Ryan Kuo is an editor at Kill Screen, 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.