Slow gaming (minor Portal 2 spoilers)

So I finally got around to watching that Wolpaw interview, good stuff. Loved the part where he was talking about play testing "early and often", players playing levels "all the time" . . . really solid. Also, there's that one part where he talks about Richard Lord and the Animal King. That makes me happy.

It's generally wonderful to watch him crawling through a level, moving around the test chambers to illustrate the content, and ocassionally even failing. It's not a speed run, but at the same time it's also not a slow play of Portal 2. This post is actually about slow gaming and not the Wolpaw interview, but I wanted to include it anyway because his familiarity with the game challenges our understandings of what expertise looks like. Since I don't plan on blogging about that, I wanted to point it out here.

Seriously though, even his failures are incomprehensible.

The NYU Game Center Lecture Series: Erik Wolpaw from NYU Game Center on Vimeo.

I mean, how is it the man can fail to put a cube on a button? It's mind boggling.  

So, slow gaming. This post is about taking a game slow, and I'm here to say that it's really hard to do. There's a tremendous amount of pressure on gamers to complete big titles (especially the narrative ones) relatively quickly. The internet is a minefield of spoilers. Of course, that goes for a lot of different media these days, but the culture around games is particuarly driven when it comes to finishing content and shouting your opinion for the whole world to hear. I knew this going into Portal 2. I did a slow play through of it anyway.

I'm not going to go into the ways in which social media makes slow gaming hard in any great detail, but I will note that Twitter is particularly challenging when it comes to any slow gaming effort. The internet wants me to know about things in general, but it's relatively easy to filter out blog posts and the like. After all, writers are usually good enough to provide big fat spolier warnings in their titles (or at least within the first paragraph or so). Individual social media users are not necessarily so deliberative when offering their opinions of a played experience.

At any rate, I took my time with Portal 2 and I mean I really took my time. I took what . . . over two months with it? Something like that, maybe even three months. Most of my play took place in very small sessions of roughly half an hour. I'd do a few test chambers, and then tear myself away from it. My motivation for this was simple. I knew this game was good, and I wanted to take my time with it and enjoy it thoroughly. I'd done some slow gaming previously, but it had always been accidental. Life would get in the way and then I'd decide to just go with the slowness. I figured with a game like Portal 2, it would be worth it to take it slow intentionally.

I actually had a few moments when I felt like I was actually going too slow. I regularly went out for beers with friends or saw people at roller derby who had finished the game days, weeks, or months prior. They would have to divert conversations to avoid spoiling things for me. The awesome part in this is that my friends were extra complicit in my slow play. Once they knew I was taking my time, they didn't bug me to hurry up and finish, they just checked in to see where I was.

Overall, I'd have to say that my slow gaming experience with Portal 2 was worth it. I'm not sure I'd do it again (or at least not quite so slowly), but I'm definitely glad I tried it with this game. On some level, I lived with Portal 2 for the entire time I was playing it. Whether it was rethinking the Borges like nature of the Portal world, silently speculating as to what the next level of Aperture might reveal about the fictive history of that universe, or just wondering what lay in store for Chell in the next chamber, there were ways in which a slow play of Portal 2 enhanced the literary aspects of the gaming experience.

To clarify, slow gaming is not just the thing that happens when it takes you a long time to finish a game. I'm still playing Super Meat Boy after many many months simply because I'm stuck on the level before the final boss, but that is not slow gaming. Slow gaming requires intentionality. It means putting the controller down/stepping away from the keyboard despite your intense curiousity about what the next level might hold.

In principle, it's probably possible to have a slow gaming experience with a game that isn't driven by a big narrative. However, it's likely that the rewards of slow gaming are more powerful for big narrative games. Like taking a book slowly, slow gaming allows part of your mind to dwell in another world for a little longer. It emphasizes that the reward is not winning the game, but playing it.

Outside of the slow gaming lens, my main conclusion from my experience of Portal 2 is not a particularly remarkable one. Portal 2 is (IMHO) a great work of art. It includes and exceeds the fundamental experience of Portal, and more importantly works as a truly succesful comedic endeavour. Wolpaw claims that he wanted to make a comedy before a "Citizen Cane", but it is well known among writers that good comedy is actually harder to write than drama. Portal 2 is a brilliant comic narrative. The player's experiences of conflict are progressively mapped to the writing, and the brilliant long arc of the game creates opportunities for novel content that blends with game design. I'm sure I would've appreciated all of these things about Portal 2 without taking it slow. Perhaps I appreciated them a little more because I did.

Comments

[Jordan T. T-H]

My problem with taking games like Portal 2 slow is that after I play through a chamber or two, my reflexes and mind is honed and in a place where I can think on my feet. When I return, say, the next day, I feel like I have to spend 15 to 20 minutes getting back in that space. So I beat it in three play sessions.

[Lance Burkett]

"...there were ways in which a slow play of Portal 2 enhanced the literary aspects of the gaming experience."

I think that playing games slower does enhance the story, especially if the gameplay doesn't require heightened reaction times. When I played The Witcher 2, I was in rush to finish it. As a result, I found the story to be really clever and intriguing, but I felt really unsatisfied with the ending. When I played The Witcher 1, I wasn't in a rush to finish it and I really liked the conclusion. Although that might just be the differences between the two games. Either way I'll play through them again really slowly.

@Jordan

That is true, but what I find is that when I am in that zone I completely disregard the narrative and context. All my focus is placed on the puzzle and nothing else.

[Moses]

Interesting. I wasn't really thinking about the trade-off when I decided to take Portal 2 slowly, but it's often a consideration I'll take into account when weighing the possibility of playing more than one game concurrently.