According to Liam Mitchell, Bastion is not just a video game. It’s a text “advanc[ing] an argument about the nature of contemporary society and a claim about the ethical and political disposition that might be equal to this technological epoch.” Yada, yada, yada. Hoity-toity.
I get it: I too love video games, and I too lament their low-brow-ness, the fact that people don’t think they are as “good” for you as Nietszche. I too would love to accord some cultural capital to them by, say, imbuing it with the gravitas of a philosophical treatise. However, I don’t know if we need video games to become more than video games in order for them to be important cultural objects. We don’t need to elevate video games to “art” by forgetting one of its most central elements: visceral pleasure (cited as the dividing line between art and non-art). Indeed, I think we should celebrate Bastion not because it’s some ethical political treatise (though it has some of those elements), but because it is honestly super fun to play.
Let me give some simple examples. Mitchell writes that the lack of repetitive dialogue is evidence that “the temporal structure of Bastion is […] cyclical, but not simply so.” According to this blogpost, the dialogue didn’t repeat because otherwise it would break the immersion of the game. Mitchell writes that the floating tiles are a “visual metaphor” for “shakily constructing the world by being in it.” The designers made the tiles float because players would then know where to go, and then dressed it up in narrative terms afterwards. Of course, we can read it both ways; the fact that the designers weren’t thinking in such hoity-toity terms doesn’t mean we can’t read it as a hoity-toity thing. However, I’d argue that this hoity-toity reading can’t explain some of the most central elements of the game.
For example: the proving grounds. In a ludic sense (to borrow a word from Mitchell), there’s a very simple explanation for why the game has them: the players need to learn how to use their weapons because the designers wanted to make the game accessible to casual gamers. Indeed, what sets Bastion apart for me is the mechanical depth of the game: you can play as someone who barely touches a mouse in your life, or you can be a master at juking and destroy your enemies. For Mitchell, however, the proving grounds might be some demonstration of the cyclic temporal structure, which teaches you to “love fate” because they force you to re-play over and over to perfect your intuitive relation to the set of rules in accordance with Nietszche’s master-slave philosophy… whatever. Buzzword buzzword. You get the point.
A lot of Mitchell’s argument also hinges on the ending, the choice between Redemption and Evacuation. Mitchell writes, “Where Restoration signifies the denial of the eternal return, Evacuation signifies its acceptance.” But it’s not clear that the choice is really about evacuation or redemption: Clarkson writes, “the choice to escape in the Bastion seems to come from pitying Zia’s sob story, rather than being a positive decision to use the Calamity as an opportunity to break the cycle of violence.” It’s also interesting to note that this is one of the most ham-fisted moments in the game; I would not characterize the block-text presentation as one of the most “pivotal” moments in the game. For example, critic Clarkson writes, “The explicit way they’re posed (as giant, selectable blocks of text) is at odds with the game’s otherwise subtle presentation.”
I would not come back to Bastion because of the complex ludic metaphors or its (slightly convoluted) storyline. Compared to other more narrative-driven games like Undertale, there is actually very little choice. Clarkson points out correctly, I think, that the game feels extremely linear: you get Cores and then Fragments, which is the same thing as beating levels. You uncover more about the world, but you don’t get to make any dramatic decisions that changes its fate. The narrative meshes well with the fighting mechanics; there’s no point in which the narrative contradicts the “rules” of the world, like in Bokura Planet; but narrative decision-making is for sure not the primary “fun” thing of the game.
The reason why I would come back to Bastion would be to master those weapons, to kill Windbags, and get a bunch of fragments to upgrade my gear. The hammer is just so satisfying to use; the building up of the Bastion is a great incentive for completing levels. Each level feels unique and the fighting mechanics are awesome. I love the existence of the Power Shot (so satisfying!), the different Elixir upgrades, the wide variety of weapons. The game does action extremely well — it also invests a lot of time and energy into these mechanics (proving grounds! 6? weapons! 3 abilities!). When I play Bastion, though, I just learn to get good at juking and shooting. I don’t learn to love fate. But you know what — it is darn fun!
What Mitchell does is what I think many art critics do: they love an art piece, and then they try to justify why they love this art piece by imbuing it some with some super hashtag-deep take about ethics or the state of society. The problem is that when we do this, we reinforce the fact that art has to be expound some deep philosophical message to be important. It’s just not true; video games can be great as video games, without teaching you some great lesson, without making you a more ethical Ubermensch. We don’t need to make low-brow art high-brow to acknowledge its beauty or its usefulness.
(Slight side note: by focusing too hard on the philosophy of Nietzsche, Mitchell also falls into a simple sociological trap: the idea that mastering video games can make its players unethical by teaching them to map the same “algorithmic” relations into the real world. He writes, “This allegorithmic relationship (Galloway, 2006) can grow into a general attitude towards the things of the game world, or the things of the world outside the game.” This is, in effect, the sensitization argument; but I think it belies a misunderstanding of how people ingest and understand aesthetic objects in the first place. Generically, this just doesn’t happen: you don’t play a video game and then suddenly want to kill Windbags in real life.)
I thought your take was really interesting, and I love the pushback against the idea that only “high-brow” readings of games make them worth taking seriously. I personally love playing terrible browser games with basically negative story and pure fun, so I really agree that games don’t need to deliver some profound philosophical lesson to matter or be a great game.
I also think the two readings analyzed Bastion a lot like a film or book, when, like you said, many of the story elements were probably built around choices that first existed to make it a better game. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing though but I do think Bastion was probably not the best example of a game to deep dive into story for (I could imagine an analysis of a game like the Last of Us for example being much more fruitful/worthwhile). I also think the readings were an interesting selection, where it felt like Sparky Clarkson was analyzing the story for fun, while Mitchell had a philosophy paper due and just absolutely wanted to write it about a game. Because of this, I felt like the philosophical analysis was somewhat out of place for Bastion, but I do think there’s still value in analyzing game design choices from different angles.
For example, thinking about why Bastion is fun would probably also include asking what the narrative adds to that fun. The game would still play well without thinking too seriously about the story, which I think actually makes it more interesting to ask what the story is doing on top of the mechanics.