Gravity Bone, Thirty Flights of Loving, and Games About Games.

It’s hard to know what to say about these games. Firstly, because they are so short. Gravity Bone, released in 2008, is completable in barely 10 minutes, and Thirty Flights of Loving, from 2012, is roughly the same length. Both of these tiny games are by Blendo Games, a development studio founded and run by Brendon Chung. Chung has collaborators on his projects, but his work and these games in particularly are largely one-man operations. These tiny, independently made experiences certainly have interesting things to say, but I don’t feel strongly compelled to write about them. These games speak for themselves very well, and given how short they are to play through, I would simply recommend anyone with even a passing interest give them a try.

Secondly, both of these games, and many other pieces of Chung’s work, have been covered very well in an episode of Errant Signal. That episode covers Chung’s development history, notes the thematic throughlines in his work, and neatly describes much of what makes these games interesting. I strongly recommend that you check it out here.

So, I’m not going to try to recap the story of these games or their development. For the purpose of this series on walking simulators, just know this: like so many developers in this series, Chung got his start making maps and levels and mods for first-person shooters, including Half-Life and DOOM. Both Gravity Bone and Thirty Flights of Loving are built upon the Quake 2 engine. In addition, Chung’s prior work was more traditional FPS fare. With Gravity Bone, it was initially a shooter that got successively reworked and reoriented in a stranger direction.

Now, here are some brief thoughts on these games.

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On Gravity Bone.

To me, Gravity Bone is a joke about video game deaths.

This short game is constructed as though it’s a much longer experience. Within the two spy missions the player embarks on, the structure and mechanics are in place for a lengthier playtime. In each mission, I received a small card giving instructions on where to find the tools needed to complete the given mission. The first mission goes off without a hitch, and I received affirmation of a job well done, along with money I could easily assume I would get to spend at some point. The game even has a lengthy list of load slots you can fill up, a feature that would only be really necessary for a longer experience.

In both of the missions, there are many opportunities to die and encounter a fail state. In the first mission, I accidentally slipped of a ledge and died. In the second, I whiffed a simple platforming challenge and died again. In these instances, the game allows you to reload from an auto or manual save. These deaths are player mistakes; within the fiction of the story being told, these deaths did not happen. They potential realities that could happen to the player character, but are not actual outcomes acknowledged by game’s fiction.

But, after nearly completing the second mission, the player gets shot in the back by an innocuous NPC. This injury is real and acknowledged within the universe of the game. But the game continues. The player character gets up off the ground and gives chase to the assailant. A chase sequence ensues, in which there are more opportunities for out-of-fiction deaths if the player makes a mistake. Fail to dodge a train in time, and the sequence is reset for you to try again. By the end of chase, the player has caught up with the assailant, who shoots the player three more times. The player stumbles back over the railing, presumably to their death. This death is treated with serious emotional weight, as tragic music plays and scene, presumably from the character’s life, flash before their eyes.

It highlights the absurdity inherent in many videogame narratives. I’m reminded of the many failed attempts to complete sections of various action games, all of which are ignored by the narrative. Or how an action hero in game can whether a storm of bullets in gameplay and be healed in a split second by a health pack, only for violence to be dealt to the same character in a cutscene that is treated with utmost sincerity and had actual consequences on the narrative. The differing modes of in-game violence are a contrivance that is accepted and rarely questioned by players or developers, and Gravity Bone creates a clever little experience to highlight this odd component of game design.

bang.

Thirty Flights of Loving

Thirty Flights of Loving made me think about videogame length.

Maybe that’s just because, at the time of writing this, game media is in the midst of a hefty d i s c o u r s e about The Last of Us Part II, one of the main areas of criticism being it’s length that some critics and fans deem to much longer than necessary. But I have been annoyed by game length for years now. When I was younger, game length was no barrier to enjoying an experience. Kids have nothing but time. Post-high school, I have become increasingly annoyed at games that take any time longer than strictly necessary to convey their point. This generally means that I do not have the time or patience to experience most of the big budget mainstream games of the past couple years. Games have, in general, moved to towards larger experiences that emphasize a high level of verisimilitude. I think back to the discussion about Red Dead Redemption 2’s lengthy, realistic animations that slowed down the pace of the game. I couldn’t even get myself to the halfway point of the first Red Dead Redemption.

Thirty Flights of Loving presents an experience that focuses on editing and pacing. It builds off of the ending sequence of Gravity Bone, in which flashes of a life past flash before the eyes of a dying man. TFoL has even more smart editing tricks that serve to rapidly convey narrative information in a brief period of time. Slick title cards quickly introduce the main cast of characters. Smash cuts jump the action forward and backward in time in a nonlinear narrative about a heist gone wrong. Leaving to begin the heist on a small biplane jumps to the bloody aftermath of that plan gone awry. The subsequent chase sequence through an airport terminal jumps forward in time, conveying the arduous nature of the escape while keeping the pace and excitement elevated. This style of editing is new to games, and lifted from movie language, a medium in which traditional expectations of length requirement much greater efficiency in storytelling than is commonly seen in games.

TFoL is not just jumping around in time to hit the most exciting story beats. The game knows when to slow down and allow the player to linger in a space. In a flashback, I awoke on a mattress in a bare apartment to my partner, Anita, reclining by the balcony with the fan on, eating oranges and tossing the peels out into the air shaft. I joined her, picking up an orange and tossing the peels over the ledge, down countless stories. I watched floating police cameras drift by. It’s a peaceful moment and I could stay as I long as I want. This is important to the emotion of the story, not the specifics of the mission that went wrong, or the aftermath. The game is very intentional in what it wants the player to experience. That’s one of the benefits of a one-person operation - development limitations force selectivity in what gets made.

Games tend to have the player do most things literally. I’m thinking again about The Last of Us. In that 2013 game, smash cuts are also employed fairly effectively as transitions between the four main chapters of the game. The game hits big emotional climaxes and then jumps forward to the aftermath of those moments. But the game also has the player experience every single one of the dozens of violent encounters that the protagonists have on their journey. I walked with those characters through long stretches of deserted city blocks without narrative development. Thirty Flights of Loving presents an alternative.

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