For many of us, it has become second nature – the fact that my gaming group has played Counter-Strike for so long has made these controls natural even to me, a player of very few such games. Players who have now racked up hundreds, perhaps thousands, of hours in control of a disembodied gun-graphic forget that just moving around in these worlds in first person perspective is a skill that has to be learned. How sad that I was the only person who was enabled to do so – especially since examining Dear Esther practically shows how pathetically simple it would have been to have games/art of this kind available for play years before if only the development community hadn’t been so busy with its primary preoccupations.Īt its heart, Dear Esther isn’t just built with an FPS engine, it is built as an FPS. Still, I have enjoyed roaming their virtual hillsides and shorelines for hours at an end. I have spent many happy hours crafting wonderful environments inside Far Cry’s first-rate level editor that alas fell flat because most were ill-suited for gun violence. In a GDC talk, Ernest singled out Far Cry as an excellent example of a virtual world sadly closed to tourists because there is a perpetual gunfight going on inside. Both my colleague Ernest Adams and I have long wanted games to be less obsessed with giving players fictional guns to wield and more willing to allow players to enjoy the environment. I disavow the term ‘game’ if it is going to get in the way of understanding games, and Dear Esther is a game worthy of study. But none of these objections help people to understand the play of Dear Esther. Others object on grounds based directly on the addictive dopamine-hit of winning expressed by the victory aesthetic or the problem aesthetic.
In Implicit Game Aesthetics, this aesthetic judgement is termed the agency aesthetic, a way of enjoying play that focuses on the player’s ability to enact meaningful change in the fictional world of the game as the sine qua non of game aesthetics and hence a necessary condition of ‘gamehood’. Too much noise has been generated by people objecting to the idea that thechineseroom’s title qualifies as a game – some, like Tadhg Kelly, insist that it is worthy as a piece of modern art, but it isn’t a game because there is no agency. Much has been written about Dear Esther, alas little of it useful.
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