For a long time, people told me to play Pentiment. It’s an adventure role-playing game set in 16th century Bavaria. It’s historical. So I should like it, right? The thing is, I’m less interested in games set in the past than games that are about the practice of interpreting the past. Usually I frame this in terms of archaeology, but more broadly we could call these historiographical games, rather than historical games.
Anyway, I eventually did play Pentiment. There’s a scene very early in the game that cemented my love for it. The protagonist, Andreas, is undertaking an apprenticeship as an illuminator at Kiersau Abbey. A senior member of the Scriptorium, Brother Piero, asks to see the manuscript he’s working on.
Piero: Yes, the composition is lovely. There is a joyful spirit in your arrangement of the figures.
…
Piero: It’s an excellent interpretation of someone else’s work.
Naturally, Andreas isn’t pleased with this assessment. Piero also goes on to point out that the idyllic winter scene he has drafted is no longer possible as peasants are now forbidden to forage for acorns in the forest. Then comes Andreas’ reply, which I’ve been thinking about ever since:
Andreas: “What difference does it make? This is the way November is painted.”
Piero asks Andreas “What do you want? Where are you in the work?” and Andreas’ potential answers are equally illuminating:
-> I didn’t know there was room for me in there
->That doesn’t concern me
->I want to do a good job, I want my clients to be satisfied
This conversation, and indeed much of the rest of Pentiment, is a meta-discussion on creativity and the material conditions that shape it. It reminded me of the online discourse about yellow paint as a design trope in video games. No, I’m not going to rehash that argument here, except to say that perhaps the use of yellow paint is less about good or bad game design and more about predictable results and commercial games as a product.
The secondary point, about the imprinting of the artist in their work, also resonates with conversations around game production. In Pentiment, the Scriptorium faces redundancy with the rise of the printing press. This clearly has parallels with anxieties around automation and creativity that are happening now, but seeing as I am not favourable to the use of industrial-scale LLMs, but I am interested in the original work of independent artists, I’ll frame this discussion around the latter.
Much has been said about the democratising effect of open source game engines, especially tools such as Twine and Bitsy that require little to no knowledge of coding to use. Anna Anthropy wrote about this all the way back in 2012 for Rise of the Videogame Zinesters. Greater accessibility to game-making tools has led to a proliferation of games from different perspectives; you only have to look at recent award-winning titles like Consume Me and Sextuple L to see how games that centre marginalised lived experience are extremely powerful.
It’s easy to paint a rosy picture of independent game development, though. We are no longer in the halcyon days of the 2010s and the video game industry is on fire in both old and new ways. Arguably this democratised creative impulse to create games has been commodified by platforms such as Roblox, which are creating a new generation of designers in a walled garden (and a distinctly unsafe one at that). How will this change the norms in video game creation over the next decade?
So, how do we paint November? What’s the blueprint for success? There’s the mythological figure of the genius solo dev, who springs out of obscurity to make the next big hit, that some of the most alternative devs secretly want to become one day. Even queer games have tropes. That’s not a bad thing. Perhaps the great tragedy then, is not painting November like everyone else, but never asking why you feel compelled to do so.
Playing Pentiment, I sketched a picture in my head of a parallel history in which intricate video games are made as devotional experiences in secluded abbeys for rich patrons, elaborating on the same artistic templates ad infinitum. Then I realised, well, maybe it’s not such an unfamiliar painting after all.
Florence Smith Nicholls 