Blog - Garfield Minus Garfield and Games -- New Experiences Through Removing Elements From Classic Games
Tuesday, July 28, 2009Was just reading through the website Garfield Minus Garfield again. If unfamiliar, the premise is this: a guy takes old Garfield comics, and erases any reference to the title character, Garfield the cat.
What happens is pretty spectacular-- the context of the comics is changed entirely and the comics begin to chronicle the rather depressing life of a lonely and rather insane-sounding Jon (the character who normally is Garfield's human owner).
He now talks to himself, and appears to cry or scream for no reason. His comments normally directed towards Garfield where he expresses, say, his excitement to go fold some socks, now is just idle musings and makes his life seem even more empty and meaningless than it already did.
So I'm thinking now about doing that same idea with classic games, rather than comics.
Now, I guess I shouldn't be too intrigued by this idea, as one of my first class projects as a game design student (actually, my first game design project ever, I think) was to modify a pre-existing board game by adding or subtracting one rule, and see how that changed the game.
Games, as dynamic systems, I suppose naturally lend themselves well to experimentation with what happens when you remove some kind of critical element.
When designing a game the designers are somewhat encouraged to test the limits of what needs to be in their system and does not. Everything must be there for a reason.
Yet, Garfield is there for a reason in the Garfield comics-- yet there's something really awesome that happens when he's removed.
I suppose I've seen a few things that border on this concept already in the realm of video games.
Rom Check Fail plays with the idea of replacing critical game elements from classic games with elements from a different game. Granted, it's a replacement, rather than a removal, of a critical element-- but that's still pretty close.
Of course, a lot of times, when removing game elements what results fails to be a game anymore. In board game terms, what the hell would Battleship be if you removed the battleships themselves? Or the ability to fire? Are either one still a game?
That example above provides some pretty terrible results, but this is not always the case... an extreme example of removing game elements to create an interesting new piece with a new context would be Cory Archangel's Super Mario Clouds-- a hack of Super Mario Bros. where everything but the sky was removed.
The resulting piece of art is no longer a game, or even interactive-- you just watch 8-bit clouds peacefully roll slowly on by, as though you're looking out of a surreal alternate reality window. But even though the result is no longer a game, it's a decidedly cool piece of art, at least in my opinion.
So, I'm currently having fun exploring how various games would work without their title character and their according mechanics. It's difficult to try to make the results still playable, let alone as interesting as Garfield Minus Garfield comics are. (Ironically, Garfield Minus Garfield comics are usually more interesting than the real original Garfield comics...)
Part of the problem is the nature of the avatar-- most title characters are the avatar, and with that removed, the result is typically no longer interactive. If you removed Pac Man from Pac Man, well, you'd just watch ghosts run around a maze. I suppose that's about as interesting as Super Mario Clouds, but seems a bit disappointing.
But take, say, Sinistar, a game who's title 'character' is not the player character, but the villain of sorts.
The level ending conditions of, y'know, destroying the Sinistar get a bit thrown out of whack if you removed the Sinistar itself from the game, obviously. But other than that, the game seems like it could at least function with out him, just as a kind of rather uninspired space shmup sort of game. So, sure, it works still as a game... but the only meaning provided by removing the title character is pointing out how much better the game is with him in it. :)
And on the other extreme-- remove the Halo from Halo and, well... you'd have a slightly different storyline, but the gameplay would probably be mostly unaffected. Again, the element of removal doesn't provide an interesting new context like the Garfield Minus Garflield scenario.
So I'm trying to think of more examples that would turn one game completely upside down in a truly interesting way by removing something important, just like how Garfield Minus Garfield makes for a more interesting comic than the original by removing the main character.
Labels: design, garfield minus garfield
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 12:39 AM
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