Gurn Group is a video game enthusiast and philosophy student in Shanghai, China.
David Kanaga’s 2017 game Oikospiel Book I is difficult to summarize, but the first moments of the game offer a glimpse of what it’s like to play. Huge red rain particles fall from the top of the screen as the introductory credits scroll down. Behind the text is a collage-like scene that includes 3D models, hand-drawn cartoons, and a forest of wind turbines set against an acid-gradient sky. As the player moves the mouse, the sound of rushing wind plays, the turbines spin, the camera swivels and coloured lights glow. This first scene reflects a design sensibility which pervades the entire game: a sensory barrage of diverse images, sounds and symbols, coupled with rich ornamental effects that respond to player input. The game’s overarching narrative is similarly chaotic, following a group of canine game developers through various surreal environments over a hundred-year period as they work on developing a monumental virtual opera. Very much happens, very little makes sense.
Commentary on Oikospiel has focused on its thematic content and its distinctive production process, but I want to suggest that looking at the game’s particular experiential qualities might be a way of linking together several of its idiosyncratic aspects. Stephen Gillmurphy’s essay “Output Lag,” published a few months after the game’s release, doesn’t discuss Oikospiel directly, but I think it offers a useful lens here. Gillmurphy’s thesis is that playing videogames engenders a particular mental state he calls “consciousness churn,” a distracted, microscopic, back-and-forth loop between human and computer. He suggests that this form of consciousness has implications for the way narrative can function in videogames, so that narrative elements can comfortably coexist without the game having to draw explicit connections between them. He goes on to advocate for a renewed understanding of videogames as material and sensuous — existing on a physical screen and perceived through the senses — as opposed to fundamentally abstract systems.
Oikospiel in many ways acts as an extreme demonstration of these ideas. The game’s rich, unconstrained and ever-present interactive texture responds to and affirms the player’s churning consciousness, and its disparate, non-sequitur narrative elements illustrate the narrative possibilities that Gillmurphy suggests. Further, Oikospiel’s use of prefab game assets collected from diverse sources (the Unity Asset Store among others), and its careful attention to game feel, draw focus to the expressive sensuality of raw videogame material. In sum, we can understand Oikospiel as a striking example of what Gillmurphy calls “art for a peripheral form of consciousness.”
Gillmurphy’s essay takes as its starting point the “playable cutscene” in Half-Life (Valve) and games like it – a plot-focused dialogue or action sequence that proceeds without player involvement, but where the player character can still move around in space: “the semblance of goals and consequence have been taken away, but the controls still respond the way they always do.” The tendency of players to aimlessly move their character around during these scenes reveals to Gillmurphy an excess of “useless energy” that underlies the experience of playing videogames, and of using computers more generally—energy which drives a feedback loop of consciousness “recognising itself a second or a millisecond too late, correcting, revising, circling, re-expressing.” Gillmurphy is not the first to describe the videogame as a feedback loop (or cybernetic circuit) between human and machine; Brendan Keogh identifies several precursors, and discusses the idea in depth, in A Play of Bodies (66-67). However, Gillmurphy focuses specifically on how this loop operates on a rapid, microscopic level, at the very edges of consciousness—driven not by a rational, goal-directed process but by an aimless, twitchy dispersal of energy. Although Gillmurphy is hesitant to call this “play”, there’s a correspondence with Roger Caillois’s notion of paidia, the kind of play characterized by “diversion, turbulence, free improvisation, and carefree gaiety” (13). Caillois contrasts paidia with ludus, meaning structured, goal-oriented play. In the playable cutscene, it’s the affordance for control in the absence of goals or challenge—the absence of ludus—that allows the turbulence of consciousness to come to the surface.
In terms of Caillois’s paidia/ludus distinction, Oikospiel is a game that leans heavily towards the former. The game has very little in the way of challenge or rules-based gameplay, and the only goal it nominally sets for the player is to play through a mostly-linear sequence of scenes, arranged into five acts. Even this structure is optional, and the player is encouraged to skip ahead if they wish. This reflects Kanaga’s game design philosophy, which values exploration, free play, and “shifting possibility spaces” over rules, competition, and fixed goals (Kanaga, sec. 6). In other words, Kanaga values paidia over ludus. But paidia is more than mere absence of ludic structure. A blank screen has no paidia—the player must be given something to play with. Oikospiel provides a rich responsive field for paidia to inhabit: at nearly any moment in the game, even in cutscenes, menus, and loading screens, there is some opportunity for interaction. Mashing WASD keys often produces non-diegetic sound effects; clicking through dialogue advances a stream of bouncy animated text; even just moving the mouse around on the title screen creates a glowing effect and alters the tone of the music. This ever-present rich interactivity is also what makes the game a remarkable example of Gillmurphy’s feedback loop. The overflowing activity of consciousness is always given an outlet, some interactive substance into which it can be directed; a constant rapid conversion of player input into audiovisual output.
The playable cutscenes in Half-Life provide an unrestricted outlet for churning consciousness, but only incidentally, in moments auxiliary to the central gameplay logic; Oikospiel, on the other hand, seems to consciously incorporate the player’s jittery undirected activity, to respond to it and thereby make it real. One prominent example is the sections of the game where the camera looks down from above, and the player character, a dog, follows the movement of the mouse, acting almost as a cursor, while traversing the terrain beneath. In its wake, the dog leaves a trail, a record of its path through virtual space and therefore a record of the random distracted motion of the player’s mouse. It is what Gillmurphy calls “the movement of our insect-like subconscious as it buffers across the screen,” rendered visible and concrete.
Thinking in terms of consciousness churn also sheds some light on Oikospiel’s idiosyncratic approach to narrative. One of the implications of consciousness churn, according to Gillmurphy, is that semantic elements in videogames (narratives, symbols, images) are often only registered at a barely-conscious level, and so can comfortably fit together without needing to relate to any central theme, a phenomenon he calls the “charged field”. Our semantic experience of videogames, rather than being conscious and unified, instead consists of rapidly appearing and receding associations, animated by the distracted feedback loop of computer consciousness: “it’s this churn that allows the narrative level (or condemns it) to operate in odd liminal spaces, shorn of unity or the capability for same, art for a peripheral form of consciousness” (Gillmurphy).
Whereas conventional videogame narratives tend to operate against, or in spite of, this liminality, Oikospiel’s approach is well-suited to it. More than most games, Oikospiel is made up of disparate elements: most of the assets used in the game are prefabricated, purchased from the Unity Asset Store or found elsewhere (Pipkin). Many are references to other games or literary works. For example, in Act I, scene 4, a photorealistic bear, cartoonish mushrooms and a flat black-and-white Ubu Roi (from the print of Alfred Jarry’s play) happily coexist in a reproduction of Kokiri Forest from Ocarina of Time (Nintendo). This collage-like approach seems to align with Gillmurphy’s “charged field”: despite lacking any clear unified visual or thematic sense, these elements are thrown into correspondence simply because of their shared existence in the scene.
The game’s narrative sequence is similarly scattered and nebulous. In the first scene of Act I, for example, the player begins in control of a chicken character; after walking a short way down the path the chicken is violently killed by a dog, after which the player takes control of the dog, who is recruited into a labor union and tasked with handing out union cards. Further down the path the player character passes by what appears to be an attempted shooting (with the player briefly taking control of the hand that pulls the trigger). Much of the game plays out in this way; filled with events, accompanied by music and cinematic camera choices, which feel loaded with significance even when their relationship to the overarching narrative is totally unclear. Even so, certain themes are apparent throughout: in particular, climate change and labor politics. In a 2017 interview, Kanaga describes Oikospiel as a “propaganda game” which aims to connect these two themes, “a feverish mirror to these kinds of entanglements that need to be considered” (Gordon). Rather than draw these connections explicitly, however, the game presents us with a barrage of signifiers (wind turbines, labor unions, melting ice, industrial equipment, …), and lets our turbulent videogame consciousness throw up associations and correspondences between them. Lewis Gordon writes: “Kanaga works with icons, potent signifiers smashed against one another, the connective tissue and meaning splattered against the screen.” This rich, tangled network of affects and associations may be hard to consciously make sense of, but following Gillmurphy, this may be exactly appropriate for the videogame format, allowing the work of interpretation to take place at a subconscious level instead.
Oikospiel has several things in common with ‘flatgames’, a genre of short-form homebrew videogame which Gillmurphy puts forward as an example of the possibilities of consciousness churn. Like flatgames, Oikospiel relies heavily on a few conventional ‘readymade’ mechanics (like the 3D movement system, camera, dialogue, etc). Also, both Oikospiel and flatgames are marked by the presence of what Gillmurphy calls “overexpressive content”, meaning “things which carry a larger load of affect and association than their structural role necessarily requires”. This phrase well describes the nature of the prefab assets that Kanaga uses heavily throughout the game: for example, the collection of film posters, medieval illustrations and dog photos that hang on the walls of the Koch Games office (Act 1, scene 5), or the animated 3D monkey in the first scene of the prelude, which sits atop a grand piano making expressive gestures that seem out of place relative to its minor role in the scene.
Gillmurphy argues that the flat visuals, over-expressive content, and simple mechanics of flatgames force us to consider the videogame as something that takes place materially, on a screen, rather than as a fundamentally abstract mechanical system. That is, we are confronted with the “material sensuousness of objects, drawings, lines of text … as things in themselves”, rather than as mere “projections of some ultimately underlying system.” Oikospiel is mostly rendered in 3D perspective, not flat, but its use of over-expressive content has a similar effect. Nearly every object in the game, like the wildly-gesticulating monkey, seems to have its own reason for existing, a ‘life of its own’ outside the narrative and mechanical structure of the game. We are asked to consider each object as something with its own individual emotive and material qualities, rather than as a mere component in an overarching system.
One way in which Oikospiel differs sharply from flatgames is its aforementioned liberal use of paidia-infused interactive audiovisual effects. Whereas the materiality of flatgames is typically limited to the visual plane, I want to suggest that Oikospiel does something similar in another (higher-order) sensory dimension, the sense of weight and texture that responsive mechanics evoke; namely, game feel. This term was popularized by Steve Swink in his 2008 book of the same name, and further explored by Brendan Keogh, who argues — mirroring Gillmurphy’s comments on flatgames — that game feel and audiovisual surface are just as fundamental as game mechanics in the construction of player experience:
… to appreciate how a video game feels, to perceive its material form, is to appreciate the irreducible sensorial experience, wherein the resistance of springs beneath buttons, visual flourishes, audio cues, and mechanical organization combine to provide tactility, texture, and tangibility to the screen imagery. (Keogh 159)
Oikospiel is brimming with carefully crafted audio-visual-tactile sensations. As an example, in one of the top-down mouse-controlled sections of the game, there is an area with two squares bearing fire and ice textures respectively. When the cursor hovers over the fire square, the music is dark, a violin melody backed by brooding timpani rolls. When the cursor moves to the ice square, the music shifts smoothly, leaving the central melody intact, but replacing the timpani with tinkling bells. This mechanic, like many others in the game, unifies multiple sensory dimensions: the visual texture of the environment, the musical texture, and the tactile motion of the player’s hand on the mouse…
It’s worth noting the close connection between game feel and the microscopic churning feedback loop that concerns Gillmurphy. Brendan Keogh makes a similar connection, via Kanaga’s own description of game feel as “input-microrhythm”:
Regarding videogames in particular, Kanaga points to the ‘rhythms’ of play and movement, describing Swink’s notion of game feel as gaming’s “input-microrhythm”: that flowing feedback loop of input and output, input and output that is the player caught up in the cybernetic circuit, the pleasure of acting and the pleasure of being acted upon. (Keogh 167)
That is, what we call game feel is the way a game behaves at the most rapid, microscopic levels of interaction—the same level at which consciousness churn expresses itself. Flatgames largely avoid any experimentation at this level. They may be expressive in terms of visual and textual material, but unsurprisingly, they feel flat to play. Oikospiel mirrors the expressive sensuality of flatgames, but in a way that more fully explores the affordances of consciousness churn, expanding into a new sensual dimension: that of feel.
Oikospiel is a game unlike any other—it departs from convention in multiple distinctive ways, and so perhaps demands an unconventional analysis. Gillmurphy’s concept of consciousness churn applies to videogames in general, but it finds an especially stark expression here in Oikospiel. The disjointed narrative, use of diverse reappropriated assets, and ever-present interactive texture, are all unified in the way that they relate to consciousness churn. The game constantly responds to and affirms consciousness churn, takes advantage of its narrative affordances, and as Gillmurphy advocates, reasserts the aural, visual, and tactile sensory surface of the videogame. If our basic experience of videogames is one of twitchy interaction and barely-conscious symbolism, then Oikospiel shows us that we need not see this as a limitation—instead, videogames can be a space to experiment with this aspect of experience.
Works Cited
Caillois, Roger. Man, Play and Games. University of Illinois Press, 2001.
Gillmurphy, Stephen. “Output Lag”. my friend pokey, 2017. Accessed April 2024.
Gordon, Lewis. “David Kanaga’s Dog Opera, ‘Oikospiel’, Is Delirious Protest Art”.Vice, 2017. Accessed April 2024.
Jarry, Alfred. Ubu Roi: drame en cinq actes en prose. Mercure de France, 1896.
Kanaga, David. Oikospiel Book 1. 2017, Microsoft Windows, macOS.
Kanaga, David. “Played Meaning (Concerning the Spiritual in Games)”. 2012. Accessed April 2024.
Keogh, Brendan. A Play of Bodies: A Phenomenology of Videogame Experience. RMIT University, 2015. Accessed April 2024.
Nintendo. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. 1998, Nintendo 64.
Pipkin, Everest. “An Interview with Dog Opera manager and Koch Games employee David Kanaga, on Oikospiel, Book I”. 2017. Accessed April 2024.
Swink, Steve. Game Feel: A Game Designer’s Guide to Virtual Sensation. Morgan Kaufmann Game Design Books, 2008.
Valve. Half-Life. 1998, Microsoft Windows.