Did you happen to play Firewatch?  It had a pretty sexy marketing campaign back in 2015-16 when it came out, sexy enough to make certain reviewers decry it as the videogame equivalent of "Oscar-bait."  I suppose it might be that, if we were to take the Academy at their word - if we were to accept that an Oscar is awarded for outstanding technical or artistic merit.  As it stands, Oscars are generally awarded for Outstanding Marketing Merit in the category of Subject Matter Interesting to White Men, video games are praised for their consumer value per dollar if at all, and Firewatch got tepid praise from the pretentious and buyer's remorse from the disengaged players of games with more guns.

I find Firewatch interesting because even a lot of the players who enjoyed the game for its artistic value and atmosphere were seemingly frustrated with the ending, found the game's world unresponsive and the elements of player choice unrewarding... and then I sort of understand why we're having such trouble getting a grasp on games as art - because in most cases, we don't even perceive the whole art piece, having started from the assumption that our form and manner of engagement with it is meaningless and aesthetically or narratively pointless.  We don't consciously register many of the mechanisms by which games convey meaning and narrative, and so we assume they're not even trying.

In the same way that someone analyzing Mark Rothko's paintings will understand them much better having visited, or even heard of, the Rothko Chapel, art that explores the boundaries of a medium is often hard to parse without stepping back to examine everything about the experience - the framing or presentation of it, the title of the piece, the structure of the text in literature, the casting or marketing in theater or film.

These metatextual elements do not enhance our interpretation when we're trying to do a 'death-of-the-author' style dissection of the art as presented, but when we're making decisions about what art to consume and buy in our daily lives, we're mostly not analyzing it that way.  We don't buy things based on some objective standard of artistic merit, we buy them because something about that meta-experience catches our attention - the color of the packaging, the person selling it, the item's immediate utility and price, the novelty or popularity of it.  

In the context of making purchasing decisions, the meta elements of art are often more impactful than the artistic elements of it, and this only becomes more true when we're talking about a medium that requires more from the audience to engage with it than any other medium to date.  We're still debating which kinds of interactivity count as "gameplay," but if we can set that aside for a moment, we can perceive that the meta-elements of any art determine how we engage with it in a way that deeply affects whether or not we'll enjoy it.

Remember Pan's Labyrinth?  Remember the marketing campaign that made Guillermo del Toro's very adult, traditional (in the Grimm tradition) fairy tale seem like an ethereal kids' fantasy movie, only for thousands of moms and five-year-olds to flee the theater twenty minutes in, when a man dies of a graphic broken-bottle face-stabbing?  Yeah, that's what I'm talking about.

People who wanted Guillermo del Toro's brand of grotesque beauty didn't see it in the marketing and might have missed the movie, and people who wanted the movie sold by the trailers were outraged and horrified.  I'm willing to bet a lot of both would have been fine with the experience as presented, and willing to look for the artistic value in it, had it conformed at least somewhat to what they thought they were signing up for.  Same as someone who likes horror novels will scoff at the happy endings in your adventure stories, someone who likes Michelangelo might have trouble seeing the artistic value in Rothko, but that's not because the value isn't there, it's because it's not the kind of art they understand and enjoy, so they're not receiving the band of data on which it's trying to communicate.

Engaging with games is always going to be a higher barrier to entry, just based on the fact that if you don't play a lot of games, many of the basic mechanical assumptions, systems and shorthands that games use to onboard the player and convey subtext will be totally opaque to you.  A non-gamer would take Firewatch as presented, learn WASD movement there in Henry's shoes, and absorb the game's narrative from the overt text and onscreen events.  That person wouldn't find the combination of text storytelling and immersive 3D gameplay unusual.  That person wouldn't be disappointed that the wilderness isn't stuffed with collectibles to find, because they've never played an open world RPG, so they didn't go into the woods looking for treats.  That person might be disappointed with the narrative, find the stakes too low, the story threads too unemotional and unresolved, because they didn't register things the game was communicating through its mechanics.  That person, overall, would probably conclude that the game is beautiful, well-written, and falls flat at the end.  Based on a scan of the game's reviews on Metacritic, this is the bottom of a shallow inverted bell curve, the least common opinion among a mass of extreme reactions.

The extreme reactions come in one of two flavors: the negative, of which there are a great many, and the positive, of which there are a small handful.  These, too, are all very similar to one another - they make the same points, cite the same events, and complain about the same things.  The one thing every review, good and bad, seems to agree on is that the ending to Firewatch is a disappointment that fails to resolve any of the plot points it spun out or offer any change in outcome based on the player's choices.  This opinion is shared by consumers and reviewers, those who hated the game and those who loved it.  Almost all of the public response to Firewatch, in other words, misses the point of Firewatch, because they're not perceiving how the game is talking to them, and so they assume it has nothing to say.

So here's where I break down the game and show you what I mean.  Spoilers ahead, but if you're worried about that with this game, I should tell you... you're already approaching it the wrong way.

We start the game with a story in text form, a story that lets us choose a few irrelevant details - the name of your dog, what you do on a date, that sort of thing - interspersed with our main character, Henry, making his way up to a firewatch tower in the woods of Wyoming.  This intro is where people start feeling emotional dissonance, because this text is actually what the game is about, but none of the things you DO in the game relate to it at all.  

A lot of games actually pull something like this - the Dark Souls series is a great example.  Most Dark Souls fans will admit with a laugh that they haven't got any idea what the games are really about - the lore is mostly in item descriptions and throwaway dialogue lines, almost buried - but it's also that the overarching plot of the setting and the series, the point to everything you actually accomplish in the games, is completely unrelated to the plots of the characters and enemies you'll meet.  Each individual character and event matters mostly as a symbol or representation of theme.  This creates - say it with me - ludonarrative dissonance, a case where the game's theme or story doesn't feel like it fits with the mechanics you're using or the actions you're asked to take.

It's unfortunate that "ludonarrative dissonance" is such a buzzword now, because I think that makes people perceive it as an unmitigated flaw, something to be avoided at all costs, when in fact that dissonance is one of the tools games have to communicate with us.  In the same way that an author might construct a sentence oddly, just to make us slow down and really think about the text as we read, or a cinematographer might overexpose a shot to give a scene a chaotic, overwhelming mood, an artist will often create this kind of intentional dissonance between elements of their art to call attention to something or provoke a particular emotional response.  Firewatch does this almost constantly.

The plot of the game involves you discovering a mysterious person in the woods, chasing down suspicious signals and messages, growing increasingly paranoid about a government conspiracy - all ideas any gamer would be well-versed in, ready to sink their teeth into.  None of these things give you a full mouthful to chew on, though.  They don't matter, and what's more, they're boring.  The signals in the woods were mostly planted by students studying deer.  The person watching you is a nobody, someone more afraid of you than dangerous to you.  Not a single plot thread goes totally unresolved, but the resolutions aren't satisfying or exciting.  This is because the plot is a distraction, what the game is doing with its hands while it's talking to you.  The mechanics - and lack thereof - are the real text here.

You strike up a relationship with Delilah, your supervisor, via the radio.  As the only real human contact the game offers, it's understandable that players fixated on this relationship and attempted to "progress" it in the same way most games would permit - a series of dialogue choices ending in a vigorous session of pants-on snuggling set to swelling strings.  These players were disappointed that they didn't get to meet up with Delilah at the end, seeing the game as a choice between Delilah and Julia, Henry's absent wife.

Impersonal Tragedy

Julia has early-onset dementia, and that is the underlying theme that I think most people are missing when they look at the game - the internal conflict of caring for someone you love after an impersonal tragedy takes all the joy of their company from you.  The game only asks one meaningful question, and it's right at the beginning - "Will Henry go back to his relationship with Julia?"  The ending doesn't give you an unequivocal answer, not because there isn't one in the game, but because your actions and behavior as Henry in this situation should have told you who your Henry is and what he wants to do now.  If you don't know by the end of the game if Henry will go back to Julia or not... you haven't been paying attention.

This is the theme of Firewatch - the commitment and selflessness required to look after something that fundamentally cannot reward you for all the energy you put in.  The theme is there in the sparseness of the environment and its fidelity to the landscapes it's representing, in the murderous banality of the traps in which each of the main characters is caught.  

This job Henry's taken, the job of firewatch or forest ranger, is not a rewarding job.  It's lonely, it's isolating, it doesn't pay especially well, and when it's not dangerous, it's dangerously boring.  You do this job for one of two reasons - you value the land you're looking after, or you value the isolation it provides.  These positions are represented by the two other prominent characters in the story, Delilah and Ned Goodwin.

Ned is the creeper in the woods, but he's not really dangerous.  He's a man who went out camping with his kid, and when his kid was accidentally killed rock-climbing, was too afraid of the potential consequences to return to society.  Ned has been living in the woods for years, and represents the escapist option here, the end result of a chain of decisions that started with abandoning a person he loved when they were innocently and irrevocably hurt...

Just like Henry has done to Julia.  Henry is shown an image of himself, the rotting of the self that results when we turn away in fear from our life, willing to give up on human experience entirely just to avoid confronting our mistakes, willing to lose ourselves to our inhumanity if it means we never have to look in a mirror again. Or, ah - what was that, oh Tiny Samuel Johnson who lives on my shoulder?

"He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man." - Dr. Samuel Johnson

Delilah did it too.  She tells Henry in one of their conversations that her boyfriend ended their relationship during a period of profound grief after a relative's death, and she abandoned him to take this job, to make the break complete.  A tragedy unrelated to either of them hurt her partner, and when it made her partner unable to give her anything back... she quit.

The ludonarrative dissonance is part of this theme.  The indifference of the wilderness, the transitory and pointless involvement of random elements - the teen girls drinking at the lake who leave their beer cans scattered around, the station in the woods - these all form part of the game's thesis.  Environmental pressures with no inherent meaning or perspective provide a looming threat via forest fire or falling rocks - this is the meaningless cruelty of life, pain that no one sent and that teaches you nothing because it's not about you - it's just happening to you.  That's something gamers, unlike readers or cinemaphiles, are very unused to experiencing - a story that is happening to them but not about them.

None of the stories in this game are about the person experiencing them, and that's what makes them so painful.  Ned Goodwin isn't really to blame for his son's death - certainly he could have been a better father, but his real failure is not his proximity to a horrible accident, but his refusal to take responsibility for it.  That's the thing right there, the game's point - it wasn't Ned's fault, but it was Ned's responsibility.

Firewatch wants to talk about feeling responsible for something, taking responsibility for something that isn't our fault because we are the one who can when the need arises.  Did you pick up the girls' beer cans around the lake?  There's no achievement for this, no objective tells you to do it and nothing notes whether or not you did at the end.  But that's what you're here to do, isn't it?  To take care of this landscape, to look after it.  You didn't put the beer cans there, but you pick them up because that's who you are supposed to be in this game, the role Henry is trying to learn to play - someone who takes responsibility for the thing they've promised to protect, even if you're not the one who harmed it.  Someone who stops and picks up the pieces when no one else will.

Every part of the ludonarrative of this game is conveying the same message.  Your choices don't matter, not really, because the tragedy that is happening in Henry's life doesn't care about his choices, or Julia's - it's happening now, it's not fixable, and no choice he's ever made could have prevented it.  But your choices tell you how Henry copes with that lack of real control, how he responds to the inevitable moment we all have to face at some point in our lives: the moment when we realize that random chance and factors beyond our control will eventually take away all of our choices.

The only thing that saves us in those moments is the thing Henry failed to give Julia - a promise that when the end comes, impersonal, people will stand together against it regardless of our culpability.  We promise each other when we marry, when we have kids, explicitly.  It's part of the traditional vows - "for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health..."

What are we saying there if not "when the world is cruel to you, I will be kind.  When the world is senseless, I will try to make sense of it with you.  When time takes everything we are, robs us of everything we love about each other, I will remember this promise, remember the reasons I care for you today on the day when our reasons crumble.  When the world is indifferent to you, I will take responsibility."

Your Ending is Your Own

On the last day, you can find Henry's wedding ring on his desk if you think to look before you leave.  You can put it on, if you want to, and if you do, it doesn't change the ending a bit... except that the hand you raise to help yourself into the helicopter at the end has a ring on it, or it doesn't.  

It doesn't tell you what Henry decides to do, because you already know.  Did you leave the beer cans laying around?  Trash the teen girls' camp?  Did you burn down the tent in the woods?  Did you get paranoid searching for the secret government conspiracy, desperate to believe that there's some greater meaning to your petty irritations?  Were you able, ultimately, to accept that most of the pain you experienced hasn't happened because you deserved it, but because you were there, and it doesn't alter your responsibilities in being there one tiny little bit?

Your ending is your own, it’s in you, in whether you walked this path with Henry and came to any conclusions about what he should do next from your time in the woods.  It's in whether you felt his pain resonate with other hard choices you’ve made for people you love, other promises you’ve kept or broken, other times the world has shown you, again, that it will give nothing back, and you’ve chosen to keep pushing forward anyway.

The people asking for a definitive ending, or more detailed resolutions to the game's side-plots, are feeling the same hurt, confused ache for agency and control that someone losing a loved one to early-onset dementia is feeling (though obviously to a different degree, not trying to draw a parity between a fictional experience of grief and a real one).  They want there to be a reason, but there's not.  They want to be able to say, "But I'm innocent, they are innocent, we didn't deserve this!"  But there's no judge to tell, no one who could reduce your sentence for good behavior.  It’s happening, and you don’t get to opt out, and looking for sense in it is a waste of time that only delays the moment when you act to mitigate the damage.

The fact is that shit happens.  We like to use our art to argue with reality about this, to imagine a universe where our choices shape the movements of the world, and when a piece of ostensibly escapist media presents us with an experience that echoes the powerlessness and fatalism we can get perfectly well at work, thanks... it's understandable that most people won't like it.  

Certainly Firewatch isn't perfect, no art could or should be - but it attempts to evoke an experience that is rare in its medium, that is rarely expressed in these terms and with this delicacy and tenderness.  That amount of investment on the dev's part warrants at least as much commitment on mine, to push through a sometimes-frustrating experience and consider that the frustration itself might be an intentional effect, to a purpose.  This is the real poetry of interactive art, its purposeful metatextual attempts to guide the player in engaging with it from the best angle, in the perfect frame of mind.

Firewatch is about how we deal with what we can't escape, and what we owe to ourselves in terms of upholding our commitments. We can decide that we are a victim, and flee from everything that once made us happy just to avoid a fate that feels unfair, fully identify our self with our suffering and nurture it close to us forever, like a bad tooth, always prodding at it to see if it still hurts just as much.

Or... we can decide that being here, making the choices we can, getting to continue participating and connecting in human life, is reason enough to take responsibility for protecting fragile things and fixing broken ones.  We can decide that it's not about fault, not about being a hero, not about winning or getting rewarded... it's just about the truth: we're the ones who are here now, when help is needed, and if we don't help, no one else will.