Meow Wolf and archival adventuring

I was recently in Albuquerque for a wedding (yay Liz and Tyler!) and was thrilled to be able to check out The House of Eternal Return, Meow Wolf's new Santa Fe art installation. In 2016, George R. R. Martin bought an abandoned bowling alley in Santa Fe and let the Meow Wolf art collective turn it into a 20,000 square foot immersive, a-linear sci-fi experience. You explore the house and ephemera of the fictional Selig family, crossing back and forth from their normal Victorian home to wildly unearthly environments created by the Seligs’ chaotic experiments with time, space, and death. Portals can be found in the most pedestrian of places—open the fridge and walk into a blinding white hallway that leads to Lucius Selig’s tasteless multiverse travel agency. Open the sliding doors there and you find yourself somewhere like “Saint Malibados: the most spectacular beach in the multiverse!” or “Carboniferous Island,” located on earth 300 million years ago and complete with “Gourmet paleo-dishes, prepared with locally sourced pre-extinct species of fish, and garnished with natural ferns[.]” If you read through the clues hidden within the house, however, you learn that Lucius Selig went mad with his power to create new worlds, began to claim the status of a god, and attracted the attention of The Charter, an ancient illuminati-esque force tasked with cleaning up exactly these sort of experiments.

You can treat the exhibition like a playground, as many of the children there were doing, but it’s most fun on a deeper narrative level: combing through the papers and bookshelves and picture albums and computer programs of the Seligs, trying to see how it all fits together. Lucius’ abilities, it turns out, were not innate. While attempting to make a hamster immortal (an experiment that ghoulishly succeeded), his father Emerson accidentally hit young Lucius with the right concatenation of sound waves to bring about the ability to traverse and create new worlds, a skill Lucius would later use to found his cultish “Inter-Dimensional Vacation Resort” and “Power of Positive Mechanics” movement. After Lucius loses his power (betrayed by his lover and acolyte Christian, who allies with the Charter after Lucius went too far), he encourages his nephew Lex to read through Emerson’s papers and conduct his own experiments, a process that results in Lex being trapped in another dimension. So the family tries to save him, which is why The Charter has frozen their home. There’s a lot more, but if you imagine a real-world Myst, you won’t be too far off.

This kind of immersive, site-specific performance is really hot these days. Punchdrunk and Wrights & Sites are two of the most famous companies doing similar work, but between the prevalence of Escape Rooms, walking performances, and increasingly immersive video game environments, Meow Wolf feels like an artwork of its time. And got me thinking a lot about how possible it might be to take over a castle in Wales for a few weeks with this kind of site-specific project.

It also reminded me a lot of a game mechanic I’ve been trying to place for awhile now: the archival adventure. It’s related to a puzzle game (see Myst, again), but it’s more text-based. An archival adventure makes you find and sort through a whole lot of textual items to knit together a narrative. It’s detective work, but the fun kind, where there are enough clues if you look for them, and you’re pretty sure that the payoff at the end will be interesting. Gone Home, walking sim extraordinaire, is an archival adventure: you wander around a deserted house, piecing together different family members’ personalities and experiences based on the letters and objects they leave behind. Her Story does it in a different medium—you search through a database of short clips on a police computer, hearing tiny bits of one woman’s testimony over the course of several months. At the beginning, you don’t even know what was the crime being investigated; by the end, you have scrawled pages full of notes and have come up with a series of increasingly convoluted theories about who she is, what she did, and why you (the player/character) cares so much about it.

Some thoughts on this:

1) Archival adventuring is non-violent and rather academic in tone. Perhaps violent things happened in the past, but you are the mere observer/recorder/detective of them.

2) Therefore, it's also passive (or to be more specific: non-interactive in the third Salen/Zimmerman sense of interactivity). You can't alter Meow Wolf. It's all sitting there, waiting for you to discover it or not. This, some argue, is what makes games like Gone Home not feel like games. You don't change the environment; the environment changes you as you better grok the narrative and your perception of the space alters along with your growing knowledge.

3) The experience of playing this kind of game reminds me a lot of reading a book, or getting to know a person you like. To quote Lizzy on Darcy: "I think Mr. Darcy improves on acquaintance...in essentials, I believe, he is very much what he ever was...when I said that he improved on acquaintance, I did not mean that either his mind or manners were in a state of improvement, but that from knowing him better, his disposition was better understood.'' The game, the text, the person unfolds themselves to your improved understanding.

4) The trick of designing this kind of game, then, is in divulging the information cleverly, in an order that feels expansive and evokes whatever you want it to evoke. In a novel, the author controls this dissemination of information artfully—crafting a series of events and narrator(s) that make sense, revealing smoothly what needs to be revealed and hiding the rest until later. A game (or a person) often does it a-linearly, and that a-linearity is a lot of what makes the game feel like a game—it feels more interactive because you pick the order, or feel like you do.

5) Unlike a game or novel, a person or an archive (which is just the ephemera of an important person) has no teleology. You might be digging around in a dead library, chasing loose ends that wither away, following what seems like a grand narrative arc but turns out to be dust. "Moving bones from one graveyard to another," as Kurt's dissertation advisor so eloquently put it several years ago, when we were both just starting the dissertation process.

6) One of my favorite parts of The House of Eternal Return, and something that distinguished it from an archival adventure video game like Gone Home, was the presence of real books. Not everything in the house was created intentionally to be in the house. Or, to be clearer: some of the objects inside were window dressing, meant to evoke tone rather than filled with clues. A video game could conceivably fill a bookshelf with books that contain no narrative spur, just to throw you off the track, but it usually doesn't. Usually, everything you can interact with in a video game is interact-able for a reason (here, interaction just means touchable, not alterable (Salen/Zimmerman type 1 or 2)). The presence of real books hidden among the hand-made pamphlets and journals and notes of the Selig clan meant that you were constantly on high alert, paging through "useless" material to find the stuff that would take you deeper into the story.

7) Half-boredom mixed with intermittent discovery feels a lot like flow. Boredom is good. Boredom is necessary for things to feel real, alive, not catering to your every enjoyment. An experience that's constantly stimulating might be fun, but it's clearly manufactured and feels like it.

8) People, too, need to feel non-teleological. Luckily, unless they are robots trying to please you, people are very good at not making sense, not "heading somewhere" as narratives. People are very good at being a-linear narratives. Robots less so.

9) Whelp, somehow I've gotten from Meow Wolf to sex robots, so I'm gonna stop here and a take a good look at my life.

#boredom #academic #WalkingSim #experience #performance