Dear Phoenix,
I closed my last letter by saying that it is difficult to write about Act IV, and then I played Act V. I have forty-three pages of notes on Kentucky Route Zero’s acts and interludes (and I haven’t yet played The Death of the Hired Man. I had to go back to Act I to unlock it). Just three of those pages cover Act V. One note simply reads “God, the sunrise is beautiful.”
Of course, notes or not, there’s a lot to say about Act V, especially jumping off the article you cited in your last letter by Yussef Cole pointing toward theatre as a frame for thinking about KRZ, not just in terms of the way the experience is presented, but as a way to talk about how game spaces are different than the film spaces (and thus that there are maybe limits in how useful film language and theory can be in talking about games).
Ever since Eisenstein, we’ve talked about film as a medium of discontinuity — the essential language of film is the cut, and the way that the sound and visuals on each side of a cut speak to each other (or demand that we make them speak to each other) is what makes film film.
Video games, on the other hand, are a medium of extension — pixel arranged next to pixel in order to create the illusion of space, be that two-dimensional, three-dimensional, or something in-between. That is, while there are “cuts” between levels and non-interactive narrative scenes, video game spaces are much more operations of continuity than non-continuity. (And the exceptions to this condition — think of Resident Evil and how it makes the game camera jump in non-intuitive ways as the player moves through the game’s environments — ask that non-continuity to perform specific work.) Film is a medium of assemblage. Games are a medium of navigation. In film a character might jump from a building and the camera is as likely as not to decline to show the entirety of that character’s fall, cutting perhaps from the moment the character’s feet leave the room to the moment they crash into the dumpster several floors below (perhaps, for comic rather than mimetic effect, including a brief shot, from a third angle, of the character’s arms and legs flailing as they fall). In Super Mario Bros., there cannot be a cut between Mario leaping off the ground and his feet landing on the bricks suspended in the air above his head. It would be a filmic nightmare to force the viewer to watch this action performed in exactly the same manner the hundreds of times required to complete the game’s eight worlds. But as a gameplay element, it’s necessary and even enjoyable.
As players in interactive media, we seem to like to think of ourselves as co-authors, and there is even a way in which this is true, but it is the way in which the consumption of any media (and not just “interactive” media) is an act of reconstitution, in which we are the co-authors of our experience of the media object rather than co-authors of the object itself. It seems much more productive to think about the player instead as an actor, and the choices available to the player in the light of the choices available to an actor as they consider and create their performance. It’s meaningful that we don’t usually consider actors as authors in the same sense as the scriptwriter or even the director, and while there’s a tremendous amount of agency available to the actor in their performance — why else would casting be so critical? — it is an agency that exists within rigid and specific constraints.
If game theory must ultimately break even from theatre and performance theory, however, it must be in creating a language where the actor is not creating a performance for an audience, but that recognizes that in a game that the actors are the audience.
Not unlike the way in which the player inhabits the role of the Bar-fly in The Entertainment, observing from the stage, and shaping their own experience of the play while never exactly changing it.
And if continuity and performance are two of the major tools available to think about KRZ — that is, how is it that the player moves through KRZ’s weird spaces, and how do they react to the characters and events they encounter? — it may be worthwhile to consider the third of these tools, KRZ’s insistent discontinuities, through a theatrical frame rather than a filmic lens.
Because KRZ’s discontinuities aren’t cuts — that is, they aren’t primarily juxtapositions. They are voids, sometimes aesthetically and at other times quite literally. Nearly three and a half years elapsed between the release of acts IV and V. It was a long time to process Conway’s departure on one’s own.
One might reasonably expect, given the conventional vocabulary of the game experience, that Act V would offer some sort of an opportunity to redeem or rescue Conway. Even now, I can’t stop thinking about the secondhand IOU from the Hard Times distillery that Junebug has been carrying ever since her performance at The Lower Depths. It even shows up in the player inventory, but it doesn’t do anything.
If KRZ has regularly alienated the player from identification with its characters, asking them instead to consider their actions through videos and documents considered at a remove in time by faceless characters who are frequently suspicious or dismissive of the motives and actions of the player characters, then Act V brings this gesture to a culmination, allowing the player to interact only through the movements of a dragonfly who is chased by a stray cat. There is no player character, and if the conversational options seem to allow the player to determine who will choose to leave the unnamed, ruined town and who will remain to rebuild, the framing of the ending makes it unclear finally whether anyone actually leaves or stays.
This is the language of Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre, which seeks to interrupt audience identification with the actors, keep the proscenium always visible, and offer an experience of self-sufficient elements rather than an organic dramatic progression of scenes. As the player, we are never really Conway or Shannon, much less Ezra, Junebug, or any of the other characters we meet and with whom we travel for a time. The goal isn’t to save any of them. There isn’t really a goal. We can try to understand them if we wish, recognize their world, perhaps, and we can mourn their losses.
I wept when the Neighbors were buried. If I am honest, I am having difficulty even writing about it now.
I’m going to resist the temptation to draw parallels between KRZ’s funereal conclusion and the way in which this year feels like a time of endless mourning. There is no way Cardboard Computer could have known, and KRZ would have been difficult, compelling, and beautiful even without its unfortunate timeliness. It is far too specific for such a sloppy analogy.
That said, I am glad that I got to play Act V this year. I needed it.
I hope you are well. I hope it is a better year ahead.
~ G.
Dear Gavin,
While I wasn’t necessarily stumped on what to write about regarding this final act I found that at first I was coming up with a lot of observations that came across facile. “This act is a manifold ending” — obvious. “5 Dogwood Drive is an empty stage or frame; it was about the journey and not the destination all along” — reductive. “Act V is like the calm after a storm” — well, duh. There’s something slippery about Act V, and more than once I felt that perhaps I was missing something. Something grand yet very apparent. Like that sunrise; it was indeed quite a sight. Perhaps I’m just used to having something complex in KRZ to latch onto and pick apart, like a cat given a particularly tangled knot of yarn.
The above is not to say that Act V isn’t complex, but it’s much more elusive in its elegant simplicity. I agree that having the framing of theatre is a helpful tool for orienting oneself not just for this act, but for this entire surreal sojourn. The role you play in this act and its performance is what struck me the most. At first it was the most quizzical thing; why am I cat chasing a dragonfly? What does that have to do with the culmination of the game’s plot? Is it to say all of these happenings were truly happenstance? Is it to show indifference to the cast and their plights (whatever they may truly be)? But then when you think of the interludes and the other roles you inhabit, like (as you pointed out) the Bar-fly, things start to become a little more grounded. I’ll return to this shortly.
By happy accident I had unlocked The Death of the Hired Man by the end of Act V and it’s a lot more definitive in its sequential positioning as an epilogue than the previous four were. Yet the structure of the final interlude is still up for interpretation, consisting of you playing as Emily watching the old TV set in The Lower Depths as she listens to Carrington and Harry have a conversation about what became of the former’s ambitious experimental play. In my playthrough, my suggestions for a performance venue (Equus Oils) led his play to ruin and obscurity. But the only action the player can perform as Emily is to switch (or not switch) TV channels. You can even decide to leave the set on the static between stations (now I’m humming Junebug’s music again). Arguably as a player, all we ever do when gaming is sit in front of a screen and give input. Emily is another instance of the actor as the audience, an extension of the Bar-fly role.
The cat-and-dragonfly role is part of Cardboard Computer’s theatrical rhetoric as well, positing that while we are interacting with things in games, we are often much more passive and at a remove from what’s going on than we think we are. Your Brecht reference is really helpful here, as we navigate the haunted town. We may mew at characters, hiss here at a colony of bats in a barn, or yowl into the well (literally yelling into a void), but ultimately we are each still a witness. You do “direct” conversations here and there, and choose which reveries the townsfolk and ghosts reveal, but beyond that we are there to observe the drawing of the half-curtains as it were. The thoroughness of Cardboard Computer’s artistic direction make them impressive half-curtains, to say the least.
I found throughout my playthrough of Act V that I’m more predisposed to be aware of KRZ’s aesthetic discontinuities than the literal ones. After all, I played this act for the first time as part of the complete “TV Edition,” so the fragmentation and contemplation of events as you waited during the almost 4 years-long intermission couldn’t be part of my mindset. But I do appreciate the void as a motif throughout Act V.
For instance, the well at the centre of town is a void. Yet the well is also a place of emergence, since it is a direct passage from the Zero to 5 Dogwood Drive, which is also a void or a space of potential. I enjoyed how Shannon and the others could imagine different uses for the luminous vastness of the building, including a home and a concert venue. In my final scene, Dogwood Drive seems ready for a new life, even if it isn’t clear yet what shape that new life will take.
Although Cardboard Computer leaves interpretation up to the player, as always, there were echoes here and there of that famous and often quoted sentiment that people are “condemned to be free.” It’s up to the player to make their own meaning. As such, I noticed that in my explorations as the cat, I was essentially performing a “widening gyre” about the town, which put me in my mind of Yeats’ Second Coming. While the end of KRZ is not nearly as dire as the landscape of that poem, there was a sense that the town’s centre couldn’t hold after the storm, either physically or culturally. There was a drowning of innocence of sorts with the loss of the Neighbours, who symbolized the town’s heritage and how it was enfolded into their everyday life before the storm. As you said, you choose who will stay and who will leave the town, and I chose to have Junebug, Johnny, and Ezra become a found family who may or may not stick around (or together, for that matter).
While I didn’t weep at the Neighbours’ funeral, I was still suffused with the melancholy of that scene. We are visiting a town built upon a grave, what seems like mere days before the Consolidated Power Company is due to gentrify it, forcing some if not all the inhabitants to scatter to the winds. Someone describes themselves as the derelict town library’s “only next-of-kin.” Another line that the player can choose for Ron to respond to Clara as she speaks of needing to get home to her dying uncle read as almost child-like in its nonsensical plea: “But with everyone gone, who’ll feed these ghosts?”
The widening gyre also visually made me think of the gallows humour of other acts again as well. You circle the well at the centre of town, as the town’s way of life potentially circles the drain. Coming full circle also comes to mind since this is the end of KRZ’s tale, but since you aren’t really ending in the same place you started, it’s more like you’re closing a loop. As far as we know, none of the crew is going to return to the Zero, thus ending the pattern of briefly bobbing to the surface before plunging down into that underworld once more. But KRZ’s unique brand of humour serves another function as well, one that ties directly into the game’s theatricality.
KRZ’s humour is often self-reflexive, commenting on the limitations of technology and the point-and-click adventure and early text games to which it pays homage. Colossal Cave Adventure, like many adventure games of its era, struggled with its players pushing against the limits of the vocabulary it had for inputting instructions. One solution for mitigating the awkwardness of seeing the seams of the game was not only to acknowledge those seams but to offer nonsensical responses to the player.
Audrey Anable in her study of video games and affect points out that KRZ references this tactic via scenes like Conway needing to write a poem to gain access to the computer at the gas station, or selecting the option ‘Games’ and receiving the ungrammatical response “‘Games’ is not real.” She goes on to posit that the point-and-click dialogue, which has the illusion of seeming like a branching path narrative also points towards the limitations of many systems these characters face such as: “language, networks, bureaucracies, families, histories” to name just a few. I strongly agree with these points especially in regards to KRZ mimicking old-school adventure games. By consciously joking about the limitations that the designers themselves baked in for the purpose of acknowledging and exposing the seams of their game, KRZ sticks to its theatrical framing even at the granular level of text and mechanics.
I’d like to switch gears a bit, and address your point about the discontinuity of the IOU. I chose to look at that item in the inventory as a hopeful marker. The IOU may mean nothing for Conway, but it may mean everything. Perhaps Junebug is completely indifferent to what the IOU means. But she likes to be specific, and she’s no stranger to exchanging favours. Another item I found just as mysterious was the twenty-sided die that the player can pick up in the basement of Equus Oils while Emily, Bob, and Ben as they played tabletop games. The trio reads out the rules of what each number on the die represents in terms of a player’s fate, but other than rolling the die in your inventory, the only other function the die serves is to disappear when Conway does in Act IV. Perhaps Conway holds onto this token while he works at the distillery, a reminder of his journey or a marker of how random chance can impact the trajectory of one’s life. Or perhaps it’s still in Conway’s jacket that he gave to Shannon.
I feel grateful that Cardboard Computer designed this game with mystery as a core design principle. I think KRZ’s mysteries are what keep its spaces (both mental and physical) believable and open to possibility, despite how abstract and allegorical those spaces can be. Although I didn’t have to wait for this conclusion like you and other players did, I still can’t believe I’m here at the end of a decade-long journey. It’s hard not to feel wistful about it.
I hope you are well too, Gavin. May next year be the antithesis of this one. And may whatever roads we travel be done so with intention.
~ P.
About the Authors
Phoenix Simms is a writer and critic living in the Maritimes of Canada. Her work has appeared in Third Person (now archived on her Medium blog) and Hand Eye Society’s “Six for Bricks: A Game Jam” Zine.
Gavin Craig is a writer and critic who lives in Maryland. His work has appeared in Unwinnable, Electric Literature, Snarkmarket, Kill Screen, Bit Creature, and Videodame.
