I’ve been following the development of Despelote since I first caught wind of it NYU Game Center showcase (or at least I think that’s where I first saw it) some years ago. I was happy to see that its release at the start of this month was widely celebrated, and I’m so happy for Julián and Sebastian (the co-developers) to see it making the rounds at indie festivals. The game always stood out to me as having a unique visual style that blends 3D scans, lidar-like textures, and 2D billboard characters/illustrations. In addition, it’s been in a “pool” of games I’ve been collecting that utilize diaristic storytelling. These games fall under the loose umbrella of “Essay Games.” This designation is not my studio, but rather a… trend(?) I’ve observed in indie games and solo-developer projects.
Though I have a very solid idea of what “Essay Games” are, I realize that I haven’t really written/published much about this concept beyond a couple of conference papers/presentations. So I wanted to write about this game, but also write about how it works as an essayistic work of interactive storytelling.
For starters, the framing of Despelote is very “neat.” The game uses chapters and repeatable game spaces to investigate incremental environmental changes. By this, I mean that the player revisits locations frequently and encounters NPCs in the central square/park/neighborhood over and over. Each chapter is one stage of Ecuador’s march toward World Cup qualification in 2001, facing off against football giants like Argentina, Colombia, and Brazil. Even though the game explores national identity and politics, the framing of those (somewhat large) motifs is done quite locally. We see the same lovers picnicking, the same joggers, the same store clerks, the same neighborhood friends over and over, and get little slices of how their lives are changing. Through these loops, we see what a lot of narrative games rarely accomplish: development.
This process is often subtle and not obvious to the player at the onset. Each day or “chapter,” we see the community responding to the previous match as well as larger political events unfolding in Ecuador. For every match, the player is acutely aware of the stakes these games hold for individuals in our community. How people internalize their national pride and outwardly hypothesize what these games mean for the country at large is so wonderfully articulated by the excellent banter between the parents and the snippets of conversation overheard on the streets.
But what’s masterful about this framing is that the designers pair the rising tensions, the hopes and dreams of the national team’s road toward the World Cup, with more pressing concerns of the country’s populace. In doing so, each match becomes an emotional milestone for character development. We see our community struggle with the emotional rollercoaster of the national team’s performance on a global stage. The attitude of the neighborhood shifts between celebration and tension. The highs and lows of these games (and their significance juxtaposed against larger political strife) are etched into the actions of ardent fans waving flags on street corners, as well as dismissed by the aloof young adults focusing on more immediate concerns (like a crumbling economy). Through each “loop,” we witness faith tested, nerves frayed, and heartbreak mended by residents of a country striving for stability and recognition.
The process of playing through the complexities of this moment for Ecuador is precisely the kind of essayistic storytelling that inspires my creative practice. Though I often cite essayistic experimental filmmaking (ala Chris Marker or Chantal Ackermann) as the primary critical/conceptual source for Essay Games, literary non-fiction is also a key influence. In the case of Despelote, I can’t help but think about the writing of George Perec. As a central member of the OULIPO group, Perec loved playful experimentation with formal constraints (a passion perhaps shared by many game designers). But the comparison I wanted to make with Despelote was with his work, Species of Spaces.
In this work, Perec revisits a childhood neighborhood several times and makes unsentimental, yet poetic, observations about local changes. What the author chooses to focus on, highlight, and muse about becomes a larger reflection of Perec’s traumatic past. Through each “loop” (as it were), the stories of the neighborhood become more knotted, intricate, but also ambiguous. Perec struggles to recollect everything (as anyone would), but chooses to leave in omissions to reinforce the fickleness of memory. Perec’s poetic essay shows how we attempt to reconcile the past by creating works of fiction.
Despelote does the same: we revisit a seemingly “complete” image of the designer’s past, only for them to admit to us that they had to take liberties with this historical retelling for the narrative to make sense. This creative decision highlights the slipperiness of memory but also our innate desire to understand (and narrativize) the messiness of history. Like Perec, Despelote’s designers opt for transparency as a gesture of authenticity. When the reality of the park that Despelote builds from is revealed to the player through imperfect and glitchy 3D scans, the narrative shifts toward the present. During this vignette, the narrator discusses some of the aftermath of Ecuador’s World Cup run, reflecting on the positive impact it had, while also acknowledging the current struggles the country still faces.
For Perec and Despelote, the essayistic formula combines documentary observation, personal narrative, and creative/critical commentary. But another hallmark of essayistic works is that they also contemplate the form of their medium to some extent; Marker or Orson Welles’s use of “the edit” in their work complicates viewers’ understanding of time, linearity, and photographic “truth.” For “Essay Games,” this typically manifests (unsurprisingly) in gameplay (though it can also occur in the writing/subject matter as well).
In this way, what struck me about playing Despelote is how it utilizes common design conventions in unconventional ways. Because, at its core, Despelote is an open-world game. Although it has tighter boundaries than the prototypical game in this genre, Despelote fundamentally asks players to go forth from a hub space, explore, experience the environment, engage with NPCs, and return to the hub at a given interval/time. This design convention not only sets up a very rewarding “loop” but also establishes player expectations focused around familiar gameplay patterns.
Besides this being “smart game design,” the utilization of these design conventions at a smaller scale touches on what open-world games (and games that use open-world mechanics like MMOs) can do better than other genres. That is, namely, a focus on the importance of community. In open-world games, the player is presented with seemingly endless options to explore. But to ground the player, open-world games utilize communities–whether by NPC or multiplayer interaction–as a focal point of navigation and “expression.” Open-world games without a strong sense of community often fall flat because the player doesn’t understand the stakes of their interactions. Though these communities can be “artificial” in that they are designed to serve a particular gameplay purpose (forming raiding parties, assigning quests, selling loot, advancing plot, etc.) they are instrumental in making the player feel like the (often times quite large) world they’re inhabiting is cohesive and approachable.
Despelote borrows from open-world design conventions to not only situate the player in a potentially unfamiliar time and place, but also the reinforce the important role that community played in this historical moment. Without community, Despelote‘s introspective musings would not only feel out of place, but the gameplay wouldn’t inspire the player to explore and interact in any meaningful way (which is what makes Despelote so fun and engaging in the first place). This might seem obvious to anyone who’s played the game, but for a second, imagine if this game were instead a deck-builder, or a visual novel, or a third-person platformer. One could conceptualize different ways to tell this story through different genres, but none of them feel right. I admit this could be a kind of silly exercise, but as a designer, I think that so much of the unsung work of creating a game is finding the right fit for your material.
Whether deliberately or not, Despelote nails this by pairing game mechanics, critical voice, and personal narrative. It is exactly the kind of design practice central to what I identify as “essay games,” and Despelote is a superb example of this technique at peak execution.
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