In Response to the Responses I Got For What I Said About Limbo

I like getting thoughtful and intelligent criticism of my work. I like reading what people had to say. It means I had enough of an effect on them to make them think and ad drive them enough to respond. And while I like the criticism, whether it agrees, disagrees, clarifies or whatever else, I also like responding back. I want to head off at the pass that I’m writing to the following in an effort to silence my critics. No, I’m responding to them the same way they responded to me. We call that a conversation.

Right after I wrote ‘Atmosphere is Not Enough‘ for Nightmare Mode, I got two written blog responses within days that I’ve been meaning to respond to myself. I’m a little late, but I still want to do it. So here are my musings.

The first is by Chloi Rad who went to the lengths of setting up a blog just to respond to my piece. I don’t know why he didn’t just respond in the comments, especially since as of writing this it’s the only post on the blog, but I still appreciate the effort. He also says he hasn’t played Another World yet; well I implore him to do so.

Chloi Rad says that I am misrepresenting the presentation of Limbo by condemning it for being open to interpretation and that its vagueness is an asset as it matches the oppressive nature of the world Limbo is portraying and thematically resonates with the mystery of waking up in such a world in the first place. He then goes on to give his own interpretation of what is happening in Limbo. Generally, I applaud this kind of thinking and yes interpretation can go many different ways and no single interpretation is flat out wrong so long as the text can support it. I have written on the nature of interpretation before, but not I’d like to add a caveat to it. While a work can have many interpretations and your interpretation is loosely supported by the Limbo text…there’s no other way to put this, you’re doing it wrong.

Before I used Mulholland Drive to show that multiple interpretations can exist for a vague, confusing and sometimes batshit insane work and be cohesive. The key is to finding a key that can unlock the obtuseness and interrelated meaning of all the elements. This is true for all works, but for most it is much more obvious and we don’t instinctively put it in same mental category. For instance, Die Hard is about family and coming together to defeat a humbug in time for Christmas time. Yes, it seems to go to absurd lengths when you boil it down to that, but it is true and is rather obvious about its intentions that people get it without too much hand wringing. Mulholland Drive is another matter altogether, but only in terms of degree. The two main interpretations that I am aware of it the death dream that latches on the key of the finale and explains the story backwards, unlocking the meaning of the duality the worlds and the more weird imagery. The other is that the blue box is a hypercube that crosses two parallel realities with the elements mirroring themselves with the worlds based on tragic or comedic drama subtypes. Both work because they latch onto different elements to unlock the rest of the meaning. But each one focus on one elements and everything else falls into place. Not so with Chloi Rad’s thesis.

He says several times suppose or what if or maybe to different elements to get them in line. He says that the boy in Limbo is the victim of a car crash and before he can go to the other world he must find his sister. Okay, simple enough. So begins by crossing the River Styx (nevermind that Limbo is on our side of the River Styx and not actually part of hell that the river is the barrier to, I put that mistake on the shoulders of the developers not Rad) and is in the forest to represent life flashing before his eyes. By itself that is an reasonable statement, but you already said it was a car crash you the text needs to connect the two. The he says:

Perhaps this is simply a metaphor. A hotel is a place visited temporarily, and the boy is slowly coming to terms with the idea that where he is now, Limbo or someplace similar, is exactly that. He’ll move on eventually, but not before he accepts that. Or, maybe the hotel is a familiar place to him, part of a memory that he’s torn himself from the reality of his situation to visit, one last time.

Excuse me what. If the game doesn’t inform you of this anyway then you are forcing things to fit. In fact throughout your interpretation, you only offer two actual pieces of evidence the seemingly support your theory without pushing other elements into line like the above Hotel piece: the burning tires and the crash through the glass at the end. More than that you leave a lot of WTF imagery that is far more important to latch onto by the wayside. Like the fact that you do see your “sister” long before the end before being attacked by another brain slug only to come back and find the environment has changed. Or the rising water levels in certain sections, the spider, the kids, any of the industrial equipment. You give some reasonable explanations for the shifting gravity and bear traps, but everything else is based on further guesswork and supposition.

That is the beauty of art and interpretation, after all. My own imagining of the game’s narrative utilizes and at the same time neglects many of the elements I’ve gathered from playing through it, which just means there are so many other ways of looking at the story.

Then that’s a shitty interpretation. You can’t exclude elements because it doesn’t fit your vision of what a work means. You have to figure out how they fall into place. If they don’t fit and there are as many items as you excluded then its wrong. The text says you are wrong. You’re interpretation and understanding of interpretation is faulty. Yes, Death of the Author and all that, but a work cannot mean whatever you want. The text says no.

Which only goes to further highlight the problem I brought up with Limbo. There is no answer and I don’t mean there is no authorial driven answer, there is no answer at all of any kind. They separated the elements so far removed from each other that none of the elements can associate with one another in any way. You end up having to do mental gymnastics to try and keep things together and that is a sign of incohesive work if not one that lacks meaning all together. A work doesn’t need a spelled out answer, but some cohesion in its elements might be nice. So, I think Chloi Rad for offering me a piece to bounce my position off of and help explain better why it was pretentious and how meaning escaped the work. If it was a black and white puzzle game without the atmosphere and just the physics puzzles I wouldn’t have ground to stand on with such an accusation and thus wouldn’t make it. But the developers added so much with regards to atmosphere and narrative elements even if only thematically that the lack of any cohesion that allows for a meaning to be discovered at least if not delivered it presents itself with a pomp and gravities it neither earned nor deserved than yes, it is pretentious. Not a failed attempt or mere experiment of formalism, but a pretentious work.

Halfway there.

The second response comes from the all too infrequent writings of the belovedsanspoof blog. He goes to the lengths to invoke David Lynch in his piece, so you know this is going to be fun. He asks if he characterizes my feeling about Limbo correctly, and yes I believe he does, maybe a little better than I did myself. Belovedsanspoof (I don’t have his real name, so…) defends Limbo not with a half-assed interpretation that the game does not allow for, but with a different point of view. He says the Limbo is not about the “story” and is instead coming from the same place that much of Lynch’s work comes from, an image that the rest of the work is built around. He likes it to the Dadaist appreciation of an image as image. That works for paintings and maybe moving images in a set course, but in a video game it only goes so far. While the appreciation of an image as an image is nice in its Platonic conceptualizing it doesn’t work in practice. Even Dada art had meaning behind it or at least a point in the case of the formalism experimentation. Even Lynch at his most batshit insane has a core behind it, even if he himself does not realize it at the time of shooting. Lynch’s work is cohesive even at its most ridiculous mainly because he is a circular creator. Elements repeat, they separate, scatter and then coalesce back together.

I also feel that I must clarify by what I mean as a connecting point. The connecting point is the key I metaphorically explained above. It is the point by which when used it unlocks the meaning of everything else and it all sets itself into place in the interpretation. It doesn’t have to be one thing; it can be any point in the work that sets all the other elements into place. Limbo does not have that.

I also feel like there is a disconnect between our different uses for certain words. Story does not mean plot. The story is what the work is about. It’s what the very center, the core of a work is where everything takes its direction. Belovedsanspoof says that the atmosphere was built from the ground up, but that’s not true. Playdead has spoken at length that the core of the game was the puzzles. The vicious nature of the puzzle elements and deaths were done as a teaching element not one of atmosphere building. The style came after they had many of their broad strokes in place as a way to explain how the puzzles would be explained to the player. The puzzles are the core of the game with the specific atmosphere tacked on. I’m sure a lot of the other atmospheric elements they had were tacked on as well. In fact Limbo goes on too long because of the puzzles. They ran out of creepy imagery and concepts long before they ran out of puzzles. The final third is full of puzzle padding. The shift in setting doesn’t help the game any either. We go from the forest to an industrial environments without nary a word or pictorial why. This hurts the game overall.

Conjuring up a series of images without a clear connecting point and then presenting them without an accompanying story might be someone’s way of trying to [dramatize] their subconscious; bypassing what they perceive to be the filter of narrative. This, indeed, might manifest in a noise of non-sequiturs but just as with the series of images, ideas and emotions that occur involuntarily in dreams, they can’t immediately be dismissed as meaningless just because there’s no apparent connecting point to them. There might even be a meaning that hasn’t been [realized] yet.

Could not agree more in theory. In practice Limbo does not earn any of this consideration. Because if this is suppose to be a crazy subconscious dramatized, then it doesn’t go far enough. Furthermore if that were the concept behind it that would be the connecting point bringing meaning to the rest of the work. The thing is the game does not eschew the “filter of narrative.” It revels in it at the beginning. The repeating motif of the children and the spider as antagonists are clear narrative motifs of man vs. man. Even without them the narrative motif of man vs. nature still permeates the work at the environment becomes the antagonist. The narrative is one child’s journey through limbo until it just stops. You can’t have it both ways. It has to commit to the imagery idea or narrative one. Lynch submits to the narrative every time. His works may start off with an image, but in the end they are there to supplement the story, the meaning behind his work.

Swain asks many questions of Limbo throughout his piece culminating in “What The Fuck?” Maybe Swain is asking Limbo the wrong questions.

I would love that to be the case, but it isn’t. Even without a clear meaning or just not being able to see it a person can tell whether they are looking at a work with an obscured meaning or one without any at all. It comes from pulling back the layers. If they find more and more layers then yes they just haven’t found the key yet. If they pull back and find only the other side of the same layer they pulled back and nothing else, then no. I am perfectly capable of asking the wrong questions of a work, but I don’t think Limbo has any right questions. It will ignore them all because it hasn’t the material to engage with any. It is a work that ultimately falls apart under it’s own façade if you ask anything of it.

In the end what I learned from all of this was not the something I was missing from Limbo, but that my dislike for Limbo apparently overshadowed my love of Another World, so let me clear that up. Another World is an all time classic that has stood the test of time and will continue to do so as one of the greatest video games ever made.

4 thoughts on “In Response to the Responses I Got For What I Said About Limbo

  1. I gotta say I was previously on the side of belovedsanspoof with Limbo. To me it was really impressionistic and people seemed to be taking it waaayyy too literally. However after reading your response, I understand where you’re coming from a lot better and I’m much more sympathetic. Personally, my experience with Limbo was perfectly coherent, but after reading your takedown I don’t have any good counterarguments. You win this round!

  2. Thank you very much for taking the time to respond to my post Eric.

    I’m going to insist that Limbo was built around atmosphere. For sure, puzzles are the mechanics of the game but as Arnt Jensen (PlayDead’s founder and Game Director) said, “Limbo started with a mood setting…it was just this secret place. I tried my whole life to get ideas, but when I drew this first drawing–it was just like this is the place.” (http://m.uk.ign.com/articles/1120477)

    There was an article posted at Edge (coincidentally the day after you posted this response) that looks at the spider sequence: (http://www.next-gen.biz/features/designing-limbos-spider)

    “Jensen couldn’t pinpoint the moment Limbo’s spider appeared in his sketchbook any more than he could date-stamp the onset of his arachnophobia…“I really hate spiders. And I still do, so it was very natural to confront one in the game, and kill it”…The basic outline of how Limbo’s boy would interact with the spider crystallised in Jensen’s mind before PlayDead’s founding.”

    It is revealed in the article that the puzzle part of the spider sequence (defeating it with traps) came later in the development after staff reacted with amusement to an animation of the boy being maimed by one and it describes the difficulty PlayDead faced in implementing the entire sequence. Development apparently rolled on for a year before staff meetings yielded anything more productive than observations of how challenging it was going to be, an extra programmer would eventually be hired to deal with the 2-minute cocoon sequence and in response to staff suggesting it be dropped altogether Jensen was adamant that it wasn’t going anywhere observing “a lot of times if you have an idea that’s too complicated, you just ditch it. But this was so important. I kept insisting, we have to do the spider”.

    This doesn’t strike me as something that’s been “tacked on”. It’s clearly something that has been conceptualised before puzzles, before Limbo, before PlayDead and implemented with the passion to instill a sense of unease and communicate to the audience Jensen’s fear of spiders (note that there’s no mention of what it means to the story). But even the boy and the spider themselves were preceded by the creation of the “secret place” that they inhabit, this “mood setting”.

    I feel that the importance of this point applies to the following:

    “The story is what the work is about. It’s what the very center; the core of a work is where everything takes its direction.”

    I disagree. What is at the center of a work is entirely interchangeable. The story is merely one element of a work which the creator can prioritise higher or lower than other elements. This is the case with Lynch who most certainly does not submit to narrative and whose work is driven by image and mood with meaning taking the passenger seat; still present just not at the wheel. If you found a key that unlocked the interrelated meaning of all the elements of Mulholland Drive then more power to you but any meaning you found was on the periphery of the visceral and textured atmosphere.

    We seem to be in agreement that dramatising the subconscious and avoiding narrative can result in some pretty crazy output but you suggest that Limbo does not earn the consideration of being a product of this because it “doesn’t go far enough” and because it does in fact revel in narrative. I would argue that if Limbo does not go far enough then this does not necessarily make it incompatible with that methodology but rather an example of it done badly, failing as a result of the creators lack of imagination.

    I’d also argue that Limbo draws atmospheric strength from the unexplained shifts in setting that you describe as hurting the game. The incongruous environments melting away into one another with “nary a word or pictorial why” demonstrates the marginalisation of narrative coherence in favour of mood; I felt like I was the protagonist in someone else’s nightmare. I should also point out that repeating motifs and themes don’t necessarily constitute a narrative.

    In this response you’ve repeated that Limbo doesn’t have a connecting point. I’m not necessarily disagreeing with that but in my initial response to you I was questioning (regardless of whether it does or not) whether a game lacking a connecting point lacks a core by extension.

    I guess my question to you would be the following: do you feel that a game can lack a connecting point but still have a core? That is, if a game lacks a key “which unlocks the meaning of everything else” then can it be anything more than a hollow shell? If the answer is no then may I also ask from where you derive this intrinsic value that you place on a connecting point?

  3. I’m not going to do my standard piece by piece response to your comment. Instead, I’m going to get to the heart of the matter, your end questions. “Do I feel a game can lack a connecting point, but still have a core?” No. No, because the connecting point is the core. It is the very thing that lies at the heart of a work that holds all its elements together even if only tangentially. I used key as a metaphor when I probably should have used shovel to describe working with a multilayered work. They are not puzzles with a solution as multifaceted work that continues on down. But should there be a central conceit then yes, the work is hollow. My intrinsic value is in the core of the work, the thing that connects the meaning of all a work’s elements together. Lynch is not a bunch of strange scenes and mood images strung together willy nilly. It may look like that at times, but there is very clear deliberation in the images chosen and their repetition. He may start out with a mood or abstract concepts, but all his work is narrative focused.

    And this brings me to something that really bugged me about your comment. Narrative, plot and story are not the same things. These words get used interchangeably, but they are very distinct concepts with different definitions. The plot is what is going on, the narrative is how what is going on is told to us, and the story is what it is all about. In Limbo we know what is going on and it is structured in a way that we do have a narrative direction. But what is it all about, I haven’t the a clue. Yes, the developers put a lot of time and effort into creating complicated individual elements and making sure they evoked a mood that came across, but not once in those pieces did they explain how they folded it into the larger work. The spider sequences are just that, the spider sequences. The story of their creation is divorced from the rest of the work. The central part has some interesting ideas on its own with water and the mind slugs as the beginning had the spider and the children, but they lack the same punch. And the final section has nothing to it at all. An entire third of the game has no imagery, mood setting or otherwise disturbing thematic elements to even attempt to connect to the rest of the work. The PS3 bonus level had more mood and atmospheric building than the entire second half of the game.

    The first two-hour section could work on its own as a work unto itself, but that’s not what we have. The rest of the game fails to continue what the first part set up and it is set up because the game continues on for bigger and grander designs. Lynch’s work always brings his imagery around again like a big circle so that his work is consistent and images relevant to the whole piece. Koyaanisqatsi – a much better example of what you are talking about – piece by piece, image by image builds upon the last even though it eventually leaves the originals behind to work to some greater meaning. The images do not stand alone, but in conjunction with each other. Limbo does not.

  4. Thanks for answering those questions Eric I’ve got a better idea of where you’re coming from. Thanks also for these exchanges, it’s been an interesting discussion. We clearly differ in the way that we consume some creative works in terms of how we reach what we perceive to be their depth.

    For you, the connecting point is the core, for me it’s one of the things a core can be. Whereas you find the connecting point in Lynch’s work I see the search for one (depending on the film) as potentially limiting. I think the Limbo would suffer if there was something in it that might explain it all (the damsel in distress trope goes too far as it is).

    I’m quite aware that plot, narrative and story are different things but I wouldn’t call their definitions distinct. It doesn’t take long to find someone whose definition of them overlaps or contradicts someone else’s and what you see as me using them interchangeably is, I expect, a slight divergence in how you and I use them.

    I could talk about Koyaanisqatsi but I feel this conversation has perhaps run its course. Before I sign off though I want to mention that I agree almost entirely with what you’ve written about Another World which is why I’ve had so little to say about it. It’s definitely a classic that should be played and, as you’ve said, it’s a game that shows that the new ground a lot of people think we’re breaking has already been broken and not even that recently.

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