Naming the Otherwise
Unnamable: Mother 3 as Interactive Art
Herbert Marcuse states in One-Dimensional
Man that "[t]he aesthetic dimension still retains a freedom of
expression which enables the writer and artist to call men and things by their
name – to name the otherwise unnamable"(247). All established artistic media contain this
quality. Architecture, the novel, dance,
music, sculpture, theater, film, and every other respected medium have
historically been used to preach specific philosophical messages, whether
political or abstract, and all have resulted in critically praised
masterpieces. The novel as medium could
not be artistic without such harrowing political works as Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, exposing the horrors
of Soviet Russia under Stalin, or without García
Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude,
an exploration of man’s relationship with technology.
In 2006, such video games as Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War, Heroes of Annihilated Empires, and Ninety-Nine Nights were released, all of
which were completely forgettable.
However in the same year, Nintendo released Mother 3, a sequel to the cult hit Earthbound released eleven years prior, which had it received more
publicity outside of Japan, could have easily been viewed as Nintendo’s Casablanca. Mother
3 is notable because it
tells a story of the gradual corruption of a pure, utopian society into one gradually
more reliant on technology and greed via exploitation of reactions caused by
players’ interactivity.
It takes advantage of this
interactivity in the form of a video game, the only current medium entirely based on interactivity, which allows
it to act as support towards the notion that video games can “name the
otherwise unnamable”, and thus establish themselves as a legitimate form of
art. Their inherent interactivity allows
for, as McDougall and O’Brien claim, “the avatar [as] the visual representation
/ embodiment of the player”(14) and the notion that “…narrative is, if not
replaced, then at least displaced, by navigation”(15).
The unusually upbeat game
of Mother 3 initially takes place in
Tazmily Village, a utopian village in which Flint, his wife Hinawa, and their
two children Claus and Lucas reside. After
a forest fire, Hinawa is impaled by a Drago, a normally peaceful creature,
shocking the villagers, driving Flint almost insane, and traumatizing his
children. After this, Duster, a thief,
is sent by his father to a castle to find an “Egg of Light”, which leads to the
recruitment of Kumatora, a tomboyish princess and the loss of Duster’s memory. Meanwhile Salsa, a monkey, is traveling with
his abusive master Fassad, who gradually corrupts Tazmily Village into a
consumerist society increasingly reliant on technology. After Salsa is rescued, the narrative shifts
to Lucas, who searches for Duster with Kumatora and Boney, his dog. They find him playing bass in a band, then
immediately move to shut down Thunder Tower, built to electrocute those who do
not conform to Fassad’s attempts at modernization. The party falls from the top of the tower, and
all survive because Hinawa visits her father in a dream and tells him to put
down bales of hay, revealed after Lucas sees her running through a meadow of
sunflowers. Lucas eventually learns of
the existence of the “Seven Needles”, which can destroy or save the world
depending on who finds them and learns that a Masked Man who is under the
control of Porky, leader of the Pigmasks (and secondary antagonist of Earthbound), is also pulling them. After traveling to New Pork City, learning
the history of Tazmily Village, and defeating Porky, Lucas is forced to fight
the Masked Man, revealed to be his brother Claus. Hinawa chastises both boys for fighting and
the final battle ends with Claus committing suicide. Lucas pulls the final needle and the world is
saved, as revealed by a secret ending where the characters thank you (you, as
in the player and not any of the characters) for saving their world.
Like many Japanese
role-playing games, Mother 3 uses a
turn-based battle system, but it includes a few extra quirks, like enemies
having specific “beats” and attacking them in time with the beats allows for
extra hits and when the player’s HP runs out, it does so on a rolling meter, so
acting fast can save a character from death.
It also was made in two dimensions, allowing it to graphically resemble Earthbound, its predecessor and many
other early 1990s role-playing games. Finally,
it uses multiple points of view, dividing the game into eight chapters that
revolve around specific plot elements, with the first three featuring different
protagonists and the final five featuring Lucas.
One
of Mother 3’s most important scenes
is Hinawa’s death. It is considered by
fans to be among the most depressing scenes in the game, eliciting strong
emotional reactions due to the shock of the scene. An idyllic village previously established as
an uncorrupted natural utopia has experienced its first tragedy – that of the
death of its matriarch at the hands of a chimeric dragon-machine hybrid.
The
death could not have been presented via other media because its lead-up relies
on immersing the player in the search for her.
You, the player are initially sent by various characters to search
frantically, running through forests and fighting numerous enemies in the
process. Picking up a piece of her
clothing on a tree is the first sign that something terrible has happened. In a film or even a comic book, the cloth would
be seen, but the narrative nature of
video games allows it to be experienced. You experience a sense of dread because you
find the cloth on a two-dimensional pixelated mountain in a world that has
forced you to experience it. And the
eventual discovery of Hinawa’s death is only that much more impactful because Bronson
tells you. Not an actor or a character or in a novel or
any other of a myriad of possible different disconnected entities. You. Narrative is replaced by navigation because
it is you that frantically rush around looking for your wife in the form of an
avatar, which is enough to immerse you into the game and its philosophy.
Mother series creator and designer
Shigesato Itoi also notes an important other manner that the game influenced
players’ reactions. “When I heard about the impressions people got from Hinawa's death, the
ones that really stood out to me were from people who had named her after their
own mothers.”, Itoi notes, which places you in an interesting role within the
game’s narrative structure. The simple
act of including a naming screen, a feature unique to video games, allows you to
make a seemingly-insignificant decision that will heavily influence how you experience
the world of Mother 3, taking the
game out of the realm of the virtual and into the realm of reality. Your own personal life and experiences become
a part of the game because you indirectly chose to make them so.
The naming screen thus
places you into the position of combining a virtual reality with your own,
imparting the roles of your own family onto the roles of Flint’s. Flint ceases to be “Flint”, the video game
character and becomes you, Flint, the son or husband, leading to an immediate
emotional reaction that makes it feel as if someone had just told you that your
own wife or mother had died. The
navigation through the naming screen leads to the navigation through the
wilderness searching for your wife, and eventually to the revelation that she
was horrifically murdered protecting her two children. In this way, Mother 3 allows the aesthetic to “name the otherwise unnamable” by placing
the player in a situation that would be impossible to replicate in any other
manner.
The involvement of
the player also allows for a much more direct realization of the game’s overall
philosophical dealings with the increasing corruption of nature by man. The idyllic, utopian paradise of Tazmily
Village has been invaded by an army that tampers with nature, and in the
process, has taken a peaceful creature and corrupted it into a sadistic killing
machine that murders your wife. This
acts as a contrast to your initial navigation of Tazmily, which creates the
realization that there is nothing “bad” that the villagers have ever
experienced. Sunlight and food are
plentiful, animals and humans are friends, and no one has ever been imprisoned,
as evidenced by a sign in front of the village’s only jail.
This involvement is especially notable
because it allows for a virtual form of embodiment. Gregersen and Grodal define embodiment as
“…an embodied awareness in the moment of action…where one experiences both
agency and ownership of virtual entities”(67).
Your agency exists in the form of the avatar, through which you play the
game, and your ownership is what you, through the avatar, experience and
perform. This form of experience through
embodiment of an avatar, although indirect, causes the video game to impart its
philosophy through navigating its virtual world and not by being described
indirectly like in a poem or a novel, both of which require an external world
defined and created entirely by a poet or author, of which the reader is not a
part. These typical forms of narrative
prevent you from truly exploring and experiencing their worlds. As a video game, Mother 3 expresses its philosophy through
navigation and embodiment of a virtual avatar, which again, allows video games
to “name the otherwise unnamable” by presenting their own, unique forms of philosophical
expression by means of navigation.
While Mother
3 utilizes navigation as a means of expressing its philosophy, Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein, one of the most
important novels of the early 19th Century, delivers Mother 3’s argument about man and
technology, but through means representative of its own form. As a novel told in the first person, Frankenstein is predominantly told
through the perspective of Victor Frankenstein, who presents his account and views
of his experience to Robert Walton, who acts as a surrogate for the reader. Frankenstein describes his “…anxiety that
almost amounted to agony…” in the process of creating his monster and directly
asks the reader “How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how
delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavored to
form?”(53). Because of the medium in
which she wrote, Shelley had to use dialogue as the predominant means of narrative
because by nature, novels are almost entirely an imageless medium. This lack of images creates the requirement
for large amounts of narrative and descriptive text, which in the case of Frankenstein, ”names the otherwise
unnamable” by providing the reader with the view of technology as corruption of
the natural world by textually stating so, both directly through character
dialogue and indirectly through various incidents that occur in the novel.
However when compared to Mother 3, a video game, there is one dimension that a novel like Frankenstein could never include, which
is a literal immersion of the reader into the story. Mother
3 takes you, the player, the equivalent of the reader, and places you into its
navigatory world and allows you to explore it by walking around, talking to its
denizens, and by being present during cutscenes, many of which provide their
own vital narrative information. Frankenstein does not allow the reader
to embody Victor Frankenstein, or to walk around Geneva and discover Justine,
or to be present at Elizabeth’s death after running around for an hour outside
waiting in fear for a monster to come and kill him in the avatar of
Frankenstein. This is not a weakness of
the novel as form, but simply an aspect it lacks due to its being a collection
of text instead of a collection of text, image, and most importantly,
interactivity. Both “name the otherwise
unnamable”, but Mother 3 features embodiment
of the player throughout its entirety, which becomes especially important in
Chapter 3.
Chapter 3 consists of navigating through the
avatar of Salsa, a monkey who experiences constant abuse at the hands of his
master, Fassad. The relationship would be
quite typical or black-and-white in any other media, with Salsa clearly being a
victim and Fassad clearly being a captor, but its depiction in the form of a
video game allows their relationship to become significantly more complex.
When Salsa is first introduced, he is a weak,
powerless victim belonging to a man who keeps him solely as a tool. When you embody him, he, and thus you, have
no initial fighting abilities and the lowest statistics in the game, beginning
at Level 1 and being forced to fight very strong enemies. But because Fassad, your physically abusive
master, is present as a temporary party member, you are able to survive because
his attacks are significantly more powerful and he performs most of the damage. This contradiction places you in the center
of two points of view of the abuse you experience. Even though Fassad shocks you with an electric
collar and verbally berates you for no reason, he is absolutely necessary for
your survival, no matter how much you train and level up at the initial parts
of your journey.
Shigesato Itoi himself notes the importance
of this. “During battles, there are
times when Fassad appears to be a reliable ally. That evokes very complex
emotions. Basically, the person who hurts you the most is the one who comes to
your aid to save you from outside enemies. There's also the feeling of, ‘You
probably haven't felt this feeling before, have you?’ Games are really
interesting because they're able to do that. You wouldn't be able to transfer
something that evokes emotions in that way into a novel, for instance.” Navigation through the avatar of Salsa places
you into the position of ambivalence in an abusive relationship, forcing you to
feel how Salsa feels. Itoi is correct in
stating that the kind of empathy that results between player and avatar is
entirely unique to video games because video games are the only medium in which
a player can embody the characters a story is about. A novel is too disconnected from the reader
to allow for such an experience.
This experience, by nature, requires an
element of tediousness. Chapter 3 is
often considered to be among the most frustrating moments of Mother 3 and many players cite it as the
moment they stopped playing. GameFAQs user
“mrwhoompy” notes “Its [sic] so annoying. Every 10 seconds [Fassad] interrupts
the flow of the game, calls Salsa a 'stupid monkey' and electrocutes him.” Your frustration is mandatory for
appropriately experiencing the chapter because it expands the embodiment of the
avatar of Salsa from embodiment of his body to embodiment of his emotions. He has been kidnapped and forced to endure
horrific abuse to save his girlfriend, and he is rightfully frustrated with
being weak and electrocuted randomly, making it all the more satisfying when Kumatora,
Wess, and Lucas free him from his chains at the end of the chapter. The way in which Mother 3 uses its narrative form as a video game to force the
player into a sense of frustration is unique to video games, precisely because of
the vital roles of the process of embodiment in an avatar and navigation
through its virtual world. The concept
of abuse is thus portrayed in the most realistic possible manner due to the player’s
frustration, allowing it to “name the unnamable” with regard to what abuse
entails. And even while it does this,
the chapter also provides an important part of its message concerning
technology.
The message is presented through Salsa’s experiences
with Fassad, which put the player into the position of unwilling villain, being
forced to deliver “happy boxes” to the villagers of Tazmily and to dance so
they desire them. Regardless of what
they actually contain, the happy boxes are clearly representative of something
technological and you are the unwilling Prometheus that delivers humanity its
fire. In later sections of the game,
when you watch the gradual dissolution of Tazmily and final fleeing to New Pork
City, you are forced to realize that at a certain point in the game, you
corrupted the town and turned its denizens into greedy consumers who neglect
nature and become selfish shadows of the cheerful people once were. This is the point when money, a usual
role-playing game construct, becomes an actual part of the game, indicating
that consumerism has become an important part of society. And this is all because you, while embodying
an abused monkey, were forced by a madman to introduce and market technology to
an idyllic, utopian village. With the unique
position of forcing the player to frustratingly introduce technology and to
later fight against it, Mother 3 forces
the player to navigate through two distinct types of avatars – one a tortured
soul who introduces technology and consumerism to the masses, and the other three
young heroes and their dog who want to defeat those responsible for it. This experience is entirely unique to video
games, as it requires you to experience. And this experience allows for “naming the
unnamable” in that the type of information revealed by living Salsa’s story is
the information that will influence the entire rest of the game.
“Video games can never be art.”
This was the title of a Roger Ebert piece penned in 2010. He uses it to ask one notable question. “Why are gamers so intensely
concerned, anyway, that games be defined as art?...Do they require validation?” I answer this question with a single word:
“Yes.” Establishing video games as a
legitimate art form would entitle video games to the same scholarly attention
as novels, films, and every other narrative mode, and through this scholarly
attention video games would finally be allowed to provide us with the kind of
insight that they have shown themselves to be capable of. Mother 3
is one of many games that could potentially have thousands of pages
collectively written about them by critics who take them seriously, and not who
disparage them like so many critics who see the medium as consisting entirely
of shooting games and oversaturation with trash. Ebert says the day will not come for a very
long time because “No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a
game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and [sic]
poets." This is true for the time being. The great poets and novelists all benefitted
by using forms that had been established for many years, and the great films
from the fact that there was never a point in time in which they were advertised
or stereotyped solely as childrens’ playthings.
However with the increasing acceptance of “nerd culture” across the
masses and more developers willing to truly explore what the medium is capable
of, it is only a matter of time before critics recognize that video games can
“name the unnamable” and thus present themselves as art.
Works
Cited
Ebert, Roger.
"Video Games Can Never Be Art." Roger
Ebert's Journal. Chicago Sun-Times, 16 Apr. 2010. Web. <http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/04/video_games_can_never_be_art.html>.
Gregersen, Andreas, and Torben Grodal. "Embodiment and
Interface." The Video
Game Theory Reader 2. By Bernard Perron and Mark J. P. Wolf. New York:
Routledge, 2009. 65-83. Print.
Itoi,
Shigesato. Nintendo, Brownie Brown, HAL Laborator. Mother 3. Nintendo, 2006. Game Boy Advance.
Marcuse,
Herbert. One-Dimensional Man:
Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston: Beacon,
1991. Print.
McDougall,
Julian, and Wayne O'Brien. Studying
Videogames. Leighton Buzzard [England]: Auteur, 2008. Print.
mrwhoopy. "Anyone Else
Bored by Chapter 3? *Minor Spoilers*." Online posting.Anyone Else Bored
by Chapter 3? *Minor Spoilers*. Gamefaqs.com, 26 Dec. 2011. Web. 22 Apr.
2012. <http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/914622-mother-3/61471583>.
Shelley, Mary
Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein:
The Lynd Ward Illustrated Edition. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2009.
Print.
"Shigesato Itoi Tells All About Mother 3." Starmen.net. Nintendo Dream. Web. 05 Apr.
2012. .
Relevant Gameplay Videos
Note: I included this section to provide gameplay
videos to make many of the details of gameplay a lot more clear, and because
they provide a much better depiction of what I am discussing than the summary
information at the beginning, which was intended to place everything into
context. Additionally, because the
English translation is a fan translation and is thus not authorized by Nintendo
(they never licensed it for release outside of Japan), the game is impossible
to obtain without the use of emulators, so these videos should suffice.
These
are also good because the player was unable to edit out the “fluff” like random
battles, so they are untouched gameplay videos.
Chapter 1 (Note that he chooses to rename the characters):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DItx7_98wWM&feature=relmfu
(The news of Hinawa’s death is at 10:00)
Chapter 3:
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