This week, Rebecca Wigmore is your guide to the smokey jazz clubs that skeletons inhabit in GRIM FANDANGO.
This is the legacy of Tim Schafer, who started at LucasArts co-writing Day of the Tentacle and the first two Monkey Island adventures before being handed sole creative control of his own projects, including his masterpiece, Grim Fandango.
You might want to watch this. It establishes tone. I don't have the wordcount to establish tone. I'm busy.
The quality of the writing and the thrill of incidental discovery was the reason these games had such a powerful replay factor – a sort of novelistic pleasure in inhabiting a wholly authored universe, coupled with what David Lynch calls “space to dream.” There is a deeply satisfying tension between the driving narrative force of the puzzles and the more abstract pleasure of wandering about, luxuriating in language and incidental space. LucasArts adventure games were certainly what the immersive theatre/tech crowd call “on rails”, in that the player had one route to one ultimate goal (solve puzzles, progress the story) but the experience of playing was so leisurely and ambulatory in nature it's little wonder that Grim Fandango is often heralded as the pinnacle of the form. For it is here, in this world, that the gamer encounters the ultimate expression of LucasArt's adventure gaming philosophy: they play as Manny Calavera, a jobbing grim reaper cast in the Día de los Muertos mould; a literal undead flâneur.
Baudelaire would have made an excellent skeleton.
"Well, I have a poem I wrote just for you. Pay attention because it's pretty short. Here it goes: Ch-ch-ch-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-mp."
As Jon said in the first post in this series, inserting poetry into games seems to have a function that sits outside of the purely ludic: to give a sense of narrative texture, a sort of shorthand for folklore and history.
Grim
Fandango's universe is alive with poetry, where it functions as a way
to give the game's universe a rare texture and history, build
character and puncture pomposity, a conceit that is
set up early on in the game (indeed this puzzle formed the game's
demo way back when PC Gamer had corporeal giveaways on its cover)
when Manny has the option to ask the balloon artist to make him a
balloon in the shape of a cat, a dingo or a famous poet. The puzzle
requires that Manny pops that balloon to scare away some aggressive
pigeons. Now, if you can get through life without enjoying the phrase
“Run, you pigeons, it's Robert Frost!” then I admire your
austerity but ultimately, I pity you. This puzzle sets the game's
tone: knowing but willing to prick any pomposity, whether it be from
the Old Guard or from phony anti-establishment types.
You can see the likeness. Balloon pipe and everything.
The War on Beat Poetry
Let's look at the this segment now, which is just under halfway through the
game's four-year structure. Year Two: Rubecava.
The
game has a lot of fun with the club's beatnik audience – "Hola,
trust-funders!" – but one of the true pleasures of this
segment is your interaction with Olivia, the owner of the club, and
her subsequent performances.
You can watch the performances here. They are accompanied by very excited gamer commentary,
which adds to it, somehow.
Olivia's
first two performances are exemplars of the kind of performance
poetry that often infuriates: lotta poetry 'voice' and vague
aphoristic-sounding half-jokes that barely scan:
I called my cat "Boney."
'Til she said it wouldn't do
I said, "Why?"
She said, "Sister
'Cuz that's what I'VE been calling YOU!"
That extra syllable that 'Cuz' provides in the final line is maddening,
although the spoken delivery of the poem means that the player glides
fairly easily over it. The voice acting in Grim Fandango is uniformly
excellent and the work of Paula Killen, who voices Olivia, does a lot
to elevate the poem's stature. Olivia's cat poem was never intended
for the page – the transcription is from the game's subtitles, the
capital letters functioning as performance note more than anything
else – direction that Killen thankfully ignores. The rest of
Olivia's poems are the same kind of beatnik pastiche until we reach
her final poem:
With bony hands I hold my partner,
on soulless feet we cross the floor,
the music stops as if to answer
an empty knocking at the door.
It seems his skin was sweet as mango
when last I held him to my breast,
but now we dance this grim fandango
and will four years before we rest.
I want you to understand how much this thrilled my 15-year-old self and, in truth, how it delights me still. This is one of a handful of poems in Grim Fandango that have a function beyond character-building and laughing at how lame bad performance poetry can be3. This poem, which serves no function from a gameplay standpoint, is the only point in the entire game in which the title is mentioned at all. It would be easy to bypass it entirely if you were focused on beelining through the puzzles. “Grim fandango” is a wondrous phrase, an iambic delight and one of those rare titles that seems to contain more the more you consider it – yes, it's literally a dance of death, which calls to mind the herky-jerky climax of The Seventh Seal, the rhythmic contradiction of this frenetic and joyous couples' dance being invoked in a poem with a slow, thunking heartbeat of a meter. For the first time there is imagery that extends beyond a punchline or narrative set-up. There is something sensual and vaguely upsetting about skin-as-mango-flesh: exotic and heady, yes, but also something that drips with moisture, easily rent from the body. There is a pun and palpable despair in the “soulless feet” that cross the floor.
Ludologists Are Vomiting Mango Chunks As They Read This.
The
ease with which Grim Fandango manages the drastic tonal shift from
beatnik comedy bits to the mortal wrench of the final poem is one of
the arguments I can make for this game as art. You could make a
similar case for Portal 2, although that rather worryingly betrays my
origins in the traditional humanities department. Non-ludic narrative
world-building is only an aspect of digital gaming and one that is
certainly not essential to the artistic success of any given number of
games. Yes, poets have embraced him but Pacman does not have a richly
imagined in-game social history. There is no moment where you can
instruct Pacman to 'use' the moon, as you do Manny in Grim Fandango, and be
surprised by his recitation of a simple, Poe-ish verse. There is no
purpose to this action another then that shock of pleasure at
uncovering what appears to be a moment of shared folklore as the NPC
sailor joins in with the final gothic couplet:
This
isn't Pacman's schtick at all. Its pleasures are visceral as part of
a carefully designed and programmed feedback loop of input from
player and output from game. There isn't the poet's space to dream in
this kind of game, unless it is created externally. Indeed, if you
start reading old-school academic analysis of computer games, it
often reads starkly irrelevant. Like using the same aesthetic
criteria to evaluate Jaws as you would Moby Dick – they might
have a crossover but dude, they're different animals, always.
There
is much more to say about Grim Fandango's use of poetry – we
haven't even gotten to the player-created in-game performance poems –
and I will continue in PART TWO.
1. Let us gracefully draw a veil over subsequent instalments. Very few
things were meant to have quadrilogies. The Fast & The Furious
series is a notable exception to this rule, Vin Diesel more than
anyone understands the profound, self-replicating beauty of a
fractal.
2. There are exceptions to this, most notably the Indiana Jones game
series.
3. Both entirely worthy aesthetic pursuits.
3. Both entirely worthy aesthetic pursuits.
Is there a part 2? I loved this!
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