ZORPON
A philosophically Absurdist adventure puzzle mystery game.
Sole creator (except the OST).
Designed and wrote the high concept Absurdist mystery.
Conceived, planned and implemented mechanics and levels.
Includes adaptations of Todesfell and The Myth of Sisyphus
ZORPON playthrough by the youtuber video game essayist; LeadHead
High concept and design goals.
Zorpon was primarily conceived as an introduction to absurdism and existentialism in the modernist style of art for the sake of exploring an idea – think No Exit or The Stranger. To this purpose, the main challenge of Zorpon was how to share this idea with the player without the player being made to feel belittled while utilizing the strength of video games as an interactive medium
As cliche a term as it might, the name of the game was ludonarrative, the usage of scattered story and mechanical elements to convey and explore absurdism, leading the player themselves to come to the conclusions expressed by the absurd without the game having explicitly instruct the player in the same way a novel otherwise might.
To further add just that little extra existentialist flavor to the game, heavy inspiration was taken from the Theatre of the Absurd and Dadaism which both used nonsensical and deeply bizarre techniques and narratives to compound the topic of existentialism. Though deeply engaging (and just plain weird), the stylistic techniques inherent to these two postmodern approaches – the radical deconstruction of form and content, conflicted with the modernist aims of the game. The challenge then of Zorpon’s subsequent mechanics would be how to mesh its modernist content with its post modernist form.
Exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum
As a part of the Smithsonian’s SAAM Arcade exhibition which exhibits innovative video games along with indiependent developer showcases, I had the honor of — together with IGDA Washington, exhibiting Zorpon at the Smithsonian!
Mechanics and vision
With these core pillars in mind, Zorpon was fundamentally formed as a mystery game, wherein the player would be tasked with discovering and successfully guessing what Zorpon was. To aid them, players were presented with a series of different levels each of which had a connecting thematic link to what Zorpon is. Any level can be played in any order. Every single level has its own respective minigame which lets you ZORPONs to try to guess what Zorpon is along with hidden keys which unlock more levels, allowing for the greater replayability of levels in any given playthrough if the player wishes to go through a level again for hints. Moreover, in an attempt to limit play sessions to a single sitting and to add additional pressure onto the player, a two hour timer was added after which the game ends.
Though the menu screen, the introduction, some levels and much of the game’s UI adhere to ‘traditional’ dadaism and the ideas of the theater of the absurd, in order to limit what one play tester so aptly called “pretentious weird fatigue”, an alternative approach was needed. To this effect, the majority of the levels were essentially developed as entirely standalone games – with an overarching theme of absurdity, yes, but entirely unique in form and content. Ultimately, the whiplash players experienced switching between for example; the dating sim visual novel level to the sand castle builder level, provoked exactly the kind of reaction the game aimed to elicit – puzzled curiosity.
Breakdown
To illustrate one of the more traditionally more dadaist levels, allow me to break down the respective parts of Zorpon’s first level; Ozymandias.
Summarized, the function of each respective level in Zorpon is to:
Give the player help in guessing what Zorpon is.
Leave a dadaist / absurdist aesthetic impression.
Facilitate the joy of discovery.
In the level, the poem Ozymandias is read in the robotic SAM voice much of the game’s UI and important info is read in. The fairly well known poem contains themes of decay and the mortality of art as well as of life. Moreover, the seminal line of the poem: “Nothing beside remains.” is replaced with “Zorpon beside remains.”. Though seemingly insultingly obvious, very few players who didn’t both intimately know of the poem and absurdism (for whom the playing of the game was for the sake of dadaism and the joy of discovery). For the players who knew the poem and moved onto other levels, many retrospectively looked back at Ozymandias as a well spirited teasing hint.
From a dadaist perspective, the poem was read by a mustachioed skull in the desert flanked by a pair of jeans – a dadaist take on the visage and legs of stone described in the poem. The scene itself (though not the content) is not only a subtle reference to the Samuel Beckett play Not I, but the mustachioed skull itself – used occasionally throughout the game, is an excellent representation of what absurdist art does. Absurdist art takes life with all of its little cruelties and its lack of meaning (the skull), embraces it, and makes joyful art out of it (the mustache).
Finally, to show the player that their exploration and curiosity is rewarded for challenging the boundaries of the game, if the player chooses unprompted to press the arrow keys a previously static seagull springs to life. The same seagull also shoots lasers once moved which, if shot at the legs in the scene, makes them spin and allows the player to get a key which blows past the screen from time to time. This very easy introduction to exploration and keys in what is likely to be one of the first if not the first level the player chooses telegraphs that their exploration is rewarded, encouraging deeper engagement with the game and its levels.