STRUGGLE! Soft lock picking and pursuing the nadir of gameplay
A frame-perfect jump, practiced ten thousand times; a split-second reaction, ground on the whetstone of a thousand fatal pratfalls; self-inflicted damage to slip through the very boundaries of the world. Developer oversight and failed QA become arcane study, tools to push the limitations of what a human with a controller is capable of. Over twenty years of speedrunning as an online community has seen games built for a singular experience evolve into what can only be described as monastic disciplines, community members proving their devotion through both mental athleticism and scholarly documentation of every mechanic and phenomenon, intended or otherwise. The community coalesces around a game and slowly pushes it towards its most elevated state – whatever their cloistered order has decided that is – in search of the perfect run; a zenith of play.
Wherever that lofty perch is, we aren’t going anywhere near it.
Christian Asprey makes a lot of videos about Pokemon. Like the speedrunning community he is a devoted scholar of a chosen set of games, and under the handle Pikasprey Yellow, has employed that encyclopedic knowledge in service of producing emergent states of play. His grimoire of software and hardware knowledge combine to produce the conditions needed to place a save file into an elaborate kind of code-bondage, where restarting from zero seems more appealing by the minute.
But there’s no art to simply tossing the hypothetical Houdini of such a bespoke save file into an inescapable oubliette. Within the early annals of videogame history is a sizable hall of shame of poorly tested games easily made accidentally unwinnable (or, in some cases, impossible to clear from the very first screen by normal means). No, each of Asprey’s soft-locks is elaborate, deliberate, and, in theory, escapable. Not, however, by anything resembling intended play.
The mechanisms of Asprey’s locks run on a gradient from the poetic to the sadistic. In one, the player’s sole Pokemon is a Chansey (Lucky, if you’re a Japanese player), on the verge of demise by poison. Your only shot at avoiding eternal banishment to a remote island is to win a lottery you can play once a real-time day. The necessary top prize could take 5 minutes or 187 years, your cartridge battery having long given up the ghost.
In another scenario, the player is trapped in Cerulean City, and the only way out is to trade an elusive Shiny Poliwhirl to an NPC. In a third, the secret to your escape is to patiently plant and water a berry for months until you have a harvest sufficient to buy a single Pokeball. All these terrible fates and more (including some non-Pokemon examples for good measure), are cataloged in Pikasprey Yellow’s “Soft Lock Picking” series, available for anyone who wants a profoundly unconventional way to explore Pokemon’s simple, cheerful* virtual world.
If the speedrun is an act of monastic devotion, proof of love for the game and power over the self, Asprey’s softlocks are not even so much as puzzles to be solved as koans to be contemplated, exercises in cosmic futility. Their construction is the art, the absolute knowledge required to construct such a lock the proof of devotion, examination of the cage a rumination on the nature of the virtual world. None of these puzzles will persist past the New Game button. There’s always a way to cut the knot, delete the afflicted save, and be free to play the game as the developers intended; yet, at the nadir of gameplay, the lowest state in which progress can still be made, one can gain insights both hopeful and bleak.
The love and care taken by the design team to make these traps difficult to get into - the meticulous addition of an NPC to hand you a much-needed item or teleport you free, for instance, all while camouflaged as an unobtrusive part of the game world – is highlighted by the creation of the lock. Pokemon games were designed with a younger audience in mind, one perhaps the least familiar with genre conventions that could trash a hard-won collection of beloved virtual pets. Asprey takes care to highlight the evolution of these anti-frustration measures over time, reinforcing how far out of bounds his runs become. Likewise, there is a contemplation of the residence these charming little virtual worlds have taken up in our hearts and minds, that this obscure knowledge of how to break them might even occur to us in the first place.
An alternative view of what these self-contained little games-within-games represent might be found in Kikiyama’s 2004 cult classic Yume Nikki. As the shut-in turned psychonaut Madotsuki, your entire waking life is lived within the four walls of your room playing NASU, a frustrating, lo-fi, calculatedly hideous mini-game of catching a falling vegetable with a frame-perfect jump in your mouth, forever, until you drop one, prompting a flash of red sky and a mocking fanfare in a dismal soundfont as the game restarts with stilted timing. You hop in place on a narrow field and you eat until at last you do not eat, and you lose.
It is an unbearably bad game designed by a person who understands what makes games feel good, precision-crafted to make you want to turn the thing off and do literally anything else – go to sleep, return to the game as it was meant to be played (exploring Madotsuki’s expanding nightmare-world in search of the meaning behind her isolation, in this case). For the character, NASU exists as mirror and metaphor for the depressing waking existence and mental health struggles of a hikikomori: “don’t live this life; there’s nothing for you here.” For the player, it exists as a darkly comic, miserable experience that outlines in brilliant hues the highlights of the game it is contained in. And yet, the annals of YouTube contain videos of people playing NASU – not for the atmospheric benefits, but for the clout, for the high score, for the simple experience of it.
That so many of these locks hinge or must work around one of the most iconic anti-lock provisions in Pokemon, is, I think, deeply poetic. STRUGGLE, a move that can only be used when every other move is exhausted of Power Points, is a slow, painful technique applied only when there are no other options; no choice but to beat one’s head against the stone wall of an opponent, striving for a desperate victory inch by inch. The experience of this gameplay state is encapsulated here, in an unglamorous and painful STRUGGLE towards an escape based on luck and stubbornness alone, one no doubt far more relatable to the average real-life person than a triumphant slide into an effortless victory.
Though precious few would choose to spend their free time in service of striving for this anti-flow-state, this profoundly negative gaming experience, the gaming community is richer for Pikasprey’s work. If the rampant and ongoing success and acceptance of Dark Souls (FromSoftware, 2011) and I Wanna Be The Guy (Michael "Kayin" O'Reilly, 2007) style masocore challenges (in which even Pokemon is represented with difficulty hacks and punishing Nuzlocke variants) it doesn’t seem unlikely that the broader community may soon recognize these new ways to appreciate familiar territory (and surely his 14,000 Twitter followers can’t all be wrong.)
Hobbyist engineers the world over have known for a long time that one of the best ways to enjoy a shiny toy is to take it apart; it takes a particular kind of wit to put it back together and lock yourself in it. From striving for the perfect run to the perfect trap, the beauty of emergent play is as endless as our willingness to construct it.
*Miserere is tonally and structurally much more in line with the likes of, appropriately enough, Yume Nikki, and obviously not very cheerful. Pikasprey’s video on it is quite good nonetheless.
Selah Driver is a multidisciplinary writer, game designer and poet. Her interests include 80s anime, fighting games, parkour, high fashion and the Black Iron Prison. Follow her on Twitter dot com @fujikoketamine.
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