Pony Island begins innocently. Treacly music, art from a '90s flash game aimed at your niece. I press "Start Game." The loading screen "breaks," and before I know it I'm embroiled in a struggle for control of a buggy game experience that might be trying to steal my soul.
Oh, it's one of those games.
Yes, Pony Island, recently released on Steam, is only tenuously about ponies. It's more a game about videogames, a genre that is having something of a moment recently.
Pony Island joins other mid- to high-profile recent indie releases like The Magic Circle, The Beginner's Guide, and Undertale that offer insight into the inner workings of games and gaming. These games use techniques and ideas literary theorists call "metafiction." In her handy 1984 book on the subject, Metafiction: The Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction, lit professor Patricia Waugh defined metafiction as writing which draws attention to itself, to its status and existence as a created piece of art, "in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality."
Metafiction, when done inelegantly, can feel self-indulgent. Hearing a game talk about itself so eagerly and obviously can prompt ridicule, even contempt, instead of introspection. Some metafictional games certainly can come off as self-important while still having a lot to offer. The best strive to expand their boundaries and give players genuinely thought-provoking questions. They are a springboard for thinking about games, and the world, in new ways. That's the great secret with games about games. They're not about themselves. They're about everything else.
Every now and then, you glimpse a hand at the corner of the screen while playing Pony Island. It's the player. Not you, but the person you're inhabiting when playing the game. He's trapped, stuck within the closed world of a game-within-a-game, also called Pony Island.
Reality here is slippery, mired in recursion: "You" are the person playing the person playing the game, a strange state that forces you to reflect on your role as both the audience for and participant in the experience. In playing this game, are you the center of this experience, or merely its facilitator? Who's really the player---you, who guides the experience, or the fictitious player who wrestles with the devil in the machine?
It's a literal devil, too. The game is plagued by the developer of the in-game Pony Island, a Satanic figure who wants to steal your soul through bad design. The game uses this conceit to get at another question metanarrative fiction loves to ask: What's the role of the creator in his own creation?
Developing a game requires creating boundaries for a player, challenges that sometimes slip beyond their grasp. Is that relationship an adversarial one? Intrepid audiences will spend hours chipping away at a game's ruleset, looking for exceptions, breaking things just to see how they look in pieces. Does that make the designer their enemy?
"Because we are still so terrible at simulating even a subset of reality, the games which are the most ambitious in terms of simulational fidelity are also the most bug-prone," says Jordan Thomas, creator of The Magic Circle, in which you play a guy playing a guy in a game-within-a-game called The Magic Circle. "The margin for error is so wide that we already rely on the player to willfully unsee all the stupid things and to participate actively in that illusion."
The Magic Circle's fake game is a broken project stuck in development hell. Players must "hack" the AI and create something coherent from its scattered pieces. "We wanted to reveal to otherwise narratively biased players that they really are, at the end of the day, in charge, and that their creativity is part of a duet," Thomas says. "Over time the kind of Prometheus arc of the player stealing power, fire, from the developers, was exciting to us."
Such questions can feel like navel-gazing, but they reverberate beyond the borders of game spaces. Systems don't exist solely inside of games, and designers are far from the only people whose intentions and constructs we must navigate. Through parody and deconstruction, metanarrative games prod at our understanding of the systems and relationships that govern our lives.
The Magic Circle's story, in which we hear its fictitious "designers" as they bicker over the game's direction, is shot through with concerns about the rules and challenges that come with designing games for a mass audience. How does the art we love actually impact the people who slaved away to make it? It can be difficult to see creators as people.
"My whole career, I had heard players refer to big-name-big-face developers as 'gods,'" Thomas says. "But when I actually broke into the industry, I realized that the inverse was also true. Developers spoke about the players with a vehement surety that they knew what the player wanted, and because the player is such a broad field---it could be anybody---they argued about that unknown like a deity... in the Second Coming sense. 'When the player shows up, they're not going to care about that.'"
The Magic Circle is about removing that veil, forcing the two parties to reckon with each other as not distant, unknowable obscurities, but as people.
"Metafiction," Patricia Waugh wrote, "is in the position of examining the old rules in order to discover new possibilities of the game."
"A big part of what Pony Island was, was about taking the expectations you have about games, particularly the [user interface] of a game, and flipping them upside down," Daniel Mullins, the primary developer behind Pony Island, says. "In the beginning, you see a start button. First thing you do is try to click it. That expectation of, 'oh, the start button starts the game, obviously'---when that's flipped upside down, it puts [players] off and makes them a little uncomfortable."
Metanarrative games ask questions, earnestly. They ask in order to urge the player into reflection, to imbue the minutiae of mechanics and game rules with more compelling meanings. They ask in order to make themselves better. Not all of the games that try to do these things succeed, and even if they succeed, they’re not all good games, exactly. But it's an attempt to reach beyond the box games are so often put into.
"Great stories descend from specificity," says Thomas, but "games are sort of the opposite, right?... It's like having the lead actor wander on stage with no script."
"One of the possible solutions is to embrace the gaminess," he says. "Embrace the fact that the player is sometimes a natural disaster on legs."
