What Your Fingers are Doing

I love Paste and I don’t think it’d be controversial of me to suggest that they publish some of the best videogame criticism on the net. That being said, I did take issue with the slightest of details in Garrett Martin’s recent review of Firewatch, which I’ve tried to respond to here – mostly for the opportunity to work through my own thoughts on the subject. My (very minor) beef is with the last paragraph, in which, in a well intentioned rhetorical maneuver designed to emphasise the strength of the game’s writing and characterisation, he sets aside the “game” parts of Firewatch from its “narrative” parts, dismissing the former as unremarkable compared to the outstanding quality of the latter:

Firewatch is a game, and it feels like one when you’re moving Henry through the gorgeous Wyoming forest, or exploring a cave in hopes of solving one of those mysteries. It’s not useful to write about it as a game, though. Who cares what your fingers do while you’re playing this? Yes: it has graphics. The stuff that matters is what Henry and Delilah talk about on their radios.

(After this he goes on to list a few other things that “matter” that are ostensibly removed from its “game” parts.)

The thing is, I don’t think you can chop and divide Firewatch into parts as the author does here, into mundane player actions and ostensibly more expressive elements. I think, like in any videogame, what your fingers do is far from trivial, and even if it’s not immediately obvious to you, you do care. To do a disservice to the terrific, nuanced work of videogame academic Brendan Keogh by glossing it briefly here, the gist is that you can’t separate the work your fingers are doing – or any part of your body for that matter – from the pleasures or meanings you take a away from a videogame. As Keogh elaborates in his thesis, any response you have to a videogame (intellectual, emotional or physical – though perhaps these distinctions are dubious) occurs in a holistic way, whereby every aspect of a game converges to produce meaning. So in Firewatch, even if the most interesting part (“the stuff that matters”) is purely the auditory content of Delilah and Henry’s conversation, you can’t discount all the surrounding videogame phenomena, including your own hands clutching the controller, because all of it informs how you receive that dialogue.

The impact of the Firewatch’s evolving relationship is very much dependant on your impression of who Henry is, and while a whole lot of his character is expressed through his words, so much is also communicated through audio, visual and mechanical qualities: his walk speed; his grunts and shouts; the embodied sense of his weight, stature, age, strength and temperament conveyed by the combination of your finger pressing the “A” button and the time it takes for him to climb a ledge or hop over a tree trunk. Similarly, Firewatch’s wonderfully palatable sense of paranoia isn’t something baked into its code in 1s and 0s but a sensation that emerges from your participation with the game. It manifests in the dialogue choices you make, but also in the way you move through the world, the tentativeness with which your fingers nudge the thumbsticks forward or the frenzied way they whip them around in response to a distant sound.

My point here isn’t to judge whether, if completely divorced from the rest of the game, Firewatch’s dialogue would make for a more or less compelling experience (though I’m sure that most folks – the reviewer included – would agree with the latter). Rather, I’m trying to illustrate that it would be an entirely different experience without everything else that constitutes the game. What your fingers are doing while you’re playing Firewatch is incredibly important, not just because they’re providing the stage directions and camera movements that propel the experience forward, but because they’re also vital receptors. So much pre-conscious (to pinch one of Keogh’s fancy phenomenology words) sensory information emerges from how your fingers control and respond to what you see on-screen, and to dismiss this whole channel of engagement is to discuss a comparatively impoverished experience.

The last element Martin includes in his list of things that “matter” is this:

…what you feel as the story unfolds like a short story on your television screen, visiting the private grief of others who can struggle to communicate just as torturously as all of us in the real world can.

And I emphatically agree. But it’s important to stress that “what you feel” is a product of your entire, embodied relationship with the game – it’s prompted not just by what you hear, but also what you see, how you move, where you go, what kind of controller you’re using and, importantly, what your fingers are doing.