Surreal(ist) Video Games

Lucid Assemblage is a short exploration game created to embody Surrealism in its development and output. Its objective is to serve as a microcosmic exploration of an attempt to implement Surrealist philosophy in video games. In the process, it forms part of a wider contemplation of video game design in relation to art and philosophy movements, an area we consider underserved by current game design literature. We developed the project with a reflective practice methodology derived from Newsome-Ward & Ng (2021), in turn inspired by Donald Schön’s classic The Reflective Practitioner, to unveil “knowledge about practice through practice” (Newsome-Ward & Ng 2021, p. 559; emphasis in original). Our approach involved three stages. Firstly, we researched and collated key aspects of Surrealist philosophy, eventually identifying the 3 most dominant tenets to inform our project: dreams and the subconscious; nonconformism and counterculture; and irrationality. In the second stage, we ideated, designed and implemented a media artefact based on the crystallised tenets of Surrealist philosophies, accompanied by documentation concurrently made through journaling and detailed recording of processes, inspirations, contradictions and challenges. Finally, we reflected on the development process and the resulting product by correlating how the development of the project performed and/or reflected ‘Surreal’ qualities via the three identified tenets. We also conducted close reading of the work itself, specifically of its gameplay, presentation and narrative, to examine its reflection of Surrealist philosophies by which it had been implemented. Our key results from this study in relation to the method of Surrealist game design were two-fold. The first was the strange tension of the subconscious against the conscious in developing the game. Incorporating Surrealist philosophy into the project’s development process itself, our approach was influenced by the original Surrealists’ inclination towards automatism, a technique that prioritises spontaneous thinking to generate ideas untainted by rational oversight, thus tapping into the subconscious. By integrating automatism into game design, forethought could be minimised and the game would be positioned as a raw Surrealist expression. But this basis of the automatic game development framework that guided Lucid Assemblage’s production became a contradictory process which mirrored the paradoxes at the heart of Surrealism — the endeavour of thinking about how to not think – against the conscious, involved and functional decision-making and actions necessary to the creative act. Surrealist game development is thus a complex balancing act — one must minimise forethought to maximise spontaneity, but exercise a degree of reason to produce something comprehensible as a game. In this process, time management also becomes a major challenge. To avoid spontaneous ideas extending the project duration in perpetuity, one must define some kind of end point. The greater the span of time between idea and implementation, the more considerations the idea undergoes, and thus rationalised. Secondly (if relatedly), guarding against tangential conscious thoughts and influences for the game’s development, even when – or perhaps particularly when – not actively developing the game, also emerges as a deeply covert, if not impossible, endeavour. We continue thinking about and feeding into our minds ideas about the project even as we are not actively working on the project. In our reflections, we note how these challenges, whilst present in other forms of Surrealist art, are exacerbated by game development’s relative lack of immediacy (e.g. as opposed to automatic drawing or writing) and in its more long-drawn process of steps and stages stretched across ideation, mediation and computational processes. In this instance, the automatic game development framework was successful in producing a ‘Surreal’ game by limiting rationalisation in the design process. However, it is uncertain if the same result would have been achieved had the ideation process not been targeted toward the tenets. Further research might focus on automatic game development in the absence of such a constraint.