La Noche de los Muertos
Greg Trefry
Lost
My feet pound the street in time with my racing heart. I reach the end of the bridge and bolt left down the street running parallel to the river. My lungs burn from the dash. I’m not sure I can keep going. I sprint out of the glow of the streetlight and behind a shed in planted in the center of a small parking lot. I glance back over my shoulder to see if anyone’s following me. No one is.
Instead of black-hooded ghouls I see a couple strolling along by the water in the cool September night-air. Instead of my teammates I see a group of Friday night revelers staggering down the street towards a small pub. I’m surrounded by people, but I’m alone. Not one of these people seems to realize the city, their city, is infested with hooded skeletons lurking around corners and behind dumpsters just waiting to pounce and grab me, to rob me of my cherished mask and armband
But I can’t tell them this. The ghouls aren’t chasing them. They aren’t marked like I am. It’s not La Noche de los Muertos for them. Only I know all of this—well, me and two hundred other players swarming across the city toward some unknown destination. This is not ordinary night; it’s the night of the dead.
I’m alone; alone on the streets of Bristol. I only just landed in the country 10 hours ago. I’m beginning to realize I have only the foggiest notion of where I am. I dig into my back pocket and pull out paper damp from sweat. I finger the limp pages loosely and twist to try and get a bit of that streetlight’s yellow glow to illuminate the map printed on the front. A river splits the map. What luck, a river runs past me on my right. I take this as a good sign. I decide I’ll follow the river and cross back over at the next bridge where I hope I’ll be safe from the skeletons lurking on the other side of this bridge.
I lope off down the street following the river for several blocks until I come to a wooden bridge. I’ve never been to Bristol before and I’m struck by its blend of industrial, modern and ancient architecture. I sprint across a wooden bridge figuring if I were a skeleton charged with chasing down humans I’d guard every bridge. What better place to trap and cut off a player. But no skeletons leap out. I’m met only by the startled faces of a couple on a late night run for groceries. Maybe it’s the running or maybe it’s the Mardi gras mask I’m wearing. I find myself on a large island with two choices: a dark alley or a dark curving rode. Neither seems particularly attractive. I pull out that sweat soaked map again. Ugh. Why did I wear jeans to play a game that demanded so much running? I look around for a street sign I can use to pinpoint myself. Nothing. I glance back over the bridge. I’m still nervous I’m being followed. I need to find another street name, a bigger street that might appear on this damned tiny map.
I find a street sign but no correlation on my map. That’s when the panic starts to creep through me. This miniscule game map is the only guide I have to Bristol. It’s 10 PM; most of the places I could buy a map are closed. If only this were Half-Life or some other video game on rails. A few seconds of fumbling down that alley and I would find it cut off by chain link fence; I would know that I’m supposed to follow the curving road. But peering down the alley I’m pretty sure it goes somewhere—probably no where I want to go, but it does seem to stretch on. Even an open world game like Grand Theft Auto makes it pretty obvious when you’ve reached the end of the content, if not the technical end of the world. The flood of details slows to a trickle. Not here. Man, the Bristol city planners suck at level design.
Then another thought occurs to me. I have no idea where I’m supposed to be staying tonight. A friend of a friend has graciously offered to put me up for the night. But I met him only briefly before all the running and chasing. We’re supposed to re-connect at the finish line. And I have no idea where that is—no one does. Only the game designers possess that crucial bit of information. The rest of us have to earn it by completing the game. I check my iPhone which hasn’t had been charged in more than 24 hours. Muerto. Of course. And that’s when it hits me: I’m really, truly and utterly lost right now. I’ve no place to sleep. This alley? I don’t even know where I am in Bristol. And it’s awesome and terrifying at the same time. I feel the artificial terror of the game mixing with a real sense of danger. It’s an unusual cocktail of feelings to find stirred into a game, the different flavors intermixing and strengthening one another.
Pause. Restart.
But maybe I should back up a bit, because unless you were there that Friday night in 2009 on the 11th of September in Bristol you probably have only the foggiest notion of what I’m talking about. And your having been there seems relatively unlikely. Because as monumental as the game looms in my memory, only a couple of hundred people ever got to play. But boy do I wish you were there, because the game was an experience, a co-mingling of rules and time and location that make the experience feel unique and beautiful.
So let me go back to where it all started. Two hours before my panicked realization at the fact that I was totally lost, without an instruction manual and faced with the ever-increasing likelihood that I would be sleeping in the bushes, I was standing in the courtyard between two silent office buildings in a long snaking line of
eager players.
I had come to Bristol, England for igfest, an annual festival of real-world games. The festival is spearheaded by SlingShot and Simon Johnson. Each year the festival features dozens of new and unusual games at different locations throughout Bristol. These games could be called new street games—they use the streets as the playing field, often transforming elements of the city into game pieces. The 2009 line-up featured a diverse set of games. There were location specific games like Snakes & Blaggers, a chutes & ladders like game that took over a six-story car park. Circle Rules Football, a sport featuring a gigantic yoga ball and a single goal offered the athletically inclined a strange cross between soccer and basketball. While some games involved a new fangled piece of technology like GPS-enabled smartphones, most were constructed of simpler stuff—rules, players, wristbands, chalk and occasionally a healthy slathering of face-paint.
The several hundred players now gathered to play La Noche de Los Muertos had each been given instructions to meet at a secret location—this dimly lit courtyard—at 7:30 PM. Upon signing into the game we were each given a Mardi gras style paper mask, an armband and a single sheet with a map and some simple rules. We formed into teams of five or six and waited in eager anticipation for some explanation about what the hell we had just agreed to. Having just arrived in town, I chatted with my teammates, only one of whom I had ever met before. Simon Evans, my one contact in the group, and his wife introduced me to our fourth teammate, Nina. Nina was a theater director down from London for the festival. Another young woman none of us had ever met rounded out the group. We all chatted, eagerly introducing ourselves and wondering aloud what was in store.
Then the courtyard buzzed to life as twanging guitars echoed off the concrete walls and an undead mariachi band sauntered in serenading the assembled players. Then Simon Johnson, one of the designers and organizers of the game demanded our attention. Through a crackling megaphone he explained each team’s mission: we must visit a series of checkpoints, collecting a trinket at each one en route to a final destination that will only be disclosed at the 6th and final checkpoint. Along the way we must avoid being caught by any of the undead zombies lurking the streets waiting to prey upon us. While playing we must wear our mask and armband at all times. Should a team member be caught, he or she must remove their mask. They are out of the game. The first team to reach the end wins. To win, at least one player from your team must make it to the end without being caught. We must do all of our travelling on foot. And that is basically it—that was the core of what we needed to know to play.
Get to the checkpoints, don’t get tagged. Simple enough.
And with that the organizers began to send us off in waves. The first teams were released, with others following closely on their heels out into the darkening streets of Bristol.
My team dashed across a footbridge leading out of the courtyard and down a winding set of stairs, where we have our first encounter with what lays in store for us. On this lonesome footbridge had been erected a sprawling memorial of flowers and votive candles, littered with trinkets. A lone figure dressed in black with face hooded from view stood watch over the otherworldly scene. Catching site of the figure my heart leapt and my teammates and I stumbled over one another as we instinctively recoiled. The figure motioned to the trinkets and we realized this is was our purpose; we needed to grab one. Timidly collecting our first small trophy we spun on our heels and headed for a different set of stairs, bounding down them two at a time.
On the right we heard screams and saw another team being chased by figures in black. My heart leapt into my throat and we sprinted in the opposite direction down the streets of Bristol. A rush of fear mingled with hope. We were getting away. Those poor suckers were barely out of the gate and already running for their lives.
From folk games to designed games
From a game design standpoint La Noche offers few innovations. On the surface it’s a pretty straight-ahead chase and race game. You are given a set of spots to reach. Along the way you encounter some non-player characters who leap out, scare the bejeezus out of you and give chase. Your ultimate goal is survival and speed. There’s no great need for strategy, just some clever navigating and fast feet. In fact the game is very much inspired by folk games like zombie tag. What made La Noche great was not innovative game design, but professional execution, inspired location selection and wonderful moments of small theater. This allowed the game to naturally mix with the texture of Bristol to produce a singular experience for the player.
Zombie tag revolves around the idea of an ever-growing hoard. In its most simple form the game plays like this: There are twenty players; one person is a zombie; when the zombie tags another player, the tagged player also becomes a zombie. With each new person tagged, the hoard of chasers grows. So slowly the game shifts from one player chasing 19 to 19 players chasing one. This gives the game a naturally escalating tension and arc straight out of a horror film. As the number of chasers swells, the game grows increasingly terrifying for the surviving players. This simple version of zombie tag can be played on a big open field with the grounds of the game delimited for players.
So where does this mechanic come into play in La Noche. Well it doesn’t exactly. Johnson and the other designers, Clare Reddington and Hazel Grian based La Noche on a similar game called Journey to the End of the Night originally created by a group called SF Zero from San Francisco. That game used the mechanics of zombie tag described above and stretched them over an entire city. 200 players start off racing across the city chased by a handful of NPC zombies. As players are tagged they join the ranks of zombies. So by the end of the game, assuming you’ve survived that long you have whole mobs of players after you. Journey also uses checkpoints as a way to structure the game and give it a shape. By requiring players to pass through certain checkpoints, the game pushes players into moments of danger and interaction. In the big spaces between checkpoints you can assume you are relatively safe. It’s as you draw close to a checkpoint that you must raise your guard, because that’s most likely where the zombies itching to tag you lurk.
The design team of La Noche had run a game of Journey to the End of the Night in 2008 and found it both thrilling for players and also kind of broken. In play they realized that balancing for the zombie conversion mechanic is extremely difficult to manage. The number of zombies tends to escalate very rapidly, quickly making the game nigh impossible for the remaining runners. This ground the game to a halt after a few checkpoints.
To prevent this, the La Noche team jettisoned the zombie conversion mechanic, relying instead on a set number of non-player characters to act as the chasers. This gave the team more control over the pace of the game. The designers could pick where they wanted to station chasers to help craft the thrills of the chase. They could strategize and pick bridges and key corners near the checkpoints to guard. But this control came at a price. The number of non-player chasers the designers could recruit limited the game. In practice what this meant was the early stages of the game felt densely packed and suffused with danger. Chasers seemed to lurk around every corner you wanted to turn. The designers quite brilliantly anticipated the most desirable paths to the first several checkpoints and littered them with danger. But as the game stretched out over space and time, it began to seem as if the designers had spent all of their NPCs and they weren’t able to adequately guard all of the game terrain. In reality they would have needed an army of NPCs to adequately cover the entire area. As the game stretched over more and more space, the number of paths players could take naturally increased. And the mass of players spread out making it harder to stand guard and startle large groups. Despite the checkpoints, it became impossible to guard all potential entrances.
In spite of this gradual thinning of danger, the game remained compelling. The designers had two key elements on their side; player psychology and the ability to tweak that psychology with the right bit of theater.
Out of the brambles and into the crypt
As the screams from our fellow players fade into the distance and we put a few blocks between them and us we slow to a walk and catch our breath. We secured our first token and survived our first encounter with the cloaked seekers. I am already growing a bit lost. I usually have an excellent sense of direction, but I am fast finding myself turned around. The combination of trying to learn a new city while being chased by hooded figures is not doing my internal compass any favors. We pull out the game map and Simon, thankfully more familiar with Bristol than I, suggests a path towards our next checkpoint, a place called Castle Park. He believes if we circle around and enter the park from the back we can avoid the more obvious entrances where chasers will inevitably lurk.
We all give winded nods of ascent and start out again at a trot. All goes according to plan until we get within sight of the park. We carelessly round the corner and standing there in the middle of the street is a figure hooded in black. For an instant we all freeze and then a scream of “Run!” frees us from our paralysis and all five of us take off down the street in a full terrified sprint. As I’m running a thought occurs to me: Get out in front of that short girl, they’ll surely catch her before me and my long legs. Our team had begun to form some camaraderie after our small victories and clever plotting, but in that moment, I think anyone of us would have gladly watched a teammate get caught rather than feel the gloved hand of this hooded chaser wrap around their arm. I don’t look back till I round the next corner. Not very gentlemanly, but it’s not like I had a secret weapon to ward off zombies.
Fortunately, another team had cropped up at the same time as us and the chaser bolted after them. Our team all arrives intact around the corner and dashes to hide behind the concrete base of an office building. Glancing back we see an empty street. Coast clear.
As I pant and catch my breath, I think about my reaction and my unwillingness to sacrifice myself for a teammate. I ask myself, what should I have done? Some part of me thinks the noble act would have been to try and save my teammates. But what could I have done other than run? The game threw us into a situation of recognizable danger (well, recognizable from movies and games that is): You are being chased by a monster and your team is in jeopardy. My mind instantly goes to Left 4 Dead and it’s exhortation to stick together. I think of how many times Louis has freed me from a Smoker or some such ghoul. Thank you AI-controlled teammate, you are far nobler than I. What value does sticking together have here? We can’t fight back. All we can do is flee. Is a big group even optimal? Wouldn’t our team’s chances be better if we were running solo, making us harder to spot and catch as a group? One of us would surely get through, right? But being on your own doesn’t seem like a good idea either. On your own you don’t have the safety of a slower person running next to you making a better target. And plus, it’s all feeling a tad freaky and I have no f’ing idea where I am. While I realize our chances of beating all 200 other players to the finish line are slim, I do want to win. Preferably as a team, right? Righhht.
“Let’s enter the park over there,” Simon says, breaking me out of my reverie. He is pointing at a short wall behind which appears to be thick brush and forest. The ludicrousness of trying to claw our way through that bramble actually offers an enticing comfort. Surely no one is waiting in there to chase us. They’d have to be dumb or crazy to crawl through there. Which we figure makes it exactly the right choice. We trot over and hop the fence and plunge into woods. I am filled with the thrill of the taboo. I am a respectful law-abiding citizen, which means that I don’t usually get to hop fences. And while this improvised entrance into the park hardly qualifies as seditious, it does feel vaguely rebellious. So much more so than knocking down an old lady in Grand Theft Auto where the only rules are game rules. Without informing the Bristol authorities, La Noche has empowered me. I’m just trying to survive. It imbues my out of the ordinary actions with a kind of legitimacy and lets me explore the city in new ways, like crawling through a thicket of bushes.
Halfway up the hill, as we struggle through up the thicket, someone asks Simon where exactly were supposed to be going in the park. To which he responds, “I’m not really sure.” And suddenly the brilliance of this move seems questionable. We clear the top of a hill. Just a short way down in a small clearing sits stone building with torches blazing framing a door. And we know that’s got to be it! We sprint down the hill in triumph and up to the entrance. Another team is leaving (“That’s fine, we’ll pass them on the next leg,” I think). A guard in black, face painted white and black into the leering likeness of a skull ushers us into a glowing crypt where another ghoulish woman gives us our second trophy. We slowly back out of the tomb, simultaneously creeped out and excited. I’ll return to this site the next day for another game and find it only half-resembles a tomb, but in the midst of the game I could swear I’ve stepped into the land of the dead. At this point I don’t even quite realize how thoroughly the game has sunk its bony fingers into me.
Personal experience versus the object
It is at this point in writing about La Noche de los Muertos that I begin to fear that I’m simply recounting stories about my personal experience of the game.
The game designer Nick Fortugno once told me his theory about why games and narratives make such strange and often mismatched bedfellows. Games are like dance. They are about the experience you have while playing. That experience can be powerful and even take on a sense of connection and narrative for the dancer. You experience it and build a narrative in your head out of all of your moves. But describing it often just comes across as a series of mundane choices. I tend to agree with him.
There’s nothing more boring than hearing someone describe how they waited until the guard went back in the other room and then they switched to their big anti-gravity gun and then they jumped out and then they wasted all of the robots and it was freaking awesome! It ranks right up there with someone regaling you with hazy descriptions of their dreams. Both dreams and descriptions of your play make horrible, stumbling stories full of repetition and randomness. I love hearing about games, but I want to hear about mechanical choices the designers made to create a good game. Not the choices you made as a player to win the game.
At the same time I would contend that you can’t fully understand the aesthetics of a game without considering the experience of playing it. Sometimes just talking about the mechanics of shooting zombies doesn’t do justice to the experience of frantically trying to ward off an imposing horde battling at you from all sides.
Unlike a book where the text claims a natural position of primacy over your experience, games rely on the player to animate the game. So while a reader brings all sorts of personal biases to their reading, it doesn’t really have much bearing on the state of the story. For one thing, books are largely standardized. We all get the same set of words when we pick up a book. Video games and board games generally offer similar objects, with some exceptions for the systems a video game might be played on, say a console versus a PC. These differences might seem trivial, but they can make the experience entirely different. We’ve probably all played a first-person shooter that was tuned more for one type of control than another. Perhaps it was tuned easier for a joystick, making play with a mouse and keyboard trivial. Or conversely the game required a level of precision hard to accomplish with
dual joysticks.
Experiential differences like these become even more exacerbated in real-world games where the designers must contend with a greater set of factors they cannot control. Rain and shine can both ruin a game. An unexpected event like a passing group of laughing school children can bring a wonderful light-hearted texture to your game. Or in the case of La Noche, you may have a bumbling American fresh to Bristol get utterly lost while playing, through no fault of the game designers, layering the game with complementing levels of fears about the game and the real-world. So in real-world games the experience comes to really dominate the aesthetics of the game.
For me La Noche drew much of its power from the tension between the game and the world. In the end, I struggle with how much I loved the game versus how much I loved my experience of playing it.
You don’t know what you got till it’s gone
We get separated sometime after the third checkpoint. At this point we’re really cruising along. We had aced a musical challenge posed to us by the ghoul at the third checkpoint—a Simon-says like drumming challenge versus a tuxedoed figure with antenna sprouting from his bowler.
We have no doubt we’ll make it to the end. Heck, we even talk about possibly winning. It sure seems like we’re out ahead of the other teams. We get cocky. Up to this point we’ve assiduously avoided the direct obvious route. But now in our hubris we’re making a beeline for checkpoint four. We haven’t updated our meet-up points should we get separated.
And that’s when it happens. We step out onto a main drag and there are two or three chasers waiting. No one even has to yell run this time. All five of us take off. But unlike last time when we serendipitously head the same direction, this time confusion reigns and the group splits in two, then splinters again.
Next thing I know I’m pounding my way across a bridge, veering off towards a small parking lot where I can hide and regain my bearings. As I’m running I have the feeling of our team splintering. I assume someone was caught and this time I’m actually saddened by the prospect of our team losing a member. At the same I assume I’ll be able to meet up with the remains of my group at checkpoint four by skirting down this river and across the next bridge I see. It seems too dangerous to go back the way I came.
I hoof it downstream, cross the bridge and wind up in that dark alley trying in vain to match my map with my current location. And though I thrill at the prospect of being lost, I miss my team. I miss the camaraderie. A flight from the living dead necessitates teammates. Left 4 Dead was right, “Stick together.” If not for strategic reasons, then for existential ones. We were just getting to know one another; we had so much potential.
I stand now on the fringes of the game, being pulled quickly out of it by the dawning realization that I am indeed truly lost in a city I don’t know with a dead cellphone and no way of finding my way home. The designers of La Noche don’t have the advantage of boundaries keeping their players in and pushing them towards the goal.
Boundaries provide the designers at Valve one of the best ways to shape and craft the experience of the player. The level designer crafting Left 4 Dead can disguise the shape of the world with a few well-placed open fields, switchbacks and blown out bridges. The player may not even realize how they are following a tightly prescribed path. The La Noche designers must contend with the fact that a player accidentally crosses the wrong bridge, wanders a bit off grid and suddenly their game has melted away into a typical Friday night. The further I wander from the game; the longer I go without sight of a ghoul; the more the game fades away and real-world anxieties take over.
I gather myself. I know I need to be west of wherever I am. I also realize I’ve probably missed the chance to catch my team at checkpoint four. I decide I will head west until I hit another river. That should indicate that I’m going the right way. A six-minute jog later and I’m crossing a bridge. Finally I find a street sign that matches the map. And like that I’m back in it. I think an approach along the north side of the river will lead me straight into chasers. So I cross another bridge and skirt along the southern side of a river until I catch the torches of checkpoint five blazing through the darkness.
The saving grace of pinch points
Just as in open world video games like Far Cry 2, pinch points save the day and give some form to what could otherwise become an amorphous mess. While the open-world nature of La Noche and well, the world, allowed me to go off and craft my own “fear of sleeping in the Bristol gutter” narrative the pinch points of the checkpoints brought me back into the narrative of the game.
They work structurally to allow the designers to craft moments of tension and conflict, stationing chasers around them. Equally importantly they offer the designers a place to focus the theater of the game. As with the votive candle memorial and crypt, each checkpoint allows the designers to design a scene that can compete with the real-world. Layering games on top of the everyday world puts the narrative of the game in conflict with the texture of the space. And unless you have a huge budget, the world’s going to win out. That’s why even on movie sets they’re only filming small little views of the world. In a real-world game you can’t control camera angles. It’s even worse than Half-Life where the game allows the user to point the camera wherever they please. In that situation at least Valve knows all of the possible things the user might see and can craft ancillary visuals appropriately.
It’s more difficult to maintain the narrative of deadly zombies when you can turn around and there’s a family carrying groceries walking bemusedly by. The pinch points combined with the darkness and torches allow the designers to focus attention and really decorate a location in a way that offsets and complements the real-world. By choosing excellent locations for the pinch points from a stone building in Castle Park to a quiet footbridge to an ancient and overgrown graveyard, the designers can occasionally reinforce the narrative and texture of their game.
More importantly, it gives me a place to meet up with my teammates.
Let’s never lose each other again
I wait within the safety zone of checkpoint five for five minutes, 10 minutes, 15. I start to worry. Have I missed them? Are they just gone? Did they give up when we all separated? My spirits momentarily boosted by finding checkpoint five begin to sag. Other teams come running up, accomplish the blindfold challenge required to move on. I see our chances of winning begin to fade. I ask myself if I could preserve our chances at winning by just plunging ahead. But somehow it doesn’t make sense to go on alone. I need my team.
And just when I’m ready to throw in the towel, up dash the Evanses, sprinting towards the bridge to reach the safe zone. We cheer for joy at the reunion. We’re still missing Nina and that girl whose name we couldn’t remember, but we at least have a quorum. We’re a team again. Though I barely know these people, I’m relieved to the point of hugs to see them again. I’m reminded of the incredible ways that games forge social bonds. Especially when I consider that if we don’t get to the end and I don’t find my host, hopefully these nice people will let me crash on their couch.
We set off again. There’s an obvious and straight path towards the final checkpoint, but we don’t take it. We set off on a circuitous route to enter the park from the back again. The entire time we’re jogging down abandoned streets looking over our shoulders and peering around corners. And even while I know in the logical part of my brain there’s no way the designers could possibly have enough NPCs to guard this entire area, I give myself over to the fiction and look nervously back and peer trepidatiously around. The game and reality are pulling at each other and competing. In the back of my head I hear a repurposed version of Franklin Roosevelt’s maxim, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” The longer the game goes on the more it cracks at the seams. All of the chasers have been spent. All La Noche has left is the darkness and moonlight. But I have had such a good time up till this point, I want the game to work, I owe it. So I forgive the lack of chasers and plunge forward in my self-created anxiety.
Finally we stand at the crest of a large hill looking down across a wide-open field towards a wooden structure again blazing with torches. We know that’s where we have to go. We know this is probably the last dash of the game. The moonlight softly blankets the grassy field. We look at each other in relief; that we’ve made it here; that at least three of us are still together; that it’s over and we can stop all of this running soon. We can dimly make out the small figures of other players down there. We know we probably haven’t won. But we feel a type of victory nonetheless. We know now, this wasn’t a game about winning. It was about surviving. And with one last run we’ll have done just that. We take off in a wide arc down towards
the torches.
A coda
I am right that the game will offer no more gameplay. From this point on the game evolves into its own long coda. We make masks; we ride an old-fashioned London double-decker bus to an ancient graveyard where we traipse through the dark. A few ghouls jump out to scare us, but there is no more chasing. The game ends with the return of the undead mariachi band and zombies in wedding dresses dancing amongst the tombstone and players regaling one another with tales of their exploits.
We all wind up at a bar afterwards and I am reminded how important experience and especially shared experience can be. We tell stories of the game, of how we avoided chasers and snuck into safe zones and skirted danger like they’re our own war stories. And they are. And we know that this is all a game and that most people will never care deeply enough to listen to us recount this experience. But that’s okay. Because in this moment our shared experience is still fresh, the sweat is just drying and our muscles have not yet begun to ache. Like dancing the realness of it will soon fade. Some of us will be cursed to look back on it clinically, searching for lessons as game designers, finding fault with the balancing of this or the length of that. But the lucky ones will look back on it as something else, something closer to the wild exuberant experience of dancing and playing and being lost and found.