For the past three weeks I have been fully consumed by a WiiWare title known as bit.trip Beat.  It’s very, very wonderful.  I’ve been trapped in the loop of thinking I should write something about bit.trip Beat, then deciding I should play bit.trip Beat a bit more before I write anything about it, and then waking up the next morning cursing myself for staying up until 3AM playing bit.trip Beat.

Basically, the game is single player Pong.  You have  a little paddle, and you move it around to repel tiny squares.  Except the little squares are smart, and repelling them produces harmonious tones. And each “level” is a section of a larger musical composition, of the chiptune variety.  And instead of using the directional pad, you twist the Wii remote.   And I feel at peace with the world when I’m playing.

The behavioral patterns of these little squares, the “beats” (as the manual refers to them), are incredibly varied.  Some fly at you in triplicate, some skip along the bottom of the screen, and others move in such an erratic manner that you cannot predict them… you just need to react.  Unlike the falling gem rhythm games where you just need to monitor an area of the screen and respond accordingly, bit.trip Beat feels like playing actual music.  You are in the zone and you just know what will happen next, even when you don’t.

Contemporary psychology has a word for this:  the flow state. Popularized by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi¹, the flow state is a sort of involuntary mindfulness (think Zen Buddhism without the botanical knowledge). Key components include the loss of self-consciousness, focus of awareness, and an altered perception of time.  This is where your mind goes when you’re playing a sweet bass solo or, in my case, trying to hit little squares with a paddle.

Of course, I can’t bring this up without mentioning the game titled flOw (which will run you five dollars and is well worth your time). Jenova Chen’s thesis was a direct attempt to translate Csikszentmihalyi’s theory into an interactive experience.  Aside from the ridiculous capitalization schemes, flOw and bit.trip have little in common.  flOw used the prime ideas behind the flow state to dictate the game’s difficulty dynamically in response to player ability, while bit.trip hopes to invoke the flow state through extremely brutal difficulty.

When I say it’s difficult, I mean it’s difficult with a capital “WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED?”  It’s got the challenge level of a shoot-em-up², where you go from thinking life is great to crying in the corner over the course of thirty seconds.  It’s like a video game version of my first sexual experience that I get to play over and over again.

The difficulty is the beautiful part of the whole thing:  you will always fail at bit.trip Beat.

There’s no way to win.  Or, at the very least, I can’t win.  But not winning is where things get interesting.  Miss too many beats and you get sent into a “nether.”  The overly saturated colors disappear, you see only your avatar and the beats, and the sound cuts out minus a single rhythmic bleep from the Wii remote. Repel enough beats and you go back up to the main play area.  Miss them and you’re back at the title screen.

If I were to rank my favorite gaming moments, my first time entering the nether in bit.trip Beat would easily be number one.  Going from being fully immersed in a driving beat coming from my speakers to this extreme absence was like a slap in the face.  It is so jarring and so very beautiful.  I don’t think I’ve ever been more aware of the act of playing a game.   All I could see was a wireframe of an idea on my screen, and the game controller alerting me to the fact that I was still playing. This says something. I was so disoriented that I didn’t even understand what was going on at first.  It was like waking from a dream and hearing the buzz of an alarm clock, realizing that what you just experienced, no matter how real it may have seemed, was nothing more than a product of your mind.  I am now convinced that adding a speaker to the Wii remote was a stroke of genius.

It may have helped that I was playing on a projector in complete darkness with the volume at max.

The motivation to play again is not just to top your high score, but also to progress further and hear more of the song. I believe that the song never actually ends; maybe some  programming trickery allows it to mutate at a cellular level as you progress.  That may not be the case, as there are two inactive options in the main menu.  I assume there are prerequisites that must be met for those options to become active… maybe requirements such as winning, or at least not losing.

I haven’t even begun to touch on the narrative elements of the game (yes, there is a narrative!).  “Everything comes from something,” the operations manual informs me.  “We will return to something once we become nothing.”  Heavy.  The little paddle you control?  That’s your avatar, and he has a name. All of the bit.trip games (there will be more, I assume) revolve around a character known as Commander Video.   His mantra speaks of moral fallibilism and self-acceptance³:  “I am only a man.”  And, indeed, you’ll find no extra lives in bit.trip Beat.  You may be able to skate around that near-death nether, but once you’re done, that’s it.  You’re evaluated whether you win or lose.

Someday, when you’re older, remind me to tell you the story of the four player co-op.  Did I mention this game is only six dollars?⁴

Update: I just read the IGN review for bit.trip Beat, and apparently the song does end, and the greyed out options in the menu are additional songs.  I must be terrible at this game.  Forgive me.  I am only a gamer.

1. Hottest psychologist ever, am I right?! [↩]
2. I refuse to use the word schmup, unless it itself is incorporated into an equally ridiculous portmanteau.  Like “aweshmup” or “schmupsicle.” [↩]
3. For additional information, please see the Wikipedia entry for Human. [↩]
4. I totally stole this footnotes idea from The Quixotic Engineer.  I think it works well.  Though the hypertextual nature of the internet may render traditional MLA style citations pointless, there’s a lot of stuff that just doesn’t fit into a document.  Like whatever the hell I’m saying in this footnote. [↩]

This entry was posted on Friday, April 17th, 2009 at 7:23 pm and is filed under Play Summary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.