malvasia bianca

I haven’t played shooters much since grad school, and these days I almost don’t play them at all. Part of that is that shooting isn’t a mechanic I’m particularly drawn to; part of that is that shooter games have moved more in a multiplayer direction, which means dealing with dramatic skill ranges, assholes, and no extrinsic narrative to compensate for those drawbacks.

But part of it is the guns: games in general are way too likely to be slaughterfests, and these days I just don’t feel great about playing with simulated guns in particular. Guns aren’t a complete dealbreaker for me or anything, but they are a reason to push me away from playing shooters; and, with my time as limited as it is, that push makes a difference.

The one exception to my shooter avoidance is Splatoon 2: I started playing the game right when it was released, and I still pick it up once every couple of weeks. And I’d thought of that as fitting into the above, showing that if a game matches my taste in enough ways, then that overcomes the gun objective. Splatoon 2 is bright and colorful and fashion-focused, it’s got a platformy respect for navigation instead of focusing exclusively on shooting, the multiplayer is designed in a way that makes it very difficult for other players to be assholes, and not only does killing (or “splatting”, as they call it) other players not directly affect your score in the multiplayer mode, in the primary multiplayer mode it’s not even particularly tightly related to your effectiveness.

Recently, though, I’d wondered if even that analysis is incorrect. Because, the more I think about it, the less I’m convinced that my categorization of Splatoon 2 as a gun game is even correct.

Your guns in Splatoon 2 don’t shoot bullets, they shoot paint: they’re squirt guns. I’d been thinking of it as obviously true that squirt guns are stand-ins for guns, but after thinking about it a bit more, I’m actually not at all sure that that’s correct. In particular if we do a thought experiment of a world without gunpowder, or at least without guns, would squirt guns still have been invented?

I kind of think that the answer is “yes”: playing with water is fun, adding water pressure into the mix expands the range of play possibilities, and doing that in a handheld format feels like it would eventually lead to something like squirt guns. Also, it’s not particularly clear to me that squirt guns are significantly more closely linked to regular guns than water balloons are to bombs; so maybe it’s partly a linguistic accident of history that I put squirt guns and lethal bullet guns in the same category? Which doesn’t mean that I should discount that categorization — categories affect our thinking no matter where they come from — but maybe I’d want to try to loosen the hold of that categorization on me?

So, if we run a thought experiment of what it would mean to design a squirt gun game without thinking of it as a gun game, then what might such a game look like? You’d get stuff wet! Maybe that would affect the properties of various objects in the world — e.g. sponges absorb water. If it’s in a multiplayer context, maybe you’d give points to people who had gotten the most stuff wet; so, maybe instead of squirting water, you’d squirt paint of different colors, so you could see what stuff has already gotten wet and who was the last person to squirt it.

You’d probably want to acknowledge the idea that, yes, people will squirt other people. That’s not necessarily going to be your primary mechanic, but maybe you could use it as a penalty box mechanism, where if you get too wet, you need to have a time out? There might be different multiplayer game modes — e.g. maybe in one, your score is based on painting all of the environment, while in another, your score might be based on painting certain specific subsets of the environment. (With a corollary that painting your opponents and sending them back to the penalty box is probably more important in the latter mode than the former, because of the localized battle for control.) You might throw in a mode which is all about painting your opponents; and, in single player modes, you might throw in more types of environmental objects that are activated in different ways by being painted.

That thought experiment is a pretty good description of Splatoon 2. There are some differences: they didn’t decide to include a multiplayer mode that was exclusively focused on splatting your enemies, for example. (Maybe that’s because they wanted to weaken the conceptual link between splatting and killing; maybe that’s because of the negative social interactions that scoring based on personal attacks could reinforce.) And there are a few other modes that they thought up beyond what’s in my sketch, including one purely co-op multiplayer. But it’s close enough to make me think my thought experiment is plausible: maybe I really shouldn’t think of Splatoon 2 as having much of anything to do with real-world guns after all.

And, of course, Splatoon 2 goes beyond my thought experiment in two significant ways. One is that it applies a platformer / traversal focus sensibility to the game design, and uses the paint of your color as a non-scoring mechanism as well: you can turn into a squid and travel quickly through paint (at the cost of not being able to use your paint gun), but only if that paint is of your color. And the other is that it goes in on the artistic sensibilities that are latent in the very fact that you’re painting the environment: stylish clothing is a very important theme in the game, as are music and architecture.

Anyways: Splatoon 2 is a great game. Full of life, full of spirit, full of art. Fun single player, and the multiplayer is the only multiplayer that I’ve spent much time playing in ages. I haven’t quite decided to spend the time to actually get good at it, but the fact that I’m enjoying the multiplayer enough to keep on coming back even though I’m not so good says something, too.