Doppelgänger

(Originally featured in Issue 1 of Spiral Manifesto)

The closest thing I have to a sacred text is a computer game from 2004. Titled N, iterated upon in 2008 (N+) and ultimately perfected in 2015 (N++), it remains, after three installments & three decades of my own life, the only aesthetic object I’ve encountered which will outlast however many hours of attention I have left for it. An interactive singularity, a monument to minimalist design, a kind of prayerbook. Less dramatically: the game is a two-dimensional, level-based platformer, one of the many grandchildren of Super Mario Brothers. Unlike its garish run-&-jump relatives, N++ has stronger focuses on momentum, pacifism, and minimalism, with each of its monochromatic levels only ever contained upon a single, unscrolling screen of perfect information. 

Consider one of them, “the upwards stampede.” Its conceit involves seven vertical chambers: one wider tunnel in the middle separates three tunnels on either side which, due to one-way gates, can only be descended. In each of the six smaller chambers is a single key which opens one of the others, and eventually your exit; the game’s visual simplicity, its careful rearrangement of fixed composite elements, allows players to sight-read these partitions of space like sheet music, intuiting immediately a necessary route—an idea—in the form of sequential descent: down each tunnel once, six return journeys up the middle. 

The challenge comes less from the layout of this room than the antagonist it contains. Players are forced to touch a small portal—or is it a mirror?—upon entering, a circular array of shards which begins spawning a glitchy replica of your avatar every two seconds, every one of which traces your original path exactly. Doppelgangers, ghosts, clones—contact with any one of these copies kills your original immediately. 

And so you begin to lead a chain of doubled selves around the room, your own memories forming a kind of tail, the physical choices of all prior movement now drastically changing any space you’ve already visited with precise, determinate rhythm. On each ascent through the wide central chamber, you must thread the needle through your own previous journeys up it, each of which are likewise dodging erratically; the challenge is to loosely memorize every ascent or else collide literally with a previous version of yourself.  During the final lap, dozens of echoes bounce up the walls of the central chamber, ricocheting between decreasingly available space and erupting out of the top—the upwards stampede. 

Here and elsewhere, this doubling enemy forces you to visualize and interpolate future selves, too—just as pertinent as where you just were, or where you are now, is where you need to be later. What’s odd is the way that slow mastery over this choreography of dancing figures—over any particular arrangement of hallways and obstacles in this game—allows one to begin to see and control each level as some kind of grander mechanism, a device which takes the three available inputs—left, right, jump—and transfigures them into miniature journeys for your brain. A singular level, the room in which the many yous are contained, shifts out of focus into something more abstract, something which must be subjected to any number of modes of escape—of expression. Since each level is so visually spare and mechanically complex, the gameplay loop becomes an act of microdosing the existential satisfaction between an epiphany and its enactment. I had an idea; it exists because I am writing it down. 

The “evil ninja,” as this replica enemy is called, is only one of fifteen ways in which you might be killed in this game—in which expression becomes stifled. And yet, each method of failure is so contextually sensitive to its playing space that such a number becomes moot. In effect, each particular room, every moment, is its own personality. A distinct mirror for the paths you may or may not take. Platformer games, which are about running between platforms and jumping over obstacles, can be in deeper sense about the mental conflict specific to a certain arrangement of elements, about the version of yourself that arises in response & to inhabit any particularized place, whether real or imaginary. 

The “upwards stampede” is one such arrangement; so too are levels like “schnorgled,” “oblate spheroid,” “diactites and stalagonals,” “away in a mangler,” or “go fish”. If N++ is nothing more than another Super Mario Brothers game, then it’s about fifty of them: 1988 genre masterclass Super Mario Brothers 3 has about ninety levels. N++ has four thousand three hundred and forty. 

Some of the hardest rooms may demand hours of attempts, but every successful exit only ever takes thirty seconds or so. I’m reminded of that definition of a sonnet: a moment’s monument. Abstraction arising out of careful acts of reduction—interactive complexity here contingent upon a simplistic control scheme and minimalist aesthetic—all signal, no noise. Each level staging a spatial metaphor for the inescapable compression, contention with, and eventual expression of an idea; the larger level-select grid, which shows zoomed-out quadrants of the negative space of each level, becomes checquered wallpaper of the many metaphors in question. Stampedes, dances, heists, strolls. Very quickly you begin to remember these abstract shapes for the individual places behind the monochrome, like little rorschach screens. Memories of your own containment and escape, the elicitation of expression. New shades of internality, the spiritual resonances latent to pressing three buttons in a certain order—pages in a prayerbook. 

All of this sounds insane; N++ remains easiest to describe by negation. There is no health bar or checkpoints (fail states are immediate), no narrative (N stands for ninja), no desert or forest or volcano palette-swaps, no castles, no boss fights—no fights at all. The hardest & latest levels in N++ “look” just like the easiest & earliest. There is nothing left but to confront yourself within moments and places that, strictly speaking, do not exist. The game is what happens in your head.