Dave Critiques - Night in the Woods: The meaning of replayability

Transcript

Hey hey folks, Dave here. Welcome to my critique of Night in the Woods. Just a friendly reminder that I will be discussing the game for those who have played it. If you haven’t and are worried about spoilers, please pause the video and go play the game before returning. For everyone else, let’s continue.

One notable aspect of Night in the Woods is that during the day to day repetition, you choose which of Mae’s friends to spend time with. This means that based on the decisions of the player, you will miss content that reveals character and may help understanding of what the game is actually about. This gives the game ‘replayability’. This has often been a sought after selling point of videogames. Due to the nature of choice, an abundance of content, or simple secrets, games are praised for having new things to show the player on subsequent playthroughs. In narrative games, this is often done by asking the player to make decisions that impact the story in some way. Choosing which friend to hang out with may not seem like it matters all that much in the grand scheme of things, but Night in the Woods shows that such decisions can affect an overall understanding of what the game is about.

Viewing games as an artform, this presents an issue that paintings, films, or books don’t have to contend with. Yes just like these artforms, games can contain deeper meanings and thematic depth, but the difference is that those other artforms are static. A book has exactly the same words each time you read it and a film is exactly the same each time you view it. The only thing that changes is yourself as the audience, as you might uncover or make some aspect of the work more resonant than it was the last time you read or watched it. In fact, if a game is different each time it is played, it may be that it’s more difficult to engage with any deeper meaning or thematic depth as it’s quite possible that these aspects of the work are not experienced by each player on each playthrough.

The reason this idea struck me while playing Night in the Woods is because of how layered the game seems to be when trying to discern what it’s actually about. And I think that’s mainly because it’s not exactly just one thing. It’s many things, and these things overlap. For instance, Night in the Woods is a tale about the dangers of nostalgia. A manifestation of that idea that you can’t go home again because home isn’t the same as you left it, and you certainly can’t force it back to the way it was. It’s a coming of age story about early twenty somethings learning responsibility and understanding who they are and what they want their relationship to the world to be. It’s about mental illness and learning to live with that part of yourself. These seems to be the more grounded readings.

Night in the Woods is also about lovecraftian horror, about a malevolent elder god who might have descended from the stars and currently resides under the town of Possum Springs thirsting for blood. Whether this horror is legitimate or a metaphor for the more grounded aspects mentioned before is up to your interpretation. Having said that, the game is also about faith. Faith in people, faith in community, and faith in something larger than yourself. It’s about what faith means to different people, and what faith means to those who believe in the religious, including the possibility of the elder goat god. Lastly, It’s about small town America and the economic struggles of Possum Springs in the modern era.

All these aspects of the game I did not work out just by playing the game. I felt like I recieved the cliff notes versions of some of this while playing. The main path of the game will have you come into contact with the majority of these ideas, but my deeper understanding of the majority of them was coloured by the research into what other people have written about the game after playing.

Now if I were to play through a second time, I should be able to expand my understanding of the game’s meaning by making different choices in Mae’s day to day life.But let’s think of what this means for Night in the Woods as a piece of art with a definitive meaning. By definitive I mean what the people who made Night in the Woods had in mind when they created the work. I am not saying that an artist’s meaning is the “proper meaning” of a work or more important or “right” than the interpretations made by anyone who plays the game. It’s just that this game more than others has me thinking about what ‘replayability’ means in terms of artistic expression and interpretation.

The interpretations of Night in the Woods are based on repeated playthroughs and discussions between people who experienced different playthroughs. If you look at a game’s meaning as say a giant jigsaw puzzle, these playthroughs and discussions are clusters of pieces working to create a whole image. What does it mean however that a single playthrough of the game might only reveal small clusters of the jigsaw puzzle, and different ones each time? Does this mean that the meaning of the work is different each time? If so that adds a wrinkle to the idea of gaining new perspective from art when you return to it as the art itself may have changed. Then again, all this information present is actually a part of the game itself. It’s still been coded and animated even if the player never experiences it. I wonder if the ideas presented here hold merit.What’s your take?

Thanks for watching.