Bareness is the tonsure of games writing. With a glimmering, chrome-dome bareness, bareness allows games to transcend from being the sensual assault they once were to something more meaningful, transcendent.
There’s something welcoming about bareness, like some minimalist monstrosity generating and consuming several different types of meaning at the same time, writing and rewriting meaning with every single iteration.
It’s this bareness which breeds simplicity, spawning a piece of work so laconic and easy to consume and understand that its multifaceted meanings supersede the bare systems we experience. Like Malevich’s Suprematist masterpiece Black Square or Stella’s super precise Die Fahne Hoch!, such simplicity and cleanness give rise to thoughts more intricate and complex than its artistic generators.
Waiting for the Bus Simulator is on par with Black Square and Die Fahne Hoch!, a tour-de-force of systems recollective of Nighthawks; it’s both calming and agitating at the same time, drawing eyes in so many directions at so many moments that you can’t but help that such drawing draws you into the vortex of colour and wonder.
It’s a bare game pattered by folksy southern hum as a banjo plays in the background, twinging with nondescript flow and directionless decadence. It repeats itself ever so often, reminding us of the banality of luxuries as we slog through the entrenched and monotonous landscape of life. Its unity controls even accentuate that: the graphical quality versus game speed is stripped aside, meaning nothing to the game: the Fastest setting and the most Beautiful settings are nearly alike, expressing the simple idea that visuals are transitory, superfluous. Like this bus stop, everything is lost in time.
But even so, the deep browns of the bench reveal some semblance of care. Even though the world is a wide and empty place, the bench seems inviting. It’s a woman that takes you in from the rain before you slaughter her; a child that gives a homeless man candy before he kicks her; a friend who gives an umbrella to someone who never returns it. It’s an oasis in the desert.
Indeed, the deserts represent the game’s bareness. Like the cavernous vagina of an abortion veteran, the uncharacteristic dunes of Waiting for the Bus Simulator are void of life, with the only animation being the furious dust storm in the distance. Here, even as white, fluffy clouds hang lazily in the sky around a lens flare sun, you can feel the heat emanating from the golden plains.
These dunes are evidently recalling Dali-esque emptiness, reminding us of the unnecessary component that background plays in such terseness vis-à-vis The Persistence of Memory or even more contemporarily Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man. Much like the latter, these dunes are simply a way for the character to exist, inhabit, but it doesn’t give up the perspective for the ultimate subject, a character named Mark Bob.
Mark Bob is all of us and none of us at the same time; he’s only two first names, creating an immediate feeling of familiarity and affinity, and as a male he immediately sparks a sense of sameness in the form of patriarchal power. One on hand, Lang cleverly juxtaposes Mark with the desert as a symbol of triteness within triteness. As a man without meaning and clan (since he has two first names), Mark Bob is meant to be a force of creativity and wonder standing alone in a wasteland gilded by a golden sheen.
Mark Bob is, in many ways, proletariat warrior. He functions not only as a worker, waiting for the bus because of his inability or lack of love for vehicles, but also because of a purpose – what keeps him there for so long? Why isn’t he moving? Why isn’t he sitting? Why is he always standing?
At first, it seems crazy, limiting, nonsensical. But over time, the layers peel away, the colours twist and turn into something wondrous, and meaning is laid as bare as the game itself: Mark Bob is a vanguard, ever watchful and vigilant, standing by the one staple of civilization in sight (the bus stop) as he waits for another (the bus). In some ways, the bus stop and the bus are simply the transferral of hands, one being a base and the other a superstructure. By waiting for the bus, Mark Bob reveals himself to be awaiting freedom.
Most strikingly, the bus never comes. It’s always there, a small blotch in the distance, haunting us with its ever siren-like presence. It’s always arriving, but never arrives. It’s evident that Lang intends for the bus to be freedom, a reference to a Moorean Utopia. Being covered in the dust storm (which I argue is Mother Nature), Lang merges the freedom of looking at or away from the bus as a means of understanding our roles and freedom in this complex relationship.
Waiting for the Bus Simulator isn’t a game, not in the vein that we consider traditional games like Gone Home, The Stanley Parable, and Day One: Garry’s Incident to be games. They’re hallmarks of ludic elements, powerful in their ability to believably and mightily graft gameplay-heavy elements to tell an intricate tale, yes. But Waiting for the Bus Simulator moves beyond that sort of pettiness to the realm of ludonarrative complexity like some metaphorical contortionist. It’s a cobweb of ideas that purposefully and masterfully impose self-aware limitations to create meaning to such remarkable efficacy that I can’t help but get up and wonder about my life. What have I become? What will I become? What will I do? What do I hope to do? These are some of the questions it asks with such bullish boldness and wanton disregard for deftness that you can’t help but be smothered by its philosophical quandaries.
It’s a bus that never comes; It’s a man that never moves. It’s a bench that’s never sat upon. It’s a stop that never works. It’s a landscape that never lives. It’s a sun that never sets. It’s clouds that never rain. It’s an answer to a question that’s never answered; a puzzle never solved.
Joe Yang
@yaochongyang
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