I lost a week of my college life to the fully immersive exploratory puzzle game Myst when it hit CD-ROM drives in 1993. And I lost another week to Myst’s sequel, Riven, when I was in grad school. By 2004 I was well on my way to building an addiction to the first-person-shooter game Half-Life 2, sessions of which I rationalized as self-administered rewards for writing a few pages of my dissertation. Later that same year, after an all-night stint playing Call of Duty and emerging into the gray light of a Manhattan winter morning with claim to neither sleep nor sexual conquest, I left “gaming” behind.
Described by Mélanie Courtinat, a Paris-based artist and art director, as an “interactive experience,” The Siren (2024) is a video game of sorts, but one that is intended, as most such “art” games are, to induce in the player a self-consciousness about what it means to play such a game and the mechanics of narrative-meaning that attend to gameplay itself. Produced using Unreal Engine, an industry-leading programme for creating immersive digital 3D environments, The Siren has the look and feel of other contemporary adventure games built with the same engine, such as Chivalry 2 (2021) or last year’s Dragon’s Dogma 2 (sequels are inevitably the main event in this world).
At Gray Area, it’s set up for solo play in an alcove just big enough to fit a large flat-screen monitor on its back wall. There is a single controller that sits on a waist-high white pedestal, suggesting that the experience to come will be more communion than collaborative assault. As a player, you are in “control” of the protagonist or hero, a notably androgyne character decked out in an impressive—and impressively glinting—suit of armor (think Brienne of Tarth from Game of Thrones, but not quite as beefy or blond). You’re stationed on a rock-strewn sliver of beach that backs up to cliffs and castle ruins, and these surrounds, including the water, you are free to explore up to a point. As with all such environments, you will reach a boundary that appears to be navigable, but beyond which your player cannot move.
This activity of exploration, of getting the feel for the environment’s limits and physics—how fast can you run? (not at all), how high can you jump? (you can’t), can you climb the cliffs? (not really), what happens when you walk off a ruin? (nothing much)—isn’t really necessary, but is the kind of thing even novice gamers will generally do when there is a lull in the action or a lack of urgency to the task at hand, whatever that might be.
In The Siren, that task turns out to be collecting a set of six glowing seashells and communicating with something like the game’s “intelligent designer” (let’s call it “ID” for short). The ID at turns scolds or encourages your actions. Getting things going entails first picking up a glowing backpack, after which the ID asks you accusingly who gave you permission to pick it up. The two replies you can offer are something like “I just saw it there abandoned on the sand, I didn’t mean any harm,” or “It’s mine now.” And every ensuing set of replies to the ID’s questions, which come after you pick up each seashell, entail one or the other of such aggressive or submissive options.
In the process of picking up the shells, you learn from the ID that there is a princess that needs saving, but also, as part of the metacommentary which marks this work out as “art,” that such “damsels in distress” are conventional to games and fairytales alike. Once the final seashell is collected, a victory cutscene plays that shows the princess falling from the sky into the water, then you, the protagonist, “rescuing” her, only to have the princess disappear from your arms. The ID tells you that you’ve failed and asks how you feel about that. A final animated shot shows the hero dashing through the glowing entrance gate of the castle, which is now no longer a ruin but reconstituted in all of its medieval majesty. So not such a failure after all?
There is a robust history and current practice of alternative game designers who actively play with the conventions of their medium (from Cory Arcangel’s early Super Mario Bros. hacks in 2002 to Jenova Chen’s multi-award-winning titles such as Journey, 2012, and Sky: Children of the Light, 2019). How The Siren fits in here is an open question, and I worry that it doesn’t. Play it twice (a single session takes between five and fifteen minutes) and you’re sure to reach the ends of its story and gamespace. There are moments of promising slippage of the fourth-wall type, when you are addressed by the ID at turns as player and as the character, for example, but those moments are marginal, not central. For as much as The Siren seems to want to foil expectations, its efforts on this front come across as didactic and so entirely conventional, whereas its frustrations—every time you pick up a glowing shell you must endure another back and forth with the ID before being able to move on and explore further—are just that: frustrating.
Art of course can be frustrating, intentionally so, and often the last thing it wants to be is entertaining. One can take it for granted, though, that something created using Unreal Engine, and which is meant to compare, at least audio-visually, to what the AAA game studios put out, will entail attractions that are compulsively watchable, particularly in a gallery or museum context. But for a game, it’s the gameplay that matters, whether you are the player or, increasingly today, a spectator. Simply making explicit the MacGuffin structure of the conventional adventure narrative doesn’t get at how or why a game is compelling to play. That might require pushing past the admittedly stunning but actually quite superficial aesthetics afforded by Unreal Engine, and committing oneself to conjuring something truly unexpected, for games at least, such as whatever lies on the other side of winning.