What gets lost when creation and experience are smoothed over?
It’s hard to focus lately. Everyone wants a slice of the pie that is my free time—endless feeds algorithmically designed to keep me scrolling, free-to-play shooters with infinite updates and gameplay loops, streaming services pushing out more and more original series to spoonfeed me between ads. Every other YouTube video on my home feed is a how-to guide for getting off your phone. The content farm keeps on churning, and despite my best efforts I am no better than a baby, open-mouthed and utterly transfixed by 3D models of smiling, dancing fruit. God forbid I want to read a book or something.
Perfect Tides: Station to Station takes place in 2003, a time when the internet was something you could walk away from and I was literally an open-mouthed baby. Despite the time gap, Station to Station is a memoir game that could have been about me. Like a funhouse mirror, my life reflects and refracts Mara Whitefish’s: a young writer in “The City,” naive and desperate to be distinguished. A string of lovers to unwittingly hurt and be hurt by in return. A tedious campus job getting in the way of homework. A suburban Jewish family a train ride away, calling ambulances for Safta and always, always worrying. 20 years apart and some 30 blocks away, there’s a Gray’s Papaya.
It’s hard not to project myself onto Mara when so many of my specific struggles are laid out before me in Station to Station. Over and over Mara and I are both confronted with the horrifying truth that we know way less than we thought we did. So it’s jarring that, while I stare at blank documents for hours, Mara’s actual pen-to-paper writing practice is largely frictionless.
In lieu of a skill tree or experience points, progressing through the game unlocks various Topics for Mara to explore and level up. These Topics—things like Anarchism, Sex, and Music—manifest as 3D polygons rotating around in Mara’s brain (real), and are the basis for her writing. When Mara sits down in front of the chunky library computer and opens up the word processor, the time she spends coming up with an idea amounts to how long it takes the player to select a couple Topics for her to center her piece on. The more a Topic is leveled up, the better her writing is likely to be received.
Topics can be leveled up by doing things like meeting people, going to the movies, and reading books—which in turn makes Mara’s writing better, and her life richer. Since there’s a limited amount of time in the day and a finite number of actions you can take, you’re encouraged to direct Mara to do things that will broaden her worldview and improve her writing. It’s not quite as simple as that, though; sometimes, completing actions that you would expect to level up a given Topic don’t teach her anything. Accepting a free drink or a joint doesn’t expand Mara’s understanding of Drugs, for instance. Meanwhile, doing something seemingly silly and pointless—like pushing a heavy CRT up a flight of stairs with nobody around to help or hear if her body gets crushed—ends up granting Mara valuable insights into Death.
The unpredictability of the Topics mechanic echoes what it’s like to learn from being alive in the real world. Revelations come in all shapes and sizes, and often from the places and conversations you least expect. You can’t minmax growing up; it just happens to you, constantly.
By contrast, Mara’s actual writing practice is incredibly straightforward: once you pick the Topics, Mara usually cranks out the entire piece in one sitting. In the writing tutorial, the narrator warns her, “On any given day, you will need to choose between collecting more ideas, and delivering your work on time.” But in reality, she has plenty of time to do both.
The quality of Mara’s writing varies based on the levels, relevance, and usage frequency of her primary and secondary Topics. This system is very logical, so it’s easy to consistently write well. While Station to Station often portrays Mara as out of her depth, in this realm she is almost eerily competent. But my writing practice doesn’t resemble a rational puzzle game at all. I spend hours staring at blank documents and blank walls, desperately trying to assemble my jumbled thoughts into something coherent. Sometimes writing feels like throwing up; sometimes it feels like strangling myself. I’m left to wonder: are Mara’s systematic writing capabilities simplified for the sake of a cleaner game, or am I alone in my creative clumsiness?
Mara can write one piece per in-game day. She can also, once a day, read an entire book. The process is exactly as easy for her as writing: at the player’s command, Mara sets herself down on a stoop and reads a given title cover-to-cover in one sitting. If it was actually this easy to read in 2003, I should’ve stopped worrying about being a baby and locked the fuck in.
There’s a menu that breaks every in-game day down into two checkboxes, denoting whether Mara wrote something that day, and whether she read something—or not. This abstraction condenses reading and writing to black-and-white matters of productivity rather than gauntlets of creative strife and fulfillment; that Mara finishes reading or writing something is mechanically more important than her experience during it, despite the game being thematically centered around her experiences.
You could argue that the reward of playing Perfect Tides: Station to Station is the game’s writing. When Mara finishes a book, she shares her impressions of it, and while there are some titles she doesn’t mesh with, her analysis is generally sharp and insightful. The books she reads can slightly influence Mara’s relationships and level up Topics, but overall what Mara chooses to read or not has little impact on the course of the narrative.
In a similar vein, right-clicking on various parts of the environment will lend nuggets of information about Mara’s perception of the world around her at that particular time—a mechanic which I didn’t realize existed until the game’s denouement, and had no tangible effect on the game (other than my horror at how much I had unknowingly missed). This strict adherence to point-and-click adventure genre conventions kneecaps the narrative weight of Mara’s observations. Her reading, writing, and examinations are presented as extraneous avenues of player expression—as items to check off a to-do list or ignore altogether.
It reminds me of my never-ending backlog of books and games and films, and how they feel like chores to put off indefinitely. In a culture inundated with content, there is overwhelming pressure to consume and produce at Mara’s inhuman speed, and anything short of that can feel like failure.
But the friction is what makes art important. It’s annoying to remember to bring Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits when I go out, and I often forget it at home. But the fact that it’s taking me months to get through this story told across generations means I am growing and changing alongside the characters, and that aspect of the reading experience would be lost entirely if I read it all in one sitting on a stoop. This essay has been weeks in the making, and it wouldn’t exist if I didn’t have time to go about my life and passively digest the game in the process. When the creative process is streamlined as immediate and without struggle, something essential is lost.
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