In Tokyo on 26 January, 1948, a man walked into a branch of the Teigin Bank, claiming to be a public health official sent to vaccinate the staff against dysentery. What he made them drink was poison. Twelve died. Later, a watercolour artist called Hirasawa Sadamichi was arrested for the crime and confessed, even though witnesses did not identify him as the murderer. Hirasawa later recanted his confession but was sentenced to death anyway, despite the absence of any other evidence as to his guilt. No Japanese justice minister ever authorized his execution, so he died in prison in 1987, having lived on death row for 32 years. The crime has never been definitively solved, and a campaign to clear Hirasawa’s name continues.

Such is the plot basis of Occupied City, and it is all historical fact. The question for the writer of true-crime novelizations, then, is how to arrange the facts aesthetically, and to justify processing them into fiction.

Courageously, Occupied City takes for its central drama the author’s own struggle to make a novel out of his research materials. It begins in second-person-singular narration, where “you”, a writer, are struggling with your documents. The prose has a druggy-poetic feel, as though William Burroughs were channelling Gerard Manley Hopkins:

But the ghost-laden wind is here now, again the be-specter-ed air is upon you. It steals your papers and it shatters your spectacles, it makes a sheaf-blizzard of the loose-leafs, a shard-storm of the slivered-lenses, as you claw through the laden wind, as you thrash through the haunted air—

It turns out that a game of ghost-storytelling is to be played, with various characters connected to the Teigin Bank incident appearing to the writer and telling their tales, then snuffing out one of twelve candles, until there are none left lit. The subsequent framing passages are all in this oxygen-starved style of faintly cheesy occultism, with emboldened phrases and portentous lineation, until finally the writer is complaining so hard about how his book will not come that the reader wonders how the thing came to be in his hands after all.

Luckily, this is not the only style available to Peace. A mode of incantatory repetition, familiar from the consciousness of the narrator of Peace’s previous novel, Tokyo Year Zero, is used to more effectively haunting effect in the apparition of the murder victims, and that is followed by the notebook entries of a detective investigating the crime, in refreshingly choppy style, with sentence-fragments separated by dashes. There follow letters from an American soldier, news reports from a journalist, the diaries of a Soviet soldier (melodramatically going mad), the memories of a gang boss, and so on, each recounting the crime, its aftermath and possible antecedents. As previous writers have done, Peace leans towards the theory that the real murderer was connected to Unit 731, a Japanese biowarfare research division, and among the novel’s nastiest passages are reconstructions of their experiments on Chinese prisoners.

This polyphonous scheme is obviously inspired by Rashomon, as the reader guesses early on and as the author confirms at the end. The two-page list of the author’s “sources” also includes Gogol, Büchner, Borges, “The poems and prose of Paul Celan”, and “The films and diaries of Andrei Tarkovsky”. (What, all of them?) A novel that offers such an extensive bibliography prompts the question of whether it has managed to clamber out from under the weight of it. For all the stylistic variation, much of the narrative takes place in declarative hindsight, with little synchronic representation, as though hurrying to include as many facts and anecdotes as possible. And Tokyo itself, the novel’s titular character, remains strangely abstract. Everyone is always talking about the city and calling it names — it is the Perplexed City, the Posthumous City, the Fictional City; it is a “coffin”, a “wound”, a “séance” — but there is very little sensuous evocation of any part of it.

Meanwhile, other possible influences not mentioned include Mark Z Danielewski (of whom I was reminded by Peace’s verse-prose mashups and games with struck-out text), and T S Eliot. It is Eliot, for example, who seems to be the gloomy spirit behind what at first promises to be the book’s most unreadable sequence, thanks to its rapid alternation of roman, italic and uppercase script. It concerns a mysterious second detective whose relationship with his wife is deteriorating quickly:

Now I take some money from my pocket, I give it to my wife, I say, I have to go, go back to work the dog and his master BLOWS, IF WE’RE NOT I’m a bad person I know, my wife is weeping, I’m bad for you. If I had a sharp knife, I could stab myself. I want to die the bad dog, the good master IN ROOMS, UNDER CLOCKS I leave the room, I close the door, I leave the building, I turn another corner, and I’m gone again among the tunes, among the smoke WE WAIT FOR DEATH

At length this morosely tolling, Waste Land-ish atmosphere exerts a peculiarly hypnotic effect. It is perhaps telling that many of the novel’s most striking aspects — this thread of domestic despair, or the remarkable final scene (modelled after Athenian tragedy) — can be viewed more or less independently of the main bank-massacre narrative, which remains stubbornly a collection of facts and speculations. You might then conclude that the book is not successful as a whole. But Occupied City is at least a defiantly experimental novel — annoying and gnawingly interesting by turns, mixing cheap effects with genuinely original ones — and the authorial will to follow the experiment to its conclusion constitutes its own kind of success.

It’s a brilliant, evocative work of interactive folktale that interrogates our assumptions about choice, success and failure, and the medium of the videogame itself. It’s a supremely boring collection of FMVs with pretensions to interactivity that very quickly wears out its joke about control and becomes a tedious slab of nihilistic whimsy.

Those, at least, are two possible responses to The Path. Choose your own! Me, I think The Path bears the same relation to the craft of videogames as “video art” bears to the craft of filmmaking. Perhaps you have wandered into a darkened art-gallery space and seen a film of an artist bouncing up and down on a trampoline for 15 minutes. “Meh,” you might have said, “I suppose this is making a point about some aspects of performance and film, but there is, in fact, considerably more artistry in most 30-second beer commercials.”

The Path affects to be something different from a traditional game experience (though gamers who have been around a bit, playing Pimania or Seaman as well as Halo and Zelda, know that there is no such thing as a homogeneous “traditional gaming experience”). At the same time, The Path is much more gamelike than it likes to admit, exploiting some standard paradigms of control and status indication, albeit executed in a manner that, depending on taste, you will call “ironic” or just plain broken. Eschewing most of the pleasures of interactivity, however, the game plainly has greater aspirations to the literary and the cinematic.

Consider how much text and explicit narrative The Path finds necessary to invoke its mood, compared with the beautiful austerity of exposition in Ico, and how much less fluid and pleasurable is its player movement. Or, if it is unfair to compare an indie game made by two people to a highly polished commercial product from a much larger team, compare the deeply intriguing Linger In Shadows, a feast of pure experimental game aesthetics with a similarly limited (but much more satisfyingly engineered) palette of interaction.

The Path doesn’t do itself any favours, either, with the specific choices it makes: for example that, in an area of interest, you are no longer allowed to run, limited instead to a tediously slow walk. This is probably a comment on the impatience and hyperactivity of other games, but that doesn’t stop it being extremely annoying. Meanwhile, the way in which, at grandmother’s house, you are forced to keep pressing any button in order to proceed on rails towards the ending might give you a feeling of nightmarish inevitability, but I felt more as though I had to keep jabbing at a dying remote control in order to keep my DVD playing.

In a way, The Path is the opposite of survival horror; it is death-seeking horror. (”Are you trying to get yourself killed?” “Yes!”) So imagine my frustration when I navigated a sister to the edge of a big lake, and discovered that I couldn’t just make her throw herself in and drown, Ophelia-style, which might have made for some prettily haunting melancholy. Instead, I was doomed to trudging the periphery with excruciating lack of haste, until I could start blindly running again in any random direction, hoping that next time a zombie squirrel would bite my head off.

The Path is well-named, after all: there is a predestined, authored storyline for each of the characters (her path), and your task as a player is to find that path and walk it. That is all. You cannot change anything. Your job is merely to scrabble round in the possibility space (the wraparound forest) until you bump into what the designers wrote.

Even so, in its ornery and precious way, The Path is a triumph of atmosphere, coming much closer than the cruder shocks of games such as Silent Hill or Bioshock to a dramatization of what Ernst Jentsch and Freud analyzed as the “uncanny” in literature. There is a lugubrious, Lynchian surrealism to the mise-en-scène of a forester indefatigably chopping at trees while a girl hops in and out of her tent; a tableau of chairs arranged underwater around a tree-trunk; or the climactic house with its perspectives and interiors gone increasingly wrong. The shivering opaque scribbles on the screen, smudges of wolfprints or pummelling bursts of static and flashes of barbed wire, make the game’s “window” a kind of occult palimpsest, and Jarboe’s beautiful music is a model of minimalist suggestion.

We are living in a fascinatingly rich era for videogame experimentation, when works such as The Path (or Linger In Shadows or Flower) can achieve wide distribution and prompt passionate discussion. Deeply flawed though it is, we should be glad The Path exists. But it also suggests a general truth about many “art games”: they would be better as art if they were better as games.

It was when I climbed to the mountain lodge, hid inside a bush across the wooden drawbridge, and fired a single shot from my flare pistol. The flare ignited the lodge, and the guards started running around in a blind panic. I just sat there, listening to the cries of my target inside the lodge as it smoked and burned, until he fell silent. Job done. I got off the mountain fast and proud. That’s one stealthy psychotic safari outing. That’s power.

Like many people, I had initially dismissed Far Cry 2 as yet another boring open-world job simulator involving endless backtracking. Coming back to it in search of more pretend men to kill after completing CoD4 left a killing-pretend-men-shaped hole in my digital heart, I realised that such criticisms were both true and beside the point. For many of them, it is a plausible response to say: “You’re doing it wrong.” Are you driving up to every checkpoint in your Jeep, hopping out guns blazing? You’re doing it wrong. (The simple solution to the respawning checkpoint controversy: they ought just to have taken a longer, and more fictionally plausible, time to repopulate: say, 24 gameworld hours.) Are you sticking to the roads instead off driving cross-country whenever possible? You’re doing it wrong.

Of course, to be justified in saying “You’re doing it wrong”, a game must give you an enjoyable way to do it right. Yet for the first couple of hours, Far Cry 2 fails dismally. The player is just not yet properly equipped to play the game. Stuck already in the tutorial, I eventually realized that I was obliged to buy one of the crappy guns the arms dealer was offering me. But I didn’t want any of those guns: they looked rubbish. And, as I quickly learned when I yomped off through the bush, they were.

So the player feels impotent and frustrated for the first few hours of the game. Much later, it all clicks. Finally you can stride out loaded up with, say, the Dart Rifle, the Silenced MP5, and the Flare Pistol. Now you can snipe people in the face from afar and chuckle bloodthirstily at the emergent comedy of panic-stricken guards blowing themselves up. You have gone from zero to badass. That’s satisfying.

But does the satisfaction retrospectively justify the clunky beginnings? Many games progress in the same way as Far Cry 2, as we would see clearly if we plotted graphs of player power over time. Far too often, the player is underpowered early on. It is as though developers design the core experience around the peak of player power, with all the rules and toys in place, before working back through the game, gradually stripping power until the player is forced to begin with a rusty screwdriver. Presto, an instant mechanic of reward — but one that is fatally easy to misjudge.

Player power’s ebb and flow, with spikes and troughs in the time-curve, can imply its own emergent narrative. Take two complementarily stunning moments near the end of MGS4. In one, you are almost completely impotent, crawling through a corridor and unable to use any weapon or gadget. The other moment is one of the exhilarating peaks of player power in all videogaming: you are piloting a Metal Gear through hangar tunnels, stomping and shooting hundreds of tiny, terrified guards. Nothing can stop you.

Some games are nervous of allowing the player to become “too powerful”. Far Cry 2’s own Clint Hocking, one of the most thoughtful and eloquent of contemporary developers, explained in a talk at this spring’s GDC that the game’s systemic random annoyances, malaria attacks and jamming guns, were designed so as to forestall a feeling of “mastery”, where everything always went according to plan. “When we master a thing, we destroy it,” he argued.

I don’t agree; nor, I suppose, would many world-class athletes or musicians. In a videogame, absolute, unchallengeable power (as in MGS4’s Metal Gear moment) is a fierce, raw pleasure. It cannot last the whole game, but it can be a durable and thrilling peak. (And it is available, in bursts, in Hocking’s own game, as when a sniping mission is going well.) As Hannibal Smith said: “I love it when a plan comes together.” Should the designer really be a moralistic father-figure, assuming too much power is bad for his children, second-guessing the player’s creative planning in order to try to bork it in advance?

By exploiting the player’s anxiety and adrenaline directly through the downgrading and up-ramping of his power, after all, Hideo Kojima has demonstrated an extraordinary tool for engaging the player emotionally: a more visceral bond between player and gameworld is thereby created than can ever be induced with cinematics or “buddies”. As Nietzsche said, and Far Cry 2’s Kurtz figure rehearses: the will to power is all.

You can’t always get what you want. I have just offered my enemies money for reconstruction, and they laughed in my face: in view of my recent “security actions” (um, political assassinations using Apache helicopters), no one believes that I really mean well. To add insult to injury, opposition members of my own government have called my tenure a “comedy of errors”. I realize that everything I do is an act of symbolic communication, and so my actions need to represent a consistent narrative. Lesson learned: I ease border controls and trade restrictions, arrest a few of my own extremist nutters, and eventually another offer of aid is accepted. I do better in the polls, and soon I am rewarded with a video of bikini’d babes walking along a beach, tickled by the “Winds of Peace”. I have reached a pacific milestone. But the tension is not over yet.

Such is one possible experience of playing Impact Games’ rightly admired PeaceMaker, a geopolitical simulation that you can “play” as either the Israeli Prime Minister or the president of the Palestinian Authority. It combines an RTS-style map of the territory with real news footage and a turn-based mechanic. Every week you choose one action — making a speech, negotiating with internal factions, encouraging or suppressing violent activity — and then watch as an unanticipated event (suicide bombings, riots, etc) throws a spanner in the works, and your poll ratings vacillate among the various domestic and global onlookers. Naturally, things proceed very differently depending on which leader you are: no standard videogame concept of “balanced” forces can apply here. As the Palestinian president, you have to keep Hamas and Fatah relatively on-side, while commanding only a ragtag police force, and having to make wan appeals to outside actors such as the UN. As Israeli PM you have the option of missile strikes and tightening army checkpoints, while also having to deal with your own parliament and the “settler” faction, but at least you have the US as a friend.

PeaceMaker is thus an “educational” game, in that it provides a roughly accurate model of the political and security options on both sides of an actual conflict — as with Impact’s very interesting continuing series of web minigames based on current affairs, under the rubric “Play the News”. But perhaps the most potent aspect of PeaceMaker’s pedagogy is more abstract and potentially more widely fruitful. It’s the fact I began by mentioning: that sometimes, you cannot do what you want to do. Not because it’s a greyed-out menu item that is impossible to choose in the first place, but because, unlike in most videogames, there is an unpredictable disjunction between intention and effect. So you click to give the Palestinians some money to rebuild their infrastructure, and wait nervously as the calendar ticks over. They refuse to accept it. A thought-provoking kind of frustration ensues. The right thing to do is, somehow, not the right thing.

Such an unreliable sense of agency would be enormously annoying in most games, even though it is closer to real life. Indeed, one of the high-level pleasures of nearly all videogames is precisely that they provide a sense of perfectible agency, which is essential to inducing that exhilarating feeling of individual power with which videogames console us for the powerlessness of our daily existence. But the point that PeaceMaker drills into the player — importantly, not through text or video, but through the way it models interactive casuality — is that even those people who ostensibly do have power, prime ministers and presidents, cannot control everything. They, too, can be at the mercy of events.

Creatively compromising the player’s agency is an underexploited tool of game design. To make an analogy with prose, it is as though videogames are written almost entirely in the active voice, with too little heed paid to the aesthetic effects available in the passive voice. Now, if you withhold agency from the player completely, what you get is a cut-scene. Yet what PeaceMaker most reminded me of, curiously, was the stunning passage in Call of Duty 4 where you struggle out of a downed helicopter to see a city devastated by a nuclear explosion. You don’t even have a weapon in your hand, and a mushroom cloud is towering in the sky. Your breathing becomes increasingly laboured. At length you fall over, and die. The game brilliantly underlines the enormity of the scenario precisely by putting you in command of an individual who is utterly powerless.

Sometimes, one man cannot change anything with a rifle and a bagful of grenades, just as sometimes, a political leader cannot accomplish his objectives with the levers available for him to pull. Both PeaceMaker and Call of Duty 4 are subtly educational to this extent: they remind us that however big your hammer, sometimes you will come across something that is not a nail.

Stunt books — in which the author goes off and does something unusual in order to write about it — can be an excellent source of vicarious pleasure. And Neil Strauss — whose previous stunt book, The Game, saw him initiated into the world of “pick-up artists”, who teach geeks algorithms for attracting women — has picked an ideal follow-up stunt for our uncertain times: becoming a survivalist.

“I’ve begun to look at the world through apocalypse eyes,” he declares portentously. What if society breaks down? Could a rock journalist survive in the subsequent atavistic free-for-all? (Strauss’s coinage for this scenario is “a Fliesian world”, as in Lord of the Flies. No, I don’t think it will catch on either.)

Searching for guidance, Strauss meets an assortment of fanatical anti-government weirdos, a legendary outdoorsman called Tom Brown Jr, and a master knifemaker named Mad Dog (who sports, reassuringly, “a brown handlebar mustache”). Teachers of survival skills say things like: “We’re nine meals away from chaos in this country.” And Strauss gets his stunts on: learning to use firearms, build shelters, find edible plants, and kill a goat. (At least one animal really was harmed in the making of this book.)

For an idea that presses so many universal male-fantasy buttons (I for one would love to get a book out of learning to shoot guns and whittle sticks), the result is remarkably tedious — partly because it tries so frantically to avoid tedium. It is evidently aimed at people who don’t read books: the chapters are mostly about three pages long, presenting light-magazine-style 1200-word write-ups of his various survival, first-aid, or urban-evasion courses, interspersed with conversations with his girlfriend, sophomoric reflections on politics, and cartoons depicting a more-handsome version of the author doing manly things with soft-drinks cans or shoelaces.

Most fatally, though, Strauss glosses over the details of what he actually learns, regularly mentioning a new battery of skills he has acquired but not bothered to explain. At the end of one chapter he even announces that he is going to learn “street-fighting” at the local Krav Maga school, and then never describes the training. (Perhaps he is saving that story up for another stunt book.)

The real story here is Strauss himself, and his changing attitudes to fear and danger. (He eventually finds peace of mind as an emergency volunteer.) Unfortunately, he lacks the writerly and observational subtlety of, say, Jon Ronson (who has covered some of the same material in a much more interesting way). Meanwhile, readers who buy the book expecting lots of useful facts and tips are likely to feel short-changed by a decadently attention-deficit, philosophy-free version of Self-Reliance for the Twitter generation. Earnest emergency fetishists will rue a missed opportunity, and fondle the reassuring covers of their Worst-Case Scenario handbooks.

After the 2007 publication of Tree of Smoke, his stupendous 600-page Vietnam-war epic, Denis Johnson might well have wanted to kick back and let off a little steam. He does so in grand style here. Nobody Move is a terse little hardboiled entertainment that originally ran last year as a four-part serial in Playboy magazine. Relatively speaking, the author may be slumming it, but he can’t help slathering the story’s pages in his usual idiosyncratic brilliance. It’s a story of small-time gamblers, crooks and gangsters in the contemporary American west, which opens on a scene of insouciant incongruity. Our hero, Jimmy Luntz, is singing on stage in a barbershop chorus competition. Two pages later he is in a car with a melancholic villain, Gambol, sent by the guy to whom Jimmy owes money. Four pages after that, Jimmy has shot him. Unfortunately, Gambol survives. He and his boss will come after Jimmy hard.

Meanwhile, there is also a dame: Anita, who has been framed for her husband’s embezzlement of $2.3m. She gets drunk in afternoon cinemas, shoots jars of nuts and bolts for target practice, and has “a smile that would have blown the doors off Jesus Christ”. She and Jimmy meet and hook up, planning to steal her husband’s stolen money.

Johnson concocts a loving sensorium of interstitial America: neon reflected in wet small-town streets, bars and drugstores and anonymous motels. Checking in to one of the latter, Jimmy notices:

the walls of this small room looked like logs. He put his hand out and discovered he touched real wood. He hadn’t known they still made things out of actual logs. He’d assumed all logs were fake.

Later on, he will be riding in a Jaguar and touching the dashboard to make sure that, too, is real wood.

The book is dialogue-heavy, which is good, because Johnson is superb at dialogue. At one point the hero and the heroine wonder who will come off better if there is a shootout with their pursuers:

Luntz said, ‘You’re the sure shot. In my whole life, I’ve fired exactly one bullet.’
Anita said, ‘I can knock bottles off a fence all day. But I’m not the guy who shot a guy.’

You feel the Coen brothers might do the caper justice on celluloid. The jacket blurb does not fail to namecheck Cormac McCarthy (whose No Country for Old Men was filmed by the Coens) as well as Chandler; but, though there is something of Chigurh in the implacable killer, Gambol, a more apt reference for the story’s snappy talk and comic incompetence is Elmore Leonard.

Johnson’s own special ingredient, though, is his attention to moments when people slip the moorings of a logical narrative: as in Tree of Smoke, certain scenes bloom with a kind of poetry of dissociation. One encounter, for example, is narrated first from Gambol’s point of view, and then from Luntz’s. The part that belongs to Gambol, a practised killer, hums with the precision of movement and reconnaissance: examining a door, he has time to notice that “Dead wasps and dead flies littered the threshold”. In dramatic contrast, when we cut to Luntz, who does not make a habit of this kind of thing, the action is shot through with lacunae that surgically reproduce the character’s panic:

Luntz turned and flung himself to the ground, hearing gunshots, and his senses ceased functioning. When the darkness and silence ended he was over the side of the hill and standing behind the building and hearing the river, and now his senses were sharp, precise.

(Even so, Johnson creates the leisure for an extraordinary observation, as Jimmy reaches under his bed for a bag that contains a shotgun: “Rather than pulling it to him, he found himself floundering toward it under the bed.”)

The story motors on, dispensing wisecracks and style-bombs on every page. Anita’s husband, Frank, “wasn’t that good-looking. He simply had this way about him that suggested it was his party, and the human race was lucky to be his guest.” Someone gets shot: “The back of the head had been scooped away and flung against the oven’s door.” When the sun rises over the action, “The morning seemed lit by a blowtorch.”

Eventually we hear of, and then meet, a bad guy who is much worse than the bad guys we already know. He is known as “The Tall Man”, even though he is five foot eight inches tall. There is something wrong with his face. What is wrong with it? Johnson won’t say, but that’s all right. He knows what to leave out, as well as what to put in. Reaching the end, the exhilarated reader is blindsided by the hint of something huge.

It’s when I have two men and a dog happily balanced on the undulating form of my giant quadrupedal anthropomorphic caterpillar and then eat a house that I realise this is either one of the most important videogames of recent years, or somehow not a videogame at all. What is this crazy thing called Noby Noby Boy?

The core pleasure of Boy’s stretchiness is the kind of thing that is sometimes loosely called a “mechanic”, but that word implies a sense of linear rigidity belied by Boy’s twangy and twirly acrobatics. It’s more about the simulation of a recognisable material quality, like my preference for blue denim when I am Sackboy (a texture I in some way stroke with my eyes), or the peculiarly satisfying way in which MGS’s iconic cardboard box flops down around Snake. Some kind of stylised “physics” had been around in videogames for a long time, of course (think of the crucial role played by versions of “inertia” in Asteroids or the 2D Mario games), but gradually more interest was directed not just to how objects move but what they are like in themselves. This is one obscure thread, indeed, by which you could trace the evolution of videogames: from hard and rigid (the only halfway “realistic” representations for a long time could be of shiny metal objects) to soft and deformable.

Like its predecessor Katamari (and before that, Stretch Panic), Noby Noby Boy is an example of what we could call a physical-property toy. The much-lauded indie game Gish, meanwhile, was built on the physical property of viscosity (a ball of tar), paving the way for the delightful squishiness of LocoRoco. There appears to be something inherently thrilling about bounciness (not just for the obvious psychosexual reasons to do with the stereotypical videogamer demographic): the word (64 or 128 bits long) is made flesh (of a naturalistic or surreal kind). A curious joy is awoken in witnessing a representation of what is attractively tactile, locked away or sublimated to a realm where you can’t actually touch it, as with Salvador Dalí’s famous soft clocks.

To call it a “toy” is to recognise the most radical aspect of Noby Noby Boy, which is that there is nothing to do. Or, if you prefer, there is everything to do. It’s just that, aside from sending statistics of your length increases to Girl, the system does not predetermine some set of actions as a win and another as a fail. Similarly a child’s plastic truck comes with no rules, strategies or definitions of success that are extrinsic to how the truck actually works as a physical thing. You play a game, but you play with a toy.

If playing with a toy sounds somehow like an “immature” pursuit, we ought to recognise that it fits into everyday adult life very nicely. After all, huge numbers of non-gaming grown-ups play with toys, too: it’s just that the toys in question are cunningly disguised as sports equipment, or vehicles, or “productivity” devices. (The dazed masses who cannot stop fiddling with their iPhones in the pub or at the bus stop or over romantic candlelit dinners are surely entranced as much by the functioning of the device itself as by whatever they are “doing” on it.)

As a toy, Noby Noby Boy also takes a polemical position on what we call “freedom” in videogames. It ought to remind us that there are actually two sorts of freedom we care about. The more restricted kind can be called “freedom how”: the game gives you an objective or issues you an order, and you then explore the freedom of combining tools and tactics to accomplish the mandated task in your own way. “Freedom how” is what we value in MGS, or Far Cry 2. But those games offer very little of the other kind of freedom, “freedom to”: the liberty to define your own tasks in the first place, or just to act in a way that isn’t task-oriented at all. Often, the more a game tries to give us a little taste of “freedom to” — as in GTA4 — the more frustrated we become by its limitations (you can’t go into /that/ building; you can’t wander off and try a pottery class).

Noby Noby Boy splats gaily down into this argumentative space by showing us an extreme execution of “freedom to”, not telling us what the hell we are supposed to be doing in its ridiculous universe, and relying on no other motivational structure to keep the player going than its innate charm and the vague feel-good communalism of sending Girl further out into space. It is a gauntlet thrown down to videogame designers and players, demanding that we ask whether it is a videogame at all, what we want out of videogames, and whether the pleasures of the form, like Boy himself, can be teased and stretched in surprising new directions.

Can a videogame be like a poem? Well, back in the 1980s, Tir Na Nog and Dun Darach raided the mythology of the Celtic sagas; and Lara Croft has just finished doing the same for Norse mythology. Perhaps the Metal Gear Solid series updates the medieval allegory Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, replacing the Green Knight with nuclear-armed giant robots, which is obviously an improvement. The Zelda saga rehearses the epic, episodic romance quest narrative of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Maybe cracking a particularly tough battle in Advance Wars sparks a dopamine rush akin to that furnished by one of William Empson’s anfractuous, hyper-dense poems, and Killzone 2 is the digital equivalent of the comforting ditties of Pam Ayres.

A poem is a marriage of determinacy and indeterminacy. The words in their unalterable order predictably generate a literal meaning, but also give off a cloud of association and implication whose extent is unforeseeable, keeping ambiguities eternally in play. A videogame, too, runs on determinate code to produce predictable effects, but also allows a larger set of possible outputs that cannot be delineated in advance.

Well, perhaps now we are cheating, having moved from the proposition that a videogame is like a poem, to the more concrete comparison of the videogame’s written instruction set to the written poem, taking advantage of the old saw that “code is poetry”, and noticing the distant din of PlayStation3 developers complaining that they are forced to write The Waste Land while their Xbox colleagues can still get away with scribbling rhyming couplets.

Such speculations arise from thatgamecompany’s PR claim that Flower is “Our video game version of a poem”. It bespeaks simultaneously a cringeworthy medium anxiety (no one respects videogames; poetry is the thing to aspire to) and a fey artistic hubris (look, we are poets!). Well, to me, Flower does not feel like a poem. In fact, it suggests nothing so much a version of Space Harrier customized for the personal pleasure of Alan Titchmarsh. I am just glad that I did not come across the claim that Flower was somehow a “poem” before I had played it, because otherwise I would have settled down to the game saying to myself “Okay, what is this conceited bullshit?”, rather than just downloading it, playing it, and saying “Wow”.

The developers claim that Flower “challenges traditional gaming conventions”, which is disingenuous. For a start, it is blatantly heavily indebted to two games: Okami (the way in which verdure and colour ripple out across the landscape from an epicentre of player success is torn straight from that game) and Rez (for the way aural feedback is incorporated into the musical score).

But those two titles were definitively gamers’ games. You and I might agree that they were more dense, varied and satisfying works than Flower. What the latter has done very successfully, on the other hand, is not to abandon gaming conventions but, on the contrary, to take a handful of conventions and purify them to the point where they seem “natural” even to the non-habitual gamer. A fine example of this is its path indication. Where many games tell you where to go next with glowing arrow that is not ontologically rooted in the gameworld, Flower uses rows of little white plants that nudge you in the right direction without breaking the organic illusion.

The fact that such path indication is even present, of course, points to the truth that the game at heart is utterly conventional in its sequential task-based nature: you basically collect stuff to open doors. What is remarkable about Flower is the illusion of liberation it manages to create within this labour-based structure owing to its extraordinarily pleasurable sense of flight. The developers say that “the player controls the lead petal”, but it feels to me as though my “character” is really the wind itself, and thus that I am playing from an indeterminate perspective: neither first-person nor third-person, but a depersonalized plurality.

Thatgamecompany’s ambitious claims for Flower have already worked, to the extent that you can read countless reviews happily babbling about how it’s like “a Zen poem“, like no other videogame ever made. But this is the wrong way to honour its achievement. A stern critical pragmatism is required. Flower is nothing like a poem, we ought to insist: it is a really interesting videogame, one which does things that many other videogames have already done, but with a more focused finesse, in the service of a clear artistic vision. It does not stand outside the medium’s history but is embedded within it. And it is for that reason that I look forward with interest to whatever the developers produce next, while steeling myself for the inevitable puffery claiming that it is somehow like a Da Vinci sketchbook or a Wagnerian opera.

Number theory — what Gauss called “the queen of mathematics”, devoted to the study of numbers and their arcane interrelationships — does not perhaps sound like the most fruitful basis for a poignant domestic drama. And yet this novel, with its skilful admixture of tender atmospherics and stealthy education, has sold more than four million copies in its native Japan. Its unnamed characters suggest archetype or myth; its rapturous concentration on the details of weather and cooking provide a satisfyingly textured foundation.

The book is narrated by the housekeeper of the title, a single mother employed by an agency, who is assigned a new client. He lives in a dingy two-room apartment, and his suit jacket is covered with reminder notes he scribbles to himself. This is the Professor, a brilliant mathematician who suffered brain damage in a car accident in 1975, and since then cannot remember anything for more than an hour and 20 minutes at a time. “It’s as if he has a single, eighty-minute videotape inside his head,” the narrator explains, “and when he records anything new, he has to record over the existing memories.”

What he can remember is mathematics. He asks for her shoe size and telephone number, and reflects on the mathematical properties of each. Once he has drawn a picture of her and clipped it to his suit so that he is not altogether surprised to see her every day, he begins to induct her into number theory. We learn about primes, triangular numbers, the invention of zero, and so on, in surprisingly warm-hearted scenes of exposition. Perhaps the Professor’s most splendid speech dramatizes prime-hunting as a quest through inhospitable country. At first, the prime numbers are frequent, but:

“When you get to much bigger numbers — a million or ten million — you’re venturing into a wasteland where the primes are terribly far apart [...] that’s right, a desert. No matter how far you go, you don’t find any. Just sand as far as the eye can see. The sun shines down mercilessly, your throat is parched, your eyes glaze over. Then you think you see one, a prime number at last, and you go running toward it — only to find that it’s just a mirage, nothing but hot wind. Still, you refuse to give up, staggering on step by step, determined to continue the search… until you see it at last, the oasis of another prime number, a place of rest and cool, clear water…”

Soon the housekeeper begins to take her young son to work, and he and the old man become friends. (The professor decides to call him Root, after the square-root sign, because the top of his head is flat: his mother never refers to him by any other name.) Subsequently, nothing much happens. There is a subplot about baseball, which may excite American readers more than British ones. The housekeeper takes the Professor to get his hair cut, after which she remarks, perfectly: “For once he smelled of shaving cream rather than of paper.” A conflict with the Professor’s over-protective sister-in-law is somehow defused by the writing down of Euler’s formula on a scrap of paper. The Professor wins a contest in a mathematical magazine and waves away congratulations, saying he just “peeked in God’s notebook”. An old box is rummaged through. The characters age.

The book as a whole is an exercise in delicate understatement, of the careful arrangement of feather-light materials into a surprisingly strong structure. The pure mountain air of number theory blows gently through all its pages, even if at one point there appears to be a blip in plausibility. The housekeeper, newly entranced by “amicable numbers” (a pair of numbers A and B such that the factors of A add up to B, and vice versa), says that she spends part of one evening testing all the pairs of even numbers between 10 and 100 manually to see if they are amicable. By my calculation there are 1,035 possible pairs of even numbers between 10 and 100 inclusive, so this might take rather longer than she claims.¹

Only at length does the reader wonder whether the touching illusion that Ogawa creates — of a lasting friendship with a man whose memory only lasts 80 minutes — was just that, an illusion. One prefers to dismiss the thought, as one is sometimes reluctant to wake up from a beautiful dream.

1. All she actually needs to do is to sum the factors of each of the 46 even numbers and then look for matches, but that’s not what she says she does; and even this would take a while by hand. «