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The page you want to visit contains information about all the in-game achievement for “Doors”.
To avoid spoilers, we recommend that you play through our small philosophical videogame before proceeding.
Congratulations! You opened the front door to the Inn! To be more specific, this so-called “front door” is merely a combination of pixels arranged so as to represent the entrance to an inn. One could say it is a fictional door: it was made with the intention that the player would imagine a door. One could also say it’s a virtual door: a computer-programmed model designed to simulate the functioning of actual doors.
But then, is it true that you, the player, “opened the front door”? Would it not be more precise to say that you, taking on the role of the protagonist of this game, used your cursor to interact with a virtual model and thus fictionally opened this door that is represented to exist in the gameworld?
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Clearly, none of the doors that can be encountered in this game are actual doors. They are digital representations of doors, some more responsive and possible to be manipulated than others.
Unlike the other doors, however, this one is not only a representation of a door for you, the player, but it is also a representation of a door for the characters that inhabit the gameworld. It is, in other words, a meta-representational door: a digital representation of a painted representation of a door.
Why even calling it “a door” then?
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The door shown on the security screen is Britain’s most famous door, located in London at 10 Downing Street. This representation thus refers to a door that actually exists in your world, player!
So, should we interpret this particular representation of a door as a non-fictional door, since it refers to a door we know to exist in the actual world? Or is it a fictional door, because we have to imagine this door as a part of the fictional world inhabited by the Professor?
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The door to room 103 was allegedly stolen from the hotel. In the game’s narrative, the door was not simply taken off its hinges and carried away, but it was removed wholesale – as if it never existed. Based on clues that you found in the gameworld, however, you reconstructed what this door looked like. Although this particular representation of the door is part of a game menu (and not of the game’s fictional world), it shares with its referent both its looks and its function: that of giving access to room 103.
This door does not really make any sense, narratively speaking. But maybe that is not a problem, as it is helping gameplay along?
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This door does not look like a door, but like a bookcase. Players only find out that this bookcase is secretly a door by interacting with it. In other words: this particular arrangement of pixels does not visually represent a door, but it does functionally represent a door: when interacted with, it opens up like a sliding door and reveals a secret passageway.
Does this mean that this is a representation of a bookcase that becomes a representation of a door once you interact with it? Or was it already a representation of a door to begin with?
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This kind of door is often found in videogames. It simulates some key features of actual doors: it looks like a door, it closes off a room, and it can be opened (in this case, using a key). Actual doors in real life potentially allow us to perform an infinite amount of actions: we can paint them, kick them, set them on fire, use them as rafts, put stickers on them, and so on. In videogames, the set of possible actions you can perform is typically limited or incomplete, as is the case with the door you just opened.
This raises the question of which characteristics of a door need to be simulated in a videogame for this simulation to be recognized as a door. Does the game object only need to look like a door, or also act like one? And what does it mean to “act like” a door?
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You picked up a magnetic keycard! Surely this means that, somewhere in this fictional gameworld, there is a door that can be opened with this keycard. Why else would the designers of this game put the keycard there? This idea shows that, although many aspects of fictional gameworlds are explicitly described to the player, many of their components and details are merely implied.
When interpreting the meaning of objects in gameworlds, it is always useful to ask yourself what the game designers might have intended when creating this object. That said, there is no guarantee that you will ever find the door to which this card gives you access. What if we only left the keycard there because we intended to make this point?See also:
Objects represented in interactive works of fiction tend to afford a limited set of action possibilities. Doors in games, for example, are typically reduced to being barriers that can be opened by players in one particular way, such as by finding the right key. This old door is a bit different. It offers you, the player, non-doorlike interactive possibilities: it is not only an obstacle that blocks entrance to a room, but also becomes a valuable in-game resource when it’s reduced to wooden planks.
Does this old door fail at representing a door, because it crumbles once you try to open it? Or is it a more realistic and complete representation of a door, because it can be reduced to wooden planks just like actual wooden doors?
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This door cannot be interacted with, either by the player or the protagonist. It was designed to serve a purely decorative function, fleshing out the fictional hotel environment of the game. Still, it differs from doors described in non-interactive works of fiction such as movies and novels. After all, you still have some action possibilities towards this particular in-game door. The Professor can walk past it or stand in front of it. Moreover, although all their efforts to open it would fail, players can (and are likely to) try to open this door.
Can anything truly be called “non-interactive” if it is encountered in an interactive gameworld?
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This portal took the mysterious Professor back home! Differently from other doors in this game, this portal offers a function that cannot (yet) be encountered in the world we share as biological creatures. This particular door does not simulate the way actual doors function.
Could we still call this arrangement of pixels a “simulation”, if what is being simulated does not even exist to begin with? Could we call it a “re-presentation” of a portal, if portals are never “present” to us in the first place?
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