The once famous doctor, and arguably the most influential chemist of the 16th century, Paracelsus founded a branch of chemistry known as Iatrochemistry that saw itself as a servant to medicine. Although outdated, and composed of only three fundamental elements: Salt, Sulphur and Mercury; it proved to be a useful foundation to what are now the fields of pharmacology and toxicology.
He also believed he could generate a Homunculus, a human created rather than born, by mixing warm blood and semen, so nobody’s perfect…
Setting Research
I wanted to create a game that felt divorced from reality in some way. Both for the freedom to include elements that seem fantastical and to centre the player in a space that in all respects feels contained, and cohesive. This will allow me to create a self contained space, where information gained by the player will relate only to objectives, other information, and loosely to the lore of the “outside world”.
In creating this setting, I decided that I needed to research the practice and philosophies of alchemy, and dove into getting my head around what at the time was an advanced practice, but now seems alien in it’s goals and concepts.
While I can’t lay all my research out here as it would compress the scroll bar of this post to the size of a pixel, a through line of my research into the practice was the idea of immortality and continuance. One of the most recorded goals of Alchemy were the creation of the Philosopher’s Stone, which could both grant immortality and eternal youth, but also transmute elements like lead into gold, to not only allow you to live forever, but to live in wealth and luxury. Paracelsus’ goal of creating the Homunculus was itself aiming for continuance, in the same way that having a child naturally is. These goals were also unobtainable as neither one was possible as we now know, Eternal life in the literal sense is impossible, and the closest we have to the Homunculus is in vitro fertilization.
To me these ideas made for interesting themes for the main “plot” of my game, and I want to explore these concepts further in it as well as the aesthetic of obsession. To me the Alchemist of old can be compared to a modern day “misunderstood genius” or at least the idea of one as an incomprehensible person that does their best work in isolation, emerging from weeks of labour with a world shattering piece of art, or fiction or poetry. In reality this is just an aesthetic, an outward appearance of brilliance to explain the existence of remarkable people, who historically have been more so remarkable for their affluent upbringing, and coincidental place in history.
Plot and Themes
Without spoiling the intended final draft for the game’s story, it will centre around the estate left to you by your father after his passing. It will begin in media res with the player in his father’s study. Through a bit of exploration the player will gain access to the primary play space of the game: His laboratory. The game will then revolve around completing the Grimoire left in the centre of the workshop, aiming to identify the potions in his cabinet through the environmental traces left behind in the workshop.
The story of the game will take a backseat to the active process of learning about the processes that went into creating the potions, their purpose and the completion of the grimoire, with clues about your father’s life and practice sprinkled in to give context to the player about how the potion fits into the life of the man who left them to you. The aim of this separation is to focus the narrative of the gain on self actualization, and the player discovering their place within the setting and creating a sense of continuance beyond the game’s finale.
The Four Similitudes
Through my research, I was directed by a friend towards a chapter from Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things (Foucault, 1966) about the Four Similitudes, categories of the role that resemblance played in the foundations of enlightenment science. Foucault’s writings are too academically dense for me to properly parse and internalise, but to summarise, these were four categories of resemblance and similarity that formed connections in the world between things, and were core to the mode of thinking of the discipline and era. Whereas now we think more in terms of representations and signs, links were instead made through resemblance and similarity between things. The four similitudes are:
- Convenienta: adjacency, intermingling of fringes, things becoming similar near each other
- Aemulatio: a sort of imperfect reflection, from a distance rather than based on proximity
- Analogy: more subtle resemblances of relations, traits and concepts
- Sympathies: attribution of emotion and agency to links in the chain
I don’t claim to understand fully what these mean, and how could anyone in the modern day fully grasp modes of thinking ingrained in people from the past. I do however see an interesting framework for designing categories of mechanics for the system I will use to tell my indexical narrative. I’ll break them down as such, as a way to organise the traces in the space to create links and connect information through space:
- Convenienta: Traces in close proximity to each other share an idea, this can be a set of incomplete information all relating to the same potion, or information that completes itself contained in the traces.
- Aemulatio: Traces far apart that resemble each other in some way, either in their presentation or aesthetic, to communicate that they contain information relevant to the other. This could be two sets of information that complete each other to identify a potion.
- Analogy: Subtle hints at connections between information, symbols appearing on or around each trace, a similar colour palette or apparatus. This can be used to start trails for the player to follow. Trace A hints at a way of brewing the potion, and Trace B has information on that method that further completes the chain towards the final goal of identification
- Sympathies: This one seems a little harder, but through the insertion of the father into the narrative, emotional hints can be left to form connections between traces that later resolve to both complete the set of information, and the story it tells. A note left near a beaker about how it is used for a positive and hopeful outcome, can hint towards the nature of the potion it was used to brew, while forming an idea about it’s genealogy and emotional significance.
As my next step will be to break down the potions into categories and begin to decipher how to communicate their categories and identifications to the player, these will be useful concepts for me to keep in mind to ease the creation of the games closed space.
From here I’ll have to flesh out the prototype alongside my process of implementing the game’s systems and beginning the process of asset creation. For this purpose I have created a rough Gantt chart of how to undertake the process.
Bibliography
FOUCAULT, M. (1994). The order of things: an archaeology of the human sciences. New York, Vintage Books.