Gnog bundles the puzzle game into a series of discrete pocket universes. Blocky, pastel containers float in starry voids, or humming laboratories, or amid cramped cityscapes. The player can examine them from any angle she likes. Some of the contraptions resemble anthropomorphic lunchboxes, with wide facial features and flip-top lids; a few take organic form, like a tree stump filled with baby birds.
It is always a gamble to push at generic expectations. Gnog is incontrovertibly a puzzle game, as it requires “solving” spaces to unlock new ones, but the escalating difficulty and mechanics implicit in puzzle games are absent. A handful of levels are as easy as a few obvious levers and switches. The beauty of Gnog is not in mastering any intricate systems. It is in simplicity.
Gnog’s puzzles do not allow the player to get lost. The construction of each box, all chunky switches and knobs, instead invites the player to explore. No matter where you pull or poke something happens. The puzzle box becomes a site of meditation; the body focuses while the mind wanders. Its tight, playful spaces evoke nothing so much as dollhouses.
We might imagine the dollhouse as an apolitical object, a wistful, charming toy, yet that’s rarely true. In 1924 architect Edwin Lutyens built Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House, a famously intricate, functional dollhouse for then-Queen of the United Kingdom and British Dominions, Mary of Teck. Lutyens is also noted for designing the new British imperial capital of India, New Delhi, described critically by Sunil Khilnani in his book The Idea of India as “a sublime fantasy of the creating and ranking of social structures.” Today the old colonial district of Delhi is an enclave for the elite, but in its own time it was, like much of the grand schemes of the British in India, a totalizing attempt to bring “order”, structuring its spaces around classist divisions and the spectre of British supremacy.
The underlying political and metaphorical structures of the dollhouse as a totalitarian object
Lutyens’s dollhouse is a reflection of this impulse, built by over 1,500 people, it is rigidly arranged; its maddening attention to detail carrying an undeniable mystique. It is as purpose-built as New Delhi; its purpose being a tribute to both the exquisite finery of British royal life and the talent of British arts and manufacturing. But through this it also betrays the implicit stench of cultural supremacy, and the dictatorial attitudes of its creator. This is expressed most profoundly in its details: The house’s library holds one-of-a-kind miniature books from A. A. Milne and M. R. James, among others; the tobacco in all the tiny pipes and tins was the King’s favorite blend; the elevators and automobiles are functioning replicas.
This totalizing order recalls Ian McEwan’s description of protagonist Briony Tallis’ “controlling demon” in his novel Atonement: “Her straight-backed dolls in their many-roomed mansion appeared to be under strict instructions not to touch the walls; the various thumb-sized figures to be found standing about her dressing table … suggested by their even ranks and spacing a citizen’s army awaiting orders.” Together these two images suggest the underlying political and metaphorical structures of the dollhouse as a totalitarian object.
When approaching Gnog, this history allows us to understand its spaces as more than idle toys, blank and colorful. In their ordering of the world they evoke a history that connects the dollhouse, the puzzle box, the closed miniature world of toys and figurines, to the human instinct of total control.
Among Gnog’s array of tree stumps, synthesizers, laboratories, and candy shops there is one standout: a series of chunky houses stacked one on top of the other. To solve this puzzle, the player helps a thief suck up the residents’ money with a vacuum. The game does not overtly comment on this development, but this is the only puzzle in the game with a multilevel design: four houses atop a utility room, where the player can cut the power and water supply. It is marked as important by this slight shift in the game’s established design pattern.
The vertical, cross-section construction of the houses as well as the domestic spaces within make this Gnog’s most explicit reference to a dollhouse. The inhabitants don’t appear to be up to anything nefarious, but the player is an accomplice to robbing them nonetheless. She is positioned outside this comfortable middle-class life. She can peel back the skin of domestic existence, but once the puzzle is solved, the game moves on.
The construction of each box, all chunky switches and knobs, instead invites the player to explore
This is perhaps the closest Gnog gets to letting its toy architectures become representations of control, yet it is not the only example, just perhaps the least surreal. In one world you solve a puzzle on an atomic level; in another you feed baby birds until they grow full-size in an instant. To the player everything exists to be manipulated into the correct configuration. Even organic shapes like tree stumps click into mechanical synchronicity. But each level ends with the puzzle box coming to life, its squat face animating joyously. It’s a sort of reward, the game’s psychedelic art direction reaching a crescendo of strobing color and sound as the box-creature sings its own brief tune. Shifts and changes are as apparent as organisational obsession, and this is a game often oscillating towards chaos, not inhuman order. it takes the frame of the dollshouse, with its insipid totalitarian tendencies, and finds within it the unhinged mechanisms of a world of surprises, not solutions. If Gnog represents a return to childhood play, it is not via the unpleasant “tidiness” of Briony Tallis but the idle dreams of more fluid minds.
It is appropriate then, that the final puzzle box is a young boy’s room, with each previous level represented as his toys and trinkets. Gnog is about trying to understand the world, about breaking it into functional pieces and mechanical architectures. There is merit to the notion that miniaturizing life makes it more comprehensible; the fetishistic detail of Luyten’s dollhouse exists on a spectrum with a Lego set. But Gnog manages to escape the desire to have everything just-so: Each level is instead a brief immersion in the roiling stew of a child’s consciousness, the currents and rituals of adult life sublimated into blocky, Fisher Price-simple constructs that open to reveal expansions, not reflections, of our world.
If you enjoyed this study please consider supporting the Heterotopias project through purchasing our zine. Issues 001 + 002, featuring almost 200 pages of visual studies and critical essays on games and architecture, are currently available in a discounted launch bundle here.
Thank you for your support!
Gnog bundles the puzzle game into a series of discrete pocket universes. Blocky, pastel containers float in starry voids, or humming laboratories, or amid cramped cityscapes. The player can examine them from any angle she likes. Some of the contraptions resemble anthropomorphic lunchboxes, with wide facial features and flip-top lids; a few take organic form, like a tree stump filled with baby birds.
It is always a gamble to push at generic expectations. Gnog is incontrovertibly a puzzle game, as it requires “solving” spaces to unlock new ones, but the escalating difficulty and mechanics implicit in puzzle games are absent. A handful of levels are as easy as a few obvious levers and switches. The beauty of Gnog is not in mastering any intricate systems. It is in simplicity.
Gnog’s puzzles do not allow the player to get lost. The construction of each box, all chunky switches and knobs, instead invites the player to explore. No matter where you pull or poke something happens. The puzzle box becomes a site of meditation; the body focuses while the mind wanders. Its tight, playful spaces evoke nothing so much as dollhouses.
We might imagine the dollhouse as an apolitical object, a wistful, charming toy, yet that’s rarely true. In 1924 architect Edwin Lutyens built Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House, a famously intricate, functional dollhouse for then-Queen of the United Kingdom and British Dominions, Mary of Teck. Lutyens is also noted for designing the new British imperial capital of India, New Delhi, described critically by Sunil Khilnani in his book The Idea of India as “a sublime fantasy of the creating and ranking of social structures.” Today the old colonial district of Delhi is an enclave for the elite, but in its own time it was, like much of the grand schemes of the British in India, a totalizing attempt to bring “order”, structuring its spaces around classist divisions and the spectre of British supremacy.
Lutyens’s dollhouse is a reflection of this impulse, built by over 1,500 people, it is rigidly arranged; its maddening attention to detail carrying an undeniable mystique. It is as purpose-built as New Delhi; its purpose being a tribute to both the exquisite finery of British royal life and the talent of British arts and manufacturing. But through this it also betrays the implicit stench of cultural supremacy, and the dictatorial attitudes of its creator. This is expressed most profoundly in its details: The house’s library holds one-of-a-kind miniature books from A. A. Milne and M. R. James, among others; the tobacco in all the tiny pipes and tins was the King’s favorite blend; the elevators and automobiles are functioning replicas.
This totalizing order recalls Ian McEwan’s description of protagonist Briony Tallis’ “controlling demon” in his novel Atonement: “Her straight-backed dolls in their many-roomed mansion appeared to be under strict instructions not to touch the walls; the various thumb-sized figures to be found standing about her dressing table … suggested by their even ranks and spacing a citizen’s army awaiting orders.” Together these two images suggest the underlying political and metaphorical structures of the dollhouse as a totalitarian object.
When approaching Gnog, this history allows us to understand its spaces as more than idle toys, blank and colorful. In their ordering of the world they evoke a history that connects the dollhouse, the puzzle box, the closed miniature world of toys and figurines, to the human instinct of total control.
Among Gnog’s array of tree stumps, synthesizers, laboratories, and candy shops there is one standout: a series of chunky houses stacked one on top of the other. To solve this puzzle, the player helps a thief suck up the residents’ money with a vacuum. The game does not overtly comment on this development, but this is the only puzzle in the game with a multilevel design: four houses atop a utility room, where the player can cut the power and water supply. It is marked as important by this slight shift in the game’s established design pattern.
The vertical, cross-section construction of the houses as well as the domestic spaces within make this Gnog’s most explicit reference to a dollhouse. The inhabitants don’t appear to be up to anything nefarious, but the player is an accomplice to robbing them nonetheless. She is positioned outside this comfortable middle-class life. She can peel back the skin of domestic existence, but once the puzzle is solved, the game moves on.
This is perhaps the closest Gnog gets to letting its toy architectures become representations of control, yet it is not the only example, just perhaps the least surreal. In one world you solve a puzzle on an atomic level; in another you feed baby birds until they grow full-size in an instant. To the player everything exists to be manipulated into the correct configuration. Even organic shapes like tree stumps click into mechanical synchronicity. But each level ends with the puzzle box coming to life, its squat face animating joyously. It’s a sort of reward, the game’s psychedelic art direction reaching a crescendo of strobing color and sound as the box-creature sings its own brief tune. Shifts and changes are as apparent as organisational obsession, and this is a game often oscillating towards chaos, not inhuman order. it takes the frame of the dollshouse, with its insipid totalitarian tendencies, and finds within it the unhinged mechanisms of a world of surprises, not solutions. If Gnog represents a return to childhood play, it is not via the unpleasant “tidiness” of Briony Tallis but the idle dreams of more fluid minds.
It is appropriate then, that the final puzzle box is a young boy’s room, with each previous level represented as his toys and trinkets. Gnog is about trying to understand the world, about breaking it into functional pieces and mechanical architectures. There is merit to the notion that miniaturizing life makes it more comprehensible; the fetishistic detail of Luyten’s dollhouse exists on a spectrum with a Lego set. But Gnog manages to escape the desire to have everything just-so: Each level is instead a brief immersion in the roiling stew of a child’s consciousness, the currents and rituals of adult life sublimated into blocky, Fisher Price-simple constructs that open to reveal expansions, not reflections, of our world.
If you enjoyed this study please consider supporting the Heterotopias project through purchasing our zine. Issues 001 + 002, featuring almost 200 pages of visual studies and critical essays on games and architecture, are currently available in a discounted launch bundle here.
Thank you for your support!
Share this: