Inconvenience

In I Am Bread you play as a slice of bread that roams around a room with the goal of becoming toast. It’s very silly and also quite frustrating. You don’t move around in a conventional video game way, instead, each shoulder button on the controller lets a corner of the bread ‘grab’ a surface which you then use to leverage your way around. It’s nonsensical, it’s inconvenient, and it’s fun.

I Am Bread wouldn’t work near as well if it had an ‘easy’ way of moving around. The game is about being a slice of bread and that theming allows for a truly bizarre control scheme. Mastering movement (or at least getting to the point where you can move with some fidelity) is arguably more vital to the game than finding a heat source to turn yourself into toast. QWOP isn’t really about running the race to its end, it’s about somehow being able to make the guy run with the unwieldy controls. The inconvenience is the point. 

Perhaps that’s something it has in common with something like Ulysses, a book that I inch closer to finally rereading every day. The book is dense, rife with intertextual references that extend beyond literature to the geography of Dublin. The book isn’t an easy read, even when you’ve got a guidebook (The New Bloomsdayis the equivalent of a GameFAQs walkthrough). But when you get into the book, like when you’re able to make that slice of bread move, you find the beauty in it and end up ranting about it at parties at 1am. The obliqueness of the prose is part of what makes it so beautiful, without it, Ulysses is just the story of a fairly ordinary day.

The way a story (be it, y’know, silly game or literary classic) is told is often as important as the story itself. I Am Bread is built around a ridiculous concept so of course the controls will be ridiculous, just as the complexity of Ulysses is intrinsic to its narrative. I Am Bread would certainly be more playable with more conventional controls, but it wouldn’t be as weird and the central silliness of playing as a slice of bread wouldn’t feel nearly as palpable.