# 130.0020 - Tracing the Obra Dinn ## Thesis In Homo Ludens, J. Huizinga theorizes that play “creates order, is order” and “demands order absolute and supreme” (Huizinga, 1949, p. 10). Return of the Obra Dinn (RotOD) might have delighted Huizinga. Billed as “An Insurance Adventure with Minimal Colour,” Lucas Pope’s 2018 deductive puzzler is nothing if not orderly (Return of the Obra Dinn). The critically lauded, solo-designed game took four years to produce (Wikipedia. “Return of the Obra Dinn”). Its tightly constrained, and closely aligned formal, aesthetic, and ludic characteristics combine to produce a singularly resonant experience for an audience who finds pleasure in completing logic puzzles. ## Theory Great game design aligns the inherent constraints and affordances of the environment (or platform, or medium) with the mechanics of the game. ‘Collimation’ is the optical process of aligning photons from a light source on parallel paths. Parallel photons travel without losing coherence, as a result, a beam of light can remain focused over a long distance. I adopt this term to describe a game design where there is coherence between the formal and ludic aspects of a game and the constraints of its platform (or medium). Crossword puzzles are an example of a game form closely collimated with the affordances of the medium, early newspapers were published in black and white, printed with lead type, produced daily. Other similar games are produced by the same constraints, Jumble, Sudoku. These games appeal to a particular type of player, whose primary interest is the flow-state found in successfully reproducing a predetermined solution to a familiar and structured type of problem.  I’ll borrow another term to describe this particular pleasure, found in deep-thinking flow states that produce narrow focus: ‘monotropic’. The term is used in cognitive science to describe an executive tendency toward immersion and flow states that may be achieved “through sensory delight and predictability, rather than challenge alone” (Wain et al., 2026, p. 9). While the term is used to identify traits that underlie Autistic flow, the trait itself is just a form of neurodiversity that may help explain why certain players are attracted to certain types of games.  I think of jigsaw puzzles as a privileged example of this kind of play. The solution is known before the puzzle is begun, if there is a challenge, it is the patient persistence of trial and error, with only the broadest strategies at work. The discrete moment of pleasure is found in each piece snapping into place, joy comes with being engrossed by the task, and the overall dynamic of play is one of acceleration as incorrect possibilities are eliminated.  Collimated games may attract monotropic players, or it may produce them. The close alignment of mechanics, platform, and formal and narrative design reduce the points of friction that disrupt the flow state. The etymology of monotropism traces back to the Greek root that also describes the biological phenomenon of tropism, where an organism turns in response to a stimulus. For example, phototropism is the mechanism of a plant turning to maximize its alignment with a light source. A highly specialized artistic voice has a certain highly specialized audience. The light aligns and the flower turns toward it. The Orchid and the Wasp (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 33). And since I am invoking Deleuze and Guattari, I’ll borrow another framework from them to apply to my analysis. RotOD offers a play space that is narrowly focused on the exhaustion of a problem space or closure/completion of a set. Caillois might have had trouble defining this game as play, it fails one of his analytical demands that play be: “Uncertain: the course of which cannot be determined, nor the result attained beforehand, and some latitude for innovations being left to the player’s initiative;” (Caillois et al., 2001, p. 9). Caillois analyzes the “playability” of solved games in part two of the second appendix of Man, Play, and Games in the section on Mathematical Approaches. His conclusion is that pleasure in playing is inseparable from uncertainty (ibid, p 173). But many players do find exquisite pleasure in solving Pope’s puzzle, despite its singular, predetermined solution.  Pope said of RotOD: “...I don’t really make games for everybody… some people will really like this game, a lot of people will bounce right off of it… I wanted to capture those people… like me, who saw… a blank manifest in the book and just had to fill it out, basically. It’s a very kind of carnal desire to put names in all those boxes” (Cressup, @15:45, 2024). This is not a desire I feel; the appeal of a blank manifest or sudoku grid is exactly the appeal of a blank income tax form. But for a monotropic player, their enjoyment seems to come from the flow state they find in “[putting] names in all those boxes.”  Deleuze and Guattari might categorize this form of play with a predetermined outcome as ‘tracing’, part of a process of reproduction, connected to the principles of arborescence. This is in contrast to their category of ‘mapping’ which is creative, and associated with rhizomal structures. “The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves an alleged ‘competence’” (D&G, ATP p. 12-13). Consider the trees of boolean logic that define the single correct “solution” to the mystery of the Obra Dinn. “All of tree logic is a logic of tracing and reproduction” (ibid, p. 2). Tracing Games include puzzle games, riddles, what Caillois calls “mathematical recreations” (p 30). They feature arborescent play, simple rules, predictable structures, and reward completion, reproduction, closely following a pre-existing structure. Their pleasure comes from their familiarity, predictability, repetition, these are cozy power-wash simulators.  So if Obra Dinn is a “tracing” game, what is a “mapping” game? Sandbox games like Minecraft are an obvious example. So are highly emergent games like Dwarf Fortress. But consider fighting games---they have simple goals, defined move sets, priority systems to resolve the order of attacks—but no two matches, even between the same opponents, will be totally identical. Playing a fighting game is a performance, a pas de deux. “The map has to do with performance.” Each new performance is mapping an unpredictable, unknown space. Chess is (still) a mapping game. Even though it is technically arborescent, the exponentially expanding set of options have so far kept it from being a “solved” game.  Of course most games are some of each. But note the extent of RotODs monotropic fixation on the pleasures of tracing. RotOD is extremely focused, minimal in some senses to a fault, and yet there are six(?) different monitor emulations. This may be to minimize player issues with motion sickness, but it’s also a serious commitment to reproduction of nostalgic detail, intended to appeal to players with an equal focus on the minutiae of their own experiences with early gaming. Also note the youtube video of Pope [literally tracing](https://youtu.be/Zpe2Ivnei14?si=3xYiOwVVCyXXQexR) the rendered scene for the manifest. Pope is tracing, possibly so that the player can re-trace pope’s own apparent pleasure in the tracing process (Pope, 2017). ## General Mechanics The basic game loop of RotOD is functionally simple. The game’s limited interactivity is clearly conveyed by the keyboard controls listed in the menu: action, zoom, pause, open book, close book, page right, page left, back, table of contents.  The player explores a three-dimensional sailing ship. They have an inventory of two items, found in the first few minutes of play, a ‘Memento Mortem’ pocketwatch and a mostly empty book chronicling the voyage of the Obra Dinn: A Catalogue of Adventure and Tragedy. The player mechanics involve navigating the ship to find flashback sequences, and using the book to record the player’s deductions about the fates of sixty “souls” lost on the ship Obra Dinn.   When the player finds the remains of a dead body, they activate their pocketwatch. After listening to an audio clip for clues, the player explores the environment again, now frozen at the moment of the corpse’s death. By examining all of the visible figures in this new tableau, the player identifies each of the sixty individual crew and passengers in the drawing from the book. The relevant pages of the book fill themselves out with a portrait of each character, the location of their corpse, a fill in the blank about the “fate” of the dead character, and what other characters were also present.  The player eventually uses clues to identify all sixty names from the manifest, match them to the drawings, and explain their cause of death. And that’s it. RotOD has no “enemies” per se. There is no way for you to ‘die’. There is no temporal pressure. There are no other puzzles to solve besides the matrix of names. In fact the closest thing to an opponent is the limits of reproduction, the artifacts of corruption, in a low resolution screen. Power Wash Detective Simulator. ### Visual Mechanics  Aesthetically, The Return of the Obra Din highlights the resonances between mid-eighties dithered monochrome digital art, ala [Dark Castle](https://youtu.be/6U6v3XyrPLc?si=9p_K0yAD8xkXhSro) (1986) and [The Colony](https://youtu.be/i1XENlUUOhA?si=km_gE6ehGPBrothi) (1988) and the monochrome style of nineteenth century nautical engravings and cartography. The game presents the three-dimensional environment in wireframe, with bitmap dithering producing halftone dots distributed in a point-cloud effect reminiscent of those found in photogrammetry or lidar. The overall appearance of the environment  evokes Larry Cuba’s groundbreaking 1977 [Death Star animation](https://youtu.be/v_QoigEbwyA?si=00tClvNL3bbdtQ4c). That sequence was produced on a Vector General 3D and PDP-11, and Cuba struggled to get the primitive system to produce the 40 seconds of footage used in the film (Sweet, 1981).  While early artists like Cuba struggled against the technical constraints of their time, Pope chooses this graphical limitation. Modern computers are thousands of times more powerful than necessary to produce these 1-Bit graphics. By conforming to technical limitations of early gaming platforms, Pope is constructing a set of formal constraints that mimic the aesthetics of early computing. This serves in crafting a detailed nostalgic familiarity for players, and offers interesting parallels between the thematic concerns of the nautical environment, the skeuomorphic interface of recording fates in a ship’s logbook, and typographic and illustrative invocation of generic naval fiction. Pope describes this balance more plainly, “I never wanted the old-computer shit to override the old ship-shit, basically." (PC Gamer, 2019) The use of the 1-bit graphics in RotOD serves to aestheticize limitations, not of processing and model complexity, but of the artist’s capacity to produce the requisite detail for modern levels of immersion.  “I chose the aesthetic because it stood out, but I also chose it because it's a good style if you want to obscure things, if you want to leave stuff out," he says." The lighting is very sharp, and it leaves a lot of detail out. For me, it's a benefit as a developer, because I don't have the bandwidth to put in all those details, but it's also a benefit as a player, because there's more empty space for them to fill in the blanks and imagine those details. For me, it's a lot scarier to see the silhouette of the creature, rather than all the details at once." (PC Gamer, 2019) Similarly, the cuts to a black screen with audio hide the limitations of a single artist producing the cut-scenes, and invoke an aesthetic lineage like Jarman’s Blue, and the motionless, yet dynamic compositions of the bullet-time freeze frames from a style reminiscent of superhero comics or martial arts films. The use of freeze frames to tell a story could also be traced back to La Jetée. Collectively, these design choices produce a striking aesthetic that evokes player nostalgia while liberating the designer from certain responsibilities, eliminating the time consuming process of animating them, and dispensing with the need for detailed texture mapping. I also claim that these chosen constraints narrow their audience while deepening that audiences’ relationship with the game experience because of its collimation with their monotropic ludic preference for deep focus on clear details presented in a linear and reproducible way. ## Reflections: Preferences for pleasure - Closure vs. Lines of Flight The game’s devlogs record great detail about Pope’s process developing the tools that produce the game. Pope seems, if nothing else, narrowly focused on being focused. “...I’m always sort of designing within constraints… at the beginning, I set up my constraints. I have a mechanic I want to work on… but as I go further and further and put more work into it I just keep adding more constraints…” (Cressup, @ 11:45, 2024).  Looking at Pope’s devlogs, the game design process looks more “fun” to me than playing this game. To be clear, while I don’t personally enjoy the game very much this is decidedly not a point of criticism, and is not at all a point of failing. The game has overwhelmingly positive reviews and I am genuinely impressed by its singularity. Obviously I’ve been inspired to give it all some careful, perhaps even monotropic, thought. I am realizing that I am playing my own form of mapping game now. Researching Pope, reading their devlog, considering their work, I realize I am both tracing and mapping. I am tracing the investigative process/practice that is being modeled/gamified in RotOD, but rather than tracing the story of the Obra Dinn in the game, I am tracing the game itself, its creation, the processes of the designer, and mapping a new analysis. This is a game that I greatly prefer playing—over actually returning to Return of the Obra Dinn. I am simultaneously tracing and mapping. My ludic constraints are the ‘syntagmatic’ linearity of academic language, the formal arborescent structures of reference and the despotic, semiotic regimes of citation, recitation, and resuscitation. I saw a concert last night, hosted by a friend, with two interesting and very different solo artists performing. [Matt Carlson](https://mattcarlson.bandcamp.com/) performed a beautiful, mellow, and slowly evolving, contemplative piano piece. I watched one audience member get so restless that he left his spot on the front row to go to the back of the venue and pace. He returned to his spot and during [Sunik Kim](https://sunikkim.bandcamp.com/album/formenverwandler)’s extreme computer noise performance, he appeared rapt.  Tonight (as i write this), I'm going to see “[Toki the Japanese Elvis](https://www.facebook.com/p/Toki-the-Japanese-Elvis-100093290320900/)” A performance invoking someone whose popularity was so massive that it splintered, shattered under its own weight into a thousand impersonators and a million acolytes. He popularized for massive white audiences the innovations of generations of diasporic black culture. Now Tomo Toyukazu is reflecting that refracted brilliance, another kind of diaspora, and another kind of monotropic collimation. I wonder at these narrow gaps, which allow us to witness the even narrower focus of each other’s joys— pleasures we may find queer. ## Citations Caillois, Roger, et al. Man, Play, and Games. 1. Illinois paperback, Univ. of Illinois Press, 2001. “Collimated Beam.” Wikipedia, 23 July 2025. Wikipedia, [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Collimated_beam&oldid=1302040770](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Collimated_beam&oldid=1302040770). Contributor, Austin Wood. “Lucas Pope on Life after Papers, Please.” Eurogamer.Net, 2 Nov. 2017, [https://www.eurogamer.net/lucas-pope-on-life-after-papers-please-and-the-road-to-the-return-of-the-obra-dinn](https://www.eurogamer.net/lucas-pope-on-life-after-papers-please-and-the-road-to-the-return-of-the-obra-dinn). Cressup. Lucas Pope Interview | Obra Dinn Sequels & New Game Mars After Midnight. 2024. YouTube, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8IMDfnLULI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8IMDfnLULI). Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. With Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Huizinga, J. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. 1st ed., vol. 3, Routledge, 1949. International Library of Sociology. orbiscascade-washington.primo.exlibrisgroup.com, [https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315824161](https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315824161). Pope, Lucas. Return of the Obra Dinn - Manifest Sketch. 2017. YouTube, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zpe2Ivnei14](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zpe2Ivnei14). ———. Return of the Obra Dinn - Narrated Modeling Mega Timelapse. 2025. YouTube, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90vqCKEEj3s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90vqCKEEj3s). published, Steven T. Wright. “Lucas Pope on the Challenge of Creating Obra Dinn’s 1-Bit Aesthetic.” PC Gamer, 23 Jan. 2019. Puzzle. www.pcgamer.com, [https://www.pcgamer.com/lucas-pope-on-the-challenge-of-creating-obra-dinns-1-bit-aesthetic/](https://www.pcgamer.com/lucas-pope-on-the-challenge-of-creating-obra-dinns-1-bit-aesthetic/). Return of the Obra Dinn. [https://obradinn.com/](https://obradinn.com/). Accessed 2 May 2026. Sweet, Neesa. Animating the Death Star Trench. Very Best of Fantastic. February, 1981. https://ballyalley.com/articles_and_news/animating_the_death_star_trench.pdf “Tropism.” Wikipedia, 6 Apr. 2026. Wikipedia, [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tropism&oldid=1347394912](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tropism&oldid=1347394912). Wain, Daniella, et al. “Transitioning in and out of Autistic Flow: A Qualitative Study Presenting a Non‐Pathologising Approach to Autistic Well‐Being and Conceptualising Autistic Ways of Being in Clinical and Therapeutic Settings.” Counselling and Psychotherapy Research [Abingdon], vol. 26, no. 1, 2025, p. n/a. orbiscascade-washington.primo.exlibrisgroup.com, [https://doi.org/10.1002/capr.70073](https://doi.org/10.1002/capr.70073).