“…there are all these games in which your health regenerates after a while but they aren’t about finding shelter or moving from one point of cover to another. they’re just there because they’re cruft that’s been accumulated. a lot of what contemporary video games are is the accumulation of that cruft. it’s all borrowed material that’s been completely divorced from its original context.
we’re not looking carefully at our history, we’re just taking the shiny thing and running with it.”
-Anna Anthropy, interviewed at ctrl-alt-defeat May 1st, 2012
A great deal has been made lately of ‘evoking emotions in players’ by game developers and the writers who love the games. The recent Lone Survivor by Jasper Byrne spends a fair bit of time trying to get under your skin in familiar ways. Players commonly remember Silent Hill 2 and 3 as the last great horror games, with pretenders such as F.E.A.R. and Silent Hill: Downpour attempting to reclaim the originals’ glory, but there seems to be nothing concrete about this yearning, no next step to take. Just as in Joseph Hilgard ‘s critique of game reviews , there’s little awareness of the actual mechanics of scaring the player. We call them horror games, but we don’t understand what it means to be horrified. It’s not just being startled.
The evidence is clear and available on every gaming forum: anyone can reel off a list of elements and gameplay mechanics that are common in the horror games they’ve enjoyed. Tense music, ambiguous ambient noises, modulated screams and croaks, music boxes, precocious children, grotesque sexualised imagery, environmental narratives, darkness with limited light sources, terrain that has been supernaturally rearranged, genuinely threatening enemies, puzzle-solving, etc. But as any half-baked parody of a genre shows, it’s clear from recent releases that simply including all these elements isn’t enough to create a harrowing experience.
Take Lone Survivor for an example: Byrne is clearly a fan of the Silent Hill series. Like the adventures of James Sunderland and the Mason family, Lone Survivor features supernatural themes, physical rifts from reality into another horrible dimension, monsters which move in unnatural and seemingly impossible ways, an unreliable narrator, illusions, delusions, psychotic and pacifist influences, behaviour tracking, and the barren environment where all hints of help or support are crushed utterly. On paper, it seems like Lone Survivor should increase sales of adult diapers nationwide. In practice, it often feels like it’s trying too hard; although there’s far more emphasis on hiding than combat, the monsters attacking the protagonist look more ludicrous than disturbing, their animation seeming more like a playground shove than any real threat. Also, there’s no real sense that the player character is becoming damaged; when I neglected the tutorial’s insistence to hide, the protagonist just stood there calmly while the first monster of the game shoved him over and over. Eventually he crumpled to the ground and I was presented with a game over screen. I restarted at a checkpoint from seconds earlier. So much for tension.
But it’s easy to list elements of a game in a snarky way, particularly when it’s vivisected with an eye to its construction. If nothing else, Lone Survivor absolutely has its heart in the right place. If effort and passion alone made masterpieces, then Byrne would be rolling in fans and money. Even when the game’s influences shift from Akira Yamaoka to David Lynch , the whole exercise comes across more as rote repetition than genuinely unsettling gameplay and it’s hard to understand why since Byrne clearly knows so much about the genre. It’s easy to write abstract compliations of game mechanics, and in many ways an omnibus essay would fall into the same traps as most conversation on the subject.
I’ve decided to introduce a new series to Medium Difficulty as a result, focusing not on horror as a whole but on games which horrify the player and also those which make interesting mistakes while trying to do so. Next time we’ll tackle SHODAN and System Shock 2 , but for now let’s consider one of Lone Survivor’s high points.
DISLOCATION AND HOW TV TROPES ARE BORING AT PARTIES
The “unreliable narrator” is a trope that has been worn into the ground in certain circles. An unreliable narrator is one who is not impartial in the events he is narrating, and is likely to leave something out when “telling the story” to the reader/player; if you’ve ever seen the Usual Suspects, it’s a great example of this. The classic example in games is Bioshock, and the trope is a large part of the reason why we’re all so tired of hearing about that game.
But be careful, dear reader, of suffering the curse of TVTropes – the idea that tropes are all bad, because you can identify them easily. The attitude of the player becomes “If I can recognize it, it’s not original.” That’s just not the case. Tropes are tropes precisely because they pop up despite ourselves; they’re inevitable combinations of elements of a story. It’s nice to have a map of potential tropes when we talk about cultural objects, but as the bishop said to the actress, the map is not the territory.
Lone Survivor proves itself a particularly apt adaptation of that adage: Byrne does a fantastic job of keeping you off-balance, both in terms of the protagonist’s view of reality and in terms of being able to navigate the ethereal apartment complex in which the game takes place. Early in the game, You (the protagonist’s name) finds a creepy doll and hands it over to an acquaintance at a party; she invites him onto the fire escape and tells him to pick up the handgun at the other end of the walkway.
When he does and returns to the apartment proper, the acquaintance and the party guests are gone, replaced by mutilated corpses and the same faceless monsters You encountered earlier. This kind of turn is a familiar one to any enthusiast of unsettling fiction, but it succeeds in Lone Survivor precisely because of its familiarity: clearly something is going on, but it turns on an unexpected fulcrum – the fire escape. It’s rare for things to change that immediately, without a signposting of the event in terms of word or image; the party guests were disaffected and remote, but that’s true of everyone you meet in the game, including the protagonist. The trigger for the scene change isn’t clear: is it the creepy doll, the picking up of the handgun, the fire escape? The fire escape in You’s stolen apartment is locked – why is that the case? He seems to know less than you do. After traversing an unsettling organic tunnel that defies physical explanation, your narrator shudders and refuses to return. He has no comment, however, for the fast travel system – a series of identical dusty mirrors which act as portals between frequently traveled areas, and which cause You to offer some comment on his mental health.
Lone Survivor’s hints of unreliability work, in other words, because it doesn’t engage in unreliability for unreliability’s sake. You seems genuinely confused by what’s going on, and he reflects the player’s confusion and enacts it selectively within his world. At the same time, he’s disturbingly familiar with strange elements in the game. You’re constantly coming across diary entries by a sociopathic Draco and another voice of pacifism, but they both treat the monsters as commonplace. It works because there are multiple viewpoints at play, and the tensions they create keep you from intuiting or forming concrete theories about what’s going on.
Silent Hill 2, that magnum opus of subjectivity in the gamer’s sacred canon, succeeds at dislocating the player for precisely the same reasons. James’ motives are unclear and he is as mystified by the events in the foggy town as much as you, the player, are. When the player discovers the secret motives and patterns behind the town, James is exactly as surprised as you are. That’s important, because if he knows more than you, well… it’s all in his head, right? But if that’s the case, who else seems to be aware of the town’s (or apartment complex’s) penchant for shifting geography? Who wrote that infamous graffiti, “ There was a hole here – but now it’s gone “?
Horror is about keeping you questioning, trying to make sense of the impossible – because it makes you wonder about your own worldview. Are you the unreliable narrator, just ignoring things you can’t explain? How much can you really trust your memory?
See you next time.
