I've always enjoyed horror. It's part of who I am. I love horror. But do I, really? I used to love the exhileration of running home from a friends after having watched a horror movie because I was so scared of what might be out there. I even enjoyed the fact that I had to run with my hands in front of my face because I thought someone had maybe strung a line of some sort to cut my face up in my path home. It becomes more bizarre still -- I actually cherished the nightmares I had because they were such a creative outlet and inspiration and seemed so much more real than my waking life in some sense. And so I've always loved horror. But those nightmares are long gone, and I don't run home from friends apartments anymore, and if I do hurry on my bicycle, it's because I''m afraid actual people might hurt me, and not Chucky the doll or a Terminator . And that's no fun -- that's no fun at all. There is a difference. But I do still love feeling alive, and I do love the bizarre and surreal.
I've come to the conclusion that I don't enjoy traditional horror anymore, but that I do enjoy horror tropes, existential horror and some form of cozy horror. You know, the eerie conversations between characters that take place in Silent Hill 3 to the sound of triphop beats. I feel that Kentucky Route Zero at times is the Silent Hill game I've been waiting for. It is a different beast altogether in many ways, but it has that surreal nightmare quality over it that I associate with Silent Hill as well. I loved Pathologic as a horror game, but don't think I at any time during it felt I had to take a break because I was too scared. And that's a good thing, it made it possible for me to enjoy the horrific qualities of it all the more. The darkness of Undertale isn't visceral but sublime. The horror of Silent Hill: Shattered Memories isn't visceral, but realizational. Slow-paced. It's the same with Kitty Horrorshows, David Szymanskis, Sherlock Connors and Cameron Kunzelmans horror games. They all have a long tail and haunt me after I've stopped interacting with them, because they bring something else to the table than a good scare. I'm not afraid of Chucky running after me in the dark anymore, but I still love how good horror experiences can get under my skin.
In theory, I adore the horror design of Amnesia: The Dark Descent. It's pure genius that you can't look directly at the horrors that haunt you, and that you must hide in darkness from them - the very place where your sanity is depleted. But an hour or two in and I just don't care anymore, even if I try to follow the story that takes places in the notes found. I thoroughly enjoy reading Thomas Grips blogposts about video game horror design and the philosophy by which Soma was created, but I need more than good horror mechanics to be interested, and if something's too scary, well, then even the parts that are "more than just good horror mechanics" become fuzzy enough to be blocked out. And fuzzy isn't cozy nor existential.
I can't wait to play Until Dawn with friends!
Tuesday, December 29, 2015
Focus: Three horrific and Lovecraftian game devs in the walking simulator genre
Connor Sherlock
“In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming."Recommended game: Marginalia, made together with Cameron Kunzelman who also made the awesome horror game Catachresis and the quite funny Slavoj Žižek Makes A Twine Game. (Kunzelman has an interesting blog as well.)
§
“In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming."Recommended game: Marginalia, made together with Cameron Kunzelman who also made the awesome horror game Catachresis and the quite funny Slavoj Žižek Makes A Twine Game. (Kunzelman has an interesting blog as well.)
§
Kitty Horrorshow
"I still like telling stories, but I want to make environments to contain the stories, so that people can walk around and feel present and be absorbed and crane their necks up at things.”
Recommended game: Chyrza. No frights, just chills down my spine, all the way down. Exactly the way I like my horror.
§
David Szymanski
That’s kind of the underlying theme of The Moon Sliver: the horror of
uncertainty and the yearning that maybe there’s ultimately something
better than this. I don’t think it’s specifically a Christian game,
because I think everyone struggles with these questions. It’s portraying
life as I see it. A lot of confusion, but there’s this deep almost
instinctive knowledge that something isn’t right, and there’s more than
just this. - See more at:
http://www.relyonhorror.com/in-depth/david-szymanski-interview-the-journey-to-horror-via-story-faith-and-impressionism/#sthash.YzHZfC6F.dpuf
That’s kind of the underlying theme of The Moon Sliver: the horror of
uncertainty and the yearning that maybe there’s ultimately something
better than this. I don’t think it’s specifically a Christian game,
because I think everyone struggles with these questions. It’s portraying
life as I see it. A lot of confusion, but there’s this deep almost
instinctive knowledge that something isn’t right, and there’s more than
just this. - See more at:
http://www.relyonhorror.com/in-depth/david-szymanski-interview-the-journey-to-horror-via-story-faith-and-impressionism/#sthash.YzHZfC6F.dpuf
I’ve
dealt (and still deal) with a lot of questions and uncertainties.
That’s kind of the underlying theme of The Moon Sliver: the horror of
uncertainty and the yearning that maybe there’s ultimately something
better than this. I don’t think it’s specifically a Christian game,
because I think everyone struggles with these questions. It’s portraying
life as I see it. A lot of confusion, but there’s this deep almost
instinctive knowledge that something isn’t right, and there’s more than
just this - See more at:
http://www.relyonhorror.com/in-depth/david-szymanski-interview-the-journey-to-horror-via-story-faith-and-impressionism/#sthash.VHvUGoxC.dpuf
I’ve
dealt (and still deal) with a lot of questions and uncertainties.
That’s kind of the underlying theme of The Moon Sliver: the horror of
uncertainty and the yearning that maybe there’s ultimately something
better than this. I don’t think it’s specifically a Christian game,
because I think everyone struggles with these questions. It’s portraying
life as I see it. A lot of confusion, but there’s this deep almost
instinctive knowledge that something isn’t right, and there’s more than
just this - See more at:
http://www.relyonhorror.com/in-depth/david-szymanski-interview-the-journey-to-horror-via-story-faith-and-impressionism/#sthash.VHvUGoxC.dpuf
"I’ve dealt (and still deal) with a lot of questions and uncertainties. That’s kind of the underlying theme of The Moon Sliver: the horror of uncertainty and the yearning that maybe there’s ultimately something better than this. I don’t think it’s specifically a Christian game, because I think everyone struggles with these questions. It’s portraying life as I see it. A lot of confusion, but there’s this deep almost instinctive knowledge that something isn’t right, and there’s more than just this."Recommended games: The Moon Sliver and The Music Machine, and not because of their tangential story connection, but because they affected me the most. The have the best characterization of hir four games and explore hir relationship to faith most succinctly.
§§§
Rough, discontinuous edges; looming architectural masses; bulging swathes of colour—all of them luminous, or cast in shadow. These are just some of the effects you encounter in the growing genre of freeware horror and landscape games, spearheaded by the likes of ceMelusine, Kitty Horrorshow, and Connor Sherlock. Together, they constitute a “glitch art” known for its lethargic smearing-together of retro graphics with dreamlike and impossible aesthetics.
§
Dialogue and thought texts appear where the speaker or thinker would have been standing. The pop-ups thus work like stage directions overlaid onto a 3D environment, adding another layer of interpretation to the scene: Not only are you piecing together the flow of conversation, but the flow of movement as well. This gives the empty, dead, and lonely world a surprising dynamism and life that makes the story feel more immediate, more in-the-moment.
/.../
The Moon Sliver is all about interpretation and misinterpretation and reinterpretation, and the presentation of its story forces us to live in that same state of confusion as its characters.
/.../
So when we do find the titular Moon Sliver, that holy document of prophecy, and we hear of its concrete morality and its precise blessings, the simplicity and straightforwardness of its divination becomes very attractive. Precise prophecy is so much more comforting than the vagaries of life. It’s no wonder these people worshiped The Moon Sliver. It offers understanding.
But now The Moon Sliver is gone, and we too feel the oppressive confusion that consumes the remaining islanders. Is its prophecy true? Are its blessings real? Who are we without it to guide us? Who are we in general?
/.../
The text never prioritizes one point of view, preventing us from forming a sympathetic bias towards the protagonist. Or rather, we’re allowed to form a sympathetic bias towards each character since any one of them could be the protagonist, could be “us”.
/.../
The game combines past and present, purposefully trying to confuse us about identity and time because it knows both of those things add context to a scene that change its meaning, and The Moon Sliver wants us to be aware of this change.
/.../
The Moon Sliver is a story of four worlds, one belonging to each character. Each of us constructs our own world through our own experiences, and when those experiences aren’t enough, we may or may not turn to others to fill in the blanks. It’s tempting to live in our world only, but The Moon Sliver forces us to live outside of our own head, showing us a drama from every perspective.
Monday, December 28, 2015
Crit Links 28/12
Games are primarily conceptual / performance art; games are culture; it's more important to witness a game than to play it.
/.../
Invoke other games or cultural phenomena; your game is a piece of interconnected culture, not a walled garden.
/.../
We often think of game development as a technical discipline, but so much of a video game has nothing to do with code or technology. You don't have to release a software patch to update a game; all you have to do is to change how people think about it and interact with it. To totally murder this metaphor: your voice is the most powerful auto-update utility ever.
§
Chapter One introduces a bunch of theory and argues that how the participatory nature of videogames does not render them immune to textual analysis.
/.../
Chapter Four makes the argument that ‘action’ is too reductively considered when we talk about videogames and that ‘looking’ and ‘listening’ are acting in their own right. To say a play ‘does nothing’ during a cut-scene greatly misunderstands how bodies engage with moving images.
§
Propaganda Games: Sesame Credit - The True Danger of Gamification - Extra Credits
§
The Arcade Review #2
§
"I was surprised how many people watched my rather strange film. At the same time, looking at the stats, I was even more surprised how few of the viewers actually watched the entire movie to the end. There is a lot of scrubbing going on. I somehow thought I'm the only one who jumps around on the timeline of internet videos, but it's everybody." His reaction was to produce a new short film, which eventually would become a short computer game, called Plug & Play. The idea was to give the viewers, who are all so eager to jump around the narrative, more control over his movie. At the same time he wanted to have more control over the way the audience experiences the film by not allowing to skip the narrative without interacting with it and therefore become part of it.
§
It’s a time when we’re increasingly within reach of each other, unbounded by physical distances due to digital technology, yet the overwhelming volume of information and possible number of connections to be made leaves us … where? Through Plug & Play‘s black-and-white binary world of male and female electronics—the plug and the socket—Frei seems to propose that we have become obsessed with fitting in with each other. The tragedy, it is suggested, is that we find it to be a difficult desire to fulfill.
/.../
The duration required for us to reject one another has been decreased substantially through these digital roulette wheels. And yet the time and effort required to actually connect with one another, to become friends or lovers, has not lessened at all.
§
motherhood is often kept out of the creation, consumption, and conceptualization of popular culture. A society ruled by the Kingdom of Fathers, as Rich describes, relies on the devaluing of motherhood while also simultaneously tasking motherhood with the most invaluable work on the planet. A mother’s reward for breeding humanity is exclusion, marginalization, and disregard. At most, motherhood appears in popular culture as a concept: a perfect, selfless mirage or a horrid, selfish monster. Her story is never told in full: from her exclusion in something as silly as #dadbods, to the continued absence of significant maternal stories in mainstream videogames, TV shows, and films, patriarchy puts the mother in opposition to pop culture—after all there’s no quicker way to kill a trend than to see your mom do it, right? However, 2015 revealed glimpses of the mother’s elusive profile.
/.../
While mothers are busy getting refrigerated, there’s no shortage of videogame dads who capture the multiplicity of a three dimensional human being. The dadification of games took place long before fatherhood became the focus of a few “gritty” big-budget titles. As an echo of our culture, the paternal mentality has defined videogames for most (if not all) of the medium’s existence: from Space Invaders to Pac-Man, the notion of protecting your territory, conquering death through iteration, and measuring success through monetary gain birthed the medium, and continues to dominate game design to this day.
/.../
So we return to the million dollar question: what would a truly maternal videogame look like? There’s no doubt that Toby Fox’s Undertale relies on the inhumanly selfless portrait of motherhood, but it does so with a purpose.
/.../
Most players kill Toriel on their first playthrough, even if they’re aware of the game’s morality system. But this choice, rather than serving as a reflection of the player’s lack of moral fiber, instead holds the mirror up to videogames themselves. This, Undertale says, is the kind of player patriarchal game design produces: impatient, quick to quit, and more than willing to sacrifice their own mother and humanity in the name of…what, even? Progress? A positive feedback loop? This vague and arguably meaningless concept of “leveling up” through “experience points”—whatever the fuck that even means in this context? As games like Undertale show, maternal game design isn’t just about telling worthwhile yet disregarded stories. The popularity of paternal game design is indicative of deeper issues, ranging from how we as a society measure success and who and what our laws protect.
/.../
After decades of paternal game design, I am eager to unleash the potential of videogames born of woman. Motherhood deserves more than a cursory glance, and play deserves the benefits of creation instead of destruction. If and when that will happen, no one can say. But in 2015, we captured a glimpse of what fruit it can bear.
§
The only visible measure in Orchids to Dusk is the oxygen level on the left of the screen (and there’s no way to refill it).
/.../
It’s like directing your own funeral.
§
The beautiful terror of Year Walk is that in it, your deepest fears and anxieties are based on the truth. In a deranged twist of events, what I am experiencing is essentially a love story.
/.../
My deepest fear is to have her eyes burn through mine and see her mouth the words, “I don’t love you anymore.”
At the end of the jump scares, ominous soundtracks, and haunting creatures, the fear of loss and betrayal is what lingers the longest in my Year Walk. We give ourselves entirely in seeking the truth and yearning for love to the point of a physical and emotional breakdown. Perhaps this journey is the most accurate description of love and heartbreak: a series of signs and symbols we have to decode, and we receive either the answers that provide us warmth, or remain lost in the freezing woods until we are freed to walk again.
§
As an adult, how does one learn to play electronic games? With no older sibling or friend down the block to teach, no community of mates to check in with, no memory of games from childhood, how does one begin, how does one progress?
/.../
I really think this could be easier. Can’t someone create a graduated list of games for adult-onset players, a series of games to take on, in sequence, that would build familiarity and component skills and even attitudes, in a conscious way? Most players I know have only the blurriest memories of how one learns this stuff, little sense of the parts that make up the whole: sorting it out might be an interesting project.
§
“The journey is more important than…the other thing,” muses one of your passengers, too enraptured by the pure alcohol of the drive to bother to complete philosophical cliches. And in a sense, that’s Glitchhikers. The emotion is more important than what the emotion might mean. Just being in the game matters more than…the other thing. The antithesis of other videogames, where making me feel something, some specific and preferably unclaimed by another developer emotion is the only and final goal, Glitchhikers allows me to ruminate, to imbibe, to simply “be”.
§
[Three Fourths Home]
the dream of climbing the social ladder puts emphasis on the economic costs and benefits of ‘making it’, but ignores the more immaterial costs, such as separation from one’s family and loved ones. That narrative does not factor in those costs because they are not part of its implied values.
the family is almost entirely dependent on a medical corporation, possibly a health insurance company.
another effect of the family’s limited options and urgent needs is that they are hoping Kelly becomes a part of that same oppressive structure, which is very twisted if you think about it, but it’s a consideration that they cannot afford to do.
People don’t fight back against the powerful abusing their power, they beg them.
in CL [Cart Life] there is a sense that one may very well hold on and live another day, if they try hard enough, if they know their way around the city, if they balance everything just right. And even that is a slightly more optimistic perspective than Three Fourths Home has to offer, because systems can be read, can become not scary but familiar, and they can be manipulated. TFH offers nothing but a one-way street, with an emphasis on the emotional resonance of that mechanic, but also on its inevitability: there are no choices to be made, the dialogue options offer only superficial alternatives. The player has no power to shape the story, because the Meyers have no power to shape their story, like they have no power over the tornado that is approaching their house.
§
Is Language a Virus? Starring Punished "Venom" Snake | Idea Channel | PBS Digital Studios
§
So, let's talk sex games.
§
Sex games, part 1: sex as bodies
§
Sex games, part 2: sex as gesture / sex as poking
/.../
Invoke other games or cultural phenomena; your game is a piece of interconnected culture, not a walled garden.
/.../
We often think of game development as a technical discipline, but so much of a video game has nothing to do with code or technology. You don't have to release a software patch to update a game; all you have to do is to change how people think about it and interact with it. To totally murder this metaphor: your voice is the most powerful auto-update utility ever.
§
Chapter One introduces a bunch of theory and argues that how the participatory nature of videogames does not render them immune to textual analysis.
/.../
Chapter Four makes the argument that ‘action’ is too reductively considered when we talk about videogames and that ‘looking’ and ‘listening’ are acting in their own right. To say a play ‘does nothing’ during a cut-scene greatly misunderstands how bodies engage with moving images.
§
Propaganda Games: Sesame Credit - The True Danger of Gamification - Extra Credits
§
The Arcade Review #2
§
"I was surprised how many people watched my rather strange film. At the same time, looking at the stats, I was even more surprised how few of the viewers actually watched the entire movie to the end. There is a lot of scrubbing going on. I somehow thought I'm the only one who jumps around on the timeline of internet videos, but it's everybody." His reaction was to produce a new short film, which eventually would become a short computer game, called Plug & Play. The idea was to give the viewers, who are all so eager to jump around the narrative, more control over his movie. At the same time he wanted to have more control over the way the audience experiences the film by not allowing to skip the narrative without interacting with it and therefore become part of it.
§
It’s a time when we’re increasingly within reach of each other, unbounded by physical distances due to digital technology, yet the overwhelming volume of information and possible number of connections to be made leaves us … where? Through Plug & Play‘s black-and-white binary world of male and female electronics—the plug and the socket—Frei seems to propose that we have become obsessed with fitting in with each other. The tragedy, it is suggested, is that we find it to be a difficult desire to fulfill.
/.../
The duration required for us to reject one another has been decreased substantially through these digital roulette wheels. And yet the time and effort required to actually connect with one another, to become friends or lovers, has not lessened at all.
§
motherhood is often kept out of the creation, consumption, and conceptualization of popular culture. A society ruled by the Kingdom of Fathers, as Rich describes, relies on the devaluing of motherhood while also simultaneously tasking motherhood with the most invaluable work on the planet. A mother’s reward for breeding humanity is exclusion, marginalization, and disregard. At most, motherhood appears in popular culture as a concept: a perfect, selfless mirage or a horrid, selfish monster. Her story is never told in full: from her exclusion in something as silly as #dadbods, to the continued absence of significant maternal stories in mainstream videogames, TV shows, and films, patriarchy puts the mother in opposition to pop culture—after all there’s no quicker way to kill a trend than to see your mom do it, right? However, 2015 revealed glimpses of the mother’s elusive profile.
/.../
While mothers are busy getting refrigerated, there’s no shortage of videogame dads who capture the multiplicity of a three dimensional human being. The dadification of games took place long before fatherhood became the focus of a few “gritty” big-budget titles. As an echo of our culture, the paternal mentality has defined videogames for most (if not all) of the medium’s existence: from Space Invaders to Pac-Man, the notion of protecting your territory, conquering death through iteration, and measuring success through monetary gain birthed the medium, and continues to dominate game design to this day.
/.../
So we return to the million dollar question: what would a truly maternal videogame look like? There’s no doubt that Toby Fox’s Undertale relies on the inhumanly selfless portrait of motherhood, but it does so with a purpose.
/.../
Most players kill Toriel on their first playthrough, even if they’re aware of the game’s morality system. But this choice, rather than serving as a reflection of the player’s lack of moral fiber, instead holds the mirror up to videogames themselves. This, Undertale says, is the kind of player patriarchal game design produces: impatient, quick to quit, and more than willing to sacrifice their own mother and humanity in the name of…what, even? Progress? A positive feedback loop? This vague and arguably meaningless concept of “leveling up” through “experience points”—whatever the fuck that even means in this context? As games like Undertale show, maternal game design isn’t just about telling worthwhile yet disregarded stories. The popularity of paternal game design is indicative of deeper issues, ranging from how we as a society measure success and who and what our laws protect.
/.../
After decades of paternal game design, I am eager to unleash the potential of videogames born of woman. Motherhood deserves more than a cursory glance, and play deserves the benefits of creation instead of destruction. If and when that will happen, no one can say. But in 2015, we captured a glimpse of what fruit it can bear.
§
The only visible measure in Orchids to Dusk is the oxygen level on the left of the screen (and there’s no way to refill it).
/.../
It’s like directing your own funeral.
§
The beautiful terror of Year Walk is that in it, your deepest fears and anxieties are based on the truth. In a deranged twist of events, what I am experiencing is essentially a love story.
/.../
My deepest fear is to have her eyes burn through mine and see her mouth the words, “I don’t love you anymore.”
At the end of the jump scares, ominous soundtracks, and haunting creatures, the fear of loss and betrayal is what lingers the longest in my Year Walk. We give ourselves entirely in seeking the truth and yearning for love to the point of a physical and emotional breakdown. Perhaps this journey is the most accurate description of love and heartbreak: a series of signs and symbols we have to decode, and we receive either the answers that provide us warmth, or remain lost in the freezing woods until we are freed to walk again.
§
As an adult, how does one learn to play electronic games? With no older sibling or friend down the block to teach, no community of mates to check in with, no memory of games from childhood, how does one begin, how does one progress?
/.../
I really think this could be easier. Can’t someone create a graduated list of games for adult-onset players, a series of games to take on, in sequence, that would build familiarity and component skills and even attitudes, in a conscious way? Most players I know have only the blurriest memories of how one learns this stuff, little sense of the parts that make up the whole: sorting it out might be an interesting project.
§
“The journey is more important than…the other thing,” muses one of your passengers, too enraptured by the pure alcohol of the drive to bother to complete philosophical cliches. And in a sense, that’s Glitchhikers. The emotion is more important than what the emotion might mean. Just being in the game matters more than…the other thing. The antithesis of other videogames, where making me feel something, some specific and preferably unclaimed by another developer emotion is the only and final goal, Glitchhikers allows me to ruminate, to imbibe, to simply “be”.
§
[Three Fourths Home]
the dream of climbing the social ladder puts emphasis on the economic costs and benefits of ‘making it’, but ignores the more immaterial costs, such as separation from one’s family and loved ones. That narrative does not factor in those costs because they are not part of its implied values.
the family is almost entirely dependent on a medical corporation, possibly a health insurance company.
another effect of the family’s limited options and urgent needs is that they are hoping Kelly becomes a part of that same oppressive structure, which is very twisted if you think about it, but it’s a consideration that they cannot afford to do.
People don’t fight back against the powerful abusing their power, they beg them.
in CL [Cart Life] there is a sense that one may very well hold on and live another day, if they try hard enough, if they know their way around the city, if they balance everything just right. And even that is a slightly more optimistic perspective than Three Fourths Home has to offer, because systems can be read, can become not scary but familiar, and they can be manipulated. TFH offers nothing but a one-way street, with an emphasis on the emotional resonance of that mechanic, but also on its inevitability: there are no choices to be made, the dialogue options offer only superficial alternatives. The player has no power to shape the story, because the Meyers have no power to shape their story, like they have no power over the tornado that is approaching their house.
§
Is Language a Virus? Starring Punished "Venom" Snake | Idea Channel | PBS Digital Studios
§
So, let's talk sex games.
§
Sex games, part 1: sex as bodies
§
Sex games, part 2: sex as gesture / sex as poking
Critical Compilation - Cibele
§CIBELE
One of the reasons why confessional storytelling is so rare in games might be because of the way it puts a lie to one of our most commonly held assumptions about players and the characters they control. We generally imagine that, when you play as someone, you are becoming them—adventuring as Lara Croft, saving the human race as the Master Chief, etc., etc. Confessional narratives shatter that illusion with experiences so specific and so tied to their creator that the distance between the player and the character is always present. When we see Freeman’s pictures and hear her voice, her personhood is inescapable.
/.../
For a few years as a teenager, I imagined myself living a double life, an awkward teenage boy in one world and a creative, vibrant young man somewhere beyond the bounds of an LCD monitor. Playing Cibele highlighted the dissonance of my young identities and the way I used technology to shape them. I was neither; I was both.
/.../
Even if you can’t relate, Cibele still insists on a personal response. If anything, my tendency to distrust Ichi made every moment with him feel all the more intrusive and significant. I wanted to see myself in his relationship with Freeman. Or maybe I wanted to see what she saw.
This is a game about that drive to connect, to see others and yourself clearly. It’s an experiment in how a creator might put themselves into a work and make a game that speaks honestly about their real life to the people who play it.
§
I often think about the fact we don't really have 'online lives' any more.
/.../
online is real life now.
/.../
Nina Freeman's Cibele is a gentle but involving callback to a youth when the realm of internet chat—here, visualized quite literally through an online fantasy game—could be an all-consuming, furtive repository for everything fraught and unexpressed in our real lives.
/.../
There will always be stories of young love, and people probably meet online now more than ever, perfunctorily, but it fascinates me that these stories will never again happen in exactly this way.
/.../
Virtual communication is no longer magic. It's no longer rare and risky, and as time passes, more and more of us will be much the same person "here" as we are "there." Lots of us today spend more time on devices than we do off them. Friends and colleagues report being overwhelmed, not intrigued, by Reddit threads, Twitter replies, Tinder messages, Facebook notifications, Google Calendar invites, iMessages and texts. Now, for me, meeting someone in a club late at night who has read my articles actually recalls that old sinking feeling of finding out someone in your internet roleplay group actually goes to your school—they've accidentally found the real-life me, the secret me. The script has reversed: nowadays, in the age of remote working and Real Name Policies, some corners of real life feel more forbidden, more secret, than the internet does or perhaps ever will again.
/.../
Games like Cibele and Emily is Away are not just memoirs; they're memorials. When today's young people want to whisper their secret longing and loneliness into the night in search of others, will they still put it online? If not, then where?
§
This is a game about a young woman’s experience, fundamentally; it is her role you adopt, after all, her eyes through which you see. But Ichi (voice acted expertly by Justin Briner) also emerges with nearly equal vulnerability, showing a side of young men that is only ever ruthlessly mocked if it is portrayed at all. He is initially presented as that most loathsome figure in MMO gaming: the tough-talking, foul mouthed, exacting raid leader who sees himself cursed to be surrounded by idiots. But as you play, you see that he is, in certain ways, Nina’s mirror; MMOs afford her the opportunity to thrive socially in a world where she is not judged for being a nerd who cheerfully describes her aesthetic as mahou shoujo, and they afford for Ichi the opportunity to socialize without getting too close to people.
§
exhibitionism and a confessional style of video game seems appropriate in this case, given the game’s thematic interest in adolescent infatuation.
/.../
It’s a clever game, told in a clever way, that produces a very authentic representation of a fairly universal experience, but it feels like that in presenting the story in as raw a form as Freeman has that events here haven’t yet been considered with any maturity, only idealism.
/.../
The game knows how to express itself well enough, but the reason that it doesn’t really enlighten us in any way seems to be because there is no sense of transformation of the character of Nina herself.
/.../
Nina at the beginning was a girl infatuated with presenting a certain idealized image of herself and her world, and Nina at the end is a young woman that still seems infatuated with presenting a certain idealized image of herself and her world.
/.../
Maybe, though, Cibele is simply intended as a fable or allegory. It’s just disappointing to me because it initially seems to promise an investigation of identity and exhibitionism that might uncover something a bit richer, perhaps, more oracular, than those genres typically allow for.
§
There’s only so much you can read into the game as a broader commentary on the intimacy of play and on formation of sexuality in the digital age. It’s not as didactic as one might expect, to the point where I occasionally found myself tempted to read straight past the game into the phenomenon it portrays.
/.../
For all its shortcomings, which should not be either ignored or overstated, Cibele has remarkable fidelity as a communication of a personal experience, and that makes it an exciting and successful piece of autobiography.
One of the reasons why confessional storytelling is so rare in games might be because of the way it puts a lie to one of our most commonly held assumptions about players and the characters they control. We generally imagine that, when you play as someone, you are becoming them—adventuring as Lara Croft, saving the human race as the Master Chief, etc., etc. Confessional narratives shatter that illusion with experiences so specific and so tied to their creator that the distance between the player and the character is always present. When we see Freeman’s pictures and hear her voice, her personhood is inescapable.
/.../
For a few years as a teenager, I imagined myself living a double life, an awkward teenage boy in one world and a creative, vibrant young man somewhere beyond the bounds of an LCD monitor. Playing Cibele highlighted the dissonance of my young identities and the way I used technology to shape them. I was neither; I was both.
/.../
Even if you can’t relate, Cibele still insists on a personal response. If anything, my tendency to distrust Ichi made every moment with him feel all the more intrusive and significant. I wanted to see myself in his relationship with Freeman. Or maybe I wanted to see what she saw.
This is a game about that drive to connect, to see others and yourself clearly. It’s an experiment in how a creator might put themselves into a work and make a game that speaks honestly about their real life to the people who play it.
§
I often think about the fact we don't really have 'online lives' any more.
/.../
online is real life now.
/.../
Nina Freeman's Cibele is a gentle but involving callback to a youth when the realm of internet chat—here, visualized quite literally through an online fantasy game—could be an all-consuming, furtive repository for everything fraught and unexpressed in our real lives.
/.../
There will always be stories of young love, and people probably meet online now more than ever, perfunctorily, but it fascinates me that these stories will never again happen in exactly this way.
/.../
Virtual communication is no longer magic. It's no longer rare and risky, and as time passes, more and more of us will be much the same person "here" as we are "there." Lots of us today spend more time on devices than we do off them. Friends and colleagues report being overwhelmed, not intrigued, by Reddit threads, Twitter replies, Tinder messages, Facebook notifications, Google Calendar invites, iMessages and texts. Now, for me, meeting someone in a club late at night who has read my articles actually recalls that old sinking feeling of finding out someone in your internet roleplay group actually goes to your school—they've accidentally found the real-life me, the secret me. The script has reversed: nowadays, in the age of remote working and Real Name Policies, some corners of real life feel more forbidden, more secret, than the internet does or perhaps ever will again.
/.../
Games like Cibele and Emily is Away are not just memoirs; they're memorials. When today's young people want to whisper their secret longing and loneliness into the night in search of others, will they still put it online? If not, then where?
§
This is a game about a young woman’s experience, fundamentally; it is her role you adopt, after all, her eyes through which you see. But Ichi (voice acted expertly by Justin Briner) also emerges with nearly equal vulnerability, showing a side of young men that is only ever ruthlessly mocked if it is portrayed at all. He is initially presented as that most loathsome figure in MMO gaming: the tough-talking, foul mouthed, exacting raid leader who sees himself cursed to be surrounded by idiots. But as you play, you see that he is, in certain ways, Nina’s mirror; MMOs afford her the opportunity to thrive socially in a world where she is not judged for being a nerd who cheerfully describes her aesthetic as mahou shoujo, and they afford for Ichi the opportunity to socialize without getting too close to people.
§
exhibitionism and a confessional style of video game seems appropriate in this case, given the game’s thematic interest in adolescent infatuation.
/.../
It’s a clever game, told in a clever way, that produces a very authentic representation of a fairly universal experience, but it feels like that in presenting the story in as raw a form as Freeman has that events here haven’t yet been considered with any maturity, only idealism.
/.../
The game knows how to express itself well enough, but the reason that it doesn’t really enlighten us in any way seems to be because there is no sense of transformation of the character of Nina herself.
/.../
Nina at the beginning was a girl infatuated with presenting a certain idealized image of herself and her world, and Nina at the end is a young woman that still seems infatuated with presenting a certain idealized image of herself and her world.
/.../
Maybe, though, Cibele is simply intended as a fable or allegory. It’s just disappointing to me because it initially seems to promise an investigation of identity and exhibitionism that might uncover something a bit richer, perhaps, more oracular, than those genres typically allow for.
§
There’s only so much you can read into the game as a broader commentary on the intimacy of play and on formation of sexuality in the digital age. It’s not as didactic as one might expect, to the point where I occasionally found myself tempted to read straight past the game into the phenomenon it portrays.
/.../
For all its shortcomings, which should not be either ignored or overstated, Cibele has remarkable fidelity as a communication of a personal experience, and that makes it an exciting and successful piece of autobiography.
Every playthrough is equal, some playthroughs are more equal than others
I've now
written three texts about games (Planescape Torment, Undertale, Life
Is Strange) where the way I played them and the outcomes of those
playthroughs affected my understanding of them1.
And in all three cases there are other ways of playing the game which
if one took into account all the possible playthroughs for ones
understanding of the game and tried to stack them on top of
each-other, one would have to alter ones conclusions drawn. Because
how can one be an asshole to ones companions yet still regain ones
mortality in Planescape Torment? How does all the themes of
acceptance in Life Is Strange fit in with the ending where one
decides on saving Chloe? Do those alternative (to mine) endings
contradict my conclusions simply because my conclusions were wrong to
begin with? I don't think that's the case, and I don't necessarily
believe that games should be only understood in the context of all
possible states that they might finalize in (or indeed be understood
primarily based on their final states).
All playthroughs of games are worlds in themselves and can be regarded as consistent and perfect. That doesn't mean that there isn't anything to gain from going through a videogame with a different playstyle or thematic predisposition compared to ones older playthroughs in order to inform ones understanding of the universe that is a specific game as a whole. Perhaps I'm wary of going down that path in part because it takes more artistic genius to make all paths point in the same general direction or at least give tools for satisfying meaning-making in all paths. Then there's also the question of my choosing the path which makes the more sense for me. It's not weird that other paths don't seem as well-made – they weren't made for me.
All playthroughs of games are worlds in themselves and can be regarded as consistent and perfect. That doesn't mean that there isn't anything to gain from going through a videogame with a different playstyle or thematic predisposition compared to ones older playthroughs in order to inform ones understanding of the universe that is a specific game as a whole. Perhaps I'm wary of going down that path in part because it takes more artistic genius to make all paths point in the same general direction or at least give tools for satisfying meaning-making in all paths. Then there's also the question of my choosing the path which makes the more sense for me. It's not weird that other paths don't seem as well-made – they weren't made for me.
1To
be completely honest I did make it seem as if the actions I took in
Planescape Torment were necessary to reach the best ending at all,
but most of them really weren't. That's different from how ones
experience of Undertale might vary according to the path taken,
because in Undertale my interpretation might still hold in a
no-mercy run – the game is very different but it's not essentially
different or dissonant with the Undertale of a pacifist run.
Sunday, December 27, 2015
Life is Strange
Music.
Chloe: "Do you read minds as well, or did you travel back through time and know I stole the chair?"
Max: "It's the power of best friendship. I know how you roll."
Max Caulfield has a super power – time traveling. But more importantly, she has another super power – mind traveling (mentalization/theory of mind/vibratory telepathy1). This power is the power which makes us all potential "Everyday Heroes", potentially "super" - potentially to the max. It's the power with which Max reads the minds of the people in Arcadia Bay, but also the power she uses to understand all the possibilities that is herself. It's the power we as players use to understand Max and all the possibilities surrounding the gamespace of Life is Strange. It's the power the developers utilized when they filled the world of Arcadia with clues as to what the focal point of the story, a scene, or an exchange should be. It's the power of imagination, introspection, prediction, questioning, of what-ifs, maybies, chance, compassion, empathy, and with it we travel both through space and time. It's the power that enables Max and us to reach out to others. The power which enables Max and us to treasure and value friendship and love, and ultimately to form bonds that go beyond death itself. This power is an ability that, like family, binds both ways, and it's what allows my existential tethering to the strange lives of Max and Chloe, and enables your traveling here, dear reader.
At the destination that is Life is Strange, photography has a prominent and multifaceted role. There, people use photography as a means of expression, and it's a means for us as players to understand the people there. A way for us to gain insight into the world and its inhabitants and their relationships to one another. It's a means through which we might come to understand others better in some ways than they do themselves, and it's a way through which people express things which they otherwise would not be able to, or know how, to express. Max's diary was filled with drawings, pictures and words which helped me to take her perspective and mantle "the role" of Max Caulfield, photography student, teen girl, and a bunch of other descriptors. Max's diary was the picture through which I could frame Max and the choices she made, or I made through her – playing is, after all, a two-way mirror. Through me, Max's introspection changed both the (meaning of the) past and the future.
Chloe: "Do you read minds as well, or did you travel back through time and know I stole the chair?"
Max: "It's the power of best friendship. I know how you roll."
Max Caulfield has a super power – time traveling. But more importantly, she has another super power – mind traveling (mentalization/theory of mind/vibratory telepathy1). This power is the power which makes us all potential "Everyday Heroes", potentially "super" - potentially to the max. It's the power with which Max reads the minds of the people in Arcadia Bay, but also the power she uses to understand all the possibilities that is herself. It's the power we as players use to understand Max and all the possibilities surrounding the gamespace of Life is Strange. It's the power the developers utilized when they filled the world of Arcadia with clues as to what the focal point of the story, a scene, or an exchange should be. It's the power of imagination, introspection, prediction, questioning, of what-ifs, maybies, chance, compassion, empathy, and with it we travel both through space and time. It's the power that enables Max and us to reach out to others. The power which enables Max and us to treasure and value friendship and love, and ultimately to form bonds that go beyond death itself. This power is an ability that, like family, binds both ways, and it's what allows my existential tethering to the strange lives of Max and Chloe, and enables your traveling here, dear reader.
At the destination that is Life is Strange, photography has a prominent and multifaceted role. There, people use photography as a means of expression, and it's a means for us as players to understand the people there. A way for us to gain insight into the world and its inhabitants and their relationships to one another. It's a means through which we might come to understand others better in some ways than they do themselves, and it's a way through which people express things which they otherwise would not be able to, or know how, to express. Max's diary was filled with drawings, pictures and words which helped me to take her perspective and mantle "the role" of Max Caulfield, photography student, teen girl, and a bunch of other descriptors. Max's diary was the picture through which I could frame Max and the choices she made, or I made through her – playing is, after all, a two-way mirror. Through me, Max's introspection changed both the (meaning of the) past and the future.
Through photography we find out different sides to people, see them in a new angle, or just in hindsight see something which we missed the first time around, making us go "I should have fucking suspected there was something wrong with that guy, just look at his photographs!", but then realizing that we didn't in fact blink twice because that shit's just the way things are – both in the world of Life is Strange, and ours.
Photographs are also something which
we might remember people by, a bond beyond death, when they are no longer with us.
In Life is Strange, a photography isn't only something which is looked upon, but something which is used for understanding and presenting oneself, a way of conceptualizing and framing oneself in a broader, social context. Max is shy, insecure, and uses her powers to gain social leverage – at least I did in my playthrough and that playthrough is my phenomenological reality of Life is Strange and thus the basis for this text. What kind of pictures does Max take? Self-portraits, or "selfies". One might say that Max hides in plain sight, and she certainly isn't the only one, being a teenager and all. Max is the typical, overly socially conscious high-school kid who knows very well the potential of photography and how it might be used for an array of means – why else would she take up the study of it? That pictures can be used for both good and evil is an especially poignant point in the context of what happened in Episode 2 of Life is Strange to Kate, a girl who was drugged and filmed for the whole world to see on the internet, girls-gone-wild-style. In a world where that kind of social stigma and the wounds that follow it can be ripped open with a lazy click on a received link, it becomes all the more important to at all times be prepared for "the flash", and never forgetting to strike a pose. No wonder teenagers today are more self-conscious than ever. Then again, if one has the power to turn back time, one might have other ways to deal with embarrassment and a different way of grounding it in ones personal and social narratives.
For my Max it was very important for
things to go just the way she wanted to, exploring different
timelines as one might explore different clothing styles, making it
second nature to appear more savvy than she really was. Chloe (her
old-new best friend) on the other hand seemed to live life without
regrets, was notoriously reckless and managed to get herself killed
in all five episodes, no matter how much Max and I tried to prevent it. Incidentally, Chloe is also a total wreck
and doesn't even attend Blackwell High after having been kicked out
of there. What of her pictures, then? They are basically just missing
posters of Rachel, the Laura Palmer of the story, of whom we learn
more as we see pictures of her with the most varied of people in
contexts we couldn't imagine when starting out, forcing us to
constantly re-frame what we think of her and the people who she
appears with in said pictures. Like the Prescott family, Rachel seems to
tie in with every aspect of the local community, as she does with the
other events which Life is Strange centers around and seem to be
collapsing upon; The Vortex Club and the End of the World
Party; Max's time traveling powers (symbolized by a spiral); the viral video of a drugged Kate gone-wild on the web; the
visions of a tornado which destroys Arcadia Bay (the actual
end of the world?); and the Everyday Hero Photography contest (its
promotional poster has a clear sky in it).
Being a (super) hero is no easy task
with all of these things superimposed on top of each-other. Under such circumstances (or indeed all teen circumstances), it might
even become an ordeal to be regular and just fit in, or understanding who you are and being yourself. Things get out of hand in Arcadia Bay and Max's world soon enough, and in
order for Max to get her happy ending we (think we) are forced to expand the
scope of our powers and not just settling for rewinding time 30
seconds in order to get the answer to a question in class right. Eventually Max learns that she can go back years in
time by focusing on the polaroids she's taken with her instant
camera. Through these we travel to little "time pockets of regret" where Max did something she regrets, but
also to scenes which we aren't a party to, share no blame in, but Max now thinks that she with
her new-found powers has responsibility to correct anyway, such as the case
of Chloe's dad dying in a car crash. Accompanying our mastery of
time-traveling are more frequent nosebleeds and more intrusive
visions of the end of the world, and so we start to suspect that
perhaps we can't, shouldn't, have our perfect ending after all. Not that this stops us in our tracks - our efforts to correct every wrong in life are instead doubled, as are our nosebleeds. We start noticing
small cracks in our grand plan, cracks that go back to the very first scene in Episode 1 where
we are chastised by the popular girl Victoria for not being able to
answer a question put forth by the teacher about "the derregiere
process". There, we first discovered our powers, rewinded time, and the very
first lesson from this very first rewind was that there were consequences even to the smallest of time-travelled changes, and that some things simply couldn't be "fixed". Victorias mind, and her fate, seemed to be fixed - we answered the question correctly and thought we wouldn't be chastised this time around, but we got shit from Victoria anyway,
because now Victoria thought we were a know-it-all, and had
no qualms telling us so. These cracks exist, because life isn't perfect, it's strange, and
its inhabitants are too. And fate, the strangest of them all, seems to have a sense of irony...
§
There is a lighthouse at the end of
the world. It stands erect on a hill overlooking all of Arcadia
Bay, in the eye of the tornado which is forecasted to destroy the
world. As such, seeing how it's perspective is that of one who has all of creation behind and thus in a way in front of them, it's a place for assuming the bird's eye view, but not only that, but also the best spot for opening the mind's (third) eye and contemplate all that has taken place. It's the site for
self-examination and revelation – for brainstorms. It takes a while
for Max to reach there, but she does, eventually. On her way there, she goes
through a nightmarish vision quest full of different scenarios that
are all about assembling data and courage for the gathering storm and
the final sacrifice that must be made at the end of the world. In that vision quest,
Max solves puzzles by narrowing data points and focusing on what's
important by looking in mirrors. There, Max gets closer to her truth by rummaging through the internalized
voices of all the residents of Arcadia Bay, hiding from some of them, and learning from others.
Before she reaches the lighthouse, she also gets to see her and Chloe's friendship's defining moments, a reminder of all the good that's been, and all the good she needs to let go of.
Before doing what needs to be done – letting her best friend die.
§
In Life is Strange, there were important decisions concerning Max's coming of age besides the final one at the lighthouse, and other decisions which had nothing to do with the time-traveling that upset the natural order of the universe (as opposed to the mind-traveling which made us grow). It was when we were out of "time-traveling juice" that we talked down Kate from jumping off the school roof. There we managed to save Kate as well as the fabric of the universe, and we did it through non-supernatural means – by knowing when to kick up dust with destiny, and when to accept it. We didn't win the Everyday Hero competition, because we were too busy saving lives, and had to make a choice, and accept the consequences that followed upon it. We were too busy doing everyday good deeds for Kate, such as erasing the link to “Kate's video” written on the mirror in the girls bathroom, and other people whom we might call friends. Our Max Factor didn't turn out to be the ability to do everything at once, being "outside of time" but communication, the power of having shown a big enough interest in people in our vicinity that we might give solace to them when they needed it, the most important example of this being that we took the time to understand Kate's situation well enough so that we might change her mind concerning suicide.
Speaking of time (do we ever do anything else here?), the pacing of decision-making in Life is Strange is a bit "strange", or "outside of time", which is worth noticing. What I mean by that is that the decision making isn't timed as it is in similar games such as the Telltale ones, because Life is Strange isn't about tension during time, but about deliberation and taking ones time, in the sense of preparing. About laying the groundwork for the future to come. About moments of decision as photographs and echoes of future choices yet, and thus about looking back upon past decisions, revisiting and learning from them. And perhaps we weren't able to rescue everyone that we wanted to, but our bonds with them weren't cut because of that, but instead remained strong, were saved, by our having shared something special together. And through our super powers of mind traveling, we might even ask ourselves just what those we didn't save might be saying to us right now if they were here. We just might even have photographs, or psychometric traces, of those special moments which we can go back to in time and remember them by. Because the "Psychometric Tracer" can not only leave impressions of emotions, history and knowledge, the user of this ability contains a smaller, imperfect echo of the entire universe within themselves, enabling them to search out paths through probability to any desired future, effectively making it a form of “time-traveling”.
§
In Life is Strange, there were important decisions concerning Max's coming of age besides the final one at the lighthouse, and other decisions which had nothing to do with the time-traveling that upset the natural order of the universe (as opposed to the mind-traveling which made us grow). It was when we were out of "time-traveling juice" that we talked down Kate from jumping off the school roof. There we managed to save Kate as well as the fabric of the universe, and we did it through non-supernatural means – by knowing when to kick up dust with destiny, and when to accept it. We didn't win the Everyday Hero competition, because we were too busy saving lives, and had to make a choice, and accept the consequences that followed upon it. We were too busy doing everyday good deeds for Kate, such as erasing the link to “Kate's video” written on the mirror in the girls bathroom, and other people whom we might call friends. Our Max Factor didn't turn out to be the ability to do everything at once, being "outside of time" but communication, the power of having shown a big enough interest in people in our vicinity that we might give solace to them when they needed it, the most important example of this being that we took the time to understand Kate's situation well enough so that we might change her mind concerning suicide.
Speaking of time (do we ever do anything else here?), the pacing of decision-making in Life is Strange is a bit "strange", or "outside of time", which is worth noticing. What I mean by that is that the decision making isn't timed as it is in similar games such as the Telltale ones, because Life is Strange isn't about tension during time, but about deliberation and taking ones time, in the sense of preparing. About laying the groundwork for the future to come. About moments of decision as photographs and echoes of future choices yet, and thus about looking back upon past decisions, revisiting and learning from them. And perhaps we weren't able to rescue everyone that we wanted to, but our bonds with them weren't cut because of that, but instead remained strong, were saved, by our having shared something special together. And through our super powers of mind traveling, we might even ask ourselves just what those we didn't save might be saying to us right now if they were here. We just might even have photographs, or psychometric traces, of those special moments which we can go back to in time and remember them by. Because the "Psychometric Tracer" can not only leave impressions of emotions, history and knowledge, the user of this ability contains a smaller, imperfect echo of the entire universe within themselves, enabling them to search out paths through probability to any desired future, effectively making it a form of “time-traveling”.
At one point in Life is Strange, Max gets a plant from her parents, and it survives to the end only if you water is just enough – not too much, not too little, but manage to strike a balance between the two. Some things you can't save no matter how much you water them, and your watering just becomes fuel for a storm of some kind. Sometimes you never even get to see the consequences of your actions, as with Alyssa, the kid you save from incoming projectiles of different kinds in every episode. And that's part of life as well. The more Max time-travels, the more her power expands the scope of her vision, and the more she realizes that there are things that she simply can't solve. The more conflicting perspectives she tries to take into account, the less she feels like the master of her own destiny, and the less capable she is of taking good decisions that stem from her own, imperfect self. It's as if power on that kind of Godlike level seems to be constant, and no matter how great your ambition or scope, it all comes back to the lowest level of actions – those in the present. We use our capabilities of prediction to understand others, but there are no certainties as to what the outcome may be. In some time-lines and playthroughs, Kate didn't even survive and what I would have taken away from Life is Strange would be quite different. But in my world Kate did survive, and afterward she acknowledges us being both not perfect and good: "You're such a good person, Max. Even if you're full of crap. But I'll come with you... You're my friend." In a way, we are not only Kate's friend, but also her Guardian Angel, and Kate is not only our friend but also our Guardian Angel for reminding us that we aren't Gods, nor ever will be, but that we are in it together, for good or worse, and that that is (just) enough.
§
"Goodbye to the children we'll never meet, and the children we left behind".
Chloe is the driving force behind the main quest in the Life is Strange. Max has the powers, but always uses them to protect Chloe and further Chloe's goals. Who gave Max powers? Rachel? The Prescotts? Some old Gods? Arcadia Bay itself? It doesn't matter, all that intellectualizing draws our attention away from the heart of the matter and what really hurts – the fact that we left our best friend, and came back to find out that she had had a really tough time while we were gone. The fact that we promised each-other that we'd always be there for each-other, yet weren't. The fact that in our absence Chloe had somehow managed to lose her childhood, but never found a way to grow up.
Faced with all of this pain and regret, we did the seemingly responsible thing and tried to make it all up to Chloe, to protect her. But that decision (we realized just in the nick of time) was grounded in the insecurity of the girl that was Max, a decision born from pain, denial, and immaturityl. Again and again we tried saving Chloe, both from destiny and herself. Because we wanted to assuage our guilt. Because we wanted to make things right. Because we suffered from the magical thinking of a child, taking responsibility for everything bad in Chloe's life after we moved out of Arcadia Bay. But growing up, we realize that we can't take responsibility for the actions of others - that doesn't make us masters of our destiny, and in fact makes it harder for us to take responsibility for that which is ours to own up to. The signs concerning Chloes undeniable fate have been everywhere, practically screaming at us, and standing by the lighthouse with Chloe and looking her in the eyes, we know now, at last, what we have to do, which is leave our best friend – again. First we get the chance know them, and when we come to love them, life demands that we let them go. I told you - fate is the strangest of them all...
§
In Life is Strange, people are always-already diary entries – approaching them, they become objects of interaction with their becoming outlined in the style of our notepad sketches. All of the world is already "out of time" as they are non-corporeal objects in Max's subjectivity, but they are also out of time because the central conceit of Life is Strange - that we can save Chloe if we just play good enough - isn't a possibility, making all of Life is Strange a picture rather than a movie - a memento mori where the challenge lies in letting go, rather than winning, and accepting the passing of Chloe, rather than passing some sort of skill test or trying to "game the system". Nor Chloe's nor Max's quest was ever primarily about saving lives, but about saying goodbyes. For Max, it was about having one final, awesome week as authority-defying teenagers flying in the face of fate itself with her best childhood friend. About getting a short moment as almost grown-ups together at the lighthouse, immortalized in them being brave in the face of death and inevitability. And in the end when the storm has blown over and our time traveling capabilities are but dust in the wind, there are no illusions of grand gestures left, only the power of friendship, and the reality of both grief, and hope, in the aftermath of death. And though we've lost something precious to us, we still have the world and all of the people there who we can travel to, and since we're still technically teenagers - kick up some dust with. We still have our mind traveling which we can visit Chloe with, and that's hella super. It just took us having been gifted with supernatural super powers and then losing them, to make us understand that. Ironic, isn't it?
§
______
1Vibratory Telepathy: "By transmitting invisible vibrations through the very air itself, two users of this ability can share thoughts. As a result, Vibratory Telepaths can form emotional bonds much deeper than those possible to other primates." (http://lesswrong.com/lw/ve/mundane_magic/) Mentalization (psychology): the ability to understand the mental state, of oneself or others, that underlies overt behaviour.
______
Special thanks to Geek Remix for their wonderful contribution to the Life is Strange community in the form of critical videos filled with astute observations which helped me to better understand and appreciate the artistic merits of Life is Strange.
Saturday, December 26, 2015
We Know The Devil
This is a
follow-up post to an earlier post of mine where I mentioned We Know
The Devil and A Good Gardener, two games I bought last week. This
post will detail mainly We Know The Devil, seeing how A Good Gardener
was somewhat of a disappointment and I barely have anything to write
about it. Yes, some of the plants you grew looked like weapons, so
that was a bit of environmental storytelling foreshadowing. But there
was just too little of everything, even if the game was under an
hour. It ends in a loop of Sisyphean prisoner-of-war effort, but I'm
not sure it's very interesting or satisfying. I just wish the
experience was more fleshed out, or more suggestive. As it is now,
it's neither, just a short conceptual piece with gardening gameplay
that feels like doing chores and doesn't lead anywhere in particular.
I guess that's part of “the point”, but yeah, that's what I have
to so about that!
So. In the visual novel We Know The Devil (WKTD), queer teens Jupiter, Venus and Neptune are in a Camp for bad teens. In this camp, participants are in groups of three, are told that the devil is among them, and that the devil will show hirself during camp week. You play through the last night of the week, and you will know the Devil.
§
I understand WKTD to be about how structures of oppression are handed down from generation to generation and the rituals that are performed to solidify hierarchies and separate insiders from outsiders. The Camp is such a ritual, and the way in which the activities during that camp are set up shows us how such rituals might take place and also how one might resist them. The common knowledge in the game seems to be that being alone, or different, means that the chances of becoming the Devil dramatically increase. And yet the groups of threes (our planetary trio is named Group West) are told to fix sirens when they start wailing in the forest, but also that they must stay in their cabin. The groups can't do both, and thus pairings must take place. Ideology goes in, the Devil comes out.
But there is more to the indoctrination than double-binds and unfair camp experience design, as it would seem that to various degrees the participants have internalized the ideology or oppression handed down to them (even if they also resist that very same internalization and throughout the last day negotiate what it means to not like oneself, “be wrong”, wondering how normal teens would do, wanting to sacrifice oneself, being part of a group, apologizing all the time, having self-respect, wanting to be like their friends, having ones own identity, etc). One might wonder why they don't just stay in their respective groups, not leaving anyone alone, thus not bringing out the Devil at all. One might wonder why Neptune only brought two shot glasses, and why that means that only two of them can drink and drunk-talk together. And the answer is ideology and how structures of oppression work in a modern, self-policing, social context (post-Foucault).
"Group South does everything perfectly and is the fucking worst. The best kids in a camp for bad kids are absolutely certain to be the fucking worst.”
What does it mean to be good or bad? Is it a good thing to be awful? Is getting in trouble a good thing? Is being perfect too much? If it is, why would one be jealous of someone who is perfect? In WKTD, there are a lot of mixed emotions that Jupiter, Neptune and Venus express. Their communication is playful and especially Neptune can be quite sarcastic, and I believe that their speech patterns are a product of the double expectations and/or the wrong expectations placed upon them by the adult world and the imbalances which takes root in their hearts because of it. It becomes a way for them to maneuver the world, trying to make sense what is expected of them and who they really are. God might always be at the same frequency (109.8FM) in this world, and God is the one who finally announces what one person is the Devil, but other than that, our trio is very confused as to how they should behave. Even that doubleness in itself is a minefield of a double-bind: the system is designed to encourage fear and uncertainty in what one should do, and yet doubt is in its essence wrong – the Devil is never at the same frequency but is heard between radio stations, which means one has already taken a step away from Gods channel and tried at walking between the default paths.
There are more seeming paradoxes in how one navigates the world in WKTD. How one might be hanging out with the worst crowd so they'll leave you alone. How one might bully someone because one likes them. How one might be in a place where people force one to do things one doesn't want to do, yet is willing to pick dare in a game of truth or dare. How one might be considered good even when one claims that one isn't good because what else kind of person would hate themselves but someone who was really good?! And then there is the question of the Devil hirself. The Devil and the double nature of being good, the double nature of being bad, and the fetishistic appropriation of both. About the fear of turning into the Devil and the pain that brings, but also about the lure of being the Devil and how liberating it might feel not to care about the opinions of others anymore. How liberating it might feel not to hate oneself and hide anymore.
At one point, Neptune tells Venus that zie is too nice – that zie wants something and believes that being nice is going to get them that something, but that until they figure out what it is they want, every kindness of theirs will be full of that unknown want. Well, when Venus turns into the Devil, it is not as a man (everyone has referred to Venus as a man throughout the game and we aren't told otherwise), but as a woman. That zie doesn't have to be nice anymore seems to follow. But when our trio chooses to not separate at one of many crucial moments, it is not God who speaks to them and announces who has fallen – it is the Devil. What zie tells them is critical – “there is room for three in my world, but only room for two is His”. It's all about scapegoating in His world, then, and about trinity and multiplicity in the Devil's. Or as Jupiter says: “What's ugly isn’t having choosing one to be the scapegoat, but to choose at all”.
There is power in “not choosing”, and there is power in numbers. Group South fell back on the default path of being identical to each-other (learn teamwork, be the same!) in fear of becoming unique and alone, but when our Trio sticks together and doesn't leave anyone behind more than anyone else, they choose unity through difference and become Devil's all three. The planets align and the meaning of the adage “the devil is weak, humans are strong – even a child can kill the devil, all she has to do is try” is flipped on its head; “the devil is strong, humans are week – even a devil can kill an adult”.
But isn't becoming the Devil bad? In the non-true endings (which means the endings you probably got the first couple of times) it would mostly seem that way. But there is a difference in becoming the Devil alone and out of self-hate, and in becoming the Devil by ones own free will. When one does it by ones own free will, dares it together, then the opinions of others don't have to stop to matter and one doesn't have to unleash the beast inside and become a monster as the Devil. One doesn't have to shut out the world in order to give in and live out, but can negotiate a position in-between, as both part and whole.
The devil is lonely, it's been claimed, but here, in the true ending1, the devils song is loud and lovely. There is nothing to fear when there is two against the devil, it's been claimed. But our trio has claims of their own now, and they can't wait to see what the others will do with their exorcism-radios and their spells and their God against the three worst girls since Eve.
§§§
Caveat: there is danger in solely
defining oneself as an outsider, even if there is power in that as
well. I've always considered myself an outsider, and I've had it both
empowering and disempowering me. I've long been fascinated with the
liminal figure of the “alienated other” (the outsider who can see
things in their capacity as outsider), and the idea of fetishistic
attachment through distancing by means of the “oppositional
stance”2.
Sometimes when we try our hardest to break free, we don't realize
that the tools of fighting back have become so ingrained that we
start fighting shadows as well as oppressors. And this is a dangerous
thing. It is not the point of community, or society, or being a
Master – it is the equivalent of someone screaming at you but
really being mad about something else. Instead, every “circle” is
the exploration of a modus vivendi which permits the situation
to be lived in such way that when it comes undone, those who will
have participated in the weaving come out of it more alive, having
learned and become capable of teaching others what they have learned,
capable of participating in other circles, other weaving processes3.
One cannot do that if one decides to never leave a circle.
After the trio has become Devil's, it is claimed that the Camp Captain has no stories left to tell because they were all lies. I do wonder about that. Surely the Captain has a story with some truth in it? Thinking zie does not is turning hir into an unwilling Devil. And although it's not everyone's responsibility at all times to bring out the good in others or in trying to leave safe spaces, there is little to be gained from black-and-white color palettes.
After the trio has become Devil's, it is claimed that the Camp Captain has no stories left to tell because they were all lies. I do wonder about that. Surely the Captain has a story with some truth in it? Thinking zie does not is turning hir into an unwilling Devil. And although it's not everyone's responsibility at all times to bring out the good in others or in trying to leave safe spaces, there is little to be gained from black-and-white color palettes.
Another danger I wish to warn about is related mostly to some trans women, who as Venus don't believe being mad is OK and rather would be made fun of than being “mean”. I think this can be a real problem. Trans women and other women might try to live their lives as women and thus follow ideals concerning women, which in turn might lead to confusing having integrity and being assertive with being masculine. When one associates masculinity with something negative (and ones own masculinity in particular) then one just might throw out the baby with the bathwater and in fear of being perceived as being masculine one might instead become submissive.
Related to this, for me, is the paradoxical relationship I have with queer communities in that I don't necessarily feel more comfortable or safe there than anywhere else. I've thought that this might mean that I probably don't have need for safe-spaces and thus don't belong in queer communities, but I think that's just the voice of the evil queer hive-mind in my head. I think it has to do more with a feeling of my not being able to assert myself the way I want to in those type of communities and often second-guess myself and my actions in a way that just makes me feel bad and isn't very productive for my personal or social growth. The norms in queer communities can be really hard to fit, much harder than those in society in general or other communities. That's part of the practice of constructing a safe space in a queer setting, but it's never been my safe space, and even if I get comfortable enough not to see Devil's everywhere and think others are out to get me, I'm just not sure queer communities will ever be for me what I think it is for other queer people who seem to live almost exclusively in queer communities. It goes without saying that it's not only in heteronormative communities that some people (often the loudest ones) confuse being an asshole with having integrity. And you know, “the best people in the worst group”...
If I have some bad things to say about WKTD, then it's that it's very static and non-responsive to input in the long run. Who in our trio becomes the Devil is not foreshadowed very much, instead it comes suddenly and only takes one small “mistake” from the player. The work would feel much more deep and genuine if it didn't just tally the pairings and make a judgment based on that at the end of the game, but instead changed some dialogue around depending on the pairings that the player chose and the conversations that took place because of that. As it is now, all dialogue is the same throughout, no matter what pairings are done during the game. When a game is so short, more could be expected I think. Or rather than to talk about expectations, let's just say that the experience would feel much more alive if it acknowledged the path chosen by the player more.
Shouldn't it be harder for one person not to become the Devil if they've been left out a couple of times already? In WKTD that doesn't matter as long as you just keep count and balance things out at the end. I also wonder if the Devil couldn't conceivably come out even if our trio is together, or paired. Surely one can be alone together with others, or hurt other people without excluding them. These sorts of things are not explored in WKTD and although it would take much more work to acknowledge these sorts of possibilities mechanically and in the narrative, I think the game would be much better for it and I wish the creators would try out a more rich approach in their future games. The dialogue and characterization are really strong in WKTD, and on that much can be built.
1Referred
to as such by the developers.
2Being
a rebel (without a cause or otherwise) means not necessarily that
you are free and autonomous, as you are bound still with the object
of your oppositional stance. Over-investing in this link can drain
the existential life force out of you. You will never be able to
join the community with those ties because as a rebel your identity
depends on your autonomy being the result of a screaming and if not
an indiscriminate “no”, then at least an over-invested one, that
entails being a cynic, or a critic for whom individuation equals
righteous insurrection or a taste so acquired as to be beyond the
insulting world of mere mortals, a community of non-humans due to
their being made simply all too human. The result is
perpetual conflict.
3Capitalist
Sorcery: Breaking the Spell, Isabelle Stenger
§§§LINK COLLECTION§§§
This is their rite of passage to join society: by creating an Other, by knowing that the devil is somewhere outside themselves, in their former friend, they hide the aspects of themselves that are also demonized by that wider culture, and learn to assimilate.
/.../
The conflict between Jupiter and her
friends begins to arc toward concordance when she truly looks at the
inner self that emerged from the shell of Venus’s old body and
finds herself correcting her habitual “he” to “she.”
/.../
To be the devil is to be queer, to
go against the strictures imposed on us by our rearing.
§
In We Know The Devil, there are rules that must be followed, and authority figures are very insistent on letting everyone know that they will be punished for breaking them, yet the rules themselves are never made clear. This is true of a lot of things, obviously, but it’s as teenagers that we, that I, developed an acute awareness of how structural and unfair that is.
/.../
Venus deals with the rules by
buckling and apologizing for any perceived slight the first chance
she gets; she responds to the rules by making everyone aware of
just how aware she is, in the hopes that they will deem her
acceptable and let her move on. Jupiter internalizes the rules;
she has become so good at following them or appearing to follow them
that she sort of becomes the physical manifestation of the rules and
the idealization of herself. Neptune, finally, kicks and screams
and swears and claws at the rules every chance she gets; she
defines the rules by being opposed to them and tries to get everyone
else on her side.
/.../
the power trio don’t really fit into
the world of We Know The Devil at all. No really, the shack where
they have to face The Devil is literally 2/5ths too small for them.
There is no room for Venus As a Girl or a mythologically
incestuous lesbian power couple in God’s world, so they are left to
pick at their bodies as much as they pick at their surroundings.
/.../
Group West is kidding themselves. They
may have a future in God’s world, in the Real Scouts (the one where
the buddy system works and you get transformation sequences), but
only as deeply compromised selves. That future is one where others
will hate who they really are, where they will hate themselves for
who they really are. Already figures of authority—The Bonfire
Captain, God—are teaching them to look for evil in each other or
The other, The Devil, not in the system. In the mean time, those same
figures of authority assume the worst of their charges.
/.../
one girl is far from unstoppable, even
if she is The Devil. It is because they are together that they can
fight against the third and drive her off. It is because they are
together that they can weather God’s kingdom and convince
themselves it is good. It is because two of them drew closer together
that they did not notice the third hurting as much as she did.
Friendships are a powerful tool for survival, but if you’re not
careful with them, they can also be a trap: a little bit of honey
that convinces you your situation might not be so bad after all.
/.../
if they could all become The Devil,
then everything would just be fine and dandy, wouldn’t it? So, in
the fourth, final ending, that’s what they do. They all become The
Devil and they create literal Hell on Earth. And the jerks from South
Campus join them, all the kids do. Of course those kids hated God’s
world too! They were mean to the girls precisely because of how they
embodied its rules to them.
§
Though God and the devil are central presences, it never really explores issues of faith. There’s no question of belief here: the main characters know for sure that these figures exist. Nor does it really tangle with the institutional power of religious organisations. It does, however, rely deeply on the cultural power of religion, its ability to define right and wrong for whole communities and the way that, over time, those definitions become unchangeable. The use of radios serves to highlight and emphasise this.
/.../the one who speaks least is the one whose problems you see most clearly. The one you exclude is the one pushed to the forefront. At the very beginning of the game the camp counselor says that he had two friends that he tried to treat equally, but he always secretly liked one of them more. This, he says, was a mistake. He should have been honest about his feelings, and it would have been easier in the long run. His words set up the dynamic for the rest of the game. Your choice defines who is liked less, who is slightly excluded, and this isolation lets the devil in./.../ It’s hard to say that the fourth ending is a truer ending than the others. All the endings are possibility spaces, outcomes that exist in the tangle of emotions and choices these characters could make. But while the three individual endings seem to spell out a painful inevitability—you can’t stay friends with everyone, you can’t help everyone, you can’t love everyone—the fourth is aspirational. It dreams a different way of approaching the world, and perhaps a different way of emerging into adulthood.
/.../
The defiant embrace of the weird and beautiful and bizarre in We Know the Devil is a challenge to any conception of a normal adulthood. It also acts as a challenge to the notion that we should strive to be our best selves. Rather, it proposes embracing the whole self, with all its contradictions and painful conflicted feelings.
[It could be argued that it is the faith in society, friendship and oneself that is explored. "Do I exist?", and "how do I exist?" are central questions explored.]
§
Though God and the devil are central presences, it never really explores issues of faith. There’s no question of belief here: the main characters know for sure that these figures exist. Nor does it really tangle with the institutional power of religious organisations. It does, however, rely deeply on the cultural power of religion, its ability to define right and wrong for whole communities and the way that, over time, those definitions become unchangeable. The use of radios serves to highlight and emphasise this.
/.../the one who speaks least is the one whose problems you see most clearly. The one you exclude is the one pushed to the forefront. At the very beginning of the game the camp counselor says that he had two friends that he tried to treat equally, but he always secretly liked one of them more. This, he says, was a mistake. He should have been honest about his feelings, and it would have been easier in the long run. His words set up the dynamic for the rest of the game. Your choice defines who is liked less, who is slightly excluded, and this isolation lets the devil in./.../ It’s hard to say that the fourth ending is a truer ending than the others. All the endings are possibility spaces, outcomes that exist in the tangle of emotions and choices these characters could make. But while the three individual endings seem to spell out a painful inevitability—you can’t stay friends with everyone, you can’t help everyone, you can’t love everyone—the fourth is aspirational. It dreams a different way of approaching the world, and perhaps a different way of emerging into adulthood.
/.../
The defiant embrace of the weird and beautiful and bizarre in We Know the Devil is a challenge to any conception of a normal adulthood. It also acts as a challenge to the notion that we should strive to be our best selves. Rather, it proposes embracing the whole self, with all its contradictions and painful conflicted feelings.
[It could be argued that it is the faith in society, friendship and oneself that is explored. "Do I exist?", and "how do I exist?" are central questions explored.]
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