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juushikaVarious Tumblr crossposts about video games. Apparently I write a lot about ~the void~.
k but let's talk cosmic horror and Mass Effect
Cosmic horror by its very nature requires intangibility—a force so alien, so vast, so powerful, that those aspects alone make it horrifying; we fear it for its unknowability, and for the fact that its scale makes humanity seem so small. But go too far in that direction, and you lose impact; it's not effective without a certain cognitive dissonance, if there isn't a sense of self to lose when viewing the unknown. BioWare games are half plot, half social simulator, and that style works well for this content even though they're wildly imbalanced in ME2*: the emphasis on the interpersonal grounds everything, the high concept sci-fi, the cosmic horror, so that we never lose sight of the scale or investment in the outcome.
* And this may just be the result of doing all quests for all crew members, but the fact that almost everyone has a recruitment quest and everyone has a loyalty quests means that there's about 20 personal quests against like 5 plot quests and that sure makes the narrative feel flimsy.
There are moments when it's truly fantastic cosmic horror: the scale of the Collectors's, uh, collections, boarding the first Reaper ship and especially the logs there, the fate of the Protheans**, the entire concept of the Omega 4 Relay as the unknown badlands that bridge the known galaxy and dark space. And space is the native environment of cosmic horror; it's already vast and unknown.
But where the ancient hiveminds of the Thorian and rachni deadened the reveal of the Reapers in ME1, ME2 falls all over itself with the gigantic larval human robot. Body horror and cosmic horror are comfortable bedfellows—nothing dehumanizes quite like warping a human body—but: put the human back into cosmic horror and you destroy the point. They'd been building up to it a bit (Mordin, telling us humans are unique for their innate genetic diversity), but I honestly don't care. When the horror singles out humans in particular as special, humans are no longer diminished by the horror: the dissonance, that fear of the lost self, dissipates. And it decreases the scale, because what made ME1 in particular so ominous was that the Council was tying you in red tape while you were warning them of the impending extinction of all sentient life, a threat so vast that ruling bodies could hardly contemplate it. There's a background sense that that will still occur, but as the focus narrows the impact decreases.
Now, the way that cosmic horror usually avoids all this is by gracefully sidestepping concrete plot. Cosmic horror requires a certain inscrutability; after all, it's about the unknown. That doesn't mean it can't interface with sci-fi (if you haven't seen Europa Report, please please do), but the monster in particular has to maintain some mystique; often, the plot is "we investigated the unknowable, and as it turns out it was impossible to know, and now most of us are dead or traumatized oops." That wouldn't transfer well to ME's style, and that's okay, I guess. But the gigantic larval human robot wasn't. I can make some concessions, but that ain't one.
** This is the other solution, by the way: the cosmic horror changes humanity, humanity does not change the cosmic horror; that it distorts and destroys us is effective, but that it makes a big robot copy of us sd;lafjsdfsdss is ineffective.
Scale, space, liminality, and existential horror in video games
Lately I've been playing Katamari Damacy and Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP (the latter with mixed success, because the touch screen controls are hella dodgy and there's some significant design issues in the boss fights) and I keep running into Void Narratives.
Katamari does phenomenal things with scale—it is my rectangles-infinitely-duplicating-and-doubling-in-size nightmares (everyone had these as a kid, right?) turned into a game, sufficient small things creating bigger things creating bigger things creating until the small things aren't even rendered creating bigger things creating until it's consuming people, buildings, islands, clouds. At sufficient render distances, detail disappears and the view grows hazy. Make the Moon took me days to pass because once my Katamari was big enough to roll around the sea (scary because water and because innate existential horror!) I would lose my bearings, literally growing lost in the void.
Sword & Sworcery is about liminial and created space, from its fourth-wall breaking meta-narrative to its first person plural narration to its dreamscapes and time paradoxes: any game with a real-time mechanic and an in-game way to circumvent the mechanic is playing with the reality of created spaces. But sometimes, it's as small as inviting the player/Scythian to transcend perceived physical boundaries, a trope which reoccurs in the Moon Grotto, there used to transcend perceived chronological boundaries.
Neither game is meant to be scary! This isn't cosmic or existential horror in a traditional sense, but it borrows that profundity. It's the essential mechanic of Katamari, cosmic scale played as contrast to the absurd tone. Sword & Sworcery is all about profundity, breaking the fourth-wall to engage and challenge the player.
All of that is true. Also true: Roll up the universe into a near-indistinguishable mass barely visible through the haze of the heavens. Roll up people! roll up islands! roll up the sea, roll up the world, everything is ultimately minuscule and meaningless. And this is also true: Step into the void! Step into the void of time to continue to the plot. Demolish boundaries of immersion as you pass the edge of the collision map. Nothing is true, everything is permitted; this game is a construct and so is life.
I have a good few phobias* but nothing is on par with my existential horrors. Most of those phobias have a push/pull aspect—I find them equally compelling and off-putting, and because I have such a strong reaction I pay them extra attention. As such, they're effective narrative tools (see: the science lab whyyyyyyyy). Video games in particular are a manufactured reality, a reality that's easy to inadvertently or intentionally draw into question; they're prime material to explore the void, the innately captivating and terrifying void. (That means I've written about some of this before, including re: The Stanley Parable and re: Assassin's Creed's Animus, posted below. Interesting to encounter it concurrently in two games of wildly different tone and intent.
* life where life shouldn't be (including: clowns; autonomatonophobia; monkeys, because they're close enough to humans but different; some dolls and most mannequins); spiders, all arachnids and insects with three exceptions; alarms and ringtones; water, esp. standing water
The Stanley Parable is my version of brain candy: in a potentially off-putting, transparently didactic, fourth-wall destroying way (with a bonus side-serving of delightful dark humor) it looks at near all the aspects which fascinate me when I talk about games as narrative devices:
It is user interaction that makes games unique as narrative tools.
Every aspect of a game is manufactured; more than most media, it lives and dies by suspension of disbelief.
User-created narratives are only as complex as the manufactured narrative. The user's interaction is vital, but it is at best an illusion. True control remains with the game.
Those limitations and contradictions do not prevent games from being uniquely effective and affecting stories, ones which are successful precisely because they are games, and which are individual despite their limitations. The player is meaningless, and essential.
The Stanley Parable can never quite decide if it's making a broader analogy than that: Are its claims about the futility of free will (not that there is no such thing, but that no freely taken action is any more independent or successful than the next) applicable to, well, life in the universal sense? or are they restricted to the lies that we tell ourselves in the media we consume?
Honestly it gets a free ride, making those implications without being burdened by the effort of exploring them to their fullest extent, and the game is better for it. It's an hour's diversion, thought-provoking rather than tiresomely philosophical, bleak but rewardingly humorous. It's a raw effort but a successful one, mostly because it doesn't overextend itself.
But to say all that is to miss half the point. This is one of the things I want to dissect, but experiencing it is honestly more effective than all my blather. More effective, and more amusing.
All of this is also almost to miss the point of what left an impact on me—games about the futility of choice, and that futility's impact on choice making, are rare and fertile ground, but I've played Loved (go play that too, while we're on the subject—it's short, free, and in-browser; you have no reason not to) and so I've already had those thoughts. And they were good thoughts! But I've had them.
What I haven't had is the fourth wall so brutally broken that I walk into an untextured room or see scenery bits and wall textures thrown around willy-nilly, and the effect is devastating. I have a fondness for self-aware media—whether that means genre savvy characters or lampshade hanging or, at its most basic and delightful, simple trope inversion. I'm also insistent on maintaining suspension of disbelief. Let me tell you about the hatred I have for real world photo and video in video games! No actually, don't, it would bore you, but—I find suspension of disbelief particularly important and fragile, perhaps because I rely so heavily on escapism and yet am so critical in my media consumption.
Because no media (except perhaps computer animation) is so artificial as video games, no media relies so heavily on suspension of disbelief; at the same time, few media do such a shitty job maintaining it. Standards for suspension keep changing (sometimes even within a single game), texture flicker is everywhere, and we insist on using live action video in cutscenes for some unholy reason.
And The Stanley Parable takes all that and throws it right out the window. It breaks the forth wall, it repurposes textures and objects, it mentions that what the hell you look down and you have no feet; it doesn't just question how and why and whether stories are or should be meaningful, it question stories—and how unique and contrived this specific vehicle for them can be, and how absurd that it is, and how discombobulating it can be to realize it.
After playing Second Life and Sims, after becoming interested in video games as medium and the creative process thereof, I've become increasingly aware of those aspects: of why alpha flicker happens, and how we design levels; of games as manufactured art form. But that's always been fascinating, incidental background; in The Stanley Parable, it's half the point and purpose. It fucks with my head in a way which delights and discomforts me. For me, it's easily the best of the game.
Assassin's Creed's Animus and phobias
Funny how often I talk phobias, here. I'm scared of life where life should not be, so Corpse Party and then Ib terrified me. Breaking and questioning suspension of disbelief and creative mechanics in video games can unsettle me deeply, as did The Stanley Parable.
But my biggest, greatest fear is one that's difficult to describe, although I brushed against it in the above posts, particularly the one about The Stanley Parable. The vastness of the unknown terrifies me. It's akin to cosmic horror, and the fact that Elder Gods aren't frightening because they might kill you but because the unfeeling alien vastness that they represent would render not only your death but also your life irrelevant; it's that feeling you get from staring too long at the night sky, or reading this comic, or watching this gif.
When I used to play Second Life and I'd hack the natural flight limit to make skyboxes, it was the same feeling: going so high so that I could see only sky, heavy, oppressive, crushing down on me. Worse still: flying higher, the sky and sun would distort and I'd reach the end of the world, an artificial limit to an artificial construct, destroying the immense sense of immersion that comes from a social simulator. It would terrify me.
I used to have dreams about large rectangles. They would duplicate, and then duplicate again, each time growing larger in size; larger and larger rectangles, until the first rectangle looked so small; until the first rectangle effectively no longer existed, so minute was it compared to the current rectangle. And then the rectangle would duplicate, and the next would be even larger.
For me, it's all tied together: the abyss, my insignificance; recognizing the artificiality of constructs, finally seeing the abyss. It's not about me being small, that doesn't scare me: I'm content to mean nothing. It's about the vastness of all the rest.
So.
I find the Desmond Memory Sequences in Revelations near unplayable. I love that the collectables unlock them, because collectables are my passion (and have been since the first AC game) and in-game rewards for collectables should be mandatory, if only to feed the cycle. But after playing the first, I've left the others I've unlocked languishing. The Stanley Parable directly confronted what terrifies me about video games, the telling gaps in their artificial landscape; Desmond's Memory Sequences force you to pass through them. You float, you rez the world, you fall from it into the literal void. And because it's interactive, it's the most vivid example of this particular terror that I have ever encountered.
Assassin's Creed has always has moments—the tallest peaks, the bravest leaps of faith—that trigger this fear in me, because they so convincingly render the sort of vast distances that make a man into a small, mortal, meaningless speck. But they do it as a thrill: the bottom dropping out of your stomach as Ezio leaps off a ledge, but the safety of that cushioned landing.
This is not that. There's no safety and no thrill; I only end up trembling and in a full-blown hour-long panic that makes me put down the game for a few days. It's the other reason that it's been taking me so long to build an opinion about Revelations: like Ib, it hit on something which scares me on such an irrational, essential level that I can't be objective. It probably will rob me of a chunk of the game, and there's shit all that I can do about it.
I've been having a lot of conflicted feelings re: Death of the Outsider, including:
when you do disregard paratext? (answer: literally whenever you want, honestly all the time, do it now for free!) and when you do disregard aspects of text, and why? because of internal contradiction, because of narrative self-sabotage, because it's reductionist, because you personally disagree? what aspects of text can be selectively preserved?
timelines! low-chaos Dishonored 1 is effectively canon b/c that is the beginning point of Dishonored 2; similarly, low-chaos + time alteration Dishonored 2 is effectively canon for Death of the Outsider but it's precisely this time-alteration that, Madoka-like, seems to make Billie Lurk special enough to be noticed/marked by Outsider/Void, thus able to fulfill the events in Death of the Outsider. its seems, then, even more tenuously canonical—or, at least, more actively questioned by the extensive number of competing potential canons
so hell yeah disregard big old swathes of that text: the narrative structure itself encourages as much
(and why is Billie Lurk the one who should be making these calls? what gives her the right to judge how the Outsider's Mark influences human society when she has never personally been marked, and therefore is unaware of the relationship between Mark and consent, between power and action? Daud is better equipped to answer but obviously, profoundly wrong in his conclusions; the Outsider does not create human sin, is not even conduit for it; he is only another, albeit potent, wildcard)
(the Outsider claims to dismiss his cultists; this is a huge pile of shit. 1) obviously not all of them! see: Granny Rags. 2) his shrines as conduits to the Void. 3) bone charms ... work....
corollary: to what extent can the Outsider be circumvented? is this, in part, what the various cults achieve? how does this interact with the Void's desire for a representative?
side note: can you believe it wasn't until this game that I realized that bone charms can be made with non-whale bones. including human bones. oh.)
if the Void "hungers for a representational, godlike entity" (which is paratextual but heavily supported by text, specifically b/c the Outsider became its representative), then why are these representatives human (answer: because humans have a hard time telling stories without human figures and human lenses, which is understandable but still sucks)
corollary: previous representatives absolutely have not been human, for a couple reasons: humans are not the most important/only important thing in the universe (but are in fact a fairly minor part of it), also humans have not always been part of the universe
corollary: whales or whale ancestors absolutely were a previous representative of the Void, in part b/c leviathans predate human evolution, in part b/c whales in this universe are supernatural/intelligent, in part b/c it explains why they remain linked to the Void
if the Void hungers for representation, it's because the Void can't but interact with life on this plain; the Outsider is/was conduit for that interaction but not its source or cause. not having a (human) representative doesn't remove the Void's influence; if anything, it only makes it more unpredictable
question, therefore: what are non-represented periods like? what is it to be "marked" by the Void without that conduit; what are the powers and their effects? without a human conduit, there's no reason to presume that humans will be the (only) ones marked; what does a Void-touched non-human entity look like?
(spoiler: like a whale)
if the world itself becomes potentially chaotic b/c anything can be/is Void-touched, how does human society change? does a concrete non-human threat unite humanity? (answer: given what we've seen of the rat plague, not even a little.) but does it change the religious systems? without the Outsider, can the Abbey of the Everyman make the same links between Void = Outsider = human sin = individual guilt?
but, as aforementioned, humans like human lenses; we have a hard time writing narratives without them. this means that if the Void gains another representative, it will probably be human, and my issue with this is: boring
also, according to paratext (but also again supported by common sense/everything that makes the Void interesting): unrealistic; unrealistic that there would likely be another human representative in the near future
(I welcome a cyberpunk Dishonored narrative. though: the next time we saw a human Void deity, it was the future; now technological transhumanism overlaps the transhumanism/body horror of what it means to be touched by the Void) (corollary: Void powers are a great explanation for why "hacking" in cyberpunk look more like science fantasy than science fiction)
when I played Mass Effect 2, I said that "cosmic horror changes humanity, humanity does not change [...] cosmic horror" and
Dishonored is interesting because it controverts this: what makes the Outsider as a Void representative so engaging—and, from the Abbey's point of view, so threatening—is that it makes human ability a conduit for cosmic horror; because it questions the relationship between human and Void, because it recognizes the way that humanity shapes the Void while those vast, alien landscapes and those eerie black eyes remind us that the Void also changes us. Death of the Outsider, however, makes the same missteps as the end of ME2: to scale the Outsider down, to render him so limited and human in his desires, detracts again from the cosmic horror. there are ways to explore the Outsider's human qualities, even human vulnerabilities, in a way that doesn't decrease the scale (and therefore highlight other issues in worldbuilding like, again, the prioritization of humans), but Death of the Outsider fails to find them
(similarly, I'm unimpressed by the implicit moral judgement in paratext that equates the Void with hell (and nothingness with heaven) and the implication that the Outsider in his suffering is surrounded by those who have used his Mark in chaotic ways. it's limited, reductionist, human-centric)
finally, does Arkane know what a 15-year-old boy looks like? no? I didn't think so. (you can't bring us to his human form and make us feel sympathetic towards his surprising vulnerability without exploring his self-conceptualization, the relationship between his body and the Void, most especially when you can assassinate him with the now-magic blade that made him a god; we need to explore why he looks like he does, what he does look like, what the murder of a young man looks like; the Outsider recreating his own ritual murder in Dishonored 2 actually did this better than Death of the Outsider does)
The productive entropy of Dark Souls
Missy likes to send me Dark Souls memes and a bit ago he sent me
and I have been mad about it since.
Point the first: most of us would suffer and die in the vast majority of video game worlds, because our odds of being protagonists with superpowers are low and our odds of being trash mob #583453 or an NPC with 2 lines are very high, and a lot of video games center around combat, so everything would be war and we'd probably get murdered, even if the landscape around us were pretty or magic were real, cool, glad we've established this.
Point the second: like, I will credit that Dark Souls is the possible "yeah, no, you would definitely die and then you would probably become trash mob #24289 and then you would die some more" that can possibly be
but what's beautiful about Dark Souls is that all of those trash mobs and NPCs and unlucky few player characters are participating in a larger purpose. The purpose is, fairly universally, "the losing battle against entropy" but everyone is tied up in that; it built their cities, their faiths, their orders; even those relics of the failing battle are proof of it, animated by it beyond their life and consciousness. This is something I would give anything for: a universal, compulsory engagement with something larger than myself. This is how I wish faith and magic worked.
And many of the NPCs—especially in Dark Souls II—are searching for a reprieve from entropy, for Majula, an oasis of light; one of the series's ongoing themes is the fragile solace found within suffering, and! sign me up for that, my dude.
And unique especially to Dark Souls III is the option either to enter into an age of dark—to concede the fight, for now; to lie fallow, then regroup, on a universal scale: a different sort of reprieve, much more bitter but still something—
—or to break the cycle. A million years ago I read a Tumblr post (or comic? we may never know) that I've never found again re: the endings, the lore, and clinical depression. I reiterated the thesis once before*: that to a depressed person, giving up, giving in, recognizing failure and making radical, hitherto-considered negative change, is a rare, valuable, and earnest narrative. I feel about Dark Souls the way I feel about Yume Nikki (here are my thoughts on the end of Yume Nikki, lol look at younger Juu try to be coy about suicidal ideation), in the sense that, if your baseline is misery, then a world built within misery, to explore misery, as bastion of misery, engaged in an unwinnable war against misery, provides three things:
one, that this experience of misery is real, and it feels unbeatable because it is
two, that there are within the misery occasional beauties, there is the Firelink Shrine, there is the Candle World, there are reprieves
three, that—even if it can't be beaten—it can be ended.
I have a million narratives about reasons to keep going, and that sum total hasn't helped me as much as the rare few that validate my wishes not to. That scary, mournful setting feels more welcoming, more like home—and in Dark Souls you also get super neat monster designs, and are compelled to participate in a world-defining cycle, and there's fucking candles everywhere, plus scholars and old books, plus overgrown ruins, plus birds of variable size and visibility, with bonus body horror for fun and profit. Hell yes would I live in Dark Souls world. Would I be happy? I ain't happy now, I got not much to lose.
*Quote taken from another post:
Second is that I love the endings, the conversations they have between one another and the game series. I feel like "just keep trying!" narratives are a dime a dozen, and I understand both their appeal and value. But—and, eh, maybe this is just the mental illness talking—stories about giving up, giving in, recognizing failure and making radical, hitherto-considered negative change, are rare, valuable, and in earnest.
k but let's talk cosmic horror and Mass Effect
Cosmic horror by its very nature requires intangibility—a force so alien, so vast, so powerful, that those aspects alone make it horrifying; we fear it for its unknowability, and for the fact that its scale makes humanity seem so small. But go too far in that direction, and you lose impact; it's not effective without a certain cognitive dissonance, if there isn't a sense of self to lose when viewing the unknown. BioWare games are half plot, half social simulator, and that style works well for this content even though they're wildly imbalanced in ME2*: the emphasis on the interpersonal grounds everything, the high concept sci-fi, the cosmic horror, so that we never lose sight of the scale or investment in the outcome.
* And this may just be the result of doing all quests for all crew members, but the fact that almost everyone has a recruitment quest and everyone has a loyalty quests means that there's about 20 personal quests against like 5 plot quests and that sure makes the narrative feel flimsy.
There are moments when it's truly fantastic cosmic horror: the scale of the Collectors's, uh, collections, boarding the first Reaper ship and especially the logs there, the fate of the Protheans**, the entire concept of the Omega 4 Relay as the unknown badlands that bridge the known galaxy and dark space. And space is the native environment of cosmic horror; it's already vast and unknown.
But where the ancient hiveminds of the Thorian and rachni deadened the reveal of the Reapers in ME1, ME2 falls all over itself with the gigantic larval human robot. Body horror and cosmic horror are comfortable bedfellows—nothing dehumanizes quite like warping a human body—but: put the human back into cosmic horror and you destroy the point. They'd been building up to it a bit (Mordin, telling us humans are unique for their innate genetic diversity), but I honestly don't care. When the horror singles out humans in particular as special, humans are no longer diminished by the horror: the dissonance, that fear of the lost self, dissipates. And it decreases the scale, because what made ME1 in particular so ominous was that the Council was tying you in red tape while you were warning them of the impending extinction of all sentient life, a threat so vast that ruling bodies could hardly contemplate it. There's a background sense that that will still occur, but as the focus narrows the impact decreases.
Now, the way that cosmic horror usually avoids all this is by gracefully sidestepping concrete plot. Cosmic horror requires a certain inscrutability; after all, it's about the unknown. That doesn't mean it can't interface with sci-fi (if you haven't seen Europa Report, please please do), but the monster in particular has to maintain some mystique; often, the plot is "we investigated the unknowable, and as it turns out it was impossible to know, and now most of us are dead or traumatized oops." That wouldn't transfer well to ME's style, and that's okay, I guess. But the gigantic larval human robot wasn't. I can make some concessions, but that ain't one.
** This is the other solution, by the way: the cosmic horror changes humanity, humanity does not change the cosmic horror; that it distorts and destroys us is effective, but that it makes a big robot copy of us sd;lafjsdfsdss is ineffective.
Scale, space, liminality, and existential horror in video games
Lately I've been playing Katamari Damacy and Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP (the latter with mixed success, because the touch screen controls are hella dodgy and there's some significant design issues in the boss fights) and I keep running into Void Narratives.
Katamari does phenomenal things with scale—it is my rectangles-infinitely-duplicating-and-doubling-in-size nightmares (everyone had these as a kid, right?) turned into a game, sufficient small things creating bigger things creating bigger things creating until the small things aren't even rendered creating bigger things creating until it's consuming people, buildings, islands, clouds. At sufficient render distances, detail disappears and the view grows hazy. Make the Moon took me days to pass because once my Katamari was big enough to roll around the sea (scary because water and because innate existential horror!) I would lose my bearings, literally growing lost in the void.
Sword & Sworcery is about liminial and created space, from its fourth-wall breaking meta-narrative to its first person plural narration to its dreamscapes and time paradoxes: any game with a real-time mechanic and an in-game way to circumvent the mechanic is playing with the reality of created spaces. But sometimes, it's as small as inviting the player/Scythian to transcend perceived physical boundaries, a trope which reoccurs in the Moon Grotto, there used to transcend perceived chronological boundaries.
Neither game is meant to be scary! This isn't cosmic or existential horror in a traditional sense, but it borrows that profundity. It's the essential mechanic of Katamari, cosmic scale played as contrast to the absurd tone. Sword & Sworcery is all about profundity, breaking the fourth-wall to engage and challenge the player.
All of that is true. Also true: Roll up the universe into a near-indistinguishable mass barely visible through the haze of the heavens. Roll up people! roll up islands! roll up the sea, roll up the world, everything is ultimately minuscule and meaningless. And this is also true: Step into the void! Step into the void of time to continue to the plot. Demolish boundaries of immersion as you pass the edge of the collision map. Nothing is true, everything is permitted; this game is a construct and so is life.
I have a good few phobias* but nothing is on par with my existential horrors. Most of those phobias have a push/pull aspect—I find them equally compelling and off-putting, and because I have such a strong reaction I pay them extra attention. As such, they're effective narrative tools (see: the science lab whyyyyyyyy). Video games in particular are a manufactured reality, a reality that's easy to inadvertently or intentionally draw into question; they're prime material to explore the void, the innately captivating and terrifying void. (That means I've written about some of this before, including re: The Stanley Parable and re: Assassin's Creed's Animus, posted below. Interesting to encounter it concurrently in two games of wildly different tone and intent.
* life where life shouldn't be (including: clowns; autonomatonophobia; monkeys, because they're close enough to humans but different; some dolls and most mannequins); spiders, all arachnids and insects with three exceptions; alarms and ringtones; water, esp. standing water
The Stanley Parable is my version of brain candy: in a potentially off-putting, transparently didactic, fourth-wall destroying way (with a bonus side-serving of delightful dark humor) it looks at near all the aspects which fascinate me when I talk about games as narrative devices:
It is user interaction that makes games unique as narrative tools.
Every aspect of a game is manufactured; more than most media, it lives and dies by suspension of disbelief.
User-created narratives are only as complex as the manufactured narrative. The user's interaction is vital, but it is at best an illusion. True control remains with the game.
Those limitations and contradictions do not prevent games from being uniquely effective and affecting stories, ones which are successful precisely because they are games, and which are individual despite their limitations. The player is meaningless, and essential.
The Stanley Parable can never quite decide if it's making a broader analogy than that: Are its claims about the futility of free will (not that there is no such thing, but that no freely taken action is any more independent or successful than the next) applicable to, well, life in the universal sense? or are they restricted to the lies that we tell ourselves in the media we consume?
Honestly it gets a free ride, making those implications without being burdened by the effort of exploring them to their fullest extent, and the game is better for it. It's an hour's diversion, thought-provoking rather than tiresomely philosophical, bleak but rewardingly humorous. It's a raw effort but a successful one, mostly because it doesn't overextend itself.
But to say all that is to miss half the point. This is one of the things I want to dissect, but experiencing it is honestly more effective than all my blather. More effective, and more amusing.
All of this is also almost to miss the point of what left an impact on me—games about the futility of choice, and that futility's impact on choice making, are rare and fertile ground, but I've played Loved (go play that too, while we're on the subject—it's short, free, and in-browser; you have no reason not to) and so I've already had those thoughts. And they were good thoughts! But I've had them.
What I haven't had is the fourth wall so brutally broken that I walk into an untextured room or see scenery bits and wall textures thrown around willy-nilly, and the effect is devastating. I have a fondness for self-aware media—whether that means genre savvy characters or lampshade hanging or, at its most basic and delightful, simple trope inversion. I'm also insistent on maintaining suspension of disbelief. Let me tell you about the hatred I have for real world photo and video in video games! No actually, don't, it would bore you, but—I find suspension of disbelief particularly important and fragile, perhaps because I rely so heavily on escapism and yet am so critical in my media consumption.
Because no media (except perhaps computer animation) is so artificial as video games, no media relies so heavily on suspension of disbelief; at the same time, few media do such a shitty job maintaining it. Standards for suspension keep changing (sometimes even within a single game), texture flicker is everywhere, and we insist on using live action video in cutscenes for some unholy reason.
And The Stanley Parable takes all that and throws it right out the window. It breaks the forth wall, it repurposes textures and objects, it mentions that what the hell you look down and you have no feet; it doesn't just question how and why and whether stories are or should be meaningful, it question stories—and how unique and contrived this specific vehicle for them can be, and how absurd that it is, and how discombobulating it can be to realize it.
After playing Second Life and Sims, after becoming interested in video games as medium and the creative process thereof, I've become increasingly aware of those aspects: of why alpha flicker happens, and how we design levels; of games as manufactured art form. But that's always been fascinating, incidental background; in The Stanley Parable, it's half the point and purpose. It fucks with my head in a way which delights and discomforts me. For me, it's easily the best of the game.
Assassin's Creed's Animus and phobias
Funny how often I talk phobias, here. I'm scared of life where life should not be, so Corpse Party and then Ib terrified me. Breaking and questioning suspension of disbelief and creative mechanics in video games can unsettle me deeply, as did The Stanley Parable.
But my biggest, greatest fear is one that's difficult to describe, although I brushed against it in the above posts, particularly the one about The Stanley Parable. The vastness of the unknown terrifies me. It's akin to cosmic horror, and the fact that Elder Gods aren't frightening because they might kill you but because the unfeeling alien vastness that they represent would render not only your death but also your life irrelevant; it's that feeling you get from staring too long at the night sky, or reading this comic, or watching this gif.
When I used to play Second Life and I'd hack the natural flight limit to make skyboxes, it was the same feeling: going so high so that I could see only sky, heavy, oppressive, crushing down on me. Worse still: flying higher, the sky and sun would distort and I'd reach the end of the world, an artificial limit to an artificial construct, destroying the immense sense of immersion that comes from a social simulator. It would terrify me.
I used to have dreams about large rectangles. They would duplicate, and then duplicate again, each time growing larger in size; larger and larger rectangles, until the first rectangle looked so small; until the first rectangle effectively no longer existed, so minute was it compared to the current rectangle. And then the rectangle would duplicate, and the next would be even larger.
For me, it's all tied together: the abyss, my insignificance; recognizing the artificiality of constructs, finally seeing the abyss. It's not about me being small, that doesn't scare me: I'm content to mean nothing. It's about the vastness of all the rest.
So.
I find the Desmond Memory Sequences in Revelations near unplayable. I love that the collectables unlock them, because collectables are my passion (and have been since the first AC game) and in-game rewards for collectables should be mandatory, if only to feed the cycle. But after playing the first, I've left the others I've unlocked languishing. The Stanley Parable directly confronted what terrifies me about video games, the telling gaps in their artificial landscape; Desmond's Memory Sequences force you to pass through them. You float, you rez the world, you fall from it into the literal void. And because it's interactive, it's the most vivid example of this particular terror that I have ever encountered.
Assassin's Creed has always has moments—the tallest peaks, the bravest leaps of faith—that trigger this fear in me, because they so convincingly render the sort of vast distances that make a man into a small, mortal, meaningless speck. But they do it as a thrill: the bottom dropping out of your stomach as Ezio leaps off a ledge, but the safety of that cushioned landing.
This is not that. There's no safety and no thrill; I only end up trembling and in a full-blown hour-long panic that makes me put down the game for a few days. It's the other reason that it's been taking me so long to build an opinion about Revelations: like Ib, it hit on something which scares me on such an irrational, essential level that I can't be objective. It probably will rob me of a chunk of the game, and there's shit all that I can do about it.
I've been having a lot of conflicted feelings re: Death of the Outsider, including:
when you do disregard paratext? (answer: literally whenever you want, honestly all the time, do it now for free!) and when you do disregard aspects of text, and why? because of internal contradiction, because of narrative self-sabotage, because it's reductionist, because you personally disagree? what aspects of text can be selectively preserved?
timelines! low-chaos Dishonored 1 is effectively canon b/c that is the beginning point of Dishonored 2; similarly, low-chaos + time alteration Dishonored 2 is effectively canon for Death of the Outsider but it's precisely this time-alteration that, Madoka-like, seems to make Billie Lurk special enough to be noticed/marked by Outsider/Void, thus able to fulfill the events in Death of the Outsider. its seems, then, even more tenuously canonical—or, at least, more actively questioned by the extensive number of competing potential canons
so hell yeah disregard big old swathes of that text: the narrative structure itself encourages as much
(and why is Billie Lurk the one who should be making these calls? what gives her the right to judge how the Outsider's Mark influences human society when she has never personally been marked, and therefore is unaware of the relationship between Mark and consent, between power and action? Daud is better equipped to answer but obviously, profoundly wrong in his conclusions; the Outsider does not create human sin, is not even conduit for it; he is only another, albeit potent, wildcard)
(the Outsider claims to dismiss his cultists; this is a huge pile of shit. 1) obviously not all of them! see: Granny Rags. 2) his shrines as conduits to the Void. 3) bone charms ... work....
corollary: to what extent can the Outsider be circumvented? is this, in part, what the various cults achieve? how does this interact with the Void's desire for a representative?
side note: can you believe it wasn't until this game that I realized that bone charms can be made with non-whale bones. including human bones. oh.)
if the Void "hungers for a representational, godlike entity" (which is paratextual but heavily supported by text, specifically b/c the Outsider became its representative), then why are these representatives human (answer: because humans have a hard time telling stories without human figures and human lenses, which is understandable but still sucks)
corollary: previous representatives absolutely have not been human, for a couple reasons: humans are not the most important/only important thing in the universe (but are in fact a fairly minor part of it), also humans have not always been part of the universe
corollary: whales or whale ancestors absolutely were a previous representative of the Void, in part b/c leviathans predate human evolution, in part b/c whales in this universe are supernatural/intelligent, in part b/c it explains why they remain linked to the Void
if the Void hungers for representation, it's because the Void can't but interact with life on this plain; the Outsider is/was conduit for that interaction but not its source or cause. not having a (human) representative doesn't remove the Void's influence; if anything, it only makes it more unpredictable
question, therefore: what are non-represented periods like? what is it to be "marked" by the Void without that conduit; what are the powers and their effects? without a human conduit, there's no reason to presume that humans will be the (only) ones marked; what does a Void-touched non-human entity look like?
(spoiler: like a whale)
if the world itself becomes potentially chaotic b/c anything can be/is Void-touched, how does human society change? does a concrete non-human threat unite humanity? (answer: given what we've seen of the rat plague, not even a little.) but does it change the religious systems? without the Outsider, can the Abbey of the Everyman make the same links between Void = Outsider = human sin = individual guilt?
but, as aforementioned, humans like human lenses; we have a hard time writing narratives without them. this means that if the Void gains another representative, it will probably be human, and my issue with this is: boring
also, according to paratext (but also again supported by common sense/everything that makes the Void interesting): unrealistic; unrealistic that there would likely be another human representative in the near future
(I welcome a cyberpunk Dishonored narrative. though: the next time we saw a human Void deity, it was the future; now technological transhumanism overlaps the transhumanism/body horror of what it means to be touched by the Void) (corollary: Void powers are a great explanation for why "hacking" in cyberpunk look more like science fantasy than science fiction)
when I played Mass Effect 2, I said that "cosmic horror changes humanity, humanity does not change [...] cosmic horror" and
Body horror and cosmic horror are comfortable bedfellows—nothing dehumanizes quite like warping a human body—but: put the human back into cosmic horror and you destroy the point. [...] When the horror singles out humans in particular as special, humans are no longer diminished by the horror: the dissonance, that fear of the lost self, dissipates.
Dishonored is interesting because it controverts this: what makes the Outsider as a Void representative so engaging—and, from the Abbey's point of view, so threatening—is that it makes human ability a conduit for cosmic horror; because it questions the relationship between human and Void, because it recognizes the way that humanity shapes the Void while those vast, alien landscapes and those eerie black eyes remind us that the Void also changes us. Death of the Outsider, however, makes the same missteps as the end of ME2: to scale the Outsider down, to render him so limited and human in his desires, detracts again from the cosmic horror. there are ways to explore the Outsider's human qualities, even human vulnerabilities, in a way that doesn't decrease the scale (and therefore highlight other issues in worldbuilding like, again, the prioritization of humans), but Death of the Outsider fails to find them
(similarly, I'm unimpressed by the implicit moral judgement in paratext that equates the Void with hell (and nothingness with heaven) and the implication that the Outsider in his suffering is surrounded by those who have used his Mark in chaotic ways. it's limited, reductionist, human-centric)
finally, does Arkane know what a 15-year-old boy looks like? no? I didn't think so. (you can't bring us to his human form and make us feel sympathetic towards his surprising vulnerability without exploring his self-conceptualization, the relationship between his body and the Void, most especially when you can assassinate him with the now-magic blade that made him a god; we need to explore why he looks like he does, what he does look like, what the murder of a young man looks like; the Outsider recreating his own ritual murder in Dishonored 2 actually did this better than Death of the Outsider does)
The productive entropy of Dark Souls
Missy likes to send me Dark Souls memes and a bit ago he sent me
Image reading:
You wake up in the last video game you played. It's now your life. Where are you?
Facebook user Naores: I feel sorry for those who say Dark Souls
[meme poster] This is a hypothetical game, and I still legitimately feel bad for them.
and I have been mad about it since.
Point the first: most of us would suffer and die in the vast majority of video game worlds, because our odds of being protagonists with superpowers are low and our odds of being trash mob #583453 or an NPC with 2 lines are very high, and a lot of video games center around combat, so everything would be war and we'd probably get murdered, even if the landscape around us were pretty or magic were real, cool, glad we've established this.
Point the second: like, I will credit that Dark Souls is the possible "yeah, no, you would definitely die and then you would probably become trash mob #24289 and then you would die some more" that can possibly be
but what's beautiful about Dark Souls is that all of those trash mobs and NPCs and unlucky few player characters are participating in a larger purpose. The purpose is, fairly universally, "the losing battle against entropy" but everyone is tied up in that; it built their cities, their faiths, their orders; even those relics of the failing battle are proof of it, animated by it beyond their life and consciousness. This is something I would give anything for: a universal, compulsory engagement with something larger than myself. This is how I wish faith and magic worked.
And many of the NPCs—especially in Dark Souls II—are searching for a reprieve from entropy, for Majula, an oasis of light; one of the series's ongoing themes is the fragile solace found within suffering, and! sign me up for that, my dude.
And unique especially to Dark Souls III is the option either to enter into an age of dark—to concede the fight, for now; to lie fallow, then regroup, on a universal scale: a different sort of reprieve, much more bitter but still something—
—or to break the cycle. A million years ago I read a Tumblr post (or comic? we may never know) that I've never found again re: the endings, the lore, and clinical depression. I reiterated the thesis once before*: that to a depressed person, giving up, giving in, recognizing failure and making radical, hitherto-considered negative change, is a rare, valuable, and earnest narrative. I feel about Dark Souls the way I feel about Yume Nikki (here are my thoughts on the end of Yume Nikki, lol look at younger Juu try to be coy about suicidal ideation), in the sense that, if your baseline is misery, then a world built within misery, to explore misery, as bastion of misery, engaged in an unwinnable war against misery, provides three things:
one, that this experience of misery is real, and it feels unbeatable because it is
two, that there are within the misery occasional beauties, there is the Firelink Shrine, there is the Candle World, there are reprieves
three, that—even if it can't be beaten—it can be ended.
I have a million narratives about reasons to keep going, and that sum total hasn't helped me as much as the rare few that validate my wishes not to. That scary, mournful setting feels more welcoming, more like home—and in Dark Souls you also get super neat monster designs, and are compelled to participate in a world-defining cycle, and there's fucking candles everywhere, plus scholars and old books, plus overgrown ruins, plus birds of variable size and visibility, with bonus body horror for fun and profit. Hell yes would I live in Dark Souls world. Would I be happy? I ain't happy now, I got not much to lose.
*Quote taken from another post:
Second is that I love the endings, the conversations they have between one another and the game series. I feel like "just keep trying!" narratives are a dime a dozen, and I understand both their appeal and value. But—and, eh, maybe this is just the mental illness talking—stories about giving up, giving in, recognizing failure and making radical, hitherto-considered negative change, are rare, valuable, and in earnest.
