“I love the way the player’s body moves in Bloodborne: You can fly in any direction like that, like a nervous little bird. If you want to be close, you are instantly close, and if you want to be away, you are instantly away. What a gift. Of course everything is violent and wants to touch you, but if you are perfect, you will not be touched. There is a little secret here which perhaps you can notice: When the ugly monster’s limbs reach out to touch the small human’s body, there is about a tenth of a second—maybe less— where her body is invincible. It doesn’t even matter if she’s geometrically in harm’s way or not. She is safe because she timed it right, was perfect. See, even in this very hard game, there is something wonderful and fair: The game doesn’t care about the way bodies actually intersect. If your timing was correct, it agrees: “You were not touched.” Many games hide that tiny moment of invincibility within quick movement, and it feels so kind just knowing, no mater how bad you are, that if you could fit every moment of pain in that one tenth of a second you could be invincible for the rest of your life. Sometimes I wish I had this power in real life. If I had it would mean never having to say ‘no’ in so many words, nor the confrontation that sometimes comes with saying no. But that perfect, flawless dodge is not sustainable—you have to be devastated so many times to get the timing so flawless. And here’s my bad secret: when I killed this one monster, I didn’t do it by dodging flawlessly, but by mashing some awful weapon in her side while her limbs were flailing and she could not hit me back. Unfair and problematic of me, I know. So often, games’ expressive qualities are limited to the violent motion of virtual bodies, yet they can be extremely articulate within that vocabulary. As much as I want to be an untouchable angel of forgiveness and grace with a bottomless well of compassion for all living things, I keep messing up that dodge and I think it’s making me a bitch.”
— Aevee Bee, “I love my untouchable virtual body” (via goodbyemisery)
Tokyo Cyberpunk: Emphasizes human relationship to technology, identity, psychological transhumanism, and the human-as-resource. In Tokyo Cyberpunk - Capitalism wants to own you.
Seattle Cyberpunk: Emphasizes class analysis through technology disparity, physical transhumanism, and the disposability of humans. In Seattle Cyberpunk - Capitalism wants you gone.
Tokyo Cyberpunk showcases nightlife where clean streets are illuminated by neon signs tempting you into consumerism as a therapy for your alienation. It’s percieved cleanliness acts as a symbol where corporations justify their rulership through the illusion of social progress. The robot is friendly, companionable. Societal problems and capitalist contradiction are silenced and swept away without the common person knowing.
Seattle Cyberpunk showcases a nightlife of homelessness and decay with corporate monoliths on the horizon. The streetlights no longer work, but the darkness is kept partially at bay by the neon tubes of bars where people watch wishes of their youth vanish at the bottom of the bottle. The lucky ones working for the corporations do so with the fear they will be kicked to the street. The robot is an expression of force intended to keep the common person afraid. Corporations do not try to justify their rulership, social problems and contradiction are solved with force.
This is a love letter to the creators of free itch.io games.
There is something incredibly refreshing about spending an evening on the itch.io free games page. They’re little bite-sized pieces of game play, but its not just the novelty of springing from game to game, from genre to genre that makes a few hours on itch.io feel like a cold drink on a hot day. I love itch.io because it feels like a reprieve. I talked in my last post at length about how Cyberpunk 2077 represents the flaws with the game industry and ‘gamer culture’ in a major way. This time around I want to take a closer look at the alternatives.
Six Cats Under
Six Cats Under (Team Bean Loop) is both the most cheerful game I know of, and the most bittersweet. The basic premise is that you are an elderly lady who has died and you need to make sure your many many sweet kitties don’t go hungry. You achieve this by haunting your house as a poltergeist and getting those little kitty cats to eventually open the door and let themselves out. Six Cats Under takes the crazy cat lady stereotype of unmarried older women and uses it to explore a happy life we well lived. The game makes it clear that the old woman was not dissatisfied with her life, and these cats are not there to fill the void. She just loved cats, and lived surrounded by them. Six Cats Under did make me a little sad. It reminded me of those stories of the elderly who are left for weeks alone after they pass, with no one checking on them until they start to smell. Its an undignified and sad way to go and we hear about it all too often. For this woman though, its okay. All she wants for is for her sweet kitties to leave the apartment and then she’ll be at peace. No regrets, no unfinished business, no lamenting the path in life she chose. Playing in this woman’s domestic space, and using that domestic space to manipulate the cats according to their own distinct personalities is a joy. This game is a wonderful exploration of life and death. It is charming and happy. Importantly though, it doesn’t force you to be happy. You can be sad for the death of this woman, and either way it’ll comfort you.
https://teambeanloop.itch.io/six-cats-under
make sure its closed
The description of make sure its closed (corpsepile) reads ‘I made a short game about something that used to scare me as a child’. What stands out about this is something that I’m sure is the case for a lot of itch.io horror game creators - its a game about what scares them in particular. make sure its closed features a garage door that is tricky to close and something horrible just outside. The game is incredibly simple in its controls and execution. It feels a lot like a scary story someone might tell around the campfire but a really good one. While I can’t comment on corpsepile’s creative process, to me what comes across is a real authenticity, that corpsepile wanted to tell their players why they they were scared of the garage door. We all have our own garage door. A place in our homes or another place that we feel is otherwise safe that gets our minds ticking over outrageous but horrifying ideas that something might be lurking just out of site. For me, it was the corner where the stairs in our hose would go out of sight. make sure its closed puts you back into that childhood body and asks you to revisit that childhood fear, making it visceral and uncomfortably familiar.
https://corpsepile.itch.io/make-sure-its-closed
Kill the Ice Age Baby Adventure: The Game
This game is very silly and very funny. Kill the Ice Age Baby (kypello) is like walking though a strange fever dream. Kypello implores the player not to play - ‘you’ll lose braincells’ but having ignored their request I found myself very invested in seeing the end of the ice age baby’s life. The humour of this game comes primarily from taking established properties, characters, and even political figures and completely alienating them from their intended context. Ronald McDonald gives me speech in which he expresses his WWII opinions. The primary villain, the ice age baby, is a character who was once supposed to inspire warmth in audiences of the hit animated movie saga Ice Age is appropriated to become something so utterly divorced from the intended context. This is something that game studios cannot do. Not because they aren’t funny or clever enough, but because this sort of appropriation would result in legal headaches and would simply not be allowed. The beauty of Kill the Ice Age Baby comes partly from the fact that it cannot exist outside of the margins.
An assessment of the political implications of this can be found in a video on the McElroy brothers by let’s talk about stuff in which she addresses why corporate alienation is so effective - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nNYQc98Ftw
Browsing the free games on itch.io feels like the modern day answer to zine culture. They are organic, grass roots, and are often created in the margins. Just a quick browse of the Top Free Games Page will highlight just how often these games forefront LGBT+ characters, stories, and relationships (There’s This Girl by Angela He, one night, hot springs by npckc). They engage with topics that are often (or completely) ignored in larger game studios such as mental health issues (Adventures With my Anxiety by Nicky Case). They are sites for fans to express their love for other media (Transient - A Good Omens Fangame by Oemuff), and they can be satirical, or even scathing subversions of the world around us (Eat the Rich by Call Of the Void).
These games are small, but they feel like an escape from the alienation that bears down on large studios who produce games for mass markets. Much like zines, these games were made for the love of making games, and the love of whatever the game is about and it shows. Creators on Itch.io show us what videogames have the potential to be if we could all pursue what makes us happy rather than necessarily what will sell. Sitting down and playing these games allows me to briefly live in that world, and it is a joyful place to be.
https://itch.io/games/free
P.S - support game creators if you can! They do need to pay their bills at the end of the day!
You used to have it all. The internet’s favourite celebrity white guy, the progressive approach to character creation, smooth gameplay, and an exciting concept. Okay so not everyone is disappointed by you. There have been some pretty good reviews from IGN and TechRadar. The epilepsy thing though... Come on. The exploited worker too but I suppose that’s just old hat in the games industry these days. You should know better, Cyberpunk. I think you probably did. I worry, Cyberpunk, that you are actually a microcosm of the capitalist values present at large in the games industry. I worry that you reflect how many videogames are an honest and accurate reflection of neo-liberal culture from your exhausted workers to your disregard for accessibility.
It is rewarding to approach cyberpunk stories with a disability focused analysis. Post-humanism is a tenet of the genre, and the relationships that human beings have in cyberpunk with the body are intricate and nuanced. According to Nia Cheyne, science fiction is able to evoke wonderous affect in audiences, and disability is central to this. In this sense, disability in cyberpunk is not adjacent to the genre, but rather the cyberpunk genre puts disabled bodies front and centre. Science fiction takes the technology that is associated with disability and represents it as a source of immense power for characters rather than a demarcation of weakness. This makes sense given that science fiction is interested in going beyond physical might and modifying the human experience with tech and scientific achievement.
Cyberpunk as a sub-genre theorises about a future in which technology is alienated from the people, but the ‘punk’ in cyberpunk sees protagonists appropriate this technology for anti-capitalist and anti-authority agendas. Cyberpunk blurs the lines between the human and the non-human, but does not idolise a past in which human and tech are separate. Instead, cyberpunk empowers humans through science, while also emphasising how technological advancements can be distorted and adopted for those in power.
Cyberpunk 2077 is not cyberpunk. It never could be. It is a AAA videogame produced to sell the fantasy of cyberpunk without empowering or emboldening its players. Unfortunately for Cyberpunk’s studio, CD Projekt Red, they haven’t hidden that fact very well. CD Projekt Red have fabricated a cyberpunk aesthetic but they have no interest in the real life philosophies that make cyberpunk such an exciting and attractive genre. Without this, Cyberpunk just becomes another RPG game but with more neon lights and futuristic weapons.
Videogames do not exist outside of a capitalist framework. This is both in how they are made and their content. Videogames are cold, unsympathetic, and they make players hurt and fail in order to win. If you are unable to live up to what the game demands then you simply cannot win. In Cyberpunk, individuals with epilepsy are shut out of success, just as many disabled people in the real word are shut out of opportunities, career prospects, and often, success more generally. Happiness is reserved for people who can do it. For people who can pull through and work all night, for people who can grind, for people who can endure. If you can’t do those things because of your chronic illness, health condition, mental health, or other then you’re at a disadvantage. That’s capitalism, baby.
It’s the same with games. Aren’t dexterous enough to pull off this move? Lack the skills for this quick time event? Games are hard. If you can’t do it though, then you’ll just have to ‘get good’.
Game developers are pushed to the brink. Crunch periods mean 16 hour days, workers are pushed to the brink. It’s all a flat circle; a merry-go round of exploitative studios, inaccessible games, and inhumane working conditions. It is a pervasive culture that was born of capitalist greed and values.
Studios with this ethos are never going to be cyberpunk. They’re never going to be punk. I hope that CD Projekt Red rectifies the issues raised about accessibility for epileptic players, but to see this as a stand-alone honest mistake by the game creators is a dangerous idea. Instead, we must take this incident for what it is - symbolic of the capitalism that is baked into the the games industry. It’s a lot more cyberpunk to fight for alternatives than it is to play Cyberpunk 2077.
Let me preface this by talking about how much I love Stardew Valley (Concerned Ape, 2016). I was a late adopter of the game, but since picking it up this September it has skyrocketed up my favourite games list and enjoys the the top spot in terms of number of hours played on my Steam account.
This post is about the inherent loneliness of Stardew. Below the cut I will be including late game dialogue from Elliott, be warned if this is what you would consider a spoiler.
It started off fine. I would play for hours on end, giving out gifts like candy in attempt to make the townspeople like me (and to woo a beautiful man who lived in the beach cabin), and building up my farm as fast I could earn money. This lasted a few months. Sure, dialogue tended to repeat itself but it was enough for me. Then one day I thought I’d take a look at my social stats. For the uninitiated, players earn hearts for each NPC by remembering their birthday, giving them gifts they like, and regularly talking to them. The number of hearts a player can get for each character is capped. If a player chooses to date or marry one of the bachelor or bachelorette characters this cap goes up. With their spouse, a player can have 12 hearts maximum. Players can track how many hearts they have with NPCs, who will in turn behave in accordance with how close they are with the player.
When I checked on how I was doing in my pursuits of friendship I was dismayed to find that I was best friends with everyone. It was like a punch in the gut. Rather than feeling pleased that I had succeeded in winning everyone over I felt like something had been pulled out from under me.
The smoke had cleared. These characters who I had cared so much about were running like machines, like clockwork. All of them from here on out would circle each day in a loop the same as always, totally divorced from whatever I was doing. There was the option of intentionally losing hearts but even then there’d be nowhere new to go with these relationships. I was... dare I say it? Lonely.
So I got married.
From the moment I saw Elliott I knew that I wanted to marry him. Thanks to my lateness in picking up the game I had heard much about Stardew spouses and from day one was on the look out for mine. Even so, marrying him was a band-aid solution. I needed something to move, I needed to feel like I wasn’t so alone in the game with these clockwork people.
I proposed to Elliott on the bridge where I first saw him. Not that it made a difference to him. The heart-breaking thing about Stardew is that the characters cannot acknowledge efforts made by players to be thoughtful or romantic, drawing further attention to the gap between organic player feelings and the apathy of videogames. Three days later we were wed on Fall 3. Two days before his birthday.
For a while, it worked.
Things felt good again. The game didn’t feel new, that’s not what I was after. Rather, it didn’t feel lonely. Elliot would surprise me with presents, coffee in the mornings, and with poetry. I was enjoying the game as much as I did in the beginning. Maybe even more because I felt safe, wanted, and cared for now.
It’s been about an in game year since I married Elliott, and the creeping sense of loneliness has come back. It started after our twelve heart event (I won’t spoil the game by detailing what that was) and it occurred to me that it was the last one. I would try each night to get back before Elliott went to bed but whether I made it in time to kiss him goodnight or not, he didn’t care. I’m not being a good spouse. I go out at 6am each morning and often leave him rattling home alone all day, joining him in bed only once he’s long asleep. I could be a lot worse. Some players have found out that neglecting their spouse entirely leads to negative consequences in their relationship. Generally, though, Elliott does not care if I don’t see him most of the day. He cannot receive the love and care I have for him. It is impossible for him to do so.
I still love Stardew. It is because I love it that it causes me to hurt. These moments that I have detailed above are are moments in the game in which it becomes painfully clear that it is not equipped to fill the hole in my heart that I am trying to make it fill. Instead, the loneliness of Stardew only serves to draw attention to the empty parts of my real life and unaddressed yearning that I cannot remedy with a game that cannot meaningfully acknowledge me.
There is one more thing I can do. One last band-aid in the box. I can have two children with Elliott. They’ll never leave the house and they won’t grow beyond infants, but they’ll change things up again. Truthfully, I doubt I’ll ever have them. I’m too scared of feeling like I have completed the game. There are lots of games that I didn’t want to end. RPGs that I still saw through until credits rolled. I feel sad but no existential dread when I take a character to the end of their narrative, but in Stardew I’m not playing as a drug addicted samurai, an Italian assassin, or a young woman uncovering family secrets; I’m playing as me.
I have decided that I will play Stardew for two more in game years. Then I will put it down for good. Okay, maybe not forever, but I won’t come back until I feel more settled in real life. That way the loneliness of my Stardew life won’t be as threatening to my wellbeing. I want to stop playing when there’s still a future for me and Elliott. Unless I cut myself away like this I’ll end up peetering out in a never-aging clockwork world where my loneliness becomes more and more apparent amongst characters who never could care about me in the first place.
There’s a level in Inside (Playdead, 2016) that sees the player-character, a nameless young boy, sprint from cover to cover as supersonic booms blast at timed intervals. I discovered pretty quickly that being caught out in the open during one of these blasts kills the boy in a horrifying explosion. His dismembered limbs go flying towards the camera before the game cuts and asks the player to try again and again.
Even thinking about this level inspires a visceral horror in me. It took me so many attempts to finally get it right. Not only that, but this level was what made me understand what made Inside such a disturbing game - it made me loathe myself. But why self-loathing? Seeing a young helpless boy struggle through a brutal and hostile environment and seeing him die over and over is upsetting but why do I hate myself in particular?
Perhaps in all these bad feelings I directed some of them towards myself. Do I hate myself for making me see these horrible things so many times? Maybe I feel betrayed in some way because I’ve exposed myself to something sickeningly sad and violent.
No. There’s definitely more to it than that.
The level with the sonic booms is an excellent example of why Inside makes me hate myself for two reasons: 1) It’s deeply impersonal and 2) I’m really bad at it. Let’s address these both in turn.
It’s Deeply Impersonal
The sonic boom level comes at mid-late point in the game. At this point, I have played enough of Inside to understand the situation at hand. I am playing as a young boy and my goal is to enter a mysterious facility. What I am running away from or towards is unknown. I have so far seen piles of dead pigs, security systems that kill trespassers, and limp men who can be controlled by whoever is wearing a special helmet. These men are being paraded in front of others; some stoic bourgeoisie types.
Notice that in my description of the game, I heavily focused on the environment of the game. The mindless slaves, the pigs, and the security systems were things that I, through the player-character, experienced but none of these were put there for me specifically. I didn’t cause any of this, and I will not be able to stop any of it.
Then I come to the level with sonic booms. There is some sort of experimentation going on in this facility, that’s for sure. These booms are just a part of this. Everything is so big around me and I am so, so tiny. I am inconsequential here, dwarfed and alienated by my surroundings. The booms are procedural. They are not targeted. They do not care for young human boys. They are not malicious, they are completely apathetic.
I must contend with the only human agency being present in this scene being my own. Now, in single-player videogames the player is always the only human agent, but in other games an illusion is built that NPCs have feelings, that can harbour ill will towards you, or that they can actively desire the player-character to save them. Taking all this away means that I am forced to reckon with my own complicity in killing this small scared child. Other levels that have the player chased by a pack of furious dogs or smothered to death by a mermaid at least had something that I could shift the blame onto when it killed me. In this level though, the sonic boom level, all I had was myself and the knowledge that I put the boy in this lethal situation
Tobi Smethurst, a games academic, also found this in Playdead’s other game, Limbo (2010), which has another young boy protagonist. Smethurst underlines how the levels in Limbo grew to also feature this alienation between player and environment more and more as the game progressed. Smethurst similarly points to how these games are so affective because they force the player into a place of complicity. Smethurst points out in their paper ‘Playing Dead in Videogames: Trauma in Limbo’ (2015) that in Limbo rag-doll physics mean that all of the young boy’s deaths are visually different. Becoming de-sensitised to the gruesome deaths therefore becomes more difficult. Failing one level may mean the boy falls in a way that bends his neck at an unnatural angle. Failing again may mean that this time he flops onto his front. The player must reckon with the reality that is their agency that caused a young boy’s death. I have not added a picture of a death in Limbo and I only advise looking one up with a hefty content warning.
While I found playing Limbo deeply upsetting, it did still give me a purpose to cling to. I knew from the very first level that I was looking for my lost sister. A little girl needs me is what I told myself. I clung to the fiction that I needed to rescue her. Without it then how was I supposed to face the fact the the person killing this little boy was me? Nothing was chasing me at the start of the game, nothing was out to get me. It was me, me who had walked the boy into a environment that was totally unsuitable and deadly. Inside takes the sister away. There is something at the end of the boys journey, but the player does not know this until late in the game. Whether or not the thing at the end is a good thing is also another question entirely. As I exposed the boy to killer explosions, attempted to make him jump between tall buildings, and led him deeper into the hostile facility I hated myself. I was doing this cruel horrible thing to him. All me.
I’m Really Bad At It
Which leads me on to my own lack of skill. I’m not a great gamer by any means. I love playing, but key tenets of game mechanics like pressing buttons or keeping to rhythms are things I struggle with as a . In Smethurst’s paper, an important point is made. It’s that even though Limbo makes it near impossible to complete every puzzle on the first try, it is not impossible. Both Limbo and Inside are trial and error games. In Limbo some puzzles purposely subvert behaviours that it just taught players moments ago. Nonetheless, even though it is very hard to achieve a no deaths run in either game the slither of possibility means that each death weighs on me even more.
I could have gotten the boy past the explosions this time. If it only weren’t for my lack of skill. If I were only more careful. Why am I so bad at this? I keep killing this kid. I’m going to see him die again and its my fault.
Inside not only highlights my agency in playing and failing at the game, but Inside has been actively made to be like the game environment itself. Brutal. Uncaring. Apathetic. Even though the game is hard, I cannot blame it for killing the boy without also blaming myself to a certain degree. And so I hate myself. The game has convinced me to hate myself while I’m playing.
Killing Little Boys in Videogames
Before I end this piece I’d like to address one more videogame boy that I’ve killed. What Remains of Edith Finch (Giant Sparrow, 2017) is about the curse of the Finch family and it shows the player through a series of vignettes details of how each Finch family member died.
Calvin is just a child when he dies. He’s ambitious. He wants to swing his tree swing all the way around the branch. He swings, ignoring calls from his mother to come in for supper and goes higher and higher. The tree branch creaks and wind whistles by his ears and he’s almost made it. Then he loses control, and the player watches from Calvin’s perspective in horror as the boy flies over his garden to his untimely death.
Pretty sad cutscene, right?
Except it isn’t a cutscene. It very well could have been a cutscene. The game creators, however, elected to have the player make Calvin swing. The player is tasked with pressing two buttons in time to make Calvin slowly pick up momentum. The player knows where this is going and that this is dangerous. Yet if they want to continue playing they must kill Calvin. Again, the player is complicit in Calvin’s death with each button push leading Calvin closer to losing control of the swing.
For a game that is thematically interested in facing trauma in order to process it, this is a perfect encapsulation of game mechanic echoing game story. By making the player a part of this scene, making their engagement essential, Edith Finch makes its players similarly face something that is uncomfortable and upsetting. Because they are active in Calvin’s death, the players are unable to stop looking at the screen, close their eyes, glaze over, or reject what they are seeing in any other way. Sure, the controls are easy, but they still importantly require a level of effort from the player. The player can shift blame in this scenario. Unlike Inside or Limbo, survival is not an option for Calvin and so the player can easily argue that it isn’t their fault. This time, however, Calvin’s death being anyone’s fault is not the point. The engagement with the trauma of his death is what this scene is most interested in.
I would like to discuss how all of these characters being little boys might also be a contributing factor in why these games make me hate myself. I feel it would risk being too tangential so I’ll merely include a question: How do these little boys affect me simply by being little boys? For now, I will go and wallow a little more in the self-loathing that Inside has managed to make me feel.
Sources Cited:
Tobi Smethurst, ‘Playing Dead in Videogames: Trauma in Limbo’, The Journal of Popular Culture (2015).
Possum Springs as an Extension of Mae in Night in the Woods (contains spoilers)
They were just shapes
It isn’t incidental that in Night in the Woods (Infinite Fall, 2017) Mae’s issues with disassociation manifest in ways that bare uncanny resemblances to aspects of game design. When Mae tells this to Bea or Gregg (the NPC in this scene depends on choices made by the player throughout) the player will likely be met with the realisation that the game design has been representing Mae’s trauma the whole time. The player needs to suddenly come to terms with the aggressively cute and simple design of the characters Possum Springs being part of Mae’s efforts to hide away from things that are painful or traumatic. Saying Night in the Woods is about Mae doesn’t sound like a bold claim considering that she’s the player-character and the central character but I want to really push this statement to the extreme: everything about the game comes back to Mae’s attempts to hide away from what hurts. Below I have added a helpful visual aid.
This scene with Gregg or Bea on the couch, however, doesn’t come up until around 2/3s of the way into the game. Night in the Woods though still manages to use Mae’s narrative affectively before the player even fully understands what Mae has been going through.
Coming up next: Garbo and I join a cult!
Mae struggles with mental health issues, but what has happened to Mae and how she feels is not immediately made clear. Her tendency to avoid facing her emotions and trauma means that even as the player controls Mae, they will not get the opportunity to fully understand her trauma until later in the game. Night in the Woods uses NPCs to flavour Possum Springs and make it uncanny, hinting at something deeper and more disturbing beneath the cheerful version of the world that is first presented. The uncanny is a feeling of discomfort that comes from the fear of unknown processes beneath a certain façade.[1] This uncanniness functions to create an uneasy sensation as the player finds difficulty in reconciling the playful, colourful, and two-dimensional animation with the darker and far more existential themes that lurk just beneath the cheerful front of the game. Outstanding examples of this uncanniness include the television hosts Garbo and Malloy, who feature when Mae first arrives home at the start of the game and then throughout it. Mae’s initial arrival in her hometown features a closed bus station save for Garbo and Malloy playing on television to a lone janitor which points to their role in setting the tone. The two hosts talk to each other in upbeat banter expected of talk show hosts, but their talking points frequently veer into the existential. Garbo asks, ‘Do you ever think about the afterlife?’ to which Malloy replies, ‘I don’t think I have a life as it is!’. Garbo and Malloy’s discussion of the afterlife suggests a conversation that confronts some existentially troubling questions, but it is yanked jarringly back into light generic talk-show humour before it can go any further.
Moments with Garbo and Malloy betray Mae’s efforts to keep her experience of the world light, simple, and easy. The discomfort that the player is encouraged to feel in these moments of uncanniness is not from the existential themes themselves, but their disconnect from the cheerfulness that the game first suggests. The uncanniness reflects Mae’s emotional distance that she puts between herself and everyone around her (including the player) to avoid confronting her dissociative episodes and how much they have hurt herself and others.
Nightmare Eyes!
When Mae finally tells a friend about her struggles with disassociation, it is revealed to the player how much of what they are experiencing has been warped by how Mae perceives the world. Mae confides that after being disillusioned by a videogame, her disassociation with the world around her has led her to see it as colourful shapes:
They were just shapes, and their lines were just things someone had written. They never existed they never had feelings. They never would exist either […] And the next day was the softball game and Andy was the pitcher when I went up. And he was just shapes too […] I was just so scared and I dunno. Before I knew it I was on top of him, smashing his face in with the bat. Just shapes. Red shapes all over the grass.
Mae continues to describe how this state continued to haunt her and how it impacted her life at college so much so that she had to drop out and return home. The artistic style of Night in the Woods is simplistic, two dimensional, and is made entirely from the colourful shapes described by Mae. This, as well as the emotional distance the player feels in Possum Springs, allows the player to immerse themselves in Mae’s experiences and perceptions while still making Mae’s eventual disclosure of her honest feelings climactic in a compelling narrative
Game design is fundamental in Night in the Woods to making the player feel the story. The representation of Possum Springs isn’t interested in realism because the way in which game design compels players to feel both warmth and unease simultaneously is more important to player engagement than realism. Game design in Night in the Woods ties together narrative and representational practises so that the two are intimately connected. Uncanniness from this representation causes an uneasy dissonance that suggests that there is something more than meets the eye. This is experiential storytelling. Because Night in the Woods shows and doesn’t immediately tell, the player engages with the feelings important to Mae’s narrative. Once Mae reveals how distorted her experience of the world is and how this led to a shocking act of violence, the player must come to terms with their own experience of this distortion. Before this moment, the existentially disturbing themes that are thinly veiled by game design allow the player to feel the unease and discomfort without facing these feelings directly, much like Mae does with her own trauma. Once Mae finally confronts her struggle with disassociation and the pain that it has caused, the player too must come to terms with the distortion of reality in Possum Springs. Night in the Woods tells an affective story by tying together an affective narrative and game design that promotes care for Mae while still providing an immersive and (after her revelation) disturbing representation of her disassociation.
NOTE: This post is an edited version of a section of MA dissertation ‘Can a Computer Make You Cry? The Affective Power of Empathetically Engaging Videogame Storytelling through Procedural and Narrative Aspects’ (2020) which I am the author of.
[1] Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, trans. by David McLintock (London: Penguin, 1919; 2003), p. 135.
