At first glance, my posts from across the semster don’t appear very connected, but after digging deeper I’ve noticed two broad themes that have been pervasive in my responses. In my first post, I discussed the notion of liminality in regards to A House Full of Ghosts, writing, “Tremblay could be implicitly arguing that we will always exist in a liminal state, firmly rooted in the not-knowingness of the digital/reality-tv/globalized age.” Grey areas and the idea of ‘in-betweenness’ is fascinating to me, and a few of my other posts demonstrate the influence this fascination has had on my thought-process. Most strikingly, this interest has manifested itself twice in discussions of hypermediacy, once as the main focus of my Comparitive Horror Analysis, and once in my second blog post on the video game Outlast. In these two examples, I’m concerned with how hypermediative video game mechanics create a feeling of liminality, wherein players feel at once both inside and outside the game. I’ve really enjoyed exploring this topic, and might even try to incorporate further analysis and examples into my final project.
Another theme that has cropped up a couple of times is my questioning of the future or evolution of certain phenomenon we’ve studied. Whereas in earlier blog posts I was eager to find “sightings” to further prove points or explore further, later in the semester I began writing more speculatively, asking several questions about what the future might have in store. In a comment I made on one of Sidney’s posts, I considered the future of trolling, asking, “With tech becoming increasingly advanced (and accesible), I wonder what new kinds of “trolls” are on the horizon. Could there be A.I. trolls in the near future?” In another post, I hypothesize a much more positive future where there is a revival of “fixing” and a new impotus for companies to democratize repair.
If I could redo the semester, I would have liked to engage much more with and comment on other posts from other groups, although with our posting schedule being spread so far out, remembering to check the class blog was difficult.
Upon my second reading of this piece, (shout-out to DIG 401), one passage I didn’t pay much attention to the first time stuck out to me. On page 229, Jackson speculates, “Can breakdown, maintenance, and repair confer special epistemic advantage in our thinking about technology? Can the fixer know and see different things—indeed, different worlds—than the better-known figures of “designer” or user?”
We’ve discussed before how so many products nowadays are ‘designed for obsolescence’, and how difficult it is to get things like computers and phones repaired. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I repaired anything, other than the shoe I repaired for the project assigned in our seminar. At least based on what my grandparents and older family members have told me throughout the years, it seems like previous generations were much more tapped into the kind of “broken-world thinking” Jackson talks about. In poor rural communities like where my grandparents grew up, if something you needed broke, you had to either repair it, or figure out a way to replace it with whatever objects you had lying around. Generally speaking, we don’t do that anymore, and the people who do have the special knowledge required to repair digital items like iPhones now carry a sort of social and economic capital, making ‘fixing’ a valuable skill.
These thoughts lead me to wonder – as older generations and their skills die out, will there be a revivalist ‘Fixer Movement’ to replace the current Maker Movement? Or perhaps as the world acknowledges all the e-waste it’s producing, will giants like Apple democratize the repair of its products?
It seems like the overarching theme of this week’s discussion has been asking what is or isn’t ethical in regards to using a deceased person’s likeness. One person wrote, “When an actor or model participates in the creation of a piece, they are part of a community”, while another said, “The way I see it, the estate should have the right to sue in cases of unauthorized use AND misuses of the deceased’s image…”. While I agree that in an ideal world, estates or family members (or FNOKs) would have full agency over the deceased’s public image/works, I believe, like Jack said, that it’s nearly impossible to do that – and we have Barbara Streisand to thank for that. The Streisand Effect is the rule that if a famous person (or their estate) makes a fuss about something, say an unauthorized, scandalous use of an image, that image will then receive much more attention than it ever would have before.
Sorry, Beyoncé – this image is never going away.
Not to be super cynical, but like we’ve discussed in class before, it’s extremely difficult to scrub things from the ‘cloud’ once they’re on there. In the case of celebrities, I think it’s just something they have to accept comes with the territory. For us regular Janes and Joes though, I definitely agree that there should be safeguards or channels in place for legal action to be taken against unfavorable use of images.
A few weeks before we even broached the subject of the digital afterlife industry in class, I was conceptualizing what it might look like for my haunted media project. In short, I wanted to investigate what a company looking to “[capitalize on] digital remains” might look like, while producing new questions and implications from the creative process (Öhman & Floridi, 3). Enter What Will You Leave, my version of a digital will start-up in the near future.
In this imagined world, What Will You Leave puts the management of digital assets into the consumer’s hands. Through a simple online portal, WWYL provides everyone the chance to bequeath their own digital inheritance to their family and loved ones. The business model is as follows: before a person passes away, they upload whatever content (such as social media accounts, playlists, photo albums, etc) they want in their digital will and specify who it will go to, much like the process of creating a traditional will. Then, when the person dies, the company sends a postcard to the inheritor with a QR code they can scan to access whatever their loved one left for them. Additionally, a the bottom of each postcard, recipients are invited to create their own digital will through the company website.
After conceptualizing this fake company, my project turned toward fleshing out the narrative behind each of the three postcards I created on the free graphic design software, Canva.
I ended up producing three postcard recipients, a teenaged boy who lost his grandparents, a college student who lost her younger sister, and a young man who lost his older brother. The QR codes on each postcard lead to whatever each of the deceased characters chose to bestow upon their family members.
One QR code sends users to a fictional ‘finsta’ page created by Jodie, a tween who died of cancer. Another links to a Twitter bot that ‘resurrects’ a highly opinionated and contentious older brother named Levi. Lastly, one unique QR code (provided by Spotify’s own QR creator) grants access to a playlist of songs as well as an old voicemail left by two grandparents.
Initially, I wanted to design a company website with WordPress as well. This page would host ‘user reviews’ of the service, as well as provide more info on the company through an about page. Unfortunately technological difficulties on the back-end of Davidson Domains made that unfeasible, but I found a work around. Because I wanted to generate as much paratext and ‘believability’ surrounding the project as possible, I made an Instagram page for the company. In addition to a short bio about the company, each user review has been uploaded there as a graphic.
If I were to do this project again, I would have liked to create even more postcards and narratives behind them to better highlight the potential ubiquity of this company in the digital afterlife industry. Although I believe I achieved a well-rounded demo with the initial three, I recognize how expansive the digital realm is, and think there are many more interesting things that could potentially make their way into a digital will. While testing the QR codes, I also noticed discrepancies between the mobile and desktop version of the Spotify playlist. On the mobile version, the grandmother’s voicemail isn’t available (possibly because the file is only hosted on my desktop), and the playlist description isn’t accessible. This isn’t ideal, because the QR code is only scannable on mobile, leaving out valuable paratext. If I could go back, I would like to try and rework my idea for a playlist on another platform like Apple Music.
In thinking about how to situate this project within the context of our class materials, Carl Öhman and Luciano Floridi’s “An Ethical Framework for the Digital Afterlife Industry” immediately comes to mind. The framework of What Will You Leave combines what Öhman and Floridi categorize as “information management services” and “online memorial services” (2). WWYL eases “digital asset management” by encouraging users to be specific in what they decide to leave behind. Additionally, the service bridges the gap between the departed and the living by providing a digital space for “a deceased individual or group to be mourned and/or remembered” (2).
Unlike the “unanticipated memorial spaces” platforms like Facebook have given rise to, What Will You Leave’s model is about creating fully anticipated spaces for grief and remembrance (Brubaker, Jed R., et al, 163). Regardless whether or not recipients know they are receiving a digital will, once they have access to it, the contents stay in their compartmentalized place, ready to be engaged with whenever one is willing and ready. This model also helps to facilitate the kind of “continuing bonds” Brubaker, Hayes, and Dourish describe, in opposition to the typical ‘let-go’ approach to grief (153). By maintaining that compartmentalized space, whatever bond the living had with the deceased becomes revitalized, dynamic, and somewhat ongoing.
In her article, “Who Wants to Live Forever? Living, Dying and Grieving in Our Digital Society”, Deborah J. Basset introduces the concept of “digital zombies”, beings who are physically dead but virtually ‘alive’, and “crucially still being socially active” (1134).
The Tupac hologram is one example of a “digital zombie”.
She even notes an example of QR codes on tombstones as an example of digital zombification. In this particular example, the QR codes are interactive, allowing users to ‘engage’ with the dead; in other words, they contain “data [that] can be amended and added to by whomever has control of the site, thus enabling the deceased to be socially active” (1134-1135). Although Basset makes the case for the very real phenomena of so-called “digital zombies”, I don’t believe my project can be said to generate them. A QR code recipient could potentially reanimate the deceased if they were left log-in information, but the true purpose of the digital wills is to create a closed memorial space with no level of interactivity.
An earlier piece by Öhman and Floridi further discuss the implications of the digital afterlife industry through engaging with the idea of “informational bodies” (655). According to Floridi, “one’s personal identity…is to be understood as an informational structure; a narrative constituted by everything that defines it” (655). This understanding, as proposed by the authors, should provide an ethical foundation for the treatment of digital remains. From this perspective, “commercial alterations of the digital remains of the dead can and should be seen as an illicit infringement on human dignity” (656). While this imagined company would have an “economic incentive” to aggregate and disseminate these digital remains, doing so would not infringe upon the ‘accuracy’ of the information contained within, leaving me to wonder if WWYL could then be considered a ‘humane’ enterprise.
In conclusion, this project was a great foray into thinking about the future of the digital afterlife industry and what happens to the digital remains it relies on. Creating the narratives behind each postcard additionally led to reflections on how different demographics choose to engage with digital platforms and spaces, and led me to ponder what digital wills may look like for Gen Z-ers and beyond. Ultimately, my goal for this project was not to provide a definitive solution for an ‘ethical’ digital will start-up. Rather, I hope What Will You Leave demonstrates the stark neutrality of such a service, and produces a fruitful discussion on how the inevitable rise of these companies may disrupt and evolve the way we grieve and engage with the memories of those gone.
Bassett, Debra. “Who Wants to Live Forever? Living, Dying and Grieving in Our Digital Society.” Social Sciences, vol. 4, no. 4, 2015, pp. 1127–1139., doi:10.3390/socsci4041127.
Brubaker, Jed R., et al. “Beyond the Grave: Facebook as a Site for the Expansion of Death and Mourning.” The Information Society, vol. 29, no. 3, 2013, pp. 152–163., doi:10.1080/01972243.2013.777300.
Öhman, Carl, and Luciano Floridi. “An Ethical Framework for the Digital Afterlife Industry.” Nature Human Behaviour, vol. 2, no. 5, 2018, pp. 318–320., doi:10.1038/s41562-018-0335-2.
Öhman, Carl, and Luciano Floridi. “The Political Economy of Death in the Age of Information: A Critical Approach to the Digital Afterlife Industry.” Minds and Machines, vol. 27, no. 4, 2017, pp. 639–662., doi:10.1007/s11023-017-9445-2.
Video games offer a rich medium for exploring postmodern horror. Among other affordances, games invite users to step into Huizinga’s “magic circle”, connecting the player to the in-game world via the controller or keyboard (105). In addition, the length of games, (often anywhere from 10-30 hours) can provide a framework for producing compelling and complex narratives. When combined with the horror genre, the final product can be truly impressive. In this analysis, I will examine two well-executed examples of postmodern horror video games, Supermassive Games’ Until Dawn (2015), and Team Salvato’s Doki Doki Literature Club (2017), reflecting on the nature of their late postmodern elements and ultimately using each example to illuminate the other.
I’ll begin with Until Dawn. The game follows the well-worn premise of a group of unruly teens vacationing in a remote cabin. Chaos ensues, and the group must make critical decisions regarding who lives, who gets terrorized by a masked psycho, and who gets killed by a modern reimagining of the Algonquin Wendigo monster.
However, the developers at Supermassive Games know that to pull off a pulpy teen slasher nowadays, there needs to be an element of self-awareness. To achieve this, the game subverts several key elements typical to the horror genre through narrative and mechanics. Perhaps the most critical of these is the “Butterfly Effect” system. When players boot up the game, they are greeted with a screen stating, “A tiny butterfly flapping its wings today may lead to a devastating hurricane weeks from now”. In effect, the game features a choice-based narrative, wherein all actions have consequences. Choices are made during tense “quick-time events”, wherein the player must select a choice from several options or successfully complete a button sequence in a limited amount of time. This gives real weight to a player’s choices, and ensures that they are able to shape the story as they see fit. For example, all of the characters can die if certain choices are made, undermining the typical trope of there being a ‘final girl/boy’ to face off against the villain.
Along with the butterfly effect, the game also tailors aspects of its horrors specifically to the player. Each “chapter” of the game begins as a session with a mysterious psychiatrist named Dr. Hill who asks the player to answer questions about various images and scenarios. Depending on what personal insights are revealed, the game will modify certain scenes or jumpscares to reflect the appointment with Dr. Hill. For example, if a player expresses that they are more afraid of needles than storms or dogs, the Psycho will end up using a syringe to incapacite another character instead of a mask filled with sleeping gas. Through the modifications of these cutscenes, the game further subverts its role as a supposedly distanced narrative.
This transgressive sense of metalepsis upsets the boundaries of what is and isn’t within the game. In addition to the emphasis put on player choice and expression, the game uses a form of hypermediacy to further this confusion between the in-game and outside world. This is reflected through one of my favorite mechanics, the “Don’t Move” feature. When one of the antagonists is critically near, players are instructed to hold their Dualshock controllers still until the threat passes. See the video below for a compilation of “Don’t Move” moments.
Unlike a traditional horror film where a spectator may yell, “Don’t go in there!” or “Don’t do that!” to no avail, Until Dawn puts the character’s survival literally into the hands of the player, both reminding them of the medium and further emphasizing the importance of the player/author’s actions.
Mental illness and societal ignorance it is also a topic explored by Until Dawn. By the climax of the game, it is revealed that one of the main character’s, Josh, is actually the masked psycho figure. If players choose to read/watch collectible notes and videotapes, they’ll learn that Josh is suffering from schizophrenia and is wrongly being treated for depression by his psychiatrists, including the aforementioned Dr. Hill. Although the Wendigo monster is a capable and frightening killer, the game situates the true evil as a medical system that doesn’t know enough, or perhaps doesn’t care enough to provide adequate treatment for people like Josh, a character who ends up dead regardless of the choices made. On the other end of the aesthetic spectrum is Doki Doki Literature Club, another video game that has sparked a discussion surrounding mental illness.
On the surface, Doki Doki Literature Club is an entirely different beast. This anime-style PC game brands itself as a cute, brightly-colored dating sim. The story follows a male protagonist who is invited by his childhood best friend to join their school’s literature club. After joining the club, the player is led through mini-games and dialogue with the four female members. Once the player finds a distressing poem written by their best friend, Sayori, the game’s façade quickly cracks, revealing a psychological horror game that relies on metalepsis and heightened self-reflexivity.
Similar to Until Dawn, this game effectively rebels against all expectations of a typical Dating Sim. Although the main point of the first mini-game filled hour is to develop relationships with the girls, the main character’s role in the Literature Club quickly transforms from a possible romantic interest into that of an intervener. Through finding other poems, the player learns of the girls’ issues and troubled home lives, and must help them avoid self-destructive behaviors like self-harm and suicide.
In addition to this task, the user must figure out why the game keeps glitching and restarting. The developers at Team Salvato know how to successfully use hypermediation to create disturbing effects; after the childhood best friend of the main character commits suicide, the game’s graphics quickly devolve, with character animations twitching, glitching, or text boxes being replaced with gibberish. To combat these game-breaking mechanics and produce better endings for the characters, the player must venture outside the game-world to delete files associated with the game.
An example of one of the many glitched screens players will encounter.
These hypermediative mechanics achieve a similar sense of metalepsis to Until Dawn, albeit in quite a different form. At the end of the game, the villain is revealed to be the self-aware NPC Monica, who is trying to create the perfect in-game world to live in with the protagonist forever. She admits to amplifying the effects of the other character’s mental health problems in an attempt to make the player “hate them”. To get to the true ending of the game, the player must figure out how to escape the in-game world and delete Monica’s character file permanently, thus ending the cycle of abuse.
Go to 58:30 to see the file-deleting mechanic in action.
Although both games are aesthetically dissimilar, they intersect in a few key ways. Both produce a sense of metalepsis through calculated hypermediation. Where Until Dawn invites players into the game via the Butterfly effect and the “Don’t Move” mechanic, Doki Doki Literature Club uses glitching and file-manipulation to jolt players out of the game. In her essay on metalepsis in popular culture, Karin Kukkonen describes these two related types of metalepsis. According to Kukkonen, “metalepsis can be ascending across narrative levels, when a character moves out of the fictional world and enters the real world…or it can be descending across narrative levels, when authors or narrators enter the fictional world.” (2). As the ‘author’ of the action in Until Dawn, the player “descends” into the realm of the game, where in DDLC, Monica ascends to the player’s reality, even going so far as to address them by their Steam account name.
The two games also intersect in their sympathetic approaches to the topic of mental illness. Doki Doki Literature Club has been praised for its “clear and frank exploration of mental health” (Rose). Central to the narrative is how each character experiences their respective mental illness. In their role as friend and comforter, the main character must listen to and respond appropriately to their friends’ admissions of depression and suicidal thoughts. And although the game admits that these symptoms are being artificially exaggerated by Monica, the game “refuses to exploit mental health as a mechanic, or even as a gamble” (Rose). The literature club girls are all victims of circumstance; the player is pushed to help them not to gain experience or in-game currency, but because they care about their well-being.
Although Until Dawn ultimately expresses a similar attitude regarding Josh, the way his character is framed for much of the game is steeped in harmful tropes. In The Butler(s) DID it – Dissociative Identity Disorder in Cinema, Peter Byrne writes, “[Many] misrepresentations of schizophrenia invoke the discourse: “schizophrenics” are either a violent threat or figures of fun. In addition to the distress such stereotypes cause, these misconceptions have a bearing on negative attitudes in the community…” (Byrne). For much of the game, Josh is situated in this oscillating binary of “figure of fun” and “threat”, with the distinction becoming more pronounced after the player finds recordings of him practicing his “Psycho” voice, thereby revealing that the masked figure was him all along. Left at this, the game would appear to promote harmful stereotypes (and for many casual players, it may seem as such). However, as mentioned prior, careful examination of in-game collectibles proves Josh to be as much a victim as the other characters, making his inevitable death all the more tragic.
In conclusion, Doki Doki Literature Club and Until Dawn offer two examples of how video games can create richly interactive horror experiences by implementing hypermediative mechanics. Additionally, these works have pushed back against traditional narrativessurrounding mental health, sparking critical conversations surrounding stigma, treatment, and how to further rehabilitate mental health’s presence in popular media.
Works Cited
Byrne, Peter. “The Butler(s) Did It – Dissociative Identity Disorder in Cinema.” Medical Humanities 27, no. 1 (June 1, 2001): 26–29. https://doi.org/10.1136/mh.27.1.26.
Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens. Einaudi, 2009.
Kukkonen, Karin, and Sonja Klimek. Metalepsis in Popular Culture. De Gruyter, 2011.
Rose, Victoria. “God of the Script: How Doki Doki Literature Club Gets Mental Health Right.” Medium.com, 16 Dec. 2017, medium.com/@riningear/god-of-the-script-how-doki-doki-literature-club-gets-mental-health-right-76762a7806c0.
Outlast is a massively popular survival horror game that debuted in 2013. As the player, you take on the role of a journalist investigating the infamous Mount Massive asylym. Unfortunately for you, the place is crawling with violent and disfigured patients – and you’ve only got a dinky camcorder to your name.
While reading Kirkland’s piece, I immediately thought back to when I first watched my favorite Let’s Players cover the game. At the time, Outlast put an intriguing spin on the traditional survival-horror genre by not giving the player any sort of weapon to defend themselves with. Thus, the game operates on a “run and hide” system, wherein you are forced to face your own vulnerability and tailor your moves carefully to avoid confrontation. The camcorder (equipped with a limited night-vision feature) fits into this system by giving you the ability to see what horrors might be ahead in the dark asylym, and plan accordingly.
(10:30-12:30 to see how the camcorder works)
This mechanic is a great example of what Kirkland calls the “issues of vision and power” in regards to analogue technologies in digital media (120). By remediating the camcorder and imposing the arbitrary rules –
1) The player/protagonist is stripped of power – you have no means of defense
2) You must use the old camcorder to proceed
3) The night-vision function only has limited power and you must constantly be looking for batteries, or else you’ll be wondering around blind
– the game is able to effectively utilize both immediacy (at the beginning of the game) and hypermediacy (once you’ve figured out the ‘rules’ of the camcorder).
This kind of vulnerable vision proved quite popular with players, and has been adopted in later entries to the Outlast series.
As I was reading chapters 21/22, I was struck by how well Tremblay situates his novel in a sense of liminality. Even before Marjorie begins acting strange, the Barrett family is already living in an in-between; with the dad losing his job and the family having to start the process of resituating themselves. Before they can do that, however, the Marjorie saga begins and everyone is thrown deeper into this unsettling, liminal state.
We’ve discussed at length the role of ambiguity in this novel and other pieces of horror, and what I think AHFOG does so well is it continuously tries and tests our limits existing as readers in this space. Early analysis of ‘the liminal’ describes certain “transitional rites” and rituals that have a natural order to them, i.e., after completing a rite of passage, so to speak, a person would cross a threshold and be restored to a newly stable state of being. What’s interesting here, is that Marjorie goes through a rite, the exorcism, but there is no real revelation or restoration afterward.
Or, you could view Marjorie’s suicide (or at least I think that’s what happened – I haven’t reached the end yet) as her way of tragically breaking free from the liminal. Tremblay could be implicitly arguing that we will always exist in a liminal state, firmly rooted in the not-knowingness of the digital/reality-tv/globalized age. If Marjorie truly was “possessed by pop-culture”, then the only way out is to unplug.
