{"id":428,"date":"2019-02-17T11:33:10","date_gmt":"2019-02-17T16:33:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/?p=428"},"modified":"2019-02-17T11:33:10","modified_gmt":"2019-02-17T16:33:10","slug":"mediated-vision-the-camcorder-in-red-barrels-outlast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/2019\/02\/17\/mediated-vision-the-camcorder-in-red-barrels-outlast\/","title":{"rendered":"Mediated Vision &amp; The Camcorder in Red Barrel&#8217;s &#8220;Outlast&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Outlast\u00a0<\/em>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 &#8211; and you&#8217;ve only got a dinky camcorder to your name.<\/p>\n<p>While reading Kirkland&#8217;s piece, I immediately thought back to when I first watched my favorite Let&#8217;s Players cover the game. At the time,\u00a0<em>Outlast\u00a0<\/em>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 &#8220;run and hide&#8221; 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.<\/p>\n<p>(10:30-12:30 to see how the camcorder works)<\/p>\n<div class=\"jetpack-video-wrapper\"><span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"480\" height=\"270\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/j8ri1v8vTTM?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en-US&#038;autohide=2&#038;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox\"><\/iframe><\/span><\/div>\n<p>This mechanic is a great example of what Kirkland calls the &#8220;issues of vision and power&#8221; in regards to analogue technologies in digital media (120). By remediating the camcorder and imposing the arbitrary rules &#8211;<\/p>\n<p>1) The player\/protagonist is stripped of power &#8211; you have no means of defense<\/p>\n<p>2) You must use the old camcorder to proceed<\/p>\n<p>3) The night-vision function only has limited power and you must constantly be looking for batteries, or else you&#8217;ll be wondering around blind<\/p>\n<p>&#8211; the game is able to effectively utilize both immediacy (at the beginning of the game) and hypermediacy (once you&#8217;ve figured out the &#8216;rules&#8217; of the camcorder).<\/p>\n<p>This kind of vulnerable vision proved quite popular with players, and has been adopted in later entries to the <em>Outlast<\/em> series.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Outlast\u00a0is 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 &#8211; and you&#8217;ve only got a dinky camcorder to your name. While reading Kirkland&#8217;s piece, &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10],"tags":[14,13,15],"class_list":["post-428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-group-e","tag-horror","tag-mediation","tag-video-game"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paB9Ga-6U","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=428"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":432,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428\/revisions\/432"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/death19\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}