Tag: freud

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A Potato Powered Adventure | Let’s Play SPACEPLAN

SPACEPLAN is a silly clicker game on Steam where. The player takes on the role of an astronaut many years in the future. The story is given as a chat log of your fellow astronaut. Once you wake up, you find yourself orbiting a strange red planet. So why not send in your probetato to do some scanning?

As stated in the game’s description, the story is largely based on a complete misunderstanding of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, so you can expect to play with physics, black holes, and parallel realities in this potato powered adventure!

The developer Jake Hollands utilized a minimalist approach in designing this game where the individual facets of digital media seem simple on their own, but together yield a stronger work of electronic literature.

Works Cited:

Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey, XVII:218–52. London: Hogarth Press, 1953.

Murray, Janet H. “Chapter 3: Beyond “Multimedia.” Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1997, pp. 65–94.

Pawlicka, Urszula. “Towards a History of Electronic Literature.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature  and Culture, vol. 16, no. 5, 2014, doi:10.7771/1481-4374.2619.

Robin, Bernard R. “Digital Storytelling: A Powerful Technology Tool for the 21st Century Classroom.” Theory into Practice, vol. 47, no. 3, 2008, pp. 220–228.

 

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Looking at the Uncanny in The Flat

In his essay, The Uncanny, Sigmund Freud analyzes uncanniness as it shows up in literature. He comes to the conclusion that there are several factors that can evoke the feeling of uncanniness in any work, whether that be a film, book, or in our case electronic literature. One of these factors is involuntary repetition, which is described as an unusual repetition of something random such as seeing the number 13 multiple times in one day, or wandering through a city and always ending up in the same alleyway.

In playing through Adam Cambell’s The Flat, one can feel a sense of uncanniness and involuntary repetition as they attempt to move through this thriller. The Flat always starts you at the bottom of a stairwell with dimmed lighting and grainy camera effects, then prompts you to move throughout the the flat by offering shimmers of light to click on in order to move around and read more of the story. You feel a sense of unease as you always end up at the same place at the end of the two minute time limit the work gives you to explore. The screen darkens and you hear an urgent knocking at the door, and upon answering you see a mysterious figure on the lawn. Afterwards the screen darkens once more, and you are given the option to re-enter the flat to try and learn more than you did in your first first couple tries.

This screenshot is of an uncanny depiction of a human face found when exploring the flat. Humans are hard-wired to notice other human faces, which leads to this instance of the work to be incredibly uncanny and creepy.

Overall, I feel The Flat is an exemplary model of the uncanny in electronic literature as it certainly evokes feelings of unease and discomfort. At the same time, however, it does a good job of piquing interest and requires several play throughs to satisfy one’s curiosity.

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Uncanny Coats

On the rare occasion, I wake up in the middle of the night and roll over while I am half asleep. In my blurry vision, I see my coat hanging on the wall. However, the combination of poor lighting and my blurry vision makes my coat seem just dissimilar enough to be a cause for alarm. Consequently, I am now fully awake and adrenaline is rushing through my system. So much for going back to sleep. This is one scenario in my life which I consider uncanny. Despite knowing I hang my coat there and the repeated occurrences of this scenario, my inability to immediately identify the dark figure in my room still results waking up.

This story came to my mind after playing Andy Campbell’s The Flat. A normal household, like my coat, should cause no alarm. However, the addition of a few special effects changes the entire situation. Just as darkness and blurry vision contributed to my sleepless night, Campbell used darkness, unsettling audio, and even perspective to create the uncanny nature of The Flat. As an example of perspective, I began panning up in the starting screen. As the top of the stairs came into view, I saw what I thought was another person. As I continued panning up, I realized it was a coat.

At the top of the stairs lurks a killer….oh wait that’s just a coat rack. Image is a screenshot of Andy Campbell’s “The Flat.”

While I agree that uncanniness comes, at least in part, from the returned of the repressed, as Freud argues in “The Uncanny,” I believe a certain aspect of the uncanny arises from the unknown. As I see my coat in the darkness or as I see a figure at the top of the stairs, I do not feel uneasy due to some repressed memory or forgotten tragedy. Rather, I do not recognize my coat in such a dazed state and nearly a million thoughts rush through my head at once because I do not immediately know what it is. The figure at the top of the stairs, as far as I was concerned, was very real and potentially hazardous, especially considering the atmosphere that Campbell established. Essentially, the unknown is unsettling as our mind prepares for the worst.