Category: Group E

Queers in Love at the End of the World is a timed hypertext game in which the player must decide what to do or say to their romantic partner in the span of ten seconds. Her Story is a database game in which the player must piece together a coherent narrative from hundreds of police interview clips. Even though their narratives and mechanics couldn’t be any more different, these two games do share one crucial similarity: keywords.

You could say that keywords are present in every hypertext game, as there are almost always words in a given passage that, when clicked or otherwise interacted with, progress the narrative. However, the time constraint of Queers in Love lends such words a heavier significance than usual. Ten seconds is hardly enough time to read even a single passage. If the player wants to get further in the game, they must make snap decisions about what paths they want to take and click through them almost nonstop. The player may feel as though they are clicking at random, but I would argue that they are in fact likely to gravitate towards the words that compel them the most, whether they’re sensual like “kiss” or expressive like “tell.”

The appeal of Her Story rests on this very same premise. The game begins with a word already typed into the database, waiting to be searched—”murder.” The several videos with this word in it produce other terms of interest, which in turn produce other terms of interest, and on and on without an end in sight. Much like in Queers in Love, the player latches onto whatever words pique their interest the most, from Simon to fennel to twin, and uses them to push the narrative. The five-video limitation on each keyword especially encourages players to search for the words that will help fill in all the blank spaces.

Bursts of static, wayward pixels, frames dropping at random from a dimly lit video—in most video games, these effects are mistakes. They interrupt the immersion and so degrade the quality of the work. Sometimes they render an otherwise respectable game unplayable. Why, then, do they produce the opposite effect in horror games? How can they intrigue and electrify a player when they frustrate in every other circumstance?

Sigmund Freud describes the “uncanny” as a crossing of boundaries between the familiar and the unfamiliar. It just so happens that horror is a genre primarily concerned with the crossing of boundaries, primarily those holding our reality together. I’ve heard that the appeal of horror games is that they allow people to experience fear in a safe, controllable environment, but a good horror game seeks to undermine our reality. It reaches out to us from beyond the screen.

The Flat, for example, is a game that features a first person point-of-view filtered through a VHS-like distortion. It shakes and scrolls in strange directions as you attempt to navigate the titular flat. Whenever you move between areas, the screen flashes with static. The audio is somewhat garbled, as if it’s being played underwater. Though these effects give the impression of glitches, they’re clearly intentional. They’re so out of place, so inherently wrong. You know without being told that something terrible happened in this flat. And if the medium keeping it inside your computer is fraying, what’s to stop it from happening to you?

While “playing” The Flat, I realised that it reminded me of the video game Gone Home. However, one is a piece of digital poetry and the other one is an adventure video game; two things that would normally be considered very different from each other. Still, the lines are quite blurred when it comes to the nature of The Flat. It is not an actual video game and for that matter, Gone Home can not be considered digital poetry either. The dulness, mystery, spookiness and darkness of both works creates this characteristically video game ‘vibe’ that we see in The Flat.

In our posts we’ve all used the word “play” to describe the action we are doing when navigating this piece of work. In reality we are never actually “playing” anything, we are rather just clicking to specific areas that have already been indicated to us and are the only option for moving forward. Moving on, what we read are not clues that will help you figure out the game or come to a solution but words of poetry. Yet the combination of the three different ‘layers’ of The Flat; the music and sounds, the imagery and the text, create the whole story behind the meaning of this particular work. The theme of horror the keeps popping up in all of these works of interactive fiction we have seen is, also usually associated with adventure and thriller video games. Those three layers are also the ones found in video games. So could we say that videos games are in a way digital fiction or vice versa?

The eerie and the uncanny are two similar descriptions of situations which invoke a sense of uneasiness. In fact, the two are so interrelated that definitions of uncanny often include a feeling of eeriness (which doesn’t help when trying to differentiate between the two). In class, we described the eerie as something present when there’s supposed to be nothing, or nothing present when there’s supposed to be something. This description is not far off from the one presented in “The Uncanny” which states “everything is uncanny that out to have remained hidden and secret, and yet comes to light”(4). Both involve something being present when it typically isn’t. They also both rely on some degree of unknown. Once that uncertainty disappears and you know exactly what has been presented to you, any suspicions go out the window and take the eerie and the uncanny with it.

However, there are small subtleties that distinguish the two which I better understood after exploring The Flat by Andy Campbell. The Flat is undoubtedly an uncanny piece of work. The fact that you are placed in this unknown environment with no sense of what is going on captures the uncanny feeling of something being oddly familiar. To further push the point, the last line of text states “what you didn’t see was what happened when you weren’t here”. While the setting of an apartment is a familiar scene to most, the fact that you don’t know what’s going on, and the odd placement of certain objects throughout the flat create suspicion. Furthermore, the lone figure outside of the end of the work provides an example of how questioning if “an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate,”(5) contributes to the uncanny.

With the eerie, things show up when they aren’t expected and more so contribute to a feeling of fear than the uncanny. With our example from class, you know people are supposed to be roaming our campus, so if one day everyone mysteriously disappeared, that would be eerie. With the uncanny, everyone didn’t disappear, but you notice they seem a bit off. People might be acting differently than usual, or there’s a weird vibe in the air. In the Flat, the eerie could correlate to returning and expecting people to be over but they aren’t. When going through The Flat, I assumed I was alone and not expecting anyone so I wasn’t surprised by the lack of people. However, even without knowing much about the apartment, I had a feeling that something felt off. That is what is core to the uncanny.

In the scope of the class so far, this piece utilizes interactivity as a tool for storytelling like we’ve seen in most of the works we’ve examined. This interactivity gives the reader agency in the sense that they are able to decide which areas they want to explore. Even though there is no explicit end goal, this work encourages multiple plays as the reader tries to understand the story.

At the end of Monday’s class, Prof. Sample said that Andy Campbell’s “The Flat” would provide a jump scare.  It’s safe to say that the only jumping I did while playing “The Flat” was jumping out of my seat to get some water before writing this post. Even though I wasn’t scared, it’s safe to say I was confused by the whole thing, and in the end, I definitely had some questions. Why did I keep seeing a face every time I clicked and saw static? Why did I definitely see a face in the closet? Who’s house am I in, and if it’s mine, why do I still live in a haunted house, and if it’s not my house, then why am I breaking into someone’s house? Lastly, why is Andy still obsessed with The Blair Witch Project 7 years after it’s release? All jokes aside, when you start the game, you start at the bottom of a staircase with words appearing in the air. You have the choice to go up the stairs or wait until that mysterious clock hits zero. If you’re adventurous and walk up the 14 steps,  you’ll be able to go into two rooms and a bathroom.  Each has different things, but you can explore them and get more confused. Personally, my favorite place is the bedroom, since it has more of a sense of mystery than the living room. Once you finish exploring and run out of time, you are dragged to look outside a window, and you see a shadow move past it. You may think it’s a raccoon, a dog, a cat, or even a person, so the sense of adventure tells you to investigate by opening the door. Then you see the cloaked figure on your lawn, and the story ends.

If Sigmund Freud were alive, he’d probably be so happy to see a game that utilizes his thoughts on the “uncanny,” which he talks about in his paper “The Uncanny.” “The Flat” has a sense of something that is seen in day to day life, an everyday apartment and adding a touch of spooky vibes to it. When we combine these two aspects, it looks like the idea of “uncanny” is what the “The Flat” is trying to maintain.

The first work that I looked at was The Flat. The interactive game starts with you at the bottom of a flight of stairs. The screen almost looks like you are watching this through one of those old TVs, where the horizontal lines flicker, reminiscent of early 2000 televisions and electronic sets (from what I remember). Words flickered occasionally on the bottom, with hints of self doubt and generally just creepy sentiments. The music/ambient noise added to the suspense of the scene. There also was a clock in the upper right corner counting down how much time you had. I was initially confused on what the purpose of the clock was. Was I supposed to find something/someone? Was I supposed to escape the room? Some of the floating words talked about how the house was always stuffy/closed up, increasing the suspicion that something was going on. The “surprise” at the end added to the creepiness of the whole narrative/game. I found that this game really reminded me of The Blair Witch Project, where people go into the woods to look for a murderer and some of the film is portrayed through a handheld video camera. The creepiness of both the house in The Flat in woods in The Blair Witch Project were amplified by the lo-fi aspect of the filming. I think that this allowed the stories to seem more believable, as it could’ve been made by anyone. The idea that this could be real is what really terrified me. Without the authenticity and amateur style of the videos, these films/games wouldn’t have been as haunting. Another aspect that I found similar between the two was the lack of answers. Not knowing the full story increased the suspense.

This idea of creepiness in the mundane was something that Freud talked about in his essay Uncanny. The idea of something familiar being creepy directly ties to The Flat as at its core, the game is really just exploring someone’s apartment. There is nothing inherently creepy about the apartment itself, but the situation surrounding the apartment make it creepy.

While playing howling dogs and Destroy/Wait I realised that I saw a similar theme in those two ‘games’ as I did in most of the other IF we have seen, played and discussed. They all have some dark, mysterious and (Technologically) futuristic aspect to them. Whether it is the pitch black backgrounds with the brightly colored fonts or the snippets of photographs and drawing (like we saw in My Boyfriend Came Back from War, My Body – A Wunderkammer  or even Uncle Roger) or even the actual content itself, they all discuss a weirdly dark, unknown and even uncomfortable situations and circumstances that remind you of some sort of sci-fi thriller.

In Emily Short’s review of the howling dogs, she explains how Twine is often experienced or referred to as a CYOA book. I realized that the Return to the Cave of Time (1985) by Edward Packard, which is the book I read for our project, had a very similar pattern – any mentioned of the future and the whole plot became weirdly dark, strange and extremely futuristic. What I mean by “extremely futuristic” is the fact that any time I had to ‘time-travel’ to the future it never lead to something ‘simple’ like a flying car or a super high tech phone, but rather I would find ‘myself’ in a fully blown out production of humans living on different planets, in special egg capsules, living of off tubes connected to who knows what and swimming is some sort of special liquid to survive. Similarly, these IF game narratives describe circumstances where it is never really clear exactly what is going on. The rooms you are found in are never lit enough, survival is crucial; for some reason you never have enough energy and you usually lack water, nutrients and food, oh and weapons or spooky clue that have been left-behind are always an added bonus. 

I wanted to connect this with the thought that IF started appearing during a time were technology and computers also started gaining more and more fame and the realisation that they can be something so much more than we had ever imagined. The combination of all the aforementioned definitely reminded me of dystopian worlds presented in Fahrenheit 451 by Red Bradbury or Neuromancer by William Gibson, where worlds of the past and the future create hazardous worlds where culture is based of off the old/ancient while using the new. In this situation IF has been able to combine the existence of a narrative or a story traditionally found in hand-held books or other form of print with the rise of high-tech technology (computers, AI, VR, etc.) that is so transcendent, it has been able to be depicted in the actual IF narratives themselves. The fact that authors, artists and creators no longer need to be ‘confined’ or ‘restricted’ in a limited space (of a traditional book bind), has allowed them to create pieces where they are easily able to get away with providing only fragments of a story, give limited context and make it completely spooky and dark. However, they are also encouraged to connected it with futuristic elements because of the fact that the reader/player is not longer confined to follow actual page but can click away to any link, page, image, or sound that is connected to the plot itself. Changing the definition of “narrative” also changed its context and possibly its meaning and its goal.

In Porpentine’s howling dogs, the idea of form mirroring content is present in the recurring scene of the room. After any plot occurs, you are always placed back in the same room with the exact same options. Similar to how a person in a hospital or prison is subjected to the same routine everyday, playing through this game you are forced to eat and drink before entering the activity room just as the character in the story has done for the past 360+ days. This fact highlights the idea of grasp mentioned in Sam Ashwell’s “A Bestiary of Player Agency”. This rule isn’t obvious right from the beginning. However, by the second day in the game, I knew to immediately go to the nutrient dispensers before doing anything else. In addition, the images that appear once the visor is used simulate what the character sees when they ingest the fluids.

The use of this game layout works to place you in the character’s position. I was surprised the first time I tried to get more food and was met by the abrupt message that I had reached my rations for the day. The fact that the game allows you to click on the link knowing the action is no longer available contributes to the empathy one feels for the character when playing. I’m sure the feeling I had when I was denied was similar to how the character felt the first time they were hungry and tried for more food but couldn’t get any. This game layout and lack of areas to physically explore also create a sense of confinement. While there is the sanity room, and activity room, and a bathroom, there is no mention of any external doors to lead elsewhere. This is evident in the fact that all actions return you to the same room. This limits the exploratory agency and agency of possibility that we’ve seen in other types of digital literature such as interactive fiction and hypertext.

At the same time, the virtual world represents the opposite of confinement. It represents a world where you are in control of the narrative. It can act as an escape from the real world around you. This could be why the time in the virtual world grows longer and longer as the days go by. As the character continues to experience this alternate world, they want the experience to last as long as possible as a way of escaping their reality. When Porpentine wrote this piece, she had just started hormone replacement therapy. Her experiences during this process probably manifested themselves in the escapism seen in this game. While not explicitly stated, the idea that the virtual world is more pleasant than reality is evident throughout the game.

The one aspect I questioned was the importance of the “{*}” that appears right before sleeping and right after consuming the fluid to enter the virtual space. I imagine this placeholder before entering and exiting this virtual world exists to represent the barrier between the real and imaginary. Since the game ends with you being unsure what world you’re in, I would assume it would end without the “{*}”. However clicking the last “{*}” brings you to a blank screen which I figured was intentional before the last quote comes up. Never going to sleep then waking up leaves you in a state of limbo where nothing is certain and you feel lost and confused, feelings that probably led you to want to escape in the first place.

While playing Destroy/Wait, I was confused at the initial goal of the game. I didn’t totally process what was going on with the initial noun and the choice to destroy or wait. What was I destroying or what was I waiting to do? Eventually, I figured out what was going on after pressing wait a couple times in a row. I found it interesting how it started off with physical things to decide on, such as cities or trees, but then moved to love and then eventually yourself. I played this game a couple of times and was interested if there were numerous outcomes, like some CYOA, but it seemed that the game always ended in the world ending with nothing left, which I found intriguing, yet dark. It seemed like there was an inevitable end to everything as even if you waited to destroy something, you were just prolonging the end of it anyways.

The second game, Howling Dogs, was even more dark. It seems like every time you enter the activity room, darker and darker “dreams” occur from strangling someone to death, to eating someone alive, to even being burnt alive. This game was a little hard to navigate in the beginning but I found it interesting to keep playing the game to see what the next “dream” may be, however dark it may have been.

I found it interesting as well how other people, like myself, found the game confusing, yet cool and kept them playing, like Emily Short cited. Being a hyper-text game, she found that this one was one that kept her thinking, which I agreed. I wondered, why were there so many different realities for this person to explore and what were they escaping from? It almost seemed like the person was using these dreams as a way to distract from sort of inner trauma, as the dreams they were interacting with were extremely dark and graphic. To me, it could almost be a sort of prison-like sentence, where someone is sent to spend the rest of their life living out other horrific acts and events. This made me think of Ashwell’s thoughts when he talked about protagonism as a way to drive player agency. In every dream, the player becomes a “new” protagonist and is the center of attention within that event, or at least their actions contributed to the story.

One thing that I questioned was why Howling Dogs had limited choice in the actions that you could take within the narrative. Salter talked about how games that had limited choice tended to increase user empathy. Were we supposed to feel empathy for the main character that is stuck experiencing all these dreams/VR interactions? Additionally, I felt it interesting to have such little choice for the user. If empathy was not the goal, was limited choice more of a style choice? I came away from this game with more questions than answers.

You would think that what every game wants is to get you to keep playing it. The more hours you log, points you gain, achievements you earn, and money you spend (if micro-transactions are involved), the better for its creator. If you play to the end, assuming there even is one, then play it again. It’s a win-win situation—the creator gets acclaim and you get to have some release from the stresses of the real world.

Yet some games will tell you that there is no happiness to be found inside of them. These games include “howling dogs” by Porpentine and “SPY INTRIGUE” by furkle.

During each day that passes in “howling dogs,” you must complete a series of menial tasks before you can indulge in the activity room. You are made to shower, eat a nutrient bar, drink a bottle of water, and maybe clean up your trash if you feel up to it. These tasks are important to your upkeep, of course, but they’re monotonous, repetitive. They aren’t nearly as interesting as the activity room, which lets you participate in vivid scenarios that vary in setting and role each day. Later in the game, the shower won’t turn on, the hydration unit fails to deliver cold water, and the trash disposal ceases to operate. Your skin itches and trash piles up on your floor. Even the sanity room begins to break down, signifying that your deterioration is mental as well as physical. This is all the more reason for you to retreat to the lavish fantasies of your activity room, up until you lose your very sense of self in the game’s most common ending.

“SPY INTRIGUE” gives a similar commentary about the allures and dangers of escapism. It has a clunky interface reminiscent of an outdated computer, featuring text in all caps and a choice map that lets you anticipate which options let you progress and which lead to dead ends. On the surface, the game is a ridiculous spy adventure that is impossible to take seriously. Whenever you die, however, the screen fades into a flashback sequence typed in all lowercase. These sequences give keen insight into the descent of the character’s real life, including drug abuse, traumatic memories, and mental illness. It’s as if in the interval between their game character dying and the game reloading to its last checkpoint, the player character is forced to sit alone with their dark thoughts and impulses. Then the game reverts back to its chirpy spy antics. Where the player in “howling dogs” wants to rush to the activity room as soon as possible, though, the player in “SPY INTRIGUE” wants to guide their character to the supposed dead ends in order to learn more about them. The more you die in the game, the more you revisit your life. It isn’t as fun—it’s pretty heart-wrenching, actually—but in the end, it’s the better option.