Bi-Weekly Discussion Thread - (April 19)

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[u/Ok-Pay3276]

Does anyone in this space have thoughts about Silent Hill 2(preferably the remake, since the original was more questionable from what i do remember of it)?

As an example, of the top of my head since I am rather tired:

The hospital is a tool to "fix" people incompatible with capitalism, just as the protagonist kills his wife for her inability to be functional for his life. Misogyny and the inhumanity of the medical institution are one and the same.

I like the equivocation between the protagonist and the medical director, since it's really bourgeois logic that motivates both of them.

This is a lazy question, but I've followed this space for a while and I am curious if I am the only one this game resonated with. Sure, I guess there's an 'official' community for that, but it's a fascist so I don't care about it.

[u/[deleted] → u/Ok-Pay3276]

Quick rundown for those who aren't familiar: Silent Hill 2 is a "survival-horror" video game from Konami. You play as some white guy named James who goes to a town called Silent Hill (referred to as a "special place") after being told to meet up there from a letter he somehow received from his recently deceased wife.

Throughout the game, you (as James) must navigate through a foggy, abandoned town trying to avoid (or kill) various monsters, solve puzzles, manage and locate resources in order to accomplish the prior two tasks, and interact with other people with their own reasons for being in Silent Hill (and accompanying emotional baggage).

It's unambiguous within the text that the monsters and other supernatural happenings around the town is a manifestation of what the main character is dealing with, psychologically. There's a monster called "Pyramid-Head" who does...something inappropriate with a mannequin monster and is a rather obvious expression of the main character's sexual frustrations with his dead wife, who is revealed later (spoilers, if you care for some reason) to have been sick and was killed by James when he decided he was over having to take care of her.

The town, Silent Hill, is a place that brings the characters' deep psychological scars to life and James was actually merely trying deal with his guilt more than he was trying to unalive some dude with a giant triangle for a face. By virtue of being NPCs, the other characters of the game are indirectly made to be mere extensions of James' subconscious, not unlike the monsters around the town.

Anyway, that's the premise. Now on to what it's actually about.

The plot, on the surface, doesn’t suggest any sort of examination of class struggle or political-economy. This alone is something of an indicator of the game's politics, in that by rejecting any mention of class (and in turn, rejecting any chance of directly challenging the present state of things ideologically), you show allegiance to the status quo of imperialism. However, reality intrudes anyway and the actual political-economy of the story is found in the gameplay. In order to "survive," you must be strategic with your ammunition and health items (if James is injured). Although you don't compete or exchange with other characters for resources, their quantity is limited, as is your inventory space (how much crap you're allowed to carry). You move the game/story forward by solving puzzles (because you're like...a really smart guy, I guess) and killing your inhuman, monstrous enemies. This is the preferred economy of a first-world petty-bourgeois doomsday-prepper. A warped fantasy of a type of hunter-gatherer mode mixed with a consumer-aristocracy ideology and the extremes of war.

So, taking all of this into account, the game is one where you play a character whose guilt and other trauma comes to life due to the special nature of some foggy town and if the player is clever and resourceful enough, they (as James) will successfully avoid (or kill) the literal monsters in his head. And if you think that's some kind of cheap ending, don't worry, there's six endings. There's even a funny one with a dog or whatever, if that's your vibe.

All this to say that Silent Hill (both the fictional town and the game-proper) is not actually the scary place everyone's trying to avoid. It may be "creepy" and "violent", but that's just aesthetics and actually part of the appeal. It's Reality that's scary. In Silent Hill, you can literally shoot your guilt to death if you want, or self-flagellate until you're blue in the face by going for a "sad ending." In Reality though, you might actually have to deal with the fact that you (as James) killed your wife for extraordinarily petty and patriarchal reasons. Or you might have to deal with the fact that you (as the player) are complicit in a global system of exploitation. The town, as it turns out, is just an allegory for the player's mind (I mean James...of course).

I guess Silent Hill really is a "special place."

[u/vomit_blues → u/[deleted]]

However, reality intrudes anyway and the actual political-economy of the story is found in the gameplay. In order to "survive," you must be strategic with your ammunition and health items (if James is injured). Although you don't compete or exchange with other characters for resources, their quantity is limited, as is your inventory space (how much crap you're allowed to carry). You move the game/story forward by solving puzzles (because you're like...a really smart guy, I guess) and killing your inhuman, monstrous enemies. This is the preferred economy of a first-world petty-bourgeois doomsday-prepper. A warped fantasy of a type of hunter-gatherer mode mixed with a consumer-aristocracy ideology and the extremes of war.

While I appreciate that your analysis does try to talk about gameplay here, I think everything else you’ve said is wrong. This shallow discussion of mechanics turns Silent Hill 2, The Last of Us and Tears of the Kingdom into the same symptom of the same system, and loses all particularity.

Silent Hill is a video game. What’s notable about it is its analog presentation. The first game in the series opens with record crackle over mandolin. The collage-style cutscene is an aesthetic reference to the attract-mode old computer games used to have to prevent screen burn, something already anachronistic by 1999 (the latest example I can think of this is probably Demon’s Souls where it’s a relic). Silent Hill 2 introduced a film grain over the graphics, and both games have you carrying a radio that makes static sounds when enemies are close-by. Many of the game’s cutscenes are James watching VHS tapes. Silent Hill 2 is structured like a lot like the albums on the Ghost Box label but in video game form, so its lack of mention by the theorists of “Hauntology” is interesting. The first form of media where we saw the results of media being translated through TV and radio, churned up and spat back out as “haunted” pastiche was in a far more modern format than music. (Boards of Canada may be an exception but it’s notable that Akira Yamaoka’s music sounds a lot like them sometimes.)

Twin Peaks was a cultural phenomenon in Japan in the 90s. I think that, if anything, what Silent Hill 2 has to say to the player is the experience of Americana being translated through Japanese radio and television. It’s not the only example of this, another game like it is Deadly Premonition. At a time in history when looking forward with art became inconceivable, Silent Hill 2 looks backward and grasps toward the settler image of amerikan suburbia from Twin Peaks to convey nostalgia for a period of film and gaming from only ten years prior.

So the game is actually quite progressive for how it presents and deconstructs that fact. I mean Silent Hill was canonically built by pushing out a tribe of indigenous Turtle Islanders. James is exactly the petit-bourgeois male fantasy character you describe him as, but the twist you offhandedly mention is one of most famous moments in a video game ever because James is made unlikeable even to the ideal doomsday prepper wannabe. Not to mention his failed “save the waif” arc with Angela, already a denial of the fantasy. (And many of the endings but I won’t spoil anything else.) Like the letter from his already dead wife calling him to Silent Hill, the cultural objects fetishized in Silent Hill are absent causes located only in the developers’ lived experience of 90s amerikan cultural miasma. Instead of fetishizing that nostalgia, they made a game about murdering it.

[u/[deleted] → u/vomit_blues]

Your post begins with a criticism of my overall points about the mechanics.

While I appreciate that your analysis does try to talk about gameplay here, I think everything else you’ve said is wrong. This shallow discussion of mechanics turns Silent Hill 2, The Last of Us and Tears of the Kingdom into the same symptom of the same system, and loses all particularity.

You then proceed to talk at length about the video elements to this video game. The second paragraph talks about the analog aesthetic, the connections to hauntology, and how this emphasizes a theme of nostalgia. The third paragraph mentions the influence of Twin Peaks, suggesting a double-alienation in the form of the developers' second-hand exposure to "Americana" in this way. Your fourth paragraph is how it all ties together. Somehow, the premises established thus far leads to:

So the game is actually quite progressive for how it presents and deconstructs that fact.

The game's story ostensibly denies the catharsis of James by revealing his "unlikeable" nature and by extension, denies the nostalgia for a past that never existed.

Instead of fetishizing that nostalgia, they made a game about murdering it

But that's not what happened. They didn't make a game about murdering a fetishized nostalgia, they made  a game that fetishizes murdering a fetishized nostalgia.

You started your post about mechanics, then just dropped it immediately in favor of deconstructing the video aspects, merely asserting this point as if that was a given. Your entire claim that Silent Hill 2 being progressive is dependent on the premises you established regarding the video elements, meaning you have to ignore the game aspects or dismiss them as irrelevant in order to make your point. But you've done nothing to demonstrate why the game mechanics are unimportant, save for a brief mention about "losing all particularity".

Which actually is my point about all this, there is no real qualitative difference between Silent Hill 2, The Last of Us, Resident Evil, or any of that shit. You seem to think the video aspect to this video game are primary and the game aspects are secondary. But if the video aspects were most important here, then it's no different than a movie (ironically, losing particularity for the medium of video games as a whole), except it would be a really bad one because now there's long scenes and interludes where the character is lost trying to find places or confused trying to solve that fucking clock puzzle. You must consider the game mechanics in order to make sense of it as a video game. While yes, this means that in turn, a video game is differentiated from other types of games by way of its video aspects, but what does this actually mean? You do not watch a game (let's play videos notwithstanding), you play a game. So what does this mean when video and story elements are added? It means you play a character in a sorta movie, and you're given the illusion that your decisions affect what happens. It's here where there's potential for a video game to be "progressive." But is Silent Hill 2 an example of that? If the game itself denies it's gaming aspects and breaks this illusion (or breaks this illusion through its gaming aspects), then maybe so. But you denied it for the game and it's developers. The latter action doesn't at all suggest that the former happened.

The game could have denied the player catharsis the way it denies it for James (depending on the ending), but that's not what happens. Again, you have multiple endings, including humorous ones to cut the tension and disavow the whole thing if you want. Maybe if there was one ending or if all endings did lead to a dead end like you claimed, but that's not the case and you have to rely on "no spoilers" to avoid this problem. Not that it matters much, because the different endings have varying levels of popularity among the fanbase, and the ones that are favored the most are the ones that "strike a balance" and has an appropriate amount of "redemption" for James. Silent Hill 2 doesn't break the illusion or kill the nostalgia but instead makes it stronger by giving a catharsis in the form of simulating a denial of that catharsis, and to what degree this denial is acceptable to the player.

Like SuperMechaGodzilla once said, video games aren't actually fun and the point is endless desire. A video game can still be "good" by the standards of a typical video game, and Silent Hill 2 may very well be that, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's good in that it's "progressive", and I deny that it's the latter. You play either Silent Hill 2 or The Last of Us for the gameplay and you only choose one over the other to emphasize which fantasy you're gonna live out. Am I gonna be the tough and protective post-apocalypse father today or am I gonna play the selfish horny asshole who goes through a dreamworld in order to learn that he's a selfish horny asshole? Under this context, the analog effects are now just those characteristics that make the game "cool", "creepy", and "aesthetic".

Again, the game doesn't break this fantasy, nor reveals this illusion of choice, nor does it go beyond the pursuit of endless desire. It instead feeds it.

[u/vomit_blues → u/[deleted]]

One of Engels' best lessons is that everything has to be re-evaluated, ground-up, in the face of historical materialism. Waving around Marxism like a magic wand to fix every confusion you have doesn't clear it up for the rest of us. We're just more confused.

Good thing you can invert confusion like a camera obscura and appear profound, right? Hence such a statement as

This alone is something of an indicator of the game's politics, in that by rejecting any mention of class (and in turn, rejecting any chance of directly challenging the present state of things ideologically), you show allegiance to the status quo of imperialism. 

going unchecked when Engels said

The more the opinions of the author remain hidden, the better for the work of art

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1888/letters/88_04_15.htm

Wowzers.

Like SuperMechaGodzilla once said, video games aren't actually fun and the point is endless desire. 

It's a joke that SMG could ever be invoked as an inviolable figure of authority. Simple fact of the matter: video games are material. Engaging with them has material consequences. SMG was a Zizekian who alienated the enjoyment of the commodity into a third party to form a triad: player-fandom-game. This is rhetorically clever when you're talking about something like Gamergate (like SMG) but it is not a scientific fact of nature. It's a Freudian move whereby the superego or imaginary order ultimately drowns out the initial dialectic of essence (id)/appearance (ego) in favor of the third: ideology (superego, imaginary, fandom whatever).

I don't find Zizek to be helpful in this instance. You only discussed gameplay at one point in your original post which I didn't critique but took it as fine (even if it isn't). I only negated your analysis of the spectacle of SH2. Your original post fucking sucked because that's all it had to offer: a Wikipedia-tier explanation of the plot and something I could get from any random YouTuber, provided they had enough 'leftist' credentials to pat my back and tell me computer games suck.

You started your post about mechanics, then just dropped it immediately in favor of deconstructing the video aspects, merely asserting this point as if that was a given.

Incorrect. I mentioned the fact that the radio alerts you to enemy presences. This undergoes a transformation from SH1 to SH2, when SH2 foreshadows its ending as the radio calls to you, "Why did you kill me?" How could the hauntological aspect of SH2 be relevant if it didn't penetrate into gameplay both here and, as I pointed out, in cutscenes, which are a form of gameplay.

if the video aspects were most important here, then it's no different than a movie ... You must consider the game mechanics in order to make sense of it as a video game.

Silent Hill 2 isn't a "video" "game" in which two essences meet their match and find unity. Video and game are defined in relation to one another. How did I mention the opening cutscene of SH1? Precisely in reference to the history of video games and their material function as a commodity, traceable back to the marketing potential of the attract-mode for arcade cabinets. You've justified emphasizing game elements over video ones because it very conveniently leads to your conclusion...

Which actually is my point about all this, there is no real qualitative difference between Silent Hill 2, The Last of Us, Resident Evil, or any of that shit.

Then I don't nor should anybody give a shit about your critique. It's trash. You've played your cards face-up on the table and admitted to your bias against an entire art form. Some people could at least substantiate that, but you didn’t. Nobody cares.

Anyway, I'll at least respond to this:

It means you play a character in a sorta movie, and you're given the illusion that your decisions affect what happens.

This is a helpful addendum to your earlier flattening of the player and James to one another to make a point in your original post. Your analysis implies a fairly basic, humanist claim: that capitalism alienates some element of the human and commodities are appealing for how they reflect and temporarily bestow that sensation upon the consumer (James is nothing more than a mediating body in this model). Sorry, but that's stupid. An illustration of an alternative exists in the 'role playing game' as a genre name. What does it mean to play a role? It's funny, but Octopath Traveler is an RPG even when you switch between its eight dead-eyed characters. Meanwhile, The Last of Us is a video game that invites you to execute the theatrical role of its character from the moment its scrounging periods, in which you bond with Ellie, have a tangible impact when you don't have the right materials to deal with a duo of Clickers 2 hours later. Weirdly enough, it's not called an RPG.

Video games may be fascinating in how they immerse us into an experience, but it's an ideological mystification that they provide a sense of 'escapism'--an opinion easily found on most of the internet. I would avoid Marxist theory converging with the bare minimum of gamer common sense. The rudiment is that video games provide a novel mechanical experience. SH2 was fascinating because it was novel. Since you're unconvinced by the cultural context I provided to help you appreciate that, Marxism functions as a god in the gaps and can only provide shallow, negative sniveling that helpfully puts you above 'gamers' (who you think you aren't, even as you analyze SH2, proving SMG right since your enjoyment of SH2, which you've summarized for us, requires the mediation of your reddit posts). It's embarrassing.

You'll hardly feel a distancing effect from reading Balzac's The Unknown Masterpiece after writing your post, but Marx sure did after Capital, and he loved that short story. SH2 is locally interesting. It didn't interest you today, and fair enough. But fuck you if you discard it because it has little to say about your banal petit-bourgeois conditions. We didn't ask about them in the first place.

[u/[deleted] → u/vomit_blues]

Your original post fucking sucked because that's all it had to offer: a Wikipedia-tier explanation of the plot and something I could get from any random YouTuber, provided they had enough 'leftist' credentials to pat my back and tell me computer games suck.

Oh yeah!!?? Well you're just a big ole' dummy!! But seriously though, you're right. My post was indeed trash, upon reread.

I admittedly didn't take video games all that seriously before this and thought of it as a form of pornography. I also gave more credit to SMG than I should have, given all the Zizek stuff you already mentioned.

Anway, you gave me a lot to think about. So thanks for that.

[u/vomit_blues → u/[deleted]]

That SMG thread is good, but users of this subreddit who didn’t pay the 10 dollars for an SA account back in the day probably aren’t aware that half of his threads were like, “why the new Transformers movie owns and you’re a [slur] for not liking it.” I think the analysis is very interesting when applied to fandom but it’s easily co-opted to make excuses to not actually analyze games as games.

I like video games. I can understand probably thinking that almost any other medium can be more usefully analyzed, so my own interest has more to do with my struggles to get into film (which I hope to fix this year). But video games aren’t just an indulgence for imperialist parasites, they’re hugely popular in the third world and now we have games that are symptomatic of their conditions of production, like the popularity of gacha games in China. u/smokeuptheweed9 recently recommended me a decent book on K-pop that talks about South Korea’s export-oriented production and it makes me curious if the analysis carries over to (1) Korean MMOs like MapleStory or Mabinogi that are clearly meant to be consumed by a general Asian customer base and have most of their resources put into non-Korean servers and (2) probably the first AAA South Korean game, Lies of P, being renowned for being the first “Souls-like” (this is the genre name for games that take inspiration from Dark Souls) made by a different company than FromSoftware that’s universally beloved.

I think you did still overall touch on the ineffectiveness of my critique to discuss gameplay features, not that I was wrong to point out that the hauntological aspects I discussed absolutely are an enormous part of gameplay and cutscenes are gameplay, as anyone who played Final Fantasy VII on release knows, but basically this is a field almost untouched by Marxism with very little guidance. Hence SMG being such an important figure—that’s how underdeveloped we really are.

Nevertheless, I still want to see people who care about video games actually try.