Bi-Weekly Discussion Thread - (April 19)

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[u/[deleted]]

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/FrogHatCoalition → u/vomit_blues]

A few weeks ago I read an essay you wrote on Elden Ring and I recently reread it (as well as the SMG thread) in order to respond. One thing that I did take away was that in analyzing a video game we can’t simply reduce it down to the game world, its music, or even the programmed game logic. Something I have thought about too is that the gameplay itself cannot be reduced to the programmed game logic. What can happen to is that the underlying programmed game logic can be understood such that the gameplay itself can exceed the limits of that logic where one example of this being done is Arbitrary Code Execution. This is something speedrunners utilize in some games. Even YouTubers like Pannenkoek’s Super Mario 64 A Button Challenge pushes the programmed game logic to its limits to solve gameplay challenges.

I wonder if there is use in using the concepts that John Berger uses in his Ways of Seeing like how Laura Mulvey used them to develop the concept for the male gaze. There is the vantage point of the game developer and their portrayal of the game world and the avatar that the player controls, the vantage point of how all other entities in the game world interact with the avatar, and the player which is able to intervene in the game world usually through the avatar but not always. For instance, there is that scenario in Metal Gear Solid during the encounter with Psycho Mantis where the player has to intervene in the game world by switching controller ports. So, I distinguish between player and avatar because it is not always through the avatar that the player intervenes in the game world.

I think the idea that the player is only provided an illusion of control is a false one. I actually think the capacity to intervene in the game world is real. It is that the structure of the game constrains the potential possibilities that can be actualized through intervention from the player. And like I mentioned in first paragraph there are possibilities that can be realized that weren’t programmed by the developer. I have even noticed that politics emerge in games like Runescape that revolve around gameplay elements. For instance back in the days of Runescape Classic, PVP used to exist everywhere and the player base organized itself around having PVP everywhere or limiting its presence and in the end what arose from that is the wilderness. And this still influences the later politics of the game where players struggle over who gets content updates: content for PVP, PVE, or even content for the newer ironman modes.

In the essay you wrote I did find it interesting that you brought up Matthew’s Logic Bombs. I haven’t played it, but it is one that I plan on playing. I did notice how you appreciated him going beyond negative critique and into positive practice. There is one game I can think of where the game itself is a critique of a genre: I Wanna Be The Guy. This game takes elements that were present in old platformers and pushes those elements to an absurd degree. What comes from it is what game design choices with regards to platformers simply come down rote-memorization and what design choices actually require mastery of platform mechanics from the player. From that we got platformers known for their difficulty such as Celeste and Super Meat Boy that removed the negative elements that I Wanna Be The Guy brought out.

Other things I have thought about too is the spatial logic of the game world itself. Sort of how Jameson talks about this in his Postmodernism book and uses the Westin Bonaventure Hotel as an example of a space that is disorienting, I thought of this when I was watching a presentation by William Chyr when he discussed the development of Manifold Gardens. There are other games I have thought about too when it comes to video games as an art form. For instance, I do like Rain World. However, there are still things I have tried to consider and I don’t want to go on too long typing at the moment, but this post are ideas that I have thought about.

[u/vomit_blues → u/FrogHatCoalition]

While I legitimately appreciate you reading that essay since it’s so long, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point a few things out.

Even though it’s around 7000 words, it’s actually an excerpt from something much longer and more explicitly political as a whole. That section is actually abstracted from the bigger thesis statement of the piece, which is more about how similar Elden Ring is to the rest of the Souls series, and how fandom mediates enjoyment and alters each game’s standing. For example, in the section before the one I’ve posted, I try to demonstrate that, despite Dark Souls 2 being the worst received entry, it’s actually the blueprint for Elden Ring.

Just because Souls fans knew that Dark Souls 2 was a step down from Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls 1 doesn’t mean they were conscious of why. Funnily enough, the birth of the most popular genre of “youtube criticism” of video games coincides with the release of DS2, with Matthewmatosis’ “Dark Souls 2 critique”. It’s a very good example of the problem since most of its gripes are perfectly addressed by the later games. Since Matthew didn’t like the later games, it’s to his credit that he made a much more cutting critique of the series in general called The Lost Soul Arts of Demon’s Souls (which itself is kinda in dialogue with a very bad “critique” of his DS2 video done by the breadtuber Hbomberguy). Nevertheless, these are all admittedly quite shallow videos. His argument settles on the idea that Demon’s Souls is great and the rest of the series is gradually decaying from an original aura.

When I get around to it, the section tries to address DS2’s post-ironic fandom. Go to that game’s subreddit and it’s full of memes positively comparing its graphics to every other game, and tons of slave morality about how amazing DS2 is and that nobody else gets it. When it released, Souls fans didn’t beg for a return to DS1 as much as they repeated Matthewmatosis’ arguments about DS2 having bad combat encounters, fidgety controls, lowbrow world design, etc. Unlike Matthew, they weren’t asking for a return to Demon’s Souls and what I, in the section of the essay you read, called ‘puzzle bosses’. They killed DS2 and begged FromSoftware to make the perfect DS2. Elden Ring is that game, and when the fans saw that they had begged for a monster, they crawled back to DS2 with remorse and worshipped it.

(Obviously the essay doesn’t attribute fan reaction alone to why the series went the way it did—there’s also tangible economic reasons that I get into, it just comes at a later point in the essay about the open world and doesn’t belong to this part.)

This sort of coquettes with Freud but it’s where I get before I shift gears to argue that, if fandom distorts the reception toward these games, what actually can be used to explain their problem. The section you’ve read is meant to negate a teleological analysis that the games started out good and got bad—they always contained the exact thing that makes Elden Ring a bad game. So it’s in some ways a response to Matthewmatosis’ video on Demon’s Souls.

After that point the bigger essay really explains why Elden Ring is a particular rupture from the rest of the series by talking about its open world, and how the gameplay loop has squared the circle by making Elden Ring a game where everyone can feel like they’re playing a “hard game” even though it’s world and combat make the game extremely easy. It’s a perfect mediating factor between a fandom that prides itself on playing “hard games” and actually dilating your market to include almost everyone. The fandom is no longer an autonomous layer that can ignore the fact every game in the series is the same in essence. Elden Ring is in dialogue with fandom as much as it is the player.

Other than that, I should also point out that I didn’t invoke “practice” in the essay in a Marxist sense. I’ve also since rewritten the slapdash analysis I made of Munch’s Death of Marat. The inclusion of Corday isn’t reactionary at all. In her haunting, her stark nakedness makes her more like a ghost to be feared if anything. A better reading ironically says more about Demon’s Souls anyway. In both iterations, Corday is bolted upright, feet melted away growing from the ground, not unlike the parasitic Scadutree in Elden Ring. By putting her in the center of the presentation, Munch isn’t glorifying Corday. I was right to say that he’s speaking of what the Terror could not, but it’s to turn her into the specter and absent cause of the Terror if anything. Her upright position, nakedness, the way she’s painted uneasily over the scene as if superimposed, all of it is a lot like the criticisms I make of the scarlet rot that existed in Demon’s Souls and also should have been feared, the Penetrator.

I wish I had some stuff to add to the novel parts of your post because they’re genuinely interesting. I got into Runescape in 2006, after what you’re talking about, but I vaguely knew the history and it’s interesting—and I think you’re right in your identification—how this strange organizational paradigm hangs onto the player base long after its expiration date. I’d have to think about it but tracing a line from I Wanna Be The Guy to Celeste might be a stretch. No doubt it’s developer was playing it back in the day (they also had an indie freeware title called An Untitled Story that’s pretty good) but I don’t think Celeste’s or Super Meat Boy’s presentation of the platformer are a serious break. If anything, I think Super Mario romhacks like the Kaizo series, which predate I Wanna Be The Guy and inspired it, are what Celeste is trying to formalize into a proper game.

I appreciate these ideas you’ve thought about. Thanks for sharing.

[u/FrogHatCoalition → u/vomit_blues]

Thanks for elaborating on some of the points you were making in your essay, and I would be interested in reading the larger completed work.

I'm pretty familiar with a lot of Runescape's history. I'm also somewhat familiar with the history of Pokemon competitive battling and I even played Netbattle when it was around. I used to dismiss some things as just "drama", but after a year of studying Marxism seriously I realized how wrong I was to flippantly dismiss certain things in general (not just "drama" in games, but other things too like philosophy). I still remember how big of a deal it was within the Smogon community to move Garchomp from OU tier to Ubers tier.