Quizzical Play #3: Gamecamp 2013

Last year I went to Gamecamp. This year I went again. But this time, I ran my own session, delivering a twelve-minute speech on my ideas about 'quizzical play' to a bunch of people who were kind enough to come and listen. Here is a recording of that talk, as well as my notes, from which I read almost verbatim.

You can listen to the talk on Soundcloud here. You can also listen to the follow-up discussion here. Some parts of it basically summarise or replicates stuff I have already written about Dishonored and Art Game. Below is the full text of my notes, which I have tried to sprinkle through with links to the things I'm talking about. But it might be more fun to listen to the talk; I think so, anyway.

The Political Uses of Fear

Edited screenshot from Lim, by Merritt Kopas

This post is in response to Blogs of the Round Table. Trigger warning for street harassment, passing anxiety, rape culture. 

Here in videogameland we relish fear like children relish Halloween. Actually, we relish Halloween like children relish Halloween. But our uses of fear are essentially escapist, even hedonistic: we lust after the adrenaline rush of shocks and frights and cathartic thrills like the psychologist in Psycho who has a little too much fun delivering the denouement. Games are very good at fear, too, though when we mention this it's usually just before we note how bad they are at ~*love*~. But that primal, animal emotion, that evolutionary hangover that cross-wires nuclear bombs with teeth and claws, is good for more than rollercoasters. It has political uses. By harnessing fear we can trap even the most privileged players in the frightening subjectivity of another. The scariest things are not the ghosts and goblins of seasonal kitsch, but the hidden, suppressed suffering our society produces as if it were a machine specifically constructed for that purpose.

Teaching the Camera to Lie: Amnesia and the First-Person Other

Holmes breathes heavily, his face pressed against the wall. He has been running, running for hours, and now he has resorted to screwing up his eyes and trying not to look at the thing that is chasing him. But the temptation is too great. He slowly peers, behind him – and cries out, for though he never made a sound, Watson is there. Watching.

This chilling effect, while hopefully unintentional, tells us much about what First Person games can do. Watson’s creepy teleportation is possible precisely because so much of the environment is obscured behind the edge of the screen.

In ‘First Person Problems’ we argued that although early developers were attracted to first person because of the limitations it enforced, the rise of the shooter has over-prioritised the accuracy and power it allows. I advocated stepping back and re-examining the possibilities its evolution has left behind. Amnesia: The Dark Descent is a game whose developers did just that – illuminating in the constellation of first person’s pros and cons a rarely recognised capacity for subjectivity, and achieving a literary trope not often found in videogames: the unreliable narrator.