FPEG: First Person Explorative Games
I have so many half-baked blogposts right now (I might just post all of my ideas in a collection at the end (?) of this project just to show how much more tangential and impractical this shit could have gotten), but here is another one. I started doing more research on games and stumbled upon an article titled First person Exploration games: A Subgenre on the Rise. In it, the author, Charly Mottet, explains the creeping emergence of first person games that allow the player to explore more than perform in combat. Included in the list of games that might fall under the title of FPEG are Amnesia, The Dark Descent, Dear Esther, Myst, Gone Home, and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. These games, Mottet argues, foreground the experience of exploring more than they focus on violence, giving an alternative to people who don’t wish to always be interacting with that broad aspect of gaming. Of the games listed I’ve really like to speak on Amnesia and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture.
Reading youtube comments of a game like Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture provide the reader with numerous variations of, “This is not a game” or comments suggesting negatively that it is a walking simulator. Here is a video of the gameplay.
The games visuals are beautiful and deathless it seems. It utilizes rendered space in a way that both Tocci and Galloway would approve of. It puts a very simple mystery narrative (Where has everybody gone?!) in conjunction with deathless exploration in order to produce what I imagine (in theory) is a truly perfect filmic/game combination. Even if it is progressive in both its aim and execution, there is no doubt that violent video games hold a vice-grip on games themselves, providing them with bigger budgets, and often more intricate and evolved gameplay. I’m not trying to say that I think that games like Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture should not be made, in fact I’ll probably buy the game soon, but what I am saying is that there is clearly interactions within violent games, especially networked ones, that have players coming back for more and more.
Amnesia factors death and fear back into the game. I referred to it in an earlier post, but it is worth considering in regards to Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, because I feel like it presents a counterpoint to it and to Toccia as well. In Amnesia, the player is unarmed, and can only survive being attacked by enemies by running or hiding. The longer the player hides, the more sanity she/he loses, and the more they hallucinate. Amnesia refuses to allow the player to avoid coming in contact with death. To be honest, I’m pretty surprised that Charly Mottet considers this a game to take a break from more violent video games for, considering the powerless stance it puts the player in — but in a sense it is sort of illuminating.
As I stated before, roaming a space with a gun is different than roaming a space without one. Amnesia places the player in a realm of vulnerability given their lack of weapon. The computer is always stronger, you are always running or hiding. As James alluded to in a comment on my previous post, weapons in games serve as examples of affect management. The second you are looking out of the eyes of someone with a gun in their hand, you are aware that you are going to be fighting with that gun to continue to look from those eyes. The weapon is both a symbol of power and risk within successful games. If the enemies are extinguished too easily, the gameplay in an intensely linked form, will not last. I learned this when I was young and playing Turok on Nintendo 64. My dad would put the cheats in for me and I would blast dinosaurs and pixel-men off of the face of whatever strange planet Turok inhabited, until it became boring.
God-mode or invincibility allows for all of the affective motion without any of the risk of losing that affective motion. Is rendered space not made more affective by placing fear and power relations within it? My Turok anecdote might seem dated, but even as a child exploring the levels only served to occupy me for so long if there weren’t any consequences. My friends and I always used to put in weapon cheats for the Grand Theft Auto games, but that was always just to gather more and more heat (police, army, fbi), seeing how long we could suspend death.
***When the media portrays violent video games as bad, I think the god-mode scenario is the one they rely on. Violence becomes synonymous with extinguishing consequences from the player in that regard- or- the player of violent video games is always playing a game that puts them in an all-powerful position that only has them erasing lives from existence with little else.***
Back to Amnesia. Even though the game is not violent in the normal sense (because the character is not dishing it out), it is violent in regards to the player having violence dealt to them. This seems to be one of the only alternatives to having an effective/affective rich game without having the player dishing out digital-murder. When the player is in god-mode, the game is boring, but when the player is facing a computer that acts like it is in god-mode, it becomes enthralling once again.
To bring film back into the mix, Amnesia uses first-person perspective in order to explore the same thing that many point-of-view/found footage horror movies do. Although the Paranormal Activity films often use shots that have us looking in a fixed way on the characters sleeping, subjective shot sequences of characters roaming around their homes are also abundant. It is the interplay of the two that gives these films their affect. By combining the subjective exploration shots (which can never reach games’ level of exploration) with the third-person still camera shots, we fear for the bodies of the characters not because we like them, but because we have also looked through them.
My next post is going to be a wrap-up post/lite death of this project. It will not be the end, the loop will remain, it will just take a few slugs and wait for me to respawn.
