computer game

Sam Barlow’s 2015 computer game Her Story is barely a game. The interface is an obsolete police database stocked with seven videotaped interviews of a woman accused of a crime, broken up into clips of between ten and ninety seconds. The game is played by typing in words to search through the clips, and the database returns only the first five videos, chronologically, that contain the query. The player pieces together the mystery at the heart of the game in whatever order they choose – the primary cue that the game provides is an initial search term, “MURDER,” – and the game is ‘over’ only when the player decides they have seen enough. As they play, the game’s interface design, along with its thematic focus on liminal and reflective surfaces, incorporates the player into a system of cognitive apparatuses. Critical responses to Sam Barlow’s 2015 video game Her Story were rapturous. The Washington Post called it “the best the medium has to offer;” Rock Paper Shotgun said it “might be the best FMV game ever made;” and in their article proclaiming it the best game of 2015, Polygon’s Colin Campbell wrote “I don't think you will 'read' a better mystery novel this year.” The comparison to a novel is particularly interesting, because the game is in large part shaped by an absent text: the “digitally stenographed” transcript through which the player searches is never directly accessible, and is instead explorable only through the manipulation of video clips whose quality has been artistically degraded through lossy VHS transcoding. The transcript’s absence is compensated for by another text: the “three A4 pages of notes” that Rock Paper Shotgun’s reviewer describes handwriting himself over the course of his playthrough – an experience I shared. This presentation will trace out these two peripheral texts in Her Story – the paper notepad and the inaccessible transcript through which the user searches – alongside an examination of the game’s interface design and thematic concern with mirrors, windows, and other real-life interfaces, to explore how the game imbricates the reader into what N. Katherine Hayles calls a “cognitive assemblage” with itself as database and as text. This experientially unusual mode of ‘reading’ will be compared with traditional works of paper detective fiction, with a focus on how Charles Rzepka’s notion of the “puzzle-element” of the genre constructs a reading subject that is similarly imbricated with their text. I will explore the modes of subjectivity that both digital and virtual styles of ‘reading’ engender, with a particular focus on how the peripheral texts and the interface of Her Story blur the division between the player and the character - pictured only as a ghostly silhouette in the virtually simulated glare of a CRT monitor - as whom they play. Rather than recapitulating the argument that IF provides deeper immersion than traditional fiction, however, this presentation will explore how both media immerse their readers into a system of cognitive technologies, and what kind of consciousness that system might have.

In Howling Dogs, Porpentine presents us with a bleak picture of existence. The player character lives in a cell-like environment. The only escape on offer is a virtual reality system that places the player in variety of dark fantasy environments. As Porpentine writes, the system offers “false catharsis in the form of these victories–but at the end of the day you’re still in the black room” (Heartscape and Short, 2012). Porpentine weaves the biological, the mundane, and the drudgery of ordinary life into the surreal unfolding of her often-painful hypertext fantasia. When there is a bed it is there for you to sleep in. In Howling Dogs, you need to eat by getting a nutrition bar that varies only slightly in its flavor in successive meals, and you need to drink before each session with your virtual reality device. Porpentine describes the work as a metaphor for a situation of many living as “refugees in their own country,” destitute and “less and less capable of caring about yourself,” able to afford only the bare minimum: “Terrible food and some kind of glowing screen, and when you look away from the screen, you’re still in the same place.” 

The fantasies offered by the VR system are hardly escapist in the sense that they focus on painful episodes and uneasy subject positions. In one of the VR episodes, the player character is enlisted to strangle an abusive partner. In another she is cast into the role of Joan of Arc in the last moments before she is burned alive. Porpentine’s prose is taut, sharp, precise, and visceral. She uses the second person in a similar way to most interactive fiction, but in Porpentine’s stories, the “you” often sees the world from a precarious position, as some kind of moral or physical violence often lurks on the immanent horizon. When violence takes place, it is not the easily dismissed cartoon carnage of video games. In one scene in Howling Dogs, the player character is described as “sopping with blood, shouting, bellowing, ramming your weapon through rib cages, twisting, shredding hearts into flimsy strips that hang from chest-holes like tinsel wigs.” The text of the link that follows is “You bring back a couple fingers for your bone-sparrow to nibble on.” It is not enough to simply describe the player character vanquishing an opponent: the player participates instead in killing as psychosis, playing a murderer who not only throws herself into surreal acts of butchery, but also collects flesh trophies to bring back as snacks for her creepy familiar. 

(Source: Scott Rettberg, Electronic Literature)

In Their Angelic Understanding (2013) the player character lives in fear as the enemy of angels, whose visitations are not heavenly but tortuous violations. She has been scarred and wounded by an angel, and no one came to her aid. She is unconsoled, deeply conflicted, feeling somehow complicit in her own violation: “… I finally woke up, stupid stupid stupid, no one will save you, no one cares./ No one cares when an angel touches you. / I realized what I had to do./ I had to sacrifice my desire to be thought of as a good person.” She lights off on a surreal journey to confront those who have hurt her. At one point she has to clean the streets of amputated hands that fall ceaselessly from the sky, covering every surface. She has to play a cruel game of endurance in which she and her opponent must clutch red vampire tiles that cut their flesh and suck blood from their hands. The writing is suffused with a sense of displacement that seems related to a sense of being born in the wrong body, such as “i keep my hands in my lap where i can see them/ and the other moms will never know/ how much I want to rip their wombs out/ and fix my big horrible problem.”

(Source: Electronic Literature by Scott Rettberg)

One of the first works of interactive fiction made by a female designer, La femme qui ne supportait pas les ordinateurs is an examination of sexual harassments in cyberculture. The game, written by Chine Lanzmann and coded by Jean-Louis Le Breton, allows the player to impersonate a woman who has to face numerous seducers. Interestingly, one of the sexual predators is a computer. The game is stylized upon a chat on Minitel, where the player is asked several questions. She can type only two answers: "yes" or "no", which influence the outcome of the game. However, the more the player becomes involved in the simulated chat, the lesser the chance to avoid one of the six endings, all of them negative.

This poetic Internet artwork makes a visceral connection between the documentation of frags in Counter-Strike multiplayer servers and the military actions documented in the Wikileaks Afghan War Diary database. As it connects the fake videogame death to military actions that usually resulted in the loss of one or many real human lives, it performs Google Earth searches to display the location of these actions. By presenting three events and locations at a time, it allows for the visuals to load and creates a time buffer to allow us to focus our attention on a particular location for longer than the few seconds between frags allow. And since we are unable to control anything in this piece, except the choice of server at the beginning, we become powerless spectators of violence made abstract through terse language and eerie landscapes devoid of human beings. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)