Unreliable Narrator

Exploring stories in games and the art of telling tales

Sam Barlow on game loops as perfected by Alfred ed Hitchcock

My party trick used to be explaining at length why film director Alfred Hitchcock was the world’s first great game designer. Since 2020 cancelled all the parties, shall we do it here instead? Grab a cocktail and settle in.

Have you seen The Birds? It has a lot to teach us about game design and story. How so? Stories live in the minds of their audience. The story is: what the audience thinks is happening now, what they desire to happen next, the action they formulate to act on that desire and the consequences of that action. Games exemplify this loop. A player has information, has desires and then acts on both – and the game responds. Let’s look at how The Birds works this loop.

The sales pitch for The Birds: come watch people be attacked by birds! This is the promised spectacle that gets the audience in the door. They sit down and the movie starts. And for the next 25 minutes, Hitchcock shows a lot of birds but not a single bird attack. He deliberately frustrates the audience by withholding exactly what they came to see. The longer they go without seeing it, the more they want it. They desire bird carnage. How does Hitchcock focus this fermenting desire? With his protagonist.

Let’s rewind to the start and meet her, one Melanie Daniels. WASP-y as heck with pearls and her hair up and lacquered to the nth degree. She walks with the purposefulness of someone used to never being denied entry and strides into a pet store (many birds, zero attacking). She is brusque with the owner and then is drawn into pranking a handsome man (“Mitch”, solid.) She pretends to be a clerk but is thrown off by his superior bird knowledge. In some movies this would be flirty and fun but here it’s about Melanie’s stubbornness. She persists with her pretence because she doesn’t want to concede to him. After she releases a bird and causes a little chaos, Mitch reveals that he knows exactly who she is: an infamous socialite who is known for pranks at others’ expense. She hates being put in her place and so concocts an elaborate prank to pursue him out to Bodega Bay and have the last word with this man she barely knows.

The audience dislikes their protagonist. Sure, she’s not done anything evil, but she has shown herself to be arrogant, privileged and reckless. So what’s Hitch up to here? Well, the audience wants two things: they’re waiting for those bird attacks; and they want this trust fund prankster to get her comeuppance. Like two streams that meet to form a river, those two desires merge. Dammit Hitch, when are those birds gonna attack and rattle this smug proto-Paris Hilton? Twenty-five minutes in,

Hitchcock springs his trap. Melanie has succeeded in her prank and is escaping across the bay in a boat when a lone gull swoops down and attacks. There’s no spectacle, just a single gull. It hits her head, messes up her hair and leaves a small cut on her forehead. Instantly Melanie Daniels is upset. She’s a human being who’s hurt. We got what we wanted – the bird attacked proto-Paris – but we’re not sure we wanted this. We willed it, it happened, but now we feel bad. (You might note that when it attacked, the gull was filmed thrown down from our POV away from the camera as if we threw it at her). We feel guilt. We repress that a little. And when you repress guilt, freefloating anxiety arises. This is, of course, a boon for the director of a horror movie because it will attach itself to whatever is around. It will make the fictional events of the movie more real, more scary. For the rest of the movie we’re emotionally connected to the character because of this moment.

In a game, when we give players an analogue stick to control the actions of the protagonist, we’re giving them a way to express their desires. In The Birds, the audience is willingly pushing an invisible analogue stick to send Melanie Daniels into the bird attack. Their feelings towards her for the rest of the movie are tied up with their complicity in that first attack. An emotional charge binds them. Most games treat the player character as a tool to act out the player’s desires on the world rather than as the object of them. In doing so they scatter this emotional charge outwards, rather than concentrating it and fixing it on the player character. Hitchcock knew that we are not literally the player character and so need more than an analogue stick to connect them to us. In The Birds, guilt was the means to this end, not the end in itself. The host is giving me that look and your cocktail glass is empty so I will finish here, but let’s talk later? I have a bit about Psycho and videogame toilets that you’ll love.

In a game, when we give players control of the protagonist, we’re giving them a way to express their desires