Unreliable Narrator

Exploring stories in games and the art of telling tales

Sam Barlow explores ways to preserve or break immersion

Death. The undiscovered country from which no visitor returns. Unless you’ve played a videogame, in which case you will have returned plenty. I was thinking about which game mechanics stood out over the past year and the one that had lodged in my head was how Amnesia: Rebirth tackles player death. Player death is a tricky thing in all cases but is perhaps most tricky in horror games, a genre whose primary concern is mortality.

Telling a story is first and foremost about making an audience believe in some fictional things. The stakes are what we use to hack our body’s survival mechanisms (especially ‘the imagination’) into caring. The threat of death is the most primal of all threats, and if we get the imagination thinking that we’re in a lifeor-death situation, it tries really hard to get the rest of the brain on board. This apparent jeopardy is what makes horror games so immersive. So you’d be forgiven for thinking that horror game protagonists die most often. In reality, most horror games are designed to avoid killing the player because actually dying is a recipe for puncturing their immersion.

In his book Film And Suspense, Altan Löker suggests some events should be avoided because they break the connection between viewer and protagonist. Seeing a protagonist have their head chopped off, our body is likely to reject this event if we are in possession of a head in reality. A viewer may desire to have sex with a character through the proxy of the protagonist, driving suspension of disbelief. But the point where a fictional character orgasms highlights the disparity between the viewer and the proxy. Better, Löker advises, to brush up against the absolute moment but turn back. So the most erotic moment might be in a film noir where the femme fatale begins a striptease and consummation is close, but is interrupted when her violent husband returns and the protagonist must hide or flee. Desires can be used to stall each other.

Returning to Amnesia: Rebirth, we see that Frictional has learned this lesson. In Rebirth the player can never ‘die’. Instead, upon approaching death, the protagonist is taken over by a bestial part of themselves and we see flashes of Monster POV as they rush around the level. We then regain full consciousness – sometimes in a new area, or an out-of-reach cubby hole accessed via monstrous athleticism. It’s like waking up from a drunken bender with a hazy memory. The game will use this device to skip encounters or problems that are impeding a struggling player. The shock of loss-of-agency as our character takes on a life of their own mirrors the protagonist’s own emotions. Our desire to not lose control has distracted us from our desire not to die. There is no explicit discontinuity. It smooths out the game balance and ties into the story of a character who is terrified of losing their identity to the beast within. Compare that with Resident Evil 4, an acknowledged masterpiece. The early chainsaw opponent is terrifying; it chases us around the village, the enhanced vertically of the game’s space only increasing the intensity of our flight instinct. But should we get caught, we’re treated to an animation in which the chainsaw decapitates our protagonist. In this instant we are no longer sharing Leon’s shoes, we become spectators with fully intact heads. We reload and rejoin the game as an alternate-universe Leon who might not die, a new fork in the path. It will take some time to suspend our disbelief back to where we were.

A game, then, should be precise in avoiding these physical absolutes – not just to avoid frustration, but to preserve the suspension of disbelief. Games should be aware of the pure desires they are piggybacking to create immersion and then precisely avoid hitting the absolute moments that will puncture it. Another recent mechanical example is Inkle’s Pendragon. A game built around the premise of ‘what if chess pawns could talk?’ clearly has to grapple with death. There’s less direct immersion here but the game is still interested in preserving continuity after failure (the notion of ‘interesting failure’ is key to Inkle’s approach to narrative). Should a character come close to death, the game gives their ally a burst of desperate rage with which they can clear the board of enemies. It’s dramatic, it adds depth to the character relationships, and it keeps the story going.

So, the next time a game maker is about to animate a gory death animation, they should consider how they are spending their budget. They might redirect efforts toward mechanics that allow the game’s precarious juggling act to continue, rather than dropping their beautifully rendered balls on the floor.

Most horror games avoid killing the player because actually dying is a recipe for puncturing their immersion