Unreliable Narrator

Exploring stories in games and the art of telling tales

Sam Barlow’s got the look – but what can a player’s gaze do?

Think about the act of looking. Videogames are a visual medium and, for sighted players at least, revolve primarily around looking at things. We have given over the right analogue stick on the standard game controller to looking. Yet, despite this, very few games have gamified the act of looking. Sure, some have weaponised the gaze: the firstperson shooter adds a reticule to make our attention deadly. But take the gun and trigger away and our eyes become impotent again. A game story is told through what we see and what we do in response, and yet when it comes to telling stories in games we like to grab the player’s eyes and force them to look at things. On my list of the most disgusting trends in modern games is the ‘press X to look at’ mechanic. We allow players to opt in to having their eyes grabbed, in games in which they are supposed to have control over the camera – where they have a stick for it!

In the real world a lot of money is being spent on technology to track the eyes of TV watchers, of pedestrians, of anyone looking at their phones. Marketeers know that what we look at reveals more about us than what we do or say. In games we don’t need to track eyes because the player is constantly spooling data telling us where they want to look. Still, the majority of triggering of scripted events in games is driven by the player crossing an invisible tripwire rather than by looking someplace. If you want to be in sync with your player’s attention, the latter can be powerful. In Silent Hill: Shattered Memories my team often triggered events to occur when the player was looking in the right place and characters would sometimes notice if players were (or weren’t) paying attention to them. Rather than have a game feel like a mechanical ghost house, reacting to the extremities of our virtual bodies, we can make them feel like they are reading your mind. Shattered Memories also weaponised the player’s gaze – but not like a firstperson shooter. It took note of what the player was looking at and used it to populate its profiling data, then used this to tweak the world and story to react to their behaviour. Schrödinger taught us that looking at something is not a neutral act – it changes reality.

When we dipped our toes into the idea of the gameplay gaze, we took inspiration from earlier masterpieces. The Zelda games have some memorable moments when our gaze triggers events: in Ocarina Of Time, the player enters an empty cave and eventually decides to look around using the free look mode; when their eyes alight on a strange object on the cave roof, the game registers this and the shape blinks and reveals itself to be the eye of a giant spider boss! The trick is repeated in

Wind Waker when they look around with a telescope in the game’s opening: they spy on the island postman, see him react with fear to something off camera, then tilt up to follow his gaze and see a giant bird monster! This moment is illustrative of how games are comfortable with making gaze actionable when there is a viewing tool attached.

Pokémon Snap, Project Zero and the recent

Umurangi Generation are examples where the use of an in-game camera allows for more specific gaze gameplay. Suda 51’s messy trash classic Michigan is a whole game where you play a TV cameraperson. The game tracks what you look at and ranks you in three categories: ‘suspense’, ‘immoral’ and ‘erotic’ (also how De Palma movies are filed in my local library). These Camera Games do interesting things but is their concept that different from attaching a gun to make looking count? Perhaps not. Feeling that our gaze matters is a big part of interaction on a human level. Looking is intuitive and personal, implicit, but when we hold up a camera it becomes conscious and explicit.

Reaching for more instructive examples, I look to a much earlier game, ironically one that is entirely text-based. In Infocom’s A

Mind Forever Voyaging, the player takes the role of an AI inside a simulation which must perform everyday activities. Its gaze is recorded by scientists so they can analyse life in a predicted future America. It starts off easy enough, giving them a list of things they need to experience. But as it opens up, the player is left to their devices and starts to see things of their own volition. They report back to the scientists to alert them to worrying trends, like a citizen journalist with built-in Google Glass. It is a marvellous setup – the player is passive outside of their ability to witness events. It turns the act of looking into a powerful action and suggests that the eye is mightier than the sword.

On my list of the most disgusting trends in modern games is the ‘press X to look at’ mechanic

Sam Barlow is the founder of NYC-based Drowning A Mermaid Productions. He can be found on Twitter at @mrsambarlow