Note: This was originally published in 2022 in Heterotopias 009, which “explores the experience of wielding power in virtual spaces”. Heterotopias was a fantastic publication, and while it is no longer active, you can still very much purchase and support its run (and I strongly recommend doing so!) either through itch.io, or in a beautifully-designed physical format via Lost in Cult.

Something is amiss on the island of Auroa. Across the fields and forests stretch the appendages of strange instruments, whispering amongst one another. The skies are abuzz with the thin hum of passing drones. There is something on the wind, just below the rush of the leaves in the trees: a vague, impenetrable din, reverberating and tumbling through the fjords and tundras and marshes, the sound of something gone wrong, of a process correcting itself. All across the land, signs and premonitions have begun to pop up, scrawled across walls and odd monuments of mechanical rubble: “WE ARE SUMMONING THE DEVIL”.

Ghost Recon: Breakpoint is a strange, strange game. To call it “haunted” might feel like a now-trite, over-applied critical cliché, but I struggle to think of any other words that more succinctly and immediately capture its uniquely intense sense of dispossession, especially for a project of its size. Doomed on arrival by an overwhelmingly negative initial reception, and plagued by a litany of mind-bogglingly weird design decisions that seem outright contradictory when taken holistically, it is a work which seems fundamentally at war with itself, trapped between dual fictions and legacies: on one hand, the AAA, multi-million-dollar, Clancy-of-franchise-bestsellers banner which lends it its namesake and affords it its scale of both vision and execution, but which it never seems to be quite willing to aspire towards, let alone embrace with the kind of reverent zeal all works on such a scale both demand, and command; and on the other, its far weirder, Clancy-as-doomsday-preacher sprawl of Cold War geo-anxiety and martial nihilism, towards which it reaches and occasionally even brushes against, but which it is condemned by its very scale to never reach.

This tension, however willingly or consciously, underlies the entire premise of the game–a dream of transcendence, doomed from the start by the very legacies and apparatus which enabled that dream at all. It is tempting to look at it and lament what could have been, what should have been, or, perhaps most realistically, what might have been — a flagship open-world tactical shooter for consoles, perhaps, or a uniquely survival-focused milsim title poised against the tactical hyper-competence of its genre; or at the very least, the world’s greatest off-brand Splinter Cell LARPing opportunity. But what it is now, I believe, is in fact the most honest and interesting version of it: a muddy, strange work, hopelessly incomplete and sunken by the weight of its own ambitions. And yet, it is in this very incompleteness that I believe it indirectly achieves the most competent articulation of the cycle of triumphant despair fundamentally underlying the appeal behind games of its nature — the dream of the mythical eternal battlefield, utterly untethered from human cause or effect, governed solely by the mute mechanical pleasure of martial logic; and the fleshly animal bodies and passions which conjured it into existence, and decorate its sunken shores.

One arrives on Auroa by way of what can only be described as ‘catastrophic tactical clusterfuck’. Deployed to the archipelago as part of a 32-person clandestine mission to (notionally) investigate the sinking of an American cargo ship off its coast, the player is (re-)introduced to Ghost Recon’s latest poster soldier “Nomad”, reprising their role from 2017’s Wildlands as nonchalant DoD-sponsored hitman and one-man state-destabiliser. Things invariably, immediately ‘go south’, in a manner of speaking: the entire platoon is instantly ambushed upon arrival by a swarm of insect-like microdrones, swiftly reducing the total functional personnel count of the mission to a single limping, lumbering, pathetically under-equipped Nomad.

In a remarkably strange but bold design decision, especially for a large-budget open-world title, Auroa is introduced to us not as a grand and welcoming environment to explore but as a muddy, bloody place, a dim and claustrophobic bog with few roads or meaningful markers. The first hour of the game is almost entirely contained within this unflattering environs, as the player slogs through, and literally buries themselves, in foul mud and tepid water in order to both hunt and evade enemy forces.

This is abandoned land, in both composition and history: a place where the earth is fighting a losing war of attrition against the sea, which has risen and pulled away with it entire chunks of what was once fertile country, rendering the coast into a cluster of loose mud patches and gullies. We’ll later learn that these salt marshes and swamps serve as something of a temporary home to one portion of the island’s security forces–the aptly-named international private military contractor Sentinel Corp–who huddle in the crumbling, moss-covered derelicts of Cold War bunkers and observation posts, relics of the island’s history as an extended landing strip for American forces against Japanese and Soviet interests in WWII. One can come across entire homesteads and military bases which have been pulled into the black mud, along with many, many kinds of wreckages: vehicles, aerials, downed military aircraft, satellite installations, ancient burial sites, fresh corpses. One of these provinces carries a particularly apt name: Sinking Country.

This tension–between the inevitability of natural forces and the greater ambitions of human ones–underlies the entire realised geography of Auroa. Unlike the fictionalised Bolivia of 2017’s Wildlands, whose vast, open sightlines and sweeping vistas invite a feeling of exploration and even adventure, Auroa seems to be a place almost anathema to human navigation. Dense mountain ranges and forests render both on-foot and vehicular traversal a tedious and often frustrating exercise in geometric exploitation. The clarity of vistas become easily lost in directionless underbrush and overhead coverage. Roads are swallowed up by weeds and waterways, and major motorways–of which there are two conspicuously well-paved and -maintained ones, which naturally link only the most major industrial and commercial provinces–are filled with hostile security checkpoints and enemy patrols. And in a somewhat-controversial change of pace, road-based GPS navigation–a feature inWildlands, itself a bit of a strange concession since much of that game consisted of flying down similarly-unmarked back-country dirt roads on motorbikes–has been completely removed, forcing the player to navigate solely through a combination of landmarks and an abstract topographic map.

This intentional disruption of clarity is carried over into the game’s mechanical approach as well. Nomad, who inWildlands was a superhumanly-spry and hardy omni-athlete who could effortlessly bound up and over and down cliffs and mountain ranges and jungles and valleys with ease, is now a defined physical presence in the world: grunting and panting with effort, easily fatigued, weighed down with a human inertia and sense of balance that even causes them to trip at times–a quietly radical innovation in the long-standing, ongoing video game tradition of attempting to “accurately” represent the “authentic” “tactical” experience, finally capturing in full glory the oft-overlooked yet frighteningly common danger of catching one’s toe on a loose stone or in a deceptively deep puddle and tumbling magnificently, head over ass in full battle rattle, down ravines and sand bluffs and even flights of stairs.

These features were later significantly toned down through a series of launch-week updates as an unfortunate concession to player complaints, many of which attempted to counter that a game about a “tactical experience” should not feature “clunky” or “sluggish” or “unresponsive” movement mechanics that “actively hinder the player experience”. But this is, in fact, the very fundamental friction that always underlies every logistical and tactical decision that prevents even the best-laid plans from consistently being executed at 100% efficiency: that we are not well-oiled machines, but fragile, flimsy, physical human bodies, constrained by fragile, flimsy, physical human limitations and needs and desires. To fail to account for this element is, at best, to delude oneself with a fantasy of performance, divorced from the necessary inefficiency of animal bodies.

Elsewhere on Auroa, QRF units piss away their afternoons performing a litany of mind-numbing “inspections” and “observations” from the decaying ruins of an old Spanish fort, which only a handful of centuries earlier housed their spiritual predecessors in the form of the conquistadorial expeditionary forces, driven to the outer rims of the island by indigenous resistance movements and impenetrable jungle.

Along the western cliffs, mineral extraction facilities and aquaponic start-ups sit a stone’s throw away from 19th-century gold mines and fishing hamlets, whose shores are still dotted with the skeletal remains of clubbed seals and beached whales. Deep within the caves, amongst phosphorescent blooms and sulphur deposits, sit carved effigies of animal gods, whose names and meanings have long since been lost to time, but whose presences still seem to linger across the island with a ghostly animistic hue. There is a sense of profound tragedy at work here, an unspoken, unseen violence which can only outdo, never undo itself: the dream of new land, of gold, of wealth, of dominance, of liberation, always meeting the same end.

Although the present residents of the island are concentrated in the sun-soaked and temperate meadowlands of the south, where flights from Australia conveniently do not pass over the less presentable regions of the island, the itinerant, utilitarian traces of their day-to-day existences can be encountered all across the map, in nearly every environs, in the form of striking modular buildings, conspicuously-clean and almost alien in their settings. The game’s asset re-use works to great advantage here: there is little to differentiate a bedroom from a laboratory from an observation post, save the arrangement of the minimum furnishings contained within. These are not meant to be permanent habitations, but temporary installations, designed in a lab and assembled on the go to accommodate the animal inconveniences of the supply chain at its weakest and most inefficient points.

The grand project of “AI research” that lies at the heart of the game’s plot–much of it involving ambiguously-designated “testing zones” and “restricted areas” and “proving grounds”–takes place in the depths of dim rainforests and rolling valleys cordoned off by ocean or monolithic security gates respectively, far away from human infrastructure and insulated from overhead observation by dense foliage. There are only a handful of major inhabitations that exist in the game, the largest being, apropos to the naïve techno-libertarian bent of the Skell corporation whose major enterprises now dominate the island, the crudely-named “Liberty City” in the south. The others are all false facades, whose high-rises and storefronts are mere mock-ups, used to train autonomous drones in preparation for the imminent age of urban warfighting.

Drones wander the countryside and drift through canyon passes, their harsh red eyes glimmering in the darkness as they rumble and buzz and thunder along like half-realised animals. A number of them, as one can learn from R&D documents, have been repurposed and redesigned from civilian counterparts as autonomous pollinators and search-and-rescue vehicles and delivery systems. We learn their new names, given to them during the refactoring process to signify their new purposes: Incubus, Aamon, Azrael, Stolas, Malphas, Legion. These are the names of mythological demons, used both in the process of evocation, and to spread fear amongst those one turns them against. Traditionally, a demon, by its nature, is constrained by the will–and conscience–of its master; but the more frequently they are conjured, or the dirtier the deed in which they are to assist, the more porous the line between summoner and summoned grows.

Above the snow-swept tundras and lush meadowlands rise strange, angular towers, like gun barrels aimed towards the skies. Their purpose initially is unclear, but if one lingers for long enough in their presence, they will encounter a startling phenomenon: a rumbling begins deep within the ground, which rapidly crescendos into a roaring buzz as the sleek profiles of the monuments suddenly erupt and flare like gills, releasing a massive swarm of insect-like drones into the sky.

Nomad will later learn that these swarms are the same ones that are responsible for taking out not just the Blackhawks the Ghosts arrived in at the start of the game, but all unknown entities and vehicles discovered attempting to both enter and exit the island. There is a strong implication by the end of Breakpoint that–in part due to Nomad’s very efforts to “liberate” the island and return it to American control–this quarantine has evolved beyond the scope of human sanction, with the AI master controller responsible for enforcing it–originally having been created to autonomously oversee, coordinate, and improve the operational efficiency of its many subsystems, whose sheer breadth of activities and calculations far exceed the capabilities of any reasonable attempt at human observation–itself having developed a “will” within its programming that has become untethered from its original end as a human utility, becoming something closer instead to the eerie, incomprehensible silence of animal will.

How this happens, of course, or even what is happening at all, remains unresolved, both for the audience and the characters alike. The game seems to strongly imply that the origins of this seemingly-novel ‘consciousness’ are, at least notionally, ‘natural’: in an ending montage, a strange, swirling formation of these drones is initially misidentified as an unnatural flock of birds, and later, Nomad is tasked with tracking down an entomologist, whose research on apine behaviour is believed to have been used to build a newer, deadlier iteration of the swarm technology. There is a subdued, almost-folkish strand of animistic ambience which runs through the quieter and stranger elements of the game, hidden away in the crags and crevices of its landscape and UI alike — indirect parallels drawn between the mechanical offspring of Skell’s Faustian optimism, and the unknown animal-like gods of the island’s oldest inhabitants, whose relics and totems still stand here and there, gazing over the churning waters at wind farms, and squatting in the trickling darkness of subterranean caverns, amidst the tumorous bloom of sulphur crystals.

Ultimately though, Breakpoint, for better or worse, largely avoids the temptation of overstepping its casual flirtations with the realm of science fiction, and dodges further speculation about such philosophically fraught questions as the potential ‘sentience’ of this new intelligence, or the delineations between human and nonhuman ontologies. Instead, it chooses (probably wisely) to restrain its modes and ends of inquiry firmly within the all-too-familiar and remarkably unremarkable realm of boots-on-the-ground, knives-in-throats, bullets-in-flesh manoeuvring: the soldier’s dream of dream of tactics, liberated from the political apparatus.

This is at once Breakpoint’s greatest success, and also the very element of its identity which thoroughly frustrates conventional readings. To attempt to read it as an articulation of one particular argument or the other–about ‘the ethical risks of autonomous AI’, or ‘the battlefield of the future’, or whatever–is fruitless, as the game has little apparent interest in any of these things: its central plot so abstract, its main actors such caricatures of their real-world analogues, its visions of its primary themes so hypothetical and divorced from any traditional understanding of either reality, or its own genre, as to be functionally illegible. It is not a work about a conflict, in the sense of an ideological or political will, but instead, about conflict itself, as act and action, liberated from the smallness of human ambition, and the necessary vanity of meaning-making.

This is, of course, a story you’ve already heard before, hundreds of times, about men with guns slipping and crawling and sinking into the mud, tearing at each other’s bodies and blowing each other to pieces. Like with nearly all of these stories, the “why” and “how” are barely relevant, and quickly dissolve into the fugue of battle, overwhelmed by the mute, dumb, eternal pleasure of sending lead down-range, and dropping tangos. All that remains, after all the fumbling grasps at ‘transcendence’ and ‘liberty’ and ‘transhumanism’ and ‘justice’ and ‘peace’, is the insensate noise of bodies and machines in motion, collapsing in meadows exploding with wildflowers and mortar shells, an eternal dance beneath the pale moonlight.

The body, as it is said, keeps the score for that which the mind cannot bear. Vanity of vanities. Make no mistake, boys: this is our final mission. We will die upon this cursed soil. We will roam this earth as ghosts. By tomorrow, they will have forgotten us. They will have expunged our names from the official records. They will have built a shopping mall over our unmarked graves. They will have excavated our forts and last stands into parking lots and observation posts. By winter, new ships will settle on these shores: more bodies will join ours in waiting. Mangroves will spring forth from this charnel clay. In ten years, our bones will crumble into the fetid peat and ferns will smother our eyes. In ten thousand years, our rifles will have rusted into relics, our swords sunken into the sand and become like skeletons smudged into the sediment. In ten million years, we will be dug up again as black gold, that ancient and dormant loam, entangled with the roots of the earth. By then, history will have ended. We will be purified and cleansed by flame and filtration. A new war will be dreamt of, a new justice, a new peace, a new frontier. We will spill forth and seep into the cracks of all things, the life-blood of a new modernity, once and future. We are asleep in the earth, but soon, we will be arisen. We will summon the devils we named. We will rise into the air and settle like a smog along the horizon. We will carve twin vapour trails into the skies above the bay. Our gaze will sweep across the face of the earth. Our eyes will watch the stars and the seas and our hands will carve trenches in the earth to swallow up young corpses. Our spirit will move across the face of the waters and pluck birds from the air and sink the ships gathered at our shores. The future is ancient. The past is now. All is vanity. And the waters will rise. The coasts will recede. Our children will usurp us. The earth will devour us. Our hands will be turned against us. The sea will claim everything. The sea will reclaim everything.

Introduction

Hi, my name is Spencer. I’m an American video game designer and developer based in New Jersey, and represented through Sutemi Productions. I am currently working on the investigative horror game My Work Is Not Yet Done, which will be published by the boutique indie (un)publisher Raw Fury.

This write-up will go over the process of pitching the game to Raw Fury, including the state the game was in prior to submitting the pitch, the contents of the pitch itself, and some personal thoughts on the process as a whole, as well as in regards to common advice surrounding the broader topic of “how to pitch a game”.

The first section, “The Premise”, is a presentation of why I’m writing this and what I hope to accomplish in doing so. More nakedly, it’s an articulation of my personal beliefs surrounding what the pitch process actually is, and how one should orient themselves to and around it. It’s the closest this write-up will come to offering any kind of “advice” of any sort; although it’s not really necessary for the ultimate sake of this piece and I confess I mostly am including it out of some likely misguided sense of self-indulgence.

The second section, “The Materials”, is likely what you’re here for. It is a concrete presentation of the pitch submission, the pitch email, my playable submission, and some thoughts on all of those.

As per my publisher’s request, I am obliged to include a link to the game’s Steam store page, and to encourage you, if you are so inclined, to wishlist and eventually purchase the game. Thank you for your time and interest.

More information about the game is available here.

Thank you for your time and patience.

The Premise

One of the most enduring and popular questions amongst independent game developers is how to successfully pitch one’s game to a prospective publisher. There already exists a pretty substantial amount of advice out there, from a wide variety of people coming from a wide variety of backgrounds and approaches, each seeking to answer this question. As with most advice, some of it is broadly useful and applicable, but — and let’s just be perfectly honest with ourselves here — the bulk of it isn’t.

I reckon that the biggest “problem” (if one could even call it that) underlying the general uselessness of most advice in this sense rests in the inherently paradoxical nature of how we relate to and make sense of specificity in our learning experiences. People love concrete, specific details: this much is certain. But the problem with this in relation to certain ideas of “success”, especially when defined in such a limited capacity as a rather competitive selection and vetting process, is that such “success” is by its very nature a deeply idiosyncratic — and thus, practically irreproducible — thing.

The natural counter-argument to this is to bring up the relative effectiveness of research-driven speculation. However persuasive this may seem though— especially nowadays, where there are entire industries dedicated to organising, storing, and making sense of the already-unfathomable quantities of data ripe for all manners of exploitation— I reject the relevance of this framing for the scope of this write-up. I’m neither a marketing strategist nor a business analyst; and anyways, if you’re looking for advice on how to approach this topic from that lens, in a manner where you can neatly corroborate conclusions from data-sets and arrive at hypotheses through coefficients, there’s no shortage of people out there who have attempted such (in my opinion, fruitless) experiments and offered their perspectives.

I believe that the process of pitching is, first and foremost, a philosophical endeavour, which is how I will approach it in this write-up, and how I approached it when I was in the midst of the process myself. With that in mind, I caution that you do not attempt to derive or emulate any specific concrete strategies from this particular example; but rather, use it as a point of introspection in regards to your own work, if and where applicable.

My intent with this write-up then, as follows, is not to provide any kind of specific advice in itself, but instead, to interrogate through demonstration the inherently limited nature of existing advice on this topic by providing a living example of a project pitch that thoroughly runs counter to a variety of traditional assumptions about how to properly pitch a game, but which was still able to succeed at a high level, not in spite of its departures from convention but precisely because of them.

At the same time, I don’t intend for this to be any kind of articulation for a “game plan” either, or some kind of argument for an “either/or” approach specifically when it comes to determining the “best approach” for pitching one’s work. I took this particular approach precisely because the traditional approach to pitching didn’t and won’t work for me, based on my understanding of my work and my priorities and inclinations as a creator. But that doesn’t mean it categorically won’t work for others: and, as plenty more traditional examples will very clearly demonstrate, it works perfectly well for a whole lot more people than it fails.

Like I said — I’m not here looking specifically to prove anyone, or any philosophy “wrong”; but rather, to offer what hopefully might be a clearer and more concrete articulation for the oft-stated, but just as often poorly-framed belief that there is no “right” way of going about things. I largely much agree with this sentiment, although I also think that, in its most frequent quotations, it’s missing a very important subordinate clause: there is no “right” way of going about things, as long as you’re able to answer the right questions.

I suppose it would be rather unfair to drop a line like that and then withhold what those “right questions” I mentioned were until the end, as is habitual for what is generally considered “good” promotional writing practice. But since this is not a promotional piece and I myself hate delayed gratification for dramatic sake, I will simply leave them here so that you may keep them in mind while reviewing the following materials.

Let’s return then to my initial point: the process of pitching your work to a publisher is, first and foremost, a philosophical endeavour. I will clarify this further: the process of pitching your work to a publisher is, first and foremost, a philosophical discussion in which you’re trying to convince another person (the publisher) about the validity of your argument (your work). It’s a dual interrogation of understanding. The first, is whether you can actually understand your own work. The second, is whether you can understand your work from the perspective of others.

I’m going to assume that, if you’re reading this and looking to pitch your game to someone, that you’re a reasonably self-respecting creative of some sort operating in good faith. With that in mind: the moment you start thinking about it in any other framing— as a sales pitch, as a business arrangement, as a vibe check — you risk losing sight of the gravitas of what’s being argued.

Contrary to how bizdev people might view it from their perspective — and all the respect to their perspective for them— you are not trying to “sell” your work to the publisher. Rather — you, as the primary generative force in this process, are trying to persuade the publisher that your work, as you intend it to be, is something worthwhile enough that they would be willing and able to help you accomplish.

From this, we can extract several questions that I believe are the foundational corners underlying the developer-publisher relationship, and the ones to which both you as developer and any prospective publisher should hold you accountable.

For you as the developer, it might look something like:

1. What am I making? Do I actually understand what it is that I’m making? What is its thesis? Do I understand how it will actually function in practice? Do I have a relatively stable idea of how I intend it to exist as a complete experience?
2. Why am I making it? Do I understand why I’m actually making this? Do I understand why I’ve chosen to make it this way? Or am I just making excuses for myself?
3. How will I present this? Can I properly articulate my design? Does my understanding allow space for others? Does my understanding factor in the consideration of others, or is it primarily self-centred and self-serving? Do I have an understanding of the prospective audience for my work?
4. Can I actually make this? Do I understand the capacity of my own abilities? Am I able and willing to honestly admit my limitations? Is my product feasible?

A less existentially-tinged version of this may be extrapolated, from the opposite perspective, as follows:

1. What is the game you’re making? What are your expectations for it as a finished work?
2. Why are you making this game? Why are you making it the way that you’ve chosen to make it?
3. Can you clearly and effectively articulate the “what” and “why” of your game? Why have you chosen us as a prospective publisher?
4. Are you able to present, and adhere to a clear and honest understanding of how you’re going to make your game? Do you have evidence to back up that understanding?

And lastly, before we move on, I’ll just admit outright the real punchline to all this: being able to perfectly answer all of these will still not even close to guarantee that your pitch will work in your favour. There are plenty of mitigating factors that stand between you and a successful pitch, and plenty of hard-assed marketing dudes out there who will jump at the gun to remind you that actually, your game probably looks and plays like shit and is out of season and anyways, who really needs another platformer-as-metaphor about overcoming depression.

And maybe they’re right. Or maybe they’re not. But all of that — that part’s on you alone to figure out.

The same way that it’s psychically irresponsible and destructive to both those we meet, and especially ourselves to attempt to use others to compensate for our weaknesses and uncertainties, it’s just as artistically irresponsible and destructive to attempt to resolve our insecurities about our work through some external process, especially one as mercilessly particular as a publisher pitch. I firmly believe that one’s work is an act of faith: a means to come into communion not just with some greater part of ourselves or our understanding of our world, but also with one another. If you’re going to share your work, do it because you believe in it so strongly that you want others to share in it it with you; not because you want others to believe in it for you.

Anyways, onto the important part…

The Materials

This section contains all the relevant materials submitted during the pitching process. They have preserved as close to possible to their original forms, except where otherwise noted.

Setting up for the pitch

I started working on Work in the summer of 2019, as far as my memory permits. Truthfully, there was no formal “setup” for any kind of pitch to any publisher as, up until the moment that publishers started reaching out to me, I was fairly confidently convinced that no publishers would be interested in my work to begin with. It was never intended to be much more than a diversion at that point: a small project that I had begun at the behest of some new friends, both to ease myself back into the possibility that I could make games again, and to distract myself from the onset of a profound depressive suicidality that had begun to settle into my life.

My first breakthrough came at the beginning of 2020, with the success of my Kickstarter campaign. (You can read the postmortem for that here if you’re interested.) Although the amount I actually received from it was pretty much pathetic relative to the average American salary, let alone the average salary for where I live, let alone most game budgets, it nonetheless was able to sustain me for at least a year in the conditions in which I was living. The campaign, but especially the first trailer, garnered a significant and surprising degree of media attention which brought it to the attention of the circles in which scouts for publishers tend to circulate.

(I also elected to write and post monthly updates on my Kickstarter page, which I’ve mostly kept up on. I was told by both my scout and producer after we started working together that the consistency and dedication to my Kickstarter updates was a major persuading point for them during the consideration process, in that it demonstrated a high level of discipline and consistency.)

A considerable number of representatives from publishers ranging from reasonably niche to alarmingly conspicuous contacted me in the months afterwards expressing interest in the project. (Most of this fairly informal, through Twitter or email.) This interest continued for several months, during which I continuously shared my work on Twitter, where I had achieved a minor degree of popularity as a developer.

(My thoughts on Twitter are a bit more ambivalent, but I disagree with the common talking point that goes something like “Twitter is for other devs and publishers, not players, so it’s a waste of time when you could be using a much more audience-oriented platform like TikTok”. If you’re thinking about signing with a publisher, the only audience that should matter in the immediate are publishers.)

At the time, my idea of what the game could be was still pretty firmly fixed within the more limited constraints in which I had been operating up until that point, and so working with a publisher — as interesting as I found the possibility to be — seemed like a bit of a waste of time. I was still not entirely convinced, despite the success of the campaign, that this game would have any lasting purchase, or ability to make back any meaningful sum of money; and anyways, I figured I’d be done with the project by the end of the year.

These were, I suspect, just excuses, though.

There was an element of stubborn bravado (and concomitantly the inverse, profound insecurity) to it all which, in retrospect, I think was the real reason it took me so long to sign with someone. I knew from the very start that the game would be somewhat strange and unconventional, even confrontational: and on the very, very slight off-chance that it could find some degree of success, some part of me kept on hanging itself on the belief that if I did it “alone”, I could somehow emerge stronger from that, more dignified in my loneliness, perhaps. If I could turn this into something good on my own, I figured, maybe I could finally be someone worth living for and with.

This was, in retrospect, a deeply damaging belief which continues to destructively impact both my views about, and my practical ability to meaningfully engage with (and work on!) my work in the present. It was not until I was able to confront and work towards resolving this within myself that I finally came around to my senses. I think that resolving this within myself was the real reason I was able to sign with a publisher at all, when previously, while I had always wanted to do it, I suspect I’d been self-sabotaging under the cover of a variety of seemingly practical excuses to justify myself.

At this point I’d narrowed my choices in commitment down to two publishers with whom I was having fairly regularly discussions: one of whom was Raw Fury, and the other, a publisher specialising in games with a strong narrative focus. While I believed (and still do) that the latter would’ve been a better fit more immediately given the design of my game, I found myself continuously intrigued by Raw Fury’s apparent commitment to a certain kind of openness towards experimentation which, in this industry, is fairly unusual. For me, this was best embodied in their publication of their developer contracts the previous winter holiday, which was a major point in the “Why Raw Fury?” section of my pitch deck (available below).

A huge part of my personal ambitions as a developer rests in my commitment to promoting a very high level of transparency in my own development process. The games industry is notoriously opaque in its machinations, often, historically, intentionally in some misguided attempt to preserve the semblance of some Hollywood-like acheiropoietic “studio magic”. The cost of maintaining that illusion though has contributed to the formation of a culture where the people who partake in the works have become deeply alienated from the people who make the works; and in that gap misunderstandings and resentment have bloomed in poisonous ways.

Against that end, I seek to make as much of my process and assets accessible for public use as possible, so that we may be reminded of the necessarily human nature of these endeavours. In practice, this entails a number of stipulations — releasing the source code for public use, and promoting a pay-what-you-can pricing model alongside the traditional fixed one in particular — which are understandably pretty difficult for most publishers to easily agree with, both from a legal and practical perspective.

At this point, and in light of that, the major point of decision was whether I wanted to form a relationship based more around the work itself, or around my greater priorities as a developer in the long run.

After a couple more months of discussions, I made the decision to sign with Raw Fury. It was the only pitch I submitted, and at this point, I had firmly decided that I was either going to sign with them, or with no one.

Here’s what I proposed to them.

The pitch “deck”

This pitch piece served as the equivalent to what people would usually present as a “pitch deck”, which is traditionally a relatively short (especially on text) slideshow presentation. Here are two decent templates, and two examples of other successfully pitched games’ pitches that I looked at briefly.

• eggnut’s Twitter write-up of their pitch for Backbone
• A collection of curated pitch decks

I hate slideshow presentations though and did not feel like confident in my ability to adequately articulate the purpose and scope of my project through a PowerPoint, so instead I just prepared a write-up instead. It was submitted as a single-spaced text document which, including two pages of images, came out to just a little over ten pages.

The pitch is available as either a PDF or a Google Doc. Initially I had reproduced the text here in its entirety, but I didn’t like the way it looked so instead I will simply refer you to the original.

Further thoughts

• Honestly, especially in retrospect, I feel rather embarrassed re-reading my pitch presentation; and the idea that at some point someone had to stand up, literally or otherwise, in front of the entire company and present this shit straight-faced as a legitimate investment opportunity is pretty ludicrous. I’ve been told at various points in my life with varying degrees of charitability that I have a tendency to talk too much and slip into obsessive and circular tangents, which is no doubt greatly exacerbated by the absence of an editor in writing. I would say that very much applies here…
• Following that, I think that much of this is pretty excessive, although ultimately I also reckon that the level of detail I went into was likely a strong persuasive point for them that I knew exactly what it is that I’m making, why I’m making it, and how I’m making it. Although I talk relatively little about how the game actually plays in practice, I think the more philosophical approach combined with the practical demo helped paint a decent picture of what the game will play like in completion.
• The budget I proposed was, as I rather quickly came to discover, extremely low, to the point where I was strongly recommended by my scout to increase it pretty substantially in the contract (which I did). I had calculated this number based on an estimated minimum required to live somewhat reasonably in my area. I was rather embarrassed by this amount, honestly, and I had placed it so low because I figured it would be more than I’d ever expected to earn from the game in sales anyways, so anything would be better than nothing. Next time I’ll strive for a bit more confidence in myself and my work, and ask for a bit more.
• I maintain that the strongest part of this was concluding with the “Why Raw Fury?” section. Despite what some embittered individuals on Twitter or Reddit may say otherwise, a good developer-publisher relationship is just that: a relationship. There are two parties involved and each must complement the other. I think I did a good job articulating not just what Raw Fury could do for me, as a publishing house with a strong, demonstrated practical commitment to an ethos of transparency, who would permit me a much wider range of experimental freedom in how I represent and release this game; but also what I could do for a Raw Fury as well, as a relatively low-cost, philosophically-attuned agent through which they could experiment with and pursue a much more radical expression of that ethos which, if successful, would serve as a strong affirmation of their stated philosophies as a company.

The pitch email

The following contains the reconstructed email I submitted to Raw Fury as per my scout’s instructions, when it came time to officially initiate the formal process. I sent this on 3 September 2021. It took me about twenty minutes to write and assemble. I didn’t follow any templates or look for any examples at this point as I regarded it primarily as a formality, and I think I was vaguely hungover that morning. Instead I just focused on answering several points which I considered to be most salient:

1. Who am I?
2. What am I pitching?
3. What are my plans for it?
4. How can you help me?

In any case, here it is.

PITCH : My Work Is Not Yet Done, a 1-bit investigative scientific horror game

Hello:

My name’s Spencer and I represent Sutemi Productions, a (1-person, so far) American studio aiming to produce challenging and unorthodox titles, currently working on My Work Is Not Yet Done. It has been in production since 2019, and I seek to wrap up development soon with your help.

My Work Is Not Yet Done is a narrative-driven investigative horror game, combining elements of the survival/simulation genres with a dense, nonlinear plot exploring the imbrication and dissolution of human identities/meanings within uncanny wilderness.

You can view a trailer here, and the successful Kickstarter campaign (+updates) here. I’ve attached a brief playable gameplay demo (Windows) as well for your consideration, which I believe demonstrates the most salient aspects of the game’s general mood and pacing. General instructions, information, and control schemes are included as separate documents in the installation folder.

In the meantime, here are some things you can do in this game:

• Attempt to uncover the source of a strange and inscrutable radio transmission
• Perform unreasonably-detail diagnostics and repairs upon a number of faithfully-reproduced environmental sensors and meters
• Contemplate lovely two-tone black-and-white wilderness
• Encounter unspeakable, claustrophobic dread and horror in your pursuit of the transcendental
• Trace the progress of water in mL through your digestive and excretory systems
• Read through many, many pages of personal journal entries and speculate about the author’s psychic state
• Experience an authentic reproduction of what it feels like to defecate in the absence of flushing toilets and toilet paper
• Ignore your mission and spend your final days processing worms into nutrient powder

Ideally, I am targeting a late 2021/early 2022 PC-exclusive release, and am expecting at least another eight to twelve months of development.

I am seeking a partnership with Raw Fury in order to cover remaining development costs (up to $60,000 USD); and with the desire to explore through this project our mutual goals of promoting through practical action radical transparency and honesty on our respective sides of development.

I have attached a pitch document further elaborating upon several points here, and am happy to discuss the project and the prospect of working together moving forward. Feel free to reach out to me at this address (spenceryan123[at]gmail), on Discord (@spncryn#9144), or via Twitter (@spncryn).

Thank you for your time, and interest!

Have a nice day,

Spencer

Further thoughts

• Overall I feel pretty satisfied with this pitch email. I think I did a decent job of presenting the game in a fairly straightforward and easily digestible way, without sacrificing any of the necessary nuances of it.
• If I have any grievances with this at all, it’s that the static and animated images were differently-sized, and not at all compressed, so my email client had to redownload all of it every time I received a reply.

The playable build

I went back and forth on releasing this for a few minutes before deciding that I might as well commit to it. You may access the pitch build I submitted to Raw Fury here.

Please note that this is not a demo of the game, was not intended to be a demo of the game, and is not an accurate representation of what the game is like. This is an intentionally stripped down version per the included description designed specifically to complement the pitch.

Further thoughts

A lot of people get really bent up trying to figure out what a playable build should contain, and how involved it should be. For me, how one goes about answering this reveals how well (or not) a person understands the essence of their work. Some people may interact with this build and come away saying something like, “I thought your game was a heavily story-driven game. But there’s no story whatsoever in this — or mechanics! It’s just an environment, isn’t this misrepresentative?”

I feel like this interpretations betrays a fundamental misunderstanding about what this build functions as, which in turn I think betrays a misunderstanding of what a pitch is.

The “story” part of the game — or rather, my ambitions for it narratively and mechanically — are already articulated clearly enough in the various documents attached with the pitch. The point of this build, then, was to demonstrate that I had the technical ability to ground all of that theoretical abstraction in a concrete experience; and so the build intentionally strips out everything except what I believe to be the essential qualia of the game’s moment-to-moment experience, which is simply existing in and moving through a number of spaces.

Conclusion

I’m terrible at conclusions, and also, I have someone to meet right now, so unfortunately I am forced to cut this short as is. I hope though that all of this has been able to help you in some way or another. Feel free to use as much or as little of it as you see fit. Until then, take care.

Necessary disclaimer(s):

This… essay, if you can even call it that, deals with some pretty heavy topics, the most explicit one being very extensive discussions and depictions of suicide. If you struggle with similar kinds of issues, I strongly advise you to seek help wherever you can — whether in the form of a local hotline, or a counselling service, or a friend or family member whom you can trust — as soon as you can, and to try your best to not dwell on these kinds of things for too long, before you potentially find yourself in a position you may live to one day regret. You may feel like living may absolutely fucking suck right now, but until someone can come back and convince me otherwise, the pessimist in me is gonna assume that dying is probably a little bit worse than even that.

And for those who may be potentially concerned about me: I’m doing pretty alright now, possibly even better than I’ve ever been in my entire life, although some days it certainly doesn’t feel like that. I wrote this now primarily because it’s a subject I’ve wanted to write about for a long while, but only now do I finally feel like I’m in a position where I have enough support and stability and most importantly distance to be able to parse things from a healthier perspective.

At the age of seventeen, just a few weeks after I graduated high school, I decided that I would kill myself on my twenty-second birthday. It came to me one particularly unremarkable summer day, very suddenly and with a startling degree of clarity and certainty, like a revelation of sorts: the first vision of my future I felt unwaveringly sure about, maybe for the first time in my life.

Whenever I tell people this — my parents, my friends, my therapist, hell, casual strangers some days — I always get confronted (after, of course, the usual degrees of emotional fanfare) with the inevitable question:

Why?

‎It’s a difficult question to answer — not least when the person asking also happens to hold some sway over the circumstances of your imminent future. I try to be as honest as I can, although truthfully, I usually just end up defaulting to a handful of ready-made excuses (which the following years certainly provided no shortage of convenient circumstances to reap): lost a scholarship, lost a significant other, first big project failed spectacularly, friends drifted away, no job prospects, no dating prospects, tidal waves of public humiliation , debilitating envy and resentment, the god-damned vending machine breaking and taking the last three fucking dollars on my debit card, whatever and ever, amen.‎

But you already know all this. You’ve heard this story a thousand times. There’s nothing new here, no revelations and no surprises. And besides, like I said: they were mostly just excuses anyways, coincidences of circumstance which simply accelerated an instinct that’d been building in me years before that.

Because, you see: lying there in the sand on that clear, bright summer afternoon, the dim hum of the ocean in my ears and the heat rising beneath me, there were no convenient excuses. Right then, high school was just beginning to feel like a pleasant thrill of the past, and in a few months I’d be attending a good school on a full scholarship. My girlfriend was lying next to me, reading a book I think, and every once in a while I’d look at her and she’d catch my eye and we’d half-laugh to one another with that kind of innocent romantic idiocy, not even the slightest hint of resentment or distance yet.

Earlier that week, someone had reached out to me for the first time to do an interview about my latest project: a free mod that I’d started in my spare time as a means of distracting myself from college applications, but which had suddenly and unexpectedly bloomed into something much more than that, maybe even the big one, the thing that I thought, no, desperately hoped, would be the break that I needed to finally be someone worth talking to, someone worth hiring.

I’d told all my friends about it the day I found out, as we unwound ourselves over our usual spot in the parking lot of the ACME, which only a few months before had been the A&P, watching the sun dip behind the treeline and the sky gradually wash out to a thin vanilla hue. The Dr Peppers we were drinking were ice-cold, $0.75 a can from the liquor store, and the air had a kind of warm clarity to it: whatever the scent of freshly-mown grass and rising smoke and root-beer in the summertime and all that dumb shit is supposed to make you feel.

It was in that moment that the decision came to me that by the year I turned twenty-two, I would leave this world without a trace.

Why?

‎There’s a genre of video games out there (or, if we’re being a bit more fastidious with our taxonomies, a sub-genre of the larger and even vaguer umbrella of “action games”) broadly referred to as “survival games”. The premise of these games tend to follow a pretty familiar pattern: you hit Start, you’re dropped into the PoV of some nobody who’s found themselves, for one reason or another, utterly alone and adrift in some forlorn world; and armed with nothing but an omniscient UI and a burning desire to get your twenty dollars’ worth of content, you as hapless drifter are then condemned to spend the next several dozen hours of your life eking out a semblance of an existence for yourself from little more than the sticks and stones and bits of detritus (and on rare occasions , even less) which surround you.‎

Or, well, that’s the idea of it, anyways.

It’s a mightily compelling setup, especially for a game: you get the blank slate freedom of your convenient amnesia opener, mixed with the life-affirming, sticks-and-stones, rags-to-riches grind of the great American bootstrapping myth. (And, on top of all this, the developer gets a built-in narrative justification for not having to spend a whole bunch of time and money to design, model, animate, program, and voice a bunch of friendly NPCs for you to kill and fall in love with!) In this light, it’s easy to understand the appeal of survival games for both players and developers alike: the ultimate frontier fantasy, born again in a world free of expectations and responsibilities to anyone but oneself, free to carve out a brave new world through sheer grit and cleverness.

The thing is though, that’s all it is. A pastoral fantasy, of a state of living that at best usually just ends up being little more than a pretence towards naturalism; and far more often, one which manifests as the kind of cheap libertarian wet-dream entire cultures have been built on, a moral fable about worlds of wolves and sheep, and the age-old virtues of mashing one’s nose to the grindstone and “just gittin’ gud”.

You see, I’ve come to be convinced that there are no real survival games. Or perhaps, more precisely, that there are no games that are really about survival. And before I get put on blast for committing the oh-so-grave Internet folly of semantic pedantry (or perhaps even worse, an informal fallacy!) I will readily admit that I don’t think this discrepancy actually “matters” in any grand educational sense, when considering the intents and purposes of designers in designing engaging video game experiences, usually for the purposes of entertainment. I will even concede that this discrepancy probably doesn’t matter to anyone in any meaningful sense except perhaps myself, for intensely selfish and idiosyncratic reasons.

But the thing is, when we talk about “survival” when it comes to game design, what we’re really talking about most of the time is just a primitive-level awareness of the most basic and rudimentary aspects of our bodies’ (or, well, our simulated bodies’) presences within an implied physical world. If we take even the most cursory glance at the basic nouns of what most people would constitute the trademarks of the survival genre — hunger, thirst, fatigue, shelter implied through a focus on base-building — it becomes rather quickly apparent that we’re truly just dealing with the absolute flat-fuck rock-bottom of the idiomatic pyramid. This is survival in the most nominal, animal sense of the word: a purely mechanical process which utterly reduces the executive function and purpose of a human being down to its most primitive, stem-of-brain form, a machine that needs occasional refueling and rests in an otherwise unceasing march towards some monumental end.

To what ends?

If we take a look at the some of the most popular survival games (this just happened to be the first result of a Google search, no attachment here), we can begin to form the image of a vague cloud of possible conclusions to this death drive: either you live a slave to the earth, digging with your hands through mud and grass and dirt and sand, piling up enough refuse long enough until one day you become the one who disrupts the ecologies and scatters the inhabitants of the fields; or you claw and punch and stab and shoot your way as an interloper in a strange land, dropped there suddenly by some horrible twist of fate, pitted against a savage and unrelenting landscape picked clean by unhinged clans until one day it’s you who’s the one running around in mismatched military gear with an automatic rifle in hand and a backpack filled with thousands of rounds of ammunition and the jerkied remains of other unfortunate interlopers, hunting down fresh arrivals for fun and meat. More often than not, it’s a bit of both, but the cycle is pretty clear: kill, harvest, build, expand, repeat.

Of course, I’ve chosen to deliberately frame the core gameplay loops of these titles in the most uncharitable ways possible, and I readily recognise that the general experience while playing most of these games is probably going to be one of continual delight and entertainment, rather than active disgust or despair. However, I think this discrepancy is vital to note as well: with few exceptions, these titles are designed to be experiences which first and foremost entertain the player, a significant part of which means making necessary concessions against boredom and frustration, which will undoubtedly deter the vast majority of players from continuing to engage with the work.

I think this is ultimately where I define the point of semantic failure earlier, in describing the term “survival game” as a kind of blunt misnomer: not that most of these games are necessarily failing at being games about survival, but that they do not really aspire to such a thing in the first place. Rather, they are games about building elaborate or beautiful structures, or assembling powerful clans, or killing and surviving, that have also decided to add in, perhaps as an attempted concession towards an idea of “realism” (or, as people like to put it now, “immersion”), a slight bit of friction which borrows the language — however primitive — of the broad idea of survival.

So what is survival?

One of the most common criticisms I see applied to survival games is that for a significant majority of titles, players describe the task of having to maintain statistical balances such as hunger or thirst or fatigue as amounting to little more than a trivial annoyance. After a certain point, especially when the game has “picked up”, such tasks seem to only serve as temporary disruptions of more enjoyable game loops, such as gunning down a potential hostile after a pitched firefight in a treeline. Someone on Reddit once referred to “the actual survival mechanics” as the game design equivalent of a particularly troublesome hangnail, which I found to be a startlingly apt and intuitive summary of the overall sentiment I was seeing across a number of discussions.

Isn’t that the point, though?

Survival is the most boring battle. It’s not just the encounter with the wolf, but the digging in shallow dirt with your fingers for worms to stave off your starvation, the cloudy darkness of your piss, the lurching nausea as your body rejects the mushrooms you ate in a stream of rancid diarrhea, all the microtears and blisters and fissures that open up all over your flesh which you hope will harden over into calluses before they become host to bacteria and rot.

‎It’s not just those five minutes of trauma that completely unravel a life in the making, but the next five decades of dead-end therapies and desperate solutions and oceans of swelling resentment and distrust. It’s the flow and ebb of piece-of-shit customers and piece-of-shit bosses, and counting your macros so your heart doesn’t give out before your career does, and watching the numbers rise and recede in the corner of your screen day in and day out as you sit there in front of a blank monitor with a blank mind and a languishing posture wondering what you’re gonna have for lunch. It’s the oil that gathers in your hair every night when you sleep, the dust that accumulates on every surface of your room, all the trinkets and souvenirs and detritus of your past lives that you gathered into a drawer that now needs to be emptied out because you no longer live there. It’s the tingling feeling of numbness in your legs when you’ve been standing so long the circulation gets cut off, because they told you that you can’t sit because it’s bad for their image, and it’s smiling like you mean it at people whose perception of you ranks you on par with the local furniture, and it’s the feeling that one day you’re gonna snap and there’s gonna be a reckoning , because a brand-new Glock 19 and a fifty-round box of 9mm FMJ rounds costs about the same as about a month of therapy which probably isn’t gonna help you much anyway. ‎

The thing is though — I admit it — no one really wants to play a game like that, and honestly, in good conscience, I don’t think anyone really wants to make a game like that either. Nobody actually wants to know what it feels like to shit in the woods, or what a bunch of chopped-up, salted-and-fried worms tastes like; and anybody who has experienced those things can readily attest to the fairly obvious conclusion that yes, they in fact, without a shadow of a doubt, fucking suck.

And that’s the thing. Having to stop what you’re doing to eat and drink fucking sucks. Feeling too tired to get up at the alarm’s behest fucking sucks. Having to acquire, process, and transport the lumber you need to start building a new table really fucking sucks, especially when the table ends up not even looking that good anyways. There’s a reason (well, several, but…) why most of us don’t go through life sprinting through our neighborhoods and work places at full speed and jumping up and down the sides of mountains so we can shave off a couple of minutes had we just chosen to take the road around; but in video games, this is common behaviour, because walking takes a long time, and generally fucking sucks.

But that’s the point right?

Survival isn’t fun. Survival isn’t engaging. Survival is friction and fragility, the parts of life that get left behind on the cutting floor. Survival is an endless grind towards diminishing returns. And when reproduced in fiction, what other purpose can it serve in its most authentic representations but to act as an ever-present reminder of the constant decay of our bodies and our minds? This is the texture of our lives: what we talk about when we talk about living, and being human, whatever that means.

Every action we take in this world depletes some part of us which must be replenished, every step forward comes at a cost. It’s a kind of ultimate humility in a way, the tax of all taxes: a reminder that even the fastest gun on this side of [nondescript loosely-fictionalised Russian city] still sweats and bleeds and could use a candy bar every once in a while. Memento mori, motherfucker. And remember to have fun while you’re at it.

Picture this:

You press Start. You wake up at rock bottom, bare-handed and bare-assed. You’re probably wounded, so you slap a leaf onto your body and begin to feel better immediately. With the remaining leaves, you stitch yourself a loincloth real quick, because of course, decency matters. You realise you need to eat, so you craft a spear out of a long sharpened stick, and effortlessly cut down a wild boar that happens to run too close to you and ends up getting stuck on the terrain geometry. You harvest the meat cleanly and efficiently in a matter of seconds using little more than a sharpened stone. That’s dinner taken care of. You wander a bit until you find a stream from which you drink until you no longer feel thirst. This seems like a decent place to settle down.

You build yourself a pickaxe or a hatchet out of twigs and a slab of stone, which you use to fell a tree in four mighty swings. You take the remains of the tree, conveniently pre-processed into perfectly-shaped logs of lumber, and construct yourself a small house real quick, where you’ll pass the first couple of nights. Not a bad start, you think to yourself. Not a bad start at all.

Over the next couple of days, you’ll repeat this process, venturing out further and further every time, discovering more hardy materials with which you can craft more elaborate tools and structures. You repeat this every day for weeks, maybe months on end. And then one day, maybe as you’re mindlessly sharpening an obsidian sword, or perhaps you’re overlooking your newly-constructed granary, it suddenly hits you:

There’s nothing else to do in this world.

You’ve seen all there is to see. Stepped foot on every greyed-out block of the map, looted all the major and minor dungeons and every unmarked crack and crevice in between, slayed all the end-game inhabitants and reaped their remains for the rarest gear and materials. Your settlements dwarf the pathetic shack villages of the indigenous population and you can kill anything you come across with the ease of an afterthought. You will never go hungry or thirsty again because your combined production output exceeds the potential yield of the entire natural ecology. This is what you wanted, right? What you worked so hard for all those hours to build for yourself. This is living at the fullest.

Except, well, there’s nothing left to do.

The other big complaint I hear about survival games is that they just get so boring after a certain point. One of the most common grievances, often coming from players with hundreds or even thousands of hours invested into these experiences, is that the game suffers from a “serious” lack of “end-game content”.

“End-game content” is a somewhat curious concept generally used to refer to playable content, often “optional”, that is meant to be accessed only after all the other “main” activities in the game have been completed. Practically speaking, this usually takes the form of incredibly difficult content (events such as “Raids”, for example) that requires a significant amount of time, investment, and coordination within the game’s ecosystems to have even a semblance of a fair chance at attempting; and is often posed as, and taken on as a kind of final challenge of sorts to the most dedicated players.

The problem with end-game content though is that the very idea of an “end-game” is in itself an infinitely receding concept, and one whose inevitable conclusion is always decadence and gratuity. It’s predicated upon the assumption that not only must there always be something new to do, but perhaps more pointedly, that there always must be something worth doing.

Look, I get it. We were animals once. It is in our instinct to continue on as long as we can, long after the thrill of living (or maybe just playing) is gone. I understand how habits and rituals work, and I understand what sunk-cost fallacy is, especially when it comes to the wallets of fickle players.

But the fact of the matter is that games are not, and cannot be infinite by design, by — and this is particularly when it comes to the genre of survival games — virtue of the fact that every design is inherently and particularly limited by the lexicon of potential actions it offers to the player through which they can engage with the constructed world. This is the fate of every self-contained system, after all: its conclusion is written into its choice of verbs from the very start.

When all you can do is kill, and loot, and build, then the world begins to seem just a little bit more bleak, just a little bit more devoid of meaning once you’ve killed all you can kill and looted all you can loot and built all you can build. These are not games that are concerned on any level with “survival” as a practical question, but which apply the frictive texture of the “survival experience” frivolously in an attempt to convey a depth or perhaps authenticity that is simply not present within the core of the intended experience.

‎These are worlds devoid of the need to survive, as they’ve already centred at the core the pleasure of their players as the default: where the only supported structures of meaning revolve around the extraction and accumulation of material resources, and where the top players are the min-maxing hoarders who have become addicted to this ruinous engine and, unable to aspire to more , often end up simply devolving into the cruelest versions of themselves, roaming around and actively meddling in the pathetic efforts of those of lesser means, for the sole and simple pleasure of casual spite. ‎

The end-game is the hardest part to design in my opinion, far more so than any other stage, precisely because its very existence is an active acknowledgement and refusal of natural conclusion. And far more often than not, it’s not a part of the game that’s designed for or played out of a healthy love for the work, but a peculiar breed of fear: a fear of irrelevance, of sunk cost, of the vanity of potential. Most games are afraid of the end-game, and either shy away from it, smartly embracing more linear frameworks in which to situate their action; or they panic and throw funding at it as long as they can, hoping to fill in the existential abscess faster than its gravity can drag the rest of it down (or so people on forums and in comments sections love to think, at least).

There is one game though that I come back to often, that I feel manages to not only avoid this, but actively confront, and maybe even embrace it, this sense of an ending. It’s a game called The Long Dark, by the Canadian developer Hinterland Studio. It describes itself as:

a thoughtful, exploration-survival experience that challenges solo players to think for themselves as they explore an expansive frozen wilderness in the aftermath of a geomagnetic disaster. There are no zombies — only you, the cold, and all the threats Mother Nature can muster. (Steam)

This is it, friends. The big one hit, the rapture arrived. The world is over. And yet — somehow, I’m not.

I come to my senses in a narrow ravine. I have no idea where I am or how I got there or even who I am for that matter, although I suppose only the first of these things ultimately matters. All I know is that I’ve arrived as an interloper into this barren wilderness, although even my intent will remain unknown to me for the duration of my numbered days.

The sky is dim and low, a neutral sheet of grey that continues as far as I can see. There is a collapsed train tunnel behind me, and the remains of the tracks stretch out into the snowy haze just beyond. Lacking any other sense of direction, I decide to follow them.

I cross over a small trestle, continuing to follow the tracks until I find myself in the midst of a grove of logging stands. A small trailer stands nearby. I search inside: several bunk beds which look comfortable enough, a single stale energy bar. I’m not particularly hungry, but I eat it anyways, maybe just out of habit. Outside, as I’m leaving, I notice a corpse half-buried just slightly out of the way which I’d somehow missed coming in. Its features are unrecognisable, completely obscured by snow. There’s nothing on the body, and I move on.

Further down the tracks, through another tunnel, I pass over a much larger trestle, overlooking a rather remarkable waterfall and an equally extravagant plunge into a rocky valley down below. I linger for a few moments to indulge in the sight of it before remembering that I am slowly freezing to death and that I don’t have the luxury to stop, least of all for some light tourism.

Eventually I find myself at a small crop of trailers, arranged like a campgrounds along the tracks. Having lost my way once or twice after deviating from the tracks to forage for some firewood and medicinal herbs, the sight of the trailers comes as a steady relief to me: the sky has begun to darken, not just with the setting of the sun, but also with the arrival of an ominously dark layer of clouds, which loom heavy and foreboding and cast the snow in a dim pallour. The wind’s begun to pick up and light flurries of snow fill the air, careening past my vision.

I step into one of the trailers, where I find to my dismay little more than a bed, a can of expired peaches which I can’t open because I have neither a can opener nor a knife, and an assortment of wooden detritus which is largely useless to me in its current form. I consider taking a look at the other cabins, but to my vague horror, I discover when I open the door that the flurries have turned into a full-on blizzard and that, with my torch immediately snuffed out by the wind, I can see nothing within that swirling blindness.

Back within the shelter of the trailer, I stand there for a moment in the midst of the inky black, before uncomfortably fumbling my way to the bed. I check the inventory of items I managed to pick up earlier in the day: mostly herbs and twigs, a handful of mushrooms, some stones. I carefully eat a packet of ketchup chips in the dark, and replace my coat with a slightly-less tattered outer shell. For a moment I contemplate the distinct possibility that I will unceremoniously freeze to death overnight while asleep, killed by foul luck, and my own lack of preparation in less than a day. After flipping a coin, I decide to take the risk anyways.

It was on one particularly cold, bright spring evening in 2019 that I decided to finally kill myself for good.

Why that morning, I couldn’t — and still can’t — really tell you. I guess I just didn’t feel incredible. People say that suicide is a process in the coming, but the way it’s always felt to me, more often than not I think it just comes down to a split-second decision at the end of the day. Sure, stuff builds up over months, over years, no doubt about that — but that’s just all innuendo. The actual moment — the only meaningful part — occupies no more than the span of an instant. You could be waiting in line for groceries, or taking the train back home one evening, or even just sitting there doing absolutely nothing at all when suddenly, it hits you, just like that. You discover all of a sudden that you’ve been spread out too thin on the world all this time, that you just can’t go on anymore, no matter what. And that’s the moment it happens. Yes, or no: the most binary and fundamental of decisions. You flip a coin, you push a button, you take a step, you pull a trigger.

Whatever.

Maybe it was the pounding in my head when I woke up. Maybe it was the way the shower head sputtered twice, pipes groaning with pressure, before finally giving in and spewing forth an impotent and lukewarm trickle. Maybe it was the newsfeed that morning. Maybe it was the slightly rancid aftertaste of the milk in my cereal, just a few days overdue. Maybe it was an old friend messaging me that afternoon to tell me that she hoped I was doing well, asking me if I’d found someone yet, telling me about how she was doing, about her friends, about her boyfriend and how she was going on a trip that weekend with all of them, when I hadn’t asked, and didn’t want to know. Maybe I couldn’t help myself. Maybe I was just too out of touch for far too long, and maybe I just couldn’t take it anymore. Maybe I was just bored. Maybe it was all these things, or maybe it was none of them at all.

After some period of uncertain deliberation, I settled upon hanging as my preferred exit strategy.

In truth, it was a bit less than ideal, to put it lightly. Embarrassingly enough, I’d always envisioned a more dramatic, or at the very least impactful death. To cast my body from the heights of windswept cliffs to the heartless seas: how romantic! Even a direct gunshot to the head, however messy, would’ve sufficed — that uniquely American thrill.

Circumstance had it otherwise, though, and since I had neither cliffs nor handguns, or a bottle of pills or a handshake of carbon monoxide to see me off proper, I settled upon hanging, which seemed anyways to be my best option in terms of both efficacy and ease of operation. All things considered, perhaps it wouldn’t be too bad at the end of the day. I admit in retrospect that I probably should’ve done a bit more research into the precise mechanics of it, but it seemed simple enough at the time: mass, compression, distance over time.

Well, physics was never my strong point, after all, but I was pretty sure I’d be able to figure it out.

As luck would have it (or maybe not), the rope I had chosen had been sitting in the garage long enough that the individual threads had, over years of exposure to moisture, dust, mould and insects, become brittle and thin. Why I hadn’t noticed this initially continues to utterly evade me: I must’ve been struck with a bout of stupidity, blindness, or something in between. Or perhaps I chose it that way unknowingly, not really wanting to die all that bad: yet another stupid trick I’d play upon myself.

Either way, when I stepped off the chair, the sudden amount of stress split the rotten fibres and instead of my neck snapping, the rope itself snapped and I fell to the floor unceremoniously like dead weight, only minus the “dead” part.

‎Cradling a mildly-swollen ankle, and having failed quite pathetically at taking my own life, I sat for a long while and contemplated what I would, what I should do next. ‎‎Should I try again? ‎‎ I wondered. Any reasonable person would probably say yes. After all, such a monumental decision would’ve certainly been informed by enough willpower to overcome even the mildest discomforts, right?‎

However, the will to live, as I’ve come to realise over the past few years, has a terrible tendency to resurface in the most inconvenient moments.

Instead, I decided to go for a walk. It was the first time I had left my house all year. I can’t tell you why I felt the need to go out; it must’ve just seemed like the best idea at the time, I guess. I wandered for over an hour, drifting across the sidewalks, and eventually out into the road. At that hour, the streets were entirely vacant: I must’ve looked real suspicious. After a certain point I got a bit tired, but since the ground was wet from rain the prior night and I’d already walked that far (which, granted, didn’t even turn out to be that far at all), I decided to continue walking anyways.

Some time later I found myself at the train station near my house. I contemplated boarding a train somewhere, but realised I had left my monthly pass at home, and had no more money on my debit card to afford a ticket anywhere else. I then briefly contemplated lying down on the tracks and letting a train run me over; but after waiting for some time (I ended up not lying down after all, as the rails were cold and wet, so instead I just stood there quite stupidly, hoping no one would notice my presence and summon the police), a train did not come and my impatience was beginning to mount and anyways, I realised at some point that getting hit by a train leaves the body in a rather unflattering state; so I got up and just returned home.

For the second time that night, once again ensconced in the dim glow of my bedroom, I thought about what I would be leaving behind. Not much, I figured: a shitty room with no meaningful possessions, a shitty life with no meaningful prospects. As above, so below. Earlier that day, I had read an obituary in The Guardian from a woman whose husband, an anaesthetist, had killed himself some months prior. “It feels like carelessness to me,” she wrote. “Like he slipped through my fingers while I looked the other way.” It was a painfully effusive piece. My heart felt hollow after reading it. It ached for some time with a dull and alien sense of longing. What for, I’m not particularly sure. It made me feel a bit uneasy, like the nausea of motion sickness. After a while, though, it went away.

The hardest difficulty available in The Long Dark is called Interloper. It’s an interesting name for a positively brutal experience, one which takes the natural scarcity and indifference of the game’s setting and escalates it significantly across virtually every aspect of the design: useful item spawns are much rarer, items decay faster, wildlife is scarcer but more hostile, the days and nights alike are both colder and more deadly.

An interloper is a kind of stranger, one who’s not welcome in a usually foreign, or even alien landscape. This, for me, is the core of The Long Dark’s thesis: the experience of suddenly finding oneself, woefully unprepared and ill-equipped, in an unrelentingly hostile environment where any chance of survival is contingent upon sheer luck, and any preparation or planning can be utterly undone by a second of misfortune.

The other difficulties similarly reflect through their names, with remarkable accuracy, their understanding of the player’s place within this world: Pilgrim, Voyageur, Stalker. Like the interloper, each is a figure a few degrees removed from the environment, who has come to it with some kind of purpose in mind: to contemplate, to explore, to inhabit. But the interloper is the only one whose namesake also contains a response from the environment itself to their presence: that they have chosen to enter with the mark of an intruder, and will be treated as such.

Regardless of whichever difficulty the player ends up choosing though, there is only one possible ending to the game, contained within its very title and presented to the player on a stark black card upon their death: to fade into the long dark.

There are a number of games out there that profess to be, on whatever level, about death, and particularly, death that comes as the conclusion of one’s own decisions. I usually try my best not to doubt their best intentions, but oftentimes I find most of them to be too sentimental or cloying, and the ones that aren’t are rarely ever about death itself, but rather, overcoming it through perseverance and sometimes just sheer grit.

Looking back, what The Long Dark offered to me was the first (and if I’m being honest, probably the only) experience that did not try to lay some moral claim over my decisions, that did not try to project upon my struggle any drama or swooning revelation. It was the first work in which I felt my experience was truly recognised, and mirrored: that my decision to no longer live would not be a meaningful act to anyone but myself, and that it would be one with no trigger or framing, just one final action on just another day of what in another timeline would continue on as my life.

I think a big part of this lies in just how thoroughly disinterested the game is in constructing a narrative or canon out of any single player’s lived experiences within the game. It is a world utterly devoid of other observers or signposts of meaning; a landscape that has, through sheer desolation, become truly alien in its indifference towards its interlopers’ actions.

No matter how well they planned their expeditions; no matter how many sunsets and sunrises to which they bore witness, or great expanses they contemplated; or how many wolves they managed to shoot down, and pounds of meat they were carrying upon their death; or whether they saw and mapped every square meter of every region, or didn’t manage to make it past the very first few; everyone ends the game the same way.

Unlike with most other games, the idea of “competing” here on any aspect feels redundant, maybe even crass. It doesn’t matter if you lived a thousand days, or less than one. Each approach and experience embodies its own philosophy of living and dying that is no more or less valid than the other; and the only thing that differs is the valence of one’s emotions in the moments before death.

After a few days or so of contemplation, I settled on the Raven Falls Trestle as my final spot. It seemed fitting, as it was the first major structure I’d come across that first night; but beyond that, I had no serious attachments to it. Honestly, it was just the closest vista to where I’d chosen to make my base, and after about ten seconds of contemplation, I realised I didn’t want to invest the effort to plan out yet another series of expeditions just to find a good spot where I could kill myself.

I’d survived 44 days up until that point. That afternoon, just before sunset, I set out with nothing on my back except my clothes. I wanted to arrive at sunset, and go out with that as my last memory here. The weather was mostly clear, just a little bit overcast. It didn’t look like there was any chance of a storm picking up any time soon.

I arrived almost exactly on time according to my calculations. The sun was beginning to crest over the ridge. Unfortunately, I hadn’t factored in the possibility that it could look anything but magnificent. The sun indeed set as I sat there, languidly dipping beneath the mountains: a thin watery shade of vanilla, with a smattering of orange splotches scattered throughout.

My disappointment in the moment was palpable. I thought about postponing the whole thing until tomorrow, or the next day, or even the day after that. But I was there already, and I’d already made my choice, and if I didn’t do it then, I’d be too much of a coward to do it again.

I tried to think about something. My head was blank though, preoccupied with the task at hand, the bitter cold gripping me. I spent a good ten minutes, or maybe it was ten years, just standing there, shivering, trying to conjure up one last thought about something. I couldn’t believe how difficult it was given how distracted I felt by this kind of dumb shit any other given day.

At last, though, one came to me.

I am seventeen, and I have been dreaming. Mostly of stupid things, probably, but you know how it is: in high school, surrounded by pretty girls and petty struggles, time and consequence seem to have little bearing. People ask you what you want to do in the future, but no one really cares, or probably knows for that matter what “the future” even means at that point. At that age, it’s just another one of those fictions people tell you about to try to scare you into obedience. Spring has come, the days are both numbered and endless, and nothing matters: no jobs, no goals, no motivation, no future. Most of us will probably just go on to do whatever it is our parents, what the career counselors tell us to do: go to college, get some bullshit degree, get some bullshit job, pursue some bullshit passion if we can afford it. But in that moment, we’re not really thinking about any of that.

I’m seventeen, it’s the end of senior year, and the light of the setting sun filters through the blinds in the Latin room, getting in my eyes occasionally, but I don’t mind too much. I think I’m laughing, my friends are laughing, some stupid joke I can’t remember anymore, and for whatever reason, maybe it’s because I just got caught up too much in the moment, I say out loud suddenly, to no one in particular, “You know, I think things will be fine, regardless of where we end up going. I think we’ll all be okay.” We must’ve been talking about college. I had no idea what the hell I was saying, but it sounded right to me. I felt pretty good about things.

A few months later, we graduated. We left for college. Time passed.

At first, it was barely noticeable. That winter — motivated in part by a newly-renewed sense of worthlessness following a disastrous first year at university, mixed in with the unusually frigid and dismal weather — I stopped going out. It’s too cold, I’d tell myself; all this snow and slush. It seemed like a convenient excuse at the time. Besides: my friends — my new ones — still came by to visit me every once in a while, I still kept in close contact with my old ones, I was still in a fairly stable and comfortable relationship, I still had something to work on that made me feel like I was worth something: things were okay. It was just a seasonal thing.

But then spring came around.

Things did not get better. In fact, things not only did not get better: they got much worse. My grades plummeted. My relationship imploded. My project failed. Other than attending classes (only in the most nominal sense, admittedly; somehow, I’d managed to hold on to the barest semblance of my responsibilities as a student), I stopped going out altogether. Every other week or so, I’d leave my room at three in the morning, picking up the next week’s worth of food from a harshly-lit 24/7 about a fifteen-minute walk away. The trash accumulated. I didn’t want to see my friends. The sight of them forced me to confront, with acute directness, the depth of my own failure — and who wants to do that? I didn’t want to see anybody at all. I was scared. I felt profoundly, impossibly alienated. I didn’t want to feel that way — so in order to avoid it, I shut myself away.

Just outside my window, life rushed past me at dizzying speeds. This is what they call parallax, I guess: the singular and ageless antidote to solipsism. Every morning I woke to signs of global collapse: insurmountable debt, random acts of violence, mass exploitation and terror and despair. The atmosphere of the earth was crumbling and conspiracies seemed to metastasise by the day. My friends got new friends. My ex-girlfriend got a new boyfriend. They got internships, they got jobs, they earned money, they travelled and saw the world. We got older.

In the amber of my bedroom, time seemed to pass at an impossibly glacial rate. Eased by a steady drip of violent video games, high school anime melodrama and internet pornography, the days and nights bled together until they became indistinct, and then indistinguishable. The world was simultaneously ending, and utterly stagnant. We were all coming apart at the seams, at a speed so tectonically slow that we couldn’t even notice it. This can’t go on much longer, I told myself; this will go on forever.

Shortly before graduating, as a sign of commemoration for our enduring friendship, one of my closest friends took me to a local department store where he purchased us a matching set of wristwatches. The gesture was inspired by a recent film for which we shared a great appreciation, in which a father, before setting off upon an interstellar voyage to the end of the universe, gives his daughter his watch as a means of comparing their relative time upon his return. Sitting on the top deck of the parking lot of a nearby IKEA, we synchronised the watches to the second: the idea was that when we met again in the future, having returned from our separate ways, we would still be connected by that persistent tick, the mechanism of our relationship embodied in literal clockwork. We agreed to always keep them on, so that our memories could remain just a glance away.

Something went wrong, though. Call it mechanical imprecision, call it human error: for whatever reason, the hands of our watches slowly began to desynchronise, and what started out as an imperceptible difference eventually became a matter of seconds, which by the next year had become a difference in minutes, and eventually almost an entire hour. Each time we met, I seemed to fall further and further behind him.

The last we spoke, he was no longer wearing it. He’d claimed someone had stolen it from his room earlier that year. It didn’t matter whether he was telling the truth or not; I believed him, but more than that, I believed in the irreversible loss of its meaning. Not too long after that, I stopped wearing the watch as well. None of this is a metaphor for something more profound. The band had begun to wear down and chafe my skin, and although I hadn’t noticed it before, the weight of the watch itself at some point began felt a bit uncomfortable, a bit too noticeable upon my wrist. Every once in a while, I’ll still put it on, usually in anticipation of situations where its presence will be able to lend credence to the illusion of urgency. Most of the time, though, it just sits in my dresser. Sometimes, late at night, I can hear it ticking, and the sound fills me with the dread of nostalgia. At this point, that’s all it’s really good for: noting, with casual indifference, the passage of time.

Just the other day, he reached out to me again. I don’t know what compelled him to suddenly remember me, to reach out across the distance and send me a message. “How have you been?” I couldn’t tell if he actually cared, but it didn’t matter too much. We exchanged some pleasantries, cursorily updated each other on our states of living with information we probably could’ve gleaned more succinctly from our resumes. He was finishing up school. He had a job lined up as a software engineer at a prestigious technology company where he’d interned the previous summer, making more money in a year (not including bonuses) than my life will ever likely be worth. He felt somewhat unsatisfied and expressed mild anxiety about not knowing what he’d be doing for the rest of his life; he felt he was living insincerely, and didn’t feel like his personal passions were being fulfilled. I told him not to worry so much, since at least he was in a position where financial stability was not an imminent question; and that things were probably going to be okay. We didn’t talk about the past.

Then I jumped.

Except, of course, I didn’t.

I took a step, I really did, maybe even two — and then I saw the waves frothing beneath me, folding and unfurling, utterly indifferent to my presence looming up above.

I thought about a lot of things in that moment. I was scared. I hate the ocean. The smell of seawater makes me sick. If hell is real, I didn’t want to risk the chance of being stuck down there in the pitch black cold for the rest of eternity. They say that supposedly your life flashes right before your eyes at the moment of death; but there was no flash, no illumination, not even the slightest hint of revelation or even realisation for me.

Honestly, all I could think about was how much I wanted a fucking Dr Pepper.

I took a few moments to collect myself. Oddly, I didn’t feel that much different than moments before: I had no desire to cry or scream or anything melodramatic like that, and all I really felt was a sense of vague queasiness, the kind you get when your body’s pumping full of adrenaline and telling you to get the fuck out of there by any means necessary. My hands were shaking a bit, although I attributed it at the time to the cold. I’d taken my shoes and socks off just before. I put those back on too.

Then I went to the 7/11, got myself a Dr Pepper, and went to class.

Honestly, there’s no clean conclusion to this story. I have nothing to offer you that you don’t already know or haven’t already heard a million times already: no catharsis, no moral lessons, not even the vaguest ability of consolation. I’m sure some people will feel the temptation after reading this to say some stupid shit like, “oh, you’re so brave!” or “you’re a real survivor!”. And while I certainly don’t doubt, and perhaps I may even appreciate on some level, the sincerity of their intentions, I also don’t want to hear it either, and I think that that kind of shit is just a bunch of dumb platitudes that people made up to deal with the cognitive discomfort of having to cope with the realisation that someone they may know has just attempted to erase themselves from this life.

But all of that is neither here nor there.

The thing is, when we talk about what it means to survive, to be a survivor, there’s a tendency to frame the state of surviving (I guess what they call “survivorship”) as some kind of dramatic event or trait, like this odd, almost heroic thing that you are or maybe even become as the result of your experiences.

I dunno, maybe that’s true for some people; and if so, well, I’m glad — or at least, I’ll say that I’m glad — that they were able to derive something positive from it.

But even if you don’t feel that way for whatever reason, or maybe you feel frustrated because things feel bad, maybe they’ve felt real bad for a long while but you’ve got nothing to show for it yet, no great event or trauma in your life to quote as a citation for your patience: I’m here to tell you that you too have survived, and that in itself can be meaningful in its own right.

I’m not really sure how to end this honestly, but look. I don’t believe in hell, and most days I struggle to believe in heaven as well. One thing I know for sure is that there are no 7/11s down in hell, and there are definitely no ice-cold Dr Peppers to be found there either.

And in the same way, I’ve now come to realise now that there is no great race in this life, no matter what some people will tell you. No great competition either. There is no great victory, no triumph over life or death, except perhaps whatever small, moment-to-moment ones that we manage to burrow out for ourselves amidst the smoke and grime and mud of our world.

That’s all there is, man.

In time, this will all be over. We will have no choice: it will be utterly beyond our control and our will. The curtains will fall and crumble, the stage will rot and collapse, the servers will shut down and degrade, the hard drives will corrupt and melt, and there’ll be nothing left of any of it except electrical phantoms and vapours.

But for now, we are young. Our work is not yet done. And despite everything, you’re still here — and so am I.

Hang in there, friend.

The potency of myth is that it allows us to make sense of mayhem and violent death. It gives a justification to what is often nothing more than gross human cruelty and stupidity. It allows us to believe we have achieved our place in human society because of a long chain of heroic endeavors, rather than accept the sad reality that we stumble along a dimly lit corridor of disasters. It disguises our powerlessness.

Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning

War never changes — or so it goes. What exactly this means precisely is not entirely clear (as is the case with most pithy aphorisms of the sort), and largely depends on who you’re asking. Is it a heroic statement, meant to evoke the enduring humanity of those who fight and perish within battles? Is it an admission of pessimism, a recognition of the essence of warfare? Perhaps a patriotic sentiment, intended to establish a historical lineage of conflict, with the goal of rallying the spirit in the present?

Does it really matter?

Few other major contemporary creative forces — corporate or independent or anywhere in between, working in games or otherwise— have dedicated as much time, energy, and budget to portraying and exploring a certain kind of mythology of warfare as Ubisoft has done in recent years. Whether this is intentional, hell, self-aware even, is beyond the point: what matters is that Ubisoft’s broad canon of franchises demonstrates with startling clarity a remarkably singular and coherent thesis about warrior ideology and war as a state of mind: a framework not only for existentially justifying nations and societies, but individual lives as well. The result is a compelling and deeply pessimistic view of a world in which war exists as the fundamental existential force for its own sake, providing a structure and logic that transcends ideological boundaries or structures.

This article will examine, across a wide number of (probably) disparate topics, vignettes, and discussions, the ways in which this broader idea is manifested across several of Ubisoft’s major franchises, with a focus on more recent titles. While I’ll try to be as comprehensive as possible in my presentation, this is by no means meant to be all-encompassing and I am intentionally eliding from mention a good amount of nuance in certain topics:

• I’m not gonna be discussing issues such as the influence of the military-entertainment complex or the precise legal/political nuances of international policies regarding military conduct or protocol over the years.
• I’ll try to keep my comments/speculation on the role of 9/11 and the War on Terror brief, out of respect for the fact that literally everyone’s talked about it at this point and there is absolutely nothing I can say about it which someone else hasn’t already offered a more qualified or interesting take about.
• I (probably) will not discuss the cultural legacy of Tom Clancy much or try to parse the enduring influence of his politics on Ubisoft’s Clancyverse. While there’s certainly much to be said in that direction, I’m frankly uninterested in Clancy’s work in general (having read a decent amount of it back in the day) and I think it’s a pretty safe conclusion to draw that Ubisoft’s works under his name at this point are, for better or worse (probably the former), a far cry tonally, aesthetically, and ideologically from anything Clancy wrote or would have written.
• I acknowledge that many of these points can be applied more broadly to other works and franchises. As a matter of fact, the impetus for this article was based on plans to write about Modern Warfare’s treatment of special operations as heroic myth. However, I stand by the fact that Ubisoft’s presentation of these topics is unique in how coherently and homogeneously they’re developed across all their titles, almost as if in service of an overarching thesis. (Do I really think that Ubisoft, a corporate publisher with an international audience, is intentionally crafting a broad canon of works with a unified and relatively sophisticated argument about the nature of violence? Probably not, but that doesn’t mean that thesis doesn’t exist.)
• Lastly, all discussion of gameplay and story elements is drawn from my personal experience with said titles.

The premise of most Ubisoft games is, after all analysis, pretty straightforward: an individual (or very small group of individuals) singlehandedly wages a campaign of terroristic violence against a much larger group, using a litany of subversive methods including sabotage and assassination. These individuals — whether they’re from an ancient fraternity of prophet-assassins (Assassin’s Creed), a T1+ special operations unit (Ghost Recon, Rainbow Six), or a global syndicate of vigilante hackers (Watch Dogs) — are always exceptional in both their talents and backgrounds, their extraordinary individual lethality multiplied even further by the tactical and logistical support of their respective parent organisations, who offer everything from cutting-edge tech to diplomatic invisibility. They may be severely outnumbered, but they more than compensate for it through a combination of technological supremacy and sheer ingenuity (and easily exploitable AI pathfinding, to be fair).

There is a heroic element to each of these character’s stories, lent by a common invocation of “extraordinary circumstances”: events whose magnitudes and natures defy common ability or reason, which require responses liberated from the confines of traditional law and order, even morality. A deep-state network of embedded sleeper cell agents is activated after a biological catastrophe in order to save America (The Division); an elite unit of soldier-assassins is deployed to singlehandedly dismantle and secure a rogue sovereign state (Ghost Recon). It’s worth noting that in many of their games, the sense of heroism quickly falls apart at even the slightest inspection however: the Strategic Homeland Division’s primary (and possibly sole) targets are American citizens themselves, gunned down mercilessly with overwhelming firepower on American soil; and the Ghost teams are no more or less than professional hitmen operating loosely under US military command to advance American interests where traditional diplomacy and armies cannot reach.

All of these are, of course, by no means unique, and might in fact even come off as quite cliched in their own rights. What makes these works interesting is the framework in which all of these genre cliches are situated: a singular, all-encompassing vision of a world beyond saving.

There is a seemingly straightforward and basic fundamental struggle at work at the heart of Assassin’s Creed: liberty versus authority. It is from this seemingly simple dichotomy that an ongoing recondite war lasting millenia, possibly even predating the existence of humans as Homo sapiens, spills out thus, forming the backbone of the franchise’s narrative.

On one side, there are the Templars — descended ostensibly from their namesake organisation, widely implicated in no small number of conspiracies throughout our history which the games confirm as verifiable canon — representing a belief that human beings are inherently savage, naturally prone towards chaos and spiritual/moral weakness; and consequently must be tamed through obedience to enlightened authority. On the other, there are the Assassins — descended ostensibly from the more obscure hashshashin, a Levantine warrior sect who are portrayed in the series’ first entry to be religiously-neutral humanitarian philosopher-warriors (but who in reality were probably closer to a fringe extremist cell, whose jihadic violence today would be considered rather radical and possibly even heretical) — who represent a belief in skeptical liberty and self-determination, and who seek peace through education and tolerance rather than force. Each side believes steadfastly in the moral supremacy of their respective visions, each generation of new converts and disciples, of sons and daughters, killing and dying in the name of a better tomorrow that has yet to be seen.

Liberty and authority. Free will and obedience. Self-determination and conformity. The individual against the collective. The one against the many.

Of course, though, the reality is never so cleanly delineated; and throughout the history of the world as presented in the franchise — much like our own history which the fiction attempts to mirror — this central conflict is repeatedly interrogated, deconstructed and reinterpreted, both by groups and individuals alike who reframe it towards their own ends, their personal histories and motivations and ambitions and desires. The pursuit of liberty becomes indistinguishable from the desire for vengeance and the hedonism of anarchism; the restraint of authority inextricable from the temptation of tyranny and a lust for power.

Both the Templars and Assassins were founded on a genuine shared belief that the world deserves to be bettered, that it can be bettered — and yet they are undone, time and time again, by the very things against which they fight so desperately. The Assassins become tyrannical and dogmatic in their ethics; the Templars fall victim to their own basal natures and become drunk with greed and lust. In the world that they’ve created in their stead — a world in which laws are written at the ends of blades and the worth of institutions weighed in blood and gunpowder — a principle ceases to carry much weight, it’s little more than an abstract talking point, a palette swap for your new linens, a choice between hood or hat. The only truth that remains beneath it all is far simpler: that nothing is true, that everything is permitted.

There are four fundamental freedoms, as articulated by Franklin D. Roosevelt in a now-famous State of the Union address in 1941, which he believed everyone in the world ought to enjoy: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom of want, and freedom from fear.

There is, however, an additional fifth freedom that exists unbeknownst to the public, granted only to a select, almost infinitesimal minority of individuals: freedom from the law. The fifth freedom is “the right to defend our laws, by breaking them. To safeguard secrets, by stealing them. To save lives, by taking them. To do whatever it takes to protect our country.” And this freedom belongs to one man, and one man only: Sam Fisher.

Sam Fisher is an extraordinary figure in many ways. In-universe, he’s a legend amongst soldiers and intelligence operatives, a man who has survived and accomplished the impossible not once, but over and over again, enough times to have made a career for himself running missions that for others would end careers (and probably lives). As a cultural figure, he’s the perfect embodiment of a new kind of world order, one that’s been gradually emerging since the end of WWII but has since taken on new life in the grainy phosphorescent glow of DEVGRU operators decked out in Crye Precision gear, stalking down pitch-black hallways in some dusty compound with their panoramic NVGs and IR lasers and short-barrel M4s with built-in suppressors: a far cry from the days of young GIs fighting a noble war in the mud and grime, towards a murky shadow world defined by the precise movements and trigger-pulls of professional ghosts-for-hire, whose actions will not be recorded and whose deaths will not be noted.

Fisher’s world is one in which nothing is true, and therefore, everything is permitted. Allegiances shift at a moment’s notice; no matter what you do, you might find that your best friend in one moment is suddenly on the other end of your gun in the next, and if you fail to pull the trigger you could risk either blowing your own cover (Double Agent), or failing to prevent WWIII (Chaos Theory), or both. Either way though, it doesn’t matter: the only truth is that no matter what you feel in this moment, you will pull the trigger, and what happens next has already happened, and there is nothing you can do to change it, to prevent it from happening exactly the way it just did.

Look at it this way: it’s 2002. Your best friend has just been discharged as a patsy over a friendly fire incident. Using the money he earned from a successful lawsuit against the United States Marine Corps for defamation, and a long history of connections forged through superlative service, he is able to establish a private military company — Displace International — which very quickly rises to the top. Now it’s 2007 and you’re holding a gun up to his head in a shitty bathhouse somewhere in Tokyo, and he’s telling you that America is sick, that America is dying, that all of it — the politicians, the bureaucrats, the whispered backroom deals — it’s all life support for a sick old woman who’s died long ago. He’s telling you that the world is built off of three things — honour, courage, and fidelity — and that he knows you believe in these, more than any government. He’s telling you this and then you respond by shooting him, because if you don’t, he’s gonna pull a gun on you anyways and do the same to you.

Or consider this: it’s 2011. Your long-time employer, Third Echelon, is infiltrated by a mole (Conviction), but your supervising officer, whom you’ve just shot in the head to maintain your cover within a homegrown American terrorist organisation (Double Agent) dedicated to reforming the country’s corrupt government through forceful decapitation of the executive command, has faked the death of your daughter without your knowledge, sending you spiraling into a decade of grief. Third Echelon is hunting you down: the new Director, who was the mole all along, and the Vice President are conspiring to kill the President and seize power via laws of succession, so you storm the White House, executing dozens of other nameless corrupt Splinter Cell operatives along the way, and shoot them both (well, only one canonically, but…).

Because of your actions, you’ve been promoted to take leadership of a new Echelon unit(Blacklist) following the dissolution of the former, and now you’re infiltrating Guantanamo Bay under the guise of a political detainee to interrogate a prisoner who has been feeding the CIA false information about a rogue MI6 agent who is the ringleader of an organisation claiming responsibility for a series of devastating attacks against American interests in order to force the country to recall its troops abroad, effectively ending the reign of American imperialism. You deploy from an unmarked air fortress with advanced stealth technology and full living facilities that floats outside of any national boundaries yet can mobilise to any location in the world in under a day. Nobody knows who you are yet everybody knows your name; nobody’s ever seen you and yet your footsteps have been felt in every corner of the world, on every continent and in every major (and otherwise) conflict across the globe. You’re both everywhere and nowhere at once; but you’re growing old, and soon, like others, you’re gonna die, whether by somebody else’s hand, or by the telomeres in your genes, which since the age of 25, maybe 26, have been slowly unraveling, breaking down the organs and muscles in your body, so that even though at the prime age of 60, you can still effortlessly execute six men half your age in 10.2s, the joints in your knees pop a bit and the oxygen seems to burn in your lungs a little hotter than before.

It’s 2013. Your partner, a man named Briggs, the most promising operative in the new organisation known as Fourth Echelon, your organisation, crafted in your image, is executing the Secretary of Defence because he’s been compromised, because he’s about to give them — who are they again? The Engineers? John Brown’s Army? Displace International? — the launch codes, because no individual life is worth more than the continuity of the United States of America. This is your legacy. What is the United States of America? What does it mean? Honour, courage, fidelity — does it matter? Your name is Sam Fisher, and you are a Splinter Cell. The fifth freedom is yours and yours alone. Nothing is true, and everything is permitted.

One of the defining traits of the War on Terror’s reimagination of the modern battlefield is that every space is a single gunshot away from turning into a warzone, that any moment can suddenly blow up (forgive the pun) into an “active situation”. The greatest threat of terrorism isn’t the bomb or even the detonation itself, but the ensuing terror (in case that wasn’t obvious enough from the word) which resituates the savage Other — previously conveniently segregated by geography or appearance —as being ubiquitous and omnipresent, yet invisible at any given moment. Unlike deterrence, where the the sword hanging above you can be seen at any moment, and the fear comes from a question of when the thread might snap, terrorism is based around creating the idea of the sword, so you always live in fear of the possibility that it’s there, lurking in the shadows, dangling from a pipe above you, a blade hidden in a sleeve in a crowd.

The beauty and cruelty of terrorism as a form of warfare is that, in practice, it has a tendency to be truly egalitarian in its effect: the truck bomb and the drone strike are equivalently ambivalent in their impacts, and in fact become more efficient in their delivery the more “collateral damage” they soak up. In a single moment it erases the boundary separating the civilian from the combatant, the home from the battlefield; it displaces all authority and agency and creates a vacuum, in which, for just a moment, the only logic is its own. There’s a twinkle in the sky, a low roar; and then you’re gone. This too was the fear of God, and the lesson to Job: that at any moment our environment will rise against us and strike us down without warning, for reasons that we cannot possibly begin to comprehend.

Rainbow Six Siege is ostensibly a game about the actions and operations of an international syndicate of crimefighters (technically under NATO command, although I’m not sure that context even matters here) known collectively as Rainbow, who have been drawn from some of the most elite police, military, and even private counter-terrorism units (CTUs) in the world. In the present, the game is functionally little more than (but certainly no less — it succeeds spectacularly at its current ambitions) a hero-driven shooter in tactical cosplay, starring a litany of unusually good-looking and demographically diverse “operators” with lovable personalities and a wide variety of gadgets that would make Q jealous. In its original conception, however, there is evidence of a much different approach, which reflects more directly both the series from which it draws its name, and Ubisoft’s broader approach to the notion of terroristic violence.

Siege’s (unfortunately barebones) solo experience, consisting of several “Situations” in which the player takes the role of an operator and performs an objective (usually securing a hostage or defusing a bomb), begins with a cinematic starring the now-former commander of Rainbow, a woman known as Six, who delivers the following monologue (with excellent gravitas, might I add):

I called you here today because we face dire circumstances. Our intelligence has confirmed the existence of a new threat that is unlike any we have seen before. This organisation has the ability to carry out attacks anywhere in the world. They are highly lethal and indiscriminate of age, religion, or nationality. The potential for loss of human life and psychological terror is substantial and cannot be ignored. They are the very definition of an unknown quantity.

Our only choice of action is to meet force with force. As of this moment my programme is reactivated and I am handing over command of all global field operations to you. Recruit your operators from among the world’s foremost elite. Borders and protocols are irrelevant. We must be the shield that safeguards the civilised world from those who wish to do it harm. No matter how ore where our enemies strike, no matter what defence they cower behind, Team Rainbow must stand ready.

Her monologue is intercut with a series of dramatic shots featuring the presumed enemy force — later identified as a faction known as the White Masks — preparing what appear to be highly portable chemical and/or biological weapons. An official blog post made prior to the release of the game further clarifies the lack of available intel regarding their nature: “We don’t know who they are. We don’t know what they want. We don’t know where they’ll strike next. We only know that they present a big enough threat for the Rainbow program to be reinstated years after its deactivation.”

The phrase “stochastic terrorism” saw a surge in usage shortly after a series of unrelated back-to-back mass shootings in two American states during August of 2019, and has since become closely associated with far-right violence and ideology, including the ways in which the kinds of language now characteristic of the Trump administration have contributed to the weaponisation of pre-existing mental instability towards convenient political targets. Stochastic terrorism does not refer to the actor who depresses the switch on the detonator, or even the act of detonation itself; but the voice which pollutes the public space with paranoia and uncertainty, which actively seeks to cultivate a volatile atmosphere in which unstable individuals can be tipped over the edge, so to speak, like intentionally filling a room with gas fumes knowing there’s a risk of a spark. At the end of the day a bomb or a rifle is just a vector for the immaterial; terrorism is not about an act, but a state of mind.

Team Rainbow, initially conceived of in Tom Clancy’s novel Rainbow Six (1998) as a coalition rapid-response team designed to address the potential emergence of extra-national terrorist actors following the demise of the Soviet Union (“and other nation states with political positions adverse to American and Western interests”), still very much operated in a post-Cold War understanding of the world in which the greatest terrorist threats ultimately still had probable origins in old political intrigue: disenfranchised former intelligence agents, or corrupt political leaders with criminal connections.

The reconstituted Team Rainbow of Siege, however, is in many ways a unique and potentially novel reaction to the emergence of a previously-unimaginable culture in many ways defined by stochastic terror, in which the origins and identity of the threat are unclear and potentially even nonexistent in terms of a coherent sense of purpose, and in which terror has taken on an autotelic function in perpetuating itself for its own sake. Barring the likely reality that there was simply very little budget allocated to the writing team for Siege, the White Masks are presented as entirely without discernible structure, organisation, or even purpose: “They are the very definition of an unknown quantity,” the former Six intones, and their completely rhizomatic nature is made all the more threatening by their choice in weaponry: a highly toxic biochemical agent which manifests as a dense, pollen-like yellow fog deployed from portable, seemingly homemade canisters.

In the first and only major story event included with the base game, a mission ominously named “Article 5”, the newly-assembled Rainbow team faces a “trial by fire”: the White Masks have inexplicably targeted “one of our most notable institutions of learning” (whose logo looks an awfully lot like Harvard’s, and which also just so happens to apparently be located in Cambridge, MA), where they have unleashed copious amounts of their mustard-coloured gas and, armed with light machine guns and plastic explosives, have proceeded to lock the campus down and rig it with powerful explosives.

What exactly they’re attempting to communicate with said attack is unknown, but judging from both Six’s narration (“This is more than an attack on our soil… this is an attack on our future.”) and Ubisoft’s official description (“blast through the brick walls that have protected the leaders of tomorrow”), it’s quite clear that the attack is received not as a political statement, intended to advance any specific goal or agenda, but an existential threat, an attack on the very idea of a nation’s future. In this sense, the attack needs no motivation or justification beyond its very own existence: violence for the sake of violence.

There’s been a good amount of speculation amongst fans as to what exactly is going on in the multiplayer section of the game, which pits two teams of five Rainbow operators against one another in tense objective-oriented standoffs. The common consensus — which seems to have basically been confirmed as canon by recent official cinematics — is that the operators are participating in elaborate training simulations taking place in very detailed reconstructions of the environments to which they’ll eventually be deployed (never mind the logistical gymnastics of that). This is not altogether unbelievable — after all, militaries around the world are certainly no stranger to building vast and incredibly detailed artificial cities in which they run combat simulations, accurate down to the very scents and sounds — and it would certainly explain the oddities of the maps upon closer examination: why are there no doors anywhere? Why are there no civilians — the most volatile element of an active urban situation? Why are there ventilation holes punched seemingly randomly into the walls which just so happen to perfectly accommodate the drones that the operators use? Why is there only one bathroom in a multistory building???

So what of Terrorist Hunt?

The Terrorist Hunt game mode (which has since been rebranded to the equally generic but probably more immediately accessible “Training Grounds”) is the one place in the game where the game’s supposed main villains, the White Masks, appear with some regularity. If the multiplayer matches are meant to be Rainbow’s simulation training, Terrorist Hunt is typically regarded to represent the actual missions Rainbow undertakes as part of its (largely invisible) campaign against the White Masks.

If so, however, the nature of the White Masks’ goals becomes even more incomprehensible. If the maps are anything to go by, taken either literally or as Rainbow’s simulated approximation of their perceived threat evaluation, the White Masks suddenly seem not only like an untraceable group with access to ungodly amounts of hazardous biochemical material; but one which can successfully strike at any given moment any number of targets across the world ranging from upscale suburban houses to grungy biker clubhouses, from derelict theme parks housing drug labs to fancy skyscraper towers done up in traditional Japanese regalia. Their choice in targets seems completely arbitrary, devoid of any similarities or conclusions beyond the fact that there might just as well be none. The only mention of something even remotely close to betraying some kind of identity comes with a map named Oregon, described as “an assault on a fortified survivalist compound”; and yet, in context of everything else, it’s just another mystifying and seemingly discrete node in a vast scattering of seemingly discrete nodes.

In a way, there’s a kind of elegance to this. Long before anyone could have imagined that it would eventually become the e-sports titan it now is, Siege was compared to the War on Terror as sport:

[Conflicts] feel hollow at first, like dramatized chess puzzles, but the absence of narrative context or characterization begins to feel purposeful, embodying the fantasy of the specialist who doesn’t need to know why he’s invading a fortified chalet in the French Alps, only that the order was given. The decision happens elsewhere, the debate about strategy and potential consequences out of his hands. For a game about guns and combat, “Siege” often makes one feel oddly vulnerable, powerless to do anything but follow orders and oversee the efficient discharge of one’s weaponry.

The reality of any combat situation, but particularly counterterrorism efforts, is that it exists as a consequence and at the confluence of a much larger interplay of known knowns, unknown knowns, known unknowns, and, most scarily of all, unknown unknowns. Every round fired — or not fired — is a political statement, and a physical acknowledgement — or lack thereof — of a line between the world of civilians and the world of active combatants, which is simultaneously impermeable and infinitely fragile. Hell, a war conducted in an urban environment is in itself already a kind of political statement, a tacit admission of a profound failure to uphold the most basic and arguably sacrosanct promise of a government to its people to act as a safeguard, a kind of thin red(/blue/green/whatever) line as someone once put it, between savagery and society, law and anarchy.

How liberating then, how thrilling would it be to fight a war freed from geopolitics, from hypocritical commanders worried about their promotions, from an apathetic and mocking snowflake public that cannot possibly understand your struggles and sacrifices, the rush of terror and adrenaline and ecstasy— against an enemy with no discernible face or name or purpose, who exists solely to be fought? Honour, courage, fidelity — people talk about these things, but who can say what they really mean? It is the dream of the warrior that the war shall never end, that the battlefield shall one day stretch across the face of the earth, that even the gods should become swallowed by it: everything else after that is just pretense for weaker men.

This is after all the great illusion of Achilles’ shield, whose supposedly invulnerable face bore an intricate mandala of the entire Homeric cosmos in all its banalities and its contradictions, divinely sanctioned by the gods themselves: that somewhere beyond the battlefield, there lies peace and civility, abundance and song, all of which bring into focus the sacrifices and horrors of war. But we should do well to remember that after all the ekphrasis and microcosm, metaphor and cosmogony, it’s just a trick, a nice painting by a lame god cast into the darkness by his own brethren; and that Achilles’ shield is just a shield, whose face was meant to be seen not by its hellbent and bloodthirsty bearer, but by the victim, as a mocking prelude to a blade in between the ribs.

At the end of the day, after all analysis, only two facts can be discerned for certain about the White Masks: we know absolutely nothing about them, except that the threat they pose is great enough to singularly justify the continued existence of Rainbow. And it’s with that knowledge alone that the war must continue to be waged, no matter the cost.

The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living. Only when we are in the midst of conflict does the shallowness and vapidness of much of our lives become apparent. Trivia dominates our conversations and increasingly our airwaves. And war is an enticing elixir. It gives us resolve, a cause. It allows us to be noble. And those who have the least meaning in their lives, the impoverished refugees in Gaza, the disenfranchised North African immigrants in France, even the legions of young who live in the splendid indolence and safety of the industrialized world, are all susceptible to war’s appeal.

Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning

There exists a concept in military science known as fourth-generation warfare (4GW), used to describe a conflict in which the traditional boundaries delineating acts of warfare — direct vs covert action, combatants vs civilians — begin to erode or outright collapse into one another. In 4GW, ultimate control over violence becomes decentralised from forces representing the state, and instead becomes redistributed over a wide playing field made up of a variety of violent non-state actors, oftentimes representing a diverse range of backgrounds and interests in the conflict. There are typically understood to be three layers of 4GW: the physical layer in which direct combat occurs, and which is considered to be the least important in determining the outcome of the conflict; the psychological layer, which involves things like morale and spirit; and the cultural layer, which includes morals, values, and traditions, where the primary conflicts of 4GW — “to destroy the moral bonds that allows the organic whole to exist” — are both waged and won (10).

Few other games have dealt with this last layer — symbolic and culture violence as the site of warfare — as directly or explicitly as The Division (I’ll proceed to treat both games under the general umbrella term of The Division from here on out). Others have written far more eloquently than I can about the specific ideological structures and struggles which underlie the broader politics of The Division; but my interest lies specifically in examining the ways in which violence is enacted anathema to ideological lines and tensions, existing as a self-propagating force irrespective of cause.

Much has been written as of late about The Division given its uniquely timely and bleak portrayal of a world lain to ruin by what is confirmed in-game from the start to have been a man-made virus. A good amount of this writing tends to focus on the physical devastation: the smouldering ruins of upended vehicles stacked up at the intersections, the looted pharmacies and department stores riddled with shell casings and debris, the mountains of bodies wrapped in body bags and eventually in trash bags when they ran out of the former, stacked up two, three stories against the sides of apartment buildings. There’s plenty of talk as well about the astonishing efficacy of The Division’s fictional CDC/FEMA stand-in, CERA, and its response to the Dollar Flu pandemic: the proliferation of mobile testing sites and field hospitals throughout the cities, the abundance of medical stations that seem well-equipped, many even with advanced tech such as UV checkpoints for sterilisation. Compared to the response of many real world governments to the threat of COVID-19, what might have been taken for granted before — that the CDC in the event of a pandemic would actually over-respond in the way that we’ve been conditioned to believe by so many years of pandemic films and zombie apocalypses — pales next to the casual cruelty and gross inefficiency and ineptitude of reality.

The most attention by far however has easily gone — with fairly obvious reason — to the games’ astonishing ability to render with eerie accuracy a vision of our very world in ruins: our monuments converted into makeshift hospitals, their once-recognisable facades desecrated by graffiti or draped in tarps; the very streets we walk down on a daily basis in reality emptied of vehicles and covered in heaps of trash and detritus, some of it once human.

The totalising effect of this extraordinary devotion to a certain kind of psychospatial verisimilitude — not just in recreating the city in its exact proportions and visuals, but also in imagining how the city itself would react, where people would flee (and alternately, where they would go to die), where barricades and evacuation routes might be realistically set up, how shelters-in-place might be constructed based on the inhabitants and purpose of the building — is not just that we are left with an unbelievably impressive “recreation” of one possible (albeit unlikely) future; but that we become invariably immersed within the logic of the fiction, which is intentionally designed to mirror that of our reality. The desecration of a familiar sight — for me, it was seeing a section of the High Line, which I often walked with my friend, collapsed right next to a bench I swear I’ve sat on multiple times — disrupts the very nature of the semantic relationship between player and avatar, reality and fiction. War becomes a force through which all things become alienated from their original associations and contexts, and are repurposed by a logic of sightlines and probable cover, machine gun nests and sniper posts. A defensible position is, at the end of the day, a defensible position, whether it’s the Capitol Building or a nondescript sewer atrium.

The Division deals extensively with this kind of symbolic disruption and violation on nearly every level of its design, and built into this is a deeply cyclical vision of violence enforced directly through, amongst other things, the game’s loot-driven RPG mechanics. The weapons themselves become decontextualised from their physical properties by their damage stats, their talents, their attributes; the missions, many of which take place in dramatic interpretations of iconic real-world locations themselves repurposed by catastrophe, are played again and again until each one loses all narrative and even visual significance and becomes a fixed pattern of repeated inputs and motions.

Very quickly, exposed to the meat grinder of the game’s mechanics, the ideological differences between the various factions, each of them otherwise remarkably complex and nuanced in their grievances and desires, rapidly collapse: the LMB become indistinguishable from the Rikers who become indistinguishable from the True Sons who become indistinguishable from the Cleaners who become indistinguishable from the Outcasts, ad nauseam. The game’s mechanical thesis becomes quite clear, a kind of diluted reflection of a callous reality which by now would be something of a cliche if only we weren’t living in its shadow every moment: the fight for America is not a revolution but an arms race, and it will be won by those with access to the best tech.

The Division 2 even further exacerbates this process of symbolic disruption through its introduction of an ambient world event system paired with the Invasion mechanic, in which each week several locations are “invaded” by a new hostile faction introduced at the very end of the game known as the Black Tusk, changing the way those missions must be approached and effectively resetting the completion status of them on the player’s end. The climactic fight for the Capitol Building, taken over by a disillusioned band of extremist National Guardsmen who saw their government’s response as weak and inadequate and who hold as their vision of America a nation ruled by the strong with no room for the weak, marks for many players the true “beginning” of the game: the mission can only be started once the player reaches the highest achievable level — a feat which for most people will warrant at least a dozen hours of playtime at minimum — and only then does the true nature of the game — a small-arms race as RPG — reveal itself, unlocking a vast, complex system of “post-game” mechanics and storylines which serve to completely recontextualise the past several dozen hours of shooting and looting.

Even this final state has its own tiers of progression (referred to conveniently as “World Tiers”, which correspond to the player’s “Gear Score”, an aggregate abstraction of their overall lethality), in which, as the player becomes more powerful, they become exposed to even deeper layers of the game’s many conspiracies. Voices on your transceiver, on the radios littered throughout the city, are constantly talking about “taking back Washington”, “taking back New York”, “rebuilding our city”: but this is effectively impossible. Every victory is just a prelude to an even greater struggle; each enemy leader eliminated an opportunity for three more to arise.

No matter how many times you push back the True Sons from the Capitol Building, no matter how many times you empty out Manning National Zoo of the Outcasts and their central leadership, they will always return sooner than you think— and in greater force each time. You can take back every Control Point in the city, save every hostage you come across along the way, wipe out the leadership of every faction a thousand times, hell, you can even disavow the Division and go rogue as a built-in mechanic, become the exact thing the games have spent some fifty-plus hours warning you against — and it won’t mean a goddamn thing.

The games’ overarching story, with its littering of factions and conflicts, conspiracies and rogue entities, reflects a view of a world in which society and law were only ever just a mere scrim, beneath which lay concealed all manners of impulses both nihilistic and self-destructive, hell-bent on turning the world into a battlefield. At first glance, the plot seems to revolve around the atrocities of a rogue agent named Aaron Keener, who, after being abandoned by his government during the evacuation of Manhattan, disavows the Division and comes to the conclusion that human beings are irredeemable, and that the only way to build a better world is to first eliminate the existing one.

But what would he have been if not for the actions of Gordon Amherst, a lone ecoterrorist who engineers in his basement the strand of smallpox which he hopes will “reset” humanity to its natural state; which will, in a stroke of profound irony, decimate America’s capital structure through its very life and blood, the dollar bill; which will bring Manhattan to ruins, which will cause Directive 51 to be activated and Aaron Keener to be deployed into the epicentre of the infection and the helicopters to leave him behind, leave him for dead?

And what of all those who were already abandoned long before the virus hit, who in many ways become both liberated and victimised even further by it: the prisoners of Rikers Island, who are regularly exploited for de facto slave labour; or the sanitation workers, who watched and listened as their government failed them again and again in their time of need? What of the “Hyenas” — those who have no place in “the new normal”, “who build nothing, who create nothing”, who “prey on the weak”, who’ve “made our world bleed”? In-game, they’re presented as a generic faction of vicious looters and rioters whose power is derived from methamphetamine-like narcotics: but who were they before all this, and what caused them to become like this? Were they always this way? Were they just hiding amongst us all this time, waiting for the moment to strike?

Better yet — who are we? What is “our world” that we’ve built, this “new normal”? A world liberated from coffee in the morning, from free WiFi — where “for the first time in centuries, what we want is truly what we need”? And what is that which we “truly” want, or need? A camera pans over lush fields of hydroponic rooftop gardens full of fresh corn. Is this our new normal?

And somewhere in between us and the hyenas of our world, there is a third element: “a brave few” — and here, the iconic theme music kicks in, and the imagery of the Strategic Homeland Division (who up until this point have existed little more as a spectre in the minds of most people, just another fringe libertarian conspiracy theory not too different from the rest) shines through the darkness — who have “sworn to protect us and save what remains” (which is what, exactly?). “They unite us,” we are told — and it’s pretty clear by now that whoever “we” are supposed to be, it sure as hell isn’t the Division — “remind us that we are one people.” (Except for those who don’t belong, of course.) The music swells: “They are our shield and our light. But if that light goes out, who can save us then?”

This brilliantly-shot piece of what can only really be described as propaganda (for whom, it’s far less clear) is remarkable in many ways, but particularly in how clearly it identifies a certain social stratification whose layers pre-date any modern political or ideological models, and which have roots in a far more primitive model of the world: one in which the warrior exists by choice as separate from the rest of society, governed by his own logic and moral teleology; and yet is still held responsible for protecting the society, acting not only as its shield, but its light.

The conceit of the Division as an organisation, however, simultaneously affirms this and wholesale rejects it. The games make frequent reference to the very real and rather obscure National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive (known also as “Executive Directive 51”), a presidential directive signed by the incumbent George W. Bush shortly before the end of his second term whose purpose was to “establish a comprehensive national policy on the continuity of Federal Government structures and operations” in the event of a “catastrophic emergency”. It is as a part of this initiative that the (as far as anyone is aware, fictional) Strategic Homeland Division is established. Its members are hand-picked from various backgrounds and areas of society with a focus on demonstrated loyalty and technical acumen, and after vigorous training in a variety of disciplines they are returned to their civilian backgrounds, where they are required to remain invisible until activated in the event of some kind of disaster in which all other public protection options become either unavailable or are exhausted. Once activated, however an agent of The Division outranks all other federal agents, and have complete operational autonomy that allows them to avoid red tape and legal procedures. (The World of Tom Clancy’s The Division)

It is essential to remember then that the Division exists not to ensure continuity-of-society, but continuity of Federal Government structures and operations. The game tends to conflate these two interests and portray them as overlapping; but if the history of our government’s actions, of which the recent responses (or lack thereof) to the pandemic serve as a particularly imminent example, are anything to go by, it can be said almost with certainty regardless of political affiliation that in reality, any overlap between these two interests is more or less circumstantial. Curiously enough, The Division itself actually addresses this exact discrepancy through what is shaping up to be its ultimate antagonist. The game strongly suggests that even if none of this had happened, even if there was no Amherst and the virus was never created, even if all these tensions and hairline fractures were not already in place for years, just waiting to erupt — there were already plans long in the works anyways: a deep state conspiracy even darker than the Division itself, a shadowy cabal of executives and warhawks for whom the outbreak was simply a convenient opportunity to finally assassinate the executive command and enact a plan that would allow them to seize control over the country and establish unilateral dominance. In-game, they’re portrayed, as they usually are, as sinister and cunning, hidden amongst the shadows of surveillance tapes and corrupted phone recordings. But in reality, we don’t have to look too far at all to see the machinations of those in power who would gleefully sacrifice us at a moment’s notice so that their schemes may go on.

The Division tries to temper its cynicism by frequently evoking familiar images of the near-past — images of people sitting in a Starbucks drinking cappuccinos; Christmas trees lighting up Rockefeller Centre; spotless American flags waving in the warm summer sky above a shaded boulevard; hell, even an entire level set in the National Museum of American History, in which the player fights through dioramas representing a century of cultural and moral victories — as a justification for the violence of the present. This is what we’re fighting for, so we’re told. This is the world worth saving. It’s all just an excuse though, a flimsy myth we tell ourselves to obscure a more inconvenient truth: that this was coming for us all along, and that we even knew it, and still let it happen. That there was never any chance things could have gone any other way.

“Apocalypse” is a Greek word whose original etymological connotations implied something closer to a revelation: that the end of the human world was just an unfortunate intended side effect of God’s kingdom being unveiled to mankind. In this sense, The Division is not so much about a society that’s collapsed and is recovering, as it is about one that is trapped in the process of perpetual collapse, for whom The Big One really just revealed to it the extent of its decay: far less of a post-apocalyptic tale than one of an apocalypse in motion, one with no end — and quite possibly one with no beginning either.

For Honor has always struck me as one of Ubisoft’s strangest works to date. It’s a game that draws extensively in both its design and marketing from a kind of nostalgia of sorts for pseudo-history, with all its knights and Vikings and samurai; and yet it is blatantly ahistorical at the same time, in a way that feels at first flippant but upon closer inspection seems startlingly cogent and intentional (for reasons beyond the obvious marketing-related ones).

When does For Honor take place? The immediate natural response is to situate it somewhere vaguely in the far past — the various designs of armours across all three factions span a vast time period stretching over a thousand years, between 300 and 1700, and the ruins of stone castles lie in the backdrop of many maps, their state of degradation suggesting they’ve been crumbling for centuries at the very least. But according to some theories, which have been confirmed obliquely by official writers, the game actually takes place in what we would consider to be the near-future, around 2100, in an alternate timeline in which the 12th-century world is devastated by a series of cataclysmic natural disasters which irreparably deform the natural continental geography and plunge the world into a millennium of vicious and constant global warfare — a war so long that eventually nobody remembers what they’re even fighting for anymore. Eventually this period of bloodshed dies down towards an unofficial conclusion, after which the various factions retreat and settle into an uneasy peace for several centuries, during which they begin to grow both culturally and militarily stagnant and their former might rapidly deteriorates.

The rather scant story of For Honor takes place some time well into this period of decay, and follows the emergence of a legendary warrior named Apollyon, who has become disgusted at the decadence and complacency of the world and believes that the only way to restore it to its former honour, to remind them all of who they once were, is to usher in a new age of war by turning them all against one another: an era of wolves.

Thomas Hobbes, the infamously cynical contractarian, famously argues in his 1642 De cive that, “The natural state of men, before they entered into society, was a mere war, and that not simply, but a war of all men against all men”: bellum omnium contra omnes. The implications of this for Hobbes, which he expounds upon later in his seminal work Leviathan, are relatively straightforward: that by nature, man is like a wolf to other men, inclined towards moral anarchy and ruthless savagery; and that the only way in which mankind as a whole can have any chance at something even remotely resembling peace is through the social contract of political community, in which personal rights are ceded for mutual protection.

Apollyon, however, knows better. She was born in the mire of a massacre; she has felt the mud and the sweat and the rain and the sinew, has tasted of the metallic reek of blood and the stench of rot, and she remembers what she is. Of course, Hobbes is correct in his initial observations: men are like wolves, vicious and greedy by nature. But what good is a government, a social contract? Governments rise and fall all the time, social contracts unravel at the pettiest disputes. What is peace, but a delaying of the inevitable? Peace, which atrophies the muscles, weakens the grip, slows down one’s reflexes. Peace, which inculcates through idleness the roots of complacency, which will one day bloom into desertion and disloyalty: a betrayal of the very things upon which it supposedly rests.

For all the elaborate attention that’s gone into creating rather lavish and historically authentic setpieces, it’s notable that the only locations which seem to populate For Honor’s world are actual fortresses, ruins of fortresses, and ad hoc fortresses. Unlike in Siege, where the locations are predominantly made up of sites that have erupted suddenly into violence, or The Division, where a once-bustling urban landscape has decayed over time into a dense sprawl of skirmishes and loose fortifications, For Honor’s world seems dominated by a philosophy of militarisation that informs the very architecture and layout of nearly space: shipyards come pre-fortified with stone ramparts, villages are dense with elevated walkways. (The only locations which seem to have been spared this treatment are religious structures such as cathedrals and temples, which have been repurposed in their own ways as barracks and warehouses.)

This makes sense, of course, in the context of For Honor’s millennium-long war: this is a world in which war is not only a normal state of affairs, it is quite possibly the only state of affairs. There is little evidence of civil life that remains untouched by martial order — a market here, a garden there — and by the time the player arrives, there are not even corpses of civilians: just hordes and hordes of soldiers. It’s nearly impossible to imagine that any kind of longterm, let alone permanent structure could have been established existing beyond an army’s supply chain. There’s evidence of commerce, but who could find the time to run trade routes when there is no economy to speak of beyond the engine which churns out blades and bodies? Who’s training the priests? Who’s birthing the children? In a world like this, what does peace mean? What would it look like? Who’s even left to be able to appreciate it as anything more than a temporary respite from yet another battle ahead?

Apollyon’s philosophy seems impossibly bleak to us, as inhabitants of a timeline in which the world’s wars have been mercifully short-lived (compared to hers, anyways); but even still, perhaps we shouldn’t be so quick to judge her from where we stand. Because really — who can say for sure? Throughout history nearly every society has had the luxury of parallax, of being able to look back and remember some golden age, whether it was actually there or not, which rectified their spirits and turned them away from their crueler inclinations. But for someone who doesn’t have that — for someone who looks both into past and future, and sees nothing but bloodshed — if men are born as wolves and have lived as wolves for centuries, then what good does it do anyone, she asks, that they should suddenly try to become sheep? Unlike either wolves or sheep though, men — for better or worse — have been granted the ability to choose: to live as a wolf, or to die a sheep. It is for this very reason that a warrior truly fights, she reckons: not for any cause, not so that he may eat or that his home may remain safe; but because it is his fate to choose, and in his choice lies his honour. And what sane man would choose against his own nature?

There is the tendency, in both fiction and reality, to assume that the past was better than the present. This is the central conceit of a certain kind of view of history: the belief that at some point, things were already good enough, that we had already reached a “Golden Age”, but something must’ve gone wrong — the kings grew too complacent, the philosophers too petty, the warriors too idle, the labourers too greedy — and after that it’s just been one long downhill slide into the proverbial ash-heap.

The ultimate expression of this is the trope of the First Civilisation: a precursor society, perhaps one made up of a distinct race of protohumans, from whom all humans are descended, and of whom all later civilisations are just increasingly degraded imitations. Their ruins paint a picture of a people whose technology far exceeds the boundaries of all latter knowledge, whose heroes seem more heroic, whose achievements seem more monumental, who seemed to have lived free from all the terribly trivial trials and tribulations and travails and troubles which plague us in our daily lives. Hesiod’s Golden Age as described in the Works and Days — certainly not the first but probably the most well-known incarnation (at least in the West) next to Eden — was a time of primordial peace and prosperity, in which humans

lived like gods without sorrow of heart, remote and free from toil and grief: miserable age rested not on them; but with legs and arms never failing they made merry with feasting beyond the reach of all devils. When they died, it was as though they were overcome with sleep, and they had all good things; for the fruitful earth unforced bare them fruit abundantly and without stint. They dwelt in ease and peace.

What triggers mankind’s lapse into eventual degeneracy and cruelty for Hesiod, amongst many others, is the discovery of knowledge — but particularly, of choice. The fire that Prometheus steals and shares with man is not just a pleasant metaphor, but a powerful tool from which technology as a discipline emerges, allowing men to see in the night, to keep warm where it’s cold, to break down and reshape the earth into all manner of tools and utensils and weapons with which to conquer and divide the earth — to transcend the limitations of his flesh, which tethered him to the earth before like all the other animals.

In Eden, the choice is more metaphorical, but it persists in the form of shame, which descends almost immediately upon both Adam and Eve alike: over having hidden themselves from God, who sees through their deception right away; and over having to hide themselves and their bodies from one another, suddenly forced to make a choice between the lust in their flesh and the love in their hearts. From their shame emerges the nascence of industry, as the earth is made barren and the bushes become filled with thorns; man must now till the earth and break his back so that he may live, he must wander the earth until he finds for himself somewhere to call a home. Freed from the ignorance which binds all other living creatures, he faces now the ultimate unspoken consequence of his liberation: loneliness.

If For Honor paints a picture of a world in which open warfare has displaced society as the source of both social and individual meaning, Assassin’s Creed represents a kind of philosophical antithesis: a world in which society itself has become the staging grounds for an invisible ideological war pre-dating mankind’s very existence. The world of Assassin’s Creed is one in which every aspect of what would otherwise appear to be a “normal” civilisation has been covertly weaponised towards an eternal hidden struggle for philosophical supremacy: intellectuals are indistinguishable from assassins, artisans live double lives as tacticians and quartermasters. Pythagoras is not just Pythagoras, a talented but otherwise human mathematician, but the progenitor of an ancient bloodline possessing quasi-psychic powers that allow them to discern the transmundane. John F. Kennedy’s assassin uses a piece of esoteric precursor tech to create a holographic projection of a shooter on a grassy knoll in order to mask the direction of his shots. Even a reckless sadist such as Jack the Ripper is given esoteric significance as a cunning manipulator and terrorist savant. At the nucleus of all of these figures and their gadgets and their schemes though is a remarkably simple and timeless question: what do we do with ourselves now that the gods have left us behind?

In Genesis, at the end of the third chapter, God has discovered the duplicity of Adam and Eve and, after cursing them, has expelled them from the garden of Eden (but not before first crafting them some new clothes). From what we’re told, it doesn’t sound like he has too much confidence in them though, or at least their ability to stray too far on their own; for at the east of the garden he has placed the cherubim — the first, and one of very few times these strange and elusive beings are mentioned — and a flaming sword which turns every way, to guard the way to the tree of life. By the beginning of the fourth chapter, one line later, Adam has “known” Eve, and she has given birth to Cain. For how profound and long-lasting the implications of this sequence of events will be, at the end of the day, all things considered, it actually comes off as startlingly banal, especially compared to the apparent gravity of the trespass which has just been committed.

In Assassin’s Creed, this series of interactions goes a bit differently.

Adam and Eve in this universe are a pair of hybrid human-Isu: just two of many, many children of a technologically advanced race of protohumans known as the Isu, who have created humans in their image to function as a subservient and docile slave race. In order to exercise control over their workforce, the Isu have constructed a number of inexplicable technological devices known as Apples of Eden (Eden being one of several major cities, the others including Atlantis and Elysium), which manipulate certain neurotransmitters in the human brain. Because they are only half-human, Adam and Eve are less susceptible to this influence, and one day, they suddenly get the great idea — no serpents or rogue angels involved in this version— that humans should not need to live in slavery to the Isu. They steal one of the Apples and, in a daring escape sequence involving humanity’s first apparent recorded usage of parkour, they escape from the concept-art green city of Eden, triggering a decades-long civil war between humans and Isu which is ended by an unforeseen and inconvenient coronal mass ejection event that scorches the earth, inverts the magnetic poles, and wipes out nearly all life.

In either scenario though, Adam and Eve survive their respective cataclysms and find themselves suddenly alone in a new and unfamiliar world, with all the time in the world to contemplate their next steps, as well as reflect upon the consequences of their betrayals. The Adam and Eve of Genesis are left with a gnawing sense of despair and the growing pains of labour; the Adam and Eve of the Isu are left with… a sense of hollow victory, maybe, but more importantly, a largely unscathed Apple of Eden.

The true curse of Eden lies not in the moment of expulsion but in its memory. Aristotle writes that there are only two kinds of beings in this universe who can endure the loneliness of existence forever: the gods, and the beasts. Man, however, has relinquished claim to either: possessing neither the infinite patience of the gods nor the peaceful ignorance of the beasts. How many sleepless nights must Adam and Eve have spent just lying there in the darkness staring up at all those unfamiliar stars, thinking about how good they had it, cursing themselves for that moment of infidelity? How much easier things had been under God; how much harder it is now out on their own, trembling in the long dark.

The Pieces of Eden in this way serve as a literalisation of the existential anxiety of separation: a kind of extended, clumsy metaphor for the ways in which humans have grappled, probably since the beginning of time, with the irreparable loss of blissful ignorance — as a child of God, as a child of one’s parents — and in their grasps at maturity, have been condemned to a fate of floundering and flailing to restore order to a world emptied of apparent meaning. In this kind of struggle, the Pieces of Eden — just like any other technology — might as well just be paper cups to amplify one’s voice, the hidden blades and trick bombs little more than elaborate props in a lethal stage play. The real war will be waged in principles and maxims.

The titular and now-iconic Assassin’s Creed goes something like the following: Nothing is true, everything is permitted. The series has devoted a remarkable amount of time and energy, especially for a AAA franchise, exploring not only the possible philosophical meanings of this cryptic phrase — derived from a quote supposedly attributed to the real Hassan-i Sabbah, the leader of the Levantine hashshashin from which the series draws its origins — but the personal implications of it as well, and how its meaning changes to reflect the dispositions and backgrounds of those who struggle with it.

I’ve always found it rather curious that the first nine entries (up to Origins, in a now twelve-part series counting only the main titles) focused so predominantly on what some would consider to be “modern” history (an era starting around, depending on who you ask, the 16th century or so), especially when so much of the series’ commercial appeal revolves around its tremendous potential as a form of historical tourism (which usually tends to be more interested in classical settings such as ancient Rome or Greece). But when considered in relation to the game’s own central maxim, this focus on modernity begins to make sense in terms of exploring the ways in which the meaning of the individual has become displaced and reconceptualised over time.

The very first Assassin’s Creed, which is a kind of coming-of-age story set in the Third Crusade about the first of the legendary Master Assassins, Altair Ibn-La’Ahad, is situated during a time period in which the geopolitical boundaries between occidental and oriental cultures became increasingly blurred via cultural exchange, introducing in both directions a wide variety of novel technologies and ideas, including the flourishing of universities across Europe in the Muslim style. It was during this time that the Islamic Golden Age, to which Altair’s discoveries indubitably belong, saw the rapid rediscovery, revitalisation, and eventually advancement of the works of the Greeks by Islamic scholars, covering all manners of philosophy including science, technology, and cosmogony, that would eventually find their way to the courts and universities of Europe.

Consequently, Altair’s understanding of the Creed is centred heavily around abstract truths, mirroring the mystical inclinations of his era, and his religious background as a hashshashin. His philosophies focus on the metaphysics of the human experience, in which the battle is overcoming the veil of the world itself:

“What is the truth?’ he asked.
‘We place faith in ourselves,’ replied Altaïr (…) ‘We see the world as it really is, and hope that one day all mankind might see the same.’

‘What is the world, then?’
‘An illusion,’ replied Altaïr. ‘One we can either submit to — as most do — or transcend.’

‘And what is it to transcend?’
‘To recognize that laws arise not from divinity, but reason. I understand now that our Creed does not command us to be free.’ And suddenly he really did understand. ‘It commands us to be wise.”

(The Secret Crusade)

Altair’s revelation — closely aligned with the emerging mystical secularism of the late Crusades — paves the way for the birth of modernity, in which God is displaced as the authorial subject of metaphysical attention and the focus shifts more and more instead towards the individual human as teleological subject. The next several games follow an increasingly apparent lineage tracing the emergence of the unique anxieties and issues of modernity through their respective historical eras: the Italian Renaissance, the Age of Piracy, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution. In each of these, the respective protagonists struggle to understand the relevance of the Creed in relation to the unique philosophical currents of their contemporary periods, as well as their personal lives.

Ezio Auditore, poster boy of the series and ever the statesman, forges his legacy as a verifiable apostle of the Creed, mirroring the explosion of cultural expansionism of the Renaissance along with its increased focus on situating the individual human as the centre of cosmic meaning and interpretation. His Creed is unmistakably suffused with the humanism and egalitarian vision of his time, focusing on a powerful and authoritative vision of individual responsibility and dignity:

To say that nothing is true, is to realize that the foundations of society are fragile, and that we must be the shepherds of our own civilization. To say that everything is permitted, is to understand that we are the architects of our actions, and that we must live with their consequences, whether glorious or tragic.

Black Flag’s pirate-turned-Assassin, Edward Kenway, initially takes to the Creed as a shallow justification for his hedonistic and mercenary lifestyle: “For if nothing is true, then why believe anything? And if everything is permitted… why not chase every desire?” This meaning is fitting when one considers the ways in which the Golden Age of Piracy itself emerged both as an indirect response to the rapid overseas expansionism of the previous centuries, as well as a perversion of the aristocratic individualism of Ezio’s era, with many of the pirates having come from emancipated slave ships, or poorer urban areas in search of an escape from widespread impecunity, overcrowding, and sometimes just sheer boredom. (A similar, although more optimistic and socially-oriented version of this Creed is later adopted by the Frye twins who, like Kenway, view its message as fundamentally liberatory, an invocation to the individual to rise above the mechanised cruelty of the industrial age and its callous capitalist overlords, and to reclaim one’s purpose and sense of self against a system built to exploit the weak and theh vulnerable.)

For Ratonhnhake:ton, the son of an American native and a Templar Grand Master, the Creed takes on a much different, more subdued meaning, reflecting the ambivalent nature of the American Revolution as a war for a certain kind of independence, which simultaneously inflicted devastation upon the lives of the natives, many of whom — including Ratonhnhake:ton’s own mother — were caught in its crossfires. Eventually, it becomes as well a kind of acceptance of his father’s enduring influence in his life, and a compromise of sorts: that the Templars may have been correct after all about the intrinsic selfishness of human nature, but that they were misled in their pessimism, and that human beings can still be led the right way. (This also acts as a tacit reflection of the contractarian values of the new American nation, which Ratonhnhake:ton has directly assisted in birthing, and is the first of the Creeds to acknowledge the individual’s place in a larger social scheme.)

This grim acknowledgement is given a sense of tragic finality in the philosophy of Arno Dorian in Unity, from whom the French Revolution robs first his father, and then years later, his beloved. Having witnessed firsthand through the Revolution the collapse of idealism into fanaticism and the fatal, however unintended, consequences of extremism, he is the first of the Master Assassins to take full responsibility in record for the irreparable tragedies the Assassins and Templars alike have wrought in their dogged pursuit of the truth; coming to the conclusion that ultimately, the Creed is not in itself a guiding philosophy or even principle, but rather an admonition of sorts to not lose oneself to violence and to always remember the human costs of abstraction:

The Creed of the Assassin Brotherhood teaches us that nothing is forbidden to us. Once, I thought that meant we were free to do as we would. To pursue our ideals, no matter the cost. I understand now. Not a grant of permission. The Creed is a warning. Ideals too easily give way to dogma. Dogma becomes fanaticism. No higher power sits in judgement of us. No supreme being watches to punish us for our sins. In the end, only we ourselves can guard against our obsessions. Only we can decide whether the road we walk carries too high a toll. We believe ourselves redeemers, avengers, saviours. We make war on those who oppose us, and they in turn make war on us. We dream of leaving our stamp upon the world… even as we give our lives in a conflict that will be recorded in no history book. All that we do, all that we are, begins and ends with ourselves.

There is a war going on for your mind. At every moment, all around you, it’s right there, just beneath the surface. The shadows beneath the window conceal government-contracted ghosts-for-hire on their way to take out a high-ranking lieutenant for a gang whose name you’ve never heard of, which has made a multimillion-dollar business trafficking a new hardcore street drug whose formula you’ve heard was ripped by Chinese hackers from an experimental FDA programme investigating supersoldier serums for boosting aggression and suppressing pain in the heat of combat. The woman behind you in a pink Adidas hoodie and athletic pants sucking an iced Americano from a Starbucks cup has a retractable blade concealed within her sleeve whose hollowed shaft contains a deadly serum designed by an R&D weapons lab fronting as a household pharmaceutical company to rapidly circulate through the bloodstream and seize up the muscles around the heart inducing a lethal coronary spasm, instantly killing the target in case she somehow misses the placement of the first jab (she won’t). Out of the corner of her eye she’s watching the man sitting two tables down, who’s got one hand in his pocket and the other gripping a phone, on which he’s just begun running an app after breaking into the local ctOS control tower and scrambling the verification data which will temporarily short out the transformer powering the backup generator so that in exactly twenty-seven seconds, when the power for a six-block vicinity flickers once, twice, and then goes out, the team waiting in the lobby of a nondescript office low-rise across the street can enter without risking their faces getting ID’d and draw from their briefcases custom PDWs acquired from a Russian ultranationalist dealer in Croatia which have been fitted with integral suppressors and chambered to accommodate a special proprietary supersonic round designed to punch through the ballistic armour of the CTU team that, exactly six minutes and forty-three seconds after the first silent alarm is triggered, will swarm the building from the second floor and basement simultaneously deploying smoke grenades and specialised cluster flashbang charges but by that point, they’ll already be gone. The radio fizzes in and out, and there is a man speaking through it, telling you repeatedly, Listen up. There is a war going on for you mind, and on the television CERA’s tracking a new potential outbreak of an as-of-yet-unknown biochemical threat on the Mexican border which has manifested in the shape of an ominous dark cloud and which may or may not be highly lethal. The channel’s switched now and there’s Notre Dame up in flames, its spire disappearing into the thin evening air in a column of smoke and light, and they’re telling you it’s probably some kind of construction-related fire, possibly a short-circuit, it’s too early to tell, but what they’re not telling you is that it’s a cover-up, engineered by a lone saboteur who infiltrated the crypt beneath the plaza in search of an ancient artefact said to possess mind-bending properties, buried supposedly with the remains of a former grandmaster of a fraternal order whose name you don’t recognise, whose escape was facilitated by the intentional detonation of a flashbang device which triggered a minor incendiary reaction that happened to ignite some wood paneling and now it’s in flames, it’s all burning down, billions of dollars of possibly irreparable damage. And thousands of miles above you, watching all of this right now, all at once, the lone unblinking eye of a covert satellite peers down, unfazed, its electronic brain moving teraflops of numbers every second as it traces the movements of humans and ocean waves, cattle herds and unmarked flights across the open empty earth. There is a war going on for your mind. Don’t touch that dial now, we’re just getting started.

Introduction

This document is a full transcript of a series of interviews and subsequent discussions between myself and Edwin Evans-Thirlwell about my project My Work is Not Yet Done, which were eventually condensed and published on Rock Paper Shotgun as “How a would-be priest explores the horror of God in videogames”.

While the article does a pretty excellent job parsing a whole lot of information into a much more immediately accessible format, I feel that unfortunately — through nobody’s particular fault — a good deal of the often necessary context and nuance of our conversations was unfortunately lost in translation. The goal of this document is to provide that additional context.

This document is broken into two major sections: the initial interview, and the post-interview discussions. It is also available to read on Google Docs, which offers a full outline of the contents.

I. Initial interview

This was the initial interview, conducted on 17 January 2020. The full audio for the interview is available here, with partial transcriptions of the most relevant sections provided down below. Topics have been grouped by header. Light edits have been made to improve clarity and continuity.

[On the origin of the concept for the game]

Are you talking about the concept of the game [itself], or the ideas behind it? Because the concept for the game… I just took a shit one day in the woods and I realised there weren’t any games that really highlighted that! But talking more about the sort of ideological foundation…

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[…T]he other inspiration [was] the opening [canto] of Dante’s Inferno where, you know, obviously, he’s wandering around this sort of dark wood and he sees these like these animalistic figures, which a lot of people have taken to be metaphorical. You know, that’s probably how they’re intended to be. But everybody always focuses on the latter [sections], the bulk of Dante’s world where it’s dealing with this very peopled version of hell, this sort of social version of hell. But not many people talk about this stage that he was in at the beginning […] The opening lines are typically interpreted to be this… you know, he’s found himself in a place of profound despair. And he’s completely lost. And that metaphor is carried through over into this literal wood, and I wanted to explore that concept.

At some point, I was studying theology with the intention of becoming a priest. And a lot of my work there was sort of rooted around this idea of the sin called acedia, which is a very particular sort of idleness or sloth. The idea of sloth, in its original form, was actually presented in these two forms, which were acedia and tristitia [NOTE: These terms can, depending on who you ask, be used interchangeably to describe similar if not outright identical phenomena. The disambiguation I make here is not universal.]

Tristitia is more like what we would describe today as a depression: it’s a kind of physical and psychic exhaustion that drained monks of their ability to work because, you know, they were sitting in monasteries in the darkness for years on end, which is I imagine not good for anybody’s mental health. Acedia is more of a spiritual or philosophical sort of weariness, where over time, encountering so many different kinds of ideas and interpretations you inevitably come to this question of, “Well, is there actually a god? Do any of these principles hold up?” Which is kind of where Dante is at at the beginning of the Inferno and the Divine Comedy, where he’s very much lost his way, both in the material world and in the spiritual world. I wanted to start from that kind of point.

Everybody knows what happens in the Inferno, and everybody knows what happens afterwards, when he goes through and sees the sort of the aftermath of the material world as it’s present. But I want to explore this sort of liminality within that space with this sense of acedia, which is what happens when you’ve become… I guess a modern term for it would be “alienation”, but alienation has a lot of modern connotations that come with technology, or whatever. [Acedia is] a different kind of alienation, I suppose. It’s an alienation from a self that comes through too much introspection [of a specific kind]. So that’s I guess where the ideological motivation comes from.

[On the idea of a “pilgrimage simulator”]

The trailer uses a very sort of liberally interpreted translation of the opening lines [of Dante’s Inferno], but [the narration is] not actually from the character that you play as. Essentially, the entire narrative arc of the game or the overall narrative of the game is very much planned around a kind of journey, although I wouldn’t compare it to a pilgrimage in the usual sense, which a lot of people interpret to represent [a journey across] vast geographical distances. It’s more of a simultaneous sort of descent and ascent into who [Avery, the central character] is as a person: she’s confronting, for example, all these presumptions, suppositions about her faith — which is faith both in a religious sense, because religion plays a huge role in this world, and faith in a sort of political/existential sense.

[The] characters in this world belong to this sort of monolithic entity called the Empire… [it’s] not a bad place to live at all, but participation within the Empire requires a conjoining of one’s individual existential identity with the existential identity of the Empire. And, as she’s out in this area that’s completely estranged from the Empire’s influence and control, she has to cope with the sort of dissolution of that, the testing of that. In that sense, I’d say it’s a pilgrimage, because not only is she moving towards some potentially inscrutable destination that has, in-universe, these quasi-theological implications, but she’s also moving in a sense, both towards and away from her own faith, and the construction of identity around her faith.

[the influence of Vandermeer/Garland’s Annihilation]

Annihilation was not so much a direct influence [but] I think the thing that stuck out to me most about Annihilation was… there are a lot of stories that involve this kind of process: you know, a team goes out into this sort of wilderness and then they slowly become separated. There’s plenty of horror stories about that in literature and reality and cinema. But I think that Annihilation, both the book and the film, have a kind of mood to them, I suppose, that I think really captures a particular focus on the ecological nature of the areas in which they’re going into. Whereas, you know, something like Stalker, for example, very much focuses on a person’s interior ecology, their psychic ecology.

And I think Annihilation does a good job of sort of conjoining or blurring the boundaries between the external ecology of the flora and fauna with one’s internal ecology. In Annihilation, that sort of thing is much more pronounced, more extreme because of the character’s occupation [as a biologist] and just the way she is. So I don’t want to go that far [to suggest that My Work Is Not Yet Done is heavily influenced by Annihilation], but it’s certainly something that serves as a very solid point of influence. I guess aesthetically, there’s a.. you know, there’s gonna be inevitable comparisons, but actually, those comparisons didn’t really come to me consciously until after I started looking at my own work. And I was basically like, oh, okay, that’s just Annihilation!

[the influence of Lem/Tarkovsky’s Solaris and Stalker]

I’d say my work is much more influenced by Solaris than Stalker. [There’s] the [inevitable] comparison to the Zone and what the Zone does for people in Stalker, I can definitely understand that. But essentially, Solaris is about this team of… I think, they’re scientists or something, and they go to this very distant moon in a spaceship and much of the film is concerned with the ways in which this moon exerts this… some people will say it’s hallucinogenic, but it exerts some kind of presence on them, in which reality begins to slip in the sense that it starts producing duplicates. It becomes this very sort of oneiric… it has a kind of duplicating effect upon people. I think that’s the best way to put it. Or not duplicating, but it strips away the boundaries between, let’s just say like, image and reality, if that makes sense. Where people begin to see like doppelgangers of themselves and stuff like that. And that was actually a much greater point of inspiration, a more direct point of inspiration for my work than Stalker.

Stalker ultimately, at least for me at the end of the day, is not really a film about isolation so much as an isolating process. And I think that, you know, that’s valuable. But for me, I was more interested in the actual effects of isolation and alienation in the long term, which is what Solaris very much deals with. I think the two films also work together really well as a sort of dialogue. Solaris is kind of what Stalker would be like, if it was about people who instead of entering and leaving the zone, [stayed] there for six years or something. It’s a much more sort of long term examination.

[On player-avatar dissonance, and the influence of Darkwood]

It’s ostensibly a similar premise [to Darkwood, which I had mentioned earlier was probably the single biggest influence for this project when it comes to games] where it’s a survival horror experience. The entire thing [Darkwood] uses a direct top-down view, but it still manages to do horror very effectively. I found that to be a very engaging premise, that somebody can take this view that seems almost entirely antithetical to the idea of horror, and still somehow make it very unsettling.

I ended up choosing a sort of three-fourths view. […] One of the larger ideas that I’ve always been interested in as a developer is the dissonance between what the player does and what the character does. We can talk a bit more about this later, but I know something you were interested in was sort of like the psychic effects, you know, or just the idea of the psyche [in the game]. Part of the way that’s reinforced is sort of, you know, the lower the character’s psychic condition becomes, the more she sort of deteriorates, the more she becomes [assimilated] as part of the space, the less control the player will have over her. It’s kind of an ambivalent process.

It’s measured in-game via this thing called willpower. Essentially, the lower her willpower is, [the greater the chance that] she might start refusing what the player tells her to do. There[‘s a chance for these] sort of like blackouts [to occur] where the player will completely lose control, and she’ll just end up in a completely different location.

So essentially, with a three-fourths view, I want to reinforce this idea that the player is more of an observer: they’re kind of a coordinator more than [a controller for] the character herself. A big part of the game is figuring out her feelings based on a [a variety of cues such as] animations, the things she says, the way she talks — noticing signs of slippage. […] Basically I want the player to invest in the character as one would sort of invest in someone in real life. Which is like, you’re not going to be seeing a meter representing someone’s abstracted hunger, so instead, you have to pay attention to what she’s doing.

[…]

Oh, I was talking about the perspective! So, the [three-fourths] perspective sort of reinforces the idea that someone is viewing this from a satellite perspective. You can zoom in and out during the game, and I intentionally added this sort of like very lens-like effect to that, where, you know, when you zoom in and out, it feels and sounds like you’re zooming in via a camera. That was kind of the intention for that…

As for the 1-bit monochrome aesthetic, I chose that really for two main reasons. The first being that it’s just much easier to produce assets in two colours than in multiple colours! I had to shortcut that one. Also, I found that it made it much easier to blend the character into the environment. I’ve gotten some comments that people can’t see what the character’s doing… but in many ways that was kind of intentional. Going back to the point I made earlier about the collapse of the boundary separating one’s internal ecology from the external ecology… I think that everybody who’s seen [the game] in action — maybe the three people who have actually played the game currently, including myself — I think we’d all say that when you’re playing it is generally pretty easy or pretty manageable to keep track of the character on screen. I’m not too concerned at this point at least from a player’s perspective. I think people will just have to trust me on this. It’s very much a part of the gameplay, needing to find the character constantly against the visual noise, the fecundity of the place.

[On resisting stereotypical portrayals of mental health]

That’s definitely a major point of concern. The representation of mental health in general is a very relevant topic for me. I think that I distinguish psychic health from mental health in a critical capacity. I think the language of it [as framed in-game] is my attempt to address that.

A lot of games represent the cumulative condition of a person, and that takes into account a lot of different factors. Games like Don’t Starve, for instance, have sanity metres. For me, that cumulative condition is represented by the idea of willpower. All these things together aren’t necessarily sapping her overall condition, this ambiguous [idea of] condition, but her willpower to continue on. And that plays into the title theme of somebody’s work not being done, so they have no choice but to continue.

There actually is a numerical representation of her psychic state, or not her psychic state, but the amount of psychic trauma she’s endured [although it’s not visible to the player]. The amount of psychic trauma she endures is directly linked to her overall willpower. It’s a multiplier [representing how] certain factors in the game, like injuries, deplete her overall willpower [in a compound fashion].

Whatever she’s feeling internally, there’s a little bit that comes out. […] Depending on how much psychic trauma she’s endured, her responses to things will change. When she thinks things or speaks to the player, some of her responses will become more pessimistic, or she’ll stop noticing certain things, or she’ll start noticing other things. Not necessarily in a hallucinatory way, but she’ll start noticing certain details. For me that’s the best representation I can personally come up with for this kind of thing, because at the end of the day you can only really have somebody’s words to rely on for getting a read of how they’re doing. Just to be fair, I guess, to the character, inasmuch as one can be fair to a character, I think that’s the only thing they can really do.

Originally, she could develop stuff like insomnia or depression. She can still develop things which have symptoms like insomnia, something that prevents you from sleeping, for example, or makes the act of sleeping much more difficult. [But] I didn’t want to give it psychiatric terms, because I feel that kind of both trivialises actual psychiatric conditions, and attaches those features to a pseudo-medical framework that I don’t particularly want to encourage in this fiction.

[Ultimately], the way I chose to represent [mental health] feels to me like a fair compromise, because at the end of the day, you can’t ever really represent somebody’s psychic health or develop a stable metric for it. Any kind of metric [though] is going to be [by necessity] grounded against something, and I chose to ground it [in this case] against the player’s relationship to her, or the player’s ability to control her.

[On the idea of an “excursionary force”, and the kingdom of heaven]

[The term I use in-game] is actually “an expeditionary force”! It’s funny though, I did originally use the word “excursionary”… In any case, yeah, [Avery’s] part of this expedition. The Empire is sort of like I said before, it’s just like this monolithic — it’s not even like a global organization, it’s better to think of it in some sense as like an existential state. And this is something that the Empire itself very much inculcates in its members: the Empire isn’t just a government or a group of people, the Empire is quite literally a state of mind, not to quote the song or anything but yeah.

For a slight detour, I think that the best way to think about it is that there’s this idea in Christianity that, you know, the ultimate goal of Christianity is the establishment of the kingdom of heaven. And in many ways, the Empire is a version of the idea of the kingdom of Earth, the kingdom of Earth being the kingdom of heaven. These two [have become] conjoined forces, where it’s like this Empire, you know, it has such a presence that it effectively has erased all of history. The Empire has the power to completely reshape history, so there’s no other Empire before or after. And so it’s from this place that Avery is coming from. She’s part of this sort of this expeditionary team that’s specifically designed to investigate things that potentially threaten or pose a sort of existential risk to the Empire.

They’re very much concerned with the existence of paranatural phenomena, which is a very big thing in this world. They’re constantly investigating these sorts of openings in the earth where the boundaries of natural law — or not natural law, but the boundaries of expectation of what is called the “natural order” — are breached. They go and investigate these places, and she’s part of […] a specific group that’s assembled to address the issue of this “sinking country”.

The game takes place in a fictionalised version of this national park in Georgia, and the coast has receded significantly by the time the game takes place, so that she’s right up on the edge of the ocean. Georgia is… I don’t know if you know anything about American geography, but there’s maybe a thousand kilometres of receding coastline. [NOTE: Evidently I don’t know much about American geography either… the real number is much closer to around 300km or so, depending on where you decide to measure distance to shore.]

So she’s been sent into this region to investigate this strange signal that’s causing disruptions, and she was originally sent in as part of a four-person team. But the other three people are no longer there for reasons I suppose that the game will answer (or maybe not!). The game starts just after the third person has gone, and now she’s just alone and she’s been here for like, maybe a month or two, and she has to figure out what to do. Does she continue with their mission? Or does she abandon it, just live it out? It’s a very open-ended game in that sense. The idea of whether to respect both one’s external and in some sense internal mission, regardless of whether you still have connection to that original source.

[On Ligotti, and his identically-named work]

I don’t know if you’ve read [Ligotti’s My Work Is Not Yet Done] but it’s essentially grounded in this idea of cosmic horror [of] the corporation, a kind of monolithic fear that we typically associate with eldritch gods. There is an element of bureaucratic inscrutability to the game, but it’s more of an oblique reference. I think the thing the book does very well, proves very well is that cosmic horror doesn’t have to be grounded in the Lovecraftian approach, which I personally really do not like for a number of reasons. The aesthetic can be grounded in something more — in the case of the book — social, such as a corporation. Or in my case, something pseudo-ecological. There’s immense horror to be found in the natural world and just the idea of wilderness. A lot of people are like, “oh, what if what if we went into the sky and into space or whatever: surely there must be horrifying things.” And sure, no doubt it’s fucking horrifying out there. But there’s plenty of that kind of stuff to be found down here.

[On empire]

It’s not really possible to talk about [the nature of the Empire’s power] without mentioning the underlying importance of the theological element within the construction. I probably won’t go into too much detail about it right now, but essentially the Empire was founded by an almost Christ-like figure, a figure that’s now considered messianic, who emerges in the world and with them they bring these immense powers — maybe godlike is not the right word — but they wage absolute fucking destruction upon the earth in its present form. And the Empire sort of emerges from the lineage of that, both directly and spiritually, where a lot of its power lies not just in controlling resources or anything but […] its particular sensitivity to the natural ecology, if you will: man’s relationship to the earth in ways that present industries very much deny.

[…]

They say that every empire’s control ultimately comes down to how well it can keep its citizens fed. A lot of empires in fiction are depicted as… the source of their power is military, it’s oppressive. I want to explore the idea of a utopian empire, of empire as a utopian concept. The idea of utopia kind of died out with the Nazis, since they were arguably one of the last major sort of utopian movements, who actually came to power and did something with it, and you know, everybody knows how that turned out…

So I think that people are very wary of utopia, you don’t see it much in fiction, or at least at mass scale, but I wanted to explore the idea of… what if the kingdom of heaven on earth were to actually be established? What would it look like, where would it derive its power from? So much of the misery in the current world comes from the inability to keep people fed and housed; I thought it’d be fitting and interesting for this empire to derive almost all of its power from its ability to sustain everybody’s daily living. Ultimately I believe that in some sense the Empire here is genuinely a benevolent force of some kind. But I’m also very interested in exploring the ways in which that kind of benevolence is very intentionally constructed. I don’t know, I guess I don’t want to be cynical. But I do want to explore the implications of that on a social level.

-

I think [My Work Is Not Yet Done] doesn’t deal that much with the sort of… I don’t want to say political, but I guess just for lack of a better word, the political exploration of [the concept of identity in relation to the Empire]. That is something I definitely want to explore in later games, and I have a bunch of stuff already written for… maybe not the next one, but something down the line that very much deals with the idea of becoming dissociated from or disconnected from the Empire at least in its most obvious [political and social] form.

There’s this idea that in this universe, the Empire is quite literally everything and everything is the Empire, including that which is not part of the Empire. Empire [in general] is very much defined by the elements that resist it as much as it is defined by the elements contained directly within it. So that is something I want to explore later. But for this game, this sort of dissociation is less about a political sort of existentialism in the Empire as it is an interrogation of its role [in the natural world]. I wouldn’t go so far as to say outright “disenchantment”, but definitely, there’s a kind of sustained interrogation of the idea that all, you know, the Empire truly is all of reality.

-

The next iteration of this [series of ideas] that I’m interested in is effectively a direct exploration of the present history of the Empire. In the past several years, they’ve been undergoing not so much a kind of civil war, but a minor [civil] conflict within their [home] region. And it’s from this conflict that Avery is actually coming. She’s a veteran of this conflict, but unlike, you know, modern conflict where so much of it is combat-oriented, the Empire’s ideology is that they seek to assimilate people [rather than dominate them, and much of its work and understanding of things like conflict and violence is more cultural/symbolic than literal]. They don’t want to just outright destroy people, that’s their last resort. The Empire never kills people. They don’t have a military, they don’t have a traditional military force. Avery’s coming from [a conflict] against this group that’s, at least in [how it’s presented in this next potential] game, this sort of nascent pseudo-religious group that’s very much inspired by some of my issues with Metal Gear Solid. That’s one of these groups that pose an existential threat, a political counter-argument to the Empire. But we’ll save that for a later game…

[On genre conventions]

I want to contribute a title to the survival genre that’s very much focused on the physical act and feeling of surviving, rather than just the guise of surviving. [So, in a sense, on] the very literal act of surviving on a microscopic level. That ties back into what I was saying about maintaining that critical distance between the character and the player. So at any given point, you’re not surviving as the player, it’s not you playing; [instead] the player coordinates a number of actions by observing Avery and basically figuring out that she’s hungry, or needs a piss. I guess the other way of putting it is that I want to put the survival back in survival horror; that’s what I tell myself personally. But I don’t say that kind of stuff out loud in public, because it kind of makes people mad!

[On horror]

It does not take much to scare me at all. I genuinely consider jump scares very, very effective. But some of the most horrifying moments in my life have come out of… I don’t do it so much these days, but […] I used to go on these very long walks. And some of the most horrifying moments in my life have come out of just sitting out there, just noticing things that seem, in a Mark Fisher sense, very weird or very eerie. Just the feeling of having to get up in the middle of the night to go the bathroom is potentially traumatizing.

A lot of the horror draws from things that personally really frightened me. So the example that comes to mind for me, is this one time I was out maybe 30 or 40 kilometers into a reservation [near] where I lived [at the time]. And, you know, it’s like 30 kilometers out, there’s no infrastructure around, there’s no cell signal, there’s nothing, not even much of a trail left. I hadn’t encountered anybody for a couple hours. And then all of a sudden, like, as I sit down — like, I’m just sitting down on this rock and I suddenly noticed a beer bottle, lying beneath the rock. No other sign of human beings, just a single fucking beer bottle, just sitting here. And in that moment, I just felt this wave of fucking immense horror wash over me. I felt like I was being watched by something. It was a very disrupting moment.

I think that kind of feeling is something that you can’t really understand until you’ve encountered something similar, finding yourself an environment in which you don’t expect to see something, and then you see it. Or you expect to see something but you don’t. And that’s where a lot of my horror comes from, I think. There’s also plenty of uncomfortable imagery in the game, let me put it like that. But I consider that kind of horror to be lesser to that sort of existential horror.

[Is the horror more from a sense of incongruity, or finding an artefact with a purpose?]

It’s a combination of both those things, as well as the entire shattering, I guess, of an expectation. The bottle looked pretty recent, as well, it still had some liquid in it, so somebody had been here relatively recently. That combination of total isolation in the environment, the fact that I was off the trail, the fact that like, I just hadn’t seen anybody and therefore had gotten into this kind of mindset… it was a very chilling moment in some ways.

It’s like when you have a particularly grainy photo, like those urban legend photos, where it’s like, “oh, look, there’s a ghost in the background”. And at first you don’t see anything and then you look into a dark corner and suddenly see a tiny smattering of pixels that might look like a face. And now you can’t stop thinking about it, you can’t stop seeing it. It’s this idea of the fact that any given moment in our lives, it could be some kind of presence that’s just cohabiting with us: not even with sinister intent, but it’s just there and we have no idea. And that’s fucking terrifying to me.

[Where does the player factor into the sense of horror?]

There’s two kinds of horror [at work], I think. The player doesn’t know about the things they see in the environment, but the character might understand them because it’s her occupation, she primarily deals with these very strange occurrences. Her training has involved undergoing these incredibly disturbing, psychically intense experiences in which she’s conditioned against fear as much as possible. So things that disrupt the player may not necessarily disrupt her.

But she can also recognize things in the environment which she may not tell the player about. Something that may be completely unrecognizable to the player she’ll just look at and feel nothing or she’ll recognize it [but say nothing]. I want the player to distrust her a little bit. Later when her willpower, which sort of represents her connection to the player, starts to deteriorate, she’ll start to do things that are against or even entirely independent of the player’s agency.

I guess the easy way of putting this would be that she’s an unreliable narrator. I kind of wanted to reinforce the horror of this idea… “What does this character know that I don’t?” […] As the game progresses the character herself, if the player chooses to play [a certain] way, becomes alien to the player, in the sense that she becomes more a part of the environment. She becomes more accustomed to the strange logic of this place [ — but the player is left behind.]

[On mechanics of interaction and UI]

I’d say that [Avery] has possibly three, depending on how you like to mix categories and nuances, ways of communicating with the player.

The first is just sort of like, you know, the general status, like status quotes or whatever, [communicating very immediate sensations like the need to drink or piss].

[Then there’s a second mode] where […] if you like, hold down the right mouse button, you can look at various things and she’ll say, like, okay, “that’s a rock” or “that’s a building”, and she’ll try to guess the purpose of the building.

And [the third is that] she has a sort of journal, which is the game’s way of saving. So every time the player wants to save, they have to [physically] type out a log. It’s a deliberate attempt to create a kind of manual [engagement] on the player’s part. […] They have to type out this log which they will be reading as both they and the character are typing it out. And that will reveal things, similar to the way Red Dead Redemption does it: stuff that she doesn’t say otherwise would be revealed through this.

[She then must go back to the outpost to upload the log to a central server, which on the player’s end is when the game is actually saved.]

My intention was to make the act of saving a very laborious process. I didn’t want the player to just rest to save at any time. It gives the player an incentive to come back to the outpost over and over again, as the character herself would do, rather than giving you the opportunity to game the system by having her walk in a particular direction till she inevitably progresses in the plot overall. Which is definitely something that people can do, but I don’t want to incentivise that kind of behaviour.

[…]

I want to basically model it as similarly as possible to the way people communicate in real life. So like, even if you have a puppet, you don’t know what the puppet’s thinking.

[On religion]

That’s definitely the source of all my stuff.

Sometimes [my approach is] more direct, sometimes not, but [all my work] comes down to these fundamental questions that are ultimately of theological nature. So a lot of what I’m concerned about is, you know, the idea of maintaining faith in spite of testing conditions or circumstances. Or like, the idea of unconditional love. Essentially, what would the ideal of this be like?

-

I guess when I try to process theological questions nowadays on a personal level, I try my best to phrase it in a way that’s not necessarily secular, but in a way that can be applied in a more humanistic sense. And because a lot of people these days are very cynical — for very good reasons — about the language and sort of terminology of religion — and I don’t blame them for that — but I think that ultimately, religion, at least in its — I don’t want to say intended, but at least in a certain vision of religion of there’s still a lot of value to be found, in the consolatory and, what’s it called… clarifying nature of how the process works. Because at the end of the day, you know, theology as a discipline is very much a process of working with logic, the same as philosophy or even the traditional sciences. […]

I think theology at the end of the day for me, is just the process in which one works through an understanding of the world and your place in it. And I think it has a unique edge over something like you know, the STEM understanding of science, where that only focuses on a very material and objectifying way of looking at the world, whereas I think theology is able to handle the questions of the individual subjectivity within the grand scheme of things better.

All my works again deal with these questions — obviously religion plays a huge role in the actual construction of the game world which is something I’m very interested in hearing more people talk about, especially people who are like, you know, raised that way. I was not raised religious. My family came from the Communist era of China, a very transitional period when religion was seen as a very negative [phenomenon]. So, you know, it’s a very different experience, parsing questions of faith and questions of theological importance between someone who chose essentially to engage with that dimension of life, versus someone who had no choice, someone who went to Catholic school their entire childhood. So, you know, I’m interested to hear what people say about that. I think that’s the part that I’m most looking forward to hearing about, when it comes to the sort of the reception of the game, the critical discussion.

And I guess on a last note, or as a sort of overarching note: I do suffer admittedly from theological uncertainty. The major reason why I didn’t go through with religion as an occupation was that I never really could feel certain that I actually believed in something. People would ask me: oh, so are you Christian? And I’d be like, well, you know, I don’t really know. I don’t know how to answer that. I don’t want to say yes, because saying just outright “yes” doesn’t feel right to me from a religious perspective, or from an ethical philosophy. But I also can’t say no, because I do certainly think about this a lot more and like this is this kind of stuff is like very profoundly relevant both towards the things that I aim for and aspire for myself and others, and the things that I derive you know, immense horror from.

II. Post-interview

This interview took place between 11 February and 6 March 2020, and constitutes a number of follow-up discussions mostly aimed at clarifying certain elements of my personal background. Much of the article linked in the introduction draws heavily from this series of conversations in particular. Edwin’s questions have been preserved by and large in their entirety, and are represented with headers and in bold. This section is, with the exception of several spelling fixes and header breaks for continuity’s sake, entirely unedited.

—

RPS is particularly keen to hear about the game being a kind of continuation of the thinking that once led you toward the priesthood — you’re kind of carrying those inquiries forward into the field of art.

With that in mind, I have a few more questions just to fill that side of the conversation out. Obviously don’t feel obliged to answer if I’m getting too personal!

—

Can you tell me more about the formation and development of your feelings about faith and religion? Were you quite a firm believer when you were younger? What denomination exactly did you adhere to?

I largely arrived at religion through my own accord: my family, who grew up in an era in China during which religion was seen as not only irrelevant, but inherently dangerous to society, viewed all religion as “poisonous bullshit”; and the area in which I grew up was basically secular in a pretty typical American neoliberal fashion, where questions of church-going and “faith” in a higher power were operative in a mostly social sense. For a long time, I actually was pretty hostile to the idea of religion in general but particularly Abrahamic religion; most of my antagonism was informed entirely by a sense of profound cynicism and bitterness however, and although I did have some experience reading the Bible, I focused exclusively on the negative aspects of it: the calamity and carnage and wrath of the Old Testament, divorced of all context. I spent most of my time reading a lot of philosophy and theory — probably not with any particular nuance, to be fair — and in general, I thought myself above the influence of the church, which I figured to be an irrelevant and obsolete institution in the modern age, and God seemed too distant of a concept for me to care. The future seemed infinite back then and I didn’t care much about anything, and wanted to fight back against everyone: I did a lot of drugs that didn’t make me feel great just because no one else dared, told a bunch of lies I didn’t really mean just to create an image of a life I did not want, had sexual relations with a lot of people I didn’t really like just because I could, got into a bunch of fights I didn’t really need to fight just so I could hit someone; and in general lived entirely enthralled to this kind of moronic adolescent bravado and shamelessness whose consequences I’m still trying to untangle and move past to this day.

I can’t really tell you if there was any particular profound moment of revelation to serve as an impetus for my interest in religion. The truth is, I think I was just getting tired of the way I was living my life, but I couldn’t find any other way out, and for all the shit I was reading, none of it really seemed to offer any kind of consolation. If there was any particular moment which served as a kind of tipping point thought I can remember this one afternoon distinctly when I was just sitting on the beach with my friend and she was saying something to me, something utterly mundane and inconsequential, and I was looking at the sky — it was kinda just overcast and flat, nothing special, no miraculous meteorological anomalies that day — not really listening to her, just staring out towards the perimeter where the sea seemed to meet the sky and wondering if there was anything out there; and suddenly I was struck by this profound sense of coldness and acute loneliness. Everything got very bright all of a sudden, and then very dim, and I felt utterly alone and insignificant in the world, like all my actions would just evaporate. There was this kind of immense presence passing over me — the overwhelming terror that the sea was reaching out to devour me, each dark wave lurching closer and closer; or maybe it was the sensation of the sky looming over me, the clouds shifting and rapidly descending to crush me beneath their weight — and I felt completely immobilised. It was a very brief moment in reality but it felt like it went on forever.

In all likelihood, I probably just experienced some kind of vague psychotic episode, which was not at all abnormal at the time given the kind of lifestyle I was living; but in the moment it felt positively tidal in a strange way. I don’t know why I picked up a Bible when I got home; up until that point I’d never particularly been interested in the idea of the divine, and I certainly didn’t view the incident — either at the time, or in retrospect — as any kind of act of divine providence or anything like that. Maybe it was just because I happened to be reading a lot of Kierkegaard around that time, and for whatever reason his theology in particular stood out to me as uniquely compelling: how uniquely personal and internal it presented both the presence and process of God, especially in contrast to the more systematic and systemic exteriorised understanding of God held by his contemporaries. For whatever reason God all of a sudden no longer seemed so remote of a concept to contemplate.

As for why Christianity in particular: I imagine a large part of it was convenience, but also, I think that even if I hadn’t been born in a national culture so heavily steeped in the language and, at least in the most nominal sense, ethical framework of Christianity, I still would have inevitably found myself attracted to it at some point. While most, if not all, systems of faith suffer from internal contradictions and confusions by virtue of their intended goal to interface the human with the divine, Christianity is particularly plagued by these kinds of things, and its history and documentation offers a view of an extraordinarily complex and internally inconsistent system of beliefs, simultaneously authoritarian and liberatory, centralised and rhizomatic, petty and profound, esoteric and universal. I’ve always lived my life vacillating between extremities of expression and belief — maybe because it’s my astrological fate as the wretched Libra, permanently imbalanced; maybe just because I just suffer from a restless yet agoraphobic sense of self — and Christianity was the only system that really managed to speak to me in all its tremendous conflicts of faith and interpretation. For most people who commit apostasy and renounce the validity of, say, the Bible, or become disillusioned with the idea of God, the most common points of departure seem to be focused around the Bible’s many discrepancies and “errors”: why should we trust the Word of God, as it might be, if it’s so riddled with such obvious gaps in continuity? But for me, that fickleness and inconstancy, the errancy and interpretive mutability of the Word, was the exact thing that attracted me to it.

When and how were you studying to become a priest? Can you say more about why you decided it wasn’t for you — where did your uncertainties about Christianity come from?

I initially chose to become a priest rather naively — because everybody had started applying to colleges and talking about “the future”, whatever that meant, around that time, and I didn’t want to just become another CS or finance major like everyone else — but, having stated that goal with some conviction to a number of people but most importantly myself, I started seriously dedicating myself to it, lacking any better choices at that time (the only other appealing choice was to go into the games industry, which at the time seemed basically like a pipe dream). At that point, I was pretty interested and well-read in theology, wanted to do some kind of job that could directly help other people or improve their lives in some way, and people were always telling me I was reasonably good at talking people through difficult things and explaining difficult concepts in approachable ways; so priesthood seemed like an appealing option.

I doubled down on my Latin studies and took up some classical Greek and Hebrew, and began sitting in (well, unofficially anyways) on graduate classes at NYU, where I started engaging with a lot more interesting topics in a considerably more rigorous fashion than I was used to prior. The programme there was focused on Religious Studies, which I had naively mistaken as theology, and was a lot more academic in focus, drawing just as much from critical theory as from exegesis and hermeneutics. Once I felt I’d acquired enough of a theoretical background (or probably more honestly, around the time people started getting suspicious of my previously-assumed identity as an NYU student), I started looking at seminaries, which is the first step towards ordainment, and eventually decided to sit in on some open houses to check out what they were all about. That was just about the time I realised there was a pretty big problem: I wasn’t actually sure if I believed in God, or just the idea of God.

Up until that point, my experience with religion was entirely solitary: God was always something I experienced alone. My family had never gone to church but many of my friends’ families had gone nearly every weekend throughout their lives, so I was always curious about the experience. The first time I attended service — at my girlfriend’s local church for Sunday mass my senior year of high school — I left feeling vaguely sick and angered by the sheer platitudinal mediocrity of it all: the rote exchanging of pleasantries, the limp singing of songs, the uninspired sermonising. Perhaps I’m being too harsh on it in reality but the overall sensation I was left with was one of overwhelming disappointment: this was not the experience I’d envisioned religion to be, this kind of spectacularly unremarkable and perfectly adequate performance of rites. I couldn’t fit in with anyone there, either their social community or their shared sense of mild religious responsibility, and as time went on I discovered more and more that that feeling would be reiterated repeatedly in the years to come.

I felt uncomfortable calling myself a Christian, which in most people’s minds would align me with the kinds of people who tag the name of Christ onto nearly every sentiment like a psychic tic, who believe without any examination in things like the power of prayer or the literal infallibility of the Bible. But at the same time I also knew for certain that I cared about these kinds of issues with a degree of intensity a bit more pronounced than the average individual, so to call myself “agnostic” or whatever felt like a kind of cop-out, a rejection of my own interests. The result was that I didn’t know where I belonged, I couldn’t find any order to fit in with — a common refrain in my life, echoed in nearly every aspect of my identity — and as a result I became alienated from all of it, growing increasingly lonely in the practice and investigation of my faith, to the point where it became maladaptive and misanthropic.

I always tell people that one of the major reasons why I struggled with the practicalities of priesthood, with its insistence upon declaration and affirmation of institutional allegiance, was that I was never able to formally identify with any denomination: that the primary issue that led to my choice to abandon priesthood, was that, despite much of my theoretical foundation being built upon a catholic, deeply mystic understanding of guilt and witness, authority and alienation; in practice, I found the nature of the church as an institution and its practice of dogma deeply unappealing and in some ways even irreligious, which are sentiments that make one on a strictly ethical and administrative level pretty obviously unsuitable for priesthood. That’s probably just a cover-up, though; the more likely truth behind why I turned away from priesthood is because I was simply unable to cope with my intense personal alienation not from my faith itself; but from the experiences and lives of other people, and the ongoing concomitant feelings of frustration and resentment I experience constantly as a result of that failure. How could I pretend to console someone on matters that I found to be fundamentally flawed in premise alone, whose ways of viewing the world I found wholly unrelatable and even anathema to my own? The same way the measure of a good teacher lies not in their ability to recite from memory impressive technical passages, or identify the specific linguistic mechanisms and nuances that separate one translation of a text from another, but in their ability to inspire in their students a love of learning and one another, and a desire to engage with the world; so too is the measure of a good priest their ability to inspire in their congregation a love of God and one another, and a desire to engage with the world. With that being said, someone who holds others in contempt or looks down upon them simply because their lifestyles and philosophies differ — however much they attempt to conceal it — cannot be trusted to responsibly provide good counsel, especially of the spiritual kind.

At one point you talked about the horror of realising you aren’t quite alone, however alone you might feel — “at any given moment in our lives, it could be some kind of presence that’s just cohabiting with us — not even with sinister intent, but it’s just there and we have no idea”. Setting aside secular and/or existentialist interpretations, is there a theological dimension to that horror? Could you be describing fear of God as something omnipresent, watchful and unknowable?

I think when people traditionally talk about the “fear of God”, what they’re actually talking about — which makes sense, given the kinds of structures in which these faiths developed — is the fear of authority, where God is the ultimate authority in the Old Testament sense, capable of punishing anyone anywhere, of peering into our minds and discerning our intentions, uncovering all manners of sinful thoughts and things we don’t even know about ourselves yet.

The thing is though, I grew up under constant surveillance. My door had no lock and my father could and would enter at any given point for inspections; my time on the computer was heavily restricted to one-hour segments, during which a screen capture tool would take a snapshot every other minute or so and upload it into a log somewhere along with my entire browsing history; my father often threatened to (and sometimes actually did) cut off the hot water to my room or block my devices from the wifi if I “wasted my time” or “did bad things”. As long as I can remember, everything I did which could potentially have an effect on my “future” — the food I ate, how I spent my money, even the classes I took in university and what I studied — was strictly maintained under the authority and regulation of others. For a really long time I hated it and actively tried to do whatever I could to resist it or escape from it; but eventually I came to realise that without it, I actually felt even worse, as all of a sudden my life seemed to lack a sense of structure and order that by that point felt almost necessary.

All of this is to say that I think I’ve always lived my entire life with the expectation that there’d be some kind of authoritative shadow looming over me at any given moment, ready to strike me down with or without apparent cause. In many ways, I feel that it’s actually empowered me in many ways: I’ve lived so long under the threat of an all-seeing eye that I no longer feel threatened by it or its machinations, and in letting go of that fear, I’ve found the confidence to become fully transparent, to commit myself fully to my actions and beliefs despite knowing that there might be figures lurking in the shadows waiting to undermine and disenfranchise me, to expose me as a fraud, to dig up my past as a weapon against me. I do not fear God as an institution because institutions are made for and by human hands and at the end of the day, the worst they can do — which is still pretty fucking horrible, don’t get me wrong — is render meaningless the existence of individual lives. An institution can surround your house with men with guns and gas you, they can drag you out and cut you and your friends into small pieces with handsaws and melt you in stacks of tires, they can leech your entire lifeline dry with unending reams of legal bullshit and doom everyone you love into irredeemable debt; but their authority over you at the end of the day is limited by your flesh, and your ability to endure pain.

The God I truly fear though is the one whose works I cannot even begin to imagine, let alone understand. God for me is that indescribable feeling of inertia which drags me to the edge of a cliff, the immense and inexplicable urge to tip forward just a little bit, enough so that I lose balance and plummet forward; God’s the impenetrable blackness just beyond the reach of the porch lights weakly illuminating the edges of the forest in my backyard, the vast and sudden swell of dread I feel when I’m sitting alone in my room at night and suddenly I happen to catch a vague, blurry glimpse of myself in the reflection of my monitor. In any of these cases, I suppose you could make the argument that the sense of fear arises as a kind of assumed antecedent to some premonition of physical danger — the very real threat of falling off a cliff, the possibility that there’s some kind of predator in the woods I can’t see, the fear that I might see someone standing behind me in the reflection — but I personally believe that the true source of the horror lies in the moment just before the onset of physical terror, when we come face to face with a very present absence which we will never be able to identify. There’s been a lot of interest especially recently with the idea of horror on a cosmic level — the unknowable and incomprehensible, the unstoppable eldritch that defies logic and reason and scientific knowledge, which is abound with impossible contradictions and inconsistencies — but that fear is nothing new. I think only recently have we as a species begun to remember what it feels like to be threatened by something entirely beyond our control, to feel utterly powerless against something which exists beyond the works of human hands, but, having abandoned the institution of religion, we have to instead turn to pop culture for a kind of (well, at least in my opinion) inferior and materialistic language and iconography in order to process our collective sense of despair and helplessness. The sublime though, after all, is only ever able to exist as a faint echo of the divine; and by limiting our language and scope of understanding to the secular and materialistic (of which I still would very much classify the aesthetic), I believe we are throttling our ability as a whole to negotiate our relationship to this tilted world.

Your discussion of cosmic horror as a stand-in for religious horror rings very true for me. I don’t know if you’ve read any Timothy Morton, but his concept of the hyperobject may be useful? Something of incohere-able scale/occupying a different order of being, yet troublingly entangled with day-to-day activities such as turning a tap, or using a plastic comb.

I’m pretty familiar with Morton’s work and especially the theory surrounding hyperobjects; while I wasn’t directly influenced by it. it’s definitely an interesting and viable perspective to consider and I imagine that whole body of dark ecology in both theory and art in recent years most definitely has casted a long shadow, no pun intended, over this work whether I realise it or not.

I also strongly relate to the section about being drawn to textual inconsistency — vaguely paraphrasing Benjamin on constellations, I think texts attain a certain powerful and specifically material life when they are unresolved and self-contradictory. Just some quick thoughts, anyway.

Yeah, the parallel to Benjamin’s relativity is very apt! I’ve always seen nearly all texts as discursive, where it’s basically one person saying to another, “hey, this is something I experienced and this is how I felt about it, did you feel this way too”; it really helps to ground what would otherwise seem hopelessly abstract and alienated from reality back into the world that we understand, where all things exist ultimately only as far as we can experience them, either alone or together; much of my work aspires to that level of honesty where the transparency isn’t just about technical processes or workflows or whatever, but a kind of enduring attempt to reach out across this immense gap that exists first between author and audience, which is then exacerbated by medium and interface, which is then exacerbated by culture and language, etc etc ad nauseam until someone can just really finally get what you’re trying to say, on a really basic human level, and be like, “hey, I too feel this way”

[…] With regard to your thoughts on transparency and honesty: it strikes me that one way MWINYD goes about being honest is by refusing to overlook any of the gaps you describe, almost but not quite to the point of incorporating them into the fiction (in the casting of the player as a semi-literal camera). I’m very curious to explore this in the game.

I’ve now submitted a draft and the editors really like it, but they’ve given me a couple of things to follow up on.

Can you tell me a little about how The Document of Midnight Animal and The Exegesis of John the Martyr fit into your exploration of faith and divinity? I apologise for not asking about them during the original interview — I pitched this as a piece about the new game rather than yourself, and I wasn’t sure you’d want to discuss that work as (going by the Eurogamer piece) it sounds like there’s a lot of turmoil involved. But it would be good to get some sense of how those and any other previous projects anticipate what you’re doing in MWINYD.

The premise of the original Midnight Animal followed what was essentially a glorified bureaucrat with a licence to kill who’s sent by his employer, a major pharmaceutical company, to investigate the proliferation of a new street drug (which goes by the titular Midnight Animal) which causes people to lose sense of themselves and become extraordinarily violent or deranged. The game took place several decades after a post-nuclear America (which is how Hotline Miami 2 ends), and a lot of my interest in the game was exploring what that kind of post-catastrophe world would look like: this kind of corporate technofeudalism where a handful of syndicates reign over megacities, and the skies are constantly scorched with ash, and the waters run blood-red with algal blooms following ecological devastation. The twist was that eventually the character would discover that not only was this drug actually manufactured by the very company he works for but that its effects are in fact psychic rather than pharmacological, where essentially it’s a primer designed weaken the normal psychic boundary in people’s minds, thus making them susceptible to becoming transmitters for this alien signal that the company had uncovered decades prior (which was the real trigger for the initial blast which was mistaken for a nuclear detonation, kickstarting the global holocaust that ends Hotline Miami 2).

I think a lot of MA’s story, which was fundamentally about absolute impotence in the face of inscrutable catastrophe — the main character’s inability to come to terms with his own role as an agent of tremendous violence, the company’s futile attempts to negotiate with an entire realm of knowledge that they have no ability or frankly even language to comprehend, the entire so-called apocalypse in both the common and more linguistically literal understanding of the term having been precipitated by what is essentially a linguistic failure, etc — emerged out of my own feelings of desperate uselessness, which Nic’s article does an excellent job of providing a context for. While that feeling didn’t manifest in or out of any particularly theological lines of thinking at the time, at least not consciously, it definitely was all-encompassing enough to serve as a pretty decent shorthand for how I felt about my faith in general at that point, which was deeply fatalistic and defeatist.

The two works that emerged directly out of all that — The Document of Midnight Animal, and The Exegesis of John the Martyr — were both excessively formal works that were largely made out of spite and ego, although they were dramatically and almost diametrically different in aim. Unfortunately, due to the circumstances of their production, the intent of both has largely been compromised, and as a direct result I feel the actual resulting products don’t at all adequately represent what I intended with them at the time (and are frankly pretty embarrassing from a technical perspective, if I have to be honest…)

Document was basically a counterargument to everyone who claimed I had somehow lost my way or that I didn’t know what I was doing as a game designer. It’s not really an interesting project in any meaningful capacity beyond that.

The Exegesis of John the Martyr is a project that I definitely plan on returning to some day, but for now I’ll speak about it only relative to its past form. It was a two-part multimedia work: one part was the game, which uses a largely traditional VN-style format to tell the story of an inquisitor who’s tasked with investigating a series of disturbing incidents with potentially apocalyptic implications; and the other part was a written text, which includes both a direct transcript of the game’s textual content as well as an increasingly expansive series of extradiegetical footnotes, commentary, and marginalia which eventually reveal another story about the death of the author of the Exegesis as a text-within-a-text, and his friend’s attempts at coping with the meaning, or lack thereof, behind that.

As I mentioned in one of our previous conversations I’ve long been fascinated with the idea of inconstancy in texts and the liquid nature of interpretations, especially in regards to works that are regarded as immutable in some sense: the Exegesis was my first real attempt at trying to create a narrative that would on every level — including the level of my own life — fold in upon itself. A martyr is, etymologically, a witness; its profundity as a religious term came later as the martyrs were all in some way the ultimate kinds of witnesses, who gave their lives for their knowledge (or perhaps knowledge is too weak a term for what they discovered). I wanted to really examine the implications of that idea — what it means to truly bear witness to something, and the textual and personal legacies of that witnessing, and how in time the two processes become fundamentally intertwined so that one’s meaning and even creation becomes inseparable from the other — and in a more literary sense, a lot of it was a projection of me attempting to grapple with my own existential responsibilities as an author: both as creator and as witness, simultaneously transcribing a vision that did not feel like it was mine while writing into form a kind of subreality I could not inhabit.

So on one level, you have the eponymous character John, who’s transcribing his witnessing of what is essentially a kind of apocalypse in motion (which itself is being revealed to him in several echoing layers via a number of in-universe mechanisms); then you have the author of The Exegesis of John the Martyr, who has ostensibly written this work as well as a substantial amount of commentary, some of which strangely differs substantially from the contents of John’s narrative; then you have the author’s friend, who is trying to piece all of this together in an almost editorial position so that they can understand what happened to their friend; then you have the actual author, which is ostensibly me, etc, ad nauseam… But the point is that all of that becomes at some cyclical and collapses in upon itself, which has become a kind of cliché of postmodernism nowadays. My goal though was — is — to reclaim the sovereignty of the individual voice from what would otherwise just seem like random abstraction, and find the humanity within each one of the authors.

As a slightly better example probably: when we speak of the Book of Revelation, we’re also speaking of the Revelation to John on the island of Patmos; but who was John? His identity doesn’t matter anymore to us as readers and what we know about him — if anything — is irrelevant to our ability to appreciate his records of what he saw; but what must it have felt like to him in the moment? That’s not to say that I consider my work revelatory or stemming from anything close to a divine source in the slightest — in fact I very much feel my work is hopelessly grounded in the social and the material — but I became very interested in exploring that process of revelation as a kind of witnessing (and apocalypse as a kind of revelation or uncovering) and in the meantime I quickly found myself becoming trapped in this kind of cycle of endless creative revelation and transcription, a witness to something that felt both within me and beyond me.

To frame this in a broader and less immediately selfish sense: I think that the Exegesis is where I really began to consider faith as THE core theme of all my work moving forward. The subtitle of the Exegesis — “A Story of Love and Forgetting” — was always misinterpreted to be a kind of surface-level indication of the presence of stereotypical romance plotlines or whatever (which were never really intended to be an element); but in reality those two things, constantly in tension, are what I think forms the fundamental dynamic behind faith in general. That is to say: faith is a constant negotiation between the idea of love, and the act of forgetting. If someone bears witness to something they find meaningful without anyone else around, without being able to record it — what happens when they’re gone? Who’s to say they were ever there at all? The only bulwark we have against that kind of age-old curse of time, the devourer of all things, is the love we can find for and within one another: sure, the romantic sense works, but also in the compassionate sense, in the platonic sense, and ultimately in the divine sense, where love becomes this thing that can transcend the limitations of history itself, that can endure beyond memory and human understanding. The Exegesis at its heart, for all its academic pretensions and whatnot, was fundamentally intended to be about the importance of finding one’s faith in the face of a certain kind of oblivion, and enduring beyond that: about how the act of telling stories and bearing witness to and of each other is the only way we will survive our own apocalypses, personal or otherwise. I think that at the end of the day that’s what all of my works are about actually: love as a bulwark against forgetting, finding within ourselves the ability to trust our records to another..

It would also be good to know when and why you started thinking of a career in game development. Apologies — had I known I was writing something comparable to a profile, I’d have started with these questions!

Not entirely sure how you prefer this to be answered, but I’ve spent a lot of time talking about the more philosophical bases behind a lot of my decisions so I’ll frame this more practically. Up until about a year ago making games as a career was basically unthinkable for me. Nearly all of my prior experience was spent effectively as a modder using assets from HM (the Exegesis was a custom engine but I still largely considered it to fall under my work as a modder), so I never felt like that counted as actual “work” in any meaningful sense. Earlier, I had harboured ambitions to eventually work in AAA — that’s more or less why I pushed MA in a public sense so much back when I first began, because I thought it’d serve as a good portfolio piece — but over time I realised I just didn’t have what it takes to work in that kind of environment, and that my resume would basically would never cut it. For some time, with the encouragement of people I trusted, I strongly considered becoming an academic, but that was rather quickly put to an end after I failed to get into a single one of the programmes to which I applied. Over the next few months I drifted in and out of a variety of service and labour jobs, all of which I was very much not cut out for and unwelcome in, before settling into a state of NEETdom for the next year.

Having failed at virtually every single thing I’d attempted at that point and with no further ambitions or visions of the future beyond the inevitable impending impecunity once my parents’ patience wore out, I just kinda drifted in this state of gentle anxiety. One afternoon, I saw that another developer I was following was streaming some development on Twitch, and for whatever reason, despite not having any prior interest in streams, I decided to head to his channel and watch him work. I felt a sense of kinship and over the next few months I kept on showing up regularly, and eventually I made two of my best friends who also worked in the same engine I used to work in, one of whom was the guy whose streams I initially started watching. I can very safely say that it was almost solely through their continued presence and support of me that I was able to finally find the ability to start working on games again. I finally found not just one, but two people who understood almost exactly what I felt, the kind of extremely particular anxieties and frustrations and elations that come with working on games as a particular kind of person, whom I could trust with my feelings to be able to say, “yeah, I get what you mean, I feel that way too”. They were the ones who inspired me to first start working on My Work Is Not Yet Done, and who in time eventually encouraged me to pursue it as a commercial work (initially I was just intending on working on it for a bit and just releasing it for free).

I don’t know if making games is the thing I’m “meant” to do in this life, or if they’re the most efficient way of communicating how I feel, or if I’m even that good at making them; I don’t know if, who knows, maybe if things had gone right, if I’d met the right people at the right time, I could’ve been a successful academic, or a teacher, or a priest, or a web designer or a trench digger or a coroner or a line cook or a soldier or whatever. The thing is, though, I didn’t. I’ve had a lot of dreams that were nothing more and a lot more ambitions that amounted to nothing. I’ve tried a lot of things in my life, I’ve been to a lot of places and I’ve met a lot of people who’ve told me a lot of things, about the world, about myself, about where I fit in (and usually, where I don’t). And the only thing I ever felt welcome doing was working on games: not just because I succeeded — but because at first, I didn’t.

When I was young I was told to live my life in pursuit of what I was passionate about, but I felt passionate about a lot of things, and could never commit. At the root of that word “passion”, as it’s almost cliched to point out these days, is the Latin “pati”: to suffer. Slowly, over the years I suffered through my passions — one by one, they dissipated silently, meaninglessly, fading into the backdrop of my memory. Who knows, maybe Work will end up being an abject commercial and critical failure, maybe (most likely not, but who knows) I’ll completely fuck this one up too somehow. But this time, I know that even if I do, I won’t have to suffer through it alone. I know there won’t be a boot waiting for me, eager to kick me down; I know that someone’s got my back. I can’t tell if I feel this way because the games industry in particular tends to attract certain kinds of people, or if I just got very lucky, but either way, I suppose it doesn’t matter too much. All I know is that I think I’ve finally found something worth suffering through; not because the end is particularly rewarding, or the work itself is particularly interesting most days, but because it’s the only thing that’s really made me feel a genuine sense of good faith in and love for one another and the craft. That’s good enough for me.

GAME: Fugue in Void

PRODUCER: Moshe Linke (@moshelinke)

LINK: https://moshelinke.itch.io/fugue-in-void

The word “fugue” has two meanings. The first, in the realm of music, describes a composition introduced by a brief melody or theme, which is then reiterated and expanded upon throughout by a number of voices. Each variation builds upon the others, creating a cascade of recursive textures. The fugue is a process of multiplying the individual: one voice, speaking alone, is soon joined by others — some echoing, some arguing — and yet, by the end, they all speak the same thing, dialectic as chorus, pieces forming a whole.

The other kind of fugue belongs to the realm of psychiatry, and describes a state of profound dissociative disconnection, during which aspects of one’s identity essential to identifying one’s own individuality — name, personality, even memories and sensations of self — are lost. Fugue is specifically distinguished from retrograde amnesia by two major factors. The first is its temporality: episodes can last anywhere between several days, to months, but always, eventually, the individual returns. The second, and more inexplicable of the two, is its lack of direct physiological causality: it is not linked to either substance abuse or medical trauma, but profound psychic disturbance. Some believe that it is a kind of extreme defensive mechanism in which the individual, unable to bear the sudden presence of some unbearable stimulus, utterly retreats into a state of isolation so severe that even the sense of oneself is left behind.

Moshe Linke’s Fugue in Void largely exists at the intersection — or perhaps it’d be more accurate to call it an absence — between these two seemingly paradoxical definitions. It’s a work which seems intimately concerned with the fragility of the self in relation to the other: tensions between the two permeate every surface of the game’s inhuman and often uncomfortably alien spaces, and always, there is the sense that at any moment, everything is on the verge of folding in on itself — less an act of momentous collapse than a slow but certain erasure through erosion.

Fugue doesn’t see this process as altogether horrifying, however (although there are plenty of moments of profound ontological anxiety to be found here, for sure). Rather, it approaches it with a sense of curiousity, and at times, even wonder. The very first — and only — indication of explicit exposition we will receive throughout the entire experience comes at the start, in the form of a single sentence. In glowing white letters suspended in a black void, occasionally interrupted by what appears to be a passing train: “This is the story of my mind.” Intriguingly, “the story of” soon fades out, leaving us with “This is my mind.” If we view the entirety of the experience through this one line — whether as the implicit narrative of the former, or even the more direct qualia of the latter — the work as a whole, for all its seeming otherness, suddenly begins to feel much more human.

The first mechanically interactive sequence in the work sets the player on a bridge of light shining in the darkness. Just a few metres beneath, a vast monotonous sea churns, its black waves stretching endlessly out into the void. There is no other immediate sign of present life: occasionally, over the lurching sound of waves folding and falling, the cries of seagulls can be heard somewhere in the distance, but they are nowhere to be found in sight. Ominous drones rumble every few moments, seemingly building up towards something, perhaps horrific — something massive looming in the darkness just beyond or sight, or beneath us, passing through the waters below — only to suddenly cut off just as they reach a climax. The player cannot fall off the path, or move further out into the darkness. The only way is forward.

Eventually, the bridge leads to a building of sorts. ‘Building’ here is used in the most tentative manner: the structure seems less of something that was deliberately built as it is something that was discovered, a kind of brutalist concrete cave emerging from the shifts and seizures of some titanic continental slab. Although it lacks clear function or purpose, however, to say it is featureless would be wholly inaccurate: into its monolithic stone surfaces have been carved a series of increasingly narrow and byzantine passageways and chambers, which have been adorned (however sparsely) with fluorescent lights. The stone blankness is interrupted occasionally by bundles of black corrugated pipes, emerging from what appear to be dead ends and tunneling down into impossibly dark holes through which the player must fall to progress. The space as a whole seems a wholly inhuman artefact, whose presence and construction seems almost anathema to life.

In the building’s depths — although any semblance of meaningful cartography is discarded upon entrance — are several atria containing strange metal lattices. It’d be tempting to liken them to Modernist wire statues, especially given their placement and display, often as the sole focal points of many of these rooms; but statues require at least masons, if not observers, and in this place, there are no intimations of either.

One particularly large room features several of these structures, obscured in pitch darkness: each one hums with an almost electric activity, and the rumble of thunder overhead disrupts the overwhelming blank ambience of the previous rooms. The player passes through this room amongst the structures guided only by flashes of blinding white light which illuminate the darkness just enough to be able to make out the next few steps, throwing stark, strange shadows across the space. Eventually, the player catches sight of a rectangle of blinding white light: a door, perhaps, into yet another unknown.

This door leads to a series of images: a rippling texture that waves and vibrates, and then a series of tunnels of light extending infinitely towards a single focal point, flashing like synapses firing off in rapid sequence. After several moments, darkness seeps in. When we next emerge, we find ourselves in the desert.

Unlike the previous building, which was a claustrophobic and inhuman space, the building in which the player awakes in the desert seems less of an architectural aberration and more of a cavernous ruin. The light here is warmer, the colours more vibrant: reddish sands lend to the ashy stone a glow that feels pleasant and at times even comforting. Arches sweep upwards towards hallowed heights, over doorways glowing with ethereal white light. In some places, daylight breaks through the cracks where the sand has overtaken the stone.

At the end of the building, the player follows a path out into the desert proper: a vast, featureless stretch of unmoving red, it seems almost like an antipode to the churning waves from which we first emerged. In the distance stands a lone figure: a strange, spectral humanoid shape, rendered in pointillist form. Is it a person? A ghost? Is it even alive? Notably, there is no available interaction with it, and it does not move, or react to the player’s presence. Over the eerie sounds of wind blowing up against stone, one can just barely make out what sounds almost like human voices, spoken underwater from a great distance. As the player draws closer to the figure — at this point, the only visible figure in the dusty redness — these voices intensify in volume, and seemingly, in frequency as well. Upon contact, they suddenly stop, and once again, darkness settles in.

In the midst of the desert wilderness there is an array of monoliths which stretch out into the hazy distance. But even before we see the statues — or are they gate posts, or pylons? — looming in the distance, framing a massive sphere of light from a stream of black, ash-like particles rise into the sky like a flock of birds; we see above us hanging in the pink vanilla skies some kind of massive structure, like a derelict of the future. Although we will later discover it is a tower, whose architecturally-impossible base rises suddenly and unexpectedly in the blasted sands, our first glimpse of it is disconnected from any terrestrial tethers. It looms at once in the distance like a satellite, tiny lights aglow over its alien-like surface, and yet also seems precipitously close as well, its presence imparting upon the scene an ominous gravity.

Interacting with the sphere at the base of the structure brings us into some kind of interior. It’s a return to the dark stone of the first building after the prologue, but this time, there is an important difference: the intimations of a human presence. Lighting up the walls in a warm, humid blue is some vaguely Asiatic-looking character, the first suggestion of a written language. Somewhere in the distance, a voice sings, muffled through walls but definitely there. We pass through narrow hallways with low ceilings which grow more and more cramped, before finally, we emerge in a series of chambers.

The first of these chambers is what appears to be some kind of clock-like structure (or perhaps even an orrery), replete with spinning gears which grind and shift against one another with mechanical duress, producing a ticking that sounds subterranean. The next chamber seems to be some kind of devolved version of this, a rotating mass of uncomfortably long spikes, growing and swirling, coiling and unraveling. We pass through several more rooms, each cast in a different hue of light, featuring increasingly devolved variations of the initial clock. All throughout, the ticking continues, and grows more present, becoming the only apparently consistent logic uniting these strange geometries.

At last, we exit from this sequence, and find ourselves surrounded by red. After several moments, the red turns to white and lifts, revealing the interior of what seems like an uncomfortably claustrophobic apartment. The sudden reveal is surprising, to say the least; and compared to the increasingly abstract and often surreal images encountered in the last forty minutes or so, the intrusion of recognisable signs of life ironically feels unfamiliar and alien.

From the walls, lines are run across from which photographs hang — pictures of previous locations, perhaps mementos — and in the corner sits a suspiciously healthy-looking potted planted, its greenness jarring and even unwelcome. In the tray of a printer near the photographs is the newest print: a close-up of the strange pointillist figure encountered in the desert. There are the intimations of a rudimentary living space: a makeshift bed on the ground, a set of cabinets and inset machines which seem to serve some kind of dining function. Turning around, we see a chair in the corner, with an extendable dome hanging over it. This is where we have emerged from. It seems, then, that our trip has been some kind of simulation: an extended dreamscape, perhaps, or a particularly vivid VR experience. A trip into someone’s mind.

Exiting from the cramped apartment through a sliding stone door, we emerge onto a balcony, overlooking a gloomy smog-choked cityscape, like something out of a cyberpunk dystopia. The familiar trappings seem to all be present: below us, the sounds of human activity echo through the cavernous depths: the screech of car tyres, the bustle of human movement and industry, sometimes a peripatetic voice or melody from a song just barely straining out of the noise.

And yet, there isn’t a single visual indication of any of this activity, or any activity at all. A single glowing orange sign — a pair of Asiatic-looking letters — glows against the side of a building before us, illuminating the fog; and in the distant towers, lights from what are presumably windows glimmer. But below us, where all the sound seems to be coming from, there is an abysmal darkness; and up above, nothing moves, and everything stands still with a kind of abandoned solemnity. The balcony extends to accommodate the neighbouring apartments, yet there is no indication that there is any other life at all: the windows, if they can be called that, are opaque and dim, and the doors are firmly sealed, the utter lack of features for accessibility suggesting an almost tomb-like state. We have awoken from the solitude of the dream, the deserts and caverns of the mind: and yet, even here, we are still alone.

There is a profound loneliness at work at the heart of Fugue in Void. Its landscapes are immaculately barren, their granite glaciality desolate even by the already spartan standards of the brutalist movements with which the author seems so enthralled. The architecture here is inhumanly indifferent to the presence of the lone spectator that moves through its passages: it isolates and separates, and thwarts all attempts at communication. Multiple times, the player comes into contact with what appear to be the echoes of other people, other lives: yet all they are is echoes and glimpses, muffled and warped by impenetrably dense stone which rejects connection. The only other distinctly human-like presence, encountered in the midst of a barren wilderness, is already scattered into a series of almost unrecognisable points long before the player even witnesses it.

The dual dissonance of fugue plays a central part in the author’s attempts at negotiating this loneliness. Each of the environments is a series of echoes and variations on one another: a sea becomes a desert, a finely-tuned clock a mass of disparate particles. Bottomless holes rise into pillars; vast chambers narrow into claustrophobic corridors. The contrapuntal repetition of themes creates a constant sense of imbalance and unease: the player never feels sure of any sense of meaning or belonging, of their place in these strange spaces.

The voice of the fugue at work here is not that of the spectator, who is utterly dwarfed and alone; but of the stones themselves, whose contradictions are anathema to interpretation or superimposition of meaning, and cannot be inhabited. Architecture has long held an almost mystical association with music: a symphony as a cathedral of sound, stones arranged like melodic harmonies. Traditionally, both have long served the hearts and minds of humans (or their ancestors in the gods). And yet, in Fugue, the stones still sing: not the songs of men, but of an order from which humans have been permanently excluded.

What place, then, do these songs have in the mind — or more ambiguously, the story of a mind — of a human being? The final space encountered seems to suggest that the entirety of the Fugue has been of the psychic variety: a moment of passage into the titular void of the incomprehensible. The isolation of the fugue state is reflected here within the very space itself, both internally and externally through the utter lack of visible identity of any kind. For whom were the photographs which hang in the apartment taken — and for that matter, when were they even taken?

The only people, it seems, who will view them are the hidden spectator whom the player ostensibly guides, and the player themselves. For the spectator, alone in a dimly-lit, cramped apartment in what appears to be a city profoundly alienated from itself, passing away the days in a virtual reality, the photographs seem almost like mementos of fugue, souvenirs taken so that one could look upon them later and say, I was here, and this is proof. But what the spectator does not know (at least ostensibly) is that in fact, they are not alone: we are here, too. We have followed them through the sinuous passages, the tunnels of light. We have seen what they have seen, and we too have experienced what they have experienced. What they may forget, we have remembered: my screenshots will serve the same purpose as their photographs, and my words will, like a voice calling to another in the darkness, join with those of others and together we will sing our own fugue, our own song to pass the days and survive in our dimly-lit, cramped apartments, in cities profoundly alienated from themselves. This is the story of my mind: and in witnessing it, it has become the story of yours as well. We are not alone.

“I was talking about time. It’s so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place — the picture of it — stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don’t think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.”

Toni Morrison, Beloved, Chapter 3

Ghosts are a curious affair. Those of the American variety, in particular, have a special peculiarity to them that sets them apart from their peers: their sheer diversity and variety nearly unrivaled, testament perhaps to the scattered melting-pot of the nation itself. Ghosts have played throughout history an entire spectrum of roles — everything from agents of horror, to wayward prophets of cautionary moralistic fates, and even as playful comedic figures — but always, in the service of the living. Ghost stories — which must be distinguished from the stories about, and of ghosts themselves — are told explicitly for the living, by the living. In this sense, Toni Morrison’s Beloved is not a ghost story, but a story about ghosts — what it means when we speak of them, when we tell their stories; and more hauntingly, what it means when we don’t.

The primary tension of Beloved can be roughly summarised as what Judith Herman describes in the introduction to Trauma and Recovery as ‘the conflict betwen the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud’: namely, what she explicitly identiifes as the ‘central dialectic of psychological trauma’ (Trauma and Recovery 1). The characters of Beloved are almost singularly trapped within the liminality between the unspeakable past, and the haunted present: both psychically, as they struggle with the burdens of immeasurable personal and collective traumas; and physically, their bodies scarred with ancient wounds and the very land itself distorted into a kind of psychogeographical hell in which they are cursed to relive the same painful memories over and over again. Their inability to negotiate this dialectic — to even begin to acknowledge the pain inflicted upon them, the pain which continues to fester beneath the skin — will serve as the teleological impetus for the ghosts which will soon emerge; but even before then, it is critical to note that they have already lost touch with their very existences.

Herman describes that “long after the event, many traumatized people feel that a part of themselves has died” (36) — and indeed, the major characters of Beloved all exist within various stages of psychic decay and thanatos, a sort of negative ego death in which their individual teleologies of meaning have become so eroded that they can no longer function: Sethe, who loves children more than anything, has been shunned from the community for her infanticide, and lives in active denial of the past; Denver, survivor of her mother’s attempted infanticide, refuses to acknowledge any part of the world outside of the haunted space of 124; Baby Suggs, the preacher, has lost faith in God and has retreated to her sickbed, where she dies, bitter and spiritually exhausted; Stamp Paid, as atonement for his past sacrifices as an agent of the Underground Railroad, has lost his name in exchange for having his moral debts paid off; Paul D, who sees himself neither as man nor even human, has been cast out into the wilderness to wander alone. It is through the confluence of these tremendous psychic calamities that the ghost — the revenant Beloved — emerges.

A haunting requires two things. A ghost, for one, most usually a spirit disrupted, who could not find resolution in death because of profound lingering psychic attachment to something in life. It would naturally follow, then, that the second is something — or more usually, somewhere — to haunt in the first place: a locus of tremendous (and often negative) psychic activity, often with an extensive history of some kind of generational or recursive violence, which serves as a physical conduit between the realms of the dead, and the living. Herman attributes to this crystallisation of violence a “frozen and wordless quality” lacking “verbal narrative and context”, a “fragmentary sensation” of memory which she describes, through Robert Lifton’s vocabulary, as an indelible image or death imprint (Trauma and Recovery 27).

The house at 124 Bluestone Road is the death imprint of both Beloved, and Beloved. The epicentre of tremendous personal trauma — Sethe’s gruesome act of infanticide, which leaves her daughter Beloved nearly beheaded — and collective trauma — retold through the transmigration of escaped slaves via the Underground Railroad through the house — 124 is ripe for haunting. The novel begins with an account of 124’s poltergeist — the spirit of Sethe’s baby Beloved, wailing into the night and throwing objects around — that is impetuous, and “spiteful” (Beloved 1). It is worth noting that at this point, it is a disaporic force that drives people apart from one another: each of Sethe’s sons, at the age of thirteen, flee from the home “the moment the house committed what was for him the one insult not to be borne or witnessed a second time” (Beloved 1); Denver lives peerless and isolated from the world outside of the house; and Baby Suggs has languished and died bedridden, in spiritual defeat. The ghost at this stage is what Herman would describe as constrictive: it acts as a suffocating force which exists because the family members actively attempt to deny and suppress its presence, and consequently it lashes out at them, disrupting their ability to exist within the present and future. Notably, however, it does not act upon them directly, and instead expresses itself through their surroundings: as Sethe later tells Paul D, who feels its presence as a “wave of grief so thorough he wanted to cry”, the ghost is “not evil, just sad” (Beloved 9). It is a shadow of the past, created in the deliberate absence of memory enforced by those who created it, who is seemingly expelled by the arrival of Paul D (who himself is in some ways a wandering spirit): but we shall know soon enough that the exorcism is no exorcism at all, but a transmutation. For although Paul, for Sethe and her family, may seem like a source of hope in the moment for a new beginning, he too harbours a dead soul within him just like them, and is tethered to the painful, forgotten past. Even more than any of them, he engages in almost self-annihilating levels of constriction, having locked away his emotions in the “tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be… [i]ts lid rusted shut” (Beloved 72). He is no intervention, but a refugee from the land of cruelty and misery, that ironic death-house Sweet Home from whence Sethe herself had only recently just fled. He is even worse off than her in some ways, his dehumanisation more total, his identity more fragmented. It is his pain which serves as the tipping force that frees the ghost from the past, and manifests her in the present, in the form of Beloved.

There is much controversy over the precise nature of Beloved — if she takes on a corporeal body, for instance, is she still a ghost? Whose ghost is she — Sethe’s daughter, or a revenant of the Middle Passage — if she perceives time and memory discretely, as her monologues seem to suggest? Is she even a ghost at all, or just another survivor, one more broken body amongst foundations? The root of all these questions lies in an assumption of the novel as a ghost story, which itself relies upon established fundamental assumptions about the constitution of ghosts, and their habits. Beloved, however, is not a ghost story, and Beloved is no ordinary ghost.

If her prior ethereal form as poltergeist of 124 was Beloved as a constrictive force within Herman’s terminology, then the strange woman who shows up one day on 124’s doorstep is Beloved as intrusive force. Herman defines the intrusive force as the remnants of a past which “becomes encoded in an abnormal form of memory, which breaks spontaneously into consciousness”, and manifests in the present as a repetitive “fragmentary sensation […] experienced with terrifying immediacy” (Trauma and Recovery 26–8). Beloved, given form by the sudden and uncomfortable reawakening of the past triggered by the arrival of Paul D, is the past made flesh. She comes from beneath a bridge over the Ohio River, which Sethe and the other slaves had to cross to order to return home from Sweet Home (a metaphysical transition from the false ‘home’ of Sweet Home, the land of the dead, to the spiritual home of Cincinnati, the land of the living — or at the very least, those who have escaped death); and which serves as a sort of localised American Kalunga line, drawing early symbolic parallels to the Atlantic slave trade, which will be referenced more explicitly later in a memory by Beloved herself (and which is notable given its significance in the mythology of many enslaved Africans themselves, who believed the New World to be the land of the dead and the Middle Passage to be a passage into hell itself, from whence they would never again return — not an incorrect outlook, given what is now known).

It is a frightening, and often intensely painful thing to come into contact with a ghost. In both the American, and the Gothic traditions particularly, the ghost is a revenant of the past itself, a fragment of history which has become dislodged because of the acute jaggedness of its shape, and slipped between the cracks into the present. Beloved is such a figure, although the trauma she was born from is multiplicitous, and enormous: on one hand, she is borne most directly from the brutality inflicted upon Sethe’s murdered daughter; but even further than that, her true genesis is more ancient, and profound, the culmination of centuries of torture and abuse, the souls of the “Sixty Million and more” — those who perished in the Atlantic slave trade — forgotten and swept away into the collective darkness of history, both by the victims and the perpetrators of this obscene enormity. She is neither singularly the individual past of Sethe, nor the collective horror of her ancestors, but both at once, occupying time past, present, and, in a postmodern sense, future as well (all the way to the present of Morrison’s writing, and even the present of the now). Her monologues speak of memories of what appear to be the Middle Passage centuries prior, where there is “[n]othing to breathe down there and no room to move in […] A lot of people is down there. Some is dead.” (Beloved 75) Although ostensibly she is speaking most explicitly about the nightmarish and claustrophobic darkness of the ships themselves, it is possible too that she is referring to the land of the dead itself, which is populated not just with the dead but the dead men, women and children walking, whose bodies cling to the earth yet whose hearts have long since hollowed out, and rusted: no more alive than she herself.

Where Beloved comes from, the grief is too enormous to remain contained, and centralised: she is a ghost not of an individual or even a people, but an entire history itself, which has become dislodged and dismembered from the flow of time, the narrative lost almost entirely except as a shadow occupying a single dark corner where the ashes just barely trace out the remains where a person once was. That Morrison has the novel shift to the perspective of Beloved, the revenant, is highly unusual per ghost stories, where too often the ghosts themselves are typically just inert agents of fear and mourning, whose sole purpose is to serve as a morbid cautionary device for the author’s morality play. By ascribing a certain amount of agency and consciousness to her ghost, Morrison is able to transcend the archetypes of the ghost story and create a ghost that is at once mythical yet also human, a memory of extraordinary collective trauma, yet also one of a singular, profound personal tragedy. She is both sixty million countless beloveds hunted like beasts, chained into pitch dark abscesses in the bowels of lurching ships and enslaved in service to a cruel new world which would rape and devour them; and one woman’s Beloved, murdered in a moment of brilliant, anguished clarity, a mother’s greatest and cruelest act of love for her children signed in blood.

It is a curious affair to speak of ghosts. What do we say about them, of them? Do we recall the lives they once lived, the people they once were? When we’re touched by them, do we recoil in fear, or reach out in sympathy? And how do we define them — by the absences they have left in our houses, in our hallways, in our hearts; or by the presences which we swear we have felt, in the sudden stillness of an empty room or a strange nostalgic scent carried to us by a peripatetic breeze? All these questions have for centuries, millennia even, gone unanswered; perhaps the answers will never come at all. Either way, it’s alright; we’ve dealt with the uncertainty for this long, and so long as can listen to the stories they have to tell, we might just be okay. Beloved is one such story: not a ghost story, but a story about, and of a ghost — a ghost of a woman, a ghost of a people, a ghost of a history. Whatever they are, one thing about ghosts is certain: we would do well to heed their words, for they are the voices of the violence we could not bear, and theirs are the words which will save us from ourselves. Their trauma does not disappear, but comes and goes, comes and goes. It is all around us — intimately familiar, hiding just beneath the surface; it can be found peering just behind the eyes of the children, in the sighs of the adults. Look away for just a moment, and it disappears again as though there were nothing there at all. Wind through the leaves. Not the breath of the disremembered and unaccounted for, certainly not the beloved or the dead. By and by all trace is gone. The rest is just wind.

A spectre haunts the modern world — the spectre of death. In a zeitgeist saturated with — if not in many ways defined by — a constant stream of images of mediated violence, much of the struggle of the modern individual deals with learning to negotiate, and eventually (hopefully) live in a world that’s drowning in a seemingly bottomless sea of calamities. Don DeLillo’s White Noise is an exploration of the lives of several characters struggling with a similarly disjointed and haunted world, united despite philosophical differences by their primitive ambivalence to that overwhelming question — what will happen when I die? Much has been written about White Noise’s treatment of death as a physical, social and existential force. This essay will instead focus on the role of death within White Noise as a literary and ontological phenomenon, analysing the ways in which DeLillo’s treatment of death is reflected in the structure of the narrative itself, and observing how this frustrates and rejects traditional approaches to storytelling.

The central character of White Noise, an astoundingly mediocre professor of “Hitler Studies” (a field which notably, he personally pioneered) by the name of Jack Gladney, is pathologically obsessed with death. Virtually every aspect of his life is saturated with this obsession: from his job, having made a career from arguably the single most vilified individual in modern history, who many have deemed to be a singular monolithic embodiment of death itself; to his relationship with his family, of which he ominously asks himself repeatedly, “Who will die first?” (45); to the “broad towering ruddled visionary skyscapes, tinged with dread” (76) which he watches with no small amount of awe; to the numbers on his alarm clock when he wakes at night, asking himself in a confused panic, “Always odd numbers at times like this. What does it mean? Is death odd-numbered?” (21). He wakes “in the grip of death sweat”, “defenseless against [his] own racking fears” (20). Death appears frequently in his conversations with others — both at work, where it is “strictly a professional matter” that he is “comfortable with” and “on top of” (33), and in personal life, in the form of the “usual rumors […] of sexual freedom, sexual slavery, drugs, nudity, mind control, poor hygiene, tax evasion, monkeyworship, torture, prolonged and hideous death” (10) — where at one point or another, he casually, and with remarkable detachment, discusses with nearly every other significant character in the book a startling host of serial killers, spree-shooters and mass murderers. He passively mentions his wife’s growing fear that their son will become one of these killers, ending up “in a barricaded room, spraying hundreds of rounds of automatic fire across an empty mall before the SWAT teams come for him with their heavy-barreled weapons, their bullhorns and body armor.” (9)

And yet, for all the talk about death, it ultimately ends up being utterly meaningless.

Towards the beginning of the novel, during a discussion with his students about “the plot to kill Hitler”, Jack alludes to an underlying theme throughout the novel, and what is arguably the crux of the novel’s “action”, if it can be called that — the dialectic of life with death, and the negotiation of narrative in between:

The discussion moved to plots in general. I found myself saying to the assembled heads, “All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers’ plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children’s games. We edge nearer death every time we plot. It is like a contract that all must sign, the plotters as well as those who are the targets of the plot.” (11)

Death is conceived as a sort of noble construct here; or at the very least, a distinct singularity towards which all plots — including that of life itself — proceed. Jack asserts this with some degree of authorial dignity, in the careful and measured tone of a professor attempting to impress some air of didactic authority over his students — but immediately undercuts himself privately by asking to himself (or perhaps the reader — the distinction is unclear): “Is this true? Why did I say it? What does it mean?” (11)

The irony of this moment resonates throughout the rest of the novel too, which itself not only does not “move deathward”, but in fact, for the vast majority of the plot, arguably does not move at all, at least in any meaningful traditional sense. Structurally, White Noise is constructed in a manner that is antithetical to nearly all conventional standards of narrative sensibility: its chapters are presented as discombobulated episodes of seemingly unrelated and discrete qualia, with little connective tissue in between; and each chapter begins and ends abruptly, with little indication of even an attempt at continuity. This is not to say however that each chapter or section is without structure entirely; throughout the novel, on both a micro- and macro-narrative scale, there is a consistent cadence which emerges out of what otherwise appears to be general purposelessness. This cadence is the underlying structure of what DeLillo interprets to be modern life, and death itself: the sine wave.

White Noise is divided into three sections, which roughly correspond to three properties of the oscillation: the first section, titled “Waves and Radiation” serves roughly as an introduction to the idea of signal failure, embodied by boredom, and constant frustrated attempts at communication which end up being distorted or outright ignored; the second segment, “The Airborne Toxic Event”, describes the effects of the titular calamitous event which itself is a mediated account of an amorphous and potentially inexplicable phenomenon, representing the abstraction of death; and the third segment, titled “Dylarama” (a pun on the Greek horama, meaning “sight”, created by mashing together Dylar — a fictional drug that can supposedly “cure” one’s fear of death — and horama; which can also function as a pun on the word “diorama”, which alludes to the novel’s preoccupation with mediated artifice and representation through the televised image), follows Jack’s attempts to renegotiate the value of his own life through the spectacle of violence, which he attempts to reproduce in his own life.

One can trace roughly across these three segments a kind of inverted wave: the first segment serves as the baseline between wavelengths (with the narrative itself being one particular wavelength); the second segment serves as a trough, in which Jack is forced to confront the uneasy presence of an mediated unknown, and through this process, discovers the impetus to change his life (or so he thinks); and the third segment serves as a crest, in which he finally gains the courage to actualise what previously existed solely as a representational image (violence on television), only to realise that he cannot and consequently he returns to his life of mediocrity, or the beginning of the wavelength.

Each one of these phases is also subjected to a kind of self-referential irony, in which expectations of narrative and amplitudinal distinction become deliberately conflated and interchangeable. The Airborne Toxic Event is described variously as an amorphous nebula of questionable origin, identity and even effect, which cannot be consistently detected in any form; its presence is insidious and creeping, and it does not strike so much as it suffocates slowly and silently. There is an implicit implication of a previous passage in which Jack discusses his own ideas of death after visiting the hospital with his wife and son for a routine visit:

Doctors’ offices depress me even more than hospitals do because of their air of negative expectancy and because of the occasional patient who leaves with good news, shaking the doctor’s antiseptic hand and laughing loudly, laughing at everything the doctor says, booming with laughter, with crude power, making a point of ignoring the other patients as he walks past the waiting room still laughing provocatively — he is already clear of them, no longer associated with their weekly gloom, their anxious inferior dying. I would rather visit an emergency ward, some urban well of trembling, where people come in gut-shot, slashed, sleepy-eyed with opium compounds, broken needles in their arms. These things have nothing to do with my own eventual death, nonviolent, small-town, thoughtful. (34)

The Airborne Toxic Event is Jack’s eventual death on a mass scale — his “weekly gloom”, his “anxious inferior dying”, “nonviolent, small-town, thoughtful” — except unlike his death, the Airborne Toxic Event is a media event, broadly televised and broadcast on the radio. It however is also different from the “floods, earthquakes, mud slides, erupting volcanoes”, the “houses slid[ing] into the ocean, whole villages crackl[ing] and ignit[ing] in a mass of advancing lava” which hold his family so rapt with attention and left “wish[ing] for more, for something bigger, grander, more sweeping” (29) in that there is no spectacle involved save for the simulacrum of the spectacle created by the media: it is quite literally an indistinct cloud hanging over the town, utterly lacking in spectacle, defying even the most basic of descriptions. In short, it is the slow death, the anxious, inferior death, presented as spectacle; and consequently, it fails to sedate or elate, and results in a signal failure.

Following it is the Dylarama, in which Jack attempts to reassert himself and his own sense of life through the false myth of redemptive violence which he has been attuned to through consumption of mediated spectacle. After receiving a gun from his stepfather, who, in so many words, encourages him to pursue a more primal drive towards vengeance and bloodshed, Jack embarks upon a quest to find a man who not only has had an affair with his wife, but who is the producer of the titular drug Dylar, which is rumoured to be able to completely inhibit one’s fear of death (which, in this context, takes on the role of a kind of existential pharmakon). Upon finally locating the man, though, Jack finds himself unable to parse the gap between the “calamity of death” — “something bigger, grander, more sweeping” than his feeble existence, glorified through television as spectacular and cathartic violence — and his reality, defined by his fears of his own slow death. What occurs is a fundamental epistemological failure, in which the violence of the spectacle (and vice versa) has been attempted in reality, only to fail comedically. This too constitutes a signal failure, in which the medium and the message have become confused and have been revealed to be fundamentally incompatible.

In both cases, death is presented as an impossible and possibly even irrelevant state in relation to life. The death that Jack observes on television is not the same as the death that he actively fears; yet with these two major incidents, it seems clear that there is little distinction between the two in practice. Multiple times throughout all three sections, Jack directly questions whether he himself is dead:

The face on the screen was Babette’s. Out of our mouths came a silence as wary and deep as an animal growl. Confusion, fear, astonishment spilled from our faces. What did it mean? What was she doing there, in black and white, framed in formal borders? Was she dead, missing, disembodied? Was this her spirit, her secret self, some two-dimensional facsimile released by the power of technology, set free to glide through wavebands, through energy levels, pausing to say good-bye to us from the fluorescent screen?

A strangeness gripped me, a sense of psychic disorientation. It was her all right, the face, the hair, the way she blinks in rapid twos and threes. I’d seen her just an hour ago, eating eggs, but her appearance on the screen made me think of her as some distant figure from the past, some ex-wife and absentee mother, a walker in the mists of the dead. If she was not dead, was I? (47)

Confronted directly with the presence of the dead, he wonders:

The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream.

May the days be aimless. Let the seasons drift. Do not advance the action according to a plan. (44)

And finally, and most hauntingly, he confesses to Murray later on;

I only know I’m just going through the motions of living. I’m technically dead. My body is growing a nebulous mass. They track these things like satellites. All this as a result of a byproduct of insecticide. There’s something artificial about my death. It’s shallow, unfulfilling. I don’t belong to the earth or sky. They ought to carve an aerosol can on my tombstone. (128)

For Jack, for all his fears of death, there seems to exist little practical difference between the white noise of life — with all its empty marketing slogans and academic jargon and inscrutable bureaucratic euphemisms and endless banners of products spooling out forever and ever — and the white noise of death, an eerie static, insistent but near subliminal, just beyond the threshold of perception. Both are equally discombobulated and disjointed, and, in the words of his colleague Murray, Jack, and everyone around him, “inhabit the same air as the dead” — a vast, unending stream of errant signals rushing through “one channel of vitality”, undifferentiated and equally indistinct (68).

In traditional narratives, life and death are typically seen as reasonable start and end points: it’s only natural, one would suspect, that a story would take on the structural format of its teller’s life. But in DeLillo’s White Noise, no such distinction exists. Life and death are effectively interchangeable; one is neither alive, nor dead, but either either, or neither — or more likely than not, both at once. The novel ends, and begins, and ends, and begins cyclically, images of order giving way to images of disorder and so on and on and on, ad perpetuum; the events of the novel having brought few revelations, and only revolutions. The life of Jack Gladney rises and falls in measured, sputtering cadence; but each and every time it is observed, he gets no further than he did before, trapped as a ghost within the spaces between the word and reality.

There’s a popular saying that literature lives, that stories are alive; but in truth, it’s a bit more complicated. The moment a story is told — especially the moment it is recorded — it becomes frozen, its characters trapped in a perpetual looping stasis. The myth of the eternal death is that when our stories end — whether they be the ones we have written, or the ones we have read — there will be a sense of closure; we will be afforded the spectacle of an ending, so that we can say with some sense of finality, this is it. But that’s not how it actually is; and death shall have no dominion. The signal does not disappear just because we stop observing it; it goes on, and on, and on, and on, cascading forever, going nowhere, haunting the air, looming just beyond the threshold of our perception. At every moment, they’re there all around us, thousands of signals, blending together, a seamless fold of ghosts unraveling in time. This is the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living.

Memory is a fickle thing. To remember something is to engage in an act of cartography of oneself — a path of temporal and psychic coordinates, tracing through a byzantine topography as hazy and fugue-like in some places as it is brilliant and startling in clarity in others. Things come together; things fall apart — history: a messy, inconstant and incommensurable series of abstractions, resonances and representations held together by the sole desire to remember — that is, both to not forget, and to evoke the phantom of a distant self.

John Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse” is a story about one man’s attempt at remembering one particular day early in his youth, which served as a foundational moment — existentially, spiritually and sexually — in his life. On the most surface level, it deals ostensibly with the experience of a boy named Ambrose on a family trip to Ocean City, Maryland; and his internal conflicts regarding a girl named Magda who has accompanied them, for whom he harbours both sexual and romantic feelings. The story, through a number of extensive metafictional devices and choices, also alludes to several other layers of narrative taking place collinearly; the first suggesting that the story is in fact being written by an unnamed narrator who is very likely Ambrose himself, writing in the assumed present about the experience of remembering this incident from his past; and the second being the act of Barth himself writing this story as the superdiegetic author within our present layer of interpretation, with some implied undertones of autobiography. For the purposes of this essay, I will be focusing on the relationship between the explicit narrative — Ambrose as a boy in Ocean City (Ambrose as subject) — and the first implicit narrative — the unnamed narrator, assumed in this essay to be an older version of Ambrose himself, writing a story about the aforementioned event in his past (Ambrose as narrator) — and how the two, through the literary device of repetition, interact as a process of self-constructing autohistoriography.

One of the most common motifs in “Lost in the Funhouse” is its highly unusual usage of repetition, of both ideas and literal phrases. Each one of these occurrences seems to be tied to an object or moment which triggers some kind of feeling of intense isolation within both Ambrose the subject, and narrator. These early repetitions in particularly seem to almost always refer to something sexual in nature — the physical description of Magda, who is described several times nearly verbatim with the phrase, “Her figure was very well developed for her age,” (71, 78, 79, and, in its most unusual occurrence, 92); the logo on a cigar box Ambrose focuses on while sharing an uncomfortably intimate moment with Magda behind a woodshed after playing a game with her (74, 80); the matchbooks found beneath the boardwalk at Ocean City where Ambrose witnesses a couple having sex (76, 77, 83). Each one of these is presented at first in a rather mundane and unremarkable context, before acquiring later on a more pathological inertia as Ambrose the narrator begins to fixate on them as points of focal resonance as he remembers the events of the day.

The couple having sex takes on synecdochal value as Ambrose the narrator begins to imagine them as the latest occurrence of a peculiar tradition dating all the way back to

the year when Lord Baltimore was granted charter to the province of Maryland by Charles I [nearly 300 years prior to the beginning of the story, in 1632]” in which “five hundred twelve women — English, Welsh, Bavarian, Swiss — of every class and character, received into themselves the penises the intromittent organs of five hundred twelve men, ditto, in every circumstance and posture […] [i]n alleyways, ditches, canopy beds, pinewoods, bridal suites, ship’s cabins, coach-and-fours, coaches-and-four, sultry toolsheds. (76–77)

Within their cadence and undulation lies “[t]he shluppish whisper, continuous as seawash round the globe, tidelike falls and rises with the circuit of dawn and dusk” (77) — the pervasiveness of sex, and people having sex, all around Ambrose the child, “under the boardwalk and in all the hotel rooms and cars and alleyways” (86): a world he can just barely sense the presence of but from which he feels existentially and perpetually alienated.

Similarly, the logo on the cigar box which he stares at “with awed impersonality” as Magda essentially accosts him behind the woodshed is itself a sensualised, if not erotic image, depicting “a laureled, loose-toga’d lady” with the lower half of her conspicuously peeled away (74). This image is later repeated almost word for word in the context of what is ostensibly a fantasy of Ambrose the child, who attempts to suppress his current sexual frustration by sublimating it into the distant trappings of a future in which he is “wise-lined and gray at the temples”, smiling “gravely at a fashionable dinner party and remind[ing] her of his youthful passion. The time they went with his family to Ocean City; the erotic fantasies he used to have about her. How long ago it seemed, and childish! Yet tender, too, n’est ce pas?” (80) In both cases, Ambrose the subject conjures the image as first an actual memory, and then an imagined memory; which is then retold by Ambrose the narrator as a memory of a memory. It is interesting to note that in the former case, it is presented by Ambrose the narrator as a sort of hint at his own identity, calling to question the choice of the distanced third-person perspective (the memory is immediately preceded by the sentence, “The more closely an author identifies with the narrator, the less advisable it is, as a rule, to use the first-person narrative viewpoint,” (74), which, taken in tandem with a later statement made at the effective ‘climax’ of the story, stating that Ambrose the subject had a tendency to “f[a]ll into his habit of rehearsing to himself the unadventurous story of his life, narrated from the third-person point of view” (92), closely implies the two are intimately connected, if not one and the same). The precise nature of the situation as well is unclear, although there are implications that Magda has sexually taken advantage of, if not outright raped Ambrose by fellating him (“But thought he had breathed heavily, groaned as if ecstatic, what he’d really felt throughout was an odd detachment, as though some one else were Master. Strive as he might to be transported, he heard his mind take notes upon the scene: This is what they call passion. I am experiencing it.” (81)). This act is further supported by her showing unusual ability to “hold a banana in one hand and peel it with her teeth” (73) during the car ride, which inspires some level of discomfort in Ambrose; and a later passage shortly following his account of the incident:

His son would be the second, and when the lad reached thirteen or so he would put a strong arm around his shoulder and tell him calmly: “It is perfectly normal. We have all been through it. It will not last forever.” Nobody knew how to be what they were right. […] Magda would certainly give, Magda would certainly yield a great deal of milk, although guilty of occasional solecisms. It don’t taste so bad. Suppose the lights came on now!

The day wore on. You think you’re yourself, but there are other persons in you. Ambrose gets hard when Ambrose doesn’t want to, and obversely. Ambrose watches them disagree; Ambrose watches them watch. (81)

Ambrose attempts to justify his discomfort with the situation by attempting to shift the temporal frame, imagining himself as a father reassuring his own son that what happened was “completely normal”, and that he would get over it; when this doesn’t work (“The day wore on.”) he begins to further dissociate, first with his physicality (in reference to his erection), then in terms of an observer, and finally in terms of a meta-observer. Ambrose the narrator later alludes to the subject’s habit of dissociating from himself and referring to himself within the third-person as a means of coping with situations he cannot control.

The image of the cigar box is presented much more fondly and tenderly in Ambrose the subject’s mind the second time when he recalls it as a false memory, although the narrator’s tone seems to take on a markedly acerbic and mocking edge (“Even then he had felt wise beyond his years; he’d stroked her hair and said in his deepest voice and correctest English, as to a dear child: ‘I shall never forget this moment.’” (81)) which suggests that the narrator has seen through this profession of sentiment from his younger self, and understands what it really is — an attempt to alleviate his guilt. The image once again makes another appearance — though this time, subtly, and without elaboration — beneath the boardwalk where Ambrose witnesses the couple having sex, although this time it is as an evocation or resonance of an earlier memory, rather than an explicit image — the “cold sand under boardwalks, littered with El Producto cigar butts” (77). The El Producto cigar label has become inextricably linked with moments of painful guilt Ambrose experiences after witnessing or experiencing sexual acts, and his memory is littered with traces of it, both explicit and unconscious. Each layer of the memory of his violation, crystallised within the image of the cigar box and processed through multiple layers of interpretation and diffusion, develops a new identity and meaning within Ambrose’s personal historiography through the critical distance afforded to him by language.

The last, and most conspicuous repetition lies within the description of Magda — “a pretty girl and exquisite young lady” (69), whose “figure was very well developed for her age” (71). Magda’s description, unlike many other characteristics or elements within the story, remains constant and unwavering in its repetition all throughout, up until the very end. Over repetitions, becomes almost a sort of obsessive incantation of her essence as Ambrose begins to lose his sense of control over his situation as he attempts to cope with both her powerful sexual allure, and his own inability to escape the titular ‘funhouse’ (a complex and involved metaphor, at least for Ambrose, for the world of sex).

The first time this description is brought up, it is used by Ambrose the narrator in order to, at least at face value, establish the innate incommensurability of description, by describing both Ambrose’s mother, and Magda as “pretty”, although in the case of the latter, he goes much into much further detail (71). It is interesting to note the ways in which the sentences here become disrupted; Ambrose begins by proposing that “Magda was also pretty, yet in an altogether different way [from his mother]” but then immediately jumps to a description of her good manners and performance in school. (71) He then tentatively makes an even bolder statement about her physicality, describing her precocious body, before quickly jumping back to a more neutral description of her sitting beside the younger Ambrose in the car. The moment is one of remarkable intimacy — particularly to Ambrose the child, who allows himself the minor thrill of placing his hand just beneath her so that should she sit back, he would feel her against his hand — and Ambrose the narrator seems to shy away out of a sort of strange guilt.

The next incidence in which this description occurs is when the family has gone to the pool, and Magda and Ambrose are sitting by the poolside. The description here comes as a more jarring non sequitur, placed rather inscrutably in between Ambrose describing his easily-burned skin, and a more neutral statement about why she had declined to swim (78). The scene as a whole is punctuated with various titillating images — Magda’s tanned skin, the slip of “one nipple’s auburn edge” inside her swimsuit top — but more revealing than any of these is a question that seems innocuous and irelevant appearing at the end of the paragraph in which her description appears: “Why did a person come to Ocean City?” (78) This is a repetition of an idea, later answered by Ambrose the narrator himself:

If you looked around, you noticed that almost all the people on the boardwalk were paired off into couples except the small children; in a way, that was the whole point of Ocean City! If you had X-ray eyes and could see everything going on at that instant under the boardwalk and in all the hotel rooms and cars and alleyways, you’d realize that all that normally showed, like restaurants and dance halls and clothing and test-your-strength machines, was merely preparation and intermission. (86)

Magda’s description here still carries a kind of guilt to it, but rather than being just curious, it seems invasive, leery; Ambrose’s gaze sustains itself, and even peers further, directly at her skin, into her top — both physically, within the memory, and textually, within the language.

This sort of active gaze intensifies even further in the next occurrence, where it has become tinged with jealousy as Ambrose looks on at Peter showing off on the diving board. The first thing that is notable about this passage is the explicit absence of the “grown-ups”, who have “gone on”; the word choice here is particularly interesting for the deliberate ambiguity and multiplicity of what it could suggest. Ambrose the narrator describes Ambrose the subject’s desire to “converse with Magda” — yet immediately then once again repeats his refrain describing her body, this time extending it even further by wondering about the rumour that a girl can develop a good figure by “rubbing with a turkish towel,” amongst other theories (79). Ambrose admits that “he could think of nothing to say except how good a diver Peter was, who was showing off for her benefit”, and realises that “Magda pretended to be uninterested in the diving” — an interest troubling enough to him that he immediately feels the need to undermine her, guessing that “she probably weighed as much as he did” (79). The entire passage, which is remarkably focused compared to the previously disparate and meandering subjects before, is suffused with jealousy and envy alike. The closing lines of it drive this point home:

If you knew your way around in the funhouse like your own bedroom, you could wait until a girl came along and then slip away without ever getting caught, even if her boyfriend was right with her. She’d think he did it! It would be better to be the boyfriend, and act outraged, and tear the funhouse apart.

Not act; be. (79)

Heavy with sexualised language (the imagery of the bedroom, of stealing away partners, of subsequent outrage), here, Magda’s body becomes the subject of a particularly jagged and envious lust, and even spite; Ambrose the subject, unable to engage with her in conversation yet also unable to engage with her sexually, feels impotent as he watches her admire his brother’s physique and carefreeness, and wishes to steal her away. Ambrose the narrator, however, is not content with this; he amplifies this sentiment with a more destructive and violent edge, offering the possibility of not just stealing away another’s partner, but giving in to the rage, having the power to act upon one’s thwarted desire and “tear the funhouse apart” — to destroy the very idea of desire itself. Ambrose, in direct dialectic with his own past, slips up at this point, and must correct himself — he cannot simply “act”, but must “be”. A parapraxis of sorts occurs immediately within the next paragraph:

“He’s a master diver,” Ambrose said. In feigned admiration. “You really have to slave away at it to get that good.” What would it matter anyhow if he asked her right out whether she remembered, even teased her with it as Peter would have? (80)

Ambrose, both the subject and narrator alike, align in this moment as the memory coalesces with the present: the present as master of interpretation, the past as slave to reinterpretation. It’s unclear to whom the parapraxis belongs, but whichever it is, it represents a major point of convergence in memory, and one of the most prominent incidences of the collapse of historiographic distance which has been maintained heretofore.

The next, and last, time Magda’s description appears, it no longer belongs to her. Trapped within the titular funhouse, Ambrose has begun to hallucinate — or perhaps in some sense, literally create — futures for himself. Desperately alienated, both physically and socially, emotionally and existentially, his mind has begun to unravel within the distorted liminality of the funhouse:

This can’t go on much longer; it can go on forever. He died telling stories to himself in the dark; years later, when that vast unsuspected area of the funhouse came to light, the first expedition found his skeleton in one of the labyrinthine corridors and mistook it for part of the entertainment. He died of starvation telling himself stories in the dark; but unbeknownst unbeknownst [sic] to him, an assistant operator of the funhouse, happening to overhear him, crouched just behind the plyboard partition and wrote down his every word. The operator’s daughter, an exquisite young woman with a figure unusually well developed for her age, crouched just behind the partition and transcribed his every word. Though she had never laid eyes on him, she recognized that here was one of Western Culture’s truly great imaginations, the eloquence of whose suffering would be an inspiration to unnumbered. (91–92)

The passage is particularly dense with repetitions — both internally (“He died telling stories to himself in the dark”, the strange and inexplicable repetition of “unbeknownst”) and referential: the image of the operator, which Ambrose becomes obsessed with towards the end of the story; the idea of a “young woman with such splendid understanding that she’d see him entire, like a poem or story, and find his words so valuable after all that when he confessed his apprehensions she would explain why they were in fact the very things that made him precious to her . . . and to Western Civilization!” (88); and of course, the unusual reframing of Magda’s description itself.

This occurrence is unusual in that it marks the confluence of several major symbolic figures within Ambrose the subject’s imagination: the operator, his dream woman, and Magda. Each one serves to represent a different aspect of the funhouse — of sex, and romance — that Ambrose has internalised: the operator as the master of the funhouse, capable of manipulating it as he sees fit, and most of all, able to “ease this fellow’s way, complicate that’s, to balance things out; if anyone seemed lost or frightened, all the operator had to do was.” (93) — note the jarring terminus; the dream girl, as a desexualised, intellectually mature woman who can admire his intelligence rather than draw forth from him an inscrutable and uncontrollable sexual desire; and Magda, the temptress, and embodiment of his sexual frustration, disappointment and alienation who reduces and debases him. Distorted in the odd darkness and spatial rape of the funhouse, Ambrose — this time, both as the subject, and the narrator — begins to utterly unravel, all previous assocations — linguistic, symbolic, psychic — intertwining, losing boundaries, acquiring new ones, becoming impossibly aware as the distinction between the narrator and subject — previously enforced rigorously through language — collapses. Notions of history begin to collapse as Ambrose (this time, it’s unclear if it is Ambrose the narrator or the subject speaking) tells of his own death (92), and then a future “years hence, successful, married, at ease in the world, the trials of his adolescence far behind him” (93); he “dreams of a funhouse vaster by far than any yet constructed”, “incredibly complex yet utterly controlled from a great central switchboard like the console of a pipe organ”, one in which he is the operator, yet “he’s only thirteen years old” (93). Time and memory become first displaced, and then irrelevant as Ambrose becomes, to quote Vonnegut, ‘unstuck in time’, simultaneously existing within the haunted past, as the thirteen-year-old; within the present, as the narrator; and within the hallucinatory future, as the operator. Historiography has collapsed, language has begun to break down, and the narrative has become dislodged from the linguistic framework upon which it is constructed. Ambrose has fallen in between the cracks of history, “in some new or old part of the place that’s not supposed to be used”, which “winds around on itself like a whelk shell”, which “even the designer and operator have forgotten” (80).

By its end, “Lost in the Funhouse”, at first seemingly a relatively linear work of historiography, has successfully managed to become a story of recursive historiography — self-writing, autotelic and infinite, like a Moebius strip. Ambrose the subject becomes Ambrose the narrator becomes Ambrose the subject — et cetera et cetera et cetera et cetera et cetera ad infinitum. Through its usage of repetition, “Lost in the Funhouse” manages to simultaneously work as a startling work of personal historiography, while also functioning as a critique on the framework of stories, and language itself, which prove to be ultimately limited, and impotent as vehicles of memory, and memorialisation.

— Barth, John. Lost in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice. (LF) New York: Bantam Books, 1980.