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xyzzysqrlSo having spent, by my count, four and a half kertrizillion dollars on the latest Steam sale, I feel like I really need to do something faintly productive to attone for it. So I'm instituting a Policy.
I will blog once a week. Even if it's just two words, as long as those words are meaningful in some way, I will write something here every single week. If I can get myself writing regularly I'll start to put together some other ideas I have, but right now: Write something here, once every week. If I have not written something here and it's been more than a week, you are all invited to find me on IM or whatever and ask me, "Hey, weren't you supposed to have written something this week?" until I leave to go write something. Please do this.
Okay, so what did I really want to write about? Alan Wake. Alan Wake is a game about a writer in a survival-horror scenario, searching for his missing wife and a missing week of his life while dealing with the idea that his writing MAY be affecting reality. There's gonna be spoilers for it, and for Silent Hill 2 so... duck out if you care. Also I felt like just dashing through this piece so I don't get real descriptive about what I'm talking about. Sorry.
Anyway I'm playing Alan Wake right now, up to I think the third Episode, and it's absolutely insane how thick and dense the metatext on this piece is. (What? Oh. Yes, it's a good game too. Very shooty, lots of exploration. Whatever.) I just love how things are all woven together into one big dense contextual knot. Let me try and lay out the layers of meta here, or just... whatever, I'm ranting.
Alan is a writer, so we see a lot of his writing/manuscript pages in game, as well as a number of episodes of a TV show he wrote for. Naturally, these pages contain elements of what's going to happen or things that have just happened in-game. At first I was a bit worried about the idea that I'd find a page that would tell me what happened next... but then I realized that a part of horror is anticipation, suspense. I know he's going to get thrown off a cliff. But why? How? How does he survive? (Does his upper arm get a bruise?) I'll come back to this.
The TV shows are less contextually thick with meaning, but they're full of cliche horror tropes, particularly the Twilight Zone Twist variety... again, come back to this.
As Alan is a fairly famous, prolific writer, we see other aspects of his writing throughout the game. One of them is the novel "The Sudden Stop", which unlike all the other text (so far) in the game ISN'T read aloud by Alan. It's read by James McCaffery, who played Max Payne back in the day, and it reads like an novelization of the Max Payne games complete with gently overwrought metaphors.
In "The Sudden Stop", the Payne-a-like mentioned a "Late Goodbye". This is a direct reference to a song by band Poets of the Fall, which was written for Max Payne 2. (ANOTHER game thick with metafiction. That's another rant.) The same band wrote a song for Alan Wake as themselves... and two more songs as a fictional band, "Old Gods of Asgard". Of course in the songs by Old Gods of Asgard you can pull some clues and cues for the plot of the game Alan Wake, and at one point he sits down and listens to these songs to get an idea of what he's up against.
(Meanwhile, online, you can find fan pages for the Old Gods, who fully accept the fictional conceit that these guys were hard rockers of the seventies. Me, I've just decided I've only heard their second album in my older brother's music collection and thought they rocked all this time. It's great to see some music from an underrepresented band get play in a video game! Maybe they'll show up in Guitar Hero?)
Right. Swinging back a bit. Alan, as a writer, is very aware of the tropes at play here because he's used them all. Watching "Night Springs", the TV show he wrote for, is like watching an outright parody of the Twilight Zone played completely stoic. People do things full of hubris and get smacked down by the universe at large. People do incredibly ominous things and then SHOCKINGLY turn out to be evil. Plots twist and turn on a dime just to be "chillingly unpredictable". I love it. It's glorious.
The in-game plot does the SAME THING, but with more subtle nuance. Night Springs was Alan's first writing job, you can see he's clumsily trying to get his ideas across, which he'd later sling out with a great deal more skill. Alan passes out... and wakes up in the hospital! It's all been a hallucination! OR HAS IT? Alan goes to the cabin where his wife was... AND IT DOESN'T EXIST! DUN DUN DUNNNNN. Alan is still using the same writing tricks he used on a cheesy-ass TV show when he got started... but he builds up to them now, he writes characters reacting with a more believable air, and suddenly it works.
I'm even starting to try to use the metaplot to predict the way the story will turn next. Did I, for even a minute, believe that Alan may have had a psychotic break and murdered his wife, then constructed an elaborate fantasy around it? Fuck no. They pulled that in Silent Hill 2. And I -know- that the WRITERS knew that -I- would know they'd done that. The entire time that card was on the table, me and the game were eying each other over it. When the game flipped it over and gestured in a grand "This is NOT your card, sir!" swoop, I nodded and smirked knowingly, because of course it wasn't.
Where IS my card, my big plot reveal that will make me go "Oh. Oh my god, really?" ... I DON'T KNOW. For all I know it's under their hat, or in Stephen King's latest novel, or at the bottom of the damn lake. But the game and I both knew that such an obvious pull from a fog-shrouded, lonely video game about a man searching for his missing wife wasn't going to fly in THIS lonely, fog-shrouded video game about a man searching for his wife. That would be a lazy-ass plot construction, and dear god if there's one thing this game isn't, it's lazily plotted.
That's probably why I'm enjoying this so much... it's NOT lazy. Why is Alan constantly just-barely getting out of scrapes and certain doom? That's how a horror protag HAS to be written to be believable. You can't have a horror game with an invincible hero. You can't have a horror story with an invincible cast, so some people have to die... but Alan's never killed anyone, they explode into light. They were dead, possessed, monsters before he got here. His hands are dirty and clean at the same time.
Why can't the Evil Darkness just destroy everyone and everything? Narrative causality. Enemies come in waves, from the woods or from windows or the dark closets, from wherever you aren't looking, but they can't live in the light because they're written not to. The darkness can't be all-powerful because that's too bleak.
The characters have to have a fighting chance, or it's a boring story, and they have to have something to struggle against and be hurt by or it's a boring story. The game constantly pushes to be true to its genre and still heroic, and Alan talks about what a struggle writing it that way was even as he's battered and beaten but barely survives. I love it.
I've been playing one episode a night, because the game is broken into TV-style episodes and I want to acknowledge and honor that. When I've finished the game, I'll "replay the DVD set" and see if I can collect more story, since there is story you can only collect on the hardest level. Do I do this for most games? No. I am not a challenge gamer or achievement-oriented person.
If there's one thing that WILL make me replay Alan Wake, though, it's the promise of more writing, more plot, more fuel for the imagination. This game flaunts its influences like a peacock plume, fanning out years of horror tropes and references in a spread that dances in front of me. I'm completely entranced.
I will blog once a week. Even if it's just two words, as long as those words are meaningful in some way, I will write something here every single week. If I can get myself writing regularly I'll start to put together some other ideas I have, but right now: Write something here, once every week. If I have not written something here and it's been more than a week, you are all invited to find me on IM or whatever and ask me, "Hey, weren't you supposed to have written something this week?" until I leave to go write something. Please do this.
Okay, so what did I really want to write about? Alan Wake. Alan Wake is a game about a writer in a survival-horror scenario, searching for his missing wife and a missing week of his life while dealing with the idea that his writing MAY be affecting reality. There's gonna be spoilers for it, and for Silent Hill 2 so... duck out if you care. Also I felt like just dashing through this piece so I don't get real descriptive about what I'm talking about. Sorry.
Anyway I'm playing Alan Wake right now, up to I think the third Episode, and it's absolutely insane how thick and dense the metatext on this piece is. (What? Oh. Yes, it's a good game too. Very shooty, lots of exploration. Whatever.) I just love how things are all woven together into one big dense contextual knot. Let me try and lay out the layers of meta here, or just... whatever, I'm ranting.
Alan is a writer, so we see a lot of his writing/manuscript pages in game, as well as a number of episodes of a TV show he wrote for. Naturally, these pages contain elements of what's going to happen or things that have just happened in-game. At first I was a bit worried about the idea that I'd find a page that would tell me what happened next... but then I realized that a part of horror is anticipation, suspense. I know he's going to get thrown off a cliff. But why? How? How does he survive? (Does his upper arm get a bruise?) I'll come back to this.
The TV shows are less contextually thick with meaning, but they're full of cliche horror tropes, particularly the Twilight Zone Twist variety... again, come back to this.
As Alan is a fairly famous, prolific writer, we see other aspects of his writing throughout the game. One of them is the novel "The Sudden Stop", which unlike all the other text (so far) in the game ISN'T read aloud by Alan. It's read by James McCaffery, who played Max Payne back in the day, and it reads like an novelization of the Max Payne games complete with gently overwrought metaphors.
In "The Sudden Stop", the Payne-a-like mentioned a "Late Goodbye". This is a direct reference to a song by band Poets of the Fall, which was written for Max Payne 2. (ANOTHER game thick with metafiction. That's another rant.) The same band wrote a song for Alan Wake as themselves... and two more songs as a fictional band, "Old Gods of Asgard". Of course in the songs by Old Gods of Asgard you can pull some clues and cues for the plot of the game Alan Wake, and at one point he sits down and listens to these songs to get an idea of what he's up against.
(Meanwhile, online, you can find fan pages for the Old Gods, who fully accept the fictional conceit that these guys were hard rockers of the seventies. Me, I've just decided I've only heard their second album in my older brother's music collection and thought they rocked all this time. It's great to see some music from an underrepresented band get play in a video game! Maybe they'll show up in Guitar Hero?)
Right. Swinging back a bit. Alan, as a writer, is very aware of the tropes at play here because he's used them all. Watching "Night Springs", the TV show he wrote for, is like watching an outright parody of the Twilight Zone played completely stoic. People do things full of hubris and get smacked down by the universe at large. People do incredibly ominous things and then SHOCKINGLY turn out to be evil. Plots twist and turn on a dime just to be "chillingly unpredictable". I love it. It's glorious.
The in-game plot does the SAME THING, but with more subtle nuance. Night Springs was Alan's first writing job, you can see he's clumsily trying to get his ideas across, which he'd later sling out with a great deal more skill. Alan passes out... and wakes up in the hospital! It's all been a hallucination! OR HAS IT? Alan goes to the cabin where his wife was... AND IT DOESN'T EXIST! DUN DUN DUNNNNN. Alan is still using the same writing tricks he used on a cheesy-ass TV show when he got started... but he builds up to them now, he writes characters reacting with a more believable air, and suddenly it works.
I'm even starting to try to use the metaplot to predict the way the story will turn next. Did I, for even a minute, believe that Alan may have had a psychotic break and murdered his wife, then constructed an elaborate fantasy around it? Fuck no. They pulled that in Silent Hill 2. And I -know- that the WRITERS knew that -I- would know they'd done that. The entire time that card was on the table, me and the game were eying each other over it. When the game flipped it over and gestured in a grand "This is NOT your card, sir!" swoop, I nodded and smirked knowingly, because of course it wasn't.
Where IS my card, my big plot reveal that will make me go "Oh. Oh my god, really?" ... I DON'T KNOW. For all I know it's under their hat, or in Stephen King's latest novel, or at the bottom of the damn lake. But the game and I both knew that such an obvious pull from a fog-shrouded, lonely video game about a man searching for his missing wife wasn't going to fly in THIS lonely, fog-shrouded video game about a man searching for his wife. That would be a lazy-ass plot construction, and dear god if there's one thing this game isn't, it's lazily plotted.
That's probably why I'm enjoying this so much... it's NOT lazy. Why is Alan constantly just-barely getting out of scrapes and certain doom? That's how a horror protag HAS to be written to be believable. You can't have a horror game with an invincible hero. You can't have a horror story with an invincible cast, so some people have to die... but Alan's never killed anyone, they explode into light. They were dead, possessed, monsters before he got here. His hands are dirty and clean at the same time.
Why can't the Evil Darkness just destroy everyone and everything? Narrative causality. Enemies come in waves, from the woods or from windows or the dark closets, from wherever you aren't looking, but they can't live in the light because they're written not to. The darkness can't be all-powerful because that's too bleak.
The characters have to have a fighting chance, or it's a boring story, and they have to have something to struggle against and be hurt by or it's a boring story. The game constantly pushes to be true to its genre and still heroic, and Alan talks about what a struggle writing it that way was even as he's battered and beaten but barely survives. I love it.
I've been playing one episode a night, because the game is broken into TV-style episodes and I want to acknowledge and honor that. When I've finished the game, I'll "replay the DVD set" and see if I can collect more story, since there is story you can only collect on the hardest level. Do I do this for most games? No. I am not a challenge gamer or achievement-oriented person.
If there's one thing that WILL make me replay Alan Wake, though, it's the promise of more writing, more plot, more fuel for the imagination. This game flaunts its influences like a peacock plume, fanning out years of horror tropes and references in a spread that dances in front of me. I'm completely entranced.
