If you were to get a pirated copy of Spyro:
Year of the Dragon all the way back at the turn of the century, you’d be able to play
the game normally, at first. Game crackers managed to bypass the game's
crack protection just like they had every other major release at the time, and since
the first few worlds played normally, they assumed this game was like any other one. For players trying to complete the game, though,
they noticed some… odd occurrences. Once those first few levels were over and
you went to check out the hot air balloon travel system, Zoe would tell
you this… After that message, Spyro, the game, started
acting strange. At first, it’s only a few small problems. An egg you previously collected was suddenly
missing, some gems would disappear, the entrance to an area you just went into was locked again. The game grew unstable, crashing more and
more frequently, more eggs went missing, more gems. The game language would switch, you’d be
stuck on permanently low health, the travel system broke entirely. The game became a nonsensical labyrinth, being
sent to the wrong rooms or entirely wrong worlds at every new area you enter. It’s like the game itself was rotting from
your presence, doing anything it could to make you stop playing it. The idea of games taking life has, for the
longest time, been something naturally unnerving to people. I don't think it's controversial to say that
most video games want to be played. However, there are times when a game, even
popular games, reject us. The Halo series is known for many things,
but one aspect that’s always interested me was the fact that you could actually kill
your teammates. This is true both in the multiplayer and the
campaign, but the campaign is what really catches my eye. In the mainline series of games, you play
as master chief, this ridiculously powerful and near perfect super soldier who has an
endless loyalty to protecting humanity from galaxy wide threats. Despite Master Chief being a silent protagonist,
his wills and wants are very clearly established. That being said, Master Chief is not the person
playing Halo. For the story of these games, outside of cutscenes,
he's entirely controlled by you. All main characters are piloted by us, as
is the nature of video games, and that creates a weird gap in storytelling that these games
need to fill. Master Chief wouldn't kill his allies, but
the danger of accidentally killing them is still there, so the games give you some leeway. You can kill a few marines and pass through
the level just fine, but if it becomes clear that you're just looking for wanton murder,
Halo itself turns on you. The rest of your allies decide to kill you,
deciding you’ve gone rogue, and most of the time succeed in the process. Technically this is an ending to the story
of Halo, in the same way that Master Chief dying in the line of duty is, but this ending
doesn’t make sense at all. Master Chief, the character, does not go rogue,
at least for no reason, meaning in this moment, this isn’t Master Chief at all. This is transparently the player going rogue,
and the video game itself punishing them for it. Most narrative games have this sort of invisible
deal between the player and the character. You’re given room to act like the character
would, and so long as you do, that invisible line is never crossed. But the moment you stop pretending to be the
character, the game stops pretending to have no control over your actions. And as time has gone on, games surrounding
this idea, this friction between the player and character, have become more and more popular. Many games center around rebelling against
some powerful meta figure, like a narrator or developer, but it's always, to an extent,
self contained. The Stanley Parable is one of the most meta
games out there, with its pure existence being a commentary on video game structure, and
centering around your relationship with the narrator's wishes. This is an entire genre of video game, ones
where you rebel against the narrator in silly and clever ways, but, what's important to
note is if you play the game, "Don't press the button", it actually wants you to press
the button. If you follow all of the narrator’s instructions
in the Stanley Parable, you get exactly one ending, showing a kinda bland and obvious
story about mind control and being a slave to work. Every other ending in the game requires you
to have, at some point before or during it, done something the narrator didn't want you
to. And despite the game being as meta as it is,
it never actually addresses the player. No matter how aware of being in a video game
the narrator is, you are always Stanley. And, through this formula, the game is an
absolute joy to play. It's silly and lighthearted and clever. It's self awareness is a tool to entertain
us, and manages to still immerse us in this weird office world of the Stanley Parable. Let’s compare this to another game, an indie
game called Depression Quest. Depression Quest is a text-based adventure
game made in 2013, centering around the idea of choice. When you go to the website, you’re given
a warning that the game covers some dark topics, saying, “Depression Quest is a game that
deals with living with depression in a very literal way. This game is not meant to be a fun or lighthearted
experience.” From your very first choice, you’re presented
with a list of options, with the options that would actually help you, options that would
be healthy, being directly crossed out. As your depression worsens, fewer and fewer
choices are given to you, still tantalizingly there but out of reach. The game could have simply given you the actually
available options, but it chooses to show you, the player, that these cannot be picked.The
game knows they’re the right thing to do, the person in the story does as well, but
it’s simply impossible. You have three status bars in the game, “You
are depressed, You are not currently seeing a therapist, You are not currently taking
medication for depression.” These can all change over the course of the
game, and they have a very real effect over your future choices. The entire experience is a desperate crawl
out of your depressed state, all while it becomes harder and harder to crawl, and as
your depression gets worse, your choices become suffocating. “You are profoundly depressed. You are barely functional, on days you can’t
even get out of bed at all.” At that deep down, the game almost ceases
to have choices entirely. You and your character simply subsist, barely
sleeping, and reacting to whatever random events happen to you. However, while it seems that every option
has a downside, and at times that there’s no way out, the game does have a number of
endings. Those status bars can be changed. You can seek therapy, you can get medication,
and your mental state can get better. Talking to someone about your problems, scheduling
appointments, getting a cat, it is the opposite of fantasy. Sometimes the best choice is to lie to a family
member because they’d make things worse for you, sometimes the best choice is to be
honest. You pick and choose your battles, and fight
in any way you can, even when your best option is still bad. Depression Quest is deeply aware of the role
of games, and uses that expectation to make the player feel crushed by their lack of real
choice. three years after the release of Depression
Quest came an itch.io game called Solitudo, or, Solitude. You start the game dropped into a small apartment. A gentle guitar song is playing through your
laptop speakers, and you’re given the power to interact with nearly everything in your
room. On your bed is a diary, with an entry reading,
“I think I will not leave this room anymore. Yesterday I had a wonderful night with that
guy, but after all I bored him with all my fears and insecurities. He left and will not come back. I’m hurt and scared. He doesn’t need me like this, no one needs
me. I cannot change. I will spend some more decades here, until
all that’s left after me is just a fetid black spot... I want to see him again.” There’s a few more notes, some objects to
throw around, but quickly, the only thing left to do becomes glaringly obvious. See what’s outside of the apartment. One last warning tells you that you can order
food online, go on welfare, that bathrooms are overrated, but none of that matters to
the player, because we don’t actually live here. The character does. However, right now, we’re in control. With all the content in the room gone, you
try to step outside, but… You are allowed to leave the room, but all
you can find is this spacious black void. As you approach the giant looming text, noise
starts to build around you from no particular source: a mix of a looming bass-y drone, indecipherable
whispers, and reversed speech. And this is the entire game. A few let’s play channels covered Solitude
around the time of its release, and you can really see them struggle to hit the 10 minute
mark, because where most games go through elaborate processes to get across the feelings
of the character to the player, Solitude has no such intentions. To get across the feeling of isolation, most
games would have the door locked, despite the character having the ability to open it,
because while the world to the character might be miserable, looking around outside would
be nothing but more content to the person playing. But Solitude lets you, the player, open it. In Halo, when you go against the desire of
the game, it simply slaps your wrist and resets you back to the previous save. In Solitude, we can leave while the character,
canonically, stays inside. And as a result, we see the world that our
protagonist does in a way that only the player can see. An empty void of anxiety and misery. Anatomy is a game about a sickness. You are placed, without explanation, in a
house. Your goal is to collect tapes. In fact, the game itself tells you to collect
tapes, with no further explanation or in game reasoning. And so, you do. With each tape, you’re given a monologue
by a nameless person: maybe a philosopher, maybe a scientist, lecturing on the importance
of houses to the human psyche. After each tape ends, you’re sent to a new
part of the house, getting familiar with its layout and structure, all while you hear more
and more from this voice in the tape. The monologue goes out of its way to compare
the house to a living being. Several entries are dedicated towards comparing
the anatomy of our bodies to the rooms of a house, a comparison that seems out there
at first, but makes more sense as the speaker continues… The house, in this game, is equivalent to
another living being, the video game itself. Even beyond the idea that your entire experience
takes place in and is entirely related to the house, when it decides to reject you,
it acts through the structure of the game itself. A few tapes in, and suddenly the illusion
of reality starts to fall apart. Models become visibly displaced from where
they’re meant to be, paintings phase out of reality. The volume of the tape recorder suddenly spikes
in volume and fizzles out, the text guiding you corrupts and falls apart. The tapes themselves become disjointed, the
audio is corrupted, you find a tape floating in the air, and once you’re finally directed
to enter the basement, the subconscious of the house, the game itself crashes. If you reboot it, you once again hear the
sound of a tape being inserted, a sound indicating that you’re choosing to re-enter this place. You spawn in the bedroom, the mind of the
house, with everything significantly more corrupt. A red hue covers the game as long connected
sinew shoot through walls, phasing in and out of existence. Clumps of moving tissue crowd the hallways,
endlessly merging in with itself. The structure of the house, its objects, are
entirely scattered and barely recognizable. Only the layout remains, and, after you run
out of tapes, only one place is left for you to explore. The basement. As you look around, you find the staircase
you entered has disappeared entirely, as the speaker, voice coming from the walls, has
one final message for you. If you pirate Spyro: Year of the Dragon, you
are treated like the exact thing you are: an invading force. The game, understanding what you need from
it, entertainment, becomes sick. Its organs, its functions slowly become difficult
and obstinate. The music disappears, the world is made unstable,
and by the end of the game, it eventually consumes you whole: destroying all of your
progress, and leaving you back at the start with absolutely nothing left. The fear that anti-piracy measures inject
into us is something as unsettling as it is primal. It’s a reminder of the true relationship
between us and the game, one normally designed to make us forget it ever existed. The knowledge that a video game knows that
you’re there, and that, sometimes, it really doesn’t want you to be. In the relationship between the player and
the character, it’s important to note that we’re not the only ones that suffer from
it. Spec Ops: The Line released in 2012, the same
year as CS:GO, Black Ops 2, and Borderlands 2, but it interpreted the shooter genre in
a very different way. The gameplay of Spec Ops: The Line isn’t
anything particularly special, and that’s for a good reason. The game, for the first time player, is meant
to come off as nothing more than a large scale shooter story where you play as a borderline
superhuman saving an entire city. That city in particular is Dubai, with the
game starting 6 months after a series of increasingly disastrous sandstorms. While the elite of the city evacuated in secret,
the citizens are trapped, surrounded by an endless desert and cut off from the rest of
the world, with only the strongest radio signals being able to cut through. You control Captain Martin Walker, the leader
of the US Army’s Delta Force after getting a transmission 2 weeks prior from the heart
of the city, from none other than Colonel John Konrad. Konrad was a decorated war hero, and the leader
of the 33rd Infantry Battalion. When the disasters began, on the way home
from Afghanistan, Konrad volunteered the 33rd to help with evacuation. However, when they were told to evacuate the
city themselves, when the sandstorms became too much to bear, he and the rest of the 33rd
defected from the US Army entirely. After months of silence, though, the transmission
made something clear. Your mission is to search for survivors, one
you immediately achieve as you’re met with a group of hostile insurgents a few minutes
into the city. After dealing with them, you get a live distress
signal from a group asking for help from the 33rd, but you’re just barely too late to
save them. One of their own was kidnapped, McPherson,
to a place called the nest. And, seeing far more people alive than you
expected in the first 20 minutes in the city, Walker makes a decision: to see what’s really
going on here, and to save everyone he can. Confusion is a common theme running through
Spec Ops: The Line. The game opens in the middle of a helicopter
fight, only to have your crew hit by another falling chopper as it cuts to black. The majority of the game is spent getting
back to that point, but once you finally do, it’s not the exact same sequence. Once you take off and you find yourself back
where you started, Walker says… While this game eventually becomes surreal,
the characters never get this explicitly meta at any other point. That helicopter scene isn’t a fourth wall
break, it’s Walker recognizing that these events truly are happening again. According to lead narrative designer Walt
Williams, Walker recognizing these events repeating isn’t an easter egg or nod to
the audience, but an implication that the game doesn’t jump around in time at all. The first helicopter crash did happen before
all the events we’ve seen. A narrative rule revealed to fans after the
game was released gives us a much deeper look into what’s really going on. At the end of each and every scene, it will
fade out to either black or white. If it fades out to black, the next scene will
be something that really happened. If it fades to white, the next scene will
be, in some part, a hallucination. The interesting thing is that the intro to
the game, the one after the helicopter crash and the very first fade out we ever see…
fades to white, well before anything strange starts to happen. While the first half of the game plays as
a high action third person shooter in a truthfully really cool location, the entire tone and
direction of Spec Ops: The Line switches in an instant, with one fatal mistake. While you get into several firefights with
the 33rd, assuming you’re part of the CIA trying to kill them for going rogue, an actual
CIA agent decides to help you out. His name is Agent Gould, and he seems to have
the same goals as you: to evacuate as many citizens as possible. As you go to meet up with him, though, he’s
captured and eventually executed, before you can learn his and the CIA’s plans to do
so. All you get from his body is a map leading
to a place called The Gate. The most natural assumption in a game like
this is that it’s a base that needs to be taken, and so Walker and the rest of delta
force move to take it. Sneaking in, you find yourself next to a mortar
launcher, one with White Phosphorus, a dangerous and incredibly cruel chemical weapon. Seeing no other way to clear out the place
with so many people there, you decide to use it, and blanket the entire base with it, killing
countless soldiers in the process. Once you drop down into the encampment, though,
you and Walker realize something horrifying: Gould wasn’t trying to take the base. He was trying to free the civilians trapped
there. Beyond this point, you are no longer playing
a regular shooter. Konrad, the colonel you’ve been trying to
find over the course of the game, finally makes an appearance in the form of a voice
in a radio, one you find soon after leaving The Gate. In contrast to the war hero Walker knew him
as, this Konrad is cartoonishly evil. Far more evil than anything or anyone else
the game has thrown at you at this point, as your hallucinations become more and more
frequent. The idea of choice is brought up over and
over, in the context of how pointless it is in this game. In the moments just before the white phosphorous
killing at the gate, you’re told… The interesting thing about this interaction
is that both of them are right, depending on who is being spoken to. Walker has no choice. We’ve been controlling him since the very
start of the game. But once we approach the mortar launcher…
we, the player, need to press the button. Just like with the helicopter scene, Walker
seems to know the situation he’s trapped in, somewhat. While it’s never said explicitly, this game
is very aware of the split between the player and the character, and uses that relationship
to punish both of them. Many people have analyzed this game under
the lens of making the player feel guilty, subverting the military hero power fantasy
that most shooters have, but it, in my opinion, shines an even brighter light onto the hellish
situation these main characters are put in. According to Walt Williams… again… Walker is trapped in a hell of his own creation,
but I think in an even greater sense that Walker is trapped in a hell of the video game’s
creation. It’s easy to forget that the original objective
of Spec Ops: The Line was to simply check if there were survivors, a task accomplished
in the first 5 minutes of the game. If Walker did what he was supposed to do,
there would be no video game. In order for Spec Ops: The Line to happen,
Walker had to disobey orders, he had to try to be the hero, or he wouldn’t exist at
all. He and every other video game protagonist
is trapped in an endless loop, being replayed millions and millions of times all over the
globe, suffering and dying and losing friends and allies all as a means for our entertainment. Spec Ops: The Line being a video game is also
important specifically because of this idea of control. The game is a linear story with some minor
choices that don’t really affect anything in the long run, but the form of control we,
as the player, get to exercise is if we want to keep playing. The guilt we feel is not just for the suffering
we inflict on these fictional innocent lives, but also the guilt of knowing that we still
want to keep going. When we see the button prompt to launch that
White Phosphorous, we do have a choice. That choice isn’t to change the story, but
to stop playing it entirely. Because, the only thing that happens from
here is pure, painful suffering. The game has a few more twists and turns before
we get back to the 2nd helicopter scene, like destroying all the water reserves in Dubai,
leaving everyone for dead, you know, small stuff, but after the crash, the game abandons
any semblance of reality. Figuring that Konrad would put himself at
the highest vantage point of the city, you and the rest of the delta force make your
way to the tower. However, your two friends, the last anchors
holding you to reality, swiftly meet their end. Lugo, right after the crash, is taken away
and surrounded by some of the abandoned citizens, being blamed for all the chaos that’s unfolded
over the course of the game, eventually being overrun and murdered. Right before you and Adams get to the base
of the tower, you’re surrounded by the 33rd. Adams, refusing to surrender, gives you the
cover fire you need to run away, being killed off screen. However, after he’s taken care of, the rest
of the 33rd seem to disappear along with him, leaving you entirely alone with Konrad’s
voice to guide you… The firepower that killed Adams is suddenly gone,
and you finally find yourself at the base of the tower. Despite being defenseless, the supposed last
of the 33rd, just 9 total men, surrender to you, asking you to meet Konrad upstairs. However, once you meet Konrad, the truth to
it all is finally revealed. He’s dead. He’s been dead, and has been for a long,
long time. The Konrad who Walker’s been speaking to,
the evil ruthless monster he can blame all of his problems on, never existed. The justification for murdering all of what's
left of the 33rd, the journey to get to this relentless monster, never existed in the first
place. You launched a mortar that murdered 47 innocent
people, for absolutely nothing at all. Konrad speaks to both Walker and us… At the end of this conversation, you’re
faced with a decision. To shoot Konrad, to continue to blame someone
else, or to shoot Walker, and take responsibility yourself. The game knows that shooting Walker isn’t
a suicide, and for the very first time, both you and Walker are on screen at the same time
separately. You control his actions. You dragged him through this hell. And, as your final choice, you can choose
whether he lives or dies. Because, from the very start of this game,
he was nothing more than a vessel for your entertainment. He never had a choice in the first place. Ultimately, most games want to be played. Even acting at your worst, most games will
simply reset you or even let you get away with anything, but that makes the games that
go a step beyond something to behold. Obviously, these games are not sentient. They don’t have real wants or desires, but
neither do the characters in these stories. And yet, we still get immersed. And so, when we’re faced with the game itself
making a choice for us, interrupting us, or speaking to us directly, for just a moment,
it can feel deeply, deeply real. Thanks for watching, and have a nice day.
