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RG4: Into the Dive
Episode 4 Notes
Article Discussed:
Into the Dive
Emilie Reed
https://archive.org/details/Arcade_Review_Issue_2/page/n11
Music:
“Yarn Ball” from Love ZZZV.
Support Zan-zan-zawa-veia at https://www.patreon.com/zzzv. Find out more about Zan’s music at https://zan-zan-zawa-veia.bandcamp.com or http://aanaaanaaanaaana.net/.
Other Links:
All issues of The Arcade Review: https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Arcade+Review%22
My article, inspired in part by Into the Dive, on user-created nightmare suites in Animal Crossing: New Leaf https://killscreen.com/articles/creepypasta-hell-inside-animal-crossing-new-leaf/
Rough Script:
This article might be slightly tougher to talk about than the previous three. Not because it was any less influential on me; this is the first that actually helped inspire me to write my own piece of criticism, which you can find linked in the episode description. It’s because, in some ways, this piece reads a lot more like a survey of the field. There are arguments made, of course, and positions taken. But the ultimate goal is fairly easy to define. And, by my reading at least, it doesn’t necessarily have the same kind of broad reaching effects on how to understand games as those others have.
That’s not just fine, it’s necessary. This podcast will be getting into a number of very particular arguments, alongside the broader ones. In a sense, then, the big takeaway for this episode might be that everything doesn’t need to have a big takeaway. Sometimes it has more to do with examining what is there, drawing some conclusions, and then moving on to the next thing.
Before we dive into “Into the Dive” itself, I do want to mention the magazine this was published in. If Nightmare Mode, which I mentioned in the first episode, was the place that brought me into a critical understanding of games, The Arcade Review was what helped me solidify it. Edited by Zolani Stewart and Alex Pieschel, it was billed as an Arts Review for videogames. I think they did a pretty exceptional job on that front. You can find the entire run in the “other links” section of the show notes.
But let’s get into it. “Into the Dive” structures itself around the disparity between “large studio, commercial horror games … like the Resident Evil, Dead Space, and Silent Hill series” and games like Yume Nikki and Ao Oni, largely made by one person in an engine designed for amateur recreation of 1990s Japanese RPGs like the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest series. This tool, in other words, is not meant for creating atmospheric titles or cutting in to jump scares; it is designed primarily to facilitate having little 16-bit characters wander around towns and world maps, fighting monsters as a world-spanning epic story unfolds around them.
Emilie Reed sets up why these stakes are important, saying,
“Many genres of indie production attempt to emulate the work of big studios as closely as possible, in terms of graphics, environments, and the various tests of mental and motor skill followed by a feeling of accomplishment each genre offers. But a significant subset of horror indies seem to be taking the opposite approach.”
In other words, this model of creating horror games is different from much of the indie market. Unlike Braid, which is very invested in being a twist on the platformer genre that feels as good as a Mario game, these titles are built in an engine which explicitly can’t do the sorts of things one does in a Resident Evil game. Their perspective is different as well, meaning they have to relate to the player in a fundamentally different fashion than a first- or third-person game.
This disconnect is used, in part, to establish one of the key terms of the essay: anticipation. Reed will go on to argue that this is a key element in how these very different experiences end up producing a similar affect. But before that, we should set up her second key term: sociality. This similarly works on both a material and aesthetic level.
“Many [RPG Maker] Horror games do fail to be scary on a basic level, and are panned by fans and LPers who are looking for something thrilling. However, many do succeed, and a lively community making fanart, Let’s Plays, and derivative games has grown around them.
“These derivative games, also made by individual, amateur designers and often one of the first games they make, do little to change the basic dynamics and even appearance of the original, and yet they are sought out, created, shared, and can become sub-fandoms within the fandom surrounding the original game.”
Reed goes on to point out that the simplicity of the aesthetics, the relative ease and availability of the tools, and the presence of this kind of fandom often leads to fans becoming creators in their own right. This is the material element of these games’ sociality; creators get plugged into an ecosystem of forums, YouTube channels, and social media fandoms. Discussion and approval or disapproval are broadcast along these channels. Some games will then become exemplary, leading to people within that ecosystem creating derivative games that themselves have the opportunity to repeat the cycle, although almost exclusively in miniature.
We then return to the discussion of anticipation. She brings up that, “Exploration and chase are two main elements used by many RPG Maker horror games.” These are the two prongs that are manipulated to bring anticipation into the aesthetic form of the games themselves. Reed uses Yume Nikki, a game about a girl exploring a dreamscape, to make this point.
“We are driven to explore Madotsuki’s disjointed and macabre dreams in Yume Nikki because we anticipate the novelty of new environments … The desire to create a narrative connecting all of these strange and disparate places leads players to reflect on their experiences in Madostuki’s eerie dreamscape long after they have explored most of the game.”
This puts that aesthetic consideration into a causal relationship. You go in to anticipate, and end up reflecting. The exploration aspect has a fairly obvious connection: once you see what the game has to offer, you want to see more of it. So you go explore. The chase elements are addressed much later in the essay, so we’ll pull an unorthodox move for this podcast and jump ahead a bit.
“Until you reach the ending, there is no ‘game over’ in Yume Nikki. At worst, you will be captured by strange bird-faced girls and put into a strange, dead end room … The only exception is a scene commonly referred to by fans as ‘face,’ which causes Madotsuki to wake immediately after seeing it, as if jolted awake by a truly bad nightmare. That the situation is so closed to interpretation or understanding is often more unsettling than a simple jump scare or a spray of gore.”
We have quite a bit to work through, here. First, the chase element. It’s more pronounced in some of the other games that Reed discusses. Especially Ao Oni, a game that features kids being chased by a demon. I think it’s worthwhile to talk about her explanation of its use in Yume Nikki, though. There, rather than a verb, it sounds closer to a kind of punctuation. Exploration is not just the verb; it’s full sentences. Paragraphs, even. It’s broken up not by death or failure in traditionally game-y ways, but by rare instances of being chased and put into even more ethereal worlds.
Second, I’d like to touch on reflection. This brings us back to the ways that RPG Maker horror games are differentiated from the genre as produced in the AAA space. The kinds of challenges and visceral reactions that games like Resident Evil are looking for aren’t necessarily conducive to ruminating on for lengthy periods of time. At least that’s what Reed seems to be saying; I’m not sure I quite buy that, and we’ll go into it more fully with episode six of this very podcast. But there’s at least a kernel of truth to the whole thing. The way that games like Yume Nikki almost aggressively refuse to explain themselves does touch a nerve. Coupled with the right combinations of evocative imagery, it sparks something in certain kinds of players that gets amplified through fandom. Being scared by Uboa leads to an interpretive desire. That might be to help tamper that fear by putting it into context, or to justify it and thus defuse the shame around it.
This is important because it leads up to Reed’s final major point. We’ll get there in due time, though. As we move toward wrapping this up, though, I want to bring us back to the other key term, sociality.
“Discussion boards attempting to pull together a legible plot from the disturbing and disconnected imagery of the dreamworld create backstories for Madotsuki … Along with fan games, this speculation shows the community’s drive to get even more chills out of the source material, by creating their own systems of signs and meanings to explore, drawn from the images in the game, which rarely betray specific meaning or intent.”
This is the way that social impulse itself moves from the material to the aesthetic. Specifically in fan games. The systems of signs are fundamentally markers of being together, or having experienced a thing with others. This is especially notable in a game like Yume Nikki, which is a game about a girl wandering through her own dreams. In isolation, that seems like it might possibly be the most solipsistic story possible. Especially when the obtuse imagery might be read as an attempt to refuse any material explanation. But social formation happens around this anyway.
Reed’s summation of these two key terms is:
“The threads of anticipation and sociality, which intensify the emotional responses the player has to the game, are embedded in the creation of games, how they are disseminated, played and discussed over the internet, and the larger fan culture surrounding RPGMaker horror.”
As I said at the top of the episode, the big takeaway here might just be that there doesn’t need to always be a big takeaway. This article does a good job, I think, of illustrating the ways a particular scene can intertwine aesthetic elements with material relations to produce something valuable to inquiry. In just a moment I will read what I think is Reed’s closing argument. But before that, I’d like to contextualize it a little.
I don’t think I agree with the conclusion she comes to. Not because I don’t want to, but because I think it stretches beyond the bounds of what she has established. As I mentioned earlier, I also don’t agree with some of her characterizations of bigger budget horror games. They seem, to me, to be more like a convenient framing device than a genuine survey of the objects being referred to. Putting these two things in tension does, however, produce one critical point, without which this article would be significantly slighter. Indie games production often does do its best to mirror major games studios’ output by genre. RPG Maker horror games are notably different in their failures, intentional and unintentional, to abide by that general rule. If, as I’m about to quote Reed as saying, there is “an important strategy of resistance” it’s in those failures more than anything else.
So, to bring it to a close with Reed’s closing argument.
“As the technological gap between what is available for home use and for professional use narrows, indie and experimental games risk feeling the pressure to look and run more like their AAA counterparts. Recent horror titles from major publishers clearly skew in favor of prioritizing complex action sequences, realistic gore and monsters, and fast paced, high-stakes action sequences to ramp up tension. RPGMaker horror titles and the productive communities surrounding them represent an important strategy of resistance to this trend.”
Next Time:
The Tyranny of Choice
Aevee Bee
https://gameranx.com/features/id/14224/article/the-tyranny-of-choice/
