Insignificant as an Ant: The Magic of Disempowerment

Okay, so I'm not doing a creator spotlight this week, nor probably for the rest of June.  This doesn't mean I don't want to, it means I have something else I want to talk about.  This week and the week after I get back from New York, we will be spending doing a talk about power fantasies in video gaming.  The two sides of power fantasy.  Empowerment and this week's topic, disempowerment.

Insignificant as an Ant: The Magic of Disempowerment

            Extra Credits brought up an interesting bit of discussion during one of their segments recently, talking about the Cthulhu mythos and how so few people understand what it means.  It's not about monsters or beasts, it's about the abject horror of being so small, so infinitely weak that the monsters we face are beyond our understanding and that we are as insignificant as an ant to them.  Or even less so.

            This got me to thinking about disempowerment in video games.  There are whole genres of game design which seem to want to disempower the players, such as Outlast or Silent Hill, and many games which use disempowerment as a tool, such as Sang-Froid, where you are disempowered for the purpose of storytelling or character growth.  But why do we like disempowerment?  Why do we play games that may make us feel afraid, insignificant, or powerless?  Well, lots of reasons.  Many people are control freaks and the idea of losing control is appealing to them as a way to relax and let go of the stresses of the day, even if they have the ultimate power, the power to turn the game off.  Others Like to start off weak so they feel much better when they become strong.  Others still like the adrenaline high...the feeling of struggling to stay alive in spite of all that is stacked against you.  Count Jackula actually put it best for me.  We all need to feel fear, to understand what it is to be weak, because then, when we are faced with true horror in our real lives, we will not flinch.  In many ways, they teach us to cope, to handle obstacles, and to find hope.

We put ourselves through fear to better prepare ourselves for the coming nightmares.  Or perhaps because we just enjoy it.

            Whatever the reason, there is an art to disempowerment.  It can be handled in a number of ways.  One way is to not give the player any power to begin with.  To place them in a position of danger and give them no way to cope with it, other than to run.  This gives a modicum of control to the player, namely the ability to run and hide, but prevents them from acting like...well...a human being.  Because, no matter how scared or weak we are, some of us, when cornered, will grab a pipe and start bashing away at the cosmic monster or the psycho killer trying to destroy us.  While flawed, I believe this method has some interesting applications.  The ultimate goal is to make the players feel helpless, but to not make them feel like a pawn of the game.  These experiences are generally very, very linear, since your actions are so limited.  These are story driven experiences, not sand box games.  These games give players the illusion of choice, and thus the illusion of hope, when in reality they are just pulling you by the nose towards a goal, with the atmosphere around you and your own mind starting to play tricks.  Outlast and Amnesia are games like this.  You cannot fight, your inventory and ability to run/heal are very limited, and you will always follow the same path each time you play.

You have no power in Outlast.  All you can do is run.  Try to outlast your hunters.

            I heartily disagree with this method of disempowerment because while these games can be quite horrifying, I think they make a cardinal mistake.  Outlast, Amnesia, and Slender, are all games based around running, hiding, and light puzzle solving in order to try and evade some horrific monster or psycho killer.  One way that disempowerment fantasy works is that you are put under a threat and a fear and you wish to avoid it.  Typically the fear is about death.  However, Outlast, Amnesia, and Slender usually kill you right at the end of the game anyway.  Now, this isn't necessarily bad, as the point of these games is, as I said, story driven.  To make you feel horror and fear in regards to the story being told.  However, the flaw is that if you just die at the end...what is the point?  Why are you being pushed forward so much if once it is all over, you simply die?  Why do those other deaths matter any less?  The answer is, of course, so you can enjoy the journey and see more horrific sights.  At the end of the day, I feel it's a bit of a cheat, however, because they don't really give resolution.  You may get to a point where you cannot run any more or where there is nothing else left to do, however we don't get an end to the overall story, usually.  It just ends.  Worse is that during these death scenes at the end, your ability to run or struggle is taken away, robbing you of your control and removing you from the body of your avatar.  This kind of takes away the disempowerment, because you're no longer playing, you're watching.  There is a disconnect between player and avatar, as what the player may want to do is not what the game is ALLOWING them to do.  At least some players will want to try and fight, no matter how futile it is.  Taking away the control to fight, or hell, even run, removes some of the fear, horror, and disempowerment.  And I think they should be allowed to fight if necessary.  Why?  Because another way to disempower the player is to give them power, but show them that their power is ultimately meaningless, weak, or that they are truly insignificant.

Problems with games like Slender or Amnesia or Outlast are...if you're just going to die anyway, what makes this death at the start of the game any more or less meaningful than the death at the end of the game?

            The Silent Hill games are a beautiful bit of disempowerment fantasy, where the player is actually given a decent assortment of weapons, from pipes and clubs to various guns.  These can be used to defend yourself against the enemy, however it is ultimately. futile.  Why?  Because the true horror does not come from the fear of death.  The true horror is not about physical bodily harm or a monster getting you.  The true horror is about living with the monster.  About being surrounded by an unholy feeling of dread that although you could be killed at the whim of whatever you are facing, you are left alive only to suffer, for the amusement of whatever you are facing.  The Silent Hill series does this better than almost any other game, with the possible exception of Lone Survivor.  The atmosphere around you is incredibly heavy and the enemies, while dangerous, seem to have a kind of apathy towards you.  They care very little about you...not even to the point where they even need to attack you.  They will if they see you, however you know that if they all charged you at once, you'd die...but you are kept alive because Silent Hill itself doesn't care about you.  Not even enough to kill you outright.  In all the Silent Hill games, you CAN die at the end if you act in a certain way, however most of them offer a solid resolution, showing either a falling deeper into horror or finding a way out, which I believe is nice for disempowerment fantasy...it helps bring the players back to reality, so to speak, while still being a bit obscure...leaving the player wondering and making connections with their own life.

The true terror of a game like Silent Hill 2 is living with the monster that is the town.  It hates you.  But it doesn't care so much to kill you...it will let you kill yourself, little by little, because you really are insignificant.  This is what makes the game so disempowering...and so brilliant.

             Another way to handle disempowerment fantasy is to try and give someone something truly unknowable that they are facing.  It might be given an explanation or a synopsis on some wiki, but the creature itself is still alien to you and acts in a way no human could ever act.  This is truly horrifying, as we don't understand the reason for its actions.  It is beyond us.  Even if armed with powerful weapons, like in Prey, you can feel weak and disempowered because you cannot fathom the purpose of the enemies around you, or even if you can, you cannot reconcile it.  SCP: Containment Breach is a charming little freeware indie game that does this better than any game I've ever seen.  Using the monsters on the SCP wiki, it has creatures that are gifted with power beyond your understanding and a dark purpose that is never explained.  The horror comes from trying to survive them, such as a porcelain statue with an unblinking, painted face, which will only move when you don't look at it, like the Weeping Angels in Doctor Who.  While the Angels can be figured out and were even given a voice, the statue has none of this and haunts you, perhaps for no reason other than its own amusement.  Other monsters abound in SCP containment breach, such as the plague doctor, a creature that can pass through walls, or even a simple painting which compels you to slit your wrist and finish it in your own blood.  These are nightmares that cannot be reasoned with, figured out, or in many cases, even fought.  They are contained because of the danger involved.  These horrors would make you cringe and feel weak even if the game gifted you with a gun, which it does not, and in many ways are one exception to my rule of not letting the player fight.  When you are facing human monsters, or human-esque monsters who kill you with physical force, that's one thing.  But when you are facing a creature that kills you by infecting you with a disease, forcing you to slit your wrist, or simply hiding in your peripheral vision...what can you do?  How do you fight something that kills you by simply being?

Blink or take your eyes off the statue and you die.  It will move so long as you're not looking in its direction.  How do you fight something like that?  More to the point...what the hell is this thing?!

 

Did I forget to mention...in SCP: Containment Breach, the doll from hell isn't the only monster out there.  We have many, MANY more...

           And of course, many games try to disempower using tried and true horror cliches, such as the jump scare, the sound of people dying within your ear shot to make you feel that you're responsible or too late or what have you.  They can use gross out moments, such as filling a room with roaches or they can use gore, such as bodily dismemberment.  However, the instant you take away control from the player, I personally believe that it stops being a disempowerment game.  It stops being that horrific experience of facing demons and trying to come out unharmed, both as the character and as the gamer.  So, many times I feel these techniques are wasted.

Fear is demoralizing and disempowering...and body horror is a great way of inducing fear and making the player feel weak and scared.

            So, now that we've looked at different ways to disempower, how can we take it that one step further?  How can we improve on the subject?  Well, there are a number of ways. 

            SCP: Containment Breach, I believe has great potential because it does one thing that most horror games don't.  It adds an element of randomness.  You see, the death of horror and disempowerment is rote memorization.  The longer a player experiences a game, the better equipped they are to deal with it later.  The game stops being disempowering because you now have the power of pre-cognition.  You know what's coming and are therefore able to handle it, even if the character in game cannot fight.  When I played Dark Souls 2, I beat the game 3 times before starting a new game+.  When I got to one section of the new game, a GIANT MONSTER climbed out of the ground and began to attack me.  I was shocked and a little scared.  I felt helpless, as I wasn't expecting it.  It wasn't supposed to appear.  And it does disappear quickly enough, but the shock and surprise, not unlike a jump scare, got me.  That element of newness, of the unexpected, actually got me.  SCP: Containment Breach does this quite well.  It has randomly generated maps so that players dealing with the monsters within have the potential to find new monsters in places they thought were safe.  The game always starts and ends the same, however where it proceeds from there is different each time, and that keeps people on their toes.

Seeing something new, horrific, and scary will demoralize and disempower the first time you see it...but once the newness wears off, so too does the fear.  You have to keep things fresh...keep people on their toes...to keep them disempowered on a regular basis.

            Sadly, however, even random elements can be predicted to an extent.  No matter how random the layouts, play SCP: Containment Breach enough times and you'll eventually get used to the monsters and they'll stop scaring you and making you feel weak.  A more lasting way to get into people's heads, in my opinion, is to make their fear personal.  Now, this is limited by the hardware.  You can't have a game slamming doors or rattling walls in real life.  However, there are ways to make it feel personal nonetheless.  Silent Hill 4, for example, takes place in a person's 1 bedroom apartment.  Slowly, the apartment becomes more corrupted and your haven becomes your prison.  Since I live in a 1 bedroom apartment myself, this really freaked me out.  Likewise, in Gone Home, the idea of your family home being exactly as it should be, but without your family and with a painful story to tell can be unsettling.  A home matching yours covered in Slender man scribblings can be downright terrifying.  These personal touches can make games far scarier, because you never get used to them, at least while you're in the place that it makes homage to.  So, one way to create lasting fear in spite of being able to predict or get used to the disempowerment is to make it personal.  This is naturally quite hard, due to everyone being different, however I believe some things are universal.  If you can tap into that, then you can make something truly horrifying.

My apartment looks similar to this in terms of layout...but not nearly as much blood or rust.  Seeing this in a game...seeing my home become a nightmarish prison...it really got to me.  THANKS, SILENT HILL 4!!!

            Also, I believe that the key to disempowerment is tricking the player into feeling weak, when in fact they can do whatever they want.  Once again, Silent Hill does this very well by giving you the ability to fight, but by making you feel as if your fighting is futile.  A way to improve this is to have tighter controls.  Silent Hill usually has very clunky controls, even with the more combat focused games like Homecoming.  If the gameplay allows the player to do anything, but still makes them feel weak...then you've successfully disempowered them in the best way possible.

The trick to making a game truly disempowering is to give players perfect control...and still make them feel helpless.  If you can do fight or trick enemies but still feel weak and helpless...then you've got a good horror/disempowering title on your hands.

            A key way to get around the problem I talked about with games like Outlast or Slender is actually to make death and rebirth an integral part of the game.  Imagine the horror you might experience of finding your zombified/petrified/mutilated corpse on a subsequent playthrough?  ZombiU does this, by allowing you to spawn a new avatar with each death and forcing you to reclaim your supplies by killing your zombified former self.  Unfortunately, where ZombiU stumbles is in the storytelling, as the new character is different, thus the horror is diminished, since death no longer becomes that big a deal.  After all, if all that you can be threatened with is death, then why be afraid?  Death is merely an inconvenience.  Neverending Nightmares and Gyossait found a brilliant way around this, in my opinion, each approaching the problem in a different way.  Neverending Nightmares is a game about dealing with horror, monsters, and tragedy, but also puts instakill enemies and traps in the game.  However, when you die, you wake up in bed, panting and covered in sweat, as if it were a dream.  Even when you advance, it is always like waking up, only to be still trapped in the nightmare.  The beds act as checkpoints and each death only leads into another nightmare.  Conversely, Gyossait states after your first death that you are here to be tormented and that you will be reborn time and again only to suffer.  What's more, I believe your corpses linger in these games, even with the new lives.  How horrific is that?

Death is not the end.  It only leads to more nightmares.

 

You live to feel pain.  And each time you die, you will be born again, just so I can watch you suffer...

            Along that same line of thought, I'd say that all games, even Outlast, Slender, and Amnesia should feature the ability to attack monsters.  Now, don't misunderstand me.  Just because you can attack a monster, I don't think you should be able to beat it.  Give them infinite HP, while still making the weapon sound like it touched them.  Players may die a few times while trying to fight off their foes, but it will just add to their sense of helplessness and sooner or later, they will try to run, realizing their own weakness.  This is something that will disempower greatly.

Could you or I really beat a monster like this?  Maybe not, but we don't know until we try...and if you let us try and fail, imagine the horror and weakness we'd feel the next time...

            Finally, the most effective way of disempowering a player is selective loneliness.  Removing any figures of compassion or understanding.  Putting them in a world that hates them.  This is hard to do, even with the best of games because they typically need at least one or two figures who will give the player hope or push them forward to try and survive.  This is where "selective" comes into play.  You should not have anyone to give support to the player while they are actually playing.  Have enemies and monsters as even with a great atmosphere, if you feel truly alone, then you have nothing that can hurt you.  Even Amnesia had to throw a monster at you after an hour or two of atmospheric teasing, lest the player start to lose their fear.  With no one to rely on, despair can set in, as human beings are social creatures.  With no one to fight for or to help you, you may begin to lose hope, no matter how capable you are, pushing forward only because you fear death or want out of your nightmare.  This is where true disempowerment lies.  Neverending Nightmares sets this up with a brilliantly dark opening, featuring a young woman being stabbed, apparently by the player, right before we wake up and meet the same young woman, our younger sister, who is nice to us and tries to guide us forward.  Once she vanishes, our apprehension and fear return...more so than before, because we fear we will hurt this person...we fear we will be alone.  We despair of saving  or being saved.  We feel weak.

In Neverending Nightmares, you are alone...that which is here, hates you.  That which you love is gone.  God...why have you forsaken me?

            When it comes to gaming, I'm not sure if we can ever fully simulate the feeling the Extra Credits crew was talking about.  Cthulhu, to them, was not an entity, but a concept.  It was an idea, or a presence.  The very existence of it breaks our understanding of reality, of our importance in the world.  The only reason we live in a world with Cthulhu is because we are so small that he does not care about us.  We could be stepped on or spared, and the elder god would not care.  In this aspect, one of the few things we can hope to do is survive the nightmare...to hide and if we're lucky, avoid the foot of god.  This presence, this feeling that we are always and forever weaker than we think, the idea that the universe is so infinitely large and that we are so pathetically small, could make for an interesting corner stone of disempowerment in video games.  It just hasn't been tried that much.  Games like Silent Hill or Lone Survivor do it on a small scale, where the presence of the world around you exacts a pull on your psyche, however on a truly cosmic scale?  Nothing quite that ambitious has been done. 

To truly know how small we are on a grand a scale as this is hard.  To truly feel like an ant under the boot of an eldritch god, who cares nothing for our existence, for good or ill...that kind of horror is still waiting for us to discover in gaming.

            I believe that as horror evolves, it may be tried, as disempowerment is a part of our development.  We have to feel weak sometimes to understand the value of strength.  We need to be tested with helplessness in order to temper our resolve and not lose hope.  Or perhaps we just like being scared and the adrenaline high does it for us.  Who knows?

            I am not a horror gamer by trade.  I have Silent Hill 2-4, Homecoming, and Clock Tower 3.  I generally DO NOT LIKE playing horror games.  That being said, it doesn't mean I'm not fascinated by the stories they tell or by the odd approach they have to game design.  Making someone feel weak runs contrary to basic game design.  And yet, it can still be compelling for the reasons I stated above.  So, I have gained a growing interest in horror games.

Perhaps I too gaze into the abyss in fear, in hope, or to test and see...if something is going to gaze back at me.

            I hope you have enjoyed this exploration of disempowerment fantasy and ways that it might be improved through game design in the future.  Check out some of the horror titles I've mentioned for a terrifying good time and come back in two weeks for when we discuss the exact opposite.  We're going to talk about how to make you feel like a bad ass.