Gameology: Commentary and Resources for the Game Studies Community

Abstract:

In video games, ghosts can refer to multiple instances: those within the game's machine, the software, those represented in the game narrative, and those that the ghosts represent. This presentation focuses on video games that represent the undocumentable past within game worlds through the act of haunting. Haunting occurs in all digital media through the act of telepresence with the predetermined possibilities set in place by the game designers, and then the traversal and exploration (and possible exploitation) of those possibilities by the player. More traditional notions of haunting occur in games with narrativized ghosts that exist within the game space. These ghosts are sometimes only shadows that cannot be accessed and serve to populate only the visual presentation of the game space. Other times these ghosts are enemies or friends that may affect gameplay.

In addition to more literal examples of haunting, many other games include characters that haunt the game space without ever actually existing in the games. These characters haunt the game world through their remains--their notes, photographs, and other personal affects--but they themselves are never in the game in any corporeal or ethereal manner. Many horror games create haunted spaces by depicting the remains of those who have passed through the game space, yet who are no longer there in any physical sense. The games do so by presenting the remains of the characters who have passed through--their clothing, living quarters, journals, and other personal items. My presentation will first trace the types of haunting in games to show how haunting exists and operates on multiple levels and to show how that haunting affects and alters gameplay in a process of othering the player to the game and the technology of the game space. I will then conclude by focusing specifically on the characters who were never programmed, never created in the games as images or figures, but who still haunt the game space and on their significance to their respective game worlds as othered creatures to the players and the game characters.

Text:

In video games, ghosts can refer to multiple instances: those within the game's machine, the software, those represented in the game narrative, and those that the ghosts represent. This presentation focuses on video games that represent the undocumentable past within game worlds through the act of haunting. Haunting occurs in all digital media through the act of telepresence with the predetermined possibilities set in place by the game designers, and then the traversal and exploration (and possible exploitation) of those possibilities by the player. More traditional notions of haunting occur in games with narrativized ghosts that exist within the game space. These ghosts are sometimes only shadows that cannot be accessed and serve to populate only the visual presentation of the game space. Other times these ghosts are enemies or friends that may affect gameplay.

In addition to more literal examples of haunting, many other games include characters that haunt the game space without ever actually existing in the games. These characters haunt the game world through their remains--their notes, photographs, and other personal affects--but they themselves are never in the game in any corporeal or ethereal manner. Many horror games create haunted spaces by depicting the remains of those who have passed through the game space, yet who are no longer there in any physical sense. The games do so by presenting the remains of the characters who have passed through--their clothing, living quarters, journals, and other personal items. My presentation first traces the types of haunting in games to show how haunting exists and operates on multiple levels and to show how that haunting affects and alters gameplay in a process of othering the player to the game and the technology of the game space.

Ghosts exist in the act of haunting. Haunting expresses a disjunction and a mediation—often between past and present, or between home and the unheimlich. Haunting is bound to the act of mediation and thus to technology. Jeffrey Scone notes the manner in which telegraph lines and radio were viewed as haunted media for their ability to create telepresent states (Haunted Media). Julian Wolfreys conceptualizes of haunting whereby haunting is a process by which disruptions are released into the domestic scene (5). In both cases, haunting operates as a process. As a process, John Lorenz demonstrates how haunting answers social and cultural needs by allowing for the ghosts of the past a form in the present: “Haunted – it is a word that speaks to Raymond Williams’s concept of the ‘residual,’ that which has been effectively formed in the past but is still active in the cultural process” (10). Haunting as a process of disruption allows the ghosts of the past to enter into the present. In doing so, creating “a space in which the past can persist in modified form” in order to confront new social issues” (The Gothic 29).

For digital media, haunting as a process can be most clearly seen through the reducibility of the body to a homogenous text that can be read by a machine. Indeed, digital media scholar Lev Manovich has argued that digital media is defined in part by the ability to be reduced to binary code (The Language of New Media). Reducing the body, or any text, to a machine readable code is an act that haunting seeks to disrupt because this rediction makes life monstrous in the reduction and separation of body and spirit. It is precisely the divide between body and spirit that digital media, and in particular video games, trouble.

Because the mere creation of a ghost figure can begin a process of haunting within the game text, an exploration of the different types of ghosts in games—both those that are troped figures and those that signal the larger process of haunting—is necessary. The ghosts that are represented in video games sometimes take the form of generic enemies that are called ghosts. These opponents—as can be seen in Clock Tower 3 and Echo Night—have a form and a function within the game world. They serve as opponents and do not disrupt the game system merely through their presence. Other games include ghosts that have a presence without a function or affordance within the game world. Titanic, System Shock 2, and Cold Fear all feature ghosts—their voices or images—without those ghosts having a use value within the game. In Cold Fear for instance, when lightning flashes outside of a window, the figure of a creature is illuminated. In the next instance, that creature vanishes completely. The creature-as-ghost in these instances has no use value within the game. The ghost exists, but does not act within the normal structure of the game where all items or objects have direct use values. Like the ghosts in Cold Fear, these ghost represent a small point of rupture because they exist in worlds of function and use, worlds where they represent neither.

While they present a point of rupture, it is often a rip that is immediately closed because the ghosts do not point to the larger process of haunting. For instance in Cold Fear, it is unclear whether the ghosts are the ghosts of dead shipmen, whether the ghosts are generic ghosts of those who have died at sea, or whether they are the ghosts of others. Because these ghosts do not reference another time, place, or person, the ghosts are presented in a localized manner that suggests that particular entities are tied to the game world as ghosts. These ghosts are in some way delimited through their definition as ghost of this particular world instead of as ghosts that exist outside of these worlds. These ghosts thus do not invoke the process of haunting.

However, other ghosts that are structurally the same in that they do not carry a use value and may appear in the same visual and auditory manner, may invoke the process of haunting. For instance, in Silent Hill 2, the main character James receives a letter from his dead wife asking him to return to the town Silent Hill. After he goes to Silent Hill, he finds a knife and it cannot be used to fight the monsters. Instead, the more James—or the player as James—looks at the knife and tries to use it determines James’ mindset. At the end of the game, James can take several paths, including one that looking at the knife leads him to, which is an ending where he kills himself. The knife, while it has no use value in terms of fighting within the game world, comes to symbolize James’ guilt over Mary’s death, and his personal haunting by her ghost.

Likewise, the ghosts in Titanic, for instance, are structurally equivalent to the ghosts in Silent Hill and Cold Fear in that they have no use value and in that they present a point of rupture in the game world. However, the ghosts in Titanic open this point of rupture into a recursive process in which the real past bears witness within the constructed game world because the ghosts in Titanic reference the ghosts of the dead on the real Titanic. In doing so, the ghosts continue to have no use value in the game, but they extend the game space from the immediate world of the game into the real world and the suffering of those who have died in the past of the real world.

Haunting in video games often occurs through game design that summons the past and the dead. The dead can be summoned through their personal belongings and the dead and the past can also be summoned through personal and cultural memories of the past as well as the architecture of the game world. Haunting from personal and cultural objects act through a process of displacement. This displacement occurs when the objects do not have a place within the typical game structure. For gaming, this means not having a direct use value, as with the case of representations of ghosts. The Fatal Frame games present the remnants of the dead which connect more directly to the ghosts of the dead in the game and to an often denied historical past. The first two Fatal Frame games both tell stories of the oppressed and their torture and sacrificial killing by the government. Further, both games focus on the sacrificial killing of women. While the games are not based on completely accurate historical information, they do draw on legal, cultural, and social historical realities. In examining the similar contextualization of the Gothic tradition, Brogan explains that “While contemporary African-American writers often invoke the Gothic tradition, they tend to filter its conventions through African folklore and spirit beliefs” (2). The Fatal Frame games also combine elements of Japanese history within the Gothic frame. In doing so, representations of the dead in the games directly connect to the dead of a specific national and cultural past.

The process of haunting through particular artifacts proves increasingly complex as additional information is involved and invoked throughout the Fatal Frame games. For example in Fatal FrameII: Crimson Butterfly, twin sisters stumble into a cursed village that has been trapped in the past. In the game, players find historical documents that explain that in this village the second born of any twin is considered the older twin. In Japan, villages could decide the birth order for twins until the Meiji period when Japan sought to modernize. In doing so, the Japanese government decreed that the firstborn twin would be eldest in all cases. For an incredibly complicated game world, this may seem like a minor note. However, the Fatal Frame games draw on Japanese history and culture to present their worlds and the Meiji period was a time of great change and great conflict. It was also during the Meiji period when women’s rights were reduced, another change in an attempt at western-style modernization. Players learn of the birth order rules in this village through the collection of multiple notes and journals, including journals from a folklorist, Seijiro Makabe. These journals and notes sometimes provide clues for how to best navigate the game world; likewise, the ghosts in the games sometimes function as enemies that can be fought, meaning that these objects sometimes have use value. On the whole, though, the notes and journals serve no other purpose than to bring the dead into the present of the game world. Because the journals, notes, photographs, and films are strewn throughout the game world, players inevitably find some of these items. The items represent the dead and bring the dead to weigh upon the present. In doing so, the objects act as conjures for the dead that begin and continue the process of haunting. As a process of haunting, the games do not simply invoke the dead of the games, but also the dead of Japanese history.

Many video games were and are developed in Japan and then exported across the globe. Video games, already tied to their own technology, are further tied to the rise of the internet and to globalization. Brogan argues that, “Stories of cultural haunting attempt to remap an often fragmented and inevitably changed memory to its new coordinates by conjuring ghosts who pass from the past into the present, from the old territory into the new” (130). In connection with video games, those changed coordinates are global coordinates in a changed world. Those coordinates are also in relation to a changed location of memory with digital archives and a in changed relation to technology in everyday life.

While haunting is an uncanny return of the past, the dead, or memory within a displacement of the present, it provides a needed passage by which the past and the repressed can enter. This need is exacerbated when the past or memory has been intentionally repressed or removed because: “Like the partially obliterated records that appear in contemporary haunted literature—the family papers mildewed and faded, stories left without endings or explanations, crucial words that resist translation—the ghost's elusiveness conveys a past not easily accessible” (Brogan 29). Like other textual forms, video games also offer texts that can be haunted by the ghosts of the past, and of the ghosts of the present who have lost the channels by which to speak.

Perhaps more important than even the significant memories and histories that haunt specific games are the manner in which they point to all games as mediated and as haunted. As texts, games are haunted by their creators and by that which they represent. As technological artifacts, they are haunted or haunt their technological forms while also being haunted in the act of play and the memory of play, and by the characters and worlds they represent. Addressing haunting in games serves to articulate a manner of game construction and game play as well as to remember—and in some ways—to eulogize the dead in games and the past represented in games.

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