I’m in something alright I know
I got to live it out, uh oh
– New Town Velocity, Johnny Marr
One of the most modern digital emotions, I think, is despair. If you’re in tune with the internet enough, I think it’s an almost constant hum in the background, some kind of anxiety mole, tunneling into your space. It should be said that it’s worth doing one’s best to live outside of the internet, to avoid these encroaching feelings of despair. But despair is a fairly novel emotion for a video game to evoke. In order to evoke despair – a feeling of general hopelessness, combined with sadness for something – we generally need to have a sense of powerlessness.
I have recently been playing Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, which is, by and large, not meant to evoke despair. The narrative beats, are fairly serious in the bounds of a superhero narrative, are meant to show the limits of power, and the effect that power has on those that wield it. Narratively, I am disempowered. Yet the gameplay acts as a power fantasy, despite the narrative’s proposition that too much power is assuredly a bad thing. Yes, one fights alongside other vigilantes and must rely on those without powers too in order to achieve victory – but you’re also still inherently superpowered, inherently other. For the most part, I find pure power fantasies to be dull these days, and also unable to dispel malaise. Perhaps it is a general fatigue from the open world genre, but a relief to despair is not attained merely by clearing markers off of a map. The days when Assassin’s Creed 2 and feather collecting could hold my attention have since passed.
Negative emotions in games are a very tricky concept to pull off, at least deliberately, with control. By this I mean narratively-generated despair, rather than despair that is generated through frustration. There are certainly enough of those kinds of games, which get your adrenalin pumping only to kill you a few moments away from beating a difficult section, and forcing you to start again. This is like throwing your adrenalin against a brick wall over and over again – it doesn’t feel healthy for your brain sometimes. I know I’ve had feelings of despair over difficult sections – will I ever beat this? – Crash Bandicoot springs to mind. Getting the gold time trial relic in the penultimate level, The Lab, is a thoroughly miserable experience. I remember in my last ten or so attempts wondering whether I would ever be able to get the gold. It was making me feel this weird kind of despair – but it was in no way enjoyable or cathartic.
Cathartic despair, as weird as that might sound, comes from games that intend to evoke those emotions. I argue that cathartic despair, at least in relation to myself and my own experience, is more helpful than power fantasy escapism – at least as presented in triple-A video games. It’s probably no surprise that I have found myself less and less invested in the big budget titles as the years have rolled on. It’s funny to think that maybe it’s because they don’t invest enough in properly negative emotions, that they don’t feel human enough. The teams making them probably feel enough despair making these colossal games, these thankless behemoths, that they can’t put any of it in their games.
Narrative despair comes most easily from horror games, obviously. Games are cultural touchstones that allow us to index and understand modern events and modern emotions – they are, just like novels, an art form that speaks to the moment. I am not opposed to games that are relentlessly upbeat – in fact, sometimes that can be very enjoyable. But perhaps Spider-Man just happened to find me at the wrong time. I am the kind of person who interfaces analytically with a work if it does not engage me emotionally – and if it engages me emotionally, I’m even more invested in analyzing it. The games that evoke genuine despair are therefore fascinating to me.
Some of my earliest memories of despair in horror games would probably come from environmental or sound cues, particularly as cued by Akira Yamaoka in, of course, Silent Hill 2. When the player learns the truth of James’ suffering, Yamaoka’s song “Black Fairy” plays as the environment is revealed to be horribly decayed. The character’s mental state is reflected in the environment, but it extends to the music, which indexes despair in its repetitive, droning sounds. In that moment in my first playthrough, I remember feeling genuinely ill at the revelation. The way the game looked and sounded reflected my own mental state – I realized at that moment that I had been controlling someone whose actions I could understand, but never condone. It created a tangible feeling of despair knowing that I could never change that action. This is the feeling we get when examining moments of regret in our own past, and the sweeping traumatic tidal wave of news we can receive from the internet (and other media too, of course).
Trauma goes hand-in-hand with despair, of course, and Silent Hill used to be very good at tapping into that emotion under Team Silent (and, arguably, Shattered Memories did it well too). Sadly, the newest Silent Hill “game”, Silent Hill: Ascension, reduces the incredibly complex feelings of despair and trauma so prominent in the first four Silent Hill games to a rainbow sticker that reads “It’s Trauma!”. That in itself evokes despair, but for all the wrong reasons. It is more the kind of despair that someone could look at these historical touchstones, and come out with that. That the developers could look at these games which mean so much to so many people, games that people can genuinely interface with, games which are such powerful artistic and emotional experiences and reduce them to “trauma”! Not only is this cruel to anyone suffering from legitimate trauma, it erodes the memory of despair created by those earlier games.
Pathologic is another game that legitimized despair for me in video games. The death of a prominent character in the Bachelor’s route caused such despair in me that I tried to rewind time by reloading a save, just to see if I could change it. But it was fixed. I found this moment cathartic, because it allowed me to work through the idea that not everything can be changed – that I am not the sole arbiter of what happens and what doesn’t within a video game world. This is a far cry from the patient worlds of many RPGs, which wait for you at all times.
The dynamism of a tabletop RPG is very different – if a player at my table refuses a plot hook, that plot hook advances without them. The video games that do that have my respect, and a much deeper level of appreciation.
The Void is a game that has evoked the most consistent level of despair from me. It is a game that is both sublimely beautiful and awe-inspiring, and also crushingly difficult. But, unlike Crash Bandicoot, it was crushingly difficult in a way that reinforced the theme of the game. Everything in the world of The Void is slowly dying. It is a universe that is decaying, and that decays the longer you play it. The longer you play, the harder it gets. It is a fascinating experience. The worst part of my first playthrough was realizing that the initial goal the game sets you up to achieve is something of a red herring. I achieved that goal, but the game’s final goal was forever out of reach due to my single-minded pursuit of that goal. If I’d made smarter choices, I could have easily attained both – but I was foolish, and spent my time and resources elsewhere. That was perhaps the sweetest taste of despair in a video game I have ever felt. Because I was still playing toward my inevitable demise, and yes, the game is fabulously difficult, but it was ultimately my own fault that I failed. The game didn’t need to put some immutable narrative event in front of me to make me feel despair, nor did they just need to pump my adrenalin up and hold it static as it killed me over and over again. The game just needed to lure me into a trap, and the despair I felt was so real.
It made me rethink how I perceive video games, and their impact on me, a third time. Silent Hill made me conceive of despair that something that happens to me – a shocking twist, a kind of volta at the end of a game that transforms everything we have encountered before. Pathologic made me appreciate that video games can create despair that is so raw that it can change how we see the gameworld around us. I no longer felt as much empathy for the people of the town, and I felt oddly distant for the rest of that first playthrough – though that was the exact effect the game was trying to generate. As the Bachelor becomes more exhausted, so does the player.
But The Void generated such despair in me that I kept playing in spite of that despair. I knew that things were going to go bad. I knew that whatever happened, I wasn’t going to be able to crack the code. That I hadn’t played the game well enough. But in the face of that despair, I found a glimmer of something I hadn’t felt in a video game so solidly ever before – the knowledge that even if I lose, that even if everything dies – that I tried. In the face of despair, in facing down demons, in pushing into the darkness – I emerged with a greater knowledge of myself. Instead of just encouraging the player to burrow into pure escapism, into a game world that empowered the player at every turn, The Void created something far more profound. Yes, it creates an impressive world that is so immersive and alien it definitely can be construed as escapism – but the emotions it makes you feel can create intense feelings of catharsis as you overcome one obstacle and move onto the next.
The bad endings of certain horror texts create feelings of intense despair. To cite a popular example, I remember the first time I read Junji Ito’s Hanging Balloons story, or Uzumaki, that I was left with a similar feeling of despair settling in the pit of my stomach as Silent Hill 2‘s. Nun Massacre‘s standard ending evokes this same emotion. Horror is built around cycles, so much horror is repetitive. So much of the despair within the reality we live in is cyclical, too. Escape can be hard to see. But that’s why despair within a safe environment can be used to make yourself psychologically more resilient (provided you’re in a safe headspace when you’re reading it).
Fear & Hunger, a game I have finally started to play, has impressed me in a similar way. It is much like The Void, where failure is a given, but also a learning opportunity. Death is a failure state, to be sure – but also a way to bounce back next time, to learn from that mistake, to overcome it. Despair is a complex emotion, and definitely one that not everyone will want to interface with – but as I grow older, and hopefully more distant from consuming internet media as much as I once did, the feeling of despair that video games can generate can, in fact, power something far more rewarding. The feeling of despair present in Silent Hill 2 reinvigorated my desire, eventually, to replay it and to do the story justice. If it was not for that deep feeling of loss, that feeling of negative despair, I would not have felt so compelled to understand the game. Not everyone’s brain works like that – but I know that I like my victories to be earned. When I went back and beat The Void, the feeling of triumph was almost indescribable. If I ever manage to beat the brutal Fear & Hunger, I know I will probably feel the same way.
Here’s to (a healthy, manageable amount of simulated) despair. It’s a part of what keeps me interested in video games – and invested in life. We can push past it – if we also learn to manage it.
Horrorgameanalysis 