If you were a child in the 1990s you already know all about this. Me, I’m catching up with a whole branch of hauntology that has passed me by – too old or young or something.
The fable goes like this:
- There is an old man or woman who is getting rid of junk. Or a shop closing down. Very Twilight Zone episode set up.
- The protagonist finds a game cartridge, which is in some way a prototype or worn in a unique way. The title is written on the case by hand. Nevertheless the game itself is rare and precious. What a bargain!
- For some reason the Nintendo 64 seems to be the focus of these stories, this must be a folk tale of a certain time period in the USA.
- The protagonist plays the game. They have played it before, and notice that there are odd changes to the game play. The game is incomplete or it is hacked. There’s a lot of glitching and impossible physics.
- As they play, there is an increasingly sinister retelling of the game narrative. The story becomes increasingly menacing and directed at the player in the moment.
Around this point the story usually goes into a bad version of The Ring and ghosts jump out of the console ruining the suspense. The best known variant of this called Ben Drowned is a classic example – starts weird and wonderful, descends into shit rapidly. It’s hard to write good fiction (particularly when your target audience is 4chan).
I’m really interested in the point where the player has played the game before and notices things that are just different. The forbidden book story (for example in The Picture of Dorian Grey) involves hidden contents which must remain unknown. The forbidden video story, likewise you are not to see the contents, that is a transgression. I like the ghost cartridge better because the player is already familiar with the world and surprised by changes to the constructed reality.
These ghosts are ‘real’.
At least two processes are at work in a game, the models and the animation. When they fall out of line there’s a sharp shock – the character should be animated by its internal components, ‘mind’ being an activity of the brain and all that – instead it is torn about by the unseen. And the unseen is both in control and out of control. It can change the game world in any way, but each change tears the game reality apart.
I wish football was really like this
Koji Morimoto’s short film Beyond makes a good stab at this kind of world twisting, succeeding in being one of the few parts of The Matrix projects which had a personality and human interest. But it’s too polite – the distortions that happen in games are uncanny and threatening while hilarious.
And film isn’t yet a medium where you’d be able to watch it again and see the plot bend into an altered state. Game media is the only form that can do this (include interactive fiction in ‘game’) and that could be the saving virtue of it.
There is such joyous potential in this kind of storytelling. Casablanca with a glitch where the actors fall out of sync, walking through invisible doors from the last scene and announcing their lines to an empty corner. I’d like to see that more than Casablanca as it is. You could do it by painstakingly masking each onto their own layer and then time stretching them. It would be great… but still a game engine is going to be a better option soon enough. Rip the plot into fragments, drag the actors through solid walls – you’re testing the limits of reality the way that Vertov did back with Man With A Movie Camera.
I almost admire World Of Warcraft for the first time ever, now that I learn of uncanny goings on that are partly pranks by the programmers (the mysterious “Goldshire Children”) and places that the programmers have abandoned, and remain hidden in the world, useless and foreboding until somebody breaks in via an impossible act.
From these falsehoods, real ghosts shall arise!