Curator's Note
In The Phantom Pain (2015), a radio flatly broadcasts a report about a murder. You might not even notice it at first, but if you choose to stop and listen to it, things turn more sinister. The signal breaks, and a voice barks threats and a numeric sequence before ominously uttering: “LOOK BEHIND YOU.”
This is a (chilling) easter egg, a nod to P.T. (2014), the now-inaccessible demo for the aborted Silent Hill chapter that Konami assigned to Kojima. Besides being a reminder for Kojima’s followers of a (possibly) great game that never was, LOOK BEHIND YOU is a mood-affecting, loaded expression in itself: a crucible of affective and cultural values across various media, and in real life. For example, Wes Craven famously played with it in Scream, as we all probably did at some point as movie spectators.
Now put this significance aside (that surely Kojima, notoroius film-buff, enjoyed), and consider how the crude LOOK BEHIND YOU-setup of an in-game threatening voice reaches us as players of two games (P.T. and TPP), that both pivot around the logics of survival via exploration and exploitation of the avatar’s surroundings – a trademark of Kojima as game developer and world-maker. The same input engenders quite different experiences.
In P.T., constructed in first-person perspective, complying with LOOK BEHIND YOU will make your avatar die a horrendous, supernatural death (and treat you to a perfectly timed jump-scare). The trick to survive is not turning around when told so. Reject the challenge, relinquish control over the game’s world: choose to be vulnerable.
In TPP, mostly built in third-person perspective, you can LOOK BEHIND YOU by turning the camera around your avatar. Not only this is a less embodied form of peeking, but also, and more crucially, it is a display of the essence of a succesful playing of TPP: to vigilantly exercise perceptual mastery over, and proactivity toward, the game’s world.
So, to deal with LOOK BEHIND YOU, Kojima gave us in these games two different possibilities in terms of camera movement: hence, two different experiences of space, and then two distinct ways to pursue survival.
I claim this suggests that his worldmaking is only accidentally about survival by the means of avoidance of ghosts or militias, as genre classifications would have it. Instead, the core of Kojima’s artistry lies in his awareness and playful toying with the workings of our perceptual access to (his) worlds: the challenges they pose us are about learning how to be in them, how to inhabit them.
Comments
Perceptual access in games
Hey Gianni, this is a super interesting analysis. Perceptual access in/to games is something I am going to try and pay greater attention to moving forward, as I am sure there are many interesting things occurring in a lot of the games I play that I just do not notice because I'm not trained to look. LOOK BEHIND YOU is a great link to demonstrate a real difference between games, so nice work on apprehending its significance.
I have been playing Red Dead Redemption 2 this summer, since I have some time, and the amount of modes of perspective that game offers, like everything else, is excessive: third-person, cinematic, second-person at times, and first-person. Overall I assume the game is generally a third-person game, yet there is so much that you are only likely to notice in any of the other perspectives, namely first-person, kinds of experiences that affirm that sense of inhabitance within the game. And sometimes it's just really jarring instead.
Do you have any suggested reading or viewing, relating to games or film, for me to look up? And just because this is so interesting, what game(s) deal with perspective in ways that most excite you?
You've sent me thinking (playing DOOM only in automap, Screencheat! and DUSTNET.) Thanks for the awesome and inspiring post, Gianni!
Survival and Genre
Gianni,
Great post! I am totally not biased for the P.T. content. It made me think that a recurring theme in Kojima's interpretation of survival gaming is based on his filmic interests. The Resident Evil franchise is laoded with filmic design and reference, but the survival gameplay is more focussed on micromanaging inventory screens and meticulously counting bullets. Kojima's survival elements feel more inspired by his love of film and tend to involve seeing or not being seen. What are your thoughts?
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