How One of P.T.’s Scariest Moments Shatters the “Magic Circle”

Credits to Nicole S, who’s post is briefly mentioned in this one. Minor spoilers for Batman: Arkham Asylum and Metal Gear Solid 2. Major spoilers for P.T..

P.T. was a short horror game released as a PlayStation 4 exclusive on August 12^th, 2014. I say was because P.T. cannot be downloaded anymore (at least through non-illegal means). This is because the game’s director (one of gaming’s most famous auteurs, Hideo Kojima), who initially published the game under a fake studio name, had a falling out with the title’s publisher, Konami.

Also, the entire game was a hidden teaser (Playable Teaser… P.T. get it?) for a new entry in what is likely gaming’s most critically successful horror franchise of all time, Silent Hill.

But why is this important – especially in the context of magic circles? For the uninitiated, “magic circles” are defined by psychologist David Myers as what can “distinguish between what lies on either side… the real and the make-believe, the necessary and the frivolous” (Myers 48). Essentially, they define the boundary between what we accept as part of a game and part of reality.

In terms of this, a raw analysis of the game’s mechanics won’t bring one very far. Looking at player action, one can’t really do much besides walking around and zooming in on things. The game environment is similarly limited, being largely confined to a single hallway that loops when one reaches the end. There is certainly meaning to be found here (Kotaku’s Patrick Klepek famously noted that: “The photorealistic quality of P.T.’s singular, tormented hallway lulls one into a familiar and emotionally disarming place. We’ve all been in a hallway like that”) (Klepek 2015), but I will leave insight on this to a more eagle-eyed games analyst.

P.T.’s gameplay, now, is a lot more complex, coming in the form of cryptic puzzles that unearth scares and eventually allows the player to leave the hallway.

The word “cryptic”, however, does not really do these puzzles justice, and here is where the magic circle trickery begins. See, about halfway through the game, the game crashes, or at least seems to crash. And to bring the effect one step further, the screen you see is randomized, so that no two players will see the same thing. One possible screen talks about a bug where the cause is unknown. Another assures the player that: “This game is purely fictitious. It cannot harm you in any way, shape, or form”. All are complete with harsh colors and different language translations.

Usually, bug reports are meant to explain away unnatural occurrences in a piece of software, but their presence here does the opposite, instead increasing the mystery surrounding this experience. It helps that they all deviate just enough from real-life error screens just enough to be deeply unsettling.

What I’m saying is: blue screens and crash reports exist outside of a video game’s magic circle, and this is made none the more evident when they happen in a moment of peak immersion, enjoyment, or time investment. The sight of them has long been associated with a return to the “real world” of finnicky hardware, of 1s and 0s and of machines made of silicon and sand and circuitry that can go haywire when some cosmic radiation blows the wrong way.

Kojima and his team, like us, know this. He also knows about prior efforts to break the fourth wall in this way (setting aside examples like Batman: Arkham Asylum’s fake crash, which was mentioned in an earlier blog post), as he himself did this in a prior game, Metal Gear Solid 2. The Batman example goes for realism, attempting to fully trick the player believing their game froze, while Metal Gear Solid 2 went for surrealism, making the game act like it was glitching in bizarre, campy ways. Though these moments also pull the player from the magic circle, P.T. usage of fourth-wall breaking material does so in an entirely different way.

See, I have played through P.T. many times, and watched others play it many more. Not one person has seen one of these screens and believed it was real for more than a second. No real error screen would look like this, after all! Nevertheless, I have also never seen someone not be creeped out by this moment.

Why is that? In my opinion, the answer lies in how this moment grabs the player and tosses them outside of the magic circle. This is most evident in the “This game is purely fictitious. It cannot harm you in any way, shape, or form” screen. The statement, just like the glitch screen itself, is non-sensical: the first sentence is derived from book disclaimers, and the second is often seen on dangerous things that have been contained (like on the side of a zoo enclosure for stinger-less stingrays). It also, of course, is true: P.T. is just a game, and disappointingly, only a piece of a larger one that will never exist. A game of this kind cannot hurt anyone.

However, this is the easiest way to make it seem like it can.

Look, I don’t believe in ghosts, at least not since I was a kid. I also have found the whole “monster coming out of the video game/computer” trope corny. But something about P.T., and this moment in particular, frightened me and many others to the core. Before all the game’s secrets were revealed – nobody knew what this extremely haunting experience (that, in all its unnerving dialogue, had a pension for referring to the player in second person!) was hiding. This fourth wall break didn’t trick me, or make me laugh at the game’s cleverness – it harkened back to an age where PC blue screens struck terror in my heart, and the family PC was a hulking machine that drove me under the covers with its sudden whirs and beeps in the middle of the night. It alienated me from a console and controller I knew like the back of my hand. And just for a second, an irrational, childlike voice from within me worried that a video game could break the laws of time and space, reach out from within the magic circle, and hurt me.

That’s pretty scary if you ask me.