This post is at least partially in conversation with the post Preconceptions and Their Effect on Gameplay by fredrechid00 last week. Spoilers for the first hour or two of gameplay.
On Thursday of last week, I started playing Soma. It must have been about 10 or 11 pm, I was alone in my dorm room with the door closed and it was obviously quite dark out. I have a large screen monitor that I play games on, and I was of course wearing my nice over-ear headphones.
I made it through the opening area, sat down for my brain scan, and then I was suitably concerned by the strange location where Simon wakes up. Wandering my way around the first part of Upsilon, I eventually reached an area with a door whose seal I could choose to open. As I approached the door, there was a very loud crash (there had been several in the past few minutes that were already creeping me out). The lights cut out, leaving only some dim red lights around the room that made it very hard to see. A tooltip appeared at the top of the screen reading “Moving while crouching is less noisy and reduces the chances of being noticed”.
RabidRetrospectGames on YouTube.
At this point, alone in my dark room, almost fully isolated from the real world, barely 20 minutes into the game, I quit out of the game. I’ll admit that I don’t play a lot of horror games, and I had unintentionally set up my playing environment to maximize my own immersion. Even though nothing “had happened” in the game, my immersion in the game world, combined with a tooltip that suggested something bad was about to happen was enough to overwhelm me.
Later on, I re-opened the game and continued through that door, where I found absolutely nothing of any interest except a couple more loud crashes. Perhaps the game had been over-eager in giving me that suggestion to crouch, or I unknowingly avoided all of the danger. Either way, Soma had cemented itself in my head as absolutely terrifying — if it was that bad before anything scary actually happened, imagine how much worse it would be when something did!
A couple of days later, I hadn’t progressed much farther and I made plans to have a Soma play session with several friends at their apartment. After futzing around with game downloads and wireless controllers, we decided to just watch the YouTube playthrough instead of playing the game ourselves. Although it removed our agency a little bit, I think the experiences are similar enough that I can continue to compare them.
Watching the video, we soon reached the same point in the game. We still don’t really know what’s going on, the lights are even off in the apartment, and we see the tooltip appear at the top of the screen. If you haven’t watched the playthrough, I recommend just watching this clip, which should automatically start around around 21:45
Clearly, the player of this walkthrough was unfazed by the tooltip that appears at the top of the screen. They just crouch-walk up to the door, unlock and open it. Immediately behind the door was one of the patrolling robotic monsters which jumps forward and knocks Simon out. This was undeniably a far scarier experience to have while playing (or perhaps even if I was watching alone in my room), but my emotions and my friends’ emotions were the opposite of what I felt after my much tamer experience in this room.
Rather than screaming in fright, or pausing to turn the lights on for a bit, we all just started laughing. Something about the atmosphere in which we were watching the game or the power of being in a group removed almost all the terror from the scene.
I’ve found myself fascinated by the polar differences I found in the experience of playing Soma on my own compared to watching the game together with friends. In a horror game like this that relies so much on emotional manipulation of the player (or spectator), it feels almost disappointing that is is possible for the experience to fail so totally as it did for us, and definitely through no fault of the developers. I know it is an impossible question to ask about developer intentions, but I’m pretty certain here that my initial experience was far closer to what the scene here was designed for than what we encountered as a group. Should the game come packaged with instructions on how to play it for the optimal experience?
If so, how does that interact with accessibility features that the game might include, like hints or a safe mode? This question opens up a massive can of worms, but I think some initial thoughts might focus on Gone Home, which offers some accessibility features like a “Lights On” mode, but warns the player that these settings might affect the way the game was intended to be experienced. Across to a different genre, Celeste‘s Assist Mode provides a huge number of options to make the game easier or more forgiving, allowing many more players to play through the game. But a lot of people don’t approve of Assist Mode, insisting that making the game easier ruins the experience. They aren’t totally wrong here — an easier version of Celeste would not have been anywhere near as compelling for me as it was, but they certainly aren’t correct in the sense that we should remove Assist Mode and bar some players from experiencing the game at all.
I’ve digressed a little bit from my initial point (because I love Celeste very very much) but I’m definitely interested in this question of being able to “play a game as intended.”
The problem of accessibility is quite interesting, since it is something rarely demanded of in other mediums. For example, people don’t really ask for an “easier version” of say Infinite Jest, but since videogames is more flexible and easier to mould with constant patches, new features, and updates, it became a realistic demand. Overall, I think diversity of gameplay is a good thing and it’s really a blessing that the videogame form can actively support it by creating multiple modes. It is also perfectly right for the designers to communicate to the player the experience they want to deliver since the player doesn’t always know what he/she wants either.
The idea that the comment before mine brought up about how the audience doesn’t ask for an easier to get through version of a book really makes me want to side with the imaginative developer insistent on having the game played as intended, re: the developer’s version of intention. I know that if we tried to “mod” a novel to make it more accessible, the kinds of complaints that would follow are along the lines of ruining the author’s intention, even the story. I can imagine a bigger following for this side of the argument than the one siding for more accessible novels. Yet, we see this dynamic shift in relation to games where there seems to be less concern for the creator’s intention and maintaining that work. When it’s about a novel, there is very little concern for the reader. Yet, with games, the player seems to be one of the most significant aspects.