The game we played this week, Until Dawn, reminds me of a game from our first week’s class—Dys4ia. Similar to Until Dawn, Dys4ia gives players little agency and challenges our traditional definition of video games as an interactive medium. It even exercises it to a more extreme state by forcing video game players to enter the next stage no matter what action they take. We discussed in class how horror game genre plays with the notion of game’s interactivity, and what catches my attention here is that even though Dys4ia does not belong to horror game genre, it shares the same lack of interactivity with Until Dawn and some other horror games. Their similarity made me wonder why these designers intentionally choose to deprive players’ agency and take control over the game from the first place. In other words, are there any characteristics, across genres, that determine how much interactivity is involved in a video game?
Players are asked to only shoot at specific targets in Until Dawn
There is no way the block can pass and it is okay– the game will continue anyway
The first thing that came to mind is the intention of the video game. In both Dys4ia and Until Dawn, the main purpose is to tell a good story to the audience. In Until Dawn, though there are dozens of ways to get to the ending, the main storyline is clear— a group of high school friends gathered together in a mountain cabin to commemorate the missing of two characters and were stalked by mysterious wendigos. The interactivity of the game determines if and how many characters will be able to pull through and survive at the end, yet the main storyline is not greatly affected by the players’ choice along the way. In fact, this game actually restricts the scope of players’ agency to make sure the continuity of the storyline. For example, no matter whom Chris chooses to be cut in half, later players will see that it is a prank by Josh and the decision players made previously would not lead to any serious consequences involving real life-and-death situation. Dys4ia shares the same heavy emphasis on the story the designer wishes to tell: it even makes it to extremity by avoiding players’ reaction and goes directly to the next chapter to continue the story. There is no way for the players to fail or to change the plot whatsoever.
Another important shared characteristic between Dys4ia and Until Dawn is the purpose to use this lack of interactivity to generate specific feelings within the players. Just like what Tanine Allison pointed out in her essay Losing Control: Until Dawn as interactive movie, the lack of interactivity gives players no way to practice and improve, and this impossibility to dominate the avatar challenges the players and infuses them with the feeling of futility, confusion, insecurity, and fear (292). Essentially, interactivity gives players a sense of control by building up their familiarity with the game and thus allowing them to see how their actions will impact the outcome, while Until Dawn disrupts this process of accumulating familiarity and thus leaves players in the horror of uncertainty.
Dys4ia, though not aiming to horrify the players, does share the same intention to use this lack of interactivity to generate grievance caused by the loss of free will and oppression. As we can see from the prologue of the game, the game designer’s decision to take hormone replacement therapy was not a fully voluntary decision but a result of the society’s refusal to accept her gender identity and negation of her voice. By having players follow her step and listen to her story, Anthropy shows the trauma and hardship she had to experience and puts the players in this negative position with a lack of control over the situation, just like what she went through before. This lack of interactivity here puts the player in Anthropy’s position and evokes this specific feeling of bitterness and unfairness.
The ending of Dys4ia
Through this brief comparison between Dys4ia and Until Dawn, we came to see the use of interactivity as a carefully-made decision by the game designers to highlight the narrative of the game and generate certain emotions among video game players. This brief discussion raises more questions than the ones it answers. Specifically, does this emphasis on the storyline at the expense of interactivity in both games show the internal conflict between game’s narrative and mechanics that cannot be reconciled? Besides, can the emotion generated through this deprivation of player’s agency be seen as another form of interactivity in some sense?
This comparison is very interesting! The commonality that these two games share in terms of lacking agency to some extent makes me think about another possibility of interpreting dys4ria. This feature could actually let dys4ria become some kind of existential horror game, although it has only simple mechanics and graphics. It is about the experience of surviving the transgender process, and the different mechanics presented there represented different kinds of horror that you can’t dodge, or you have to fit (even if you don’t). This is very similar to the player’s mental process in playing horror games as well, in which you can’t quit and have to get through.
This post is very interesting! It’s interesting how both Until Dawn and Dys4ia use the lack of interactivity as a method to tell their stories and trigger players’ emotions. It is quite unexpected especially since the two games look so different visually, and probably a lot more money went into making Until Dawn than Dys4ia. This makes me think of another question–is the aesthetic style really an important aspect at all? Does the visual design & aesthetics contribute to generating players emotions? Especially with a lot of really moving text adventure games in mind, what’s the point and role of aesthetics in video games then?