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Psychoanalyzing Resident Evil and Silent Hill
The Game Career Guide site has up a piece doing a psychological examination of horror games. The uber-successful series Resident Evil and Silent Hill go under the microscope, giving readers a look at the psychological archetypes the games elicit, while also discussing the titles from a gameplay standpoint. It is the author's contention that the RE series is the 'standard' for the genre, while Silent Hill games shake up the gamer's viewpoint with 'avant-garde' elements. An interesting, and thoroughly academic look, at the modern face of gaming horror.
I like the concept of the article but when I get to the first picture and see
A, Resident evil 4 (an action game more than survival horror)
B, A complete and utterly incorrect comment
I have to wonder if I want to read an "indepth" article by these people. I mean how difficult is it to get that Resident evil 4 has ZERO Zombies? There are NO Zombies in RE4.
If you're going to do an indepth article at least make a note that the living dead tend to be... well dead.
I like muppets.
In psychology, everything is either about sex, or your mother, but usually both at the same time...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
To try to shoehorn RE4 to line up some of the symbology to Silent Hill..
RE4 wasn't really the same sort of game as previous RE games, not really scary at all, just an action game for the most part. That said, RE has never struck me as being a particularly deep game series, for the most part simple resource scarcity and 'boo!' moments for relatively cheap suspense/horror. Extensive psychoanalysis of that series, particularly trying to pull in desire for a womb/sexual desire, comes off as a huge piece of bullshit to me.
Silent Hill's creators obviously very much buy into and intentionally incorporate every psychoanalysts dream smorgasbord of refrences/meaning. It ultimately makes it easy for psychoanalysts to roll through and point out the obvious things put in by the creators. Problem, for me at least, was the whole womb/room/umbilical cord thing just didn't strike me really. In fact, it kinda softened the impact of the whole thing because even as they tried to integrate it, it just seemed out-of-place, and not out of place in an eerie way, just in an almost funny 'reducing suspension of disbelief' sort of way. It was just so painfully obvious a psychological theory planted into the game that I've never took stock in. The fact that I didn't buy into it reinforces to me the decreased merit of 'everyone wants to be back in the womb' theories that pervade psychology. However, to me, Silent Hill *does* make good use of some deeper psychology to evoke deeper suspense and fear that is more persistant than anything in the Resident Evil series, so net Silent Hill's strategy of using more complex psychology works for them. To this end I was able to look past the parts that bugged me and enjoyed the overall game.
When I observe psychological archetypes that I do not believe have real meaning in a game, for me that's generally the point where I'm convinced (it fits so well, leaves my suspension of belief intact, and I can identify with the situation), or proves to myself that I'm not just being skeptical. Maybe it varies from person to person, but it seems most psychoanalysis is no where near as universal as the writers would have you believe.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Silent Hill is about subtle horror and intelligent, deep plot development. Silent Hill doesn't have monsters, the monsters in Silent Hill are the characters.
- OF-THAT-WINDOW shock effects designed for 15 year olds.
Resident Evil is a stupid action game with cheap OH-I-NEVER-EXPECTED-DOGS-WOULD-SUDDENLY-BURST-OUT
I'm not going to read this article because even somebody that actually likes RE will agree that RE and SH are completely different games.
I have recently played through both RE4 and SH2 so the experience is fresh. I can see how the points the authors made in this peice highlight each games style. Not just in horror gaming but in how a good horror story is told. I never really thought of it the way they analyze it. I'm currently in school for game development and I enjoyed reading the psychoanalytic view of both these series. RE being the game style of save the world and put things in order vs. SH where everything that happens has us question our own avatars sanity (and perhaps our own). Horror game development is something I thought I might work on some day. This really opened my eyes and I'm glad I read it. Perhaps it will inspire me when I make my own horror game some day :)
I got about two paragraphs into the article, then decided it was computer-generated essay designed to see how many people would actually think it meant something.
Wow. I've played and beaten RE4 six times and never once stopped to think about the deep, psychological mechanisms that went into its creation. ...
Yeah, I think everything this article just said is either reading WAY too much into it, or just bull s***.
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I'm just a doomed red shirt
Now I will get chills every time I have received a Word document as an email attachment or any time a potential employer requests my resume in Word format. Wow, this Lacan guy is spot-on.
Why bother.
Yes, I just noticed where I forgot to change from past to future tense and I am smacking my forehead now. Thank you.
Why bother.
I think I know what inspired at least parts of Resident Evil 4:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089243/
http://www.i-mockery.com/minimocks/gymkata/
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...Some /. reader parser crashing, or what ?
Because yes, RTFM=big pain here, no doubt.
[Pruneau
the fact that this article is citing lacan for support makes me think that there has to be something more to it that a lot of you are not seeing.
how many of you watched Blue Velvet and saw anything worth paying close attention to?
slavoj zizek?
michel foucault?
i think the reason that you have a hard time picking anything worthwhile out of this article could be because you're not looking at it in the right way. when you're part of the gang of skin-heads beating up a jew, you don't see it as out of the ordinary (no hidden agenda to that statement, just the first example that came to mind)
...that it is riddled with stupid grammatical errors on top of the verbosity. Sentence fragments like "Order by any means necessary." and omissions like that in "Silent Hill significance stems from its avant-garde status:" (apostrophe-s, anyone?) make this painful to wade through, as if the blathering exercise in gratuitous vocabulary doesn't cause enough headaches.
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Thought I might post my thoughts on horror games.
i ef
.. well an adrenaline high, I raced through - terrified, loved it but didn't stop to breathe.
:/
For some reason, unknown to me I have nothing short of a fantastic suspension of disbelief.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_of_disbel
I don't know why, it could be my upbringing, I might have trouble telling from real and fantasy, I could have deep mental issues, who knows.
What I do know is that I totally and utterly am scared easily, be it movies / games etc, it's fantastic - because I can enjoy some games more but it's terrible because I can be frightened so much.
Here's some examples of games I have quit due to fear.
Aliens vs Predator 2 demo, quit on the second level, not seeing a single alien, scared the shit out of me.
System Shock 2, lasted 5 minutes into the demo, quit - terrifying
Ultima Underworld 1 (yes UW1) I quit when I reached level 5, the ghosts, paranormal stuff, demons and darkness - I high tailed it back to the dos prompt.
Space Hulk (again an old one) - not a chance in hell.
Doom 1, I finished it but I distinctly recall playing it on
Silent Hill 3, lasted about 10 minutes, iirc it was foggy - quit.
Call of Cthulu, made it to the town, got into some kind of store and stole a liquor bottle, couldn't escape before the guy caught me - fear was too intense anyhow and quit.
I couldn't watch Disney's the black hole because Maximillion scared the shit out of me
I watched the exorcist recently for the first time and made a conscious mental decision to simply switch my mind off - I "observed" without listening, otherwise I'd totally shit myself.
Devils advocate, didn't know what it was about, when the "evil wives" faces morphed demonically, well I finished the movie but it scared the shit out of me.
Funny enough though I also get embaressed when watching some movies, I put myself in the shoes of the actor / actors, I find some humour difficult to watch and awkward, Borat for example makes me cringe, I see the humour but I can't watch it, nor can I watch someone make a fool of themselves on youtube, I feel embaressed for them - I don't feel the disconnect from the situation that others do, so it makes things quite awkward.
So, to get back on topic, scary games can be an amazing experience, because well - I feel like I've experienced it somewhat, for real, myself - and I've survived, it's fantastic but such a burden too.
The more you know.
Secondly let me quote the article: We chose to work with Resident Evil and Silent Hill since they are the two most significant series in the survival horror genre. Only once we started filtering these games through our psychoanalytic lenses did we recognize that they are significant for entirely different reasons So initially they didn't have a clue about at least one of those two games. Also they conclude a lot of things by using The Room as an example - which shouldn't have been a Silent Hill game (don't get me wrong it is still a good game). SH4 is so different from the series and was only named Silent Hill because Konami was afraid it wouldn't sell. Then they just freely jump from SH3 to SH2 and SH4 in the rest of the article. I don't know how they want to make a coherent psychological analysis if they don't take the cruel drama of SH2 in account or the stressful gameplay of SH4.
Oh wait!
I do now! All they talk about is save points - geez, that article really seems deep but in fact it is not.
To the authors: Next time you plan to write an article, do it after having played the games. Then you might even find a interesting aspect to psychoanalyze.
Psychoanalysis is a method of therapy related to psychotherapy. This is basically just looking at video games and saying "Freud would probably have said X about ..."
Lacan was a student of Freud. IIRC my psych prof. dismissed Lacan because he doesn't like to provide integral scientific data to support his conclusions.
Anyways... yeah... pretty pointless.
Live according to the Categorical Imperative. If the Categorical Imperative tells you not to live by it... ignore it
...left me perplexed. SH2 and 3 are full of this kind of strange moments which I havent seen in any other game.
Are there any other games like this series?
Now, this might just be me here... ...but isn't this just a case of a writer trying to emphasize how smart he thinks he is?
I sincerely question that the creators of these games spent any significant amount of time reading freud or looking into the deeper meaning behind "icky umbilical cord-thing".
More likely, the process was something along the lines of "What creeps me out?"
I'd love to see a good analysis of horror games, and the minds of their creators, and the reason why things are scary or not, but this is not it.
I'd be very interested in learning why some people find the direct threat of shambling zombies scarier, whilst others find the altered reality theme of Silent Hill scarier.
Machine9dotNet
Please hire me.
Why bother.
Thank you to those who enjoyed the article, I enjoyed writing it (and researching it too, of course). Seeing a link to the article on Slash.dot was quite cool. I do not pretend to understand all the depths of psychology as a field--as a rhetorician, I borrow critical theories as way of seeing and explaining the ways humans interact with each other. At the time I co-wrote the article, I was particularly drawn to Lacan because of the way he defines humans as lacking something. Now I'm not so happy of thinking of human beings as operating from lack--or of difference as essentially a negative; I'm reading a lot of Levinas and Derrida and understanding that our difference, or lack in Lacanian sense, is a postive condition for existence--if we weren't missing something, something infinitely beyond our grasp, then, well, we would all be the same / static / nothing. To those who think we read too much into RE, of course we did! But we don't take our analysis as a revelation of the game maker's intentions--rather we are hoping to demonstrate that RE's narrative (and this could be said of all narratives) reflects some of our basic human problems, things we encounter in the day to day. And our point was that RE was simple-minded when compared to Silent Hill--in the same way that Freudian psychoanalysis is conservative in comparision with Lacanian psychoanalysis (from a postmodern persepctive). I wouldn't say Freud is simple--his writings were extremely progressive, and his development/popularization of the unconscious forever changed not only psychology, but also western metaphysics. To whose who can't stand the academic-ese, sorry. But I'm a professional academic, and that's time consuming. I enjoy playing games, and would like to see academia pay legitimate respect to video games. For that to happen, academics have to receive recognition for the work they do. And the only way we get that recognition is if we write in the social language of our field. When we began working on our first article, we wanted to explicitly argue that games were worthy of academic analysis. Instead, we simply treated video games as objects of analysis, and allowed the "should they" argument to remain implicit. Again, thank you to those who enjoyed the article. Apologies to those who didn't.
I would just like to say that, like my co-author and good friend mentioned, I, too, am very flattered that so many of you took the time to not only read this article but to also criticize or discounted it as "bull shit" :) I personally think that academia needs to write more "bull shit" about video games and their highly complex narratives. I would love to assign "chapters" in a video game to my students for their own analysis. In my opinion, Silent Hill 2 is as sophisticated as anything that ever came off the quill of Shakespeare.
I also believe that the designers of the Silent Hill series are very aware of psychoanalysis, and they definitely used what they know to add fascinating visual and psychological depth. To not stop a minute and appreciate this layering would be to trivialize the experience of playing these games. So many of us are drawn into dark, dark blood-soaked caverns of survival horror games, I think Stephen King in his article "Why We Crave Horror Movies" is correct. These games are a purging of the deeper demons within all of us. They illuminate the blackest corners of our own psyches. That, to me, seems worthy of as much "bull shit" as we can devote to it.
I put up a blog post on my new blogger site wading through some of the bullshit. For those who care. The site is supposed to be strictly for me to practice image manipulation, and now its soiled with psychoanalysis. Sigh. Won't anything maintain order for more than five days?
Sorry, that wasn't anything against you, i just hate people who post without reading the article