Assignment: Ada

I tried to play Lurking Horror, a survival-horror text adventure suggested by Laura. I don’t know how big the scope of the game is, but I can’t imagine I went past the first 5-10% -- but that doesn’t mean I didn’t spend 2 hours desperately typing in ineffective commands. This is a language I have not yet learned, and the only scary thing was how awful I was at the game. So, jonesing for something easy and familiar, I returned to RE4. This language is familiar, this narrative has been embedded and expanded for ten years in my imagination, and these algorithms are internalized.

The main story has ceased to interest me, so I decided to try my hand at the bonus “Assignment: Ada,” unlocked when you beat the game. This mini-game starts with presupposition of having just played the original narrative of Leon and Ashley, because you have to beat the narrative to unlock the extra mission. This asks an interesting quesiton about narrative: I skip most of the cut scenes, (almost all of them), but I can still, through the background environment, required tasks and goals, and evolution of gameplay mechanics, formulate an unavoidably parallel story. The narrative is embedded within the game’s mechanics and environment so that the storied dialogue is unneccesary. With this in mind, I aim to look at Assignment: Ada’s narrative, its embedded story from ‘holistic textual readings’ of the mechanics of gameplay and the designed environment.

The assumed familiarity of the player allows for a complete lack of storytelling or extended introductory cut scenes. Ada is inserted into a pre-existing narrative simply from a different perspective, a postmodern but unrevolutionary twist. What does Ada’s perspective really have to offer me? I am excited to play as a female character (who is not the ill-equipped, passive Ashley), and it feels instantly different. I am attracted to the way her body moves, her hips move. The story is already different from the minor changes of the avatar’s motion. Her special kicks, climbing walls, and shooting weapons vary from Leon’s in ‘non-diegetic’ ways that create the embedded diegesis. I have an objective instantly, displayed in white text on the screen, in a straightforward, undisguised by in-game story lines assigned mission. I am on a mission to retrieve 5 samples of the La Plaga virus, the infection that creates the mutant-zombies I fight. I see zombies! When I die, the bloody text reads “Mission Failed,” instead of the more gruesome “You Are Dead” given to Leon. I snipe some, I explore, and I cautiously proceed.

When I start to battle the zombies, I shoot their knees to use my character’s hand-to-hand combat techniques in order to conserve my bullets. My favorite character move of Leon’s is to "Suplex", grabbing a zombie on his knees in a bear hug and doing a backflip, crashing the zombies head against the ground. It’s gruesome, it’s effective, and it’s ridiculously dramatic compared to other attacks. My preference for this move leads me to discover Ada’s “Backward Kick,” which is disappointing at most. It is amazing what these games teach me to do, what I internalize from the completion of the game. I am luring zombies to the ditch, to shoot them off balance to conserve ammo, I am Backward Kicking and Suplexing, strafing and crouching, using shotguns and hand grenades. I will never translate my enthusiasm for this game to enthusiasm for real combat, but I do believe that if I were placed in a similar situation to the ones I have simulated, I would perform with more confidence and perhaps skill than if I had not spend 40+ hours beating RE4 a few times. When I internalize the algorithms of RE4: the particular motion of my characters, the attack strategies, the quick-thinking button mashing cut scenes, am I just internalizeing the way I press the buttons? I don’t think of pressing X, I think “Suplex.” So, when I internalize the game’s mechanical conventions, what kind of internalization of the painted façade of the algorithm occurs in my metaphorical imagination?