Screens and Screams: Condemned 2 and Dead Space

My postmodern sensibilities take in a television screen represented on my television screen without a moment’s pause. Our contemporary depictions of realistic or fantasy worlds (in games, movies, or any fiction) is inundated with technology: screens, cameras, weapons, computers, phones. The use of in-screen screens in digital games asks questions about our survelliance culture and the existential crisis of digitally mediated lives. In horror games, screens serve to mediate the player’s relationship to danger and vulnerability by removing the three dimensional rendered space and replacing it with an effectively 2-d “break” from the game. These screens are experienced in many manifestations: inventory management abstractions of a backpack or briefcase, diegetic screens like computer monitors or television screens, or cut scenes.
As discussed in my previous posts, the ability of a game to really ‘horrify’ its players is closely tied to the continuinty or discontinuity of gameplay and how that serves to meet or defy gamic expectations. A “pause” moment, whether offered through an inventory screen, a save point, or an embedded ‘diegetic’ moment like the elevator rides of Dead Space, offers the player a moment to collect themselves and to place the scary experience in its unscary context: a watched and controlled screen.
In my short experieince with Condemned 2, my own television screen was prohibitively dark and the brightest object I came across in the game was a static, fuzzy TV screen. TVs are interspersed throughout the game and are used to transmit information to the character. Grab the antennea, adjust until the signal is received, receive message or information. Sometimes it is news of the impending apocalypse, sometimes it is a direct message from the apparent villian. This villanous communication (a puppet or mask-like face on a grainy TV screen) is seen ad infintum in the Saw horror movie series. In Saw, victims awake to a recorded tape or TV screen through which they receive instructions of how to play the “game” of torture they are trapped into. The Saw series also makes use of multiple screens for survelliance, blurring the identity of the cops and villans as both use television screens for survelliance or communication. My drunk avatar’s manipulation of the TV’s bunny ears as I manipulate the avatar through the frame of my own TV could be disquieting, but my familiarity with games, self-referential mediums, and the TV screen as an effect communicator of short-and-fast bits of information mutes any potential existential horror. The ‘commercial’ age, home-growing ADD and ADHD through its 10 second montages, breeds this familiarity with the TV screen as this type of communicator of information.
Dead Space, however, incorporates digital screens within the game in innovative and effective ways. The unbroken gameplay, resulting in part from effective use of in game screens, creates a scarier and stronger experience. In Dead Space, the player can manually rotate the POV of the camera, so that the viewed screen is seen as a holographic three-dimensional plane projected immediately in front of the character. The player is given a subjective shot of what the character might see (an information scene, but not the associated non-diegetic pause of gameplay). The spaceship environment of Dead Space itself contains many in-game screens. There are fuzzy, static, sepia-colored screns that give a dully lit background to the rooms and halls. Lines of unreadable text constantly scroll downwards at different speeds on semi-translucent hallways. A dark character can be seen lurking behind the faux-information screen. Many of the walls are columns of scrolling information, undecipherable “text” that suggests information without providing it. Video Logs or Audio Logs left behind by the long-dead inhabitants are avaliable to the character during moments that act as ‘cut scenes’ or ‘loading scenes’ in the game. For example, the elevator ride is essentially a “load screen;” it serves as a low-intensity wait screen between two areas of gameplay. Keeping the gameplay as seamless as possible and removing the “cut scene” as the only way video is portrayed to the character and player keeps the player engaged, alert, and provides a contiguous enviromental narrative that more fully immerses the player. Dead Space’s weapons shows the amount of ammo left on a number on the gun itself, the spine of your space suit has four glowing meters that describe your health, and additionally the suit has a “stasis” meter, a special ability that powers up much like “mana” or “MP.” This elimination of the need for a heads-up display also changes the player’s interaction with her screen: the flatness of the screen is obscured and challenged by only showing rendered, playable, three dimensional space that the character can always inhabit.
These screens are all familiar, expected, and easily accessed. The “screen-within-a-screen” itself does not impress, but rather the intimacy and disinterest the player experieinces managing, investigating, and ignoring the various frames is characteristic of the relationship between player and screen. When a non-diegetic screen pauses the game, the player is given a moment of safety. Managing resources and reactions in real time are another part of the immersion of Dead Space. The more internal diegetic experieinces (loading, inventory managment, video communication) happens without pause. Condemned 2 and the Saw movie series provide examples of non-innovative use of TV screens within horror games and movies, while Dead Space provides creative solutions that dramatically improve gameplay and the contiguous ‘horrifying’ experience.