Innuendo Studios

March 8, 2016

The first of my new series on interactive narrative. This one is about Dear Esther. You can support this and all my other work on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

OK so here’s the beat:

(Spoilers ahead.)

This is where Esther died.

I’m going to walk you through what it’s like to play Dear Esther if you’re someone like me. The game begins on a pier jutting out into the water off this small island. A voiceover begins narrating a letter addressed to someone named Esther, the logical conclusion for anyone who plays games is that the voice is you. As you start to explore the island, more letters are read, and though they’re kind of vague you start to piece together the basics: Esther is a lover who died in a car accident, and you’ve come to this island off the coast of Scotland as a sort of pilgrimage, you and Esther having read about the island in a book. Fragments of memories come through in the letters: of meeting with the man who drove his car into yours, of the hermit who used to live in the bothy, of Esther being next to you as you woke up from kidney stone surgery. All the while you make your way forward across the island.

Despite hearing all these letters read aloud, you never actually stop to write any, but you take that in stride. You think of how, for instance, at the beginning of Half-Life 2, it’s morning, and it’s evening by the time you get to Black Mesa East, and then it’s nighttime in Ravenholm, and then daytime on Highway 17, and then nighttime again when you get to Nova Prospekt, and if you cut out all the times you’ve quickloaded no more than 6 or 7 hours of real time have passed, and at no point have you stopped to eat or go to the bathroom, and that’s OK. With games time gets compressed in service of the story. You roll with it.

But as you progress and make your way into the system of caves that takes you through the mountain, things start to get a little… hyperreal. The caves are, frankly, beautiful, but do caves off the coast of Scotland really look like this? And how exactly is all this being illuminated? It’s a bit much for bioluminescent mushrooms. But whatever, it’s maybe a strong aesthetic choice by the designers. You roll with it.

But then you fall down this waterfall and splash into this pool of water and then… you’re here. The scene of the accident. It’s just… here, in a pool, in a cave.

I’m going to try and articulate what it is about this scene that feels so… haunted. Because it doesn’t quite feel like anything else I’ve experienced in a work of fiction.

When you come across a scene like this in a movie or a novel, there’s usually the moment where you ask, “Wait, is this real?” And then your suspicion is confirmed. [Wake up clip.] And that’s what dreams do, they end when you wake up. Unless you’re in a coma, all dreams - even lucid dreams - will end of their own accord. And that’s how books and movies work as well: the only way to experience a movie is to have each frame be followed by the next; the way to experience a book is to keep turning pages. You consume the narrative by being pulled forward through it. This sequence will also end of its own accord after about a minute, but by this time the caves have incrementally become so surreal that they no longer feel markedly less dreamlike than what you’ve just experienced.

You are theoretically underwater, but you’re body has no buoyancy. You don’t float. You sink. This space has rules, just as concrete as the rules of walking around the island. This leaves you with the sense that, while this space is clearly impossible, it doesn’t feel like a dream; it feels like a place. It’s the difference between being shown a haunting image and being in a haunted house.

Dear Esther is a dense text - dense with visual and narrative information. If a book is dense, your primary option for unpacking it is to, upon finishing it, reread it, and see if you notice more this time. You can’t spend more time in the book; the only way to be in its world is to progress towards the end of the book. Dear Esther takes only about an hour and a half to play beginning to end, but you have the freedom to spend three, five, ten hours poring over the details, of which there are a lot. This dreamlike world will end after about a minute, but this one won’t, not until you choose to proceed. What the game can do that books, movies, and dreams can’t, is allow you to linger.

So what is and isn’t a dream? Where if this scene were in a movie you’d be doubting the protagonist’s perceptions, here you’re starting to doubt your own. Where in a movie you’d be asking whether this is real, here you’re asking, “Has anything up to this point been real?”

Because, thinking back on it, you’re starting to wonder about what’s preceded this scene. What seemed like narrative elisions now seem like discrepancies - the narration says you’ve come to the island with one copy of the book you read with Esther, and yet there were many copies strewn around the bothy; the narration says you broke a leg in the cave, and yet that doesn’t seem to have happened. Come to think of it, you noticed the remnants of a wrecked car on the beach, which you took in stride at the time, but now you realize there are no roads on this uninhabited island. You remember all those times you saw something out of the corner of your eye, what usually turned out to be brush blowing in the wind, but wonder now if you weren’t actually seeing figures in the distance (and, on further playthroughs you will discover that, yes, there are ghosts on this island). And, notably, the narrator didn’t mention anything about finding a stretch of highway in a pool of water.

So is this island real?

This scene becomes a turning point in that question. As the game progresses from here, the narration becomes more and more abstract, and so does the island. The narrator describes his broken leg becoming infected, his narration descends into delirium, and you start to gather that he’s probably dead. So is this island some purgatory, built of his regrets? Is he actually you, or are you someone else, living out a dead man’s memories? (I mean, that is literally what you, the player, are.) Various images and memories start to mix together as the narrator tries to make sense of his loss. At the game’s end, you are left not entirely understanding what happened in this man’s past, or what his ultimate fate was, or, really, what the game was about. You’re left only with the feeling of lack that comes when a loved one exists now only in memory and memory is fallible and incomplete, with a jumble of images and sensations trying to make sense of a senseless tragedy, trying to add up into a person.

And, if you feel you can make sense of the game, you can treat it like a book and go back through it again - you can, like the narrator, visit and revisit this memory of the accident, hoping to understand more this time. But with every playthrough, elements are randomized - you get different letters, encounter different ghosts. Even, some small percentage of the time, this scene is partially replaced with the recovery room after the narrator’s surgery. And if you find some new detail you didn’t notice before, you can’t be sure if it was even there the last time. Memory is fallible. No two players will get precisely the same set of variables and notice all the same things, which is something games can do that books and movies can’t. So everyone is given their own incomplete set of puzzle pieces, and the option of going back through to look for a few more. And, like going through your actual memories, you can always learn something new, but it may never be enough; it may never be resolved. A tragedy may never make sense.

This is how we tend to think of ghosts: people who, even in death, can’t let go. People who are still trying to fix something that can’t be fixed.

Lots of game mess with sanity effects to simulate a character going delirious. But these effects make you question the character’s rationality, not your own. They may be disorienting, but you never actually doubt your perceptions; you know the screen is actually going all squidgy.

But this is something unique, and exclusive to interactive media. Not to watch a character realize they’re dead but to realize it yourself. Not to watch a space be haunted by ghosts but to be the ghost. To walk through a believable world and slowly discover that this world is maybe something else, something traumatized, something you may never fully understand; a place where you might just find a car crash at the bottom of a waterfall.

4:41pm | URL: https://tmblr.co/Zts6Ry232m3KL

(Notes: 29)