Changing the Game: Self-Reflexivity in Spec Ops: The Line

Self-reflexivity is a known feature of many media forms, with film and literature turning their gaze inwards in numerous texts, and such self-reflexivity is frequently connected with the postmodern text, a theoretical structure with which videogames are also associated, through their ability to subvert traditional ideas about the distinction between reality and simulation or image, for example.  Some videogame releases of recent years attempt to address cultural concerns connected with gaming; Bioshock uses the game’s structure and narrative to consider notions of free will as a gamer; Deus Ex: Human Revolution offers a consideration of the uses of computer and internet technology to collect potentially sensitive, or private, information, and Heavy Rain uses the medium to offer an examination of the prevalence of violence within the medium, through reinstating violence as a destructive and shocking part of gaming, rather than a norm.  This is taken further in the 2012 game Spec Ops: The Line (Yager 2012), which explicitly explores the morality of violence in videogames using the tropes of the first person shooter genres to subvert player expectations and, furthermore, uses the visual and ludic elements of other games as pastiche to do so.

                Spec Ops is a loose adaptation of both Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and the canonical Apocalypse Now (Coppola).  The game offers a personal exploration of the decisions made by the protagonist, Captain Martin Walker (and the player), as he makes his way through a speculative version of Dubai, which has been destroyed and left communicatively in darkness by a series of sandstorms, in search of the ‘Damned’ 33^rd Battalion and their commanding officer Konrad who have gone missing after being left to protect the survivors of the storms.  The game makes explicit similarities between Walker and the protagonists of Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now, placing his actions in dialogue with the actions of the protagonists of those earlier works.  At first, Spec Ops appears to be a clone of games like the Call of Duty franchise, achieved through using the same tropes and ludic strategies of that franchise as the basis for questioning those games portrayal of a violent occupation as a legitimate and normal part of the ludic experience of these games, but the intertextual relationship the game has with other games in the shooter genre, as well as the texts upon which the game draws from, signals more than simply a direct cloning of these other texts, but uses these texts as the basis by which it critiques itself and the medium.

                The game opens with the player controlling Walker as he enters Dubai, under orders to carry out reconnaissance to locate the 33^rd Battalion and their commanding officer John Konrad.  Upon finding the bodies of American soldiers, Walker disobeys his original orders for reconnaissance and instead decides that the team will enter Dubai to search for survivors, beginning the game.  In most narratives, this disobedience is justified, with subsequent events proving that the original rubric is flawed, and so the player assumes this to be the case.  Once gameplay begins, there is a familiar: aim, fire, load, repeat.  However, where many games use this as a method of empowerment, as Michael Hartman suggests, offering repeated sequences that require the player to ‘wantonly execute people, zombies, head crabs or splicers, which satiates some limitless desire for players to empower themselves while playing’ (Hartman 2012), Spec Ops uses instead ludonarrative dissonance to subvert these usual empowerment fantasies, seen in the repetitive fight sequences, in which wave after wave of enemies have to be destroyed, their numbers swollen to absurd levels,  and are placed on the screen in a way that allows the player to destroy them without the need for much gaming skill.  Here, the ludic enjoyment and empowerment provided by the fight sequence is destabilised and questioned through the sheer volume of enemies that appear in opposition to the protagonist and his crew of two.  Ludonarrative dissonance is also used to subvert ludic progression.  Typically, videogames require the player to learn skills and offers a reward system for the successful implementation of those skills, such as better weaponry after killing an end of level boss.  As the player controls the protagonist, Captain Martin Walker deeper into the ruined city of Dubai, she begins to perceive that the reward for the successful implementation of ludic skills is, in fact, a punishment: the games tone becomes darker, and she is treated to a series of scenes of escalating brutality as the protagonist degrades both physically and mentally on the screen in front of her.  The ludonarrative dissonance and the negative reward the player is given for progression culminates in one of the most disturbing scenes in the game, which the player is presented with a scene familiar to players of Call of Duty 4.  In the Call of Duty mission, Death from Above (and it cannot pass unnoticed that the name of this mission is the same as the slogan printed on the front of the helicopter Colonel Kilgore uses in Apocalypse Now, further emphasising the intertextual relationship between the different texts), the player takes the role of a gunner in an aircraft, providing support for the main characters of the game (including the protagonist, Soap McTavish) as they make their way through hostile territory for extraction.  The mission calls for the player to target white ‘hotspots’, areas of enemy militia and armament to allow the ground crew to reach the extraction point, with an achievement for killing 5 or more enemies with one shot, thus highlighting the games objective of killing as many people as possible (after all, Call of Duty 4, as with the other games in the FPS genre are shooting games and require the player to shoot enemies).

Call of Duty 4: Death From Above mission

For the player of Spec Ops who has previously completed this or similar missions in other games, the rubric seems clear: target the white areas with weaponry and eliminate as many enemies as possible.  However, the game critiques this, using a munition—white phosphorus—that has been hotly debated after it was revealed that the US military employed this weapon in 2004 whist fighting in Falluja, Iraq (Reynolds 2005) as the primary method of attack in this scene.  This munition is used in warfare as a obscurant and will allow the protagonist and his team to pass this encampment unscathed.  Sergeant Lugo challenges Walkers use of the munition, citing its harmful effects and offering a moral counterpoint to Walkers determination, but is overruled; this section of the game is completed via an aerial view of the landscape, and closely resembles Call of Duty 4 in its design, as does the gaming strategy.  However, unlike Call of Duty, once the section has been completed, the player must guide Walker and his team through this encampment, where she witnesses the consequence of using this weapon.  White phosphorous, as well as providing cover for the movement of troops, has a number of other effects, such as severe injuries, including being able to penetrate clothing and to burn directly through skin and bone.  The smoke is toxic and can cause severe lung irritation if it is inhaled.  It is also incendiary, and fragments of the phosphorus get stuck to the skin as it explodes—and will continue to burn until fully consumed, or deprived of oxygen.   (Forensic Architecture 2009).

Spec Ops: The Line

After the smoke has cleared—literally, the players reward is revealed.  Usually for performing such feats, progressing through narrative as well as ludic elements of the game, but here again, those expectations are disrupted, leaving the player shocked as she sees that Walker has fired on civilians, and that she was controlling him at the time.  The cut-scene that follows the white phosphorus scene depicts Walkers path through burned corpses, lingering on a dead woman clutching a child to her, their mouths open in agony.  The players response to these images—and the realisation that she condoned this by carrying out the attack—mirrors that of Lugo and Lieutenant Adams who argue in the background of the scene, their confusion and self-disgust evident.  This part of the game aroused strong emotions in testing, with players having to leave the room and to compose themselves after seeing the mother and child images (Dyer 2012).  Game writer, Walt Williams considers this to be a moment in the game that aims to offer the player an insight into the psyche of the protagonist, saying ‘if you were actually a soldier in that situation, you would have to make that very conscious choice of trying to move on and accept what you had done’ (Dyer 2012) and explicitly asks the player to make a similar decision: ‘is this actually a game that I want to finish playing? And if I do, I have to accept what just happened and choose to keep playing this game’ (Dyer 2012).

White Phosphorus

This scene, in particular, seeks to highlight, and to subvert, player expectations, forcing her to reconsider her actions—and her acceptance of those actions—even in a virtual context.  Spec Ops offers the player a commentary on choice in the game, despite its strict linear structure; there are repeated pieces of dialogue that feature Walker telling other characters that there is no choice in the actions he is taking, such as when Walker is challenged by Lugo about the use of white phosphorus.  At each point in the game where there are actions that are immoral, or which the player is uncomfortable with, the player is offered a choice: to quit playing.  In continuing to play the game, much like Walker continuing into Dubai, she makes a choice, and each time does, the game rewards her with more death, more destruction, more discomfort, and complicity in Walkers actions.  Even the loading screens of the game question the role the player takes in the game.  Usually, loading screens offer the player hints and tips to aid in the successful completion of that game.  However, Spec Ops once again subverts this trope, and instead offers captions such as ‘It takes a strong man to deny what’s in front of him’, ‘Do you feel like a hero yet’, ‘You are still a good person’, ‘How many Americans have you killed today’, and ‘To kill for yourself is murder. To kill for your government is heroic. To kill for entertainment is harmless’.  Each of these screen captions serves two purposes, to remind the player of the psychological events related to the characters, and to question her role in the game.  Tellingly, each of the quotes suggest that the player is implicit in the violence Walker inflicts during the game, asking her if she feels like a hero as she controls Walkers actions.  ‘To kill for entertainment is harmless’ suggests that the player’s actions are harmless; however, these actions are not referred to as virtual: the player is not told that she is playing, she is told that she is killing, a word whose connotations are predominantly negative.  Brendan Keogh considers the loading screens to be part of Walker’s subconscious, an attempt to justify his actions (Keogh 2012, Loc 176 of 2850), reflecting the decisions Walker makes for himself and his team and how these change the way the trio interact with each other, and with subsequent events as the team penetrate deeper into Dubai; Walker becomes less professional in his tone and manner, and his behaviour becomes more erratic and brutal and the group dynamic is lost.  His physical appearance changes along with his mental deterioration; his skin is burned and eroded by the sand and the violence he encounters and initiates is reflected in this physical change.  The game does more than this, however, it challenges the player’s assumptions about her own behaviour whilst playing Spec Ops and similarly structured games.  The game, then, directly addresses the player and asks whether this hyperbolically violent game arouses feelings of enjoyments, and furthermore whether she considers the killing she engages in to be harmless.  As Mitch Dyer of IGN comments after playing Spec Ops the game tries to engage the player with a number of questions: ‘What is it you were wanting to feel when you chose to sit down and play a military shooter? What did you think you were at the beginning of this game? Why did you think it was okay to keep going and to keep doing these things?’ as Walker commits more and more atrocities, disobeying the commands of his superior officers to further his own aim of finding the missing Konrad.

Loading Screen

                Ultimately, the game asks the player whether the only way to win Spec Ops: The Line is to turn it off, to refuse to engage with Walker and his team; to actively question her role in games such as Call of Duty, Black Ops, and Spec Ops, and further asks her if playing these games make her complicit in the violence the various protagonists inflict throughout the games.  Spec Ops does not attempt to either justify or condemn the violence it presents, but through the hyperbolic gameplay asks the player to consider this for herself, and whether turning off the game constitutes a legitimate gameplay strategy.  In being able to do this, Spec Ops: The Line in turn asks questions that encompass the medium of the videogame, questioning its own actions, drawing attention to its artifice, and offering the player the ability to do the same.

Videogames, through interactivity that renders the player a quasi-author, are particularly well placed to interrogate intersections between real-world and virtual-world ethics in a variety of ways.  As I have shown, for Spec Ops: The Line, this takes the form of individual morality and decision-making.  Videogames also challenge the ethics of gaming meta-textually. Indeed, Spec Ops not only considers the fictional ethics of hyperbolical virtual situations, but also reflects on the ethics of gaming itself, whether or even if gamers are free to choose the actions they perform, or of mainstream videogames’ normalizing of risk-taking and violence.

                There has been much debate over whether videogames increase real world violence or whether they have an opposite effect, offering a virtual and safe outlet for violent propensities This paper has been less concerned about the likelihood of players of actually killing themselves or others in the real world than the ways in which videogames engage consumers ethically. Whether the haptic participation of players in ethical and unethical fictional events is more or less likely to lead them to similar actions in the real world is not within the scope of my research. My conclusion, however, is this physical participation allows for a more engaged interrogation of ethical values than traditional media do.  Bob Rehak notes that ‘the disavowal necessary to gameplay is like the ‘yes, that’s what I see’ of successful cinematic structure, but goes further: ‘yes, that’s what I do’ (Rehak 2003, 121).  The ability of the videogame to allow players to explore virtual ethical situations, carrying out physical actions in a physically safe real-world context, allowing them to do, and at the same time to consider the ethical and/or moral weight of these actions more intensively displays a maturity of the medium, as well as of videogame designers and players who interact with these games.

Authorship and Point of View in the Videogame.

In Half Real, Juul distinguishes two types of videogames: games of emergence and games of progression, with emergence games being the historically dominant form. Emergence games use ‘nominally simple rules where it nevertheless requires immense amounts of effort to gain proficiency in playing the game’.  Tetris is a typical example of a game of emergence; it is a puzzle game, ‘with the shapes each consisting of several squares that are falling down the well. When playing a Tetris game, one turns them or moves left and right, trying to arrange the shapes in a line. When a line of squares makes a line from edge to edge, it disappears and all the pieces move down by a square. When the well is filled up, the player loses (Absolutist 2013)’.  Similarly, Space Invaders (Pixeleye Interactive 2012) involves moving the game avatar left and right across a fixed screen, firing missiles at moving targets.

            Narratively, the title of Space Invaders suggests that there are invaders from space and the player is charged with repelling this invasion.  Despite this suggestion, the game is not a narrative driven game.  There is an inferred beginning (the invasion) and a middle (the action of the game), but there is not an ending to this game, however; the invaders move progressively quicker until the player succumbs to the space invaders and the game ends.  Incidentally, this structure is also problematic for Juul’s six point classic game model, which requires a game to have a variable outcome (as discussed in chapter 1), which neither Tetris nor Space Invaders have, with the only conclusion being the player losing the game. 

Opposed to this, narrative games are usually progression type games; games of progression are those where the ‘game designer explicitly determines the possible ways in which the game can progress’ (Juul 2005, 56).  Videogame walkthroughs can vary from being explicitly instructional (‘Climb along the yellow rail to the left to reach the underside of the train’ (Bradygames 2009, 24)) to those resembling works of fiction.  Alan Wake has such a walkthrough, with the action of the game presented as if it were a piece of textual narrative fiction:

Wake left the car in a state of agitation.  He staggered forward toward a rough-hewn wood pole.  He gazed up into the illuminating glow of a lamp on the left side of the road.  It seemed comforting: like a Safe Haven subduing the creeping sensation of fear. (Hodgson 2010, 24)

The Walkthrough is presented almost as a novelisation of the videogame, a third-person retrospective narration of Alan Wake’s quest to save his wife.

Games of progression more closely resemble traditional narrative structures in other media.   The structure of the progressional game is, as its name suggests, a progression—from the beginning, through a middle, to an end, a structure that has characterised traditional media since Aristotle’s famous propounding of it as essential to theatre (Aristotle 2008).  Even videogame franchises that span numerous games, such as Assassin’s Creed have a progressional structure, with many game franchises developing sub-plots or episodes that are self-contained as well as connected.^[1]  Generally, the player can assess the type of game s/he is playing using the following test:

Search for a guide to the game on the Internet.  If the game guide is a walkthrough (describing step by step what to ­­­do), it is a game of progression. If the game guide is a strategy guide (describing rules of thumb for how to play), it is a game of emergence. (Juul 2005, 71)

Whilst the player may feel as though they are influencing the narrative, the ability to create a walkthrough that encompasses all plays of the game refute the players role as the author; instead reaffirming the designer as the authorial presence in the narrative, and the predetermined status of videogame narratives.

Although most discussions of identification in narratives concern identification with characters rather than authors, since videogames are interactive—that is, the player influences the action taking place within the game through play, and this play can change the outcome of the game, both ludically and narratively—players do not simply identifiy with the characters they control, they furthermore take on authorial roles,and videogame authorship is an interactive rather than a dictatorial affair. Janet Murray makes the distinction between the author and the interactor^[2] of a piece of electronic narrative (Murray 1997, 153).  In Hamlet on the Holodeck, she considers ‘authorship in electronic media [to be] procedural’, meaning that the designer is charged with

Writing the rules by which the texts appear as well as writing the texts themselves.  It means writing the rules for the interactor’s involvement, that is, the conditions under which things will happen in response to the participant’s action.  It means establishing the properties of the objects and potential objects in the virtual world and the formulas for how they will relate to one another. (Murray 1997, 152)

Whilst the player of a videogame can put the pieces of the narrative together, sometimes in several different ways, the constituent parts of the narrative are created by the game designer.  It is possible to suggest that the player, then, is a quasi-author, creating a variation of the narrative that may be unique, but nevertheless formed from the game content provided by the game designer.  This is not to suggest this as a precursor to Murray’s holodeck—each of the elements of a game must be created by the designer prior to a game’s release meaning that a truly interactive game, which the player authors as she play, is unlikely for the foreseeable future.  However, there are a rising number of games that use the veneer of choice to allow a player to feel as if she is influencing the narrative, whilst retaining the core elements that all players share.  An example of this can be seen in the Mass Effect franchise (Bioware 2007 - 2012), a futuristic set of games that centres on the character Shepard, a soldier who leads the defence of the Galaxy in a series of missions and quests.  The core elements of the game are fixed; the pursuit and destruction of the ‘Reapers’, a life form that aims to destroy all other life in the galaxy; the player has the option of enlarging the game and the narrative however, through the quests and missions, and through interaction with non-player characters, allowing the player to enter into optional relationships, for example, and to affect the personality of Shepard, and therefore the reactions of other characters to Shepard. 

Heavy Rain is another example of the ability of the player to act as a quasi-author.  Here, the ending of the game depends on the choices that the player makes throughout play, such as whether the identity of the serial killer is discovered, and which characters survive to the end; these combine to give a total of eighteen possible conclusions to the game, ranging from the Origami killer going free, and all other characters being killed, to everyone surviving and the killer apprehended. These options, then, are not minor variations on a theme but significantly contrasting. While the player is instrumental in selecting the composite parts of the conclusion, and so plays an authorial role in the game, even so, each of the endings are predetermined by the designer simply by the fact they are already loaded into the software that is being played.  Thus while the player is free to make choices, s/he may only choose from among what has already been programmed.

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[1] Assassin’s Creed uses the framing narrative of Desmond Miles to allow the franchise to span 5 separate game episodes to date.

[2] Murray uses the term interactor where I use player.  

Letters To Esther: The Haunted Landscape in Dear Esther

Dear Esther.  I am on a stone Jetty, the sun is setting, and I am alone on this island.  I cannot interact with anything; all I can do is walk, look, and listen.  As I walk, I hear a voice speak, reading fragments of letters to you.  It becomes clear, as I listen to the fragments that I am following the path that someone else has already trodden; the author of the letters has preceded me in my traversal of this island.  I walk on, the fragments of letters becoming more confused, the mental state of the writer deteriorating as time passes, until I have a vision of climbing an aerial tower, and plunging to the ground.  I fly over the island, over all the locations I have already visited, until once again I am at the stone jetty, and the screen fades to black, with the words ‘come back’ ringing in my ears.  Then I am back—back at the stone jetty; the sun is setting and I am alone.

Dear Esther is not a typical videogame, but part of a growing genre known as the first-person walker.  It's Creator, Dan Pinchbeck, wanted to remove most of the ludic, the playing, elements of a game, leaving nothing 'but story to engage a player’ and so immerse the player into the world of the game, with no distracting enemies to kill, points to score, or princesses to rescue. (Biessener 2011).  This means that I, as the player, am able to concentrate on the narrative, the setting, and the soundscape of the game with no distractions; the barren landscape is complemented by a gothic score, which creates a feeling of solitude, of increasing uneasiness as the game progresses, and I begin to make sense of the narrative.  My aim today, is to show how these three elements, the landscape, the soundscape and the narrative combine to bring about a gothic experience in videogaming and produce an immersive, haunting, story.

At its core, Dear Esther is the story of a man who has lost his wife, Esther, and about his struggle to come to terms with her death, and his suicide, through which, he hopes to be reunited with Esther.  The narrative unfolds through a series of letter fragments, written after Esther's death, in which the narrator relates the chain of events that has brought him to the island, and his death.  As with many other Gothic stories, the haunting return of past transgressions forms the basis  of a narrative that destabilises the boundaries between fantasy and reality, causing me, the player, to doubt what I am experiencing, where the differences between fantasy and actuality are no longer secure (Botting 1996, 11-12).  Another classic trope, that of doubling is found not once, but four times in the game.  Most obviously, the narrator is doubled with an explorer, Donnelly; the narrative text makes this explicit;  the experiences of the two men are closely linked, both dying on the island of a broken limb and blood poisoning, alone.  As well as this, there is a doubling of the narrator and Jacobson, a Shepherd hermit, and of Paul, who was involved in the crash that killed Esther.  However, it is the doubling of the player and the narrator that is pertinent to this paper.  The player follows in the footsteps of the narrator, as he returns again and again to the scene and the trauma of his death and just as the narrator becomes a ghost that haunts the island, the player to becomes a spectre of herself, and must repeat her passage through the island to reveal more of the story, again and again. This necessity of having to double oneself to attempt a fuller understanding is appropriately Gothic and uncannily echoes the conventional desire to replay a game in order to achieve a higher score.  The player becomes the haunter, haunting the landscape, each replay re. enforcing of the narrators haunting of the island.

The doubling of the narrator and the other characters also produces a narrative in which the player is not certain who is responsible for what actions as the narrators psychological state deteriorates.  The narrator begins by suggesting that  Paul is responsible for the accident that caused Esther’s death, drunk-driving on the M5.  The doubling of the characters, and the delirium invoked by the blood poisoning, begins to break down the mental barriers that the narrator has constructed, until the narrator implies that the accident was caused by the himself, not Paul, and that the denial of his culpability is broken down as he nears death: as he says at the end of the game in one of the fragments ‘He was not drunk Esther, he was not drunk at all.'

Clearly, then, the speaker’s role in the car accident is central to the narrative: the narrative bringing about the question, was he responsible for the death of Esther?  The game does not reveal the answer to this question, or any other that arises, but leaves the player to interpret the letter fragments as they become increasingly more confused.  At the beginning of the narrative, the letter fragments are lucid, detailing the theft of a book from Edinburgh library, written by a man named Donnelly to provide a guide to the island, and charting the death of Esther in a car crash, and as I have said, considering the responsibility of the character, Paul for her death.  During the game, after the narrator relates that he has fallen and broken his leg, and that it is infected, the narrative becomes increasingly disjointed, the narrator revealing this confusion to Esther, relating that he is ‘increasingly unable to find that point where the hermit ends and I [the narrator] begins’ as he confuses himself with the doubled characters, and the strands of the letters being written to Esther become more and more entangled in the other characters, until I am no longer sure what is true, and what is a result of the delirium of the infection.  What does become clear, however, is the narrators wish to die, and that the path that I am following is that of the narrator as he contemplates and commits suicide, before being returned to the stone jetty, to begin his journey again, a ghost haunting the island, with the player haunting the narrator as he does so.  The narrator's haunting is manifested in shadowy, human shapes that are visible in the distance if the player looks, but disappear as she approaches, belonging in, and to, this beautiful landscape.

The setting of Dear Esther on a deserted Hebridean island, places it firmly in the Gothic context.  The barren, yet beautiful landscape is as sublime as that found in Frankenstein or Wuthering Heights, inspiring awe in me as I walk round the island and also chilling me with its bleak emptiness.  I pass, but cannot interact with the evidence of previous inhabitation, ranging from a stone circle thousands of years old to an aerial that sends a red beacon into the perpetual twilight of the game, their ruinous presence reminding me that I am in a typically Gothic space.  I am told through the narrative, that the island was abandoned in 1778, and so most of the broken buildings that I pass are at least this old, their presence creating a feeling of gloom, of ruin that pervades the entire landscape.  As with many other Gothic texts, the setting is an important device in the creation of the game, as important as the Gothic castle, a central character in the narrative providing clues for me to interpret the information I am given by the narrator, and as with many other Gothic texts, ranging from the Castle of Otranto onwards, the setting of the narrative is a space that houses secrets from the past, that haunt the characters (or in this case, the character).  Dear Esther, furthermore, is part of the terror gothic tradition, which holds characters and readers (or players) in suspense about threats to life, safety and sanity, which are kept largely out of sight, in the shadows or in the suggestions of the past found in the setting.  The games relationship to the landscape, and the primary playing technique of the game can be summarised best by one of the fragments the narrator relates as he crosses the third beach of the island:

To explore here is to become passive, to internalise the journey and not tou attempt to break the confines.  Since I burnt my boats and contracted my sickness, this has become easier for me.  It will take a number of expeditions to traverse this micro continent.

Playing through the game, the landscape foregrounded and my interactivity limited, I begin to question the landscapes verisimilitude. Like the narrator, I find myself ‘slipping into the delusional state of ascribing purpose, deliberate motive to everything’ in a landscape that is wholly created, whether that is by a game designer, or by the narrators own mind.  For example, one of the opening narrative fragments has the narrator reveal ‘I sometimes feel as if I’ve given birth to this island’, while another fragment asks ‘was this island formed during the moment of impact, when we were torn loose from our moorings and the seatbelts cut motorway lanes into our chests and shoulders.  Did it first break surface then?’ Most tellingly, the narrator repeatedly uses the motif of himself as travelling through his own body as he makes his way around the island, like the infection that courses through his veins.  This landscape then, it is inferred, is created by the narrator himself, and is a product of his own imagination; the island is created in the aftermath of the accident that killed Esther.  Visually, the landscape is littered with detritus from the car accident, and surgical equipment that would not be present if the narrator washed ashore, as he says, supporting the supposition that the island is a imaginative creation.  The final passage of the game, at the point of the narrators death is a final letter to Esther, in which he tells her that he has ‘painted, carved, hewn, scored into this space all that [he] could draw from him’ and that he ‘will rise from  the ocean like an island without a bottom, come together like a stone, become an aerial, a beacon’ giving further credence to the islands internal construction in the mind of the narrator.    Where am I then, as I walk this island?  Trapped, with the narrator, in his own mind, whether that mind is being held in limbo on an imagined deserted Hebridean island, or in a hospital bed, comatose, nearing death.

The third facet of this game is the soundtrack.  I am by no means an expert on music and the sounds of Gothic, and so the influence of Isabella van Elferen and Vivien Saunders is clearly noticeable in what I say next.

The ideal method of playing Dear Esther is in a darkened room, with the sound playing through earphones to block out any external noise. The sensory concentration of this allows the sounds of the landscape and the musical score to become foregrounded and to take their place as an integral part of the narrative experience, alongside the landscape. Jean-Luc Nancy argues that music engenders a time and space of its own, which alongside the perpetual twilight of the island means that the player leaves behind the here and now of reality, entering the universe of the game and this perfectly describes the immersive effect of the soundtrack to Dear Esther, the ambient sounds, the disembodied human noises, and the musical score combine with the landscape to create this effect.  Van Elferen, in Gothic Music, considers that gothic 'game music defies the borders of the screen and envelopes game and player alike in its own, sonic version of virtual reality' (van Elferen 2012, 106) with its Gothic sounds, ranging from 'hollow footsteps' to 'ghostly melodies’ (van Elferen 2012, 1).  The game is filled with the diegetic sounds of the landscape, the crash of the waves on the sea, the sound of the wind across the island and the plaintive cry of a single seagull as it is disturbed, with the only diegetic man-made sounds being footsteps as I walk the island, The source of the footsteps is enigmatic; are they my footsteps as the player, or are they the footsteps of the narrator, reminding me of his prior claim on the narrative, and the setting, a supernatural echo that only I can hear, but the source is not locatable.  Occasionally, the sound of a female voice, whispering ‘come back’ reminiscent of Cathy Earnshaw’s ‘Let me in’ (Bronte 1968, 54) at her bedroom window, can be heard if I sink into the sea, refusing to let me fade into nothingness.

Music plays at almost randomly, as I walk; a violin or a piano’s disembodied tones penetrate the diegetic sounds, dragging me, as van Elferen says, ‘along in the musical movement from the mundane to the divine or the occult’ and enveloping me in the timeless nature of the narrative, a time parallel to, within and yet without the present outside the game.  A female voice can be discerned within the music, her voice a non-diegetic element of the game, which seems indistinguishable from the diegetic noise of the landscape, her litany an almost religious undertone to remind me of the islands position as limbo.  As I pass specific landmarks, the non-diegetic sounds of the music are interspersed with extra-diegetic sounds relating to the landmarks origins, the sound of groaning metal as I pass the wreckage of the car on the beach, the soundscape and the landscape combining to create a haunting, eerie journey.

In removing the ludic aspects of the game, Pinchbeck makes the player focus on that which is frequently ignored.  The landscape of Dear Esther, whilst beautiful, is not dissimilar in construction to Bioshock; both landscapes, while visually different, provide narrative background, and use audio clips to further the narrative history.  Where Bioshock foregrounds gameplay over the narrative though, Dear Esther chooses instead to forgo this in favour of directing the player's attention to these narrative tropes as the primary object of the game.  Combining this with the score and the fragmented, traumatic narrative, the game becomes an immersive and sensory experience that leaves the player haunted, understanding the actions of a man whose only hope of life is death and she is left moved by this experience in a way not as easily achieved by other media.

There is not enough time here to interrogate the game fully, to consider all the elements of the narrative, such as the repeating religious motif, or the relevance of the number 21 that is foregrounded by the narrator.  However, what I hope to have shown is that playing this game, alone in a darkened room, with all external sounds removed, produces a ghost story in which the player is the haunter, haunting the narrator, just as he haunts the island, reliving with him his final days and death repeatedly in order to fully understand the narrative of the game, and that the medium of the videogame, with its visual, sonic and interactive elements (or enforced lack thereof), bringing about a novel method of presenting a sensory ghost story.