A familiar wretch in the game resembles a pair of legs stuffed into a body bag. Many of them seem more pathetic than threatening.
The prototypical zombies/monsters that James faces don’t look or behave like monsters from any other survivor horror game. Dead bodies littered around the lifeless, fog-cloaked town bear a faint resemblance to James himself. While the set-up is not unfamiliar to gamers, there are twists that engage the player emotionally from the start. Because of this, he is immediately sympathetic in the eyes of the player, and after receiving a letter telling him that his dead wife is waiting in their “special place,” a vacation spot in Silent Hill, he sets out on a dark damsel-in-distress mission to rescue her. The real story takes place when the player has hold of the protagonist, James Sunderland, an effeminate weakling (one of the first videogame protagonists not in a position of power) who has long suffered since the death of his wife, Mary, three years ago. The story in SH2 is not told well, with cut scenes demonstrating the resource proficiency of daytime soap operas with similar mistimed melodramatic acting. The result adds to the suffocating atmosphere of the game, since the player does not know what choices they’ve made will affect the outcome or how. Because SH2 was driven by a narrative plot, it required the semi-closed nature of the moral divergence tree, but since those were a relatively unknown concept at the time, SH2 opted to hide the determining algorithms for the story from the player. It is also superior in its combining the narrative framing of the situation with the ludonarrative of its design. Silent Hill 2 is renowned for dealing with themes largely absent from contemporary game narratives. The strongest use of this particular tool can be found in one of the most beloved entries in the now culturally defunct run of survival horror games popularized in the later 1990’s and early 2000’s. That is: the “hidden” moral divergence tree, wherein players are not confronted openly regarding choices that will affect the outcome of the in-game narrative. In this special Halloween post, we’ll discuss a lesser-used method of manipulating narrative structures to influence player ethical behavior-but nevertheless one that we think has yet to be exercised to its full potential. In our previous blog post, we outlined the differences between the open and closed ethical designs postulated by video game expert Miguel Sicart and the apparent moral divergence trees in games with strong narrative frames. This is the eighth in a series of guest posts by Hali Sofala and Eric Jones on the connections between gaming (video and otherwise) and the literary.
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