Fear Of Closure

When I recently played Closure, I couldn’t help but wonder how much thought the developers put into how players would respond to it.

It must come as a huge surprise to game devs when they hear about all the different experiences people have with their games and all the readings people walk away with. As someone who used to paint a lot, I’d always be amazed at the way people would read into my artworks and see things that I felt weren’t there. “Your landscapes have gotten darker and muddier – were you going through a darker patch in your life?” Ummm, no? “I love the way you painted the prostitutes in that scene!” Err…they’re ballerinas. *Beat*

Game developers and creators of texts can shape our experience with their creations by playing on common feelings and perceptions that most people hold; there are things they can expect from the audience. They can anticipate that having a swarm of zombies charge out of the darkness and straight at the player will induce a sense of panic, or that a dark, dilapidated corridor stained with blood is more likely to create suspense for a player than a camp fun-land with rainbow floorboards (although that in itself can be quite suspenseful and leave me shit-scared). There are elements that a developer can control that will guide the player in the direction that they want the game to be played. But then there are the elements that can’t be controlled. Developers can throw in all the zombies, stained corridors, rainbow flooring and camp fun-lands as they like, but the one thing that determines how a game is experienced lies in the hands of someone else – the player.

I’m not talking about a player’s particular style of gaming. Rather, I’m referring to the specific things that we pick up from our interaction with other texts that come to shape our experiences with games.

This wasn’t something I’d thought about until I played Closure a few weeks ago. I kept associating elements of the game to artworks by Alberto Giacometti – an artist who has always made me feel uneasy – and that unease found its way into the game.

Closure required me to move orbs of light around, illuminating my surroundings so that I could see where I was going. But I also had to use darkness to my advantage. If an area was lit and visible, it existed and was tangible to my character. If it was hidden in darkness, it did not exist. There were elements of the game that reminded me of Echochrome inasmuch that what was there was only there if I could see it. Walls and entire surfaces would cease to exist the moment they were cast out of the light. If I took a step into what I couldn’t see, I’d fall into the chasm of darkness and, presumably, die.

Perhaps I am just a massive pansy, but this game had me on edge the whole time. Every noise the game made startled me; I literally sat at the edge of my seat feeling incredibly uncomfortable, partly because my arse was about to fall off my chair, but also because the game instilled a genuine sense of fear in me. Puzzle games may not be my strong point, but they don’t intimidate me enough to actually scare me. Having said that, this puzzle game left me feeling as though I was Jennifer Lopez in The Cell – the bit where she enters the mind of the serial killer played by the guy from Law & Order. The main difference being that she was a sexy psychologist with a nicer arse and rack, and she actually had something to fear, whereas I was sitting in my pjs, eating beans while playing a free flash game.

Flash game or not, I had myself believe that there was something seriously twisted and wrong about the black and white world I was playing in, even though the game gave me no reason whatsoever to feel such a way. As I progressed through each room, I felt more and more uncomfortable and on edge; I wanted to explore more, but I was afraid of what I would see. I wanted to trust my little character and, heaven forbid, like him, but he was the source of much of my anxiety. His resemblance to Alberto Giacometti’s stick-thin sculptures brought the surrealist into the game and I couldn’t help but start associating elements of the game to Giacometti’s oeuvre, which had always made me uncomfortable to begin with.

I’ve always found Giacometti’s work particularly eerie – from the rail-thin and fragile sculptures of the human form, to his darker sketches of faces filled with busy lines that smudge into each other. Beautiful as they may be, I remember when I first saw his artworks exhibited at the Art Gallery of NSW in 2006, there was something unsettling about them. It wasn’t so much the way they looked as much as it was about why the artist chose to portray the human figure in such a way. For Giacometti, it wasn’t simply a matter of stylising his work in a way that he found most aesthetically pleasing, nor was it about conforming to the subversiveness of the surrealists of the time. For him, he sculpted women in the way that he saw them by focusing on the shadows that they casted. With their limbs elongated and their heads stretched until they were as sharp as a knife’s edge, he managed to reduce the fullness of the human form to a shadow and make it seem other-worldly. The final result was meant to represent the sensation he felt when he looked at a woman – most of his works embodied the blocs of sensation he experienced when he looked at everyday objects and people – and I found it unnerving that someone could respond to the female form, or any form for that matter, in such a way.

Such a response came across to me as being a bit morbid, possibly because I was used to seeing women portrayed in ways that I associate with being positive. Brett Whiteley and Richard Larter, for example, portrayed their wives as full-bodied women who were luscious, sexual and, while they were often skewed, exaggerated and greatly abstracted, there was something undeniably warm about them, as if the affections of Brett Whiteley for his wife Wendy could be felt reverberating off the canvas.

Looking at Giacometti’s sculptures, I caught myself several times thinking what a peculiar and morbid man he must have been to feel such a way when he looked at people – to envision them as shadows. And what got to me the most was that he was sculpting his reality. Like Frida Kahlo, who denied that she was a surrealist because her work was not dreamed up or exaggerated – rather, she was painting her reality – Giacometti created what was real to him. I couldn’t get my head around what must have been going on in his head for him to feel such sensations when he looked objects and the human form.

I associated my character in Closure with the eerie Giacometti figures, and that led me to allowing the darkened world of Closure to take on the characteristics of the twisted world that I thought Giacometti’s mind inhabited.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Giacometti’s work; they’re haunting, delicate, and beautiful on so many levels. But their brittleness and my interpretation of his work left me feeling uneasy whenever I looked at them. As I played Closure, my mind kept coming back to Giacometti and the shadows he portrayed. When his stick-women were placed in Closure’s claustrophobic rooms that were swallowed by darkness, the eeriness was only exacerbated and I was no longer just fearing what I couldn’t see; I found myself fearing what Alberto Giacometti – with his skewed perception of reality and all – was going to bring to the game. Or, at least, what I had allowed him to bring to the game.

For this pansy, he brought a hell of a lot.