Terrain as Area for Player Character/ Villain Identity Confusion
No game is complete without opposition, either in the form of obstacle or enemy confrontation. An engaging game-play scenario must provide interaction sufficiently alluring, yet sufficiently agitating, that it insists on continued reevaluation. In this sense, just as there is a relationship between the player character and the environment, so is there a relationship between the villain/opposing force and the environment. The environment, as obstacle course and field of strategy, encompasses both the struggle the player character is intimately familiar with, and the outcome that remains questionable. Thus, every obstacle in the environment at once refers to the player character’s weaknesses, and the strengths and tendencies of the opposition. For instance, according to Richard A. Bartle, author of Designing Virtual Worlds, “Corners hide information… On the other hand, a vista can symbolize the distance of goals…” (648). Lefebvre also discusses how spaces symbolize relationships: “By and large… horizontal space symbolizes submission, vertical space power, and subterranean space death.” (236) Nonetheless, although one might destroy a villain, the environment is circumnavigated, readjusted, or the player character gains new insight or abilities that allow him/her/it to pass through where once he/she/it was forbidden. Although violent confrontation with an enemy character provides the hope of conquest through total destruction, exploration of enemy territory affirms player character identity, and suggests that just as the world is an extension of character, the player character is dependent on the villain for definition of that world. In exploration-based games, where the villain as virtual character might never be encountered, but rather the villain is encountered through clues, artifacts, the structures of civilization, or the sensual quality of the world, the relationship between the player character and the villain becomes even more dubious, and the player must struggle not only to solve the mystery of the villain’s identity, but also the one they play. They are haunted by the question: “on this playing field, where do I end, and the villain begins?”
Sanitarium (1998) is an investigation-based puzzle-solving adventure game that explores player character identity confusion through the environment, and may have even served as inspiration for American McGee’s Alice. The main character is Max, an inmate of an asylum, who must rediscover his lost identity, which evades him as a psychological anomaly, and symbolically, is hidden by bandages that cover his face. From level to level, the world around him shifts from landscapes conjured from schizophrenic delusion (Fig. 8) to the gothic architecture of the asylum (Fig. 9). Regardless of whether he explores the asylum, or the warped corners of his mind, every locale is cluttered with details that may potentially reveal Max’s history, the reason for his present state, and his future goals. As he gathers clues, solves puzzles, and devises methods for outwitting foes by manipulating the environment, it becomes clear that there is evil amok, and that Max has had an unremembered, yet nonetheless intimate history with it. The asylum is thick with the stench of death (Fig. 10), Max’s mind is a patchwork of crumbling churches, haunted hallways, and alien habitations (Fig. 11), and here and there the player encounters cryptic messages that suggest Max is no ordinary patient, but may have actually been a doctor once, may in fact be responsible for the perversities of the asylum, or be friend to the one perpetuating them. Moreover, even now a mind-corrupting virus may plague him. As Robert Coffey states in his review: “Broken into eight chapters, the entire game is a journey through your own madness to potential salvation.” Not only must the player discover who Max is, they must define the opponent.
Moreover, by the end of the game it becomes apparent that Max is not dealing with a single foe, but with a community of evils that are metaphorically linked. His old friend, Doctor Morgan, has become infected by a self-destroying hunger for power, symbolized by the identity-destroying virus-cure he has devised and injected into Max. The identity-destroying virus-cure plagues Max, just as Max’s guilt does, the one feeding the other. Finally, the disease is symbolically conveyed through the landscape of Max’s mind, which is wracked by decay, infestation, and devastation.
Reflecting the internal conflicts and issues your character is grappling with, these worlds establish unique moods that drive the story of the game forward. Particularly effective is the sequence where you wander your childhood home, rendered in washed-out sepia, and observe the specters of your family… (Coffey) (Fig. 12)
The environment reveals and exploits Max’s primary weakness, ignorance, by taunting him with strange locales he does not exactly remember and obscure clues that provoke more questions than they answer. The villain, be it the virus or Morgan, by extension, are powerful because of their superior knowledge of his past. To undermine this scenario, Max will have to virtually outwit himself, symbolized by the climatic battle in which Max faces a dark phantom of himself who mirrors his every move on a larger-than-life chessboard (Fig. 13). Nonetheless, the relationship between Max and the opposition may not be as opposed as first appears. Max’s delusions are not just metaphorical depictions of his ongoing struggle with the virus and his secret guilt, they are fantasies that situate him on a heroic pedestal, exemplified by the salvation he renders unto a village of children by electrifying an alien with a church cross, or by his temporary transformation into an object of the environment himself, a statue imbued with semi-divine life (Fig. 14). Thus Max depends on his delusions for the megalomaniac sense of accomplishment they provide. And with each success he enjoys, as he masters the environment, the virus grows stronger and more deceptive.
