Neirai the Forgiven
Christian Guilds List Manager
This is an actual assignment (read:essay) that I completed in my last semester of college. In form, it consists of a "creative" portion, where I lay out my plans for a video game, and an "explication," where I discuss what I was doing in the game and why. Because of time and space constraints (the essay was supposed to be only 10 pages) the explication is very distilled and brief. Feel free to read this and to comment on it. I would be more than happy to interact with your comments and possibly to defend certain actions or forms of content within this work.
"Black Hour" is based loosely on the book Fight Club, by Chuck Palahniuk. It is not based on the movie: although there is certainly overlap between the two, I have never seen the movie.
This work is my response to the age-old question, "Can you make a Christian shootemup that isn't cheesy?"
And yes, this is a severe wall of text.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
“In the real world, things are very different. You just need to look around you: nobody wants to die that way. People die of disease and accidents. Death comes suddenly and there’s no notion of good or bad. It leaves no dramatic feeling, but great emptiness. When you lose someone you love very much, you feel this big empty space and think, if I had known this was coming, I’d have done things differently.”
Dialogue from Final Fantasy 7 (Square, 1997)
BLACK HOUR
Introduction
Black Hour centers around a small group of survivors, people who have not been bitten and affected by werewolves. The game begins on the day after a full moon. On the previous day a number of werewolves began a rampage through the relatively small city, attacking and infecting the city’s population with lycanthropy – the tendency, usually a byproduct of a disease or curse, towards involuntarily becoming a werewolf. The survivors believe they must find a way to stop the lycanthropy from spreading and plaguing the city before the next full moon, or else the werewolves are likely to finish the task. The danger of the werewolves taking over the town is made much more likely by the fact that these werewolves are intelligent, and given enough time, such as the twenty-four hours of the full moon day, the wolves will to pack together and accomplish more difficult problem-solving tasks – like rooting out small groups of survivors.
The werewolves in Black Hour do not behave like traditional werewolves, per se. One particular oddity is that on days listed on calendars as being associated with a full moon at night, the infected people become werewolves from the moment that they awaken till the time that they go back to sleep. Also, the werewolves assume their lupine – wolfish – form every day from 6:30pm until 7:30pm, the so-called Black Hour. Finally, none of the werewolves are aware of their condition, suppressing all memories of being werewolves during the Hour, and leading regular human lives for the rest of the day. These people employ cognitive dissonance whenever they encounter evidence of werewolf activity from the night or even hour before, despite the fact that this wanton ignorance adds a surreal quality to their existence – as evidenced by newspaper and television stories throughout the game that report the bizarre events caused by the werewolves, but attribute them to various other causes.
Gameplay in Black Hour will take part in two phases – survival, the phase leading up to the dreaded “full moon day,” and infiltration, which occurs during the full moon day and leads to the game’s resolution. In each phase, the player has limited and different knowledge of the werewolves’ nature and the effects of this limitation is illustrated by the narrative, camera work, and gameplay mechanics of each phase.
Phase 1: Survival
At the beginning of the game, the player character finds himself in a survivor’s meeting at an old high school. He is surrounded by about two dozen other survivors, who come from various walks of life, including, but not limited to, teachers, doctors, members of the U. S. Army, and computer programmers. Several of the “survivors” are not really survivors but are victims of the lycanthropy who are aware of their condition and lock themselves away during the hour or allow the doctors to experiment on them – within reason.
The player character learns that he has roughly one month to help determine the cause of the lycanthropic outbreak, and of the werewolves’ unexplained, non-“textbook” behavior. Failure to accomplish this goal in one month will not necessarily result in the termination of any attempt to stop the lycanthropy, but the survivors are not sure whether they can survive the upcoming full-moon day. The other, non-player characters present differing views on how stopping the outbreak may be accomplished, such as the use of lethal violence, as the game will include a number of traditional survival-horror weapons; the use of non-lethal violence, which would involve raiding a police station under cover of the Black Hour for Tasers, or perhaps a zoo or hospital for tranquilizers to subjugate the werewolves; other characters advocate that this kind of violence is not conscionable against what may very well simply be sick humans and suggest less violent routes such as gathering information through medical, historical, and psychological assessment of infected humans. The player is also informed of the werewolves’ habits during the Black Hour: their roaming, eating, and packing habits, and their strange tendency towards grouping together in the main town square for a period of time before spending their last 10-20 wolfish minutes in what appears to be either searching for survivors or trying to leave town.
At this point, the player is given the choice as to which path (or blend of paths) of “player quests” he or she wishes to go down. It is important to note that in Black Hour the non-player characters will each attempt to do his or her own thing regardless of whether the player chooses to join them. The pro-violence groups will eventually attempt to use some violent ways to suppress the werewolves, although, without the player’s siding with the pro-lethal group, the pro-violence group will tend towards non-lethal means. The non-violent groups will also attempt to carry out their plans. The player will have the constant ability to switch between the various groups at will. For example, a player could choose to affect a heist for Tasers and then join with the team who is looking for evidence of prior lycanthropic activity in the area, and later on may decide that going on a shooting rampage is best. The game will allow the player to make these decisions, as Black Hour will be more-or-less an automated story that characters play a single actor in, rather than a set of events that are triggered by and occur around the player. This model of the player as a supporting actor rather than the initiator of the action is suggested by adventure games legend Tim Schafer, creator of the Curse of Monkey Island series (Pearce 8-10).
Over the course of this first phase, four overall events will take place. The more violent non-player characters will find that violence does not enable them to defeat the werewolves, and they will in fact eventually become infected themselves. In the process, they will also alert the local police to the fact that a “violent domestic terrorist group” exists in the city, which will result in a police crack-down on the survivors, in about five days after the defeat of the pro-violent ex-survivors. The police scrutiny will force the player and the non-violent characters to work towards their goals more quickly. Second, the non-violent survivor characters will determine that the lycanthropy is not in fact caused by any disease or medical condition; they will also discover that the city has a history of hushed-up werewolf activity. Eventually, it will be determined that the city was founded by a number of refugee werewolves and that the entire town is actually descendants of werewolves – the wolfish tendency is part of the nature of the people, and not caused by an external force. The bizarre non-storybook behavior of the werewolves is simply caused by the social acceptance of lupine behavior during the Black Hour and on days marked on the calendar as having full moons.
These events will serve to pressure the player to move forward in the story. Roughly thirty game days from the beginning of the game, which is about the same time that the true nature of the werewolves comes to light, the dreaded full moon day – twenty-four hours of lycanthropic activity – will begin. The full moon day will be the player’s largest challenge to date, as the werewolves will begin to coordinate their actions after about an hour. The werewolves will attempt both to root out any survivors and to begin attacks on the neighboring towns. This widespread and dangerous lycanthropic activity ends up alerting the United States government to the threat of a werewolf outbreak and, quickly thereafter, the U.S. Army is dispatched to deal with the situation. If the player cannot resolve the lycanthropy by the end of the day, the town and everyone in it will be destroyed.
Phase 2: Infiltration and Resolution
With the realization of the nature of the werewolves, the player character gains the self-knowledge that he is also a werewolf and can assume the form of a werewolf at will. Doing so allows the player to infiltrate the werewolf’s assemblies without getting killed. This ability is especially important during the full moon day, as every other person in the city at this point is a full-fledged werewolf. While in werewolf form, however, the character’s propensity towards violence increases with time, causing the player to risk losing control of the character with increasing probability. Violence during this phase is still treated as a negative, and so giving into the player character’s new wolfish tendencies will still be a very bad thing.
During his infiltration of the werewolves, the player character learns that the werewolves are basically acting out of their own desires for power and control. When coordinated over greater periods of time (like full moon days,) the werewolves are attempting to create a lycanthrope-Supremacist state, which is driving the attacks on neighboring towns and which spurred the attacks on the surviving townspeople. The werewolves believe that by spreading the lycanthropy to humans, they can create a new, perfected state.
At this point, the player is given the choice as whether to attempt to defeat the alpha male, a pro-violence survivor character from the beginning of the game who now leads the werewolves, and assume command of the werewolves. This resort to violence would begin a set of events, explained in a full motion video, where the werewolves attack the U. S. Army and are defeated, because the American firepower is still greater than the werewolves’ lycanthropic powers – although, some visual cues will suggest that some of the werewolves or, at least, some other werewolves continue to live on as some of the U. S. Army soldiers may have been infected during the fighting, or possibly have been werewolves all along.
If the player chooses to avoid the final confrontation, he or she is given an alternative route, which involves infiltrating a fairly well-guarded high-rise and using a local television/radio station to attempt to communicate with the werewolves and the U.S. Army. The player may, once again, use violent or non-violent methods, although nonviolent methods tend to once again be privileged as the sounds and smells associated with the violence will attract more enemies. When the player character arrives in the television studio, he begins a broadcast informing both the werewolves and the United States as a whole of the current situation – that the people are all werewolves, and that their lycanthropy is, albeit unconsciously, voluntary. He urges the werewolves to abandon their hostile ways and resume normal human activity. While some of the werewolves accept his words, most of the werewolf-supremacists attempt to storm the player character in the studio. The player character then must run to the top of the high-rise, where he is rescued by a U. S. military chopper. In the final movie, the player urges the military to rescue any people who return to human form. The game ends with the military attempting to accomplish this while defending against the werewolf supremacists. The ending video, while positive, is bittersweet in that it remains ambiguous whether or not the remaining werewolves will survive, and also whether the werewolves who return to their humanity will choose to stay that way, whether the American people will accept their humanity or whether the ex-werewolves will always be treated as monsters, and whether the ex-werewolves’ lust for power will resurface.
EXPLICATION
Richard Olsen argues that in order to reach popular culture, one needs to use methods that appeal to the mindset traditionally associated with being “right-brained,” that which privileges imagery and sounds, because the new culture is highly iconic (Olsen 2). According to this model, a method of reaching today’s popular culture must be immersive (2), experiential (3), popular (5), entertaining (6), and external to the viewer (7). A video game such as Black Hour is designed to exhibit all of these traits.
On Genre
The survival-horror genre is based on the basic notion that the player (the “self”) is beset upon by monsters (the “other,”) that he or she must defeat and destroy in order to survive. This means that, structurally, survival-horror games are based on the notion that survival is attained through the “self” engaging in gratuitous violence against the “other.” This notion might be acceptable in a video game environment where the “other” is inhuman, but translates very poorly and dangerously into the rest of human lives, particularly when the person who has this notion might have a bigoted view of what the “other” is: e.g., people of minority or women.
On Werewolves
Werewolves are a metaphor for the dangerous undercurrent of evil given by hegemonic consent (DiGiglio-Bellamore 3). Werewolves refer to humanity’s use of the power of ideological manipulation in a world without a proper balance of power (4). The “werewolf” of hegemony gains its power when society turns a blind eye to the hegemonic power structures that make up their world.
Another reason for using werewolves as the primary monster in Black Hour is that werewolves deconstruct the typical human/monster opposition of the survival-horror genre. Werewolves are both humans and monsters, depending on the time of day. In Black Hour, none of the werewolves are consciously aware of their monster status, and therefore lead normal lives most of the time. This means that the enemies in Black Hour are constantly changing sides on the human/monster opposition, making the use of violence an ethical dilemma.
On Fight Club
Most of Black Hour is an adaptation of Fight Club’s themes, translated into a story of werewolves in order to fit Fight Club into the survival-horror genre. Also, Black Hour gives the player the choice of multiple routes through the adapted Fight Club story, and privileges non-violent routes. Fight Club tells the story of a pervasive and evil fascist empire created through channeling the self-suppressed antisocial tendencies of masculine nature (Ta 265). Black Hour’s evil is created through the subconscious acting-out of werewolf nature, but the theme of creating a contagious evil by constructing an environment where violent, antisocial behavior is socially acceptable – what Olsen calls the “werewolf curse” – is largely the same (Olsen 4.) Unlike in Fight Club, however, where the members of Project Mayhem are men trying to maintain their masculinity and the implied male supremacy, Black Hour’s werewolves are attempting to maintain their wolfish power and superiority by assuming their lupine forms (Ta 267). Black Hour also brings to bear a similar irony to that of Fight Club: Fight Club’s Project Mayhem attempts to use anarchy to defeat a repressive “feminizing” society, while creating a secret society that is just as repressive (267). Likewise, in Black Hour, many of the survivors espouse the use of violence to defeat the violent werewolves, unaware that they themselves are also werewolves, also prone to the use of violence as power, the sign of the werewolf curse.
On Fascism
Fascism is common to both Black Hour and Fight Club. Jennifer Barker argues that Project Mayhem’s members are silenced shaped by their leader, Tyler Durden (Barker 180-181). Likewise, the Fight Club is a governing body that claims to give meaning to its followers as long as they follow its rules absolutely (181). In Black Hour, the werewolves become organized into a similar movement, under the thumb of their leader, the alpha male.
Fascism plays an explicit role in Black Hour because players of Black Hour might not reject violence as a result of the breakdown of the human/monster opposition, and might resurrect the opposition in the form of a new monster/human structure. If they do so, they miss the point of the whole game. Rather than prevent the player from siding with the fascist werewolves, Black Hour enables the player to join the werewolf supremacists, but illustrates why and how this route does not work.
On Camera Work and Being a Werewolf
During Phase 2 of Black Hour, the player character gains the ability to be a werewolf, giving the player the experience of the very power that he or she is supposed to be resisting. The feeling of power will be illustrated by through the use of camera techniques: when the player character is human in form, the game will use an over-the-shoulder third-person camera view. The third-person view conveys a sense of vulnerability and mortality (Carr 24). When the character assumes werewolf form, however, the camera will shift to the popular first-person shooter view – the avatar is invisible and the player sees his or her character as simply a weapon, in this case a wolf’s snout. The first-person view gives the player a feeling of immortality and power. This camera change will make lycanthropy, which is Black Hour’s metaphor for the use of violent power, seductively attractive to the player, as it frees him or her from being related to a weaker, mortal character (25). Prolonged use of the werewolf form, however, will cause the player to lose control of the player character, illustrating the way in which the use of power as social control snowballs out of control and into violence (Ta 267).
Conclusion
It is my desire that Black Hour’s target audience – existing fans of the survival-horror genre – will come to realize that wielding violent power against the other, whether the other is a video game monster or a real-life person, is ineffective and simply leads to counter-violence. Black Hour adapts Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club into a video game, and gives the player the choice of multiple paths through the action – the player is not simply forced to take Fight Club’s narrator’s path of following the villain Tyler’s lead towards fascism. By providing the player with choices and by pairing the choices up with realistic consequences to otherwise gratuitous actions, I hope that Black Hour will cause gamers to begin to ask relevant questions about the nature of violence and to realize that the distinction between the self and the other is purely artificial.
Works Cited and Consulted
Barker, Jennifer. “‘A Hero will Rise’: The Myth of the Fascist Man in Fight Club and Gladiator.” 36.3 (2008): 171-187.
Bendle, Mervyn F. “The Apocalyptic Imagination and Popular Culture.” Journal of Religion and Popular Culture. 11 (2005): n.p.
Carr, Diane. “Play Dead: Genre and Affect in Silent Hill and Planescape Torment.” International Journal of Computer Game Research. 3.1 (2003): n.p.
DeGiglio-Bellemare, Mario. “‘Even a Man Who is Pure in Heart’: Filmic Horror, Popular Religion, and the Spectral Underside of History.” Journal of Religion and Popular Culture. 10 (2005): n.p.
Hall, Richard and Kristy Baird. “Improving Computer Game Narrative Using Polti Ratios.” International Journal of Computer Game Research. 8.1 (2008): n.p.
Humphries-Brooks, Stephenson. “The Body and Blood of Eternal UnDeath.” Journal of Religion and Popular Culture. 6 (2004): n.p.
Olsen, Richard. “Keeping the Fidelity in Stereo Catechesis: Opportunities and Dangers in Transmediation of the Gospel as Illustrated in Sister Act I and II.” Journal of Religion and Popular Culture. 14 (2006): n.p.
Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996.
Pearce, Celia. “Game Noir – A Conversation with Tim Schafer.” International Journal of Computer Game Research. 3.1 (2003): n.p.
Smith, Greg M. “Computer Games have Words, Too: Dialogue Conventions in Final Fantasy 7.” International Journal of Computer Game Research. 2.2 (2002): n.p.
Square. Final Fantasy 7. Tokyo: PlayStation, 1997.
Ta, Lynn M. “Hurt So Good: Fight Club, Masculine Violence, and the Crisis of Capitalism.” Journal of American Culture. 29.3 (2006): 265-277.
"Black Hour" is based loosely on the book Fight Club, by Chuck Palahniuk. It is not based on the movie: although there is certainly overlap between the two, I have never seen the movie.
This work is my response to the age-old question, "Can you make a Christian shootemup that isn't cheesy?"
And yes, this is a severe wall of text.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
“In the real world, things are very different. You just need to look around you: nobody wants to die that way. People die of disease and accidents. Death comes suddenly and there’s no notion of good or bad. It leaves no dramatic feeling, but great emptiness. When you lose someone you love very much, you feel this big empty space and think, if I had known this was coming, I’d have done things differently.”
Dialogue from Final Fantasy 7 (Square, 1997)
BLACK HOUR
Introduction
Black Hour centers around a small group of survivors, people who have not been bitten and affected by werewolves. The game begins on the day after a full moon. On the previous day a number of werewolves began a rampage through the relatively small city, attacking and infecting the city’s population with lycanthropy – the tendency, usually a byproduct of a disease or curse, towards involuntarily becoming a werewolf. The survivors believe they must find a way to stop the lycanthropy from spreading and plaguing the city before the next full moon, or else the werewolves are likely to finish the task. The danger of the werewolves taking over the town is made much more likely by the fact that these werewolves are intelligent, and given enough time, such as the twenty-four hours of the full moon day, the wolves will to pack together and accomplish more difficult problem-solving tasks – like rooting out small groups of survivors.
The werewolves in Black Hour do not behave like traditional werewolves, per se. One particular oddity is that on days listed on calendars as being associated with a full moon at night, the infected people become werewolves from the moment that they awaken till the time that they go back to sleep. Also, the werewolves assume their lupine – wolfish – form every day from 6:30pm until 7:30pm, the so-called Black Hour. Finally, none of the werewolves are aware of their condition, suppressing all memories of being werewolves during the Hour, and leading regular human lives for the rest of the day. These people employ cognitive dissonance whenever they encounter evidence of werewolf activity from the night or even hour before, despite the fact that this wanton ignorance adds a surreal quality to their existence – as evidenced by newspaper and television stories throughout the game that report the bizarre events caused by the werewolves, but attribute them to various other causes.
Gameplay in Black Hour will take part in two phases – survival, the phase leading up to the dreaded “full moon day,” and infiltration, which occurs during the full moon day and leads to the game’s resolution. In each phase, the player has limited and different knowledge of the werewolves’ nature and the effects of this limitation is illustrated by the narrative, camera work, and gameplay mechanics of each phase.
Phase 1: Survival
At the beginning of the game, the player character finds himself in a survivor’s meeting at an old high school. He is surrounded by about two dozen other survivors, who come from various walks of life, including, but not limited to, teachers, doctors, members of the U. S. Army, and computer programmers. Several of the “survivors” are not really survivors but are victims of the lycanthropy who are aware of their condition and lock themselves away during the hour or allow the doctors to experiment on them – within reason.
The player character learns that he has roughly one month to help determine the cause of the lycanthropic outbreak, and of the werewolves’ unexplained, non-“textbook” behavior. Failure to accomplish this goal in one month will not necessarily result in the termination of any attempt to stop the lycanthropy, but the survivors are not sure whether they can survive the upcoming full-moon day. The other, non-player characters present differing views on how stopping the outbreak may be accomplished, such as the use of lethal violence, as the game will include a number of traditional survival-horror weapons; the use of non-lethal violence, which would involve raiding a police station under cover of the Black Hour for Tasers, or perhaps a zoo or hospital for tranquilizers to subjugate the werewolves; other characters advocate that this kind of violence is not conscionable against what may very well simply be sick humans and suggest less violent routes such as gathering information through medical, historical, and psychological assessment of infected humans. The player is also informed of the werewolves’ habits during the Black Hour: their roaming, eating, and packing habits, and their strange tendency towards grouping together in the main town square for a period of time before spending their last 10-20 wolfish minutes in what appears to be either searching for survivors or trying to leave town.
At this point, the player is given the choice as to which path (or blend of paths) of “player quests” he or she wishes to go down. It is important to note that in Black Hour the non-player characters will each attempt to do his or her own thing regardless of whether the player chooses to join them. The pro-violence groups will eventually attempt to use some violent ways to suppress the werewolves, although, without the player’s siding with the pro-lethal group, the pro-violence group will tend towards non-lethal means. The non-violent groups will also attempt to carry out their plans. The player will have the constant ability to switch between the various groups at will. For example, a player could choose to affect a heist for Tasers and then join with the team who is looking for evidence of prior lycanthropic activity in the area, and later on may decide that going on a shooting rampage is best. The game will allow the player to make these decisions, as Black Hour will be more-or-less an automated story that characters play a single actor in, rather than a set of events that are triggered by and occur around the player. This model of the player as a supporting actor rather than the initiator of the action is suggested by adventure games legend Tim Schafer, creator of the Curse of Monkey Island series (Pearce 8-10).
Over the course of this first phase, four overall events will take place. The more violent non-player characters will find that violence does not enable them to defeat the werewolves, and they will in fact eventually become infected themselves. In the process, they will also alert the local police to the fact that a “violent domestic terrorist group” exists in the city, which will result in a police crack-down on the survivors, in about five days after the defeat of the pro-violent ex-survivors. The police scrutiny will force the player and the non-violent characters to work towards their goals more quickly. Second, the non-violent survivor characters will determine that the lycanthropy is not in fact caused by any disease or medical condition; they will also discover that the city has a history of hushed-up werewolf activity. Eventually, it will be determined that the city was founded by a number of refugee werewolves and that the entire town is actually descendants of werewolves – the wolfish tendency is part of the nature of the people, and not caused by an external force. The bizarre non-storybook behavior of the werewolves is simply caused by the social acceptance of lupine behavior during the Black Hour and on days marked on the calendar as having full moons.
These events will serve to pressure the player to move forward in the story. Roughly thirty game days from the beginning of the game, which is about the same time that the true nature of the werewolves comes to light, the dreaded full moon day – twenty-four hours of lycanthropic activity – will begin. The full moon day will be the player’s largest challenge to date, as the werewolves will begin to coordinate their actions after about an hour. The werewolves will attempt both to root out any survivors and to begin attacks on the neighboring towns. This widespread and dangerous lycanthropic activity ends up alerting the United States government to the threat of a werewolf outbreak and, quickly thereafter, the U.S. Army is dispatched to deal with the situation. If the player cannot resolve the lycanthropy by the end of the day, the town and everyone in it will be destroyed.
Phase 2: Infiltration and Resolution
With the realization of the nature of the werewolves, the player character gains the self-knowledge that he is also a werewolf and can assume the form of a werewolf at will. Doing so allows the player to infiltrate the werewolf’s assemblies without getting killed. This ability is especially important during the full moon day, as every other person in the city at this point is a full-fledged werewolf. While in werewolf form, however, the character’s propensity towards violence increases with time, causing the player to risk losing control of the character with increasing probability. Violence during this phase is still treated as a negative, and so giving into the player character’s new wolfish tendencies will still be a very bad thing.
During his infiltration of the werewolves, the player character learns that the werewolves are basically acting out of their own desires for power and control. When coordinated over greater periods of time (like full moon days,) the werewolves are attempting to create a lycanthrope-Supremacist state, which is driving the attacks on neighboring towns and which spurred the attacks on the surviving townspeople. The werewolves believe that by spreading the lycanthropy to humans, they can create a new, perfected state.
At this point, the player is given the choice as whether to attempt to defeat the alpha male, a pro-violence survivor character from the beginning of the game who now leads the werewolves, and assume command of the werewolves. This resort to violence would begin a set of events, explained in a full motion video, where the werewolves attack the U. S. Army and are defeated, because the American firepower is still greater than the werewolves’ lycanthropic powers – although, some visual cues will suggest that some of the werewolves or, at least, some other werewolves continue to live on as some of the U. S. Army soldiers may have been infected during the fighting, or possibly have been werewolves all along.
If the player chooses to avoid the final confrontation, he or she is given an alternative route, which involves infiltrating a fairly well-guarded high-rise and using a local television/radio station to attempt to communicate with the werewolves and the U.S. Army. The player may, once again, use violent or non-violent methods, although nonviolent methods tend to once again be privileged as the sounds and smells associated with the violence will attract more enemies. When the player character arrives in the television studio, he begins a broadcast informing both the werewolves and the United States as a whole of the current situation – that the people are all werewolves, and that their lycanthropy is, albeit unconsciously, voluntary. He urges the werewolves to abandon their hostile ways and resume normal human activity. While some of the werewolves accept his words, most of the werewolf-supremacists attempt to storm the player character in the studio. The player character then must run to the top of the high-rise, where he is rescued by a U. S. military chopper. In the final movie, the player urges the military to rescue any people who return to human form. The game ends with the military attempting to accomplish this while defending against the werewolf supremacists. The ending video, while positive, is bittersweet in that it remains ambiguous whether or not the remaining werewolves will survive, and also whether the werewolves who return to their humanity will choose to stay that way, whether the American people will accept their humanity or whether the ex-werewolves will always be treated as monsters, and whether the ex-werewolves’ lust for power will resurface.
EXPLICATION
Richard Olsen argues that in order to reach popular culture, one needs to use methods that appeal to the mindset traditionally associated with being “right-brained,” that which privileges imagery and sounds, because the new culture is highly iconic (Olsen 2). According to this model, a method of reaching today’s popular culture must be immersive (2), experiential (3), popular (5), entertaining (6), and external to the viewer (7). A video game such as Black Hour is designed to exhibit all of these traits.
On Genre
The survival-horror genre is based on the basic notion that the player (the “self”) is beset upon by monsters (the “other,”) that he or she must defeat and destroy in order to survive. This means that, structurally, survival-horror games are based on the notion that survival is attained through the “self” engaging in gratuitous violence against the “other.” This notion might be acceptable in a video game environment where the “other” is inhuman, but translates very poorly and dangerously into the rest of human lives, particularly when the person who has this notion might have a bigoted view of what the “other” is: e.g., people of minority or women.
On Werewolves
Werewolves are a metaphor for the dangerous undercurrent of evil given by hegemonic consent (DiGiglio-Bellamore 3). Werewolves refer to humanity’s use of the power of ideological manipulation in a world without a proper balance of power (4). The “werewolf” of hegemony gains its power when society turns a blind eye to the hegemonic power structures that make up their world.
Another reason for using werewolves as the primary monster in Black Hour is that werewolves deconstruct the typical human/monster opposition of the survival-horror genre. Werewolves are both humans and monsters, depending on the time of day. In Black Hour, none of the werewolves are consciously aware of their monster status, and therefore lead normal lives most of the time. This means that the enemies in Black Hour are constantly changing sides on the human/monster opposition, making the use of violence an ethical dilemma.
On Fight Club
Most of Black Hour is an adaptation of Fight Club’s themes, translated into a story of werewolves in order to fit Fight Club into the survival-horror genre. Also, Black Hour gives the player the choice of multiple routes through the adapted Fight Club story, and privileges non-violent routes. Fight Club tells the story of a pervasive and evil fascist empire created through channeling the self-suppressed antisocial tendencies of masculine nature (Ta 265). Black Hour’s evil is created through the subconscious acting-out of werewolf nature, but the theme of creating a contagious evil by constructing an environment where violent, antisocial behavior is socially acceptable – what Olsen calls the “werewolf curse” – is largely the same (Olsen 4.) Unlike in Fight Club, however, where the members of Project Mayhem are men trying to maintain their masculinity and the implied male supremacy, Black Hour’s werewolves are attempting to maintain their wolfish power and superiority by assuming their lupine forms (Ta 267). Black Hour also brings to bear a similar irony to that of Fight Club: Fight Club’s Project Mayhem attempts to use anarchy to defeat a repressive “feminizing” society, while creating a secret society that is just as repressive (267). Likewise, in Black Hour, many of the survivors espouse the use of violence to defeat the violent werewolves, unaware that they themselves are also werewolves, also prone to the use of violence as power, the sign of the werewolf curse.
On Fascism
Fascism is common to both Black Hour and Fight Club. Jennifer Barker argues that Project Mayhem’s members are silenced shaped by their leader, Tyler Durden (Barker 180-181). Likewise, the Fight Club is a governing body that claims to give meaning to its followers as long as they follow its rules absolutely (181). In Black Hour, the werewolves become organized into a similar movement, under the thumb of their leader, the alpha male.
Fascism plays an explicit role in Black Hour because players of Black Hour might not reject violence as a result of the breakdown of the human/monster opposition, and might resurrect the opposition in the form of a new monster/human structure. If they do so, they miss the point of the whole game. Rather than prevent the player from siding with the fascist werewolves, Black Hour enables the player to join the werewolf supremacists, but illustrates why and how this route does not work.
On Camera Work and Being a Werewolf
During Phase 2 of Black Hour, the player character gains the ability to be a werewolf, giving the player the experience of the very power that he or she is supposed to be resisting. The feeling of power will be illustrated by through the use of camera techniques: when the player character is human in form, the game will use an over-the-shoulder third-person camera view. The third-person view conveys a sense of vulnerability and mortality (Carr 24). When the character assumes werewolf form, however, the camera will shift to the popular first-person shooter view – the avatar is invisible and the player sees his or her character as simply a weapon, in this case a wolf’s snout. The first-person view gives the player a feeling of immortality and power. This camera change will make lycanthropy, which is Black Hour’s metaphor for the use of violent power, seductively attractive to the player, as it frees him or her from being related to a weaker, mortal character (25). Prolonged use of the werewolf form, however, will cause the player to lose control of the player character, illustrating the way in which the use of power as social control snowballs out of control and into violence (Ta 267).
Conclusion
It is my desire that Black Hour’s target audience – existing fans of the survival-horror genre – will come to realize that wielding violent power against the other, whether the other is a video game monster or a real-life person, is ineffective and simply leads to counter-violence. Black Hour adapts Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club into a video game, and gives the player the choice of multiple paths through the action – the player is not simply forced to take Fight Club’s narrator’s path of following the villain Tyler’s lead towards fascism. By providing the player with choices and by pairing the choices up with realistic consequences to otherwise gratuitous actions, I hope that Black Hour will cause gamers to begin to ask relevant questions about the nature of violence and to realize that the distinction between the self and the other is purely artificial.
Works Cited and Consulted
Barker, Jennifer. “‘A Hero will Rise’: The Myth of the Fascist Man in Fight Club and Gladiator.” 36.3 (2008): 171-187.
Bendle, Mervyn F. “The Apocalyptic Imagination and Popular Culture.” Journal of Religion and Popular Culture. 11 (2005): n.p.
Carr, Diane. “Play Dead: Genre and Affect in Silent Hill and Planescape Torment.” International Journal of Computer Game Research. 3.1 (2003): n.p.
DeGiglio-Bellemare, Mario. “‘Even a Man Who is Pure in Heart’: Filmic Horror, Popular Religion, and the Spectral Underside of History.” Journal of Religion and Popular Culture. 10 (2005): n.p.
Hall, Richard and Kristy Baird. “Improving Computer Game Narrative Using Polti Ratios.” International Journal of Computer Game Research. 8.1 (2008): n.p.
Humphries-Brooks, Stephenson. “The Body and Blood of Eternal UnDeath.” Journal of Religion and Popular Culture. 6 (2004): n.p.
Olsen, Richard. “Keeping the Fidelity in Stereo Catechesis: Opportunities and Dangers in Transmediation of the Gospel as Illustrated in Sister Act I and II.” Journal of Religion and Popular Culture. 14 (2006): n.p.
Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996.
Pearce, Celia. “Game Noir – A Conversation with Tim Schafer.” International Journal of Computer Game Research. 3.1 (2003): n.p.
Smith, Greg M. “Computer Games have Words, Too: Dialogue Conventions in Final Fantasy 7.” International Journal of Computer Game Research. 2.2 (2002): n.p.
Square. Final Fantasy 7. Tokyo: PlayStation, 1997.
Ta, Lynn M. “Hurt So Good: Fight Club, Masculine Violence, and the Crisis of Capitalism.” Journal of American Culture. 29.3 (2006): 265-277.
