...and here's the other thing I've been working on!

Hey everyone (again),

As per the last post, here's the other thing I've been working on. Similarly this is a work in progress right now, but putting this through as a paid post now just means that I'm not without income for the next month which would obviously be a big help. This one is not going to take as long to finish as the Metal Gear Solid behemoth, obviously. As with that piece, I'm working on this pretty constantly.

The thing is, the script was already largely done, because what I'm doing is presenting a video version, exclusive to patrons, of a piece I wrote for a book that will be releasing very soon! I got approached around this time last year and was asked if I wanted to contribute a piece to a Lost in Cult affiliated project called Mansion, broadly themed around horror and haunted houses and the like.

There are a lot of games that would probably immediately come to mind to write about in that regard, but one of the suggested titles was The Sims—a game you don't normally associate with horror, which made the concept of writing about it in such a way all the more tempting.

What resulted is, without wishing to sound boastful or anything, what I think might be one of my favourite things I've written—talking about how The Sims might actually be more abject in its horror than something like PT, and how it shares a lot of similarities with the inherent discomfort of certain slow cinema. I also get to flex my creative writing muscles a little bit, which proved to be extremely fun.

So yeah, apparently the book is shipping now... or soon (I haven't heard a whole lot about it since the initial post many, many months ago)? You can get it here if you're so inclined, and indeed it is unbelievably cool that this will be the first time my game writing has been physically published. I just thought it would be fun for patrons to get a video version of the piece to accompany it. Writing for the page is pretty different to writing for video, so I've had to adapt a few things for that version, but the spirit of the piece remains consistent.

I'll post the script below, and the video will follow very soon. Once again, I cannot thank you enough for your patience with all of this. It's just been, as is hopefully evident, a whooooole lot of work. Rest assured though, I have been working pretty much constantly to ensure it all gets done. The videos will be with you extremely soon!

Thank you so much once again. You are all the best.

Hamish

Writing on Games

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“My home is trying to kill me.” A short sentence, but one dense with narrative potential.

Our philosophical conception of home (developing, as historian John Lukacs posits, in the seventeenth century alongside a “bourgeois insistence on personal privacy”) represents possibly the pinnacle of comfort and sanctuary—where all barriers we raise to shield us from the dangers of the outside world come down. It’s a place where you can truly be yourself, at your least filtered and most intimate… and that place where you should feel the safest has turned on you.

How has it turned? Is it something within the walls? Is it the home itself? How can a home kill? Can the inhabitants truly know what is happening to them? Will they be believed? This is the kind of horror that gnaws at you, opening up the possibility that some supernatural evil could be lurking in your most cherished of spaces and that you might never truly understand it—a situation where any physical threat pales in comparison to the emotional torment being inflicted on the characters in such a scenario.

Perhaps unexpectedly, this is also the kind of horror that underpins almost all day-to-day existence in The Sims. What’s more, it’s a horror of your own creation. You built the house you haunt.

With the series’ visual design presenting a colourful, happy-go-lucky vision of suburban America (satirical or otherwise), my guess is that this isn’t a conclusion many would readily come to. To the extent that the occult appears, it is largely played for laughs. When Sims die, for example, they are taken to the afterlife by a cartoon of the Grim Reaper.

And yet, the reality is that torture and torment have long been considered part of The Sims’ systemic lexicon, to the point that Sim murder is almost mundane, even if it is rarely spoken about so explicitly. A far cry from the game’s now fairly cosy image, adolescent discussions of The Sims both online and in the playground back in the day would inevitably turn to the expectedly juvenile ways in which people were sowing the seeds of chaos and despair.

Despite the fact that Sims have been able to leave swimming pools freely without a ladder for multiple games now, removing said ladder and leaving your Sim to drown is a method of despatch that has become downright iconic in its glib sadism. It’s second perhaps only to trapping your Sim in a room with no door, food or bathroom—the kitschy tarpaulin draped over these mechanics and systems shifting what could be read as abundant cruelty into comedy.

You might turn the alarms off or remove the phones, so that when tragedy does befall the household you created (perhaps naturally, perhaps by commanding a Sim to, say, set off a firework in their own home), they have no means of alerting anyone—screaming into a void that will not respond.

This tomfoolery, crucially, places players in a very unusual role for games in general, let alone one as outwardly cartoonish as this—that of the horror antagonist. You are the spectre haunting the houses of every Sim you take control over—turning the foundations of the home, its doors and walls and floors, against its inhabitants. In so doing, you shift the home as we know it into something much more sinister—a place of surveillance.

This isn’t the kind of horror where you act as The Thing That Goes Bump In The Night. Sims, with their fairly stark emotional states, mostly lack any conception of who or what is controlling them—let alone suspicion regarding the machinations of their unknown, unseen puppet master. As such, sneakily shifting furniture around won’t create any dramatic tension—the Sim won’t be compelled to figure out what’s going on.

Instead, the horror of The Sims, as resulting from your actions, is less Poltergeist than it is Cube—an exercise in psychological and physical torture that, to your test subjects, might as well be happening for no reason. You carefully observe and alter the movements of your guinea pigs, reading the gauges and subtly altering their environments to push them to their absolute limits. This might seem a little extreme, but all it takes is a slight change in perspective and suddenly The Sims shifts from fun suburban satire to horror that borders on the cosmic.

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Richard, a lawyer, was helping his longtime partner Eileen feed their two young children before school and the morning commute.

Putting down his utensils, he felt compelled to walk into an unassuming, unfurnished new room in their two-storey suburban home, whereupon he suddenly found he had nowhere to go. There existed no memory of why he was there, no purpose. Recollection was not even a faculty he fully possessed.

He turned around, unable to process the fact that the door he entered through was not in its original place. It had disappeared—just one more patterned tile to match the aseptic modern wallpaper that now surrounded and enveloped him.

The fact that, in an instant, this unsuspecting closet had just become his tomb seemed to have little effect on him. It caused no alarm. It didn’t even register—not with Richard, nor with his family downstairs. How could it have done?

He stood in place for almost an entire day before displaying any real discomfort. Lacking the luxuries afforded by his well-paying job that otherwise adorned the home immediately outside these four walls, he became bored. Without a fridge or stove, he desired sustenance unavailable to him. A squirm materialised in his step as he nervously grabbed his crotch, requiring use of the bathroom lying tantalisingly out of reach—beyond a thin layer of drywall that nonetheless he lacked the capacity to tear down. His family watched cartoons downstairs.

Another day passed. His partner prepared meals for the two kids who went off to school. Richard hadn’t slept. Without a bed, he was irritable. The squirming intensified. He cried out towards the ceiling as if to beg for help from whatever power might lay beyond it. With those cries unanswered, urine streamed down his leg, pooling with such intensity that it left a visible mark in the carpet. It would not be the last. Exhausted and humiliated, Richard collapsed in his wet filth.

He pleaded for anything that would lessen the stench of the three-by-four tiled prison he had now endured for days; he yearned to bathe—the frustration of his inability to do so increasingly exacerbated by his lack of food or a pillow upon which to lay his head. He screamed and screamed and screamed at the ceiling, not even to be let out per se—he’d have been happy with a toilet haphazardly shoved into what, for days, had served as the entirety of his living space.

He was granted no such mercy. No one responded. His partner and children regarded his disappearance with the same alarm they expressed towards their recent inability to access this particular storage space—that is to say, neither seemed to throw them off their stride. They did not miss him as he rotted away—they could not. Their daily routines continued.

Would it have rendered this continued decay any less agonising for Richard had some unknown entity responded to his cries? Had he known that his predicament resulted from an act of completely random sadism—his life forfeit to nothing more than a puerile desire to inflict pointless harm, as if he were an ant under a magnifying glass on a scorching summer’s day?

He had no means of comprehending such heady notions. All he felt was pain and hunger and exhaustion and stress and unguided, generalised rage—as frustrated at himself for being unable to remedy his ills, as he was at whatever absurd force might have placed him in this situation to begin with.

He collapsed once more, the fibres of the carpet encrusted with whatever piss and tears his desperately dehydrated body could muster. He would not get up. As his body lay lifeless, the image of Death itself appeared as if to make a mockery of the walls that had imprisoned Richard for all this time. With a similarly effortless flick of the wrist, his soul was wrought from the emaciated husk that once contained it. 

Death departed with its bounty. The door reappeared.

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There’s something inherently uneasy about The Home as a horror setting. Where most games in the genre have you trying to figure out the hows and whys of a fairly immediate problem—what caused this zombie outbreak you’re escaping from, for example—Hideo Kojima’s PT instead places you in a setting that isn’t obviously hostile. Its hallway is one you’ve likely seen dozens of, rendered so pristinely that the ways in which its subtle details are achingly contorted—an old portrait scratched into oblivion, the hallway light turning red—are as likely to set you on edge as Lisa, the wraith chasing you through this loop. The home itself morphs into an object of distrust—its quiet mundanity becoming one of its biggest threats.

Or, in the realm of film, take Chantal Akermann’s seminal work of slow cinema, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, in which we are provided a remarkably unvarnished view of the titular Jeanne across the film’s three-and-a-half hour runtime. This is not a horror film per se, nor is there anything inherently horrific about the actions we see her carry out—prolonged shots of cooking meals, eating, bathing, cleaning the house, etc.—but it’s a film whose starkness makes me squirm every time I watch it. 

It’s the fact we’re so intensely viewing these moments to begin with, surveilling this woman. The camera does not allow us to look away, turning Jeanne’s already cramped home into a borderline panopticon—where she is allowed no reprieve from every societal pressure imaginable bearing down upon her (to remain prim and proper while providing everything to everyone around her on demand), for fear that she is being watched, judged. Clearly, it’s not an unreasonable fear to have, and the resultant violence of the film’s final scene is just as understandable—no less comfortable than anything else we’ve been forced to stare at within these claustrophobia-inducing walls.

The thing is though, PT at least has a linear progression—you can outwit Lisa and, for all intents and purposes, win. Even Akermann’s film, despite its naturalistic presentation, sees a narrative presented in which a woman is pushed to her limit, expels the metaphorical demon from her home and returns, however momentarily, to a place resembling almost meditative calm. Credits roll—we can imagine what happens to her afterwards, but as far as the boundaries of the story are concerned, we leave her in that calm. Viewers are granted some mercy. We can leave the house.

In The Sims, no such clemency is afforded. You can never leave, because such narrative boundaries do not exist. The Sims is a perpetual engine of cruel cosmic indifference.

A pipe will burst in a bathroom and, with no means of alerting anyone and seemingly lacking the ability to fix it themselves, a couple will simply try their best to clean up the mess. The mess, however, never stops—one flood is dealt with, only for two more patches to appear. The need to stop the flood saps up all available energy—any thoughts of food and sleep go out the window. The couple fails to show up to their respective jobs and they are both fired. Their abject despair in mopping for days on end becomes so palpable that they don’t even seem to notice when a social worker comes to collect their now-neglected child from the adjacent room. At this stage I have to turn the game off because it has long become legitimately uncomfortable to watch but, given enough time, it’s hard to imagine the couple doesn’t eventually die cleaning up that mess. If Akermann was working in slow cinema, The Sims can be downright lethargic.

Outside of games or film, the flat I rent in real life has had its share of problems in recent times. Appliances failing, drainage issues, mould… hell, for a brief but frightening moment, asbestos exposure was a legitimate concern. Belligerent in their demands whenever they need something, the landlord and letting agent are disconcertingly silent when asked for assistance in return. Inspectors regularly attend at our inconvenience but nothing gets done—more of an exercise in keeping tenants in line than anything remotely serving the betterment of the living space.

I go through my day increasingly worried that something will go wrong and I will lack the control to fix it and if the landlord responds at all, it will be to cast undue blame. This place is meant to be a home, and yet the feeling of safety and security we associate with that concept seems like it grows further and further away from me.

In those moments, it feels like every home might be a haunted house—haunted by the spectre of countless societal decisions made over decades, centuries that shape these living spaces in favour of monetary gain and bureaucracy above any kind of basic humanity. More immediately though, as those spores fill your lungs, while you wonder when or if the problem you’ve been shouting about for months will ever be sorted—in the same manner a Sim might wonder if the ladder they used to get into the pool will ever materialise again, screaming into a void that gives nothing in return—that worrying thought might just enter your head.

“My home is trying to kill me.”