Personalized Video Games

Angela from "Silent Hill 2" climbing a burning staircase and saying "For me, it's always like this..."

Let’s talk about shovelware for a minute.

When video game critics talk about certain cheaply-made games, they sometimes use a term called "shovelware". This term has a connotation to it. Not only is the game made using limited money or resources, it's probably low-quality. It assumes the creators' primary concern is profitability instead of a pleasant player experience. Player experience may not have been a design factor at all.

Other media deal with similar problems: book publishing has pulp novels, albums can have filler songs.

Part of the reason for that is a push towards industrial scale. This is not art for a single-person or even a specific audience - it's meant for as many people as possible, so the publisher can make as much money as possible.

Video games were one of the last new technologies with common mass market appeal. People could talk about "the new video games of a season" the same way they talk about a TV show season or newly-released movies or a new album by a musician. They were art that you could assume your community knew about. You can talk about video games because you can find people in the cafeteria or dining hall that played the same games. You did not have to go to the subreddit or the Discord server or the YouTube community page for that specific game.

There was a sense of scarcity, too. Indie game developers did not have the Internet to tell you all about their pizzeria animatronics or literature clubs or supernatural pest controls.

At this scale, an individual player is a conceptual premise that has to be true for everything else to work but does not otherwise feel like a serious consideration. A video game producer is not starting the development cycle with “Well, what does this guy like in a video game?” As well they shouldn’t. A focus group to one person’s exact taste ignores the rest of the audience.

Even games that are high-quality are made in a similar media environment. Players might expect to make some emotional connections to the game as they play. A player can care about what the game is trying to do as a experience. But the game doesn't care about what the player is thinking or how they feel at any particular moment.

Right?

Maybe the game can tell what you, the player, the person reading this article, are thinking. Maybe it can respond to that. Maybe it can even do those things when you're not playing.

This is the conceptual opposite of shovelware. Instead of a game that doesn’t care about the player, now the game cares deeply, has intense interest in the player.

People bring their real-life experiences into the games they play.

Why are we so scared of the game bringing itself to us? Because if the game doesn’t like what it sees…

Learning

I have written before about some reasons why painting darkness onto kids’ media has an appeal for storytellers, even when those storytellers are still kids themselves.

Personalization is a similar type of nuanced paint. Like Slappy the Goosebumps doll, the personalized object moves when it shouldn’t, talks when it shouldn’t and creates a sudden two-way relationship between itself and the player. Writers use this tool because a character gains their own dramatic agency where there was none before. It’s the same reason Disney movies personify inanimate objects for their characters.

Video games were the art of our time before the Internet. So when popular games like Super Mario 64 can invade your life, you can't leave the art behind. When you are done looking at art in a gallery or watching a play at the theater, you leave the whole building. You leave the public art and go back to your private life. Personalized video games are already private, already intimate.

Ben Drowned, also a creepypasta designed after the N64's Ocarina of Time, exploited this horror in its first and most famous arc. A college student finds an old copy of OOT and something in the game not only forces him to keep playing but implies that it can spread into the Internet.

The NES Godzilla creepypasta glitches into a surreal nightmare.

Some players of Pokémon Red and Green supposedly experienced Lavender Town Syndrome - physical symptoms from listening to the level's background music.

Stories about tragic, despairing game development are popular for online horror projects at time of writing.

And these are just the most overt stories that use the video game context in service of other stories. Personal touches like Psycho Mantis reading your save data and Colonel Campbell telling you to turn the game console off while you're playing made the Metal Gear Solid games memorable.

Personalizing things that are supposed to be mass-produced goes against centuries-old design trends. The scare that this pre-existing artifact is changing in real time, sometimes as a response to the player and sometimes with a motive that does not include the player, hits the classic cosmic horror vibes.

We are not alone. There is something that treats humans the way humans treat everything around us. It knows we are here. And it hates us.

Intimacy

Now, a game doesn’t have to hate you. It can want to be your friend, fall in love with you, offer you advice, or do thousands of other things friends do. Horror isn’t the only option, but it can get your blood pumping.

One of the (many) tricks that the novel House of Leaves uses to mess with the reader is making the events of the Navidson Record book reflect into Johnny’s life. If you support the idea that the book existed before Johnny encountered it, which not everyone does. I've talked before about Kingdom Hearts and the polluting intertextual feelings I get from that story - that you can't understand any particular idea there without missing three others. House of Leaves does that more pointedly and just shortly before Kingdom Hearts appeared in this timeline.

The "myhouse.wad" Doom map pulls out every trick of its hardware and some from outside its hardware to turn the game into a psychological journey, even borrowing some explicit elements from House of Leaves.

Personalized also means lonely. Most people don’t have the unique version of the video game. That’s what makes it unique. A mass marketed video game that was only made for one or two people, like "Catastrophe Crow", is a self-contradicting artifact. The characters that explore Silent Hill 2 all experience different versions of the town and can’t cooperate with each other. Monika from "Doki Doki Literature Club" kills off the rest of the cast just to be alone with the player forever, knowing information the player often prefers she didn’t.

It’s classic social penetration: the more the game knows about you and you about the game, the more intimate and vulnerable you are with each other. But we are supposed to do this with a game. This is supposed to be parasocial at best, not a two-way relationship. A personalized video game that knows you like you know it messes with our assumptions about social behavior. That’s why the premise shows up in cartoons and comedies. Because if you try to turn off the game and the game says “I’m sorry, I’m afraid I can’t do that”, we have gotten too comfortable. The game knows us better than we know it. And the only thing we know for certain is just how little control we actually have.

But this is a video game, right? It's planned and created by developers in advance. Players can get a lot of choices, but they're not making the game do something new. Games can have multiple endings, but players don't make new endings. Again, doing more than that is breaking the rules. If you want a rabbit hole full of more examples, look for "Urban Legend of Zelda" tropes.

Conclusion

This trope attacks some of the fundamental assumptions humans have about agency. Now, we are not the smart, high-stamina, social creatures at the top of the food chain. We are scared. We are easily manipulable. We are not in control of our destinies. The game is.

And once the game is here, it doesn’t have to stay put with cosmic fear. It can show us visceral gore and physical danger. It can feed an addiction so you never turn the screen off. It can adapt to its environment, like our habitual fear of the current moment’s new technology.

That’s true, but it’s also reductive. There were stories of evil board games existed that forced players to keep playing while creating a game environment around them. Jumanji is the most popular version of this trope. Game nerds have wondered for a long time about social influences and environments for play.

Players treat glitches as features, especially for speedrunning games as fast as possible. Games like Super Mario 64 have exhausting levels of detail in elements as simple as walls to stop you from getting to certain locations. Absurd is not the same as impossible, and the trope of personalized games is keeping up with us, no matter the generation or console.

A personalized video game is a gimmick. It’s only one tool game developers have among many, just like breaking the fourth wall is one tool for a playwright, cinema verité is one tool for a filmmaker, “this is not a game” is one tool for a game master.

Shovelware is cheap, and cheap is not the same as high-quality. Personalization is bespoke, and bespoke is not the same as high-quality. Video games can do more than just know there is a player. The technique has impact because it is unusual. If an actor jumps into asides at every opportunity, they get stale. The work can wear out its welcome, even if it was invited in.