The plot, such as it is, sees the player character deliver a collection of video cassettes from one location to another. Videotape of course already has a rich lineage as a symbol of anxiety of disquiet and distress, of surveillance and copy-anxiety. From David Cronenberg’s Videodrome to Hideo Nakata’s Ring and Hisayasu Sato’s An Aria For a Gaze, the process of copying forbidden events to magnetic tape, and the intrinsic anxiety of the degradation of such events as they are dubbed, mixed-down and shared with unwitting participants explores the fear of a dangerous new medium. Tellingly, in all three of these films, there exists a ‘beeding out’ of themes and ideas encoded within cassettes. Rather than being safely encased within the diegetic enclosure of the tape itself, the recorded media in these texts are able to transcend layers of diegesis, and, in all three films, it gradually becomes harder and harder for the audience as well as the protagonist to distinguish between fleshy fantasy and cold reality. These narratives doubtless arise from societal anxieties surrounding the nascent and ill-understood power of recorded media. If there is such a facile link between media and its effect on a gullible audience, then of course the newly liberating qualities of videotape and its ability to provide the enthusiast audience with the means to be a producer presents a further hurdle to regulation. Video Nasty’s were especially nasty through their hitherto unforeseen ability to bypass traditional and sacrosanct regulatory structures and appear in your own home, raw and unvetted by arbiters of taste and decency.
Growing up, I had a particular aversion to videotapes. The vast stack of my father’s video collection, mainly hastily marked home recorded VHS tapes assembled in dusty black towers terrified me through the thought of what they contained. I knew that they mainly contained horror films, and I knew that I was absolutely not allowed to watch any of them. Internally, I began to fabricate elaborate visions of what they contained: grainy ‘snuff’ films (I had just read an article about supposed death films in Fortean Times), faces being caved in, bodies melting into sludge. Having never seen a horror film, my imagination ran wild. Yet just from imagining the horrors these tapes contained, I began to fear the medium itself. Even being in the same room as them provoked increasing anxiety. What if the contents were so ghastly, so forbidden, that they could get out?
Thus the notion of ‘haunted media’. Something imbued with something beyond our comprehension. Something that seems so very ridiculous and illogical in the cold light of day, yet in the thick black blue shadows of your bedroom wall at night seems as tangible as anything else. All narratives ask an audience to negotiate with this, to suspend disbelief, but also to suspend reason and logic in a process of self-imposed foolishness. When these new rules emerge, jerkily and ill-defined from the diegetic veil, then we must confront the existence of ghosts.
This notion is of course too good to waste of videotapes alone. Thankfully, this very particular anxiety of the wonton obfuscation of the encoding/decoding binary applies particularly well to videogame as well. In fact, there has always been a ‘haunted’ quality to videogames. Their hazy, ill-defined graphics, compounded by the thrilling haze of the cathode ray tube or the blinding glow of of the vector display always seemed to exist in some liminal and unfinished zone. Unlike the cozy, complete and easily identifiable narratives of films, carved into perfect triumvirates of Classical Hollywood Narrative, videogames ask you to explicitly identify with the protagonist, and then to watch them die and be reborn, often within seconds of starting. They excel in manipulating the anxiety of an audience in ways that a film would struggle to do so. The worst case scenario with a film is that you could perhaps not understand it at al. Without the necessary hand/eye coordination and/or explicit dedication, there are many games that you will doubtless never be able to even finish. The narrative resolution such as it is will always be sealed off.
There’s no such roadblock in Paratopic. Everyone who picks up a pad will doubtless finish it and see the conclusory ending credits approximately one hour after launching the application. There is, however, a consistent and constant anxiety that you as a player are doing something wrong by even playing the game in the first place. It feels unfinished and broken, frequently punctuated by (extra?)diegetic glitches that obfuscate the narrative linearity. You, the player character find yourself in a diner, a block of flats, the open road, a service station then a quiet mountain stream. You wander arbitrarily for minutes at a time before finding a small hut. You find a staircase leading down. The iron door at the bottom is closed. Turning away to leave, you hear a creak behind you. The door is now open. You enter a strange room. Push a few buttons. A garbled video plays. It’s all very videogame-like. Yet you cannot find anything else to do.You leave and keep walking. Several minutes later the game glitches out again. You're back in the car. The feeling of doing something inherently wrong intensifies.
In this sense, Paratopic is ‘haunted’. It evokes a particular and hard to place anxiety of something that refuses to stay rooted in it’s diegetic prison. There are other games which evidence this tendency, including Team Salvato’s superlative deconstruction of the visual novel Doki Doki Literature Club! (2007), which will doubtless be explored later, as well as any number of gleefully fourth wall breaking texts from Mother 2 (1994) and Metal Gear Solid (1998). Yet more than any of these, Paratopic revels in its status as artefact as opposed to product. The distinction here is important. An artefact is sacred, imbued with meaning, and, fundamentally, lacks a discernible author. It’s lack of authorial intent stands in direct contrast to a product, which demonstrates and even shows off it’s status as something that was created. Conversely, while a product may implore us to admire and understand it’s craftsmanship, it would be profane to consider the construction of an artefact. It is just there. It has been found, and it is imbued with mystery. To consider it’s creators, or the fact that it was ever created in the first place would strip it of its status as an artefact. Much like the haunted videotapes of my childhood, simply creeping downstairs in the middle of the night and inserting a tape into the VCR would more or less instantly dispel it’s haunted status. Indeed, many years later when I finally watched one of these forbidden films, Alien (1979), I was significantly disappointed in the utter lack of depravity, and it took me years to appreciate it on it’s own merits. The film had lost its status as a haunted artefact, and had become a mere product, made by people a bit like me.
Wisely, you do not see the contents of the videotapes in Paratopic. Until the game’s penultimate scene, when you do. Glitching back to start of the game (yet the end of the narrative?), the soundtrack kicks in with a satisfying electro-thump. The gun you were never allowed to use, despite laboriously loading is in your hand. A man backs away from you, his hands in the air. You pull the trigger, more out of curiosity than anything else. There is an epiphanic gush of blood, and a moment of regret. Again, you have done something wrong. You pick up a videotape and place it into the VCR. The scene glitches back the the second of the murder you have commited. You pick up a different videotape and place it into the VCR. Once more the murder. The penny drops, and the contents of the video becomes crystal clear.
To analyse Paratopic any further goes against the spirit of it’s genuinely dream like narrative, where causality and linearity and continuity are never explicit. In this sense it is similar to the dreamscapes of Lynch, or the aforementioned Cronenberg, with all the anxiety that these entail. Yet the works of these directors are clearly accomplished products. Paratopic feels raw, unfinished and even frustrating. I have no compulsion to replay the game searching for the ‘truth’, to read fan theories, or even to research the creators. Doing so would of course strip the game of its status as an artefact. Paratopic perfectly captures the anxiety inherent in magnetic tape and in videogames, in ephemeral ways that it is difficult to discern. And it quietly pushes the potential of videogames as a narrative medium in an unexpected direction.
All images are taken from the game's Steam page.