291: To Die at the Hands of Your Own Creation

[CopperBoom]

I already loved Alan Wake but the way this piece frames it makes me appreciate it even more.

Alan Wake is about making a game as INCEPTION is about making a film... brilliant!

Thanks for the great article, it really makes the whole game; including the ending; make more sense to me.

 

[lohac]

Brilliant! Having followed Remedy's work much of my life, I'm pleased to see their style is still very much intact. Ever since Death Rally in 1996, their creations have all had a metalayer or three stacked on on top of otherwise simply enjoyable narratives and gaming experiences.

 

[Denizen]

Incredible deduction, your insight was very motivating. Thank you

 

[Dr.Nick]

Absolutely great article Definitely made me look at the game in new ways.

 

[Moeez]

Yeah, after I was done with the game and loved it, it just made me think this is Inception in videogame form. Ridiculous level design with the tilting level in Writer DLC, clever storytelling, guilt-driven characters with wives, and a strive to return to normalcy. Oh, and it's actually really funny in places, when it's going all meta. References to Max Payne. Night Springs, as Twilight Zone. Barry Wheeler. Old Gods of Asgard. The Taken's commonplace stock dialogue turned menacing is SO good!

If you haven't, you MUST play the DLCs, Signal and Writer. They continue the story right off, and are an epilogue.

Can't wait for "The Return", if it ever happens.

 

[Juan Regular]

You´re definitely overthinking it a fair bit, but a very interesting read nonetheless.

 

[Lucifer dern]

I have never read one of your articles before.
you have a new fan.
That was a brilliant read.

 

[voetballeeuw]

Fantastic read, I really enjoyed it. It's always interesting to see a great game in a different light.

 

[The Random One]

Excellent work. Alan Wake, for all its shortcomings, is a game that deserves this sort of scrutiny. I'm not sure if that is what the work is intended to be, every interpretation is valid, and yours is great and wonderfully woven together.

The bit about the Dark Presence being a force of uncreativity was specially striking to me. I noticed that the game sets the Dark Presence as being a sinister, evil intelligence, but in practice it is really dumb and all it does to try to stop wake is to send people to hit him with shovels and throw barrels at him. That is, the Dark Presence is pretty dumb. I honestly wondered if the game designers had designed it to be that way or if they just had failed to realize how dumb their big villain was; your analysis gives me hope for the former.

I could write an entire article on theories on Alan Wake, but one thing that I thought was interesting was how the manuscripts were supposed to be the entirety of the Deliverance book, but they were of course small, self-contained bits of exposition. I wonder if it would be possible to write an entire, novel-lenght book made entirely of two-paragraph koan-style tidbits. If I do I'll name it Deliverance.

I respect what you've written here, but I don't find theorizing about Remedy and especially Sam Lake (neither of whom you seem to have actually talked to) in this way particularly useful. Alan Wake was a complex and obviously troubled project that - I guarantee - had a lot going on behind the scenes. I think there'd be genuine insight to be gained from an article on that, if you could ever get past the NDAs, but a straight up lit crit essay leaves me cold. Only my impression, and thank you regardless for putting your work up on The Escapist.

Respectfully,

Colin

This amuses me a lot. Have you heard of something called Death of the Author? It's a theory of literary analysis that says that once an author has published a work, their ideas on what it means or how the story goes are of no more importance than your average joe's, because after a work is release all of its meaning and stories should be contained within it. I remember reading that Vladmir Nabokov caught some major flak from critics after he said one character in one of his books (Pale Fire if memory serves) commited suicide after the book's end, until another critic came along and said that there were, indeed, things in the narrative that supported the theory of the guy who freaking wrote it. It's pretty much an alien idea in this world of pop culture obsesses with canon and with the creators dripping tidbits of info on us.

My point is that, yes, he could have talked to Remedy and heard what they say on it, but under Death of the Author, it wouldn't be any more valid that what he wrote here.

 

[TailstheHedgehog]

A fantastic article. Alan Wake never really got the credit it deserves, and I can't help but think it's because there's not many people willing to think about it as anything but a toy. It's good to see parts of it being scooped up and analysed - especially into this fascinating read.

 

[Condemned]

I loved the game but I never thought about it this way. This article was fascinating.

 

[AxelxGabriel]

... or just maybe it's none of those things and it was just a bad game.

 

[ryukage_sama]

Very interesting perspective. I wonder if any of the game's developers would comment on this interpretation.

 

[Jacob.pederson]

Very interesting article, Rob.
Fascinating to think of the game as a meta commentary on other games and game development. Not sure I agree, but fun to think about.

Initially, I wanted to poo-poo the connection to Bioshock. because I saw Zane's suit more like an astronaut (bursting with light), while the bigdaddy is a monster (darkness contained). I assumed they must have started AlanWake with the suit in mind, because it's so similar to an astronaut suit, then refused to change course later when Bioshock came out.

But while playing the game I noted other possible references. I wondered if one part with a large teetering crashed plane might be a nod to Lost (my initial thought was "man, you just can't do a crashed plane in the woods any more. not after Lost.").
And at another part, I was overwhelmed by the farm concert scenario, having just enjoyed the concert finale in L4D2. i remember strongly wondering who was ripping who off.!

Now, after reading your thoughts, I'm eager to go back and play much closer attention to the names and scenarios. Maybe they weren't coincidences?
Seems like someone could write a book on all the potential nods! heh. hmm.

(Like: are the clouds of ravens a nod to Gears of War? Was the initial car crash a nod to silent hill? etc.)

I saw the diving suit as more of a reference to "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly"
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0401383/

 

[Mooshman]

I bought a 360 for Alan Wake, I'd owned a PS3 since launch and the more I saw of Alan Wake the more I fell in love with the idea of a 'lovecraftian' story (what I thought from the trailers) , with the punchy writing of Remedy after loving the narrative of Max Payne.

The more I found out about it, the more I found out about the troubled development behind the scenes. I bought a 360 and a copy of the game to just support the devs, too many original titles get buried whilst stale sandbox games get oodles of sales and sequels (crackdown, I'm looking at you).

Ever owned a console with just one game to play? Provided it's good it consumes you, I got lost in the mythos and the likeable characters to the point where I completed it 3 times.

And not even once did I pick up on what was noted in this article. My mind has been blown by what was wrote here, and as I type this the good old 360 is booted up and the Remedy logo is splashed across my screen.

Congratulations to the developers, Alan Wake isn't just a tale of a struggling dev team, but a monolith of inspiration to other devs.

 

[beema]

Great read. I had no idea this game was so "meta." Very intriguing. I always wanted to give the game a try, a shame it's exclusive to xbox.

 

[Unesh52]

I really enjoyed reading that. I almost want to go out and buy this game. Almost.

 

[Woodsey]

I like your take on the lodge sequence, but the diving suit being a reference to Bioshock giving Sam Lake hope for games as an art form iiisssss...a bit of.....a stretch. To say the least.

Agreed - there is such a thing as looking too much into something, and I wonder if they're looking into the lodge sequence too far also.

Could it not just be a joke, as in the development of the game had driven them close to madness? They've even said they'd do 6 months work (especially early on when it was open-world, which would have been a terrible mistake I might add) and then just scrap most of it. I mean, Sam Lake's not a bad writer, but after Max Payne and Alan Wake I am starting to wonder if he really does think those metaphors are good. In which case, could he construct something as subtle as an asylum representing the big bad publisher? Perhaps, I guess.

... or just maybe it's none of those things and it was just a bad game.

The point of the article is not to excuse it for being a "bad game".

Anyway, I do hope it gets a sequel. Now they know the direction they're going it's not going to take 5 years.

 

[Therumancer]

Interesting, and believe it or not I had similar thoughts when playing the game, though I didn't tie everything together quite the same way you did. My approach to it was a little differant.

The thing about Alan Wake though is that while I liked the game itself, I think it tends to summarize a lot of the problems with the game developers themselves. Namely the simple fact that they made a game which largely seems to be a giant whine about their own situation. This combined with being upset with the performance and player response when this is what they deliver, along with the product not being what they promised to begin with.

See, the thing with the "poor us" bit is that the game developers seem to be detached from reality. It wasn't all that long ago when The Escapist had an article where some game developers were complaining about working 10 hour days, which is pretty much a normal work day for most ordinary people. On top of this you look at some of these virtual office tours and the like, and all the staged events aside, these guys are almost totally unprofessional, it doesn't surprise me that there are complaints when they actually get told to you know, do the work they are being paid for, they exude that vibe in a lot of cases. Add to this that these huge development budgets go to human resources, with the development budget largely being what a design team decides it wants to pay itself, and it's really hard to take "oh, pity us poor tormented creative souls" arguements seriously.

I'll also be honest in saying that "Alan Wake" represents one of the two major examples of prima-donna attitudes among game developers. Largely because while decent, it's NOT the game people wanted, or what was promised, and yet people who criticize that seem to be looked down on. To date we're still waiting for a sandbox survival horror game that delivers on the promises made here. The second is of course my much rehashed criticism of Bioware over them asking for feedback on "Hawke" in Dragon Age II, getting a negative response, and then trying to present it as something else while going right ahead doing whatever they want to anyway... asking for input your going to ignore if you don't hear what you want is one of the things that really slots me off. The third is of course Blizzard's (in)famous "we make games, not promises" response to not delivering on what they promised the community, though that has faded with the passage of time, I still get irritated when I think about it. Whether or not I agree with them or not on actual issues being discussed, the game industry acts like a group of Olympian gods elevated that far above their fans, even while they occasionally deign to try and make a show out of pretending "oh hey we're just like you" when they think it can help sales. When you add a huge "QQ" rampage to the whole thing it's positively maddening.