Every year or two a new game is inevitably dubbed "the citizen Kane of gaming." Maybe it's Bioshock Infinite, or The Last of Us, or even Mass Effect. The term gets thrown around a lot by over eager critics who are desperate to prove that video games have "made it" as an art form. And yet, most of these people don't seem to realize that Citizen Kane isn't just a good movie. It's a movie that showcased what film can actually do. It flexed the creative muscles of an entire medium. I wondered, then, what games could showcase the potential of video games, and I finally settled on two titles. One was Dark Souls. The other was Silent Hill 2.
It's only recently that I realized how far ahead Silent Hill 2 was. It's not just that it was ahead of its time. It's that it's still decades ahead. And here's why. While Mass Effect ushered in the concept of player choice in games, Silent Hill had already perfected it. Bioware, Telltale, and Quantic Dream have all focused their entire model around player choice, and yet they all fail. They advertise your decisions in the most heavy handed, obvious way possible, and yet simultaneously fail to make your decisions matter. Silent Hill 2 allowed the players behavior to dictate the ending of the game, and yet it did so subtly. Small behavioral patterns, such as gazing at a knife too often, or failing to heal your wounded character, impacted your characters mental state. Some have claimed that it is unfair that most players didn't realize that their decisions mattered, and yet that's why it was so perfect. It allowed for true, organic play through of a game. In a way, the moment a player realizes they have choice is the very moment their play through ceases to be organic. More impressively, every ending is quite different, and manages to say something about both James and the player. Silent Hill mastered player choice before most people even realized it was a thing.
Silent Hill 2 also mastered something that most modern developers are only just figuring out. How to tie together the game play and the plot, so that they are inseparable entities. You can't have one without the other. Dark Souls mastered this as well. The game mechanics reflect your characters lack of combat training. The actual physical environments comment on the mental state of the protagonist, feeding information to the player without need of dialogue or exposition. The plot is subtle, and yet the player can piece together the narrative if they pay attention. Every single action has a symbolic meaning. Something as trivial trivial as killing a monster has meaning, since it represents James's treatment of his wife, and possibly women in general.
It also dealt with themes that modern games would never touch. Sexual abuse of a child, murder, depression, self loathing, sexual depravity and torture, and the dark, secret desires of our hearts. It's a deep, introspective study of the self, unlike anything seen in gaming. For that reason I would argue that gaming has had its Citizen Kane moment for a long, long time.
It's only recently that I realized how far ahead Silent Hill 2 was. It's not just that it was ahead of its time. It's that it's still decades ahead. And here's why. While Mass Effect ushered in the concept of player choice in games, Silent Hill had already perfected it. Bioware, Telltale, and Quantic Dream have all focused their entire model around player choice, and yet they all fail. They advertise your decisions in the most heavy handed, obvious way possible, and yet simultaneously fail to make your decisions matter. Silent Hill 2 allowed the players behavior to dictate the ending of the game, and yet it did so subtly. Small behavioral patterns, such as gazing at a knife too often, or failing to heal your wounded character, impacted your characters mental state. Some have claimed that it is unfair that most players didn't realize that their decisions mattered, and yet that's why it was so perfect. It allowed for true, organic play through of a game. In a way, the moment a player realizes they have choice is the very moment their play through ceases to be organic. More impressively, every ending is quite different, and manages to say something about both James and the player. Silent Hill mastered player choice before most people even realized it was a thing.
Silent Hill 2 also mastered something that most modern developers are only just figuring out. How to tie together the game play and the plot, so that they are inseparable entities. You can't have one without the other. Dark Souls mastered this as well. The game mechanics reflect your characters lack of combat training. The actual physical environments comment on the mental state of the protagonist, feeding information to the player without need of dialogue or exposition. The plot is subtle, and yet the player can piece together the narrative if they pay attention. Every single action has a symbolic meaning. Something as trivial trivial as killing a monster has meaning, since it represents James's treatment of his wife, and possibly women in general.
It also dealt with themes that modern games would never touch. Sexual abuse of a child, murder, depression, self loathing, sexual depravity and torture, and the dark, secret desires of our hearts. It's a deep, introspective study of the self, unlike anything seen in gaming. For that reason I would argue that gaming has had its Citizen Kane moment for a long, long time.
In the game it's obvious that James isn't a 'bad' person but rather just a man whose desires got the best of him. He couldn't see the wife he loved sick and dying and frustrated by his grief and suppressed physical desires he talked her into euthanasia(or maybe even went one step further).
