Freaks | Fiction | One of Us! One of Us!

Everyone; I’ve fallen in love with a freak. And by freak, of course, I mean ‘one in a million’, ‘utterly unique’. What? I’m shifting the cultural emphasis of the word! Shakespeare did it all the time! Refudiate that!



For a couple of months now, I’ve been wondering if there would ever come along a video-game that would, er, refudiate (damn it, it’s addictive) the now-famous Roger Ebert claim that the medium can never be art. Not, you know, wondering that hard. I have fiction-related stuff to be getting on with. That narrative form can presumably take care of itself.

Pictured: art.  And ambiguous directorial motives.

But, still, it matters to me, so I was delighted to find the game that proves him wrong. It’s called Deadly Premonition, and it was made by a small Japanese studio, and then hawked over here a few months ago as a budget game. It got a couple of awful reviews for its dreadful appearance, unnecessary combat, odd design decisions, etc. Then some irritating hipsters began to declare that it was so bad it was good. Then some more irritating hipsters insisted that, actually, in spite of everything it was good in its own right. Now I’m planning to be the most irritating hipster of all.

Let me explain. Deadly Premonition is maybe fifty-percent ripping-off Twin Peaks – a coffee-sipping FBI agent travels to a surreal, pine-filled American town to investigate the death of a young girl – and fifty-percent ripping-off the quirkily-gory Japanese horror games of yesteryear, in particular one of the best (I’ll give you a clue. Deadly Premonition invokes it with mysterious rituals, a deranged killer who tends to pop out and force the hero to hide in nearby cupboards, and a clocktower. A Clocktower.). There’s actually also a little Japanese-style surrealism in there too; the gas-mask-wearing “mysterious capitalist” Harry Stewart, who whizzes about in a wheelchair and speaks only in benevolent proverbs through his rhyming butler, Michael, is pretty Murakami. Actually, has anyone ever taken the time to compare Murakami and Twin Peaks? Might be interesting.

What Deadly Premonition does have is a protagonist who’s pretty unique, and who actually gets to explore the problems and fascinations of the gaming medium without ever truly breaking the fourth wall. Y’see, ‘Agent Francis York Morgan’ is no ordinary FBI agent. In fact, judging from the way he shoves his badge into the face of every new person he meets and announces his full title, staccato, and the fact that he never contacts his agency, ever, we might be inclined to believe that he is no FBI agent, period. ‘York’, as everybody calls him, is a twitchy type with a habit of constantly raising his hand to his ear, as if there’s an earpiece there (there isn’t) and talking to his good buddy Zach, who nobody else can see.

Now Zach is an odd one; part imaginary friend, part spiritual guide, he sees what York sees and to some extent controls him. In the most intense moments, York asks him what he should do, in idleness, York chats to him about 80s movies, and often when he’s having a conversation with one of the townsfolk, York will mock them, in asides, to Zach. Nobody ever seems to notice this. York is obviously a nutter, a freak, though a well-intentioned one – but at the same time, Zach is us, the player; so we laugh at his jokes and warm to his position. The ‘normal’ people very quickly become the outsiders.

Pictured: also art.

I should also mention that, in-game, York has to go around town questioning suspects, calling meetings, holding autopsies, and so on. But everyone in the town has their own daily routine set out for them (they genuinely do follow an intricate pattern around the map), and the game plays out in near-real time. So York, the outsider with nothing to occupy him, is often left with time on his hands and nothing to do, as the town plays itself out all around him?


So what does he do? He smokes endless cigarettes, for one, which do actually cause time to speed up. But he also plays games, sad, lonely games. You can take York down to the lake and fish, in the torrential rain, a happy little smile on his face. You can partake in solo races around the parking lots of the town, which he seems to have invented on the spot, as he never breaks the speed limit. You can even send out for fresh laundry, predict the future in your coffee, shave, and, most poignantly of all, walk up to residents’ houses, which you cannot enter, and ‘peek’ at them going about their daily lives. His freedom is beautiful, but also oppressive. There’s a genuine world, all around him, that he can participate in, but never fully enter. Sooner or later he’ll have to leave the little town and venture back into reality – we can only hope – an improved man. (There’s actually a great deal more of this in the game’s often bizarre and laughable plot. But I spoil not.)

Pictured...actually, okay, this one's debatable.

This is the difference, in the end, between the majority of fiction and video games, or cinema and video games.  Not this illusionary 'freedom' thing, but the fact that the two 'established' art forms allow us to remain apart, an observer to the last (in most cases - see my Second Person article).  Video games take us further in; we become complicit in the action, and more fully immersed.  It's far closer to 'pure' escapism.  I'm often reminded of the danger implicit in the character of Jonathan in Angela Carter's The Magic Toyshop, who daydreams so thoroughly that he drifts out of the narrative and vanishes entirely.  If games are to take us further into the illusionary other-world, my point is, they'll have to work far harder to make sure we come out with a heightened sense of ourselves, not a lessened one.  But it can be done.  There's no reason it can't be done.



What’s that, Zach? Freaks? I don’t remember being asked to write anything about freaks.

Jon Ware
Fiction Editor

Butterflies | Fiction | Two Riders Were Approaching...

“I have given bread to the hungry man, and water to the thirsty man, and apparel to the naked man, and a boat to the shipwrecked mariner.”
The deceased gives good account of himself to the divine court, The Coffin Texts, 2150-1750 BC

“Charity’s a Christian virtue, y’know.”
Bill O’Reilly



I am in love. The moment I read the Ancient Egyptian funereal writings ‘The Coffin Texts’, I fell instantly in love with them.

Honestly – what a religion. My vague memories of being scared by the jackal-headed, monstrous figures in my Horrible Histories books have vanished entirely. The afterlife is presented as the kind of transcendental journey of the self that ought to fascinate anyone even vaguely interested in Hermeticism or in certain of Jung's theories.  And there’s an overwhelming sense of decency to the entire set-up. Evil men are not tormented for all eternity; they’re simply eaten, one time only, by a monster, and are annihilated as a result. Their punishment is not to have an afterlife (all right, so this part's debatable, but I'm taking the optimistic view). The deceased actually gets to defend his own nature before the gods, instead of being told what sort of a man he is; and, if he ascends into the Elysian Fields, rather than making him sing them hosannas to them for all of eternity, the gods will charitably dine with him, and converse with him as an equal. There is much mention of “cakes and ale.”

I’ll say it again – what a religion.

But for our purposes, there’s something that fascinates me still more. It seems the world was not created, in much of Egyptian mythology, by the Christ-like Osiris, or Ra, the sun-god (who does become annoyingly close to all-powerful in the later, and more famous Book of the Dead). It was Thoth, the ibis-headed writer-god, who scribbled down the spell that formed reality. And, furthermore, the Coffin Texts and its forebear, the Pyramid Texts, strongly imply that it is Thoth who causes every event in the gods’ lives to occur, by writing them down; it praises, him, for instance, for bringing about Osiris’ resurrection, rather than praising Osiris himself.

Thoth.  Ultimate Badass?

Now, I like Thoth. He’s also revered as the inventor of all arts and sciences, which suggests he probably wouldn’t get pissed at mankind for discovering fire or a system of morality. He’s my new favourite author, in fact. But this same preoccupation with the immense power of the word – and the fact that this power is in human hands - runs deep through all of the texts. All of the books themselves, most obviously, are spells of a sort; actings-out of the deceased’s journey through the afterlife. At one point, to enter the divine mansions, he must first recall the names of the very hinges of the entrance door – and the planks of wood over the floor refuse to let him pass until he’s given them the names of his feet, which are going to be passing over them.

This same concept of being able to defeat something, or gain its support, by knowing its True Name, has passed through a great deal of our literature since then, most notably becoming extremely popular in modern fantasy. But it has made me ponder something that’s probably a truism; did the Ancient Egyptians revere the power of words more, since their words were pictographic in their written form, and therefore already endowed with symbolic meaning, from the very beginning?
And this brings me on, of course, to the Rorschach butterfly.

We all know it. You could even argue it’s one of the most popular symbols of our time that isn’t associated with a brand; i.e., a symbol that’s endowed with its own meaning, and not meant to imprint a particular product or person in our minds. And, to grossly over-simplify, the idea of it is that the psychiatrist holds up the above picture (the first in a sequence of ten, that grows more complex), asks the subject what they see, and explain their interpretation. And so both the answer and the method of getting there may give clues about the subject’s state of mind.

Now, these images are very much in the public domain. And it’s been argued (quite reasonably) that only testers should have ever been allowed to see them, since subjects are now “primed”; we see a butterfly, or a bat, or a moth, because we’ve seen that symbol before, and we know that’s what it’s supposed to mean, and we want very much to get the ‘right’ answer. Perhaps students of the psyche should have taken a lesson from the Hermeticists or the authors of the Book of the Dead, who argued, “This book is indeed a very great mystery; and thou shalt never allow ignorant folk, or any person whatsoever to see it.” Elitist, perhaps, and that makes our post-modern blood boil, but if everyone knows the meaning of the magic word, it ceases to have value.

It’s the curse of the symbol, more potent than any Egyptian magic; how do we distil cultural baggage from the word, strip it of its existing symbolic meaning so that we can add our own? I’m fond of a technique that’s half-nicked from sources like the ancient tradition (very popular in Egypt, incidentally), of dismembering the corpse so that it can be put back together in the afterlife, of removing the earthly organs so that divine organs can be administered, and half-stolen from Sideshow Bob’s classic ‘rake’ joke. Repeat the word until it loses all meaning. Then repeat it some more, on your own terms, until it’s endowed with a new meaning, that belongs only to you. “I am Yesterday, and Today; and I have the power to be born a second time.”
Try it. It’s quite a spell.