Stucking yourself, again. Aliens and guns...pew pew pew
Hello wonderful friends!
Last week I talked about getting stuck. Or rather, feeling stuck. This week I want to explore the difference, if there is one, between feeling stuck, and actually being stuck.
Perception is really important. My favorite example of the *weight* perception has on experience is the first level of Halo. You start in cryosleep on a spaceship that gets attacked.
Now you’re being boarded… 😱
…and now you’re crash landing ☄ 💥
But you’re totally not bothered. Why? Because it’s the first level. Second level: you’re stranded, alone, and you’re surrounded by hostile aliens. Are you afraid? Only if you’re playing on a hard difficulty 😛
My personal experience is that my perception of where I am in the context of a story arc is the major indicator of how I’m going to feel about the experience. Read: expectations. Don’t we know how expectations can burn forests to the ground…#pixarsequels
Diagrams are the best
The beginning of Halo – the crash and isolation – is the inciting incident to set up the rest of the game. Well made games respect this period as a warmup for players, orienting themselves to a new world. Except Dark Souls. Dark Souls hates you 💀 We expect the first level to be a certain way, and for the progression to follow a certain pattern.
I found an excellent summary of the Halo plot that fits the model rather straightforwardly (in my draft I had this color coded, I can’t do that in Substack🤷♂️)
Inciting Incident
Rising Action
Climax
Falling Action
Resolution
Master Chief is awakened from cryosleep upon the Autumn's arrival at a mysterious ring floating in space.The Covenant, who had managed to find them regardless of the random jump, attacks, and Master Chief hops into an escape pod to land on the Halo ring.
Covenant run rampant on this Halo installation. Naturally, since Forerunners built this Halo ring, the Covenant are fascinated.
The Flood are discovered on the installation, and it becomes a more significant threat than the Covenant.
Master Chief destroys the Halo ring by detonating the Pillar of Autumn.
He escapes the explosion.
Playing Halo, I experienced 2 kinds of stuck: one was where I didn’t know what to do or where to go. Most of the time that wasn’t the case, because for most of the game you have clear instructions of where to go. When you do get stuck – with a room, or encounter with enemies – if you do it a few times, you learn the flow, and can practice to a point where the obstacle is passable. It might take some time, but it feels manageable. Most of the game moved like that, “gently” guiding you through the story/experience. Halo is a well designed game, BH, and you get plenty of context as you move through the story.
The second kind of stuck happened with the introduction of The Flood. The game transformed: it wasn’t just action – action I can handle. Now I’m scared. Scary. Emotions. Ruin. Me. 🙈
The Flood flourish all kinds of horror genre tropes: They’re like zombies. Your resources are tremendously limited. They flood in in seemingly limitless numbers. They kill everything, even the other bad guys. And they’re yucky 🤢
In “Stuck 1”, I’d experience a temporary slowing of momentum through the story arc, as I did whatever I needed to do. But with “Stuck 2” my fear extracts me completely out. Forget excitement, it doesn’t feel like a game anymore. The context changes from: I need to figure this out, to: I’m going to die! My life viscerally feels threatened. Even though it’s not. While fear is merely a slice of the total experience pie, I feel consumed by it. The word “triggered” is used a lot for this.
When I have a clear head, in games or in life, I know exactly what I’m supposed to do: use the grenades, shoot the shotgun, take the damage. I know I’m going to make mistakes while I’m learning, it’s supposed to be “stressful”. The tension is exciting! Fear and excitement are supposedly extremely similar in the way they show up in the hypothalamus. If that’s true, what determines if you’ll be afraid or excited?
Remember: every piece of the game building up to the climax is a setup, intentionally designed to prepare you. Try listening to a song you love starting from your favourite part, without any of the song before. Does it feel empty? A climax is climactic only because it is built, with appropriate measures of tension. Life is the same. You are delivered experiences designed to progress you through your avatar’s story.
The section with The Flood is the climax of Halo’s story arc. Functionally, the difference between this section and the one before is the addition/initiating of horror into the mix.
What I’m learning recently is that for me, for whatever reason, in place of horror I get terror. This video explores the difference in depth, but in summary: Horror is when something scares you, Terror is when you’re scaring yourself.
When my inner animal is scared in a way that feels life-threatening, it shuts out my higher self, hyperfocusing on self preservation. Correct context – appropriate vigilance – is replaced with fight or flight. Let’s massage my initial question using these new terms. What’s the difference between:
I’m stuck, I need to figure this out
vs.
I’m so afraid that I’m experiencing paralysis?
Here’s where I’m at as of this writing: if horror (what’s intended to happen, at least in this case with Halo) is the game scaring (hyperfocusing) me, what’s happening when I hyperfocus(scare) myself?
For me, my personal super-duper core fear is often associated with perfectionism. And the horror elements of Halo wreak havoc on that part of myself. E.g.:
What’s the best thing to do? But I don’t have enough bullets!
Best weapon? Out of bullets!
Best path? Zombies everywhere! BUT I DON’T HAVE BULLETS!!
There isn’t supposed to be a “best” anything at this place in the story: the narrative purpose of The Flood is to be overwhelming! The FLOOD. My issue is, in my Mom’s words, that I start to “should” myself. I should xyz. Isn’t there a way I’m supposed to do this? The game’s story is telling me: just survive, this part is pass/fail (which is especially meaningful to the story if you know Master Chief’s backstory). My inner animal doesn’t like that. So it manufactures new context, which it thinks is necessary to survive.
So, instead of experiencing the climax, I find myself effectively extracted out of the narrative of the game in a full force cycle of anxiety. When I first played Halo by myself, when I got to The Flood, I stopped playing. It was too much, even though there were literally no stakes.
So, am I stuck? Yes. Is it an “actual” stuck? Yes! But…and this is my point → it’s an inside job. A game within a game… hmmm…🤔
WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO ABOUT IT?
That’s next week
Lots of love, Shana Tova!
tty next year ^_^