Blackwell (Series) and the Female Legacy.

*Spoiler warning* This post contains spoilers. It will ruin your gaming experience, but those spoilers are necessary to explore the gender narratives of this excellent collection of games. So if you don't think you will play, you're not interested in point and click, or want to read my analysis anyway, read on gentle traveller. p.s. Most of the spoilers come from the first game in the series: The Blackwell Legacy.

[Trailer]

That's a ... pretty severe attitude,
wouldn't you say?

The Blackwell series is a collection of four point and click adventure games which trace the relationship and life of Roseangela Blackwell and the ghost that has haunted the women in her family for three generations. The game begins with Rosa scattering the ashes of her aunt, who, we learn later, was the previous host to smooth-talking 40s ghost Joey. Her voice is monotonous, and if you watched the trailer, like me you may have laughed at the opening line delivery by her voice actress. But as the game begins you quickly realise that her monotonous drawl is an intrinsic aspect of the disillusioned new yorker's personality. Rosa is anxious, she is shy, she is not charismatic and so the monotony of the voice is the culmination of these aspects. In a commentary that comes with the game, the writer Dave Gilbert compliments a colleague who animated Roseangela's walk, noting that she looks slumped and lazy; her walk is as hesitant as the character to whom it belongs.

Her isolation is illustrated by the games opening puzzle; a punk-ass teenager mans the door to her apartment, and refuses to let her in, because he knows everyone in the building, but he doesn't know her. From the players point of view, entering into a game about ghosts and spirits, you imagine shenanigans are afoot. Is she dead? Is this a dream? Is this kid pranking her? But it turns out that he simply doesn't know her, despite her living in her current apartment for several years. A freelance writer, Rosa, seems to fit a stereotype of a recluse. But then even this representation of an ordinary, dumpy, awkward woman as a protagonist of a video game is innovative.

As the game gets into full swing Joey appears, explains that Roseangela will be haunted the rest of her life, and that she must help restless spirits pass by solving the mysteries surrounding their deaths. Roseangela and Joey have a tense relationship which carries through several hours of gameplay without being resolved. Occasionally the ghost is flirtatious, occasionally cruel, and consistently his overt 40s sexist names, "doll", "kid" and "sweetheart", invade conversation. Joey is the vehicle that forces Rosa out of her apartment and into the adventure. To begin with he berates her, but they develop a more equal partnership once Rosangela appears to accept the role that she has been given.

So a ghost walks into a bar...

 At times, Rosa enjoys the ghost hunting, but this enjoyment is consistently overshadowed by the fear that she will, like her aunt, go insane. This is the threat that pushes her into ghost-hunting since the insanity is always articulated as a lack of acceptance of the role forced on them by Joey. Insanity pervades the first three games as a consistent theme set against the theme of death. Indeed for most of the characters that Joey and Rosa encounter one of two fates is laid before them: madness or death.

There is strong emphasis on the fact that Joey haunts only the female members of the family. Perhaps therefore he represents a particularly gendered form of madness. He frequently, terrifyingly, threatens his host that IF she reveals his existence she WILL be locked up in a loony bin, and that he will make her life a living hell. However light Rosa makes of these threats the game uses the achievement system (steam) to reinforce them. "Crowd Control" is awarded if you never speak to your ghostly friend in the presence of another character.

Blackwell Unbound is the second game in the series and it follows Lauren's (Rosa's aunt's) time with Joey. The game is sad. Throughout you know of Lauren's unhappy ending in the mental asylum. Within the game, as the trailer shows, Lauren is warned that she "may die". "Oh, is that all?" she replys. Ironically it is the insanity that she fears which is to be her fate.

In placing the two female protagonists in this bind; with only a choice between ghost hunting and insanity, Dave Gilbert creates an interesting narrative about female fear and agency. Rosangela certainly is a character who prides herself on clarity: a freelance reporter her intelligence and analytic skills are the source of her self-esteem (limited though it is). Thus she takes more pride in working out how to drug a neighbour's dog than in having established a friendship with that neighbour in the first place. Not making sense and loss of agency is far more threatening than isolation. Joey has removed the majority of that agency, so little wonder that the Women in Rosa's family have fallen into madness. Incoherence is a particular fear for a well-educated, probably (ambivalently) feminist, character. Aware and frustrated that there is a "Legacy" of madness amongst women in her family, Rosa has over-compensated.

There is a recurrent spot where the
pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous
eyes stare at you upside down.

Another legacy emerges. If we consider literature and women's history, we stumble upon other narratives of the female search for clarity, and for being taken seriously. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The story traces a young woman who under the rest cure stares at patterns in the wallpaper, and in them she finds her own form of clarity but in the process goes insane. Outspoken women, difficult women, angry women, frustrated women, have through the century been derided, laughed at and considered insane by those around them. In my family, we have our own legacy of female madness. By which I mean, my granny was difficult, my mother is emotional, and I am both. Rosa's visceral fight to maintain coherence, despite her paranormal activities, is her fight against the supposed hysteria that has plagued her family.

Typically in videogames, the central aim is to not die. The choices you make have consequences that will or will not lead you to death. If you fail to jump here, or you miss the quick-time event there, then the consequences for your character will be a swift and painful death. In the context of a point and click, especially this one, the only consequence for failure is not progressing with the narrative. In this regard, the fear of loss of agency is elegantly placed in a point and click character; because failure leads to stasis; not unlike the rest cure that Aunt Lauren suffered. By using the frustration of point and click to articulate Roseangela's working role, Gilbert demonstrates that her sarcasm, her irritable personality and her self-imposed isolation might have deeper feminist anxiety driving them. The fear of being incoherent.

Painfully hard platform puzzlers.

I started playing two different indie platformers today. Both of them are spectacular but I found the differences extremely unnerving. Warning: Spoilers, nothing major, but you have been warned.

Super Meat Boy:

The game is tongue-in-cheek parody of the hyper-violence and masochism in video games. The games protagonist, meat boy, goes on a super mario quest to save his female friend, bandage girl from the grasp of doctor fetus... an evil baby. It takes the plot of super mario, and desecrates it with meaty bloody juice splodges designed to represent meat boy whenever he hits anything sharp. Hacksaws and hyperdermic needles have their wicked way with our unfortunate protagonist, but he brushes it off and respawns within seconds. (Sometimes before you realise he'd even died.) The gameplay is spectacularly fun, with just the right combination of impossible challenges, and satisfying reward. The best reward comes at the end of each level when all attempts at completing it are shown simultaneously in a live-action replay. You watch with satisfaction as a lone SMB completes the level in one fell swoop, or else, watch 40 or 50 meat boys simultaneously take on the level. Each is picked off at all the different obstacles you had to grind past, with one lone lucky guy reaching bandage girl. Pure fun.

Limbo:

In comparison Limbo, is one of the most stark, goosebump inducing, intense gaming experiences. Black and white, total quiet, and barely anything moves.

The reds and browns of SPM still echoed in my eyes as I sat down to play this game. It was like I'd eaten too much chocolate (insert your drug of choice here), and now was time for the come-down. Limbo has no introduction, a boy wakes up in a black and white forest and he must go forwards, (going back gives you the "wrong way achievement.") Totally alone, he trudges through the forest, jumping haphazardly over obstacles, and then gets brutally killed in a bear trap. It's a sickening feeling. You mourn a just met character. Then he respawns... but painfully slowly. Unlike in SMB there is no promise of the cathartic watch all the painful deaths, in fact there was no beginning to the level at all, no comforting tutorial. The help section of the game is like an ikea manual, a to jump, b for action, left stick to move. The developers seem to know that once a seasoned player is looking for "help", it's because they want some kind of explanation. They offer none.

Drowning is the worst. No insta-respawn here, you watch as the bubbles slow and his eyes close. At least the bear trap was quick. The kid becomes instantly more vulnerable, instantly younger. You've watched him trudge through the forest barely able to jump, and now he's never even been taught to swim. It's unbearable.

Both games are beautifully crafted and ingeniously well-thought out. They were both worth every penny I paid for them, but playing them one after another was like going on a bouncy castle and then cutting myself for ever believing I deserved to have fun.