Intermittent Mechanism

By: Daniel Stein

Minecraft is a lot of things. Its best description is an open-world sandbox survival game first published by Mojang in alpha version 1.0 in 2010. Although the type of game can be narrowed down in this way, approaching the particular genre of story Minecraft provides is a bit more difficult. In the original (and most well-known) game mode, “Survival Mode,” The player spawns into a randomly generated world of colorful blocks representing the materials that the world is constructed out of. The player can immediately begin exploring and collecting resources to craft tools and to build structures within this natural world. Throughout a single playthrough in Alpha 1.1 the player can traverse plains, hills, mountains, rivers, oceans, and caves. The only things the player will never find in this world is a hint of an existing story.

Although each world of Minecraft is essentially infinite as they generate new biomes as the player explores farther from spawn, the Alpha version was completely devoid of generated structures. The player can travel as far as they desire, but they will never encounter any objects, terrains, or structures hinting at a sign of “civilization” nor will they find any type of story or objective to follow. The world is open for exploration and change driven solely by the player. In this way, the world exists for the player to do with it whatever they wish to do. The state of Minecraft remained relatively static for over a year, except for the addition of The Nether, an alternate realm only accessible by constructing a portal. The Nether also lacked structures, goals, and story elements, but it provided several new materials to be acquired, opening the door for new possibilities for the player to build.

The “story” of these versions of the game becomes the individual experience of each new world. Rather than being told a story through the experience of playing a game, Minecraft acts as a canvas on which the players can write their own narrative. As they shape the world by chopping logs from trees, mining for stone and ore, and building whatever they like, the player is simultaneously creating the story of that world. Although Survival Mode includes monsters that will attack the player (including creepers that can explode and destroy blocks), once the player has accrued strong enough armor, tools, and weapons to overcome these obstacles they can then spend as much time as they like building whatever they want to. It is possible to build immense castles or even entire villages complete with irrigated wheat farms. If the player chooses to mine enough, they could find and mine enough gold ore to build a golden throne or even a much rarer diamond throne. The possibilities are (nearly) endless. The only limitations of the end state of a Minecraft world is the player’s imagination, their determination to harvest natural resources, and the finite types of blocks and items obtainable and craftable in any given version of the game.

Here we get into the ways in which the game’s design drives and potentially limits the player’s control over the narrative. Every sandbox comes with rules. The basic mechanics and the engine of Minecraft are not very limiting factors; there is only a single type of block that is absolutely unbreakable, called bedrock, and it only exists as a lower barrier to prevent players from falling out of the bounds of the world. At the upper limit there is an invisible building barrier beyond which no blocks can be placed. In later release versions, the horizontal border of the world is incredibly large, and players are unlikely to reach it in a survival world. These are relatively minor constraints on the freedom to mine, build, and explore as they are necessary to enforce the bounds of the world generation.

The other limits manifest in the inherent world generation and design. There are a finite number of types of blocks and obtainable items. Despite the addition of hundreds of different types of items in subsequent versions, there is an inherent limit on creativity based on the functionality of each block and item, especially in the Alpha release in which blocks are exclusively decorative when placed. Functional blocks and items in later versions, such as redstone and noteblocks, allow players to get more creative with their worlds and have more freedom in building structures that can act as storytelling devices.

Full release versions of Minecraft began in 2011 with the “Adventure Update” which included the major area of the game called The End. The End, as its name suggests, is the “final area” of each Minecraft world, accessible through a special generated portal that must be found and unlocked by the player using crafted items called eyes of ender. The End was originally a limited, small floating island made of a unique block, dotted with large obsidian pillars each of which holding a single End Crystal. The End functioned as a boss fight, spawning in the Ender Dragon, a monster that only spawns once in each world with a health bar UI. When a player depletes the dragon’s health bar the bedrock “fountain” at the center of The End spawns a portal that loads the “ending” and credits of Minecraft before respawning the player in the overworld.

The addition of The End was a major change for Minecraft. Now the game had a clear goal as well as intermediate steps to accomplish that goal. In order to find and open the End portal, players first have to craft eyes of ender, whose components require a certain amount of exploration and resource collection. The “Adventure Update” also added many structures that generate with the world. These included the End portal and the stronghold that contains it, Nether fortresses where a component of an eye of ender is exclusively found, mineshafts that can be found underground, and villages populated with humanoid creatures. This update ushered in the first full release version of Minecraft and transformed the game from an objective-less sandbox into a goal-oriented exploration and survival game.

Although there was a shift in Minecraft’s overarching checklist, most of the game’s implied “narrative” remained the same. When the player first spawns into a new world, the only information provided to them is the interface at the bottom of the screen and their view of the world. In Alpha, the interface only contains a line of hearts and a bar of empty squares representing the item hot bar. This is very little information for beginning a new game. The player is expected to experiment with the world on their own in order to discover the basic mechanics. In the current version (1.16) there is a prompt to open the inventory and an achievement for doing so, but the older versions have no hints towards the existence of an inventory outside of the control menu. Alpha Minecraft relies so heavily on the player to explore and experiment with all aspects of the game due to its lack of information and no expectation of a knowledgeable new player base.

The “story” experienced in a Minecraft playthrough reflects the mechanics included in the game. As explained earlier, each playthrough’s “narrative” is entirely driven by the player’s choices and experiences in the sandbox world. The minimalist world of Alpha restricts this narrative to a simplistic survival tale: the player appears in a strange new world with no information about its resources or terrain and must find a way to survive each night as monsters spawn and attack them. In the first full release of the game, this narrative can have more complexity. Instead of being completely alone in this world (ignoring the existence of multiplayer in both versions) the player can stumble upon a village while exploring and can interact with the villagers there. Even later updates allow the player to trade with the villagers who gained specialized professions. These updates also introduced illagers, an evil counterpart to villagers who inhabit the world either in specific generated structures or randomly spawned near the player in the overworld. The inclusion of villagers and illagers create an implied story for the world that would seemingly occur without the presence of the player.

New structures such as desert temples and mineshafts also contribute to the idea of a generated world with its own implied story. The player is confirmed as an outsider arriving to a world that is (or once was) inhabited by entire societies that could harvest and create just as the player can. The player loses a little bit of their status as the only being who can manipulate the world as they do. Of course, none of the structures come close to the destructive and constructive capabilities of the player. Nonetheless, Minecraft has shifted over time from a focus on pure resource extraction and environmental destruction towards more exploration and discovery as more biomes, structures, and creatures have been introduced to be discovered.

However, the game remains static in respect towards the player’s relationship towards all of these new discoverable elements. Although the villagers can be viewed narratively as a self-sufficient society, in practice they become tools for the player to manipulate. By understanding the core mechanics behind villager trading and breeding, players can create faux villages and grow their own manipulatable populations to produce optimal trades for the resources they desire. The same manipulation of game mechanics can occur with other structures. Monster spawners that are randomly generated in dungeons or Nether fortresses can be manipulated into monster loot and experience farms to simplify the survival and resource gathering aspects of the game. In the end, the player remains the dominant force of the world who destroys and creates as it benefits themselves at any expense to the natural environment or the world’s natural “inhabitants.” At its core, Minecraft is about ones own survival and gain in a world that exists solely for them to manipulate into their own personal narrative.

References:

“Java Edition version history,” Minecraft Wiki, last modified February 19, 2021, https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Java_Edition_version_history.

by Jared Zuker

“Attention. Hull failure imminent. All personnel abandon ship.” Heavy breathing as we climb into the escape pod. “Launch in 3…2…1”. The pod falls apart as a panel hits us in the head and renders us unconscious. Everything is black. We open our eyes to see fire and need to put it out and leave the escape pod. Our ship is in the distance, but we are completely and totally alone. We look out into the infinite ocean and as survival seems a daunting prospect, we know that is the only option. 

This is the introduction to the world of Subnautica, in which the player must survive while exploring a hostile alien world. The story, I believe, can be broken down into three acts, each determined by the resources the play has at their disposal. The first act is all about Survival. The second is about exploration, and the third is about solving the mysteries and finally culminating in leaving the planet. 

In act one, as I noted before, gameplay revolves around survival; the player does not venture too far from their escape pod and their primary goal is to search for food and water. In this segment, the player becomes familiar with the mechanics of crafting, power, tools, oxygen, and basic resources. Oxygen is perhaps the most important resource as it is the one to look out for most often. The player can upgrade their O2 tank to stay underwater for longer periods of time than the original 45 seconds. This Oxygen limit is the main factor in inhibiting further exploration both farther away from the starting point (the ‘Safe Shallows’) as well as deeper underwater. 

As the player ventures a bit farther out for each trip, they uncover a scanner, the main tool of the game, and with the tool they learn about the flora and fauna around them as well as discover blueprints for new tools and upgrades. We shift into act two: exploration when the player uncovers the blueprints for the Seamoth, a basic submarine, and builds the vehicle. The quick Seamoth allows the player to effectively have infinite oxygen as long as the vehicle is not destroyed or they are not separated from it. The player is now inhibited by the seamoth’s crush limit (that is upgradeable) as to prevent the player from reaching the end game too quickly. (Though pressure does not affect the player outside of a vehicle in any other way than making O2 less efficient). 

In Act II, (or possibly Act I if the player hits certain markers first), three major events take place. The first is when the player performs a self-scan with the scan tool and is told at first that all results are nominal, but later that the player has contracted an alien bacterial infection. The second and third require the repair tool as when the player creates the tool, they fix the radio, resulting in locations of other escape pods to be transmitted to the player over the next few hours. At one point the player is contacted by the spaceship sunbeam which eventually tries to rescue them, but is destroyed by an alien laser. This then leads the player to explore the laser and discovers the remnants of an intelligent race, including a ray gun, a doomsday device, and the building being a quarantine enforcer for the alien bacteria the player contracted.These ‘precursors’ play a major role in the story of subnautica as well as the philosophy it presents but we will touch on that later.

The third event is the detonation of the crashed ship’s (The Aurora’s) nuclear engine, resulting in pollution in the form of radioactive leakage. The player is then encouraged to fix the leakage and stop the pollution in the environment. 

All these events allow for the continued exploration and uncovering of mystery in Subnautica, as the player, now equipped to travel across the surface quickly and use a wide array of tools, can travel these distances without starving, suffocating, or dehydrating. 

In the last event, that of the quantum detonation of the Aurora’s drive core, for most players, is one of the first times they hear the Reaper Leviathan’s roar. These giant terrifying beasts are lurking in the cloudy crash zone and elsewhere waiting to tear the player apart. 

Throughout the course of exploration, the player will learn to craft upgrades and new tools, as well as rooms and utilities for buildable habitats that allow the player to create a new base of operations, and possibly several. With every base, the player must use the resources they gather into making the hostile environment a bit more manageable. Though the fear of the giant Leviathans and other creatures never goes away as we venture deeper into the unknown. 

As I said before, this world is extremely hostile. Not only are you infected with a potentially terminal illness, but a large number of the creatures you encounter will attack you for being in their territory or simply because you are below them on the food chain. Reapers will hunt you down, ghosts will chase you for entering their area, crab snakes will lash out at you for getting too close to their nests in jellyshrooms, crab squids and ampeels will zap you, bone and sand sharks will hunt you, and stalkers will bite you for traveling in the creepvine. All of these creatures act independently of you and carry out their hunting, escaping, and defending regardless of your presence. Even if you were to create an extremely expansive base using loads of resources. The creatures will not be deterred by them and resources will return over time. As we see with similar habitats from a former exploration team, these bases, too will be reclaimed and will not inhibit the environment, but become a part of it. 

All of this hostility and feelings of being out of place, not in charge, and not high in the pecking order are further explored in the game in various ways. One small example is how the fish, the mesmer hypnotizes the player into swimming towards it, following up with an attack. It does this with an eerie screen effect and seemingly uses the PDA’s voice (which is the player’s only companion throughout the game) to swim closer to it. This creature clearly has far greater control even over how we perceive and move in the game than the player when trapped in its hypnotic gaze. The safety of being in a vehicle is abolished not only when the vehicle is ripped apart by a leviathan, but also when the mysterious and seemingly intelligent creatures Warpers teleport the player out of their vehicle where they are fair prey. 

The game is constantly reminding us that this is not our world, and though we can adapt to survive in this foreign environment. Others that came before could not survive long, and everything on the planet is far more powerful than us. We as the player start out with the ability to take small fish and cook them in a crafting station or turn some fish into water. This is the main method of survival in Act I until farming and water filtration almost make the earlier method obsolete. What is so important in this fact, however, is that it never changes. No matter how we upgrade our gear and vehicles, we are always in the same spot in the food chain. What I mean by this is that we are always vulnerable and never the conqueror of the planet. We grow in our knowledge of how the game functions and so the annoying crash fish that killed us in the beginning of the game is now a sign that we can collect cave sulfur. Likewise, seeing a stalker is not scary anymore, but a means of crafting enameled glass for more advanced upgrades. We do not attack this world, but learn about it. This, I think, is best expressed in how our only weapon is a knife, which is described in the game as being “the only exception” for weapons in  “standard survival blueprints following the massacre on Obraxis Prime.” Other tools that are weapon-like include the prawn suit (a mech-like vehicle that allows for easy mining and travel at great depths), the stasis rifle that stops enemies in their tracks for a period of time, and the propulsion cannon (gravity gun from half-life). Even the torpedoes fired from vehicles only serve as decoys, or some other non-lethal method of leading predators away. However it is only possible to damage creatures with the mech’s drill arm and the knife, and it takes a very, very long time to kill anything. Most importantly, there is no reward for killing a creature other than small fish for food and water. Killing a reaper or ghost takes some hundreds of knife swings and only results in the beast turning on its belly and remaining still, I would imagine to make the player feel guilty. This is very different to games like The Forest and Minecraft in which killing enemies nets loot that makes it easier to survive. 

This is crucial to exploring how the game views its survival narrative. We are an observer of this world. We are a passer-by who is placing ourselves in the food chain for a limited time and as we will get into soon, are actually helping the ecosystem (rather than merely fixing the created issue of radiation leakage from the Aurora). Survival is directly tied to discovery. Both of the alien ecosystems and of the alien machinery left behind. The player interacts with the underwater expanse in a number of ways that all tie in with the core goal of exploration and discovery. Survival is used as a tool in which the gameplay loop works for the purpose of making the exploration more rewarding. It is possible to play the game in a creative mode or without the need to eat and drink–simply building and exploring the beautiful ocean Unknown Worlds created, but the intended experience is survival mode. It takes time and effort to gather blueprints, upgrade your gear, eat, drink, and even learn the layout of the world. Most importantly though, is it takes time to uncover the mysteries of the aliens who once inhabited the planet, what happened to the previous crew who explored the area, and what happened to your fellow crew members from the Aurora. 

All of this leads to the final act of the story, in which the player investigates the bacterial infection as well as the telepathic messages from some more intelligent creature. In this act, the player uses all their tools to venture deep into the maze-like biomes of the lost river and eventually the lava zone. Deeper still the player comes into contact with the benevolent leviathan, the Sea Emperor in which she asks the player to help ensure the survival of the species and in the process create a cure for the bacterial infection plaguing both you and the planet. 

After this is done, it is possible to build a rocket and leave the planet, returning home and improving the planet you once resided upon for a period of time that your character is not soon to forget. 

Even with this ending, was it wrong of us to impose our will on the alien environment? It clearly was not to the level of the original survival story of Robinson Crusoe, but does this story still have the player enact too much of their will on the planet? I would argue that the player’s relationship with the planet was not parasitic as with Crusoe, but symbiotic as the player became part of the environment and learned, provided for, and was provided by the once hostile and terrifying world in which they once resided. Subnautica uses its gameplay to tell a story of survival and growth where the hero does not damage the foreign world, but in a Campbellian way, becomes a master of it, not in conquering, but in accepting their place amongst the ecosystem. 

by Jacob Briggs

Summary

Last Day of June begins with a happy couple, June and Carl, enjoying a romantic evening by the lake. On their way home, however, they get into a car crash which Carl survives, but June does not. Carl struggles with the death of his wife, but he finds a potential solution to his grief in her art studio. Carl can rewind time by interacting with her portraits and change the actions of a specific neighbor. Using this power, he attempts to prevent the car crash from happening over and over again until it is eventually caused by severe weather. Knowing that he cannot prevent the storm or the date, Carl decides to take June’s place in the passenger seat, sacrificing himself so that June and their unborn baby can live. There are some aspects of the game that suggest June never died and was instead imagining this scenario in her grief (one such example being June’s sketchbook, which shows the player’s failed attempts at stopping the crash), but the story in which the player enacts is what I’ve described. For the entire game, we’re led to believe that we’re controlling Carl, and I don’t think either story changes the successes or shortcomings of the game. The June reading is an interesting interpretation, but it is a separate conversation and so I’m going to set that aside for this analysis. If you’d like to read more about it, here is a link to Nate Hohl’s article that proposes the theory: https://ag.hyperxgaming.com/article/3202/last-day-of-june-ndash-figuring-out-the-games-ending.

The majority of the player’s time is spent exploring the town as various characters. As Carl, the player learns about his history with June and acquires new portraits. As the townsfolk, the player searches for tools and areas that will create new timelines for each neighbor, potentially stopping the accident. With each new character that becomes playable, finding the correct timeline becomes more and more difficult. Characters will have to remove obstacles that the other neighbors cannot overcome, and the player will have to alter what some characters do in order to open new pathways for the others. For example, if the boy is playing soccer with the dog, the hunter will be unsuccessful in chasing down the bird, which causes the accident. At the same time, if the boy doesn’t play with the dog, he will use the rope which the woman needs to secure her moving boxes, which also causes the crash. These complications are solved as the player explores new areas and discovers new items, such as a second rope. The other motivation the player has for exploration is acquiring memories, which reveal the stories of each of the side characters. They aren’t required and don’t unlock a secret ending, but they provide context for each of the neighbors’ actions.

Successes

Navigation and narrative are the two driving forces behind Last Day of June, and they are closely intertwined through the game’s setting. To understand how the game utilizes its space, it is useful to consider Murray’s idea of the Violence Hub and the Solvable Maze. She describes the former as a game which tells the story of many different characters, all linked to a single, tragic event. The player of such a game won’t finish with a perfect, clear-cut explanation of what happened, but rather “the retracing of the situation from different perspectives leads to a continual deepening in the reader’s understanding of what has happened” (Murray 136). Witnessing the same event through many different positions gives the situation nuance, and this model is somewhat present in Last Day of June. By finding the memories of the neighbors, we get to understand their own histories of grief and develop a rich understanding of the town. However, I struggle to call this game a true Violence Hub because none of these side stories complicate the accident. In fact, collecting these memories is completely optional, so the player never has to delve into the lives of the townsfolk to learn the full narrative of Carl and June’s relationship.

It is more accurate to describe this game as the Solvable Maze. Murray describes these games as those in which “the story is tied to the navigation of space. As I move forward, I feel a sense of powerfulness, of significant action, that is tied to my pleasure in the unfolding story” (Murray 132). This is a fitting description for Last Day of June because the player’s motivation and reward for exploring the town is to progress the narrative. The bulk of gameplay is spent navigating the town in order to create different outcomes, and this is the same goal that Carl has in cutscenes throughout the game. The map itself is also mazelike, with branching roads and areas that aren’t immediately available to the player. The reward for going off the beaten path and fully exploring the town as each character is the aforementioned memories, which expand the story of the world. What’s most impressive about how the game handles space, though, is how the player rediscovers the town.

The way in which the player explores the town changes in various scenes, redefining our relationship with the space. When the player controls Carl, we see his memories with June in the exact spot at which they occurred. For example, we see them setting up the scarecrow in front of their house, or June painting in the gazebo. The order of these memories also tells a brief story, such as June’s first miscarriage and Carl’s attempt to help her cope with that loss. Even the player’s ability to navigate is different since Carl uses a wheelchair and cannot access the town’s stairs. New boundaries are presented to the player as well as a new mode of delivering narrative, and we see this pattern repeated with the old man. Towards the end of the game, we control an old man who delivers a present to June, which is what sparks her idea to go to the lake. We repeat this delivery again and again, with June trying to stop us by creating uncrossable rifts throughout the town. These rifts act as new barriers that change how the player moves through the world. They also provide a role-reversal: instead of the player trying to change what the game deems inevitable, the game tries to stop us from enacting that same outcome. Last Day of June’s ever-changing delivery of navigation and narrative was quite effective, but it is spoiled by what Murray calls the “drawback to the maze orientation: it moves the interactor towards a single solution” (Murray 132).

Shortcomings

This drawback ties into one of Murray’s most pressing questions: “Could a digital narrative offer a higher degree of agency while still preserving the sense of tragic inevitability?” (Murray 178). In other words, can the player make meaningful choices despite the narrative’s conclusion that none of those choices mattered? I don’t think that Last Day of June accomplishes this feat, and I think the single solution is only part of the problem. No matter which twists and turns you take in the maze, you must ultimately take a specific path in order to progress to the next section. If you want to get the boy out of the street, he must fly the kite; there is no other option. The woman will not help the hunter out of the hay bale, even though she has a rope to lift him up. Last Day of June presents a problem, forces the player into a single solution, and then tells us that the ending is inevitable.

I had a hard time believing this outcome because I was never shown why my ideas would fail. For example, instead of switching places with June at the end of the game, why not have Carl refuse to drive home until the weather clears? Or drive so slowly that the weather won’t cause them to slide off the road? I could picture scenarios in which these decisions might fail, but the game never gives the player enough agency to test whether or not they would. A fair counterargument to this critique would be that Last Day of June has a specific story to tell, and that providing a nonlinear experience isn’t one of its goals. This is all true, but it still conflicts with the gameplay and narrative premise. The map is not designed as a left-to-right sidescroller with an obvious endpoint; it is a fully explorable town. The reward for exploring beyond a specific path, however, is irrelevant to the main narrative. The story itself centers around the concept of going back in time and making different choices, but the game doesn’t accommodate the choices the player might wish to make. The design of Last Day of June seems perfect for giving the player agency, but instead limits them to tell a linear, illogical story.

Works Cited

Murray, Janet Horowitz. Hamlet On the Holodeck : the Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New York : Free Press, 1997.

By: Alan Countess

Asymmetric Gaming Structure

Asymmetric game structure can take many forms. At its core, it involves giving players different abilities or rules, and often involves a different set of objectives that pits players against each other. Games like Overwatch and League of Legends are popular examples of games that revolve around characters with different abilities. These characters fit into specific roles and as a game is optimized at a high level, there becomes a standard ratio of roles present on each team. Outside of these examples where players have the same objective (destroy enemy team, capture a zone, destroy a base), asymmetric gaming can also give players on opposing sides distinct objectives. For instance, search and destroy is a common game mode in many first person shooters. In this setting, characters often have the same tools and abilities, but the game creates asymmetry through goals. One team must plant a bomb or destroy the other team while the other team must prevent the bomb from being planted, or diffuse it once it is planted. This structure forces players to act with unique strategies based on which side they are on. 

Even outside of video games, asymmetric structure is often used to generate excitement. Games like mafia and werewolf are very popular group games, and in the board game realm, games like Betrayal at House on the Hill, Pandemic, and Scythe rely on asymmetries between players to create unique playing experience and various clashing strategies. Clearly there is something exciting about this type of game structure. With the recent rise in popularity of Among Us, we have seen how a simple game can capitalize off of the asymmetric structure of gaming to draw in players.

This brings us to Friday the 13th: The Game

Friday the 13th: The Game embodies many of the features asymmetric games can include. In this game, Jason is a playable character that is randomly selected out of the 8 players in the lobby. The remaining 7 will play as camp counselors on a team against Jason. The counselors can win by various means of escape, such as: escaping by boat, escaping by car, calling the police and reaching them once they arrive, and by waiting until the time limit of the game expires. The characters in this game win individually as they either escape or are killed whereas Jason’s objective is to kill as many counselors as possible. The game places tools around the map for the counselors to use. These tools can heal them, allow them to attack and stun Jason, or craft one of the means of escaping the camp. 

In constructing these features, the game creates a completely different experience and style of play depending on the player’s role. Jason can interact with very few of the things players can interact with. He can not utilize or damage tools or travel through windows as the other players can. Furthermore, counselors are limited to inconveniencing Jason (it is possible to kill Jason but requires far more coordination and luck than you would expect to see in a game played by humans) while Jason has a very high chance of killing a target he is near through use of his abilities. These asymmetric elements make a large contribution to why people enjoy playing the game, but an even larger factor in this is the way the game capitalizes on fans’ nostalgia for the Friday the 13th movie series. 

Friday the 13th as a tribute to the movie series

Much of the player base for this game are, unsurprisingly, fans of the Friday the 13th movie series. Fans who have watched these movies and enjoy horror movies in general enjoy reliving the movie through the game itself. Rather than recreating the plot of the movie, the game makes an attempt to create similar emotional elements that fans would experience when watching the filme. Being in the horror genre, a large focus of the movie series, and thus the game revolves around how fear is created. In the movies, there is a distinct soundtrack played when characters are in danger, or when the movie is meant to invoke fear. Often the music begins when Jason is nearby the counselors. The music adds to the rising suspense as characters are unaware of the mounting danger they are in. The game chooses to share the classic music track from the film series. Additionally, to create the same mounting suspense as the movies, players will hear the in game music become more dramatic and louder as Jason is closer to them. This is an interesting way for the game to produce the sensation that danger is close at hand without the character knowing where exactly Jason is and if he is even targeting them or another close by character.

In the following clip, you can hear the changes in music as the distance between Jason and my character changes. Additionally, you can see Jason use an ability to travel closer to my character without his movement being seen.

In addition to the use of music in this scene, we can see how the game recreates jump scares that appear in the movies. Jason is able to move very quickly off screen. His movement is not human and gives him a terrifying sense of power as he can always appear from just out of frame. The game recreates this by giving Jason the ability to teleport in a few ways. One way he can do this is to choose any location on the map, and instantly teleport to that location. Additionally, Jason is able to enter an invisible and very fast moving form in which Jason’s player moves in first person point of view. This camera effect is very similar to what is known in film as a killer point of view. The camera angle is directly from the perspective of the killer, you are unable to reverse, and you move towards victims without their knowledge of where you are. To avoid breaking the immersion of Jason literally disappearing from the players view when he uses this ability, the game produces a static effect on the screen for nearby players which has a similar effect to a character in a movie briefly looking away and losing track of Jason. These abilities to move in an inhuman manner around the map well replicates some of the fear tactics employed by the movies and gives characters a fun way to get a feeling for what it might feel like to move as Jason. 

When players are moving around the map within the game, they spectate their character from a 3rd person point of view with the camera looking over the characters shoulder. This has a few interesting effects on how the player relates to their character compared to how they do in the movies. First person point of view and third person point of view are the two primary options when designing the camera angle for a game. First person point of view will give the player more of a sense that they are the character, as their view is identical to that of the character’s. Although the camera angle is not first person, this effect is still well achieved from the over the shoulder shot. In this situation, the character and the player have a very similar point of view. However, the third person shot also creates somewhat of a sensation that the player is a viewer, similar to how they would relate to a character in a movie. This choice helps recreate the movie feel of character association while creating a relationship with the character that is conducive to fear. 

Some additional ways that the game indulges the nostalgia of fans of the series are through the customization options in the game. The game allows for characters to play as different versions of Jason. These versions match the appearance of various versions of Jason throughout the movie series. Additionally, the game allows players to customize the kill animations that Jason will use when they play as him. The player can choose some of their favorite kills from the movies, or simply pick ones they enjoy and use them when they get the role of Jason in a game. 

In this final section, I would like to highlight some areas where I felt that the game diverged from the movie feel. One such way is that in the game, all of the counselors are immediately aware of the threat they face. While the movie plays on the information gap between the audience and the characters, the game is dealing with players who know Jason is hunting them. Because of this the game chose to introduce Jason with an initial cutscene that all of the players and characters see when the game starts. Although this is not true to the story in the films, I didn’t feel that this detracted from the gameplay experience. Additionally, chat is open with the random other players you are in the game with. This can lead to some fun banter, however, this can also lead to a much different atmosphere than the game tries to create. Through players and opponents not taking things seriously and joking around, the tension created within a game can quickly be cut. An additional way players can change the gaming experience are by playing poorly or being afk (away from keyboard). In these situations, a player purposefully killing teammates or not killing anyone as Jason can change what makes the players feel threatened when they play and lead to things such as music cues not creating fear as they are intended to.

In the following clip, you will see an example of some friendly banter that cuts the tension of the game followed by the player with the role of Jason being afk. You may notice how this contrasts with the earlier clip shown.

Thank you for your time and attention!