Intermittent Mechanism

by Josh Nkhata

“Show, don’t tell” is often considered the golden rule of storytelling. A good story, it posits, does not tell you what is happening but demonstrates it through the actions and behaviors of characters in scenes. If John is sad, do not tell us John is sad, show us how mopey his walk is, how contorted his face is, and how he talks to the barista. Video games often choose to obey this rule, however, they don’t seem to be bound to it in the same way that prose, poetry, or drama are. The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker is a game that seems to function almost entirely around the opposite idea, “tell, don’t show”, and yet somehow it still works as a narrative entity. By exploring what allows Dekker to skirt and morph the “golden rule” we can begin to identify aspects such as gamification, genre amplification, and a warping of POV, that make video game narratives different from their counterparts. As Jon McKenzie notes in his response to Henry Jenkins, video games are “not narratives, not films, not plays – but they’re also not-not-narratives, not-not-films, not-not-plays”.

In The Mysterious Madness of Doctor Dekker, you play a therapist investigating the murder of Doctor Dekker, your clients’ former psychiatrist. You do this by typing in questions to each character who, if the system understands your question, answers. The game consists solely of video clips of patients answering questions on the couch in your office. This formula clearly does not seem conducive to narrative storytelling as the act of talking to a therapist is inherently a “tell” act (it’s “tell me about your day” not “show me about it”). It also creates a scenario where there is very little room for actual action to occur and, accordingly, there isn’t really action in the game. The “real” story exists entirely outside of our player character and yet the game still engages the player. One way it does this is through gamifying itself. At most moments the game feels much less like a narrative and more like a puzzle, both a puzzle to interact with the database through questions (as at times it is quite challenging to find the next right question) and a puzzle to solve the mystery itself. In these ways the game is akin to a physical jigsaw puzzle: one rarely solves it to see the beauty and craftsmanship of the picture like they would a story (just look at the box!), rather, there is joy to be found in the act of solving itself. At first glance it seems like the gameness merely distracts us from narrative elements, seemingly supporting a “ludological” view that games are mechanical before they are narrative. However, the gameness in Doctor Dekker feels to be an intentional exaggeration of a very narrative/literary concept, genre.

Video games very often pledge themselves to specific genres and employ tropes from their genres to great effect. In many cases, the increased immersion, which stems from the player being an actor in the story, can amplify the effects of the genre. One might consider how the jumpscare of horror game feels particularly intense compared to that of a novel or even a movie. Or how the 50+ hr sagas of an adventure game may feel more epic. In the case of Doctor Dekker the genre, mystery, is already fairly game-like, as so much of its appeal comes from figuring things out as you read or watch. Thus, a game like this ends up amplifying the game-like components of mystery. This amplification is another reason why Dekker is able to tell instead of show. Being sworn to a genre means that players of the game will bring preconceived notions of the kind of story your telling. In Dekker the story is so similar to ones we already know that much of it can be imagined and filled out in our heads without the game needing to show us explicitly. Mckenzie says games “depend on our familiarity with the roles and goals of genre entertainment to orient us to the action”. We can imagine and craft what the murder and body might have looked like and when we are told details, like the murder weapon being a paper spike, we can slightly alter our stereotypical picture.

The warping of POV in video games is another facet that Dekker uses to dodge the golden rule. Most of this stems from the difference between playing a character and embodying a character. Embodying a character is rather easy in literature and often in traditional cinema too. When embodying a character you do share a point of view but there is a degree of separation between you and the character. If a first-person narrative uses the I pronoun the reader knows it doesn’t also mean them even though they share a perspective with the character. Many video games, Dekker included, instead function like the more obscure 2nd person narrative where you are implied to be actively within the story. This not only creates a heightened sense of immersion but also alters the meaning of what “show, don’t tell” is. Although in these kinds of narratives there is usually a story happening outside of your character that you are observing, there is also a story strictly about your character which cannot help but be entirely show. In the case of Doctor Dekker, while the more important story, the murder, is something we don’t get shown, there is also a story about our character as a therapist interacting with our patients. Everything that happens is implied to be happening to us and, thus, we are being shown everything and told nothing. While this certainly should not change our view of Dekker as a tell-based story it can offer an explanation as to why the game, and many similar games, do not feel as if they are contradicting “rules” of storytelling as you play them.

The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker is a particularly interesting game for studying digital narratives. It is at the same unique and genre-reliant, it is innovative in its form but borrows so much from text-parser games before, and it is narrative but does not follow the roles that govern narratives. The game also raises thematic questions in regard to mental illness and autonomy. Questions of form and of theme are constantly intertwining in the game. Perhaps, video games as narrative mediums are most effective at allowing us to explore these intersections.