DAY 3

As far as post-modern video games go, P.T. seems like a very odd choice to analyze. First off, it's not really a game. It was a playable teaser (P.T.) for Silent Hills, the formerly planned newest game in the Silent Hill series. The Silent Hill series is a survival horror game series known for containing themes of psychological guilt, religion, family, memory, and insanity, and this now cancelled Silent Hills teaser seemed to contain similar elements of family, sudden loss of control, and religious imagery. Also, it's scary af. ALSO, this game isn't really a post-modern game in the traditional sense. Most video games viewed as post-modern like Spec Ops: The Line, Metal Gear Solid 2 (also by the director of P.T., Hideo Kojima), or Undertale usually discuss themes of player-character interaction, the nature of video game storytelling, and the deconstruction of the game as a set of code and pixels, whereas P.T. is post-modern in how it discusses the way video games scare us and the concept of reflection and identity as a whole works as simply one of its many, many themes. The unique themes discussed in P.T., as well as my personal love of horror, are why I chose this tech demo over classics like Undertale.

The first thing the player is greeted with upon starting the game is the following quotation:

Watch out. The gap in the door... it's a separate reality. The only me is me. Are you sure the only you is you?

If I had the time, intellect, and passion I could write a thesis about how this line plays out through the demo and it's implications towards the higher meaning of the art, but let's just say that alternate realities and uncertainty of identity are central themes to the series as a whole. These themes seem to be more modernist than postmodernist in how complex and intertwined the ideas work, but the work really is a postmodern text because of how these ideas unfold. In this case, through the gaming community.

The puzzles and sequences that are required by the player to complete the game are so overtly complex and require such outside critical thinking, and mountains of luck, to discover that inevitably the overwhelming majority of players will turn to the community for a way to beat the game. The game's final puzzles were finally deciphered by a small group of overly dedicated gamers who worked together and with the community to determine how to best the game, and they eventually cracked the code through communication and teamwork. The game P.T. is postmodern in how it effectively portrays the differences between the mediums of horror; in this case, video games.

References today:

Kojima, Hideo. P.T. Konami, 12 Aug. 2014. Web.