The unreliable narrator in Silent Hill: Shattered Memories

[Update: my review of Shattered Memories just hit Popmatters. If you don't plan on playing this game, go read that before reading this.]

I was first introduced to the unreliable narrator in college during a Nathaniel Hawthorne class. The novel was The Blithedale Romance. At the time, the novel seemed boring to me. “It’s just a bunch of people at a farm in some sort of love triangle. Whatever.” But it was soon revealed to me that the protagonist – whose perspective is the primary one – was not only not privy to everything that was going on in the narrative, but may have been intentionally lying to the reader.

What?

Up to that point, I had assumed everything a main character said in a novel was truth, presuming they weren’t a villain. And even then, it was most often made clear they were lying. This was a literary revelation for me, even if I didn’t know it at the time.

What if we cannot trust the only person available to us?

Blithedale is not the first novel to use this tactic. Famously, Lolita features a pedophile lead whom, through lies, charisma, and the fact we only get his perspective, we come to sympathize with. Or at least don’t hate. That is an amazing feat, considering the pedophilia and all.

The unreliable narrator is a unique literary maneuver. It is, in effect, a gimmick. We generally only know a narrator is unreliable by the story’s conclusion. And only then do the narrative’s previous events come into question. Even if we know early on, we don’t know what’s true and what’s not. In film it is more challenging to pull off, as it gets rarer and rarer we have voice-over narration in the medium. We are used to seeing all or most angles and lying to the audience is more challenging.

Rashomon

Video games are in a unique position, in that they are unparalleled in their ability to put the user in a character’s perspective. You force the action. You make the decisions. You see the story unfold in front of your eyes. Video games have the opportunity to push the unreliable narrator to unknown places. I have glimpsed this in Silent Hill: Shattered Memories.

[As an aside, I'd say seek this game out. It does some wonderful things, all in a very tight package. My review on Popmatters is pending. There will be massive spoilers to follow.]

In Memories, you play as Harry Mason. A loving father who is thrust into confusion and mystery surrounding the disappearance of his young daughter after a car crash in the namesake town of Silent Hill.

At least, that’s what you’re lead to believe.

The structure of the game features third-person “action” (more exploration) scenes for most of it’s run. It’s in these scenes where we move the plot forward. Interspersed are first-person therapy scenes, where you answer some personal questions that tie to the action going on in-game. Since we control Harry, we assume Harry is the one in therapy. It seems like a logical connection to make: we control Harry in the game world, therefore we control him throughout.

It’s this incorrect assumption that creates a unreliable narrative.

The game’s very first screen is a video tape of Mason playing with his daughter. The tape rewinds as he embraces his daughter, who espouses, “I love my daddy” at a key moment. It is a haunting start-up screen to be sure, but one I brushed off as a clever way to start the game. Upon completion, this was far from the case.

Analyzing this scene, we assume we are in Harry’s head as he watches an old tape of him playing with his daughter, longingly looking back on a missing loved one. After all, we know from the game’s box that Harry Mason is looking for his missing daughter. But the big reveal in the game – that it is indeed Cheryl Mason is in the therapy sessions and Harry died in the car crash years ago – changes everything that has happened along the way. It was Cheryl watching those tapes, longingly viewing the few moments of a happy life she never had.

Even before this reveal, it was difficult to trust everything unfolding in front of Harry. He stumbles across characters that seem unrealistic – a far too-friendly nurse who dies soon after being introduced, a teenage girl who shows up to a school reunion alone – and mysterious. He often complains of memory problems and seems confused more than not. There are even shifts in time lines that make no sense. Even when I didn’t know Harry was a memory, I never trusted him.

It’s this first (even third, with some degree of skill) -person perspective where video games have a chance to really push the boundaries of story-telling, especially the tactic of using  an unreliable narrator. The nature of being locked into a first-person view is we are limited. We see everything (and only what) Gordon Freeman sees. We experience Jack’s (and only his) discovery of the secrets of Rapture. When done well, story-telling in the first-person can push immersion to levels unavailable in other mediums. By simply putting us in Harry’s perspective, we assumed we were in his even when the perspective shifted. Memories took learned behavior in gaming – that we trust our character, we are alerted to character shifts – and turned it on its head. But the genius of the game was sprinkling the world and Harry’ character with doubt, without giving away the reveal until the game’s conclusion.

A piece of entertainment such as Memories is only effective as a video game. The cuts to therapy sessions would not make sense (since the camera would have had to pan to whoever was on the couch at some point) in a film. The sense of confusion would have been lost in novel, where you were not in charge of exploring the world around you, questioning what was real and was not.

Menace or victim?

While other games – most notably Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, but also the aformentioned Bioshock – have dabbled in using an unreliable narrator, it is a tactic that begs to be explored in the medium. Why is it we trust every single thing told to us in a video game? Are the Locust from Gears of War really a barbaric race hellbent on the destruction of humanity? Or are they an oppressed people fighting back against an imperialist regime? Are we so foolish as to accept every order, command, incomplete piece of information as truth in games?

For all it’s warts, Kane and Lynch: Dead Men uses an unreliable narrator sidekick, to varying degrees of success. Lynch is a schizophrenic prone to violent outbursts. In single-player, this barely registers as anything creative, as you play as Kane. But step into the shoes of Lynch in co-op, and the game will cause you to hallucinate, seeing civilians as cops whom you will be compelled to shoot, unsure of who is innocent and who is a threat.

This is a brilliant move, and one that is not explored nearly enough in games. Sure, mental illness is an easy way out. But what if the Covenant didn’t actually look like they do in Halo, it’s how they look to Master Chief – the killing machine sent to destroy them all. Or if in Mirror’s Edge you were actually a drug courier simply moving the package along, instead of some First Amendment freedom fighter. Pretentious game ideas aside, developers should screw with the one thing that they have easy control over: perspective.

Main characters can be so much more than puppets used to lead us through a narrative. They can be self-obsessed liars with their own motivations, goals, and faults. They can be – as we are – people who don’t always see, remember, or process things going on around them clearly.

Perception is reality, not the other way around.