I’m going to use a phrase in this which is going to need some explanation: The Audience-Avatar Membrane.
What I refer to with this is the idea that in stories, there are characters who stand in for the audience member experiencing the medium. Often you’ll hear this used as ‘the point of view character’ or sometimes ‘the audience surrogate.’ In most media, like books or movies, this character is external to the audience’s control, so they can only do things that are meant to connect to the audience, but can’t necessarily actually connect them. There is a space between the Audience and their Surrogate, referred to as the Audience-Surrogate Membrane. The audience is part of this experience, where the person experiencing this is bringing to bear their context for the story as well. Sometimes an audience-surrogate can look annoying, or whiny, to an audience that doesn’t realise their own whininess or annoyingness. Sometimes they can seem deeply sympathetic and understood, because the audience has experienced something similar.
In videogames however, interaction comes in, and thanks to interactivity, players are expected to bring a lot to bear on the character they play. The act of play imbues that character with an inherent value to the player – they are by function connected to the player, an audience member. This creates a different experience, where even if there’s alien differences between the player and the avatar, the player feels closer. Players can take on the role of creatures and entities who are totally alien to them – in race, class, culture, life experience, species – and yet, thanks to the proximity of play, there is still some fundamental imbuement of the author into the character. While the Audience-Surrogate Membrane is based on commonality, the Audience-Avatar Membrane is based on functional play experience.
To me, the great failure is an Audience Avatar Membrane Failure, where the game is designed assuming an experience and a perspective of the consumer and the game does not deliver to you if you are outside of that space.
Undertale is a game whose core engagement experience is comedy, which it uses then to lightheartedly assert an expectation which it then subverts later by being not as comedic as it tries to make you think it will be. This is a very rudimentary and good tool, a storytelling device you should be familiar with if you are widely read. Create a story in the mould of A and use that to expose similarities or concepts in B. The idea is juxtaposition and we see it used quite a lot in videogames. It’s sort of one of the things videogames do really well, narratively speaking.
I didn’t find it funny.
I mean I really, really didn’t find it funny. And I don’t just mean ‘it was kinda lame and hokey’ that much I can deal with. I mean that my individual experience, my personal history, is one where for example, skeleton jokes and dad puns and font jokes are, to me, explicit reminders of things that make me unhappy.
When I complained about this, I was told off.
The assumption was that there was something wrong with me. Which is, yes, true. I am a damaged human being. I am exasperated by Papyrus and Sans because I find them tired, because of my experience, and the core of the game’s entire worldview is one that does not consider me. Which is fine – it doesn’t have to.
But people are so closely bound, so tightly connected to this Audience-Avatar Membrane that to criticise Undertale is to criticise them as people. And this means to people who have such objections, Undertale is not an opinion or a game. It’s a shibboleth. It’s a meme. It’s something that you can love so much that someone else telling jokes about it can hurt you, hurt you like hate.
That’s worrying. It’s extremely alienating.
What Undertale’s success brings to my mind however, the consistant problem videogame journalism has in the form of hegemonic experience.
When I wrote about Hotline Miami I did so in part because I felt there was almost no representation for a perspective outside the one I had in the media space surrounding that game. There were two basic conversations and they mostly chewed over the same ideas – is this game an indictment of violence? Is this game an indictment of the idea of indictments of violence? And that was it. There was no space in the conversation for, it seemed, people who had experienced and been subjected to such violence; the experiences written about all wrote about the feelings of such rage as distanced and external.
Undertale is receiving universal praise for being charming and lovely and brilliant and thoughtful and clever.
From where I sit, it isn’t.
But there’s no journalist writing my perspective. And the audience have made it clear there shouldn’t be.
Ultimately, Undertale’s single ‘great’ idea, the thing it’s trying to fake you out into experiencing by its comedic air, is one where the game tells you, the player, that this isn’t a game. That there’s more to this game than the game experience. It will persist, it will change the world, it will remember details of how you played the game the first time around. It knows you. It changes and it judges you. It wants to make you feel bad if you beat up the pixels. It wants to make you feel like you failed it – and this is a game that people have told me is nonjudgmental and chill.
Undertale wants to reach through that Audience-Avatar Membrane and grab the player. It wants to spook you. It wants to jar you like it’s a jump scare.
And it reached through and missed me.
Because I don’t need games to tell me that games reflect on who you are as a person.
Much like The Stanley Parable, the ‘great twist’ of Undertale is interesting and meaningful if you have never had the idea expressed to you ever before.
So if you’re enjoying Undertale for its comedy, its cleverness is a nice addition. If you appreciate its cleverness, its comedy is in light of that. But if you don’t find it funny, and you don’t find it clever this entire experience is hollow.