Reconstruction 5.2 (Spring 2005)

Return to Contents»

Fractured Identities : Siblings and Doubles in Video Games / Laurie N. Taylor

Abstract: In her essay on “Fractured Identities: Siblings and Doubles in Video Games” Laurie Taylor explores how certain norms of video game design – originally derived from technological constraints of code space and processing speed – continue as the narrative parameters of many if not most contemporary video games. Synthesizing approaches from literary studies and narratology, Taylor offers an innovative angle on the fractured identities of doubles and siblings as the narrative correspondence to now largely obsolete technological constraints. Game-play, related to but nevertheless distinct from the literary type of narrative, as Taylor insists, is a key factor in determining what might be called the identity politics of video games. Shifting her perspective to include a Deleuzian point of view, the author goes on to argue that such structures as created by mirroring characters and/or game worlds effectively remove parental figures from power. What appears as a mere aberration within conventional psychoanalytic terms thus takes on the quality of a utopian family as it installs the sibling/double relation, i.e. the relation between equals, as a radical alternative to traditional familial structures.

Introduction

<1> As a new media form, video games are inextricably bound by their technological limitations. These include limitations in terms of processing power and in terms of code space on early cartridge and CD-based games. The limitations for game design have decreased dramatically as the processing power of the game stations and the run-of-the-mill personal computer have increased along with the data capacity for individual games. However, the prior limitations led to certain manners of game construction that became tropes of game design that remain in use. Those former technologically based limitations that have become tropes often rely on the doubled use of code to mirror certain parts of the screen or parts of the game world, parts of the game narrative, and to mirror or double particular game characters or aspects of the characters Using examples from several video games and particularly games from the Resident Evil and Fatal Frame series, this article demonstrates the manner in which character mirroring or doubling functions in games. In particular, I argue that the mirrored characters parallel the structure of folk and fairy tales in their subversive potential. By studying  popular video games in connection with folk and fairy tales, I illustrate the potential of popular, mainstream video games to present subversive and empowering narratives to their players.

<2> In literature, the figure of the double takes many forms. As Albert Guerard notes,“The word double is embarrassingly vague, as used in literary criticism. It need not imply autoscopic hallucination or even close physical resemblance” (3). In video games, which are bound by technological limitations, the double emerges in a very distinct manner both within game-play and within gaming narratives. In a single-character and thus seemingly simpler example, many critics have attempted to frame Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft within Laura Mulvey’s theories of voyeurism in film; however, as Helen W. Kennedy rightly argues in “Lara Croft: Feminist Icon or Cyberbimbo?: On the Limits of Textual Analysis,” Lara Croft cannot be easily accommodated into the voyeuristic gaze because Lara is both the object of the gaze and the acting heroine within the game. Lara Croft manages to complicate any attempt to simplify her relationship to the player or the game because of the importance of game-play. While Lara Croft offers a comparatively simple example because she is one character, many video games double and multiply single characters into multiple player-character choices, and then those player-characters into their own enemies.

<3> Studies on doubling and identification in games have more often used psychoanalysis to focus on the doubling of the player in relation to the player-character. However, doubling and mirroring in video games occurs at the level of game-play, with the player doubling the player-character, and within the game structure as the characters themselves are doubled and multiplied. The doubling and multiplication within the game structure is directly tied to the game technological requirements that demand the mirroring of code for space conservation. However, because technological mirroring proves necessary, many games incorporate that mirroring into the game narratives to make the games’ narratives operate within the structural confines of that mirroring. Thus, many games have structural and spatial, as well as narratively mirrored characters. Because of the partly technology-derived mirroring of narratives and characters, and their subsequent multiplication, video games often focus on sibling rather than romantic relationships.

<4> The shift from romantic to sibling relationships not only changes the space in which the games are played, but also the overall movement and shape of the game narratives. In doing so, many video game stories present radical departures from traditional romantic storytelling conventions specifically because they adhere to game design conventions and constraints. Many games also follow more conventional romantic storylines, but these are often portrayed in conjunction with or as a subset to sibling storylines. While psychologically-motivated romantic structures occur more frequently in game narratives as video games develop and more mature-rated and adult-themed games are released, the sibling structures dominating earlier game narratives still remains in use in many existing and upcoming games.

<5> Because of their prevalent use of sibling structures, video games connect to a long tradition of fairy and folk tales. Further, folk and fairy tales highlight the subversive and radical possibilities in video games, whereby video games can subvert traditional narrative and typical game-play conventions [1]. Bruno Bettelheim notes in his study of fairy tales The Uses of Enchantment that two siblings are often used in fairy tales, often as brother and sister to represent two different types or different aspects of the same person. This structure has continued and evolved through comics, animation, and video games. One modern day example of this structure comes from Donald Duck's nephews, Huey, Dewey, and Louis who act as a unit in terms of actions and speech—they are parts of one person divided into three. In video games, this occurs frequently with one sibling representing greater skill in one area or more fully embodying a certain concept For instance, when one game player-character is stronger and another is faster, or as a variation on the “Two Brothers” theme that Bettelheim studies, where one character often embodies “the striving for independence and self-assertion, and the opposite tendency to remain safely home, tied to the parents (91) Bettelheim's remarks here are in reference to the entire frame of fairy tales, but they also apply to video games, as Janet Murray has noted in using Vladmir Propp's "Morphology of the Folk Tale" in order to study the story structure of video games (Hamlet on the Holodeck). While Propp can be apt and useful for many games, for others Propp's analysis is overly simplistic and cannot account for the many variations. Bettelheim's remarks on the movement and tension between siblings and on how those tensions often vary in accordance with the siblings’ relationships opens the gap left in Propp’s work and shows that video games, like fairy tales, need a more complex approach to even seemingly simple stories.

<6> The sibling structure in video games often acts in the same subversive manner as the sibling structures in fairy tales. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari explain the significance of sibling relationships for social change in the context of schizoanalysis, which they consider to be an alternative to psychoanalysis which respects the relationship of siblings and equals instead of predicating all relationships on the dominant family structure with father and mother:

This combined formula, which has value only as an ensemble, is that of schizo-incest, Psychoanalysis, because it understands nothing, has always confused two sorts of incest: the sister is presented as a substitute for the mother, the maid as a derivative of the mother, the whore as a reaction-formation. (Kafka 66)

Psychoanalysis reaffirms that dominant structure by insisting on the power and presence, even in absence, of the ordering or power structure of the adult-parent formation. As Deleuze and Guattari note, psychoanalysis insists on the mother even when the mother is absent; when the mother is absent and the sister fills a pivotal role by becoming representative of the mother. Alternately, schizoanalysis argues that for some texts – while the parental-power formation remains present – the parental-power structure is not the pivotal relationship within that structure.

<7> The structure of schizoanalysis is a structure of confusion and movement, of doubles and combinations. As such, it allows for changing and evolving structures that exist outside of the patriarchal power system. Folk tales that subvert social norms – like Hansel and Gretel as the tale of two children surviving parental abandonment and as a critique of the family structure that allowed for child abandonment – often use figures of children to question the existing power structure in part by reaffirming the fundamental nature of the sibling relationship. Similarly, many video games also reaffirm the sibling relationship, often to specifically argue against the power structures present in the game.

<8> Because of their emphasis on game-play, video games rely heavily on the reader/player for interpretation and meaning, especially as that meaning may change based on different game-play strategies. The fluid nature of video game play allows games to be analyzed using schizoanalysis and psychoanalysis with the majority of games displaying components of each, especially given the usefulness of psychoanalysis to articulate the relationship between the player and the player-character(s). The usefulness of psychoanalytic and non-psychoanalytic models is clear given the ubiquity of sibling relationships in video games These siblings are often doubles in their places within the game narratives and in their visual representation and afford a subversive vision akin to the sibling doubles from fairy tales, a vision that requires multiple lenses. The prevalent use of siblings and emphasis on sibling relationships in games points to narrativized struggles between traditional and non-traditional social models. As Paul Wells notes, the double is generally used as a metaphor for "struggles between law and order, the sacred and the profane, barbarism and civility, truth and lies" (8-9).

Siblings in Structure: Player-Characters and Enemies

<9> Video game designers often use sibling relationships because—though changing rapidly with the popularity of teen and mature rated games—the majority of video games are still created and rated for all ages. Video games need stories that are accessible for all ages and that can be translated for cultural and linguistic changes. The need for translatability is foregrounded because video games are sold across the world, with most games developed in either Japan or the United States. The need for translation requires video games to use a simple schema for game-play, and one that backgrounds more adult-related issues like sexuality. While many video games do have romantic relationships and high levels of explicit sexuality, these present greater difficulty in translation because of the different cultural standards for beauty, romantic relationships, and gender-specific behavior. While having a female character fight to save her beloved may not easily translate across cultures because of the position of women in those cultures, children's stories provide a schema in which male and female player-characters can play and fight with almost equal strength as siblings.

<10> Using nearly-equivalent siblings also allows game designers to easily offer player character options that do not unfairly skew game-play. As Andrew Rollings and Dave Morris note in Game Architecture and Design, game balance includes matching the player's skill to the game-play, matching game-play elements with each other (for instance having equivalent weapons do equivalent damage), and matching the player option so that each player, or player-character, is afforded equal skills and abilities (73-4). Rollings and Morris go on to note that exact symmetry is the fairest solution, "but it's rarely the most interesting" (74). By striving for symmetry, video games follow other competitive sports and events like horse races and boxing in that video games try to equally weigh the players in order to create an even and competitive match. One common way to make games fair while also providing equivalent, but not symmetrical, characters is to make multiple player-characters that have higher abilities in certain areas. The characters are then balanced overall with each excelling in certain areas; the characters are siblings in structural usage because they are equivalent but not necessarily symmetrical.

<11> One example of the relationship of sibling structures for character creation and development are the characters in Tenchu: Stealth Assassins. In Tenchu, the player can choose to play as the male character Rikimaru or the female character, Ayame, who is faster but less powerful than her male counterpart. This allows for slight player-character differences that relate to gender, but that more significantly relate to different options in game-play. Ayame allows for game-play that is based on quick movement and that requires more hits for a kill, while Rikimaru allows for slower play based on slower, more powerful attacks with less movement and fewer hits required for a kill. The two characters are then synonymous with their game-play options and they parallel each other in terms of their ability to represent facets of game-play.

<12> Following the need for ease of translation, game designer's also need to be able to easily implement multiple possible player-characters, for play in multiplayer games, and in multiple-character single player games. Siblings and sibling structures—where the player-characters are equivalent in age, overall skills, and goals—allow for game designers to create multiple characters with few extra programming demands. Because video games are incredibly popular and game technology is rapidly evolving, game designers’ and technological needs play a large role in the creation and evolution of game structures and narratives. As such, the sibling structures for game-play and game design operate on both the more simplistic level of player-character choice, as well as on the level of the underlying game meta-structures.

<13> In terms of player-character choice, using siblings as the multiple player-character  options allows the game narratives to be written once, and then the siblings can be easily substituted for each other during game-play without the need for multiple narrative structures or game-play options. This also allows game designers to add additional characters and character types and to add in unlockable [2] or extra characters with relative ease. One simplified example of a video game that uses characters within a sibling structure, but not a sibling narrative is Gauntlet. Gauntlet provides an excellent example of the sibling structure because the player plays as one of several player-characters which all begin with different levels of ability within the same skill sets. As the game progresses, all of the characters slowly grow more powerful in the same main categories of strength, speed, endurance, and magic. New characters with the same skill areas can be unlocked and all characters have the same maximum levels for each skill, allowing them to become equal in terms of their in-game attributes While the characters differ only slightly, and their differences do not greatly affect game play, Gauntlet still offers the appearance of choice by using the sibling player-character structure with each character as an aspect of the other characters. The sibling structure also allows game designers to easily add in additional characters for the appearance of additional game­-play options and rewards. For instance, Super Mario Brothers uses the siblings Mario and Luigi as identical character options, except for their coloration, in the two-player game. While Super Mario Brothers is ‘a princess on a pedestal game’, in which the player fights to save a trapped princess, it focuses first on the sibling relationship because both brothers are enlisted to save the princess. Mario and Luigi are identical in terms of abilities, age, and their appearance only varies in terms of the colors of their clothing; Mario wears red and brown and Luigi wears white and green [3].

<14> In Super Mario Brothers, the sibling relationship is also apparent in enemies like the Hammer Brothers, who are always in pairs and who fight by throwing hammers at the player-character. In later Mario games, the player can play as Mario, Luigi, Toad, or the Princess, all of whom have higher abilities in some areas, but have equal overall skills. More recent games also feature the character Wario, a larger and more yellow version of Mario, as an enemy or a player-character, depending on the game. The multiple player-characters and monsters, even in the simple example of the Super Mario Brothers, connect to the overall evolution of monsters. As Judith Halberstam notes, "[t]he post-Frankenstein monster emerges at the turn of the century as a creature marked by an essential duality and a potential multiplicity" (53). Like other monsters, those presented by video games are multiple in each of their instances, and in the spectrum of their iterations within a single game. And while the monsters in Super Mario Brothers are not horrific monsters, the general structural and narrative multiplicity of enemies and monsters in video games allows for the creation of multiple monster types, including horrific monsters and doppelgängers.

Siblings in Narrative

<15> Design requirements push game designers towards using sibling structures for player-characters. However, the scope in which many games use siblings not only for player-character choice, but for the game meta-narrative and game-play design shows that video games operate both within traditional romantic and familial structures, as well as within alternatives like sibling structures. For games using the sibling structures for game design, Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis proves a useful approach. For instance, both of the early games Super Mario Brothers (1985) and The Legend of Zelda (1986) are technically ‘princess on pedestal’ stories, but to read these merely in a psychoanalytic manner misses the sibling relationships in each. In The Legend of Zelda, the main character, Link, and Zelda, the princess he must save, appear as brother and sister. In a later game in the series, The Legend of Zelda: the Wind Waker Link is, in fact, explicitly named as brother to Aryll, who he must save.

<16> In each of these games, the ‘princess on a pedestal’ story is also a narrative of a brother saving his sister. As such, the game narratives are more like modern renditions of radical folk tales that question the explicit power structure by presenting an alternate structure. The folk and fairy tale structures in these games further reinforces their subversive tendencies, as Jack Zipes notes: "No matter what has become of the fairy tale, its main impulse was at first revolutionary and progressive, not escapist, as has too often been suggested" (36). While folk and fairy tales can be subversive, Zipes also argues that their presentation often diminishes or negates their subversive potential. In particular, Zipes states that the mass production of fairy tales leads to, “a technologically produced universal voice and image which impose themselves on the imagination of passive audiences. The fragmented experiences of atomized and alienated people are ordered and harmonized by turning the electric magic switch” (17). Thus, the structure of folk and fairy tales alone does not necessarily allow for subversion. Rather, it is a combination of the stories themselves and the manner in those stories and their structures are presented that allow for the subversive potential. Because video games must offer options, or the appearance of options, and because they rely on game-play, they may escape the universalized voice. For instance, even in games like Super Mario Brothers in which the player is sent on a quest to save the princess, the game focuses first on the brotherly relationship between Mario and Luigi and then on their quest to save the princess. In moves similar to this, the Mario video games often posit the primary relationship to be that of siblings, with the Princess included as an equal as she is a player-character in several of the games.

<17> Super Mario Brother's characters can be incorporated into a psychoanalytic structure that would reaffirm the dominant social-power structure of the family, but to remain only within this interpretative framework would neglect or obscure significant aspects of the game. Making this misstep, Mia Consalvo in "Hot Dates and Fairy-Tale Romances: Studying Sexuality in Videogames" psychoanalytically analyzes one of the games in the immensely popular Final Fantasy series for its characters’ romances.  However, Consalvo’s analysis neglects that all of the characters in Final Fantasy are orphans in worlds torn by war, with absent parents, making the characters siblings through their loss. Her analysis also neglects that, while the games’ ending and the jokes during the game suggest romance, the game is played in a traditional fairy tale form with the siblings fighting for survival. Consalvo bases her psychoanalytic reading of the Final Fantasy games only on the game dialogue. While dialogue is an important component for game analysis, game-play and structure point to another structural level that complicate readings of the game structure presented in the game dialogue.

<18> The sibling structure employed in Final Fantasy, with its use of orphan-siblings as the player characters, also occurs in the Final Fantasy offshoot, Kingdom Hearts. Kingdom Hearts retains some of the Final Fantasy characters while also adding new ones. Kingdom Hearts also has the player-character Sora fight his own shadow. Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts’ use of orphans to provide equivalent player characters influences the game narrative and connects to doubles. As Karl Miller notes,"[w]here the double is, the orphan is never far away" (39). For video games, orphans and doubles are connected by the game narratives that seek to provide equality, and must thus remove the more powerful ‘parental’ figures and make the characters equal by way of making them orphans. Because of the need to balance player characters, video games use doubles for both characters and enemies. By making the players in Final Fantasy orphans, the players are equal in a manner that psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on sexual relationships and the priority of the parent, cannot grasp.

<19> Furthermore, because the player-characters are all orphans and exhibit equivalent abilities, the player-characters act as doubles of each other with each one providing slight alterations, but acting in similar ways and remaining tied to the other characters within the narrative. Similar to Final Fantasy, the game ICO places the player as a young boy banished from his home village. In order to escape the prison the villagers confine him to, he must help another prisoner, a young girl named Yorda. Because of the girl's age and the game’s storytelling style, ICO also shows a sibling relationship with the two children joined in their orphaned status, banishment, and loss. In Gender Inclusive Game Design, Sheri Graner Ray argues that in ICO, “the way in which the NPC [non-player character] is presented to the player encourages emotional involvement" (55).

<20> This emotional involvement stems from the depiction of Yorda depicts as a sibling in need of help, and as a sibling in circumstance with both the player-character and Yorda living alone in exile. The fairy tale structure in these games is not a reaffirmation of the dominant structure, but one more in line with the subversive nature of early fairy tales. This is not to say that video games were designed for their revolutionary potential, just as folk and fairy tales were not always created for revolutionary reasons. As Zipes contends, folk and fairy tales have been considered subversive, “as they have tended to project other and better worlds,” and additionally they, “have provided the critical measure of how far we are from taking history into our own hands and creating more just societies” (Zipes 3). The majority of video games are certainly not developed with revolution in mind, but the majority of video games do present the possibility of better worlds and a method for making those worlds, if only in terms of the fictional worlds they present

<21> Final Fantasy, ICO, Super Mario Brothers, and The Legend of Zelda are typical for video games in their presentation of sibling relationships as the primary relationships, with parents and parental structures being notably absent. On its own, a psychoanalytic framework proves inadequate for video games like these if one wants to address the manner in which relationships are constructed and explored as they are often without parental or other hegemonic structures. Psychoanalytic theories would most likely respond to this that the parents may be removed, but that they still exist structurally. In these games, however, the parents and all parental structures have not only been removed, but the game worlds are also frequently in chaos. To argue that this chaos still implies a traditional psychoanalytic structure misapprehends these narratives and their development through game-play. As an alternative to a psychoanalytical frame for discussing these games, schizoanalysis helps to illustrate the manner in which games use sibling structures and the significance of the sibling structures in games.

<22> In Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari argue that psychoanalysis misunderstands the function of the family. In doing so, they argue that the entire field of the familial structure is misinterpreted in making the family the site where the entire social field is applied and performed:

The family becomes the subaggregate to which the whole of the social field is applied Since each person has his own private father and mother, it is a distributive subaggregate that simulates for each person the collective whole of social persons and that closes off his domain and scrambles his images. Everything is reduced to the father-mother-child triangle, which reverberates the answer 'daddy-mommy' every time it is stimulated by images of capital. (265)

Deleuze and Guattari here specifically relate schizoanalysis to the capitalistic system and to the overall social structure. While it is beyond the scope of this paper to explore the implications of sibling-structured video games for capitalist society, the alternative social structure presented in such games corresponds to the subversive potential of folk and fairy tales which question the dominant social order.

Sibling Worlds: Chaos of Changing Structures

<23> Horror games like those in the Fatal Frame and Resident Evil series present examples of subversive texts that rely on the sibling structure in order to question the narrativized power structures in their game worlds and the function of player-characters and non-player-characters in those worlds. Unlike many sibling-based games that are designed for all player ages and designed with little of a recognizably real world included, survival horror games provide a critical perspective on sibling relationships because they are situated within more realistic worlds, with older player-characters, and designed for older players, and then the games question all of the world structures they depict. Survival horror games are also easier to disentangle from their explicit narratives because the narratives are often Gothic. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick explains of Gothic conventions; “Surely no other modern literary form as influential as the Gothic novel has also been as pervasively conventional. Once you know that a novel is of Gothic kind[...] you can predict its contents with an unnerving certainty” (9). Gothic conventions may make for greater confusion in terms of the actual narrative and structure; yet, the codification of Gothic conventions serves to simplify the separation of the explicit narrative. Because Gothic narratives often appear as psychologically motivated tales, their use in survival horror games also further helps to show the need for schizoanalysis given the failure of psychoanalysis to fully explain these games. Psychoanalysis postulates that the fundamental structure is that of the family—whether this structure is that of mother-father-child or of caregiver-lack-child, the structure always refers to the initial values of the hierarchical family of parents and children. Deleuze and Guattari argue against this structure because it attributes all power to the parents and reifies the small nuclear group even as it applies to the larger social structures. The subversion of this is the schizoanalytic structure, which is one of change and evolution and which focuses on the relationship between equals – that of siblings or doubles.

<24> Removal of the parents or governing power, which is typical of many childrens’ stories and video games, does not in itself change the narrative movement from psychoanalytic to schizoanalytic. The psychoanalytic structure must be fundamentally subverted or questioned for the schizoanalytic structure to take hold. This fundamental change is enacted throughout the Resident Evil and Fatal Frame games, in which the parental figures are removed, undermined, or corrupted. The removal of parental figures and structures leads to changes in the narrative structure and the game world presentation that make psychoanalytic treatments of these games inadequate. Deleuze and Guattari contend that:

The Oedipal incest occurs, or imagines that it occurs, or is interpreted as if it occurs, as an incest with the mother, who is a territoriality, a reterritorialization. Schizo-incest takes place with the sister, who is not a substitute for the mother, but who is on the other side of the class struggle, the side of maids and whores, the incest of deterritorialization [...] Schizo-incest, in contrast, is connected to sound, to the manner in which sound takes flight and in which memory-less blocks introduce themselves in full vitality into the present to activate it, to precipitate it, to multiply its connections. (Kafka 67)

In many video games, the sister or brother is just that – a sister or brother – and does not represent the mother or any sort of territorialized structure. In the survival horror games investigated here, all of the existing structures are eroded or destroyed; only the sibling relationships remain and these are relationships of tension and change.

<25> Within the schizoanalytic structure, Deleuze and Guattari also note the importance of sound for schizo-incest’s ability to take flight. Sound in the doubled and sibling worlds of survival horror video games provides the only reliable game system – vision cannot be trusted, and often cannot be used effectively at all because of the lack of light and heavy fog. Sound fills survival horror games to define the characters' relationship to the virtual space of the game world, the narrative, and each other. Survival horror games are nightworlds and operate as Paul Coates suggests, as worlds "in which vision is abolished and a series of suggestive sounds come into their own" (123). Within these worlds, all structures are lost, save for sounds and siblings. The emphasis on sound complements the narrative removal of traditional hierarchies (with parents and the government) by removing the traditional focus of the game display by refocusing it on the auditory rather than the visual.

Figure 1: Resident Evil Characters and Families

<26> The Resident Evil games begin with capitalistic and militaristic structures gone haywire The games' conflict begins with a corporation named Umbrella, which engineers biological weapons, creating one called the T-Virus (and mutations of this virus in subsequent games). This virus animates dead flesh so that dead creatures live on in an undead state and attack the living in the attempt to devour them. As the virus mutates and as Umbrella develops other virus strains, dead plants and animals also become extremely violent and aggressive. In the various game iterations, the virus gets released into a city and several Umbrella training and development areas, which the player fights his or her way through in order to survive and to find friends and family. While the basic plot on the surface seems to be that of a low-budget horror film, the story that unfolds through game-play and the game characters indicates that this can hardly be the case. Through game paratexts and game-play, the player learns that some of the player-characters are members of S.T.A.R.S., a tactical unit that has been sent in to control the virus. Player-characters include Claire Redfield, sister to Chris who is in the S.T.A.R.S. unit; Leon Kennedy who was reporting to Raccoon City to be a police officer (but since the Police are destroyed, he is completely unconnected); Steve Burnside, son of two Umbrella operatives now dead; and Billy Coen, a fugitive naval officer who was framed, incarcerated, and has escaped from that incarceration. In the course of the game plot, the S.T.A.R.S. leader, Albert Wesker, betrays the group and attempts to kill them. In all of these cases, for S.T.A.R.S. members like Chris, Jill Valentine, Barry Burton, and Rebecca Chambers, and for the others like Claire, Leon, Steve, and Billy, the controlling social structure is absent (See Figure 1). Only in Steve's case is this structure literally parental, but all of the characters previously existed within a psychoanalytic structure of family, career, and military forces, and for all these structures have been removed or proved corrupt.

<27> Psychoanalysis could take this removal and aberration of the traditional structure as simply that, an aberration being used for the horror in the games. However, the games refuse such a simple reading. The removal of the parental and patriarchal structures is shown in small paratextual notes and in short cinematic sequences sprinkled in with game-play so sparsely as to be insignificant compared to the sibling relationships. For instance, members of the S.T.A.R.S. team are all shocked when they learn of Wesker's betrayal, but that shock in reaction to Wesker is much less than their reaction to the loss of any of their sibling team members. The overall game trajectory, including the overall movement of actual play focuses on the characters operating as siblings in order to help each other, often in direct opposition to their other orders. The focus of the game is on saving the sibling characters, and those who act otherwise are shown to be destructive and evil.

<28> Even the romantic relationships in Resident Evil are first and foremost sibling relationships, and only then romantic. In Resident Evil 0, the S.T.A.R.S. medic Rebecca Chambers, and the fugitive Billy Coen have moments where they seem to be romantically interested in each other, but the game never makes this clear. They are both clearly linked as caring friends, as comrades fighting against the monsters around them. This cooperation questions the apparent order because Rebecca's military orders are to capture Billy and because, even though she was told that Billy is a criminal by her superiors, she still trusts him. Rebecca is still a teenager in the game and her placement as a child within a militaristic order structure casts her military superiors, like Albert Wesker, as parental figures. While this is true for all of the S.T.A.R.S. members, it is especially true for Rebecca because she does not appear to be in a strong position, in terms of age or physical ability, to resist the existing structure in any way. Her placement as medic, and thus less skilled with weaponry, further reinforces her subordinate position. However, she disobeys her orders and resists the dominant powers with little effort.

<29> Like the seemingly romantic relationship between Rebecca and Billy, Jill Valentine and Chris Redfield (Resident Evil, Resident Evil 2) seem to be romantically interested in each other. Like Chris, Jill is a member of the S.T.A.R.S. team and they both fight to help each other. Their relationship, other than their functional relationship as siblings in their military unit, is never made explicit. However, Chris searches for Jill in the same manner that he searches for his sister Claire; and as Claire and Jill are furthermore similar in appearance, they both function and appear as Chris' sister. In addition to these oddly unromantic relationships, one must also consider Barry Burton and his family (Resident Evil). Barry obeys Wesker because Wesker threatens to kill Barry's wife and child. Barry acts as a traitor to his team for a period of time, but then risks his family in order to save his team members. In doing so, Barry both overthrows Wesker's control and reaffirms that the sibling relationship between S.T.A.R.S. members and other survivors comes before that of the traditional family structure. Following Barry, the traditional family is even shown to be a destructive force.

<30> Destructive forces show in all of the complete family units presented - even in those that are now incomplete, as with Steve Burnside's family (Resident Evil- Code: Veronica -) and Lisa's family (Resident Evil). Steve Burnside has to fight to survive after he and his parents are taken to an island and imprisoned by Umbrella. In one cut scene, Steve kills his zombified father in order to protect Claire. While this could be read psychoanalytically with the teenage Steve destroying his father to emerge in full manhood, the scene is a cut scene and the player has no control over this action. Steve does kill his father to save Claire, and Steve is clearly shown to be attracted to Claire; but his patricide is clearly shown as motivated by the desire to protect his equal and become part of the system in which she exists with her brother Chris, a system of siblings and of survival.

Sibling Worlds: Enemies and Monsters

<31> While the sibling system presents a web of equal and equivalent characters, it also provides the basic structure that ties the characters to their enemies. The doubling of characters in video games applies to player-characters, non-player-characters, and enemies alike, as well as to the entire structure of game-play itself. As I noted regarding the player’s acclimation to and use of the game space with the player-character acting as a double (“When Seams Fall Apart”), and in the words of Matt Bittanti, “[t]he avatar is a technologically charged doppelgänger” (248). This doubling of the player and the player-character is repeated throughout video games for both player-characters and their enemies. This multiplicity figures in the construction of the monster in both game narrative and structure because the monster also presents a portion of the subject. The monster, Judith Halberstam explains, is the subject’s double and, “represents not simply that which is the buried self, rather the monster is evidence of the production of multiformed egos. Indeed, it is only the evidence of one self buried in the other that marks the subject human” (71)In this way, the monsters within the sibling system also present the system itself either by verifying the sibling structure or by embodying the traditional structures and showing that these must be destroyed. While this replication of the system could serve to verify the hegemonic structures, in the case of survival horror video games, it serves to further undermine those structures.

<32> A large factor in undermining the traditional family structure is Lisa, a monster. Like Steve, Lisa is a young girl whose parents worked for and were subsequently killed by Umbrella. Lisa's parents are already dead when the game narrative begins, but the player learns of Lisa’s parents through their journals, notes, and other remnants of their lives as humans The player also finds Lisa's journal which progresses from Lisa the small girl, through her infection by the virus where her grammar deteriorates until she at last writes meaningless scribbles. Lisa is one of the more difficult opponents to fight in terms of game-play because Lisa is strong and still has some level of intelligence. By reading Lisa's journals and other notes in the game, the player learns that Lisa wants to be whole again and so Lisa eats everything and everyone in order to have them as part of her. Lisa has been given a clear psychological motivation in this sense, because she desires to fill her emotional needs by quite literally devouring that which she needs, and her needs include human companionship. Specifically she wants to eat her mother, the one she misses most.

<33> Lisa and, to a lesser extent Steve, can thus be read psychoanalytically, but to read them only psychoanalytically misses the complexity of both game narrative and game-play. Lisa and Steve represent traditional family structures, are both monsters, and are both killed in the end [4]. The structure that is killed with them represents the attempt at a traditional family structure and unity. Steve tries to be a sibling to Claire, but he is inevitably unable to escape his family structure and is killed. Like Steve, Lisa is trapped by her familial past and is killed.

<34> By showing the family structure fetishized by psychoanalysis as a structure which kills, the Resident Evil games open the possibility for another reading; and, because of the emphasis on equal sibling relationships with the chaotic disruptions that this brings with it, a schizoanalytic reading. Because the games can be considered Gothic, the conventionality of the games in terms of structure and narrative sets the stage for explicit breakages within the hyper-structuralization of the Gothic genre As Halberstam demonstrates, the Gothic, “tracks the transformation of struggles within the body politic to local struggles within individual bodies. The Gothic monster, moreover, as a creature of mixed blood, breaks down the very categories that constitute class, sexual, and racial difference” (78). Lisa, as a child-monster, acts to break down categories because she has grown from a child into an adult monster. As a monster of family, Lisa thus represents family even while disrupting the familial structures.

Figure 2: Fatal Frame 2: Crimson Butterfly’s Playable Sibling Player Characters

<35> Far from being unusual examples, the Resident Evil games parallel the Fatal Frame series of games, which also present sibling relationships as the fundamental connection between player-characters This connection is made and maintained even through multiple realms of existence; in Fatal Frame's case these are a realistic realm and at least one spiritual realm. The first Fatal Frame follows a young girl named Miku as she searches for her brother Mafuyu in a haunted mansion. Because of her concern for him, Miku searches for her brother even when confronted with terrifying ghosts and the gates to hell. Not only are Miku and Mafuyu children of a dead mother and an absent father, they are also psychically linked, which is how Miku is able to track her brother. During game-play, the player as Miku will occasionally stumble onto a place her brother has been recently and the player, along with Miku, sees what happened to Mafuyu at that place.

<36> Fatal Frame2: Crimson Butterfly also follows two siblings. This time the siblings are twin girls, Mio and Mayu Amakura. The player plays primarily as Mio, but also plays as the sibling Mayu for short sequences. Fatal Frame2 begins with the two sisters walking in the woods. They stumble into a haunted village and, once inside, they cannot leave. Mayu seems possessed by the place and walks away, quickly lost in the space and time of the village. The village is frozen in time from nearly a century ago, when the town was supposed to perform a bloody ritual involving the sacrifice of twin girls to appease spirits. The townspeople failed, and now the town is frozen in time and place, trapping and killing all those who enter. As Mayu drifts into the alternate realm in which the town exists, she also slowly merges with one of the twins who was to be sacrificed so many years ago, while Mio attempts to save them both. The Fatal Frame games differ from the Resident Evil games because the player only has one player-character choice in the Fatal Frame games. However, the sibling relationship in the Fatal Frame games is even more intense because the only relationships in the games are that of the two siblings, and those of the ghosts of the townspeople who performed human sacrifices.

<37> In each of the games, virginal females (women in the first game and young girls in the second) are the sacrifices and the male town elder is the one that sacrifices them. In each game, the other townspeople assist the male elder in the sacrifices. After the sacrifices fail, the townspeople in their ghostly forms attack the player-characters. In fact, the only helpful non-player-character in either of the games is a young boy in the second game. However, the townspeople-ghosts' cruelty towards the player-characters is understandable because the mansion and the town suffer not for performing these sacrifices, but for failing to do so. The sacrifices are presented as good acts, in the sense of preventing the doors to hell from opening, as well as evil for their cruelty. All of the townspeople’s relationships are bound by death and, at best, ambiguous moral choices. In this way, the only relationship that does not involve death is that of the siblings, and the only path to freedom or even survival is through the siblings working together. The parents, town elders, and all those in power are absent or malevolent. The only survival or hope is through disrupting the systems that they have put in place by reaffirming the sibling relationship. In both the Resident Evil and the Fatal Frame series, the characters, worlds, and game-play are thus defined by the sibling relationships. The sibling relationships moreover define the enemies and their places within these narratives.

Doubles, Shadows, and the Other

<38> Like the doubling of player-characters, video games also present enemies as double or shadow characters because it allows the game designers to repeat code, making the games easier to program and design. These double or shadow characters can be found in all game types. Some of the games with explicit shadow characters are: Super Mario Sunshine, which presents a water-shadow Mario enemy; The Legend of Zelda II has a dark or shadow Link enemy; Sonic Adventure 2 has a Shadow Sonic enemy; etc. The shadows in these and many other games are doubles and are concordantly presented and often also named "Shadow" or "Dark," but these doubles are not horrific as doubles and shadows often are. Doubles and shadows are connected to technology for both literature and for video games. In The Double and the Other: Identity as Ideology in Post-Romantic Fiction, Paul Coates argues that the large scale emergence of the double in literary works relates to the cheapening of mirrors and their increasing commonality in people's experiences, stating: "As the multiplication of reflecting surfaces, mirrors and plate glass in modern architecture increases the self-consciousness of society, the sight of one's own image ceases to be the harbringer of death" (35). To cope with the technological limitations, Nick Montfort explains that video game doubling began with the early games where half of the screen had to be mirrored to present a full screen [5].

<39> Following the extreme limitations of mirroring the game screen, other early games, like The Legend of Zelda II, doubled characters because it allowed the game designers to reuse code for both the fighting and movement styles as well as the character appearance. Even in the early Resident Evil games, the doubling of the player-character choices with only minor changes to the game space and game-play for each character allowed the game world to seem larger without requiring large amounts of additional code. While the repeated use of code led to many doubled characters, many of these were doubles in a non-horrific sense.

<40> The double as a horrific structure further complicates and subverts traditional structures. Doubles exist within traditional structures, and they exist in manners that question the relationship of one of the doubles to the other. In video games, the doubling questions both the relationship of the doubles and the structures in which the doubles exist because video games that use sibling structures present horrific doubles that are fundamentally connected to each other and to the story. Because video games often use sibling relationships as primary, the threat of the other becomes not a threat of something unknown, but the threat of a perversion of the known. As such, video game enemies in sibling-based stories are more likely to be doppelgängers, shadows or doubles of the player-characters. While early shadow characters are simply that, video games quickly developed non-symmetrical shadow characters in the double and doppelgänger figures of Mario's double in Wario, Luigi's double in Waluigi, Solid Snake's double in Liquid Snake, and Samus' Alien-Samus double in Metroid Fusion.Resident Evil- Code: Veronica also has the explicitly double characters of Chris and Claire Redfield as brother and sister and as the game’s player-characters, and then their doubles in sister and brother Alexia and Alfred Ashford, the heads of the Umbrella corporation and the main enemies in this game. Code: Veronica also uses Alexia and Alfred as dopplegängers, having Alex dress in drag as Alexia after he has confined her to a zombie existence through a failed experiment. Alexia emerges to fight as a zombie-esque creature at the end of the game, making her a double or perversion of her human self. The reversal and mirroring of the brother-sister pair in Resident Evil concretizes the seemingly simple sibling relationships in video games, but also the twisted relationships of dual character games where the male and female characters are used as interchangeable counterparts for each other in order to add player-character choice without disrupting the game narrative.

<41> Fatal Frame more explicitly doubles the player-characters in relation to the enemies than does the Resident Evil series as the first Fatal Frame depicts the scars of the sacrificed women slowly appearing on Miku while she stays on the haunted estate. In Fatal Frame 2, the twin girls parallel the girls who were almost sacrificed so long ago. The twin girls become doubles of each other and of the pair of girls before them. In addition to the player-character doubles in the twin girls, the earlier twins themselves have doubles in their dolls. In the game’s background story, one of the earlier twin girls to be sacrificed ran away and her sister was terribly upset. In order to console her, the townspeople made a doll of her sister that slowly comes to life as the girl plays with, and loves, the human-sized doll. The player-character has to fight both of these earlier twin girls and the doll, which also gets doubled into two dolls, at different points in the game. The use of dolls as horrific doubles is a familiar trope, as Paul Coates discusses Henry James' What Maisie Knew and how the young girl, Maisie, used her dolls in such a way that they became her doubles (59). The dolls as doubles for video games is particularly odd because it inherently questions methods of game-play because the player is playing as one of the characters, making the character perform as a puppet or a doll for the player. This bizarre connection between the player and the player-character is further reinforced in games like Resident Evil where the controller can be set to use rumble-effects to thump and pulse like a human heartbeat. These odd connections serve to increase the doubling effect and to increase the horror of the game, all the while increasing the importance of the sibling relationship as the only means of escape.

<42> Fatal Frame's game-play and fighting style further increase the doubling effects because its game-play is based on the characters fighting the ghosts by taking pictures of the ghosts that slowly diminish the ghosts' power and eventually destroys them. In discussing that the double most often appears at dusk, Coates argues that the double is like that of the photograph, stating that "[t]he Double in fin de siècle literature is thus the uncanny aspect of the photograph, which is similarly momentary and monochrome" (4). The ghosts in Fatal Frame can only be clearly seen through the camera lens, but using the camera lens makes moving the player-character more difficult and more awkward. When the player takes pictures of the ghosts, the ghosts are sometimes knocked backwards by the force of the shot, other times the ghost retreat slightly, and other times the ghosts charge forward undaunted. The closer range in which the photographs are taken increase the damage to the ghosts, so the player must balance fear of the ghosts and the damage they do with the need to conserve film in order to be able to survive subsequent encounters. Balancing these needs often means that, in terms of game-play, the player must wait until the ghosts fill the entire screen view, because the view is through the camera lens, and the ghosts are about the pounce upon the player before the player attacks. The need for close-up photographs and the camera-view construction forces the player into close proximity with the ghosts. Thus, the player is bound by a visual and proximate relationship with the ghosts while also forcing the player to take multiple shots of a single ghost, memorializing these enemies in the game photographs, which the game allows the player to keep. The Fatal Frame and Resident Evil series, while extremely codified, also present ruptures using the sibling structures to double the human with human, the human with monster, to double the structures of narrative, and to double the structures of game design. Moreover, the actual game-play further enforces this ghostly doubling by repeatedly bringing the characters in contact with doubled spaces and doubled monsters.

Conclusion: Survival Horror and Family Border Crossings

<43> The doubles in video games serve to undermine traditional family structures while also presenting game spaces filled by multiplicity, mirrors, and complications that intertwine game-play, narrative, and game design. Using the figure of the double, video games present subversive texts that parallel folk and fairy tales in their questioning of dominant structures, including their foregrounding of technological structures that require such doubling. Arguing for the neutral value of technology in the presentation of folk and fairy tales, Zipes states, “Technology itself is not an enemy of folk and fairy tales. On the contrary, it can actually help liberate and fulfill the imaginative projections of better worlds which are contained in fairy tales” (18). Zipes' statement indicates that video games, like folk and fairy tales, can display both alternate world structures or the problems in current worlds. Video game doubles and sibling structures inherently question the reigning order and provide an alternate path, one for which folk and fairy tales point the way for both children's stories and adult fiction.

<44> In More Than a Game, Barry Atkins suggests that Tomb Raider is very much like an epic folk tale because of its use of a princely narrative structure where the child of an aristocrat goes on heroic quests (42). Atkins' remarks on the folk tale are a minor note in terms of his overall argument; however, his remarks are telling in the manner that so many games, even those with limited use of doubles, still connect to folk and fairy tales. Furthermore, video games’ relationship to folk and fairy tales is far from simple. While Tomb Raider and many video games like the classic hero story-structured The Legend of Zelda can easily be read as duplicating a basic fairy tale structure, seeing only that structure without regards to its implications for subversion neglects other equally valid structures within the text. Video games, as a new and popular medium, are in danger of being inaccurately analyzed as simplistic stories in ways that neglect the interplay between game design, game-play, and narrative. Schizoanalysis is but one method for investigating video games in a manner that respects their formulation through game-play, game design, and narrative, because it retains the complex interrelations of power and social structures and sees them in relation to the subversive structures created by the game narrative and the actions of game play.

Notes

[1] Typical game-play conventions tend to focus on acquisition and progression while less typical games tend to focus on exploration and use. By focusing on acquisition and progression, many games emulate an exchange model where game-play is rewarded by virtual goods or spaces. For more on game-play dynamics and their relationship to an exchange model, see Laurie N. Taylor, “Working the System: Economic Models for Video Game Narrative and Play,” Works and Days 2: 43-44 (2004): 143-153. [^]

[2] In video games, items and characters are said to be unlockable if they are at first locked and inaccessible to the player and then, after the player completes a particular action or quest, the items become ‘unlocked’ and available. [^]

[3] Mario and Luigi's appearances do change in later games, but at first they appear identical except for the colors of their outfits. [^]

[4] Or they seem to die, the game leaves open whether or not Lisa survives. [^]

[5] See Nick Montfort's work on early text-based games and early video game consoles, like the Atari for more on code and screen mirroring. It is also interesting to note that mirror effects in games, where the characters could walk in front of a mirror or mirrored surface like water and see their reflection, is a rather recent effect in games, emerging around 2003. The underlying technical mirroring exists on the code and narrative levels, but the visual representation of that mirroring has only been technically possible in recent games.  Montfort presented his work on this at Princeton’s “Video Game, Form, Culture, and Criticism Conference,” in March 2004. [^]

Works Cited

Atkins, Barry. More Than a Game: The Computer Game as Fictional Form. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003.

Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment. New York: Vintage Books, 1977.

Bittanti, Matteo. “The Technoludic Film: Images of Videogames in Films (1973-2001)” Thesis San Jose State U, 2001

Halberstam, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham, Duke UP, 1995.

Hallam, Clifford. “The Double as Incomplete Self: Toward a Definition of Doppelgänger.” Fearful Symmetry. Ed. Eugene J. Crook. Gainesville, FL: University Presses of Florida, 1981. 1-31.

Coates, Paul. The Double and the Other: Identity as Ideology in Post-Romantic Fiction. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988.

Consalvo, Mia. “Hot Dates and Fairy-Tale Romances: Studying Sexuality in Videogames." The Video Game Theory Reader. Eds. Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron. New York: Routledge, 2003. 171-194.

Deleuze, Gilles and Fèlix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1983.

--. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Theory and History of Literature, Volume 30. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1986.

Guerard, Albert J. “Concept of the Double.” Stories of the Double. Ed. Albert J. Guerard. Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott, 1967. 1-14.

Kennedy, Helen W. “Lara Croft: Feminist Icon or Cyberbimbo?: On the Limits of Textual Analysis.” Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research. 2:2. December 2002.
<http://www.gamestudies.org/0202/kennedy/>

Miller, Karl. Doubles: Studies in Literary History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Montfort, Nick. “Combat in Context.” Form, Culture, & Video Game Culture Conference. Princeton University, Princeton, NJ. 6 March 2004.

--. Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.

Murray, Janet. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997.

Ray, Sheri Graner. Gender Inclusive Game Design: Expanding the Market. Hingham, MA: Charles River Media, 2004.

Rollings, Andrew and Dave Morris. Game Architecture and Design. Scottsdale, AZ: Coriolis, 2000.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. The Coherence of Gothic Conventions. New York: Methuen, 1980.

Taylor, Laurie. "When Seams Fall Apart: Video Game Space and the Player." Game Studies. 3:2. Dec. 2003. <http://www.gamestudies.org/0302/taylor/>

Wells, Paul. The Horror Genre: From Beelzebub to Blair Witch. London: Wallflower, 2000.

Zipes, Jack. Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Games Referenced

Acquire. Tenchu: Stealth Assassins. (PlayStation 2). Santa Monica, CA: Activision, 1998

Atari. Gauntlet. (NES). Milpitas, CA: Tengen, 1987.

Capcom. Resident Evil. (Playstation). Sunnyvale, CA: Capcom, 1996.

--. Resident Evil 0. (Nintendo GameCube). Sunnyvale, CA: Capcom, 2002.

--. Resident Evil 2. (Playstation). Sunnyvale, CA: Capcom, 1997.

--. Resident Evil 3: Nemesis. (Playstation). Sunnyvale, CA: Capcom, 1999.

--. Resident Evil - Code: Veronica-. (Dreamcast). Sunnyvale, CA: Capcom, 2000.

Core. Tomb Raider. (PC). San Francisco: Eidos Interactive, 1996.

Tecmo. Fatal Frame. (PlayStation 2). Torrence, CA: Tecmo, 2002.

--. Fatal Frame 2: Crimson Butterfly. (PlayStation 2) Torrence, CA: Tecmo, 2003.

Nintendo. The Legend of Zelda. (Nintendo Entertainment System, NES). Redmond, WA: Nintendo of America, 1986

--. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. (Nintendo GameCube). Redmond, WA: Nintendo of America, 2003.

--. Legend of Zelda II: Adventures of Link (NES). Redmond, WA: Nintendo of America, 1987.

--. Luigi's Mansion. (Nintendo GameCube). Redmond, WA: Nintendo of America, 2001.

--. Metroid: Fusion (Game Boy Advance). Redmond, WA, 2002.

--. Super Mario Brothers. (NES). Redmond, WA: Nintendo, 1985.

--. Super Mario Sunshine. (GameCube). Redmond, WA, 2002.

Sonic Team. Sonic Adventure 2. (Dreamcast). San Francisco, CA: Sega, 2001.

Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA). ICO. Foster City, CA: SCEA, 2001.

Square Enix. Final Fantasy. (NES). Redmond, WA: Nintendo of America, 1990.

--. Kingdom Hearts. (PlayStation 2). Los Angeles, CA: Square Enix, 2002.

ISSN: 1547-4348. All material contained within this site is copyrighted by the identified author. If no author is identified in relation to content, that content is © Reconstruction, 2002-2016.