Critical Response 2
American McGee's Alice
I've never done anything with psychoanalysis before so I'm trying to analyze Alice as a game and as one that relies heavily on the ideas of the unconscious and trauma as presented by both Freud and Lacan. Please email me, or tell me, about any innaccuracies or misreadings of Lcan, Freud, or Alice because I'm sure I'm bound to make a few.
Hopefully Alice will show people that PC "action" games can tell a story and make you want to play for more than just the combat.
American McGee
American McGee did succeed in making a game that tells a story and that is not purely about combat and gameplay. Alice is a beautifully designed and rendered game, unfortunately all of the creative work was put into the visuality of the game leaving nothing new or innovative for the actual gameplay. The game is basically all story and no interesting gameplay or combat. Yet the game is actually worthwhile because it is so stylized and so artistic. Given the nature of the game with its emphasis on artistic design and flowing artful rendering, the game really functions better as a cinematic than a game. Essentially, the gameplay is rewarding and interesting because it allows the player to further the cinematic nature of the game. As such, I treat this game as a user driven (in the sense that the user must act to forward the cinematics) film.
What follows may seem like an detailed game review, but this is important because it is needed to illustrate why I will focus on the plot of the game and the possibilities for modifications (mods) to the game. Normally, a video or computer game would be discussed in terms of gameplay because video games are generally focused on gameplay and the experience of gameplay (this is not negative in any way), but a game like Alice is not focused on the gameplay; it is focused on the narrative as it unfolds through cinematic sequences which the character earns through game progression. (Alice is very like Grim Fandango -extremely stylized, with witty and likeable characters, but the gameplay is just a means to the end of a new cinematic.) Alice’s game plot is almost entirely cinematic, by this I mean the plot and character development are told almost entirely through cut scenes and prescripted, unchangeable dialogue. This is not a condemnation of the game, but this is a necessary preference because most video and computer games need to be discussed as the complex interaction of the game’s parts like cinematics, gameplay, puzzles, game engine, and so on. Alice can be discussed in these terms, but Alice is an extremely straightforward game in terms of gameplay:
- the puzzles are simple and the way in which the player solves them is irrelevant in terms of character progression or development, theme, and/or plot;
- there are no complex areas to explore and be confused in (generally there is one right way to go, other paths are wrong or yield a powerup and nothing more); with this, effectively only one path is offered and the path in this is determined by the beginning and end points, not the progression through the experience of the game - the game is defined as sections with clear boundaries, not experiential areas or flowing progression - the game is defined by point to point progression on a line, not the overall movement of the line;
- the player can not interact with the nonplayer characters (NPCs) and does not except in prescripted cinematic sequences; ?
- Alice does use the Quake movement engine, which is very interesting in terms of the recombination of seemingly discrete units, but while seemingly discrete the gameplay of Alice essentially that of Quake where the player must progress through areas in a specified order, killing certain enemies, receiving new weapons, and making difficult jumps.
The plot for Alice is a twisted retelling of the Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass stories. Alice begins with Alice, the player-character, having been put in a mental institution after mental collapse due to traumatic childhood events. Alice must then fight her way through the Wonderland of her mind to reclaim her sanity and her life. With this, Alice sees Wonderland not as a childish world with underlying corruption, but as a horrid world filled with friends, evil creatures, and those needing her as a savior from this corrupted Wonderland. In this way, Alice saves herself by saving others and by being strong and determined. Thus, Alice must heal Wonderland and save its innocent inhabitants to save and heal herself.
In the opening cinematic where Alice’s house burns with her parents inside, Alice is shown in the home with many of the items that she will encounter in the gamespace of Wonderland (like Alice in Wonderland, the Rabbit, chess pieces, cards). In this way, Alice’s path through Wonderland is a memory, as Freud notes that memories can be real or unreal, but that they take structure from past experiences. Thus, the toys (Jacks, playing cards) are in Wonderland, but the toys are part of Alice’s memory of a time before her first trauma. Note that one of the few weapons that is based neither on a children’s toy (the world of the child) nor any actual weapon (the adult world) is the ice wand, which freezes enemies and keeps them at a distance. The ice wand or ice beam is a common item throughout most video games, but its place here is odd because a crib or some other child’s toy, or perhaps a simple padlock, would be better in keeping with the idea of age driven themed items. While the ice wand could be said to fit the theme of Alice because it shows Alice's inability to communicate her trauma in that Alice is frozen, it seems unlikely. So, the toys are weapons and the weapons are weapons against the evil creatures in Wonderland, which are formed from the creatures in Alice in Wonderland. Also, the opening cinematic shows Alice as being at least through puberty, if not closer to being of marriageable age (basing this on her physical appearance and on the circa 1900s elements in the opening sequence such as her family’s clothing, the clock, the toys, the oil lamp near the fire also suggest a time before the changeover to electricity - granted, all of these elements exist in the gameworld and are not attempting to present a historically accurate time period from this world, but given the conventions of the world, I would argue that Alice would most likely be nearing adulthood for her society).
With the opening cinematic and gameplay sequences, it does appear that Alice is new to the institution because she meets the Cheshire Cat for the first time in Wonderland again and asks what has happened to Wonderland in her absence, and this is the nearly adult Alice. So, why has Alice just come to Wonderland so many years after her initial traumatic childhood experience? In the opening cinematic, her wrists are slit (This is reinforced by the girl on the save screen with bloody bandages on her wrists; also note that the game needs to be inaccurate by slitting horizontally rather than vertically because of the politics surrounding video games and all media that reference suicide that children may be exposed to - the division between the worlds of the child and those of the adult in conflict). Given the structure of the game experience, flipping from Alice’s childhood trauma to her young adult institutionalization, and given Alice’s nearly adult persona and speech in the game, it seems that Alice has undergone not one, but two traumas with Alice connecting the most recent to the first trauma and acting through both traumas together. Alice’s confidence, normalcy, and intelligent, witty speech all suggest that Alice was at least fairly functional after her first trauma and until her recent trauma.
It is also most likely that the second trauma deals directly with sex - Alice plays with her childhood friends and toys while going to finally defeat the Queen of Hearts, and then to defeat herself. Alice defeating herself is clearly her regaining control of her sanity and life, but the question as to why she lost these is not answered. The Queen of Hearts as an enemy fits with the original book, but it also fits with sexual trauma because the imagery surrounding the Queen of Hearts presents a perverted figure of womanhood; it actually seems like Alice is descending into some diseased, killing vagina and womb at places near the Queen's Lair. After Alice beats the Queen of Hearts - possibly a figure of the hysteric or psychotic - Alice must then fight herself. A self which appears as the mouth of a monster opens revealing the mutated Mad Hatter whose mouth then opens to reveal a version of Alice. This Alice then tells the player-character (PC) Alice that PC Alice can not handle the adult world and better relent before she completely destroys herself because she is too weak to deal with the harsh realities of adult life.
The break between the adult world and the child world and the perversion and twisting that has occurred between is played out in the character of Alice. Alice in the game is witty, bright, and strong; where in her real world of the mental institution, she is catatonic. This break is very odd because as Alice slowly destroys the villains in Wonderland, her mental state in her real world does not progress. She remains in the institution as basically a vegetable until she completely vanquishes the evils in Wonderland and is then completely healed from all trauma and becomes the her in Wonderland outside of Wonderland. This break between her self in the imaginary and her real self (I’m still confused on Ideal-Ego and Ego-Ideal and I’m not even sure if it applies here) is shown to be a break from her in the real world and her in the Wonderland of her mind, but somehow this break leads to a resolution where her self in Wonderland becomes her in her real world by vanquishing the foes in Wonderland. Thus, the break is not a minor break that she slowly works through with the help of external others, but the break is a complete symbolic break. Alice uses the language of her childhood - with her toys and stories - to work through to a grown up and adult Wonderland meaning that the break between her real and imaginary selves is a symbolic break that she tries to overcome by bridging the gap between the symbols of her childhood and of her adulthood by having the child Wonderland first, then the perversion of the child Wonderland, and then the unification of Wonderland into a new Wonderland. Thus, Alice solves her real world problems by symbolically fixing them in her imaginary world. But, Alice not only symbolically overcomes her trauma, she also institutes a symbolic system that can account for her early self as a child and her adult sexual self.
Other notes
Alice as a retelling is particularly pertinent because Alice, as a story and as a character, have been told and retold many times. With the many retellings and odd references to Alice, Alice is no longer a holistic entity and can not be perceived as such. Thus, the backstory for American McGee’s Alice is fragmented and unifiable except in name; Lacan argued that discontinuity is the central form of the unconscious. American McGee’s Alice has Alice as insane. Alice being insane fits not only with the plot design within the game, but also for the character of Alice as she has evolved and reformed in many different works - this could be an interesting parallel to Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl.
If Alice had been made in such a way as for the player’s actions to have had some emphasis on the story or the unfolding of the story (other than the story progressing or stalling), then Alice would be particularly interesting in terms of the relationship between player and player-character. Essentially, the player could be treated as the analyst, providing a space and a way for the character Alice to work through her inner problems. The player as analyst, helping Alice go forward, but having little control over the results except to continue the treatment. This could be really interesting for transference if Alice changed based on how she was played.
First Critical Response: The Language of New Media