Are Interactive Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Games the Future of Horror Game Play?

Game title: Until Dawn

Gaming system: Playstation 4

Category: interactive, choose your own adventure, simulation, horror

Player type: single player

Age Restrictions: Rated “Mature”, 17+ (blood & gore, intense violence, sexual themes, strong language)

Average game play time: Self-paced 1 hour to 5 hours

Publisher: Supermassive Games

Release Date: August 25, 2015

Cost: $19.99

Website: https://www.supermassivegames.com/games/until-dawn

https://www.playstation.com/en-us/games/until-dawn-ps4/

Overview

Until Dawn is an interactive, choose your own adventure, single-player horror simulation game on PlayStation 4. The premise revolves around eight friends who are reuniting at the character, Josh’s, family mountain cabin on the year anniversary of his two sister’s mysterious double death. At first, everything is all fun and games, until characters start becoming injured, chased and killed by mysterious figures. Could this all be tied to their friends’ deaths?

Due to the graphic nature of the game, it’s rated “Mature” or for ages 17+.

Part of the selling point to Until Dawn is that two characters are animated to resemble two famous real life actors, Rami Malek and Hayden Panettiere, who also voice their own characters. However, the game interactivity allows the player to embody each of the eight characters at different parts of your story arc. A “story” consists of 10 play chapters where you can save the game at the end of each chapter to pick up another time or to continue playing. The goal is to have some of the characters standing/alive by the end of the story, which is dawn. Obviously, thus the name, “Until Dawn”, came to fruition.

Throughout game play, your character is free to explore the family cabin, surrounding buildings, such as abandoned structures and a sanatorium. Additionally, you can trek freely around the snowy mountain, such as climbing the emergency tower, ski lift, and caving through the old mines.

During times of danger, the game forces your player to quickly complete timed, random controller moves. Failure to complete these can result in your character getting injured or possibly dying. Each move must typically be done in a few seconds or your player often trips or falls.

Furthermore, when in difficult situations, your character may have to make a timed decision or stance on a situation. Here is an example of the type of A or B decisions characters may have to choose between within roughly 7 seconds:

Every action and decision can create a “butterfly effect” either helping to save a life or help lead to someone’s death on the mountain. You can view your butterfly effects in the game’s menu. Moreover, you can view each of the character’s traits, as well as their current feelings towards each character. Character statuses can fluctuate throughout the game:

Throughout your player’s exploration, you can also be drawn to game clues, which are typically marked by a white light spot as you near them. Clues are collected in your archives and can serve as warnings:

Lastly, players can find totems of varying meanings throughout game play. These are collected in random hidden locations throughout the game and serve as warnings of possible future events so that you can anticipate your upcoming decisions and avoid errors:

Here’s a short Until Dawn video recording that I filmed during part of our game play, as the character, Emily.

Game Experience

Although Until Dawn is a single-player game, my partner and I played together, alternating holding the controller and making joint game decisions. We played in different rooms of the house, starting in the living room and then moving into my partner’s “game cave” where we both sat in our computer chairs side-by-side. I found that playing together made the horror simulation game even more interactive than intended and we were able to share in some occasional real-life screams at really surprising parts of the game. Due to the time commitment, we played one to three “chapters” out of the 10-chapter game story on-and-off over several different days. Since I’m not as familiar with the PlayStation 4 (PS4) gaming console as my partner, I would either get additional button directions yelled out at me during fast action-paced scenes or I would pass the controller off to my partner for more difficult jumping or climbing obstacles, helping him to decide on decisions. My unfamiliarity with PS4 posed difficulties such as basic controller button understanding and having slower reflexes as I would need to think about what buttons to press rather than naturally knowing quickly.

However, the game itself was really surprisingly fun for such a dark subject matter: friends fighting for their lives on an abandoned mountain in the dead of winter. There were lots of game functions that I wasn’t quite sure what their purpose was. For example, it was clear that any clues found in the game were either pointing towards who murdered the character, Josh’s, sisters the year before or were serving as current warnings to possible sinister danger. But, the totems hidden throughout the game were less straightforward and the inclusion of the Native American reference to totems didn’t seem connected to the game at first. I actually researched the meaning of the totems online and found a large Fandom forum for Until Dawn. Overall, this game was right up my alley being open-ended, allowing the player to explore and making different decisions in this “choose your own adventure” game leading to varying consequences. I often was confused about the purpose of a location/building where the player was, meanings of clues and the varying relationships amongst the friend characters in the game. This helped maintain a sense of discomfort in the game, which helped deepen the shock and surprises in this horror game, which was more of a murder mystery survival game.

I did wonder several times throughout the game as to why Until Dawn wasn’t naturally set-up as a multiplayer game, as it has interactive functions to include more than single-player. But, perhaps our unintended use of the game can be implemented into more recent versions of Until Dawn.

Scholarly Examination and Connections

In Reed Stevens, Tom Satwicz, and Laurie McCarthy’s article, “In-Game, In-Room, In World: Reconnecting Video Game Play to the Rest of Kids’ Lives”, different vignettes are studied examining different portraits of varying relationships in game play and how skills can transfer to the real world. While playing Until Dawn, it was interesting thinking about these vignettes and my partner and my game play altering roles and room locations. As my partner is the more expert gamer for PS4, he continually acted as an in-time guide, advising on controller buttons and how to navigate the Until Dawn world. This was most similar to the cycle three article’s first vignette with Rachel and her brother, Cory, acting as her in-time guide for immediate help rather than reviewing the internet and other written guides (Stevens, Stawicz & McCarthy, 2008).

Reviewing how “transfer”, being able to use game skills and transferring them to another arena such as the real-world, might occur from Until Dawn, the game’s set-up is not truly relatable. However, I can see decision-making skills being fine-tuned from making decisions in Until Dawn, as well as acceptance of consequences. Each decision and action in Until Dawn can change the course of game play and character’s lives throughout Until Dawn. I believe that this could assist teenaged players in acknowledging that real-life decisions do have long-term consequences and to think problems through logically. Playing in a multiplayer-setting, such as how my partner and I did, assists in improving communication skills and organizational skills for shared time and tasks. And, the set-up of changing Until Dawn from a single-player to multiplayer game shows how inventive players can be with unorthodox uses of games. This is most closely explained as “messing around” by experimenting with the controllers and game rules in the “Hanging Out, Messing Around & Geeking Out: Kids Living & Learning with New Media” article (Horst, Herr-Stephenson & Robinson, 2009). Messing around allowed for unintended creative applications of game play to Until Dawn’s single-player constraints for a more collective and interactive experience.

The open-ended simulation set-up of Until Dawn helped enable me to explore and learn steps in the game as I discovered new clues, totems and game locations. However, when some of the game functions were confusing, there is a very wide affinity space on the Fandom Wikipedia page for Until Dawn. From James Gee’s “Semiotic Social Spaces & Affinity Spaces” article, amongst multiple criteria for an affinity space, he stated that an affinity space encourages a plethora of knowledge in an environment from both “newbie” gamers to experienced gamers alike (Gee, 2005). On the Fandom Wikipedia forum, there are breakdowns of the Until Dawn characters, game content, links to other Wikipedia pages, game graphics, player polls, as well as a Twitter page and a Facebook page. This is a rich affinity space that shows the impact of gaming on the Until Dawn community.

As far as relating Until Dawn to additional learning settings, I cannot see this game being allowed in school due to the graphic, violent and shocking nature of it. However, I could see older teenagers and families who enjoy more adventurous games or the horror genre playing this game together. In the “Parent-Child Play across Cultures: Advancing Play Research” article, authors Jaipaul Roopnarine & Kimberly Davidson’s research showed that parents across 28 countries prefer that their children play outside. However, in their research, it can be inferred that higher socioeconomic families may put a higher level of investment in games for learning (Roopnarine & Davidson, 2015). Comparatively, in my partner and my dual-income household, a larger proportion of finances and time are dedicated to games, such as gaming consoles, PC games and gaming groups. Presumably, a lower-income family with small children, where finances are needed more so for basic needs such as food, schooling, and transportation, would be focusing less on investing in high-tech gaming consoles and expensive board games. Until Dawn is still a very entertaining interactive game that can be played in multiple family set-ups and interest levels.

References

Gee, J. (2005). Semiotic social spaces and affinity spaces: From The Age of Mythology to today's schools. In D. Barton & K. Tusting (Eds.), Beyond Communities of Practice: Language Power and Social Context (Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives, pp. 214-232). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511610554.012

Hayden Panettiere. (2020, February 20). Retrieved on March 5, 2020, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayden_Panettiere

Horst, H.A., Herr-Stephenson, B., & Robinson, L.. (2009). Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Rami Malek. (2020, March 4). Retrieved March 5, 2020, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rami_Malek

Roopnarine, J.L., & Davidson, K.L.. (2015). Parent-Child Play Across Cultures: Advancing Play Research. American Journal of Play: v7 n2, p228-252, retrieved from https://via.hypothes.is/https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1053428.pdf

Stevens, R., Stawicz, T., & McCarthy, L.. (2008). In-Game, In-Room, In-World: Reconnecting Video Game Play to the Rest of Kids’ Lives. The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games and Learning. 41–66. doi: 10.1162/dmal.9780262693646.041

Supermassive Games: Until Dawn. (2020). Retrieved February 26, 2020, from https://www.supermassivegames.com/games/until-dawn

Until Dawn. (2020). Retrieved February 26, 2020, from https://www.playstation.com/en-us/games/until-dawn-ps4/

Until Dawn Wiki. (2020). Retrieved March 5, 2020, from https://until-dawn.fandom.com/wiki/Until_Dawn_Wiki