The Fear and the Flow of Stories Untold
The terror of Stories Untold lies in the inexorable. I often respond to contingency in games, chance and difference and the divergent manifestations of player action. It’s part of why I love Fortnite so much, the way so many factors collide to shape my experience in each match, the way player structures all over the map tell the stories of encounters that played out in specific ways.
Stories Untold has none of that. It isn’t just a game without real choice. It’s a game that makes your own participation in the march through the inevitable horrors laid out before you feel like an act of reluctant but necessary confrontation. Its first chapter, The House Abandon, takes the form of a text adventure running on a low-power computer from the 1980s, and as the narrative twisted inward on itself, I wanted to do just about anything but type phrases like “Go upstairs” and “Enter bedroom,” though I knew that there was no other way forward. Sitting there alone in my apartment in the dark of night, it took real psychological effort for me to punch the keys and hit Enter. I had to steel myself.

So I was surprised when, after the first episode unnerved me so deeply, I found a strange kind of comfort in the game later on. In the game’s third episode, the aptly named The Station Process, you receive radio signals, and must enter strings of data into a computer terminal by cross-referencing aspects of the signals with a document kept on an old microfilm machine. The data’s there. It’s not hard to find. You just need to go through a process, a very clear and straightforward process of a few steps to find it, and then type it into the computer. And I love it. I love the flow of it.
As a writer, I don’t enter a state of flow very often. I don’t know how it is for other writers, but for me, it’s routinely an agonizing process. The conscious, critical assessment of every word, every sentence, every paragraph I produce. The impostor syndrome. The feeling of failure always nipping at my heels. The agonizing need to settle for imperfection, to accept, to move on, to let go, to let the world see what I’ve produced.
In writing, there is real fear. Fear of never producing anything worthwhile again. Fear of not being able to continue making any kind of living. Fear of what the future holds, or doesn’t. And while I don’t miss the time I spent working in video stores and coffee shops, writing rarely offers me anything like the state I entered when reorganizing movie rentals on the shelves, or washing dishes, or letting my muscle memory carry me through the process of making lattes and mochas and cappuccinos. In that place, I felt safe. Capable.

Perhaps it is strange that one of the pleasures of a horror game would come from the moments in which it made me feel safe and capable, but it’s nevertheless true. I’ve never used a microfilm machine in my life, but it’s really straightforward, once you get a handle on it. I knew, playing that section of Stories Untold, that there was no way I could lose, or get it wrong. I just had to find the information I needed and type it in. Very much like looking up the answers in a hint book, but without any sense of cheating, because this is exactly what the game wanted me to do. Flip to the right page, magnify the pertinent details, type them in. It felt like work and I loved it, because it was work that I knew I could do, almost without thinking about it, and yet so much more involving than investigative processes in games often are.
I hate investigations in games that consist of me doing little more than holding a button to scan some piece of evidence while my character, or my character’s gadgets, come to all the conclusions. Give me something more to do, let me feel more involved. Give me a process in which to partake, even if it’s not challenging, because a simple multi-step process can often be a pleasure unto itself. If a character has a job to do, let me do the job. If it’s work, let me do the work. My life is so scary right now. Give me the pleasure of flow. In the narrow restrictions of a straightforward process, there can paradoxically be a kind of freedom. A freedom from fear. Flow is a good place to be.
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Watch my playthrough of Stories Untold:
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Support me on Ko-fi as I look for paying work.
Notes
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