Looking for a reliable way to support the show? Then why not try Nebula? Just go to go.nebula.tv/extracredits to get started! Or hang out with our friends at Real Time History and watch Red Atoms: nebula.tv/videos/realtimehistory-atoms-of-war?ref=extrahistory Thanks for Watching!
I think my favorite example of this sort of recontextualization comes from Star Wars: KOTOR2. It is revealed that over the course of the game, what the player character assumed were just innocent level-ups gained from battle experience were actually the result of something far more sinister. FIrst time I've ever been lied to by a game mechanic.
Here's a term from Ancient Greek literature: anagnorisis! It's when a character in a play comes to a sudden realisation, often that they themselves are the cause of the horrible things that happen in the play.
Yooo. Leave it to Greek literature and theatre to have a word for the moment you realize you totally did in fact fulfill the prophesy that you would kill your dad and bang your mom.
Excellent ! It seels modern terminology is just "Recognition Scene" (wikipedia quote a book called Recognitions and french wikipedia mentioned it is more modern). The greque variant fit more stricly aritotelician view on the subject I think
Disco Elysium does a great job of creating a sort of ‘unreliable Protagonist’ where all of your narrated thoughts and actions are very clearly being filtered through the protagonist’s preexisting biases and conditions before they reach you the player
The moment on the roof with Klaasje where Harry is very literally told that just hits different. Although Disco Elysium is more of an interactive novel rather than a game like bioshock. Almost all of the game is deliverd in the form of dialogue and dialogue options.
The first playthrough and seeing "Would You Kindly?" painted in blood on the wall is a gaming experience I will always cherish. I probably still have whiplash.
I was unfortunate, in that I'd figured out that big twist beforehand. It didn't help that key phrases and brainwashing had popped up in a story I had been reading online shortly before playing Bioshock. I also predicted the big final choice in Life Is Strange based entirely on the time travel fiction in her room when she was trying to figure out her power. Why yes, I am in fact familiar with Donnie Darko, The Butterfly Effect, etc, etc, and referencing those as environmental foreshadowing really does give it away.
I'm honestly shocked Spec Ops: The Line wasn't mentioned here. It's a shame because I feel like We Happy Few could've been done like this and been a way better game. I'm actually a huge fan of media that turns everything on its head, going back and realizing new contexts for previously innocuous moments is really effective at getting me to enjoy the story of a game/movie. One thing that immediately pops into my head was how the Collectors went from being a sort of mindless insect drone enemy in the beginning of Mass Effect 2 to being almost tragic objects of pity midway through the game, and then the 3rd act reveal of Harbinger "releasing control" of the Collector General made me feel empathy for what were, essentially, eugenics zombies.
Spec Ops: The Line for me was an example on how not to do it, at least for some parts. In one scene I knew something was up and didn't want to do the gas-on-enemies thing. The game forced me to. And then showed me what a horrible thing i'd done. Yeah that doesn't work as long as the game expect the player to be/rollplay as someone trying to act sane. they could have given choices, eg have it done by a teammate and it wouldn't have pulled me out of the experience that badly. Other parts were done better, with the things "i" did feeling natural more to me. Though I also mistook the ending metaphore and got kinda the opposite cutsceen of what i intended.... but yeah, the game had its moments
@@TheFaark I find reactions like yours to that scene in the game rather fascinating, because it shows me how exceptionally well the scene was executed. The game didn't force you to press the button. You could've closed down the game at any moment, but you didn't, either because you didn't realize it is an option or because you simply didn't want to. I mean, the game literally tells you "You always have a choice." during that scene. ;)
What do you mean, "We Happy Few" could've done it? It did a TON of unreliable narrator stuff (more in the interpersonal relations area rather than ego driven glory-hound doing objectively bad things Actually area), and yeah it's another title I'm surprised didn't get a mention.
The Stanley parable is an interesting example of video games being able to uniquely have a narrator that's only as unreliable as you chose to make them.
@@Jandalph I'm astonished it wasn't brought up here. That might honestly be the very best showcase of that mechanic at work because the story revolves around you being a real human person who is playing the game. The fourth wall was never broken, it was put behind you.
@@JandalphI immediately thought of the Beginner's Guide as well! Altho on some level, it's closer to a interactive novel / walking simulator than a proper game. Still, it was one of the gaming experiences of all time for me, such a thought-provoking title 🤔
I think 'Frame shift' from literary analysis might cover this. It's when a twist in the narrative forces you to reconsider your framing of previous actions in the work. For example there's a Roald Dahl short story wherein two characters make a bet for a high amount of money, only for the final lines to reveal that one of them has been cheating. The narrator isn't unreliable, but they're misinformed and so the frame shifts and we suddenly see small actions, like where the maid was in previous scenes, as much more significant. Also I was thinking that games sometimes use unreliable narrators in form of framing that makes them appear to be one genre, before revealing a twist. Little Inferno for example makes you believe that the fire in front of you is an abstraction before revealing near the end that you're actually in 1st person perspective from a character who can, but refuses to, turn away from the fire.
My favorite example is Rucks, from Bastion. Not only does he literally narrate while you play and reacts to whatever you are doing, but his perspective on the City significantly shifts from the truth. If you peel back his nostalgia and admiration, you can see literally all important named characters have been screwed over by the City in one way or another. The Kid had to do two shifts on the Wall because the money he was sending home never arrived, Zulf's trust and diplomatic efforts are horribly betrayed when the City decides to wipe his people out and Zia's father is forced to create the Calamity for the City (even though that proves their own undoing). But you have to take a real critical look at how Rucks perceives things, and only then will you notice the City was not all it's cracked up to be. Brillant piece of writing, that game.
This was so powerful for me as I put it together that, as far as I'm concerned, there's no ending where you activate the Bastion for its intended purpose.
Something to consider: as the primary interpreter of the game, the player is more like a narrator, since you (generally) control the action. But you're not just the narrator to yourself, you're the narrator to the game itself. The game doesn't tell you "Mario runs to the right and jumps over the turtle," you're trying to tell the game what happens. You do it through button-presses rather than words. In a way, the genius of The Stanley Parable is not that you play against an unreliable narrator that subverts your expectations, it's that you're two narrators competing over what the story gets to be. You're not Stanley, you and the narrator are God and the Devil torturing poor Job to prove a point to each other.
One of the best uses of unreliable narrators in games is in “call of Juarez: Gunslinger” where the main character is telling stories about his life as a bounty hunter, some of which are super grandiose and conflict with events widely accepted as historical fact, it does a really good job of demonstrating how its hard to discern actual history from dime-novel fantasy when it comes to the era of the wild west
The best part is when the characters he's telling the story to correct him and the gameplay changes. "Wait a sec, there's no indians for a hundred miles of those hills!" "Oh yeah, you're right. They must've been bandits then." and then all the indians you were fighting turn into bandits.
In the latest King's Quest game the unreliable narrator is used quite well too. With the grandfather who tells his story to his granddaughter. It's a bit reminiscent of the Tim Burton film Big Fish. It's not exactly lying but "embellishing reality".
"Unreliable Exposition" covers most cases. It's not strictly speaking the narrator, but games don't necessarily have narrators. But most games have exposition dumped by in-game characters, and it's not even all that uncommon for one or more of those characters to be less than totally forthcoming. One good example not mentioned in the video is Mark of the Ninja, which has both unreliable exposition and has the main character you're playing being rather unreliable in their own way.
My take would be ,,Unreliable Experience", since the game makes you think and feel one way but then turns around and remakes your experience with the game
I guess the alternative to "exposition" would be something like Spec Ops, where the actual things you're seeing onscreen moment-to-moment aren't reliable either.
Metal Gear Solid (the original) does something similar to set up a Nice Job Breaking It, Hero. The "Tales of" games frequently have such, sometimes including actual narration that it flat-out lies.
@@goldenhorde6944 But also, what you see from moment to moment in Spec Ops IS the experience of the main character. Or at least the experience as the MC remembers them, up until the end.
This is the whole reason I watched the original Twilight Zone series, to pick up some of that show's amazing skill at writing plot twists involving unreliable protagonists.
i`m fond of the term „agency subversion“ - in that it is revealed that you/your character have not been exerting agency over the game`s systems/world in the way that you were lead to believe
I instantly have to think of NieR and how the player character has this kind of typical fantasy adventure story but when it is revealed what's really going on, you're in for another emotional Rollercoaster with a blown brain on the side.
I feel like games that come really close to being unreliable narrator status are some horror (and not horror) games that make you see a different world than what is the real world, but your actions in the other world are being translated to the real world somehow. Games like Among the Sleep, Hellblade, and American McGee's Alice series come to mind, to greater and lesser degrees.
Nier Replicant is another perfect example of re-contextualizing players' actions to evoke emotion and thought about the game's narrative themes. For me, these kind of experiences separate games that I move on from (and sometimes mostly forget) from the ones that I engage with on a deeper emotional and/or intellectual level, and stick with me forever.
I feel like that's a bit too general imo, since it could be used to describe ANY sort of plot twist, when I think what's being described here is a bit more specific than that. It's a good base tho, maybe some sort of modification on "paradigm shift?" Like "mechanical paradigm shift" or something? Bad example lol, but I hope you get what I mean.
A paradigm is a concept about how ideas are structured, beyond interpretation. For videogames the paradigm would be more aching to genre than a character's frame of reference in my opinion. If you are playing a platformer that suddenly becomes a racing game or a turn based battle, than yeah, paradigm shifted. You cam say minigame tournaments like Mario Party amd Pokémon Stadium minigames are paradigm shifters in a way
Dragon Age II has an amazing sequence where you play a mission as a particular character. It starts to get weird as the character seems way more OP than previously and the mission is going really easily. The whole game has a framing narrative and eventually you realise that in this part the character himself is narrating this part to an interrogator and is bigging himself up wildly.
There was a lot of unreliable narration going on in Dragon Age 2, thanks to Varric. That fun little man was always embellishing his stories more than a little. :)
Dude I’m so surprised they mentioned Gone Home but not What Remains of Edith Finch. It’s a game all about unreliable narrator after unreliable narrator and the recontextualization of things that happened
I think this type of thing was done well in Layers of Fear where you are an artist slowly going insane as you find what you need to finish your masterpiece. They give you pieces of a story and then subsequently shift that story into a truth (depending on the ending you get from the choices you make). Very disturbing and beautiful.
I remember playing Spec Ops, and it being pretty obvious that the narrator was unreliable and being asked to attack people and thinking "Yeah this is obviously wrong, but the game doesn't give me a choice if I want to progress" then the big gotcha reveal comes and I just didnt feel engaged with it cause I had 0 other options to progress 🤷♂️
My favorite recontextualization comes from Spec Ops: the Line. At the end you realize half of what you were seeing wasn't real and the actions you took were very different from what you thought cause of your character's ptsd.
"Rescope" is a possible term for "Recontextualized Actions". It suggests changing the field of vision, and can be used for a bigger picture reveal or a more detailed closer look in the mirror. Love the series!
One example you forgot to mention is FFVII. Cloud's memories are fractured and somewhat modified, so when he tells the party about the events of Nibelheim while they're in Kalm, you literally play the flashback because he's sub-consciously making it up as he goes along. When it's revealed much later that Tifa doesn't remember him being there, and that it was Zack who was with Sephiroth, the player begins to doubt Cloud's version of events. It isn't until a bit later that we piece together the truth; Cloud was at Nibelheim, but was a trooper who just got a lucky shot on Sephiroth. Cloud is an unreliable narrator because he believes a false, modified version of events, which we become privy to over the course of the game.
I think that a good term for this is "unreliable premise". It encompasses that idea that the nature of your actions either as a character or as a player translate to something other than what was first displayed. It might also be good to differentiate between an unreliable player premise and an unreliable character premise, which denotes whether the character the player controls is subject to this deception. For example, the experience points in Undertale or the premise of Braid might be an example of the former as the character is largely unaffected and it is simply a reveal to the player and the drone pilot game might be an example of the latter, as the realisation happens to the character which is passed on the player. Bioshock technically fits both definitions as it is both a reveal to the character that their agency is under question and to the player as they question their relationship to the game itself.
I think Fran Bow handled the child unreliable narrator really well. Just by beginning the game by showing the player that there is a reality most people, especially adults, do not see, but children who have experienced trauma can, the audience is primed to question what is real and what isnt. That question is never clearly answered either, so the audience keeps engaging with Fran Bow because they are trying to answer the question of what is actually real since Fran cannot.
My favorite game in this sort of vein will always be Spec Ops: The Line. Mediocre shooting mechanics but a story that actually has deeper meaning through not giving you all of the information as you're playing someone who is going insane, so you make some weird decisions that make sense in the moment but actually are fictitious.
I'd call it a "subverted narrative" There was a game, I can't remember the name - side scroller where you play a boy sneaking through a city, avoiding notice and solving puzzles. At the end, if you pull the plug on the mind-controlling monster at the far end... you die. Because you _were_ the monster, controlling the boy's body. And what you were doing was not what you, the player, thought from the hints dropped earlier.
Spec Ops: the Line is amazing at this kind of thing. Makes you doubt the character you're inhabiting and by extension distances you from the actions you're preforming as that character. And because the game is built around a genre dependant on you not over-thinking your action (first person shooters) it becomes an amazing metacommentary.
Keeping the player Ignorant of the Context? The most explicit example I have seen in this would be Heavy Rain where... . . . . . . A playable character is the murderer in the murder mystery game and the game gives you no indication that this was even a possibility until the twist is revealed.
You could sort of say any reload of a save, any fail state that doesn't continue the narrative like perfect play would, is told by an unreliable narrator. One that makes this real clear by actually recounting the story like it was misremembered when you die would be Prince of Persia.
"Unreliable Quest Giver" kinda floats into this area as well, especially when its your first or primary source of quests right out of the tutorial area. I remember a Doom-esque game I played once where you're a soldier fighting aliens, and you get missions from your commander that always lead you back to them, with the rewards being beter than the "side-quests" you encounter along your way. However, you're given the option to dialogue with some aliens when you don't have a weapon out, and the narrative gets turned on its head with a reveal that you commander is actually this other type of alien who's been using humans as pawns in their war against the first type of alien.
Also if you want the collegiate litspace definition or word: What it gets called is Secondary Realization or Secondary Unreliability. Also heard it called Backstage Unreliability or "Ender's Game Gaslighting" Or really just called it Ender's Gaming. Since it's basically the key plot point in that book lmao
I think twelve minutes is another great example of this kind of game SPOILERS: The game follows you a man who comes home to your wife where you dance, eat dinner, and tells you she’s pregnant. Then a man claim to be a cop busts down your door and kills you both, but it’s a time loop. Long story short none of it was real and the entire experience is just repressed memory’s bleeding into a hypnotizing season to make you forget that your wife is actually your sister……
Anagnorisis is such a dope concept! I wonder if irony is a simpler version. Mechanical irony is fun to say, too. Someone had to have mentioned this already, but my favorite example is Shadow of the Colossus. It’s clear midway through the game you are causing something, probably bad, to happen but you keep going. That makes the reveal land even harder because you knew something was up but it was up but you kept pushing anyway.
I can't believe this was a whole episode of unreliable narrators without bringing up GLaDOS from Portal. Recontextualized mechanics are something I hadn't really thought about before, though.
Undertale. Twice. First in the neutral ending with the judgment hallway and then in the true ending when you realize who you're playing as. And then one final one in the genocide ending, again when you realize who you're playing as.
Honestly I think the phrase you might be looking for, you gave to yourself "The Obscured Player" fits. The player doesn't have the full picture and when revealed you're lifting their metaphorical blindfold. The little example of "man swings bat around not realizing he's being destructive" is very apt here.
Maybe not quite the same as what you're describing, but Undertale was interesting in that it takes player expectations regarding the language of video games, like XP, LV, or even naming a character, and uses that against us
A similar thing is one of my favourite tropes across all mediums, to be completely honest. And that's when, without revealing any new information or hidden secrets, the story manages to get you to see everything so far in a completely new light. It's tricky, but when stories can pull it off - hoooo, it makes for a truly incredible experience. I think it works so well because the author's being fair with you, treating you like an equal - and they're still talented enough to "beat" you, to defeat your expectations. New Model Army, by Adam Roberts, is my purest example of that, as the end of the first section manages to pull off what feels for all intents and purposes like a plot twist, despite everything you're shocked by being there plain as day all along. Mob Psycho 100's first series also does this really well. Reigen does not change as a person between episode one and twelve! You see him in different situations, and you learn a bit more about him, but there's nothing revelatory - it feels like any later situation could have been in the first episode. And yet, my God, you see him so differently by the end.
I would call it the "Unreliable Storyteller". There is a phrase I have heard before that goes, "Always trust the story, but never the storyteller." (I think it is from one of the Sandman comics.) I have heard this phrase many times around D&D where the dungeon master will guide the players through the game but he/she is always giving only hints and half-truths. (especially in Curse of Strahd.)
_Prey (2016)_ is another great example, with the choices and gameplay decisions you made during the game taking on a whole different context come the plot twist at the end of the game.
Two lesser-known games that do this incredibly: 9 Doors, 9 Hours, 9 Persons (I suggest the DS version, if at all possible for you. They do some really interesting stuff with the two screens after the big reveal drops. I would have regretted experiencing it any other way.) Baten Kaitos (there's a remaster coming out very soon, and the whole game is a hidden gem!) Sans's explanation of LV and XP in Undertale fits this idea too, but I'm guessing most people have heard of that.
The entire Zero Escape trilogy leans on unreliable narrators. 999 has a narrator who holds back a crucial piece of information until the endgame, when it recontextualises a lot of the game - and uses the DS in a way that makes all the ports inferior on that point (though the quality of life added by the flowchart is a big plus - even with Skip, having to re-solve every escape room on every run through the game in order to get the true ending is a big pain). Virtue's Last Reward has a narrator who is missing crucial pieces of information, so inadvertently misleads the player until the reveal near the end, which, again, recontextualises a lot of things. Zero Time Dilemma cheats in a couple of places in order to enable the big twist, and, for me at least, is unsatisfying as a result - on a replay, knowing the twist, there are moments where things that should have been visible aren't, or where what people say or do makes no sense given what you eventually learn. And, on top of that, where the first two games have in-character reasons to hold back the information they do, here, the only reason to lie to the player is to enable the big shock reveal - it comes across as totally forced, rather than as an organic consequence of the scenario.
Yeah, I really liked ZTD, but it was a lot like Danganronpa V3 where I thought "Now that we're reaching this much for new twists, I'm glad this is the last one."
I immediately thought of Call of Juarez: Gunslinger. That game is narrated by the protagonist, but he clearly embelishes the story, sometimes gets stuff wrong, adds details later or gets called out by his listeners for obvious contradictions. And whenever this happens, the game changes around the player. Like Silas (the gunslinger in question) remebers the red autumn trees, and they spring out all around you. He remembers finding an escape from a canyon he was trapped it, and it materializes in front of you. Or he remembers that a bunch of enemies he was fighting werent Natives, but other Cowboys, so they suddenly change shape. It was a really cool technique and the game overall is great fun still.
I would like to suggest "Garden Path Action" or "Garden Path Mechanic" as an alternative. The concept of "recontextualized actions" really reminds me of "garden path sentences". Sentences where "... readers form an interpretation of the sentence which remains plausible until near the end of the sentence ..." (wiktionary). This is essentially what happens to the players, where we interpret our actions in one way, and then towards the end of the game realize that our actions had an entirely different meaning!
They told you at the outset that he was an unreliable narrator, but I loved that Dragon Age II was framed as Varrick's recounting of the game's events, and thus nothing that took place in-game could be completely trusted to be 100% true. I like how it served to reinforce the game's themes about perspective/its limitations and miscommunication.
Ah right, the taste of power during the tutorial being him greatly exaggerating the power levels of the party. And then he retells the event with adjusted levels when called out on it.
It makes me think of Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean. You play as a spirit connected with the main character, a fact which is easily forgotten because it's usually the same as just playing as the character would be. It lets the game pull a twist, though, where said main character takes actions the player doesn't realize he's taking at the time.
Even the simple concept of "you" can be deconstructed in useful ways in a videogame. _Baba is You,_ for example: in most levels you are assigned a specific character to control (usually but _not always_ Baba) from start to finish, but this is a rule defined by blocks within the level, that you can change if you need to, and when you get to the more advanced levels, you start to realize that the "you" rule simply defines which objects in the level _respond to your controls._ There are even a few levels where you need to make something happen _without "you"_ (i.e. with no objects responding to your controls) which really messes with the usual concept of what "you" means.
I think there's a related concept to this, which I'm calling "biased perspective." It happens when a player primarily encounters one point of view, often due to who they're working with. An example of me realizing this was happening to me in a game comes from Guild Wars: Prophecies, the first Guild Wars game. Fairly early on, you join the vanguard of Prince Rurik, and thus most of the missions, quests, and NPCs you interact with early on in the game (before location changes for reasons I won't get into here) are from the perspective of Rurik's vanguard. However, the way he's approaching the current situation is very different from how his father, King Adelbern, is approaching it. We get a lot of the Prince's perspective on the situation and the king, but only a few quests and NPCs give us the King's perspective on the situation and the Prince's response. For clarity, the Prince has an aggressive focus, while the King has a defensive one. When I first played the game as a teenager, I failed to notice the bias inherent in the player's perspective that builds up as a result of the interactions with the game world, but when I replayed it a few years ago (something like 15 years after I first played it) where I took it slow and reevaluated everything, I realized all of the things I'd overlooked. For example, there's a map called "The Breach" that, as a teen, I'd assumed was called that because the enemy invader had made a breach in the defensive wall. It turns out, though, that it was actually called that because a member of the Prince's vanguard had made the breach in their line (possibly in an effort to rescue his daughter who also happened to be pledged to marry the Prince-the politics here are also a lot more complicated than I'd realized as a teenager). I think this kind of thing is interesting! We can also see this idea show up in Dark Souls 1, where we're given information from unreliable NPCs (Oscar, Frampt, Kaathe, etc.) and have to make up our own mind about what is true/right.
I'm gonna mention Call of Juarez: Gunslinger here. One of my favorite examples of the Unreliable Narrator in games, and it actually makes the game more entertaining.
Red from Overly Sarcastic Productions has a video on Plot Twists where she describes the Retroactive Plot Twist, which is a plot twist that recontextualizes past events in the story. She brings up the examples of The Sixth Sense and Planet of the Apes. In fact, what you describe lines up so well with her description of plot twists that I think that is the correct comparison, not unreliable narrator. However, unreliable narrators might show up if the POV character knew something the player didn't, as opposed to finding out the twist alongside the player.
Retroactive plot twists are sometimes the result of an unreliable narrator. The ending of Planet of the Apes is only a twist because the lead character whom the narrative was following incorrectly assumed his location. Or consider Luke Skywalker learning the wrong information about his father (a twist that actually was added retroactively) because he heard about him from multiple conflicting narrators in-story, the latest of which he wrongly assumed was actually reliable. The same concept can be applied to games where either the player themselves or the player character is fed incomplete or misleading information and they don't have enough information to discern the actual situation. The difference in definition is just whether you consider the narrator to be strictly the character being controlled by the player or if the MC is the framing device for embedded narration. I wouldn't consider Portal's silent protagonist to be the narrator, for example. I would consider the narrator GLaDOS who feeds the player incorrect information along with legitimate tutorial tips for the first half of the game, and then outright lies when it's become apparent she's unreliable. Chell is the unspoken outer narrator giving context through the player's actions, but since she never speaks we don't know if she actually trusted GLaDOS or not in the beginning or if that was an assumption the player alone made.
@@BonaparteBardithion I see what you're saying. I would have defined the PoV character to be the narrator, because that's who I would expect to be the narrator if the game was turned into a book. Therefore, someone lying to the PoV character isn't an unreliable narrator, because the narrator is truthful about their actions and beliefs, even though they may be believing lies. However, your mention of silent protagonists reminded me of The Stanely Parable, where there is a Glados-like character straight up called The Narrator. For an example I'm personally familiar with, there's Magalor betraying Kirby. He is our only source of information about the world and his motivations, so he's a Narrator in the we don't have any opposing viewpoints of equal weight. So, I guess I have to agree with you that games with silent protagonists can have other characters serve as Narrators and potentially do so unreliably. It's not as fundamental of a shock as if the PoV character can't be trusted, but it can be powerful nonetheless.
It’s just a twist ending. There are two kinds of twists, ones that change the way things go forward, and ones that retroactively recontextualize past events. Basically what you’re talking about is a “soylent green is people” or “he was dead all along” style twist ending.
The trick is that in games it’s often not done at the end, but one or two acts before the end, so you continue playing after the reveal for a while, coming to terms with the revelation
Give the player a status effect that swaps the models of the bad guys and civilians, let them see what they've done once the status effect is clear? I'm thinking something like scarecrow gas from batman. Bonus points if sometime after they've experienced that, give suggestions but no clear confirmation that they're under that effect again.
Could be as simple as labeling things deceptively, or not labeling them at all. There was a monster in Breath of Fire II that controlled the body of the NPCs it was using as a host. The objective of the quest was to free the host by targeting the monster - but the combat menu automatically selected the host first. Players have to make the effort to shift to a second target on a sprite that looks like a single unit, and no in-game dialog tells you to do this. It's entirely too easy to hit the accept button and wipe the host out without even thinking about it since that's the way most battles go.
A great book series that does a lot of subversion of expectations is The Queen's Thief series. It's very carefully written, almost like an unreliable narrator, so that you have to try and piece together what really might be happening, and I love it.
In the visual novel Ai the Somnium Files: Nirvana Initiative There are several strings of events like seeing a character's dead body then talking to them later on. It is revealed during the course of the game that the player's perspective is being sent back and forth in time by multiple years regularly.
I played BRAID a year ago to help myself get over a breakup. It tickles me that it got mentioned in this video; it's so niche that I didn't think anybody knew it existed.
Calling it an unreliable narator makes me think of the narator from kill the narator or glados from portal. The are not the traditional sort of narator but they more or less fulfill that role and they are also trying to decive you to your death.
One of my favorite examples is in A Story About My Uncle. It's a 3D platformer where the game is a story the main character is telling his child about an adventure he went on trying to find his uncle, who was lost in another world. The game itself is a pretty straightforward 3D platformer focused on a grapple hook mechanic, with colorful fantasy characters. Hidden in the fantasy, from the first level, are messages in the language of that fantasy land, and at the very end the fantasy is pulled back just a little bit to reveal the truth that the story obscured.
I use a term from marketing when I discuss this: rebranding. All of the player's activity has veen rebranded in a new light. People instantly grasp the concept as it's something we're familiar with and can easily adapt it to activities suddenly having a new meaning or direction.
An amazing game with this is AI: The Somnium Files niravanA Initiative. It begins with one of the protagonists finding the left half of a body whose right half appeared 5 years before, with the case left unresolved, and from there the story begins in two separate timelines: one investigating the events in the present and the other one in the past, with different protagonists. Each protagonist is unreliable for separate reasons, and on top of that the game drops a piece of information near the end that recontextualizes everything on the story. I think is a great example of everything discussed in this video.
I like “Plot Flip” It’s like a plot twist, but instead of a twist it’s a complete flip. (Also the human tendency to like “eye-ooh” sounds like “flip flop” makes the term “Plot Flip” sound vaguely backward.)
I would call it a Perspective Shift. That is what the moments are doing is shifting your perspective around to different angles and challenging your original experience and opinion.
Call of Juarez gun slinger does this really well since all sections you play are narrated by the protagonist retelling the events of the game to other characters and he will make mistakes or dismiss rumours or even other characters taking over narration when telling the story causing the environment in game to change or evolve or even reverse making you replay entire sections differently
the Zero Escape games are very good at using their gamey elements to deliver twists that wouldn't be possible in any other medium. I'm not gonna go into detail, but I recommend playing the games if you're into this sort of thing
I beg to differ... The narrator in The Stanley Parable is quite reliable. It is the player that is not. A counter, Bioshock it is reversed as you follow your directives as you progress through that game (Player reliable). The game throw a few twists along the way and a massive one at the end. The Stanley Parable has a fairly straight forward narrator and it is the player that causes the problems (by design). A shout out to another unreliable narrator is from System Shock 2.
It made me think about the start of bards tale when its the barrator that gets subverted in the beginning and then the whole game is about you causing the end of the world :)
The beginners guide has one of the most direct versions being a game whose premise is going through a bunch of games made by someone and being told by the narrator what they symbolize and such.
The unreliable timer in the first part of Metal Gear Solid 2 is one of my favorite gaming details like this, where the usually objective langauge of game ui is used to display Otacon's rough guess of a time frame
In a mulvyist discourse, what you're describing is the suture effect. Basically that as we interact with medium we either enter it ourselves in either 'sadism' or 'masochism' which is basically just really weird freudian ways to describe 'interactivity' and 'passivity.' Because we are active in video gaming, we are affecting it and therefore we feel more in control and can impose our will. While in film and TV it's more about learning as the affect is occurring to you. Someone else is providing the entertainment. And since that aspect of control is important for how we interact and understand a story, it's harder to lie when we are technically the one in control of the medium
This is more of a classic "Unreliable Narrator" example, since it all comes from text files and character chatter, but Transistor had a good one that I always think about. Many characters are described as having left the city for the countryside, which it turns out is actually a local idiom for something else entirely.
I wouldn't call that much different from saying "bought the farm" or "kicking the bucket" and it's very clear(ish) toward the end that there *is* some kind of space outside of cloudbank that people go to and don't come back from. Based on the visuals, it's literally depicted as rural countryside.
Best and easiest to understand term for it could be UNRELIABLE CONTEXT. It's descriptive as the context in which the player makes choises is unreliable and it resembles the unreliable narrator -term enough to be easy to start using. What do you think?
I saw Hbomberguy's video about Pathologic, and the game seems to be approaching this concept from a very interesting viewpoint. The game has essentially three playthroughs, three unlockable characters, but they are all playing the same story, at the same time, in parallel to each other. That way, you see each character's perspective on the others during each playthrough. Actions that you took with one character thinking they were smart and heroic, turn out to have been bigoted and destructive. And choices that may seem silly or illogical in one playthrough, make perfect sense in another one.
A more straight example of unreliable narrator would be of different organisations in the game promoting different versions of 'The Lore' The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind comes to mind, especially in regard to the events leading up to the death of Indoril Nerevar.
I was just the whole time thinking about Spec Ops: The Line, which just seems in so many moments just like having unreliable narrator telling the story while being this narrator who cannot see the real world anymore. And it happened to some degree in some other games where you just show enemies so player will shoot them but then reveal it was civilians/allies. I am not sure about good name but I would try to keep Unreliable in the name as it will still link to Unreliable narrator. So maybe Unreliable protagonist?
Suggestion for how to contextualize you as the unreliable narrator: Incomplete Perspective. By calling it the Incomplete Perspective you get across that you are the narrator or the one doing the actions, but once the Incomplete part becomes complete you get the recontextualization moment. Be this because the character doesn't know a key peice of information, or something in the game world is preventing you from realizing a truth about it, the result is still that you are reliably narrating what you see, but your vision of what is going on is not fully realized.
In Baten Kaitos (Gamecube, 2003) you, the player, are a guardian spirit given the means of controlling the main protagonist Kalas in his travels. It’s later revealed that Kalas has actually been a villain this whole time and trying to harness power for himself with your actions. I feel this plot twist is an even less of an occurrence in an RPGs and definitely a stand out.
Being much lighter on the gameplay side of things due to being visual novels made things easier for them to make it happen, but Chaos Head and Child are fantastic examples of unreliable narration and it was fascinating trying to figure out what on earth is actually going on over the course of the game, especially in Chaos Head
firewatch. She gazlight the player if you don't answer she sounds crazier and crazier. She throws her worries at you then magnifies it as you think about it.
A couple of games I know of that does this include apart from the obvious Spec Ops the Line there is the original Nier, Signalis as well as Wonderful Everyday Down the Rabbit Hole. Then there is the Touhou series that has a really interesting relationship with this trope, in it, we never see things through the main character Reimu's perspective. We only ever see how other characters perceive her and as a result she can have wildly differing personalities depending on through whose eyes we are seeing the story from. As for naming the idea, you could go with "Playing the Player".
"Reframing the Narrative" rolls of the tongue, in my opinion. I've seen a couple video games pull off actual "Unreliable Narration" though. Condemned: Criminal Origins comes to mind. At a certain point in the game, you are forced to decide, as the player, if you think there are actually supernatural happenings afoot, or if you (the player character) are really just hallucinating and ... well. I chose the latter and still proceeded to finish the game. It was a surreal experience.
Looking for a reliable way to support the show? Then why not try Nebula? Just go to go.nebula.tv/extracredits to get started! Or hang out with our friends at Real Time History and watch Red Atoms: nebula.tv/videos/realtimehistory-atoms-of-war?ref=extrahistory
Thanks for Watching!
Ima call this "Deceptive interpretation," nothing about it is unreliably or lying except for our interpretation of the situation.
why not simply "unreliable context" ?
Honestly, I'd just go with Recontextualization... or maybe Context Shift if you want something more snappy with fewer syllables.
contextual subversion
Maybe you could call it an ignorant or ignorance is bliss, narrator. It's sort of like growing up, and learning that you have been lied.
I think my favorite example of this sort of recontextualization comes from Star Wars: KOTOR2. It is revealed that over the course of the game, what the player character assumed were just innocent level-ups gained from battle experience were actually the result of something far more sinister. FIrst time I've ever been lied to by a game mechanic.
Can you give me a good beginner setup in Outside? I'm having some trouble, I need something good early-game or at least some good tips?
Rememinds me of Undertale, which also reveals to players near the end what EXP really mean.
@@SuperHGB You're already playing human, how much do you REALLY need a buff?
Ayo tierzoo! You my favorite channel
@@J_Halcyon he probably got a bad spawn
Here's a term from Ancient Greek literature: anagnorisis! It's when a character in a play comes to a sudden realisation, often that they themselves are the cause of the horrible things that happen in the play.
Yooo. Leave it to Greek literature and theatre to have a word for the moment you realize you totally did in fact fulfill the prophesy that you would kill your dad and bang your mom.
This happens a lot in Greek tragedy, but I do think the best example of this is Oedipus Rex...
I cant decide how to pronounce this, is it just "a nag no rices". But in any case I like this option
This
Excellent ! It seels modern terminology is just "Recognition Scene" (wikipedia quote a book called Recognitions and french wikipedia mentioned it is more modern). The greque variant fit more stricly aritotelician view on the subject I think
Disco Elysium does a great job of creating a sort of ‘unreliable Protagonist’ where all of your narrated thoughts and actions are very clearly being filtered through the protagonist’s preexisting biases and conditions before they reach you the player
The moment on the roof with Klaasje where Harry is very literally told that just hits different.
Although Disco Elysium is more of an interactive novel rather than a game like bioshock. Almost all of the game is deliverd in the form of dialogue and dialogue options.
The first playthrough and seeing "Would You Kindly?" painted in blood on the wall is a gaming experience I will always cherish. I probably still have whiplash.
"Powerful phrase. Familiar phrase?"
My mouth opened when I heard that...and nothing came out.
I was unfortunate, in that I'd figured out that big twist beforehand. It didn't help that key phrases and brainwashing had popped up in a story I had been reading online shortly before playing Bioshock.
I also predicted the big final choice in Life Is Strange based entirely on the time travel fiction in her room when she was trying to figure out her power. Why yes, I am in fact familiar with Donnie Darko, The Butterfly Effect, etc, etc, and referencing those as environmental foreshadowing really does give it away.
@OP, same here. Some experiences make us, this is one of those.
I'm honestly shocked Spec Ops: The Line wasn't mentioned here. It's a shame because I feel like We Happy Few could've been done like this and been a way better game. I'm actually a huge fan of media that turns everything on its head, going back and realizing new contexts for previously innocuous moments is really effective at getting me to enjoy the story of a game/movie. One thing that immediately pops into my head was how the Collectors went from being a sort of mindless insect drone enemy in the beginning of Mass Effect 2 to being almost tragic objects of pity midway through the game, and then the 3rd act reveal of Harbinger "releasing control" of the Collector General made me feel empathy for what were, essentially, eugenics zombies.
Oh yeah, playing through 2 again after having finished the whole series is a trip when you have all the new context.
Spec Ops: The Line for me was an example on how not to do it, at least for some parts. In one scene I knew something was up and didn't want to do the gas-on-enemies thing. The game forced me to. And then showed me what a horrible thing i'd done. Yeah that doesn't work as long as the game expect the player to be/rollplay as someone trying to act sane. they could have given choices, eg have it done by a teammate and it wouldn't have pulled me out of the experience that badly. Other parts were done better, with the things "i" did feeling natural more to me. Though I also mistook the ending metaphore and got kinda the opposite cutsceen of what i intended.... but yeah, the game had its moments
@@TheFaark I find reactions like yours to that scene in the game rather fascinating, because it shows me how exceptionally well the scene was executed.
The game didn't force you to press the button. You could've closed down the game at any moment, but you didn't, either because you didn't realize it is an option or because you simply didn't want to.
I mean, the game literally tells you "You always have a choice." during that scene. ;)
What do you mean, "We Happy Few" could've done it? It did a TON of unreliable narrator stuff (more in the interpersonal relations area rather than ego driven glory-hound doing objectively bad things Actually area), and yeah it's another title I'm surprised didn't get a mention.
@@SydMontague My choice was not to waste my money on a game that’s more interested in preaching at me than in being fun to play.
The Stanley parable is an interesting example of video games being able to uniquely have a narrator that's only as unreliable as you chose to make them.
And then there is The Beginner’s Guide, which is a classic example of an unreliable narrator.
@@Jandalph I'm astonished it wasn't brought up here. That might honestly be the very best showcase of that mechanic at work because the story revolves around you being a real human person who is playing the game. The fourth wall was never broken, it was put behind you.
They needed the Stanley parable adventure line to make an appearance in this vid 😂
@@JandalphI immediately thought of the Beginner's Guide as well! Altho on some level, it's closer to a interactive novel / walking simulator than a proper game. Still, it was one of the gaming experiences of all time for me, such a thought-provoking title 🤔
I would disagree with this; I would claim that the narrator is reliable, it is Stanley who is unreliable time and time again.
I think 'Frame shift' from literary analysis might cover this. It's when a twist in the narrative forces you to reconsider your framing of previous actions in the work. For example there's a Roald Dahl short story wherein two characters make a bet for a high amount of money, only for the final lines to reveal that one of them has been cheating. The narrator isn't unreliable, but they're misinformed and so the frame shifts and we suddenly see small actions, like where the maid was in previous scenes, as much more significant.
Also I was thinking that games sometimes use unreliable narrators in form of framing that makes them appear to be one genre, before revealing a twist. Little Inferno for example makes you believe that the fire in front of you is an abstraction before revealing near the end that you're actually in 1st person perspective from a character who can, but refuses to, turn away from the fire.
I like this term suggestion. +1
Which Dahl book is that?
That's a good one...and an unreliable narrator is then one particular type of frame shift.
My favorite example is Rucks, from Bastion. Not only does he literally narrate while you play and reacts to whatever you are doing, but his perspective on the City significantly shifts from the truth. If you peel back his nostalgia and admiration, you can see literally all important named characters have been screwed over by the City in one way or another. The Kid had to do two shifts on the Wall because the money he was sending home never arrived, Zulf's trust and diplomatic efforts are horribly betrayed when the City decides to wipe his people out and Zia's father is forced to create the Calamity for the City (even though that proves their own undoing).
But you have to take a real critical look at how Rucks perceives things, and only then will you notice the City was not all it's cracked up to be. Brillant piece of writing, that game.
This was so powerful for me as I put it together that, as far as I'm concerned, there's no ending where you activate the Bastion for its intended purpose.
Something to consider: as the primary interpreter of the game, the player is more like a narrator, since you (generally) control the action. But you're not just the narrator to yourself, you're the narrator to the game itself. The game doesn't tell you "Mario runs to the right and jumps over the turtle," you're trying to tell the game what happens. You do it through button-presses rather than words. In a way, the genius of The Stanley Parable is not that you play against an unreliable narrator that subverts your expectations, it's that you're two narrators competing over what the story gets to be. You're not Stanley, you and the narrator are God and the Devil torturing poor Job to prove a point to each other.
As soon as I read "Mario runs to the right & jumps over the turtle" I knew it'd be about The Stanley Parable
One of the best uses of unreliable narrators in games is in “call of Juarez: Gunslinger” where the main character is telling stories about his life as a bounty hunter, some of which are super grandiose and conflict with events widely accepted as historical fact, it does a really good job of demonstrating how its hard to discern actual history from dime-novel fantasy when it comes to the era of the wild west
The best part is when the characters he's telling the story to correct him and the gameplay changes. "Wait a sec, there's no indians for a hundred miles of those hills!" "Oh yeah, you're right. They must've been bandits then." and then all the indians you were fighting turn into bandits.
OMG, yes. Such an overlooked take on game narratives.
That's the game I was going to bring up, such a well done version of the unreliable narrator.
"I've never heard so much mallarchy in my whole life", is somehow a phrase I remember vividly from that game. Yeah, good one indeed!
In the latest King's Quest game the unreliable narrator is used quite well too. With the grandfather who tells his story to his granddaughter. It's a bit reminiscent of the Tim Burton film Big Fish. It's not exactly lying but "embellishing reality".
"Unreliable Exposition" covers most cases. It's not strictly speaking the narrator, but games don't necessarily have narrators. But most games have exposition dumped by in-game characters, and it's not even all that uncommon for one or more of those characters to be less than totally forthcoming. One good example not mentioned in the video is Mark of the Ninja, which has both unreliable exposition and has the main character you're playing being rather unreliable in their own way.
My take would be ,,Unreliable Experience", since the game makes you think and feel one way but then turns around and remakes your experience with the game
"Shifting Perspectives" because in the end, it change how the player perceive certains aspect of the game.
I guess the alternative to "exposition" would be something like Spec Ops, where the actual things you're seeing onscreen moment-to-moment aren't reliable either.
Metal Gear Solid (the original) does something similar to set up a Nice Job Breaking It, Hero. The "Tales of" games frequently have such, sometimes including actual narration that it flat-out lies.
@@goldenhorde6944 But also, what you see from moment to moment in Spec Ops IS the experience of the main character. Or at least the experience as the MC remembers them, up until the end.
Glory to Arstotzka!
Glory to iran
@@cyrusthegreat7030 artostka is a fictional country of the game papers please
What makes Papers Please an unreliable narrator?
Glory to Arstotzka!
Glory to Arstotzka!
This is the whole reason I watched the original Twilight Zone series, to pick up some of that show's amazing skill at writing plot twists involving unreliable protagonists.
i`m fond of the term „agency subversion“ - in that it is revealed that you/your character have not been exerting agency over the game`s systems/world in the way that you were lead to believe
I instantly have to think of NieR and how the player character has this kind of typical fantasy adventure story but when it is revealed what's really going on, you're in for another emotional Rollercoaster with a blown brain on the side.
I love how they use Don Quixote as one of the images for this episode, makes this video alot more funnier aswell as informative!
It helps that the artist is from Spain. ;P
I feel like games that come really close to being unreliable narrator status are some horror (and not horror) games that make you see a different world than what is the real world, but your actions in the other world are being translated to the real world somehow. Games like Among the Sleep, Hellblade, and American McGee's Alice series come to mind, to greater and lesser degrees.
Nier Replicant is another perfect example of re-contextualizing players' actions to evoke emotion and thought about the game's narrative themes.
For me, these kind of experiences separate games that I move on from (and sometimes mostly forget) from the ones that I engage with on a deeper emotional and/or intellectual level, and stick with me forever.
"Paradigm shift" would be a decent descriptor in my opinion.
I feel like that's a bit too general imo, since it could be used to describe ANY sort of plot twist, when I think what's being described here is a bit more specific than that.
It's a good base tho, maybe some sort of modification on "paradigm shift?" Like "mechanical paradigm shift" or something? Bad example lol, but I hope you get what I mean.
A paradigm is a concept about how ideas are structured, beyond interpretation.
For videogames the paradigm would be more aching to genre than a character's frame of reference in my opinion.
If you are playing a platformer that suddenly becomes a racing game or a turn based battle, than yeah, paradigm shifted.
You cam say minigame tournaments like Mario Party amd Pokémon Stadium minigames are paradigm shifters in a way
Dragon Age II has an amazing sequence where you play a mission as a particular character. It starts to get weird as the character seems way more OP than previously and the mission is going really easily.
The whole game has a framing narrative and eventually you realise that in this part the character himself is narrating this part to an interrogator and is bigging himself up wildly.
There was a lot of unreliable narration going on in Dragon Age 2, thanks to Varric. That fun little man was always embellishing his stories more than a little. :)
Great example.
Dude I’m so surprised they mentioned Gone Home but not What Remains of Edith Finch. It’s a game all about unreliable narrator after unreliable narrator and the recontextualization of things that happened
It's the first game that came to mind as soon as I saw the title. what a game...
I think this type of thing was done well in Layers of Fear where you are an artist slowly going insane as you find what you need to finish your masterpiece. They give you pieces of a story and then subsequently shift that story into a truth (depending on the ending you get from the choices you make). Very disturbing and beautiful.
I remember playing Spec Ops, and it being pretty obvious that the narrator was unreliable and being asked to attack people and thinking "Yeah this is obviously wrong, but the game doesn't give me a choice if I want to progress" then the big gotcha reveal comes and I just didnt feel engaged with it cause I had 0 other options to progress 🤷♂️
That's the whole point...you had no other way to progress, but that doesn't mean you (the player) had no other alternatives...
My favorite recontextualization comes from Spec Ops: the Line. At the end you realize half of what you were seeing wasn't real and the actions you took were very different from what you thought cause of your character's ptsd.
This was the first game I thought about that uses this mechanic. I think it definitely should be used more often.
"Rescope" is a possible term for "Recontextualized Actions". It suggests changing the field of vision, and can be used for a bigger picture reveal or a more detailed closer look in the mirror. Love the series!
One example you forgot to mention is FFVII.
Cloud's memories are fractured and somewhat modified, so when he tells the party about the events of Nibelheim while they're in Kalm, you literally play the flashback because he's sub-consciously making it up as he goes along.
When it's revealed much later that Tifa doesn't remember him being there, and that it was Zack who was with Sephiroth, the player begins to doubt Cloud's version of events.
It isn't until a bit later that we piece together the truth; Cloud was at Nibelheim, but was a trooper who just got a lucky shot on Sephiroth.
Cloud is an unreliable narrator because he believes a false, modified version of events, which we become privy to over the course of the game.
I think that a good term for this is "unreliable premise". It encompasses that idea that the nature of your actions either as a character or as a player translate to something other than what was first displayed. It might also be good to differentiate between an unreliable player premise and an unreliable character premise, which denotes whether the character the player controls is subject to this deception. For example, the experience points in Undertale or the premise of Braid might be an example of the former as the character is largely unaffected and it is simply a reveal to the player and the drone pilot game might be an example of the latter, as the realisation happens to the character which is passed on the player. Bioshock technically fits both definitions as it is both a reveal to the character that their agency is under question and to the player as they question their relationship to the game itself.
I think Fran Bow handled the child unreliable narrator really well. Just by beginning the game by showing the player that there is a reality most people, especially adults, do not see, but children who have experienced trauma can, the audience is primed to question what is real and what isnt. That question is never clearly answered either, so the audience keeps engaging with Fran Bow because they are trying to answer the question of what is actually real since Fran cannot.
My favorite game in this sort of vein will always be Spec Ops: The Line. Mediocre shooting mechanics but a story that actually has deeper meaning through not giving you all of the information as you're playing someone who is going insane, so you make some weird decisions that make sense in the moment but actually are fictitious.
I'd call it a "subverted narrative"
There was a game, I can't remember the name - side scroller where you play a boy sneaking through a city, avoiding notice and solving puzzles. At the end, if you pull the plug on the mind-controlling monster at the far end... you die. Because you _were_ the monster, controlling the boy's body. And what you were doing was not what you, the player, thought from the hints dropped earlier.
Can you tell me more about this? I understand that you don't remember the name, but I want to find this.
I think the name of the game is Inside
Its by the same studio that made Limbo
@@quixoticquark6474 Yes, you're right. I thought at first it might be Limbo, but I checked and it is indeed Inside.
Spec Ops: the Line is amazing at this kind of thing. Makes you doubt the character you're inhabiting and by extension distances you from the actions you're preforming as that character. And because the game is built around a genre dependant on you not over-thinking your action (first person shooters) it becomes an amazing metacommentary.
Keeping the player Ignorant of the Context? The most explicit example I have seen in this would be Heavy Rain where...
.
.
.
.
.
.
A playable character is the murderer in the murder mystery game and the game gives you no indication that this was even a possibility until the twist is revealed.
Thats basically what Sans Undertale does in the judgement hall. He reveals the true meaning of LV and EXP in the same way
You could sort of say any reload of a save, any fail state that doesn't continue the narrative like perfect play would, is told by an unreliable narrator. One that makes this real clear by actually recounting the story like it was misremembered when you die would be Prince of Persia.
"Unreliable Quest Giver" kinda floats into this area as well, especially when its your first or primary source of quests right out of the tutorial area.
I remember a Doom-esque game I played once where you're a soldier fighting aliens, and you get missions from your commander that always lead you back to them, with the rewards being beter than the "side-quests" you encounter along your way. However, you're given the option to dialogue with some aliens when you don't have a weapon out, and the narrative gets turned on its head with a reveal that you commander is actually this other type of alien who's been using humans as pawns in their war against the first type of alien.
Also if you want the collegiate litspace definition or word: What it gets called is Secondary Realization or Secondary Unreliability. Also heard it called Backstage Unreliability or "Ender's Game Gaslighting"
Or really just called it Ender's Gaming. Since it's basically the key plot point in that book lmao
For me, the best use of Unreliable Narrator is in the tv-series Mr Robot. Alot of cool uses with it.
I think twelve minutes is another great example of this kind of game SPOILERS:
The game follows you a man who comes home to your wife where you dance, eat dinner, and tells you she’s pregnant. Then a man claim to be a cop busts down your door and kills you both, but it’s a time loop. Long story short none of it was real and the entire experience is just repressed memory’s bleeding into a hypnotizing season to make you forget that your wife is actually your sister……
Anagnorisis is such a dope concept! I wonder if irony is a simpler version. Mechanical irony is fun to say, too.
Someone had to have mentioned this already, but my favorite example is Shadow of the Colossus. It’s clear midway through the game you are causing something, probably bad, to happen but you keep going. That makes the reveal land even harder because you knew something was up but it was up but you kept pushing anyway.
I can't believe this was a whole episode of unreliable narrators without bringing up GLaDOS from Portal. Recontextualized mechanics are something I hadn't really thought about before, though.
Undertale. Twice. First in the neutral ending with the judgment hallway and then in the true ending when you realize who you're playing as.
And then one final one in the genocide ending, again when you realize who you're playing as.
Honestly I think the phrase you might be looking for, you gave to yourself
"The Obscured Player" fits. The player doesn't have the full picture and when revealed you're lifting their metaphorical blindfold. The little example of "man swings bat around not realizing he's being destructive" is very apt here.
I feel like “widened perspective” or “blinders removed” are good. Frame shift, that someone else already mentioned, is also good.
Maybe not quite the same as what you're describing, but Undertale was interesting in that it takes player expectations regarding the language of video games, like XP, LV, or even naming a character, and uses that against us
A similar thing is one of my favourite tropes across all mediums, to be completely honest. And that's when, without revealing any new information or hidden secrets, the story manages to get you to see everything so far in a completely new light. It's tricky, but when stories can pull it off - hoooo, it makes for a truly incredible experience. I think it works so well because the author's being fair with you, treating you like an equal - and they're still talented enough to "beat" you, to defeat your expectations. New Model Army, by Adam Roberts, is my purest example of that, as the end of the first section manages to pull off what feels for all intents and purposes like a plot twist, despite everything you're shocked by being there plain as day all along. Mob Psycho 100's first series also does this really well. Reigen does not change as a person between episode one and twelve! You see him in different situations, and you learn a bit more about him, but there's nothing revelatory - it feels like any later situation could have been in the first episode. And yet, my God, you see him so differently by the end.
I would possibly give it the name of either "shifted perspective" or "The in the moment Revelation"
I’m Commander Shepherd and this is my favorite video on youtube.
I would call it the "Unreliable Storyteller". There is a phrase I have heard before that goes, "Always trust the story, but never the storyteller." (I think it is from one of the Sandman comics.) I have heard this phrase many times around D&D where the dungeon master will guide the players through the game but he/she is always giving only hints and half-truths. (especially in Curse of Strahd.)
_Prey (2016)_ is another great example, with the choices and gameplay decisions you made during the game taking on a whole different context come the plot twist at the end of the game.
Two lesser-known games that do this incredibly:
9 Doors, 9 Hours, 9 Persons (I suggest the DS version, if at all possible for you. They do some really interesting stuff with the two screens after the big reveal drops. I would have regretted experiencing it any other way.)
Baten Kaitos (there's a remaster coming out very soon, and the whole game is a hidden gem!)
Sans's explanation of LV and XP in Undertale fits this idea too, but I'm guessing most people have heard of that.
The entire Zero Escape trilogy leans on unreliable narrators.
999 has a narrator who holds back a crucial piece of information until the endgame, when it recontextualises a lot of the game - and uses the DS in a way that makes all the ports inferior on that point (though the quality of life added by the flowchart is a big plus - even with Skip, having to re-solve every escape room on every run through the game in order to get the true ending is a big pain).
Virtue's Last Reward has a narrator who is missing crucial pieces of information, so inadvertently misleads the player until the reveal near the end, which, again, recontextualises a lot of things.
Zero Time Dilemma cheats in a couple of places in order to enable the big twist, and, for me at least, is unsatisfying as a result - on a replay, knowing the twist, there are moments where things that should have been visible aren't, or where what people say or do makes no sense given what you eventually learn. And, on top of that, where the first two games have in-character reasons to hold back the information they do, here, the only reason to lie to the player is to enable the big shock reveal - it comes across as totally forced, rather than as an organic consequence of the scenario.
Yeah, I really liked ZTD, but it was a lot like Danganronpa V3 where I thought "Now that we're reaching this much for new twists, I'm glad this is the last one."
I immediately thought of Call of Juarez: Gunslinger. That game is narrated by the protagonist, but he clearly embelishes the story, sometimes gets stuff wrong, adds details later or gets called out by his listeners for obvious contradictions. And whenever this happens, the game changes around the player. Like Silas (the gunslinger in question) remebers the red autumn trees, and they spring out all around you. He remembers finding an escape from a canyon he was trapped it, and it materializes in front of you. Or he remembers that a bunch of enemies he was fighting werent Natives, but other Cowboys, so they suddenly change shape. It was a really cool technique and the game overall is great fun still.
I like the term "incomplete context"
I would like to suggest "Garden Path Action" or "Garden Path Mechanic" as an alternative.
The concept of "recontextualized actions" really reminds me of "garden path sentences".
Sentences where "... readers form an interpretation of the sentence which remains plausible until near the end of the sentence ..." (wiktionary).
This is essentially what happens to the players, where we interpret our actions in one way, and then towards the end of the game realize that our actions had an entirely different meaning!
They told you at the outset that he was an unreliable narrator, but I loved that Dragon Age II was framed as Varrick's recounting of the game's events, and thus nothing that took place in-game could be completely trusted to be 100% true. I like how it served to reinforce the game's themes about perspective/its limitations and miscommunication.
Ah right, the taste of power during the tutorial being him greatly exaggerating the power levels of the party. And then he retells the event with adjusted levels when called out on it.
It makes me think of Baten Kaitos: Eternal Wings and the Lost Ocean. You play as a spirit connected with the main character, a fact which is easily forgotten because it's usually the same as just playing as the character would be. It lets the game pull a twist, though, where said main character takes actions the player doesn't realize he's taking at the time.
Even the simple concept of "you" can be deconstructed in useful ways in a videogame. _Baba is You,_ for example: in most levels you are assigned a specific character to control (usually but _not always_ Baba) from start to finish, but this is a rule defined by blocks within the level, that you can change if you need to, and when you get to the more advanced levels, you start to realize that the "you" rule simply defines which objects in the level _respond to your controls._ There are even a few levels where you need to make something happen _without "you"_ (i.e. with no objects responding to your controls) which really messes with the usual concept of what "you" means.
Spec ops: The line was a really good example of this. It really elevated it from being just another uninspired cover shooter
I think there's a related concept to this, which I'm calling "biased perspective." It happens when a player primarily encounters one point of view, often due to who they're working with.
An example of me realizing this was happening to me in a game comes from Guild Wars: Prophecies, the first Guild Wars game. Fairly early on, you join the vanguard of Prince Rurik, and thus most of the missions, quests, and NPCs you interact with early on in the game (before location changes for reasons I won't get into here) are from the perspective of Rurik's vanguard. However, the way he's approaching the current situation is very different from how his father, King Adelbern, is approaching it. We get a lot of the Prince's perspective on the situation and the king, but only a few quests and NPCs give us the King's perspective on the situation and the Prince's response. For clarity, the Prince has an aggressive focus, while the King has a defensive one.
When I first played the game as a teenager, I failed to notice the bias inherent in the player's perspective that builds up as a result of the interactions with the game world, but when I replayed it a few years ago (something like 15 years after I first played it) where I took it slow and reevaluated everything, I realized all of the things I'd overlooked. For example, there's a map called "The Breach" that, as a teen, I'd assumed was called that because the enemy invader had made a breach in the defensive wall. It turns out, though, that it was actually called that because a member of the Prince's vanguard had made the breach in their line (possibly in an effort to rescue his daughter who also happened to be pledged to marry the Prince-the politics here are also a lot more complicated than I'd realized as a teenager).
I think this kind of thing is interesting!
We can also see this idea show up in Dark Souls 1, where we're given information from unreliable NPCs (Oscar, Frampt, Kaathe, etc.) and have to make up our own mind about what is true/right.
I'm gonna mention Call of Juarez: Gunslinger here. One of my favorite examples of the Unreliable Narrator in games, and it actually makes the game more entertaining.
Chiming in with another wording thought: deceptive framing?
Nice. That's one of the stroinger EC videos I've seen in a while. You knocked it out of the park with this one.
I think you can steal from another semi interactive genre, magic. Misleading/Misdirectional/Ambiguous context are candidates.
Red from Overly Sarcastic Productions has a video on Plot Twists where she describes the Retroactive Plot Twist, which is a plot twist that recontextualizes past events in the story. She brings up the examples of The Sixth Sense and Planet of the Apes.
In fact, what you describe lines up so well with her description of plot twists that I think that is the correct comparison, not unreliable narrator. However, unreliable narrators might show up if the POV character knew something the player didn't, as opposed to finding out the twist alongside the player.
Retroactive plot twists are sometimes the result of an unreliable narrator.
The ending of Planet of the Apes is only a twist because the lead character whom the narrative was following incorrectly assumed his location.
Or consider Luke Skywalker learning the wrong information about his father (a twist that actually was added retroactively) because he heard about him from multiple conflicting narrators in-story, the latest of which he wrongly assumed was actually reliable.
The same concept can be applied to games where either the player themselves or the player character is fed incomplete or misleading information and they don't have enough information to discern the actual situation.
The difference in definition is just whether you consider the narrator to be strictly the character being controlled by the player or if the MC is the framing device for embedded narration.
I wouldn't consider Portal's silent protagonist to be the narrator, for example. I would consider the narrator GLaDOS who feeds the player incorrect information along with legitimate tutorial tips for the first half of the game, and then outright lies when it's become apparent she's unreliable. Chell is the unspoken outer narrator giving context through the player's actions, but since she never speaks we don't know if she actually trusted GLaDOS or not in the beginning or if that was an assumption the player alone made.
@@BonaparteBardithion I see what you're saying. I would have defined the PoV character to be the narrator, because that's who I would expect to be the narrator if the game was turned into a book. Therefore, someone lying to the PoV character isn't an unreliable narrator, because the narrator is truthful about their actions and beliefs, even though they may be believing lies.
However, your mention of silent protagonists reminded me of The Stanely Parable, where there is a Glados-like character straight up called The Narrator. For an example I'm personally familiar with, there's Magalor betraying Kirby. He is our only source of information about the world and his motivations, so he's a Narrator in the we don't have any opposing viewpoints of equal weight. So, I guess I have to agree with you that games with silent protagonists can have other characters serve as Narrators and potentially do so unreliably. It's not as fundamental of a shock as if the PoV character can't be trusted, but it can be powerful nonetheless.
It’s just a twist ending. There are two kinds of twists, ones that change the way things go forward, and ones that retroactively recontextualize past events. Basically what you’re talking about is a “soylent green is people” or “he was dead all along” style twist ending.
The trick is that in games it’s often not done at the end, but one or two acts before the end, so you continue playing after the reveal for a while, coming to terms with the revelation
Give the player a status effect that swaps the models of the bad guys and civilians, let them see what they've done once the status effect is clear? I'm thinking something like scarecrow gas from batman.
Bonus points if sometime after they've experienced that, give suggestions but no clear confirmation that they're under that effect again.
Could be as simple as labeling things deceptively, or not labeling them at all.
There was a monster in Breath of Fire II that controlled the body of the NPCs it was using as a host. The objective of the quest was to free the host by targeting the monster - but the combat menu automatically selected the host first. Players have to make the effort to shift to a second target on a sprite that looks like a single unit, and no in-game dialog tells you to do this.
It's entirely too easy to hit the accept button and wipe the host out without even thinking about it since that's the way most battles go.
A great book series that does a lot of subversion of expectations is The Queen's Thief series. It's very carefully written, almost like an unreliable narrator, so that you have to try and piece together what really might be happening, and I love it.
In the visual novel Ai the Somnium Files: Nirvana Initiative
There are several strings of events like seeing a character's dead body then talking to them later on. It is revealed during the course of the game that the player's perspective is being sent back and forth in time by multiple years regularly.
I played BRAID a year ago to help myself get over a breakup. It tickles me that it got mentioned in this video; it's so niche that I didn't think anybody knew it existed.
Calling it an unreliable narator makes me think of the narator from kill the narator or glados from portal. The are not the traditional sort of narator but they more or less fulfill that role and they are also trying to decive you to your death.
One of my favorite examples is in A Story About My Uncle. It's a 3D platformer where the game is a story the main character is telling his child about an adventure he went on trying to find his uncle, who was lost in another world. The game itself is a pretty straightforward 3D platformer focused on a grapple hook mechanic, with colorful fantasy characters. Hidden in the fantasy, from the first level, are messages in the language of that fantasy land, and at the very end the fantasy is pulled back just a little bit to reveal the truth that the story obscured.
I use a term from marketing when I discuss this: rebranding. All of the player's activity has veen rebranded in a new light. People instantly grasp the concept as it's something we're familiar with and can easily adapt it to activities suddenly having a new meaning or direction.
Well, the main difference is that the "narrator" is replaced by the player "perspective", so...
incomplete perspective.
An amazing game with this is AI: The Somnium Files niravanA Initiative. It begins with one of the protagonists finding the left half of a body whose right half appeared 5 years before, with the case left unresolved, and from there the story begins in two separate timelines: one investigating the events in the present and the other one in the past, with different protagonists. Each protagonist is unreliable for separate reasons, and on top of that the game drops a piece of information near the end that recontextualizes everything on the story. I think is a great example of everything discussed in this video.
I like “Plot Flip”
It’s like a plot twist, but instead of a twist it’s a complete flip.
(Also the human tendency to like “eye-ooh” sounds like “flip flop” makes the term “Plot Flip” sound vaguely backward.)
I would call it a Perspective Shift. That is what the moments are doing is shifting your perspective around to different angles and challenging your original experience and opinion.
Unreliable Context
I agree with this one. Makes the most sense.
Call of Juarez gun slinger does this really well since all sections you play are narrated by the protagonist retelling the events of the game to other characters and he will make mistakes or dismiss rumours or even other characters taking over narration when telling the story causing the environment in game to change or evolve or even reverse making you replay entire sections differently
the Zero Escape games are very good at using their gamey elements to deliver twists that wouldn't be possible in any other medium. I'm not gonna go into detail, but I recommend playing the games if you're into this sort of thing
I beg to differ...
The narrator in The Stanley Parable is quite reliable. It is the player that is not. A counter, Bioshock it is reversed as you follow your directives as you progress through that game (Player reliable). The game throw a few twists along the way and a massive one at the end.
The Stanley Parable has a fairly straight forward narrator and it is the player that causes the problems (by design).
A shout out to another unreliable narrator is from System Shock 2.
"Press A to speak"
A
"OK, what you're doing there is jumping."
Even rarer is the unreliable tutorial, eg Portal 2s press space to say apple
It made me think about the start of bards tale when its the barrator that gets subverted in the beginning and then the whole game is about you causing the end of the world :)
I’m surprised you didn’t mention There Is No Game a game we’re there really is a unreliable narrator
The beginners guide has one of the most direct versions being a game whose premise is going through a bunch of games made by someone and being told by the narrator what they symbolize and such.
The unreliable timer in the first part of Metal Gear Solid 2 is one of my favorite gaming details like this, where the usually objective langauge of game ui is used to display Otacon's rough guess of a time frame
In a mulvyist discourse, what you're describing is the suture effect. Basically that as we interact with medium we either enter it ourselves in either 'sadism' or 'masochism' which is basically just really weird freudian ways to describe 'interactivity' and 'passivity.' Because we are active in video gaming, we are affecting it and therefore we feel more in control and can impose our will. While in film and TV it's more about learning as the affect is occurring to you. Someone else is providing the entertainment. And since that aspect of control is important for how we interact and understand a story, it's harder to lie when we are technically the one in control of the medium
This is more of a classic "Unreliable Narrator" example, since it all comes from text files and character chatter, but Transistor had a good one that I always think about. Many characters are described as having left the city for the countryside, which it turns out is actually a local idiom for something else entirely.
I wouldn't call that much different from saying "bought the farm" or "kicking the bucket" and it's very clear(ish) toward the end that there *is* some kind of space outside of cloudbank that people go to and don't come back from. Based on the visuals, it's literally depicted as rural countryside.
Best and easiest to understand term for it could be UNRELIABLE CONTEXT. It's descriptive as the context in which the player makes choises is unreliable and it resembles the unreliable narrator -term enough to be easy to start using. What do you think?
I saw Hbomberguy's video about Pathologic, and the game seems to be approaching this concept from a very interesting viewpoint. The game has essentially three playthroughs, three unlockable characters, but they are all playing the same story, at the same time, in parallel to each other. That way, you see each character's perspective on the others during each playthrough. Actions that you took with one character thinking they were smart and heroic, turn out to have been bigoted and destructive. And choices that may seem silly or illogical in one playthrough, make perfect sense in another one.
A more straight example of unreliable narrator would be of different organisations in the game promoting different versions of 'The Lore'
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind comes to mind, especially in regard to the events leading up to the death of Indoril Nerevar.
I was just the whole time thinking about Spec Ops: The Line, which just seems in so many moments just like having unreliable narrator telling the story while being this narrator who cannot see the real world anymore. And it happened to some degree in some other games where you just show enemies so player will shoot them but then reveal it was civilians/allies.
I am not sure about good name but I would try to keep Unreliable in the name as it will still link to Unreliable narrator. So maybe Unreliable protagonist?
Suggestion for how to contextualize you as the unreliable narrator: Incomplete Perspective.
By calling it the Incomplete Perspective you get across that you are the narrator or the one doing the actions, but once the Incomplete part becomes complete you get the recontextualization moment. Be this because the character doesn't know a key peice of information, or something in the game world is preventing you from realizing a truth about it, the result is still that you are reliably narrating what you see, but your vision of what is going on is not fully realized.
In Baten Kaitos (Gamecube, 2003) you, the player, are a guardian spirit given the means of controlling the main protagonist Kalas in his travels. It’s later revealed that Kalas has actually been a villain this whole time and trying to harness power for himself with your actions. I feel this plot twist is an even less of an occurrence in an RPGs and definitely a stand out.
Being much lighter on the gameplay side of things due to being visual novels made things easier for them to make it happen, but Chaos Head and Child are fantastic examples of unreliable narration and it was fascinating trying to figure out what on earth is actually going on over the course of the game, especially in Chaos Head
firewatch. She gazlight the player if you don't answer she sounds crazier and crazier. She throws her worries at you then magnifies it as you think about it.
1:09 i read a book (even if we break) that told each chapter from a different person. That also gives a unique experience
I like how this episode aired within a day of me starting my first playthrough of Bioshock in over 12 years.
A couple of games I know of that does this include apart from the obvious Spec Ops the Line there is the original Nier, Signalis as well as Wonderful Everyday Down the Rabbit Hole. Then there is the Touhou series that has a really interesting relationship with this trope, in it, we never see things through the main character Reimu's perspective. We only ever see how other characters perceive her and as a result she can have wildly differing personalities depending on through whose eyes we are seeing the story from.
As for naming the idea, you could go with "Playing the Player".
"Reframing the Narrative" rolls of the tongue, in my opinion.
I've seen a couple video games pull off actual "Unreliable Narration" though. Condemned: Criminal Origins comes to mind. At a certain point in the game, you are forced to decide, as the player, if you think there are actually supernatural happenings afoot, or if you (the player character) are really just hallucinating and ... well. I chose the latter and still proceeded to finish the game.
It was a surreal experience.