Hi – I’m Hamish Black, and welcome to Writing on Games.
It was literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky who said that:
‘The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as
they are known.
The technique of art is to make objects "unfamiliar," to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty
and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself
and must be prolonged.
Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object: the object is not important.’
Now, it just so happens that over the past couple of weeks I’ve been revisiting a game
that I feel encapsulates this statement more than perhaps any other videogame I have ever
played – a game that so aggressively and deliberately defies nearly all norms of game
design, narrative, genre, interface, player expectation and so much more that its sheer
existence is kind of confusing to me.
That game is Suda 51’s Killer7, and it is WILD.
AS.
FUCK.
Lately I have been trying to release myself from the grasp of reliance on hyperbole, but
I seriously struggle to picture a game that is so boldly fucking insane.
Not even the Metal Gear Solid series can approach this level of abstract nonsense.
We’re not just talking about a game with a weird story here (although it certainly
is that) – on a fundamental, mechanical level, the fact that this game even got made
is utterly astounding to me.
Perhaps the most confusing part?
It’s been an absolute blast the whole way through.
I picked this game up back when it was first released on PS2 and found it to be a confusing,
utterly flawed mess of a game that intrigued me like no other.
This time around, however, with my seemingly masochistic penchant for art that holds its
audience in utter contempt, I have loved every second of my time here.
The problem here is that it is so hard to pinpoint exactly why I’ve been thinking
like this – like I say, everything about this game defies convention.
It’s not like you can say ‘the shooting is good’, because in many ways it’s not.
It doesn’t offer a vast world to explore – in fact, it’s aggressively linear to
the point that it’s almost literally on-rails.
Its narrative isn’t inherently satisfying or neatly tied up or whatever – this is
a game that after all these years of playing I still don’t fully understand the overarching
narrative, or even just the plot.
Seriously, just perceiving what is happening on screen in front of you at any given time
can be tricky.
Hell, this is a game for which they literally released a separate book explaining what it
all meant (I’m not even kidding, you can read Hand in Killer7 online), and even that
seemed to raise more questions than it answered.
So why is it that this game had such a profound effect on me, both back when I first played
it and revisiting it now?
To this I would say that during the time I spent playing it I came to the realisation
that it was none of these things, and yet it was all of these things.
Everything about the game, when taken and examined on its own, could very easily be
described as anywhere from flawed to broken.
However, I kept finding myself returning to that Shklovsky quote I mentioned at the start,
and the essay it is taken from, entitled Art as Technique.
The point of that essay was to talk about his thoughts on Verfremdungseffekt, or the
distancing effect (consisting of many different kinds of literary techniques), which when
used by authors such as Tolstoy, or later on by playwrights such as Bertolt Brecht,
had the effect of breaking the audience’s immersion – it shocked them out of their
habitual recognition of symbols and patterns by breaking the fourth wall, for example.
In his essay, Shklovsky talks about how this recognition becomes habitual, and it’s only
by shocking the person experiencing a text that an author can break that automation of
perception and more deeply impact the reader.
It is this context with which I want to analyse just why it is that I adore Killer7 so much.
In this episode of Writing on Games I will mainly be making reference to the Shklovsky
piece (which I will link in the description) in order to explain why it’s OK that Killer7
is all style and no substance… because it’s also all substance as well?
It’s immersive as hell because it’s art, and yet it’s art because in Shklovsky’s
mindset, it is not immersive.
I want to try and break down why Killer7’s flaws not only fail to detract from an overall
sense of enjoyment within the game, but they actually help to contribute to Killer7’s
impact as a piece of art.
Essentially what I’m about to say can be boiled down to the quote I mentioned at the
start -that is to say, ‘art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object:
the object is not important.’
I want to take each element of the game on its own and examine its flaws, and then argue
why it is important that it can be experienced in its flawed state.
It’s hard to even know where to start with this stuff because, as I will explain, quite
literally everything here defies convention.
Let’s start at the beginning – perhaps the most obvious way in which this game foregrounds
its insanity - its narrative.
As I say, having played through this game multiple times, even I still don’t understand
most of what’s going on here.
Suda himself describes the plot as ‘The Smith Alliance, led by Harman Smith, is a
group of assassins hired by the government.
Harman has seven split personalities at his disposal and utilises them to complete his
assignment as they go up against the Heavens Smiles…’ (the zombie-like creatures the
player primarily fights) ‘…unleashed by Kun Lan’ (the… antagonist of the game?).
This seems like fairly simple videogame narrative – kill the enemies using different characters
with different abilities.
What this synopsis fails to mention though is absolutely EVERYTHING ELSE happening within
the game - the fact that the ghostly apparitions of previous targets appear to you frequently
(including a guy that thrusts the air whilst wearing a tank top that says ‘HUSTLE’)
to talk cryptic nonsense about the larger political intrigue that involves world peace
but then also a hypothetical nuclear war between the USA and Japan but then it’s also about
a child assassin called Emir who Harman trained but then also Harman and Kun Lan might be
gods but then Harman might have both a physical and a deity form and also the Killer7 might
be dead or they might not be real and there’s also the harvesting and selling of child organs
and you play as a luchador armed with grenade launchers and there’s an anime level where
you fight superheroes and according to one of the characters the secret to hitting on
women with 100% success is that they’re all the same and OH MY GOD I CAN’T I JUST
CAN’T.
Believe me when I say that this doesn’t even BEGIN to scratch the surface of where
Killer7’s plot and overarching narrative go.
Producer Hiroyoku Kobayashi stated that ‘when you make it to the end, the mysteries of the
game will become clear’ and I can confirm that to be categorically false.
None of this shit makes any sense and it’s constantly shifting from skater kid colloquialisms
to mind-melting spiritual talk, to hypothetical political intrigue that would never happen,
to fucking superheroes and anime, to the sale of child organs.
The tone is all over the place, and this is reflected in the drastic shift between settings
– one minute you’ll be in a theme park, then you’ll enter a door and suddenly you’ll
be in a living room watching two guys play chess, then you’ll be wandering through
a decrepit hotel only to come across a bunch of burly dudes shooting each other over a
game of Mahjong.
It doesn’t follow any kind of coherent continuity, and Kobayashi describes the game as more of
a ‘compilation than a start-to-end story’.
The reason this is strange is because it defies any semblance of Western or Aristotelian dramatic
structure that we might be used to.
It bombards the viewer as if they were flicking through channels on a TV set (and TVs are
an almost ubiquitous aesthetic within the game) and never lets up – it never lets
the viewer become comfortable.
One can interpret this many ways – one can say it’s a statement on the aggression of
American imperialism and the passivity of its citizens sitting in front of the TV, one
could say it’s about the futility of war and of peace, one could say Suda just likes
anime a whole bunch.
What I would say though, is that through this constant bombardment, the narrative of the
game becomes not one of geopolitical symbolism (although that is very apparent), but rather
it becomes a game about the inherent absurdity of playing games.
It’s a game filled with systems that most developers want to make invisible to the player,
and having the player be confronted with their absurdity and abstraction at every turn.
Essentially, it is about getting the players to think.
Suda has said that it is his ‘firm belief that video games are the most challenging
form of artistic media we know,’ and this game, at the very least, proves the plausibility
of that statement.
This is because not only is this defamiliarisation proven through the narrative, but Suda actually
weaves this subversion of expectation into the gameplay itself.
In order to discuss this, I want to talk about how the game defied my own personal expectations
of what it was going to be through its trailers.
Early footage featured on old demo discs was what initially got me super excited about
this game – not only was the footage dripping with style, but the editing was so manic that
it was hard not to be intrigued.
That said, the footage shows a number of characters running around in a 3D space, occasionally
shifting to what looks like incredibly fast first-person shooting.
The idea of shifting from third- to first-person between exploration and combat respectively
was probably the strangest mechanical element one could gleam from these trailers alone
– it seemed like a game where a bunch of kooky characters shot a whole bunch of zombies.
Fairly standard videogame fare.
Imagine my surprise when, as a 15-year-old kid taking this game back from the store,
that the tutorial reveals the game to be a case of holding down the X button on the PS2
(or the A button on the Gamecube) to run forward on a fixed path, with Circle or B allowing
the character to turn 90 degrees and go back the way they came.
Not only this, but the speedy, frenetic shooting of hordes of zombies as advertised in the
trailer was replaced with one of the strangest yet most fascinating shooting systems I have
come across in a game.
Essentially, when the player hears the laugh of a Heavens Smile, they must enter first-person
mode by hitting a shoulder button, then hitting another shoulder button to use the character’s
scanning ability to make the enemies visible, and then aiming and sniping at glowing weak
spots on the enemies as they slowly trudge towards you – if they get to close, they
explode, damaging the character.
On the surface, this seems inherently absurd – here we have a game that pushed itself
as an action-packed shooter, yet the actual game has movement on rails and slow, fiddly
sniping as opposed to the fast and frenetic shooting shown in the trailers.
Recoil, at least at the start, is intense, and your aim will go way off every time you
take a shot.
As someone who expected something completely different, not only was this jarring, it was
unbelievably disappointing.
In fact, right up until I began playing it again, I remembered it being sluggish and
unwieldy.
However, when you view it in the context of defamiliarisation or distancing, the art of
not only the system, but the bait-and-switch pulled by Suda 51 becomes apparent.
It’s here that the player must realise that the game utterly defies genre – it pushes
itself as a very easily classifiable shooter, perhaps with slight exploration elements.
What you realise is that the game has so many different genres, and at the same time is
unbelievably obfuscatory in its willingness to allow the player to define it.
In many ways it would be most accurate to call it an adventure game – for all that
movement is essentially on rails, there are branching junctions that allow for light exploration
of very specific areas, and these often lead to objects required to solve a puzzle.
That said, the puzzles often come down to literally exploring another path, then finding
the object that unlocks the door.
You could call it a shooter, but as I’ve stated the shooting is so slow and fidgety
that it would struggle to stand up to a more typical action shooter.
The game, by not allowing for any direct classification, then forces the player to think outside the
box in terms of what it’s actually trying to achieve, and this is where things become
interesting.
Is it a survival horror game?
I guess one could call it that, but the general style of the game is so cartoonish, its levels
so bright and stark, that it would struggle to be aesthetically placed alongside the murkier
examples of that genre, for example Resident Evil.
Also, unlike those games, you have infinite ammo, and health is merely an enemy’s weak
spot away.
Its jaunty, electronic soundtrack, its quirky characters and absurd tone of writing don’t
serve to send chills down the player’s spine, but often to make them laugh at the sheer
insanity of everything going on in front of them.
In other words, like it’s not just an adventure game or just a shooter, it’s not just a
survival horror game.
When you consider that the puzzle and horror elements extend to the actual mechanics of
shooting in the game, then it becomes more apparent that this game, by meshing all of
these genres, is essentially its own totally unique thing.
The horror becomes apparent when you are walking down a hallway and you hear a laugh - something
which usually connotes joy - being used to strike fear into the player.
The Smiles have a jaunty step to their movements, letting out little laughs during each step,
as well as when they get shot, and when they get close enough to the player, their death
cry is one of hysterics.
The puzzle elements make their way into this as well – essentially, when one enters first-person
mode, the screen they see is a puzzle to be solved.
It’s a puzzle of priorities – the tension arises when the player realises that despite
the aesthetically slow and sluggish aiming speed and massive amounts of recoil forcing
them to recalibrate after every shot, the enemies are constantly moving towards you.
Through this constant sense of enemy momentum, the player must decipher quickly the abilities
and speed of the character they have selected, the amount of enemies on screen, the types
of enemies (different enemies require different methods of shooting), the relative threat
of each enemy type and the location of each weak spot.
Once the player has figured all of this out and constructed the plan of how the combat
puzzle will play out in their head, the player is then forced to execute.
This is essentially the second part of the puzzle – one misplaced shot or unexpected
reload animation can result in the player’s plan changing completely, with certain enemies
moving in front of one another for example.
This forces the player to think on their feet as the solution to this abstract puzzle has
now changed completely and can result in death.
The important part about all of this is that techniques designed to defamiliarise the player
are weaved into almost every element of the game’s mechanics and design.
As I say, taken individually, these seemingly disparate mechanics, genres and design choices
can easily be construed as a mess.
The movement is restrictive, the transition between movement and shooting is jarring,
the shooting mechanics are sluggish, the typical puzzles are overly simple, the horror genre
doesn’t seem to match up with the bright, humorous tone of the environments and writing,
I could go on.
I mean, we have standards of genre, mechanics, control methods, etc. for a reason, right?
There is a reason first-person shooters allow freedom of movement and have snappy aiming,
or on a basic level, use left trigger to aim and right trigger to shoot, right?
There’s a reason survival horror games evoke a certain atmosphere or implement ammo and
health constraints, right?
These things just…
work, right?!
Well yes, they work, but to make reference to Shklovsky’s argument once again, when
things merely work, they become habitual, automated.
In Shklovsky’s view of art, once objects become this habitual, they become purely functional
and therefore have no impact on the person perceiving it.
He likens this to the process of using symbols in algebra and makes reference to Alexander
Pogodin’s argument of a boy considering a sentence merely by each word’s first letter
– when objects reach this level of innate perception, we can automatically perceive
it through a simplistic symbol, and in Shklovsky’s view, this deadens art – it renders an object
purely functional, and renders the artful unartful.
This is why people tire so much of annualised franchises – no one can argue that their
mechanics are not unbelievably sound or that they are unquestionably well put-together
games, yet this level of efficiency in mechanics can often leave the games feeling like plastic,
like all the edges have been sanded down.
We expect those games to work, we expect them to release annually, we expect everything
that these games offer.
The automatic release cycle begets automatic design.
When one examines Killer7, one finds a number of design choices that seemingly hold the
player back from the most efficient path forward, but this does not inherently make them bad
design choices.
The game is designed on every level to jolt the player out of their comfort zone, and
Suda 51 and the team at Grasshopper Manufacture are not afraid to confront the player with
things that might be considered flaws in other games, if it makes the player actively think
about what it is they are experiencing.
Whether this is distancing for the sake of distancing doesn’t actually matter all that
much – like I say, I still don’t have a firm grasp on most of the events taking
place in the game – this is game design as art for art’s sake, and when every design
choice is so carefully woven together through their individual flaws, it makes the game
inherently challenging, interesting and impactful.
This isn’t player-driven narrative - this is a game seemingly about nothing at all,
and as such makes a statement about the player, directly to the player – that is, if they’re
willing to work to figure that out.
I could honestly gush about this game for hours but I’ll stop here – this game absolutely
is not for everyone, but if what I have talked about here seems interesting to you in some
way and you have access to a Gamecube or PS2 (or are able to emulate the game on PC), then
I absolutely implore you to check it out.
It is legitimately like nothing else I have ever played, and it deserves a wider audience
for its sheer audacity.
Also, I just want to take the opportunity to thank my Patrons for their generous support
(including Nico, Artjom, Christian, Jeff, Gareth, Jess, Matthew, Adam, Gary, Gerald,
Joe, Luca, Morgan, Dillon, Robert, Jonas and Bruno) – it means the absolute world to
me and we are so close to hitting the next goal of a podcast which will be fun I hope!
Thank you so so much, and if you feel like supporting the show, then if you’d consider
pledging then I’d be forever thankful.
And with all of that said, I’m Hamish Black and this has been Writing on Games.
Thank you very much for watching and I’ll see you next time.