Most games depend on some form of violent conflict, even if it’s only colored bits of candy exploding when they’re properly aligned, but we expect the games to have moral alibis for the violence they ask of us. The animations of bodies taking bullets were lifelike to the point of inducing vertigo. Nearly a decade later, in 2005’s Resident Evil 4, Mikami abused player trust by making the game’s fundamental action-shooting-unnervingly realistic. Playing the game felt like wearing a straitjacket, and this was part of the horror: its movement system was halting and cumbersome, and it used an incoherent array of fixed camera views, ensuring that even the basic rules for moving your character changed every few seconds, even during crises. Combining graphic bodily horror and cryptographic claustrophobia-and set in a rotting mansion, no less- Resident Evil became a standard-setting high point. His career began in the early nineties with a string of convivial family-oriented games, but it wasn’t until 1996’s Resident Evil that he made a name for himself. He didn’t invent the horror video game, but in his twenty-plus-year career, he’s done more to popularize it than any other designer. Shinji Mikami’s games have tested the limits of that trust. But their surprises can’t lapse into incoherence-if they do, our trust is violated, our fun spoiled. To entertain us, games must defy our expectations. Without faith in the indifference of its automation, how could you share as much with it as you do? Video games are built around the fragility of this trust: they let us play with the horror in our dependence, experiencing the computer as a hostile entity within the safe, fictive frame of competition. Few relationships depend more on trust than the one you have with your computer.
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