I recently read Susan Sontag’s incredible essay On Camp, which talks about the value of camp in different forms of media. Camp is its own category of outragerous silliness mixed with an earnest seriousness. The essay is a great reminder of how something can be memorable based on its ability to passivly invite unintentional playfullness into the experience. Some quotes from the essay.

..third among the great creative sensibilities is Camp: the sensibility of failed seriousness, of the theatricalization of experience. Camp refuses both the harmonies of traditional seriousness, and the risks of fully identifying with extreme states of feeling

Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgement. Camp doesn’t reverse things. It doesn’t argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art (and life) a different - a supplementary - set of standards

When something is just bad (rather than Camp), it’s often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn’t attempted to do anything really outlandish. (“it’s too much”, “it’s too fantastic”, “it’s not to be believed”, are standard phrases of Camp enthusiasm)

I enjoyed Resident Evil 2 for the same reason I enjoyed Heavy Rain. It’s quality camp. It provides the material for shock, exasperation, laughs, sincerity, and confusion among many other contrasting feelings. These feelings thrive in a group setting, creating chains of in-jokes, commentary, and moments of metagaming. I played the game with a group of friends which I think is the only way I could fully enjoy this. 5 people of different levels of skill, all experiencing a campy adventure together. That made this more fun than I could imagine.

Two of the people in our group are skilled at these games, while the other 3 rarely or never played third person survival horror. We all took turns either as a watcher or player. The player would control Leon, the main character, but really it was often all of us telling the player what to do. Watchers acted as another eye and a welcome back seat player. What I found most interesting was when the friends with the least gaming experience would play. It created a new layer of horror for all of us.

A skilled player kept the camera steady, and usually had a calm fight response to enemy encounters. When the less skilled players controlled Leon, camera controls were understandably tricky. The fear of an enemy became more terrifying when we entered this more shaky mode of play. Weapon switching became slower, and encounters were a mix of a messy fight and/or flight response. Suddenly Leon seemed to have lost his confidence in the hands of a new player.

I don’t know what you’d call this. Group Ludonarrative Player-Character Embodiment Dissonance? It makes me want to play more games with people of various skill levels. There’s only so much the designers can do to make Leon seem like a confident hero. In the hands of us, we can make him forget how to use a weapon at any moment. “Okay, you have the grenade equipped now…press LB and RT to throw it…oh god..you threw it in front of you! RUUUN!!”

As for the game itself, I thought it was incredibly well made with smart level and game design. One moment that sticks out to me is when we made it to the safety of a room after using all our ammo to kill a powerful group of enemies. We were at the brink of death, but could breath a bit now that we were in a quiet place. The room had a puzzle that took a lot of moving around the room to figure out, and there was one zombie in the room with us. Usually one zombie on their own isn’t a big deal, but now we were in a cramped room trying to also figure out this puzzle, and there was no ammo or health pickups to ease the tension. So the zombie became a factor into how we navigated the room, which added a level of stress to the design of the puzzle. Well paced encounters like this are frequent.

Then we have Mr.X/The Tyrant/Tyrone (as named by our group) which is like the physical form of that giant moving screen of death from 2D mario games. It augments the tension so much by basically cancelling the current pacing and cranking up the tension to 11. Right when you thought you were getting comfortable navigating this horror, an unstoppable force shakes things up and you never know when it will arrive. All our fear and focus suddenly goes to this menace with a porkpie hat.

Before playing this, I tried Resident Evil 6. The game is non-stop action, which became tiring fast. I dropped it after a few hours. I can see why the earlier games are so beloved. It seems as the series progressed, the survival parts took a backseat to the action. From what I’ve seen of 7, it seems like a return to that original slow paced horror that the series was originally known for. We plan on playing RE4 Remake next. I played it on gamecube when it came out so I’m looking forward to trying it again, especially as a group. There’s the newness of the remake, but also the newness of encountering something familiar through the eyes of someone else’s first experience.

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My Susan Sontag notes/highlights