Welcome to the Dollhouse
While dolls remain distinct from puppets, Steve Tillis claims that a puppet can be a doll but a doll cannot assume the role of puppet (Tillis: 57), the difference seems to be one of performance and play, both elements that both hold fast in the study of games. The puppet may be a vessel for theatrical or virtual performance and the doll a figure for play, but both are pliable bodies. The doll rather than the puppet is subject to more macabre readings that lend to the darker more cynical construction of an alternate ‘virtual puppet’ theory.
In her book Critical Games, Mary Flanagan uses the dollhouse in reading The Sims. The games replication of a domestic environment in a virtual space is prefaced with a macabre overview of the changing nature of doll play as a socially constructed form. Using both Freud and Foucault, Flanagan suggests that playing with dolls takes a shift from the expression of domestic ideals to more sinister forms under repressive social times. Referring to Victorian doll play depicted familial discord and doll abuse, the use of dolls to emulate crime scenes and train criminal investigation as well as grotesque doll creations of the surrealist movement, Flanagan introduces the idea of ‘unplaying’. This refers to subversive play actions such as doll mutilation and the acting out of taboos, actions that are aligned as opposition to socially enforced repressions, from sexuality to oppressive regimes.
Unplaying, manifests in children abusing their dolls, “killing” them, or some other revision of the “care giving” framework of expected play… While at first the gruesome act of killing dolls was seen as subversive, parents eventually encouraged doll death ceremonies in order to instruct girls on family funeral etiquette.
(Flanagan: 33)
The doll may have as weighty a connection to the avatar as the puppet, though Flanagan does not pursue the negative connotations of unplaying in games, the play element available in avatarial control can carry over the doll rhetoric into gameplay. Unplaying is reified in the montage film of Brody Condon, Suicide Solutions (2004). This is a collection of gameplay footage from 50 first and third person shooter games depicting avatarial suicide, player’s killing their avatars. Perhaps considered aberrant in terms of the game texts set imperatives the possibility for intentional avatar death certainly sits within the frame of unplaying, and broader play than it does performance. There are numerous ways to intentionally kill the avatar in Halo 3, allowing the avatar to be shot by various weapons, falling of high platforms, jumping into water, inverting and reverting gravity. The player can chose to play with the avatars death, this may take the form of walking into enemies in Sonic the Hedgehog, provoking a witch in Left 4 Dead, getting infected in Zombie Zone. As it has been stated throughout this thesis, games often offer ways to ‘die’ and playing with the avatars death seems to invoke the morbidity of Flanagan’s doll play. The unplaying with avatarial death in videogames does not perhaps carry the political and psychoanalytical context of Flanagan’s dolls, but the specificity of this avatarial play is indeed deathly doll like.
While the puppet performance seems to be championed in terms of life giving performance the doll is more open in play and imbibed with darker process of meaning production, one that Flanagan’s discourse finds inseparable from cultural contexts of repression and obsessed with death. Deaths connection to the doll is not at all unwarranted and the play of ‘killing’ dolls might have a more direct relationship to the doll itself.
Freud’s notion of the uncanny is formulated in regard to his other theories including the ‘return of the repressed’. For Freud the uncanny emerges from a literary text that forces the reader to address what was once repressed. Working from Jentsch’s formulation of the uncanny which conceives of literature that confuses the animate and the inanimate, Freud explicitly apposes the doll’s inclusion in he nuanced formulation on the grounds that it does not invoke the Oedipal complex. He writes ‘the theme of the doll, Olympia, who is to all appearance of a living being, is by any means the only element to be held responsible for the quite unparalleled atmosphere or uncanniness which the story evokes; or indeed, that it is the most important among them’.
Eva-Maria Simms contests that the doll be included in relation to both formulations of the uncanny by virtue of its deadness. Reading the uncanny representation of dolls in Rainer Maria Rilke’s writing, Simms observes a persistent theme of confusion between the toy and the corpse.
There is a… connection between the doll and death, one which we have hinted at and which is so obvious that it is easily overlooked. The doll is a dead body, an inanimate child, an unresponsive rigid corpse.
(Simms: 81)
Proclaiming the doll a dead body, or dead object allows it to infiltrate the Jentsch’s form of the uncanny as it animates with play, but the deathly doll as represented in Rilke allows it to permeate Freud’s model in context. The dead doll, through its association with female innocence and play in childhood evokes a repressed developmental stage. For Simms the dead-like doll relates with the infantile mind that at one stage could not distinguish between life and death and thus provokes a return, an uncanny impression. The deathly connotations carried by the dolls figure may explain the fictional tradition for expressing the scenario - when dolls come to life.
Killer dolls
Victoria Nelson’s The Secret Lives of Puppets is a cultural historical analysis of the representations of puppets through literature and entertainment with recourse to their uncanny, supernatural and more sinister manifestations. Nelson’s approach does not differentiate between puppets and dolls in terms of performance and play, rather the approach is progressive looking at the perceived ‘life’ present within constructed bodies from puppets and toys to cyborgs and avatars.
From the twentieth century, according to Nelson, two schools of thought regarding the puppet asserted themselves, the first perceiving an uncanny soulless body and the second regarding the puppet (and its like) as a ‘Neoplatonic ensouled idol’. The uncanny school perceives the puppet as a lifeless object, born of the hand of man and equally controlled by him. Whereas the Neoplatonic school is evident in twentieth century science fiction, emerging as tales in which the makers and supposed controllers of the puppet are rivalled by them. Terming these puppets ‘divine machines’, Nelson is referring to mechanised human simulacra’s. The anxieties of the divine machine, that somewhat resemble those of cyborg rhetoric, are exhibited in films like Terminator, Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell. What follows the thematic tension of machines returning on humans is a specific representation termed ‘killer puppets’. Taking the deathliness of dolls and dummies, Nelson observes a trend for horrific filmic depictions of the puppet turning on its master and this scenario set forth might best describe the playeravatarial camera relationship at work in first-person shooters.
Nelson’s supernatural approach to the puppet mythos leads her to speculating on ideas of possession. Referring to a possession of the puppet object, not ownership, but demonic devilish possession. This theme is discussed in particular relation to a set of films that depict the doll or dummy endowed with volition without the use of strings or direct handing from another body, that is achieved through dark or evil forces. Films like Dead of Night (1945), Puppet Master (1989), Dead Silence (2007), ‘The Puppet Show’ episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Childs Play series (1988-2004) all feature possessed dolls.
In both Dead of Night and Puppet Master the puppets are victims of manipulation by an evil master but eventually gain control destroying their operators. In the latter Toulon craves immortality and brings his puppets to life in order to kill people as part of his quest. Eventually the puppets gain autonomy and take vengeance on their master.
In no time the Divine Machines were casting off their now-superfluous human agents, acquiring supernatural powers along with their freedom. Over and over the old roles were reversed as the newly independent and increasingly omnipotent simulacra first surpassed, then dominated, their human masters.
(Nelson: 258)
For Nelson this type of killing doll is motivated by vengeance, giving deserved death to a cruel master that made them perform murder. There is a second type of killer puppet however, completely autonomous homicidal maniacal dolls. Chucky, the ‘good guy doll’ from the Childs Play series for instance bares the soul of the ‘Lakeside strangler’, transferred at the moment of his death. The doll kills at random in the quest to reacquire a human form. For Nelson this depiction is a contemporary reflection on the nature of the soul and supernatural alignments with evil. Our inability to determine the existence of the soul whilst desiring it produces paradoxical representations in the form of the killer doll. The supernatural taboos mingle with desires for the spirit and, after life, return as Chucky.
It is according to Nelson’s account of the representation of the killer doll that the design of the first-person shooter is perceptibly analogous to the killing doll in three specific ways, the positioning of the players representative body on screen, the games required performance and the games rejection of the player.
The first-person shooter does not feature an avatar, but the player is positioned in ‘first-person’ assuming the position of the eyes of a playable character often with an arm wielding a gun being the only physical representation on the screen. In this sense the player occupies the body of the invisible avatar, like chucky, they are possessing it from within. The visual field, in place of a visible body as a players presence in the diegesis is a more suitable analogy than the puppet. The marionette for instance would be more suited to ‘top down’ gameplay in which the avatar is seen from above. There are no visible strings, the players hand is not directly implicated in the motion of the doll but remotely, and the player cannot perceive the physical motion of the body that they command, the position is transferred to an embodied vision of the possessed doll or puppet. In Gaming Mind, Gaming Body Bryan Mitchell-Young uses a particular form of phenomenology to formulate the player’s embodiment in the first-person shooter game. He claims that the players own body disappears in game play, merging with the ‘absent body’ on-screen, leaving only the mind, effectively producing a Cartesian spilt between mind and body. While Angela Ndalianis suggests that the ‘gameplay logic is that the player’s own body, which exists beyond the computer screen, “fills in” the remainder of the protagonists [avatars] body.’ (Ndalianis: 100). Perhaps this is why Nelson refers to avatars as ‘ethereal Neoplatonic daemons’, the player orienting their consciousness and physicality into the absent avatarial body in the game.
Gameplay in the first-person shooter genre is consistently about killing enemies and the body possessed in the game is controlled with the specific role of killing. The first-person shooter is survival based, set in labyrinth environments that must be negotiated through whilst under enemy attacks. House of the Dead 2 and Left 4 Dead enemies are a variety of zombie characters, BioShock features mutant enemies, Rise of the Triad consists of Nazi enemies and monsters, and in every case the game imperative requires the elimination of the enemy for the played character to survive and progress forward in the game. The impetus on killing in the genre situates the avatarial camera as the possessed killer doll, motivated by the possessor (the player) to kill on command.
However there comes a point in the game where the possessed body seems to turn on the player. The first-person shooters in-game death will occur from a failure to kill enemies, in Left 4 Dead this moment shifts the first-person perspective. If the playable body is ensnared by the tongue of a smoker enemy the avatar body is exposed, dragged forward appearing in the diegesis. The separation from the position of the avatarial camera is a loss of possession and the player is no longer effectively controlling the killer doll or making it kill, it is getting killed. Similarly in House of the Dead 2 the in-game death occurs when the player fails to kill an enemy, the poor possession of the killer doll becomes an equally poor performance of the killer doll manifest on the screen in the conceding of attacks by a non-player character enemy. When the attacks results in in-game death the player loses control completely and is faced with a death animation in which the avatar swoons to the ground like a puppet or doll without a master steering it. At this point the relationship that the player/possessor has to the avatar/killer doll is broken. The killing performed through the avatar as motivated by the player results in the death animation that signifies the avatars revolt on player as the avatar body is revealed in the death moment and the connection between them is severed. Like the puppet master, the possessor has had a hand in their own death, brought about with their connection to the control of the doll. Taking up the position of possessor in the game is as fated as the supernatural connection forged by Toulon in Puppet Master.
Playable character death in the first-person shooter BioShock takes another form of representation, though its results are ultimately the same as the other two examples. When the character dies the avatarial camera flips simulating a falling body whilst audio and visual feed for a few moments before fading to a menu screen. In these moments the player looks helplessly out of the invisible avatars unblinking eyes without control of it. Like the Divine Machines, the programming and animations of the games design see that the killer puppet can always turn on its master.
xoxo Final Girl
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