Layers of Reality and Alan Wake

 As I try to honor this spookiest of months, I've been thinking about horror.

Alan Wake is probably my favorite narrative in gaming, particularly the way it is presented in the second game. While there is blood and gore to be found in the games (though more the second) the horror of it is not really concerned with the visceral and disgusting. Indeed, the "monsters" in the Alan Wake games are primarily just people who have been taken over by the Dark Presence. The most inhuman we really get with foes in Alan Wake II are the "Divers," which are sort of visually distorted, but upon killing them, their human bodies are kind of straightforwardly just... human bodies (technically there are inhuman monsters because there are Taken Wolves, but these are... seemingly at least, just wolves).

It's actually kind of interesting that Control Resonant in particular dialed up the inhumanity of its monsters - whereas the previous game had presented its Hiss foes mostly as human FBC employees who had just been driven to murderous madness, but still used guns and similar weapons, the sequel expanded on the physical warping of the Hiss to give us a far greater variety of deeply misshapen monsters.

But again, going back to Alan Wake, the monsters are more of a symptom of the larger problem: that reality itself is being made darker.

Why is it becoming darker? Well, yes, there's this idea that the Dark Presence is some sort of power or force (something the FBC would call a resonance) that infects things. But it's not actually totally clear to what degree the Dark Presence truly exists outside of Alan's writings.

Nor is it clear what level of reality we actually stand in as we play the game.

This disorientation, I think, is the key to the horror - something that is perhaps not as viscerally unnerving as a body mutilated by some alien force that is then attacking you, but one that makes you question everything that's actually going on.

Let's talk specifically about Alan's parts of Alan Wake II. As the second game, they took this idea of dualities as a central motif, including the equal parts of the game in which you play as Alan versus when you play as FBI agent Saga Andersen. While we're going to have to loop Saga into this as well, we'll start by tackling Alan's side of the story.

We'll realize later on that the stories we're jumping between are not actually happening simultaneously - Alan's chapters take place before Saga's. But that, in and of itself, is only partially true, because time itself doesn't function in strict linearity.

Here's the metaphor I'd use, and a metaphor that is nearly a literally description of what happens: look at your bookshelves. Do you have a series of books? (Ideally a trilogy?) Now, you're meant to read those books in order, from volume 1 to 2 to 3. And in most cases, the events you read about are taking place sequentially, mimicking the passage of time. But in a very literal sense, those books, the words that are printed on their pages, are all there right now. You can open to a page in book 3 and then read a passage out of book 2.

And that's literally what we do in the game: we start with the first chapter of Return, the third book in the trilogy, which describes Saga's experiences in Bright Falls and Watery. But then, we go back and read (or rather, play) through the beginning of Initiation, the second book.

In Alan's parts of the game, we wander around a bizarre, perpetually midnight-and-raining version of New York City, venturing into various memorable locations that are puzzleboxes we need to navigate. While wandering, though, we can easily and instantly jump into Alan's Writer's Room.

The implication, as I see it, is that the experience we have as Alan traversing this "Noir York City" is actually a representation of the text that Alan is writing in the writer's room. The whole city and its dangers are a work of fiction. But because the Alan who is the main character of this work of fiction is the one experiencing it, that one feels like it's all real and happening.

Now, I think the way that the three main Alan chapters are described is as if they're different drafts of the story - they all share similar elements, where he investigates the site of some terrible murder that involved Scratch and/or the Cult of the Word. And yet, the playable segments are referred to as Chapters.

So: if we were somehow to get our hands on a real copy of the finished Initiation novel (not the Return manuscript, which Alan searches for through these parts, but the book that Mr. Door holds up in their first talks how interview,) what would we actually see? Would the finished book simply be the final draft, perhaps giving us the adventure known as "Zane's Film?" Or is the writing of Initiation overall, with its multiple drafts, actually what the second book in this trilogy is?

In other words, while Alan in Noir York City is a character in that novel, is Alan in the writer's room its true protagonist? Is Initiation a book about the writing of a book called Initiation?

A few posts back, I used M.C. Escher's "Print Gallery" to demonstrate what I think is going on here: the picture, in true Escher fashion, is a visual paradox (and one that requires a blind spot in the center to function) where an image in an art gallery expands to become a depiction of the art gallery and its surroundings itself. The image contains itself.

And I think that something similar happens with Alan: if the version of him in Noir York City was merely an imagined, fictional, non-sentient homunculus, then this would all be fairly simple and straightforward. But I think that Alan, as a sentient being, is forced to exist on multiple levels of reality, his consciousness spread out and stretched over these various versions of himself. To put it another way, while his sapience (a complete logical system of thought) is duplicated for each version of himself and acts as a closed system, his sentience (his actual experience of perception and sensation) is forced to endure countless contradictory inputs. Given that at least some of his sapiences are aware that this is happening, those ones struggle with the utter cacophony of the very idea of it, and that's where we see versions of him that are falling into utter madness. The number of separate Alan's that are running simultaneously is staggering: while it's basically impossible to tell in-game, the various shadows Alan faces in his chapters (the ones that don't just fade out) are actually versions of himself, using his character model in various clothing, just with such distortion and blurring that you can't really see. Are these each fragments of his own mind that seek to disrupt the process, fearing what should happen if he finishes his project, or trying to stop him for other reasons?

Now, this layering could be a glimpse at the alien nature of the Dark Place, sure. But I think that there's a lot that implies that this is also happening in the real world.

I will say, some elements of the story do kind of pull back on the most profound and disturbing implications of what might be happening: the seemingly localized nature of Alan's reality-warping writing of Return imply that this is an alteration to a baseline, "true" reality.

In Control, there's a lot of the lore that is explained through Jungian terms. I'm going to disclaim here that I have only read a bit of Jung (part of Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious) and so I'm mostly jumping off with a lot of my own ideas.

But essentially, here's my take: the central premise of science is that there is an objective reality that exists whether we understand it or not. While that reality might be one made of rules rather than concrete matter (given that Quantum Physics demonstrates how, at least on tiny scales, things exist more in mathematical probabilities) it still holds that if you want to figure out the truth of that objective reality, you use observation of that reality to form a hypothesis, and then devise tests for that hypothesis, and if the tests do not refute that hypothesis, it is likely (or at least likelier) that your hypothesis describes reality at that level. It is a bit like Plato's Cave - there's a reality that exists, and while our senses and perceptions are flawed, we can pursue a more precise model for what those actual figures casting shadows are the better we refine our methods. Again, though: the objects that cast the shadows are assumed to be real, regardless of how well we are able to describe them from our observations.

But suppose that consciousness and perception are not merely a strange but fortuitous byproduct of organic chemistry that led to the evolution of brains, but instead, that the universe would not exist in the first place unless something were able to perceive it. And then, perhaps, the perception of reality would make reality.

I think most scientists would scoff at this, but then, they would, because science is built on the "there's an objective reality" premise. (And in fairness, I tend to align more with the scientifically-minded out there, even if I hold this latter premise as a possibility). But the world as conceived by Remedy really does seem to operate on this idea of perception shaping reality, only with phenomena we don't see in the real world (or at least that I've never seen in the real world) that make such a conclusion harder to deny.

So, like Alan with Initiation, when we play as Saga, we're playing through the text of Return. But... is what we experience merely a presentation (an adaptation, if you will?) of that text, or is it that Return as a text has somehow predicted or made this reality happen?

Indeed, this actually applies to the first game as well: Alan spends a week in the Dark Place writing Departure, and I assume that the subsequent events of the game after he wakes up in his precarious car are the text of the manuscript. (I think there's a novelization of the game, and so perhaps that novelization could be the exact text that Alan wrote.)

So: are the events of the first game (post prologue) playing out after Alan gets out of the Lake initially, or are they playing out in the words that he writes down there?

And to me, I think the really bizarre, cosmic horror of these game is that the answer is yes. That reality itself is constantly being created by imagination and creativity, sometimes of a very dark variety. Now, maybe it's not all coming from the Dark Place. Perhaps other realms, like the Astral Plane as seen in Control, are also having a profound influence on this reality. And maybe it's a two-way street. Obviously, Alan's ideas of a grimy, gritty New York like the one in his Alex Casey novels is what makes the version of New York he traversers in Initiation.

Is Alex Casey his fictional creation? Yes. Is Alex Casey a real investigator? Yes. Are the echoes that Alan finds at the various murder sites the real Casey's thoughts when he was chasing down a murderous cult in New York, or were they the monologues Alan had written in his Alex Casey pulp detective novels? Yes.

All the layers of reality and fiction are simultaneously real. And that's where the horror really comes from.