Hauntological videogames

[Ron Maels Moustache]

To go a bit further back in time, the other recent thread about games set in the UK reminded me of the shit Eastenders game for the ZX Spectrum, in which you are stranded in an abandoned Walford doing pointless busy work:

Do some laundry! Order fruit over the telephone! Soothe a giant baby! Why? There is no why. Nobody will be coming to help you.

Hah! Pair that with the Grange Hill game and it's infamous "drug pusher" ending for a classic SpeccyHaunto double-bill. Just imagine booting this up anticipating japes with Tucker and the lads, and getting this instead:



"HE IS DEAD, AND SOON YOU WILL BE TOO." I mean, fucking hell. Genuinely chilling.

[Blue Jam]

I always found Portal hauntalogical for the various warning signs. Portal 2 even more so, especially the abandoned 70's testing facility and the Enrichment Centre:





I want this one on my wall:



Lovely big collection of Aperture warning signs here:

https://imgur.com/a/Xyh4w

Prey of course. I finally got The Art Of Prey for my birthday last year (thanks, Mr Jam) and it's gorgeous. More lovely warning signs:



and Soviet-era stuff:



Another big collection of artwork here:

https://imgur.com/a/royHg

Most hauntological game for me has to be Control, for all the lore and collectibles, the documents with numerous sections [REDACTED], and the gorgeous (if infuriating) map:



...but most of all the episodes of the truly terrifying "Threshold Kids" TV show. Someone evidently had a lot of fun making these bits of pure nightmare fuel:

[Video Game Fan 2000]

Good question, and I think it's a little of both.

Part of a lot of hauntological material is innocent things being unsettling in retrospect - the flutter and wow on a tape recording of a children's song, Jimmy Savile telling you to clunk click every trip - and I agree that some of this stuff only looks bad in hindsight.

However, although I didn't actually play Mario 64 as a kid, I did genuinely get the heebie jeebies from console games. In my memory, the end boss fight of Starfox 64 where Andross' face falls off was absolutely terrifying, although I've watched it again as an adult and it wasn't half as nasty as I recalled. PC games to some extent too, I didn't like how when they went full screen they took me out of the 'safe' world of the computer and into something else.

Probably some of it was just me being cackhanded and not good at navigating 3D compared to 2D games, but it really put me off for a long time. When I picked up gaming again in the 2010s I was pleasantly surprised to find how much camera and control systems (and probably my own ability to figure out what to do) had improved since the days when I would inevitably get stuck in a corner running into the wall.

i think the argument goes that iterative decay between representations and significations that are spatially removed from their referents have are objectively incomplete or lesser. if you had a photocopy of an image next to that image - they're spatially removed and we can be rational/objective in cataloguing the differences between them

however representations that are seperated from their referents or originals in time and not spatial, where there is minimal spatial difference, its not an objective thing at all anymore since the referent still functions perfectly (like in shop logos and signs, advertising, tv idents) so this inspires are totally subjective feeling since its harder to cataloguing exactly what's missing or changed from the original. a lot of things people reach for "hauntological" to describe at things that are spatially immoveable - WH Smiths is the same location, but the logo changed. the family tv is in the same corner of the room, but the idents are different, etc.

hauntology jumps on the anticipatory dimension of all representing and referencing, since the object is never right there, there's always going to be an ineffable loss side by side with the cataloguable, objective degradations. most of the time when people talk about "hauntology" in pop culture they're talking about things where these two effects are simultaneous to each other - where there are objective, measurable and expressible differences between representations and originals, but also ineffable something.

games like Super Mario 64 and Half-Life are interesting cases in so far as their pop culture impact includes material missing from the game (since images of them were drawn from pre-release builds, maybe Mario 3's flying beetle level appearing on the back of the box is a good example) and non-current technology like CRTs and overly loud, low fidelity 90s tv audio that the music and sound effects were intended to be used with. all these things take place in a linear progression of technology that gives the impression of having halted in the early 00s when other trends, and higher fidelity and digital technology, became current.

the part of this i dont buy is the ineffable, the uncanny, inexpressible, etc. being the dividing point between spatial and temporal stuff. but i think the most interesting take away of all this to me is the fact that for two centuries stuff that happening with in time was considered to be the most authentic and purest form of expression, and books upon books on aesthetics and culture and subjective experience all were written based on the notion that things unfolding in time were realer, more actual, more lived than things that were merely spatial. then a trend comes along that says the exact opposite to this and gets more pop culture clout and interest than most of these ideas ever do

the problematic part i think is the unsavory history of posting time and space together. Fisher obviously has a history with the CCRU and was inspired by Land, and the re-purposing of Derrida in his work does strike me as having something of a throughline with the reactionary thought of Wyndham Lewis - e.g. Time and the Western Man which is based on a similiar argument about the purity of stasis and spatial self-awareness against the degradation and vanishment of time. but you could just as easily say Fisher and others were doing gods work by reclaiming ideas and freeing them from Heideggerian ideas of authentic v inauthentic historicities

[Video Game Fan 2000]

the real origin of all of this poetic not theoretic or political though, its attempts to pose Mallarmé to 20th century questions of technology

there is little in hauntology, either Derrida's or Fisher's, that isn't already in L'après-midi d'un faune inc (and especially) the sense of a lost utopia or a vanished future tense. the "i" which speaks in this poem is orientated towards a temporality which has melted away, but the "me" or "self" which is subject to the described experiences remains. the widening gulf between them can be thought of the place where theorists reach for ideas like the ineffable, the uncanny, alienation, etc.

[idunnosomename]

the early 3d era was a tough one for cartoon tie-ins. Couldnt just do a decent-looking side-scoller anymore.

Iguana taking their Turok engine and attempting to infuse it with the then very-limited universe of South Park - being that they only had 13 22 minute episodes to draw on - perhaps one of the lowest points.

Just something extremely uncomfortable and deeply depressing about it

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

[George White]

Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is deliberately haunto.

As for accidentally haunto, the London level in Tony Hawk 4.

[Shaxberd]

Gonna tell my grandkids that was what lockdown in April 2020 was like. Nobody on the streets of London but a handful of hooligans and coppers (and an elephant let loose to roam Trafalgar Square).

[Mr Vegetables]

I always think the answer is Super Mario Land because that's what Mario was as a child in 90s UK, but retrospectively there is a nostalgic version of Mario that isn't actually the one which we grew up with.

So for me it kind of came to represent something almost unwritten from the past, and the fact it's kind of weird and shit reinforces that? The 1-1 music from it is like my mind's musical theme for "there are things you have lost even from your thoughts," and although it's very peppy I now find it sad as well.

I always get the sense that people here use the word "hauntology" to mean something a bit spooky or messed up, but I'd always thought it was about loss in the end? Like it's the eerie sadness of coming across a grave, instead of, like, the corpse of a man from the disco

[copa]

Project Milo could be another one. A game that never existed.

Milo, stuck in a pretend AI world in which he crushes snails for Peter Molyneux.
And who grew up to become music theory twonk Jacob Collier.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

Project Milo could be another one. A game that never existed.

Milo, stuck in a pretend AI world in which he crushes snails for Peter Molyneux.
And who grew up to become music theory twonk Jacob Collier.

[samadriel]

This has kind of worn off for me now, but I used to find Doom incredibly haunting and difficult to exist in, particularly in very large levels where long-range enemies would see you from across the map and fire stuff at you that would take ages to get to you.  The game also gave me the persistent feeling that anything could be creeping up behind me and about to attack, and I felt like I really was the only human left in these places, surrounded by horrific monsters, only I wasn't a circle-strafing, rocket-launcher-wielding killing machine, I was just me, lucky if I could wield a pistol let alone anything harder.  I think the relative crudity of the technology was what gave it that hopeless vibe, because later games that were actually much more hectic, didn't creep me out like Doom did.

[VelourSpirit]

Hypnospace Outlaw, which I would highly recommend - far less flippant and memey than it first appears with a terrific soundtrack.

also my first thought. hilarious game, some of the music playing on certain web pages still makes me laugh thinking about it, everything about the whole "coolpunk" genre. but it's got this impalpable sadness to it too. can't wait for dreamsettler.

[kalowski]

Early 80s nightmare fuel.

Kids today don't know they're born

[Deskbound Cunt]

Hah! Pair that with the Grange Hill game and it's infamous "drug pusher" ending for a classic SpeccyHaunto double-bill. Just imagine booting this up anticipating japes with Tucker and the lads, and getting this instead:



"HE IS DEAD, AND SOON YOU WILL BE TOO." I mean, fucking hell. Genuinely chilling.

Heh. My mate wrote that. And what a shocker that we used to go clubbing in the Hacienda (with everything that entails) at the time.

[samadriel]

Hah! Pair that with the Grange Hill game and it's infamous "drug pusher" ending for a classic SpeccyHaunto double-bill. Just imagine booting this up anticipating japes with Tucker and the lads, and getting this instead:



"HE IS DEAD, AND SOON YOU WILL BE TOO." I mean, fucking hell. Genuinely chilling.

I read that as "he snatches the honey from your hand" and found the rest of it completely baffling. Sort of a Nemi goaste type thing.

[Mister Six]

This has kind of worn off for me now, but I used to find Doom incredibly haunting and difficult to exist in, particularly in very large levels where long-range enemies would see you from across the map and fire stuff at you that would take ages to get to you.  The game also gave me the persistent feeling that anything could be creeping up behind me and about to attack, and I felt like I really was the only human left in these places, surrounded by horrific monsters, only I wasn't a circle-strafing, rocket-launcher-wielding killing machine, I was just me, lucky if I could wield a pistol let alone anything harder.  I think the relative crudity of the technology was what gave it that hopeless vibe, because later games that were actually much more hectic, didn't creep me out like Doom did.

There was some talk about this - the inherent spookiness of early 90s FPS games - in another thread, maybe one of Lemming's video game threads. There's a sort of uncanny valley thing going on in those games where the world is recognisable in its overall form, but fundementally unreal in its details, which makes the experience inherently creepy. The Mars base has big clunky metal doors and beeping computer screens like you'd expect, but the layout of the levels doesn't make any sense. Or the dungeons in various fantasy FPS games, where you'll find a completely bare room that for no clear reason has a big table in it, and maybe some chairs. Is this where the enemies sit down to chat? But why are there still chains hanging from the ceiling?

And then things get uncanny in a different way in the post-DN3D era, where the levels actually do look something like real locations from our world, but the limitations of the engines - stuff like darkness being an omnipresent field that's always 20 feet away from your eyeballs, rather than the mere absence of light - cast them in a strange atmosphere.

That's all lost now, in this era of high-def wood textures for table legs and ray-traced reflections in mirrors. It's something that deliberately archaic FPS horror game IMSCARED mines really well.

i think the argument goes that iterative decay between representations and significations that are spatially removed from their referents have are objectively incomplete or lesser. if you had a photocopy of an image next to that image - they're spatially removed and we can be rational/objective in cataloguing the differences between them

however representations that are seperated from their referents or originals in time and not spatial, where there is minimal spatial difference, its not an objective thing at all anymore since the referent still functions perfectly (like in shop logos and signs, advertising, tv idents) so this inspires are totally subjective feeling since its harder to cataloguing exactly what's missing or changed from the original. a lot of things people reach for "hauntological" to describe at things that are spatially immoveable - WH Smiths is the same location, but the logo changed. the family tv is in the same corner of the room, but the idents are different, etc.

hauntology jumps on the anticipatory dimension of all representing and referencing, since the object is never right there, there's always going to be an ineffable loss side by side with the cataloguable, objective degradations. most of the time when people talk about "hauntology" in pop culture they're talking about things where these two effects are simultaneous to each other - where there are objective, measurable and expressible differences between representations and originals, but also ineffable something.

I know I've moaned about this before, sorry, but I find posts like these really frustrating, because what you're saying sounds really interesting but the posts are so stuffed with academic jargon that they're nigh impenetrable to ignoramuses like me.

Can you pretty please explain it like I'm five? I honestly want to understand.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

I know I've moaned about this before, sorry, but I find posts like these really frustrating, because what you're saying sounds really interesting but the posts are so stuffed with academic jargon that they're nigh impenetrable to ignoramuses like me.

Can you pretty please explain it like I'm five? I honestly want to understand. And I think you'd get a lot more engagement from other CaBbers too, if that's something you're interested in.

in ordinary life we're used to distinctions between representations and "real" things to be understood spatially. the classic example in language is the idea that a word or a sign points towards the object that means. think about being a kid in primary school and learning letters. the teacher shows you a card with A written on it, a card with a picture of an apple on it and a real apple. then you're told A IS FOR APPLE, shown the picture of the apple and the real apple. this is the commonsensical view of signification we grew up in and its based around spatial distances. APPLE ---> PICTURE OF AN APPLE. the idea we're used to is that a sign and the thing a sign are pointed at can be brought close together, and are simultaneous for all intents and purposes. we're familiar with how spatial differences work because they're so intuitive to us: why an image of an apple is different to an apple, why a 2D represesentation is different to a 3D object, why a photocopied image is different to an original image, etc. etc.

but all these spatial distances imply one in time which cannot be visualised in the same way. for the same reason we can't imagine a fourth spatial dimension. if teacher APPLE and points to PICTURE OF AN APPLE its impossible for this process to happen instantaneously. there has to be time passing in order for actions to happen and for words to be said and understood. its not easy for the human mind to hold time as a factor in this, in the same way as ---> points in space, so we gloss over it. or more to the point we used spatial gesturing like arrows ---> as stand-in for how gesturing works in time. you can visual a cup to the left of an apple, but you can't really visual a cup "before" an apple in time unless you translate "before" into a spatial form.

with the advent of technology this gap in time is 1) hidden more effectively than ever since instantaneous-seeming communications and broadcasts are part of our world and 2) erupts into our lives in unexpected places where we're reminded of the gap between something that counts as "an act of pointing" and that something is "a thing pointed to" - these kind of feelings are historically considered to be "uncanny" or "supernatural" (like deja vu, the unheimlich, nostalgic melancholy, "someone walking on my grave") they were rare enough to be considered matters for poetry and philosophy but they're now littering our world in highly rational, technological form. its contradictory since digital technology and modern communication is supposedly all about the instantaneous and immediate, yet the more immediate things become the more these weird gaps in time proliferate. the more likely it is we'll encounter something referencing an event that never happened or something automated thats treating something from the past as current.

in a lot of the examples people give for "hauntology" we get an extreme form of this effect where something is a fixed location but seems to malfunction in time. which is not how things are supposed to work, since if bob is standing next to dan and someone points at bob and says "dan", we know they're wrong - because bob and dan are seperate objects in space. no one accidentally calls Bob from a week ago or Dan next week. if someone is mistakenly pointing at Bob, you can physically move their hand in space they're pointing at Dan.

what i mean by "anticipatory" is that every kind of pointing needs a thing pointed at, but when we do things that are pointing or gesturing, we have to take on faith that the thing we're pointing out will still be there when our act of reference arrives. if you think about - how rare would it be to be down the pub and point at someone, only to find that person had vanished when everyone turns around. it wouldn't happen all that much and feel embarrassing or uncanny when it did. but in modern culture we're used to seeing dozens and dozens of free-floating, anticipatory gestures of reference that don't connect to anything. broken HTML links, advertising for off-market products, tv shows with dead celebrities, and (importantly for Fisher's thesis in particular) references to future technology or societal changes that never actually happened. its not just that we're being constantly asked imagine or anticipate something that we can't imagine, its that our main means of analogy or conceptualisation is obscured or distorted be a sense of statis or inertia.

in videogames (esp last century) it was major import for games to present themselves as part of a general, linear trend of social and technological development over time. and games are full of spatial representations of that linear development - from iconography and "worldbuilding", to the interfaces and control schemes themselves. human being need the anticipatory dimension since our communication and thinking works in time as well as space. but since the 90s there have been unexpected retardations to technological progress, social conflicts and upheavels, etc. that mean these representations no longer work in the way that they used to. when we talk about anticipation in semiotics and semantics, its not just in the sense of representations of future worlds that no longer can exist - its not a break down on the level of imagination and representation, its a breakdown on the level of function, since the anticipation is how the communications work pragmatically rather than just the content or world they're trying to represent. i think this is a way to understand where "uncanny" feelings come from - its not happening in the meaning, the content, its happening out of malfunction and dislocation. the uncanniness that the "meaning" somehow can still arrive loud and clear despite every part of the process seeming disjointed, dislocated and obsfucated. its the reverse to what we expect, since we expect copies to decay and lose fidelity but the originals to remain constant. we expect the quality of reproductions to decay but the mechanism that reproduce them to stay in working order. but sometimes that's not what happens, sometimes copies and messages endure beyond the originals and even after the means of reproduction themselves have decayed.

its like being taught how to read and interpret images in primary school and the teacher showing you the APPLE picture, the word APPLE and then... a real orange. and expecting you to know that the real orange somehow stand what used to be an apple, but there is nothing in the class or the process of learning the word and pictures to tell how you the real apple got replaced by a real orange, since the pictures still show apples, the flashcard says A IS FOR APPLE, and the teacher is still saying APPLE. yet there is a shared awareness that the orange used to be an apple. how did it get replaced with an orange? you don't know. you assume everyone in the class knows, because they're all pointing to it and saying APPLE but you look at it and see an orange because you're no longer part of a shared consensus.
 

[C_Larence]

Isn't this just Baudrillard's stages of Simulacra?

[copa]

...a lot of the examples people give for "hauntology" we get an extreme form of this effect where something is a fixed location but seems to malfunction in time.

This seems a neat summary of it. Things that seem weird/haunting when stripped of their original context.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

Isn't this just Baudrillard's stages of Simulacra?

i think that would concern things being like other things. A Baudrillardian example wouldn't be referential or temporal, it would be a skeuomorphism for a technology that doesn't exist - or better yet, an aspect of a game's interface that was skeuomorphic for a technology that never came to pass (eg, Duke's smart glasses in the Duke Forever alpha) - something that hasn't vanished or failed to receive a reference so much as its become real through the act of imitation. for Baurillard the functions of resembling and simulating create real things, which takes over from meaning and signification. i take "hauntology" (and other applications of deconstruction) to mean that meaning and signification are still working fine enough, but on the contrary, the reality they refer to exists only as a ghost or after image. persistance of something that should have vanished versus the presence of something that only exists through being imitated by other things.

There's probably a whole other way to talk about uncanniness in games where functions of resemblence mutate into functions of reference and vice versa. which has existed as long as they have been games on home computers

[Deskbound Cunt]

in ordinary life we're used to distinctions between representations and "real" things to be understood spatially. the classic example in language is the idea that a word or a sign points towards the object that means. think about being a kid in primary school and learning letters. the teacher shows you a card with A written on it, a card with a picture of an apple on it and a real apple. then you're told A IS FOR APPLE, shown the picture of the apple and the real apple. this is the commonsensical view of signification we grew up in and its based around spatial distances. APPLE ---> PICTURE OF AN APPLE. the idea we're used to is that a sign and the thing a sign are pointed at can be brought close together, and are simultaneous for all intents and purposes. we're familiar with how spatial differences work because they're so intuitive to us: why an image of an apple is different to an apple, why a 2D represesentation is different to a 3D object, why a photocopied image is different to an original image, etc. etc.

but all these spatial distances imply one in time which cannot be visualised in the same way. for the same reason we can't imagine a fourth spatial dimension. if teacher APPLE and points to PICTURE OF AN APPLE its impossible for this process to happen instantaneously. there has to be time passing in order for actions to happen and for words to be said and understood. its not easy for the human mind to hold time as a factor in this, in the same way as ---> points in space, so we gloss over it. or more to the point we used spatial gesturing like arrows ---> as stand-in for how gesturing works in time. you can visual a cup to the left of an apple, but you can't really visual a cup "before" an apple in time unless you translate "before" into a spatial form.

with the advent of technology this gap in time is 1) hidden more effectively than ever since instantaneous-seeming communications and broadcasts are part of our world and 2) erupts into our lives in unexpected places where we're reminded of the gap between something that counts as "an act of pointing" and that something is "a thing pointed to" - these kind of feelings are historically considered to be "uncanny" or "supernatural" (like deja vu, the unheimlich, nostalgic melancholy, "someone walking on my grave") they were rare enough to be considered matters for poetry and philosophy but they're now littering our world in highly rational, technological form. its contradictory since digital technology and modern communication is supposedly all about the instantaneous and immediate, yet the more immediate things become the more these weird gaps in time proliferate. the more likely it is we'll encounter something referencing an event that never happened or something automated thats treating something from the past as current.

in a lot of the examples people give for "hauntology" we get an extreme form of this effect where something is a fixed location but seems to malfunction in time. which is not how things are supposed to work, since if bob is standing next to dan and someone points at bob and says "dan", we know they're wrong - because bob and dan are seperate objects in space. no one accidentally calls Bob from a week ago or Dan next week. if someone is mistakenly pointing at Bob, you can physically move their hand in space they're pointing at Dan.

what i mean by "anticipatory" is that every kind of pointing needs a thing pointed at, but when we do things that are pointing or gesturing, we have to take on faith that the thing we're pointing out will still be there when our act of reference arrives. if you think about - how rare would it be to be down the pub and point at someone, only to find that person had vanished when everyone turns around. it wouldn't happen all that much and feel embarrassing or uncanny when it did. but in modern culture we're used to seeing dozens and dozens of free-floating, anticipatory gestures of reference that don't connect to anything. broken HTML links, advertising for off-market products, tv shows with dead celebrities, and (importantly for Fisher's thesis in particular) references to future technology or societal changes that never actually happened. its not just that we're being constantly asked imagine or anticipate something that we can't imagine, its that our main means of analogy or conceptualisation is obscured or distorted be a sense of statis or inertia.

in videogames (esp last century) it was major import for games to present themselves as part of a general, linear trend of social and technological development over time. and games are full of spatial representations of that linear development - from iconography and "worldbuilding", to the interfaces and control schemes themselves. human being need the anticipatory dimension since our communication and thinking works in time as well as space. but since the 90s there have been unexpected retardations to technological progress, social conflicts and upheavels, etc. that mean these representations no longer work in the way that they used to. when we talk about anticipation in semiotics and semantics, its not just in the sense of representations of future worlds that no longer can exist - its not a break down on the level of imagination and representation, its a breakdown on the level of function, since the anticipation is how the communications work pragmatically rather than just the content or world they're trying to represent. i think this is a way to understand where "uncanny" feelings come from - its not happening in the meaning, the content, its happening out of malfunction and dislocation. the uncanniness that the "meaning" somehow can still arrive loud and clear despite every part of the process seeming disjointed, dislocated and obsfucated. its the reverse to what we expect, since we expect copies to decay and lose fidelity but the originals to remain constant. we expect the quality of reproductions to decay but the mechanism that reproduce them to stay in working order. but sometimes that's not what happens, sometimes copies and messages endure beyond the originals and even after the means of reproduction themselves have decayed.

its like being taught how to read and interpret images in primary school and the teacher showing you the APPLE picture, the word APPLE and then... a real orange. and expecting you to know that the real orange somehow stand what used to be an apple, but there is nothing in the class or the process of learning the word and pictures to tell how you the real apple got replaced by a real orange, since the pictures still show apples, the flashcard says A IS FOR APPLE, and the teacher is still saying APPLE. yet there is a shared awareness that the orange used to be an apple. how did it get replaced with an orange? you don't know. you assume everyone in the class knows, because they're all pointing to it and saying APPLE but you look at it and see an orange because you're no longer part of a shared consensus.
 

>go north

[Lemming]

Does anyone else get a "hauntological" vibe from the DnB tracks used in a lot of late 90s games? The Unreal Tournament soundtrack, when combined with the game's visuals, feels like something from another dimension to me.

Also, regarding Mario 64, I was thinking about it more and all the Mario games actually feel offputting to me. I was watching my niece play the new one on Switch and the whole thing just feels fucking weird and unnerving, all the objects having faces and the talking plants and shit. The SNES era ones (mainly World and All-Stars) made me feel the same way. I dunno what it is, maybe just that Nintendo's chirpy optimism always feels a little bit artificial and forced, so ends up paradoxically desolate and weird.

Or the dungeons in various fantasy FPS games, where you'll find a completely bare room that for no clear reason has a big table in it, and maybe some chairs. Is this where the enemies sit down to chat? But why are there still chains hanging from the ceiling?

This is really pronounced in the Spear of Destiny expansion pack to Wolfenstein 3D. Supposedly set in some kind of German submarine base, but there are skeletons lying around in the corner of what are presumably dining rooms, which connect directly to armories and torture chambers, and sometimes there's just a random sink in a corridor. Combine that with identical pictures of Hitler hung up in random locations (sometimes five of the same painting in a single room) and swastika signs that pointlessly read "ACHTUNG!" but don't seem to refer to any extant object nearby, and the whole thing is beautifully peculiar, like you're exploring a representation of the fragmented mind of one of the Nazis rather than actually visiting their base.