On Urgency

During a recent talk with one of my gamedev friends, I pass­ing­ly men­tioned that a game works much bet­ter as art when its game­play rein­forces its sense of nar­ra­tive urgen­cy. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but on fur­ther reflec­tion I think that it’s an impor­tant piece of the Plot vs. Fun puz­zle, and a use­ful lens for explor­ing games as art. I want­ed to explore it in fur­ther detail in hopes of address­ing some ques­tions that I raised pre­vi­ous­ly, and to add anoth­er term to the AAG’s lex­i­con of ana­lyt­i­cal con­cepts. Since the city of Warsaw requires me to warn peo­ple when I’m about to unload a wall of text, my dis­cus­sion will take place after the jump.

When I talk about urgen­cy, I mean a belief held by the play­er that they must under­go a par­tic­u­lar course of action with­in a speci­fic time­frame to achieve their goal. We see urgen­cy most direct­ly when we’re dodg­ing pat­terns in a bul­let hell game or floor­ing the gas pedal in a rac­ing title, but I want to use the term more broad­ly to include goals like mak­ing sure that I’ve swept every inch of a Zelda dun­geon for heart con­tain­ers before get­ting ready to con­front the boss. In this sense, urgen­cy is not nec­es­sar­i­ly about mak­ing the play­er feel pan­icked, but about inter­nal­iz­ing the imper­a­tive of the game. Jane McGonigal address­es this when she talks about using games as a model for gen­er­at­ing whole-hearted par­tic­i­pa­tion in activ­i­ties.

A Little History

Early video games such as Missile Command, Asteroids, Space Invaders, and Galaga all cre­at­ed a sense of urgen­cy by rapid­ly ramp­ing up the dif­fi­cul­ty of the game as you con­tin­ued to play. More tar­gets, faster ene­mies, and more com­plex tac­tics reward­ed skilled play with greater chal­lenges, which cre­ates a sense of accom­plish­ment while also avert­ing bore­dom. While this is born part­ly out of a need to force peo­ple to feed more quar­ters into the arcade cab­i­net, it was also excel­lent game design that cre­at­ed a sense of urgen­cy in the play­er to reach his or her goal.

In these early titles, there isn’t much nar­ra­tive to speak of. “Kill the aliens!” is enough story for quite a lot of video games, but for the first few gen­er­a­tions of gam­ing the exclu­sive focus was the game­play mechan­ics. Many of the arche­types of “mini-game” for­mats come from this era, and the game­play is good for a rea­son: it presents a goal, and increas­es the com­plex­i­ty or dif­fi­cul­ty of accom­plish­ing that goal at a rate cor­rel­a­tive with the player’s increase in skill. Among other rea­sons, they suc­ceed as games because the game­play rein­forces the sense of urgen­cy to accom­plish that goal.

As games have grown more com­plex and sto­ry­li­nes have become more elab­o­rate, we start fac­ing the Plot vs. Fun prob­lem: telling a good story requires seiz­ing the player’s sense of agen­cy, but end­less play­er free­dom is going to harm the story because you can’t con­trol the pac­ing or order­ing of events that lead up to them per­form­ing the right action to advance the story…

…unless they’ve inter­nal­ized the nar­ra­tive and have a sense of urgen­cy to ful­fill it.

Urgency Done Right

I’d like to elab­o­rate an exam­ple of how a game can match nar­ra­tive urgen­cy to game­play at mul­ti­ple paces with­in a sin­gle title. The AAG’s favorite dead horse to beat is Planescape: Torment, and I’m going to mer­ri­ly flog it fur­ther. While it’s not the explic­it struc­ture of the game, I want to break it up into three acts to talk about how each one uses a dif­fer­ent style of play to cre­ate an con­tex­tu­al­ly appro­pri­ate sense of urgen­cy.

In the first act, that level is zero. After wak­ing up in the mor­tu­ary with no mem­o­ries and dis­cov­er­ing that you can­not die, you are left to wan­der around the city of Sigil to learn about where you are, and your choic­es deter­mine your iden­ti­ty by chang­ing your moral align­ment, your class, and the atti­tudes and dia­logue choic­es you have with NPCs. There is no clear force out to get you, and the only objec­tive you have is the mes­sage carved on your back to seek out an object from a mys­te­ri­ous fig­ure named Pharod. The time it takes you to get your bear­ings and learn about the set­ting is designed to let you lux­u­ri­ate in the gor­geous design of the set­ting and swim around gen­uine­ly rich dia­logue.

Combats are most­ly option­al, you can explore any part of the city, and none of the NPCs give you the typ­i­cal “gath­er 5 mod­ron sprock­ets and bring them back to me” quests, save for one char­ac­ter that lamp­shades it heav­i­ly and embeds it in a ridicu­lous chain of fetch quests that are designed to irri­tate your char­ac­ter. As you explore the city and meet more peo­ple, you even­tu­al­ly find sev­er­al of your old jour­nals, and find your way to con­front Ravel Puzzlewell, the night hag who put you in this predica­ment.

The sec­ond act begins after Ravel tells you how your sit­u­a­tion arose, and the mys­te­ri­ous shad­ows that have begun to appear around you kill her before she can tell you where to find the solu­tion to your con­di­tion. At this point, the game shifts to a faster pace, as new areas are opened up for you to explore, and you sud­den­ly have a much clear­er goal: fol­low the trail the source of your con­di­tion, and put it to an end. This sends you trav­el­ing to pris­on worlds, extra-dimensional forges, and lay­ers of Hell itself look­ing for the secret to end­ing your tor­tur­ous cycle of rebirth. The scenery is just as rich, but the explic­it goal is clear­er and the forces stand­ing in your way are much more men­ac­ing. Rather than explor­ing for the sake of learn­ing your sur­round­ings, you are work­ing on locat­ing the small clues that add up to your find­ing the secret loca­tion of the source of your tor­ment.

The third part begins with the final stage of your hunt for the one who can tell you that loca­tion, and the final con­fronta­tion that decides your ulti­mate fate. This is an intense race through a col­laps­ing demi­plane on the edge of Hell, fight­ing end­less waves of pow­er­ful demons, and rac­ing to the fortress of the one who has been pro­long­ing your eter­nal tor­ture. The Fortress of Regret is not large, but the tremen­dous, des­per­ate efforts of your tor­menter kills your entire party, leav­ing you alone with your foe for a final con­flict that is bril­liant­ly writ­ten and which I have never seen topped. For the last hour of the game, you feel that the fate of some­thing truly immense rests on your actions. It’s grip­ping and heart-rending, and you absolute­ly can­not stop play­ing.

The urgen­cy of each act is com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent. When the game is meant to be explorato­ry and self-paced, noth­ing press­es you. When free-form explo­ration gets tire­some, you are given a focused goal with some flex­i­bil­i­ty around how you pur­sue it. Meaningful obsta­cles begin to push you toward your goal as the Shadows attack you when you spend too much time in areas you don’t need to revis­it. As the game draws to a cli­max, your path is short, direct, and astound­ing­ly intense. There is no chance to pause and col­lect your­self, and giv­ing you such a break would detract from the enor­mi­ty of your pur­suit.

Urgency Done Wrong

The con­verse sit­u­a­tion occurs when a game com­plete­ly fails to match the urgen­cy of your imper­a­tive with the game­play. I think the best exam­ple of this defi­cien­cy is in the Elder Scrolls titles, par­tic­u­lar­ly Oblivion. The gates of hell itself are rip­ping tremen­dous holes in the wall of real­i­ty, and Cyrodil will be flush with demons if a brave adven­tur­er doesn’t step forth to seal the breach. You are that adven­tur­er, and you can lit­er­al­ly spend years in-game col­lect­ing wild­flow­ers, with­out penal­ty, after the quest-relevant NPCs tell you that the world will sure­ly end if some­one doesn’t imme­di­ate­ly seal the Oblivion gates. There’s absolute­ly noth­ing dri­ving you to do any­thing. Ever.

The prob­lem with Oblivion is that all of your objec­tives, no mat­ter how triv­ial or dire, are of equal impor­tance. Nothing moti­vates you to com­plete any of them aside from tra­di­tion­al adventurer’s avarice. This is part of the appeal for many peo­ple, as you can sim­ply do what you want to do and explore a tremen­dous and beau­ti­ful world at your own pace, seek­ing as much com­bat or com­merce as tick­les your fancy. As much as I enjoy this, the plot states direct­ly that inac­tion will lead to hor­ri­fy­ing con­se­quences, and fails to deliv­er on that threat. If the game tells me the world will be flood­ed with demons unless I do some­thing, then it should bloody well flood the world with demons if I spend my time try­ing to steal every fork in the world.

This is not to say that I dis­like the Elder Scrolls games, as I adore play­ing Morrowind and Skyrim. I do, how­ev­er, think it harms them as art to have such a jar­ring dis­par­i­ty between the threats in the nar­ra­tion and the threats in the game. Morrowind worked slight­ly bet­ter by hav­ing a lurk­ing, loom­ing dread in Dagoth-Ur rather than an unstop­pable army con­stant­ly boil­ing forth from hell itself, and Skyrim at least drops a giant freak­ing drag­on on my head if I spend too long muck­ing about in the mid­dle of nowhere. Still, all of them have a rather absent sense of urgen­cy, as there is no reward or penal­ty for com­plet­ing objec­tives swift­ly or over the course of months in the game. The nar­ra­tive they are try­ing to build feels as impor­tant as the mean­ing­less copies of the Biography of Barenziah on the book­shelves of every last cit­i­zen of Tamriel.

The Continuum

As with most of my ideas, urgen­cy as a dimen­sion of games-as-art is a con­tin­u­um. Some games work at each end and every­where in between. Deus Ex plays won­der­ful­ly along that con­tin­u­um by alter­nat­ing between wide open city streets that you can explore at leisure to tense sce­nes of escap­ing from giant col­laps­ing build­ings. Some games stick firm­ly to the full-blown panic end of the spec­trum: bul­let hell titles and fight­ing games are short, intense bouts of fran­tic strug­gles to stay alive and defeat your oppo­nents. Titles like Civilization give you all the time in the world to plan and design what you want to see, never forc­ing you to end your turn pre­ma­ture­ly or set­ting dead­li­nes for your goals.

Urgency is a tool in the game designer’s kit, and good exe­cu­tion depends on match­ing the urgen­cy of the game­play to the nar­ra­tive goal you are try­ing to rein­force. Part of the rea­son that ran­dom com­bats in Final Fantasy titles irri­tate the liv­ing crap out of me is because they inter­rupt my desire to com­plete a goal; it feels like the game is need­less­ly obstruct­ing my desire to accom­plish the objec­tives it sets out for me. Planned encoun­ters are fine, as I am per­fect­ly will­ing to fight through a fiendish gauntlet of ene­mies if it makes sense for me to do so. Random encoun­ters like fight­ing yet-another-goddamn-goblin while trav­el­ing from point A to point B, how­ev­er, do very lit­tle to enhance my sense of pro­gress and achieve­ment, and some­times ham­per it by con­sum­ing pre­cious min­utes of game time imped­ing my pro­gress. Combat events may be intense and require action and strat­e­gy, but if they don’t build on my sense of pro­gress, then they are fail­ures. “Urgency” in the sense of “act now or die” doesn’t always com­ple­ment my use of the term.

What It All Means

My mis­sion here at the Analytically About Games is to take games seri­ous­ly as art. Sometimes this means explor­ing sin­gle titles like book reviews, exam­in­ing the details of a game as aes­thet­ic expe­ri­ences and offer­ing com­men­tary. More often, I try to artic­u­late what aspects a game can pos­sess that enhances its value as art, such as its sense of immer­sion and how its inter­face pro­vides an expe­ri­ence that can­not be had through a dif­fer­ent medi­um. A robust vocab­u­lary for dis­cussing games as art helps peo­ple under­stand why I love games so much, and why I think they can and should be taken seri­ous­ly as enrich­ing expe­ri­ences.

My thoughts above are offer­ing a term that may or may not wind up being use­ful in look­ing at other titles. The core themes that I’ve writ­ten about are immer­sion and inter­ac­tiv­i­ty, how they are not syn­ony­mous in games, and how they are essen­tial com­po­nents to under­stand­ing games qua games and games qua art. Urgency is anoth­er dimen­sion of both, and a good game will prob­a­bly lend itself to being dis­cussed in such terms. It may not stick, but it might inspire insights into other titles you’d like to share on our hum­ble blog.

You’re a Legend, Mr. Wayne

It’s Batman time.  Again. (Always).

Last time, I men­tioned that Arkham Asylum, (though real­ly neat), most­ly doesn’t exam­ine the Batman mythos with any real gran­u­lar­i­ty.  “You are Batman,” it says, “Now go punch peo­ple.”  By and large, Arkham Asylum is a game about how cool it is to dress up in tights and a cape, but there are a few moments when it stops to ask the play­er a few ques­tions about what it real­ly is to be Batman, and those are the sec­tions I want to talk about today.

The Scarecrow is an old Batman vil­lain who plays a rel­a­tive­ly small but mem­o­rable role in Arkham Asylum.  If you’re unfa­mil­iar with the Scarecrow, all you real­ly need to know is that he is an ex-psychologist who is obsessed with fear, and has invent­ed a pow­er­ful hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry fear gas which caus­es his vic­tims to relive their worst fears and night­mares.  The specifics of his place in the plot are not real­ly impor­tant, as the sec­tions which fea­ture him stand entire­ly (and some­what jar­ring­ly) on their own.  In any Scarecrow story, Batman is inevitably affect­ed by the fear gas, treat­ing the reader/viewer/player to an exam­i­na­tion of what Batman fears the most.  In the best Scarecrow sto­ries, these moments allow us to learn more about the human side of the Dark Knight.  In the worst, the story sim­ply gets trip­py and weird for a while before return­ing to nor­mal­cy.

Arkham Asylum infects Batman with the gas on three sep­a­rate occa­sions.  These three moments allow the game to put on its arty hat and dig a lit­tle deep­er into the psy­chol­o­gy of everyone’s favorite brood­ing vig­i­lante.

The Form

The Scarecrow sequences fol­low a pret­ty strict form: first, Batman will get infect­ed with fear gas, cough for a while, and then keep walk­ing with­out any obvi­ous dra­mat­ic shift.  As time goes by, things get pro­gres­sive­ly stranger and stranger as the toxin works through his sys­tem and Batman begins to hal­lu­ci­nate.  Eventually, these hal­lu­ci­na­tions cul­mi­nate in a com­plete depar­ture from real­i­ty where­in the play­er is required to play through a minigame with com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent rules from the main game.

In these minigame sec­tions, Batman is placed in a near­ly two-dimensional space com­posed of small pieces of the Asylum, float­ing in space.  In the cen­ter of this space stands a fifty-foot tall Scarecrow, slow­ly rotat­ing around and look­ing for Batman.  His gaze is rep­re­sent­ed by a halo of orange light, and the play­er must avoid this light by hid­ing behind walls and only duck­ing through exposed spaces when the Scarecrow is look­ing else­where.  If Batman stum­bles into the Scarecrow’s gaze, the play­er receives an instant game over as the giant looms over a cow­er­ing Batman.

After suc­cess­ful­ly dodg­ing the Scarecrow’s gaze and sur­mount­ing some straight­for­ward obsta­cles, the play­er will come upon a Bat-Signal.  Interacting with the Bat-Signal caus­es Batman to shine the light direct­ly onto the Scarecrow, who will cry out and van­ish.  At this point, the hal­lu­ci­na­tion ends, and Batman comes back to the real world, hav­ing com­plete­ly shrugged off the fear gas with­out any appar­ent lin­ger­ing side effects.

The Content

At first, these sec­tions read as Batman con­quer­ing his fears and there­by sur­viv­ing the tem­po­rary insan­i­ty pro­duced by the gas.  Batman endures the hal­lu­ci­na­tions and then comes out the other end by remind­ing all con­cerned that he’s Batman, dammit, and is there­fore immune to your stu­pid poi­sons.

The first time I played the game, I took these sec­tions at face value, and there­fore found them to be an enjoy­able enough change of pace, but didn’t feel like they lived up to their full poten­tial.  But as I thought about them later, I sud­den­ly real­ized they deserved a closer look.

What is the play­er actu­al­ly doing dur­ing the minigame sec­tions, the real moments of game­play?  The large Scarecrow in the mid­dle of the world is not the actu­al per­son, but a pro­jec­tion of Batman’s fears.  If the play­er runs out and tries to con­front the Scarecrow (and thus, Batman’s fears), direct­ly, he or she is greet­ed with a game-over screen.  The play­er must thus hide from Batman’s fears, must avoid com­ing into direct con­flict or con­tact with them.  Practically every other obsta­cle in the game is defeat­ed through the use of phys­i­cal force.  Batman does hide in the shad­ows when he is attack­ing a group of armed thugs, but he does so only until the play­er can iso­late them and beat them into sub­mis­sion.

But the play­er never actu­al­ly fights Batman’s fears.  Batman never punch­es the huge Scarecrow, never fights with him, never throws Batarangs at him.  Instead, he runs away from him.  He com­plete­ly avoids the Scarecrow’s gaze, and if he allows him­self to be bathed in the light of the Scarecrow’s eyes, to be caught and forced to reck­on with his deep­est fears, he goes com­plete­ly insane.

Batman is not fac­ing his fears and tri­umph­ing over them, he is run­ning away from them.  Each sec­tion forces Batman to inter­act with ele­ments of self-doubt– all of the hal­lu­ci­na­tions relate to Batman’s per­cep­tion of him­self.  Each time the Scarecrow poi­sons Batman, he forces him to take a long, hard look at him­self.

And how does Batman shake off the toxin?  Not by accept­ing the fears, or by con­fronting them, but by shin­ing the Bat-Signal on the image of the Scarecrow, lit­er­al­ly stamp­ing the Batman emblem on his fears.  This is an act of self-definition, of reassert­ing his iden­ti­ty in the face of the unpleas­ant intro­spec­tion the fear gas is mak­ing him under­go.  When Batman shi­nes the bat-signal on the Scarecrow, he is redefin­ing him­self as Batman, “tri­umph­ing” over his fears not by con­fronting them, but by remind­ing him­self who he is.  Batman is an idea more than he is a per­son, and by shin­ing the Bat-Signal on his fears, Bruce reasserts his iden­ti­ty as the leg­end.  He is not Bruce Wayne, he is the @#$%# Batman.

The fact that he shrugs off the effects of the gas all at once imme­di­ate­ly after this act of self-definition indi­cates that he is com­plete­ly repress­ing his fears and self-doubt, shunt­ing them out of his mind, con­quer­ing his fears not by fac­ing them and let­ting them pass through him, but by putting his fin­gers in his ears and shout­ing “I’m Batman and Batman is not afraid of things,” until they go away for a while.

So, what does the game think Batman is afraid of?  The three sec­tions boil down to two major fears.

1. Bruce Wayne

One of the most inter­est­ing parts about Batman is the inter­play between his two per­sonas– the inter­ac­tion and fre­quent dis­con­nect between the way he views him­self and behaves as he switch­es between Bruce Wayne and Batman.  The real ques­tion is one of def­i­n­i­tion: is this per­son real­ly Bruce Wayne, a bil­lion­aire play­boy who moon­lights by night as a cos­tumed vig­i­lante, or is he pri­mar­i­ly Batman, who pre­tends by day to be a wealthy exec­u­tive?  Some super­heroes are less con­fus­ing in this regard: Clark Kent isn’t a real per­son, he’s a mask for Superman.  Spider-Man, con­verse­ly, is an excuse for Peter Parker to do all the things he real­ly wants to do.  But Batman is less clear-cut.  Where does Batman stop and Bruce Wayne begin?

Arkham Asylum is most­ly uncon­cerned with this dynam­ic.  You play the game as Batman, and although Oracle calls you Bruce from time to time, the Bruce Wayne side of things is most­ly irrel­e­vant.  But the one time you do play as Bruce Wayne rather than Batman is telling: you don’t play Bruce Wayne the bil­lion­aire play­boy, you play Bruce Wayne the ter­ri­fied lit­tle child.

The sec­ond hal­lu­ci­na­tion sequence caus­es the player’s avatar to be replaced by a lit­tle boy in a tuxe­do, walk­ing down a rain­ing alley­way, and lis­ten­ing, in the dis­tance, to the sounds of his par­ents being mur­dered.  The alley­way seems to go on forever, stretch­ing on in per­ma­nent dark­ness, and the play­er can do absolute­ly noth­ing to stop the mur­der of Bruce’s par­ents.  Keeping the mur­der entire­ly audi­to­ry is actu­al­ly a stroke of bril­liance as it makes it all the more inex­orable.  You can’t see what’s hap­pen­ing, so you wouldn’t even begin to know how to stop it, but you can hear it, so you know it’s hap­pen­ing.  The game does not take con­trol of the avatar; it still allows the play­er to have con­trol over the char­ac­ter, in that the play­er can phys­i­cal­ly move the lit­tle boy around, but the play­er has no con­trol over the events that are unfold­ing in the game.

This is how Batman views Bruce Wayne: as a scared, pow­er­less lit­tle boy, per­pet­u­al­ly trapped in the dark alley where his par­ents were mur­dered.  In Arkham Asylum, at least, Batman asso­ciates the name “Bruce Wayne” with pow­er­less­ness, with weak­ness, and with loss.  He becomes Batman to escape from Bruce Wayne, to leave the lit­tle boy behind, and in this case, the reasser­tion of his iden­ti­ty through the Bat-Signal is a way of dis­tanc­ing him­self from this part of him­self.  “I am not Bruce Wayne,” he says, “I am not this pow­er­less lit­tle child who could not save his par­ents from being mur­dered.  I am Batman, and I can do any­thing.”

2. Illegitimacy

How is Batman dif­fer­ent from the cos­tumed lunatics and mur­der­ers he oppos­es?  Bruce Wayne, a grown man, spends his nights dress­ing up like a bat and beat­ing up crim­i­nals and lunatics, and calls it his life’s work, argu­ing that he’s sav­ing Gotham City.  But Bruce could unques­tion­ably accom­plish far more good as the multi-billionaire CEO of a major cor­po­ra­tion ded­i­cat­ed to res­cu­ing Gotham, and he would prob­a­bly get punched less.  Rather than per­son­al­ly beat­ing up rob­bers and rapists, Bruce could donate sev­er­al mil­lion dol­lars to reform­ing the entire Gotham Police Department, and then donate sev­er­al more mil­lions of dol­lars to the edu­ca­tion­al sys­tems and infra­struc­tures of the city so as to help peo­ple avoid becom­ing rob­bers and rapists in the first place.  In the real world, while Phoenix Jones may (or may not) do some good with his vig­i­lan­tism, it’s hard to argue that he does as much good for the world as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  Jones, of course, isn’t a bil­lion­aire, but Bruce Wayne is.

This is not to say that all future edi­tions of Batman comics ought to cen­ter around the day-to-day affairs of a bil­lion­aire phil­an­thropist, because, you know, yawn.  And to be fair, many of the Batman sto­ries do show him doing all man­ner of phil­an­thropy in the day­time in addi­tion to his night-time antics.  But if Bill Gates ran around in a bat cos­tume and punched peo­ple, even bad peo­ple, we would not cheer him on, we would call him crazy and lock him away.  In the real world, that kind of vig­i­lan­tism isn’t real­ly laud­able, it’s psy­chotic.

Batman, sadly, does not live in the real world, but any work of art which real­ly wants to engage with the Batman mythos is going to have to explore this prob­lem.  Arkham Asylum does so in the third hal­lu­ci­na­tion sequence, which takes the game’s open­ing cin­e­mat­ic and inverts the roles.  In the orig­i­nal cin­e­mat­ic, we watched as Batman drove a bound and gagged Joker to the Asylum and escort­ed him to his pris­on cell.  In the hal­lu­ci­na­tion, how­ev­er, the Joker takes a bound and gagged Batman to the Asylum while all of the other vil­lains watch and com­ment on how crazy Batman is.  What’s the dif­fer­ence, Batman’s psy­che asks, between these lunatics and your­self?  It ends with the hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry Joker killing Batman, and then cuts (after some fun fourth-wall break­age involv­ing a faux game-over screen) to Batman’s grave.  Batman then claws his way out of the grave and walks through a series of cells which each con­tain images of Batman behav­ing just like the lunatics in the asy­lum before descend­ing into the final minigame sec­tion.  Maybe Batman isn’t that dif­fer­ent from the Joker.  Maybe he should be caged.  Maybe he is a lunatic.  Maybe the Batman myth is dead.

Batman is almost com­plete­ly silent dur­ing these hal­lu­ci­na­tions.  He doesn’t engage with these legit­i­mate doubts and ques­tions, he avoids them, and this time, when he shi­nes the Bat-Signal and reasserts his iden­ti­ty, he is actu­al­ly reassert­ing the value of the entire leg­end.

The Bat-Signal is real­ly one of the sil­lier aspects of the Batman mythos.  While it inevitably shows up in all of the dark­er Batman sto­ries, it real­ly seems most at home in lighter ver­sions of the char­ac­ter.  It belongs with a Batman who is any­thing but dark and edgy and brood­ing, a Batman who is pure-hearted and good and maybe even a lit­tle goofy, who inhab­its a uni­verse com­plete­ly free of psy­chosis and real vio­lence.  Thus, using the Bat-Signal to reassert the valid­i­ty of the Batman leg­end may serve as a way for him to for­get all of the issues that undoubt­ed­ly under­lie his behav­ior and remind him­self of the leg­end.  No, he’s not a psy­chopath.  He’s dif­fer­ent from the Joker because he’s BATMAN.  The Batman leg­end seems dead for a moment, but Batman crawls his way out of the grave, again, not by actu­al­ly con­fronting the issue, but by reassert­ing his iden­ti­ty and his own self-made def­i­n­i­tions, ignor­ing what is prob­a­bly the truth of the mat­ter in favor of the myth.

Conclusion

The most telling part about this is that this inter­pre­ta­tion is not imme­di­ate­ly appar­ent.  Batman cer­tain­ly doesn’t think he’s run­ning away from any­thing.  Batman thinks he’s tri­umph­ing over Bruce Wayne’s piti­ful self-doubts and night­mares, and remind­ing him­self who he real­ly is.

Arkham Asylum is usu­al­ly any­thing but sub­tle: it cli­max­es in a bat­tle with a twelve-foot mani­ac clown.  But hid­den down beneath the broad strokes and nifty gad­gets is real com­men­tary about the sort of per­son Batman must be.  You have to dig down to find it, past the trap­pings of the sit­u­a­tion into the mechan­ics, the fun­da­men­tal level at which the play­er inter­acts with the game.

When Batman final­ly breaks out of his last hal­lu­ci­na­tion, he has the real Scarecrow by the throat.  Scarecrow astound­ed­ly yells that he has inject­ed Batman with enough toxin to drive ten men insane.  Batman has the willpow­er of ten men, the game seems to declare.  But maybe it’s not so much that Batman is stronger than the rest of us.  Maybe he just has a much greater capac­i­ty for self-deception.