Silent Hill: Ascension has just had its premiere, and, well, it certainly ‘Silent Hills’ things up if your familiarity with the series is based around the movies and games that came after Konami began outsourcing the IP to various developers who didn’t seem to know quite what to do with it (notable exception being Climax Studios, who actually had a couple of commendable and underrated efforts in the form of Origins in 2007 and Shattered Memories in 2009).
The interactive horror streaming-experience-game-thing features too many monsters, not enough atmosphere, and I can’t even say it resorts to cheap scares over the creeping dread that typified earlier Silent Hill games, because it doesn’t even deliver compelling jump-scares (hint: you need to build suspense for those). As you may have guessed, I’m really not sold on its delivery of a Silent Hill story, but today I want to talk about its strange and skewed implementation of the whole ‘viewers decide what happens’ setup.
Canon by Committee
For the uninitiated, Silent Hill: Ascension is an interactive horror game, where viewers make choices at key narrative moments that will affect the narrative in (as yet unknown) ways. Think of it like Telltale’s Walking Dead games, or Supermassive’s Until Dawn or The Quarry, but each decision is collectively decided upon by thousands of people tuning in. The votes and decisions get collected over several days, then you’ll see the outcomes of those decisions in the next episode.
It’s a fun idea in principle, but there are inherent narrative problems with this collective decision-making format that are only exacerbated in Ascension.
Let’s begin with the monetisation. Each viewer who signs up to the experience has a small amount of currency called ‘Influence Points’ with which to cast their votes. You can choose how many votes to cast with that currency, so it’s not just a case of one vote per person. You can vote as much as you like, and with as much of your currency as you like, so if you feel particularly strongly about a particular choice, you can invest more into trying to make that a reality.
The problem is that you can buy influence points using real-world currency, in bundles ranging from $5 to $20, so the people who are willing to throw money behind their votes get a bigger say, and real-world money is therefore influencing a Silent Hill narrative that its developers say will “impact Silent Hill canon forever.” That concept fills me with more dread than seeing Pyramid Head in the Wood Side Apartments for the first time.
Another issue with this system is with its UI, which seems to be manipulating votes in a certain direction. At each of Ascension’s four junctures where players can vote on decisions, there are three choices to make: for example, at one point a character’s wife discovers a syringe that reveals he’d been administering some kind of unprescribed, presumably potent, medication to his mother, who has just died for mysterious reasons. With the police on the way, players must collectively decide whether to hand the syringe in to the police, leave it on the ground, or destroy the evidence.
At all these junctures, each of the three decisions is marked as ‘Redemption,’ ‘Suffering,’ or ‘Damnation,’ and respectively colour-coded as blue, grey, and red. And with all four decisions in the game so far (which you can view in real-time on the Ascension website), can you guess which decision the public has overwhelmingly voted for each time? Yep, Redemption.
Illusion of Choice?
Now, in almost all these instances, the Redemption choice is also the morally sound one, ‘straight and narrow’ choice. It’s all about telling the truth, handing evidence over to police, and being cautious—all the things that precisely don’t make for a compelling narrative, even if it may lead to the desirable outcome for the player. With that said, the vote from the first choice has already manifested in-game, and given the grim yet narrative-driving outcome of that choice, it’s hard to see how that ‘Redemptive’ choice actually made a difference in the story. There was nothing redemptive about it!
On the one hand, it seems that the UI is skewing the viewership towards making the choices marked ‘Redemption,’ funneling viewers down the narrative path the devs want viewers to take. On the other, there’s a distinct possibility that these choices don’t matter all that much, and I for one would like the devs to be transparent here and at some point show the outcomes that different choices would have on the narrative (like other similar games in this genre do). I, as a viewer, don’t see the appeal of paying money to try and direct the narrative in Ascension, but if it turns out that your investments don’t really impact the narrative, well, that’d be a serious moral (and possibly legal) problem.
I’ve always enjoyed games whose narratives branch and converge based on player choices, and particularly like it when you can see the stats behind the choices other people playing the games made at key junctures. But its implementation in Silent Hill: Ascension feels all wrong, and kind of tainted.
To say Silent Hill: Ascension is ‘rigged’ is a big claim, but the fact is that people are literally paying real-world money to skew the choices in their favour, while the UI is demonstrably directing people to vote on certain choices. It would’ve been far more narratively compelling to not associate choices that people make with ‘Redemption’ on the one hand and ‘Damnation’ on the other, and allow people to follow their gut instincts a bit more. But with how that first episode panned out, I suspect that this whole exercise is more about monetisation and hollow engagement than it is about telling a compelling Silent Hill story.