Losing Control

A Dialogic Game Derived from the Crowdsourced Imaginary

“The buildings of capitalism, hives of killer bees, honey for the few.
He served there. But in a dark tunnel, when no one watched,
he unfolded his wings and flew. He had to live his life”

— Tomas Tranströmer, “Epigram”

Fan fiction traditionally follows a radial trajectory: Beginning with a locus—an author or text—it projects outward to a loose confederacy of fans who create and compile work that orbits and extends the original. But the videogame Control reverses this trajectory, taking its inspiration from a fanbase dedicated to collective storytelling—a Creative Commons fictional universe called the “SCP Foundation” to which anyone is welcome to contribute. Both properties are haunted houses of a sort, conceived as shadowy government agencies charged with “Securing, Containing, Protecting” (SCP) paranormal phenomena. The Federal Bureau of Control, Control’s in-game analog to the SCP’s “Foundation,” is literally haunted by the phenomena contained therein, but group storytelling and universal ownership queer our expectations of the haunted house paradigm: While traditional, single-author hauntings are often centered around one idea that the author controls and which the fanbase then complicates, the hauntings in Control are networked, variegated, and compounding. The narrative, in consequence, often feels tonally chaotic, but each element is a recognizable fragment in a shared imaginary, severed from its context. Control is, compellingly, a junk drawer of free ranging, psychologically-charged symbols which deliberately shift from definitive to ambiguated authorship: The game’s diffuse provenance, centerless networks, and hauntings from the collective unconscious offer players a quixotic power fantasy of literally cleansing the specters of late-capitalist alienation from a modern workspace.

Control’s set is a chilling workplace dystopia, where players are charged with containing various phenomena, usually consumer products that have come to life due to a quorum of the population imbuing them with longing or terror. They range from mischievous to neutral—haunted jukeboxes, arcade games, and lawn flamingos—but the game’s true villain is a malignant entity called only “The Hiss,” which infects people and spaces. The player avatar is Jesse Faden, a drifter who spent her life working low-wage subsistence jobs, a fact that is relevant to the project. The game begins with Jesse, in search of her brother, inside a brutalist government building in Manhattan, a building that is seemingly empty save for the electrical hum of fluorescent lights, the whisper of shuffling paper somewhere nearby, and the clanking of distant machinery. Jesse eventually finds herself in the office of the Bureau Director where he is lying dead on the floor. Upon picking up his sidearm she becomes the new Director of the FBC. All the photographs of the former Director on the walls, the player notices with alarm, have been replaced with her face, and the few office workers that remain alive greet her as the Director without surprise when they encounter her. Jesse finds she must fight The Hiss through the various departments of the Bureau, learning on the job to cleanse nodes of its influence, and shepherd uncorrupted office workers to safety. From beginning to end we aren’t sure if she is sane or hallucinating; if she is struggling underclass or apex predator; if the mysterious janitor haunting the corridors is man, god, monster, or ghost; or if the mysterious Board, a group of enigmatic entities who advise Jesse from out of a huge, inverted pyramid, are her pawns or her Svengali.

These inversions contribute to the game’s uncanny power and offer a searing critique of capitalist priorities. In “The Precession of Simulacra,” Jean Baudrillard calls our attention to “the primitive (mise en) scène of capital: its instantaneous cruelty, its incomprehensible ferocity, its fundamental immorality” (463). Control literalizes such mise en scènes by imagining the workspace as haunted by cruel and incomprehensible manifestations of corporate greed and expressions of power. The Hiss infection warps the building—the walls and corridors and furniture—in disturbing, unpredictable ways, mixing senseless architectural recursion with what feel like severed body parts. The game is a visual metaphor of Baudrillard’s “hyperreality,” which he conceives as “the infinity of capital folded back on its own surface” into a kind of Möbius strip (465). In The Architectural Uncanny, Anthony Vidler maintains that the “alienation of the individual” is expressed in the scale differences between skyscrapers—expressions of capitalist domination—and the anonymous workers who are automatons within and around them. This difference would not be so acute without “the real economic and social estrangements experienced by the majority of [a city’s] inhabitants” (Vidler 4). In Control, where there is Hiss infection, hapless office workers hang suspended in midair. These suspended figures murmur a steady chant in unison as the player gets close to Hiss-infected areas. The words of the chant occasionally come into focus with bizarrely juxtaposed Dadaist non-sequiturs like “A copy of a copy of a copy / Leave your insides by the door / The picture is you holding the picture.” They wear office attire—the uniforms of executives, scientists, secretaries, custodians, and security guards, all rendered equal in thralldom. They are liable at any moment to drop from the ceiling and attack Jesse, for the Hiss is a malevolent hive-mind that takes over bodies and spaces for some unspecified purpose that Jesse, without understanding how or why, must stop.

The gameplay involves fighting through rooms representing “the infinity of capital folded back on its own surface.” Different Bureau divisions have their own character and commentary on the class implications of corporate structure: In “Research” the player faces the experiments-gone-wrong unleashed by scientists playing god; “Maintenance” requires players to clear toxic waste and sentient fungal infestations; and in “Executive,” players discover increasingly unhinged recordings, evidence of upper management’s insanity, in their luxurious office suites. We are Quixotic flâneurs in a crowdsourced space, and the hauntings we find here are multiform and interconnected in what Neal Kirk calls “Networked Spectrality,” a particular kind of contemporary, high-tech haunted house that is collective and rhizomatic in structure, and through which our emergent fears and longings hunt and terrorize us, the more frightening because they are “unseen technological protocols” that can “structure and use human behavior” (Kirk 64). Rather than Freud’s psychological unheimlich, we find ourselves in a site of sociological unheimlich, a contemporary workspace that is also a prison, as the mysterious Board lets slip during a weapon tutorial, saying, “The Service Weapon has many Forms, like the House/Prison you occupy.” Like its real-world analogs, the Board inhabits a space wholly separate from the Bureau, and its inscrutable language—often a hodgepodge of cosmic horror and corporate buzzwords—obfuscates and bullies. Toward game’s end, Jesse teams up with another entity, which angers the Board. It says to her, “We Apologize/Deny All Knowledge. [The Former] builds a Competition/Not Us… If you [side with it] you will be Sorry/Dead. And you will never work/exist in this Torn/Cosmic Reality again.” There is no escape from Jesse’s fate—or ours, as Baudrillard would have it—but cleansing the nodes of each sector of Hiss influence comes close. Mastering these spaces of terror—watching the walls retract into smooth, gray, innocent symmetry; watching the eerie red give way to regular fluorescent lighting, hearing the blessed cessation of the chanting—is accompanied by a heady feeling of power and release.

Because no game about hyperreality would be complete without an instance of life imitating art, I’ll leave off with a real-life story: In 2015, Russian oligarch Andrey Duskin joined the SCP Foundation as a writer and began selling art based on its logo and stories, a project that was warmly encouraged by SCP—at first. But then, after copyrighting his work, he tried to wrest control of the IP away from them, using a loophole in the Creative Commons licensing. The lawsuit failed outside of Russia—for now—but it is ongoing, and he now owns all the rights to the property, including the work he did not create, inside Russia. As I was doing research for this project, Duskin became the Hiss for me, a corrupting force that consumes everything of cultural emergence only to package it back up and sell it to its creators. For this is one of the insatiable hungers of capitalism: The endless appropriation of the communicative arts, the packaging of it into bite-sized consumables, so that even our own creations are no longer ours, but part of the Möbius strip of capital, folding back on its own surface. But playing Control, on my couch in front of my PS5, at the threshold between real world and game world I felt myself momentarily free of that. For a moment, embodying a working-class hero who fell into a position of authority, I could ask myself “Who has Control?” and think, just maybe, it could be me.

Works Cited

Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra.” Simulacra and Simulation, Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. U. of Michigan P., 1994, pp. 453–81.

Control. PS5 Edition, Remedy Entertainment, Distributed by 505 Games, 2019.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus, Translated by Brian Massumi, U. of Minnesota P., 1987.

Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” Art and Literature, Translated by James Strachey, Penguin, 1990, pp. 336-75.

Joy, Reagan. “The Tragedy of the Creative Commons: An Analysis of How Overlapping Intellectual Property Rights Undermine the Use of Permissive Licensing.” Case Western Law Review, Vol. 72, Is. 4, 2022, pp. 977-1012.

Kirk, Neal. “Networked Spectrality: In Memorium, Pulse, and Beyond.” Digital Horror: Haunted Technologies, Network Panic, and the Found Footage Phenomenon, Edited by Xavier Aldana Reyes, I.B. Tauris and Company, 2015.

Tranströmer, Tomas. “Epigram.” Inspired Notes: The Poems of Tomas Tranströmer, translated by John F. Deane, 2011.

Vidler, Anthony. The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. MIT Press, 1999.

More Truth Than Fact

Finding Truth in an Allegorical Read of the Bible

“God is… an amalgam of several personalities in one character. Tension among these personalities makes God difficult, but it also makes Him compelling, even addictive.”

— Jack Miles, God: A Biography

“Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact.”

— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

Human beings, in our meaning-making toolbox, have truth and we have fact. But are “Truth” (in the Platonic sense) and “fact” synonyms? Nothing makes the distinction between these words greater than when we apply them to the bible, a work that is almost impossible to categorize as “fact.” When we endeavor to literally interpret the bible, we get into some trouble. Quite a few wars have been fought (and continue to be fought) over literal interpretations of the bible. There is a reason fiction and mythology are more suited to the exploration of ethics and the building of cohesive cultural memories than historical, scientific, or “divinely-authored” texts. When reading metaphorical or allegorical texts, readers don’t need to get bogged down by accuracy: They feel the moral repercussions more immediately, their place in the world more tangibly. Fiction creates a safe space for readers to explore, without the need to refute or prove, cultural history, cultural taboos, the law, and human beings’ place in this confusing cosmos. Certain sects of Christianity, of course, argue that the bible is the literal word of God—the Logos—meaning that God is not merely the story’s protagonist; He is also its author. But one need only glance at the bible’s first book to see overwhelming evidence that it was written over a long period of time by multiple (human) authors. Were it truly the word of God, we would expect to see greater internal consistency in style and content. We might expect God’s character to remain constant for the duration of the story. But the bible means much more for being a work that harnesses the power of fiction and myth—a work that is living, growing, accretive, rather than static; interpretive rather than absolute—to impart a sense of faith and awe, even if, for non-believers, that awe is more literary than spiritual.

The first piece of evidence that the bible is neither Logos nor history is the lack of internal consistency in its narratives. In Understanding the Bible, Steven Harris points out many of them. Rather than being the work of a single author, like the Quran, the bible is, according to Harris, “the product of a long process of composition, revision, and repeated editing by different writers and redactors,” which account for the multiple “duplications, contradictions, and other discrepancies” that litter the text (Harris 62). Similarly, in the introduction to the New Oxford Annotated Bible, editor Michael Coogan notes that “modern scholarship has persuasively argued that each [book of the Pentateuch] is composite, consisting of many sources from different periods of Israel’s history” (3). Take the first story of the creation of the world. First, God creates the world and then creates human beings in His image: “In the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Gen. 1.27). But a few lines later he creates woman from Adam’s rib: “And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man” (Gen. 2.22), suggesting that only man was created in God’s image. Coogan, in his annotation of this section, calls this shift unfortunate: “The man’s rule over the woman… is a tragic reflection of the disintegration of original connectedness between them” (15). Why would an infallible divine author create two discreet origin stories that fail to cohere? As Harris contends, the “documentary hypothesis” of biblical authorship—largely undisputed among scholars—assumes that the old testament has at least four authors, each with a slightly different goal that correlates with the political and spiritual issues that were contemporary to the writing (67).

This multiple-author hypothesis is borne out by the bible’s syntactical and grammatical style shifts that clearly divide the prose into distinct categories. As Harris points out, most scholars assume that the Old Testament is a mash-up of four authors’ words and he credits the varying styles in grammar and syntax as evidence to support this theory: J, or the “Yahwist” author (because that is what he calls God, God's actual name), is likely the oldest and in it God is anthropomorphic, quasi-human, interacting freely with His creations (67-9); E, or the “Elohist” source (“Elohim” is what he calls God—the plural for the generic term for "god"), creates a more standoffish deity, who nevertheless finds ways to communicate, directly and indirectly, with humans, though he doesn’t walk-and-talk with them (69-70); D is the Deuteronomist source, and is concerned with an inculcation of Jewish law (70); and P, or the “Priestly” source is the most recent of the biblical authors, and retroactively sanctifies the tradition and authority of priests, while simultaneously solidifying the structure and purpose of the Pentateuch after the Babylonian exile (70-71). Indeed, “When sources are separated,” says Harris, “they not only reveal internal consistencies in style and vocabulary… each of the Torah’s different literary strands consistently exhibits grammatical and other traits characteristic of a particular stage of Hebrew language development” (67). The earlier sources likely come from the oral tradition, and bear more relationship to creation myths of older cultures than do the more recent redactions, which are far more concerned with establishing laws and practices, justifying the rule of specific bloodlines, and post facto justifications of wars, murders, and—in some cases—genocides.

The duality and placement of the stories, moreover, suggest that what these authors meant to communicate is something other than factual. One early anachronism in Genesis contends that Cain, after killing his brother (and reducing the number of human beings on earth—if one parses out the etiology—to three), the Lord “put a mark on Cain so that none who came upon him would kill him” (Gen. 4.16). It’s just possible to imagine that this mark protects Cain from his own parents until section 17: “Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch; and he built a city” (Gen 4.17). Unless his wife is also his mother, we see here that the story of Cain and Abel belongs in another part of the bible, after the world has been populated. But it is more likely that the bible’s redactors gave the story pride of place because it has a special resonance or importance. As in Medieval artwork, where the more important figures are larger than the lesser figures, the bible is arranged more symbolically than realistically. It’s a text that creates a literary hierarchy among the players and events that emphasize their relative importance in the ordering of events. Straight chronology can’t do this. The placement of the Cain and Abel story by one of the biblical authors, in other words, has a significance that makes the anachronism worth it.  Presumably, something can be read into God’s unexplained preference for Abel’s sacrifice of animal flesh over Cain’s in other senses equal sacrifice of harvested grain. Perhaps, as some scholars suggest, the text is showing God’s preference for a nomadic people over a settled people. In Traditions of the Bible, Talmudic scholar James Kugel suggests that this could correlate to when this story was composed: God approves of the nomadic sacrifice, right when the Israelites were expelled from the land of Canaan, and forced into nomadic exile (54). One cannot argue that this is a factual telling: But that does not mean it is barren of some form of Truth.

God, too, changes as much as the styles change. In fact, even He doesn’t seem sure what he is or what he wants from biblical book to biblical book. In God: A Biography, Jack Miles treats the Abrahamic creator as a fictional character, and goes so far as to suggest that “much that the bible says about [God] is rarely preached from the pulpit, because, examined too closely, it becomes a scandal” (6). God makes mankind in his own image, but then expects mankind to behave according to His laws, even before the laws are written or expressed. That becomes difficult for creations who are only privy to God’s character as man’s creator. God provides no account of his own adventures that don’t relate directly to man, and God seems preoccupied only with the doings of mankind. Such is the lot of the solitary Creator: for a pantheon of other gods might provide some company, sure, but also some context: what is this deity like? If the purpose of the bible is to instruct human beings on how to build themselves in God’s image, created and creator both seem to learn by trial and error what God’s image actually looks like. In Miles’ words:

That quest [of man becoming God-like], arising from the protagonist’s sole stated motive, drives the only real plot that the Bible can be said to have. But that plot, God’s attempt to shape mankind in his image, would be far more comprehensible if God had a richer subjective life, one more clearly separate from, more clearly prior to, the human object of his shaping (87).

Despite this, Miles says, or maybe because of this, the West trusts a flawed, inconsistent character more than a complete, comprehensible one. Whether God created us in His image, or we created Him in ours, the relationship is fraught, but not without love, understanding, and the ability to learn and grow on both sides, somewhat like a new parent with his (His?) children.

Along with inconsistency in the story, grammar, and character, the bible’s lessons feel more concerned with creating an ongoing sense of cultural cohesion and united purpose than casting God and humanity as stable and unchanging. That goal is more in line with today’s philosophical valence than the stable eschatology and worldview espoused by Medieval and Renaissance theologians. We’ve seen, in the 20th century, a movement from the search for capital-T “Truth,” in the Platonic sense, to the ascendancy of the “micronarrative,” which, Deconstructionists like Jean-Francois Lyotard contend, can, in aggregate, get us closer to Truth than a single history-by-consensus. After all, he says in The Postmodern Condition, a unified history almost always serves the powerful, not the truth, and “facts” and “stats” are the worst offenders (Lyotard 504). If we want truth, the deconstructionists say, we need contradictions, paradoxical as that might sound. What is the bible, if not a series of loosely connected micronarratives, rife with comforting contradiction?

In an environment that rich in fiction, that is where we might find some Truth.

Works Cited

Harris, Steven L. Understanding the Bible, 8th Edition. New York: The McGraw Hill Publishing Group, Inc., 2011.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. “The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.” Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology. Ed. Lawrence Cahoone. Blackwell Publishers Inc., 1996. 481-513.

Kugel, James L. Traditions of the Bible: A Guide to the Bible as It Was at the Start of the Common Era. Cambridge, MA:  Harvard UP, 1998. Pp. 54-7.

Miles, Jack. God: I Biography. Kindle Ed. New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1996.

The New Oxford Annotated Bible. Edited by Michael T. Coogan et al. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. London: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1929.