Ironically, the more the characters in Rapture become more realised, the more the player’s spectral qualities manifest. These ‘connections’ are afforded by the relative ease in which we access the homes and private spaces of the people in Rapture, allowing us to not only reconstruct what happened here but to haunt the old haunts of these characters and establish a sense of a presence before the absence.
Pleasure lies not in the relative ease by which we happen upon these moments of narrative but in the ‘poetics of absence’ generated by what is left undiscovered, necessitating ‘an intimate way in following the connections’ between the remains (Pearson and Shanks, 2001, p. In Rapture, the pulsing, barely decipherable light projections of the occupants of Yaughton, are echoes of an ‘already absent present’ (Spivak in McCrea, 2014, p. In his chapter ‘Gaming’s Hauntology’ (2014), Christian McCrea argues that the dead in video games are ‘doubly-haunted’ due to being ‘resolutely about what they are not, or are no longer’ (p. The often minimal interactivity required from a player and the absence of a clear win-state has meant that such titles sit quite awkwardly within video games, leading to alternative and additional forms of categorisation which borrow from other mediums (such as ‘story-led games’ and ‘art games’). Rapture is one of many games, derogatorily dubbed ‘walking simulators’, which often utilises a vacant landscape for players to assemble the fragments of its narrative for themselves (Dear Esther, 2012 The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, 2014 Ether One, 2014 Gone Home, 2016 What Remains of Edith Finch, 2017).
As its title implies, everyone has vanished and it is up to the player to piece together the events that led to this mass disappearance of the village’s occupants. In Chinese Room’s Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture (2015), the player walks through the sleepy fictional village of Yaughton in Shropshire. As the player attempts to give presence to past events, they invariably emphasise their own inescapable spectral role. I’m the only one left.' In this paper, I argue that the often lack of interactivity and slower pace found within walking simulators is what accelerates the ‘doubly-haunted’ quality of the dead in video games (McCrea, 2014, p. I don’t know if anyone will ever hear this.
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