I wonder if gaslighting can be only in the eye of the beholder (the player in this case):
let’s suppose a player misses a pair or even more of subtle (or not-so subtle) clues, then later s/he/y reach the change hinted by the missed hints, the player can (mis)take the change for a narrative gaslighting. but there was no gaslighting, simply the player misses the earlier clues/hints in advance…
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
I think something missing in this consideration is the belligerence or dismissiveness.
> x chair
There’s no chair here.
> x chair
I just said there’s no chair here.
> x chair
There’s no chair here. Can you read?
> x chair
Wow, you’re really fixated on finding this missing chair aren’t you. The most basic, boring object possible and you’re obsessed with it.
Obvious example, but you get me.
The point is to undermine the person’s judgement and decision making. If you come away thinking “jeez ok, won’t look for this so-called-chair anymore, I guess” then that’s the start of being gaslighted.
I will also point out that some games (Doki Doki Literature Club) do corrupt save files and make it impossible to reference previous saves or transcripts.
This is key. There is no accidental gaslighting: by definition, it must be deliberate and with intent to deceive. If the players fall victims to their own intelligence and reach the wrong conclusions, it all depends whether they were deliberately set up for it or not.
Doki Doki is a particularly extreme example: it plays the trope as a subversion of customary genre conventions (or the apparent genre: it is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, after all - poses as a dating sim but is actually a metafictional surreal horror trip), and implements it in all sorts of different ways. It even uses “bugs” as an excuse to justify the corrupted saves / transcripts, lies to the player when it pretends that the game code has trapped an exception, quietly messes with the game’s folder content, and makes story choices on behalf of the player by sneakily moving the mouse.
A subtler example is another visual novel, You and Me and Her, where the gaslighting involves one of the characters knowing about the game script: some story choices are forced on the player because that character is breaking the fourth wall and trying to deceive the player into a specific story line under false pretenses.
I’m sorry, I was more or less off on a tangent of “could a parser game get a player to legitimately doubt what they remembered about the game without just looking broken”, and I probably shouldn’t have said anything since the thread is about gaslighting and as I said, I don’t actually think a game can gaslight the player.
Correct.
I think I was the one who suggested the unreliable narrator technique was sort of akin to the author gaslighting the player prospectively, but the discussion has convinced me they are nothing alike, mainly due to intention. A gaslighter is intentionally deceiving harmfully, where an author is just hiding plot points usually to set up a revelation later - it’s the difference between misdirection ('lying") in a magic trick for entertainment versus misdirection and lying as a psychological abuse technique.
I think if we frame it as “can a game enact longterm psychological abuse on a player to make them doubt their perceptions in their actual life”, then alright, it can’t.
Perhaps framing it in a local sense would be more helpful. can a game seed localized doubt, hesitation, paranoia, and self-blame in a player, affecting the way they experience the “reality” of, and interact with, the game? I think yes.