Alan Wake II diary #1: slicing the pie
on spatial attention, situational awareness, and the terror of being perceived
official Alan Wake II desktop wallpaper
Yesterday I was still adding to my third Twitter thread of the night—every tweet about Alan Wake II!—when I finally stumbled upon a series of thoughts that isn’t appropriate for an essay, or even for verbally processing out in the anarchic wilderness of a microblogging platform. So I will plant them here, off the main thoroughfare, right in my own little corner of a community garden.
This is my first time using this particular Internet diary, although I set it up a year ago in anticipation of potentially someday wanting to facilitate an Overshare. Editing to add: Okay, now it is too much. I just finished my footnotes, and no, it was not intended as a House of Leaves homage to Alan Wake—it’s just what happened when I decided not to self-edit “as I go.” It also looks like I set out to write about psychedelia, which I very much did not. All mortifying. Peruse at your peril. Back to the original foreword.
Please rest assured, you aren’t in the wrong spot. This is a public diary, not a private one. If you have any thoughts or reactions, feel free to reach out! It won’t be an intrusion. But please know that, given the nature of such a journaling space, this won’t be polished or well organized, and I might mention stuff that feels like “whoa, jeez, lady, who asked?” But it’s Hallowseason, when the veil is very thin and sometimes ghosts do slip through (and since I don’t care about being too put together, I also like to let my metaphors clash).
This post is haunted by: ptsd & fibromyalgia (–), agoraphobia/vestibular dysfunction/spatial attention (–), chronic illness (–), simulated violence (+), religion (~), therapy (+), legal psychedelic usage (++); but is also spoiler-free.
This morning, Ted praised my Alan Wake II skills: “Now you’re just Normal-bad at Alan Wake, like a regular person!” I cheered—“yaaay”—glumly. Then Ted frowned. “There’s still some room for you to improve, though. Your situational awareness is really just…! Okay. It has to do with how you enter a room. Let me teach you how to—”
“STOPP,” I said, laughing. “I am traumatized. I enter rooms like I enter any room I’m scared of! Like a feral cat, trying to sneak all the way across a party to get to the bathroom. Watch, I’ll demonstrate.”
I left the room. Then I slid back into the room, but sideways now. I looked for the nearest corner. It was to my left. Then I slid along the wall until I’d successfully backed into my target corner. “Like I’m picking a seat at a restaurant,” I explained. That was it, the whole process, but Ted’s perfectly blank expression (and sad eyes) were communicating to me that he just wasn’t getting it. Perhaps I needed to slide more slowly?
“Wait, I’m not done,” I said. I searched for the next closest corner, and I slid along the wall to reach it. Then I zipped, fast, to a piece of furniture, and I hugged it with both arms, trying to disappear into it. “See? It’s constantly looking for the next safe haven until, eventually, you’ve zig-zagged all the way across the room. It’s playing tag! Home base. Dredge rewarded this exact style of play, which is probably why I loved it so much. It’s actually how you navigate space for most of Dredge, zipping from harbor to harbor, barely escaping death. Until the endgame, when you’re powerful enough to sail the full ocean at night… mighty enough to finally confront your horrors.” I patted my bicep, trying to illustrate my adequacy.
“I’m the real horror on these seas!” Ted said, in-character as Dredge’s protagonist.
I slapped a tiny invisible man—the protagonist—down with my giant right hand, flat into the palm of my left. “No. You’re not,” I said in my best Strongbad voice, grinding the little man down, one twist per syllable, with the heel of my palm.
That made Ted laugh. “Okay,” he said, suddenly seeming very serious—because I had not managed to trick him into forgetting his current mission—“but it has to do with your situational awareness. I’m going to show you how the Marines navigate spaces, to assess for threat.” (Ugh. Let me interject here that my situational awareness is at the maximum human level; I do, however, struggle with low spatial attention [1].)