Metroid Prime 4 Beyond

For a fraction of a second, when the Charge Beam releases or an explosion goes off close enough, the glass in front of Samus Aran's eyes catches the light and shows her face. It is faint, a reflection thrown back off the inside of the helmet, gone before the player has finished registering it. The rest of the time she is not visible at all. What the player sees is what she sees: a corridor on a dead planet, rain beading and running on the visor, a heads-up display drawing its brackets and readouts around the edge of vision, the barrel of the arm cannon jutting into the lower frame. Metroid Prime, in 2002, made a decision the three games after it never walked back, and that Metroid Prime 4: Beyond inherits as the one non-negotiable fact of its identity: the world is not seen directly. It is seen through an instrument, and the instrument is part of the seeing.

The industry vocabulary would call the brackets and readouts a HUD, a heads-up display, an interface layer laid over the game so the player can track health and ammunition and the map. The description is accurate and it misses everything. In most first-person games the interface is a transparent overlay, information floating in a nowhere-space between the player and the world, belonging to neither. In Prime the interface belongs to someone. It is the display surface of Samus's helmet, curved with the curve of the glass, occasionally fogged by her breath, streaked by rain, lit from inside at the moment of a blast. The interface is diegetic, in the vocabulary the critic Alexander Galloway carried from film theory into the study of games, meaning it belongs to the world Samus inhabits rather than hovering in a layer above it. But diegetic undersells what is happening. The visor is not decorated to look like part of the fiction. The visor is the fiction's central argument about what it is to perceive.

The argument runs like this. The world is never seen raw. It is seen through an instrument, and the instrument is not a window one looks past but an organ one sees with. The frame this essay wants to give the reader is that the visor is the clearest illustration the medium has produced of a claim phenomenology spent the twentieth century developing: our tools do not sit between us and the world so much as become the means by which we have a world at all. Prime does not state this claim. Prime renders it, in glass and rain and sound, at sixty frames a second, and hands over the controller so the claim arrives as experience before it arrives as idea.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the French phenomenologist whose 1945 Phenomenology of Perception remains the founding text on how the body inhabits the world, gave the analysis its first image. He was interested in the blind man's cane. For a blind man who has used a cane long enough, Merleau-Ponty observed, the cane has stopped being an object he perceives and has become an instrument with which he perceives. The tip of the cane is a zone of sensitivity; the pavement, the curb, the wall arrive at the hand through the wood as pressure and texture and edge. The cane has been taken up into what Merleau-Ponty called the body schema, the body's pre-reflective sense of its own extent and reach. The schema is not fixed at the skin. It expands to include the tool. The perceiving body is larger than the biological one, and its boundary is drawn wherever the instrument reaches.

Samus's visor is the cane moved from the hand to the eye. The player, operating her, never perceives the surface of Tallon IV or any of the worlds the series has staged around it as raw sensation. The world arrives through the glass, and the glass is taken up into the perceiving body so completely that within minutes the player stops seeing it. The brackets that track a target, the radar in the corner, the way the thermal visor repaints a dark room in heat, are not read the way a page is read. They are seen with, the way the blind man feels the curb with the cane. This is the ordinary miracle of the interface, the thing every competent HUD accomplishes and then hides. Prime's achievement is to have built the interface so that the miracle stays perceptible.

Don Ihde, the American philosopher who founded the school of thought called postphenomenology, gave the analysis its precision. In Technology and the Lifeworld, published in 1990, Ihde sorted the ways a human being can relate to an instrument, and two of his categories sit at the center of what the visor does. The first he called the embodiment relation. Here the instrument withdraws from attention and one perceives through it: eyeglasses are the standard case, a technology one does not look at but looks with, so transparent in use that the wearer forgets they have it on. The second he called the hermeneutic relation. Here the instrument does not withdraw; it presents a readout to be interpreted. A thermometer, a dial, a cockpit gauge are the standard cases. The instrument is looked at, read, and the reading refers back to a world not being directly perceived. Embodiment relations are seen through. Hermeneutic relations are read.

The visor is fascinating because it is both at once, and it holds the two together in a single curved surface. Through the combat visor Samus sees the corridor: embodiment, the glass gone transparent, the world arriving through it. Around the edges the same glass presents readouts she interprets: hermeneutic, the health bar and the ammunition count and the enemy-lock bracket, information she reads rather than inhabits. Raise the scan visor and the balance tips: the world dims to a soft monochrome and fills with data points, and Samus stops seeing the room and starts reading it, pulling lore and structural weaknesses and creature taxonomies off the surfaces as text. The thermal and X-ray visors are the embodiment pole retuned, the same seeing-through performed in a different sensory register. Ihde described these relations as distinct positions on a spectrum. Prime built a helmet that slides along the whole spectrum and lets the player feel the slide.

It is worth staying with the scan visor, because it is the moment Prime turns perception into reading most openly, and reading is what the word hermeneutic originally meant. Hold the scanner on a piece of machinery, a mural, a corpse, a living creature, and the helmet returns a block of text: what this is, how it works, what killed it, what it fears. The world stops being only a place to move through and becomes a surface to be interpreted, a document. Much of what any player comes to know about the Prime universe is acquired in this posture, standing still, reading the world through the glass the way a scholar reads a manuscript through a lens. The series built its whole method of storytelling on the hermeneutic relation, on the pleasure of a world that will explain itself if the instrument is pointed at it correctly. That the same helmet, a trigger-pull earlier, had been a transparent window for combat is the point. One surface, two relations to the world, switched between so fluidly that the player never files them as separate things.

There is a further move, and it is the one that turns a clever interface into a philosophical instrument. Ihde noted that the embodiment relation aims at transparency: the perfect pair of glasses is the pair never noticed, the instrument that disappears entirely into the seeing. Prime refuses the disappearance on purpose. It keeps putting the glass back in front of the player. Rain beads on it and runs. Steam from a vent fogs it and clears. Come too close to an explosion and the whole surface flares white and, for that fraction of a second, throws back the reflection of the face behind it. The game spends real artistic effort making the transparent instrument periodically opaque, and every time it does, the player is returned to the thing they had forgotten: there is a surface here, there has always been a surface, it has been there the entire time. The visor becomes visible precisely at the moments the world is most intense, which is exactly when, in ordinary life, we are least able to notice the instruments we perceive with.

The lens the series works in is image and sound together, and the sound is instrumented as thoroughly as the image. The world of Prime does not arrive at the ear raw any more than it arrives at the eye raw. It comes filtered through the suit: a low continuous hum under everything, the sense of a sealed helmet between the ear and the air, footfalls and creature cries and dripping water carried with the slightly enclosed quality of sound heard inside a shell. The scan visor has its own audio signature, a shift in the ambient tone that tells the ear the mode of perception has changed before the eye has finished registering it. The score, in Kenji Yamamoto's hands across the series, does not sit outside this; it bleeds into the diegetic hum until the player cannot always say where the suit ends and the music begins. The whole sensorium is mediated, not the sight alone. Samus does not hear Tallon IV. She hears Tallon IV through the suit, the way she sees it through the glass, and the two mediations are the same argument made to two senses.

Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian media theorist whose 1964 Understanding Media carried the subtitle The Extensions of Man, generalized the point past any single instrument. Media, in McLuhan's account, are extensions of the human senses and faculties: the wheel extends the foot, writing extends the eye, electric media extend the nervous system outward until it wraps the planet. Every extension amplifies a sense, and McLuhan insisted that every amplification is also a numbing, a self-amputation; the extended sense is enhanced and, in the same motion, partly surrendered to the instrument that now carries it. The visor is a compact model of the whole thesis. It extends Samus's sight into registers no eye can reach, thermal and X-ray and the data-dense scan, and in extending it makes her dependent on it, so that the suit is not equipment she carries but the sensory body through which she has Tallon IV at all. Take the visor away and she does not see the world more directly. She does not see the world.

Once the visor is understood as a theory of perception rather than a menu, the frame travels to every game shot from behind a protagonist's eyes, and it travels fast. The heads-up display of any first-person game is a claim, usually an unexamined one, about how that protagonist has a world. The bare floating crosshair of a military shooter, information hanging in a clean nowhere with no helmet to belong to, describes a protagonist close to a pure disembodied eye, a targeting function with a gun, a perceiver with no perceiving body worth rendering. The diegetic helmet displays a handful of games commit to, the spinal health bar stitched down the back of Dead Space's engineer, the readouts inside the armored visors the medium has built in Prime's wake, describe protagonists who have bodies and suits and a mediated relation to the danger around them. The role-playing game that buries the screen edge in numbers and bars and floating damage describes a protagonist who meets the world first of all as quantity, as a field of readable values. None of these interfaces is neutral. Each is a small theory of what it is like to be the one who sees.

Brendan Keogh, the Australian scholar whose 2018 A Play of Bodies reads video games through exactly this phenomenological tradition, argued that a game is never perceived by a single body but through a layering of them: the player's flesh, the controller in the hands, the avatar on the screen, stacked into one hybrid perceiving thing. The HUD is where that stack becomes visible. It is the seam where the player's perception and the avatar's perception are stitched into a single act of seeing, the layer that belongs to both of them and to neither. Prime's genius is to have made the seam beautiful and to have made it diegetic, so that the place where the player's eye meets Samus's eye is not an ugly overlay to be tolerated but the exact surface the whole game is about. The rain runs down the seam. The reflection of her face appears on it.

The frame reaches past games as well, which is the reason it is worth having. The claim phenomenology was making, and the claim the visor renders, is not about Samus. It is about the reader. The eyes moving across this sentence are very likely doing it through corrective lenses, an instrument so embodied it has vanished from notice. The world arrives to most people now through a stack of glass and screens deep enough that raw, unmediated perception, the thing the word real seems to promise, is close to a fiction. Nearly everyone already lives behind a visor, and enjoys Ihde's transparency, the good fortune of not noticing the instrument, until a raindrop or a smudge or a cracked screen throws it back into view for a second and confirms it was there all along. Prime is a machine for producing that second on purpose. It takes the ordinary, forgotten fact of mediated perception and stages it, in glass and rain and sound and the reflected face, until the player cannot un-see the instrument they see with.

Which returns to the flash of light on the inside of the helmet. Metroid Prime 4: Beyond arrives more than two decades after the first game drew its first bracket around a Space Pirate, and whatever else Retro Studios has changed, the visor is the inheritance it could not set down, because the visor is what a Prime game is. For most of the runtime the glass is transparent and forgotten, and the player, correctly, sees only the world. Then a charge releases or something detonates too near, the surface flares, and there is the face for a fraction of a second: Samus Aran, inside the instrument, looking out through the same surface the player has been looking through the entire time. The light does not show a character. It shows the visor. It shows, for as long as the flash lasts, the thing that had been doing the seeing, and then it fades, and the world comes back, and the play goes on through a surface already forgotten to be there.