Don't Shit Your Pants: A Survival Horror Game

But the crown will not stop you from shitting your pants.

Today in class, we were told to go find a stranger and ask for a quest.

After receiving some very negative responses, I finally found someone who was receptive to my request for a quest. This person, who was clearly uncomfortable, told me and my teammate in a terrified stammer to go to the library. On the way to the library, I asked another stranger for a quest. They asked for a fish to be delivered to room 455 within the next two days. When I did a followup on this quest, they said that sometimes you can find fish in grocery stores. Fortunately, there were some gummy sharks in the library's store. Sharks are technically fish. I completed these quests and returned to class…



In class, it was said that people don't know how to voice what they want. In games, quests come to you. Characters will walk up to you, a complete stranger, and ask you to perform a task. When you enter a game, you have objectives and generally there are multiple ways to reach this objective. This was defined as in-game control. As we discussed this idea of in-game control (the game gives you objectives), we then got into the idea of out-game control. The example given was an instance when one pauses the game to go to the bathroom (or doesn't follow the quest laid out by the game).

That was when I remembered a game called Don't Shit Your Pants. (Rete, 2010)

If we are human, the one thing we all have in common is that we have, at some point in our lifetime, shit ourselves. We are taught that this is socially humiliating, which can be termed as social control. But then there is personal control, where we decide for ourselves to not shit our pants.

I would go further to argue that what we are physically and how we function physically is permanently set. It was said in class, "To be part of the game is to be."

In DSYP, you play the role of a man who is about to shit his pants. This game allows you to enter textual commands to the avatar. It's strange to see a game that makes a mundane daily function into a riddle that is broken down to every meticulous step. There is more than one way to not shit your pants. How will you not shit your pants?

Please understand that while I joke, I'm also serious. What does it mean to be human in the game? Where is the human aspect within the game? Can human be human in the game?