Another thing Batman: Arkham Asylum made me think of are video games that draw attention to the fact that they are video games. Some of these instances are unavoidable, like when tutorial messages pop up to tell you to press a particular button. Or some of these instances are just the result of long-established video game norms (some of which may be considered the result of lazy game design these days), like when you bust open a crate and a full roasted chicken pops out to regenerate your health. (In no other medium but video games would that kind of thing happen.) But what I'm thinking of specifically are those instances that are more playful and explicitly thought out, like Sonic tapping his foot impatiently if don't press any buttons for a while, or WarCraft/StarCraft characters saying funny things when you keep clicking on them. (My favourite is still the orc that says, "My tummy feels funny.") Then there are full games like Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard that are all about sending up video games in a self-referential way.

Then there is a small subset of games, like Batman: Arkham Asylum, that use this phenomenon in a very clever and devious way: *MAJOR SPOILER* For example, in Batman, there is a moment when the game appears to crash, then reset, then start again from the game's opening animation. This is very jarring the first time it happens, if you aren't prepared for it. For a minute, you think your system really has crashed and you start to worry about corrupted data, or worse, a busted system. It's only once you start paying attention to the opening animation that you notice that something's amiss. Details are different. The scene jumps more than you remember. The moon doesn't look quite right. The road sign is wrong. Then, if you haven't figured it out yet, you see the Joker driving the Batmobile instead of Batman and you finally make the connection. Oh! It's another Scarecrow nightmare! You've been primed for this already with two previous nightmare sequences, but while the first two only affect Batman, this third one affects you, the gamer, too, by bringing a gamer's nightmare seemingly to life, making you feel at least a small amount of the fear Batman feels. This moment of a game acknowledging its own gameness is absolute genius.

Apparently, there are a few other games that have done similar things. The first Metal Gear Solid's boss battle against Psycho Mantis is apparently pretty disconcerting when Psycho Mantis starts interfering with your controller and reading the contents of your memory card. And the GameCube's Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem apparently does things like turns down the volume, makes it appear as though the TV channel has been changed, or momentarily throws up the Windows Blue Screen of Death when the character's sanity meter drops too low. I love when metafictional stuff like this happens in video games. And it's just another detail that made me love playing Batman: Arkham Asylum. The use of this device remains clever and devious because it has yet to be overexploited. I hope that it continues to pop up in games, but just infrequently enough that it remains a well-appreciated surprise when it does.