Déjà Vita: Have we seen it all before?

Sony’s PlayStation Vita is the Hughes H-4 Hercules of all handhelds; the Airbus A380 to Nintendo’s Cessna and Apple’s Learjet. Taking a leaf right out of the ‘whack everything in just because we can’ school of thought, the Vita’s hardware credentials are best explained by listing what it doesn’t have, rather than what it does. And the answer to that flip-reversed question, it would seem, is “nothing at all,” – there aren’t any in-vogue hardware trinkets that the PS Vita isn’t packing, and it even manages to add one or two of its own original ideas such as the oh-so-sexy and wickedly sensual rear touch-panel. Gadget heads rejoice! This is the hot-rod of handhelds you’ve been lusting after ever since Atari had the Lynx put down in 1994.

So why, then, does it all feel so familiar? Why do launch titles such as WipEout 2048 and Everybody’s Golf feel almost identical to their PSP equivalents of 2005? Excluding the obvious generational leap in visuals, you may as well be playing the same two games in each case. Despite the bountiful array of new control methods, from a capacitive touch-screen to Sixaxis motion sensing, why does the Vita still feel uncannily like playing a PSP with its graphics chip gone nuclear? Perhaps the most practical improvement comes from a second analogue ‘nipple’, the lack of which had become a bugbear of core PSP gamers over the last seven years. At least now they can play their Call of Duties and Killzones without the sensation that they’re in a formative id shooter.

But as someone who proudly purchased a PSP on its European launch day, as well as copies of WipEout Pure and Everybody’s Golf alongside it, I felt a vague sense of déjà vu when I first sat down with the PS Vita. And it was more than just the regular disappointment of a next-gen console that fails to live up to the hype, with promises of mind blowing graphics and new ways of gaming going oh-so-predictably unfulfilled. This time it was a genuine sense of confusion and bewilderment that I seemed to be back in precisely the same situation; a situation I’d first encountered on September 1, 2005. Even beyond the familiar games and console design, yet again Sony had produced a handheld that conversely lent itself to extended, sit-down gaming sessions and barely managed to fit in your pocket anyway. Once again, Sony was outdoing its competitors by serving up visuals that were two-thirds of the way towards what it currently offered on its home platform, but failing to best the rest of the market in terms of accessibility and instantaneousness.

Unable to locate a similar example of such disappointment in memory of console launches, I did what I always do in these moments of anomie and existential abandon – I turned to science. Why exactly was I experiencing this sense of déjà vu? Perhaps it would be worth checking that it was definitely the new handheld console, rather than me, that was bonkers. My initial research revealed that the term déjà vu was coined by French researcher Emile Boirac in 1876, and literally translates to “already seen” in English. So far, so obvious. Depending on the survey, statistics have shown that 30 to 90 per cent of the population has experienced déjà vu at one time or another, although the most reliable research posits a figure of around 70 per cent. Ask around your friends and you’ll be sure to find that the phenomena is pretty ubiquitous, particularly in people under 30.

The scientific theories and explanations can be just as wide ranging as the statistics, however. At the most extreme end of the scale, there’s been quantum physicists who have theorised that tachyons (theoretical sub-atomic particles that travel faster than the speed of light, and therefore back in time) are sending us packets of information from the future that our brains are capable of picking up on, resulting in that eerie feeling of prescience that’s common with déjà vu. Building on this, recent experiments at CERN have revealed evidence of neutrinos travelling at faster-than-light speeds, prompting suggestions that these neutrinos could also explain the theoretical tachyons. Nevertheless, the consensus among quantum physicists is that using such theories to explain déjà vu is fanciful at best, as Dr. Michio Kaku (the founder of String Field Theory) diplomatically explains in this video regarding similar suggestions of déjà vu and multi-verses:

In any case, these theories are about messages that may be coming from the future or, indeed, a parallel universe. I’m fairly certain that my particular experience was originally rooted in this universe roughly six-and-a-half years ago. And so onto psychology, where things start to become a little clearer and, paradoxically, more complicated. It turns out there are actually different kinds of déjà vu according to Swiss researcher, Arthur Funkhouser (in a weird turn of events, this guy has three separate profiles on Linkedin, which is even weirder given what I’m about to explain). Funkhouser stipulates that there are three different strands of déjà vu: déjà vécu (“already experienced”), déjà senti (“already thought”), and déjà visité (“already visited”). Respectively, this means perceiving the present as something that’s happened to you before under exactly the same circumstances, experiencing it as something you may have dreamt about or considered previously, or finally as somewhere you feel like you’ve visited in the past.

One fascinating piece of research by Anne Cleary, Anthony Ryals, and Jason Nomi focused on the latter of those three types of déjà vu. Subjects were shown various scenes before being asked whether they’d seen them before, and then shown a bunch of different locations later on – layouts and configurations of the new locations were purposefully made similar, but specific objects were different across-the-board. As you might have guessed, the subjects reported a strong sense of having seen the new locations before. This goes a long way to explaining why you might experience déjà vu while visiting a country that you’ve never been to before, for example. It also reveals a lot of tricks from the world of popular culture, such as the ever-popular homage.

Take this shot from the king of all reference dropping games, Super Meat Boy. The image is taken from a Warp Zone in SMB’s ‘The Rapture’ world, and it rekindles dream-like memories from deep within my 80s/early 90s childhood. I can’t for the life of me remember the game it’s paying homage to though. The composition of image, characters, and backdrop is definitely a reference to something I’ve seen before in a game, but I’ve scoured ‘Teh Internets’ from YouTube to Gamefaqs and still nothing (answers on a postcard please).

As nice of a tangent as that is, however, it still doesn’t do much for my particular predicament with the Vita. Déjà vécu seems a little too far-fetched for my problem – after all, I can nail down precisely when and where the familiarity comes from, which pretty much unravels any sense of mystery or delusions of prescience. The real ambiguity with the Vita comes from the fact that playing it really shouldn’t feel so familiar. After all, this is a new handheld games console that I’ve just spent over £200 on – it should be opening my eyes to wondrous new experiences with cutting edge technology and innovative design, not transporting me back to thoughts and experiences I had in 2005. So perhaps that’s it, then: déjà senti – I’ve been in this exact frame of mind at some point in the past, but the context of it doesn’t seem at all right. But wait, there’s more! As Vsauce explains in its illuminating explanation of a few other types of déjà vu:

Yet again we’re introduced to more forms of déjà vu, and yet again there are multiple examples from the history of gaming that they apply to. We’ve all experienced those prolonged, painful moments where you can’t find the route to a level’s next area, solve the relevant puzzle to progress, or unleash a critical trigger-point. You’re left trying every corner of the environment, back-tracking to make sure you haven’t missed anything, and retrying potential solutions to the point of madness. It’s consistent repetition to the extent that a familiar area starts to become unfamiliar, as anyone who’s wrestled with Castle Wolfenstein can relate – perhaps this is gaming’s “jamais vu”.

But there is a vein of games through the years that have used this to their advantage. Pioneered by the likes of Metroid and Zelda on 8-bit consoles, running through to titles such as Batman Arkham Asylum/Arkham City on current-gen consoles, the design of these games actually relies on sending you back through familiar environments. With each subsequent return to a familiar location, however, you’ll notice something slightly different. Perhaps the enemies will be configured differently, or there’s a ledge you can now reach to pick-up previously unobtainable items (for example, utilising Batman’s unlockable Explosive Gel and Detective Mode to reach previously inaccessible rooms).

There’s a section in Naruto: Rise of a Ninja during the Chunin Exam level that makes particularly sublime use of this design style. Suspense is built up in the story as you start the exam, and Naruto is sent into the Forest of Death through a series of spiked, swinging logs that he’s negotiated many times previously. On this occasion, however, the timings of each swinging log have been tweaked slightly so that they now jar with your previous memory of them. On a first playthrough, this really messes with your head. It’s that jamais vu feeling, only you can’t tell whether it’s just your mind playing tricks on you or the game. So much so, in fact, that I stuck to my previous timings and collided with the spikes for a good few minutes before rethinking the situation. Like a fly into a window pane, I sacrificed most of my health before realising that the developers had just been giving me an exceptionally devious variant of the run-around.

Déjà vu and its variants are the mescaline of all gameplay dynamics, then; the peyote to a combo meter’s amphetamines or power-up’s PCP. Taking a leaf right out of ‘The Big Lynchian Book of being an Auteur’, it’s probably easier to describe the sensation of déjà vu in a video game more by what it isn’t like, than by what it is. And that description, it would seem, ends up as “pretty much everything”.

It’s hard to be definitive about why the Vita feels so familiar to me, but in the weeks that follow the handheld’s launch, Sony’s own concerns will be far clearer. Can it marry the difficult bedfellows of casual and core gaming? Can it make that array of touch and motion sensitive technology really gel, affording the core gamer more than just a cursory nod, and ensuring the casual gamer doesn’t run off terrified by this cacophony of controls?

Like Neo’s black cat, here’s hoping my initial concerns turn out to be little more than a glitch in the machine.