On the beach, amidst the bright light and relentless waves, Spencer Yan first experienced something akin to “divine dread”: he was seized by cold, loneliness, and a sense of insignificance before an immense, almost faceless presence. This flash of fear became the starting point for an inner search that led Yan to philosophy, religion, and then—to the creation of unusual video games. How can inner turmoil and crises of faith become a source of fresh themes in contemporary culture? Why does Yan’s path deserve special attention among developers?
How Religious Doubts Gave Rise to Ideas for Games
Spencer Yan was born in the US to a family of Chinese immigrants, where a skeptical attitude toward religion was more the rule than the exception. Yan’s father strictly controlled his life: he monitored what his son read and watched, and even installed surveillance software on the home computer. Thus, from childhood, Yan became acquainted with the feeling of being constantly watched—this theme later turned into an artistic motif.
In adolescence, Yan began to rebel—he got into conflicts, experimented with drugs, and by his own admission, lived “in the spirit of reckless youthful defiance.” Yan wrote about himself: “I wasn’t sure whether I believed in God, or in the idea of God.” His attitude towards Christianity combined an attraction to paradoxes and a constant inner resistance.
Family, Culture, and Surveillance as a Persistent Theme
Family distrust of religion and the experience of being a migrant shaped Yan’s unique perspective. In China, religion is often regarded as something suspicious or meaningless. Finding himself in a different environment, Yan faced the fact that his internal rift between cultures intensified his loneliness and search for self.
Control within the family left a deep mark. Later, Yan noted that the motif of “surveillance” and personal helplessness became central in his games. Living between two cultures, truly belonging to neither, turned into a constant search for one’s own identity beyond any institutions.
The Attempt to Become a “True Believer” and the Tragedy of Disappointment
Yan’s interest in Christianity grew into an almost academic passion. He studied the original languages (Latin, Greek, Hebrew), attended seminars in New York, and prepared to enter divinity school. However, when confronted with literalists—people who interpret the Bible literally—Yan felt repelled.
He said: “I was put off by this mediocrity and banality.” Yan distinguished for himself: Scholarly faith and institutional religion. The crisis of faith was linked not only to disappointment in the church but also to the inability to understand other believers. Personal alienation grew. Is it possible to find faith outside the collective and ritual?
Video Games as a Way to Survive Outside Institutions
Having lost interest in a church career, Yan turned to creativity. The field he chose was video games, not the increasingly popular virtual gambling entertainment. And this was despite the lower entry threshold and the fact that the industry is constantly growing and offering new types of entertainment. If you go to this site and find up-to-date information about the popularity of Plinko apps, you can see that there are many of them. Some arcade apps have already surpassed mobile games in popularity. However, religion takes a negative view of such entertainment. Therefore, Yan was no exception and became interested in regular video games.
The first step was modifications for Hotline Miami 2: the Midnight Animal project quickly became a hit among fans, but a conflict over copyright and script decisions led to a scandal (see Nic Reuben’s interview for Eurogamer).
From the ruins of one project, others were born:
- Document Of Midnight Animal — an attempt to respond to criticism and find a new artistic language
- The Exegesis Of St John The Martyr — a visual novel combining narrative and commentary from several authors, including Yan himself
The philosophical essence of Exegesis is that the martyr (from the Greek “witness”) becomes not only a figure of suffering but also a mediator of memory, embodying the tension between the sense of oblivion and the search for meaning.
The reaction of the gaming community was divided: some players appreciated the depth, others found Yan’s approach too complex.
How Philosophy Changes Mechanics: The Example of My Work Is Not Yet Done
The game My Work Is Not Yet Done is the quintessence of Yan’s personal and philosophical quests. Inspired by Dante, he places the heroine in a “forest of doubt”: Avery is part of an expedition, left alone in a mysterious world. The main themes of the game:
- Tristitia (from Latin tristitia) — deep physical and mental exhaustion, when even monks could not work due to inner emptiness
- Acedia — spiritual apathy, fatigue from searching and an overabundance of meanings
Gameplay features create an unusual experience:
- Complete procedural generation of the world
- Absence of familiar health and emotion indicators
- The player does not control the heroine directly, but suggests directions for actions
The game combines the traditions of Darkwood, Dwarf Fortress, and also echoes the aesthetics of Stalker and Solaris: the player must survive, relying only on intuition and indirect signs.
Alienation Between Player and Protagonist — Who Really Controls?
In My Work Is Not Yet Done, the player cannot fully subordinate Avery. She is able to reject instructions, demonstrates her own knowledge of the surrounding world, and the save system is a process in which the player blindly “observes” as the character records her own impressions.
Yan notes: “I have always been interested in the gap between the actions of the player and the protagonist.” This alienation operates on several levels:
- The player becomes just one of the witnesses, not an “all-powerful God”
- The character may sense the presence of something observing, without knowing who or what it is
Can one be a “God” to their digital protagonist if the latter is capable of resistance and knows more than we do? In this, Yan’s mechanics resemble the religious experience: the search for answers in conditions of constant uncertainty.
Fear, the Sublime, and the Attempt to Restore Genuine Mystery
In his works, Yan turns to the concept of the “literary sublime,” described by Wordsworth as the sensation of encountering something vast and incomprehensible. Through stylistic references to Ligotti, Stalker, Solaris, and Annihilation, his games immerse players in an atmosphere of fear before the unknown.
Yan himself asserts: modern fear has become an attempt to replace the sacred with the language of mass culture. Video games increasingly use motifs of cosmic horror to fill the void left after the rejection of religion: “At any moment, we may be accompanied by something, not necessarily hostile, but completely inexplicable.”
The theme of the unknowable and the dread before a presence is found in other media as well, but Yan’s projects stand out in their attempt to restore an ancient depth to this sensation.
Open Horizons
The story of Spencer Yan shows: personal crisis, cultural influence, and philosophical ideas can become a source of extraordinary creativity in new media. Is it possible to convey the full spectrum of the depth of religious experience and dread before the unknown through a game? Will virtual fear remain as effective as the one that once seized Yan on a deserted beach? In the digital age, questions of loneliness, faith, and meaning take on new forms—and perhaps it is games that will allow us to feel them most acutely.