What’s So Scary about E.M.M.I.?
Nathan Schmidt, Contributing Editor
Is there really “dread” in Metroid Dread? At first, I wasn’t sure. Metroid Dread is fun, for starters, while real dread is absolutely the worst feeling. There’s something about dread that sets it apart from the more fun, Halloweeney kinds of fear, the Addams Family creepiness, kookiness, mysteriousness, and spookiness. There’s something uniquely off-putting about that cold pit in your guts that has no choice but to acknowledge that something a) will be bad, and b) you have no choice but to face it. I can fear something imaginary, but I dread the inevitable.
I thought it was unlikely that Nintendo really intended to harness these kinds of feelings in one of their flagship titles, but then I encountered an E.M.M.I. for the first time and I thought, “Wow. Well played Nintendo. That actually kind of scared the crap out of me.” The dread, I discovered, was that of my inevitable death. A few times. Even on the first one. There was something really refreshing, in a way, about an enemy that couldn’t be killed—an existential threat of “overwhelming power,” as Samus’s AI buddy ADAM calls it. It felt like a welcome break from Nintendo’s typical brand of cheerfulness. In that first encounter, your only hope is your ability to run away and hide. Any attempt to “face” the E.M.M.I. will (almost) inevitably end in disaster. It reminded me of the moment in the second season of Stranger Things where a well-meaning Bob Newby (played by Sean Astin) tells the perpetually-haunted Will Byers to face his fears and tell them to go away. Unfortunately, the monster that haunts Will’s nightmares proves indifferent to this approach. Some things are just too terrible to deal with, too strong for any amount of moxie to overcome. The E.M.M.I. didn’t care if I was brave.
Now, for those who have not yet played the game, I am going to spoil a small detail that you will encounter really early on. For those of you who have played the game, I’m going to say the thing you were probably yelling at your screen for the whole last paragraph: “What about the omega cannon?” Indeed. And I will tell you, the first time I found the omega cannon—a device that conveniently contains exactly enough charge to kill the E.M.M.I.—I felt a little bit cheated. Here was a special kind of enemy that broke with traditional expectations about killing and power in video games, reduced to the oh-so-Nintendo status of a satisfyingly surmountable obstacle. What had been an existential threat that really made me wonder how much this game was going to play with the fear of the inevitable became just another fight to overcome, with a couple extra steps to victory than normal. The victory is still fun, and the path to it certainly remains stress-inducing, but the dread was gone.
That was the way I felt until I started thinking more about what makes robots scary in the first place. Think about it; nobody really dresses up as a robot for Halloween, and the costumes that do exist tend to fall rather short in terms of scariness. Spirit Halloween only sells about thirteen robot-related things, and while I admit this is a subjective evaluation, I feel like the options they have leave something to be desired. The prevalence of cute Bumblebee costumes might even lead one to believe that robots, in general, are not scary enough for Halloween, but I beg to differ. I would actually argue that people don’t dress up as robots because our fears of artificial intelligence are too deep-seated for a holiday dedicated to fun and camp. Vampires, ghouls, animatronics with a taste for human flesh…none of that stuff exists. They can inspire a spine-tingling moment or two, but they don’t really have anything to say about dread.
Robots, on the other hand, have the ability to be literally dreadful. They raise the specter of human replaceability and total automation. In dystopia after dystopia, robots are dangerous because they render humans unnecessary. They are sleeker than us, faster than us, and more efficient than us. Every successfully-designed robot is ultimately the product of a human being outperforming themselves. Sometimes it feels like the only thing worse than our own era of automated capitalism is the coming age in which human beings are no longer able to compete in the very markets we have set up for ourselves (or, more accurately, which have been set up for the rest of us by those who are already winning). Because—and this is always the robot problem—robots do exactly what they have been told, and are not able to distinguish a good from a bad application of their protocol. Just look at the E.M.M.I. They were dispatched to eradicate a parasite, and now they’re eradicating you. If that’s not dread-worthy, I don’t know what is.
To a certain degree, I really do think Nintendo sold itself short by making the E.M.M.I. ultimately just one more obstacle among many. And I’m not saying that from the perspective of the hardcore gamer bro who wishes everything was harder—if anything, I wish Nintendo would have crafted the game with more attention to accessibility. I mean that if a game wants to use dread playfully, leaning deeper into it could have made for a clearer critique of the helplessness we often feel in the face of automation, rather than a repeat of the level-up power trip that underlies the gamer’s fantasy of surmountability. Either way, I’m not sure the E.M.M.I. is scary just because it chases you. It’s scariest as a symbol for what might lie ahead of us.
