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  • laurencedyoung

I can’t stop playing games about death. Of course, most games are about death in some way or another. At its core, death is a mechanism of failure, there to show you what winning and losing looks like. But recently it feels like there are many more games tackling death as a theme much more explicitly, whilst also playing with what death as a mechanic looks like too. To name but a few, some of which I’ll go into more deeply, there’s been the likes of Spiritfarer, Death’s Door, Hades, Elden Ring and countless others. Whilst being myriad in their genres, styles and tones, these games all care about death deeply. And I can’t stop playing them.


I suppose I know to some degree why I’ve been drawn to these games that explore death and all its offshoots. For the longest time I’ve been both curious and horrified by the concept of death. And it is the concept, not the actual event itself. Endings. Finality. The notion that at some point in time I will just cease to be. Existential horror. It’s something I find myself thinking about a lot, sometimes in a way that I find scary, and sometimes in a way that feels almost tranquil. Like I’m reaching for a truth that once I understand and comprehend will make my life that much more peaceful. To a large degree my feelings on death have only been made more apparent the past few years, such has the spectre of the Grim Reaper come into view for so much of society through this ongoing pandemic. Which is why I think I can’t stop reaching for art that will help me embrace it, think about it, and talk about it more. So what follows is a brief meditation on some beautiful games that have helped me embrace the one thing that we all know is inevitable.


Largely, I think games that are interested in death can be grouped into two main camps. Ones that deal with death as a theme, and ones that play with death as a mechanic. It is in the former group where the imprint of death is most evident. Whether it’s in the name, Death’s Door, or the marketing tagline, ‘a cosy management game about dying’ (Spiritfarer), games that are thematically concerned with death are centred around our relationship to all that death and dying entails. Spiritfarer is one of my favourite games of the past few years, in no small part due to its charm, nuance, and care with which it tackles such a treacherous subject. You play as Stella, the newly appointed Spiritfarer tasked with ferrying souls to the afterlife, which can’t happen until you’ve taken them upon your boat and brought them peace, and often closure, in their final moments. This can happen in multiple ways, from cooking someone’s favourite meal, to taking someone to their childhood home to make amends with the spirit of their father. For me, the game’s real beauty lies in that it shows you the mistakes the characters have made, the regrets they have, and all the things they wished they’d done different, and yet despite all that, it’s still possible to feel content at the end. One of the things I think that scares me so much about death is all the loose ends, all the fragments of my life that may be unfinished, incomplete. Spiritfarer helped to show me that’s ok, that those pieces can still add up to something great and wonderful. Whilst I could wax lyrical about this game for an age, and deep dive into the joy of its systems, the quality of its writing, and the beauty of its visuals, I’ll instead say that simply being a game that talks about death makes it valuable. Like A Mortician’s Tale, and That Dragon, Cancer that came before it, being part of the growing tapestry of conversations about death and dying is intangibly potent simply because it’s something that’s so often ignored and not talked about, particularly in our post-capitalist western society that fetishes living beyond our means (both naturally and materially). There is something incredibly important about exploring our relationship to death as society, so it’s a joy to see brilliant artists putting games, with all the uniqueness that the interactivity of the medium brings, at the forefront of those conversations.


Away from games that wholeheartedly embrace death as a theme, games that play with death as a mechanic are almost innumerable. As previously mentioned, most games feature some kind of death mechanic, but the games that stand out from the crowd for me are the ones where death is more than simply a game over screen. In Elden Ring, and the entire Soulsborne series, death is the way the game teaches you patience, humility, and ultimately delivers the sweetest of victories. In time loop games such as Returnal and Deathloop, dying is central to furthering the narrative of the game, and key to unlocking the secrets of the games’ protagonists. The recently lauded indie game Hades pulls a similar trick, but alongside finding out more about the protagonist, each death gives you the chance to learn more about the cast of supporting characters that populate and give life to the Underworld; the reward of new dialogue options, new story threads to tug at, and more knowledge to be gained. Though not built into the official games themselves, Pokemon nuzlockes are perhaps my favourite example of games playing with death to create new and meaningful experiences. To the uninitiated, a nuzlocke is a run of any Pokemon game designed to artificially increase the difficulty, by adding a permanent death feature, and limits to the number of Pokemon you can catch. At their most basic, you’re only allowed to catch the first Pokemon you encounter in each new area (which must be given a nickname to promote further attachment), and if a Pokemon faints it is considered dead and unusable again at any point during the run. Nuzlockes forge friendships with Pokemon you’d never use in a normal play though, and create a lasting set of memories that go far beyond those formed in the main games. Playing with how death as a mechanic functions in your games is clearly beneficial; given the critically lauded nature of all the games I’ve mentioned above (and the prominence of Pokemon nuzlockes as YouTube/Twitch content), players are eager for experiences that defy the industry standard game over screen that has dominated since the 1980s. More than anything, playing with the mechanics of death offers learning experiences to players that are otherwise flattened when death is treated as simply the try again moment. There is so much more complexity possible, and its something we should absolutely strive towards to continue to evolve and push innovation in games.


Of course, whilst I have delineated these two camps of games concerned with death, there are games that absolutely play with death as a mechanic whilst also delving into it thematically. One such game is Citizen Sleeper, which I blasted through recently and absolutely adored. To summarise Citizen Sleeper is difficult, but you play as a ‘Sleeper’, a copied human consciousness uploaded into an artificial body that has escaped from your corporate overlords and is now trying to make a life (or seek further escape) on a remote space station. The mechanical death in the game is intricate and slippery; it is something that you creep towards day by day, as your artificial body slowly degrades, and thus your dice, the precious resource with which you interact with the world, begin to deplete. Thematically as well, death is everywhere. Death of people. Death of systems. Death of society. What it means to be human in a body that is in many ways already dead. Citizen Sleeper was a completely novel experience, and a truly boundary pushing game for the ways it interrogates its ideas and then reflects those themes back into the mechanics and design. I think Citizen Sleeper captures best what I love about all of the games I’ve mentioned here; that in dealing with death explicitly and intrinsically in its mechanics and thematics, the possibility for growth and change seems exponentially greater. What binds together my favourite gaming experiences of the past few years is that no matter how bleak, difficult, or grim a game may appear on its surface, it is ultimately a hopeful experience that shows things can get better. That’s Spiritfarer, that’s Hades, that’s Elden Ring, and that’s Citizen Sleeper. These are the types of games I want to be playing, as these are the types of games that have made me feel more at peace in the world. That’s a very powerful thing, and something I’m really grateful to these games for. I can’t stop playing games about death, and long may it continue.

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  • laurencedyoung

Hello, this is the first post of my blog where I'll be exploring some of my favourite games and hopefully sharing some interesting insights about how I see and understand their narrative content and design. This first blog post is actually a video I made with my brother, combining my love of theatre and games to explore The Last of Us Part Two from the viewpoint of legendary German theatre maker Bertolt Brecht. The full text of the video is transcribed below for anyone who would prefer to read rather than watch. Enjoy!

Hello hello, we are two brothers who like playing and talking about video games, and for some reason we’ve decided to turn some of those rambling conversations into something people can watch because well…. why not? For this first video we wanted to take a game we’ve both played recently, and do a bit of an analysis from our shared perspective of crippling student debt accumulated through overpriced post-graduate degrees, and working in a performing arts industry that is totally not on it’s knees and being dealt a final death blow by the pandemic. RIP Theatre. The game in question is The Last of Us Part 2, and the lads in question are Aristotle and Bertolt Brecht. Here we go.


Part 1 - The Aristotelian Unities

The year is 335 BC and an upstart philosopher by the name of Aristotle, you may have heard of him, has just published the Poetics. It’s probably the earliest (surviving) example of work about dramatic theory (no biggie), and in it Aristotle seeks to understand the structure and function of the great works of art of his time. He describes seven essential elements of drama: theme, chorus, spectacle yaddy yaddy yada, but the most important thing he describes is plot. Plot, Aristotle rules, is the pivotal part of any story, as plot is all about showing the consequence of action. For the Greeks, theatre has an incredibly important societal role. It’s mandated that all citizens of Greek society must attend the theatre when the great festivals are held, as they help teach the morals and values of the society. Plot is how that is conveyed; something happens because of the action a character takes, the audience sees and learns whether that action was a good or bad thing by the outcome of the plot.


Central to all this is unity. For an audience to understand the plot, and learn the moralistic message of the play, three unities must be in place. Unity of time, unity of place, and unity of action. So a story needs to all take place within a continuous time period, within a certain, or limited set of locations, and should follow the actions and outcomes of one principal main character. In tragedy, this character always has to start from a position of relative high status or happiness, and then descend into misery through a reversal of fortune of some kind. The final, important point that Aristotle makes through the description of unities and character is that often this is the work of fate. Think of sweet Oedipus, who in trying to defy the fate set out for him inadvertently ends up shagging his mum and killing his dad. The moral message is simple; trying to avoid your destiny will lead to ruin, and a watching audience would be encouraged to accept their lot in life.


Part 2 - Epic Theatre

Roll forward to 1930 and a young German playwright by the name of Bertolt Brecht is making waves in European theatreland. War is on the horizon, Germany is beginning to descend into fascism, and Brecht is trying to create a theatre that turns audiences from passive observers into active participants all striving to bring about a more fair and equal society. Brecht has had enough with Aristotle, he’s tearing up his work, and he’s taking a big old schizer over the conventions of drama that have ruled for nearly 2000 years. Brecht doesn’t want people watching drama to get caught up in the immersion. He’s raging about how the Aristotelian unities, all these nicely packaged, well-thought out and complete stories with their beginnings, middles, and ends, are turning people into fatalistic idiots who have no perception about how the world might change for the better. No more stories about the inevitability of doom, Brecht wants a theatre where people can see the moments of choice, and can envisage what an alternative, better future might look like.


So Brecht develops what he calls ‘alienation’, a series of techniques designed to remind the audience of the falsehood of everything, to make them feel detached from the psychological and emotional reality of the story, and instead be able to look remotely at the societal implications and thematics of the plot. To do this he, shock horror, has the actors talk directly to the audience, acknowledging their presence rather than building the so-called ‘fourth wall’. He says screw the unities, I want stories that jump from person to person, place to place, and happen all over time and history. He creates visual pictures that actively show the mechanical workings of theatre: open lighting, sights of people working backstage, or even no set at all, no visual aid to help the immersion into the setting. AND SPOILER ALERT, the madman even puts in prologues that spill the entire plot right at the beginning, a big old screw you to the ideas of suspense and dramatic revelation that drive Aristotelian works. And the point of all this alienation, thinks Brecht, is that the audience will no longer be sat there fully immersed in the story with no sense of agency in how the action is unfolding, but instead go ‘hey, idiot character, that was a dumbass decision you made there, here’s what you could’ve done different’. I mean, the man did have to flee Nazi Germany for fear of being executed due to the very anti-facist nature of his work, so you can kind of understand why he wanted to shake up the whole unities, fatalistic model of drama.


Part 3 - Video Games

Ok so we’ve got our Brecht, we’ve got our Aristotle, but what in the name of Our Patron Saint Waluigi does this have to do with video games, and particularly The Last of Us Part 2? Well, before we dig into the good stuff of Naughty Dog’s magnum opus, let’s consider game narratives more broadly. Story-driven, cinematic games, the type of which Naughty Dog is known for, are a relatively recent phenomenon. These types of adventure games began in earnest and rapidly expanded during the latter stages of the Xbox360 and PS3 era, think of Uncharted, Heavy Rain, Bioshock, Red Dead Redemption, games like that, as technology was just beginning to handle such ambition, scope, and detail graphically. Before this emergence, the games that had the most detailed stories, where you could convincingly say narrative was at the forefront, all tended to be traditional RPGs. We’re talking Baldur’s Gate, Chrono Trigger, The Elder Scrolls, your Final Fantasies, all those legends of the genre that pioneered massive, non-linear, detailed stories in games. Coming back to Brecht, the RPG genre had something at its heart which made them decidedly Epic in the Brechtian sense: choice. These games were all about the player leading what they wanted to do: For example, you want that guy in your party go and get him, ooo bad luck that quest is going to get your party member killed, you want to ignore the main story and join the thieves guild you ignore the main story and go and join the thieves guild! The interactivity and choice means the player is always seeing the potentials of other futures, and doesn’t feel stuck or railroaded into a predetermined outcome. But then big cinematic story games come along, and WAM BAM THANK YOU MAM we’re back with Aristotle. No more choice really, much less agency, but supposedly way more more complex types of stories, with more nuance and depth, and way more immersion. Except, is this actually the case?


Ok, let’s finally dig into The Last of Us Part 2. HUGE SPOILER ALERT HERE, we’re gonna spoil the whole damn thing so if you haven’t played the game yet and you don’t want it spoiled you really should stop here. Still here? Right, so you know the bit in the basement of the hospital where Ellie has Nora cornered? You know the bit, the push square to cave someone’s head in with a crowbar bit? Yeah, that fun little moment. Both of us almost stopped playing the game right then and there. A big old can of nope. And we’re guessing it wasn’t only us who sat there, dejectedly staring at Ellie’s rage-filled face, for a good five minutes hoping that another option would miraculously appear. You know why? Because of this little bitch [insert picture of Aristotle]. The first half of this game is covered in the stench of Aristotle. We’ve got a tragic hero who’s fatal flaw (read, Ellie’s inability to forgive Joel for stripping her of the choice about whether she lives or dies for a greater good in The Last of Us part 1) reduces them to a state of misery from a starting position of prosperity (read, the idyllic life of safety and peace that Ellie and Dina have at the beginning of the game). We’ve got a fatalistic plot that adheres to the unities of time, place, and action. And we’ve got a shallow moralistic message about cycles of violence and being damned to repeat the mistakes of our forefathers. Aristotle here is causing a real problem, because for us, this moment breaks the immersion of the cinematic quality of the game. There is an inherent conflict between the interactivity of video games, and the predetermined nature of the story trying to be told. By pushing square to brutally torture then murder someone, we, the players, are being made to feel complicit in this action, as if we’re an active participant. But in reality, we have no control over this happening, this isn’t our choice, and in our case we don’t want Ellie to do this. We’re nothing more than a passive observer, watching on with horror as the self-driving car we’re sitting in ploughs into a group of pedestrians. This is deeply frustrating, this conflict between agency and narrative, because it completely breaks the immersion in the story, and makes you as a player feel helpless and powerless. We both consider ourselves quite optimistic, hopeful people, so to be sat playing a game that is beating you around the head going, nothing will ever change, violence will be here forever, everything sucks the world sucks and you suck, felt kind of shitty. We were both so close to putting down the controller and stopping playing at that point, but we stuck with it, mostly just to see what the final denouement of the game would be. And boy, are we glad we did.


Part 4 - Epic Revelations

To come straight out with it, neither of us saw the twist in the game coming. After that low of murdering Nora, there wasn’t much we thought could red eem the game. And then, AND THEN! When you first started playing as Abby it was like oh, ok, this is interesting, expecting it to be a 30 minute sidebit that did no more than give her a shallow motivation for why she killed Joel. But that slow dawning realisation that you’re going to replay the whole 3 days from her perspective, that was an incredible moment, and also what makes this game a masterpiece, a MASTERPIECE I TELLS YA! Without this switch up in perspective, this game would be everything I described before, a shallow, fatalistic, depressing tale of violence and transgression. But instead we get something altogether more hopeful, optimistic, and downright brilliant because of a move straight out of the playbook of you guessed it, YA BOY BRECHT.


The decision to invert the perspective for the second half of the game is everything Brecht could want from a piece of epic theatre. It fucks with time, it fucks with who the main character is, it fucks with all of your expectations of how this story is going to be told, and it blows away the limits on how the game can be read. Suddenly it doesn’t feel like an on-rails, nihilistic action game anymore. By switching the perspective to Abby, the player is invited to imagine at every point how things could have been different. You retread all the important moments of choice where Ellie pursues darkness, and see where Abby instead decides to choose hope. Through Lev and their beautiful blossoming friendship you see how none of this is fate, that there is always a way to defy the path set out for you. It’s such bold storytelling and so exciting purely because it shows that even in huge, cinematic story games, the narrative doesn’t need to be beholden to 2000 year old ideas of what plot entails. You get all that glorious immersion that comes from games where player choice (in the traditional, RPG sense) is removed, but you still get to see all the possibilities and potentials within that story for a brighter, better future. If there’s one takeaway that I hope the games industry learns from this game, it’s that exciting narrative choices can breed innovation and a player-base that wants to contribute to making the world a better place. It’s no secret that there has been a lot of controversy across the game sector the past 10 or so years. Whether it’s abuse of female staff, union-busting bosses, the implementation of NFTs (fuck NFTs), or whatever else, there is a lot to feel pessimistic about in gaming. But if we can make games that have a hopeful edge, that do something with their narratives that forces us to look from a new perspective, to engage in choice, to think about the hopeful, then maybe we’ll be in a better place sometime soon. No one piece of art can change the world, but more art like The Last of Us Part 2 could help us break from the malaise and imagine a brighter future. Thanks for watching.

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