Abstract
A growing number of independent videogames explore matters of loss, death, and remembrance. The genre of walking simulators, first and foremost, tends to take players onto sojourns into lives gone, incidentally exploring strategies of memory and coping amidst virtual funerary monuments.
I explore the narrative and mechanical features used in the portrayal of grief in walking simulators. I highlight that the very gameplay conventions for which the genre is often ridiculed, combined with features of fragmentary narration, create an ambience of encouraging mystery that eases the coming to terms with the departed. In conclusion, I juxtapose my research insights with contemporary traditions of grief in western societies and argue for the consideration of new modes of coping.
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Introduction
To establish a link between videogames and eulogies, I firstly want to elaborate on an event of significance and its artistic aftermath. On October 27, 2013 Velvet Underground frontman Lou Reed passed away. The loss of the musician, well-known for his artistic and experimental ventures, provided a worldwide incentive for a vast display of epitaphs. The following text, quoted in major excerpts, was composed by Jesse Damiani:
Lewis Allan “Lou” Reed (March 2, 1942―October 27, 2013) was an American musician, singer and songwriter. He holds the record for being the only male solo artist to have his first 8 singles reach the Top 10 in the UK. With this trademark growl, his incorporation of pre-rock music styles such as blues, jazz, and vaudeville, and experimental tendencies verging on industrial music, Reed built up a distinctive musical persona. He has also been characterized as a blue-eyed soul singer, although his material draws more from middle-of-the-road pop than soul music.
[…]
His music has been a staple of the children’s television shows Rugrats, Beakman’s World, Santo Bugito, and Clifford the Big Red Dog. He also wrote the new theme song for the original Felix the Cat show when it was sold to Broadway Video, some music for Pee-Wee’s Playhouse in 1990, and the theme song for the Super Mario World TV series for DiC Entertainment in 1991. In 1997, he began hosting the House of Hair, a syndicated 1980s hard rock/heavy metal radio show that airs on over 200 radio stations across North America. (Damiani 2013)
This fragmentary recount of Reed’s importance to the world of music and entertainment concludes with the following note: “He spoke of the teenybopper image in Circus Magazine in 1973. He said he wasn’t sure how it happened. Someone saw my photo and that was it.” (Damiani 2013). More importantly, however, Damiani’s obituary ends with the following annotation: “Posted 11/07/13. All information taken from Wikipedia.” (Damiani 2013).
Damiani’s appendix provokes a dissonance between generic remembrance and personal mourning. Seth Abramson notes that Lou Reed’s Obituary “lacks a tone; it’s not autobiographical; there’s no first-person lyric ‘I’ at work; it’s neither optimistic nor cynical; it doesn’t stand (or claim to be able to stand) outside of any phenomenon and call it true or untrue” (Abramson in Clodfelter 2014). And yet, Abramson concludes, “it is … a self-expressive, allusive, highly creative collage—one a Modernist could be proud of—that is circumspect enough about the nature of truth, and the cacophonies of language and data, that its highly deliberate veneer of cohesion comes apart upon inspection” (Abramson in Clodfelter 2014). Damiani utilises one of today’s most general, standardised sources of information and shatters it into a personal collage, making way for his eulogy. It symbolises the paradoxical relation between means and needs of handling grief by juxtaposing institutionalised traditions of mourning and ever-individual emotional coping in western cultures.
Videogames, in a fashion similar to Damiani’s personal expression, provide the opportunity to resolve this paradox. They overcome paralysing patterns of grief with personal needs of coping by equipping the mourning person with agency. I argue for this thesis as follows: First, I frame death as an ideological discourse in western societies in reference to the role of the eulogy and cognitive theories. A result from this observation is the understanding that many practices of grieving in the West follow principles that, from a psychological perspective, stoke common fears of death rather than emotional healing. Second, I explain the resulting, evident importance to consolidate rigid tradition with an individual’s coping needs. This part of the paper introduces general principles that counter suppressive traditions and emancipate mourning. Third, I present videogames as an adequate medial tool to achieve such consolidation through the remediation of grief. Built on this understanding, a succinct analysis focuses on three qualities of the virtual environments provided by videogames that grant an opportunity for comfort via player agency. In order, these are the countering of helplessness through mastery, the replacement of loss with memory items, and the opportunity to foster an understanding of death through exploration. This line of argument mainly builds on using three videogames of the walking simulator genre as prime examples of these qualities. However, I also use illustrations from other noteworthy videogames that handle death in an exceptionally thought-provoking and respectful manner to support the analysis as necessary. Fifth, a brief excursion examines unhealthy representations of mourning, which are also present in contemporary videogames, and how, at the same time, more and more developers counter this trend. Finally, I conclude with a summary and outlook regarding videogames and their functionality as experience prosthetics―providing us with the virtual means to understand our emotions.
A Lesson in Grief
The western hemisphere according to Oatley, Keltner, and Jenkins, perceives emotions with appreciation and distrust (2006, p. 58). On the one hand, a display of affect guarantees authenticity. We are supposed to drop our mask when we are passionate about a topic. Only if we truly show joy when we receive a present, anger at the loss of our favourite football team, or sadness about the death of a beloved family pet can we be sure that we truly care. Holding back emotions, in contrast, appears to be distant and potentially neglectful. On the other hand, emotional behaviour is regarded as childish and immature at best―and as beastly at worst in the modern age (Oatley et al. 2006, p. 58). Those who let their emotions run free are unable to keep control of themselves and behave indecently. Approached from a cultural perspective, emotions like sadness are thus “constructed primarily by the processes of culture” (Oatley et al. 2006, p. 62). When growing up in western societies, an understanding―inherited as well as inherent―is formed about what displays of emotion conform to social expectations and what is acceptable under which circumstances.
Edward Munch’s painting Death in the Sickroom (1895) illustrates such an order of practices and rituals of grief. The painting captures the estranged quality of grief as communal isolation. One can take note of the space for the ritual meeting, the eponymous sickroom, and the clothing deemed adequate for the occasion, and may even dare to assume a social hierarchy amongst the depicted individuals, depending on how closely they stand to the mourned person’s bed. At the same time, the painting’s narrow composition cramps the mourning party together in a narrow frame yet separates them. While their body language reveals that all of them are visibly grief-stricken, no shared practice is detectable. There is no communication or exchange, as everybody appears to be lost in his or her own crisis of thought. In mourning, Munch’s work underlines that one is supposed to show affection, yet always little enough not to appear hysterical―one must enact a balanced role.
Grief is at odds with western societies because their values historically derive from a “death-denying and product-driven” attitude, argues Harris (2009–2010, p. 244). Dying in the west is a taboo topic. One dreads to discuss it, or to expose oneself to mourning for an extended period of time or too overtly. The stigma of being too emotional about death thus equals the dreaded loss of control, not in a beastly sense, but a capitalist one:
Bereaved individuals are often impaired in their functionality by their grief experience. These same individuals are often not very good consumers of market goods (unless these market goods are targeted for bereaved individuals, such as self help [sic] books and pharmaceuticals). The potential for the lack of productivity and an inability to perform the socially-expected role of consumer presents a threat to the basic structure of a capitalistic society. (Harris 2009–2010, p. 247)
As this set of values expresses the rule of patriarchal superstructures, Harris further explains, a stoic, denying reaction to grief is usually demanded (Harris 2009–2010, p. 247). After a brief, sanctioned respite, one must at least mask emotions so that they do not cause any further systemic disturbance.
Social mechanics result in the further marginalisation of the grief-stricken individual (Harris 2009–2010, p. 251). Barrett, amongst others, notes that “[H]uman grief … could be rooted in … the neurochemical basis of attachment, body budgeting, … affect”, and memory (2017, p. 271; Hogan 2011, p. 120), which we may assume differs characteristically from person to person. And while Oatley, Keltner, and Jenkins emphasise “… that values, concepts, and ideas about the self as expressed in art forms, rituals, social practices and institutions, shape how members of particular societies experience emotion” (2006, p. 62), many of these social experiences do not support the emotional needs of coping. In fact, the set imperative of rites, such as the eulogy, actively counteracts the psychological workings of grief.
The Authority of the Eulogy
The appearance of eulogies in academic search engines, for example, is quite telling about their role in society. JStor alone lists over 25,000 entriesFootnote 1 when searching for ‘Eulogy’, the results spanning journals of many scholarly fields. As it turns out though, these results almost exclusively feature actual eulogies on professors, researchers, journalists, politicians, and even abstract pamphlets such as the Eulogy of Law and Literature (Heald 2009). Texts about eulogies, their purpose or role in culture, are a rare occurrence among the search results. The lesson learned from this is again one on the discourse of grief in the west: who we mourn is not necessarily relevant to the act of the eulogy, but who mourns and who listens is.
By tradition, the eulogy strictly divides into active and passive roles. The eulogist, speaking of the departed, takes the active part. A eulogist is, for instance, expected to “show the reasons why the deceased is well-loved and will be missed by the people around him” (eulogyspeech.net). In narrative terms, a eulogist thus fulfils the role of an implied author. They shape the deceased’s presentation into a singular, canonical narration, which undoubtedly portrays their personal relation to the departed and current power over their life-narration. A eulogist is in charge of selecting what is important and presenting the departed in a specific light. Whereas the speaker speaks, attendees of the eulogy fulfil the role of the implied audience. According to the norm, they ought to deliver a display of passive and affirmative reception. The question of “who speaks in a eulogy?” thus further emphasises severe discrepancies between a social happenstance and an actual intimate need.
Death, in the sense of Maglin and Perry, is at the same time the most private human experience and a public event (2009, p. 74). Speaking even more intricately, grieving, then, is a surge of utmost intimacy taking place in institutionalised forms. The “law, medical acts and discursive practices” that structure institutional space through power relations regulate it (Whitney and Smith 2010, p. 76). These precise regulations rather evoke what Seymore Fisher identified as the four greatest fears we generally connect to death and that evoke negative emotions (2009, pp. 7–10). Firstly, it foregrounds the dissolution of life. The death of a beloved person tears us out of our day-to-day routine and forces us to adapt to rearranged social structures. Secondly, these deregulations bluntly confront us with non-existence; focusing on who the departed was also means focusing on what is henceforth missing from our life―not the remains. Thirdly, it confronts us with dreadful motionlessness. This is present in the act of the eulogy, but also in focusing on the motionless body of the deceased. According to Fisher, this evokes various kinds of impending doom, ranging from fears of physical harm and helplessness to hyperbolic fears (such as being buried alive) and innate claustrophobia (2009, p. 10). This also introduces Fisher’s final point, the confinement of space, existent again in the act of the eulogy as such, but also represented in coffin traditions: the coffin being there and gazed upon.
All of this boils down to the central observations of Patrick Hogan’s What Literature Teaches us about Emotion: a central reaction of grief to tragic circumstances is panic, this rises when action cannot be taken, and the knowledge that a situation cannot be turned to the better sets in (Hogan 2011, p. 113). Whereas the authority of the rigid eulogy must not be crossed, there are other societal mechanisms at work to counter our fears of the taboo topic of death. Harris, for instance, explains that “much of the focus in grief therapy and support is often upon the ‘un-doing’ of these oppressive social norms” (2009–2010, p. 248). Oppression, in this case, refers to the notion that one must ‘be strong’ and ‘in charge’ of one’s emotions. However, this translates into peer pressure: one must dedicate oneself to being in control of one’s emotions instead of acting on one’s own needs. It is of great importance to return a notion of agency to the grieving, to those who understand they want to comprehend death mentally and emotionally. This is where the West, it seems, is in dire need of resetting its notion of coping―or perchance in dire need of remediating it.
Walking Away from the Corpse, or: Remediating a Ritual
The Graveyard (2008), developed by the Belgian studio Tale of Tales, is a videogame on death and an illustration of how digital ludo-narrative experiences can approach taboo topics. Tale of Tales explains the short title as an “explorable painting [rather] than an actual game, an experiment with realtime [sic] poetry” (tale-of-tales.com 2008). It focuses on an elderly woman as avatar, on one singular path through a graveyard, with one bench on the path to sit down on. As soon as the game opens, the gameplay supports the immersive quality of the grave imagery by presenting the old woman standing at the gate of the graveyard and enabling players to exert agency. Kohler (2008) observes that
[o]ne very specific reason for this is that by controlling the woman, you immediately understand how old and frail she is. She hobbles convincingly toward the bench, which seems very far away. After a few steps, she can’t keep up the pace on her bad leg, so she starts limping, leaning on her cane for support.
Players have to be patient with their elderly avatar, who requires a noticeable moment to react to input commands and takes brakes between shifts in direction. Experiencing her frailty through such a lethargic gameplay strategy fosters empathy. It strengthens the bond between player and avatar, as Kohler (2008) explains, and furthermore, sharpens the players’ understanding for the slow unwinding of life as a central motif. As the players reach the bench, the old woman takes a seat and a song begins to play.
Then, the solemn audio-visuality and calm, narrow interaction of The Graveyard becomes the backdrop for an impactful emotional experience through shock of loss. While players can achieve a ‘win-state’ in The Graveyard―once the musical interlude has finished (or even at any point in-between), players may have their avatar rise from the bench and leave the graveyard―there is a random chance that the avatar dies while the song is playing (tale-of-tales.com 2008). The old woman drops her cane and her head falls forward. This can be seen in the fully-framed moment, as well as in a close shot of the old woman’s face which fades into the regular screen image as the song begins to play. From that moment on, all controls are taken away from the player. Players are forcefully confronted with the woman’s dead body without the ability to undo what happened or to regularly interact with The Graveyard. Only a ‘hard reset’, for instance by opening the Windows task manager and manually stopping the application, allows players to leave the game. The scene is impactful due to its shock-effect that, in turn, arises from its abrupt, non-expectable break with player agency. Through its unpredictable occurrence, the scene grants full absorbance into a confrontation with death while the following lack of agency enforces non-interfered thought about the setting.
The narrative quality of The Graveyard’s central experience lies in how it integrates players into its virtual geography. What is often referred to as “[e]nvironmental storytelling creates the preconditions for an immersive narrative experience” in videogames, as Henry Jenkins explores (2004, p. 5). He provides four central modes according to which a videogame may provide immersion and unfold “game spaces … rich with narrative potential, enabling the story-constructing activity of players” (2005, p. 13). His taxonomy of immersive narrative experiences circumscribes how “spatial stories can evoke pre-existing narrative associations; [how] they can provide a staging ground where narrative events are enacted; [how] they may embed narrative information within their mise-en-scene; or [how] they provide resources for emergent narratives” (Jenkins 2004, pp. 5–6). Put briefly, and with focus on an impactful experience of grief in a videogame that counters the Western discourse, the following questions are of relevance:
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How can we interact with the environment?
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What is placed in the environment?
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How does the environment hold everything together?
While the randomised death of the old woman in The Graveyard is an impactful moment, it still coerces players into an oppressive state of authority that suggests an even more meaningful approach to death in videogames: the forced confrontation with death one experiences from the perspective of an omniscient narrator. Thus, it all too obviously caters to the fearsome motifs that Fisher identified, such as the motionless body or the confinement of on-screen space. Nevertheless, the moment of shock and helplessness players experience once control is taken away is an early indicator that the experience of death in virtuality allows us to approach a taboo topic such as death in new ways. Ultimately, The Graveyard still conceptually celebrates a Totenkult, living on the shock value of the woman’s unexpected death, and the voyeurism of locking the camera onto her motionless body. It neglects the innate opportunity of interactivity in videogames that facilitate a more individual handling of death, which can be illustrated by the game Dear Esther.
Dear Esther (The Chinese Room, 2012) provides a ludo-narrative of loss and death without relying on primeval angst. Firstly, there is no dead body―and none appears throughout the game. Secondly, the departed Esther is close to our anonymous player avatar through the epistolary narration the game shapes. The game regularly provides us with brief excerpts from letters, which step-by-step reveal that Esther was our avatar’s wife, and that she died in a car crash. Thirdly, the game lets players explore these excerpts and other symbolic entities on an island, which may or may not be a construct of our avatar’s imagination. Players can find items in the landscape that tell the story of Esther’s hospitalisation, and they hear different letters depending on where they go on the island and how often they play the game―each meaningful location on the island may prompt a different, random excerpt. Thereby, players are encouraged to get in touch with Esther’s story, and to do so at their own pace. They experience empowering gameplay guiding them from sadness to understanding and, finally, coping.
Dear Esther is a so-called walking simulator. The genre, as Irwin describes it, is characterised by a first-person perspective and a purposefully limited range of action (2017). As such, the concept was and still is often mentioned in a derogatory fashion, for instance in game journalism where it is applied to decry a lack of gameplay (for instance, cf. Croshaw 2015; Cheong 2016). Despite this common understanding, I do rely on the term explicitly in an appeal to its emancipatory value. Relying on Rosa Carbo-Mascarell, walking simulators are the digitisation of the Romantic ideal of walking―a leisurely, yet intense simulation of a practice that connects us with our environments. Walking simulators foreground the experience of virtual, meaningful aesthetics and thus put unprecedented “emphasis on authentic emotion” (Carbo-Mascarell 2016, p. 1). As such, they encapsulate emotional videogame experiences, such as grief, in a fashion different from mainstream titles. Being “between playing and watching, between different levels of interactivity, seems to perfectly describe the plight of the walking simulator: a game where you are watching more than you are doing, but you’re still invested, still moved to feel an emotion other than joy or terror or triumph” (Irwin 2017).
In the following, exemplary design strategies from Dear Esther alongside two other walking simulators are discussed: Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture (2015), also by The Chinese Room, and Giant Sparrow’s What Remains of Edith Finch (2017). They all feature death without a dead body, replace the traditional eulogy’s singular authority with individual exploration, and turn the panic of loss into controlled coping by granting agency in a purposefully narrative environment. In some cases, other games along this main argument emphasise how strategies of empowering agency find relevant application in contemporary videogame design.
From Helplessness to Mastery: Death as a Quest
As a first example for the virtual re-appropriation of grief, Dear Esther’s search across an island exemplifies what happens if we understand death as a quest―a player-incentive provided by narrative videogame structures. The game opens with a fade-in from black into a first-person view, evoking the idea of the anonymous avatar gaining consciousness or opening their eyes. The first thing players see are jagged cliffs by the seaside and the red warning light of a radio tower in the far distance. With the fade-in, the first letter appears at the bottom of the screen, accompanied by a voiced narration and softly played, melancholic piano notes.
Players are immediately able to move the avatar and, as Oscar Moralde explains, might feel urged to configure themselves as part of the evocative environment: “A player always encounters a game in a state of disorientation because he or she must always learn the controls” (Moralde 2014, p. 4) and, by figuring out how the avatar of a game can be steered, immediately becomes aware of a “contingent, shifting relationship with landscape” (Moralde 2014, p. 6). “The experience of Dear Esther oscillates between viewing the landscape and moving through it; mobility evokes an awareness of the contingency of our subject positions” (Moralde 2014, p. 3). The dominant radio tower in the background is out of sight as soon as players move their avatar. The mysterious light source is lost, urging players to gain incentive to re-orient themselves by exploring.
By immersing into the virtual world as an abled first-person avatar, players are introduced to an unfiltered and self-paced narration of grief following the model of the hero’s journey―a literary concept established by Joseph Campbell to describe the relevant stepping-stones to the development of a protagonist (cf. Campell 1949). In its original form, it describes how the protagonist of a fictional work receives a call to action, which needs him or her to step out of their comfort zone and into unknown, mostly hostile terrain. Along this journey, the hero archetypically crosses a threshold of safety, after which comes a rock-bottom state of despair, followed by a slow way to mastery and a glorious conclusion. This concept has already been used in therapeutic contexts, such as in the workshops of Paul Rebillot’s Gestalt therapy, (cf. 1993), intended to invoke a participant’s inner sense of control through heroism. Videogames applying first-person perspectives, such as walking simulators, evoke identification with the protagonist, as they literally set the player in their shoes. In the role of player-as-protagonist, one is then directly able to, in Jenkins’ terms, explore the evocative virtual geography and enact personal agency in it.
Psychotherapist Joseph Weinstock relies on these encouraging qualities of videogames in his therapeutic approach. “The overarching narrative of the hero’s journey is interesting when applied to a young person’s grief,” explains the co-founder of development studio Bounce Works (Weinstock in Travis 2017), who worked in a bereavement support service. “They can get to a point where they can turn their suffering into a sort of resilience for other people. A game is a very good way of spending time with yourself. There’s the concentration, and a lack of distractions and anxiety. It gives you a space to think things over” (Weinstock in Travis 2017). Weinstock developed a game titled Apart of Me (2018), which finds application in therapeutic contexts. It was designed as a safe virtual space (bounce.works/apartofme 2018) that offers an emancipating gameplay. In Apart of Me, players become caretakers of their private, virtual island, which serves as a hub for various settings that fulfil a role in grief therapy. A treehouse, by way of illustration, invites players to fill it with memories in the form of pictures or videos. A beach location offers players opportunity to either share their emotions as messages in bottles, or to read and reply to other player’s messages. These elements of Apart of Me’s core game design fulfil integral, evidence-based therapeutic functions that teach coping. They include the development of emotional literacy, the provision of meditative exercises, and encourage players to tackle a difficult topic in a self-dependent fashion (bounce.works/apartofme 2018).
Apart of Me and Dear Esther thereby portray how fundamental game mechanics can provide players with both, the incentive and a structured path to handle death. Jesper Juul allows an understanding of this phenomenon by explaining videogames as half-real: they set players in interaction with a fictional world through fixed rules (2005, p. 1). Both layers stand in constant interaction and relate to one another (Juul 2005, pp. 195–196) which, as the example shows, provides an experience of foregrounded emotion and steady, self-guided control. Dear Esther’s guiding rules are walking without a time limit and high-score to achieve agency. At the end of Dear Esther, after players have acquired knowledge of Esther’s fate and her relation to the player, they are finally able to climb the radio tower briefly seen in the introductory sequence, symbolising mastery over an initially complex situation. The game’s native half-real state as a walking simulator means players are basically exposed to a marginal framework of ends and means in Parlett’s terms (1999, p. 3). It creates closure, and by only providing the player with the most basic controls and no time limit or similar disturbance, one can focus on personal thoughts while playing.
From Loss to Remembrance: Memory Items in Videogames
Interaction with memorabilia is a second narrative strategy that videogames apply and can effectively use to encourage a meaningful approach to death. Referring to Jenkins, objects found in a video game world provide evoked narratives that “either enhance our sense of immersion within a familiar world or communicate a fresh perspective on that story through the altering of established details” (Jenkins 2004, pp. 195–196). Establishing a bridge to literary studies specific to grief, Patrick Hogan mentions memories as one such key attribute (Hogan 2011, p. 120). Memories help us to remember how, but also why a departed person was dear to us. Oftentimes, memories stay with us through artefacts. The title What Remains of Edith Finch exemplifies their importance.
The game, released in 2017, tells the story of titular Edith, who in search for answers about the supposed Finch family curse, explores her long abandoned parental home. Every member of the Finch family has died under mysterious circumstances. As Edith walks the perimeters of the abandoned mansion, we are at points able to witness the final moments of her passed relatives, presented sometimes in dreadfully real, sometimes in morbidly humorous, playable vignettes. On her way to the house, we learn that Edith was denied a personal discourse with death from a young age. Whereas Edith’s grandmother Edi made little shrines for every family member who fell victim to the curse in an accident, Edith’s mother never spoke of the dead. In fact, it is elaborated that she bolted and locked all the rooms of dead family members. Now Edith can learn about her deceased family members, but the only way is by her accessing their rooms again and discovering their personal belongings. Every artefact found by Edith takes players to a brief vignette in which they control the departed family member as avatar and experience their final moments.
One of these episodes takes Edith on a venture into the life and death of her grandfather Sam. Sam was a photojournalist and his entire room is decorated with highlights from his career. As Edith approaches a cenotaph dedicated to Sam’s memory, interaction with an envelope of photographs takes players into a playable memento of Sam’s last hours. Fittingly, the vignette is set up as a series of photo-hunting moments and plays entirely through a camera lens. The first-person perspective is combined with a camera crosshair, and players scan the screen for interesting highlights. Players thereby create a memory book of Sam’s attempts to shape a father-daughter relation with Dawn―Edith’s then teenaged mother―which includes images of a hunting trip, Dawn shooting, a deer, and finally, the same deer kicking Sam off a cliff in its final rear-up. “Of all stories I wish mom would have told me this one”, Edith muses, as she rediscovers a tale of her family’s past her mom had kept away from her that would be inaccessible without the photos.
With each item found, Edith enables us to revisit her relatives in what von Hessberg refers to as memoria and imitatio (2018, p. 14). In every vignette of the game, we re-enact the final moments of one of Edith’s departed relatives and are only allowed to interact with the environment in a way that relates to their respective item. In Sam’s case, we become a photographer, using the controller to take snapshots. In other exemplary cases, we mimic the motion of the swing from which Edith’s great-uncle Calvin fell, or enact the mind-numbing routine of her other, hermitic great-uncle Walter. “Rather than progress (or hit the ‘point of the game’) by hitting a wall in the game’s structure,” Koster elaborates, “Edith Finch actually sets up progression in a very traditional way, by having you engage in specific types of active complicity [in Death]” (2018).
With every adventure, players complete the genealogy puzzle. Once a vignette is concluded, Edith opens her notebook and doodles the family member’s liking in it. Step-by-step, Edith and the player complete a family tree that reveals their connection to her until they finally grant Esther a complete picture of her whereabouts: the deep symbolism of her childhood home, and a sense of her family’s character. The connection between player and space in the form of profound episodes of life play an important role in the meaningful representation of death. Here, mastery over the environment plays an important role as a coping tool. Moreover, these playable vignettes offer a spatial connection: for the player with the game and its curious inhabitants, for Esther, again, with her place of upbringing.
At Peace in My Pace: Exploring Life- and Deathscapes
The entirety of the layout of a videogame’s geography also has a central importance in its approach to death. This is what Jenkins described as embedded narratives: “game space becomes a memory palace whose contents must be deciphered as the player tries to reconstruct the plot” (Jenkins 2004, p. 13). In terms of emotion, “[s]etting might convey themes or foster emotions either directly or indirectly,” explains Patrick Hogan (2017, p. 135): “For example, a landscape might directly invite aesthetic delight, whatever its place in the story. Alternatively, the emotional consequence of a setting may be a function of its relation to the story.” (135) Space plays an important cognitive function in coping with grief:
For the bereaved person, nothing is as important as the beloved’s death. Indeed, all other matters of life pale to insignificance. Of course, he or she is likely to find all other interests trivial. As such, he or she is likely to feel that the entire world should recognize this triviality (Hogan 2011, p. 127).
In all of the discussed walking simulators, the worlds to explore for the player are microcosms revolving solely around the departed. In What Remains of Edith Finch, it follows the motif of the house, in which each room is the sanctuary of one of Edith’s relatives, providing structure to artefacts of memory. As Edith herself says: “Even the fireplace had a story. Edie told me, the bricks came from the original house, after it sank”. In Dear Esther, it is the typically British motif of the island that keeps the avatar with his departed wife, and which hosts symbols of their past. In my final example, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, it is the empty pastoral landscape of a post-apocalyptic, rural Shropshire brimming with recorded memories.
The soundtrack of Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture presents its geography in a duality. In certain moments, Jessica Curry’s BAFTA awarded orchestral pieces create a mood of melancholic tranquillity (Games | Music in 2016). In many other instances, we see and hear nothing but silence and nature, soundlessness besides the glowing orbs that pick up the wandering player. As we play, we learn that these orbs belong to a cosmic phenomenon only known as ‘The Pattern’, which caused all human beings on Earth to vanish. All that is left for the player avatar to roam is an abandoned but intact townscape somewhere between Wales and England, in which these orbs guide the avatar to recorded excerpts of the former inhabitants’ lives. In total, players can discover five fragmented stories-within-the-story across the virtual landscape. Some of them are memories from just before the apocalyptic event took place, others apparently years before that.
This intricate relation between places and mourning continues the game’s duality. In Fig. 5, for instance, we see the ghostly apparitions of Kate and Stephen manifesting at a bus station. It is the introductory part of their narration that tells us about their personal struggles in Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. From the glimpses provided by their embedded narration, we learn that Kate is originally from the United States and moved to Great Britain out of her love for Stephen, but never received a warm welcome in the rural community. The setting is telling here: a bus station, a non-place in Marc Augés vocabulary (1994, pp. 94–103, following de Certeau’s line of argument). It frames the story glimpse in a motif of being in between. The bus station is a place between arrival and departure and, in such a small community, one of the few connections to a world outside the game space. Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture highlights that stories do not exist without places, and places provide the stories.
Thereby, the game ultimately achieves a duality of grief and hope. It juxtaposes the sadness of the empty world to the deeply emotional stories of its former inhabitants. We see bits of Pastor Jeremy questioning God in the town’s empty church, and farmer Frank coming to terms with the impending doomsday atop a hill behind his farm. The higher meaning of this reveals itself through gameplay only. Near the end of the game, players encounter a voice message left by protagonist Kate:
We lived apart from them; we understand now. Our failure to touch, to belong. But it doesn’t matter anymore. Everybody is gone, and we will join them. We are born apart, driftwood on the banks of an endless dark ocean. And we will be carried away by the swell soon enough. But in between, in a single day of living… that dancing in a strip of sunlight, we can find what we miss. The love that makes us whole. The imminence. Everybody found their other. This pattern is mine.
The Pattern provides a shattered memory palace, to rely on Jenkins’ vocabulary again, and its fragments become one as the players collect them. Game journalist Kirk Hamilton assumes that “Kate … is now connected to all things” (Hamilton 2016), just like all other protagonists. “Frank has Mary, Wendy has Eddie, Jeremy has God, Stephen has Lizzie, and so on. Kate’s other is the Pattern itself, …. After being taken into the light, each character finds their other. It is a revelation that could only come to place through the pattern” (Hamilton 2016). It united the individuals of the village on another plane of existence, just as it allows players to create a meaningful whole of their narrative fragments. Hope unfolds as a redeeming quality through the connection of these places.
A Grief with Agency
It goes without saying, however, that videogaming is not always respectful of death. Whereas the aforementioned titles have presented mourning as reverence, others provide a gamification of grief―videogame death sans emotional reflection. Without going into detail about the general issues of dying, continues and extra lives in videogames, I want to specifically elaborate on how the influence of these instances of meaningful meditations on death in videogames are nevertheless worth considering.
By way of illustration, the infamous ‘Press F to pay respects’ moment in (Sledgehammer et al. 2014) comes to mind. The scene lets the player participate in a military funeral in the United States after a shooting sequence, which culminates in the death of their partner. Predominantly, this moment in an otherwise fast-paced shooter is defined by visual pathos and a lack of player attachment and incentive. “The funeral scene could, at the very least, help players understand their brotherly connection”, argues Dornbush. “Instead, it condenses the totality of their bond into a single button. It’s a scene that could have played out without the player’s control and delivered the same punch, or lack thereof” (Dornbush 2014). Moreover, it loses meaning in the face of the game’s entire tone. As in other instalments of the Call of Duty franchise, the core gameplay focuses on shooting dozens of human enemies per level―in comparison, the funeral scene loses much of its sincerity. These factors show Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare not only as a failing moment of meaningful expression for death, but also that this failure is connected to a detachment from experiential storytelling through environmental clues.
Even those moments, however, do provide incentive to explore emotions through videogames with dignity. In the wake of Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, Leo Burke developed the game Press E To (n. a.). The short game at first appears to parody the aforementioned funeral scene, but is, in fact, an exercise in developing something meaningful out of a stubborn prompt. An anthropomorphic bunny in an endless forest is given a single path to a monument where players receive the prompt to ‘Press E’. What follows is a turn away from pathos. Pressing E initiates a monologue at the monument, step-by-step revealing the personal connection between the avatar and the departed. The scene is accompanied only by environmental sounds. After a long meditative exercise of clicking through the monologue, Press E finally fades to black only after players click one final time to end the game, signalling that they want to conclude their mourning and thought process. Burke programmed Press E To solely to coping with personal grief and took the player along (Burke in O’Connor 2014).
Examples like Press E To show that game design can be an outlet to convey grief. Other games, such as That Dragon, Cancer (2016) follow a similar route. It conveys the autobiographical experience of Amy and Ryan Green, whose son was diagnosed with terminal cancer (in van Deventer 2016). The everyday worries of the family are strongly reflected in the title’s gameplay which fulfils a cathartic function for families who find themselves in a similar situation. By way of illustration, Phil Tann, whose son Alex was diagnosed with cancer at just three years old, explained That Dragon, Cancer’s (Numinous Games 2016) healing empathy in an interview with Kotaku:
[There is n]o certain outcome, it’s unpredictable and if you make the wrong decision you lose. You might just lose anyway or you think you’re going to lose but for some reason you don’t. You’re on 1HP, keep taking hits but don’t die. I feel like That Dragon, Cancer is a new way to tell a story and will hit a different audience to a book, movie or TV show and awareness will help people understand (in van Deventer 2016)
“I think, sometimes, the most discouraging part about losing someone you love, is that the people who mattered so much to you are often forgotten by the world,” Amy said (in van Deventer 2016). Game design was their pinnacle of gaining agency over a story to tell it.
From Cult to Cultivation
If we regard death as the most private human experience, as Maglin and Perry support, then we may just as much acknowledge that videogames are the most private medial experience we can have. They can provide impactful, even therapeutic narrations dealing with death. They create a momentum of empowerment that counters hierarchical patterns of western grieving traditions. While rituals, such as the eulogy enforce an authoritarian mode of mourning that fosters fear by focusing on the absent and spatial confinement, videogames proverbially open up space: they can provide virtual environments and explorable narrative content about death to portray mourning in a proactive, self-controlled manner.
The videogames discussed here fulfil such criteria. Walking simulators in particular foreground emotion and self-reflection by employing means of coping in environmental narration. They focus on personal, vivid relations to the departed, and they grant opportunities for individual spatio-temporal processing. They are able to not only foreground emotions in their virtual geographies, but also to foster a player’s competence in their understanding. The key to a respectful handling of the topic is their integration of the player within their virtual environments. This experience, provided by videogames, which ultimately leads to a profound handling of emotions of grief, can reach from emancipatory ludo-narrative experiences to designing one’s own game to cope with grief, as the examples in this paper have shown. Moreover, they present themselves as archetypical examples on how the ludo-narrative half-real state of a videogame engages players that have found homes in other videogames as well.
Ernest Adams once provocatively asked if videogames will ever be considered art (2006, p. 69). By provocatively, I refer to the fact that he was asking this at a time during which videogames were not considered worthy of any real discourse. Titles like Dear Esther, What Remains of Edith Finch, or Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, released long after Adam’s statement from 2006, do in fact portray games as being a form of art―namely the art of life and of understanding it. They can serve as experience prosthetics, helping us to feel, to compare our emotions, and to dissect processes, thus not only breaking a discourse but, in a sense, also giving meaning to death.
Notes
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Accessed November 27, 2018.
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Schniz, F. (2019). To Save What’s Gone. In: Elmenreich, W., Schallegger, R., Schniz, F., Gabriel, S., Pölsterl, G., Ruge, W. (eds) Savegame. Perspektiven der Game Studies. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-27395-8_11
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