Videogames have always been a favorite timekiller of mine. They offer an escape into worlds beyond on our own and allow us to explore and recreate ourselves in new ways. This freedom enables us to be monsters or heroes. More often than not we choose the path of the hero though. Sure some people are out to destroy and enslave. It is even therapeutic sometimes to tear down things you have built. This need to destroy does not often get the better of most of us though. In my case, I almost always choose the path of the hero. After all I am a marvel age kid. My childhood and young adult life has been full of various superhero and avenger movies in which good always triumphs over evil, Infinity War aside. I always dreamed of having super powers and being the hero of a story. In my case I think it has done me a lot of good. Being influenced by a hero certainly isn’t a bad thing, as long as you don’t go full Syndrome with it. Even still I find myself acting in ways that a hero wouldn’t once a controller is placed in my hand. I will be examining three pieces of entertainment for this essay, Red Dead Redemption II, Black Mirror: USS Callister and West World. These three games and shows have similar themes, but they approach them differently. The two previous mentioned shows made me have a “oh shit” moment during my play through of Red Dead that I think is important to an avid gamer or Movie goer to consider. The thought was, what if these characters are aware of my actions and are just helpless to escape them. What if I am not the good guy after all but a puppet master playing God in a sandbox of my creation and destruction.
To take a step back and examine things let’s look at West World. The show is centered around a futuristic western theme park where rich guests go to reenact their western fantasies. Sounds great, but then the animatronics slowly start to remember their past lives and the system through which they reset everyday breaks down. Their lives still reset when killed, but their memory stays. That’s the key, memory. We tell ourselves as humans that things of lesser intelligence can’t really be effected by our actions and words because, “a fish can only remember like 5 seconds right?” Let’s say Chad is correct in his fish assumption, in that case after you tap a fish’s bowl I bet the fish hates your guts for the 5 seconds it CAN remember. In V.S. Ramachandran’s book The Tell-Tale Brain he explores what it is that makes us human. He identifies memory as an important aspect of being human, but not a defining one. (Ramachandran, 285) Humans suffer from disorders that limit the brain’s ability to recall short term or long term memories and yet they are still distinctly human. Regardless of the amount of time we can recall memories are still an important part of what makes something sentient. That being said there are other unique attributes beyond memory that define us.
Back to West World. The characters have three other distinct qualities that humanize them for the audience. They look, sound and act like we would. We learn later that their actions are almost entirely procedurally generated and predetermined, but the familiarity of their look and decisions humanize them. One example would be the scene where Dolores remembers her past life and the secrets buried within it. This creates the narrative tension that the whole story is centered around. The breaking down of a system based on memory. She sees flashes of the past and the puzzle she is destined to solve. These flashes are her “core memories,” similar memories are found in people, traumatic events and feelings that dictate our personalities and approaches to various situations. West World is not the only show to explore the idea of the lifeless gaining sentient capabilities, so let’s take a jump in a spaceship real quick and head to the world of Black Mirror.
Black Mirror is known for its various social and political comments on society and technology and its most recent series no different. In the first episode of the series we believe we are a part of a Star Trek themed videogame crew exploring the vast reaches of space. In reality we are in a videogame on the hard drive of a depressed, psychopathic game developer who is lost within the fiction of his own game. We see how the characters in the game are digital representations of the various coworkers he hates and or catches feelings for. He creates his own private playground in which he tortures, sexually assaults and constructs fantasies of his imagination. He does so while thinking he is the hero. Now the lines get a little blurry as we take a brief look introspectively. I can name a lot of people I shot who didn’t deserve it in videogames. I have yet to feel any real life consequences for those actions though because in the end it’s just a game, right?
The characters in the Black Mirror game are sentient and are feeling everything. Now, they take advantage of the futuristic videogame they are set in to contact the outside their world and, spoiler alert, eventually get their revenge. Not without their trials and tribulations, like James’s child being murdered and Annette’s (Robert’s sexual interest) face being erased, harking back to an actual Star Trek episode. Boy, being in a videogame sure seems like fun! It is though… for the guy who is controlling the game. When you hold the controller you are God, ruling over meaningless mortals and so you murder them senselessly. Not actually, but sometimes yeah. Once again, sometimes all you need to do is destroy something to feel a little better. I know that was my approach to the new game Red Dead Redemption II.
Open world games offer the ultimate freedom for gamers. We control our character’s outfits, dialog, and actions. All in a world in which we are king. Sure there are enemies that we struggle to kill, but in the end losing to them is just another respawn loading screen. I doubt anyone disagrees about the omnipotent powers that videogames give the player, where they will disagree is on how the player uses these powers. Now every game is different so your actions can be interpreted differently. Games like Call of Duty are linear and almost always have you play as the good guys, with the exception of one airport mission in CODMWII (GRAPHIC). That mission aside those stories are pretty one-sided. Where videogames get interesting psychologically is in games like I mentioned above. “Open World” and RPG games. Games in which you are the hero in a vast digitized world of procedurally generated characters. Sounds a little like West World doesn’t it. In Red Dead Redemption you even play as a cowboy.
I could write an entire essay just on Red Dead Redemption II, but I will stick to just a few key aspects that I find relevant to this argument. The consequences of actions, good vs evil system and your character’s mortality. To narrow my examination even more I will be studying these three themes through the debt collection missions. ALSO SPOILERS AHEAD. In Red Dead you are free to do pretty much whatever you want. It is produced by the same company that makes GTA so you know that means you can literally do anything; no matter how morally corrupt. In the debt collection missions, you are given the names and addresses of settlers who have borrowed money from your gang and failed to pay you back. At the start of the game you are given a debt collection mission from the camp’s treasurer. You go to the debtor’s house and find he lives alone and is determined to not pay you. So naturally you beat him until he cannot stop you from stealing his household items, one of which is a wedding band that presumably belonged to his now deceased wife. Not exactly the actions of a Hero, but business is business… right? You continue on your way after, making even on the debt and go about exploring the world. The developers didn’t want players abusing their freedom though or taking the negative actions forced upon you in the story too seriously. They created the Hero and villain system to monitor players.
Being a Hero and a villain in the game comes with different unique pros and cons. Villains have more cons, but that’s the life of a desperado I suppose. The main point of the ranking system is to determine which ending the player receives. Good players have a more honorable end, where as bad players, you guessed it, have a rather upsetting one. Also to clarify now, I say end as in the end of Arthur’s campaign I don’t count the annoying epilogue. This good bad goes up and down depending on the actions of the player, helping citizens, talking to people and donating money gives a player honor. Robbing trains, people, and murdering gives a player dishonor. For many people, such as myself, we would like to be the hero of the story. That does not mean we do not do things we would certainly not do in real life. For example, I have no interest in robbing a bank and murdering an entire sheriff’s department, but in Red Dead Redemption II that is exactly what I did. Don Gotterbarn had a good analysis on the psychological mindset of such actions in his essay, “The ethics of video games: Mayhem, death and the training of the next generation.” He says that players are aware of the fact they are playing a game and that things we find enjoyable in the game world are not things we would imagine to be fun in real life. (Gotterbarn, 2.1) I agree with this analysis 100%. There is very little guilt to be felt in a game because we rarely face any long term consequences for our actions.
Red Dead takes a unique stance on the ideas of consequences and guilt though, by transforming you into a mortal being once again. You realize 3/4th’s into the story that you are terminally ill with TB. You are going to die no matter what you do. So it is no longer about the man you want to be in the game, but the man you want to be remembered as. An interesting twist. Suddenly the player is given the option to refuse payment for good deeds as Arthur seems aware of his inevitable fate. It is unnerving. You are sad. Your god is dying. Arthur gets skinnier as the game progresses and those he previously wronged by collecting debts from reappear. The Downes family debt story is very interesting, but too long for this essay so I will link their story here. In summary you beat the sick father of the family to death and through him you accidentally contract the TB that eventually kills you.
Arthur’s whole demeanor is changed and his approach to friends and strangers is forever transformed. He is humbler and sympathetic, leading to two scenes that I felt were very emotionally powerful. Start the clip at 3:20 and end at 8:20. Arthur still knows hes a bad man and the player is forced to face those whom he/she has mistreated throughout their play through. This made me feel particularly uneasy. Never before had a game remembered my actions in such detail and forced me to face them again. It changed how I looked at the game and interacted with people. I thought back to West World and Black Mirror and realized the plot of their stories weren’t quite as far off as I had previously thought. It changed how I approached the game and made me reexamine my approach to open world games as a whole. In the end I think the realization of the player created horror is the greatest digital horror of the modern age. We are the villains of almost all our games because we treat procedurally generated characters as objects and never act as we would in the real world. We do so because we assume that all is forgiven once a new save loads.
Works Cited
Gotterbarn, Don. “The Ethics of Video Games: Mayhem, Death, and the Training of the next Generation.” Information Systems Frontiers, vol. 12, no. 4, 2009, pp. 369–377.
Ramachandran, Vilayanur S. The Tell-Tale Brain a Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human. W.W. Norton, 2012.