DIG 215 (Spring 2019)
I remixed the fairytale The 3 Little Pigs and made it into a detective/mystery game call Three Little Piggies. In the game, you play Harry Hoot, an aging detective who tries to solve the mysterious string of events that start happening on the farm. You only will have so many hours to solve the case before the trail goes cold. Also, be sure you choose your actions wisely, as the choices you make will determine the outcome of your playthrough. Good luck!
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fYwbOmvCH9AV8Zn1xdan7IsPQAr5X1SLWR9GoaIVQdI/edit
Well here we are at the end of all things.
As I read through my posts I noticed more than anything that I am very critical and skeptical of everything that we have read. My posts question the legitimacy of statements and or character shifts authors make in their characters. I seem to look to critique the pieces rather than synthesize them. My posts often lead me to question aspects of the reading or my own analysis. This need to question may stem from the fact that I am quite critical of movies and books when I watch/read them. Rarely do I dole out praise for things without following up with a but, or except. Another random thing I noticed is that I also use the line or lines similar to, “left me to question,” a lot.
I do seem to focus heavily on perspective as well. I try to figure out why characters or readers feel certain ways about events. In my second post I write pretty exclusively about perspective. In my first post I also seem to focus on why Mary’s parents behaved the way they did. I try to name counter examples to possible rationals and really seem to dig myself into the motivation behind the pieces. Even in my last post I try to refute the general argument that is made about waste. I felt as though the authors perspective limited the importance of creativity. Though now I don’t stand strongly by this argument I find it interesting that I felt the need to make an argument out of the post. Perhaps that’s just my writing style or personality.
I didn’t see a huge shift in my strategy for analysis over the past 15 weeks. I seem to keep a similar voice and technique. I think this is really just the style I write in when writing non-hyper academic pieces. I like to use a conversational voice. That voice appeared in my papers as well. In my opinion it’s a far more entertaining way to write and read because it sounds real.
In conclusion, I am really surprised at how critical I am about all the pieces. Hopefully that isn’t how I sound in class and in life outside class! I am not a negative guy I suppose I just like to question things and my history background has turned me into more of a skeptic than a believer. I really did enjoy the readings I must just default to critiques subconsciously when I read.
I enjoyed this article because it really does force you to think about where things go after you throw them out and or return them. iPhones don’t just dissolve in landfills, ships don’t sail forever after you step off them, and people make mistakes. Our minds often work in the mentality of out of site to of mind. In reality the things we create do go to a final resting place, either to be rebuilt, taken apart or destroyed. All of this I agree with and Jackson does make a convincing argument for the significance of repair to human existence
The question I was left with was, at what point does repairing becoming recreating. I know that Jackson says that repairs lead to innovation and I agree that this is true, but at what point does a repair cause an object to lose its character as a singular entity and transform into something entirely new.
The definition of repair is “fix or mend (a thing suffering from damage or a fault).” Taping over holes in a hose with duct tape is a repair, stripped a boat for parts isn’t. That ship as an entity is gone, each piece now has its own role in the modern economy. I think back to when I use to play with legos. I would create the pre-designed structures and spaceships and I’d set them aside to play with later. My brothers and I would all then play with our various lego creations together. Meaning that our creations would inevitably break into hundreds of unrecognizable pieces. We were then left with a choice, recreate the broken ship from memory (no child keeps the box and or directions after a lego creation is built), or take the parts and create something totally new.
Whenever we would try to recreate the ship something would inevitably go awry. It would be a dilapidated, misshapen shadow of its once self. Yet this was ok. It had taken on a new form. We did not pretend it was the same spaceship because it wasn’t that one had broken and become this new thing. Sometimes that new thing was even better than the first, because I didn’t try to repair it, instead I decided to recreate it.
Jackson recognized the importance of restructuring broken systems and objects, but he believes that these actions still fit under the umbrella of repair. I just feel his definition was a little too broad and by making everything seem like a repair of whatever similar invention came before it Jackson unintentionally undermines the importance of mistakes in the process of human creativity.
Thoughts and Prayers
The inspiration behind the twine game Thoughts and Prayers came in the wake of the New Zealand Mosque shooting. Too often people turn to social media to try and create “change” or empathize with those who suffered from tragedy. These people, especially those with large followings always say the same thing when something happens. “My thoughts and prayers are with those in (fill with national tragedy).” What do these posts really do though? My theory is that they are a way for us to feel included. Those that posts these things don’t really care about fixing or preventing whatever happened, but they want people to know we are thinking about it. They also know that if they say nothing they will appear ignorant or out of touch. So they sent their halfhearted, “thoughts and prayers.” Those thoughts of course go nowhere, and due to the frequency of these atrocities they often fall on deaf ears. I wanted to show the triviality of these post. I struggled with how to properly do so, and I decided that the best way to show how worthless they are was to turn them into currency.
In Thoughts and Prayers, you are a bot reprogrammed to collect as many of these T+P (Thoughts and Prayers) posts as you can without getting caught or running out of time. I wanted the player to want to win, despite what the implications of winning entailed. The two most important aspects of the game for me were that the player felt immersed in winning, and that they saw the triviality of T+P posts.
I drew inspiration for my game from JFK: Reloaded. In this FPS the player takes on the role of Lee Harvey Oswald, on the fateful day he assassinated JFK. You see through the scope of Oswald’s rifle and do your best to line up your shots with JFK and those in the motorcade’s heads. The game itself is pretty difficult to do properly and the player quickly finds themselves trying to shoot the president over and over as they attempt to get a higher score. The harder they try the more they forget that they are reenacting an actual national tragedy through the lens of the man who committed it. Seeing as my game lacked the visuals or mechanics of JFK: ReloadedI needed a way to transform text into an immersive experience. I did this through satirical writing. The narrator is your creator, and only friend. He encourages you and jokes around with you while you commit these atrocities. In practice the narrator was able to pull out smiles from players as they either enjoyed the catchphrases or paradoxical nature of the dialog compared to the work being done. Either way the player was successfully distracted from their morality.
I also looked towards the reading we did in class on trolls, specifically those that troll or make fun of death and or the deceased. This is not a new form of humor as dark humor has been around for centuries[1], but the disrespectful way we address tell our jokes is something unique to our time.[2]I wanted to find a way to talk about tragedy without playing into this trolling level of disrespect. I didn’t want to make things too specific or offensive so I had to be careful with my word choice, a topic I will discuss in the next paragraph. I knew that if I went too radical with my structure then the message would be completely lost. In many ways I used the examples and readings from class as a baseline of things to avoid. This attempt to avoid offense lead me to write the disclaimer page that the game opens with.
With the question of morality being addressed and the confines of my linguistic limitations established I needed a way to ensure that my societal message came across properly. The point system did work to trivialize the posts, but it alone didn’t make a strong enough statement. I again turned to satire and tried to turn real events into ‘game talk’ calling school attacks, “standard” and movie theatre attacks, “American classics.” Though they were still called attacks, they were also used in tandem with works typically associated with good events, such as “fantastic” and “opportunity.” These adjectives help to show the commonality of these tragedies and the absurdity that goes along with their regular occurrence. Nothing you do in this game is really that far-fetched. With the Nuke mission being the only exception. In fact, you’re rewarded for choosing the more dangerous routes outside of just the recognizable ones. The narrator will encourage you to make bold decisions and will respond positively to successful attacks. This was done ironically, but also as a way to give the player positive reinforcement and encourage further play.
Outside of the gameplay the game was inspired by a recent trend of celebrities and politicians on social media. It seems that after every tragedy or disaster there is an outpouring of tweets and Facebook posts that offer up digital “thoughts and prayers” to those who have or are suffering. The only thing I can think of when I see these posts are how little effort they take. A celebrity was probably drinking their coffee and reading their newsfeed when they heard about whatever event that occurred. They then switched over to their account and tweeted out, “my thoughts prayers are with the people of _____.” After that they likely just went back to their news feed and continue scrolling. It is now an expectation for public figures to do this, so much so that when they don’t say anything they make more news than when they do. One question I has was, what is the difference between sending out a tweet and internalizing an event? The conclusion I came to was that in the grand scheme of things there isn’t really much of a difference. So then why do we do it?
Part of it is the world we live in. This harks back to a discussion we had in class several weeks ago now, where we discussed if we were now in a new age of death. In some ways we are, because we are desensitized to it. We came to a consensus in class that our constant exposure to death has made it so we can’t live a life of constant empathetic misery so we have to block it out. Never before have we been so consistently exposed to death as we are now. Mass shootings and natural disasters gain national attention for no more than a week before the public loses interest. All that was done and all that is left behind are the tweets of sympathy and condolences. Nothing changes because we simply are not motivated by these events anymore. Why is that though? According to an article by TIME magazine it is because the frequency in which these events occur triggers a mental block in our brains that prevents us from being consumed by them.[3]
The TIME article opens with a very powerful line that I found very motivating while I was working on my project.
“It took only 23 days for the U.S. to witness its
11th school shooting of the year, during which a
Marshall County High School student killed two
of his classmates and wounded more than a dozen others.
The Jan. 23 assault, in Benton, Kentucky, was
the second shooting of the week. It was only a Tuesday.”[4]
Mass shootings, terrorist’s attacks and disasters have integrated themselves into our everyday lives. If you watch the news every night you are berated with stories of atrocities, that either occurred or were prevented. The sheer exposure has made it so, “we have absolutely become numb to these kinds of shootings.”[5]These events are hard to grasp by themselves, the psychology of it is often too complex to understand even when the appropriate amount of time is allowed. Dr. Bruce Harry, spoke to TIME magazine about this question stating, “Because these things are so overwhelming, our central nervous system basically shuts down past a point.”[6]We push things out of our mind because we cannot mentally come to grasps with them. That still bears the question, why do we wish people our thoughts and prayers if we ourselves cannot even comprehend what has happened?
The easiest answer is that we as human are empathetic, social beings and when we see grieving we feel the need to respond. Social media is the most convenient platform do this through, especially when the tragedy occurs on the other side of the country or even world. Clearly thoughts and prayers aren’t working though, so why do we still send them even though they clearly fall upon deaf ears? I hypothesize that public figures in particular send these messages to stay relevant and appear up-to-date. A very interesting study was done by several psychologists here in the US about the fear of missing out on social media. Nearly 70% of adults admit to feeling fears of missing out in their daily lives.[7]Social media has increased the “FOMO” levels in adults exponentially as there is now an endless, constantly changing, supply of new information that we are exposed to.[8]Never before has humanity been so connected. The study found that irritability and anxiety around FOMO increased with social media exposure.[9]People felt the need to know what others were talking about, as well as the need to ensure that others knew that they knew what they were talking about. This creates a competition and hierarchy of sorts, who knows and who doesn’t. In a sense it also asked the question of, who cares and who doesn’t. This can, in part, explain why public figures feel the need to write a message on social media instead of taking action. They care less about the event itself and more about people’s opinion towards them in response to the event.
I am always left frustrated by responses to these atrocities as it is never about the victims. A sentiment that my classmates share based off the subjects they chose for their Haunted Media Projects. The responses also never lead to any real change, just more talk that gets overlooked within weeks of making headlines. The New Zealand shooting really pushed me to make this game because the call for change after the attack was instant and effective. People sent thoughts and prayers as they always do, but more importantly the government and people of New Zealand reacted and created new regulations on guns. It made all the tweets that Americans send out seem even more worthless. I even include a note about the New Zealand shooting at the end of the game. I felt as though it served as the perfect example for how America should’ve been reacting to these tragedies all along and helps to solidify the primary messages of my game. With all this in mind I created Thoughts and Prayers.
Bibliography:
Abel, Jessica. “Scial Media and the Fear of Missing Out: Scale and Development and Assessment. Journal of Business & Economics Research, Vol. 14 no. 1, 2016.
Ducharme, Jamie.Here’s Why You Can Shut Out the Shock of Mass Shootings.TIME Magazine, NY, 2018
Phillips, Whitney. “LOLing at Tragedy: Facebook Trolls, Memorial Pages and Resistance to Grief Online.” First Monday, Vol. 16 no. 12, 2011.
Footnotes:
[1]Jesters in a King’s Court often held the job of telling the King news that no one else dared to deliver. They would do so in a humorous way to lighten the news and hopefully spare themselves from any harm. One famous instance of this was in 1340 when a French fleet was destroyed by the English. The Jester of the French King’s court told him the English sailors, “Didn’t even have the guts to hump into the water like our brave French.”
[2]Phillips, Whitney. “LOLing at Tragedy: Facebook Trolls, Memorial Pages and Resistance to Grief Online.” First Monday, Vol. 16 no. 12, 2011
[3]Ducharme, Jamie. Here’s Why You Can Shut Out the Shock of Mass Shootings.TIME Magazine, NY.
[7]Abel, Jessica. “Social Media and the Fear of Missing Out: Scale and Development and Assessment. Journal of Business & Economics Research, Vol. 14 no. 1, 2016. 33.
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.
One point that really stuck with me from this article is the idea about hypermediacy. Transforming the viewpoint and visual structure in which a story is shown and told really transforms how it is perceived. For example, look at 5 Nights at Freddy’s. The player controls their own viewpoint the entire time. They start in an office and they read a note telling them to keep an eye on the animatronics because strange things happen at night. Creepy, the player is already nervous. To add on to this nervousness it is also very dark and the game is entirely first person. The player can rotate between different rooms by selecting various security cameras in those rooms. When they are viewing a room any animatronic in said room is unable to move. When the player isn’t watching they are slowly progressing towards the player’s office. Once they reach the office the player can use some of his/her’s limited power supply to light up the hallways on either side of them to check for the monsters, and if the monster is there they can use even more power to shut the door temporarily on them.
Here is a video of someone playing the game, a little corny but it gets the point of the game across well. This forced perspective and constant feeling of uneasiness is a classic horror trope. Videogames allow this trope to be expanded upon though because they give control back to the player. No longer can you yell at the TV for the clueless horror victim to, “JUST TURN AROUND!” because now you are that clueless horror victim. As mentioned in the article and as seen in the game survival aspects make your experience harder. Having unlimited power would make it so the doors could always be shut around you and the threat therefore non-existant. This would ruin the suspense and take away from the constant sense of impending animatronic fluffy animal doom that the player is suppose to feel.
Just to preface this, I did read the end of the book.
Throughout my reading of A Head Full of Ghosts I kept trying to decide if the parents were truly invested in Majorie’s well being or if all this was just a front to save a failing family. From the beginning of Mary’s problems her mother and father play rather withdrawn and emotionally fragile roles. They never seem to send her to any kind of practical medical practitioner nor do they seem to operate in a way that put her needs first.
The father’s unconvincingly quick transition back into Catholicism can be chalked up to fear or to his will to make the television show work. Either way his connection to the faith seems flimsy at best. Even Mary can detect the lackluster-ness of his prayers and actions. During the exorcism he puts the pain of his daughter second to the words of men that he pretends to know. Even with his connection, or lack there of, to Christianity aside Mary’s father is a very complicated man. We learn a lot about his possible motivations in chapter 25 when Majorie has Mary read some more stories. These stories are all about the “breadwinners” of the household and how the loss of that status drove them mad in some way. I believe many of us have assumed that Mary’s father’s motivation to invite the camera crews into his house were largely monetarily based. He even says that in one of the earlier chapters when he hails the TV show as the thing that will save the family. In reality it breaks it apart beyond repair. He is a fragile man and I do believe that his fragility likely stems from his inability to hold work and provide for his family. He then imposes this self-consciousness and weakness upon his family, namely Marjorie.
The Mother is one of the most disappointing characters in the entire book I believe. She sees all that her husband is doing wrong and even visibly shows disapproval, but never fully puts a stop to it. Unlike her husband I believe that her heart is in the right place and that her desperation comes not from a projection of self-centered beliefs, but rather from the fear of harm befalling her child. As any good parent she does not want to see Marjorie in pain and she does do what she can to be compassionate and caring. What is frustrating as a reader is that she is as complacent as she is loving. It is hard to judge her as her pain is clear and her confusion is even more so. Her husband has embraced a path which she does not agree with, as seen in many cases especially during the exorcism when she does not participate, and yet she is too afraid and confused to offer up any solutions to counter him. Her desperation combined with his desperation lead to the sad ending of the story and families’ lives.
The actions of Marjorie’s parents are that of desperation. They both want to save her, and, in the case of her father, save themselves. Her dad feels as though he has failed his family and in this book we see his final attempts to fix his shortcomings. Her mother is terrified of what is happening to Marjorie, reasonably so, but her fear drives her to accept irrational thought. In the end both parent’s desperation leads to their joint suicide and joint murder of their child. An act which I personally find unforgivable.