Precarious Characters: When is an In-game Character Grievable?

By Zeru H

An Affect Theory of Grief in Video Games

Introduction

In the Grand Theft Auto series, players often drive around recklessly and run over innocent pedestrians or simply shoot up a crowd just for fun. In the Call of Duty series, players play as imperial invaders and kill enemy soldiers on their own land defending their homeland. In the Age of Empires series or any other real-time strategy games, the lives of the soldiers are often more expendable than a building. Even in The Sims, some players take great pleasure in discovering new ways of murdering the sims. Killing, without a doubt, is one of the oldest traditions in video games. Most of the time, players feel no remorse taking a life in a video game. But, if taking a life IRL is for most people something which is of great mental challenge and trauma, how could it be done so easily in video games? 

To begin our inquiry into this topic, it is interesting to point out how more and more recent video games are experimenting with the theme and mechanics of non-violence. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain encourages non-lethal approaches. The first installation of the Watch Dogs series has a reputation meter based on how many lives the player takes or saves. RimWorld features a psychology simulator where characters react to deaths and losses emergently. Undertale plays with the possibility of a zero-kill playstyle. This War of Mine, above all, revolves around the fragility of life – not only of the self, the player characters but also of the Other, the NPCs. It thus seems that the idea of life carries great weight in contemporary video games. Indeed, it could be said that the notion of life is a central theme through which narrative, affective, and moral meanings are conveyed.

However, if life signifies an array of narrative, affective, and moral importance, then how does it, in terms of these fronts, appear so differently in video games where life seems to bear little worth and in video games where life weighs greatly? What notion may underlie such differentials?

Judith Butler coins and investigates the neologism grievability in Precarious Life (2004) and Frames of War (2009). The central question, for Butler, is what life counts as life? What criteria or circumstances may render a life as incapable of being mourned, grieved, or even sympathized with? Written in the shadows of the 9/11 attack, the war on terror that immediately followed, and the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands, Butler interrogates the media landscape where some lost lives – usually white, family-oriented heterosexual Americans with Anglophone names – invoked grief, while those of victims in the Middle East – even worse, “Arabs” or “Muslims” – that died of American bombings and Israeli occupations remained nameless, excluded from the realm of grief and mourning. It is to this difference in the capacity for a life to be affectively grieved that Judith Butler designates the term grievability.

Indeed, are we not dealing with a similar problem in video games? When is the life of an in-game character grievable? This question should interest many: game designers who want to convey meanings through the theme of life or play with violence and non-violence, scholars who want to understand the cultural significance of the theme of life in video games, and players who are puzzled by their own psychology when playing video games. There could be many answers to this question, and I do not attempt to exhaust it. As Judith Butler (2009, p. 53) put it, “normative frameworks establish in advance what kind of life will be a life worth living, what life will be a life worth preserving, and what life will become worthy of being mourned.” Parallel to the real world where normative frameworks are often regulated by the actual mechanics of capitalism – laws, censorships, economic incentives, etc. – video games, we may contend, are also worlds whose normative frameworks are regulated by their actual mechanics – game mechanics.  Though many factors may contribute to the “normative frameworks'' of a video game – audio-visual representation, cultural and social contexts, etc. – I contend that it is the mechanics of a video game, a feature most exclusive to its medium, that hold the greatest sway over the “normative frameworks” of a video game. Therefore, this essay will attempt to answer the following question: how do game mechanics, on an affective level, regulate the grievability of in-game characters? There is no single theory that exhausts this problem, but I will attempt to provide a few lenses through which a new way of thinking may be enabled. To this end, I will offer the following three insights. First, life can only be grieved if it transforms the game and the player mechanically in the gameplay. Second, when player characters are as vulnerable as non-player characters, a shared grievability may emerge out of the shared precarity. Third, in order for the life of a character to be grieved, it should be able to be seen as an end in itself mechanically; that is, it should converge with the win/lose conditions of the game. 

Theory

Transformation

If we hold the premise that game mechanics is the primary factor in determining the “normative frameworks” of a video game, thereby regulating the grievability of characters, we are naturally led to investigating the relations between the mechanical functions of a character and its grievability. Then, our first hypothesis would be that a character gains grievability when its life and death matter to the game and the player mechanically. That is, a character’s life is grievable when its loss alters, transforms the course of gameplay, qualitatively or quantitatively. 

Surprisingly, Judith Butler’s tentative theory of grievability in regard to real life coincides with our gaming intuition: 

“Perhaps…one mourns when one accepts that by the loss one undergoes one will be changed, possibly forever. Perhaps mourning has to do with agreeing to undergo a transformation (perhaps one should say submitting to a transformation) the full result of which one cannot know in advance. There is losing, as we know, but there is also the transformative effect of loss, and this latter cannot be charted or planned” (Butler, 2004).

For Butler, grief occurs at the moment when an unexpected loss transforms one’s life. A keyword should be identified here: transformation. Indeed, sorrow erupts when we lose lives that are so closely linked to our own lives that their passing would fundamentally alter the course of our own lives. Furthermore, we may identify in transformation the qualities of unexpectedness, permanence, and ambiguity. Indeed, such a loss cannot be expected and planned, because otherwise, wouldn’t it be more of a sacrifice than a loss? A transformation capable of grief cannot be temporary either, for there is nothing to grieve if we could bring the dead back to life. Lastly, the ambiguity of the consequences of loss raises one of the most heart-wrenching questions in the human condition: what life could we be living now if she were here?

Permanence and ambiguity have been almost truisms in game design theory. There is no need to cite any particular author here because they all talk about it, and everybody knows Sid Meier’s catechism “a game is a series of interesting decisions.” Indeed, it has too often been said that the meaning of a game arises from the permanence and ambiguity of the choices the player is given. But grief is and cannot be a decision, at least not a free decision. If I were to grieve the death of someone, I would simply choose not to kill them or not let them die. It is precisely the lack of this option that enables grief. Therefore, it is the unexpectedness – the impossibility to plan and choose – that is most characteristic of grief.

To illustrate the importance of transformation and its three qualities – unexpectedness, permanence, and ambivalence – take RimWorld as a paradigm. In RimWorld, a space-colony simulator where the player leads a handful of uniquely procedurally generated characters to survival, the player usually has very limited manpower, and tasks necessary for the colony’s survival – farming, hunting, fighting, constructing, etc. – require characters to work on them. Every player character’s death would greatly diminish the colony’s ability to survive, hence its potential for transformation. More importantly, the mechanics of death in RimWorld has features of unexpectedness, permanence, and ambivalence. To create unexpectedness, RimWorld employs randomness everywhere: in its character generation, map generation, damage calculation, when an invasion comes, when a natural disaster happens, etc. It is impossible to foresee the fate of a character, rendering life fragile. For permanence, it features and recommends the ironman mode, which only allows for the most recent save file and frequently autosaves, making it impossible to revert a death. Ambivalence is rooted in the psychology simulator: characters are connected to one another through their interactions in the colony; they help, befriend, fall in love with, or dislike, hate, even fight one another, and every interpersonal interaction is recorded in their bio. These psychological experiences also influence their ability to work. Not only is it impossible to foresee the death of a character, but also it is difficult to calculate the consequences of the death of a character. Here, RimWorld renders its characters grievable by offering a system of procedural generation that amplifies death’s capacity for transformation and its three qualities.

To summarize, a character is rendered grievable when the life and death of them have transformative effects on the game and the player, which is unplanned, permanent, and ambivalent.  

Precarious Characters

If it is true that in RimWorld, player-controlled characters are often grievable, it is nonetheless less certain that the same goes for the non-player-controlled characters. Are NPCs ever grievable? If so, when and how? However, to ask these questions is already to presuppose a baseline where NPCs are by default ungrievable. If the pedestrians in Grand Theft Auto are portrayed as human lives, the proper questions to ask, then, is, by what mechanisms are we denied a possibility of sympathy? By what mechanisms are they denied grievability?

Coming from the Hegelian tradition, Judith Butler offers two Hegelian terms with which grievability can be better theorized: apprehension and recognition. “’Recognition’ is the stronger term,” whereas, “’Apprehension’ is less precise, since it can imply marking, registering, acknowledging without full recognition” (Butler, 2009, p. 4). Then, it follows that for a life to be grievable, it must be recognized. A life may be apprehended as merely living, but not all lives are recognized fully as life, with all their auras that affectively move us. What conditions, then, must be presupposed for a life to be recognized? Insofar as recognition “is an act or practice taken by at least two subjects, and which, as the Hegelian frame would suggest, constitutes a reciprocal action” (Butler, 2009, p. 6), there must be a shared human condition between the One and the Other – precariousness. Without a shared precariousness – if the precariousness of the Other is only foreign and alien to the One – then One cannot recognize the Other, for they are distinctly different beings. Then, it follows that if one is unbound by the finitude of life – immortal, in one way or another – then the Other, no matter how precarious, in relation to the One, is ungrievable.

Indeed, we may see the differentials in terms of grievability between characters that are recognized and those that are merely apprehended. In the choose-your-own-adventure game Detroit: Become Human, the player has three android characters to play as: Connor, Kara, and Markus. Each character has a unique storyline where they meet and form relationships with NPCs. Similar to RimWorld, Detroit, too, emphasizes “permadeath.” Although the player is allowed to load previous save files, the game strongly discourages it, especially in the first playthrough. The player characters are vulnerable and can be easily killed. A few clumsy executions of quick action events or a bad life decision may kill a player character. In my first playthrough, I lost Kara in a police raid because I chose to keep running instead of playing dead, and she was shot dead and remained dead until my second playthrough (the irony of “permadeath”?). I was devastated upon losing her – I even felt guilty. Indeed, the player characters in Detroit are grievable, perhaps because we, the players, recognize our own precariousness when we recognize their precariousness. Furthermore, they may be extensions of ourselves: when we refer to the in-game actions done by our characters, do we not speak in first person? I speak of the “I” who kept running and was shot dead, not the third-person Kara. The precariousness of the player character, indeed, enables their grievability. However, what matters more is that it also enables the grievability of the NPCs. Before I lost Kara, Kara lost her husband, Luther, because the police came to their house to search for deviant androids, and I failed to cover up our traces (again, a confusion of pronouns). And Luther was gone, again, until I started my second playthrough. The fact that he was an NPC did not diminish his grievability – I was devastated upon losing him. Perhaps, I, the player, could recognize Luther as a life proper because I could recognize the precariousness that my own character, Kara, shares with myself, and through the eyes of Kara, I could recognize Luther’s precariousness that he shares with Kara. Would Luther’s death be as grievable if Kara could simply respawn? I doubt. To summarize, Detroit: Become Human offers an example where the reciprocal act of recognition of precariousness between player characters and non-player characters enables grievability for both.

Conversely, without the reciprocal recognition of precariousness, what is left is mere apprehension, which does not amount to grievability. For example, the Watch Dogs series has attempted to play with the idea of non-violence, but I argue that it fails to render its characters, player or non-player, grievable, because it has only achieved apprehension. Its first installation has a reputation meter that indicates the public opinion towards the protagonist, a hacker-vigilante named Aiden Pearce. If you kill civilians or policemen, your reputation goes down. If you stop crimes, preferably in a non-lethal fashion, you gain reputation. When your reputation is high, pedestrians would commend you and take photos of you; conversely, they would call the police on you. The game wants the player to feel like a non-violent guardian of Chicago, but one cannot grieve the death of a pedestrian in it. First, their life and death have too little effect mechanically. Second, the player character is, in fact, immortal. He may be brought back to life regardless of how many times he has been shot. He does not share any precariousness with the NPCs, and therefore cannot recognize them, in the Hegelian sense. It for this reason that we say, “their lives aren’t real.” Indeed, their lives can still be apprehended – “marking, registering, acknowledging without full recognition” – and therefore the player feels morally compelled not to kill them for fun, as opposed to the normative framework of the GTA series where pedestrians can be shot for fun. Nonetheless, they are not grievable. 

The Instrumentalization of Life

Lastly, I want to make a distinction between life as mere means and life as ends in themselves. Judith Butler argues that the reason why some lives killed in the Israel-Palestine conflicts are ungrievable is that some were already considered dead before they were killed – their lives were rendered as mere instruments. For example, Israeli propaganda justifies their killings of Palestinian civilians with the claim that the civilians themselves are used as instruments of war – human shields, cover-ups for guerrilla warfare, etc. – by Palestinian forces. A life instrumentalized is a life that is already lost and, therefore, cannot be killed again. If a life cannot be killed, then its death evokes no grief. 

To further extrapolate Butler’s provocation, let us recall Kant’s second formulation of the categorical imperative: “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end” (Kant, 1785). Kantian ethics requires that we treat other human beings as ends in themselves, not mere means. However, in a sense, if other persons demand a moral duty of us to treat them as ends in themselves, not mere means, then, perhaps, only those that can be treated as ends may qualify for personhood. This, I believe, offers a key insight into the way grievability functions in video games, and I will offer a reading of two video games to illustrate this point.

11 Bit Studios is famous for two games: This War of Mine and Frostpunk. The former, on the one hand, features an anti-war theme and offers a heart-wrenching experience where the life and death of each character, player-owned or non-player-controlled, emotionally moves the player. On the other hand, the latter, Frostpunk, is a management-simulation strategy game where the player manages a town of survivors of the new ice age. It is often criticized for its theme, which discusses the balance between survival and humanitarian values. In the game, the player has to make choices between, for instance, forced child labor for extra coals or running out of coal to power the heater, which is the lose condition of the game. Though much of the criticism is ideologically charged – the developers are not shy about their liberal values – I think what mainly differentiates Frostpunk from This War of Mine is the lack of grievability of its characters because the latter is popular among gamers despite expressing the same values, whereas the former is hated on, the reason for which is often “the values feel forced.” This interesting cultural phenomenon, I think, can be addressed by applying the concept of grievability with regard to life as ends. 

In TWOM, the win/lose condition cannot be separated from the player characters. Each character has their own ending, and the main gameplay is about the conditions and abilities of each character. The characters are not mere means to win the game. Their fates are the win condition of the game. Therefore, the player can register (even recognize) the characters as grievable lives. However, in Frostpunk, the characters are detached from the win condition. You can win the game at the cost of laboring tens of people to death because they are mere instruments. The characters in Frostpunk are dehumanized and rendered mere instruments by its mechanics, in particular, the detachment of characters’ lives from win/lose conditions. It is for this reason many players felt “forced” when the game wants them to contemplate the theme that what is left of humanity when survival has sacrificed all its values – there is no recognizable personhood, to begin with. Indeed, is this not a common tactic of totalitarianism? When the state declares itself to be the end of the people, not the people as the end of the state, state-sanctioned violence and negligence for the weak become acceptable – you have outlived your usefulness! To sum up, I infer from the difference between the cultural perceptions of Frostpunk and This War of Mine that characters’ lives are more grievable when they themselves are part of the win/lose conditions of the game.

Conclusion

It is difficult to give an all-encompassing affect theory for grief in video games. However, in this essay, I have introduced the concept of grievability by drawing on Judith Butler to describe the conditions under which the player may feel grief towards the death of a character in video games. Then, I have outlined three heuristics for the workings of grievability. First, life can only be grieved if it transforms the game and the player mechanically in the gameplay. Second, when player characters are as vulnerable as non-player characters, a shared grievability may emerge out of the shared precarity. Third, in order for the life of a character to be grieved, it should be able to be seen as an end in itself mechanically; that is, it should converge with the win/lose conditions of the game. These insights are neither exhaustive nor immune to counterexamples, but I hope they enable and invite more discussions about this topic.

Bibliography

11 Bit Studios. (2014). This War of Mine.

11 Bit Studios. (2018). Frostpunk.

Butler, J. (2004). Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso.

Butler, J. (2009). Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? Verso.

Kant, I. (1785). Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals. 

Quantic Dream. (2018). Detroit: Become Human.