Words of Love
I wanted Dogmeat to live. During a single fight, at near the same moment every time, he would die. I would reload the game, try again and would inevitably be standing over this corpse.
This went on for seven different tries until I finally decided to load a save that was in a time before I met him. I went into the same area, accomplished the quest and then went back to find him. He never knew the difference.
Wait. Let me start over.
The damn dog kept dying. I didn’t know what to do about it. He just kept jumping in front of the Super Mutant and then getting killed. I had to keep reloading files over and over to save him until I had finally had enough and did the quest without him. After collecting my reward, I went back to get the dog and hoped that it wouldn’t happen again.
No. That didn’t happen.
Was it my fault? Did I train him wrong? Was I using the wrong settings? He just kept dying! I tried to stop it. I was using various weapons and even a grenade that one time. What could I do? Should I go back to an earlier save? Would that fix this? I thought about it and decided to reload again.
***
It’s easy to think it’s right to do that for a AI companion or a virtual pet. I do it all the time. I want to save certain people or creatures and so, armed with my previous experiences playing game, I know that if I just try it enough times I can figure it out. Brute forcing the problem will allow me to get the outcome I want. All I need to do is keep trying.
That is what worries me about the future of relationships in games. Rachel Helps and I have talked about it some already (read: I wrote some soliloquies) over in the comment section of her blog.
What’s to stop the determined player from getting to the sex scene or seducing the guy they want? What’s to stop them from using save states to “game” the relationship? What is to stop some players, to put it more bluntly, from getting exactly what they want when they want it from the characters? And, to throw more questions into this mix, is any of that right? Is it ethical?
I’m single and it influences how I see relationships in games. To me, they often feel cheap. If I can use presents to dissuade any opinion, in what way do I not have complete control over my partners? That one character didn’t like that I murdered everyone? Why, give them some presents! It will make it all better again. As long as I balance my outrageous evil with constant gifts, I’m fine.
Relationships though don’t work like that. At least, in my experiences they don’t.
“Obviously,” I can hear you saying, “you are talking about isolated incidents. Serious players wouldn’t do this.” Oh? Is that so? I was lurking on Twitter last night and I saw some very disturbing comments that I am now going to paraphrase.
“Ugh. I need to get the right romance.”
“Thank god [Y] is dead. I hate him.”
“I arranged it so [Z] would die. I’m ready for the sequel now.”
“I slept with and then broke up with everyone. Gotta play it again.”
To get ready for Mass Effect 3, I was watching some players causally arrange murders and romances for their own amusement. If they are given the power to do this, and they exercise it, is that wrong or are they just playing the game?
If you can pick the equipment, which missions they are on and arrange their lives, in what way are the companions, party members or even just virtual pets not dolls? Sure, it’s reducing these actions to the most base level, but is that it works out to be. And, in case you think I am being pejorative here, I’m not. This might be a good thing.
Those who have been following my blog for a long time know that I really liked Critical Play by Mary Flanagan. In the early chapters of the book, Flanagan talks about doll culture during the Victorian times and how some children would hold mock funerals for their dolls. This gave the children something they lacked in their own life, says Flanagan: control and a sense of closure about death.
For some players, the ability to manipulate characters in a video game is great. They can use the safety of the game to express themselves and perform actions they may not be able to do outside the game. That relationship that never worked out for them can be remade and that resolution can finally come.
Yet, there is a dark side. Choice should bring consequence and video games often lack that permanence. That is what worries me. I’m probably a pessimist at heart, but I start think of players logging hundreds of hours trying to get Lara Croft naked in Tomb Raider and how often I get Google Search result hits for the phrases “demon sex” or “demonic lady naked.”
I begin to wonder if, when we yell for more maturity in games, we aren’t just, on some level, enabling some players to abuse in-game characters.
I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong.
Wait. Let me start over.
Bits of Love
I’ve struggled with what to write about for this month’s Blog of the Round Table. The topic is “Love” and I don’t know what to say about it. What experiences do I have? What can I write? Who do I write about? What occasions have I seen “love”?
The simple answer, for me, is to just shrug my shoulders at it. I don’t know. I’ve always thought that we find echoes of ourselves in the books, movies and games we play. We associate with situations through their metaphors and are able to process, on some level, what we are seeing with what we are feeling. We go along with the ride and experience the catharsis needed to deal with our emotions. If they can go through those troubles, we say to ourselves, then I can go through mine.
We get lost in these virtual worlds. We go on adventures with the virtual only to find the real among the words. This is the power of fiction. It’s what we talk about when we say that a movie, a book or even a game “had a good story”. We become the roles we read and are able to gain, if only for a moment, the necessary distance to see our own life from a different point of view. We look through another person’s eyes and solve their problems. When we come away from it, we are changed.
That’s what I find so hard to talk about. In order to see the echoes, the waves must have first come from me. To hear them return, they must have first left. The sad truth is that I have not been a romantic relationship for just under a decade. I don’t have that. I barely remember what it was like to be “in love”. It’s been so long that it hardly matters most of the time to me.
It’s not that I don’t feel it sometimes. That sudden tightness in the chest. That moment of pause before breathing. I can remember those occasions. I might be standing on a corner waiting to cross a street and then, for a reason I can’t quite figure out, I remember those times. For a moment, I feel that joy and then, as soon as that comes, the pain too. My feet never leave the ground, yet I am taken on a emotional roller coaster over just a few minutes until the light changes.
That should be the same for video games. I should feel that again. But I don’t. It’s cheap to me. As any number of characters in any number of worlds, I have bought and paid for sex. I have charmed my way through a situation. I have been the prostitute and I have been the john. Was that “love”? Was it any approximation of those feelings? I don’t think so.
When I spend time getting to know a character and hear their story through dialogue, is that a relationship? I would say no. To me, to the player, it’s not. To the character I play, it’s important, yes, but the player doesn’t think so. There is no free will for the other character. They didn’t come to me. They didn’t think my character was attractive or smart or funny. I had to go get them. I had to recruit them and then give them presents, go on loyalty missions or complete their quests. I always have control over them.
They “like”, “approve” or even “love” me because I told them to in the first place. And, not unlike Neo in the Matrix, I find it hard to turn off the programmer part of my mind and not see the feedback loops. I isolate the if/else branching and begin to solve the problem. If I want this story or these attributes, I plot in my head, then I need for this person to be happy, this person to be sad and I need to avoid that person.
That’s not love. It’s problem solving. It’s code. Where is their choice? If I own them, they are not unlike dolls. I can dress them up, direct their lives and tell stories with them. They are variables in an equation. Plug in the correct series of inputs and I can watch them act it out.
That is also what scares me about trying to make relationships more “real” in video games. I would like to see better writing, more detailed worlds or even just really solid stories for me to play, sure, but I cannot see a way to escape the agency problem without heartbreak. If I invest time into getting to know a character, do I want them to leave me? Do I want to get rejected? If, because of how I look or act in a game, they should leave, would I go back? Is that “love”?
I don’t feel like I have a good answer for this. Then again, maybe that’s the point. We are always wondering about our output. Was what I said understood? Did I state that correctly? Does he like me? Does she like me? We try to match up the input to get the situations we want in life.
Video games characters can be so very limited at time. They are just little bits of life wrapped up in code. But maybe we are like that too. Maybe we are all just waiting for the right person to come along and ask us to go on an adventure with them.
I do things.
Hello. I'm Dan. I write things.
Contact:
dan.cox [at] videlais.com
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Nightmare Mode.
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The School of Athens Podcast (Site)
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