Editor’s note: The loss of a beloved member of his family has Travis questioning how video games treat death. As someone who has also recently lost a grandparent, I’m truly sorry for your loss, Travis. The treatment of death in games and other media has been on my mind a great deal as well — especially as I was killing hundreds of enemies while exploring the dungeons of Torchlight between the day my Grandma died and her funeral four days later. -Jason
Like the rest of the Internet, I read Aaron Thomas’s piece on death and the relative triviality of a hobby like gaming. The piece hit me (and judging by the comments, many others) pretty close to home.
I’ve been thinking about the relationship of death and games: just as video games are trivial in the face of death, games almost universally trivialize death. I read a pretty excellent review of Uncharted 2 recently that contemplated the difference in Drake’s attitude toward lethal force from the intro level to the rest of the game. In the past I’d have reacted tepidly to both of these posts — if I reacted at all.
In September, I got a call that my grandfather was suffering from two types of cancer and was admitted into an intensive-care unit for treatment. He’d broken his leg and, during x-rays, the medical team discovered a tumor on his femur. Further scans showed smaller tumors on his brain. I was shocked; Granddad had been in good health my whole life.
The night before my wife and I made the trip up to Kentucky (the ancestral home of Team McReynolds) for a visit, I stayed up late to play Halo 3: ODST. The stress and fear that I’d been experiencing melted away as I gave the Covenant their walking papers out of New Mombasa. To escape my fear of death, I proceeded to deal it out wholesale on my Xbox.
I couldn’t tell you why I didn’t make the connection between virtual death and the potential real thing. It might have been that I was watching aliens die rather than humans, or maybe I’m so familiar with the treatment of killing in games that it has an entirely separate meaning to me.
In any case, the next day I made my way up to Paducah, KY, and was thrilled to see that Granddad was still very much himself. We talked for a couple of hours. I showed him the pictures of my recent trip to Japan, and I laughed politely at his complete misconception of Japanese people. He pressured Stac and I on the great-grandchildren issue again. It was a normal visit — only the venue had changed. The doctor said treatment was an option and that most of the cancer could be removed.
I went home after my weekend-long visit relieved.
To make a long story at least somewhat shorter, two weeks later on September 21, 2009, my Granddad passed away. In spite of the optimistic news from the doctors, the cancer was just too much. The vibrant man that I sat before only 14 days prior was gone.
I got the news that morning the moment I arrived at my desk. Feelings of regret joined forces with grief and made me sick inside. I could’ve been around more, could’ve spent less time at the office and with the video games — and spent more time with my family. Stac and I packed in a hurry, picked up my sister, and drove through flood waters to get back up to Kentucky.
We arrived hungry, tired, and stressed. Before bed, I decided to get in a little DS time with The World Ends with You, a title that I’d been replaying since visiting the real Shibuya. Settling into a minigrindfest, I paid little mind to Neku’s comments at the start of each battle. Usually he says something like “You’re good as gone,” but around my third fight, he and Shiki piped up with “Are you ready to die? Then die!”
The words hit me like a ton of bricks. There I was, trying to escape what was going on around me, and instead I came away with a frightening reminder of what had just happened. What’s really crazy about it is that The World Ends with You is about a couple of anime kids beating up on cartoonish stuffed animal-esque enemies. The grind aspect of the game has about as much to do with human mortality as the Care Bears, but the damage was done. I couldn’t get that phrase, the sound of it emanating from tinny, shrill DS speakers, out of my head.
“Are you ready to die? Then die!”
At the funeral, the pastor was kind enough to address this very question. He had met with Granddad several times over the previous weeks — even if this wasn’t his time it was an eventuality he had to start planning for. The pastor said Granddad mentioned that he’d lead a wonderful life, that he loved his family very much, and was ready should this be his time. In short, he was ready to die. Then he died.
Before laying him to rest, his other grandkids and I got some Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups to place in his casket. Granddad loved these things and even went so far as to sneak a bag into the hospital. The packaging advertised a contest in which several people could win up to $25,000. I joked with everyone that we were probably burying $125,000 down there along with the candy. I was beginning to cope.
Upon returning to Atlanta I shelved The World Ends with You. I kept playing other games; I just couldn’t bear getting that specific reminder stuck in my head again. The following Monday, I discovered that over the weekend a coworker was in a car accident and didn’t pull through. Phil was a great guy — great to work with, a perennial at DragonCon, and a huge comic/game nerd. Phil was in his early 30s.
After hearing the news, all I could think about was Neku and Shiki and that damn throwaway “bark” the developers put in on a whim. Just another phrase to signify the start of a battle. “This won’t be hard” never bothered me, but the cavalier attitude toward death in having a 14-year-old ask a bunch of teddy bears if they’re ready to die stuck in my conscience.
I’ve since been recovering from the worst September of my life and am starting to consider mortality more, both in the real world and in television, movies, and games. Death is a part of life and therefore a part of our fiction, but a certain sensitivity should be adopted.
It’s easy to forget about killing in games as death is rarely treated as permanent and never carries the weight it does in the real world. Including a line like the one found in The World Ends with You is over stepping a boundary: it’s like splicing in 20 minutes of C-Span in the middle of The Hangover — it’s jarring and out of place.
Video games carry the narrative power to address death in a mature manner, or they can adopt the opposite attitude and treat it as little more than a game mechanic — like tagging someone out as much as killing them. It’s a mix of the two that rings as out of place.