Dishonored came out eleven years ago. There was a stylish trailer with an off-beat version of "Drunken Sailor," though changed to "Drunken Whaler," given the way that the steampunk world of Dishonored ran on oil harvested by eldritch, supernatural whales. The look of the game was super cool, even if a bit more graphically violent than I tend to prefer.
It was made by Bethesda, and I'd found I really liked playing Stealth-oriented characters in their Elder Scrolls games, so it seemed like a great fit.
And I started it. The story was interesting - I was particularly compelled by The Outsider, this strange being that takes the form of a young man with black eyes who could honestly fill the role of any of D&D's three warlock patron options from its Player's Handbook - the Archfey, Fiend, or Great Old One.
The game is about seeking to dismantle the conspirators who murdered the Empress, who also happened to be the player character's lover, and to rescue your daughter with her, after you're framed for the assassination (you are, after all, in addition to being the Empress' consort, also her weapon).
Dishonored has an interesting mechanic, called Chaos. The bad guys are everywhere looking for you, which means you have to be sneaky - the game is also balanced in such a way that unless you're incredibly skilled, you'll quickly get overwhelmed and killed if you're detected and don't run for cover. But, also fitting that "sneak past them" emphasis on the gameplay, this is also reinforced thematically and mechanically by Chaos. The more people you kill, the more hostile the world gets. There are larger patrols, sure, as you'd expect the guards would want to shore up their defenses in response to such killings. But also, the world itself becomes more hostile - plague rats, for instance, grow in number. I don't think this is meant to simply reflect the greater number of bodies to spread disease, but rather a kind of supernatural judgment of the world you're creating with your actions.
Each "assassination target" that is the objective of your missions can be dealt with in a non-lethal way. These aren't necessarily nice - there's one mission where you can have a slaver sold to work in his own mine. But it means not murdering.
In life, I'm nearly a total pacifist. I get angry, and I definitely got in physical fights as a kid (though not generally past, say, age 11) and I definitely get the normal violent urges to lash out with a fist when I'm angry. But I don't. And the thought of committing truly dangerous, lethal violence, is abhorrent to me. (Also, something you begin to realize as an adult is that hitting someone can become that level of lethal in the right - or perhaps better to say wrong - circumstances. I think that most of the violence we condone culturally is only out of a chicken-and-egg vicious circle out of fear of violence. People wage wars because they expect others to attack them. And I think that even the most violent criminals deserve at the very worst a life sentence (and generally that we need to put fewer people in prison,) and that capital punishment is a barbarous relic of a dark age we should strive to move past.
And so, philosophically, I like this idea - that to get the "good" story and ending in these games, you need to commit to, if not total non-violence, then at least a serious effort to be better.
It's not easy. Sneaking past a guard is a lot easier when they're dead on the ground.
Now, until I get into my deep, Philosophy 101 navel-gazing, I don't think that the characters in a video game have any sentience - any inner life or experience, capacity to feel pain or loss. When a sniper bullet in Fallout 3 shatters a raider's skull, sending brains and eyeballs flying in different directions, I don't feel the shock, revulsion, and regret that I would feel if I saw that happen to someone in real life (maybe a little of the revulsion). What happens in these games, or indeed what happens in any work of fiction, has a crucial and important distinction from reality: it didn't actually happen.
Technically, Dishonored lets you play as a violent killer, slaughtering everyone in your way. But not only does it then raise barriers of difficulty in response, but it also makes the story play out differently.
Violence is common in video games. Even in the most all-ages games. Mario's basically the Micky Mouse of video games, and Mario games are basically designed to be any kid's first video game. But even in Mario games, you stomp on enemies' heads or drop the bad-guy turtle-dragon dudes into lava. Zelda games, which are also generally appropriate for young audiences, still have you playing the role of sword-slashing hero slaying monsters.
I mean, human stories have tended toward violence as a marker of heroism. The traditional masculine roles of hunter and protector are both about using violence to help their community.
Ok, I might be getting in the weeds here.
The point is, I started both Dishonored and more recently Dishonored 2. And I liked them. And then I gave up, just sort of walking away from them.
But I played the shit out of Deathloop.
Deathloop is made by the same studio, and actually takes place in the same world as Dishonored, though a hundred years later (and unlike many fictional worlds, they allowed this one to change significantly in that time - the world is updated from a Victorian Steampunk to Mod-1960s chic).
And Deathloop does not in any way penalize you for killing. Indeed, the only way to beat the game is to figure out a way how to kill a bunch of different people (which will probably require killing a lot of other people) all in one day - an elaborate checklist that is broken down as various missions to complete.
The thing is, the whole conceit of Deathloop is that you're in a world without consequences. There is no Chaos that rises with more death, because everything resets when the day ends. This is the world that the hedonistic "Eternalists" have decided they want to live in. The goal, essentially, is actually to restore consequences.
And, in a weird way, the murder spree you go on in Deathloop is actually an act of mercy. The Eternalists, I think, assumed they would all be able to remember the previous loops even if their physical bodies reset. So, yeah, you get decapitated to splatter after jumping off a cliff, and then the next thing you know you're waking up that morning. But at the point you're at, no one except you and someone named Juliana is actually aware that this isn't, in fact, the first day of the loop. Or... it is, but that there have been previous first days.
Mechanically, this allows you to, Majora's Mask-style, know where characters will be each time through the loop, and is how you're able to orchestrate the one-day massacre of the people whose lives are tied to the loop.
Success causes one last reset - everyone you had killed (and many of them several times over) is alive again, but with no reason for Juliana to sic them all on you, they don't even remember that you're supposed to be enemies.
Jacob Geller, with whose video essays on games I've become a completionist, suggests that there's something a little disconcerting about this. In time loop stories like Groundhog Day, the protagonist often start performing acts of self-destruction in either an attempt to escape the loop or just out of boredom. Groundhog Day disturbed me a lot as a kid thanks to the sequence in which he starts killing himself over and over in various ways. When I came back to the movie as an adult, I recognized it as a work of genius, not that my childhood dislike of it was invalid.
But in most of these stories, Geller points out, this violence is self-inflicted. The victim is a knowing and consenting participant in this experiment in chronologically-undone destruction. In Deathloop, we're the one aware of the loop, and we're the one blasting peoples' heads off with guns or running them through with a machete.
The people in Deathloop are not aware of the loop, but they sort of are. One of the earlier (at least when I played it) targets is at the top of what is a kind of space-themed paintball/laser tag arena, only because everyone will pop back to life the next day, they play this game with actual guns. Real violence is no more real to them than simulated violence.
The island in Deathloop is a place of consensual brutal violence (among other, I'd say less disturbing, indulgences - though there's also a party where guests who are not seen as sufficiently brutal are ground into meat for the others to eat, which is probably the most fucked up thing in the game). The reason they brought so many guns there wasn't out of fear that they needed it for security. It's that they thought it'd be great fun to kill each other over and over again.
And as players, we have lots of fun killing them over and over again.
I don't know that the commentary goes much deeper than that. Is the loop a metaphor for our own rationalization? These people don't mind doing fucked up shit to one another because, hey, it's not real! We just reset afterwards!
And we don't have any issue with killing people in the game because hey, they aren't real people! It's a game!
Juliana effectively serves as the main antagonist of the game, given that she's the only one who understands that the loop is already in effect. But when we learn more about the relationship between Colt (the player character) and Juliana, the fact that each has killed the other countless times, over and over, becomes even more nightmarish.
I think you could even argue that the whole premise of the game - you need to kill these people to save them - is problematic. In the final moments where I beat the game, I put a bullet through Juliana's forehead - and unlike normal, when a killed character either bursts into "time energy" or their time-frozen corpse kind of shimmers with that energy, she was instead slumped in a chair with a kind of realistic bullet hole in her head.
And I did this to save her, too. Maybe most of all.
Redemption through violence is a kind of horrific pillar to worldviews I find utterly destructive. Mad Max Fury Road explored this excellently - the War Boys are told that their only value is in how gloriously they can die in Immortan Joe's service. Interestingly, that movie ends with an act of sacrificial, suicidal violence that does manage to kill a whole bunch of people, but feels totally different because the end goal of that violence is to save lives. The deaths are a side-effect.
So, is Deathloop less deep because of its forgiveness of violence?
That's reductive, of course.
The premise of the time loop is, of course, fantastical. People don't exist in these loops in a literal way - though there are ways you could treat it as a metaphor - either for the stagnation of routine or even on a spiritual level, the cycle of reincarnation that is central to Buddhist and Hindu beliefs (the former viewing that cycle as something you want to eventually escape from, even).
But as science fiction in particular is effective at doing, the hypothetical of the time loop is one that opens up opportunities to talk about heady concepts. Things like transporter clones in Star Trek (or my favorite Christopher Nolan movie) introduce new ways to think about identity, and what it means to be an individual person.
I think Deathloop also invites a kind of meta-examination of how video games work.
The first time I really remember being confronted with this in games was in Bioshock. You spend the first half (maybe more like two thirds) of the game following the guidance of a character named Atlas, who speaks in a lilting Irish accent and, seemingly as a dialect-specific idiosyncrasy, prefaces every direction with the phrase "Would you kindly...?"
The truth of what that phrase means is, of course, gaming history. But even though the player is not psychologically condition to do anything someone tells them to if that phrase comes before the request, you still wind up doing it anyway. After all, the game wouldn't go anywhere if you didn't. Maybe we are psychologically conditioned to do what we're told? After all, we want to progress through the game.
Playing Deathloop, you'll notice after your first couple loops, that the experience of being in a loop, seeing the same video game enemies walking in the same patrol patterns, having the same canned dialogue, acting with clockwork consistency each time until you interfere with their loops is... familiar.
This is, in fact, how pretty much all video games work. That Goomba at the start of World 1-1 will always appear there, moving toward you and encouraging you to jump at a point where you'll get the first Super Mushroom.
Super Mario Bros came out a year before I was even born, and yet, 38 years later, we all pretty much know the patterns and landscape of that level (well, at least the beginning of it).
In fact, nearly all of our video games are deathloops.
And you know what? Juliana's not even wrong - a lot of people enjoy slaughtering their friends time after time. It's fitting, actually, that the "single player mode" or Deathloop is about someone trying to get through the story and close the loops. The multiplayer mode, where you play as Juliana and invade others' main games, had no defined end. Just like PvP systems tend not to. After all, no single person can "beat" a competitive multiplayer game. You can win the round or even make the top rank of the season, but the appeal in competitive games is to jump in, play, and always have other players to test your skill against. The single player game can have some of that replayability - even if you break the loop, and the story says that the loop has ended, you can still keep playing Deathloop with all of your acquired skills and weapons, saved with the loop-resistant magical substance known as Residuum.
But Colt is trying to win. Juliana's trying to keep the game going.
Most video games are about violence, or at least place violence as your primary means of interacting with the world. That's not new. I mean, the ancient board game, Chess, represents clashing nations at war. The Eternalists in Deathloop have turned their lives into a video game.
We commit a massive amount of violence to break them out of this loop. We end their game. The ending does leave some ambiguity, though: did we actually do them a favor? Certainly, Colt wanted the hell off that island, and he had every right to leave it. But the world that is now visible following it seems to have undergone some world-altering catastrophe.
I'm not well-read on world religions. But generally, my sense is that Western religion is afraid of death as a cessation to existence. Our religions (and while not "Western," I think Egyptian myth also has an influence on this view) generally promise eternal life, unending existence, as a reward for moral behavior and adherence to divine law. Judaism is vague about whatever comes next, but Christianity places an enormous emphasis on heavenly eternity - that the main thing Jesus did through his resurrection was to open up the possibility of eternal life.
And while I'm not a Christian, that idea does appeal to me. I'd like to feel that I'm not just going to blink out of existence, every memory and thought I've ever had, and the continual stream of consciousness that I've been since it first awoke, simply lost to oblivion, when this body stops functioning.
But with Buddhism, at least, my understanding (and again, I apologize if I'm misinterpreting this) is that the eternal existence is assumed - that you'll keep reincarnating into different bodies and identities, but that your soul/consciousness will persist over and over. And that then, the goal of Buddhism, is to stop existing - to end that cycle of life and exit the whole suffering wheel of existence.
Now, sure, what that looks like could vary. Nirvana could mean something more akin to Christian heaven - a new kind of existence in which you've left behind all suffering and instead existence in a painless, rich, enlightened state. Or, Nirvana could be the very thing I fear the most - utter annihilation.
Is the loop something to be desired or to be feared? Something to be sought, or something to flee from?
And are we already stuck in it, yearning to break out, or are we trapped outside, wishing we could get in?
In some Christian thought, the idea of being in heaven is an existence without sin. But what is sin, after this mortal world is left behind? Is sex a sin? (I don't think it is as long as it's between consenting adults, but the moral view of a lot of traditional religious worldviews forbids many expressions of sexuality, sometimes treating it as a necessary evil whose only purpose is to create babies.) If heaven exists, do people have sex there?
What about violence?
I mean, in the mortal world, the obvious reason violence is bad is because it causes pain, loss, and death. But if you're in a world without death, where nothing can be permanently lost... is there no problem with violence?
The Eternalists seem fine with a world where they can happily play William Tell and, if they get shot in the head, no worries - they just wake up the next loop without even a headache.
Are they in heaven or hell?
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