Content Warning: extended conversation about death and dying.
Occasionally I think about dying.
Not of the moments leading up to death, but of the moment when it happens. The instant transition from sentient matter interacting with the world straight to nothingness. I think about how regardless of what I’m feeling prior to that terminus, it all will simply cease to matter in a way that not even the most jaded nihilist can match. Everything I value, every work I’ve made, every person I love, will just stop being a factor to me in that moment. And this is true for every single person on earth.
And I want to be clear I don’t think about dying in a suicidal way. While my mental health has been bad, acutely bad in the past, I have thankfully been spared that sense of utter despondency that might lead me to commit that particular act. It’s just, you get to writing about something utterly cosmically unimportant like video games, and get asked 20 times in a day “what’s it like to be 30? how does it feel to AGE you DECREPIT F-” and dying is suddenly a not-so-distant future event. Maybe I have 10 more years left. Maybe 30 or 40 or 50, that would be cool. Maybe I die tomorrow in an accident or because of an undiagnosed illness. I know for certain that whatever the length of my life, “going on forever” is unequivocally not an option. There is an end. I am closer to it now than when I wrote the first word in this article. So are you.
And hey, 30 isn’t even that old. I recognize that. But we do have a virus that is dedicated to being the Jigsaw Killer of pandemics still circulating the globe, so it’s probably natural even for someone at 30 to be thinking about this shit now.
Dying in a video game is not even really worth talking about. At best it’s a level reset mechanic, a “you failed, try again” system couched in the aesthetics of mortality. Games cannot help simply being games, even when they try to say there will be consequences for your incompetence. You can always keep playing, even if you have to start from scratch. It’s not “death and rebirth,” it’s just going back to the start of the game board.
This blasé treatment of a moment so earthshatteringly profound and final as death I think speaks to a fear we have, collectively, of the moment where we cease. It’s a fear I feel even as I’ve been writing so calmly about it. Game designers can meticulously illustrate all the means by which harm can come to our bodies – destruction in a myriad of gruesome ways – but no one, to my knowledge, has made a game that replicates death in that intimate fashion. Even mechanics like permadeath don’t really do this, despite the name. Either it only applies to certain characters – and not the player avatar – or, again, it simply leads to restarting the game.
Imagine a game that did try to recreate actual death. I can only envision a game so ludicly hostile nobody would want to play it – a game where, upon reaching a failure state, it deleted itself from your computer and you couldn’t reinstall it. Or maybe a game that, if you died, bricked your computer, physically frying your motherboard. That would enrage so many gamers. It would defeat the purpose of being a game in a lot of people’s eyes. Nobody’s going for accuracy, and that’s on purpose. We are afraid of – and often angry at – that terminal point.
The thing about death is that while it is a universal experience, it is also thought of as extremely individualized. I think a lot about that line from Donnie Darko – Every living creature on earth dies alone. Maybe it’s a truism. Maybe it’s meant to enhance the ultragoth aesthetics of that particular movie. But I think about this line, regardless, a lot. Because to whatever degree it might be true, there is also a social context to it. We all might die alone, but we are not all dying at the same time. We are preceded by our parents and grandparents going back however many hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of years until we reach the first human, and we will create – are creating – our descendants until whatever species-terminal point is reached. Generations blur together, with young and old living in the same world at the same time. Our actions will and do have consequences for others outside of our reach and control. This is the reason anyone still does activism, tries to make the world better. Because while we ourselves want to live in that better world, we know that we might not live to see it – but those who come after us will. And that’s worth the trouble.
The video game industry likewise does not exist in a vacuum. CEOs like Bobby Kotick and Yves Guillemot are not unique to video games, though their actions might still be on the extreme end of a spectrum of bad corporate leadership behavior. Even if the horror stories of extreme crunch and workplace harassment at Activision, Ubisoft, Quantic Dream, Fullbright and other companies in the video game industry were nonexistent the industry itself would still exist within a system that relies entirely on hierarchies of domination to operate. Those systems are not impossible to dismantle, but doing so takes time, and we seem to have little of it to spend.
In general we spend so much of our time simply trying to hold onto the little stability in this world that we have – voting to put a terrible, shitty centrist president in office just so we didn’t have to deal with the daily waking nightmare of a terrible, shitty fascist president anymore, only to find that doing so didn’t actually improve anything, for example – that doing anything to actually make the world better sounds fake as hell.
Occasionally I think about dying. I think about how eventually I will simply stop. My body will tell me to go fuck myself one final time. But before that, there’s a lot of life to live, and my biggest regret would be to spend that life afraid of not saying or doing the right thing because I was afraid of starting discourse, or because “this doesn’t address [a much bigger problem] that nobody, individually, can tackle, so why bother?” The status quo may be comfortable for some, but we can’t stay there forever.
If people are organizing to make a better Activision, we might look at that and say “ehh, but that doesn’t address the problem of [a much bigger system of domination] still existing right this second, so why are they even trying?” If people are trying to address the ecological problems video games and their associated plastic ephemera cause by reusing old components and shells to keep them out of landfills, we might say “Well, [the much larger system of domination on top of this one] is the true cause of climate change, so why bother trying?” And this myopia seems like a much worse fate than death to me. Do we want the better world only for ourselves? “And I know that we’ll never build starships/ Until we tackle poverty, war, and hardship/ So we fight overnight and over lifetimes/ Organize for that warp drive/ And of course I realize/ That we’re a long way from it/ But what better reason to start running?“