Death - The Architect of Passage

After power scrolling through the updates of my twitter crushes I came across an apparently aged article written by Christian McCrea, a previous games tutor of mine. As he states himself, McCrea weaves in and out of ideas a little too haphazardly for me to fully understand the broad stroke of his argument, but there were pockets of thought enclosed that triggered something within me, enough to want to form my own musings on similar subjects he mentioned. His paper can be read here.

The primary sticking point for me was McCrea’s statement on how we ‘gain pleasure from bodily exhibition, not dissimilar to a waxwork museum’. I am not entirely sure if this is something the minority experience, perhaps most viewers and players do; but there seems to be a morbid fascination and even beauty to the end-state of a life. Why else are we so bedazzled by flying limbs and corpses pushed to or from their physical extremities after an explosion or a shotgun blast? Maybe it is a fascination with dance like movements as rag dolls somersault and spin through the air, or perhaps it’s the wonder of what someone looks like when they are shot and slam against a wall, or maybe we just like to admire any kind of airborne object. Maybe it’s all three? When the main draw of this medium is its interactivity, then the process of how a user chooses to play and eventually ends a life is one of the most empowering moments within the matrix. The entire process of an in-game kill is influenced by a player, from what weapon we use, where we place the bullet/explosive and if one is perceptive enough, what kind of environmental feature the enemy will land on for maximum artistic effect. I am tempted to call the entire process itself an art, more so in a similar respect to how a traceur effortlessly glides across a cityscape. In a way, a player who has mastered the mechanics and ‘feel’ of a game reflects this artistic flow and mastery of system and self as he plays.


“The body, animated and otherwise, is the concentration point of game materiality – where the senses are interfacing most often, and where most of the production system is oriented. In cases where these bodies disappear soon after death, an evaporation of visible labour occurs.”

McCrea rightfully states the importance of the animated and ‘lifeless’ game body when we interact with it and here I’d like to briefly point out their importance. A distinct peculiarity and personal annoyance I find in some games is the abnormality of the disappearing dead body. Perfectly understandable from a technical standpoint and I know why it is sometimes necessary, but in certain games the visceral reality you've allowed your mind to immerse itself within comes crumbling down under such circumstances. As McCrea states: 

“Bodies left by the player are not murder victims, but our symbolic architecture of passage, leaving place where space once stood. In each game text, if we are to speak of specificity, a different context of memorialisation through the corpse’s lack of animation is true in each game, and in each gameplay.”

Dead bodies in a game area are an integral part of the world’s architecture as much as if the level was to stand on its own as an art piece. I'm not trying to say that the inside of a digital Vatican littered with bloody bodies is ‘art’, that is not the point I am trying to make by any means. But dead bodies left behind by a player are an important sense of passage, of how the player has chosen to touch upon the world. This is what the medium is all about. When a player blasts through a corridor leaving a trail of dead bodies only to turn back and observe that they have faded away, forgotten and abandoned by the system; that is to deny the essence of a character’s actions and of sense of place and purpose. It’s to deny Max Payne’s relentless path of vengeance, Bill and Zoe’s last desperate push for survival through a sea of zombies or the intensity of Adam Jensen’s attempt to save a crash landed friend from an onslaught. Important decisions had to be made and intense moments had by the player in all these circumstances. The game had better damn well of remembered that.

You see the bad-assery that unfolded here? Those 3 unconscious heavily armed guards?Yeah no it wasn't New Years. THAT WAS ME. These bodies, this image, tell a several hundred word story that one would scantly believe had it been a sterile corridor.

The more a game does to remember player choice, the more gratifying the player’s passage through space and narrative. For this reason I congratulate Rockstar on their ever-improving Euphoria Tech. When animation is one of the primary hurdles to immersion in an otherwise spectacularly and believably crafted vision, the reactivity of NPCs clenching their abdomens in pain or the writhing of near-corpses after being shot indiscriminately in the scrotum, is the saving grace of the virtual reality. If you must, take away my inanimate clumps of polygons off screen. But know that you lessen this player's experience when you do.