You might have seen the recent meme going around of picturesque snapshots of various snowy locations, and men commenting that they would love to bleed out peacefully there. Much like that very strange time a few months ago when we all had to pretend we believed that men really did think about the Roman Empire all the time, I don’t think they really do want to die painfully and alone surrounded by nothing but crisp tundra. But I get it. And video games don’t.
The most obvious example of this is K on the steps in Blade Runner 2049, but movies and television are full of this idea, from the willing sacrifice of Hartigan’s death in Sin City to the peace in the aftermath of betrayal for Jon Snow in Game of Thrones. There is obvious appeal in the fantasy, despite the fact you’d be dead. We all have to go sometime, and so getting A Good Death is a noble wish. But not an unselfish one – these are Good Deaths because the characters have earned them through bravery, selflessness, or sheer force of will. It’s not so much the actual lonely death in the snow people crave, but having earned it.
Video Games Struggle With The Idea Of Death
This ideal is not exclusive to a slow death in the snow. The most famous death in The Sopranos happens off screen with a cut to black. It’s boring, it’s messy, it’s a little pathetic. It follows a plate of onion rings. And yet we know it is a good death because we know it is earned. How do we know this? How do we know K’s death is equally good? They are at peace.
Video games cannot recreate this idea. Death is rarely final in a video game. You just have to reload to an earlier save, and you’re right back where you started. As many times as it takes, you will die pointless deaths with no glory or grandeur, and keep going. This is not exclusive to you, either. Other characters are thrown into volcanoes and they come right back in the sequel because their face sells copies. I love video games as an art form, and the uniquely immersive ways they tell their stories, but they don’t always take themselves seriously enough.
Obviously I’m not suggesting that every game should be hardlocked by permadeath mode. I’ve also known games attempt to avoid this issue by making you feel scared without killing you (Still Wakes The Deep being a recent example), thus avoiding deflating a scene by making you play it over and over again. However, if you make a mistake, linger too long, or just figure this out, the idea comes crashing down. You’re just standing around, invincible, while the game pulls funny faces at you. Death is hard to get right in video games.
Dying Just Doesn’t Matter Enough
But even then, cutscenes and gameplay have always been different beasts. ‘Ludonarrative dissonance’ you might call it if you’re the sort of chap who drinks micro ales from jam jars. Characters can die over and over in a particularly hard boss fight and keep coming back for more, but things all change when control is wrestled away from you. In cutscenes when a character dies, it can be for keeps.
But again, it rarely is. Video games often lack the bravery to kill off their characters, making it impossible for them to have this fabled slow bleed out in the snow. We’ve seen players back up this fear, too. There was outrage when Joel was killed in The Last of Us Part 2, despite the game being a post-apocalyptic nihilistic dystopia where he had gunned down plenty of innocent people in the previous game’s finale then lied about it. A similar thing happened when Batman (a guy who has died several times in the comics as a core part of many narratives) was killed in a game called Kill The Justice League. Batman. The guy with no powers.
There are games that can get it right, of course. Red Dead Redemption pulls off the trick not once, but twice, and manages to make it hit even harder the second time around. It’s not in the snow (though the game does have a vastly misunderstood snowy section), but it’s the closest video games have gotten to that earned, at peace, masculine acceptance of a well-earned death for the right reason. Asking games to be as ambitious as Red Dead Redemption 2 is a big ask, but if they want to capture that slow bleed in the snow feeling, that’s what they need.
Empty vistas of snow-covered urban city scopes are romantic in a lot of ways, but their implied connection with death is certainly a notable one. Like all these men who apparently want to die cold and alone, video games can earn a death like this. But it is the earning that is difficult. It’s also the earning that makes it worth it. Men are begging to die in the snow. More video games should let them.
Spoilers for all those things I mentioned.
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OpenCritic
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Top Critic Rating:
96/100
- Released
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October 26, 2018