There are two games I want to talk about specifically, in different (but perhaps not completely dissimilar) ways: Depression Quest and Hurt Me Plenty.

First, I want to talk about Hurt Me Plenty and guilt by way of embodiment of the player. I noticed that the game has the option to play with Leap Motion, a peripheral that allows you to manipulate objects with your hands in detailed ways. So, you can pinch a pen in a game and move that pen around with your hand. There is of course no resistance or tactile feedback, but it does offer a level of immersion that a controller doesn’t offer.

Other devices have been developed to allow for players to be able to gesture with their hands to control objects in the game environment. On Reddit, I saw a post of a gif of game footage from Grand Theft Auto IV where the game had been hacked/modded (whatever term you prefer) to allow for the player to use a peripheral with hand tracking. The peripheral they used was shaped like a gun and they could point the peripheral in real life to aim in the game with more precision than the way this is done with a controller: by merely pushing the right analog stick around. The gif was in-game footage of the player character pointing a gun at a civilian and shooting them dead. This is a thing that people do in the game and isn’t really worth comment except that, in the comments of the Reddit submission, the modder reported that he felt guilt when he killed the civilian. Something about the fact that he wasn’t pushing a stick, but instead pointing a device that felt similar to an actual gun, changed the experience on an ethical level for the player.

What I’m getting at here is, I wonder if the guilt of violating the terms of your BDSM interaction with your partner in Hurt Me Plenty would be intensified by the Leap Motion. I violated the terms when I played, and felt some disappointment, but I can’t characterize what I felt as “guilt.” Just an unfortunate experimentation with the code made by moving my mouse around. The interaction between my hand and my partner’s ass was abstracted to a degree that left me feeling nothing. Drone pilots report similar feelings in regards to killing people by using the video-game-like controls and viewing their targets’ deaths on a screen that live-feeds the drone’s camera. The technology abstractifies death in a way that helps them sleep well at night. There’s some connection here to be made between the drone pilot and Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto, but that would open up another rabbit hole.

With 21st century VR being born this month, I am interested to see how we feel about enacting violence in less abstract terms. Do Robert Yang’s goals with Hurt Me Plenty, a better public understanding of consent and kink, get intensified with higher fidelity interfaces? As an aside, do we also feel more responsibility over this sexual encounter the more photorealistic our partner becomes?

Now for Depression Quest, which like Hurt Me Plenty, has a social message: the destigmatizing of mental health issues and the ways in which systems and the diseases can impact your personal life and relationships in a way that feels like a Choose Your Own Adventure book. Every branch of the game is relatable to me on a personal level and the stigma against mental illness is an incredibly important topic to me. I also despise the Gamergate movement, the misogyny in gaming culture, and am nothing but sympathetic to all of the abuse she has faced from Gamergate’ers.

But I do not like this game as a video game.

I can sit and read a book, I can sit and watch a movie and have the narrative conveyed to me while my body sits still and within the norms of interacting with those media. Video games, as a media, compel me to move, to participate in ways that I do not do with a book or a movie.

This is why I hate cut-scenes in games. You have suddenly taken control of my game character away from me because you no longer trust me to construct a narrative the “right” way. I am pulled out of the experience because suddenly the camera is moving without my input and the character is moving and speaking in ways that I never chose.

I play these games and can enjoy them, but I always feel that they are lesser-than to games which have zero narrative. Games like Minecraft, Don’t Stare, Day-Z, and even the Grand Theft Auto games in certain ways all trust me to craft a narrative, a world, an experience on my own terms. Or, in the multi-player example of Day-Z, craft an experience that myself and others negotiate, but never with the developer controlling where “I” go and what “I” do.

And the stories that come from those games are better for it. Day-Z, a mod of the military simulator Arma III, involves players existing on an island overrun with zombies (cliché, I know) and sneaking around houses, stores, and military bases for necessary materials like water and food. You can pick up weapons along the way, but as soon as you die, you lose everything and must start from scratch. However, the world is persistent, meaning that the other players still exist right where they did before you died. And they can be quite mean. There are stories of well-armed groups of players holding unarmed players at gunpoint, forcing them to make their character dance around in order to spare their lives or allow them to have a tin of food. On the other end of the spectrum, there is a video of a well-armed player approaching unarmed players and offering them a gun that is loaded with blanks, unbeknownst to them. When he hears the click of them attempting to shoot him, he kills them for their naughtiness. If they don’t try to kill him, he helps them scrounge for resources.

These are exciting stories and experiences! and none of them were forced onto the player with cut-scenes or invisible walls (Call of Duty does this often) or with NPCs.

So, Depression Quest doesn’t make me feel like I really get to explore the systemic and internal obstacles that are the life of a person suffering from mental illness; it just tells me what happens in a way for which I have no identification with the character due to interactivity, which to me is what lends video games their richness as a medium.