Things continue to fall apart, for undeniable reasons, and media about alternate/parallel/multi-verses metastasise into our dimension like an eldritch god. If the Situationists were aghast/enthralled, in a Lovecraftian way, by capital’s talent for self-parody — for marshalling its self-parodies as though you were spectators at an gala opening, admitting to its own self-contradictory nature as part of the commodity-artistry of it all, not holding, pushing your investment to the breaking point, to keep you there, on the edge of your seat, semi-permanently — imagine how they’d feel watching Marvel’s Quantomania or Across the Spider-Verse.

An observer might note that the sprawl/suburbia of cinematic universes are just doing in space what videogames have been doing, since their birth, in time.

In both cases, the engine of this sprawl becomes the artistic reckoning with death, the value of ultimate challenge. There must be challenge, to justify the continuation of the franchise, the persistence of one character across hypothetically infinite movies/character arcs.

If critics have pointed out that Marvel movies have bad villains — local or franchise wide— it’s because they’re pre-defined by the goal of driving the franchise itself: to serve as justification for why the same character/film keeps repeating, to create homeostasis: infinite growth, infinite what ifs and multi-versal splitting are figured against the heat death of capital — the same way Tom Hiddleston and Jonathan Majors happily play opposing roles in the first season of Loki.

For a multi-versal character, in games or movies, stretched thin across individual films and playthroughs, the potential for death, conditioning the moments it actually strikes, acquires a crucial structural role. The good guys must be threatened with death, but never truly die. You can — and must— always restart. Things fall apart, the show/game says, and the dissolution of worlds/systems/capital may be processed by the coding of death, a way to make death say something. If it can’t be made to signify, it can at least serve as an anchor, around which whatever critical language can orbit, like a space-ship using the gravity of a black-hole as a sling-shot.

Each death in a game is a split at the root, a break between the “canonical” universe of the game— its virtual narrative arc, your sense of the game’s theme— and the failed recollection, the actual experience of the game, played out in death (2003’s Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, each death in which the Prince, narrating the game back to the player, annuls with a “no, that wasn’t quite right, let me start over…”). In your Steam Library it will note the length of time you’ve spent playing Elden Ring; over hundreds of hours invested, the unspoken question is How many times did you die? What do those hours signify, via the rupture of death/game-play?

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An observer would say: the splitting of game death serves, first of all, an economic purpose: death exists so that— in arcades during the ’80s — money could be made, repeatedly and excessively. Death is the condition of automated exchange: dollars into slots into a base-line experience for a base-line consumer. After videogames were privatised in the home, its various private spaces, death persisted to make you feel like you got your money’s worth, to translate the experience.

Death is the ultimate stamp of value. It was invented to sell arcade-like 1 Up repetition to the home market. To read politics in videogames is to learn to read necropolitically, which is why gamers don’t like politics.

Death is changed from an economic necessity — an external limit and incentive for the player to keep inserting coins — to a form of real abstraction: it becomes the travel-dictionary that mediates your exchange with the world, as a visceral button-mash, as your exploration of its artistic theme, as a predicate to morality.

On Twitter, in 2019, a game reviewer for PC Gamer reports that they completed Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice using cheat codes, avoiding its player-slaughtering difficulty. User Fetusberry responds:

You cheated not only the game, but yourself.

You didn't grow.
You didn't improve.
You took a shortcut and gained nothing.

You experienced a hollow victory.
Nothing was risked and nothing was gained.

It's sad that you don't know the difference. https://t.co/upkhLSNQNO

— Fetusberry『Butt Soup』 Crunch (@Fetusberry) April 6, 2019

You insert time-like coins. Their value is fixed by death. It’s this sense of difference— of game-death providing the rule that separates the boys from the men, their exchange value (if you tell them that nothing is risked in a videogame they’d roll their eyes, maybe even say we know!) — that gaming culture has enshrined as a formal element in what even constitutes a videogame. If the reaction toward “Artistic”, “walking simulator” games — Gone Home, Dear Esther, Proteus, What remains of Edith Finch, endless indie and experimental itch.io releases — is symptomatic of anything, it’s a vague sense that there’s a contradiction at play: deathless games that embrace the artistic potential of the medium while removing/fucking with its key elements, defining not only the given image of a videogame but what constitutes one of a game’s core artistic tools — like a film of a 120-minute unbroken shot of an open book.

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That sounds like a sick movie, an observer would say, and they’d be right. It wouldn’t become not-a-movie. The criteria for defining a movie immanently change to incorporate this bold use of cinematic technique.

A viewer may be confused and asked to stretch their sense of cinema for this immanence, but the difficulty is in deciding where the “movie” is in this example, not whether it is or isn’t: how does this one-shot movie compare to other famous one-shot movies like Birdman, Russian Ark or Rope? Derek Jarman’s Blue? Does the filmed turning of a page equate to a montage? What is the exchange-rate here?

If gaming culture is awkward with games that fuck with death, it’s because the element of exchange that death formalises/thematises/abstracts to the rest of a game’s mechanics is not only baked into the sense of a game’s artistry but reinforced and extended in its distribution. It becomes easier to call these games “walking simulators” when the industry relies on the relationship of exchange they reject.

The same relationship with death finds equivalents in the physical/virtual systems that manage said distribution, in the hype-train, of fan-speculation and industry teasing, official and unofficial release dates, periods of crunch due to the impoverished state of gaming industry labour rights, of memes on subreddits and 4chan boards escaping into Twitter-space, the rounds of discourse, and — in the final instance, per Engels — physical production/coding itself.

The original Dark Souls was advertised based on its relationship to death — Prepare to Die — and today every new Soulsbourne release pairs with a new age of discussion over whether its artistic integrity would be harmed by an easy-mode. It’s in these specific conditions that games that do incorporate death, and which dwell on it as a part of their ludo-narrative/thematics, attract outsized attention, a critical apparatus and context primed to receive them.

Dark Souls 3 incorporates endless death as a phenomenon of its world, an undeath reflective of a spent fantasy world falling into entropy, despite the horror of its rulers and the valiance of the player, continuing to restart, refusing to go hollow, to let the world die. Gamers are in masochistic love with games that mock the meat they feed on. Hades uses death as marker points in a Sisyphean journey out of the underworld, reuniting the player’s broken family — a natural extension of the aesthetic of a man with That One Camus Quote on his bicep. Disco Elysium lets you die to a light-bulb two minutes into its run-time and is the best video-game ever made.

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Darkest Dungeon 2 thematises this relationship to death — as an element of culture and specific artistic device — in the most direct way possible for a game. The world is ending/has ended/ is threatened by death in the broadest sense. It’s being driven mad; everything is senseless. The people tear themselves apart in orgies of loathing and irrational violence. “Our great cities burn. All our beauty and knowledge, ash on the wind,” the narrator intones. The Lovecraftian imagery of burning books and philosophy falling into ruin is calculated to resemble either the Nazi burning of the Hirschfield institute or woke Gramscians infecting universities with critical race theory.

You and a D&D-adjacent party — including the Jester/Bard, the Man-at-Arms, the Plague Doctor, the Flagellant, the Runaway, the Leper — must destroy Denial, Resentment, Obsession, Ambition and Cowardice, who are eldritch Organs from beyond mortal ken and literal allegorisations of what the game’s challenge represents — what you are literally and figuratively trying to overcome.

The final boss’ ultimate attack is called Face your Failures. Each time your party dies — and they will die — you restart at the beginning of a level as if nothing had happened, points accumulating each run to spend on permanent upgrades to your party, via structures like The Working Fields, The Timeless Woods, The Recollection.

The characters level up by confronting their pasts at local shrines, with mini-games in which you suppress lustful thoughts, kill your abusive husband, escape from prison and abandon your former comrades in battle. The game’s ideology — personal traumas are microcosms of larger, species-wide traumas/vices, which are macrocosms that are etc., amplified by eldritch forces, to be individualised and fire-bombed, Marvel-apocalypse style — is less interesting than how the real abstraction of game-death refracts that apocalypse.

The sense of apocalypse, of persisting in the face of universal/personal collapse, is stronger in the game when it’s purely evoked by travelling by stage-coach over a burning city-scape, of battle that intensifies the position-based nature of the first game’s combat system into micro-moments: if your character isn’t in this position to inflict x condition on y enemy, for your team-mate to combo it in z turns, you will die quickly — death simultaneously more common and more stress-inducing, a greater sense of primal fear created than any written text in the narrative.

If death — as real-abstraction— mobilises the game’s mechanics/systems/narrative to evoke its “themes”, the possibility is created for the player to abstract past how those themes are presented, and create a broader scope than the designer’s intended. A gap is opened up, between the letter of the text and its textuality, the way theme is elaborated via game-play: the text as given and a broader “sense” of the text, its potentiality and avenues of sense-creation.

Part of this gap has been formalised in popular gaming discourse as “ludo-narrative dissonance,” the point being that you lessen the dissonance for a smooth textual experience or intensify it, if you want to get Brechtian. The point, before anything else, is to binarise these experiences into fixed qualities, a fixed set of relations/correlates, for the sake of practical game-design.

As a move, this fundamentally ties the language of a game’s artistry to the creation of games that sell, of a market apparatus. When people criticise gamers for the seeming contradiction of believing that games are art, while reviling the critical languages elaborated to make sense of that artistry, they are responding to this positivisation of sense. A game is art if it presents certain signifiers that mark it as artistic/ludo-narrative consonance, tastefully subverted in places maybe, a definable narrative structure, coherence, “fully realised characters”, “good writing”— and political meeting others.

The framework evokes whole ecosystems, to make this correlation/repetition meaningful: YouTube creators and their audiences, making lore-videos/videos on the Hero’s Journey/ analyses of tropes as fixed quantities, grassroots campaigns to push back against politicisation, gaming award categories, Twitch streamers live-streaming all of the above. In short, the whole affect of gaming culture.

This is to say, as the apparatus to positivise the textuality of games develops, the hole this textuality creates — via death— deepens, intensifies for gaming culture, and the games that engage with death thematically. Darkest Dungeon 2 differs from its predecessor in that the characters are singular personalities, repeating/reincarnating over however many play-throughs, vs the first game, in which they were enumerations of a theme. Death was devalued, embraced even: there is no cost to killing your expendable party members except what you have invested. Your heartbreak is only your own.

This served the Lovecraftian theme of sending faceless temp-hires to their doom, where they are further dehumanised in contact with the abyss of the cosmos. The game’s text and its textuality play off each other, almost ironically, in the gap: though the player is here to restore their family’s reputation and estate, the means involve endless blood sacrifice and death taken as given, despite whatever precautions you take. Though you can treat your minions like meat, sending them into battle is what develops specific quirks and traits that can both further incapacitate them and grant them more power. Facing the game-death is what humanises them, figuratively — they go from copy-pastes to singular entities uniquely powerful or weak in certain areas, require certain cures for certain quirks, can be upgraded and kitted out with loot won from the dungeon— and affectively in the mind of the player: I can’t send Carcosa the Highwayman into a guaranteed death-quest. He was the one who came back from the dead after singlehandedly saving the Hamlet from Wulf the Brigand.

At the end of the game, the gap remains unbridged — every run ends slightly ironically — but now serves as your own Rosetta stone. Nothing is predicated on anything else — ancient Greek is not Latin is not Egyptian is not English — but this lack of ordering becomes a way for the player to translate between elements of a game into a unified effect, in the gap.

If the player gets the sense from the game-play that humanity is won suffering death or inflicting it upon bestialised others, the effect of the gap is to provide a means to extend and reduce its sense metaphorically, to connect it to different machines of sense-making: the Lovecraftian signifiers and their critique, a Romantic irony, the deliberate purple prose of the game’s style, the Hellboy-by-Jack Kirby visual design. The sense is always circulating like blood through the game’s various systems. If a gamer’s shitlord rejection of a political game-reading has an objective correlative, it’s in sensing this circulation: the theme of a game is always a flow between different systems in a way that, treating it as a traditional critical object, is inherently limiting. It’s enough rope to hang their refusal to imagine a game’s artistry upon their given object of play, to deny that artistry is anything other than time-consumption, in which death is a fundamental cash-point.

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This gap exists in Darkest Dungeon 2, and is brought attention to in a way absent in the first game, despite itself. Every mechanic in the game is doing double duty: supporting a given sense of the text and expanding the scope of that sense past its limited expression in the game itself.

A systematisation of your party’s interpersonal relationships and how it affects its combat effectiveness — buying drinks for them to share, watching their affinity score out of twenty decrease/increase, certain attacks triggering negative/positive effects — creates the metaphoric language for understanding why its use in the game itself feels limited and slightly ridiculous. The game-world is dying, and each time it does, it resets (we can imagine a parallel universe splitting off from the dead trunk) until the player can defeat death-the-system, hold it off until the end of the game.

Compared to this, the narrative of preventing the apocalypse is infinitely less interesting. The characters — as they reincarnate into different universes, developing different quirks, different relationships with each other, break and succeed at different points in their lives before their deaths —  turn game-death, its capacity for exchange, into a language. It refracts the apocalypse, splitting it into its facets, to be held and recombined, the sense of the game changing as light hits it from different angles. This evokes a sense of game-death, or the scraps of one, which gives the lie to how death and difficulty has figured in gaming culture. Instead of either a fixed sense, or a gap, the game figures death as a break, but precisely a break that marks points of a continuous flow.

Exchange as it appears in the game is able to be recontextualized as a point in a larger process of sense-making and creation, one that drives this process beyond the bounds of the game as aesthetic object, connecting it to broader processes: it makes the game’s artistry dependent on its ability to define a relationship of an inside to its outside. Every game is about touching grass. It’s this implication that gaming culture exists to obscure, and the gamer as a consumer identity exists to negate. Or rather, exists to siphon off, as it can’t be negated, only disavowed. It’s this ground — figured by death— that will be politicised more and more, and which must be by any critic, if they want to do justice to games as an art-form, placing them as materials against the gravitational pull of the world-system’s breakdown.

Image: a screenshot from the game