The Child in Videogames: From the Meek, to the Mighty, to the Monstrous 3031423712, 9783031423710

Citation preview

The Child in Videogames From the Meek, to the Mighty, to the Monstrous Emma Reay

The Child in Videogames

Emma Reay

The Child in Videogames From the Meek, to the Mighty, to the Monstrous

Emma Reay University of Southampton Southampton, UK

ISBN 978-3-031-42370-3 ISBN 978-3-031-42371-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42371-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: UrbanZone/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

For my grandma, Ruth, who taught me about intergenerational solidarity.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to my reviewers—in particular, Gretchen Papazian, Melissa Kagen, and Brendan Keogh—not just for your generous comments and advice, but also for inspiring me with your own work. I’d also like to thank my husband, Joost Haarsma, for loving what I love and making life so fun. Earlier versions of some of the ideas in this book have been published in Game Studies, Games and Culture, Journal of Games and Virtual Worlds, Journal of Games Criticism, and Barnboken.

vii

Contents

1

Dreaming the Myth Onwards A Seat at the Kid’s Table Childish Violence and Violent Children Adult Joy Destabilising Age-Based Identities Chapter Overview References

1 6 8 11 13 16 18

2

A Survey of Child-Characters in Contemporary Videogames The Invisible Child The Invincible Child Playable Child-Characters Central, Supporting, Background Age, Race, Gender Supporting Child NPCs Death Child-Antagonists A Shared Shorthand Approaches to Generating Taxonomies of Child-Characters Laying Bare the Faults Critical Ekphrasis References

21 22 24 25 26 28 32 38 39 40 42 47 48 52

ix

x

CONTENTS

3

The Child as a Social Construct Coded Kids Boy or Blob? History of the Child Who Thinks Beating a Child is Entertainment? Misogyny and Infantilisation References

4

Child-Killers and Killer-Children Agency and Eeriness Little Monsters Authority and Autonomy The Waif as an Indecipherable Cipher Who Won? Stereotyping as Conditioning References

89 92 94 97 104 111 115 120

5

Child Heroes An Unheroic Medium? The Spaces Between Oppositions It’s Dangerous to Go Alone The Child Hero An Inventory System Theory of Fiction Symbiotes and Parasites References

123 128 130 140 141 144 147 153

6

Plushies, Dollies, and Action Figurines Cuddly Code The Cute Aggression Response Playgrounds of Cruelty Sensory Nostalgia as an Unscratchable Itch Spectral Nostalgia Intergenerational Bridges A Distant Someplace Else Childhood as a Magic Circle of Play References

157 158 161 163 168 173 177 178 181 183

7

The Kid in the Fridge The Sacrificial Child Types of Child Death Affection, Anxiety, and Agency

187 189 192 194

57 59 62 63 71 80 85

CONTENTS

8

xi

Violent Retribution and the Hardness of Masculinity Lights, Child Death, Action Damn You, Ubisoft The Case of Kassandra References

198 201 204 206 211

Conclusion References

213 218

Index

219

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 1.2 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2

Author’s screenshot of Maxwell’s ‘Magic Notebook’ in Scribblenauts Unlimited Author’s screenshot of a collage of obscenities created in Scribblenauts Unlimited Typology of intersemiotic friction Author’s screenshot from Knights and Bikes of Demelza recounting her adventure to her dad

3 4 135 138

xiii

CHAPTER 1

Dreaming the Myth Onwards

Scribblenauts Unlimited (5th Cell 2012)

My avatar, Maxwell, hovers expectantly on his witch’s broomstick, a befitting form of transport for this haunted mansion themed level of the videogame ‘Scribblenauts Unlimited’. I click on Maxwell’s magic notebook, which opens as a yellow search bar and flex my fingers above the keyboard. Pause. This is for research purposes, I remind myself. Exhale. I type in the word DILDO, and it appears in a font designed to evoke the childly scrawling of a felt-tip pen. I press enter. A list of six near homonyms expands to fill the screen. Cheery music jangles in the background as the game enquires whether I meant, “DILSK, DINGO, DIODE, DISCO, DODO, or DAD?” I have no idea what a DILSK is, so I click on it and something that looks like a green tiara appears on screen. I open the notebook again, and this time I try VAGINA, which provides me with further learning opportunities. I add a VALIHA, a VAHA, a VADIGO, and a VAGRANT to my mise-en-scène. CUNT yields a CANG, which

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 E. Reay, The Child in Videogames, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42371-0_1

1

2

E. REAY

could be some kind of saddle. BOOBY and TIT are both birds, and MURDER is a crow. QUEER completes this avian assemblage with an exotic-looking, yellow QUELEA. ARSE delivers really exciting results that include an eagle-headed horse (an ALCE) and an ADZE (some sort of golf club?). I choose an AKEE, which is quickly eaten by my VAGRANT. BUTT PLUG rewards me with a BORT, which looks like a tiny, blue tooth. WHORE produces something called a WHO ME, which—coincidentally—looks like a butt plug. I continue to populate my digital collage with near-homonyms of taboo nouns, humming along to the game’s catchy theme tune. I don’t want to type in any racist slurs—not least because I have already encountered some disturbing racialised stereotypes in this game—but I hazard the word FAG, which has a dual-meaning in British-English. I get both a FAE and a FAY. The former is a small, female fairy that I sit atop my ALCE, and the latter is a fabulous, semi-naked, winged, non-binary person with a coiffed fringe and lime-green highlights. They proceed to kill my VAGRANT (VAGINA) and my smart-suited, bespectacled AIDE (AIDS), who fails to defend himself despite having a SEAX (SEX) at his disposal. My DINGO lollops past holding the VALIHA in his mouth like a stick. The FAY starts to attack Maxwell, so I am forced to shoot them using my GUN. I am surprised that I’m allowed a gun. I shoot the QUELEA, too, and immediately regret it (Fig. 1.1).

You might be wondering why I would want to sully a sweet, sanitised playground like the one in Scribblenauts Unlimited. The answer is I am trying to break childhood. Or, more specifically, I am trying to violate the encoded boundaries of idealised childliness that scaffold this wholesome, 2D puzzle game. And I’m failing. My efforts to introduce sex, slurs, and scatological language into this charming playspace are thwarted at every turn by the game’s wide-eyed innocence. Instead of rebuking me for my potty-mouth, the game interprets my perversity as illiteracy: it doesn’t scold me for moral transgressions but gently offers to correct my spelling. The game is patient but unyielding, like a firm but fair primary school teacher dealing with a disobedient student. No matter what I try, I cannot shrug off the childlike subject position that has been assigned to me. I

1

DREAMING THE MYTH ONWARDS

3

Fig. 1.1 Author’s screenshot of Maxwell’s ‘Magic Notebook’ in Scribblenauts Unlimited

give up and accept that the final visualisation of my stream of obscenities (Fig. 1.2) would look lovely pinned to the family fridge. For the past six years, I’ve been cataloguing representations of childhood in contemporary videogames. I began this project because I believe that videogames are key arenas in which definitions of childhood are being created and contested, and I’d noticed that while child-players of videogames are lightning rods for academic attention, child-characters in videogames are mostly ignored. As a researcher working between the fields of Games Studies and Children’s Literature Studies, this bothered me. Feminist, queer, critical race, and critical disabilities scholars often analyse how specific identities are represented in videogames. They point to fictional characters both as symptoms and as causes of misogyny, homophobia, racism, and ableism in gaming cultures. They also demonstrate that game characters can be sites of resistance, either as figureheads for change or as statues to topple. Why, then, are debates about the impact of videogames on childhood seemingly uninterested in digital depictions of children? Countless studies regard child-players as if they were uniquely susceptible to the formative influences of interactive media, and yet there are so few projects documenting the scripts, symbols, and social norms that comprise their digital counterparts.

4

E. REAY

Fig. 1.2 Author’s screenshot of a collage of obscenities created in Scribblenauts Unlimited

In this book, I examine how children, childhood, and intergenerational relationships are depicted in contemporary videogames and ask how these representations might uphold or challenge contemporary Western constructions of the figure of ‘the child’. When Carl Jung traced the pervasive presence of ‘the child’ archetype across myths, religions, folklore, and literature, he stressed that its transcultural and transhistorical role in the collective psyche could not be denied, explained away, or moved past. “The most we can do”, he wrote, “is to dream the myth onward and give it a modern dress” (1948/1979, p. 160). This book dreams the myth of ‘the child’ onward by examining the virtual children that populate digital gameworlds. As such, it does not centre what Berry Mayall (1994) has referred to as ‘children’s childhoods’, but instead explores constructions of childhood in videogames developed, published, and played by a range of age groups. The shift in focus from the lived experiences of child-players to the construction of child-characters is not an abandonment of real children— not least because, as Robin Bernstein puts it, the idea that one can firmly and definitively separate ‘imagined’ children from ‘real’ children belies the “simultaneity and mutual constitution of children and childhood” (2011,

1

DREAMING THE MYTH ONWARDS

5

p. 22). If childhood is, as Bernstein proposes, the embodied performance of a set of social scripts, then this book attempts to read those scripts as they currently appear in videogames. In doing so, this book complements the findings of children’s media scholars such as Marsha Kinder, James Gee, David Buckingham, Jackie Marsh, Seth Giddings, and Sara Grimes. However, unlike these researchers, I have not specifically sought out the perspectives of child-players, nor do I claim to represent their views. This isn’t because I think children’s opinions of the media that they consume and co-create are irrelevant—the opposite is true. I have run participatory research groups with young people about their contributions to gaming cultures, and I believe in the importance of this work. But I also think that in order to understand how videogames shape children’s self-concept and delineate the normative modes of behaviour available to them, we need a comprehensive taxonomy of the tropes, stereotypes, and symbols that habituate players of all ages to certain figural imaginings of childhood. This book, therefore, provides additional frameworks for audience reception studies of child-players by identifying and critiquing depictions of childhood that recur across a large corpus of videogames. Once we have an overview of how videogames present childhood as a conceptual category and as a conventional sign, we are in a better position to contextualise how young players submit to, collude in, or subvert the social roles made available to them through media representation. Equally, we can have more productive conversations about how adult players calibrate their own age-based identities and behaviours in response to portrayals of childhood in videogames. Dreaming the myth of ‘the child’ onward is a future-oriented endeavour, and so while I intend to provide a snapshot of current depictions of childhood in videogames, I also look beyond what is to what could be. Children’s author and researcher Zetta Elliot writes that the dearth of Black female child-characters in the novels she read during her youth made it necessary for her to “develop the capacity to dream [herself] into existence” (2010, n.p.). Elliot’s commitment to dreaming Black girls into existence speaks to the looping dynamic that characterises the relationship between fictional children and children’s lived realities. As games scholar Adriene Shaw puts it, “representation provides evidence for what forms of existence are possible” (2014, p. 4). In recording the digital kids that appear in contemporary gameworlds, I am also outlining the gaps, silences, and exclusions that fail to reflect the diversity of young playerships. Understanding the impact of erasure undoubtedly requires

6

E. REAY

the insights of child-players. However, mapping recurrent representational trends over a large corpus can corroborate their testimony, while also providing a shared point of reference for directing and quantifying change.

A Seat at the Kid’s Table To make sense of the scholarly neglect of child-characters in videogames, there are two factors to consider. Firstly, in popular consciousness, childhood is usually thought of as a straightforward, biological reality rather than as a politically contentious social status. While we are getting better at understanding gender, race, ability, and sexuality as relational identities that result from the interaction between biological and social factors, age is still generally considered a natural, essential, universal, and ahistorical identity marker. Despite the fact that the attitudes, ideals, and rituals surrounding the anatomical markers of youth vary dramatically across cultures and time periods, common sense understandings of childhood see it as a self-evident state determined by objective measures such as stages of physiological development and a person’s age in years (LesnikOberstein, 2011). Outside of Children’s Literature Studies, Childhood Studies, Age Studies, and Girlhood Studies, intersectional analyses of media representation tend to elide the ideological function of the adult/ child binary (Jenks, 2005). Of the disciplines that do approach childhood as a contested, shifting social construct, Children’s Literature Studies, in particular, has developed extensive critical apparatuses for interrogating representations of childhood that are presented to young people through the fiction they consume. In fact, the term ‘aetonormativity’—the assumption that adult experiences and worldviews are normative, while those of children are deviant—originates in Children’s Literature Studies (Beauvais, 2015; Gubar, 2016; Nikolajeva, 2005). Unfortunately, Children’s Literature Studies is not on speaking terms with Games Studies. This leads me to the second obstacle: Games Studies has claimed legitimacy as an academic discipline by insisting on the (incipient) maturity of its medium, while Children’s Literature Studies has asserted that its academic contributions are either serious or utilitarian. “We’re not childish!”, Games Studies exclaims. “We’re not playing around!”, Children’s Literature Studies retorts. Both positions are being challenged by new researchers entering the fields, but developmentalist, aetonormative rhetoric persists

1

DREAMING THE MYTH ONWARDS

7

in Games Studies, and Children’s Literature Studies continue to approach videogames with either bemused squeamishness or jealous suspicion. I can already feel the pushback, denial, and even outrage the previous statement might provoke in some readers. All I can say is that I am speaking from extensive first-hand experience. I have tried to stand with one foot in Games Studies and the other in Children’s Literature Studies for my entire academic career, and so I have seen from both sides the circular and self-flagellating arguments against the childishness of games and the frivolity of children’s literature. There are videogames that are decidedly grown-up, and there are children’s books that are utterly profound, but to reject ‘the child’ and to disavow levity is to acquiesce to the same system of values used to exclude both disciplines from mainstream academic enquiry. In all honesty, the fraught relationship between ‘the child’ and ‘the videogame’ has made it difficult for me to maintain my academic dualcitizenship as a Children’s Literature scholar and a Games Studies scholar. Despite my unwavering belief that an interdisciplinary embrace would transform both fields for the better, my attempts to integrate Children’s Literature Studies and Games Studies have thus far been about as successful as my attempts to introduce swearwords into Scribblenauts. I’ve written elsewhere about the discrepancy between the meta-critical accounts of Children’s Literature Studies’ supposed embrace of new media and the gatekeeping, resistance, and, on occasion, outright hostility researchers face when attempting to integrate videogames into existing Children’s Literature Studies paradigms (Reay, 2018). In that article, I suggest some possible reasons for the excess of caution and conservatism triggered by efforts to add videogames to existing Children’s Literature canons, curricula, and conferences. Although there is exciting new scholarship on the horizon (e.g., Harkin, 2022), the interdisciplinary waters surrounding the island of Children’s Literature Studies remain choppy, and researchers interested in videogames are still being told—implicitly and explicitly—not to rock the boat. This book is for those researchers. It contains waypoints, landmarks, and constellations to aid navigation. Safe travels, voyager.

8

E. REAY

Childish Violence and Violent Children This book is also for Games Studies scholars. I’m more sympathetic towards Games Studies’ lack of interest in—or total disavowal of—the figure of ‘the child’ than I am towards Children’s Literature Studies’ reluctance to accept videogames. Children’s Literature Studies should know better than to ignore or dismiss a body of texts because it’s been infantilised or trivialised, but there are fewer reasons why Games Studies scholars would view ‘the child’ as anything other than an annoying, unfair encumbrance. Anna Anthropy provides a concise and representative example of games scholars’ vexation with the imagined entanglement of gaming and childhood. She writes, Newscasters are fond of reporting that videogames are dangerous to children, either because they teach children how to steal cars and kill cops or because they actually connect children electronically to the game-playing predators who are waiting to snatch them away. Religious leaders have wasted no time condemning videogames as a trap for children’s souls, and armchair psychologists accuse them of turning kids into antisocial hermits. (2012, p. 1)

James Newman comments on the impact this has had on the academic study of games, noting “videogames are seen as being a children’s medium. This means that they are easily and readily denigrated as trivial—something that will be ‘grown out of’—demanding no further investigation” (2004, p. 5). Christopher Paul similarly identifies the “belief that videogames are kid’s toys” (2012, p. 39) as being one of the key elements of the rhetorical environment surrounding the medium that prevents it from attaining artistic legitimacy. When Chris Bateman gripes, “the exclusion of games from the category of art reflects the natural reluctance to let the kids eat at the grown-ups’ table” (2011, p. 355), he exemplifies the kind of defensive exasperation that characterises most games scholars’ responses to the yoking of videogames and children. Samantha Blackmon reflects on the internalisation of the infantilisation of videogames, writing, “I find it telling that as an academic who has been studying videogames for almost two decades and who has been playing videogames for more than four, I still find myself the victim of a mindset that videogames are the stuff of child’s play” (Blackmon & Russworm, 2020, n.p.). Kishonna Gray highlights a further implication of the infantilisation of videogames, writing, “the dominant framing that gaming is

1

DREAMING THE MYTH ONWARDS

9

‘child’s play’ or not a serious entity to examine suggests that the violence occurring therein is acceptable” (2020, p. 21). This is corroborated by Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist cultural critic who was one of the targets of the sexist harassment campaign known as ‘GamerGate’. In a reflective interview, Sarkeesian challenged the use of the word ‘troll’ to describe online misogynists, noting that “it feels too childish. This is harassment and abuse” (Valenti, 2015). Likewise, in Sarkeesian’s TedxTalk on the topic (2012), she stresses that the majority of the perpetrators were adults, pre-empting GamerGate sceptics who might seek to downplay questions of liability and accountability by grouping gamers and children. This chorus of perspectives aggregated here spans more than a decade. It suggests there is a continuing sense within Games Studies that unless the field can shield itself from accusations of childishness, videogames will never be considered valid objects of study. The developmentalist rhetoric of maturation pervades in meta-analyses of the field, too. Espen Aarseth’s introduction to Volume 15 of the journal Game Studies warns that “if game studies, no longer the cute baby it once may have been, is to succeed qualitatively and not just as a popular but ill-respected inter-discipline, the teenager needs to grow up and learn how to be self-critical” (2017, n.p.) Ian Bogost also uses aetonormative language to admonish the field. He compares the storydriven, indie game Gone Home to “young adult fiction”, and continues that this is Hardly anything to be ashamed of, but maybe nothing to praise, either. If the ultimate bar for meaning in games is set at teen fare, then perhaps [videogames] will remain stuck in a perpetual adolescence even if they escape the stereotypical dude-bro’s basement. Other paths are possible, and perhaps the most promising ones will bypass rather than resolve games’ youthful indiscretions. (2017, n.p.)

Bogost adopts the language of videogame denigrators to endorse a linear view of progression, wherein the passage of time leads game design on a unidirectional path towards the pinnacle of adulthood. His desire to disown the early years of game development—which he characterises as a period of infantile ineptitude—is connected to his desire for videogames to transcend ‘low culture’, for which YA fiction is a metonym. This makes sense in light of Henry Jenkins’ observation that the figure of the child “exists outside the culture precisely so that we can use it to regulate

10

E. REAY

cultural hierarchies, to separate the impure influence of popular culture from the sanctifying touch of high culture” (1998, p. 14). However, Bogost’s reliance on the fact that ‘childish’ is always an insult—even when directed at children—and that ‘maturity’ can sound like a politically neutral, universally accessible quality allows him to keep his vision for the future of videogames rather vague. I should note here that Gone Home—the game Bogost finds so underwhelming—is a non-violent, gothic, domestic, character-driven walking simulator with a queer, female protagonist. The charge of ‘childishness’ does a lot of obfuscatory work to mask critiques that could otherwise be read as sexist or homophobic. In any case, shifting the dividing line between ‘grown-up’ and ‘childish,’ a few degrees in one direction or the other is not an effective strategy for addressing high culture’s conceptually parasitic relationship to low culture. In contrast, a truly disruptive act would be to embrace childishness, arrested development, and ‘growing sideways’, as Katherine Bond Stockton would put it (2012). Queer theorist Jack Halberstam, for example, chooses to illustrate his philosophical arguments using examples drawn from popular children’s films and TV shows, not in spite of their limited cultural credibility but because of it (2011). In making an ally of the child, he signals his rejection of conventional value hierarchies within academia and his reluctance to uncritically reproduce any of its boundaries. It is no coincidence that critics who lean into the connection between gaming and childhood often use frameworks drawn from queer theory (e.g., Pugh (2019), de Matos et al. (2021), Goetz (2018), Bond Stockton (2017)). This is a defiant response to the weaponisation of the symbol of ‘the child’ against queer communities (Edelman 2004) and provides an instructive precedent for Games Studies. Taking seriously the connection between gaming and childhood can— perhaps counterintuitively—make it harder to trivialise systemic violence in gaming culture. Games scholars are right to be sceptical of studies rooted in media effects determinism that claim videogames make children violent (or obese, or hyperactive, or reclusive, and so on). But as Carly Kocurek (2022) has argued, denying the formative effects of videogames on players of all ages prevents us from adequately challenging the militaristic, white supremacist, misogynistic schema that align certain videogames with racist, anti-feminist, homophobic, fascist movements. As rules-based structures, games are powerful tools for disciplining players into accepting certain social roles and performing certain behaviours

1

DREAMING THE MYTH ONWARDS

11

(Trammell, 2020), and gamers are being actively recruited into nationalistic, alt-right political crusades (Kowert et al., 2022). Inviting the figure of ‘the child’ into Games Studies signals the field’s readiness to tackle issues relating to social impact, ethical design, and accountability. Furthermore, an intentional focus on child-characters gives Games Studies scholars the opportunity to reflect on the moral currency of childhood as it pertains to white innocence, consumer conditioning, and the twisted bildungsroman logic of ‘red pilling’ that is invoked to explain certain gamer identities.

Adult Joy The citational apparatus in this book situates my research within a network of blogs, developer commentaries, video essays, autoethnographic Let’s Plays, and games journalism. It wasn’t my intention to eschew capital ‘T’ theory, but in making space for different types of expertise I’ve found that I haven’t had to sacrifice rigour for relevance. As a case in point, the most compelling reframing of the ‘videogames make children violent’ position that I’ve encountered was written by videogames journalist Leigh Alexander (2014) in a short article published by a news outlet whose name, at the time, was a horny pun.1 Alexander pulls the rug from under hundreds of academic studies debating the effects of violent games on child-players by asking the question ‘Can joy be more ‘adult’ than violence?’. She challenges the implied collocation of adulthood and violence and identifies the radical potential of designing for childliness.2 She posits that the mainstream games industry’s fixation on ‘mature’ content is antithetical to one of the central pleasures of play—the free-form, imaginative, curious, low stakes, unselfconscious, spontaneous, experimental meanderings of ‘what if?’. Roger Caillois calls this kind of play paidia, from the root word pais meaning ‘child’. Caillois posits that all games can be placed on a “continuum between two opposite poles”. At one extreme,

1 Gamasutra was renamed Game Developer in 2021. 2 I’m using the word ‘childliness’ to describe the qualities associated with childhood that

are viewed positively (e.g., openness, curiosity, simplicity, playfulness, etc.)—as opposed to ‘childishness’, which describes the qualities associated with childhood that are viewed negatively (e.g., irrationality, weakness, foolishness, petulance, etc.).

12

E. REAY

diversion, turbulence, free improvisation, and carefree gaiety is dominant. It manifests a kind of uncontrollable fantasy that can be designated by the term ‘paidia’. At the opposite extreme, this frolicsome and impulsive exuberance is almost entirely absorbed or disciplined by a complementary, and in some respects, inverse tendency to its anarchic and capricious nature…I call this second component ‘ludus’. (1961, p. 13)

Exegesis of Caillois’ definition of paidia frequently frames it as children’s pastime—a simple, primeval form of play that later evolves into structured, rule-bound ludus. Gonzalo Frasca, for example, defines paidia as “the form of play present in early children [sic] (construction kits, games of make-believe, kinetic play)” (2003, p. 229). The strong cultural association between children and paidia means that game designers can adopt a childly aesthetic in order to promote a paidic playstyle. The childly aesthetic of Scribblenauts Unlimited, for example, frames its straightforward puzzles as games of ‘Let’s Pretend’ that can be resolved in multiple, creative ways. These puzzles become less about identifying the correct solution or the optimal strategy and more about finding the most amusing, mischievous, ingenious, absurd, or surprising course of action. In the game’s tutorial level, for instance, players are instructed to rescue a cat from a tree. The puzzle could readily be solved with a ladder, but players may elect to use a hovercraft, a flying unicorn, or Batman to retrieve the frightened feline. In this way, the game invites creative flair, boundary testing, and spontaneous, improvised self-expression. This adds autotelic value to the act of puzzle-solving, making it intrinsically rewarding as well as extrinsically motivated through feedback loops such as the allocation of points and the unlocking of new locations. Sebastian Deterding laments a dearth of Games Studies research that centres paidic play, writing “pretend play has been mainly studied as a phenomenon of child development…capturing a stage and form of play where children re-enact or invent strips of events assembled from their surrounding life and media world” (2017, p. 107). While Deterding notes the “curt, superficial, and conflating treatment” (p. 111) of paidic play, he stops short of suggesting that it is the conventional association of paidia with childhood that prevents Games Studies scholars from taking this type of play seriously. Games journalists, however, have made this connection. Keith Stuart, writing for The Guardian, comments “it can be fun to makebelieve, but it gets harder as we grow up. Videogames are a place where we can still behave like children, in a good way” (2020, n.p.). Stuart

1

DREAMING THE MYTH ONWARDS

13

recognises the connection between paidia and childhood, and his subordinate clause acknowledges the need to reframe the stigma attached to this mode of behaviour in adulthood. In his analysis of the online multiplayer game Fortnite, Stuart again figures childhood as a space rather than a life stage (August 2018), while his colleague Keza Macdonald describes videogames as time machines that tether us to our childselves (Pushing Buttons, November 2022). The conversations being had by these games journalists go beyond questions of whether videogames are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for child-players—questions that still preoccupy so many academic researchers. Instead, they centre on the medium’s potential to redraw the boundaries that establish adulthood and childhood as separate worlds.

Destabilising Age-Based Identities In an age in which our time is often valued in terms of utility and productivity, there is something radical inherent in any form of autotelic play, such that when videogame detractors dismiss the medium as a ‘waste of time’, they inadvertently point to its countercultural power. I think this transgressive potential is closely tied to the ways in which videogames can destabilise age-based identities. Specifically, I believe that when videogames facilitate paidia (or ‘playing-like-a-child’), they break adulthood—just as much as videogames that facilitate violent play supposedly break childhood. Jean Baudrillard argues that the function of Disney Land as a psychic space for adult Americans is to licence and sell paidia, while circumscribing this re-enchantment within the confines of its parks and characterising it strictly as a consumer activity (1981). This confinement renders adult paidia in other contexts ‘out of place’, shameful, and even pathological. The maintenance of the status quo requires the stymying of ‘what if?’ play in adulthood because this mode of being can prime us for social adaptation and for the re-negotiation of interpersonal and institutional rules. As Games Studies scholar Graeme Kirkpatrick puts it, imaginative play has the “ability to make people think in ways that take them beyond the current ordering of the sensible” thereby “revealing the deep contingency of current arrangements, and creat[ing] an opening on to different ways of living” (2015, n.p.). Games philosopher Miguel Sicart is even blunter, writing, “Play appropriates events, structures, and institutions to mock them and trivialise them” (2014, p. 3). Sicart suggests

14

E. REAY

that mimetic play can be a form of carnivalesque mimicry, which contaminates the real-world referent with play’s fictionality, thereby undermining its stability, gravity, and veracity. Videogame play, in particular, tests the barrier between reality and fiction by virtue of being ‘half-real’, as Jesper Juul puts it (2005). Building on Juul’s framing of the relationship between the ‘real’ rules of digital games and the fictional worlds that act as their interfaces, Timothy Welsh concludes, “The ‘real event’ of videogaming ripples across multiple, interwoven contexts—physical, social, virtual” (2016, p. 58). Videogames blur the lines between public play and private play, as well as play-asconsumption and play-as-creation. But most significantly, they blur the immateriality of fantasy with the materiality of performance by inviting players to take action. Christopher Thi Nguyen sees games as “libraries of agencies, in which we may discover and familiarise ourselves with new modes of agency” (2020, p. 76). He argues that while painting lets us record sights and music lets us record sound, games let us inscribe agency—and the inscription process makes it easier to understand different experiences of agency and autonomy. He emphasises that games don’t simply describe the outlines of agency, they encourage players to act, allowing them to understand alternate agencies from the inside. The identities of ‘adult’ and ‘child’ are contingent on collective definitions of agency, ability, competence, responsibility, and autonomy. Therefore, as libraries of agencies, videogames provide us with possibility spaces within which we might think flexibly about the changing roles, rights, and prohibitions that are conditionally doled out and rescinded along the timelines of our lives. What I am trying to say is that it’s not a coincidence that age-based ideologies are the spanking paddle of choice for the cultural hazing of videogames. If videogames can both prematurely curtail childhood by corrupting innocent children, and unnaturally prolong childhood by enabling adult regression, then it follows that the medium poses a real threat to the age-based organisation of society. Viewed this way, it seems the reactionaries are right: videogames are ruining childhood— and, by extension, they are destroying its conceptual foil, adulthood. If we contextualise the moral panic surrounding children’s relationship with videogames within a longer history of anxiety about innovations in communications technology, we can see that new tools for creative expression have reliably precipitated societal upheaval, the redistribution of power, and the reimagining of social roles. In the 1980s, Neil

1

DREAMING THE MYTH ONWARDS

15

Postman famously argued that childhood was disappearing. “Everywhere one looks,” he writes, “it may be seen that the behaviour, language, attitudes, and desires—even the physical appearance—of adults and children are becoming increasingly indistinguishable” (1982/1994 p. 4). Postman credits the printing press with the invention of childhood, claiming that illiteracy expelled children from the adult world, thereby forcing into existence a separate, symbolic realm that young people could inhabit. And he blames the television—which, apparently, hails children and adults as equals—for childhood’s end. I’m not going to speculate about whether videogames represent childhood’s death throes or its resurrection. However, my hunch is that while the children’s revolution won’t be televised, it might be live-streamed on Twitch. The implications of destabilising age-based identities are widereaching. Since chronological age is an index for political participation and an instrument for regulating gender, class, and racial hierarchies, virtual spaces in which age is not a key organising rubric have the potential to trouble hegemonic power. Imagining alternate worlds in which children are differently integrated into Western society could, for example, change labour conditions currently deemed acceptable, decrease the value placed on independence and individualism, undo the atomising effect of the nuclear family on communities, transform urban planning and the design of public spaces, reframe thinking around disability and access, undermine neocolonial attitudes towards ‘developing’ countries, and form new networks of nurture. Rather than passively waiting to grow up, it is time for Games Studies to “run toward the trouble rather than away from it”, to borrow Amanda Phillips’ expression (2020, p. 3). The anxious, angry rhetoric of videogame detractors tells us where and how videogames matter, and all routes pass through ‘the child’. The material turn in cultural studies means that the spotlight has shone on child-players, but child-characters have remained in the wings. Children’s Literature Studies has the relevant critical apparatuses to theorise fictional childhoods, but these approaches will not stay relevant unless we can apply them to videogames—the medium which will be memorialised as the defining art form of the twenty-first century. For these reasons alone, I think that building a bridge between Children’s Literature Studies and Games Studies is a worthwhile venture.

16

E. REAY

This book constitutes the planning phase of this bridge-building project. The following large-scale survey of child-characters in contemporary videogames is my version of a site inspection. The whistle-stop tour of the history of childhood in Chapter Three is my attempt at gathering building materials. The subsequent close readings of individual digital kids that constitute Chapters Four through Seven are speculative schematics for the construction phase. The conclusion is my attempt to set a firm foundation. My hope is that the readers of this book will volunteer their own research interests as struts, pillars, and supports, such that this communally constructed bridge can bear the footfall of generations of future scholars moving between the disciplines with ease.

Chapter Overview This book opens with a summary of a large-scale content analysis of childcharacters in contemporary videogames. Using examples drawn from a dataset of over 500 titles, I point to shared features and functions of child-characters in order to identify a set of common tropes. I label these tropes: The Inner Child, The Mighty Child, The Side Kid, The Human Becoming, The Child Sacrifice, The Waif, and The Little Monster. I suggest ways in which these archetypes might be used as a shared shorthand to facilitate interdisciplinary conversations between Games Studies and Children’s Literature Studies. At the end of this chapter, I describe my approach to the close reading of videogames and introduce a novel research method called ‘critical ekphrasis’. In Chapter 3, I provide a brief history of childhood and then use Quantic Dream’s Detroit: Become Human as a case study to demonstrate how the figure of the child can be used to shore up both progressive and conservative ideologies. I argue that videogames can reproduce the rules that structure the figural imaginings of the child, and then challenge players of all ages to work within these boundaries. This brings questions of aetonormative agency to the fore by demanding players submit to a logic that bestows and withholds power on either side of the adult/ child divide. I conclude that developing a sensitivity to how age functions as a rhetorical, ludic, and narrative device can illuminate other power hierarchies that might be at play in videogames. In Chapter Four, I build on the connection between agency and age by comparing the trope of The Waif to the trope of The Little Monster. I contrast The Little Monsters in Dead Space and Days Gone with The

1

DREAMING THE MYTH ONWARDS

17

Waifs in Bioshock and The Witcher 3 to illustrate that while Little Monsters create opportunities for a satisfying sense of mechanical mastery, Waifs create contexts within which players see themselves as moral agents operating within an open ethical system. I then turn to Little Nightmares , LIMBO, and INSIDE to explore how The Waif sometimes invokes a moral schematic only to undermine its logic. In these survival–horror platformers, the association between vulnerability and righteousness is gradually effaced, revealing the complex entanglement of affection and domination that characterises intergenerational relationships. In Chapter Five, I ask whether the conditional vulnerability of ‘the child’ is a precursor for a new kind of heroism. After reviewing a selection of games from my survey that connect child heroes and cooperative play, I focus on two indie hits—Röki and Knights and Bikes —to argue that childly heroism offers an alternative to current conceptions of The Hero’s Journey in videogame narrative design. I point out how the binary tropes of inclusion and exclusion that structure traditional hero stories are challenged when the skills being honed by a game consist of fostering connections, enacting compromise, and improving communication. Furthermore, the points of friction and flow between deuteragonists reflect the synergistic interplay between a videogame’s semiotic planes. I argue that far from being a binary medium, videogames are characterised by profound semiotic interdependence. The multimodality of videogames generates interpretive gaps in which complex, liminal, relational identities can exist and the lusory attitude elicited by videogames turns these moments of hesitation into playful spaces for creative puzzle-solving. I adapt Ursula Le Guin’s ‘Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’ to offer an ‘Inventory System Theory of Fiction’ that acknowledges the fundamentally unheroic nature of videogame affordances. In Chapter Six, I focus on games that hail The Inner Child, including Fall Guys, Pikmin 3, Unravel , and the LittleBigPlanet series. These games induce pleasure by evoking nostalgia for a shared ideal of childhood and suggest that childhood can be an elective mode of being. They generate a magic circle of play by drawing on common cultural beliefs about the separateness of childhood, and their gamespaces function to uncouple ‘childhood’ from a particular age range. The cuteness of the toy-like avatars in these games invites gestures of care, but also—paradoxically—a kind of carelessness, expressed through humorous violence and transgressive experimentation. While the (im)material audiovisual appearance of the toy-like avatars trammel aggression, the mechanics

18

E. REAY

themselves implicitly condone roughhousing. Competing constructions of the child as both ‘uncivilised’ and ‘uncorrupted’ are present in these games, reconciling the conflicting desires to hug/harm the avatar. In Chapter Seven, I examine the death of The Child Sacrifice in games from the Assassin’s Creed series. I propose that The Child Sacrifice functions as a rhetorical device to assuage some of the ludonarrative dissonance that arises from role-playing as a benevolent, noble hero whose main interactions with the world entail destruction and murder. In contrast to the trope of The Mighty Child, The Child Sacrifice works to eliminate moments of hesitation that could arise from tensions between mechanics and narrative. By drawing parallels between The Child Sacrifice and the woman-in-the-refrigerator trope, I illuminate this archetype’s misogyny. Rather than creating the possibility for feminine heroism, replacing the fridged wife with the fridged child reinforces the need for traditional masculine heroism. The death of The Child Sacrifice can be seen to represent a rejection of feminist game scholarship’s directive for videogames to abandon toxic masculinity: the symbol of change is eliminated so that the traditional hero can stay the same.

References Aarseth, E. (2015). Meta-game studies. Game Studies, 15, 1. Alexander, L. (2014, July 4). Can joy be more ‘adult’ than violence? Gamasutra. Anthropy, A. (2012). Rise of the videogame Zinesters: How freaks, normals, amateurs, artists, dreamers, drop-outs, queers, housewives, and people like you are taking back an art form. Seven Stories Press. Bateman, C. (2011). Imaginary games, zero books. John Hunt Press. Baudrillard, J. (1981). Simulacra and simulation. University of Michigan Press. Beauvais, C. (2015). Mighty Child: Time and power in children’s literature. (Children’s literature, culture, and cognition). John Benjamins Publishing Company. Bernstein, R. (2011). Racial innocence: performing American childhood from slavery to civil rights, America and the long 19th century (Book 16). New York University Press. Blackmon, S., & Russworm, T. M. (2020). Replaying video game history as a mixtape of black feminist thought. Feminist Media Histories, 6(1), 93–119. Bogost, I. (2017, April 25). Video games are better without stories. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/ video-gamesstories/524148/?utm_source=atltw

1

DREAMING THE MYTH ONWARDS

19

Bond Stockton, K. (2012). The queer child, or growing sideways in the twentieth century. Duke University Press. Bond Stockton, K. (2017). If queer children were a videogame. In B. Ruberg & A. Shaw (Eds.), Queer game studies. University of Minnesota Press. Bradford, C. (2009). Playing at bullying: The postmodern ethic of bully (C. Canem, Ed.). Digital Culture & Education. Caillois, R. (1961), Man, play, and games (M. Barash, Trans.). Free Press of Glencoe. Deterding, S. (2017). The Pyrrhic victory of game studies: Assessing the past, present, and future of interdisciplinary game research. Games and Culture, 12, 521–543. Edelman, L. (2004). No future queer theory and the death drive (Series Q). Duke University Press. Elliot, Z. (2010). The writer’s page: Decolonising the imagination. The Hornbook. https://www.hbook.com/?detailStory=decolonizing-imagination Frasca, G. (2003). Ludologists love stories, too: Notes from a debate that never took place. DiGRA. http://www.digra.org/wp-content/uploads/dig itallibrary/05163.01125.pdf Goetz, C. (2018). Coin of another realm. Game Studies, 18(3). http://gamest udies.org/1803/articles/goetz Gray, K. (2020). Intersectional tech: Black users in digital gaming. Louisiana State University Press. Gubar, M. (2016). The hermeneutics of recuperation: What a Kinship-model approach to children’s agency could do for children’s literature and childhood studies. Jeunesse: Young People Texts, Cultures, 8, 291–310. https://doi.org/ 10.1353/jeu.2016.0015 Halberstam, J. (2011). The queer art of failure. Duke University Press. Harkin, S. (2022). Girlhood games: Gender, identity, and coming of age in videogames (PhD Thesis submitted at Swinburne University of Technology). https://researchbank.swinburne.edu.au/file/86788440-fcec-420a8df1-b7c35f976066/1/stephanie_harkin_thesis.pdf Jenkins, H. (Ed.). (1998). ‘Introduction’, the children’s culture reader. New York University Press. Jenks, C. (2005). Childhood (2nd ed., Key ideas). Routledge. Jung, C., McGuire, W., & Ress, L. (1979). Collected works of C.G. Jung. Vol. 19, general bibliography (Revised. ed., Carl G. Jung: Collected Works of C. G. Jung; Vol. 19). Juul, J. (2005). Half-real: Video games between real rules and fictional worlds. MIT Press. Kirkpatrick, G. (2015). Ludefaction: Fracking of the radical imaginary. Games and Culture, 10(6), 507–524. https://doi.org/10.1177/155541201456 8665

20

E. REAY

Kocurek, C. (2022). The man with the gun is a boy who plays games: Video games, white innocence, and mass shootings in the U.S. Journal of Games Criticism. Kowert, R., Martel, A., & Swann, B. (2022). Not just a game: Identity fusion and extremism in gaming cultures. Frontiers in Communication, 7 , 1007128. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2022.1007128 Lesnik-Oberstein, K. (2011). Children in culture, revisited: Further approaches to childhood. Palgrave Macmillan. Macdonald, K. (2022, November 9). Playing games into the wee hours was a teenage pleasure—How I long for that time. Pushing Buttons Newsletter. Matos, A. D., Massood, P. J., & Wojcik, P. R. (Eds.). (2021). Media crossroads: Intersections of space and identity in screen cultures. Duke University Press. Mayall, B. (1994). Children’s childhoods: Observed and experienced. Falmer Press. Newman, J. (2004). Videogames. Routledge. Nguyen, C. T. (2020). Games: Agency as art (Ser. Thinking Art). Oxford University Press. Nikolajeva, M. (2005). Aesthetic approaches to children’s literature: An introduction. Scarecrow Press. Paul, C. (2012). Wordplay and the discourse of videogames: Analyzing words, design, and play. Routledge. Phillips, A. (2020). Gamer trouble: Feminist confrontations in digital culture. New York University Press. Postman N. (1994). The disappearance of childhood (1st Vintage Books). Vintage Books. Pugh, T. (2019). Chaucer’s losers, Nintendo’s children, and other forays in queer ludonarratology (Frontiers of narrative). University of Nebraska Press. Reay, E. (2018). Appraising the poetic power of children’s video games. International Research in Children’s Literature, 11(1), 17–32. https://doi.org/10. 3366/ircl.2018.0251 Sarkeesian, A. (2012). Anita Sarkeesian at TEDx Women. TEDx. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=GZAxwsg9J9Q Shaw, A. (2014). Gaming at the edge: Sexuality and gender at the margins of gamer culture. University of Minnesota Press. Sicart, M. (2014). Play matters. MIT Press. Stuart, K. (2018). Fortnite is so much more than a game. Medium. https://gen. medium.com/fortnite-is-so-much-more-than-a-game-3ca829f389f4 Trammell, A. (2020). Torture, play, and the black experience. G.A.M.E. 8.9. Valenti, J. (2015, August 29). Anita Sarkeesian interview: The word ‘troll’ feels too childish. This is abuse. The Guardian. Welsh, T. (2016). Mixed realism: Videogames and the violence of fiction. University of Minnesota Press.

CHAPTER 2

A Survey of Child-Characters in Contemporary Videogames

When I began this project, I thought that a useful first step would be to create a searchable database of child-characters in contemporary videogames. I put together a corpus of commercially successful and critically acclaimed videogames published between 2009 and 2019 using a combination of annual sale figures recording the best-selling releases, lists of the winners of industry awards, and the highest-scoring titles on the review website ‘Metacritic’ (Reay, 2021). After I’d removed duplicates, I ended up with a list of just under 600 unique titles. I organised them by genre, age rating, and publication year, and then I asked what I thought was a basic, binary question: does this videogame contain any child-characters?1 It became immediately obvious that a huge proportion

1 Defining the term ‘child’ is difficult because, as Karen Renner notes, “the laws that govern certain rights—voting, drinking alcohol, consenting to sex—vary, each suggesting that a different age marks the boundary between adult and child” (2013, p. 5). For the purpose of this survey, I wanted to keep things simple, so I decided that ‘child’ would include all characters that appeared to be between 0 and 14 years of age. If a character’s age was not made explicit in the game itself and was not specified in the game’s paratexts, then its age was determined through a combination of anatomical markers in its audiovisual representation, its social relationships with other characters, and its associated game mechanics. Unlike other content analyses (e.g., Williams et al., 2009), non-human and quasihuman characters were included my survey, following Passmore et al.’s precedent in which all characters that are “positioned in a human-relatable context, e.g., behind the wheel of a car” (2017, p. 143) were included. This approach extends to anthropomorphic

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 E. Reay, The Child in Videogames, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42371-0_2

21

22

E. REAY

of videogames in my corpus were entirely child-free zones. Even when I’d controlled for videogames that didn’t have any human or anthropomorphised characters, 65% of the remaining titles envisaged worlds without children. I checked whether this correlated with the age rating of a game and found that games rated 16+ and 18+ were, in fact, more likely to contain a child-character than games rated 3+ or 7+. When I looked at the genre, I saw that Rhythm games, Sports games, Sandbox games, Strategy games, and Shooters were the least likely to feature childcharacters, while Role-Playing games, Adventure games, Stealth games, and Platform games were the most likely.

The Invisible Child The fact that child-characters simply do not exist in most videogames reflects children’s exclusion from public and professional spheres in contemporary Anglo-American society. Games in my corpus that simulated adult professions did not contain playable child-characters, reflecting modern, Western children’s legal and cultural exclusion from most workplaces. Sports simulation games—particularly those that featured living athletes such as the FIFA series or the Madden NFL series—did not include any child-characters, and this held true for ‘realistic’ racing games such as the F1 series, MotorStorm Arctic Edge, Race Driver: GRID, and the Need for Speed series. Dance Central, the SingStar series, SongPop, Rock Band, and the Guitar Hero series only depicted professional musicians and performers as adults, and games that simulated realistic aspects of warfare represented all playable combatants as adults. Wii Fit Plus, Zumba Fitness, and other similar titles represented the player on-screen using the outline of an adult body, and creative training games such as Colors 3D and the Art Academy series were all facilitated by adult virtual instructors. You could argue that the absence of children in these virtual worlds is concomitant with the way these games use levels of professionalism and ‘career progression’ systems of advancement to ascribe meaning to the

animals, supernatural creatures, toys, automata, robots, and cyborg, because, as Carl Jung notes, “the child motif appears in the guise of the dwarf and the elf” (1948/1969, p. 159). Zoe Jaques adds there is a long media tradition “in which the child and the animal overlap, address and reflect one another” and children are frequently aligned with or symbolised by living toys (2015, p. 13).

2

A SURVEY OF CHILD-CHARACTERS IN CONTEMPORARY …

23

playing experience. In other words, since the child is a symbol for both domesticity and leisure time—which are seen in contemporary Western culture as separate from the world of professional work—the exclusion of the child from these games signals their connection to real-world industry counterparts. In contrast, the two racing games in this corpus that included child-characters—the Mario Kart series and Crash Team Racing Nitro Fuel —were not only characterised by surrealism, absurdity, and fantasy but were also designed to welcome ‘non-serious’ playstyles that valued slapstick humour and light-hearted tomfoolery as much as they valued high levels of technical skill and ludic proficiency. In his writing on the spatialised politics of childhood, Jenks notes that while all people in society are subject to geographic restrictions, childhood is that status of personhood which is by definition often in the wrong place, like the parental bedroom, Daddy’s chair, the public house or even crossing the busy road. All people in any society are subject to geographical and spatial prohibitions, whether delineated by discretion, private possession, or political embargo, but the child’s experience of such parameters is particularly paradoxical, often unprincipled and certainly erratic. In terms of social space children are sited, insulated and distanced, and their very gradual emergence into wider, adult space is by accident, by degrees, as an award or as part of a gradualist rite de passage. (2005, pp. 73–4)

Jenks’ association between modern society’s desire to insulate children and keep children at a distance holds true in virtual spaces, where children are seemingly ‘protected’ through total erasure. It seems that certain game spaces are ‘adults only’ to shield virtual children from scenarios involving sex, violence, and other taboo activities. Since what game developers make ‘possible’ in gameworlds is often conflated with what they deem ‘permissible’, creators may choose to exclude child nonplayer characters (NPCs) from their digital worlds to avoid being accused of facilitating virtual child abuse. This accounts for the absence of child NPCs in violent, open-world games such as those in the Grand Theft Auto (GTA) series, which encourage players to test the limits both of what is possible and what is permissible. Bjorn Sjöblom reports that, “children and school busses were included in the beta version of GTA III but were scrapped before the final release of the game” (2015, p. 72), demonstrating that the systematic exclusion of children from these otherwise detailed, comprehensive gameworlds was a conscious design decision.

24

E. REAY

Considering the GTA series is often accused of being flagrantly immoral and purposely offensive, it is notable that killing digital children is a taboo developers refuse to touch. Nonetheless, excising children entirely from a simulation of society is in itself a form of violence: designers pre-emptively eliminate children before players can.

The Invincible Child I found that when violent, open-world games did contain child NPCs, they tended to limit the extent to which players could interact with these characters, thereby policing player behaviour towards this social group. Red Dead Redemption 2, for example, confines the single significant child-character to the camp—a designated safe space in which players are unable to use their weapons and violent interactions are prohibited. The only other game location in which players are subject to similar restrictions is the Wapiti reservation. In this way, the game presents players with an implicit moral code that equates violence against children with violence against Indigenous Americans. Considering the fact that the game features an ‘Honor’ metre that provides quantitative feedback condoning or condemning players’ moral decisions, it is significant that the choice to commit violence against Indigenous American characters and against child-characters is withheld from the player. Preventing the player from simulating genocide against virtual Indigenous Americans reflects most colonisers’ general unwillingness to take ownership of historical and ongoing atrocities committed against Native populations globally, but it also places the Indigenous characters in childish relation both to the white, ethnically European player character and to the player. As a result, both of these social communities seem out of place within this gameworld—they sit “at odds with the dominating logic” of the virtual space (Sjöblom, 2015, p. 79). Less like NPCs and more like environmental objects, their immortality makes them ‘Other’. It is worth noting here that one of the few videogames in my corpus that I identified as fully interweaving its child-characters into the social fabric of the gameworld was Disco Elysium, which gives players the option of punching a gobby, sweary child-character in the mouth.

2

A SURVEY OF CHILD-CHARACTERS IN CONTEMPORARY …

25

Playable Child-Characters A possible explanation for the absence of playable child-characters from certain game genres—for instance, from Action games and Fighting games—is that the kinds of playing experiences associated with these genres are often designed to fulfil a specific type of power fantasy. As a social group that is both physically and structurally vulnerable, ‘the child’ does not connote strength, influence, or importance, and is therefore not an obvious choice to represent an overpowered heroic figure whose abilities greatly exceed those of an average person. In fact, the converse is true: in the games I sampled, one-third of Stealth games—a genre in which the avatar is deliberately weak and underpowered—had playable child-characters. In her work on racialised videogame characters, Anna Everett notes, “generic stereotypes are part and parcel of entertainment media’s shorthand narrative structures and communicative devices” (2009, p. 115). Dominant stereotypes about children mean child-characters can function as icons that communicate game mechanics to the player. Games with stealth mechanics such as A Plague Tale: Innocence, Little Nightmares , INSIDE, and Resident Evil 7 use playable child-characters to express and explain the avatar’s helplessness, which in turn encourages an evasive, tactical playstyle and facilitates a tense, unnerving playing experience. In short, games use audiovisual signifiers to express their rules, and a child-avatar is an effective shorthand for delineating a restricted set of abilities. While some videogames in my corpus did feature powerful child heroes (for example, the player character Aurora in Child of Light, Link in the Legend of Zelda series, or the customisable child-avatars in the Pokémon series), they generally required an additional interpretive step to explain why this particular child is unlike other children. Link, for example, appears to be a pre-teen in most instalments of the Legend of Zelda series, but his childliness is complicated by an official timeline that estimates his age as approximately 117 years old (as of the Breath of the Wild game). Similarly, the eponymous Sakuna in Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin looks and sounds like an eight-year-old child, but she throws a foot-stomping, lip-quivering tantrum if anyone forgets that she is, in fact, a divine and ageless goddess (and can therefore binge on Saké as often as she wants). Veronica in Dragon Quest XI has the appearance of a six-year-old but is actually eighteen: her eternally youthful looks are the result of a curse she suffered at the hands of the Lord of Shadows.

26

E. REAY

The sadistic twin prison guards Caroline and Justine, and the intergalactic shop keeper José in Persona 5 are dreamlike projections from a Jungian collective unconscious. Without supernatural powers, royal heritage, or exceptional circumstances, the figure of the child is synonymous with the perennial underdog. The Animal Crossing series provides an example of the exceptional circumstances in which a childly avatar can drive action and be positioned in a role of responsibility. Since power is relational, the replacement of adult figures in the game world with animals—who are reminiscent of cute, cuddly, stuffed toys—installs the neotenised avatar at the top of the hierarchy, or at least flattens the hierarchy, granting the child importance as a creator, consumer, and community leader. The anthropomorphised animals are also elevated in a parallel manner through the inclusion of non-anthropomorphic animals in the gameworld that exists on a level with inanimate objects and comestibles.

Central, Supporting, Background For the games in my corpus that did contain at least one child-character, I posed a second question: was the child-character in a central role, a supporting role, or a background role? Around half of the childcharacters were assigned significant roles, but less than a quarter were playable, and many were little more than set dressing. The lack of playable child-characters speaks to the idea of ‘the child’ as an object rather than subject, or as a symbol rather than agent, and the decentring of child-characters more generally affirms the presumed passivity and the peripherality of ‘the child’ as a social position. A proportion of games had child-characters that were playable only for a limited section of the game. Twenty-nine per cent of games with child-characters involved a temporary flashback to the adult avatar’s youth. Childhood as a critical site of identity formation is a common psychoanalytic trope used across media (Byrnes, 1995), and so in these videogames, the brief sequences featuring playable child-avatars usually served the purpose of explaining and rationalising the adult avatar’s personality, motivations, and behaviour. These flashbacks provided an origin story intended to deepen the avatar’s characterisation and enhance narrative cohesion. Additionally, flashbacks to avatars’ childhoods were designed to create a greater sense of intimacy between player and avatar, in part because childhood is often perceived as a universal and, therefore, deeply relatable experience. In the mobile game Florence, for example, the flashback to the eponymous character’s

2

A SURVEY OF CHILD-CHARACTERS IN CONTEMPORARY …

27

childhood provides context for her current life as a bored, unfulfilled accountant: she was pushed by a controlling mother towards studying maths rather than pursuing her interest in art. The pattern of giving up on—and then rediscovering—her childhood passion provides a structure for the game’s narrative arc, and the relatable childhood experience of victimisation at the hands of a well-meaning adult universalises what is ultimately a culturally and socially specific story. Flashbacks to childhood were also used to generate seamless in-game tutorials. In Horizon Zero Dawn, for example, the game begins when Aloy, the player character, is a baby. The opening cutscene allows the adult male protector, Rost, to provide some basic exposition for the player in the guise of talking in a direct and simple manner to the innocent infant Aloy. When players first assume control of Aloy she is around five years old. Players’ unfamiliarity with their environment, their inability to perform basic movements, and their lack of confidence are narrativised by placing them in the position of a young child who has not yet learned the impressive athletic abilities and hunting skills that come to distinguish Aloy as a character. Similarly, Uncharted 4 used a flashback to the player character’s childhood as a means of introducing controls sequentially. The game opens with a set piece aboard a speedboat to familiarise players with basic directional movement and camera controls, before jumping backwards in time to the protagonist’s childhood to teach the player more complex movement controls such as crouch, run, climb, and jump. The avatar’s youth in this segment provides a narrative explanation for the way the game deliberately delays the introduction of combat and shooting until after the player has mastered the controls for traversing the gameworld. Other Action games that featured flashbacks to childhood include Batman: Arkham Asylum, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2019. In fact, 13% of Action games in my corpus featured achronological flashbacks to the player character’s childhood. These flashbacks tended to centre on an incident of childhood trauma as a means of humanising the powerful, fearless, heroic avatars by depicting them at their most vulnerable, as well as working to justify the violent, vengeful behaviour of the adult avatars. Anneke Meyer notes that “the discourse of innocence makes crimes against children ‘worse’ than crimes against adults by constructing the child as innately weak, vulnerable, and defenceless. In this context, adult crimes against children become unequal and unfair, cowardly and

28

E. REAY

‘bad’” (2007, p. 96). By depicting their overpowered avatars as vulnerable children, these games make their heroes’ consequent annihilation of the forces responsible for their trauma seem not only morally ‘right’ but also ludically ‘fair’. Players are permitted to enjoy the catharsis of unleashing excessive violence on their in-game foes because it is framed as just retribution for the unforgivable, indefensible crime of harming a child. In other words, depicting in-game enemies as child-killers sublimates some of the ludonarrative dissonance inherent in the idea of a hero-avatar who murders hundreds of henchmen during the course of the game. This process also works in the opposite direction. Rather than the figure of the child functioning to produce a simple moral binary of ‘good’ and ‘bad’, flashbacks to childhood can serve to partially exonerate a game’s villain. Both Marvel’s Spiderman and Heavy Rain contain flashbacks to the antagonists’ childhoods, revealing their murderous, pathological personality disorders to be rooted in childhood traumas. Players are allowed to feel sympathy for the adult antagonists by way of their innately innocent child selves, adding a degree of complexity to players’ perception of the villains and, consequently, to their own actions as heroes.

Age, Race, Gender I ended my survey by recording the race, gender, and age of the child-characters. The overrepresentation of whiteness and maleness documented in other videogame content analyses is replicated within populations of child-characters, which—when combined with the frequent use of a repetitive set of child stereotypes—reinforces the notion of ‘the child’ as a homogenous, monolithic social status, disconnected from class, race, gender, and ability. Child-characters in my corpus were more likely to be represented as an unracialised, ungendered animal or an unracialised, ungendered sentient object than they were to be a non-white, non-male human. When looking only at playable child-characters, 62% were male, 29% were female, and 9% were not assigned a gender. 68% of playable child-characters were white. The lack of playable non-male child-characters reinforces the idea that while boys drive action, girls exist only as helpmeets, caretakers, damsels in distress, trophies, sidekicks, and cheerleaders. It also positions male children as the default gender, and non-male children as fundamentally deviant. Ageing down the ‘damsel in distress’ does not fully uncouple her debility from her gender, and an age

2

A SURVEY OF CHILD-CHARACTERS IN CONTEMPORARY …

29

disparity between male primary characters and female secondary characters neither masks nor erases the gendered nature of the power imbalance. This reflects the findings of numerous surveys of children’s literature, which report central, active roles being disproportionately assigned to male characters (e.g., Clark & Higonnet, 1999; Diekman & Murnen, 2004; Tsao, 2008). In terms of race, 15 playable child-characters had ‘no race’ by virtue of being non-racialised animals (e.g., Yoku the dung beetle in Yoku’s Island Express ), non-racialised fantasy creatures (e.g., the hero of Ori and the Blind Forest ), or non-racialised automatons (e.g., the player character in Astrobot ). 1 player character had a customisable race, and 9 player characters were categorised as ‘Mukokuseki’ or ‘culturally odourless’ (Hutchinson, 2019, p. 106). Koichi Iwabuchi (2002) first suggested the term ‘culturally odourless’ to describe the way in which Japanese creators sometimes sublimate the national and racial identity of their protagonists to increase their global appeal.2 This, again, parallels a trend in children’s literature, where studies have found that although animal and other non-human protagonists are less common than white childprotagonists they significantly out-number child-characters of all other races combined (Serroukh, 2018, 2020). Presumably, removing race as a fixed identity marker is intended to render the avatar a cipher onto which racially diverse players can project themselves. Equally, removing racial identifiers is perhaps an expression of the vacuity of the child-avatar. Many of the child-avatars whose race was categorised as Mukokuseki, for example, appeared in Role-Playing Games (RPGs). Rachael Hutchinson has argued that “[t]he hero of [RPGs] is the sh¯ onen, the youth, on the verge of becoming an adult but still young enough to jump around, play and get into trouble” (2019, p. 107). This suggests that the concept of childhood as a temporal event on dynamic journey towards adult stasis is used in RPGs to express one of the key mechanics of this genre: character upgrading and customisation. Child-avatars are ideal signifiers of potential growth, and so in the RPG genre, game designers have effectively reimagined Locke’s tabula rasa as an unlockable skill tree. However,

2 It is important to note the limits of my purview here. Conceptualisations of childhood vary hugely between cultures, and I lack the insight and expertise to comment on definitions of childhood that originate outside of a Euro-American context. Therefore, my analysis in this instance is restricted to the West’s reception of videogames by Japanese creators.

30

E. REAY

considering that 18 child player characters were white, and only 3 child player characters were non-white, this elision of children’s race works as another compounding layer of symbolic annihilation. Henry Jenkins comments on the racialised nature of childhood when he writes, “[i]n our culture, the most persistent image of the innocent child is that of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed boy…and the markers of middle-classness, whiteness, and masculinity are read as standing for all children” (1998, p. 13). The concept of a white, universal Everychild figure that can ‘stand for all children’ disturbingly implies that there is something alienating about non-white children that would impede player-avatar identification. Contemporary videogames seem to affirm that whiteness is a property of childhood, and this has serious consequences for non-white children who may be denied the protections afforded to other children on the basis of their race. Childhood Studies researcher Karen Lury writes that the coalescence of the descriptors ‘white’, ‘little’, and ‘girl’ produces a range of sentimental responses, whereas “the little black girl, it seems, has been lost and nobody is looking for her” (2010, p. 54). If a child-character’s purpose is to elicit a protective or affectionate response from the (presumed white) player, then Blackness reduces the character’s functionality—as Ebony Elizabeth Thomas states, “in the collective imagination, a dark-skinned child character cannot be innocent” (2019, p. 55). When writing about white readers’ inability to ‘see’ the child-character Rue from The Hunger Games series as Black, Children’s Literature scholar Stephanie Toliver notes that the perceived incompatibility of childliness and Blackness “creates a form of age compression, in which the young girls are likened more to adults than to children, rendering Black girlhood interchangeable with Black womanhood” (2018, p. 6). This results in the societal belief that Black girls “require less nurturing, protection, support, and comfort than White girls” (p. 7). Online discussions about the racial identity of Clementine in The Walking Dead series mirror the Twitter comments and conversations that Toliver analyses about Rue’s racial identity. The friction between a character’s identity as a ‘child’ and their racial identity suggests the two identities are perceived by some as mutually exclusive (Sharpe, 2016). This has significant ramifications for how Black children are perceived by institutions and individuals. The American Psychological Association published a study suggesting that Black boys are frequently “seen as responsible for their actions at an age when white boys still benefit from the assumption that children are essentially innocent” (Goff

2

A SURVEY OF CHILD-CHARACTERS IN CONTEMPORARY …

31

et al., 2014, p. 69). This study showed that on average adult participants tended to perceive Black boys as being 4.53 years older than they actually are and Latino boys as being 2.19 years older than they are (Goff et al., 2014). One could argue that the dearth of children of colour in contemporary videogames cannot be separated from the racial injustice that non-white youth experience. The lacuna of child-characters of colour has an impact on children’s self-concept. In a blog post reflecting on his childhood encounters with Black videogame characters, Austin Walker remembers the hours he spent “tanning” his avatar in Animal Crossing: New Leaf . This process didn’t involve playing the game, but rather deliberately leaving the game running with his avatar sat on a virtual beach in order to gradually change the default white skin tone to a darker one. He recalls, “I’m doing the thing the game calls tanning, but my objective isn’t just darkening my avatar’s skin tone, it’s being able to see in the screen what I see in the mirror” (2013, n.p.). He relays the moment in which he realised that the ‘tanning’ mechanic was designed to deter players from spending too much time with the game, and the feeling of deep rejection this elicited for him. Walker’s word choice to describe this alienating experience evokes Children’s Literature scholar Rudine Sims Bishop’s landmark article Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors, in which she states that reading “becomes a means of self-affirmation, and readers often seek their mirrors in books” (1990). She notes that this search is often futile for non-white child-readers, and it seems that the search may be equally futile for non-white child-players. Most child-characters in my corpus were aged between six and eleven—an age range wherein the signs of childness are unambiguous, but characters also have the mobility and ability to reasonably perform a range of interactions. Early teens were also a minority in my dataset, with only six player characters in this category. This is perhaps because, at this liminal stage between childhood and adolescence, the connotations of each set of age-based stereotypes are most dilute, making characters situated at this threshold less effective as conventional signs. As Patricia Holland puts it, “in a system of meanings which creates rigid categorical differences, ‘youth’ is a non-category, nothing but the dividing line between two well-defined states—adulthood and childhood” (2006, p. 126). Child-characters between the ages of six and eight were mostly female, while babies and pre-teens were mostly male. All of the childcharacters aged between 12 and 14 were human, whereas the majority

32

E. REAY

of child-characters aged three to five were coded as non-human (either as ‘Toy’ or ‘Animal’). Determining the age of a child-character was not always straightforward. Although the main player character in The Binding of Isaac series visually resembles an infant, for example, the game’s creator tweeted that Isaac is five years old (2020, retrieved from Twitter). The movement mechanics associated with Isaac corroborate this assessment; however, his bald head, his nakedness, and his babyish bodily proportions suggest he is much younger. A practical explanation for the absence of avatars that both visually and mechanically represent infants is that babies have a very limited skillsets, which constrains game designers’ desire to provide players with an engaging range of possible interactions. An interesting counter-example is the game Before Your Eyes, in which the first-person avatar is a terminally ill child who can only interact with the world through blinking. Via a webcam, the game tracks the player’s eye movements and when blinking is detected, it yanks them forward along the timeline of the protagonist’s brief life. This creates an intense degree of embodied identification between child-avatar and player—as well as a sense of challenge, strategy, and exertion—without the need for a wide range of interactions. Supporting Child NPCs Supporting child-characters in my corpus often operated as conventional sidekicks, performing the four functions that Stephen Zimmerly associates with this role in literature: they act as the ‘Narrative Gateway’ through which one “can better understand the enigmatic protagonist”; the ‘Devil’s Advocate’ to offer a conflicting viewpoint; the ‘Comic Relief’ to a serious hero; and the ‘Foil’ to “contrast with the protagonist” (Zimmerly, 2019, p. 2). Little Cereza in Bayonetta, for example, is an archetypal foil for the player character: she is akin to a funhouse mirror that magnifies the titular heroine’s already highly exaggerated qualities. When Cereza is not clinging to one of Bayonetta’s leather-clad legs, she is often imitating the pose that Bayonetta is striking. As well as creating moments of visual humour through the incongruous pairing of a sweet, teddy-squeezing, pig-tailed child and a lethal, trigger-squeezing, sultry dominatrix, the comparisons drawn between Cereza and Bayonetta amplify Bayonetta’s defining characteristic: her hyper-sexualisation. Against Bayonetta’s hypersexualisation, Cereza’s simpering, vestal purity parodies the crudeness of

2

A SURVEY OF CHILD-CHARACTERS IN CONTEMPORARY …

33

the virgin/whore dichotomy. The juxtaposition of protagonist and sidekick encapsulates the game’s camp, coquettish, sardonic slipperiness that makes it feel both like “a parody of feminism and a critique of patriarchy” (Phillips, 2020, p. 120). Child sidekicks in my corpus also frequently served to humanise the aggressive, surly, burly, hyper-masculine adult heroes. The violence of male protagonists such as Joel in The Last of Us or Kratos in God of War: Chains of Olympus and God of War (2018) is justified when it is in the service of protecting or avenging a child-character, and both morally questionable men are offered a path to redemption through their relationship with their (surrogate) children. This dynamic has been explored in a series of academic and journalistic articles on ‘the Daddening’ of videogames3 ; however, less critical attention has been paid to how the presence of supporting child-character functions to humanise the player. The relationship that forms between the player and the secondary child-character fashions the player’s identity through a parasocial bond. The player is conditioned to behave in a more responsible and more emotionally vulnerable way because of characters like Ellie (The Last of Us ), Atreus (God of War), Clementine (The Walking Dead), and Alice (Detroit: Become Human), who communicate through dialogue, body language, and impressively realistic motion-captured facial expressions the extent to which the player’s interactions affect their well-being and their worldviews. In fact, Detroit: Become Human (Quantic Dream) is explicitly about the humanising potential of adult/child relationships, and throughout its interactive narrative it repeatedly requires the player to affirm their commitment to fulfilling the role of Alice’s guardian. Quantic Dream’s reliance on a child-character to act as a so-called ‘morality chain’ is evident in another of their games: Beyond: Two Souls . Beyond: Two Souls reverses the child sidekick trope by making the protagonist, Jodie, a young, vulnerable child who is tethered to an invisible, paranormal presence with a volatile temper and little concern for the wellbeing of nonplayer characters. This spirit is not necessarily evil, but it certainly lacks a moral compass. Jodie is, therefore, burdened with acting as its conscience, and tries in vain to resist its controlling power when it breaks the moral norms of the world that Jodie inhabits. Although 3 The ‘Daddening’ of videogames refers to the rise in the number of videogames that centre fathers (see Totilo 2010; Stuart 2013; Stang 2017; Joho; Brice 2013; Joyce 2014; Myers 2013; Parker and Aldred 2018).

34

E. REAY

her doe-eyed, tear-stained countenance and quivering lip do not rein in the paranormal force, they do affect players. Players are encouraged to define themselves against this unseen, disembodied spirit that uses Jodie as a conduit to interact with the gameworld and instead direct her in a responsible way so as not to frighten or endanger the innocent child. As such, when presented with ethical dilemmas or narrative choices in the game, players may find the temptation to experiment with violent or reckless interactions is dampened by a sense of parental obligation to young Jodie. The child sidekick is not a high score or a kill count; rather, its moods and its development track the player’s ability to resolve ethical dilemmas and manage the consequences of their decisions. Telltale’s The Walking Dead requires players to make choices that affect the game’s narrative, often under time pressure. The player’s sense of personal responsibility for the game’s narrative is compounded by the frequent reminder that appears as text in the top left-hand corner of the screen reading, “This action will have consequences”. This burden arguably weighs heaviest when the game draws attention to the fact that the child sidekick Clementine has observed the player’s choice. In these instances, the text reads, “Clementine witnessed what you did” or “Clementine will remember that”. The game does not explicitly condone one set of choices over the other through a rewards system—and sometimes the consequences of a particular decision are unclear until much later in the game—but Clementine’s reactions provide an immediate indication of the effects of the player’s decision on her. Judging a character’s morality based on their treatment of children is a trope common to other media. Children’s Literature scholar Clementine Beauvais argues that adults who do not cherish and protect children in literature are immediately suspicious: an adult’s “lack of instinctive affection for the younger generation must denote a deeper lack of empathy for one’s fellow humans. Misanthropy, it seems, is inherent to ‘pedophobia’” (2015, p. 185). Child-characters such as Alice and Clementine function as moral barometres (Stang, 2019), providing compelling narrative reasons for the protagonist to behave virtuously and altruistically. Their presence encourages players to balance strategic, agonistic decisionmaking intended to optimise the likelihood of their avatar’s survival with emotional cognition intended to support and safeguard the child’s development. In other words, these child-characters act as a rhetorical argument in favour of integrity over expediency. Lee Edelman describes

2

A SURVEY OF CHILD-CHARACTERS IN CONTEMPORARY …

35

the ‘innocent’ child as a “disciplinary image” (2004, p. 18), and one could certainly see Alice, Young Jodie, and Clementine as permanent chastisements that demand a specific standard of behaviour from players. The idea of the child as a living certificate of one’s morality is made explicit in The Last of Us, wherein an NPC called Henry is identified as an ally because he is accompanied by his little brother, Sam—a boy the same age as Ellie. The Hunters, on the other hand, view children as burdens who cannot contribute to the group’s survival, and therefore choose to kill children rather than care for them. This makes the group irredeemable and justifies their total elimination by Joel and Ellie. Furthermore, Joel’s narrative foil takes the form of a sadistic paedophile and cult-leader called David. Ellie’s murder of David is not just an act of self-defence, but a defence of the symbol of childhood at the emotional centre of this game. The flexibility of ‘the child’ as a rhetorical sign is such that it can be used to emphasise the insupportable, indefensible, reprehensible nature of some murders, while highlighting the justice and appropriateness of other murders. A parallel exists in The Walking Dead series, wherein the Crawford community—which exiles its weakest members, including all those under the age of fourteen and prohibits child-bearing—is shown to have collapsed internally due to its unnatural, evil ideology. The demise of all its members is presented as both inevitable and appropriate, considering the player character’s central purpose is to protect the young Clementine. Finally, child-characters like Clementine and Ellie are framed as ‘antizombies’. The child sidekicks remind players that self-preservation can be more than the survival of one’s physical (or digital) body: it can be the preservation of one’s self-image, ideals, and identity, or the posthumous mark one leaves on the world. In other words, without a child, winning is outperforming and outlasting one’s enemies; with a child, winning is safeguarding the child long enough and effectively enough for it to outlast you. The Last of Us and The Walking Dead ask whether it is worth fighting for the continuance of the human race if humanity is sacrificed in the process. Arguably, this is a central concern of all zombie fiction, which tends to underscore the horror of a shambling, gory body outlasting someone’s sentience and personhood. However, in these games the anchor point of ‘the child’ provides an inverted alternative: the child is a vehicle for one’s beliefs, knowledge, and ideals that is growing rather than decaying. The child’s function as ‘anti-zombie’ was further underscored in the recent television adaptation of The Last of Us (dir. Mazin & Druckmann, 2023), wherein the child-character

36

E. REAY

Sam was written and performed as deaf. One of the most challenging, frightening, and grotesque enemies in The Last of Us are the Clickers, which use echolocation to find their prey. The contrast between the deaf child and the hearing zombie in this adaptation reinforces the idea that they represent opposite ends of a spectrum: one is “the corruption of biological continuity…the past’s devouring of the future” (Ramirez, 2022, p. 61) and the other signifies survival in its broadest sense through the transmission of genes, memory, history, and culture. One of the things that makes The Last of Us, part 2 (2020) so bleak is the failure of the supporting child-character to break characters out of cycles of violence, vengeance, and trauma. After Joel’s murder in the game’s exposition, it becomes clear that Ellie has not led Joel on a pathway to redemption; rather, Joel has trapped Ellie in a dead end of self-destruction. This is made explicit when Ellie inherits and wears Joel’s shattered wristwatch, the metonymic representation of Joel’s trauma. Significantly, Ellie fails to fulfil her ‘anti-zombie’ duty of transmitting human culture to future generations. Joel passes on music from preapocalyptic times to Ellie by teaching her to play the guitar. Refracted through the lens of her fear and fatigue, Ellie warps the 80s synth pop hit Take On Me (A-Ha, 1985) into a heart-wrenching dirge. As she sings a soft, acoustic version to her lover, Dina, the breezy lyric, “I’ll be gone in a day or two” is transformed from a cheeky invitation to be spontaneous to a resigned acceptance of mortality. Ellie’s voice breaks as she lingers on the line, “It’s no better to be safe than sorry”: the playful invitation to seize the day becomes a comment on the kill-or-be-killed logic of post-apocalyptic life. In her final showdown with her nemesis Abby, Ellie’s fret-fingers are severed, meaning she can never play guitar again. Her mutilation does not just prevent her from preserving this intangible echo of the time before, it also removes a game mechanic. Previously, whenever Ellie picked up a guitar, players could rotate the analogue stick to select a chord and swipe the touchpad to strum—an interactive opportunity for non-violent, explorative self-expression. Ellie’s two remaining fingers can draw a bowstring and pull a trigger but cannot form a chord, meaning her ludic possibilities narrow back down to death-dealing alone. Ellie’s point of no return comes when she kills a pregnant NPC called Mel. Ellie destroys the embryonic symbol of hope before it even has the chance to perform its narrative function of rescuing its orbital adults from the gravitational pull of endless cycles of violent retribution. When Ellie realises what she’s done, she falls to her knees, retching but unable to

2

A SURVEY OF CHILD-CHARACTERS IN CONTEMPORARY …

37

vomit: there is no way for her to purge this sin. Near the end of the narrative, Ellie has the chance to build a home with her partner, Dina, and their chubby, chortling baby JJ. She abandons the golden, hazy, haloed farmstead—a romanticised, pioneer’s dream—in favour of exacting grey and grisly revenge on Joel’s murderer, Abby. When Abby—who is sucked into the vengeance vortex when her father is killed by Joel—discovers pregnant Mel’s body, she is sick immediately. However, the hope that she has might expel the poison of this horrifying miscarriage of justice is short-lived. Later in the game, Abby tries to kill a pregnant Dina in a deliberate act of symmetrical revenge. Luckily, she is admonished by her newly acquired child sidekick, Lev, and stops before the deed is done. By this point, however, players may have lost faith in the supporting child’s ability to end violence. Lev has already experienced an unendurable amount of trauma: his sister died trying to save his life and he was forced to kill his own mother in self-defence. Lev has already failed in his task of eliciting mercy from an orbital adult, which doesn’t bode well in light of the challenges ahead. Where child sidekick fails in The Last of Us, part 2, it succeeds in God of War (2018). The child sidekick in this game is Atreus, the son of the player character, Kratos—the titular god of war. Atreus accompanies his father to the highest peak in the realm to scatter his mother’s ashes. The grieving pair embark on a dangerous journey through lands haunted by the restless spirits of those who died in combat, revenants who exchanged their humanity for magical powers, mythical monsters, and murderous Norse gods. They also form relationships with two feuding dwarven brothers, the Witch of the Woods (who is later revealed to be the Vanir goddess, Freya), and the knowledgeable head of Odin’s former advisor, Mimir, which Kratos severs from Mimir’s trapped, tormented body and wears dangling on a belt hook for the remainder of the game. Rather than seeking power through the brutal domination of others as he has done in previous instalments, in God of War (2018) Kratos yearns to break the cycle of patricidal violence in which he is embroiled. At the game’s opening, Kratos associates attaining peace with seclusion and withdrawal, but, as the game progresses, he learns that these tactics amount to repression and denial. Disassociation and rigorous self-policing may delay eruptions of violence, but they do not generate new ways of engaging with others or with the environment. It is only by seeing himself through his son’s eyes that Kratos begins to accept who he once was and understand who he might become. In this way, Atreus is responsible both

38

E. REAY

for the new path that Kratos embarks upon and—on a meta-level—for the new direction that the series takes. God of War takes the idea of the ‘daddening’ of videogames a step beyond The Last of Us: it positions the videogame industry as an imperfect dad who is tasked with raising players. The ‘dadification’ of videogames is often causally connected to commercial game designers working in a male-dominated industry becoming fathers themselves (e.g., Totilo, 2010). This is the narrative that scaffolds the making-of documentary for God of War (2018), entitled Raising Kratos (2019, dir. Brandon Akiaten). The documentary centres the game’s creative director, Corey Barlog, who returns to work on the long-running franchise after the birth of his first child with a new vision for the sequel. Barlog explains over the course of several interviews that he recognises the need for the series—and for the game development industry at large—to grow up and be better parents to their players. The documentary clearly identifies a meta-awareness on the part of the development team that God of War (2018) had to lead potentially resistant and unwilling players on a coming-of-age journey in tandem with Atreus and Kratos, so that the toxic masculinity of previous games in the series would not be re-entrenched for future generations of players. God of War’s repeated mantra—“We must be better” —implicates the father, the son, the design team, and the player in the need for change. The requirement to be ‘better’ is not a demand for the player to be more skilful or the protagonist to be more powerful, but for both parties to become more empathetic, responsible, and humane.

Death Although it wasn’t my initial intention to record the fates of each childcharacter in my database, I couldn’t help but notice the number of significant child-characters who met grisly ends. While players are generally prevented from harming child NPCs, violence against virtual children perpetrated by adult NPCs was a common occurrence in the videogames I sampled. In fact, a third of the named child NPCs in my corpus were murder victims, whose deaths were non-optional plot points in the games’ narratives. Child-characters such as Khemu and Shadya in Assassin’s Creed: Origins , and Phoibe in Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, for example, are brutally murdered by in-game antagonists as a means of emphasising the difference between the cruel, inexcusable violence committed by the dastardly

2

A SURVEY OF CHILD-CHARACTERS IN CONTEMPORARY …

39

Templars and the justifiable, retributive, necessary violence committed by the heroic Assassins. Children’s deaths are also used to underline the hostility of a dystopian gameworld. The deaths of Riley, Sam, and Sarah in The Last of Us and The Last of Us: Left Behind not only signal the dark, ‘edgy’, and mature nature of the series, but also drive home the fact that the terrifying but beautiful apocalyptic gameworld—which is lush and verdant with flora— is inimical to human life. Once again, there is a racialised component to these child deaths. Riley and Sam are Black children, and their elimination suggests there is no future for the Black Child and that the Black Child’s function is to model the tragedy the White Child must evade. The special moral status accorded to children gives their deaths additional weight, and so placing virtual children in mortal peril intensifies the player’s investment in ludic decisions and narrative outcomes. It also encourages the player to balance strategic thinking with moral cognition. The Bioshock series, the Banner Saga series, The Walking Dead series, and dystopian city-sims like Frostpunk or This War of Mine: The Little Ones use child-characters in this way to lend moral weight to in-game interactions. Decisions regarding basic resource management in these games, for example, gain complexity when players are made to feel that the optimal ludic choice—the choice that is mostly likely to bring about a win condition in the game—is not a morally satisfying choice. In representing the characters that are impacted by player decisions as children, these games approve emotional, ‘irrational’, suboptimal playstyles. Encouraging an emotional investment in dependent characters that runs counter to the player’s emotional investment in winning the game can make even the smallest ludic interactions feel important and challenging. For instance, although the ludic consequences of killing or sparing the Little Sisters in Bioshock are not significantly different, this repeated choice works to distil the game’s central message about ethical egoism, agency, and obedience.

Child-Antagonists Finally, I noticed that child-characters were highly unlikely to be antagonists, suggesting that children are seen as inappropriate or unworthy opponents. Some exceptions to this rule include the mutant kids in Days Gone and the exploding alien babies in Dead Space 2. The grotesque hybridisation of child and monster in these two games functions as a

40

E. REAY

symbol of moral decay and societal collapse, while also creating opportunities for dark humour. In these games, taking on hordes of monstrous children facilitates a satisfying style of combat. Each individual childenemy can be defeated with a single hit, but they often appear in large numbers, meaning that players can chain together an impressive sequence of death blows. The monstrosity of the child-enemies mitigates—but does not wholly obscure—the taboo pleasure in pleasure found in beating to death something less strong and less intelligent than oneself. Days Gone, in particular, leans into a pedophobic loathing of archetypal ‘loitering gangs of juvenile delinquents’ who are seen as having no right to occupy public spaces. Much like a sentient embodiment of hostile architecture or a human manifestation of a sound deterrent that targets the under-25s, the player character eliminates pernicious youth from the streets of Days Gone using violent force.

A Shared Shorthand I published the content analysis summarised above as an opening gambit to entice Games Studies researchers towards the figure of the child. However, I realised that in order for these findings to resonate with non-games scholars, I needed to devise a framework that emphasised my work’s alignment with research being done in the Children’s Literature Studies sphere.4 I took inspiration from the literacy charity ‘Children’s 4 A valid critique of my approach to generating a corpus of texts for analysis is this: if I wanted to recruit Children’s Literature scholars to analyse videogames, why didn’t I try to define a new, panmedial canon of ‘children’s videogames’? My answer is that I wanted to avoid the artifice of imposing an age-specific category onto a medium whose crossover status is undeniable and well-documented. Even videogames that seem to be explicitly designed for and marketed towards children have extensive adult playerships and vice versa. The rejection of an ‘upper-age limit’ for videogames is implicit in the Pan European Game information and the Entertainment Software Rating Board classifications systems, which use the category ‘Everyone’ to suggest that no videogames belong exclusively to children. The plus signs that follow their age-based rankings (e.g., 3+ years, 7+ years, 12+ years, and so on) further legitimise adult engagement with these texts. At the other end of the spectrum, as a consequence of digital distribution via online marketplaces, there are very few fool proof measures to prevent children from accessing games that are intended specifically for adult audiences. Ermi and Mäyrä, for example, have documented children who reported going “to their friend’s home to play games that were forbidden at their own homes” and playing “certain games covertly without their parents’ permission and knowledge” (2003, p. 241). It is, therefore, hard to make a case for the existence of children’s videogames on the basis of an age-specific playership. What is more, the

2

A SURVEY OF CHILD-CHARACTERS IN CONTEMPORARY …

41

Literature in Primary Education’ (CLPE) (Serroukh, 2018, 2020), which regularly surveys child-characters in children’s books to document the representation of minority ethnic children. CLPE has developed a comprehensive glossary of terms to identify recurrent patterns across texts. These labels are usually short, pithy descriptors, such as ‘The Jasmine Default’ or ‘The Short-Term Stay’. I decided to organise my database under a set of exegetic, memorable headings in the hope that a shared shorthand would facilitate productive interdisciplinary discussions. My aim wasn’t to make generalisations based on my database but rather to map out a videogame-specific version of what Patricia Holland calls the “familiar typology of childhood”, which exists as a kind of “cultural image-bank—a sort of quick-access pictorial vocabulary” in popular consciousness (2006, p. 4). The practical utility of organising data about representation as a set of archetypes has been ratified by Anita Sarkeesian’s video series Tropes vs Women in Video Games (2013). Sarkeesian uses labels such as ‘Damsel in Distress, ‘The Helpful Damsel’, ‘Woman as Reward’, ‘Sinister Seductress’, and ‘Women as Background Decoration’ to emphasise the fact that she is not critiquing individual instances of sexist character design, but rather the pervasiveness of specific qualities across a range of texts. The wide selection of examples that she collates—drawn from different time periods, genres, and platforms—accrete and accumulate to the point that their diversity throws into sharp relief their fundamental homogeneity. The impact that Tropes vs Women in Video Games has had on gaming

construction of a category called ‘children’s videogames’ risks replicating exclusionary systems that ascribe and deny legitimacy either side of the adult/child binary, so that videogames that are seen to have literary and artistic value would be located outside, and in contradistinction to, the category of children’s videogames. I’m more interested in creating panmedial constellations of texts, wherein each individual text can retain its membership of multiple categories and canons. I think that deliberately looking to home videogames within specific critical frames (e.g., placing games such as What Remains of Edith Finch, Oxenfree, Night in the Woods, Gone Home, and the Life is Strange series within the domain of feminist Young Adult criticism, while children’s ecocriticism claims Flower, Abzu, and Unravel , and wordless picturebook theory adopts Gorogoa, Journey, LIMBO, and Hohokum, and so on) is likely to enhance critical approaches and theories that are central to children’s literature studies while creating new insights about these rich, interesting games. That said, I would, obviously, welcome and help anyone looking to define a corpus of ‘children’s videogames’ for analysis. There is no ‘wrong’ way of doing this kind of research – the more approaches, the better.

42

E. REAY

communities and the games industry attests to the effectiveness of this approach. Sarkeesian’s video essays are in conversation with Lisa Nakamura’s earlier work on racism and Internet culture (2002, 2008). Nakamura coined the term ‘cybertypes’ to describe “the distinctive ways that the Internet propagates, disseminates, and commodifies images of race and racism” (2002, p. 3). I’m not using the word ‘cybertypes’ to discuss the characterisation of digital children because I do not want to dilute the term’s meaning as a descriptor for racialised tropes. However, in identifying an interconnected set of stereotypes pertaining to a particular social identity, I’m obviously indebted to Nakamura’s huge contribution representation studies in digital spaces.

Approaches to Generating Taxonomies of Child-Characters One approach to generating taxonomies of child-types, in particular, is the method used by Elizabeth Tucker, which involves tracing how critical interest in the figure of ‘the child’ changes over time within a specific field of enquiry. Tucker’s analysis of the foci of critical studies in Children’s Folklore yields the typology: “innocents, creators, conservators, secret-keepers, magic-makers, taboo-breakers, monsters, cerebral beings, bubble-wrapped packages, [and] evolving organisms” (2012, p. 406). I loved these evocative labels but, as yet, there is not a critical mass of research conducted on child-characters in videogames to generate an equally broad and nuanced list. Another method I considered using was taking an established set of stereotypes used to describe adult characters in videogames and applying it to child-characters. Children’s Literature scholar Stephanie Toliver, for example, adapts a set of “stereotypic apparitions” (2018, p. 6) from racist public discourse that are usually employed to designate Black female adults in order to locate the child-character Rue from The Hunger Games within a relevant a typology. This method is excellent for understanding how racist, sexist, classist, or ableist tropes that shape adult characters in videogames are replicated in the designs of child-characters. However, in the end, I chose to use this approach as an interpretive key rather than as an organising principle. Using this approach as an organising principle runs the risk of eliding tropes that are unique and specific to child-characters, whereas using this approach as an interpretive key can emphasise both the points of overlap and the points

2

A SURVEY OF CHILD-CHARACTERS IN CONTEMPORARY …

43

of difference between adult and child stereotypes (e.g., the ‘Daughter-inDistress’ and the ‘Damsel in Distress’, or the ‘Kid in the Refrigerator’ and the ‘Woman-in-the-Refrigerator’, or the ‘Child-as-Other’ and the ‘Racialised Other’). A third approach to generating taxonomies is the method employed by the researchers behind the Children Now survey (Heintz-Knowles et al., 2001), who formalised the representational trends they observed in their dataset by categorising videogame characters according to their dominant function. They identified the following roles for player-controlled characters—‘competitor’, ‘wrestler/fighter’, ‘hero/rescuer’, ‘participant’, ‘villain/assassin’, ‘killer/combatant’—and then documented gender distribution across these categories. They also considered how gender influenced the way in which a particular role was depicted, using the categories ‘heroes’, ‘soldiers’, ‘competitors’, ‘guards’, and ‘robots’ to illustrate divergence along the gender divide. The representational trends in my dataset can be expressed using a similar system that prioritises ‘function’ as an organising variable. Identifying the function of a child-character is useful because it encompasses both the key mechanic associated with a character and the related rhetorical effect by asking, ‘What does this character do?’. This information is useful for game designers who are looking to tap into beliefs about childhood in order communicate rule sets and elicit intended player experiences, and it is relevant for researchers interested in how particular player encounters with digital children shore up or challenge ideologies of childhood. The names I chose for my typology distil the core functions of the child-characters in my dataset: The Inner Child, The Mighty Child, The Side Kid, The Human Becoming, The Child Sacrifice, The Waif, and The Little Monster. In Table 2.1, each type is matched with its key characteristics and three examples lifted from my dataset. There are definitely child-characters in my dataset that defy easy categorisation. A character like Phoibe in Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, for example, resists the Child Sacrifice trope for almost fifteen hours of gameplay, instead occupying the role of Side Kid. She outlasts a long line of Child Sacrifices who appear in previous instalments of the series; however, eventually she succumbs to her fate so that the game can reaffirm the righteousness of the Assassins’ mission. Ellie in The Last of Us, on the other hand, embraces her role as Child Sacrifice with a subversive level of selfawareness only to have the game’s player character, Joel, insist that she remains a Side Kid in the game’s penultimate sequence.

44

E. REAY

Table 2.1 Table of archetypes Archetype

Features and functions

Examples from survey

The Inner Child

Toy-like, cute, carefree, comedic Signals low stakes, accessibility, and inclusivity Playable character that hamstrings aggression and encourages prosocial playstyles Nostalgic appeal The loveable, adventurous underdog who is uncorrupted by adult selfishness and individualism Playable character with cooperative mechanics, puzzle-solving, and platforming Moral barometer and externalised conscience Heightens emotional investment through parasocial bonding Mostly non-playable to be escorted and protected, but sometimes supports in combat and puzzle-solving Playable in a flashback Humanises overpowered hero/evil villain, and provides origin story Often narrativises in-game tutorials Cheerful, sweet, optimistic, and innocent A significant, named child NPC who dies tragically, which in turn motivates the hero’s revenge quest Affirms the evilness of enemy and/or evidences the moral collapse of society

Yarny in Unravel Inklings in Splatoon! Sackboy in Little Big Planet 3

The Mighty Child

The Side Kid

The Human Becoming

The Child Sacrifice

Nuna in Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna) Demelza and Nessa in Knights and Bikes Big Brother and Little Brother in Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons Alice in Detroit: Become Human Atreus in God of War IV Ellie in The Last of Us

Young Aloy in Horizon Zero Dawn Young Nathan Drake in Uncharted 4 Young Scottie in Heavy Rain Sam and Sarah in The Last of Us Lena in Watchdogs Shadya in Assassin’s Creed: Origins

(continued)

2

A SURVEY OF CHILD-CHARACTERS IN CONTEMPORARY …

45

Table 2.1 (continued) Archetype

Features and functions

Examples from survey

The Waif

Silent, faceless, anonymous Eerie, vulnerable, uncanny, and disturbing When playable, it uses stealth mechanics to solve environmental puzzles When an NPC, it invites moral decision-making that foregrounds player agency Grotesque, sickly, malnourished, diseased Antagonist NPC to be purged—mercy killings Can be a source of dark, physical comedy

The Unnamed Boy in LIMBO Six in Little Nightmares Frisk in Undertale

The Little Monster

Newts in Days Gone Baby Necromorphs in Dead Space 2 Eveline in Resident Evil: Biohazard

In Life is Strange 2, the question of whether Shaun and his younger brother Daniel are examples of the Mighty Child trope or of the Side Kid trope is a source of narrative tension. Is Shaun Daniel’s paternal protector or is he his equal? The decision to treat Daniel as a dependant rather than as an equal collaborator has a significant impact on the brothers’ relationship, as well as on the story’s conclusion. In Jenny LeClue: Detectivu, the eponymous Jenny LeClue—the young hero of a series of middlegrade detective novels—experiences a metaleptic struggle with her adult author to rise through the ranks from Inner Child, to Side Kid, to Mighty Child. She eventually succeeds, but only by leaping out of her fictional world through an in-game glitch, much like a digital remediation of the child-protagonist in Jostein Gaarder’s philosophical novel Sophie’s World (1991). In Monument Valley, Princess Ida’s ambiguous, faceless silence suggests she should be categorised as a Waif, but the dreamy, candycoloured, castles-in-the-sky that she moves through situate her within the Inner Child paradigm. Yarny from Unravel seems to belong alongside his cute, crocheted siblings in the category of Inner Child, but in Unravel 2 he is joined by a blue deuteragonist. The cooperative mechanics and themes of interdependence in this sequel suggest Yarny is, in fact, an exemplary Mighty Child, solving the problems of the adult world with childly ingenuity. The Gardens Between also seems to offer a paradigmatic example of the Inner Child trope, with its Edenic playspaces filled with

46

E. REAY

oversized toys, sentimental trinkets, and nostalgic childhood paraphernalia. Yet the single-player cooperative mechanics suggest the two heroes are undoubtedly Mighty Children. Similarly, the cooperative mechanics of Ico and The Last Guardian strongly suggest that their protagonists are Mighty Children, but—as beautiful as these games are—their fundamental pessimism separates them from other games in this category. In making players wonder whether it is possible to redeem the worlds in which these games take place, these characters perform the function of The Waif. How should one classify the character of Jodie in Beyond: Two Souls ? Is she a Human Becoming because players are involved in formative moments of her childhood? Or is she a Mighty Child, due to the singleplayer cooperative controls that connect her to the raging spirit of her twin, Aiden, who died in utero? That doesn’t seem right either—not least because her dead twin is, at best, an anti-heroic force, and, at worst, a murderous villain. Perhaps—despite being named, shod, fully voice-acted, and with a photorealistic face rendered through motion-capture—Jodie is, in fact, a Waif, because she lurks uncertainly at the edge of society, troubling the adult world with her unassimilable monstrosity. In practice, I think that rather than seeing the archetypes I’ve generated here as a set of discrete categories, it might be more useful to view them as landmarks that individual child-characters may journey between in response to a number of variables, including variables defined by player input. Plotting child-characters in varying degrees of proximity to a several landmarks not only preserves the ambiguity that may be inherent within a single character but also draws attention to the complex relationships between different archetypes. Holland notes that images of childhood “condens[e] into themselves the most emphatic of repeated meanings” (p. 4). She warns that “a proliferation of imagery does not mean a proliferation of sense” and that the apparent diversity of childtypes may well “turn out to be a distraction from what is effectively an insistent repetition of the same conceptual message” (p. 5). Although The Mighty Child and The Child Sacrifice, for instance, may appear to represent opposite ends of a spectrum, they both draw on ideas of the child as a symbol of futurity and beliefs about children’s innate innocence. The Little Monster provides a useful foil for identifying examples of The Waif. Yet it is the fact that The Waif is sometimes indistinguishable from The Little Monster that makes this archetype interesting. In short, the answer to the question “does this child-character belong in category X or category Y?” could very well be “Yes”.

2

A SURVEY OF CHILD-CHARACTERS IN CONTEMPORARY …

47

I am entirely open to readers adding to, adapting, or appropriating aspects of this typology to suit their own purposes. I, myself, am just using it as a tool to think with, and I’ve actually found it most useful in the moments when it falls apart. In fact, the remainder of this book consists of close readings that explore the cracks, fissures, and structural weaknesses of my typology.

Laying Bare the Faults Content analysis can provide a quantitative snapshot of the overarching patterns that characterise representations of children in videogames, but close readings can validate or complicate these findings by examining individual points of corroboration and rupture. While content analysis is a useful tool for documenting the presence, absence, and dominant function of child-characters in games, close reading allows for a more intersectional approach that can attend to the nuances of representation across identity markers, creating opportunities to examine internal contradictions, ironies, and polysemy generated through interpretive gaps. As Ebony Elizabeth Thomas points out, mere representation of a social group is not an affirmation of that social group (2019), and close reading creates an opportunity to discuss the quality of representation as well as the quantity. In other words, whereas distant readings are mostly concerned with contrasts and demarcations, close readings can accommodate duality, multiplicity, and ambiguity. Bizzocchi and Tanenbaum argue, “close reading is way of laying bare the faults and inconsistencies of a media artefact” (2009, p. 262). My close readings centre on three kinds of ‘faults and inconsistencies’. Firstly, they bring into focus the contradictions inherent in the dominant ideology surrounding ‘the child’ and how these paradoxes manifest in digital child-characters. Secondly, they trace the fault lines that (dis)connect players and child-characters. Finally, they emphasise the friction between the signifiers that cohere to produce virtual childhoods in videogames. Clementine Beauvais notes that transgression occurs “when a tear in the hegemonic ideology exposes it as what it is—just an ideology” (2015, p. 96). I posit that the radical potential latent in digital childcharacters can often be found at the ‘tears’ between semiotic planes. That is to say, meaning in multimodal texts is created through the cooperation and contradiction between semiotic strands, and often the snags reveal more about an ideology than a perfect weft and warp. I approach

48

E. REAY

videogames as dynamic ecosystems of interconnecting and interacting parts and therefore see the synergy and dissonance between the visual, audio, haptic, and mechanical layers as key to ‘laying bare the faults’ that undergird ideological visions of childhood. This manner of close reading employs some of the tools developed within Children’s Literature Studies for picturebook criticism—namely, the terminology used to describe the shifting relationships between the verbal plane and the visual plane, and the discourse surrounding ‘interpretive gaps’ (Beauvais, 2015; Scott & Nikolajeva, 2013). While the audiovisual plane of a videogame is designed to express and enforce a set of encoded rules, the act of translating rules into sounds, verbal text, and moving images inevitably generates interpretive gaps between sign and function. Feedback loops that attempt to retroactively fill these gaps can teach the player both how to play and how not to play—they delineate both obedience and dissent. I use close readings to identify the rules of digital childhood, as well as the opportunities for players and child-characters to resist these rule sets.

Critical Ekphrasis I take an autoethnographic approach to close reading. Stephanie Jennings argues that autoethnographic approaches to videogame analysis have always been part of Game Studies research, but that there have been numerous efforts to deny or elide researchers’ self-presence in game analysis. She connects this impulse to the fact that “subjective knowledges are still deemed illegitimate by dominant, Western research conventions” (CGSA, 2021, n.p.). These conventions uphold longstanding binaries that divide knowledge into intellectual/embodied, rational/emotional, and empirical/experiential. The sexist, racist, and colonial underpinnings of these epistemic binaries have been repeatedly exposed, along with the impossibility of separating knowledges in this way in the first place. Nonetheless, scholarly investment in these distinctions has resulted in delegitimising of autoethnography as an analytical approach in games studies. Autoethnographic papers do not net the currency that buy job security, prestige, or high citation counts, meaning that for many early career researchers, shunning autoethnographies is a “matter of professional survival” (Jennings CGSA, 2021, n.p.). However, Jennings makes a compelling case that even scholars who distance their work from autoethnography nonetheless rely on it as a method for textual analysis. She cites Espen Aarseth and Jesper Juul as examples of researchers who

2

A SURVEY OF CHILD-CHARACTERS IN CONTEMPORARY …

49

express suspicion of autoethnography but who use autoethnographic analysis to make universalising claims about the medium in general. Their autoethnographies are presented as having a scientific generalisability, reflecting the assumed neutrality of white, male, middle-class experiences. Jennings concludes that autoethnographies are interventions that challenge the dominance of scientific imperialism, universalisation, and objectivism, and, furthermore, that they have value as historical artefacts that crystallise the ephemeral, temporally situated, corporeal sensations of play. There are certainly drawbacks to autoethnographic approaches to game analysis, the most obvious of which has been identified by game designer Jesse Schell as the ‘Heisenberg principle’. Schell refers to the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics to argue that “the nature of an experience cannot be observed without affecting the nature of that experience” (2020, p. 19). On the one hand, self-conscious attempts to approach a game as an ‘implied player’, ‘average player’, or ‘ideal player’ risk sublimating the researcher’s subjectivity in favour of a kind of pseudo-objectivity. Furthermore, the concept of an ‘implied player’ (to parallel Wolfgang Iser’s ‘implied reader’) is something of a contradiction in terms: since the act of play is inherently “subversive and appropriative” (Colby & Alberti, 2013, n.p.). Consciously playing in line with the designer’s intentions, then, is paradoxically to reject the designer’s injunction to play. On the other hand, playing ‘critically’—approaching the text in the role of player-as-analyst—can fundamentally reshape the content of the videogame itself, altering everything from the chronology of the plot to the pacing of events, characterisation, thematic resonance, and rhetorical impact. One could argue that taking a critical stance alters one’s experience of any cultural medium; however, researchers do not (often) rip out, rewrite, or rearrange the pages of a novel when performing literary analysis, and no matter how unique one’s interpretation is of a painting, the artefact itself remains materially unchanged by critique. Interactive media, however, implement feedback loops that evaluate and comment on the player’s interpretation. As Daniel Vella writes, “[i]n gazing upon a painting, no matter how drastically the viewer’s conceptions might shift as she puts her cognitive faculties to the task of engaging with the work, and as she shifts her perceptual focus from one element of the whole to the next, at every stage these conceptions will continue to be referred back to the same unchanging sensory manifold” (2015, n.p.). In contrast,

50

E. REAY

the underlying textual engine of a videogame—the ‘unchanging sensory manifold’—is never glimpsed directly, and players must accept the gulf between their experiences of a game and the underlying, unseen game object. Aarseth frames this inaccessibility as, “the player cannot access a general play session (unlike watching a movie or reading a novel) but only particular ones […] players are aware of the partial nature of their experience, the numerous strategies and paths not taken, and the fact that the game may contain mysteries they will never encounter, solutions outside their reach, tactics beyond their skill level” (2011, p. 65). In a way that is much more explicit than it is in non-interactive media, videogames hold up a mirror to players that reflects back—and even quantifies—their performance and their decisions. Finally—and perhaps most significantly—videogames co-opt the player’s body as an integral piece of hardware (Keogh, 2018). They appropriate the processing power of the player’s brain in such a way that when buttons are pressed it is as if the player were reaching through the audiovisual layer of the game to tinker with the code, while the game reaches back through the controller and screen to manipulate the player’s hands, eyes, and posture in a choreographed dance. It is the player’s ‘lusory attitude’ (Suits, 1978) that transforms these textual encounters into games: other types of engagement produce other types of texts. ‘Critical play’, therefore, can result in a hobbled, garbled, and distorted text, lumbered by pedantry, intellectualism, and earnest seriousness. In her autoethnographies, Diane Carr encounters issues wherein the “role of the player-as-analyst [blurs] into the role of the sort-of-playeras-earnest-yet-thwarted-archivist” (2019, p. 6) and she also finds that the time-consuming, repetitive nature of the close reading process dulls her usual sense of curious, creative enjoyment that she experiences when playing videogames solely for pleasure. I have tried to retain an element of creative play in the archival process, while also separating archival work from analytical work as much as is possible. Having selected a section of a game for close analysis, I play it through pausing only briefly to note down plot points, key dialogue, and important controller inputs. Afterwards, I immediately write a short prose anecdote detailing my experience of this playthrough, using figurative language that attempts to capture both the sense of my visceral, kinaesthetic, embodied reactions to the text and the expressive eloquence of the game’s non-verbal signifiers. The ludic challenge of this process is to transcribe the somatic, tactile, visual, auditory, ludic, and performative signifiers into verbal language, without narrowing

2

A SURVEY OF CHILD-CHARACTERS IN CONTEMPORARY …

51

their communicative breadth or arresting their transient nature—you could think of it as an extensive, multimodal, multisensory crossword puzzle. The intention for this prose piece is not to create an objectively accurate verbal transcript of a specific sequence, but to preserve with fidelity the aesthetic experience of an individual—potentially unrepeatable—playthrough. This alleviates much of the anxiety associated with the archival stage of game analysis, since the unintentional over-emphasis of certain details or the omission of others is acceptable within this context, as these ‘errors’ bring to the fore the most impactful and significant of the game’s formal properties. This process is a bit like form of ekphrasis: attempting to describe the aesthetic experience of one art form by way of another, such as writing a poem about the affective experience of seeing a painting. The written record produced in response to a videogame is a remediation of that game, transformed by being filtered through a singular, subjective, spatiotemporally specific experience. I came up with the idea of ‘critical ekphrasis’ as a skill that could be honed as part of the heuristic process of videogame criticism during my Master’s degree, but I was told by the Head of Department to drop it because it sounded too pretentious. I don’t disagree—if I hadn’t been weirdly into the poetry of John Keats as a teenager, I probably would never have encountered this archaic, esoteric word myself. But pretentious or not, it accurately describes how I see this step of my method, so I’m sticking with it. Aren’t academics supposed to coin specialised terms to hang their name off? You will have already encountered an excerpt from one of my ekphrastic anecdotes at the start of this book, so perhaps it’s a little too late for me to try to justify their inclusion here. But I hope they provide you with some useful context for my analysis—especially if you haven’t played the games I’m writing about. At the very least, I hope they lubricate longer chunks of argumentation that otherwise might be too dry to digest in one go. And, of course, you can always treat them like a cutscene in an FPS—skip over them and get back to the action. Where possible, I have tried to locate my autoethnographic close readings within the context of a chorus of comments left under video walkthroughs of these same moments of gameplay. Doing so allows me to embed my interpretations alongside debates that are already taking place within gaming communities. This facilitates the blurring of different types of expertise and affirms the utility of academic games research for

52

E. REAY

scaffolding existing conversations about videogames between contributors with a variety of knowledge bases. Furthermore, mapping a relevant theoretical framework onto constellations of comments enables me to synthesise experience-based insights and reflect on the implications of dominant patterns. The ethical implications of citing critical perspectives shared in online spaces such as comments sections are complex. Since I engage with online commentary as critique rather than as data, I’ve tried to balance the ethical attribution of ideas with protecting the identity of their originators. I have, therefore, followed Kishonna Gray’s (2020) precedent of removing personally identifying data while attempting to preserve the essence of the original handles. While I have purposefully clustered similar comments together, there is, in fact, an inherently choral component to all the viewpoints presented in this book. This is because individual comments often receive collective endorsements expressed through actions such as upvoting. Finally, although I have highlighted moments of convergence between my experiences as a player and those expressed in the comments sections, I have also attempted— through the close reading of individual comments—to preserve the nuance, complexities, and divergence contained both within and between different perspectives.

References Aarseth, E. (2011). “Define real, moron!”: Some remarks on game ontologies. In S. Günzel, M. Liebe, & D. Mersch (Eds.), DIGAREC keynote-lectures 2009/ 10 (pp. 50–68). Universität Potsdam. A-HA. (1985). Take on me. Hunting high and low. Warner Bros. Beauvais, C. (2015). Mighty child: Time and power in children’s literature (Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition). John Benjamins Publishing Company. Bishop, R. S. (1990). Windows and mirrors: Children’s books and parallel cultures. Keynote address at reading Conference at California State University. Bizzocchi, J., & Tanenbaum, J. (2009). Well read: Applying close reading techniques to gameplay experiences, in well played: Video games, value, and meaning 1.0 (D. Davidson, Ed.). ETC Press, Carnegie Mellon University. Brice, M. 2013. The dadification of video games is real. Alternate Ending. http://www.mattiebrice.com/the-dadification-of-video-games-is-real/ Byrnes, A. (1995). The child: An archetypal symbol in literature for children and adults. Peter Lang Publishing.

2

A SURVEY OF CHILD-CHARACTERS IN CONTEMPORARY …

53

Carr, D. (2019). Methodology, representation, and games. Games and Culture, 14(7–8), 707–723. Clark, B., & Higonnet, M. (1999). Girls, boys, books, toys: Gender in children’s literature and culture. Colby, R., & Alberti, J. (2013). Rhetoric/ composition/play through video games: Reshaping theory and practice of writing (Digital education and learning). Palgrave Macmillan. Diekman, A., & Murnen, S. (2004). Learning to be little women and little men: The inequitable gender equality of nonsexist children’s literature. Sex Roles, 50(5), 373–385. Edelman, L. (2004). No future queer theory and the death drive (Series Q). Duke University Press. Ermi, L., & Mäyrä, F. (2003). Power and control of games: Children as the actors of game cultures. DiGRA. Everett, A. (2009). Digital diaspora: A race for cyberspace. New York Press. Goff, P., Jackson, M., Di Leone, B., Culotta, C., & Ditomasso, N. (2014). The essence of innocence: Consequences of dehumanizing black children. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 106,. https://doi.org/10.1037/ a0035663 Gray, K. (2020). Intersectional tech: Black users in digital gaming. Louisiana State University Press. Heintz-Knowles, K., Henderson, J., Glaubke, C., Miller, P., Parker, M. A., & Espejo, E. (2001). Fair play? Violence, gender and race in videogames. Children Now. Holland, P. (2006). Picturing childhood: The myth of the child in popular imagery. I.B. Tauris. Hutchinson, R. (2019). Japanese culture through videogames. Routledge. Iwabuchi, K. (2002). Recentering globalization: Popular culture and Japanese transnationalism. Duke University Press. Jaques, Z. (2015). Children’s literature and the posthuman: Animal, environment, cyborg, children’s literature and culture. Routledge. Jenkins, H. (1998). Introduction. In Henry Jenkins (Ed.), The children’s culture reader. New York University Press. Jenks, C. (2005). Childhood (2nd ed., Key ideas). Routledge. Jennings, S. (2021). Re-centring autoethnography as a fundamental game studies methodology. CGSA May 31st. Jung, C., McGuire, W., & Ress, L. (1948/1969). Collected works of C.G. Jung. Vol. 19, general bibliography (Revised. ed., Carl G. Jung: Collected Works of C. G. Jung; Vol. 19). Keogh, B. (2018). A play of bodies: How we perceive videogames. MIT Press. Lury, K. (2010). The child in film: Tears, fears, and fairy tales. I.B. Tauris & Co. Mazin, C., & Druckmann, N. (2023). The Last of Us. HBO.

54

E. REAY

Meyer, A. (2007). The child at risk: Paedophiles, media responses, and public opinion. Manchester University Press. Meyer, J. (2000). Humour as double-edged sword: Four functions of humour in communication. Communication Theory, 10(3), 310–331. Myers, M. (2013, July 30). Bad dads vs. hyper mode: The father-daughter bond in videogames. Paste Magazine. Nakamura, L. (2002). Cybertypes: Race, ethnicity, and identity on the Internet. Routledge. Nakamura, L. (2008). Digitizing race: Visual cultures of the internet. University of Minnesota Press. Parker, F., & Aldred, J. (Eds.). (2018). Beyond the sea: Navigating bioshock. McGill-Queen’s University Press. Passmore, C., Yates, R., Birk, M. V., & Mandryk, R. (2017). Racial diversity in Indie games: Patterns, challenges, and opportunities, extended abstracts publication of the annual symposium on computer-human interaction in play (CHI PLAY ’17 Extended Abstracts) (pp. 137–151). Association for Computing Machinery. Phillips, A. (2020). Gamer trouble: Feminist confrontations in digital culture. New York University Press. Ramirez, J. (2022). Rules of the father in the last of us: Masculinity among the ruins of neoliberalism. Springer International Publishing AG. Reay, E. (2021). The child in games: Representations of children in contemporary video games. Game Studies, 21, 1. Renner, K. (2013). The ‘Evil Child’ in literature, film, and popular culture. Routledge. Serroukh, F. (2020). Reflecting realities: Survey of ethnic representation within UK children’s literature 2019. CLPE. Serroukh, F. (2018). Reflecting realities: Survey of ethnic representation within uK Children’s Literature 2017 . CLPE Sarkeesian, A. (2013). Tropes vs. women in video games, feminist frequency, retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7Edgk9RxP7Fm7vjQ 1d-cDA Schell, J. (2020). The art of game design: A book of lenses/Jesse Schell (3rd ed.). CRC Press. Scott, C., & Nikolajeva, M. (2013). How picturebooks work (Children’s Literature and Culture). Taylor and Francis. Sharpe, C. (2016). In the wake: On blackness and being. Duke University Press. Sjöblom, B. (2015). Killing digital children: Design, discourse, and player agency. In T. Elvira Mortensen et al. (Eds.), The dark side of game play: Controversial issues in playful environments (pp. 67–81). Routledge. Stang, S. (2017). Big daddies and broken men: Father-daughter relationships in video games. Loading…, 10(16). CGSA Double Issue.

2

A SURVEY OF CHILD-CHARACTERS IN CONTEMPORARY …

55

Stang, S. (2019). ‘This action will have consequences’: Interactivity and player agency. Game Studies, 19(1). Stuart, K. (2013, July 1). The last of us, bioshock: Infinite and why all video game dystopias work the same way. The Guardian. Suits, B. (1978). The grasshopper, heritage. University of Toronto Press. Sutton-Smith, B. (2001). The ambiguity of play (New ed.). Harvard University Press. Thomas, E. E. (2019). The dark fantastic: Race and the imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games. New York University Press. Toliver, S. R. (2018). Alterity and innocence: The hunger games, rue, and black girl adultification. Journal of Children’s Literature, 44, 2. Totilo, S. (2010, February 9). The daddening of videogames. Kotaku, retrieved from https://kotaku.com/the-daddening-of-video-games-5467695 Tsao, Y. (2008). Gender issues in young children’s literature. Reading Improvement, 45(3), 108. Tucker, E. (2012). Changing concepts of childhood: Children’s folklore scholarship since the late nineteenth century. The Journal of American Folklore, 125, 498. Vella, D. (2015). No mastery without mystery: Dark Souls and the Ludic Sublime. Game Studies, 15, 1. Walker, A. (2013, June 19). Me, on the screen: Race in animal crossing new leaf. The Newstatesman, retrieved from https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/ 2013/06/me-screen Williams, D., Martins, N., Consalvo, M., & Ivory, J. D. (2009). The virtual census: Representations of gender, race and age in videogames. New Media and Society, 11(5), 815–834. Zimmerly, S. (2019). The sidekick comes of age: How young adult literature is shifting the paradigm of secondary characters. Lexington Books.

CHAPTER 3

The Child as a Social Construct

Inside (Playdead)

The little boy runs towards the central atrium of the laboratory. A few men in white coats give him odd looks, but he is mostly ignored. The scientists have more important things to attend to than an errant child. I can hear the buzzing of electrical lights, the distant clanging of metal doors, the scuffing of the boy’s footsteps, and the rasping of his laboured breaths. Beneath these sounds is a low, resonant, droning chord—a true siren’s song, in that it combines the urgency of an industrial alarm with the soothing allure of a soft, plaintive keening. The boy leaves the main thoroughfare of the building—where a large group of scientists has gathered to stare into an enormous, frothing vat—and enters a network of infrastructural pipes. He takes ever more daring leaps from platform to platform, swinging from light-fittings and scrambling up ladders. In the final stretch of the game, I find that I’m completing environmental puzzles with ease. Now that I know the affordances of crates, and switches, and hatches, and vents, I barely need to backtrack in search of solutions. And it’s been a while since I’ve made a mistake that has cued

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 E. Reay, The Child in Videogames, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42371-0_3

57

58

E. REAY

the boy’s death animation—a deeply disturbing twisting, flailing, shuddering, and twitching that always seems to last several seconds longer than it should. The sound of sloshing water lets me know that we are underneath the vat. With a series of muffled thuds, the boy removes the lock that seals the vat shut, flips a switch to reveal an opening, and is immediately sucked up inside of the aquatic chamber. As we swim upwards, the little boy sheds his red jumper—the visual symbol of his difference within this chiaroscuro gameworld. He is naked and embryonic, drifting through the amniotic fluid of a vast, grey womb. And then I see it. An abominable experiment: a colossal, gelatinous lump of human flesh and fats and skins and limbs suspended in the middle of this silo. The wobbling mass seems to be sentient and in pain, as it groans and struggles against its restraints. It is utterly abject, revolting, and pitiful, but it is also, somehow, strangely comic. Its waving limbs look like people cheering and crowd-surfing at a concert, and its soft, slopping, resilient, rolling squishiness has a pleasing tactility. It seems to defy the hard, cold, sharp, clinical environment of robotic precision and brutalist, functional architecture that characterise the final levels of the gameworld. The boy and I detach the wires that hold the blob in place, while the horrified scientists bang on the glass. I can’t hear what they’re shouting because the tank is soundproofed. All I know is that I must end the suffering of this poor, silly, wriggling, writhing tumour. As each restraint is released, the blob shudders with relief. But when I remove the third one, the blob suddenly convulses and before I can really understand what has happened, the blob subsumes the boy. It envelopes him in a squelchy embrace and he disappears completely. I blink in confusion. Having survived countless attacks by killer dogs, armed guards, and murderous security measures, the boy is snuffed out by a cuddle. I can’t quite believe that my small, plucky hero—who represented the final bastion of resistance against the homogenising pressures of corporate production—is lost inside the fleshy folds of this collective. The controls I had been using to direct the boy now operate the blob. I slop its blubbery bulk against the glass of the tank and the scientists recoil in disgust. I do it again, and some adults scatter,

3

THE CHILD AS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT

59

running in random directions. I grin. It feels good to be huge and gross and unexplainable. The glass starts to crack. And then a tidal wave of water bursts from the tank and the silence is shattered with terrified screams from the laboratory employees. I get ready to rampage.

Coded Kids Artist and researcher Harri Kalha tells a cautionary tale aimed at scholars who want to unpack the rhetorical, ideological, and symbolic function of the figure of ‘the child’. He warns them that no matter how frequently they remind their readers that, “The Child—mollycoddled with italics, a capitalised C, and the determinate pronoun—is not the same as a child, or the real children that populate our world”, they are treading on dangerous ground (2011, p. 20). Cultural commentators, and even other academics, will bristle at any perceived intellectual neglect of ‘real children’—despite the fact that real children are evidently affected by figural imaginings of ‘the child’. Kalha concludes, “Sure, theorise all you want, if you want to come across as a heartless cynical asshole” (2011, p. 37). I hope that my interest in the figure of ‘the child’ as an affective trigger—including ‘the child’ as an incitement to indignation in academic spaces—does not make me an asshole. But the fact remains that this book is mostly concerned with unreal children, idealised children, immaterial children, and impossible children. In other words, I’m interested in the textual construction of the social rules of childhood as they appear in contemporary videogames. In this chapter, I introduce the idea of childhood as a cultural creation and provide a brief overview of its various historical manifestations. Then, through a close reading of Quantic Dream’s Detroit: Become Human, I demonstrate how ‘the child’ can function as a stage for performances of morality, political identity, and group affinity within the popular press, the games industry, and academic spaces. When I suggest that we should question the boundaries between adults and children, I’m not advocating for the total dissolution of age-based distinctions. I don’t think children should be assimilated by the adult world like the young avatar is absorbed by the meaty boulder in INSIDE.

60

E. REAY

There are important physiological, psychological, and experiential differences between adults and children, and children require a specific kind of care in their early years if they are to survive and thrive. However, as Allison James and Alan Prout summarise, “the immaturity of children is a biological fact of life, but the ways in which this immaturity is understood and made meaningful is a fact of culture” (1990, p. 7). It is easy to forget the extent to which our experiences of childhood are socially constituted—not least because the efforts made by institutions, professions, and specialisms to demarcate the edges of childhood are often presented as responsive to childhood rather than generative of childhood. Furthermore, pedagogical discourses of child development from the 1970s continue to hold sway, perpetuating the view that childhood is a shared human experience that follows an evolutionarily predetermined set of linear, measurable milestones culminating in the desirable goal of rational, self-regulating, autonomous adulthood (Robinson, 2008). Coded kids in computer-generated environments remind us that much of what we assume to be biological, obvious, and consistent about childhood is, in fact, the product of shifting social rules. Furthermore, I think the association between videogames and technological sophistication may help to reverse the naturalisation of chronological age as an uncomplicated or apolitical identity marker. This, in turn, can serve as an entry point into broader discussions of what Sari Edelstein calls “the interpellative work of age” in other areas of our lives (2018, p. 11). By which I mean, digital childhoods lived out in virtual worlds hint at the possibility that just as child-characters are used as rhetorical signs to explain and justify a game’s rules, mechanics, and ludic systems, so too is the socially constructed figure of ‘the child’ used to routinise and vindicate the laws, workings, and moral systems of contemporary culture. Discovering what is and is not possible when playing with or as a child-character in a videogame spotlights the arbitrary—and sometimes absurd—borders that segregate age groups. The interactive nature of videogames can prompt playful, strategic experimentation with these agebased thresholds. However, as is the case when real children chafe against the strictures of ‘the child’, playing against the grain of encoded structures in videogames can result in punishment, failed states, and narrative dissonance. In other words, while interactivity seems to promise flexibility and responsiveness from a text, it can also powerfully underscore moments in which interaction is circumscribed by the rigid limits of incontrovertible protocol. Seeking out these non-negotiable boundaries

3

THE CHILD AS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT

61

in videogames provides us with opportunities to describe childhood as a networked, relational status arising from predetermined parameters, variables, and criteria. As Christopher Thi Nguyen puts it, the process of inscribing agency in videogames is enlightening—not in spite of the inevitable simplification that it entails, but precisely because hard limits and restrictions provoke experimentation (2020). The limits of digital childhood are not always as firmly defined as ‘here the boy is child, and here the boy is blob’, but quantifiable, hard-coded measures such as health bars, experience points, skill trees, and abilities solidify the status of ‘child’, making its features, perimeters, and internal logic easier to evaluate. When we begin to question age-based behaviours that seem natural, neutral, or normal, we are reawakened to the cultural, political, economic, and social outcomes that arise from contemporary beliefs about children. Players’ understanding of the dark, mysterious, dystopian world of INSIDE, for example, is shaken when the legible sign of ‘the child’ is taken away from them. The moral value of their actions becomes ambiguous, and the binary opposition of ‘win’ and ‘fail’ is rendered redundant. In the boy-to-blob moment, the game’s thematic exploration of mind control, lobotomisation, and automata culminates with a wordless accusation levelled directly at players: ‘are you a puppet or a puppeteer?’. The game relies on the fact that players’ responses to the stimulus of ‘the child’ are so predictable, uncritical, and uniform that they will readily submit to the game’s brutal trial-and-death disciplinary system and unwittingly become cogs in the gameworld’s oppressive machinery without question or complaint. Even as someone who researches the systems and practices that produce cultural constructions of childhood, I still responded to the little boy in INSIDE with a formulaic set of conditioned behaviours and assumptions. I was the Protector of the Innocent, the Chaperone of Hope, the Guardian of the Ultimate Symbol of Futurity. Until I unwittingly smooshed my ward into a corpulent ball of human pulp, that is. It was only when the child became unmarked, undifferentiated, and unappealing that I questioned the goals I’d been mindlessly pursuing.

62

E. REAY

Boy or Blob? Perhaps the ‘boy-to-blob’ incident in INSIDE is not as clear cut as initially seems. Maybe there is something fundamentally amorphous about ‘the child’. Here I am not referring to the patent heterogeneity of children—who come in all shapes, sizes, and guises—but to the versatility and capaciousness of ‘the child’ as an ideological device. Childhood Studies scholar Karen Sánchez-Eppler (2021) asks, Is the mewling infant darling or bestial, the roaming youth a crusader or a scamp, the labouring child valued or abused, the child reader virtuous, imaginative, or indolent?

Her list of polarised opposites suggests that there is already something slippery and pliant about constructions of childhood. Jessica Balanzategui doesn’t quite say that childhood is ‘blob-like’, but she does note that childhood is defined “in terms of its vacuity and lack of form” (2018, p. 9). James Kincaid likewise argues that the ‘hollow child’ functions as negative space whose primary purpose is to delineate adult identities. As the adult’s conceptual foil, the child is “a coordinate set of have nots, or negations” (Kincaid, 1998, p. 14). Children’s Literature scholar Marah Gubar (2016) calls this the ‘deficiency’ model of childhood. The qualities associated with childhood—innocence, irrationality, credulity, malleability, simplicity—are a set of negations to be sequentially inverted on the journey towards adulthood. The child is, in short, a roomy void waiting to be filled with cumulative experience. The persistent blankness of the sign of ‘the child’ invites constant etching, engraving, and tagging. Lee Edelman and others have argued that at certain times the sign of ‘the child’ becomes so overwrought and overwritten that it can be used concurrently at all points along the political spectrum to push any agenda. That is to say, the child can function “to explain and legitimise any practice or opinion as right while removing the necessity to provide reasons: children are the reason” (Meyer, 2007, p. 85). Katherine Bond-Stockton connects the flexibility of the sign of ‘the child’ to its role in narrativising the passage of time. The figure of ‘the child’ evokes the adult’s past: it is a rip in the fabric of time through which nostalgic adults can glimpse a lost realm of purity and simplicity. Simultaneously, the child lives on inside the adult as an ‘inner child’ or as the seat of their Unconscious, serving both as a font of playful creativity

3

THE CHILD AS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT

63

and as the site of buried trauma from which adult phobias and neuroses stem. The child is not only a backward projection of the adult, but it is also a visitor from the future. Children dwell in “the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams”, as the poet-philosopher Kahlil Gibran puts it (1923/2020). Neil Postman uses the metaphor, “Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see” (1982/ 1994), framing ‘the child’ as both a form of futuristic communications technology and as a retro time capsule. The child is not only used to tell future-oriented stories of personal development and national progress but is also used by individuals and nations as a tool to influence and control what is temporally out of reach. In this way, the sign of the child can concertina history, operating as the past’s vehicle to the future. Or, to put it another way, the child is seen as both a replica and a prototype of humanity’s production line. In the following section, I provide a whistle-stop tour of the history of the figure of ‘the child’, showing how the raw material of young people has been emulsified and reconstituted throughout the ages to produce different versions of ‘the child’. My intention is to suggest that although ‘the child’ seems fixed in its contemporary mould—solidified by medical, legal, educational, and commercial pressures—the immateriality of videogames offers us opportunities to remix the meanings of the physical signifiers of age and experiment with new assemblages of childhood. If you’re already familiar with the histories of childhood, feel free to skip ahead to the analysis of Detroit: Become Human.

History of the Child In his study of the history of childhood, Phillip Ariès proposed that prior to the seventeenth century, childhood and adulthood were not thought of as essential, separate, mutually exclusive categories (1960/1986). Other childhood scholars (e.g., Vivan Zelizer, 1985; Chris Jenks, 1996, 2005; Gill Valentine, 1996; Joseph Zornado, 2006; Anneke Meyer, 2007 and Kerry Robinson, 2008; Sánchez-Eppler, 2021) have contested the idea that childhood is a modern invention. They argue that there have always been discourses that characterise childhood as a separate life stage—the most prominent in medieval Europe being the Calvinist discourse of infant depravity, which constructed children as lowly, narcissistic, easily corrupted bearers of sin. During this period, children were considered

64

E. REAY

a threat to themselves and to society, and therefore in need of severe discipline in order to civilise them and expunge their evil nature. Nowadays, the idea that babies are innocent is so culturally entrenched that it is hard to imagine infants were once hurriedly ushered out of childhood and towards pious, enlightened maturity in order to save their souls. Chris Jenks (1996) refers to the construction of the new-born as a profane, bestial, hedonistic deviant as the ‘Dionysan Child’, and documents how its constituting discourses blended with, and were ultimately overtaken by, discourses that offered an opposing view of the child— the ‘Apollonian Child’. The Apollonian Child superseded the Dionysian Child during the Romantic movement and advanced the idea that children are inherently innocent, angelic, guileless, and close to nature. Again, this rhetorical construction was not wholly new—as John Wall notes, early “church theologians such as Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Cyprian, Gregory of Nysa, and John Chrysostom consistently hold up children as images for adult imitation on account of their simplicity, freedom from desire, sexual purity, and indifference to worldly status and wealth” (2014, p. 65). The Bible itself instructs readers to ‘become like little children’ so that they may enter the kingdom of heaven, despite issuing a later injunction to ‘put an end to childish ways’. Jenks ties the conceptual shift towards the child being worshipped as an ideal, unsullied being to the modern project of Enlightenment, in which the figure of the child was mobilised to represent the naturalness of growth and expansion. During this period, metaphors abound of children as blank slates, lumps of wax, bricks of clay, unsculpted stones, and uncut jewels, and excitement about children’s innate potential is combined with anxiety about their fate should they fall into the hands of an obscene scribe or a clumsy sculptor. Contemporary attitudes towards children continue to draw on both sets of discourses, but the advent of the Apollonian Child marked the moment when childrearing practices became “less harsh and built around care and attention” (Meyer, 2007, p. 32). While there is plenty of evidence that parents were affectionate towards their children prior to the Romantic movement, the Apollonian Child encouraged a particular parent/child dynamic rooted in mutual adoration, sentimental fawning, and watchfulness. Vivian Zelizer (1985) describes this social transformation as the ‘sacralisation’ of childhood and uses documentation surrounding accidental child deaths in the United States to show how

3

THE CHILD AS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT

65

the child’s value shifted from its economic worth to its emotional pricelessness. Zelizer does not suggest that loving connections between parents and children are a modern concept, but she does argue that valuing children exclusively in emotional terms is a very recent phenomenon, linked to the rise of the family as a sentimental institution and the domestication of white, middle-class women through full-time motherhood. This discourse constructed the child as naturally entitled to adult care and attention, and by the turn of the twentieth century, this protectionist logic and concern with child welfare was legally, socially, educationally, medically, and politically institutionalised in the Western world. Sari Edelstein identifies this historical moment as the origin of campaigns to raise the age of sexual consent, the birth of the Child Studies movement, and the formation of paediatrics as a discrete medical speciality (2018). The desire to provide all children with a standardised and universalised experience of childhood was ultimately enshrined in legislation (e.g., Prevention of Cruelty to Children acts 1889 and 1894), and the child’s new civil identity was naturalised. The developmental model of childhood that became the default schema of psychoanalysis of the 1970s can be traced to this period. This framework scaffolded a meta-narrative of progress that defined late Victorian childrearing against the ‘egregious barbarity’ of earlier time periods and, of course, against the ‘primitive’ childrearing practices of colonised people. Colonised nations were also seen as figurative children to be raised by the empire so that they could graduate from the childhood of the past and enter the adulthood of the Industrial Age. The project of empire continues to this day, with the sanctification of childhood being a key pillar of ‘philanthropic’ neo-colonialism. The idea that childhood ‘improved’ for Western children during the Victorian period is, in itself, contentious. Victorian children living in poverty, those confined to workhouses, those labouring in mines or textile mills, enslaved children, and those held in penal institutions were not granted ‘childhoods’, in the emergent sense of the word. Furthermore, researchers have noted that even upper-class, white, Victorian children— who were increasingly coddled, cooed over, and disciplined—experienced the shrinking of their autonomy, public presence, and latitude in significant and lasting ways. Jenks traces Victorian constructions of childhood through to the present day, which he characterises as an age of disenchantment in which adults experience life as discontinuous, disorienting, unstable, and isolating. Jenks argues that traditional forms of social

66

E. REAY

belonging and points of attachment have been eroded, making adults cling to children as the final vestige of care, trust, dependency, and unconditional love that is no longer available to them via other social connections. He comments that children are now seen as primary and unequivocal sources of love, but also as partners in the most fundamental, unchosen, unnegotiated form of relationship. The trust that was previously anticipated from marriage, partnership, friendship, class solidarity and so on is now invested more generally in the child. (2005, p. 111)

Ulrich Beck also connects the child’s current “monopoly on practical companionship” to the process of individualisation and social disintegration. He writes, “the excessive affection for children, the ‘staging of childhood’ which is granted to them—the poor, overloved creatures” are symptoms of a nostalgic longing for an anachronistic social experience that has become increasingly rare. He concludes that the child is “the final alternative to loneliness that can be built up against the vanishing possibilities of love. It is the private type of re-enchantment, which arises with, and derives its meaning from, disenchantment” (Beck, 1992, p. 11). Anneke Meyer tempers the conclusions drawn by Beck and Jenks, suggesting that while nostalgic images of childhood do entail a yearning for trust, interdependence, and care—which are gained, sometimes through coercion, from one’s children—they also express a longing for freedom from responsibility that is seen to end the moment one becomes a parent. Participants in Meyer’s focus groups agreed that “the beginning of parenthood marks the end of childhood” (2007, p. 65). Since the state of childhood entails being child-free, having children precipitates one’s own exile from the garden of childhood. This, in turn, prompts conflicting feelings, ranging from envious resentment that is blunted by futility, to second-hand wonder that is flattened by distance. Meyer also notes that this contemporary state of flux, ambivalence, and instability is not universally anxiety-inducing. Those who were traditionally excluded from social networks and meaningful employment may find the dissolution of these structures liberating. Nonetheless, Meyer affirms that the conciliatory function of ‘the child’ is inseparable from its regulatory power. Pushing for a collective recognition of ‘the child’ as a socially constituted role has wide-reaching implications. Stories about what children are

3

THE CHILD AS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT

67

and what childhood means thread through the master narrative that the contemporary Western world tells about itself (Zornado, 2006). These cultural fantasies imperfectly overlay the lived relations between children and adults, by turns obscuring and magnifying components of intergenerational entanglement that fortify the West’s self-image. Childhood Studies scholars have argued that the adult/child binary is a keystone that upholds hierarchical relations between many distinct domains of social life, including the public and the private, production and consumption, and objective needs and subjective desires. Balanzategui, for example, has identified the child as “one of the most pivotal of modernity’s symbolic constructs, around which central cultural institutions such as the family and the school, and even our very concept of the adult, revolve” (2018, p. 9). Her claim echoes earlier work by Sharon Stephens (1995) and Patricia Holland (2006), who both see contemporary childhood as “integrally connected to the modern reign of individualism, the isolation of nuclear families, and the fragmentation of local communities” (Stephens, 1995, p. 34). Holland observes that as the helplessness and neediness of modern childhood is concretised, “many other groups have been rhetorically bestowed with childish characteristics: women, people from ethnic minorities, and the whole of the previously colonised world have come to stand in childish relation to the exercise of power” (2006, p. 148). Aligning social groups with children is a means of curtailing their rights and excluding them from full citizenship, but social groups can also be disenfranchised by being positioned in opposition to childhood. Following the pathbreaking work of Lee Edelman, queer scholars have documented the ways in which the figure of ‘the child’ is frequently weaponised against minorities. Specifically, the child is deployed to ennoble the violent cruelty of homophobia and heteronormativity in society by enabling oppressors to wear the mantle of protectors. The heavily armed mobs of homophobes who gather with an array of lethal weapons on display to prevent drag queens from reading to children in public libraries epitomise this depressing phenomenon. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this tyrannical form of protection marginalises children too. Simon Bacon comments, Organisations, such as UNICEF and the Children’s Rights Movement, although saving and defending the lives of children around the world, universalise and define exactly what childhood is and what rights one has if you are included in within that category. Such rigorous delineation

68

E. REAY

effectively ‘others’ the child from time and place (nation/culture) within which it exists, turning the notions of protection and security into ones of exclusion and containment. (2020, p. 12)

Although the temporary nature of childhood alterity makes it undeniably different from the ‘othering’ of most social groups, the adult/child dichotomy strengthens the dualistic thinking that underpins the polarised concepts of nature/culture, primitive/civilised, emotion/reason, and developing/developed, which, in turn, bolster ideologies of racism, sexism, ableism, classism, and colonialism. For this reason, considering ‘age’ as a significant identity marker can reframe how we see other identity-based social structures too. Bond-Stockton’s analysis of the ghostly gay child who haunts queer adults, for example, raises questions about who gets to be initiated into adulthood, if adulthood is defined in terms of economic independence, bodily autonomy, stability, marriage, and heterosexual reproduction. Neil Postman fears that modern children are an endangered species whose chances of survival in today’s mass media environment are worryingly low. Children are not threatened by media habitat loss but by media habitat expansion, since Postman thinks that television has rendered age-based social distinctions irrelevant. Postman writes, If […] childhood is solely a creation of culture, as I am inclined to believe, then it would have to await a dramatic restructuring of our communication environment in order to reappear along strong and unmistakable lines. And this may never happen. We are thus faced with the possibility that childhood is a transitory aberration in cultural history, like the horse-drawn carriage or black scribbles on white paper. (1982/1994, p. 44)

I find it fascinating that Postman’s final hope for the continuation of childhood centred on the widespread adoption of the household computer. He hypothesised that because computer programming requires special training to develop “control over complex analytical skills similar to those required of a fully literate person” (1982/1994, p. 149), children would be corralled once more within a gated, regulated human training ground. However—as Marc Prensky’s (2001) concept of ‘digital natives’ suggests—twenty-first-century children may have higher computer literacy levels than older generations. The role that ‘the videogame’ has played as a ladder and as a tunnel out of the compound

3

THE CHILD AS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT

69

of computer illiteracy cannot be overstated, and the playfulness of these escape routes and workarounds makes a mockery of the idea of an orderly graduation through a single exit into adulthood. In the next section, I use Detroit: Become Human (Quantic Dream) as a case study to demonstrate how paying attention to the function of ‘the child’ can shed light on other social hierarchies and political alignments in a videogame. This first close reading looks at how the rhetorical environment surrounding the figure of ‘the child’ allows different stakeholders to enact their own moral positions across several arenas.

Detroit: Become Human (Quantic Dream)

A greyish-yellow light illuminates the sweat, grease, and week-old stubble on Todd’s sagging, sallow face. His watery, bloodshot eyes roll in swollen sockets. I marvel at the hyperrealism of his clogged pores. “Don’t you fucking move, or I’ll bust you worse than last time.” He leers, jabbing a dirty finger towards the player-character, a blonde, female android called Kara. The words ‘Don’t Move’ appear in red capital letters on the hightech heads-up-display that serves as an interface between androids and the world. The words glitch and flicker like a holographic police cordon trembling in the wind. Playing by Todd’s rules is no guarantee of safety. If I disobey, at least the latent threat of violence will concretise, and I can figure out how to counteract it. I push the left analogue stick forwards. The camera momentarily zooms in on Kara’s surprised face. Her material body remains motionless with her hands folded passively behind her back, but a technical drawing of her outline is superimposed on the screen. This outline responds to my input, pressing its hands against a digital barrier that resembles the perimeter of a VR playspace. Quick Time Event button cues tell me to hold L1 and R1, whilst tapping X. The symbol markers slowly fill with blue until—accompanied by the sound of smashing glass—Kara gasps and steps forward, staring in bewilderment and awe at her own clenched fists.

70

E. REAY

If I swing the camera towards the living room, the heads-updisplay gives me the option to ‘Reason with Todd’. Bah. Todd is beyond reasoning. I feel no compassion for him. His temper, his drug and alcohol dependencies, his misogyny, and his weakness make him contemptible, even repulsive. I have encountered his type in enough melodramatic fiction to know that his character arc probably does not bend towards redemption. My other option is ‘Protect Alice’. Alice is Todd’s snuffling, mute, doe-eyed, doll-clutching, seven-year-old daughter, and she has run upstairs to hide from her father’s violent rage. I climb the stairs, leaving Todd muttering to himself and huffing the futuristic equivalent of crystal meth. Earlier, when Kara and I were clearing empty vodka bottles and old pizza boxes from Todd’s bedroom, I found a gun in his bedside drawer. At the time, a padlock icon had appeared in the heads-updisplay, indicating that I had uncovered a new narrative pathway. Now I understand what that pathway is. I’m not going to Reason with Todd; I’m going to kill him! Excellent. Kara tucks the gun into a pocket in her white, wipe-clean apron, and I direct her towards Alice’s bedroom at the end of the corridor. The camera cuts between different angles, making the sequence the feel less like a game and more like film. Alice is cowering in pillow fort. Her pale, tear-streaked face peers out from behind the pitched bedsheets. Dramatic, low, string music reaches an intense crescendo as Todd bellows “Alice!” from downstairs. Alice starts rocking backwards and forwards, begging Kara to run, “or he’s going to break you like last time!”. Time slows and I am given the option of pressing triangle to RUN WITH ALICE, circle to LOCK ROOM, or X to SPEAK TO TODD. “And square to SHOOT TODD IN THE FACE?” I ask aloud. Why am I even carrying this Chekhov’s Gun around if its narratively redundant? Surely the payoff for Alice’s pain is the pleasure I’ll get from punishing Todd?

3

THE CHILD AS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT

71

Who Thinks Beating a Child is Entertainment? At Paris Games Week in 2017, Sony opened its annual showcase with a trailer for Quantic Dream’s new Playstation 4 title Detroit: Become Human ( henceforth D:BH). The short promotional clip depicts a scene of domestic violence in which a father beats his young daughter to death. At the close of this harrowing sequence, the phrase ‘Things Could Have Been Different’ appears on-screen before the event replays, demonstrating the multiple, divergent outcomes typical of branching narrative games. The trailer had a mixed reception, with some commentators praising its hyperrealistic visual style and gripping narrative, while others found its depictions of domestic violence to be insensitive and inappropriate. Concerns centred on the idea that this fraught topic might function merely as superficial “window dressing” (Robinson, 2017) in the game by appropriating the emotional power of these dark themes without engaging with the ramifications of representing them. However, many of those who found the trailer uncomfortable also expressed cautious optimism that the careful treatment of distressing subject matter could signal the maturity of videogames as a medium and affirm their place alongside other culturally legitimised art forms. Could the death of this digital child signal the death of the medium’s childishness? Quantic Dream, led by self-styled auteur David Cage, has built an identity around the conscious desire to create the types of emotional engagement typically elicited by Art and Literature. Known for their cinematic, narrative-driven games that draw extensively on tropes from film noir and Hollywood action blockbusters, the development team has a history of tackling heavy topics and delivering affecting set pieces. In fact, child abuse, child exploitation, and child murder feature as plot points and rhetorical devices in four out of five of Quantic Dream’s recently published titles, alongside representations of torture, rape, psychosis, depression, and suicide. Quantic Dream’s predilection for centring abuse and psychological trauma has previously been praised by gaming commentators, with Heavy Rain, in particular, receiving critical acclaim for its emotional intensity. What is more, other game trailers that premiered at Paris Games Week in 2017 featured violent and disturbing content—The Hong Kong Massacre (VRESKI), Blood and Truth (SIE London Studio), Ghost of Tsushima (Sucker Punch Productions), for example, all represent warfare, murder, and torture—but were not deemed controversial by attendees. Considering Quantic Dream’s

72

E. REAY

previous output and the violent content of concurrent trailers, why did the trailer for D:BH provoke marked unease among its audience? Cage responded to accounts of his audience’s ambivalence with defensive indignation. In an interview with Eurogamer’s editor Martin Robinson, Cage accused detractors of having medium-specific bias against videogames, and positioned himself as an avant-garde artist, misunderstood by the mainstream and persecuted by censors—a modern-day “Baudelaire” (Robinson, 2017). He implied that his critics lacked the vision necessary to conceive of a future in which videogames transcend the category of mere entertainment and sit upon the throne of high art, beyond accusations of tawdry sensationalism. Arguably, Cage was sparring with phantoms of his own creation, since the majority of the attendees at Paris Games Week belong to a demographic that is likely to be deeply invested in grand visions of the future of gaming, and commentators such as Robinson were not attempting to police videogame content nor denigrate videogame affordances, but rather were thoughtfully processing their aesthetic and affective experiences of the trailer. Cage’s concerns, however, became warrantable when a British tabloid newspaper ran a story branding D:BH “repulsive” (Manning & Manchez, 2017). The Mail on Sunday article was followed by an almost identical piece in The Sun (Parker, 2017) published under the hyperbolic heading “Most Disturbing Video Game EVER?”. Without any perceivable sense of irony, The Mail reprimanded Quantic Dream for sensationalising an important issue in order to sell a product, instead of engaging with the topic in a constructive way. The news article collated condemnatory opinions from a number of different pundits, including members of parliament, the Children’s Commissioner for England, and representatives from child protection charities. With the exception of the Children’s Commissioner, it appears that none the experts cited had either seen the trailer or a playthrough of the game and were basing their assessments on verbal summaries of its content alone. Conservative MP Damian Collins proclaimed it “completely wrong for domestic violence to be part of a videogame regardless of what the motivation is”, suggesting that what he finds objectionable is this particular pairing of medium and content, demonstrating the type of medium-specific prejudice bemoaned by Cage. Dame Esther Rantzen, founder of children’s protection charity Childline, agreed that videogames were an inappropriate medium for this topic, and imagined that since videogames are interactive, D:BH must amount to a child abuse simulator. She posed the incredulous, rhetorical question,

3

THE CHILD AS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT

73

“Who thinks beating a child is entertainment?”, implying the game caters to an audience of depraved abusers. A simulator, she argued, might titillate potential abusers, emboldening them to enact their “fantasies” upon real children. Using this premise, she justified her moral outrage by causally linking virtual violence with real violence. There is, however, an interesting slippage between her concern for real children and her concern for fictional children. She insisted that “designers have a duty to protect children, and that responsibility extends to protecting virtual children”, and demanded that Sony “remove this scene where a virtual child is put in life-threatening danger”. Since virtual children can only ever be in virtual danger, Rantzen’s desire to extend the protections reserved for real children to virtual children is perhaps indicative of a need to defend a specific ideological construction of ‘the child’. Anneke Meyer notes the tendency to conflate concern for children with concern for ‘the child’ when she comments, “adult indignation [about child abuse] is not only motivated by the harm inflicted on children but also by the infringement of adult ideals of childhood” (2007, p. 102). Chris Jenks adds that the treatment of ‘the child’ is a moral barometer for a society: he writes, “whatever the general condition of childhood in society (treated violently, exploited, pornographized) it may be regarded as an index of the state of the wider social relation, the moral bond in society” (2005, p. 38). Media that present the mistreatment of children without emphatically condemning it, threaten to undermine the moral authority of the society that produced those media. Violence against children—including virtual representations of children—strikes at the heart of the Western sense of moral superiority and undermines neocolonial claims to global stewardship and cultural paternalism. Performances of outrage at the thought of innocence assaulted protect contemporary Western society’s collective self-image, as much as they protect the well-being of young people. When I accessed The Mail on Sunday’s online article about D:BH, there was a hyperlinked advertising bar at the bottom of the webpage recommending ‘related stories’ covered by The Mail. It offered me an exposé of an orphanage implicated in the deaths of numerous children, including a baby boy who was “savagely beaten by a nun”, an article warning parents of the “terrifying truth about what your child watches on YouTube”—which apparently includes videos that glamourise childhood eating disorders, videos promoting teen suicide, and Peppa Pig pornography—and a story of a “computer game-obsessed” student who

74

E. REAY

murdered his teacher before killing himself. The latter article mentions that this teenaged boy idolised Walter Sullivan (the main antagonist in the videogame Silent Hill 4: The Room), and quotes his mother as saying, “Andrey spent most of his time by computer screen (sic). He was a big fan of computer games”. This article ends with a psychologist commenting, “Computer games with shooting form and develop aggression, and people who are playing such games may bring into live (sic) the scenarios of these games” (Stewart, 2017). Within the framework established by these digitally networked news articles, the more one cares about children, the more one should be concerned about new media. That is to say, panic about the effect of new media on children’s welfare is cyclic and mutually enforcing, which means that condemning videogames is a way of demonstrating one’s ethical commitment to ‘the child’. It is significant that in the latter two linked articles, protecting ‘the child’ from the perils of new media necessitates and legitimises the curtailment of children’s agency and the dismissal of children’s preferences by adults. The scenarios described in these news articles rationalise adult surveillance of, and control over, children’s media use, because keeping the child innocent, asexual, harmless, and wholesome requires adults to police children’s access to information. Susan Honeyman identifies this practice as “the bourgeois-bound rhetoric of ‘selfless parenting’ (that of ‘protecting’ children from the public sphere by isolating and controlling them all the more as a result)” (2008, p. 200). Across these three articles, one can see how children’s ‘innate’ vulnerability—children’s physical vulnerability (their bodies are smaller and weaker) and their mental and social vulnerabilities (they lack certain social skills and mental competencies)—is used to rationalise and naturalise their structural vulnerability (the asymmetric power distribution between children and adults). The discourse of ‘innocence’, which constructs children as uniformly incompetent and ‘at risk’, warrants a particular form of adult authoritarianism that demands compliance with adult wishes, rules, and practices. In this way, structural vulnerability can actually produce and amplify children’s innate vulnerability, firstly because, as Meyer writes, “children are discouraged from being independent and gaining experiences, [so] their judgements of danger and acceptability may be impaired” (2007); and secondly because children are not easily able to defy asymmetric power structures when adults abuse them, since obedience to adult rule is seen as a key aspect of the adult–child relationship.

3

THE CHILD AS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT

75

This is the context within which one must interpret The Mail ’s coverage of D:BH ’s trailer: a context wherein the figure of ‘the child’ is deliberately deployed to provoke strong feelings of pity and fear, while simultaneously allowing the outraged adult reader to feel secure in their alignment with normative morality. This context substantiates James Kincaid’s (1998) argument that the same social groups who perform moral outrage when they encounter violations of childly innocence, also possess a voracious appetite for child abuse narratives. He claims that consumers of these narratives get their self-righteousness and their titillation in the same sitting, so that news articles about child abuse function as a kind of pious pornography that thrills consumers even as it affirms both their moral superiority and their right to exert power over children. The highly visual nature of The Mail ’s online layout—with images taking up more space than verbal text—compounds the potential for voyeuristic enjoyment of children’s suffering. The domestic abuse scene in D:BH is not experienced from the perspective of the abuser, as Rantzen imagines, or from the perspective of the child victim, but rather from a third-person perspective that is aligned with the character of Kara, an enslaved AX400 android worker who is called upon to make a moral judgement about the violence that she witnesses. In this way, D:BH is less of a child abuse simulator and more of a child protection simulator. The pleasure or thrill that the player experiences in D:BH is not dissimilar to the enjoyment available to The Mail’s readership through its coverage of incidents of child abuse. By which I mean, I found that my enjoyment of the sequence was rooted in the game’s affirmation of my pre-existing beliefs about the sanctity of ‘the child’. The game permitted me to perform a domestic version of the self-sacrificing saviour trope typical of action-oriented heroic epics. I was allocated the comfortable role of the protector of the weak, the vanquisher of the tyrant, and the agent of irreproachable justice. In D:BH, player proficiency is aligned with moral good, meaning that the player’s reward for a demonstrating technical skill, high levels of precision, and rapid reflexes is the chance to ‘do the right thing’. The Quick Time Event (QTE) challenges are designed to be metonymic (for example, swinging the controller to the side is meant to simulate dodging in that direction or repeated, rapid tapping of a button is meant to simulate effortful straining), suggesting that they are intended to elicit mimetic play rather than points-scoring competitive play. The fact that the correct button presses are represented visually on-screen the moment at which

76

E. REAY

they have to be performed creates the sense that the player is simply being tasked with continuing the smooth-running of a pre-sanctioned sequence. Any mistakes—indicated by the symbol prompt turning red—that result in the suffering of either Alice or Kara are positioned as a rupture from the ‘correct’ version of events. Although the opportunities for interaction in the game moved me beyond straightforward voyeurism, D:BH did not demand my complicity in morally reprehensible actions nor did it require me to assent, even temporarily, to perspectives that differed from my own. I was not faced with difficult narrative choices, moral quandaries, or ‘unfair’, unworkable ludic systems that might have led me to confront my own assumptions about child abuse or to new insights about this issue. As a point of contrast, the historian and children’s rights advocate, Mathew Staunton, is in the process of developing a board game about child maltreatment that has players take on the role of the violent parent in order to educate people about the ways in which social systems in twentiethcentury Ireland failed to protect young people from harm. The board game, which has not yet been published but has been showcased at numerous academic conferences, uses simplified visual abstractions to represent variables in the system, thereby encouraging critical reflection over emotional responses, while also hampering any pleasure that could be derived from voyeurism. Ironically, Rantzen’s ‘child abuse simulator game’ does exist—albeit in analogue form—and it is used as a powerful teaching tool to enhance conversations surrounding this taboo topic and to push for better outcomes for young victims. Another useful parallel to D:BH is the short DLC (Downloadable Content) for Life is Strange 2, entitled The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit (henceforth TAAoCS, 2018). This hour-long game is a window into the life of nine-year-old Chris, who lives alone with his violent, neglectful, alcoholic father. Released in the same year as D:BH, the mechanics, dialogue, visual style, and premise of TAAoCS bear clear similarities to Quantic Dream’s game, but this makes the differences between the two texts more striking. Chris is the player character in TAAoCS and, like Kara, he spends most of the game exploring a shabby, untidy house, cleaning up dirty dishes, and doing laundry. These mundane chores are overlaid with moments of imaginative play wherein Chris becomes his alter ego—a superhero with telekinetic powers called Captain Spirit. His narration of his imaginative play provides opportunities for him to reflect on how the “ultimate battle of good versus

3

THE CHILD AS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT

77

evil” is often more complicated than simply “be[ing] nice and always fight[ing] for the good team” (TAAoCS). The game gives Chris space to be both victim and hero, vulnerable and competent, and innocent and knowing. Furthermore, since the player is subject to the same spatial, social, and physical restrictions as Chris, they become intensely aware that Chris’s victimhood is not a product of the character’s innate weakness or unworldliness, but of his isolation and his total exclusion from systems of structural power. The latter impediment is made explicit via officiallooking disciplinary letters from his school, mandates from the state’s social services, and written complaints from local parents that Chris and the player find hidden around the house and must-read in secret. The attempted intervention of a neighbourly adult only makes Chris’ situation worse. However, the vignette’s bittersweet conclusion has the child deuteragonist of Life is Strange 2, a young boy called Daniel, save Chris from physical injury using his real telekinetic powers. The impossibility of child empowerment within current social structures is felt acutely through the necessary incursion of magic. On the other hand, the connection between Chris’s/Captain Spirit’s imagined telekinesis and Daniel’s actual telekinesis frames Chris’s paidic play as an effective coping strategy and a valid form of self-parenting. Chris’ resilience points to the difference between agency and autonomy. While children may be denied autonomy, it does not follow that they therefore cede all agency in their own lives. Despite Chris and the player’s limited interactive options, Chris’s inner world materially and imaginatively transforms the world around him. This is felt most keenly in Chris’ bedroom, which—unlike the rest of the drab, grey house—is a colourful, sunny haven bursting with creativity and fun. Furthermore, the game takes a positive view of Chris’s unrestricted access to a range of media, including comics and a ‘Playbox’ videogame console. In fact, the fictional worlds he encounters in games and comics bleed into his everyday reality, providing him with invaluable interpretive frameworks that support acts of independent meaning-making and self-definition. Another key difference between D:BH and TAAoCS is the depiction of the abusive adult. Chris’ father is certainly not exonerated for his neglect and abuse of his son, but players are provided with routes to empathise with him. He, too, is a victim of an unloving, intolerant, and neglectful system that sequentially strips him of his autonomy. Players are invited to imagine the kind of father he could have been in other circumstances. The parent-character—Todd—in D:BH, however, serves only to provide the player with a foil against which they can define their moral superiority.

78

E. REAY

Todd is a grotesque, unnatural, irredeemable villain, whose despicable actions give the player licence to relish his unsparing punishment—and even his murder, in my case—without moral qualms. I was not alone in this. Under a video walkthrough (Cinematic Gaming, 2018) detailing a range of possible outcomes for this scene, @devilham666 writes, I just started playing this today. When I found out I actually got a chance to kill Todd, I was SO happy!

While @jasondepew1932 shares, First time playing. I just killed Todd, no regrets.

The characterisation of Todd draws on classist stereotypes about workingclass men. He is depicted as slovenly, overweight, foul-mouthed, and unintelligent, addicted to alcohol and drugs, apparently unemployed, and engaged in criminal activities. In short, he is positioned as a thoroughly unsympathetic character, designed to evoke feelings of disgust and contempt. The character’s moral decrepitude is not only externalised in his physical appearance but is also apparent in the squalor of his home. Todd’s treatment of Kara and Alice is not the only sign that he is unfit for the role of patriarch: the pizza boxes, the electric guitar in his bedroom, the numerous sports magazines, the vodka and crisps on his bedside table, and his senseless outbursts make him a ‘man-child’. His involuntary reliance (which he, himself, laments) on the domestic labour of androids to perform basic household chores further undermines his status as ‘adult’ because dependence is a childish quality. In the ekphrastic recording of my playthrough, I repeatedly flag Todd’s dependence, weakness, volatility, irrationality, and animalistic qualities (italicised): A blue symbol prompts me to press and hold L1. Gripped by a sense of urgency, I do so immediately—there is no timer, but the characterisation of Todd as violent and volatile makes me feel I must match his impulsiveness with my own decisiveness. I feel no compassion, no sympathy, no pity for Todd. His temper, his drug and alcohol dependencies, his misogyny, and his weakness make him contemptible and repulsive. I have encountered his type in enough melodramatic fiction to know that his character arc probably does not bend towards redemption.

3

THE CHILD AS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT

79

I do not want to endanger Kara by making her approach Todd, plus Todd is beyond reasoning and his cruelty makes him worse than an animal.

The attributes that I felt defined Todd are commonly associated with children, but whereas weakness, irrationality, and impulsiveness are considered acceptable (and sometimes, even, endearing) characteristics in children, they are presented as pathetic in adults. In fact, one could argue that the permissibility of these qualities in childhood is what delegitimises them in (male) adulthood. The game works just as hard on the level of mechanics to prohibit player identification with Todd. Todd is an obstacle to be overcome, which creates a sense of ludonarrative consonance with the easily legible message of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ expressed on an audiovisual level. The interactive mechanics in D:BH mostly urge the player to avoid and defend against the violent onslaught of the abuser, while trying to create opportunities for Kara and Alice to escape. The only moment in which I felt aligned with Todd was deeply jarring, and was due to the game’s haptic controls: I lean forward in my seat, concentrating intensely so as not to make another mistake and subject Kara to further pain. Todd grabs Kara around the neck with both hands and starts to choke her. I have to move the whole controller rapidly up and down to allow Kara to break free. The gesture feels odd—the way I am gripping the controller creates a sensation that I am doing the choking rather than the writhing.

The embodied sensation of feeling physically connected to Todd was enough to break my narrative immersion. I suddenly became hyperaware of my hands holding the controller, and of the triviality of the metonymic gesture in contrast to the seriousness of the on-screen event. It was the only moment in this sequence that made me question my ethical position in relation to the text. I came close to feeling a sense of shame at being enthralled by a scene of domestic violence. The fact that this experience was anomalous in my playthrough attests to the seductiveness of the comfortable, conventional, default subject position offered to the player. I looked up a Let’s Play video on YouTube (VGS, 2018) to understand what interactions would have to take place in order to bring about Alice’s death. I found that even if the player fails each of the Quick Time Event (QTE) challenges, it is still possible to rescue Alice and escape, and the only way to ‘fail’ entirely is if the player does nothing. If the

80

E. REAY

player does not press a single button on the controller during the final QTE, both Alice and Kara are murdered by Todd. Essentially, if the player treats the text as a film rather than a videogame, they initiate a fail state. This is, in itself, a value statement about the ethics of intervention that is arguably less nuanced than the forms of neighbourly intervention modelled in TAAoCS. Kara’s death is permanent, and the player cannot use her as an avatar for the rest of the game, meaning that one-third of the game’s narrative experience is withheld from the player as a direct form of punishment. Before killing Kara, Todd repeats four times over: “This is all your fault”. He faces the camera when he delivers these lines, creating the impression that he is speaking directly to the player, reminding the player that the interactive affordances of the text implicate them morally in the narrative outcomes. It is also a way of insisting that the responsibility for the child and the woman’s fate resides with the player and not with the text. At the close of the sequence, a flowchart measures the player’s decisions in relation to a peer group of fellow players and provides a percentage score indicating the normativity or perversity of the player’s choices. Seeing how few players experienced Kara and Alice’s deaths is a form of social shaming. It is worth noting that androids who ‘become human’ are referred to in the game as ‘deviants’, yet the game does not really encourage player deviance.1 The player is then returned to the home screen where the ‘host’ android (another conventionally attractive, slim, busty, blonde woman who serves as the game’s spokesperson) reprimands the player, saying, “You let Alice and Kara die…How could you do that? You could have saved them”. Far from being an amoral, guiltfree, consequence-free space for ethical experimentation, D:BH imposes a public framing on each playthrough and subjects the player to a metaleptic scolding if they choose to play against the grain of the text.

Misogyny and Infantilisation The player is invited to perform a normative, socially condoned moral position via the character of Kara. As an android designed for domestic labour, Kara’s initial obedience to Todd speaks to the exploitation and servitude of women in the home; however, her subservience also aligns 1 At least, not on the first playthrough. Having achieved the ‘good’ or canonical ending, some players may choose to replay the game with the explicit goal of unlocking all branches of the narrative flow chart.

3

THE CHILD AS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT

81

her with Alice and the figure of ‘the child’. Kara’s face has childlike proportions, and her skin is clear and unlined. Her eyes and forehead are large, and her mouth and jaw are small and neat. She is in a permanent state of arrested development since she cannot grow old, and, following her recent reset, she has no past. Her inexperience and innocence give her a childly naivety: like James Kincaid’s designation of the Romantic child, Kara begins the game as a “strangely hollow” entity (1998, p.13). Kara’s childly qualities function to ingratiate her with players: her innocence, weakness, sweetness, vulnerability, and sensitivity inspire an emotional investment from players by encouraging them to feel protective over her. Pity impedes empathy, and despite sharing many identity markers with Kara (young, white, able-bodied, female), I felt that the subject position available to me when playing as Kara was that of the rightful patriarch: I was invited to fill the void left by Todd’s inadequacy. Pronoun slippage is common in recordings of playthroughs, and in my recordings, I frequently shift between third-person (using ‘Kara’, ‘she’, ‘her) and firstperson (e.g. “I press L1”). However, I noticed that during the QTEs in which Todd is physically violent towards Kara, I positioned myself as someone ‘intervening’ on Kara’s behalf. It is not Kara fighting back, but me fighting for her: Both Alice and I are witnesses to this violence, but one of us has the ability to intervene and end it. Kara is thrown to the ground. L1 and R1 must be tapped again, and this time I manage to do so. I press circle and then square perfectly on cue, protecting Kara from another of Todd’s punches.

Just as Kara places her body in front of the vulnerable child, players put themselves between Kara and Todd. I did not experience this sense of protective paternalism towards the game’s two male avatars, Marcus and Connor. Rather, I felt that these characters were powerful in their own right—strong, persuasive, and imposing within the diegetic world. Even when I had purposefully taken the decision to equip Kara with a handgun before she confronts Todd—thereby erasing the discrepancy in physical strength between these characters—I did not have the sense that Kara was a formidable or commanding presence within the game. This feeling was immediately validated in a cutscene during which Todd easily disarms Kara by knocking the gun out of her hands. The issue here isn’t whether people who endure domestic violence are depicted as vulnerable,

82

E. REAY

but whether Kara’s vulnerability is presented as an appealing, ‘humanising’ characteristic. As equal victims of Todd’s abuse, I would argue that the appeal of both Alice and Kara is proportional to their capacity for suffering. The game’s narrative itself confirms this: just as Kara’s moral awakening into subjectivity and personhood is triggered by Alice’s trauma, Luther’s journey to ‘becoming human’ is catalysed by the sight of Kara’s suffering at the hands of another interchangeable Todd-type called Zlatko. Marcus, in contrast, can awaken androids to sentience simply by touching them, Messiah-like, with the palm of his hand. The narrative seems to suggest that feminised, infantilised pain is a necessary rhetoric for ‘humanising’ both the diegetic characters and the player. Furthermore, the suffering experienced by victims of systemic inequality is linked to the pleasure felt by the player-saviour. Karen Lury writes that children are understood to be “‘perfect victims’, since they are blameless” (2010, p.105), which permits overly simplified “perceptions of right and wrong, despite the moral complexity inherent in any [social issue]” (2010, p. 107). I agree with Lury that the figure of the child-as-victim (the traumatised child, the dead child, the abandoned child, etc.) is frequently used across all media to heighten emotional stakes, but I would also invert her statement and say ‘the victim is the ‘perfect’ child’: the child is never more innocent, never more precious, and never more powerful as a rhetorical device, than when it is being abused by an adult. The child-character, Alice, is a perfect child and therefore a perfect victim—blameless, defenceless, and as mute as the lauded Victorian child who is seen but not heard. Docile, meek, and grateful, she oscillates between cringing in fear and offering ready gestures of affection—a hand to hold, a cheek laid against the avatar’s shoulder. In the manner of Stowe’s Little Eva, Alice is free of the prejudices and biases that adult characters harbour against androids, and therefore seemingly represents a brighter future wherein androids and humans can coexist harmoniously. On the other hand, she seems to have a staunch, inborn moral compass: she becomes upset if Kara steals food for them to eat and withdraws some of her trust and affection—the only currency with which the child can bargain—in order to influence the player’s ethical attitude. Alice functions as a litmus test for determining the morality of other characters, and characters find the strength they need to persevere in Alice’s utter helplessness. Investment in Alice’s well-being gives weight to dialogue choices and urgency to narrative decisions, in addition to amplifying the moral

3

THE CHILD AS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT

83

dimension of each interaction. It is not simply a matter of surviving in a hostile world but also of sustaining Alice’s faith in humanity and setting an ethical example for her to follow. Through Kara, the player can attend to Alice’s needs by keeping her warm, ensuring she is fed, tucking her into bed, telling her bedtime stories, ministering to her when she has a fever, and generally keeping her out of harm’s way. The player’s performance of care is ultimately undermined when it is revealed that Alice is not a real child after all, but a manufactured YK500 android designed to be—according to an advertisement—“The Perfect Child You’ve Always Dreamed Of”. While Kara, Marcus, Luther, and the other service androids are sold as tools, Alice is marketed as a plaything. Alice is not a child, but The Child, as Harri Kalha would emphatically insist. There is no underlying biological reality that justifies her social role—she is purely a cultural construction. Kara’s careful solicitude to make sure Alice keeps warm, that she has a safe place to sleep, and that she is well-fed make no sense if one remembers that androids are not physically affected by temperature and need neither rest nor food to function. The simulation of needs—her continual complaints of cold and fatigue, as well as her frequent requests for affirmation that her attendant adults will not abandon her—are integral to her being ‘The Perfect Child’, and the fact that Alice does not actually have physical vulnerabilities almost unchilds her. Kara discovers Alice’s artificial nature when she encounters another ‘Alice’, who is an exact replica of her own Alice. Kara is asked by another android, “What difference does it make?… She became the little girl you wanted! And you became the mother she needed. Forgetting who you are to become what someone needs you to be. Maybe that’s what it means to be alive.” Favourably interpreted, one could infer that the message here is ‘we become human through our social relationships to one another’. A less generous reading could understand the lesson to be ‘performing our socially conditioned roles is ultimately more important than authenticity or self-determinism, and being human still requires programmed behaviour even if it is culturally encoded rather than hardwired’. Indeed, the rhetorical question ‘what difference does it make?’ acquires a darker tone when the player is invited to reconsider Todd’s possessiveness—shown in a flashback as Todd yelling “You’re mine!” after a fleeing Alice. His words are supposedly imbued with new meaning in light of the fact that Alice is a technological device he purchased, but the very idea that his attitude towards his daughter didn’t initially register as

84

E. REAY

nonsensical demonstrates the general acceptance of the idea that children are owned by their parents. That is to say, children are doll-like possessions irrespective of whether they are made of flesh and blood or silicon and wire. Constructions of motherhood are contingent on constructions of childhood, and so Kara’s newly liberated identity is at stake if she rejects Alice on the basis of her artificiality. When Kara reveals to Alice that she knows Alice’s true nature, the player is given the choice to have Kara ‘hug’ Alice or to be ‘distant’ from her. The player is essentially invited to affirm or deny Rantzen’s belief that ‘virtual’ children deserve the same treatment as ‘real’ children. If the player chooses to hug Alice, Alice warmly reciprocates and says, “We’ll be together forever, won’t we Kara?” This childish hyperbole becomes a reasonable prediction for these ageless, cybernetic entities who can exist indefinitely in an extended state of stasis, endlessly upcycling their various parts. Android children are all Peter Pans in a state of permanent delay, and so while Alice can no longer be a hopeful symbol for social progress and futurity, her permanence has a kind of poetic finality. Alice the Android is the obvious end-point of ideologies that essentialise ‘the child’ and of a culture that naturalises, sublimates, and obscures the social construction of childhood. Alice does not need to be a ‘real’ child in order to stabilise Kara’s identity, just as she does not need to be a ‘real’ child in order to stabilise the identities of the outraged adults who read and contribute to The Daily Mail. When Kara and the player elect to ‘hug’ Alice, it is a gesture that affirms their continued investment in an ideology of childhood that is separate from the material reality experienced by real children. To embrace the alternative—to reject contemporary constructions of ‘the child’ as a moral litmus test—is to remove a keystone integral to other power structures that are rooted in benevolent paternalism, including white saviourism and patriarchal control. The fact that doing so would impede narrative coherence and position the player as a morally suspect antagonist in this game is telling. The child is the social order’s affective face—and Alice’s face is a hyperreal, motion-captured, emotionally expressive face that solicits empathetic projection through non-verbal cues such as glistening tears, a runny nose, and a trembling mouth. Her vulnerability condemns those who would harm her and the final verdict on who gets to be ‘human’ hinges on who responds appropriately to her defenceless innocence. The true tragedy, perhaps, is that while Alice the Android suffers immensely, she does not ‘awaken’ and become a ‘deviant’ during

3

THE CHILD AS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT

85

the course of the game. While it is possible for the player to guide Kara, Marcus, and Connor towards a form of liberated self-knowledge, Alice remains ‘The Perfect Child You Always Dreamed Of’, forever obedient to her own marketing blurb. Although D:BH seems to pose meaningful questions about the constructed nature of the child through its examination of ‘humanness’, it ultimately replicates and affirms the very same moral position propounded by conservative pundits in the Mail. D:BH is predicated on the idea that the child is worthy of protection precisely because it is the superstructural, unchallengeable moral object around which paternalistic, patriarchal systems revolve. By harshly judging players who reject the imperatives to shore up the moral significance of the child, D:BH undermines the radical potential latent in the figure of Alice the Android. While emotionally charged questions such as Rantzen’s, ‘who thinks beating a child is entertainment?’ are “extremely resistant to challenges, whether logical, experiential, evidential or otherwise” (Meyer, 2007, p. 89), the simulated nature of ‘the child’ in videogames opens up space in which its moral, social, and political function can be picked apart. D:BH and The Daily Mail may be more ideologically aligned than certain clickbait headlines suggest, but videogames such as INSIDE offer strategies for disrupting players’ biases and expectations, prompting critical thought about their complicity with systems that make violence against children possible. I believe that the key difference is that INSIDE leans into the immateriality of the medium—or into the difference between lived childhoods and figural imaginings of ‘the child’—while D:BH aspires to blur the digital and the real. The former approach creates space for questions, and the latter approach shuts discussion down. In the next chapter, I begin once again with INSIDE, but this time I push the argument in the other direction, showing that pulling on the thread of children’s vulnerability can unravel an entire moral tapestry.

References Ariès, P. (1960/1986). Centuries of childhood (Peregrine books). Penguin. Bacon, S., & Ruickbie, L. (2020). The cultural construction of monstrous children: Essays on anomalous children from 1595 to the present day (S. Bacon, & L. Ruickbie, Eds., 1st ed., Anthem studies in Gothic Literature). Balanzategui, J. (2018). The uncanny child in transnational cinema: Ghosts of futurity at the turn of the twenty-first century. Amsterdam University Press.

86

E. REAY

Beck, U. (1992). Risk society: Towards a new modernity. Sage Publications. Bond Stockton, K. (2012). The queer child, or growing sideways in the twentieth century. Duke University Press. Cinematic Gaming. (2018). Detroit become human—Kara, Alice and Todd: All choices|Stormy night: All endings, Youtube, retrieved from https://www.you tube.com/watch?v=WtdVMW04fPo Edelman, L. (2004). No future queer theory and the death drive (Series Q). Duke University Press. Edelstein, S. (2018). Adulthood and other fictions: American literature and the unmaking of age. Oxford University Press. Gibran, K. (1923/2020). The Prophet. Alma Classics. Gubar, M. (2016). The hermeneutics of recuperation: What a kinship-model approach to children’s agency could do for children’s literature and childhood studies. Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, 8, 291–310. https://doi.org/ 10.1353/jeu.2016.0015 Holland, P. (2006). Picturing childhood: The myth of the child in popular imagery. I.B. Tauris. Honeyman, S. (2008). Gingerbread wishes and Candy(land) dreams: The lure of food in cautionary tales of consumption. Marvels & Tales, 21(2), 195– 215, Wayne State University Press. James, A., & Prout, A. (1990). Constructing and reconstructing childhood: Contemporary issues in the sociological study of childhood. Falmer. Jenks, C. (1996). Childhood (key ideas). Routledge. Jenks, C. (2005). Childhood (2nd ed., Key ideas). Routledge. Kalha, H. (2011). What the hell is the figure of the child? Figuring out figurality in, around, and beyond Lee Edelman. Lambda Nordica, 16(2–3), 17–48. Kincaid, J. (1998). Erotic innocence: The culture of child molesting. Duke University Press. Lury, K. (2010). The child in film: Tears, fears, and fairy tales. I.B. Tauris & Co. Manning, S., & Manchez, S. (2017). ‘Abusers will get off on this stuff’: Sony under fire for ‘repulsive’ videogame Detroit: Become Human which shows girl, 10, ‘beaten to death by her father’ among a host of child abuse and domestic violence acts players watch. In The Mail on Sunday, retrieved on 01/11/19 from https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-514 0165/Detroit-Human-video-game-branded-repulsive.html Meyer, A. (2007). The child at risk: Paedophiles, media responses, and public opinion. Manchester University Press. Nguyen, C. T. (2020). Games: Agency as art (Ser. Thinking art). Oxford University Press.

3

THE CHILD AS A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT

87

Parker, C. (2017, December 3). Most disturbing video game ever? The Sun, retrieved from https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/5055715/sony-slammedfor-brutal-scene-in-detroit-become-human-showing-dad-beating-daughter10-to-death/ Postman N. (1994). The disappearance of childhood (1st Vintage books ed.). Vintage Books. Prensky, M. (2001). Digital natives, digital immigrants part 1. On the Horizon, 9, 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1108/10748120110424816 Robinson, K. (2008). In the name of ‘childhood innocence’: A discursive exploration of the moral panic associated with childhood and sexuality. Cultural Studies Review, 14(2). Robinson, M. (2017). David Cage on Detroit and is depiction of domestic violence. Eurogamer, retrieved on 01/11/19 from https://www.euroga mer.net/articles/2017-10-31-david-cage-on-detroit-and-its-depiction-of-dom estic-violence Sánchez-Eppler, K. (2005). Dependent states: The child’s part in nineteenthcentury American culture. University of Chicago Press. Sánchez-Eppler, K. (2021). Childhood. In P. Nel, L. Paul, & N. Christensen (Ed.), Keywords for children’s literature (2nd ed., pp. 38–41). New York University Press. https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/978147988 5435.003.0016 Stephens, S. (1995). Children and the politics of culture. Princeton UP. Stewart, W. (2017). Student slit his teacher’s throat, took a selfie with the body and then killed himself with a circular saw in Russia ‘as part of Blue Whalestyle online death game’. The Mail Online, published 2 November 2017, in The Daily Mail, retrieved on 01/11/19 from https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ news/article-5042023/Teen-murdered-teacher-killed-death-game.html Valentine, G. (1996). Angels and devils: Moral landscapes of childhood. Environment and Planning d: Society and Space., 14(5), 581–599. https://doi. org/10.1068/d140581 VGS. (2018). Detroit: Become human—Kara lets Alice die/ Stormy Night, Youtube, retrieved on 01/11/19 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= 1ooNJelfaXw Wall, J. (2014). The children’s table: Childhood studies and the humanities (A. Mae Duane, Ed.). The University of Georgia Press. Journal of American Culture (Malden, Mass), 37 (2), 253–254. Zelizer, V. (1994). Pricing the priceless child: The changing social value of children. Princeton University Press. Zornado, J. (2006). Inventing the child: Culture, ideology, and the story of childhood (Children’s literature and culture; [Volume 17]). Routledge.

CHAPTER 4

Child-Killers and Killer-Children

INSIDE, Playdead

The blank-faced boy conveys that he must avoid detection by crouching and cowering. This speaks to the limbic brain—that old reptilian part whose crude gears shift only between fight, flight, and freeze. I respond cautiously, my fingers hovering millimetres above the keys, waiting for sign, scouring for a solution. Adult guards jump down from the lorry, swinging torches and gripping guns. Are they faceless too? No, they’re wearing white masks. Man-made industrial detritus provides some cover. Shadows are safety for this unarmed child, and a flashlight is threat. The boy’s breathing betrays him—it almost betrays his location— but it also betrays his exertion and exhaustion. He lacks the strength and athleticism of a conventional videogame hero, and something about the impersonal, militaristic appearance of the guards suggests his vulnerable childliness will afford him no protection in the form of mercy. The guards move on, but the boy’s path is blocked by a concrete wall that is too tall for him to scale. Cathedral moonlight slants in angular beams through the canopy, illuminating a solution to

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 E. Reay, The Child in Videogames, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42371-0_4

89

90

E. REAY

the problem. I press the interact button and the boy pushes an abandoned fridge onto one side so that he can climb on top of it. Beyond the wall the boy must wade waist-deep in water and it is making him dangerously slow. There’s nothing I can do to speed him up, but I increase pressure on the analogue stick anyway. Now the soundscape demonstrates how sonic depth contributes to the z-axis illusion. A Doberman’s barks increase in volume as the animal hurtles towards the boy. A leap of faith—three keys pressed, up, forward, and grab. I wince, but something sticks. The boy makes it across the chasm and clings to a tangle of roots on the opposite side. The dog whimpers in frustration, the boy in relief. A musical ‘rest’ can be a moment of anticipation rather than moment of respite. Just so for this silence here: it is bated breath. Tires on gravel—the boy’s head turns towards the sound, and this undirected, autonomous movement suggests that two independent wills converge within one virtual body. He just manages to outpace the car and hide from the headlamps. I’ve learned from the flashlight and extrapolated. I’ve been successfully conditioned: light is death. Sounds kind of Orwellian. Playdead games don’t really coach players. There are never instructions or explanations—not even in the official paratexts. Only failure and discipline. I inch onwards. The sound of insects indicates an environmental change—the boy has covered some ground—but his pursuers have not given up the hunt. The slamming of a car door indicates the guards are on foot again. The boy has no choice but to run in front of the headlamps, cueing the first nondiegetic sound in the game. A haunting, choral alarm that wails a wordless ‘you’ve been seen’, and swells in volume and tonal richness as the danger intensifies. This rising crescendo is literally shot through with the rapid staccato of gunfire. The boy’s death is quiet but not quick. His laboured breathing lasts for an uncomfortably long time. Fade to black.

4

CHILD-KILLERS AND KILLER-CHILDREN

Injustice is expressed both on a representational level—this is just a defenceless child, murdered by an armed adult—and reinforced on a ludic level in that the game punished me for failing to complete the puzzle even though no guidance was provided to give me a fair chance. The sense of injustice originates in the game’s fiction, and the sense of unfairness in the game’s mechanics. These two affective responses are not interchangeable—in fact the dissonance between them in itself carries meaning—but they are inextricable. I make a second attempt. This time I know where to run and when to jump over the roots that tripped me before. I perform better. The child survives. Without a heads up display to map enemy positions, sound must serve to plot their locations. The barking of hounds advances from the far left-hand side. We panic. Another desperate, blind jump into a lake, and as the boy plunges below the surface both the visuals and the audio become filtered and muted. I breathe a sigh of relief. But the boy does not. He drowns. He dies in my hands because I fail to direct him to swim up for air in time. I must try again. The relentless, unforgiving, uncaring brutality of the gameworld is communicated in the harsh severity of the game’s frequent and unexpected fail states. Although the puzzles require some ingenuity to complete—and some daring in the form of calculated risks and leaps of faith— they have only one solution. In this way the game homogenises players, locking them into repetitive loops until they perform the sequence of actions that the game ordains. There is no margin for error. A mistake is death. Innocence and unfamiliarity are death. Skilful deduction—even luck—rarely lead to survival. Survival comes through automation. The kind of mindless muscle memory that dancers possess—in their perfected state, they are wholly obedient to the rhythm of the music and to the choreography. You miss one beat and the game says, Stop! Take it from the top. With all the tenderness of a remorseful chaperone, I have the boy swim very short stretches underwater to accommodate his limited lung capacity. Just far enough below the surface to stay hidden from the guards who continue to monitor the lake from a bridge.

91

92

E. REAY

The boy drags himself onto the opposite shore and shakes his head. Despite the stylised minimalism of the visuals, certain textures have been rendered with careful attention. The boy’s red jumper is now dark and heavy with water and his wet hair glistens in the early light. We pass a towering pile of pig corpses. Ok, very Orwellian, I think.

Agency and Eeriness When I organised my dataset according to genre, I found that stealth games had the highest relative proportion of child-avatars. These avatars were designed to exaggerate the core experience associated with stealth mechanics—the sense of having a conditional, restricted agency that is orthogonal to the power of the game’s antagonists. I also noticed that stealth games with child-avatars invariably had horror aesthetics, with the child-avatar itself being an uncanny site of monstrosity. I grouped these spooky, skinny, silent kids together under the category of The Waif. In this chapter, I contrast The Waif archetype with The Little Monster archetype to highlight the anxieties about agency that are specific to The Waif. I demonstrate that while both archetypes are characterised by the juxtaposition of childliness and monstrosity, this hybridity only generates uncertainty in the case of The Waif and, in fact, functions to reduce uncertainty in the case of The Little Monster. I argue that the sense of uncertainty associated with The Waif is inextricably tied to questions of control and free will, which are brought to the fore by the interactive affordances of videogames. The figure of The Waif has been analysed in non-interactive media (e.g., Balanzategui, 2018; Lury, 2010; Renner, 2013), but its presence in videogames places particular emphasis on this trope’s capacity to undermine the connection between adulthood and agency. Janet Murray describes videogame agency as an aesthetic pleasure characteristic of digital environments…When the behaviour of the computer is coherent and the results of participation are clear and well-motivated, the interactor experiences the pleasure of agency,

4

CHILD-KILLERS AND KILLER-CHILDREN

93

of making something happen in a dynamically responsive world. (1997, p. 156)

Using Murray’s definition, the latter half of this chapter explores the deep discomfort elicited by two games from my survey that feature The Waif as an avatar, namely Little Nightmares (Tarsier Studios, 2017) and INSIDE (Playdead, 2016). In these games, the aesthetic pleasures of agency are gradually stripped from players through the growing incoherence of the figure of the child. As players are forced to reappraise their relationships with the child-avatars, they become increasingly unsure as to whether they are the manipulator or the manipulated, the player or the played. Little Nightmares and INSIDE are both wordless platform games with stealth mechanics and horror aesthetics, created by Scandinavian indie studios. In these games, players direct a Waif—a malnourished, forsaken, orphaned child, abandoned in a bleak, hostile world filled with murderous antagonists. Stunted, unshod, and inadequately dressed for its grim surroundings, The Waif’s exaggerated vulnerability communicates the stealth mechanics necessary for traversing these gamespaces, while also heightening the player’s sense of dread and jeopardy. Drawing on Anneke Meyer’s (2007a) insights into the connection between children’s vulnerability and the discourse of innocence, I posit that the weakness of the avatars produces their virtue. It scaffolds a moral framework that positions players both as plucky underdogs outwitting evil oppressors and as righteous protectors of the abused child. However, the final twists in each of these games disrupt the conflation of vulnerability and innocence, forcing players to reflect on the assumptions they made about the figure of the child. Importantly, these twists prompt players to question the nature of the agency afforded to them by the games. Mark Fisher hypothesises that the sensation of ‘the eerie’ occurs either when one encounters agency where there should be none (e.g., a haunted object or a menacing landscape), or when one expects to encounter agency but instead discovers a void (e.g., an automaton or a sleepwalker). He summarises, “since the eerie turns crucially on the problem of agency, it is about the forces that govern our lives and the world” (2016, p. 64). Building on Fisher’s theory, this chapter concludes that the true source of unease in these texts is not the gloomy gameworlds, the spooky soundscapes, or the vicious antagonists, but the figure of The Waif itself. Despite its apparent weakness and its

94

E. REAY

perfect obedience, The Waif maintains a mask of indecipherable blankness that hides the nature of its agency from players. The Waif is eerie because it is akin to both a possessed doll and a humanoid husk devoid of an interior life. The Waif’s silent unknowability leaves players questioning their own independence, mastery, and subjectivity as they fail to locate themselves within familiar adult/child power hierarchies. This, in turn, troubles conceptions of adulthood that rely on childhood as a foil to assert the stability and sovereignty of adult identities.

Little Monsters The word ‘waif’ has its roots in Old French—a guaif was a ‘stray beast’— and its usage here retains the sense that The Waif is simultaneously a pitiable, lost, lonely creature and a feral threat to domesticity and civility. As a liminal figure whose inhumane treatment pushes it to the edge of humanness, The Waif can be read as an omen of—and the progeny of— social collapse. On the other hand, The Waif presents an opportunity for society to affirm its values and its functionality by folding The Waif back into the centre of its moral systems. The Waif loiters between ‘helpless’ and ‘harmful’, troubling the adult world with its baleful, mournful vacillation. It is this indeterminacy that separates The Waif from The Little Monster. On a visual and audio level, both The Waif and The Little Monster are marked by the jarring juxtaposition of childliness and monstrosity; however, on a mechanical level, only The Waif resists classification as one or the other. The game mechanics associated with The Little Monster are limited to violent interactions—players can kill The Little Monster or be killed by it. Since the game mechanics do not acknowledge the hybridity of The Little Monster, it makes it difficult for the player to do so too. As a result, The Little Monster is exiled from the category of ‘child’ and is stripped of the rights and protections this designation usually warrants. Withholding the option of treating The Little Monster as one would treat a child limits player agency, while preventing The Little Monster from behaving like a child limits its capacity to simulate agency. Despite their composite appearance, Little Monsters establish ‘child’ and ‘monster’ as mutually exclusive identities. Since monsters—along with zombies, demons, Nazis, and, to a lesser extent, aliens—are conventional, time-honoured videogame antagonists, their very presence in gameworlds constitutes a clear instruction for players to eradicate them.

4

CHILD-KILLERS AND KILLER-CHILDREN

95

The childliness of their representation does not mitigate their mechanical monstrosity; rather, it compounds their freakish abjection as grotesque inversions of innocence. Little Monsters cannot be rescued, and the society that produced them cannot be redeemed. In contrast, the presence of The Waif delegates responsibility to the player to decide the fate both of individual child-characters and of the virtual societies to which they belong. The game mechanics associated with The Waif intensify players’ sense of agency by allotting them the task of distinguishing between child and monster. Equally, the set of conflicting behaviours assigned to The Waif contribute to the illusion that this character might possess inscrutable motivations and an independent will. It is this simulated agency that keeps The Waif out of the player’s grasp, even as the game insists The Waif’s fate is in the player’s hands. The Little Monster archetype appears in the Dead Space series (Visceral Games 2008–2013) as a subset of antagonists that resemble human children. ‘Crawlers’ and ‘Lurkers’ are mutated babies whose grotesque disfigurement triggers disgust and pity. Crawlers, for instance, beetle towards the player on their backs over walls, floors, and ceilings, their engorged stomachs primed to explode at any moment like unpinned grenades. They are encountered in the space station’s former daycare centre and their presence is accompanied by the sound of infants crying and giggling. These signs of childness contrast with their murderous, self-destructive compulsion to relentlessly pursue the player until death. Environmental storytelling informs players that any attempts to engage with Crawlers as if they were babies will be futile. The corpses of childcare employees litter the level, and a cautionary cutscene is triggered when players first enter the area, documenting the death of a carer who coos over a Crawler before being blown to pieces when it inevitably explodes. Crawlers are less dangerous than most of the necromorph antagonists in Dead Space, but they nonetheless pose a threat to the player, whose only option is to dispatch them quickly by shooting them or hurling in-game objects at them. Another subset of childlike necromorphs in the Dead Space series resembles a gang of pre-teens and is referred to in the game’s paratexts as ‘The Pack’. The Pack functions as a predatory gestalt that overwhelms players with coordinated attacks. Again, although individuals within The Pack are easier to kill than adult necromorphs, their speed and agility give them the capacity to inflict harm that far exceeds that of a human child. This makes them worthy adversaries for players, establishing a sense

96

E. REAY

of ludic fairness that allays any qualms players may have about killing virtual children. The combination of a childlike appearance with swarm attacks is replicated in the more recent title Days Gone (Bend Studios, 2019), another survival horror game. ‘Newts’ are children who have been infected with the Freaker virus, a disease that turns human beings of all ages into bestial, aggressive cannibals. Like The Pack, Newts are relatively weak as individuals and are therefore usually encountered in hordes. Since individuals within the horde can be defeated with a single shot from a crossbow or a well-timed blow with a melee weapon, exterminating Newts is a satisfying, fast-paced, adrenaline-fuelled challenge that rewards players with feelings of power and mastery. In both Days Gone and Dead Space, the programmed behaviours of The Little Monsters are straightforward and transparent: they are driven by crude survival instincts and by an uncontrollable, animalistic compulsion to kill. Their mindlessness permits a reciprocal mindlessness in players, allowing players to enjoy an indiscriminate and gratuitous killing spree. In these games, killer-children sanction child-killing. Little Monsters are not unique to videogames. When documenting the trope’s appearance in films and novels, Karen Renner notes that Little Monsters are often given scant character development and usually appear as part of a larger savage pack…they are rarely individualised enough for us to develop any real sympathy for them. Furthermore, the stories generate revulsion for these children by depicting the terrible acts of brutality, cannibalism, and rape that they commit. These acts make feral children incapable of redemption and ease our acceptance of their bloody annihilation. (2013, p. 6)

The fact that across a range of media, this childlike enemy variant is matched with almost identical sets of behaviours suggests that rather than introducing a degree of ambiguity, the antagonists’ childness functions as a legible sign. The Little Monster’s childlike visual presentation provides players with information about the enemies’ attacks and statistics and thereby clarifies the optimal strategies for defeating them and achieving a win state. Jaroslav Švelch makes a distinction between sublime monsters and contained monsters, stating that while the sublime monster is “always partially unknown or cognitively challenging” because “it defies being an

4

CHILD-KILLERS AND KILLER-CHILDREN

97

object of our actions and rational reasoning”, the contained monster “is one that is described, catalogued and tamed” (2020, n.p.). He comments, Videogames tend to present monstrosity that is contained and demystified by translating the monsters’ features into rules and statistics. To be presentable in the simulated worlds of games, the monster’s 3D model and its range of interactions with the world need to be specified and encoded in software. (2020, n.p.)

The childlike appearance of these antagonists is a visual translation of their ‘rules and statistics’, meaning that they belong to the category of ‘contained’ monsters. The childness of The Waif, on the other hand, is what makes it ‘cognitively challenging’. Unlike Newts, Crawlers, Lurkers, and The Pack—whose mechanics and motivations are communicated through their visual signification—The Waif’s surface seems to garble or conceal its range of interactions. The potential discrepancy between The Waif’s visual exterior and its encoded behaviours suggests that it could possess a subjectivity or an interiority that is ‘partially unknown’ to the player.

Authority and Autonomy As is the case with The Little Monster, The Waif’s position in relation to the categories of ‘child’ and ‘monster’ is ultimately determined by the range of interactions available to players: within my typology, a childcharacter is only a Waif if its associated mechanics include both ‘help’ and ‘harm’. Several games in my dataset entrusted players with resolving The Waif’s ambiguity by presenting them with a simplified binary choice: treat The Waif as a monster or treat The Waif as a child. This explicit decision-making mechanic is compelling insofar as the optimal solution is not immediately obvious, and the game can acknowledge and accommodate both outcomes. By minimising the ludic difference between choices and instead emphasising the narrative implications, games can encourage players to use emotional reasoning and moral codes to make this decision, a process that only makes sense if players suspend their disbelief and ascribe a latent subjectivity to The Waif. An early quest in The Witcher 3, for instance, requires players to decide whether the player character, Geralt, should kill or care for a Botchling. As a miscarried foetus buried without rites, the Botchling is—from a visual

98

E. REAY

perspective—as grotesque and as horrifying as a Crawler. However, in terms of its associated mechanics, the Botchling invites judicious consideration and even compassion. Players are presented with two equally onerous options to move forward in their quest to find the Botchling’s mother and sister: kill the Botchling (and an onslaught of wraiths) and extract its blood to create a potion that will help Geralt locate the family, or soothe the Botchling to prevent it from becoming violent (while simultaneously dispatching an onslaught of wraiths) and give it a proper burial so that its newly hallowed spirit can lead Geralt to its family. A dynamic of dependency emerges between Geralt and the Botchling, in the sense that the decision to treat The Waif as a child not only determines the Botchling’s destiny but also shapes Geralt’s character development. This, in turn, constitutes an act of self-creation for players, whose choices are reflected back to them in the game’s branching narrative, thus creating a satisfying sense of agency. A rather bald example of The Waif being used to make players feel like moral agents operating within an open ethical system occurs in the iconic game Bioshock. Bioshock repeatedly requires players to choose between harming or helping a set of NPCs called Little Sisters. Atlas, an adult NPC that guides the player character for most of the game via handheld radio, says of the Little Sisters, “You think that’s a child down there? Don’t be fooled. She’s a Little Sister now. Someone went and turned a sweet baby girl into a monster”, implying that ‘monster’ and ‘child’ are mutually exclusive. He continues, “Those things may look like wee little girls. But looks don’t make it so”. He is correct to a degree because the visual signifiers are not what determines their girlhood: it is the interactive mechanics that undergird the visuals. Following the game’s exposition and tutorial, players are shown a cutscene in which the player character, Jack, rounds the corner to find a masked splicer raising a baton to bludgeon a Little Sister to death. The Little Sister, who is barefoot and dressed in a ragged pinafore with her hair in pigtails, cowers on the ground. A shot is fired from a balcony, and the splicer’s skull shatters. Dr. Brigitte Tenenbaum, the geneticist who engineered the Little Sisters, waves a smoking pistol at the player character and screams a warning—“Stay away from her, or it is you who will be shot next”. Then the voice of Atlas comes over the radio, urging the player to kill the Little Sister and extract her valuable ADAM, which is

4

CHILD-KILLERS AND KILLER-CHILDREN

99

the transformative genetic material that grants the player character superhuman abilities. Atlas once again assures the player that “it is not a child, not anymore anyways”. Atlas and Dr. Tenenbaum argue, and the Little Sister runs sobbing from the player to hide behind a sofa. The cutscene ends, and Jack’s weapon reappears in his hand—an invitation for the player to act violently, perhaps. The player approaches the Little Sister, who shuffles backward on her hands and knees. She raises her arms in front of her face—a gesture of defence and surrender—and then an info-screen halts time. It reads, CHOOSE whether to RESCUE the Little Sister or HARVEST her. If you harvest her, you get maximum ADAM to spend on plasmids, but she will NOT SURVIVE the process. If you rescue her, you get less ADAM but Tenenbaum has promised to make it WORTH YOUR WHILE.

Unlike when players destroy the childlike antagonists in Dead Space and Days Gone, the experience of killing Little Sisters is not characterised by adrenaline-fuelled urgency, quick reactions, or an adept display of fine motor skills. Neither are players offered an entertaining range of creative ways to kill the Little Sisters. Unlike other in-game enemies in Bioshock, they cannot be incinerated, electrocuted, trapped in a cyclone, or overwhelmed with swarms of bees. Instead, time is paused, and the input-controls are streamlined to a single button-press. The simplification of the controls is a mechanical description of the Little Sisters’ vulnerability: killing Little Sisters is easy and, ironically, this is what makes it hard to do. As a ludic encounter, it seems unfair and unsportsmanlike, which gives rise to the feeling that it is not morally just either. On the other hand, one could see the straightforward button-click mechanic and the euphemistic expression ‘harvest’ as inviting a cold, utilitarian attitude from the player, turning the moment into a kind of philosophical trolley problem. The input-controls obtrude at this point because they are referenced in the extradiegetic info-screen, and the game breaks immersion by drawing attention to the physical gestures of players’ hands. This distances players from the diegetic gameworld and its characters and asserts the text’s ‘gameness’, which perhaps enjoins players to approach this choice strategically rather than empathetically. That said, since the game is experienced from a first-person perspective, the parallel between the virtual hands on-screen gripping the Little Sister and the players’ hands gripping the controller could be seen to have a metaleptic

100

E. REAY

effect in the opposite direction, wherein players experience a strong sense of embodied presence in the gameworld: they may feel that the fate of The Waif is literally in their hands. Bioshock is known for its ground-breaking environmental storytelling that articulates the game’s central themes of freedom and agency— but how free are players when it comes to drawing a line between child and monster? The game is set in Rapture, which is—to quote its founder—“a city where the artist would not fear the censor, where the great would not be constrained by the small, where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality”. This amoral, permissive civilisation has spiralled into bloody chaos, filled with mutant, murderous addicts and the wrecks and ruins of industry. The city is saturated with indicators that suggest the destruction of the social contract in favour of hyper-individualism is unsustainable specifically because it cannibalises its vulnerable members, such as the Little Sisters who “have the triple disadvantage of being young, poor, and female” (Henthorn, 2018, p. 212). If the dissenting graffiti written in human blood vandalising billboards espousing the merits of so-called ‘ethical egoism’ was not clear enough, audio diaries recording the suffering and despair of civilians at the hands of Randian ideology are strewn throughout the city. In short, although the game permits moral degeneracy, it does not condone it, and this circumscribes the latitude afforded players during their encounters with the Little Sisters. Since players are trained to read game environments for information pertaining to winning strategies, they must balance the numerical valuation of their decision expressed via the ADAM metre that suggests detached, self-serving egocentrism is the optimal approach with the environmental information that suggests this kind of behaviour constitutes a losing strategy. Grant Tavinor’s autoethnographic description of this moment of gameplay captures his experience of balancing conflicting information: I couldn’t bring myself to kill the little girl, even though she had been surgically and genetically manipulated for the purpose of extracting stem cells, and so wasn’t really human at all; or so I was told. Still, those big eyes, pigtails, and the pretty frock; I couldn’t do it. Instead, I decided to save her, and as I did so, using my own genetically enhanced power to regain her humanity, an emotion of sympathy and brotherly care swept over me. (2009, p. 130)

4

CHILD-KILLERS AND KILLER-CHILDREN

101

Tavinor was told by Atlas to treat the Little Sister as a monster, but the Little Sister’s gendered signs of childness ‘told’ Tavinor to treat her as a human. In prioritising the latter communication, Tavinor feels he is restoring The Waif’s humanity, when in fact he is affirming his own. His unwillingness to behave like a game component programmed for ludic optimisation allows him to think of himself as a human agent with complex, conflicting motivations that cannot be quantified mathematically and whose submission to the logic of the game is conditional and, therefore, consensual. Bioshock’ s disquisition on the nature of agency climaxes when it is revealed that the player character has been mentally conditioned to follow any verbal order fronted with the deceptively polite trigger phrase “Would you kindly…”. It becomes clear that the only moments in which players were able to disobey Atlas’ commands delivered over the radio were during encounters with the Little Sisters. In this way, the game’s narrative aligns doing the morally ‘right’ thing (i.e., rescuing the Little Sisters) with autonomy, freedom, and independence. The avatar’s mental conditioning prompts reflection on the fact that most interactive media only offer players the clever illusion of agency. If players want to progress through a videogame, they must subject themselves to a form of conditioning in order to understand the game’s controls and execute its commands. However, in electing to save the Little Sisters, players bring their personal moral codes to bear on the game, prioritising the integrity of their values over what is ostensibly valued in a competitive game— attaining mastery and winning. In this way, player agency nuances the hyper-individualism glorified by Rapture’s founders by separating ‘selfdefinition’ from ‘selfishness’. The symbol of the child is essential to establishing this distinction because normative child–adult relationships predicated on care, provision, and intervention are symbolically at odds with the underlying tenets of Randian egoism. Bioshock has three possible endings that depend entirely on whether the player has chosen to save every Little Sister, to save some but not all of the Little Sisters, or to save none of the Little Sisters, suggesting that the decisions regarding the fate of The Waif were, in fact, the only interactions that truly mattered. All three endings are technically ‘win’ states in the sense that the player has overcome the ludic challenges set by the game system. However, two of the three endings show the continuation of Randian ideology, with the player character installed as the new violent, all-powerful dictator. The ending triggered if the player rescues

102

E. REAY

every Little Sister, in contrast, shows the player character living out the rest of his days in peace and obscurity, surrounded by his found-family of Waifs. In this ending, his hand—which the player has come to associate with the murderous genetic mutations that function as the game’s most gory weapons—is shown resting gently on clean, white sheets. The hand is liver-spotted and wizened, and it becomes clear that the player character is on his deathbed. Unlike the numerous deaths he suffered in the watery bowels of Rapture, this time he does not die alone. The hands of many young women—the adult Little Sisters—reach towards the player character and comfort him in his final moments. If one sees the ruthlessly competitive political system of Randian ideology as analogous with the ruthlessly competitive ludic system that structures the game, then ‘beating’ the latter entails overcoming the former. The endings make clear that ethical egoism in this game can only be defeated through the rehabilitation of The Waif, which functions as a symbol for socialist politics that nurture the vulnerable. Bioshock was the series that provoked games critic Clint Hocking to coin the term ‘ludonarrative dissonance’ to describe what he felt was the central failing in these games (2007). Hocking argued that the real choice underlying the encounters with the Little Sisters was not between two political ideologies, nor was it between ‘good’ and ‘evil’: rather it was a choice between competitive play and narrative satisfaction. It is true that Bioshock’s simulation of moral autonomy is perhaps somewhat heavyhanded, but what Bioshock demonstrates by way of the ambivalent figure of The Waif is that players’ sense of their own agency within a gamespace is inextricably linked to their ability to attribute agency to virtual characters. This could be seen as a simplistic parsing of the Zulu philosophical concept of ‘ubuntu’ (an abbreviation of the phrase ‘umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu’) popularised in the West by the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Ubuntu captures the idea that a person is a person through other people: we are human/humane when we acknowledge and experience the humanness/humaneness of others. Treating the Little Sisters as if they were human, humanises the player, whereas treating the Little Sisters as in-game resources positions the player as a mechanical component that perpetuates the running of Rapture’s inhumane systems. That said, unlike the crucial reciprocity at the heart of ubuntu, the humanising process of individuation in Bioshock only happens in one direction: it applies only to the player and not to the Little Sisters, who are largely interchangeable with one another and have no power over their own fates. That is to say,

4

CHILD-KILLERS AND KILLER-CHILDREN

103

the relationship between player and Little Sister is between subject and object, rather than subject and subject. The humanisation of the player character—and, by extension, the player—at the expense of vulnerable, dependent, female children is continued in the Bioshock sequels (Bioshock 2 and Bioshock Infinite), and the instrumentalisation of these NPCs has been critiqued for reducing representations of girls to mere tools for the growth and redemption of the white, male, adult avatar (e.g., Stang, 2017; Voorhees, 2016). Little Nightmares and INSIDE remove the adult avatar as a mediator in the player’s relationship with The Waif, but this does not remove the adult/child dynamics that structure the ascription of agency. However, unlike the examples of The Waif described above, the child-characters in these games are designed to have secret, complex motivations that are hidden from the player. The player’s belated recognition of the avatar’s latent desires, knowledge, and power elicits vertiginous feelings of confusion and betrayal. Players experience a gulf between their ‘well-motivated’ participation (Murray, 1997) and the feedback delivered onscreen, which drastically depletes their sense of agency. In making the signification of ‘the child’ incoherent, these games can be seen to “rail against the child’s overdrawn conceptual function” and to embrace a burgeoning awareness of the impending obsolescence of longstanding modernist understandings of childhood that subjugate the child as ‘innocent’ and ‘naïve’, and which, as justified by this posited emptiness, force her to fit our own visions of social development and futurity. (Balanzategui, 2018, p. 284)

These games sever ‘innocence’ from the ‘emptiness’ of the blank slate, and instead connect ‘emptiness’ with ‘eeriness’. They disrupt representations of linear progress towards a brighter future by having their child-avatars develop in unexpected and unsightly ways. Mistaking the figure of child for a silent cipher causes the player to misread the gameworld, which, in turn, undermines the player’s sense of being a deliberative, autonomous agent.

104

E. REAY

The Waif as an Indecipherable Cipher In Little Nightmares and INSIDE, players take control of two faceless, nameless, voiceless children. They are not just unheimlich, but unhomed—bereft vagrants without belongings or a sense of belonging. The girl in Little Nightmares is referred to as Six in the game’s paratexts, but the unnamed boy in INSIDE remains anonymous. Six’s face is hidden beneath the deep hood of her anorak, and the boy’s face is a blank space—smooth, gleaming, and featureless. Thin legs and tiny bare feet protrude from beneath Six’s yellow raincoat, which is, in itself, an intertextual allusion to other vulnerable, uncanny children across different visual media (for example, Andy Muschietti’s film versions of Stephen King’s It from 2017 to 2019 and Henry Selick’s film adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline from 2009). The boy’s red sweater differentiates him from his chiaroscuro world but seems woefully insufficient for the miserable weather conditions he endures. The children crouch, cower, and flinch when antagonists are nearby, expressing through gestures the urgent need to remain unseen by adults. They are silent except for their soft footsteps and the sound of their breathing. When the children die—which happens often—they occasionally whimper or gasp. Otherwise, they are like the ideal Victorian child: seen and not heard. The worlds that they move through are vast, sinister, and violent. The boy navigates a brutal, clinical, militaristic compound where awful experiments are being conducted on humanoid creatures, and Six ascends from the depths of an enormous ocean liner, working her way up from its mechanical guts to the luxurious suites belonging to disgusting cannibalistic guests. Six and the boy are weak and weaponless—if they are caught by the games’ antagonists, they are immediately killed, and so their silence is key to their survival. However, in the games’ final twists, their silence is revealed to be a site of resistance to the player’s authority, rather than evidence of their submission. Mark Fisher’s close readings of Scarlett Johansson’s unnamed character in Jonathan Glazer’s 2013 film Under the Skin reveals the rhetorical sleight of hand that her silence makes possible. He notes that her character has no interior life—she is only perceived from the outside, and her perfect fulfilment of the role of ‘the beautiful woman’ means she barely needs to verbally communicate with the men that she encounters for them to understand how they are meant to engage with her. She is never required to give more than a minimal

4

CHILD-KILLERS AND KILLER-CHILDREN

105

account of herself because her signifying surface is archetypal and, therefore, seemingly straightforward. Fisher argues that her ‘eeriness’ stems from the fact that she is all surface: beneath the surface is nothing but an incomprehensibly vast absence of personhood. Her eeriness, then, is “fundamentally tied up with questions of agency. What kind of agent is acting here? Is there an agent at all?” (Fisher, p. 11). The children in Little Nightmares and INSIDE function in a similar manner: they are reduced to pure surface. Even Six’s name may be a reference to her age in years, suggesting that her entire identity consists of her status as a child. The children’s silence and their blankness combined with their striking vulnerability make them into easily comprehensible archetypes. Yet, their silence and their blankness also render the nature of their agency unknowable. Harri Kalha writes, “Children (and animals) are an ideally mute object of patronage—like the ventriloquist’s doll” (2011 p. 37). In many ways, a videogame avatar is also akin to a ventriloquist’s doll, and in Little Nightmares and INSIDE, half the horror is the potential aliveness of the dummy, and the other half is pure horror vacui—the fear of an empty space. It is not just the child-protagonists who are mute: the games themselves are wordless and have hushed, minimalist soundscapes. In INSIDE, the soft shuffling of corporate masses, the thin, plaintive whines of industrial factories, and the distant thunder of war machines edge the little boy’s silence, but for the most part an eerie, yawning quiet dominates the playing experience, evoking abandonment, death, sterility, and suppression. Similarly, the quietude in Little Nightmares consists primarily of creaking floorboards and the slap of waves against the hull and is only ruptured during encounters with antagonists, who introduce revolting squelches and moans to the soundscape. Children’s Literature scholar Emma Bosch defines wordless picturebooks as “books that tell a story through a series of illustrations without written text” (2014, p. 72). This definition is succinct, but it excludes certain wordless picturebooks in which non-visual signifiers such as non-verbal sounds, textures, and page turns play a significant role in conveying the story. Nonetheless, this definition provides a starting point for defining wordless videogames. I suggest the following: wordless videogames convey narrative through visual, audible, haptic, and mechanical signifiers without the use of written text or verbal speech, other than in the extradiegetic game menus and title screens. Additionally, wordless

106

E. REAY

videogames do not convey verbal or numerical information via a headsup display.1 INSIDE meets this definition exactly, while Little Nightmares should perhaps be described as nearly wordless because if the player takes too long to discover the range of interactions available, written prompts appear at the bottom of the screen. Since the games are either entirely or nearly wordless, the rhetorical sign of the child bears a significant amount of the weight of communicating the games’ rules and mechanics to the player. That is to say, despite being nameless, faceless, and voiceless, The Waif initially functions as a highly legible sign. Little Nightmares and INSIDE are both stealth games. Tremblay et al. define stealth games as “games that emphasise stealthy movement (avoiding detection by enemies) as a fundamental mechanism” (2014, n.p.). To avoid encounters with computer-controlled antagonists, players are encouraged “to hide, exploiting occlusion or shadow”, to create diversions, and to use “abilities such as invisibility [or] teleportation” (2014, n.p.). The level of challenge may be compounded by features of the game environment such as snow that “may leave visible movement traces” or “metal floors or loose objects [that] may produce noise when walked on”, thereby attracting the attention of antagonists (2014, n.p.). Stealth games, and the survival–horror genre more broadly, typically pit underpowered avatars with limited access to resources and ineffectual weapons against overpowered enemies to elicit a specific playstyle, characterised by physical tension, hyper-vigilance, and strategic thinking. Cody Mejeur notes that the survival horror genre has a “tendency to limit player actions in order to create a sense of fear” (2020, n.p.). Using a child-avatar is an efficient shorthand for expressing the power asymmetry between protagonists and antagonists, and for communicating that the correct way to progress through the game is to traverse environments and complete puzzles without alerting enemies. The children’s vulnerability is produced through a combination of game mechanics, perspective, and visual scale. On a mechanical level, neither Six nor the unnamed boy have any attack or defence abilities, so

1 My definition differs slightly from the definition for ‘wordless narrative game’ offered by Sim and Mitchell (2017), which refers to videogames where the narrative is conveyed without verbal text. I take an even broader view, wherein wordlessness extends beyond the communication of plot and characterisation to include the wordless communication of rules, mechanics, and game state.

4

CHILD-KILLERS AND KILLER-CHILDREN

107

this precludes the possibility of engaging directly with the adult antagonists. Playdead’s striking aesthetic style is best described as macabre minimalism, and this extends to the game controls. INSIDE effectively uses two buttons for the game’s primary functions: interact and jump, where the ‘interact’ button is context-specific and serves the purpose of pushing, pulling, and grabbing. Considering the fact that a standard console controller has over ten buttons, four triggers, two joysticks, and a directional pad, Playdead’s streamlined interactions efficiently express the constraints of childhood. Six’s interactive possibilities are slightly more extensive than the boy’s: she can do all that the boy can, and additionally, she can crouch, throw, and flick a cigarette lighter off and on. However, compared to most console games, both Little Nightmares and INSIDE have restrictive input-controls, which define childhood in terms of a lack of choice and power. Furthermore, the limited range of interactions available to the player in these games is both conveyed and justified through the use of a child-avatar. This establishes a closed loop within which a game produces childhood through its rules, and then communicates its rules to the player through the descriptor of ‘the child’. The child-avatar’s structural vulnerability—the vulnerability that stems from the game’s ludic systems—is thus presented as an innate, essential vulnerability rooted in character design. Anneke Meyer argues that it is difficult to separate children’s innate vulnerability from their structural vulnerability because the former is used to obfuscate the latter. She summarises the causal connection between children’s ‘innate vulnerability’ and children’s ‘structural vulnerability’ as a two-part process: she writes, First, the discourse of innocence constructs the concept of innate vulnerability, which creates a particularly close fit between notions of innocence and vulnerability. Second, the discourse of innocence produces structural vulnerability, yet conceals it through silence. (2007b, p. 102)

Meyer notes a slippage between discourses of ‘vulnerability’ and discourses of ‘innocence’ when discussing children’s position in society, which conflates the need to protect children’s innocence with social practices that perpetuate their vulnerability—Katherine Bond Stockton refers to these practices as social processes designed for carefully “managed delay” (2012, p. 40). In this way, structural vulnerability can actually produce and exacerbate children’s innate vulnerability, firstly because,

108

E. REAY

as Meyer writes, “children are discouraged from being independent and gaining experiences, [so] their judgements of danger and acceptability may be impaired” (2007a, p. 91), and secondly because they are not easily able to defy asymmetric power structures when adults abuse children, since compliance with and obedience to adult rule is seen as a key aspect of adult–child relationships. In short, if children are seen as innately ‘at risk’—and if ‘innocence’ and ‘incompetence’ are used as synonyms— it legitimises a particular form of adult authoritarianism that demands children’s compliance with adult wishes, rules, and practices. When children’s structural vulnerability is conceived in terms of their innate innocence it naturalises their subordination within the family, the school, and other cultural and political institutions. Children’s need for adult protection is augmented by the fact that contemporary AngloAmerican understandings of ‘adult protection’ functionally eliminate children’s bodily autonomy, block their access to knowledge, override their right to privacy, restrict their ability to enter certain spaces and move freely, undermine their credibility, and disrupt their routes to financial independence. What is more, children are not simply seen as needing adult protection, they are seen as deserving of it, and if a child’s innocence is ‘prematurely’ replaced by experience, it is seen as a moral failing of adult society. There is, then, an implicit acknowledgement that continuous adult intervention is necessary to preserve and prolong ‘natural’ childly innocence. Joseph Zornado illuminates the connection between the protection of children and the subordination of children when he writes about parental love and parental control: he comments, “the adult’s love for the child and the adult’s need to exercise control over the child are usually synonymous unconscious impulses” (2006, p. xvii). Childhood Studies scholar Pia Christensen draws similar conclusions from her ethnographic study of childhood illness and injury. She writes: Attending to the surface of the child, that is to the child’s exterior body, forms first a means of expressing love and adoration of the child. Second it serves as a means of formation and social control. However, the surface of the body does not form the target of control in itself. Interventions, restrictions, and modulations directed at the exterior body have a more subtle concern with disciplining the inner body. (2000, p. 48)

4

CHILD-KILLERS AND KILLER-CHILDREN

109

Children are seen as being universally deserving of love—by which I mean ‘the child’ is considered, by default, to be naturally loveable. When control and love are interchangeable modes of behaviour, controlling children through discipline, punishment, and constraint is seen as just as natural, intuitive, and laudable as expressing affection for children. Little Nightmares and INSIDE allow players to define themselves against the abusive, infanticidal adult antagonists in the gameworld by assuming the role of loving, attentive parental protector, only for players to realise that they too are complicit in, and responsible for, the excessive violence suffered by the child-characters. The players are positioned as the child-characters’ keepers, but ultimately controlling, protecting, and loving the child-characters are shown to be incompatible, rather than interchangeable, behaviours. Meyer writes, “innocence and risk are positively correlated so that the more innocent a child is, the more at risk it is” (2007b, p. 48). Little Nightmares and INSIDE reverse engineer this association: by placing the child-avatars in perilous situations, they persuade players of the children’s innocence. In this way, the child-avatar is used to establish a simplistic, binary moral order characterised by power and vulnerability. The more monstrous a child-avatar’s adversaries, the more angelic it appears. The more the child-avatar suffers, the more deserving it is of protection. Meyer explains, “it is the vulnerability and weakness of the child which demand adult protection and construct those who provide this protection—the parents—as good and moral” (2007b, p. 22). The moral dualism, therefore, provides an appealing framework for players to locate themselves within. Players intuit that they are ‘good and moral’ through their alignment with the vulnerable avatar, while simultaneously seeing themselves as powerful in contrast to the avatar’s weakness. The childliness of the protagonists sets up what seems to be a clear divide between good and evil: only truly evil agents would kill a defenceless child, and so players intuitively and unquestioningly take the side of the child. This good child/evil adult opposition is reinforced by the fact that the only helpful or benign NPCs in the games are coded as children. In INSIDE an aquatic, foetal little girl with a cloud of black hair and a trailing metal umbilical cord repeatedly pursues the unnamed boy. At first, every time she catches the boy, she drowns him, making her one of the game’s most frightening enemies; however, the player eventually realises that the girl is trying to perform a procedure on the boy that gives him the ability to breathe underwater, making him comparatively

110

E. REAY

safe when traversing the game’s many underground lakes. In Little Nightmares , Six is handed a loaf of bread by a small boy who is trapped in a cage, temporarily relieving her of her crippling hunger. The game also features tiny gnome-like tomte who initially skitter and hide when Six approaches them, but who become gradually more friendly, warming their small hands by the lanterns that Six lights and even showing her hidden routes she can take through the environment. The ‘child versus adult’ framing strongly inclines the player to identify with the child-protagonist, who is set up as the brave underdog, and against the adult antagonists, who are depicted as cruel tyrants. This moral opposition of adults and children contrasts with Playdead’s previous game, LIMBO (2010), to which INSIDE is a spiritual successor. In LIMBO, players also take on the role of a Waif—another thin, anonymous boy trapped in a barbaric world of flat shadows that is filled with child-corpses hanging from nooses and slumped in cages. The boy is attacked by gangs of children, whose blowguns, spears, and gallows-esque treehouses evoke Golding’s Lord of the Flies. The monochromatic gameworld is juxtaposed with a decidedly grey moral order that sees children as both the victims and perpetrators of violence. However, it is significant that the NPC children mostly flee from the avatar and their violence is predominantly defensive, designed to impede the player’s progress. Players are prevented from rooting feelings of righteousness in their avatar’s childliness and instead are made to feel a sense of guilt-ridden complicity in the violence suffered by the avatar and child NPCs alike. The de-sacralisation of the figure of the child in LIMBO is perhaps felt most strongly during sequences that require players to use children’s corpses as bridges and rafts to cross rivers. The ruthless practicality of using children’s bodies as tools to traverse the gamespace coupled with the fact that the corpses closely resemble the avatar invites players to reflect on the extent to which they are using the avatar’s childly body as a mere tool to traverse the gamespace. The game’s trial-and-death pedagogy means that players’ actions cause the death of the child-avatar as much as they do the deaths of the child antagonists. Far from the results of their participation being ‘clear and well-motivated’, players’ desires to keep the avatar from harm do not map onto the consequences of their in-game actions. LIMBO demonstrates that the figure of the child is a keystone in moral frameworks, and muddying its ideological meaning creates a sense of moral incoherence and troubles the aesthetic pleasure of agency.

4

CHILD-KILLERS AND KILLER-CHILDREN

111

Who Won? The ‘win’ conditions of the core loops in both Little Nightmares and INSIDE stipulate that the player’s role is to protect the child-character from harm, but the so-called ‘trial-and-death’ playstyle necessitated by the games’ wordlessness results in frequent failure. Failure is communicated through short cutscenes showing the children’s deaths, which work to emphasise both the fragility of the children as well as the harsh brutality of the gameworlds. Towards the end of both games, however, strange narrative voltas take place that sever ludic victory from moral triumph. The boy in INSIDE becomes one with a gross but powerful fleshball and the girl in Little Nightmares inherits a terrifying death-glare ability from the final boss, which she uses to kill all the guests aboard the ship. Both children become ludically invulnerable, and their only available response to the players’ commands is to move through the gamespace doling out death and destruction with every button-push. As the child-characters become stronger, the player’s sense of agency becomes weaker, suggesting a redistribution of power is taking place. Equally, as the player becomes less secure in their understanding of the games’ narrative events, the silent children suddenly seem imbued with authoritative knowledge. These unexpected twists imply that the childcharacter’s vulnerability was not an innate or inevitable facet of their childliness; rather, it was the result of the structural interplay between the cruel hostility of the diegetic adult world and the player’s well-intentioned but ultimately deeply harmful attempts to love/protect the child. In other words, the child-characters’ seemingly innate vulnerabilities are revealed to be a direct consequence of structural power distribution between the player, the avatar, and the games’ rules. In many ways, the childcharacters’ final triumph in these games is to not only escape from their diegetic adult-oppressors but also to free themselves from the control of the players, who are abandoned to wonder, “did I win?”. Much of the confusion caused by the endings of the games can be traced back to the ambiguity inherent in the relationship between the player and the child. In the typology proposed by Tosca et al. a distinction is made between ‘player characters’ and ‘avatars’. A player character is a “character controlled by the player (except in cutscenes); we can usually control his actions, but his motivations and his missions are decided by the story,” whereas an avatar is “a non-intrusive representation of ourselves[…] Typically, an avatar has no name and cannot be seen, as

112

E. REAY

the game view is first person, so that the player merges with the character” (2020, p. 212). An avatar is a cipher onto which players can project their own identities, but a player character has a distinct identity that is separate from the player. Players might see themselves as heavily invested in and aligned with player characters, but they nonetheless view these characters as separate agents. Arguably, the children’s blankness, their facelessness, and their silence—their childly incompleteness—make them akin to avatars, as does the wordlessness of the texts and the lack of narrative exposition, which seem to invite players to insert themselves into sizeable interpretive gaps. Haptic and audio cues are used to affirm this apparent closeness between the player and the child-character. The sparse soundscapes, for example, emphasise the sounds of the children’s breathing and their footsteps. In fact, the volume of these sounds is unnaturally loud compared to other environmental noises, which creates a sense of physical proximity to the children’s bodies even when they are depicted at a distance onscreen. There are hardly any extradiegetic sounds in the games, and so the player’s auditory experience exactly matches what the characters hear. In INSIDE, for example, whenever the little boy plunges underwater, the audio becomes muted and distorted, as if the player were hearing the environmental sounds from underwater too. INSIDE’s audio designer, Martin Stig Andersen, recorded the game’s diegetic sounds inside of a human skull salvaged from a genuine skeleton to layer them with soft, resonant, intimate bone vibrations, inflecting the soundscape with the jangle of teeth and the baseline echo of a jawbone (Andersen quoted in Hall, 2016). The effect is a subtle but disorienting sense that the soundscape of INSIDE might actually originate inside the player’s head. In Little Nightmares , one of the only non-diegetic sounds is that of children’s voices softly singing a haunting nursery rhyme, which is heard whenever Six is in the throes of hunger pangs. This unnerving sound could be interpreted as an auditory hallucination, meaning the gameworld is presented to the player through the lens of Six’s troubled mind. Furthermore, when played with a controller, both games make use of the rumble effect—wherein the controller vibrates in response to events represented on-screen—to create an embodied connection between player and child-character. In Little Nightmares , the controller vibrates to the rhythm of an accelerating heartbeat when one of the antagonists approaches the child-character. This instance of haptic feedback is not simply a description of the panic and fear felt by the

4

CHILD-KILLERS AND KILLER-CHILDREN

113

child-character but is a stimulus that induces symmetrical sensations in the player. That is to say, the player experiences feelings of panic and fear first-hand on a somatic level as well as vicariously through empathy, establishing a synchronicity between the player and the child-character. Both Little Nightmares and INSIDE hint at the relational and conditional nature of childhood long before their respective twists are revealed. In INSIDE, an early puzzle requires the boy to suck a few dozen fluffy, cheeping, trusting, yellow chicks into what appears to be a wood-chipper to progress through the game. The willingness of players—and of the impassive avatar—to sacrifice gullible baby animals is an implicit endorsement of the violent, exploitative ‘might-is-right’ power hierarchy that allows adult antagonists to abuse the boy. Similarly, in Little Nightmares , Six shocks players in a cutscene by suddenly gorging herself on a tiny, timid tomte. As with LIMBO, Little Nightmares insinuates that it is a child-eat-child world. Significantly, Six’s proleptic cannibalism happens during a cutscene, meaning that players do not have control over her at this point. The illusion that Six is a cipher primed for player-projection is briefly broken, and she is shown to have a separate—potentially sinister— will of her own. Furthermore, the ‘throw’ mechanic in Little Nightmares introduces the possibility for childly mischief that is deeply appealing to the player but that has ambiguous ethical significance. Six can enact her dissent upon miscellaneous gameworld objects, either by launching them off the edge of the screen or shattering them on hard surfaces. The game endorses this destructive petulance by awarding players with an achievement if they locate and smash to pieces all the porcelain dolls hidden in the game. The faceless statuettes resemble miniature versions of the game’s final boss and are about half the size of Six herself. As with the murder of the tomte, the smashing of the little dolls reminds players that Six is part of a size-based hierarchy in which the big crush the small, meaning that Six’s actions either constitute a subversion of the game’s power structures or a ratification of them. Equally, one could see Six’s destruction of these ornamental toys as a symbol of her desire to destroy childness and a rejection of her own status as child. Six’s enduring, stony silence in these moments of violence could be read as an inscrutable refusal to reduce uncertainty about the ethical value of these actions. That is to say, her silence is a facet of her incoherence. Rather than seeing the child’s blankness as a quality that promotes player identification with an avatar, one could argue that it is a wall that reinforces a sense of separation.

114

E. REAY

Irrespective of their chronological age, players are positioned as adults in relation to the child-avatar in these games because they are tasked with protecting and guiding a vulnerable, dependent figure. Patricia Holland argues that as children “reveal their vulnerability, viewers long to protect them. The boundaries between childhood and adulthood are reinforced as the image gives rise to pleasure emotions of tenderness and compassion, which satisfactorily confirm adult power” (2006, p. 143). This sense of child alterity and adult hegemony is expressed in both games through visual scale. The camera through which players view the gameworlds frequently rolls backwards during location transitions to reveal just how small the child is in relation to its surroundings. The unnamed boy in INSIDE is killed time and time again by the enormous, powerful structures that make up the game’s hazardous environment. He falls from high ledges, is sliced to pieces by giant industrial fans, and drowns trying to cross deep bodies of water. The gameworld in Little Nightmares also seems to be designed in a way that is particularly perilous for small children. The scale is such that the furnishings and infrastructure seem extruded, elongated, and nightmarishly disproportional. Six is closer in size to the rats that roam the lower levels of the ship than she is to any of the adult antagonists. Furthermore, Six is barefoot but encounters hundreds of pairs of shoes during her time on the ship. Drawing on imagery from the Holocaust, the shoes represent genocides that may have taken place aboard the ship; however, it is striking that all the shoes are far too big for Six, who can use them to create distractions and to reach high up switches but certainly cannot use them as footwear. The keen sense that the gameworld is not made for children—that it is, in fact, designed to punish and persecute them for their smallness—reinforces the ‘otherness’ of childhood. The player’s gaze is occasionally uncomfortably aligned with the perspective of these huge, hostile environments, which are filled with enormous, Orwellian eyes. The threat of surveillance looms over both games, and each game contains puzzles in which the child-character must avoid a moving spotlight to stay alive. The player is trained by the game to view spaces and objects in the environment in terms of the amount of cover and protection they afford the child-character. Staying in the shadows and keeping to dark corners becomes associated with safety, inverting the usual connotations of light and dark. However, there are moments in both games in which it is possible for the player to lose sight of the little avatar, prompting urgent efforts on the part of the

4

CHILD-KILLERS AND KILLER-CHILDREN

115

player to locate them again in a way that parallels the vigilant scouring of the antagonists’ surveillance devices. In this way, the games position the players as if they were part of the diegetic world’s child-surveillance apparatus, meaning that the adult supervision of the child-character by the player reflects the adult surveillance of the child-character by the games’ murderous antagonists. This is underscored by the fact that while the child-protagonists are generally seen in profile and have no eyes with which to return the player’s gaze, the wide, staring spotlights of supernatural and robotic surveillance systems in the games are often positioned directly across from the player, allowing for intimate eye-contact between players and the antagonists’ distributed, environmental eyes. The scale of the environmental eyes is closer to the scale of the player, which creates the uncomfortable sensation of looking into a distorted mirror. Furthermore, since all the other forces that monitor the avatar are non-human entities—predominantly robots, machines, and cameras—the player is aligned with entities without agency, cogs in larger systems that are ignorant of, or indifferent to, the evil designs that determine their behaviour.

Stereotyping as Conditioning An inconspicuous Easter Egg hidden at the very beginning of Playdead’s earlier title LIMBO explicitly draws players’ attention to the fact that their behaviours are scripted by the game’s system and learned conventions. As with INSIDE and Little Nightmares , LIMBO is a side-scrolling platform game that limits movement to the X- and Y-axes. This format creates the sense of a relentless lateral push from left to right that is enforced as much by convention and expectations as it is by restrictions built into the game’s environments. As Justyna Janik comments, when, in a two-dimensional platform, we immediately assume that we should move to the right; most likely, we do not even consider the possibility of heading left…The way space is built in [these games] forces the player to move right, forwards: a lone figure standing on the left side of the screen, facing a whole world full of objects to collect, platforms to jump, puzzles to solve and opponents to defeat, all lined up to the right. (2020, n.p.)

116

E. REAY

At the very beginning of LIMBO, however, it is possible for players to move a few paces to the left. If they do so, the screen scrolls with them and they discover a small, enclosed space containing a glowing ball. As a playful object, the ball functions as a reminder that play is aligned with subversion rather than obedience. The player’s spatial disobedience is rewarded with a ‘Wrong Way’ achievement. However, rather than affirming the player’s sense of agency, this small moment is presented as exceptional, implying that for most of the game, the player will be required to submit to its system. Themes of conformity and control extend from LIMBO to INSIDE. LIMBO features a glowing, parasitic worm that drops from above at various points in the game and latches onto the avatar’s head. Much like a cordyceps fungus that impels insects to behave in unnatural ways to ensure the spread of its spores, this worm forces the avatar to walk slowly but inexorably either to the left or the right—and often to its death. It is only possible for the player to change the avatar’s direction by guiding it into a patch of sunlight. This element adds a level of challenge to the game’s puzzles, but it also draws attention to the ways in which the platform itself choreographs players to move in a certain direction. In this way, the player is positioned both as a parasite controlling the avatar and as a host controlled by the game-system-as-parasite. In INSIDE, an unnamed corporate superstructure has harnessed the power of this glowing parasite to create a headset that can control small groups of lobotomised humans, who slump, lumber, bob, and jerk like poorly operated puppets or janky avatars. At certain points in the game, the player must attach a headset to the boy to recruit mobs of barely living bodies to assist him in overcoming environmental obstacles. During these moments, players participate in the abhorrent systems of abusive control devised by the game’s antagonists and are reminded that their relationship to the boy is also one of total control and involuntary obedience. The game draws explicit attention to the parallel between the player’s ability to control the boy and the boy’s ability to control these violated humanoids in a ludic challenge that requires the boy to pretend to be one of them as they trundle along a production line in the factory that creates them. The player must move the boy in synchrony with the homogenous parade of drones, pre-empting and then mimicking the gestures they perform. A wrong move or a miss-timed step is read as a hint of individuation from the masses and results in the boy being skewered to death by a quality-control robot that is overseeing the production line. As players

4

CHILD-KILLERS AND KILLER-CHILDREN

117

carefully enact obedience, they become aware of both their and the boy’s differences from the unthinking drones, but also that this difference is irrelevant when a punitive structure demands their conformity or their death. The full extent to which players are implicated in a dystopian network of adult power is not realised in either of these games until their conclusions. Having overcome countless lethal obstacles, the unnamed boy in INSIDE arrives in the central atrium of a scientific facility. Here he finds a horrific experiment: a huge, gelatinous lump of human flesh and fats and skins and limbs floating in an aquatic chamber. In attempting to free the blob from its restraints, the boy is absorbed by the blob. The player subsequently uses the impervious heft of the blob to go on a wild, destructive, murderous rampage through the laboratory. The blob can body-slam the laboratory’s director, pushing him through a glass window and crushing him to death in one fluent movement—a surprisingly easy manifestation of the traditional ‘boss battle’. The blood-soiled blob then breaks out of the building, tumbles down a mountainside, and rolls along the coast, coming to rest in a golden pool of sunlight by the edge of a grey ocean. Here it takes a few deep, collective breaths, and the soundscape is simply the rush of wind through meadow grass. With the same quiet reticence that characterises the rest of the game, the camera retreats, the credits roll without fanfare, and the game ends. Players are left baffled. Under a walkthrough (GenericGaming, 2016) of the game’s conclusion, NerdyWatcher comments what kind of ending was that??? Did that thing die? What happened to that boy? What were those people doing? What was there (sic) goal? Was there symbolism in that ending? I HAVE SO MANY QUESSTTIIOONNNSSS!!! (sic).

Becoming one with a heaving huddle of connected human bodies is not the victory or the happy ending players envisaged for this little boy, who, after all, was supposed to represent a brighter future that would outlive this dystopian scenario. Players wonder if they have made a terrible mistake and directed the boy to his doom—to a very messy, sticky end. Discussions in online fora ponder whether players were tricked into doing the blob’s bidding all along, inadvertently betraying the boy by using him as a tool to orchestrate the blob’s liberation. It is not wholly clear whether the blob is actually liberated anyway, or whether it has died from injuries

118

E. REAY

sustained falling down the mountainside, or whether death is itself a kind of liberation. If players are familiar with LIMBO, they might link the weak rays of light that pierce the gloam in this concluding scene to the shafts of sunshine that disrupted the worm-like parasite’s ability to control its hosts. The fact that the game ends and control is removed from the player exactly when the blob reaches the light suggests that the thwarted parasite may have been the player all along. In any case, players are left unsure whether they have been the boy’s protector or his persecutor, and this ambiguity is the game’s final puzzle. Questions of whether the child-avatar consented to the player’s intervention suddenly arise, making the boy’s persistent silence newly conspicuous—it becomes present in the same way that a missing jigsaw piece gains shape once the surrounding tiles have been correctly placed. If the little boy is an instrument deliberately selected and exploited by the blob to engineer its escape, then the player is the object upon which this instrument was used. The player was the nail, the boy was the hammer, and the blob was the carpenter. Equally, if the boy is not a naïve victim of the blob, but a knowing participant in its escape plan, then his silence is a symptom of his purposeful deception of the player, whom he betrays by withholding a definitive ‘win’ condition at the end of the game. At the end of Little Nightmares , Six makes it past a throng of obscene child-eating guests to confront a beautiful but menacing masked Geisha who is the proprietor of the ship. This terrifying mother figure softly hums funereal lullabies and has a Medusa-like glare that instantly turns Six to ash. She can only be defeated if Six uses the last remaining mirror in the Geisha’s quarters that is not smashed to pieces to reflect the woman’s deadly stare back at her. In weaponising a mirror, Six draws attention to the child’s role as a foil. Six’s dependence and vulnerability is what makes the orbital adults—including the player—powerful. The meaning of the returning gaze of the game’s Orwellian environmental eyes is made more explicit in Six’s wielding of a mirror. In demanding that the Geisha ‘sees herself’ in the child, Six defies the alterity of childhood. This prompts a power shift that allows her to usurp the Geisha’s magical abilities. The elegant antagonist collapses, her long, dark hair falling over her face. She tries to raise herself to a seated position but her arms tremble and give way. Six approaches her and, without warning, proceeds to eat the woman’s face. This ritualistic murder transfers the Geisha’s fatal glare to

4

CHILD-KILLERS AND KILLER-CHILDREN

119

Six, who then walks calmly and slowly through the ship’s galley, effortlessly killing every last guest. They die in grotesque ways—their bones cracking, their eyes popping, and their necks twisting. Six is no longer constrained by the X and Y-axis of the platform game format, but rather she walks confidently away from the player along the Z-axis, as if she were a bride walking ceremonially down the aisle. Finally, she walks so far from the player, that she disappears from view, evading the player’s intrusive surveillance of her entirely. The player remains trapped on the ship, while Six escapes alone. When the credits roll, the player sees Six standing on a far-off island, surrounded by the sea. She is positioned beneath a stone carving of what appears to be another of the game’s environmental eyes. However, now that Six is turned towards the player, it becomes clear that the lids of the eye-symbol are in fact Six’s yellow hood and its pupil is Six’s round face. This ending could be read as a bleak take on Clementine Beauvais’ conception of the “mighty child” (2015, p. 3) who resides out of reach, in a tomorrow that the adult cannot access. Equally, one could infer that Six was actually part of the game’s Jungian phantasmagoria alongside the rest of the ship’s inhabitants: perhaps she represents the inner child, buried deep within an enigmatic realm of the adult unconscious. In the end, Six proves to be the most vicious of the shadow-creatures clamouring to be integrated into the psyche. What the endings of these two games have in common is the sudden empowerment of the child-character. Rather than this new-found power transforming the child into a vanquishing hero who re-establishes moral order, it makes the child an ambivalent force. In fact, the children’s invulnerability makes them seem almost monstrous. The children destroy the oppressive systems and structures that enforced their status as ‘children’, but this brings about their unchilding. In her analysis of waif-like children in film, Jessica Balanzategui notes, The horrors of these child characters are not associated with a shallow interplay of evil and innocence, but with the complex and impalpable ways in which they seem at once familiar and alien, vulnerable and threatening, innocent and dangerously indecipherable. (2018, p. 12)

It is the uneasy vacillation between closeness to the child and distance from the child that is the source of horror. The victory condition for the child-characters in these games entails the retreat of the child from the player and the relinquishment of the player’s power over the child. This

120

E. REAY

gesture is, somehow, mutual, as the ideological power that the child held over the player—the rhetorical demand ‘the child’ made of the player for care and protection—also abates. At the close of both games, the player stops controlling the child and the child becomes unlovable, and it is left ambiguous which of these events is the cause and which is a symptom. In trying to understand and assign value to these endings, players are forced to reconsider all of the assumptions they made about ‘the child’ as a conventional, coherent sign. The Waif is not a beacon of hope, nor an invitation for emotional connection. It is not a certificate of moral virtue, nor is it a sanctum of purity to be guarded. It is not a blank slate onto which meaning can be protected: it is simply a black hole that swallows meaning, leaving a void. Both Little Nightmares and INSIDE are self-conscious critiques of agency and conformity that exploit the interactive affordances of videogames to encourage players to question their ready compliance with cruel rules. That ‘harming’ these Waifs is presented as a necessary part of ‘helping’ them progress through the game makes explicit the entanglement of love and control that marks intergenerational relationships. These games manifest Yi-Fu Tuan’s observation that “affection is not the opposite of dominance; rather it is dominance’s anodyne—it is dominance with a human face” (1984, p. 1). Furthermore, the brutal disciplinary feedback loops in both games illuminate the torturous punishment inflicted on those who cannot conform to the strictures of maturity. Finally, both games challenge the ideology of developmentalism. If adulthood is the prize for compliance with systems of hegemonic power, then the denial of decisive win conditions in these games is a denial of developmentalist logic. Adulthood promises stability, recognition, and closure, but when the boy becomes a blob and the girl becomes a gorgon, adulthood is revealed to be a perpetually receding horizon—an unattainable, unreliable, and elusive mirage.

References Balanzategui, J. (2018). The uncanny child in transnational cinema: Ghosts of futurity at the turn of the twenty-first century. Amsterdam University Press. Beauvais, C. (2015). Mighty Child: Time and power in children’s literature. (Children’s literature, culture, and cognition). John Benjamins Publishing Company. Bend Studios. (2019). Days Gone. Sony Interactive Entertainment.

4

CHILD-KILLERS AND KILLER-CHILDREN

121

Bond Stockton, K. (2012). The queer child, or growing sideways in the twentieth century. Duke University Press. Bosch, E. (2014). Texts and peritexts in wordless and almost wordless picturebooks. In Picturebooks: Representation and narration (Children’s literature and culture, B. Kümmerling-Meibauer Ed.). Taylor and Francis. Christensen, P. (2000). Childhood and the cultural constitution of vulnerable bodies’ in the body. In A. Prout (Ed.), Childhood and society. Macmillan Press. Fisher, M. (2016). The weird and the eerie. Repeater. GenericGaming. (2016). Inside—Ending / No Commentary. YouTube. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3M7QTHV9Pw Hall, C. (2016, October 6). Inside soundtrack came from within an actual human skull. Polygon. https://www.polygon.com/2016/10/6/13190524/ inside-soundtrack-human-skull Henthorn, J. (2018). Bioshock’s little sisters and a legacy of posthuman agency. In F. Parker & J. Aldred, (Eds.), Beyond the sea: Navigating bioshock. McGillQueen’s University Press. Hocking, C. (2007, October 7). Ludonarrative dissonance in bioshock. https:// clicknothing.typepad.com/click_nothing/2007/10/ludonarrative-d.html Holland, P. (2006). Picturing childhood: The myth of the child in popular imagery. I.B. Tauris. Janik, J. (2020). Negotiating textures of digital play: Gameplay and the production of space. Game Studies, 20, 4. Kalha, H. (2011). What the hell is the figure of the child? Figuring out figurality in, around, and beyond Lee Edelman. Lambda Nordica, 16(2–3), 17–48. Lury, K. (2010). The child in film: Tears, fears, and fairy tales. I.B. Tauris. Mejeur, C. J. (2020). Playing with playthroughs: Distance visualization and narrative form in video games. Digital Humanities Quarterly, 14. Meyer, A. (2007a). The child at risk: Paedophiles, media responses, and public opinion. Manchester University Press. Meyer, A. (2007b). The moral rhetoric of childhood. Childhood, 14, 85–104. Murray, J. (1997). Hamlet on the holodeck: The future of narrative in cyberspace. Free Press. Playdead. (2010). LIMBO, Playdead. Playdead. (2016). INSIDE, Playdead. Renner, K. (2013). The ‘evil child’ in literature, film, and popular culture. Routledge. Sim, Y. T., Mitchell, A. (2017). Wordless Games: Gameplay as Narrative Technique. In N. Nunes, I. Oakley, & V. Nisi (Eds.), Interactive Storytelling. ICIDS 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 10690. Stang, S. (2017). Big daddies and broken men: Father-daughter relationships in video games. Loading…, 10(16), CGSA Double Issue.

122

E. REAY

Švelch, J. (2020). Should the monster play fair?: Reception of the artificial intelligence in alien isolation. Game Studies, 20, 2. Tarsier Studios. (2017). Little nightmares, Tarsier studios. Tavinor, G. (2009). The art of videogames. Wiley-Blackwell. Tosca, S., Heide Smith, J., & Egenfeldt-Nielsen, S. (2020). Understanding video games: The essential introduction (4th ed.). Routledge. Tremblay, J., Torres, P. A., & Verbrugge, C. (2014). Measuring risk in stealth games. Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games 2014. http://www.fdg2014.org/papers/fdg2014_paper_33. pdf Tuan, Y. (1984). Dominance and affection: The making of pets. Yale University Press. Voorhees, G. (2016). Daddy issues: Constructions of fatherhood in the last of Us and BioShock infinite. Ada, 9. Zornado, J. (2006). Inventing the child: Culture, ideology, and the story of childhood (Children’s literature and culture, Vol. 17). Routledge.

CHAPTER 5

Child Heroes

Röki, Polygon Treehouse

The final puzzle requires Pappa and Tove to bypass a frozen drawbridge. It’s a poetic description of intergenerational reconciliation, and by this point the solution is intuitive. I switch to little Tove and put her inside the rusted gibbet cage, and then switch back to Pappa, whose strength I use to winch his daughter up to Rörka’s tower. Doing so triggers Pappa’s dialogue and this time he directly addresses Tove, despite her being in a parallel dimension and therefore invisible to him. He confesses, “I’ve been so lost since your mother passed. You and I found each other again here, of all places.” So much of this game has been spent searching for lost items, hidden locations, and suppressed answers, with the metaphor of rediscovery and connection underscored by the click-and-combine mechanics. Pappa laments that Tove will have to proceed on her own once more but resigns himself to this inevitability: “Come back to Pappa Bear, my little, amazing, mighty Tove. I don’t want to miss another moment of seeing who you’ll become.” For the umpteenth

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 E. Reay, The Child in Videogames, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42371-0_5

123

124

E. REAY

time, Tove is proclaimed ‘mighty’: her power is predicated on her potential—what she ‘might’ do, and who she ‘might’ become. The irony is not lost on me that it has taken Tove becoming invisible to Pappa for him to finally ‘see’ her—to acknowledge her and recognise her. I’m pressing ENTER to scroll through the dialogue, but the game is also pressing my buttons: Dad-Daughter narratives with themes of abandonment get me every time. I’m misty-eyed and sniffing. Tove responds to her father’s speech with, “I love you too, Pappa.” The characters aren’t meant to be able to hear each other—if they could then my role as their go-between would be less significant—but in this instance it seems as though Pappa’s honesty has overcome their impaired communication. I feel proud of their synchrony and their mutual trust—and then it hits me. I’m the dead mother. Again. I probably should’ve picked up on it earlier when Pappa mistook Tove’s invisible presence for his wife’s ghost. I sigh. I appreciate that the dead mother has a long literary history— especially in children’s texts—but this must be the fourth videogame I’ve played this year where I’ve been ghost-mummed. By which I mean that partway through the playing experience, I’ve been whacked in the face with the realisation that the subject position available to me as an ‘emotionally-invested, disembodied, spectral guardian’ is Deceased Mama. I wonder whether it is really necessary to create a lacuna of care on screen by killing off the symbolic figure of maternal nurture in order to make space for the player. Or maybe it’s to make space for other kinds of care?

In this chapter, I turn to The Mighty Child archetype to examine how heroism changes when the player character is a kid. When I was building my typology, I initially called this category ‘The Heroic Child’ in reference to the brave deeds of derring-do performed by many childavatars. However, as I started to itemise this trope’s formal features and map connections between their associated mechanics, I realised there was, in fact, something fundamentally unheroic about these children. They

5

CHILD HEROES

125

were weak, cautious, and, most significantly, there were dependent. They couldn’t act like heroes on their own: at a minimum, they had to be part of a dynamic dyad. In light of this, I changed the name of the archetype from ‘The Heroic Child’ to ‘The Mighty Child’ as a nod towards a concept theorised by Children’s Literature scholar Clementine Beauvais. Beauvais questions the positions taken by Jaqueline Rose, Perry Nodelman, Maria Nikolajeva, and others, who see the child-reader as disempowered, circumscribed, and ‘colonised’ by adult authorship. Beauvais argues that the implied child-reader has a time-based power: its power rests in its potential, and it is tied to the unpredictability inherent in the child’s indeterminacy. I liked the idea that child-heroism could be an emergent condition rather than an essential quality—it was not a given, but rather it was something that ‘might’ occur under certain circumstances. This latent potential could be activated when a network was formed that held the child in heroic relation to other agents. Furthermore, ‘might’ is probabilistic and equivocal. It doesn’t guarantee the re-establishment of the status quo. If anything, it is wholly speculative, elusive, and unreliable. Finally, I was drawn to the homophonic connection between ‘might’ and ‘mite’, a word meaning a small child or animal that is often regarded as an object of sympathy. I want to document what happens when the indispensability of the ‘mite’ for demarcating traditional heroic identities is properly acknowledged. As such, this chapter focuses specifically on how The Mighty Child trope challenges the “common-sense assumption that dependent and vulnerable subjects are inherently less valuable” (Duane, 2010, p. 7). Chris Jenks has argued that “childhood might be instructively theorised in terms of dependency” (2005, p. 38). Since children need their adult companions to provide physical and emotional care, the adult–child relationship is characterised by provision, protection, and instruction that is, in some sense, expressive of altruism. As Jenks puts it, this form of carerchild relationship expresses “a dimension of sociality that is at odds with the dominant image of self and success within modernity, namely the ascendance of egoism” (2005, p. 38). In coding my dataset, it became clear that games featuring child heroes seem to resist ‘the ascendance of egoism’ through a mechanical emphasis on dependence and cooperation. Games with Mighty Child avatars encouraged a divided and deterritorialised sense of ego by having players split their agency between two or more characters. In The Gardens Between (2019), for example, players simultaneously control two young best friends as they reflect on

126

E. REAY

their shared memories of playing together in the gardens between their homes. Each child has a unique skill that must be used in combination with the other character’s ability to solve environmental puzzles as the player tracks backwards and forwards in time. As a result, the player does not strongly identify with either character, but instead occupies the subject position of Memory itself as it is shared, negotiated, and cherished by the two children. In Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna) (2014), players can either switch between the child hero, Nuna, and her arctic fox to make use of their distinct skill sets, or they can invite another player to take on the role of one of the protagonists. Similarly, in The Child of Light (2014), players can either play as both the child hero, Aurora, and her blue-wisp guide, or they can enlist another player to join the game. In A Plague Tale: Innocence (2019) and Life is Strange 2 (2018), the child heroes must protect their younger brothers as they traverse hostile gameworlds. Although players primarily control just one child-avatar, they can invoke their younger siblings’ special abilities at various points during the game. For example, if Shaun, the player character in Life is Strange 2, needs to carry a heavy object, the player can ask Shaun’s younger brother, Daniel, to use his telekinesis skill to make the task easier. Likewise, in A Plague Tale: Innocence, the child hero, Amicia, can direct her younger brother to use his power to command hordes of flesh-eating rats to ensure both of their survival. In The Last Guardian (2016), the child hero forms a close bond with an enormous, eagle-jackal hybrid creature. The young boy must collaborate with this huge animal, without whom he would be unable to fight enemies or traverse the mysterious, haunted ruins that constitute the game’s environments. The animal, whose name is Trico, has the intelligence and mannerisms of a stray dog and so cannot be commanded—rather, it must be coaxed and cajoled into cooperating with the child hero. Players not only have to find solutions to environmental puzzles, but also must learn how to communicate effectively with Trico to enact these solutions. Finally, in Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons (2014), the player interacts via two child heroes simultaneously. The player’s left hand, via the left stick and left trigger, engages the character of Big Brother, while the player’s right hand, via the right stick and right trigger, engages the character of Little Brother. To progress through the game the young boys must work collaboratively, enlisting Big Brother’s strength and Little Brother’s slightness to overcome obstacles and solve puzzles. A mistake with one hand thwarts the efforts of the other, but skilful co-ordination has

5

CHILD HEROES

127

the brothers protecting, rescuing, and enabling one another. In this way, difference is presented as a strategic strength, and cooperation is figured as a talent to be developed and mastered. The two-handed gestural controls of Brothers use both synchronicity and variance to layer moments of gameplay with complex meaning. As metonyms for the two brothers, players’ hands convey kinship, a unified will, and similitude, while the parallel gestures players perform express a sense of instinctive trust and mutual dependency. However, manipulating two avatars at once is not an easy task: an individual’s hands naturally want to synchronise, but the game requires that they operate independently. This results in moments of frustration—the kind of frustration a young boy may feel at being told he has to ‘stick close to Big Brother’ or that he must ‘let Little Brother tag along’. It would certainly be easier to explore some of the locations using just one avatar, and, on occasion, having to split one’s focus between two avatars evokes a combination of anxiety and resentment that a boy may feel when having constantly to keep tabs on his brother. In short, the gestural challenge of manipulating both siblings captures something of fraternal bonds: fundamental and measureless devotion combined with short-lived annoyance and exasperation. What is more, as the game progresses, players become more adept at managing both avatars, which creates a sense that the bond between the brothers is growing in depth and strength as they adventure together. ‘Squabbles’ become less frequent, and the boys seem intuitively to lean on each other as they face an increasingly hostile world. Unlike the very zoomed-out perspective available to players in ‘god games’, the subject position available to players in games with Mighty Children invites them to split their attention and their sense of identification between multiple characters simultaneously, such that their actions become an expression of attachment and interdependence. Players occupy the role of a unifying presence—a community spirit—that is invisible in the gameworld but that is powerfully felt by characters and that shapes the outcomes of scenarios. That is to say, rather than experiencing the world from the perspective of an exceptional individual whose heroism is an innate, essential quality, players experience ‘being a hero’ as a relational force that exists between agents and is a product of these agents’ need for one another.

128

E. REAY

An Unheroic Medium? Critics and designers alike have suggested that there is an obvious compatibility between the narrative structure known as ‘The Hero’s Journey’ and the affordances of videogames: interactivity affords the exertion of power, rule-based systems produce formulaic plots, and ludic challenges entail conflict, gradual mastery, definitive triumph, and rewards (e.g., Braithwaite & Schreiber, 2009; Burn & Schott, 2004; Lebowitz & Klug, 2011; Schell, 2020; Skolnick, 2014). I’d like to question this apparent affinity by examining The Mighty Children in two games from my dataset that engage with traditional conceptions of the hero’s quest, namely Röki (Polygon Treehouse, 2020) and Knights and Bikes (Foam Sword Games, 2019). In both games, the child heroes lack the strength, stamina, influence, and independence of conventional adult heroes, and so must develop new approaches to dragon-slaying and maiden-rescuing. In Röki, the child hero, Tove, solves paratactic puzzles through connectionmaking, lateral thinking, and perspective-taking, using her vulnerability to charm and disarm potential antagonists and her childly inconspicuousness to pass through portals unhindered. In Knights and Bikes , a pair of child heroes, Demelza and Nessa, traverse the gamespace together, moving nimbly between myth and reality as their games of Let’s Pretend meld with an ancient legend. The child heroes in both games strive towards interdependence rather than independence, and in doing so, they draw attention to the ensemble, choral properties of multimodal media and the dialogic, reciprocal nature of interactive texts. These games testify to the capacity of videogames to model intersubjectivity, shared responsibility, compromise, and collective intelligence. Furthermore, by enshrining dependence, interpersonal attentiveness, and sensitivity in their formal properties, these games demonstrate that there is, perhaps, something fundamentally unheroic about videogame affordances. In 2020, Hannah Nicklin, the CEO of game design studio Die Gute Fabrik, gave a talk at the annual Game Developers Conference (GDC) entitled Kill the Hero, Save the World. She explained the two-fold meaning of this provocative imperative: I think that killing our heroes might produce better narrative worlds in games...but I also think there is something fairly politically urgent about destroying the narrative of heroic exceptionalism. (2020, n.p.)

5

CHILD HEROES

129

Nicklin goes on to argue that hero stories do not make good use of videogame narrative affordances. Although this stance is endorsed by many indie game makers and narrative designers, it runs counter to prevailing critical discourse, which holds that “because so many videogames revolve around a theme of heroism, it is only logical that the hero’s journey is a relevant structure for a powerful video game story” (Schell, 2020, p. 332). In the early days of game scholarship, Marie Laure-Ryan claimed that gamers would always choose to play as a “dragon-slaying hero” (2001, n.p.) over playing as a complex, fallible, ensemble character with a rich inner life. Two decades later— despite significant changes in terms of medium affordances and player expectations—many scholars still claim that the expressive resources of videogames are particularly suited to rendering what Walter Ong terms ‘heavy heroes’ (2002). Andrew Burn, for example, insists that “games are good at formulaic narratives” (2017, p. 5) and that they “thrive on archaic forms of…character, combat, quest, and mission” (p. 3). This perspective is also common within game design primers, many of which rely on Joseph Campbell’s iteration of The Hero’s Journey as the default blueprint for teaching narrative structure, using the oft-cited summary, a hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man (Campbell, 1949/2004, p. 28).

As Stephanie Jennings summarises, The Hero’s Journey “has become absolutely fundamental to the training that aspiring game designers receive”, noting its centrality “within the curricula of degree-granting institutions, sown across syllabi and supporting textbooks” (2022, p. 2). This creates something of a chicken-and-egg scenario, wherein game design primers perpetuate the relevance of The Hero’s Journey to interactive narrative design by emphasising its relevance to game designers entering the industry. Furthermore, some primers, such as those authored by Schell (2020) and Skolnick (2014), convey Campbell’s concept of the monomyth to their readers via the work of Christopher Vogler—a Hollywood screenwriter and producer who reimagined the hero’s journey as ‘The Writer’s Journey’ (1998). Novice game designers are introduced to The Hero’s

130

E. REAY

Journey, then, by way of cinema—specifically via the Hollywood blockbuster. A two-hour film can track the development of a single psyche as it responds to connected events, exploiting carefully directed camera movements and evocative staging to manage the viewer’s proximity to the protagonist’s perspective, and cutting between points in time to control the pacing of the plot. A forty-five-hour video game, however, with a free rotating camera, and a narrative pace that is set by the player’s proficiency or preference clearly working with a very different set of expressive devices. As Paul Martin notes in his analysis of The Elder Scrolls, the problem with using The Hero’s Journey as a narrative framework in videogames is not so much its “clichéd nature” but rather “its fitful execution” (2011, n.p.). Instead of delivering a unified, linear narrative arc, games that apply the logic of the hero’s journey often end up jerking players between weakly connected plot points in a way that is “jarring and not at all dramatically convincing” (Martin, 2011, n.p.). As players make unsuccessful attempts to master ludic challenges, game protagonists are shown suffering humiliating defeats—which are rather unbecoming of a hero— and yet there is no real jeopardy for the hero on a narrative level, since players of most contemporary, mainstream games expect to be able to respawn indefinitely and attempt the challenge again. Martin argues that it is the game’s landscape, and not the hero character, that provides the most sustained draw for players: “unlike the hero, whose face we rarely see, the landscape demands our attention throughout the game. We get to know it intimately whether we stick to the quest, pursue the side quests or wander aimlessly about” (2011, n.p.). In film, the gravitational pull of the hero can hold all other story elements in its orbit, but in videogames an expansive virtual world, a surfeit of hours, and a wayward player can easily relegate The Hero’s Journey to being just one of many potential desire paths through the playspace. In short, the capaciousness of videogames resists narrative trammelling and works against directorial efforts to railroad the player along a predetermined route, transfixed by the impressive actions of a heroic individual.

The Spaces Between Oppositions One explanation for why commentators continue to argue for the compatibility of videogame affordances and archetypal hero stories is that they consider videogames to be a binary medium: a button is pressed

5

CHILD HEROES

131

or not pressed, a solution is correct or incorrect, players can succeed or fail, antagonists can kill players or be killed by players, in-game objects are helpful or harmful, and so on. The traditional Western hero story is similarly predicated on an “underlying structure of binary opposition that privileges mind over body, male over female, linearity over cyclicality, and individuality over relationships” (Phillips, 2017, p. 2). Margery Hourihan (1997) posits that typical hero stories are fundamentally binary because they narrativise the following sets of opposing pairs: Reason–Emotion Mind (soul)–Body Civilisation–Wilderness Reason–Nature Order–Chaos Male–Female Master–Slave Human–Non-human White–Non-white She argues that the meaning of hero stories depends upon these related pairs of signifiers which express the dualistic structure inherent in Western thought: “a pattern of values which naturalizes the dominance of the European patriarchal elite and the sub-ordination of other cultural groups, other social classes, women and nature” (p. 16). Although the depiction of these dualisms has evolved over time—with the hero and his opponents adapting to fit the changing conceptual and political environment—contemporary hero stories continue to urge the ‘natural’ superiority of the Western patriarchy and to glorify a culture of violent domination that inevitably leads to the “assimilation of all planetary life to the needs of the masters’ by way of the global Rational Economy” (p. 21). Hourihan concludes: In this ultimate scenario all the remaining space on earth is gradually appropriated to the needs of the economy according to the dictates of Platonic and Cartesian ‘reason’ which sees nature as the inferior opposite of civilisation, a resource to be exploited. Resources are increasingly withdrawn from those who refuse to be incorporated into the Rational Economy. Thus biodiversity dwindles and indigenous cultures are destroyed. Within the dominant culture space for love, friendship,

132

E. REAY

contemplation, art, the development of psychic wholeness, is sacrificed to the demands of economic rationalism. Those who cannot conform to the demands of economic rationalism – the poor, the disabled, and the old – are increasingly marginalized, and women, the irreducibly ‘other’, are either suborned or alienated. The final result, the last triumph of the hero, can only be the collapse of the culture of mastery, since nature is not an endlessly exploitable resource. (p. 203)

This apocalyptic vision suggests that the world is desperately in need of a different kind of hero story—one that subverts and dismantles conventional dualisms. This alternative hero story must retain the action, excitement, and sense of satisfaction associated with popular formulations, while discouraging the quest for domination and the use of violence to achieve it. Instead of glorifying the hero’s physical courage and his predestined path that sets him apart from the rest of society, the new hero story should dignify the process of peaceful compromise and braid the hero’s path with the paths of others. Röki and Knights and Bikes meet the criteria for an alternative hero story. Röki entwines an emotionally rich narrative about familial devotion, grief, and abandonment with Scandinavian folklore, filling the gamespace with stories of the Jötnar, the Fossegrim, the tortured Nøkken, the carnivorous Jólakötturinn, peaceful trolls overgrown with moss, buzzing älva hiding in their toadstool houses, and tiny tomten awaiting their bowls of porridge. These dreamlike myths are used to explore themes of motherhood, sibling loyalty, and community interdependence and exist in a palimpsestuous relation to the hero’s experiences as a daughter, a sister, and a child. The game posits that monstrous individuals—such as Röki and his bitter Raven-Mother Rörka—are the product of social exclusion, and so the route to a happy ending necessitates the dismantling of us/ them, human/monster, ally/enemy dichotomies. Punitive concepts of blame are replaced with ideas of shared responsibility, and the game is anti-assimilationist in that it does not require the ‘unmonstering’ of Röki (or the fearsome Yule Cat, or the Trolls, or the Fossegrimm) for his reintegration into the community. Ultimately, it is the child hero’s capacity for relatedness—expressed through layered metaphors of familial ties— that facilitates her success. Tove does not defeat others in conflict; rather, she mediates conflict and finds commonalities. Her superpowers are her openness and her generosity, which allow her to forge connections with even the forest’s most formidable inhabitants.

5

CHILD HEROES

133

Set in a dilapidated caravan park on the fictional, rural island of Penfurzy, Knights and Bikes puns on Arthurian tropes to tell the tale of two young girls—Demelza and Nessa—on a quest to discover the legendary treasure that will save Demelza’s family from eviction by a predatory landlord. Against a backdrop of economic downturn and financial insecurity in 1980s Britain, this game raises questions about conquest, ownership, and belonging, with the cursed treasure functioning as a metonym for the predicament faced by those who cannot ‘conform to the demands of economic rationalism’. The characterisation of the child heroes in Knights and Bikes explicitly challenges gender, class, and racial hierarchies, but the game also undermines traditional heroic dualisms by implicitly valuing chaos over control, wilderness over civilisation, and belonging over ownership. The game goes beyond the palimpsestuous resonance of Röki, granting Nessa and Demelza licence to graffiti and vandalise their island’s heroic origin story of crusading knights. They overwrite the original myth through the flippant insertion of its assorted parts into their games of make-believe, which are represented visually as childlike sketches rendered in crayons, chalks, and felt tips that overlay the backdrop of Penfurzy. With a mischievous irreverence, the game demonstrates that although videogames may have inherited their storytelling schema from older media, they need not replicate the individualism nor the dualistic thinking that characterises traditional hero stories. Both Röki and Knights and Bikes suggest that videogame affordances may be uniquely suited to “speaking from the spaces between oppositions” (Phillips, 2017, p. 75). Videogames communicate via a synergistic, simultaneous network of verbal, visual, audio, haptic, and ludic signs, which interweave semiotic strands to shape a multisensory aesthetic experience. Brendan Keogh uses Brian Sudnow’s description of videogames as “instantaneously punctuated picture music. Supercerebral crystal clear Silicon Valley eye jazz” to argue for the entangled, synesthetic quality of videogames. Keogh goes on to note the “fundamental irreducibility of how videogames are sensorially perceived” (Keogh, 2018, p. 112) using examples of how the interplay between audio and visuals can elicit tactile perceptions of weight and texture. The relationship between sensory planes in videogames can be described using a typology developed by Children’s Literature scholars to examine interactions between verbal and visual planes in children’s picturebooks. This typology distinguishes between the symmetrical, the

134

E. REAY

complementary, the enhancing, the counter-pointing, and the sylleptic (Nikolajeva & Scott, 2001; Scott & Nikolajeva, 2013), drawing attention to the fact that while different sensory planes can reinforce one another, they can also nuance, ironize, undermine, and even directly contradict each another. This fact has been explored in critical discussions of ludonarrative dissonance—the sense that a game’s mechanics undermine its narrative—but it is rarely acknowledged that friction between semiotic layers can be a deliberate and effective rhetorical strategy. Designer and critic Mattie Brice has suggested the term ‘ludonarrative resonance’ and Travis Pynenburg has offered ‘ludonarrative harmony’, but both terms still imply a binary that doesn’t account for different degrees of intermodal cooperation and conflict. Madison Schmalzer’s (2020) exploration of intentional ‘jank’—which she defines as “a player’s perception that a videogame does not behave in the ways that it should”—does provide a useful parallel to the idea of intentional dissonance. However, jank refers specifically to a perceived mismatch between player input and machine output, rather than to the tension that might emerge between, say, audio and rules, or haptics and visuals, and so on. While the tension between semiotic planes may be defamiliarising, it does not have to be jarring, alienating, or confusing— as jank often is. In fact, this friction may feel apt, faithful, and earnest. In the same way that poetry disrupts of the norms of everyday language in order to awaken readers to the complex relationship between signifier and signified, intersemiotic inconsistency can be meaningful, beautiful, and profound as it highlights the polysemy and complexity of what is signified. Figure 5.1 details my adaptation of Nikolajeva & Scott’s typology for use in videogame criticism. In Knights and Bikes , the metaleptic layering of fictions relies on inconsistencies between semiotic planes. The ancient legend, its contemporary retellings by adult islanders, its repackaging as a tourist gimmick, and its function as a source of inspiration for the girls’ games of make-believe are presented as being equally ‘real’ by having their constituent parts manifest on some, but not all, sensory planes. The titular bikes, for example, signify noble steeds in the girls’ imaginative games and are referred to as such in the verbal dialogue. The bikes grant the girls the physical freedom to be knights-errant, but they also grant the girls the imaginative freedom to project an epic, pseudo-mediaeval fantasy onto the world around them. The flexibility of the bike-as-signifier is represented in the dissonance between the game’s audio and the game’s visuals. When

5

CHILD HEROES

135

Symmetry Symmetrical modes create redundancy and close interpretive gaps. Feedback loops are predictable, monosemic, clear, and proportional, and facilitate obedience. Extension Modes expand, intensify, specify, or enhance each other. They may fill each other’s gaps, offering new, complementary information. Feedback loops might include extra-ludic additions, flourishes, and inflections. Counterpoint Modes offer multiple, choral perspectives, which may create (dramatic) irony, complexity, ambiguity, indeterminacy, and polysemy. Counterpoint may be tonal, stylistic, or generic (e.g., realistic dialogue with fantastical visuals; a pet sim with FPS mechanics), may have meta- or self-referential properties, or may result from player-avatar (mis)identification/alienation. Feedback loops include the possibility for subversion, surprise, and hesitation. Dissonance Direct conflict between modes, where signs offer competing information. Aporia arises when tension between modes cannot be resolved. Feedback loops obscure rather than clarify meaning, making players question their agency.

Fig. 5.1 Typology of intersemiotic friction

the girls are mounted on their bikes/steeds, they tend to vocalise the rumbling and groaning of a motorbike engine by blowing air through relaxed lips; however, sometimes when the girls are saddled up, the player hears the realistic sound of a horse braying, and it is unclear whether this sound originates within the diegetic reality of Penfurzy or within the magic circle of the girls’ shared make-believe. Furthermore, when the bikes are depicted as icons in the in-game menus and loading screens, their handlebars and front tyres are positioned in such a way as to mimic the silhouette of an Arthurian broadsword. This Rubin’s Vase style illusion suggests that slipping between fictions is a matter of skilful, flexible perception.

136

E. REAY

Similarly, the supernatural curse that the girls must overcome is represented visually as crudely etched, waxy skulls that seep out of the ground and cover parts of the screen. The simplicity and flatness of this visualisation make it look less ‘real’ than other in-game objects, which have depth, shading, and detailed textures; however, the mechanics offer a counterpoint, demanding that players take the curse seriously by positioning it as a non-optional ludic obstacle that players must interact with in order to proceed. Furthermore, when the game is played using a controller, the appearance of the curse is accompanied by a symmetrical haptic rumble that suggests the curse has a physical presence. In making the curse interactive and palpable, the game suggests that this supernatural element exists on the same material plane as other interactive objects, despite being visually less realistic. The translucent layering of semiotic modes in Knights and Bikes undermines the idea that ‘the cultural’ stands in opposition to ‘the natural’. The game’s art style jitters with madcap, chaotic energy, using textures that give it the appearance of having been hand-drawn with crayons, felt tips, and colour pencils. Both natural phenomenon and man-made items are explosions of mixed media, torn craft paper, smudge marks, and scribbling outside of the lines, neither seeming wilder nor more beautiful than the other. The puffin-filled rough, rainy peaks of Penfurzy, its muddy sloughs and its ragged coastline are not ‘civilised’ by human habitation, because the cartographic hand that rendered both is not aligned with the rational, adult coloniser, but with the unselfconscious doodling of the child. This stylistic decision draws attention to the mutual constitution of island and islanders, suggesting that there is no decisive way to separate plaything from player, or playspace from reality. In other words, the delightfully and deliberately messy art style enfolds the island and the islanders into a paidic fantasy, rendering them equal component parts in a childly mindscape. Intermodal friction in videogames not only facilitates hesitancy, uncertainty, and multiplicity in playful ways, but it can also be used to destabilise dualistic thinking. The importance of videogame affordances for fostering a tolerance of indeterminacy, polysemy, and plurality is apparent when one compares Knights and Bikes with its remediation as a middle-grade novel of the same name, authored by Gabrielle Kent (2019). The novel faithfully relates the game’s plot and recreates the game’s ambivalent attitude towards traditional forms of heroism: when Demelza summarises the legend of “the brave knights sailing out on the

5

CHILD HEROES

137

Crusades to rid the world of dragons and stuff”, Nessa responds sarcastically, “Ok, so killing people who didn’t believe the same as them, and wiping out endangered creatures. Got it” (Kent, 2019, p. 22). However, the conclusions of the two texts diverge in significant ways. The novel ends with the reveal of Nessa’s true identity—she is not a ninja, a spy, a pirate, or a rally driver, nor is she a figment of Demelza’s imagination: she is the runaway daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Chakravarty, the couple to whom Demelza’s dad is selling the caravan park. The characters in the book achieve an unequivocal happy ending in which both Nessa’s family and Demelza’s family are able to remain on the island. In contrast, the ending of the game is ambiguous. After Demelza understands that the ‘immortality’ the treasure grants is actually a kind of permanent stasis, she rejects its power and acknowledges that her desire to remain on Penfurzy is linked to her inability to accept the death of her mother. She decides that it is preferable to leave the island and process her grief than to remain trapped by the enormity of her loss. Demelza’s revelation prompts Nessa to grin enigmatically and say, “That’s all I needed to hear. I’ve got to go. But you’re going to be okay, Demelza”. The screen fades to black and is followed by a short cutscene showing Demelza passed out alone atop a cliff stack surrounded by ocean. Behind her is the giant treasure chest, but whereas previously it had been gleaming, tangible, and interactive, it is now just a white pencil outline that gradually gets erased by the downdraft of the coastguard’s helicopter as it descends to rescue Demelza. When Demelza recounts her adventures to her father, the main actants in the story appear above her head as childly crayon sketches. She reaches the point in her retelling when she and Nessa discovered a sentient, pickled, severed head that had belonged to one of the original knights, but changes her mind about including this gory, supernatural detail. This moment of self-censorship is visualised as the sketch of the knight’s head being hurriedly scribbled out (Fig. 5.2). As the author and editor of her own tale, it seems possible that both the epic quest and the character of Nessa existed only in Demelza’s impressive imagination. However, in a final twist, the coastguard reveals that he is Captain Chakravarti and that he has an adventurous, bike-riding daughter living on the mainland who fits Nessa’s exact description. While the novel offers definitive closure, the game’s ending is open to multiple interpretations. The player is teased with clues that exacerbate this indeterminacy. For example, the

138

E. REAY

name ‘Nessa’ could refer to the Loch Ness monster—a notorious collective hallucination—and Demelza herself comments that her name means ‘fort on the hill’, suggesting that the cliff stack castle in the concluding sequence might symbolise Demelza’s arrival at self-knowledge. The satisfaction of resolving the game’s ludic puzzles replaces the satisfaction of a decisive narrative resolution, and the profound multimodality of the videogame medium allows the mixed reality of Demelza’s imagination to coexist with mundane, non-magical versions of events. The interplay between semiotic planes in Röki is also used to allow the supernatural to bleed into the real. The audio is not symmetrical to the visuals—rather the game’s soundscape both extends and counterpoints the visual signifiers, adding detail, tone, and movement. The musical tracks feature bittersweet piano melodies: mirror-bright, high, sparse notes trickle and splash like melting icicles, while soft minor chords sound snow-hushed and distant. These melodies are rounded out with the gentle exhalations of folk pipes that evoke wintry breezes. Bells and a church organ express the echoing grandeur of mountain passes and haunt the cold stones of forgotten castles. The magic of the forest is heard in a joyful, trilling flute that mimics a songbird’s delicate, rapid chromatic runs. Sounds gust and ebb as if they were carried by the wind, and the

Fig. 5.2 Author’s screenshot from Knights and Bikes of Demelza recounting her adventure to her dad

5

CHILD HEROES

139

music often falls silent leaving only the diegetic sounds of small forest animals and the crunch of snow underfoot. Significantly, plaintive, wistful musical refrains thread the playing experience through with the themes of grief, loss, and loneliness that characterise the game’s emotional climaxes, even when the visuals depict an otherwise cheerful, cosy, or amusing scene. The yearning of the everfaithful woodsman, for example—who once filled the forest near his sunken cabin with carvings of ravens in the hope of coaxing his beloved Rörka home—is narrated using music. The character is visually absent from the scene, but the music that haunts his former home continues his lament. Similarly, the trills of the wooden flute make mundane, pastoral settings seem to shimmer with excitement and mystery—the dilapidated, abandoned bothies bustle with the lively movement of the music despite their apparent emptiness. The magic that blurs folkloric worlds with Tove’s everyday reality is expressed as a kind of metalepsis: a troll is depicted playing the game’s musical motif on her nose flute, uniting the diegetic level and the extradiegetic level and, as is the case with Knights and Bikes , raising questions about layers of ‘realness’. Some of the most important interactions between the audio and the visuals occur when the audio retreats and leaves the player with only visual cues. This happens, for example, when Tove encounters a troll under a bridge. Visually, the troll resembles a fairy tale antagonist and its positioning under a bridge emphasises this intertextual allusion. Tove’s reaction to the troll is based on her knowledge of folklore, and so her body language and dialogue box express fear. The audio, however, is quiet—almost as if it were holding its breath. Since music stimulates emotional responses, its absence here challenges players to decide for themselves how to feel towards the troll. If one thinks of interactive in-game objects as ‘nouns’, then game music can be understood as ‘adjectival’ (Anthropy & Clark, 2013): the lack of music transforms formulaic concepts such as ‘evil troll’ or ‘frightening troll’ into simply ‘unknown troll’. The multimodality of videogames means that a silence can be scaffolded by other signifiers, thus creating an interpretive gap that generates moments of hesitation and uncertainty. What is more, the interactive nature of videogames heightens players’ sense that they are expected to actively, strategically synthesise audio and visual information—to treat the interpretive gaps resulting from multimodal tension as puzzles to be solved. Calleja calls this orientation an ergodic disposition, or “a readiness to act” (2007, p. 84). In the instance described above, for example,

140

E. REAY

players are motivated to make a judgement about the troll because they expect to be able to interact with it. Interaction in videogames is often figured as something that requires ludic skill, meaning that when interaction is focussed on understanding relationships between characters, the successful performance of these gestures is immediately assigned the ideological value associated with a ‘win condition’.

It’s Dangerous to Go Alone Both Röki and Knights and Bikes use cooperative game mechanics to emphasise the importance of relationship-building. Knights and Bikes centres on the friendship between its protagonists, Nessa and Demelza, and their place in the close-knit community of Penfurzy. The game gives players the options of two-player online cooperative play, local cooperative play using two controllers, or single-player cooperative play that requires the player to switch between characters while AI operates the character that is not currently in use. Often environmental puzzles require the characters to interact with in-game objects simultaneously, and the girls’ combat skills are decidedly complementary: Nessa’s frisbee is a great ranged weapon while Demelza’s powerful wellies stomp nearby foes. When combined, they are an impressive duo. Players restore their characters’ health by contributing to a communal supply of plasters, which are administered by the players directing the girls to give each other a high-five. This action requires the injured player to hold down a button and wait for the other character to locate them within the gameworld and press a corresponding button that initiates the healing process—a gameplay sequence that initially elicits feelings of anxiety and vulnerability, which then evolve into feelings of trust and reciprocity as players become more proficient at assisting one another. The importance of the bond between the girls is underlined when the ‘curse’ that protects the legendary treasure afflicts Nessa, making her desire the treasure for her own selfish purposes and prompting her to compete with Demelza rather than cooperate with her. The curse changes the register of Nessa’s speech, and her dialogue becomes littered with archaic, clichéd phrases (e.g., ‘Come, tarry no longer!’ and ‘The victor will take it all!’). She is, in essence, possessed by the traditional hero story and becomes a vessel for its individualistic, combative narrative structure as well as its linguistic style, which manages to be simultaneously epic and staid. Her language is ‘adulterated’, in the sense that her usual informal,

5

CHILD HEROES

141

playful idiolect is stripped of its references to childly subcultures and its excited interjections (‘Tubular!’). In this way, adulthood is aligned with a violent, conflict-centred, archetypal hero story declaimed in epic verse, while childhood is equated with a pacifist reinterpretation told through cooperative play. The dissonance between the visual portrayal of the lively, punk-rock, British-Asian teenage girl and her stiff, dead idiolect points to the paradox of the child hero.

The Child Hero The child hero is something of an oxymoron. Although Hourihan posits, “heroes are young. In most versions of the myth there is no recognition of a future in which they will grow old” (p. 72) it is worth noting that while traditional heroes may not grow old, they necessarily grow up. In fact, the hero’s journey “signifies the protagonist’s progress through adolescence”: it symbolises the ritualised transference of power that occurs when a child is initiated into adulthood (Hourihan, p. 74). This idea is corroborated by Tison Pugh, who writes, “in Campbell’s vision of the mythic hero, the protagonist metamorphoses from an unpromising childhood into an exceptional adulthood, so the transition from youth to maturity, from innocence to experience, is explicitly thematised as a focal stage in the hero’s development” (2019, p. 195). The hero who remains in a state of childhood remains in a state of powerlessness, and so the child hero’s refusal to grow up can be read as a refusal to embark on a quest for power, mastery, and dominance. Knights and Bikes and Röki not only question the legitimacy of adult power, but also question the value of ascendency itself, both as a narrative arc and as a measure of success. The ‘powers’ that these young protagonists gain are inextricably linked to their childness: they are rooted in their dependency, their naivety, their vulnerability, and their sensitivity. On Tove’s quest she gains two supernatural powers in the form of a pair of masks, given to her by the witchy-botanist Shroomi, a talking toadstool. These masks actually confer upon the young heroine the powers of childhood. The first item from Shroomi is an invisibility mask, granting Tove the power to be unseen, overlooked, and underestimated. While wearing this mask, she can enter doors without raising alarms that trigger defence mechanisms to unlock new areas to explore. The second is the mask of All-Seeing, which bestows upon the wearer the ability to perceive what is not there. She is henceforth able to see the fairy realm of the

142

E. REAY

älvi and their magical, mushroom homes. Most children lack the breadth of life experiences that many adults possess, which generally leaves them with more gaps in their comprehension. Rather than framing this as a weakness, Röki emphasises that gaps in one’s knowledge create spaces for speculation and imagination—the larger the gap, the greater the potential for fantastical manifestations. At the same time, the capacity for imaginative projection is not positioned as superior to knowledge shaped by logical extrapolation from lived experience. The validity of both approaches is expressed in the parallel routes taken by Tove and her father to Rörka’s island. Tove spots an old rowboat at the edge of the lake but is too weak to push it into the water. Instead, she uses the oar to prise open a door concealed in a tree trunk, which leads her into a hidden magical realm. Her physical weakness limits her, but her credulity and openness to the supernatural serve as an equally powerful means of transportation. When her father arrives at the lake, he grabs the oar that Tove has left leaning against the tree, launches the boat, and rows out to the island with ease. His adult strength renders the consideration of alternative routes unnecessary, and so he does not gain access to the supernatural paracosm despite standing upon its threshold. The masks Tove acquires do not permanently upgrade her abilities. As with Trollhilde’s enchanted nose flute or the Fossegrim’s water-wielding wolf-staff, Tove only has use of these magical items for a short amount of time, and so the acquisition of these boons is not a metaphor for her advancement towards adulthood. Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen—an important intertext for Röki—concludes with a biblical quote, “Assuredly, I say to you, unless you are converted and become as little children, you will by no means enter the Kingdom of Heaven” (Matthew 18:3). Tove’s ability to remain in a state of childhood is a metaphoric key that grants her entry to Rörka’s innermost chambers, a space that Pappa is barred from. Rather than defining childhood as a state of lack or treating childhood as a process of structured ‘becoming’, Röki presents childhood as a set of coherent and valuable practices that are highly effective for traversing the world. Tove’s childly vulnerability and physical weakness are fundamental to her ability to rewrite the scripts that shape the role of the traditional hero. The troll that she encounters under the bridge accuses Tove of being a violent, Vanquishing Hero, exclaiming, “A man! You come to hurt Hilde again”. Tove quickly responds, “No, no! I want to help. I’m a girl, not a man”. ‘Man’ and ‘Troll’ have a relationship rooted in mutual violence but

5

CHILD HEROES

143

Tove’s identity as female and as a child disrupt this script. Tove’s harmlessness is not equated with helplessness—in fact, the action she assigns herself in this exchange is the verb ‘help’. The game’s exposition establishes Tove’s girlhood both in terms of a need for nurture and a capacity for nurture: Tove is shown taking care of her younger brother and thus providing nurture, but also being neglected by her alcoholic father and thus needing nurture. Tove’s girlhood encompasses both her ability and her vulnerability, and this complexity permits a reciprocal complexity in the troll. The troll is assigned a female name— Trollhilde—in the same moment that she asks Tove to remove Man’s dagger from her shoulder. Tove and Trollhilde define themselves against Man—which, in this context, is synonymous with Hero—and, in doing so, uncover common ground. There is nothing about Trollhilde’s physical appearance that is suggestive of a gender, but this intersection between Trollhilde’s and Tove’s identities is more than skin deep. The pair realise that they share the lived experience of being sisters who have lost their brothers, and comfort each other with empathetic understanding. Tove endeavours to make amends for the harm done to Trollhilde by Man, using her ingenuity to repurpose and combine items to craft a tool that will remove the man’s rusted dagger from the troll’s shoulder. Tove succeeds where the adult, male aggressor presumably did not (his failure writ large in Trollhilde’s continuing existence), not because her weakness incites pity or dismissal from the Troll but because Tove is able to form connections. On a mechanical level, she connects a rope to a bear trap to form a kind of arcade claw that can remove the dagger, and on a metaphorical level, she connects her identity and her plight to those of Trollhilde to rewrite the human–troll relationship. The trollsisters in Röki are worried about suffering the same sad fate that befell their brothers, all of whom turned to stone. Trollhilde associates this petrification process with her violent encounter with Man, lamenting, “Human thorn prick Hilde. Hilde can’t remember when. Hilde stood a long time. Don’t want to turn to stone…” Understood metaphorically, Trollhilde’s violent encounter with Man threatens to concretize her significance as ‘enemy’, trapping her on the wrong side of a heroic binary. Tove reverses the petrification process by entering into a sisterly relationship with Trollhilde based on mutual need. Importantly, Tove both aids and hoodwinks Trollhilde. After removing the dagger, Tove collects ingredients to make Hilde a soothing tea— the soporific effect of which allows Tove to borrow Hilde’s nose flute

144

E. REAY

without the troll’s knowledge. The flute is duly returned and neither ‘sister’ comes to any harm, but moral goodness in their sisterly relationship is not ascribed and denied either side of a human/nonhuman binary divide. This flexibility is expressed mechanically in that the same ‘collect and combine’ ability Tove employs to assist Hilde is also used to deceive her. The interactions between Tove and Trollhilde frame their relationship as something that exceeds the antagonist/ally binary, and this, in turn, grants each character a degree of complexity. Far from being set in stone, their identities are dynamic and result from their evolving interactions with each other.

An Inventory System Theory of Fiction Röki is a game about collecting, recollecting, and the collective. The core gameplay loop requires the player to notice, collect, and combine mundane objects in innovative ways to transform them into useful tools. This mechanic—which is represented visually in the game’s Heads Up Display by Tove’s red rucksack—is a metaphor for the character’s ability to make meaningful connections between members of her community. It attests to the unheroic nature of videogame affordances by drawing attention to the ways in which interactive texts are ‘sacks not spears’, to parse Ursula Le Guin’s ‘Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’. Le Guin writes, We’ve all heard all about all the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. (1988/2019, p. 150)

Rooting her argument in anthropologist Elizabeth Fisher’s observation that the first cultural device was probably a pouch, net, or sack, rather than a tool of violence, Le Guin suggests that the affordances of the novel are akin to those of a carrier bag: “a book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meaning. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us” (p. 152). The traditional hero narrative, in contrast, takes the shape of “an arrow or a spear, starting here and going straight there and THOK! hitting its mark (which drops dead)” (p. 150). Le Guin argues that the capaciousness of the novel makes it ill-suited to the streamlined, soaring, linear flight of a chronological arrow that bends towards a fatal, fated

5

CHILD HEROES

145

end. Rather, the commodious novel carries collected elements of a whole, which “cannot be characterized as either conflict or harmony, since its purpose is neither resolution nor stasis but continuing process” (p. 152). Röki, with its central red rucksack, could be said to warrant an ‘Inventory System Theory of Fiction’. Tove’s rucksack brings into unexpected proximity everyday paraphernalia—a trowel, a hair pin, a bear trap, a mountain flower, and so on—and in doing so creates meaningful junctures that connect characters, environments, and narrative vignettes. This collection process is achronological in the sense that items are often discovered and stashed before Tove encounters the puzzle to which they relate, meaning that at any one-time Tove’s backpack contains the necessary equipment for paratactic tasks that can be resolved in any order. Tove’s rucksack also facilitates her quest for psychic wholeness. The process of (re)collecting her repressed memories and adding metonymic representations of them to her bag allows her to make peace with the idea that the painful, shameful, and fearful parts of her coexist with her bravery, resilience, and wisdom. The space of the bag also provides an alternative mapping for the experience of childhood. Röki resists the forward pressure of the bildungsroman or the developmental model of childhood by jumbling past and present—and near and far—thereby disrupting the supposedly sequential and temporally ordered journey towards adulthood. Being able to store objects representing her repressed memories alongside objects from her present and objects related to future puzzles frees Tove from a linear chronology that sees the successional replacement of younger selves over time. To use Le Guin’s metaphor, ‘the child’ in Röki is less an unloosed arrow and more a carrier bag of potential selves. Or, to put it another way, childhood is conceived of as a space rather than a time period, which is something I’ll explore further in Chapter 6. If adulthood is considered “an epoch of independence and selfdetermination” (Edelstein, 2018 p. 15), then Röki constitutes the space of childhood as an intricate network of attachments replete with multidirectional bridges, portals, and passageways. This nuances the common game progression trope in which players unlock new locations as they gain mastery over time—a convention that reproduces elements of the conquering, coloniser hero narrative. Rather than simply expanding a map, Röki’s focus on forming and restoring links between places on the map connects the pleasure of exploration to community integration: Röki’s structure balances adventuring to faraway lands with establishing

146

E. REAY

closeness. Furthermore, since human relationships are overlaid onto spatial locations, the land itself cannot be categorised as a resource to be exploited or as a wilderness to be tamed by man’s civilising power. Instead, it is part of the social fabric of the forest community. Röki requires players to make looping, criss-crossing, recursive journeys through a series of magical spaces that seem to tesselate, overlap, and fold in on themselves in impossible ways. These spatial movements not only scaffold the game’s paratactic plot that stacks simultaneous quests, but also expound upon the game’s exploration of the sanctity of kinship and community, and the pain caused by missed or broken connections. In fact, for most of the game, Tove travels via a literalization of a family tree: after awakening the Mother Tree, Tove can commute through her rhizomes and emerge via the portals of her tree-children, thereby connecting locales on opposite sides of the in-game map. When Tove first meets the Tree of Many it comments, “Hmm. We see you are lost. No, you have lost”, and later Tove pleads, “Please, I need to find [my brother]. I have nowhere else to go.” Tove’s sense of dislocation, disorientation, and estrangement is emotional as well as geographical. Both people and places can be close and distant, and Tove’s journey is as much about navigating social relationships as it is about traversing a map. If, as William Blake writes, “Time is a man, Space is a woman”, then there is a gendered dimension to contrasting the forward propulsion of narrative events linked by a timeline of causality with the multidirectional matrix of narrative events connected by spatial proximity. Nadya Aisenberg posits, The story of women’s development is circular; therefore, structurally as well as substantively, male texts with a linear quest characteristic of the older sense of narrative fail to authenticate women’s experience. Women’s own development, characterized as interrupted, parenthetical, and marked by paradox, has required experimentation with literary forms in which to locate difference. (1994, p. 38)

Aisenberg stresses that it is not sufficient to simply replace heroes with heroines in traditionally male-led epics or tragedies. A similar argument has been made within Game Studies. Researchers analysing the ‘Lara phenomenon’ (e.g., Jansz & Martis, 2007)—named after the female avatar in the Tomb Raider series—have suggested that female leads in games can perpetuate misogynistic tropes by valorising traditionally

5

CHILD HEROES

147

masculine qualities and devaluing traditionally feminine qualities. Geoff King & Tanya Krzywinska write, “Lara Croft represents a site of digital transgendering (sic) in that a male player sees the abilities of a male body within and alongside Croft’s digitally elaborated feminine body” (2006, p. 181). Although Espen Aarseth’s comment that he could not ‘see’ Lara’s female body problematically dismisses valid concerns about the hypersexualisation of this heroine, it does highlight the superficiality of simply assigning a traditionally male role to a female character without thinking through the gendered nature of heroism. However, if the formal properties of videogames are, as I am arguing, ill-suited to rendering The Hero’s Journey—if the narrative structures of video games are ‘characterised as interrupted, parenthetical and marked by paradox’—then gender-bending the traditional hero might be less of a ‘re-skinning’ and more of an unmasking. That is to say, perhaps contemporary videogames are aligned with ‘feminine’ narrative qualities but have donned the trappings of the opposite gender to blend in with a techno-masculine industry that has a sign on the clubhouse door proclaiming No Girls Allowed (Condis & Morissette, 2023).

Symbiotes and Parasites Sari Edelstein is referring to North America when she writes, “dependence has come to be regarded increasingly as deviant, even pathological, in a culture that fetishises self-reliance and stigmatises support programmes” (2018, p. 142), but her argument holds true for the United Kingdom too. Across Anglo-American culture, dependence is increasingly figured as a symptom of irresponsibility, weakness, and even immorality, and those who need assistance—whether it be financial, emotional, or bodily—are excluded from prevailing concepts of maturity. Psychologist Sue Johnson notes that interpersonal dependence and attachment is “radically out of line with our culture’s established social and psychological ideas of adulthood: maturity means being independent and self-sufficient” (2008, p. 19). Pertinently, Johnson invokes as evidence the contemporary Anglo-American valorisation of “the invulnerable warrior who faces life and danger alone” (p. 19) through heroic figures such as the iconic impervious man, James Bond. Röki and Knights and Bikes use the childliness of their protagonists to rewrite the relationship between heroism and independence. Both games “uncouple presumptions about age from ideas about autonomy, ability,

148

E. REAY

and dependence” (Edelstein, 2018, p. 131) by showing the negative effect of individualism on adults. Röki argues that the psychic wholeness of individuals depends on their relationships with their community: the forest ecosystem suffers when interpersonal bonds become strained or broken. This suffering is represented in the game by outbreaks of the parasitic ‘nättamare’ fungus across the forest, which functions as the symbolic foil for healthy interdependence. The only time that Tove uses her dagger as a weapon is when she must hack her way through festering clumps of nättamare that block entrances, choke other plants, and poison pools of water. Significantly, rather than the leeching, exploitative properties of the parasitic fungus being aligned with dependent childhood, the nättamare affliction is aligned with adulthood. The fungus paralyses the forest’s enormous Jötun guardians, preventing them from performing their parental duties of safeguarding their magical domain. The sleeping guardians evoke Pappa’s alcohol-induced slumber during the game’s exposition, in which Tove has to make a paltry meal for herself and her brother because Pappa has failed to ensure that there is adequate food in the house. The nättamare clogs up the openings through which interpersonal connections can be made, suggesting that it symbolic of adulthood’s reduced capacity to lean on others. The other forest blight that Tove must dispel is the conspiracies of Rörka’s ravens. These ravens represent the paranoid, hypersurveillance of over-attached parents rather than the needy omnipresence of children. In this way, the two blights—the fungus and the ravens—comment on the extremes of parental neglect and parental intrusion. Balance can only be restored through the child’s intervention. The Jötun arise once more because Tove models for them a different kind of strength—she reminds of them of a power that is not rooted in their giant size, but in their trust and reliance on their Jötun siblings. Röki reveals the interdependence of all age groups, with the penultimate set of puzzles in particular demonstrating that dependence is not a uniquely childly quality. During this section of the game, the mechanics shift so that the player sequentially controls both Pappa and Tove, switching between them to interact with their separate worlds. While Pappa’s strength can break down obstacles that impede Tove’s path, Tove’s access to the folkloric world allows her to collect magical items that solve puzzles. Although Tove and Pappa cannot see each other, they feel each other’s presence as the player moves the characters closer together. Their mutual invisibility emphasises the trust that is essential

5

CHILD HEROES

149

for interdependence. The experience of intergenerational interdependence is not only conveyed in Tove’s comment, “I’d forgotten what a good team we make, Pappa”, but also in the mechanics themselves, which loosen the player’s identification with Tove and instead position the player as a collaborative energy—a line of communication between father and daughter. Hakim et al. of The Care Collective write, Given our interdependencies, each and every citizen of the caring state must be recognised as having something of significance and value to contribute at every stage of life. Thus, a transformation of cultural norms goes hand in hand with the state’s avowal of everybody’s intrinsic dependency, with autonomy and dependency seen as two sides of the same coin. (2020, p. 39)

Through its single-player cooperative mechanics, Röki efficiently models the supposedly paradoxical relationship between autonomy and dependency. The heterogeneity of the adult/child partnership in this section of gameplay translates into a broader range of abilities available to the player, which results in an increased capacity to resolve the game’s puzzles. As such, the player’s agency increases when characters depend on each other. Unlike a traditional escort mission—wherein the powerful hero must safeguard a vulnerable non-player character while they both traverse a hostile space—neither character is a burden to be tolerated (or not tolerated, as escort missions are notoriously loathed by some gamers).1 Instead, as players hone the ludic skill of dependency, their characters are better able to manifest their will. Pappa explicitly identifies his age as being a limiting factor that prevents him from accessing certain spaces. If the player attempts to make Pappa climb a structure, for example, he comments, “Maybe in my younger days…”, prompting the player to switch to Tove to traverse the space. The necessity of repeatedly moving between adulthood and childhood during this sequence challenges the idea of dependence as an essential quality tied to a specific

1 It is impossible for me to write about parasites, symbiotes, and adult / child rela-

tionships without mentioning The Last of Us series here. Against a backdrop of a deadly, parasitic, fungal infection that ravages the host’s body, Joel and Ellie ultimately fail to establish a healthy, sustainable symbiosis. This failure is captured in the opening lyrics of Pearl Jam’s Future Days that sung repeatedly by both characters in The Last of Us, part 2: “If I ever were to lose you, I’d surely lose myself…”.

150

E. REAY

age range and suggests instead that dependence is a valid and effective response to environmental obstacles at any stage in one’s life. The feminisation of dependence in patriarchal societies is key to disallowing dependence outside of childhood. In their manifesto, The Care Collective acknowledge this explicitly, commenting, Autonomy and independence have historically been lionised in the Global North and gendered ‘male’. Indeed, notions of unfettered male autonomy and independence remain symbolic of ‘manhood’, defined primarily in opposition to the ‘soft’, caring and dependent world of domesticity” (2020, p. 22)

This is perhaps why games scholar Ciaran Devlin is unsatisfied with Amicia’s co-dependent relationship with her brother in Plague: A Tale of Innocence. Rather than seeing the player character Amicia’s nurturing protection of Hugo as a laudable skill, Devlin argues that the cooperative mechanics reinforce gender stereotypes, casting Amicia in a maternal role, and Hugo—via his control of rat hordes—in the masculine role of combatant. In conjunction with the game’s predominantly non-violent stealth mechanics, Devlin reads the interdependence of the children as an obstacle that prevents Amicia’s emancipation and her inclusion in the world of “masculine-wielded violence” (2019, n.p.). I agree that her dependence prevents Amicia from engaging with male violence on ‘equal’ terms, but I question Devlin’s conclusion that this is necessarily anti-feminist. Combining a feminist reading of Amicia’s characterisation with approaches from Childhood Studies provides alternative ways of interpreting her dependence on Hugo. Sánchez-Eppler writes, “Childhood is not only culturally, but also legally and biologically understood as a period of dependency” (2005, p. xvi). The naturalisation of dependency in childhood means players may not immediately condemn the children’s interdependence as evidence of Amica’s disempowerment. In fact, the subject position available to the player—who interacts via both characters—further entwines Amicia and Hugo’s identities in a way that aligns with feminist principles of care. The space marked out for players in A Plague Tale: Innocence is the shape of both deuteragonists’ needs, suggesting that the power to act is symmetrical to our community’s need for us to take action. As Rita Manning writes, “we are all needy; our relationships are based on a recognition of need and the commitment to fill need” (1992, p. 97). Connecting heroism and childliness highlights the

5

CHILD HEROES

151

inherent neediness of the human condition and, what is more, it positions it as the source of heroic potential. Arguably, co-dependency is only pathological within patriarchal frameworks that equate maturity with independence. Furthermore, whereas feminine heroism often centres on self-sacrifice and caregiving, childly heroism centres reciprocity and interreliance. In Chapter Seven, I argue that the Child Sacrifice can be deployed in anti-feminist ways. Here, I find myself wanting to conclude that The Mighty Child has feminist potential, but I’m also cognisant of the fact that the two games I have chosen for close readings of this archetype begin with dead mothers. If a woman must die for The Mighty Child to thrive, is the trope misogynistic? My sense is that the (absent) mother characters in these games symbolise a less radical version of care: a privatised care that is undervalued and that exists to pick up the slack when the welfare state is dismantled, civic engagement is rendered ineffective, and concepts of kinship contract to encompass only the nuclear family. What is more, the caring role fulfilled by the symbolic adult woman erases her even when she isn’t dead, since her own needs are suppressed to cater to the needs of others. In contrast, the neediness of The Mighty Child is visually and mechanically ever-present. That is to say, The Mighty Child is a constant avowal of our interdependencies. It unabashedly proclaims that we all need each other—albeit in diverse and uneven ways—and this is the essence of our capacity for performing heroic feats. Since videogames communicate through a chorus of signifiers, they can foreground the importance of community, negotiation, and ecological balance. In combination, the symbolic figure of ‘the child’ and the videogame medium present a powerful alternative to the endless replication of traditional, agonistic, hypermasculine, individualistic adult hero stories. The games discussed in this chapter rewrite the rules of traditional heroism by valuing cooperation over competition. The player’s growing mastery is translated not into an increase in the avatar’s physical strength or powers, but into strengthening bonds between individuals. Rather than aspiring towards autonomy, individualisation, and power, the child heroes in these games build relationships with others to heal the divisions caused by dualistic thinking. In short, rather than villainy being a precondition for heroism, we see that heroism is born of dependence. This has radical implications when considered in the context of Ebony Elizabeth Thomas’s theorization of the ‘Dark Fantastic’, or Blackness in supernatural contexts. Thomas writes,

152

E. REAY

The fantastic has need of darkness, for these innocent ‘stories about stories’ require both heroes and villains, fair princesses and evil crones, valiant steeds and nightmarish beasts. The fantastic requires Medusas and Grendels, chimaeras and manticores, cunning tricksters and cowardly fools. It needs the Dark Other as its source of hesitation, the very spectacle that causes the heart to skip in fear. It desires the Dark Other’s violent end in a form of ritual sacrifice, purging the very source of the darkness and righting the wrongs of the world before returning to haunt the happy ending. (2019, p. 24)

Dualistic structures define heroism in contradistinction to its foil, and this creates a deep-rooted need for the Dark Other to gird the hero’s identity. However, since any kind of dependence runs counter to traditional conceptions of the hero, this need must be purged through the violent elimination of the Dark Other. Both the vanquishing of the Dark Other and the hero’s return to his community signal the end of his heroism. He forgoes his exceptional status as an individual predestined to stand out from the collective through the performance of extraordinary deeds when he is reintegrated into society via a happy ending, leaving only the latent ‘haunting’ of the Dark Other to sustain his heroic identity. The dyadic structures implied by cooperative mechanics, in contrast, do not sublimate interdependence: rather, they foreground the relational process of identity formation. They also make clear that heroism grows to fit the shape of needs and is edged by the capacities and competencies of others. Sari Edelstein uses ludic language to describe an ideology that connects age and dependence, commenting that “adulthood serves as the prize of compliance with a system that priorities the self over others and competition over cooperation” (2018, p. 145). This same ludic language appears in The Care Collective’s manifesto: “the archetypal neoliberal subject is the entrepreneurial individual whose only relationship to other people is competitive self-enhancement…the dominant model of social organisation that has emerged is one of competition rather than co-operation” (2020, p. 7). In these cooperative games, the prize of ‘adulthood’ is replaced by the prize of intergenerational solidarity. Since players are invited to divide their attention—and their sense of identification— between multiple characters simultaneously, their actions become an expression of attachment, interdependence, and care.

5

CHILD HEROES

153

References Aisenberg, N. (1994). Ordinary heroines: Transforming the male myth. Continuum. Anthropy, A., & Clark, N. (2013). A game design vocabulary: Exploring the foundational principles behind good game design. Addison-Wesley Professional. Braithwaite, B., & Schreiber, I. (2009). Challenges for game designers: Nondigital exercises for video game designers. Cengage Learning. Brice, M. (2012) Narrative is a game mechanic, retrieved from http://www.pop matters.com/post/153895-narrative-is-a-game-mechanic/. Burn, A. (2017). Hogwarts versus Svalbard: Cultures, literacies, and game adaptations of children’s literature. In C. Beauvais & M. Nikolajeva (Eds.), The Edinburgh companion to children’s literature (pp. 429–449). Edinburgh University Press. Burn, A., & Schott, G. (2004). Heavy hero or digital dummy? Multimodal player–avatar relations in final fantasy 7. Visual Communication (London, England), 3(2), 213–233. https://doi.org/10.1177/147035704043041 Calleja, G. (2007). Revising immersion: A conceptual model for the analysis of digital game involvement. DiGRA Proceedings, retrieved from http://www.digra.org/digital-library/publications/revising-immersiona-conceptual-model-for-the-analysis-of-digital-game-involvement/ Campbell, J. (1949/2004). The hero with a thousand faces. Princeton University Press. Condis, M., & Morrissette, J. (2023). Dudes, boobs, and GameCubes: Video game advertising enters adolescence. Media, Culture & Society. https://doi. org/10.1177/01634437231159533 Devlin, C. (2019) ‘Is that your only ambition for me? To follow?’: Gender in a Plague Tale: Innocence’, First Person Scholar. Duane, A. (2010). Suffering childhood in early America violence, race, and the making of the child victim. University of Georgia Press. Edelstein, S. (2018). Adulthood and other fictions: American literature and the unmaking of age. Oxford University Press. Foam Sword Games. (2019). Knights and bikes, foam sword. Hakim, J., Chatzidakis, A., Littler, J., Rottenberg, C., & Segal, L. (2020). The Care Manifesto. Verso Books. Hourihan, M. (1997). Deconstructing the hero: Literary theory and children’s literature. Routledge. Jansz, J., & Martis, R. G. (2007). The Lara phenomenon: Powerful female characters in video games. Sex Roles, 56, 141–148. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11 199-006-9158-0 Jenks, C. (2005). Childhood (2nd ed., Key ideas). Routledge.

154

E. REAY

Jennings, S. (2022). Only you can save the world (of videogames): Authoritarianism agencies in the heroism of videogame design, play, and culture. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565221079157 Johnson, S. (2008). Hold me tight. Little, Brown, and Company. Kent, G. (2019). Knights and bikes. Knights Of. Keogh, B. (2018). A play of bodies: How we perceive videogames. MIT Press. King, G., & Krzywinska, T. (2006). Tomb raiders and space invaders: Videogame forms and contexts. https://doi.org/10.5040/9780755695546. Laure-Ryan, M. (2001). Beyond myth and metaphor—The case of narrative design in digital media. Games Studies, 1(1). Le Guin, U. K. (1988/2019). The carrier bag theory of fiction. Ignota Books. Lebowitz, J., & Klug, C. (2011). Interactive storytelling for video games: A playercentered approach to creating memorable characters and stories. Elsevier. Manning, R. (1992). Speaking from the Heart: A feminist perspective on ethics. Rowman & Littlefield. Martin, P. (2011). The pastoral and the sublime in the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Game Studies, 11(3), 3. Nicklin, H. (2020, March 24). Kill the hero, save the world [Video]. GDC. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oT0Pz4fJ3WM Nikolajeva, M., & Scott, C. (2001). How picturebooks work (Children’s literature and culture). Garland Publishing. Ong, W. (2002). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. Routledge. Phillips, L. (2017). Impossible journey: The liminality of female heroes. Roundtable, 1(1), 7. https://doi.org/10.24877/rt.13 Polygon Treehouse. (2020). Röki, polygon treehouse. Pugh, T. (2019). Chaucer’s losers, Nintendo’s children, and other forays in queer ludonarratology (Frontiers of narrative). University of Nebraska Press. Pynenburg, T. (2012). Games worth a thousand words: Critical approaches and ludonarrative harmony in interactive narratives. Honors Theses, retrieved from https://scholars.unh.edu/honors/70/ Sánchez-Eppler, K. (2005). Dependent states: The child’s part in nineteenthcentury American culture. University of Chicago Press. Schell, J. (2020). The art of game design: A book of lenses (3rd ed.). CRC Press. Schmalzer, M. (2020), Janky controls and embodied play: Distrupting the cybernetic gameplay circuit. Game Studies, 20(3). Scott, C., & Nikolajeva, M. (2013). How picturebooks work (Children’s Literature and Culture). Taylor and Francis. Skolnick, E. (2014). Video game storytelling: What every developer needs to know about narrative technique. Watson-Guptill Publications. Thomas, E. E. (2019). The dark fantastic: Race and the imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games. New York University Press.

5

CHILD HEROES

155

Vogler C. (1998). The writer’s journey: Mythic structure for writers (2nd ed.). M. Wiese Productions.

CHAPTER 6

Plushies, Dollies, and Action Figurines

Unravel

‘Unravel’ begins with a cutscene set in the kitchen of a grandmother’s cosy cottage. The small room is bathed in the low, golden glow of a long Swedish summer’s evening. On a painted wooden table stands a vase of foraged wildflowers, a tin kettle, a plate of biscuits, and an open photo album. A hand-embroidered prayer cushion reads, “Lycka blommar ur sma enkla”—‘Happiness blooms out of small, simple things’. The accompanying music is ruminative—even plaintive—but nonetheless sweet and comforting. An elderly woman wrapped in a crocheted shawl smiles at the framed photograph held in her hands, but her expression soon drops, and she bows her head. She walks over creaking floorboards to a staircase, stopping briefly to straighten a portrait of a toddler sat in a heap of autumn leaves. She collects a wicker basket of halffinished knitting and carries on upstairs, but rather than follow her, the camera is distracted by a ball of bright red yarn that falls from the basket and bounces across the kitchen floor, coming to rest under a dining chair.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 E. Reay, The Child in Videogames, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42371-0_6

157

158

E. REAY

The screen fades to black, and the next moment the playercharacter Yarny—a red, woollen toy—climbs onto the table, stepping over a hand-written letter and gazing around the room, saucer-eyed with amazement and curiosity. Using the left analogue stick, I make Yarny dance across the table. His gait is a lollopy skip and I coo over his cuteness. From Yarny’s perspective, the trinkets and trifles on the table are monuments—the woven basket of dried birch is a climbing wall, the bureau is a grand, oak-panelled gallery. His head swivels from side to side in wordless wonder, discovering for the first time the extraordinary nature of ordinary things.

Cuddly Code When coding my dataset, I’d noticed that a number of the playable characters I’d been tagging as ‘Inner Child’ were designed to resemble hand-crafted dollies, soft plushies, and plastic figurines. Rather than offering players a child-character as an on-screen identity prosthesis, these games invited performances of childhood by presenting players with a digital representation of a kid’s toy. At first, I wondered if these wholesome, shiny, highly saturated games might be a good starting point for defining a ‘childly aesthetic’. I had hypothesised that childly audiovisuals would prime players for relaxing, untaxing, gentle experiences and would encourage prosocial behaviour and paidic play. The toylike avatars and breakfast cartoon colour schemes of Mario Kart 8 (Nintendo 2019), for example, communicate the game’s approachability and low stakes. In the Mario Kart series, the paraphernalia of childhood connotes a manageable level of risk by promising players the same protections from violence, stress, and consequences that contemporary society supposedly confers upon its youngest members. The childly feel of indie games such as Kind Words (Popcannibal 2019)—which is set in a child’s bedroom and has a cute, neotenised avatar—also assures players that they are entering a protected space. The game’s premise is, in its own words, “to be kind and receive kindness in return”. Like a pen pal or an Agony Aunt, players write letters to each other, seeking and giving advice, encouragement, and reassurance. The collectible rewards in this game comprise of sticker

6

PLUSHIES, DOLLIES, AND ACTION FIGURINES

159

books and plushies that can be used to decorate the virtual bedroom. The more acts of kindness the players perform, the more childly paraphernalia fills the space. In this way, childly props are both an injunction and an incentive to ‘play nicely’. As I continued to record the audiovisual details of games that featured representations of children’s toys, I was struck by their ‘haptic-panoptic’ quality (Lancaster, 2001). These games all spoke to the synaesthetic space between senses where the visual is suffused with haptic qualities that call to mind experiences of weight, texture, pliancy, and other physical sensations. In particular, I noticed that the digital skins of toylike avatars had been carefully designed to evoke tactile memories of soft, warm wool, flat, stiff paper, or shiny, rubbery plastic. The avatar in the LittleBigPlanet series, for example, is a crocheted creature made from itchy, brown yarn with black buttons for eyes and a comedy-kitsch zip running from gusset to neck that serves as a tie. His construction looks as straightforward as his overly literal name: Sackboy. Sackboy appears to have been assembled from scrap materials—the reincarnation of a holey jumper, perhaps, or a widowed sock—and the crafting process is rendered visible in the lumpy stitching that secures his hands to his arms and seals up his disproportionately large head. The playable protagonist in the puzzle-platform game Unravel is also designed to represent a hand-woven woollen doll, and in the game’s marketing material, this doll is given the name ‘Yarny’, suggesting that, like Sackboy, his identity is closely tied to his materiality. Yarny belongs to a long fairy tale tradition of toymaker’s creations that are absent-mindedly imbued by their artisans with a soul—a side effect of a long lost, pre-Fordist magic. Homely and whimsical, Yarny seems as if he were quickly crafted from offcuts—not without love, but without pretention. The low cost of Yarny’s production is inversely proportional to his sentimental value. His loose ends and visible stitching evidence the unique quirks of his human creator, making him individual, irreplaceable, and therefore priceless. In a binary medium of computational precision, Yarny’s imperfections convey the idiosyncrasies of human craftsmanship. This knitted being re-weaves the rainbow, and his corporeal crochet conceals the cold, wraithlike code from which he is actually constructed. That is to say, “the medium’s computational materiality—inherently founded as it is upon the empirical value, the defined procedure, the rigid binary of true and false” (Vella, 2015) is sublimated beneath a skin that strongly evokes sensory memories of an organic, homespun, folksy texture.

160

E. REAY

While characters like Sackboy, Yarny, and Yoshi of Yoshi’s Woolly World (Nintendo 2015) are made of fuzzy wool, the doll-like avatars in Tearaway (Media Molecule 2012) and Tearaway Unfolded (Media Molecule 2015) resemble animate origami, and move through dioramas of painted cardboard, confetti, and crumpled tissue. Similarly, the heroes of Scribblenauts Unlimited seem to be constructed from stickers and split pins. The playable characters and the in-game objects in Scribblenauts Unlimited are composed of simple, saturated, two-dimensional shapes with hard, contrasting outlines. The fact that there is no movement along the Zaxis in this game compounds the sense that the world of Scribblenauts is paper-thin. The flatness of the environments—which consist of just two stacked layers—is reminiscent of a Victorian paper theatre, with the edge of the screen functioning as a miniature proscenium arch. The visual design of Scribblenauts Unlimited—combined with the skeuomorphic ‘skrish’ sound of a paper page turning that accompanies the main game mechanic—gives the virtual world the modest heft of a colouring-book or a paste collage that might be showcased on the family fridge. Finally, there were several toylike avatars in my corpus that recalled the armies of identical figurines often found heaped in bargain bins near toyshop tills or begreased between burger and fries in a McDonald’s Happy Meal™. The toylike characters in FallGuys and Pikmin 3, for example, share a cheap, shiny plasticity that Roland Barthes would have likely condemned for being “a graceless material, the product of chemistry, not of nature” and having “an appearance at once gross and hygienic” (1957/1993). Synthetic, lurid, and effortlessly replicable, Pikmin look like injection-moulded mandrakes, while Fall Guys appear to be made from a gummy, neon flubber that combines the robustness of a dog’s chewtoy with the gelatinousness of a Jelly Baby. Focussing on the (im)materiality of these toylike avatars took me in an unexpected direction. I traced a line from the textures of cuteness, through the cuteaggression impulse to squeeze and crush, to a surprisingly painful form of nostalgia, and I ended up thinking through how these cutesy games engaged with ideas of bereavement and spectrality—not what I expected when I first played FallGuys , if I’m honest. In this chapter, then, I explore the strong but conflicting emotions elicited by digital cuddly toys. I look at how the childly behaviours of creative spontaneity and impulsive curiosity are made safe and viable through the replicable, restartable, unrippable nature of immaterial objects. I subsequently point to moments when ‘carefree’ behaviour

6

PLUSHIES, DOLLIES, AND ACTION FIGURINES

161

becomes ‘careless’ behaviour, and posit that the hearty robustness of digital toys not only withstands rough play but actively encourages it. I argue that toylike avatars allow players to express both affection and aggression—care and cruelty—in equal measure without a sense of dissonance. I unpack this apparent paradox and conclude that callous roughhousing in these videogames might be an expression of a painful, mute frustration at being trapped on the wrong side of the wall that separates adulthood and childhood.

The Cute Aggression Response When David Pizarro et al. poses the rhetorical question, “Nobody feels guilty about kicking a rock for the simple pleasure of doing so, but doing the same thing to a child is universally forbidden. What’s the difference?” (2006, p. 82), he presupposes that there is something innate in children that dissuades ordinary adults from harming them. He echoes the conclusions drawn by Konrad Lorenz in the 1950s, who posited that when a human sees a composite of juvenile physical qualities, an autonomic ‘Innate Releasing Mechanism’ is activated, which in turn prompts a caregiving response from the human. Although his animal studies remain an important historiographical touchstone for contemporary thinking around cuteness and affect, Lorenz’s position is rooted in reductive ideas of evolutionary, genetic, presubjective mechanisms, consistent with the Nazi-eugenicist ideology to which he subscribed. Lorenz’s nature-overnurture approach has been nuanced by those arguing for the role that culture plays in constructing cuteness and those who argue that caregiving is—at most—an indirect corollary of cuteness, and that cuteness “is as likely to trigger a childlike state as a parental one” (Haidt & Sherman, 2011, p. 248). Literary scholar Sianne Ngai’s findings complement those of psychologists Haidt and Sherman. Her research draws attention to the “infectious” nature of cuteness, which can induce an act of automatic mimesis, compelling the consumer of cuteness to unconsciously emulate the cute object’s “infantile qualities” (2012, p. 3). That is to say, cute characters in videogames might be an invitation to behave childishly—to be silly, irresponsible, and mischievous, rather than being an invitation to be kind, nurturing, and conscientious. The toylike avatars in FallGuys certainly meet Lorenz’ cuteness criteria (kindchenschema): the appearance of the avatars is characterised by “a relatively large head, predominance of the brain capsule, large and low-lying

162

E. REAY

eyes, bulging cheek region, short and thick extremities, a springy elastic consistency, and clumsy movements” (Lorenz, 1950/1971, p. 154). Even FallGuys ’ own marketing team is not immune to the imitative compulsion triggered by these cute objects. The studio’s Twitter account has been accused of using “heckin doggo chonk pupperoni language” (Clayton, 2020, n.p.), in reference to its use of DoggoLingo—the babytalk of the internet age. Ngai notes that encounters with cuteness does something to everyday communicative speech: weakening or even dissolving syntax and reducing lexicon to onomatopoeia […] cuteness cuteifies the language of the aesthetic response it compels, a verbal mimesis underscoring the judging subject’s empathetic desire to reduce the distance between herself and the object. (2012, p. 87)

Arguably, the dialogue exchanged between player and avatar in a wordless game like FallGuys takes place via the feedback loops of controller input and on-screen output. Since the avatars are designed to resemble both teething toys and toddlers who teethe, they invite players to perform physical gestures in the style of infants. The game controls mimic the limited motor skills of young children—they are both extremely simple (consisting only of run, jump, and grab) and imprecise, frequently triggering both surprise and frustration. Even highly skilled gamers are, for the most part, doomed to button-mashing. In a way, the player’s input is babyspeak and the on-screen output is adorable gobbledegook. Imitativeidentification between player and avatar seems to run counter to Daniel Harris’ claim that cuteness is something done to others. He argues that to perceive something as cute is “to maim, hobble, and embarrass the thing” (2000, p. 5). In this interactive medium, however, the mechanics maim, hobble, and embarrass the player, and their silly ineptitude is broadcast to a potential audience of 59 others. In tension with the desire to become one with the cute object, is the fact that cuteness “is the name of an encounter with difference—a perceived difference in the power of the subject and object, in particular” (Ngai, 2012, p. 87). If we follow Haidt and Sherman’s argument that our imitative response to cuteness is an evolutionary adaptation, this tension thwarts one of our primal desires. Perhaps the so-called ‘cute-aggression’ response—the strong desire to crush, bite, or pinch something that is cute—is, in fact, an expression of frustration at the impossibility of truly becoming the vulnerable, dependent object of affection. The gritted teeth

6

PLUSHIES, DOLLIES, AND ACTION FIGURINES

163

and clenched fists of cute-aggression are thought of as a form of dimorphous expression because the outward gestures do not match the inward emotional processes. But what if the cute stimulus really does trigger a kind of existential discomfort—even rage? This raises further questions— Is the desire to relinquish agency through empathetic identification with the cute target a kind of masochistic impulse? Or is the urge to mutilate and humiliate the cute target a sadistic fantasy of total domination that annihilates the futile desire to be cute? Ngai suggests that the “striking incompleteness of the cute visage”— specifically its lack of a mouth—is necessary to prevent full personification of the cute object, which would “symbolically render that object our equal, erasing the power differential on which the aesthetic depends” (2012, p. 91). The toylike avatars discussed in this chapter are all mute and mouthless, communicating mostly through gestures and non-verbal squeaks. One could nuance Ngai’s reading by positing that a mouth (as a metonym for speech, which indicates autonomous sentience) impedes a sense of oneness with the cute object. As an extension of the player, the cute object is a prosthesis that facilitates the experience of being cute. The player, in fact, craves a direct ‘equalness’ to the cute object, in the sense that the cute object is a vessel for a version of the player’s self— perhaps one that isn’t acceptable in most other, adult contexts. If that prosthesis is pre-emptively animated with a separate sentience, it does not so much disrupt the power balance between subject and object as cause the toylike avatar to lose functionality for the player. To put it another way, if the avatar were a realistic simulacrum of a human child rather than an approximation of a toy, this digital child would displace the player: since childness can be understood as a relational state, the presence of child would prevent the player from being able to occupy that role. Cute objects need to be incomplete so that they can demarcate clear child-lacunae for players to fill. However, this incompleteness—and the liminality of the resulting player-toy hybrid—is also a source of dissatisfaction. It is a reminder of the conditionality of the player’s return to the Edenic garden of childhood.

Playgrounds of Cruelty Cuteness scholar Joshua Paul Dale claims “expressions of cuteness, whether they emanate from animals, objects, or people, comprise a form of agency: namely, an appeal aimed at disarming aggression and

164

E. REAY

promoting sociality” (2017, p. 37), but other researchers have questioned whether cuteness always disincentivises violence. Anne Allison connects the materiality of cute objects to a desire for domination, writing, the characteristic textures of cute things are ones that invite physical domination. Hence cute objects demonstrate their responsiveness to the will of others through softness and squishiness, which allow them to be aggressively deformed by their handlers. (2003, p. 389)

As a blimpish blobject, the rubbery elasticity of the Fall Guys, for example, spectacularizes bloodless sadism. The avatars’ wobbly tactility invites roughhousing because they are biteable, squishable, and deformable while simultaneously being reassuringly robust, durable, and resilient. Their gelatinous padding makes them impossible to damage, a fact verified by their indefatigable enthusiasm for running the gauntlet. Their (im)materiality suggests a comic imperviousness to pain, which minimises any reservations players might have about their avatars being repeatedly crushed, spiked, stampeded, and jettisoned into an abyss of neon slime as they compete to be the last Fall Guy standing. The level design in FallGuys is inspired by the 90s television gameshow Takeshi’s Castle (1986–1990) and its subsequent Western rehashings such as It’s a Knockout (1996–2001) and Wipeout (2008–2012), in which contestants must surmount physical obstacles primarily in the form of brightly coloured, oversized inflatables. This genre of entertainment is not a celebration of the contestants’ physical prowess; rather it revels in the cloddish, bumbling ineptitude of the average human body. Viewers are encouraged to enjoy the participants’ pratfalls and nosedives without compunction through a combination of canned laughter and exaggerated sound effects, a playschool colour palette, and, most importantly, the apparent softness and springiness of the obstacle course. Similarly, the pleasure found in hurling hordes of Pikmin into battle is contingent upon their inorganic materiality. Smooth, hard, and uniform, Pikmin have no breakable parts nor vulnerable soft spots: they do not look like they would decompose, shatter, or haemorrhage. Players are prompted to treat the Pikmin as if they were wholly expendable in part because their materiality is suggestive of inexpensive mass production. The narrative premise of the Pikmin series raises questions about colonial violence that are barely concealed beneath the game’s childly audiovisual layer. In fact, the Pikmin’s rubbery ‘skin’ speaks directly to a history of

6

PLUSHIES, DOLLIES, AND ACTION FIGURINES

165

racialised toys that script white supremacist violence. In Robin Bernstein’s analysis of historical toys, she notes, [The] doll’s blackness [works] in combination with its composition of gutta-percha, a form of resilient rubber used in nineteenth-century dolls to enable them to survive rough play that would destroy a doll made of porcelain or wax…Black rubber dolls were manufactured, as patent applications for such dolls often specified, to withstand rough use, and this doll’s smile suggested that violent play was acceptable, even enjoyable. (2011, p. 71)

The digital immateriality of the Pikmin can perhaps be read as an extension of a long history of robust toys representing a cultural or racial ‘Other’. And just as the black rubber doll’s smile does not invite care, the cuteness of the Pikmin does not afford them protection from the player. Although he is neither waterproof nor wipe-clean, Sackboy’s toylike materiality also encourages players to conduct iterative experiments using his body—many of which result in him being incinerated, melted in acid, and pulverised by heavy machinery. Sackboy’s blithe attitude towards his own repeated destruction sets the tone for a joke that is repeated in the tutorial of each game in the series: the narrator questions whether Sackboy is resurrected after each dismemberment, or whether he is simply replaced by an identical toy. The series hamstrings aggression by invoking a childly world of wonder, but, paradoxically, this performed innocence makes violent play—specifically, the reckless sacrificing of Sackboy’s body—acceptable by alleviating the player’s sense of culpability. Scribblenauts Unlimited neutralises reckless destruction in the same way: the ramifications of vandalism are mitigated when enacted within a paper world. This goes some way to explaining the countless Let’s Play videos uploaded to YouTube in which players of Scribblenauts Unlimited attempt to solve the game’s puzzles solely using a flamethrower. Despite ‘fire’ being a suboptimal solution to most of the game’s scenarios, setting the paper world alight is a valid response to the latent, transgressive script that runs counter to the game’s overt encouragement of neighbourly community service. In these games, the avatars’ destructible materiality is augmented by their restartable, respawnable, rewindable immateriality. Like exhibits protected behind a screen of glass in a toy museum, the avatars invite boisterous manhandling while simultaneously attenuating the consequences of touch. Both their materiality and their

166

E. REAY

immateriality work in parallel to mitigate consequences by suggesting an imperviousness to pain and a forgiving sturdiness. While injury and death are standard expressions of ludic fail states in videogames, the violence sustained by the toylike avatars in these games also provides a source of comic delight and an opportunity for players to coo over the avatar’s helplessness. Amanda Phillips likens videogames to “playground[s] of mortality” (2018, p. 138), capturing the paradoxical relationship between a site of childly recreation and encounters with death. Her exploration of ragdoll physics—notably named after a type of toy—centres on the contradictions inherent in coupling of fun with seriousness, and humour with horror. Although Phillips focuses on the representation of “bloody deaths” (p. 141)—in particular, “the fetishized gore of the skull exploding” (p. 143) that characterises the headshot in videogames—her argument nonetheless illuminates an aspect shared by the bloodless deaths of digital plushies: the goofy twitching, flailing and flopping of a corpse animated with ragdoll physics serves to intensify players’ sense of agency as a perpetrator of violence while mitigating their feelings of culpability by making the deaths absurd and clownish. In the games with toylike avatars, the association of childliness and harmlessness works to nullify any remorse felt by players. But what is more, it also aestheticizes violence by making it adorable: doling out death and destruction becomes a cute thing to do. An exception proves the rule in the cooperative game It Takes Two (Hazelight Studios 2021), wherein the joyless, bickering, self-absorbed adult protagonists—who have, themselves, been transformed into tiny, squishy dolls—ruthlessly dismember a cuddly elephant plushie appropriately named Cutie. The destruction of Cutie is a metaphor for the protagonists’ total dereliction of their parental duties during their divorce, which causes their daughter serious psychological damage. Commenters under a video walkthrough of this sequence (Ruba, 2021) express their horror and dismay at the callousness of the player characters, whose adult logic results in a perverse inability to ‘play nicely’. One commenter @kanwarsingh5799 writes, Can’t believe we all witnessed one of the most goriest (sic) death scene in video history without any blood or mutilation.

6

PLUSHIES, DOLLIES, AND ACTION FIGURINES

167

They note that usually a digital toy’s non-organic (im)materiality mitigates its capacity for suffering, but in this instance Cutie’s bloodless demise feels shockingly visceral. Another commenter, @doy3doy, adds, This was the most depressing thing I ever had to do in a video game. Almost cried. Felt like killing a child or something.

Since the subject position available to the player in this sequence is that of an adult, the violence enacted here cannot be reframed as play, which results in distressing feelings of guilt and disgust. Furthermore, the intrusion of adultness into this scene makes the unequal power dynamic obvious, such that the violence against Cutie feels unfair and unsportsmanlike. Someone using the handle @dddd-t7g8 also experienced a deep sense of remorse: I wish I had a Cutie the Elephant now. Just so I could take care of her and wash this memory away. Please, this is actually the worst thing I’ve ever done.

This commenter yearns for a material version of the toy so that they can atone for the immaterial harm they inflicted on its virtual counterpart. Immaterial amends would not allow for full absolution in this commenter’s eyes. Finally, @jamieshrink8576 comments, Breaks a part of the former child of me. I have a Teddy Bear that I got on the day of my birth, some 30+ years ago. I know very well how important it was to me as a child and it frankly still is.

This commenter experiences a sense of co-location with their child-self, but it is more a moment of rupture than of reunion. Whereas the other digital toys discussed here hail the player’s inner child as a means of exonerating their darker impulses, this player’s reproachful inner child resurfaces as a sombre rebuke. Cutie continues to haunt the remainder of It Takes Two, and her reappearance in the credit sequence—inexpertly patched up with a sticking plaster—raises uneasy questions about children’s capacity to recover from trauma. It also implies there is a good reason why adults aren’t permitted to return to the inner sanctum of childhood.

168

E. REAY

Sensory Nostalgia as an Unscratchable Itch If Pikmin and Fall Guys sit at one end of a spectrum and Cutie is at the other, then Yarny is somewhere between the two. Despite featuring a delightfully destructible doll-avatar, Unravel is a game that is anxious about disintegration. Rather than Yarny’s woolly materiality and his pixelated immateriality working in tandem to support a carefree, careless playstyle, Unravel scaffolds a tactile experience that elicits a bittersweet sense of a loss, distance, and disconnection. Entangled with the feelings of satisfaction players derive from the game’s physics-based puzzles that simulate weight, gravity, tension, and friction is a fundamental dissatisfaction rooted in an unsatiated yearning for physical contact induced by sensory nostalgia. Through the character of Yarny, Unravel facilitates a fantasy of being born again into a second childhood, one more magical and more vivid than the first—a childhood lived between the hÿgge gamehub of the Grandmother’s rustic, welcoming home, and the breath-taking Scandinavian natural landscapes that constitute the game’s levels. Katriina Heljakka and J. Tuomas Harviainen writes: adults who acquire toys and play with them have their activities often explained as nostalgia, their toys considered objects that merely provoke a yearning for childhood. However […] this remembered childhood is not a lived childhood but, instead, a voluntary one. (2019)

The childhood revisited in Unravel is not a ‘lived childhood,’ but an idealised childhood—a childhood viewed both through the long lens of nostalgia and through the rose-tinted lens of a coveted fantasy. Carolyn Steedman (1995) has argued that childhood as an abstract concept has become an emblem of a lost past and lost selves, and this is certainly the case for Unravel . In fact, the poignancy of the game rests in the partial and temporary nature of the experience it offers to players: they can reenter the Edenic garden of childhood as visitors, but with the knowledge that they will never be repatriated to this universal homeland. A photo album on the grandmother’s kitchen table serves as the game’s progress log. On one page, a hand-written quote scrawled in an oldfashioned script reads, “Some days you feel warm no matter how cold they are, and some things are fun no matter how old you are, and sometimes you wish a visit could just last forever”. Unravel invites players to

6

PLUSHIES, DOLLIES, AND ACTION FIGURINES

169

step outside of age-based identities and experience the flexible dilation of chronological time, while acknowledging that this wish can only ever be conditionally granted through the ‘as if’ of imaginative play. The transitory impermanence—this sense of being out(side) of time—is embedded in the videogame medium itself. In the opening cutscene described at the beginning of this chapter, the rotary telephone, the rustic woodstove, and the old-fashioned furniture all feel anachronistic because they are rendered as computer-generated images. Equally, the precision and fidelity with which the game portrays its timeless pastoral environments paradoxically draws attention to the medium’s bleeding edge technical sophistication. The visual style of this game reaches towards photorealism, to the extent that the photographs by the grandmother’s staircase and in her albums are real-world images taken by the development team of their friends and children. This careful commitment to visual verisimilitude— particularly to the audiovisual minutiae of the natural world—feels like an act of loving devotion. What is more, since the game’s serene digital vistas are experienced from the perspective of a very small creature (Yarny measures approximately four inches tall), this meticulous attention to detail is further exaggerated. The distortion of scale imbues the humble pinecone with the majesty of a mountain, gives the moth the air of an angel, and other such Burkean sentiments. The size of these artefacts relative to the avatar enlarges their importance for the player, replicating the fascination young children are thought to have with objects that have lost their intrigue for adults. The child’s-eye-view in Unravel instigates a metaphysical shift that frames the commonplace objects of the natural world as sites of wonder and deep contemplation. Small details—the delicacy of moss, the sky reflected in a puddle—become instances of ‘greatness unbounded’ that remind the player of humanity’s relative insignificance and the limits of imaginative comprehension. In other words, the childly perspective transforms the pastoral into the sublime. Gary Cross summarises the Romantic link between childhood and nature, arguing that, “because wonder was lost when the natural world became the object of control and systematic reason, the look and feeling shifted to the child” (2004, p. 26). In Unravel , the ‘look and feeling of wonder’ seem to have come full circle, with the natural world rendered via controlled, systematic,

170

E. REAY

computer-mediated code but focalised through the perspective of innocent, childly awe. In writing about the player’s experiential alignment with the child-character Ellie in The Last of Us, J. Jesse Ramirez writes, Depending on how quickly the player walks at the beginning of the woods section, Joel can enter a clearing just as Ellie finishes talking. Golden, lateafternoon sunshine is streaming through the trees and shimmering on a pond where a white crane is resting. Santaolalla’s score blends soothingly with the atmospheric sounds of running water, insects, and chirping birds. It’s a beautiful setup that invites the player to view the world through Ellie’s astonishment, a perspective that recognizes that there is still magic in the world, that the apocalypse is still incomplete, and that people can still find peace, even if only in enclaves on the fringes of civilization. (2022, p. 62)

Ramirez’s description draws attention to the fact that the child’s-eye-view can be a rhetorical tool for eliciting estrangement—it is a perspective that “distances the player from their everyday perception and asks them to see aspects of reality as if for the first time” (2022, p. 63). In short, a childly perspective is a poetic device that reawakens players both to the beauty of the subject matter and to the artistry of its technical composition. The childly state of humbling smallness—combined with a sense of attentive absorption and intense presentness—is reflected in another annotation in the photo album: “The sky is somehow taller here. A breath here counts as ten. We can lose ourselves here, but we’re never lost, because we’re right at home”. Scale and time are re-enchanted such that the diminutive child-self and the natural location—the here-and-now— become entwined and interchangeable: both are a ‘home’ to which the player returns. The game’s paean to small pleasures is connected both to long outgrown childly perspectives and to Romantic, pre-industrial, rural locales that have remained ‘unadulterated’ by modernity. As a result, the sublime beauty of the gameworld tugs the player into personal and collective pasts, eliciting something Children’s Literature scholar Zoe Jaques terms ‘spectral nostalgia’. “Spectral nostalgia,” Jaques writes, “can be defined as a wistful looking back to the past, certainly, but via a backward glance that is specifically attentive to its hauntings and echoes, the way spectres not only emerge from the past but can shape an inflect the present and future” (2021, p. 46). The immateriality of these computergenerated images combined with the reverential veracity with which these digital spectres reproduce the physics, dimensions, and textures of their

6

PLUSHIES, DOLLIES, AND ACTION FIGURINES

171

material referents gives them a phantasmagorical quality. The analogue is rendered in the digital and is experienced like a mirage in the desert. The fact that these natural and domestic objects are both interactive and intangible exaggerates the sensory shortfall of digital formats. The resultant feeling is like an unscratchable itch on a phantom limb. Unravel ’s profound nostalgia for its material referents is made explicit in the game’s narrative premise, which entrusts Yarny and the player with collecting (or recollecting) the grandmother’s fading memories. The recollection process is symbolised by the restoration of the damaged photographs in the grandmother’s album. Torn, sun-bleached, and stained, the photographs held between yellowing pages evoke age-related memory loss. Yarny traverses different game levels encountering softfocus, life-sized still images of moments from the grandmother’s past. These images dissolve into glowing particles of dust that Yarny absorbs so that he can ‘re-member’ them when he returns to the photograph album in the game’s hubspace. The ‘re-membering’ process is also expressed via Yarny’s material body. Yarny is a visualisation of two linguistic metaphors: the images of one’s mind ‘unravelling’ with age and of ‘losing one’s thread’ when retelling a story. As an avatar, he is subjected to repeated dismemberment at the hands of the player as part of solving the game’s physics-based puzzles. Players must use the wool that makes up Yarny’s body to strategically connect platforms, so that he can climb it, swing from it, and use it to form tensile bridges. The wool available is finite and begins to unwind as Yarny moves from the left-hand side of the screen towards the right-hand side, until he is reduced to a thin, hunched, single-threaded skeleton. Like Theseus’ Ship, Yarny’s ‘original’ body is quickly replaced with entirely new skeins of wool, gesturing towards the fact that a memory of an event is not equivalent to the original experience, and that reliving a memory creatively overwrites the previous recording. The final lengths of Yarny’s wool have a series of knots that, rather disturbingly, evoke organs, and the sense that he is being disembowelled is compounded by the blood-red colour of the wool. The player can replenish Yarny’s wool by directing him towards fresh spools snagged on odd nails and splinters of wood, but when he is reduced to his final lengths, he moves pitifully slowly as if he were almost too weak to carry on. In these moments, his size and appearance evoke a bloodied tampon, or even a foetus, far from the womb of the grandmother’s cottage, pathetically trailing its umbilical cord behind it. Additionally, when played with

172

E. REAY

a controller, the player experiences rumbling vibrations as Yarny yanks at the last lengths of his own intestinal tubes. Yarny’s materiality both facilitates and limits the player’s ability to master the game’s puzzles. When players run out of thread, the grandmother’s status as someone who is both ‘forgetful’ and ‘forgotten’ are brought to mind, along with the attendant emotions of frustration and despair. The disintegration of Yarny’s body recalls Shel Silverstein’s weepy picturebook The Giving Tree, in which a tree representing a caregiver has its resources entirely depleted by a demanding child. However, in Unravel , it is the surrogate child that hazards its physical body for the benefit of its elderly creator. Both the tree and the toy are transitional objects, and their eventual abandonment is inevitable, but the toy’s childliness loans it a hopeful, regenerative, evergreen endurance that allows it to outlast individual generations and remain in the garden of childhood. More so than photographs preserved in an album—which holds only the past—the toy is a script that always solicits new performers and generates new performances. Unravel suggests that while a photograph can only replay a single moment in time, the graspable, poseable, manipulable body of a toy is future-oriented, always in anticipation of its next incarnation. Children’s Literature scholars Cecire et al. (2015) describe how the teddy Pooh Bear “takes on the responsibility of remembering and maintaining Christopher Robin’s childhood after he has left it behind, holding this conceptual space open even once Christopher Robin can no longer re-enter it or possibly even recall it” (2015). Winnie-the-Pooh and Yarny are both doorstops that hold open the entrance to the polyreal realm of paidia, so that players of all ages can continue to experience a sense of co-location with their childselves. When D. W. Winnicott (1971) described toys as ‘transitional objects’, he meant that they were both temporary aids to support children on their journey towards adulthood, and tools for crossing the boundary between the real and the imaginary. Toys have the capacity to anchor the virtual in the physical, allowing players to externalise their own mental simulations. A toy is a conduit between the outer world of the senses and the inner world of ideas, or as Katriina Heljakka puts it so succinctly, “the toy is materialised fiction” (2012, p. 156). But what does this mean for manipulable but ultimately intangible representations of toys in videogames? Gordon Calleja’s (2007) theorisation of the ‘incorporative’ quality of videogames provides a potential answer. Calleja explains, “incorporation operates on a double metaphor: incorporating (in the sense of assimilation

6

PLUSHIES, DOLLIES, AND ACTION FIGURINES

173

or internalisation) the environment while re-incorporating (in the sense of corporeal embodiment) the player through the avatar in that environment…Incorporation makes the game world present to the player while simultaneously placing a representation of the player within it through the avatar” (2007, p. 88). Calleja’s theorisation of incorporation offers an alternative to the concept of ‘immersion’. Immersion implies a one-way plunging of the player into the on-screen world, shedding their material self as they go. However, incorporation makes the body part-toy and the mind part-playground, such that some meta-self seems to play through us. For the games discussed in this chapter, we might imagine this metaself as an inner child that possesses our bodies while we, in turn, haunt our childhoods. In this way, sensory nostalgia is connected to spectral nostalgia.

Spectral Nostalgia Lynda Barry questions whether “a toy can exist without a person” and insists “the same toy is not the same toy for anybody else” (2008), suggesting that what brings a toy into being is the act of play as a spatiotemporal, ritual event. Each time a toy is awoken from dormancy by a new player the seemingly constant material object is made fundamentally different. Jaques compares the lifecycles of toys in two contemporary children’s films, noting that as “Christopher Robin’s toys [find] fresh playfulness in Madeline just as Andy’s do in Bonnie, the recyclability of the relationship between toy and child paper[s] over the unsettling fact that such beings can eternally outlive their human companions, even as they become tattered and frayed”. Jaques draws attention to the parallels between Roland Barthes’ horror at “that rather terrible thing that is in every photograph: the return of the dead” and the spectral quality of toys preserved in museums. A key difference between photographs and toys, however, is that as photographs fade, their referent also disintegrates, meaning that the material and the immaterial are effaced in tandem. In contrast, as toys grow more ‘tattered and frayed’, the immaterial begins to manifest on a material plane. That is to say, the intangible play-echoes of imaginative games become concretised as marks upon the body of the toy. Like tattoos or scars, the vandalisation and destruction of the toy are a record of ephemeral incidents of pretend play—specifically, they preserve what was seen in the mind’s eye, mediated via idiosyncratic haptic gestures. The gap between the material and the immaterial is never

174

E. REAY

so narrow as it is in the moment before a toy disintegrates entirely. In Unravel , the toy exceeds the photograph as a focal point of nostalgia— not just because it functions as a record of a tactile experience, but because it bears the traces of previous players’ ‘aliveness’. Jaques (2015) notes how fundamental a toy’s materiality is to its ‘aliveness’ in her reading of Margery William’s tale of The Velveteen Rabbit. In this classic children’s book, the old skin Horse explains to the plushie protagonist that only attachment expressed through extensive physical handling can bring toys to life. Toys that “break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept” do not become real because they are not sufficiently graspable. Jaques comments on the way the book valorises the gradual decay of frequently hugged toys, arguing that toys require something akin to an organic, mortal body in order to attain proximity to living beings. Roland Barthes also links a toy’s material body to its ‘aliveness’, making an almost religious connection between the likelihood of a toy having an afterlife and the purity of the material it is made from. He writes, Wood is a familiar and poetic substance, which does not sever the child from close contact with the tree, the table, the floor. Wood does not wound or break down; it does not shatter, it wears out, it can last a long time, live with the child, alter little by little the relations between the object and the hand. If it dies, it is in dwindling, not in swelling out like those mechanical toys which disappear behind the hernia of a broken spring. Wood makes essential objects, objects for all time. Yet there hardly remain any of these wooden toys from the Vosges, these fretwork farms with their animals, which were only possible, it is true, in the days of the craftsman. Hence- forth, toys are chemical in substance and colour; their very material introduces one to a coenaesthesis of use, not pleasure. These toys die in fact very quickly, and once dead, they have no posthumous life for the child. (1957)

Only the toys that submit to and endure the mauling of the childGod gain admittance to his nostalgic heaven, where toys’ physical bodies are retired, but the ephemeral, imagined play experiences that they once prompted are immortalised as sweet, hazy, haloed memories. The body of Winnie-the-Pooh may be out of reach in a display case in the New York Public Library, but the teddy’s hallowed soul is forever playing. One wonders what Barthes would have made of digital toys that are simultaneously more durable and more intangible than those hewn from

6

PLUSHIES, DOLLIES, AND ACTION FIGURINES

175

wood. Although digital toys cannot decay, they can bear traces of their handling by players, as Jordan Erica Webber records in her moving interviews with bereaved people who return to the save files of games played by lost loved ones. Many of the interviewees mention games from the toybox-esque Animal Crossing series, including Meredith Myers, whose sister, Kylie, passed away as a young teenager. Myers describes wanting to maintain her sister’s town in Animal Crossing: Wild World because interacting with something that Kylie had once played with gives her a feeling of closeness to her sister. Myers relates that, four years after Kylie’s death, an inhabitant of the virtual town—an anthropomorphic cat named Lolly—revealed that she was in possession of a letter written by Kylie, which Myers was then able to read. Myers says, “Being able to see the relationship [Kylie] had built with this little virtual cat and seeing it come to life was like having a little piece of her again” (2020, n.p.). When I heard this, I was struck by Myers’ choice of the words ‘seeing it come to life’. The vague pronoun ‘it’ seems to refer to the player-toy hybrid that Kylie brought into being through her Animal Crossing play sessions. Just as Yarny is imbued with a soul by his knitter, Lolly earns a soul-fragment from her former player. Kylie was outlived both by her digital toy and by her own playfulness, which engaged her sister in a paidic interaction long after her death. While the haunted toy did not help Kylie to materialise on a physical plane, it did enable her sister to enter into the digital space containing Kylie’s preserved play-echo. Cecire, Field, and Roy quote the final lines of A. A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner to capture “a vision of childhood as a place of imaginative play that outlasts the individual child” (2015). In the Hundred Acre Wood, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing, untroubled by the inexorable passage of time and the inevitable growth and decay of organic bodies. For Myers, it is not the Hundred Acre Wood but the Animal Crossing village that becomes a liminal space between the past and the present, and between the deceased and the living. Myers’ play in Animal Crossing is akin both to the ritual visiting of a gravesite and to a cross-sensory séance. Since toy-play takes place between the material and the immaterial, playing with the dead can feel like one is meeting them in the realm between imagination and experience. To put it another way, a memory exists somewhere between experience and imagination, and so a toy that straddles sensory worlds can shuttle the player back and forth in time between ‘what was’ and ‘what if?’.

176

E. REAY

The liminal space of toy-play requires a sensory compromise—or, rather, it requires the relinquishing of presentness in one material plane to manifest in another. In encountering Kylie’s play-echo, Myers experiences what is gained in terms of what is lost. She reflects, “I couldn’t take care of [Kylie] in real life anymore. But I could take care of her [Animal Crossing] village. Hear her voice through her letter. The game gave me this little piece of her.” Myers ‘hears’ Kylie’s voice through the written text of Kylie’s letter—combining auditory memory with a new communication—but her sister’s resurrection is only partial: she is granted only a ‘piece of her’. She contrasts ‘real life’ with the virtual playspace, suggesting that her actions within the digital game are mimetic signifiers of care, rather than care itself. They are spectres of care that exist in the present but belong to the past. Similarly, the bereaved father of Ezra Chatterton describes interacting with a World of Warcraft quest designed and voiced by his young son as “an echo – it’s a shadow – of the thing that I want, which is to be able to actually touch him, feel him, be with him again. But it is something. It’s more than the void” (Webber, 2020). Immateriality is, again, experienced as a loss, and the ‘actual’ is contrasted with the virtual. Ezra’s auditory (echo) and visual (shadow) manifestations scaffold the absence of his tactile, haptic manifestation. The same sensory language appears in Amy and Ryan Green’s description of the memorialisation of their son Joel in the autobiographical game That Dragon, Cancer. Ryan Green comments, They’re echoes, but echoes fade. And we have to turn our hope to the future. My hope is that someday I will see Joel again and someday I will hold him for real and someday I will play with him for real. (Webber, 2020)

The virtual afterlives of these deceased children who have been saved in games are beyond materiality and beyond mortality. The grieving adults await their own dematerialisation that they believe will allow them to experience the haptic, tactile aspects of their lost loved ones once more. Without wanting to detract from the specificity of the grieving experiences of these gamers, I wonder whether ‘play as an act of memorialisation’ or even ‘play as grieving’ applies to the nostalgic longing elicited by Unravel . By which I mean, perhaps Unravel is less about delighting in a fantasy

6

PLUSHIES, DOLLIES, AND ACTION FIGURINES

177

of an imagined childhood and more about honouring the ache of an impossible desire.

Intergenerational Bridges Lynda Barry hypothesises, “there is something brought alive during play, and this something, when played with, seems to play back” (2008). This is perhaps why Yarny’s total disintegration towards the end of Unravel is so emotionally charged. The penultimate level requires Yarny to traverse a snow-covered cemetery during an intense blizzard. He spends the level shivering with his thin yarn arms wrapped around his tiny body for warmth. In the context of this gentle game, the puzzles in this level are punishing. A biting wind erases the players progress by forcing Yarny back to the start of the level and brings about sudden fail states by freezing him to death. Finally, threadbare and deformed, Yarny reaches the crocheted badge that signals the end of the level—in this case it is one half of a heartshaped brooch. As the player makes Yarny jump towards it, the game wrests control away from the player and runs a cutscene showing the ruthless wind snatching the heart from Yarny’s hands at the last moment. When Yarny desperately dives after it, he overextends himself, unravelling completely and disappearing from existence. The thread of life is cut—as is the connection between the grandmother and her younger selves—and the portal to the past is finally closed. The grief elicited by Yarny’s unravelling is only short-lived, as the game quickly replaces or repairs the broken toy. After a weighty pause, a deus ex machina in the form of a mitten-clad hand reaches down from the top of the screen and retrieves both the crocheted heart and the unspun string of red yarn. Following a black loading screen, what seems to be an eyelid peels open, revealing that it is, in fact, a backpack being unzipped. Light pours into the bag and Yarny emerges, reborn and blinking in the sunlight. It is springtime once more, and he is at the bottom of the grandmother’s garden back where the game began. In juxtaposition to the previous level, the final brief stretch of gameplay facilitates Yarny’s easy passage via a skyful of sparkling fireflies that allow Yarny to float, flip, and fly above the ground, creating a dreamlike feeling of weightlessness and joy. He is lifted by a flurry of fireflies up onto the windowsill of the grandmother’s house where he is—rather unceremoniously—launched inside as a football hits the pane of the open window. Yarny’s hard-earned reward for his dutiful restoration of the photograph album comes in the form

178

E. REAY

of a little girl—presumably a grandchild—who flings open the door to the grandmother’s front room and skips towards the table. Yarny throws himself prostrate and feigns lifelessness while the little girl helps herself to a traditional Swedish cinnamon swirl. She grabs Yarny and examines him approvingly, before plonking him down on the table and running back outside into the garden. Toys teach us that the passage of time and the process of ageing are not linear, and do not end with death in the frozen cemetery—they are cyclic and continuous, always returning to the figure of the child. Yarny’s immortality and unending reincarnation rests on the permanence and persistence of his (im)material body. The warm, safe haven of the grandmother’s garden does not signify a final resting place but a transitional passage leading to reincarnation—it is the space preceding an invitation to Begin New Game. Yarny’s quick decision to hide his ‘aliveness’ from the granddaughter creates an opening for her to entwine her own imaginative aliveness with his physical form. That is to say, his inanimate state primes him for ghostly possession that will continue the unbroken chain of previous possessors, bridging the gap between grandmother and granddaughter. Having made bridges out of his body for the entire game, this mechanical metaphor is resolved as players understand Yarny’s true function: he is an intergenerational bridge. In fact, Unravel as a whole is a kind of bridge—between the physical and the digital, the past and the present, and childhood and adulthood. It cannot perfectly overlay the two locations, but it does make a strong case for the bridge between them being a valid destination in itself.

A Distant Someplace Else The bittersweetness arising from the paradox of ‘cuddly code’ in Unravel depends on the fact that its time travel conceit only offers a partial return to childhood. This is key for the game’s environmental message—players are supposed to yearn for the loss of the forests, plains, and coastlines associated with childly innocence. Players are meant to be aware of the gulf between their habitual inattention to the wonders of the natural world and the absorbed fascination Yarny’s perspective confers on these objects. Boel Westin argues that the ‘pain’ of nostalgia is rooted in the fact that “time, unlike space, cannot be returned to. Nostalgia becomes the reaction to that sad fact” (2021, p. 136). However, unlike films or novels, videogames are not a time-based medium: videogames are,

6

PLUSHIES, DOLLIES, AND ACTION FIGURINES

179

first and foremost, spaces. Consider how games journalist Keith Stuart describes his experience of playing the MMO battle-royale game Fortnite (Epic Games). I am playing Fortnite with my friend, the journalist and author Simon Parkin. He’s at home on the south coast of England, and I’m in my basement about 200 miles west, talking to him through a headset at 1 a.m. We’re trying to work out if we can get across Retail Row, one of the many set pieces on the Fortnite map. It’s a crisscross of wide-open avenues surrounded by stores and cafés, which provide perfect sniping positions for other players. My wife comes down and asks us to be quiet. It feels like being a kid again…Through a variety of clever design decisions, Epic has constructed a true digital Third Place, a hangout where players are given a huge amount of autonomy to seek out the experiences they want. As a child of the late 1970s and early 1980s, it hit me a few weeks ago that Fortnite feels like a skatepark. Or if you prefer, a drag strip. Or a surfing beach. Or a roller disco. It has a central function that draws people in, but more importantly, it provides a safe place to hang out, experiment, and mess around. To be free.

Fortnite allows Stuart to become a memory flaneur. Moving through in-game locales that remind him of the 70s and 80s elicits from Stuart an embodied performance of childhood—to the extent that other people (his friend and his wife) are drawn in as supporting actors. His experience of teleporting along his own developmental timeline resonates with the psychologist Pete Etchells’ account of replaying a videogame he enjoyed in his youth. The background noise of the arcade behind gives way and I become enshrouded in memories, like I’ve been transported back to that Portakabin again, from all those years ago. For a second, I imagine hearing my dad calling for me to come and join everyone for a spot of dinner. Playing that game, feeling the joystick and the buttons under my hands, is a visceral experience—much like when a long-forgotten aroma hits your nose and triggers the memory of your first love, or your favourite holiday. (2019, p. 26)

For Etchells, this moment is simultaneously sensory and spectral. It has tactile, auditory, and even olfactory components, and yet it is haunted by the ghost of his dead father, who summons him to an impossible elsewhere. In this collision of the nostalgic and the somatic, Etchells describes

180

E. REAY

being imaginatively transported to another place and another point in time, but he is equally suddenly aware of his present co-location with a child-self. When we think about childhood as a space rather than a time, the possibility of return becomes tantalisingly more concrete. Children’s Literature scholars have written reams on childhood as a “distant someplace else” (Sánchez-Eppler, 2021, p. 40). From Wonderland to Neverland to Narnia to Oz, childhood is staged in a bounded locale that is “separate from adult cares and worries, free from sexuality, outside social division, closer to nature and the primitive world, more fluid in its identity and its access to the realms of the imagination, beyond historical change, more just, pure, and innocent” (Jenkins, 1998, p. 4). Childhood, it seems, is a walled garden, replete with dormant bulbs waiting to be coaxed back to life. The difficulty lies in locating the doorway. It isn’t just exiled adults who are nostalgic for the Edenic garden of childhood. Children, too, fantasise about being admitted to this safe, secluded paradise. As Karen Sánchez-Eppler puts it, “for children, too, childhood can be an object of desire” (2005, p. xxvi). Lewis Carroll’s Alice is initially too big to pass through the little door that leads to “the loveliest garden you ever saw” in Alice in Wonderland. Her unquenchable longing to enter this idyllic environment triggers a series of disorienting bodily metamorphoses until eventually she meets all the entry criteria. Empirical children also need a cordoned-off, designated ‘someplace else’ in which to indulge in the fantasy of being a child. An ethnographic study by Dixon and Weber connected the virtual gamespace of Pikmin 3 to a secret hideout in a local alleyway that the child participants had claimed as their own. The researchers concluded, “both spaces serve to characterise the appeal of secret childhood spaces…they are spaces where a child might slip off alone escaping from daily demands; and they are places in which to fantasise and to dream” (Dixon & Weber, 2011, p. 486). For these children, experiencing the utopian ideal of childhood was dependent on their ability to travel elsewhere. What I am suggesting is that when children play these childly games with toylike avatars, they too might experience that same sense of having a meta-self—an inner child—play through them: child-players may also see childness not as a default state but as an elective mode of being that can occur under the right conditions, in the right context, with the right aids. In other words, the Inner Child is a performance of a set of qualities and behaviours, and many young people can perform this role with persuasive panache.

6

PLUSHIES, DOLLIES, AND ACTION FIGURINES

181

Childhood as a Magic Circle of Play I want to end by thinking through the overlap between the spatialisation of childhood and the spatialisation of play as a ‘magic circle’. Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman (2004) are credited with popularising the concept of a magic circle in Games Studies, a term that they adapted from Johan Huizinga’s foundational work Homo Ludens (1949/2016). Huizinga writes that play is a ‘secluded’ activity that “moves and has its being with a playground marked off beforehand either materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course”. The magic circle of play is, in Huizinga’s words, “isolated, hedged round, hallowed”. Although the value of the concept has been vigorously debated (e.g., Castronova, 2005; Consalvo, 2009; Taylor, 2006; Zimmerman, 2012), the magic circle is still used as a kind of conceptual shorthand within Games Studies to express the idea that play takes place within a separate, symbolic realm that exists outside of ordinary experience. ‘Magic’ transforms the meaning of events that occur within the circle, stripping them of their usual consequences and imbuing them with new significance. Within the magic circle, the rules and roles that govern the rest of our lives are temporarily rewritten. There are several ways to conjure a magic circle—the donning of special attire, the demarcating of an arena, vocal and gestural cues, or simply uttering the powerful incantation ‘Let’s Pretend’. Each is a means for inviting participants to engage in a different mode of being and to acknowledge the sovereignty of a new set of rules. Another foundational play theorist, Roger Caillois, built on Huizinga’s delineation of the magic circle of play, writing, “the game’s domain is…a restricted, closed, protected universe: a pure space” (1961, p. 7). His language mirrors the romanticised descriptions of childhood that are scrutinised by Childhood Studies scholars, who question whether children ever really get to “inhabit a safe, protected world of play, fantasy, and innocence” (Stephens, 1995, p. 14). Beyond ideas of protection, simplicity, and purity, the two imagined spaces share other qualities, such as the redistribution or removal of responsibility, the glorification of what would usually be considered materially trivial, the hamstringing of aggression, and the indulgence of inefficiency and non-productivity. Importantly, both spaces welcome imaginative projection. Jean Perrot claims that children’s experiences are “half-hallucinated” (2006, p. 102), echoing Jesper Juul’s suggestion that videogames are ‘half-real’. Young children are thought to be especially proficient at moving fluidly between material worlds and imagined worlds

182

E. REAY

(Turner & Harviainen, 2016), just as visitors to the magic circle are encouraged to overlay psychic significance onto in-game locations. The magic circle implies worlds-within-worlds in a way which resonates with Roland Barthes’ idea of the child-at-play as a ‘demiurge’, thinking and speaking life into existence (1957). Finally, games researchers Daniel Vella and Stephen Gualeni invoke the work of the phenomenologist Eugen Fink to argue that videogames constitute spaces in which “the illusory fixity of our everyday self” (2020) is undermined by a temporary awareness of one’s multiplicity. They take Fink’s assertion that humans are born with near limitless potential, and that over time one branch of that potential is actualised at the cost of all other possibilities: “the child is indeterminately everything, the old man is determinately little—we are born as many and die as one” (Fink, 1960/2015, p. 90). Stepping into the magic circle is akin to returning to a state of childly indeterminacy in that it reminds the player of the malleability of their selfhood. As Clementine Beauvais summarises, “the child embodies for the adult the possible return of indeterminacy in their own existences” (2015, p. 185). The doughy, deformable plasticity of the figure of child is perhaps less an invitation for domination and more an invitation for players to reciprocally soften. The games discussed in this chapter concertina personal timelines, transporting adult players into their pasts and bringing their childselves into the present. They fit the criteria of what Sari Edelstein terms an “anachronism”, which interrupts the experience of time as a linear phenomenon though “the intrusion of ostensibly outdated selves into the present” (2018, p. 80). Svetlana Boym makes a useful distinction between ‘restorative’ and ‘reflective’ nostalgia (2001). Where restorative nostalgia is inherently conservative and deceptive, reflective nostalgia is self-consciously creative, playful, and ironic. It resists teleologies that present the status quo as the natural outcome of an inexorable historical process. Considered thus, the intrusion of toys—and childselves—into the lives of adults is not just an anachronism that upsets linear trajectories of ageing: it is also an instruction to cultivate awareness of alternative modes of being and courses of action through imaginative experimentation. The digital toylike avatar is an intuitive subject position for players because it explains the alluring—but imperfectly fulfilled—promise of virtual gameworlds: enter this space and leave your time-bound, experientially marked, material self at the door.

6

PLUSHIES, DOLLIES, AND ACTION FIGURINES

183

J. M. Barrie laments that the conceptual spaces of childhood are tragically closed to adults, writing “the Neverland is always more or less an island” on whose “magic shores children at play are for ever beaching their coracles”. Although some adults “can still hear the sound of the surf”, they can no longer drop anchor and dock. If, as G. Stanley Hall claims, “men grow old because they stop playing”, then perhaps the ludic orientation of videogames can guide adult boats back to the shore. Videogames are both objects and spaces—toys and playgrounds, scripts and stages. As such, they can furnish players with a spatialisation of childhood—albeit a ‘flickering’ one that requires a sensory compromise (Keogh, 2018). To give Calleja’s concept of incorporation a spectral twist, when players haunt their childhoods, their childselves can possess their adult bodies. In fact, this ‘flickering’ quality is key to a successful séance because it disrupts the idea that adults have a stable, unified self. Straddling the Real and the Imagined reminds players that their identities consist of spatiotemporal fragments, and these echoes are distributed between objects, places, and moments in time. The renewed sense of an indeterminate self that is achieved through imaginative play is a renewed sense of childness.

References Allison, A. (2003). Portable monsters and commodity cuteness: Pokémon as Japan’s new global power. Postcolonial Studies, 6(3), 381–395. Barry, L. (2008). What it is. Drawn & Quarterly. Barthes, R. (1957). Mythologies, Collection Pierres Vives. Editions du Seuil. Beauvais, C. (2015). Mighty child: Time and power in children’s literature. Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition. John Benjamins Publishing Company. Bernstein, R. (2011). Racial innocence: Performing American childhood from slavery to civil rights. America and the Long 19th Century Book 16. New York University Press. Boym, S. (2001). The future of nostalgia. Basic Books. Caillois, R. (1961). Man, play, and games (M. Barash, Trans.). Free Press of Glencoe. Calleja, G. (2007). Revising immersion: A conceptual model for the analysis of digital game involvement. DiGRA Proceedings. http://www.digra.org/dig ital-library/publications/revising-immersion-a-conceptual-model-for-the-ana lysis-of-digital-game-involvement/

184

E. REAY

Castronova, E. (2005). Synthetic worlds: The business and culture of online games. University of Chicago Press. Cecire, M. S., Field, H., & Roy, M. (2015). Space and place in children’s literature, 1789 to the present (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi-org.soton.idm.oclc. org/10.4324/9781315610108 Clayton, N. (2020, November 5). Next week’s Fall Guys update adds big fans, tiny hammers. Rock Paper Shotgun. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/ next-weeks-fall-guysupdate-adds-big-fans-tiny-hammers Consalvo, M. (2009). There is no magic circle. Games and Culture, 4(4), 408– 417. Cross, G. (2004). The cute and the cool: Wondrous innocence and modern American children’s culture. Oxford University Press. Dale, J. P. (2017). The appeal of the cute object: Desire, domestication, and agency. In J. P. Dale, J. Goggin, J. Leyda, A. Mcintyre, & D. Negra (Eds.), The aesthetics and affects of cuteness (pp. 35–56). Routledge. Dixon, S., & Weber, S. (2011). Playspaces, childhood and videogames. In S. Giddings (Ed.), The new media & technocultures reader (pp. 479–490). Routledge. Edelstein, S. (2018). Adulthood and other fictions: American literature and the unmaking of age. Oxford University Press. Etchells, P. (2019). Lost in a good game: Why we play video games and what they can do for us. Icon Books. Fink E. (1960/2015). Play as Symbol of the World and Other Writings. In I. A. Moore & C. Turner (Ed. and trans.). Indiana University Press. Gualeni, S., & Vella, D. (2020). Virtual existentialism: Meaning and subjectivity in virtual worlds. Palgrave Macmillan. Haidt, J., & Sherman, G. D. (2011). Cuteness and disgust: The humanizing and dehumanizing effects of emotion. Emotion Review, 3(3), 245–251. Harris, D. (2000). Cute, quaint, hungry and romantic: The aesthetics of consumerism. Basic Books. Heljakka, K. (2012). Aren’t you a doll! Toying with avatars in digital playgrounds. Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds., 4(2), 153–217. Heljakka, K., & Harviainen, J. T. (2019). From displays and dioramas to doll dramas: Adult world building and world playing with toys. American Journal of Play, 11(3), 351–378. Huizinga, J. (1949/2016). Homo Ludens: A study of the play-element in culture. Beacon Press. Jaques, Z. (2015). Children’s literature and the posthuman: Animal, environment, cyborg, children’s literature and culture. Routledge. Jaques, Z. (2021). Always Playing: The spectral nostalgia of cinematic Pooh. In J. Harrison (Ed.) Positioning Pooh: Edward Bear after one hundred years. University Press of Mississippi.

6

PLUSHIES, DOLLIES, AND ACTION FIGURINES

185

Jenkins, H. (1998). Introduction. In H. Jenkins (Ed.), The children’s culture reader. New York University Press. Keogh, B. (2018). A play of bodies: How we perceive videogames. MIT Press. Lancaster, K. (2001). Interacting with Babylon 5. University of Texas Press. Lorenz, K. (1950/1971). Part and parcel in human and animal societies. In R. Martin (Trans.), Studies in animal and human behaviour (Vol. 2). Harvard University Press. Milne, A., & Shepard, E. (Illustrator). (2011). The house at Pooh Corner. Egmont. Ngai, S. (2012). Our aesthetic categories: Zany, cute, interesting. Harvard University Press. Phillips, A. (2018). Shooting to kill: Headshots, twitch reflexes, and the mechropolitics of video games. Games and Culture, 13(2), 136–152. Pizarro, D. A., Detweiler-Bedell, B., & Bloom, P. (2006). The creativity of everyday moral reasoning: Empathy, disgust and moral persuasion. In J. C. Kaufman & J. Baer (Eds.), Creativity and reason in cognitive development (pp. 81–98). Cambridge University Press. Perrot, J. (2006). Shall we burn our goddess theory? CCL/LCJ: Canadian Children’s Literature/Littérature canadienne pour la jeunesse, 32(1). Ramirez, J. (2022). Rules of the father in the last of us: Masculinity among the ruins of neoliberalism. Springer International Publishing AG. Ruba. (2021). It takes two: Cutie the elephant AKA the Queen—Sad death scene. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAa_FQm7hcU Salen, K., & Zimmerman, E. (2004). Rules of play: Game design fundamentals. MIT Press. Sánchez-Eppler, K. (2005). Dependent states: The child’s part in nineteenthcentury American culture. University of Chicago Press. Sánchez-Eppler, K. (2021). Keywords for children’s literature (2nd ed., P. Nel, L. Paul, & N. Christensen, Eds., pp. 38–41). New York University Press. https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479885435.003.0016 Steedman, C. (1995). Strange dislocations: Childhood and the idea of human interiority 1780–1930. Harvard University Press. Stephens, S. (1995). Children and the politics of culture. Princeton University Press. Stuart, K. (2018). Fortnite is so much more than a game. Medium. https://gen. medium.com/fortnite-is-so-much-more-than-a-game-3ca829f389f4 Taylor, T. (2006). Play between worlds: Exploring online game culture. MIT Press. Turner, P., & Harviainen, J. (Eds.). (2016). Digital make-believe. Springer. Vella, D. (2015). No mastery without mystery: Dark Souls and the Ludic Sublime. Game Studies, 15, 1. Webber, J. E. (2020). Playing with the dead. BBC Radio 4. https://www.bbc. co.uk/programmes/m000nv36

186

E. REAY

Westin, B. (2021). Keywords for children’s literature (2nd ed., P. Nel, L. Paul, & N. Christensen, Eds., pp. 136–139). New York University Press. https://doi. org/10.18574/nyu/9781479885435.003.0045 Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and reality. Penguin. Zimmerman, E. (2012, February 7). Jerked around by the magic circle. Gamasutra. https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/135063/jerked_aro und_by_the_magic_circle_.php. Accessed January 2020.

CHAPTER 7

The Kid in the Fridge

Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey (Ubisoft)

The temple is dimly lit and at first I don’t notice poor, little Phoibe slumped against a pillar. However, when the two guards standing over the child’s lifeless body clock the player-character, Kassandra,1 a combat sequence is immediately initiated. With little regard for my own health bar, I attack the guards with everything I’ve got, including my newly upgraded fire sword ability. The guards sizzle with small flame icons above their heads, screaming and cursing in Greek. “I ordered medium-rare”, I tell one lightly roasted guard as I impale him on my sword. Hammy acting feels appropriate for this level of melodrama. Then I accidentally stab a civilian who happens to be in the temple too.

1 Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey allows players to choose the gender of their avatar by selecting one of the two siblings—Kassanda or Alexios—to be the protagonist. When given the option, I always choose to play as a female character, but because this chapter unpacks constructions of masculinity, I also researched playthroughs where players had chosen Alexios to note points of overlap and contrast.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 E. Reay, The Child in Videogames, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42371-0_7

187

188

E. REAY

My health bar flashes red. I usually prefer stealth and ranged attacks because I enjoy combat that feels like a puzzle, but on some level I’m aware that this sequence is more about role-playing than it is about careful strategy or technical ability. On-screen I roleplay blind rage expressed as a violent outburst, but off-screen my emotional state is better described as mildly annoyed. Killing Phoibe is like kicking a puppy—a lazy way to get a reaction. I toast the final guard and a cut scene begins. Kassandra dashes towards Phoibe’s limp body, cupping her face in her hands and begging her to get up. Realising that the child is already dead, she sheds silent tears and offers up a short prayer to Mother Earth before kissing Phoibe on the head and returning to her the wooden eagle that symbolises their filial bond. Kassandra murmurs “aniazo”—Ancient Greek for “griefstricken”—and walks away, while the camera pans over Phoibe’s small, slack body, coming to rest on her hands cradling the children’s toy. I’m crying and I hate it.

Dead children are everywhere and nowhere in contemporary videogames. My survey of digital kids showed that while many videogames protect their child-characters by making them either invincible or invisible, a startlingly high number had their significant childcharacters killed off in cutscenes. In fact, of the fifty-nine named child NPCs recorded in my dataset, twenty-one died violent deaths, their lives cut short by drownings, shootings, stabbings, hangings, intentional traffic collisions, cannibalism, murderous religious rituals, and giant spider attacks. Children’s Literature scholar Susan Tan writes, “the vision of the dead child is one of the most horrific images in our cultural imaginations. It is also one of the most pervasive” (2013, p. 54). She traces the literary history of child sacrifice from Isaac’s near death at his father’s hand in Judeo-Christian texts, through Medea’s murder of her own children, to the virtuous, self-sacrificing children that populate sentimental Victorian novels, and concludes with Suzanne Collins’s contemporary young adult book series The Hunger Games. This chapter extends Tan’s documentation of the omnipresence of ‘the sacrificial child’ in literature to explore its significance in contemporary videogames. Drawing across feminist

7

THE KID IN THE FRIDGE

189

theorisations of the “woman-in-the-refrigerator” trope (Simone, 1999), I argue that the dead child is a powerful tool for resolving ludonarrative dissonance, promoting player-avatar identification, and eliciting strong affective responses. However, in replacing nuance and ambiguity with certainty and purpose, the dead child legitimises an extreme, aggressive form of vengeful, militarised, masculine violence in the guise of reasonable, responsible, protective paternalism.

The Sacrificial Child The figure of the sacrificial child has a long literary history and has generated an equally expansive body of critical writing (e.g., Houen, 2002; Mizruchi, 1998; Nussbaum, 1997; Sanchéz-Eppler, 2005; Tan, 2013). However, the sacrificial child in videogames has yet to be fully explored. The Little Sisters in the first two Bioshock games—who can be sacrificed by the player in exchange for important resources—have been analysed as central components in the games’ moral trolley problems (e.g., Parker & Aldred, 2018), but I’m defining a ‘sacrificial child’ as one whose death is a non-optional plot point that cannot be avoided through player intervention. In fact, I am particularly interested in how the withdrawal and reinstantiation of player agency either side of the child’s death contribute to a game’s presentation of power and control. Using the woman-in-the-refrigerator trope as an interpretive lens reveals the gendered nature of this conditional allocation of power. The term ‘woman in the refrigerator’ refers to issue 54 of the Green Lantern comic, in which the titular superhero returns home to find that his girlfriend has been murdered by his enemies and her body has been stuffed into the fridge. Gail Simone coined the term in 1999 to describe the trend of female comic book characters being brutalised or killed as a plot device designed to move the male protagonist’s story arc forward. Anita Sarkeesian (2013) builds on the dataset crowd-sourced by Simone to document the use of the woman-in-the-refrigerator trope in videogames. Sarkeesian notes that, “although these stories use female trauma as the catalyst to set the plot elements in motion, these are not stories about women. Nor are they concerned with the struggles of women navigating the mental, emotional, and physical ramifications of violence”. Invariably, videogame narratives that use the woman-in-the-refrigerator trope are strictly male-centred stories in which the tragic damsels are just “empty shells” whose deaths have a much greater impact on the plot than their

190

E. REAY

lives. Sarkeesian concludes that the true source of the male hero’s torment in these games is not the loss of the deceased individual, but his feelings of weakness and guilt over his failure to perform his socially prescribed, patriarchal duty of protecting his woman. The release of Sarkeesian’s YouTube series ‘Tropes vs Women in Video Games’ in 2013 contributed to a larger movement within feminist games scholarship, games journalism, and game design that drew attention to the misogyny inherent in the ‘fridged wife’ trope. As a result of these interventions, the trope has been gender-bent, ironised, or dropped altogether in several recent games. The Last of Us, Part II (Naughty Dog, 2020), for example, has its young, female protagonist embark on a violent revenge quest after witnessing the murder of her surrogate father. Similarly, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice (Ninja Theory, 2017) sees a young, female Norse warrior descend into hell to retrieve her male lover’s soul. However, the decline of the damsel in distress trope has not slowed the rise of the damselette-in-distress. Although Sarkeesian lists a number of games that feature both a fridged wife and a fridged child (e.g., Max Payne, God of War) or, more commonly, a fridged wife and a damseled child (e.g., Outlaws, Kane & Lynch: Dead Men, Prototype 2, Inversion, Asura’s Wrath, Dishonored), there has been a shift over the last ten years away from using a murdered woman as a plot catalyst to using a murdered child. The kid in the refrigerator serves a similar function to the womanin-the-refrigerator and yet, despite frequently being female, the fridged child has thus far evaded accusations of sexism. Gary Cross (2004) argues that Western society requires a social group to concurrently symbolise both weakness and goodness. In combination, these qualities comprise a conception of “purity” that must be protected from corruption through systemic paternalism. Since the feminist revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s demanded that women be released from this symbolic function, the burden “was shifted to the child” (p. 6). J. Jesse Ramirez frames this in terms of contemporary neoliberalism. He argues that in the age of Fordist masculinity, “bad men could pivot away from the extremes of hegemonic masculinity without appearing emasculated” through the love and attention of a virtuous woman. But under neoliberalism, the aggrieved ex-patriarch’s perspective has shaped cultural narratives of fatherhood that blame working, sexually progressive women for seeking their own fulfilment and neglecting their duty, namely, to make men and children decent. Since mothers and wives

7

THE KID IN THE FRIDGE

191

are scapegoats for neoliberalism’s heartlessness, children must step into their role as the external innocence and virtue that transforms men. (2022, p. 65)

It makes sense, then, that we should find a similar transition in videogames negotiating constructions of masculinity. Sarkeesian lists the characteristics of the fridged wife as “purity, innocence, kindness, beauty, or sensuality” (2013). Although the fridged child is rarely overtly sexualised, contemporary understandings of childhood as a sacrosanct age of sincerity, guilelessness, and innocence (Robinson, 2008) mean that the sacrificial child can perform purity with even greater assurance than the fridged wife. Furthermore, the paternalism of the adult avatar is rendered seemingly reasonable, apolitical, and inoffensive when it is directed towards a young person rather than towards a woman. Positioning the child sacrifice as an evolution of the fridged wife illuminates the heterosexism and violent masculinities behind child deaths in contemporary mainstream action games. This is important when one considers the fact that some games that lean heavily on the trope of the child sacrifice, such as Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, have been praised for their progressive depictions of gender and sexuality. The theoretical framing of this chapter helps to expose the latent misogyny inherent in the child sacrifice by pointing to the fact that maturity—defined in terms of mastery and agency—is equated with masculinity, while the cultural conditions of childhood—vulnerability, innocence, and dependence—continue to be coded as feminine. Sari Edelstein argues that “adulthood” refers to “the period of life associated with autonomy, legal and political rights, financial independence, and the initiation of a heteronormative life trajectory. Adulthood functions less as a biological status than a social achievement” (2018, p. 4). She concludes that adulthood is “best understood as an ideal rather than an inevitability,” since social groups that are denied full emancipation on account of race, gender, ability, or class are prevented from attaining adult privileges. Adulthood is, in Edelstein’s words, “unevenly dispensed” (2018, p. 146). The connection between the infantilisation and the disenfranchisement of women can prompt a desire to disavow and sever connections between childhood and femininity. However, in an age in which adulthood is characterised by individualism, self-reliance, and independence, standing in solidarity with the child is one way to protest against the unequal distribution of adult advantages across genders, as well as against the pathologising of care, assistance, and interdependence

192

E. REAY

in adulthood. I would like to briefly note here that the pronouns ‘he’ and ‘him’ are used to refer to the protagonist of Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey throughout this analysis, despite the game giving players the option to choose the gender of their avatar. The implications of choosing the female avatar, Kassandra, instead of the male avatar, Alexios, are discussed at the end of this chapter.

Types of Child Death Child deaths in videogames are not all alike. In this chapter, I’m specifically interested in a subset of digital child deaths that parallel the woman-in-the-refrigerator trope. The woman-in-the-refrigerator blueprint suggests two key criteria that can be used to distinguish the ‘child in the refrigerator’ from other dead virtual children. Firstly, the child’s death must be more significant than its life; secondly, the child’s death must harden the adult protagonist, inuring him to future suffering and strengthening his resolve to harm others. These criteria rule out several of the dead child-characters I came across while compiling my survey. The death of four-year-old Joel in That Dragon, Cancer (Numinous Games, 2016), for example, has a profound effect on the adult protagonists, but because these adults ultimately process their loss through interpersonal connection, self-reflection, and the nurture of their surviving children it does not meet the criteria outlined above. That is to say, since a key part of their grieving process involves the adults lowering their shield of resilience, the death of their son softens rather than hardens. Despite Jason’s death in Heavy Rain (Quantic Dream, 2010) being more meaningful than his short and unremarkable life, he is also excluded from the category of child sacrifice because his death has an atrophic effect on the adult protagonist, Ethan Mars. Ethan becomes withdrawn, listless, and pathetic following Jason’s death, and his grief-induced weakness renders him unfit for his role as husband and father. In contrast, the abduction of Ethan’s second son, Shaun, transforms Ethan into a fierce, reckless, death-dealing brute who competes in a series of violent, harrowing challenges to redeem himself as a paternal protector. Shaun, therefore, qualifies as a child sacrifice. Sarah’s murder during the exposition of The Last of Us (Naughty Dog, 2013) is a paradigmatic child sacrifice: when fleeing a zombie outbreak, Sarah is shot by a policeman and dies in her father’s arms. The bullet that kills her simultaneously destroys the wristwatch she had gifted her

7

THE KID IN THE FRIDGE

193

father for his birthday just hours earlier. Her father continues to wear this watch for the rest of the series, despite it not functioning as anything other than a timestamp for his daughter’s murder. Sarah’s death becomes the cornerstone of her father’s personality, and this moment of transformation—his rebirth as a hard, cold, closed, ruthless smuggler—is marked as a point of discontinuity through the symbol of the shattered clockface. J. Jesse Ramirez (2022) has pointed out that Joel’s final words to his dying daughter are “Don’t do this to me”, suggesting her death is something that happens to him rather than to her. Researcher, designer, and critic mattie brice summarises the rhetorical function of Sarah’s character perfectly, writing, her death has little to do with her, rather, to explain why Joel is the way he is. It’s a dad’s version of fridging a girlfriend at the beginning of the game; the more ‘mature’ option is to kill a daughter. (2013, n.p.)

The following analysis demonstrates that, as with the woman-in-therefrigerator, the child is sacrificed so that the adult, male protagonist can gain new power. When the child is sacrificed, the adult is purged of his hesitancy, his self-doubt, and his cowardice. The child sacrifice pre-emptively absolves the adult of his future sins, giving him licence to be ruthless, violent, and bloodthirsty. The child’s death impels action without compunction by creating a schematic moral superstructure that overrides all other ethical concerns. In this way, the figure of the child sacrifice liberates the adult man from both apathy and empathy. By integrating close readings of Shadya’s death in Assassin’s Creed: Origins (Ubisoft, 2017) and Phoibe’s death in Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey (Ubisoft, 2018) with comments left on video walkthroughs created by The Bleach Keeper (2017) and Zanar Aesthetics (2018) respectively, this chapter posits that the central function of the sacrificial child is to resolve ludonarrative dissonance by framing the hero’s homicidal actions as morally defensible. Ludonarrative dissonance is a term coined by Clint Hocking (2009) to describe the sense that a game’s mechanics—its rule-based systems and the interactions available to the player—are at odds with the game’s fictional framing. In the case of these Assassin’s Creed games, the narrative context presents the protagonists as noble, rational, compassionate heroes, while the mechanics limit their actions to remorseless slaughter. This chapter also suggests that fatherly forms of masculinity are used

194

E. REAY

to excuse and even glorify brutal, tyrannical, militaristic models of masculinity. I conclude that the Assassin’s Creed games sanction a kind of pleasure latent in the pain of losing a child. The righteous rage occasioned by the child’s death precipitates action, challenge, and excitement: it can foment intense emotional engagement, then provide satisfying opportunities for adrenaline-fuelled catharsis.

Affection, Anxiety, and Agency The figure of the sacrificial child leads players on an emotional journey from anxious attachment, through painful dispossession, to a satisfying slew of wrathful retribution. The characters of Phoibe and Shadya are designed to elicit feelings of affection through their cheery, playful, loveable demeanours. Phoibe, the protagonist’s orphaned protégé in Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, is mischievous, adventurous, energetic, frank, confident, and fun-loving. The admiration that she expresses for the protagonist is flattering, and she provides some light-hearted, comic relief. Early in the game, for example, she is kidnapped by thugs and, upon being rescued by the protagonist, nonchalantly informs him, “It wasn’t so bad. Last time they put a cloth in my mouth so I’d stop biting.” When the protagonist leaves the island of Kephallonia to pursue his destiny, a breathless Phoibe meets him at the docks, desperate to accompany him. The protagonist declines out of concern for Phoibe’s safety, and so she offers him her favourite toy in her stead as a sentimental token of their filial bond—a carved wooden eagle gifted to her by her dead mother. This gesture is designed to endear her to players as well as to suggest there is a fateful connection between Phoibe and the protagonist. During interactions with Phoibe, players are presented with dialogue choices that allow them to praise her, lecture her, or to ask her questions about herself. Although these dialogue choices do not significantly alter narrative events, they transfer ownership of the protagonist’s fond indulgence of Phoibe from the avatar to players themselves. Having players decide upon the manner and the extent to which they show affection to Phoibe engages our “emotions of agency” (Isbister, 2016), thereby making players feel responsible for the state of their relationship with the young child. Shadya’s character in Assassin’s Creed: Origins is likewise designed to endear her to players. Her sweet personality is briefly sketched in two

7

THE KID IN THE FRIDGE

195

short cutscenes: in the first, Shadya’s father—who is a political fugitive— has asked the protagonist, Bayek, to deliver a doll to his daughter to comfort her in his absence. When Bayek kneels before the little girl to present her with the doll, she is giddy with excitement. She gushes, “Oh, I love my new doll, Bayek! I will name her Iset, and she will be the protector of all Faiyum,” before making the doll give Bayek a kiss on the forehead. In this tender exchange, the perennially sombre, stoic, formidable Bayek smiles and laughs freely: being in the presence of this sunny child seems to instantly improve Bayek’s mood. Shadya then makes herself useful to players by guiding Bayek to her house to show him the location of a ledger that her father has stolen so that Bayek can retrieve it during a later mission. On route, she calls Bayek “Uncle”, and he fondly refers to her as “Little One,” establishing a closeness and familiarity between them. Players are inclined to share Bayek’s warm feelings towards Shadya, not only by virtue of player-avatar identity entanglement, but also because she assists players in achieving a ludic goal, thus presenting herself as both a source of diegetic joy and ludic service. Having constructed the sacrificial children as precious and adorable, these games go to great lengths to emphasise their vulnerability, prompting feelings of parental anxiety in players. In the second cutscene that centres on Shadya, for example, her sensitivity to the beauty of the world is juxtaposed with her naivety about its dangers. Shadya’s family have taken a stand against a powerful, clandestine figure called the Crocodile, who is an influential member of the enemy sect known as the Order of Ancients. Shadya’s father, Hotephres, has stolen a ledger that contains information about the identity of the Crocodile and has stashed it in his house until such time as Bayek can retrieve it. When Bayek tells Shadya that she needs to be careful, she responds, “Nothing bad can ever happen to me. Iset can fight, you know! She will protect me.” Shadya’s faith in the combat ability of her straw doll reflects her childly innocence, suggesting that the player’s duty is not only to preserve her life but also to safeguard her optimism. That is to say, ridding the gameworld of evil-doers feels like a more concrete calling when one has a personal connection to a future inhabitant of that player-inaugurated utopia. Assassin’s Creed: Origins repeatedly foreshadows Shadya’s death, stoking players’ solicitousness over her well-being and priming them to intervene in her fate. When Bayek eventually goes to collect the ledger, he finds the Order of Ancients have already ransacked Shadya’s house. What is more, they have discovered Shadya’s diary in which she confesses

196

E. REAY

to having absconded with the ledger in the hope that removing it from the family home will allow her father to return. The player discovers that The Order has slaughtered Shadya’s pet dog and impaled her doll on a javelin—both of which are heavy hints at the kinds of violence they will wreak on Shadya herself. Despite there being no ludic time limit during this sequence, players are motivated to collate clues about The Order’s movements with a heightened sense of urgency. They discover that Shadya and her mother have been taken to a nearby lighthouse. Players race to the docks, where they find Shadya’s mother kneeling at the end of a pier weeping and whispering Shadya’s name. Heads-Up Display text appears that reads “Objective in Proximity,” prompting players to use Bayek’s eagle to survey the area. The eagle identifies a target, but it is far out at sea, raising questions as to whether Shadya is being held on a ship, or has been stranded on a rock, or thrown overboard. The latter concern is captured by commenter @LickNames in the (unintentional?) pun, That sinking feeling you get when you see the marker hit over water.

Some players may commandeer a nearby boat, while others might plunge directly into the ocean and swim out to the location marker. On arrival, Shadya cannot be seen from the surface, but if players dive underwater they will find her drowned body, tied by her ankles to a rock on the sea floor. The soft, haunting music and the pitiful smallness of Shadya’s body combine to elicit feelings of grief, while Shadya’s upturned face bobbing just below the surface of the water taunts the player with the thought that she died still fighting for survival. Swimming towards Shadya triggers a cut scene that wrests agency from players and prevents them from being able to interact with Shadya. There is, after all, nothing more they can do for the dead girl. Both Shadya’s death scene and Phoibe’s death scene undermine the player’s role as a protector by suspending player agency with a cut scene. Through the bestowal and subsequent retraction of agency, the child sacrifice can engage one of the most powerful emotions elicited through interaction: guilt. As Katherine Isbister (2016) argues, “[t]his capacity to evoke actual feelings of guilt from a fictional experience is unique to games” (p. 9). She claims that while a reader or a filmgoer may feel strong emotions when presented with horrific fictional acts on the page or screen, “responsibility and guilt are generally not among them. At most, they may feel a sense of uneasy collusion” (p. 9). In both Assassin’s Creed games,

7

THE KID IN THE FRIDGE

197

guilt is simultaneously experienced vicariously through empathy with the protagonists and felt first-hand by the players. A commenter using the handle @TheDudeHimself notes, Man Bayek must have been fucked up inside after that shit, he must’ve felt as though he had failed as a guardian, not just to Khemu, but now Shadya—which explains his reaction when he meets the Crocodile

The sense of failure that this commenter ascribes to Bayek is felt directly by another commenter, @SpringtimeJean, who writes, There is no way to save her I feel like I messed up.

Bayek’s “failure” as a guardian is experienced directly by the player as a ludic failure. Similarly, in relation to Phoibe’s death, @BigFool writes, I tried to restart this scene to see if I can save her by killing the guards as quick as possible…I failed…saw Phoebe [sic] die twice that day…

This comment indicates two things: firstly, the player’s expectation of agency was so strong that initially it did not register that their ability to impact the narrative, and secondly, even after they had acknowledged Phoibe’s death was unavoidable, they continued to experience a sense of failure. The remedy for the negative affect triggered by failure is to prove one’s mastery through a series of ludic triumphs: the antidote to guilt is pride. Guilt and pride are both emotions of agency, and so they are elicited primarily through interactions (Wright, 2007). The central interactive mechanics in the Assassin’s Creed games are freerunning through open-world environments amid bouts of violent combat. In order to intuitively connect pride and violence, the games must convince players that murderous revenge is an appropriate expression of grief. This is executed, in part, through dialogue between characters. Bayek tries to console Shadya’s bereaved father by promising to murder his child’s killer. Her father laments, “none of that will bring Shadya back,” but Bayek rejoinders, “No, but at least you will have the comfort of revenge. We both will.... I will find this monster, friend. He will die.” The solidarity expressed in Bayek’s promise “we both will” implicitly pledges the player’s aid in this quest for vengeance, and the almost oxymoronic link between

198

E. REAY

comfort and murder makes it plain that the path to a satisfying conclusion is littered with the bodies of one’s enemies. Furthermore, the reductive moral binary established by the child’s murder is captured in the extreme juxtaposition of “monster” and “friend.” A similar exchange follows Phoibe’s death in Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey. With gritted teeth and clenched fists, the protagonist swears, “I won’t let them get away with this,” to which Aspasia—Phoibe’s sympathetic employer—responds, “You have to fight. For her.” Her use of the imperative underscores the seemingly irrefutable logic that connects the death of a child to extreme retributive violence. Berkowitz and Cornell (2005) argue that “what vengeance offers in response to trauma and loss is the fantasy of control” (p. 316). In a sense, the Assassin’s Creed games reverse engineer this process, justifying the pleasure of agency by locating it within the context of traumatic loss.

Violent Retribution and the Hardness of Masculinity Killing a child is considered such a heinous crime that it demands a degree of punishment exceeding all standard executions of justice. Shadya and Phoibe are deliberately earmarked for assassination because of their connection to the player character and, by extension, to the player. This makes the games’ villains irredeemable and authorises the player to exact a heavy price for the loss of each child. Since the murder of children is widely condemned as being “worse” than the murder of adults (Meyer, 2007), the bodies of hundreds of adult henchmen and bosses do not outweigh the body of the dead child when measured on the scales of justice. Commenters seem to differentiate between the murders of adults and the murders of children. One commenter, @Brutus, responds to the video of Phoibe’s death with, Before this point, things seem quite light hearted [sic]. There was [sic] killings here and there and mutilated bodies, but nothing too bad. Until this. I was genuinely shook that they killed off a little child.

Both Phoibe and Shadya’s deaths are less gory than most playerperpetrated killings, and yet they are felt to be more distressing. The games themselves work to sacralise the children’s deaths by having them take place off-screen, with the implication being that a child’s death is

7

THE KID IN THE FRIDGE

199

too horrific to be depicted. In short, killing a child is presented as such a dastardly perversion of moral norms that it initiates circumstances in which the vigilante hero’s bloodbath of vengeance can be understood as an expression of love and care. The validity of violence in the name of the child sacrifice is recognised by commenters. @StarrySmilez notes, Used to kill the cult member [sic] only to upgrade Leonidas spear, now I’m killing them for a [sic] revenge.

The child’s death turns the practical mercenary into a noble hero, and this same rhetorical move transforms the empty, violent man into a loving, righteous patriarch. The protagonist in Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey expresses his grief as anger, and Aspasia’s recommendation is that he exorcises these negative emotions through action. Commenters seem to respond in kind, with @Devilman stating, The one mission that made me really angry and inspired to kill the enemy

And @ElN adding, When Phoebe [sic] died it hit me so hard I banged my table and was about to cry [two tears-streaming emojis] she was the best [sad face emoji]

The latter comment received one thousand upvotes from other viewers of the video, suggesting the collocation of pain and rage was a widely relatable response. In his autoethnographic analysis of The Last of Us, J. Jesse Ramirez turns to the work of psychology Jonathan Frome to interpret the tears he shed over the death of Joel’s daughter, Sarah. He quotes Frome, noting “crying occurs in situations where the crier perceives themselves to be helpless; crying indicates surrender to the situation causing emotional arousal and the cessation of actions aiming change it” (2022, p. 33, my italics). In an interactive medium, the ‘cessation of actions’ must be quickly remedied for play to continue. Anger has a hardening effect on grief. The fluidity of tears must be balanced by the solidity of a clenched fist, or of a blunt weapon. Commenter @GregoryBaker reflects, I was So [sic] pissed at this point that I chain killed the first three [guards surrounding Phoibe] then switched to a heavey [sic] blunt weapon to take out the last guy. The death animation as Kassandra beat the man over the

200

E. REAY

head and kicked him in the face was extra satisfying. // Ps. This is the only time I used a bunt [sic] weapon.

The death animation is an instance of ludic feedback that affirms the player’s success, and so the intensification of gore can be read as the narrative equivalent of a high score, eliciting the same feelings of triumph. The visual display of brute strength is enhanced by rumble feedback via the controller, which reinforces players’ experience of the game’s responsiveness to their input and validates their entitlement to agency within the gameworld. Arguably, Phoibe’s death makes this familiar mechanic feel ‘extra satisfying’ in part because it resolves ludonarrative dissonance. The sacrificial child is key to reconciling ‘hard’, violent mechanics with the narrative characterisation of the protagonist as a decent, moral person. Amanda Phillips (2017) posits that the fixation on “hard” masculinities in videogames restricts characters to “a limited range of emotional and physical responses. Anger and violence, with their obvious shows of strength and rejection of weakness, predominate”. Bayek is often presented as sensitive and compassionate in cut scenes, but under the player’s direction his behaviour mostly consists of throat-slitting, bludgeoning, and skewering. Similarly, the protagonist of Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey butchers Spartans, Athenians, Cultists, thugs, mercenaries, gladiators, pirates, politicians, and even mythical creatures from Greek legends, yet is still revered as a sympathetic, kind, fair saviour. The central function of the child sacrifice is to assuage the ludonarrative dissonance inherent in the idea of a benevolent, virtuous protagonist whose primary mode of interaction with the world is limited to lethal violence. The interweaving of the player’s ludic goals and the game’s overarching narrative is apparent in the dialogue exchanged after Shadya’s death. Hotephres expresses his hopelessness: “It is over. The Crocodile has won. The ledger, lost. My daughter … my Shadya …. He has taken everything from us.” Hotephres repeats the possessive pronoun ‘my’ and uses ludic language (“won,” “lost”) as if he were describing the current game state. Bayek’s response is to demand a rematch: “He will pay for this. And all those who serve him.” Hotephres frames his daughter’s murder as something that was “taken” from him—he was robbed of a possession, and Bayek’s oath is that he will ensure the thief “pays” for what was stolen. The child sacrifice is a debt to be paid, a score to be settled. Players experience a dispossession that parallels the loss felt by the characters: they are barred from further interactions with a likeable character,

7

THE KID IN THE FRIDGE

201

and they are stripped of their status as heroic guardian. This speaks to Sarkeesian’s observation that the murder of the fridged wife is a direct assault upon the hero’s masculinity. Revenge makes sense not because, as Hotephres himself notes, it will bring back the dead child, but because it will restore the man’s sense of self. Steven Conway (2020) posits that the vengeance narrative is “the most hypermasculine of narrative tropes” because it centres on a protagonist who “seeks to dominate those who once emasculated him” (p. 945). That fatherhood is another form of masculinity rather than a relational status is evident in the fact that the protagonist can reclaim his right to patrimony simply by exerting power over his enemies, with or without the continuing existence of his progeny. The conversation between Bayek and Hotephres about winning and losing takes place while the two men watch Shadya’s mother cradle her daughter’s newly mummified corpse as she gasps her way through a lullaby. The impotent pathos of maternal care is contrasted with the masculine imperative to act. If victims are acted upon—and their objectification is presented as feminising and infantilising—then perpetrators are subjects who act, and the role of perpetrator is inherently masculine. In inviting players to act, then, the game offers up a masculine subject position—that of the aggressor. The barring of ‘women and children’ from the category of combatants in these games speaks to a wider issue concerning the gendered nature of the civilian–combatant distinction in contemporary society. As R. Charli Carpenter (2006) notes, this distinction is not only gendered but also aged: “The category ‘women and children’ conflates infants, who are indeed both innocent and vulnerable, with adult women and adolescents who may be neither” (p. 2). The alignment of childishness and femininity means that both identities function as foils to bolster definitions of masculinity while also positioning men as active, deliberate agents and ‘women and children’ as passive recipients of either violence or protection.

Lights, Child Death, Action Sarkeesian notes that the wife’s death is a call to arms for the bereaved husband. The child sacrifice has a similarly galvanising effect on a game’s narrative. The exposition of Assassin’s Creed: Origins , for example, reveals that Bayek’s decision to join the Hidden Ones—a secret, transhistorical, transcultural society of assassins who defend individual liberty against evolving cabals of megalomaniacal oligarchs—is motivated by the death of

202

E. REAY

his young son, Khemu. Khemu is accidentally killed by Bayek’s own hand when they are both captured by the Order of Ancients. Bayek attempts to stab one of his captors, who swerves aside in such a way as to guide the dagger into Khemu’s heart. Bereft of a child to protect, Bayek takes an oath to protect all Egyptians from the machinations of the Order, thus establishing the game’s goals and initiating the game’s narrative action. Commenter @JuanitodelGlobo identifies Phoibe’s death scene as That moment when you decide to hunt them all down.

And a commenter using the handle @StreamrGamr writes, Me before: Meh cult, I’ll explore the entirety of Greece first Me After: When I’m through with the Cult, Hades will curse my name for making the underworld so busy

This comment not only expresses the child sacrifice’s catalysing effect on narrative pacing but also hints at its impact on player identification with the avatar. The shared sense of purpose that now connects the game’s violent mechanics with a reasonable narrative explanation has the player combining diegetic language (“Hades will curse my name”) with possessive pronouns, suggesting a close affinity between player and avatar. The narrative injustice of the murder of a child correlates with a sense of ludic injustice that arises from the subversion of the player’s expectations of agency. The player and the protagonist can both lay claim to legitimate personal grievances and therefore share a common motivation for the bloody annihilation of in-game antagonists. Following the child’s death, players can interpret their in-games actions as more than the pragmatic fulfilment of an arbitrary set of ludic challenges: the child sacrifice provides a connecting thread that ascribes symbolic meaning to each killing. This enhances player-avatar intimacy, which is manifest in the fact that players continue to role-play as the protagonist in the comments left beneath the video playthrough. In the Assassin’s Creed series, players have the option to use stealth tactics to avoid direct confrontation with some antagonists, meaning that players can choose to spare the lives of certain non-player characters. Minimising enemy casualties is coded as expedient rather than noble. In fact, it even could be read as cowardly, since it is a strategy for avoiding combat with difficult enemies. Significantly, after the deaths of Shadya and

7

THE KID IN THE FRIDGE

203

Phoibe, commenters on the walkthrough videos explicitly rejected stealth tactics as inappropriate for the task at hand. @MohammedKhan writes, When I saw this girl who helplessly tried to swim out but being tied to a rope and drowning made me so rage that right after her death I entirely killed each and every [sic] roman I saw right after this mission I did not go stealth just direct torture kill.

@FattuAhmed concurs, describing his playthrough thus: I reached the mother crying without killing anyone behind her and then notice her crying. I then call [Bayek’s eagle] to see where shandya [sic] is and after I realised what happened, I took out the bow and started shooting flame arrows in the head at everyone with the skill where I can control the arrow. After that I just took it personal and killed everyone brutally.

The killing method this commenter describes is one that exaggerates the player’s agency, allowing them not only to fire the arrow but to control its path as it curves through the air towards the enemies, essentially turning a ranged attack into a form of close combat. Commenters react in identical ways to Phoibe’s death. @EgyptianRulers writes, I was heated playing this game when this happened. Went on a murder spree after watching this scene.

Hyperbolic violence characterises comments such as those left by @RaidGhostHeroes, who writes, The streets ran red with blood after this every encampment and guard around died

And @RandomGuy, who brags, I threw every cultists [sic] body into the sea.

The death of the sacrificial child encourages a different playstyle—one that is more aggressive, more reckless, and more dramatic. Furthermore, each commenter cited here was keen to share the manner in which they left their own, individual mark on their various murder sprees, suggesting that

204

E. REAY

their revenge missions were part of reclaiming their identities as powerful, capable, and intimidating agents within the gameworld.

Damn You, Ubisoft The idea that the virtual child’s murder is experienced as a personal affront to players is implied in comments such as @RickO’Tool’s: I was already hunting the cult like crazy just because I liked that part of the game. Uncovering mysterious people and hunting them felt cool. After this, I woyld [sic] not only hunt them but parade their bodies around whatever Island I was on while riding my horse. And I haven’t finished the game, but Im [sic] killing Deimos. Phoibe was Kassandra’s sibling not Deimos.

@RickO’Tool moves between first person and third person, suggesting that while they are closely aligned with the focalising character, they also view themself as an angel of justice whose unseen machinations must right the game’s wrongs. Since there are no textual prompts or ludic rewards for “parading” the corpses of one’s enemies in Assassin’s Creed, @RickO’Tool’s performance can be interpreted as an effort to assert ownership over their in-game actions through the kinds individualisation interactive media afford. @RickO’Tool’s diegetic performance of their personal emotions speaks to the metaleptic blurring that characterises the way in which some players see the computer-controlled antagonists as being metonyms for the game system as a whole, or even as surrogates for the game’s designers. Commenter @JarvisKamamoto curses the whole development studio: DAMN YOU UBISOFT, SHE WAS JUST A KID

@BadBoyDoge rages, First Khemu, after Shadya, and now Phoibe???? For fuck safe [sic], Ubisoft

A commenter with the handle @YoSeJesus exclaims, How dare they kill Phoibe!

7

THE KID IN THE FRIDGE

205

That vague pronoun could encompass both the in-game antagonists and the narrative designers at Ubisoft, but the sense of annoyed outrage seems more appropriate when directed towards the latter rather than the former. @SantosCortez directs the violence that the game encourages towards computer-controlled antagonists back towards the game’s creators through the virtual spaces cohabited by developers and players: Ladies and gentlemen I think this call [sic] out for a massive attack on all of Ubisofts [sic] social accounts demanding that they update the game to add an option to save phoibe [sic]

Commenter @NFLCinema writes, After that scene I felt more angry than Kassandra did, not on the cult, on Ubisoft for doing it again. After Khemu and Shadya I set the goal to myself to protect her this time and I didn’t even get the Chance to do, in a game with dialog options it feels like betrayal. From todays [sic] view, I read that Phoibe is based on the remains of a real girl called Myrtis to be found in the Athens museum, so her fate was set in stone just as Pericles was. I have been playing very diplomatic with Kass and sparing a lot lives [sic], but now I want to slaughter just everyone in my way. Including Deimos.

It is interesting that this player claims to feel more anger than their fictional counterpart. This is the character’s first experience of losing a surrogate child, but it is the jaded player’s third experience. @NFLCinema connects the emotionally charged experience of “betrayal” with the game’s dialogue options, suggesting that the game cheated players by reneging on its promise of interactivity. The dialogue choice mechanic implied players could control the relationships between characters, but Phoibe’s death was “set in stone”—a scripted plot point predetermined by history that undermines the medium’s promise of narrative customisation and co-creation. However, one could argue that @NFLCinema’s anger at Ubisoft is not a rejection of the figure of the child sacrifice but an affirmation of its rhetorical efficacy. That is to say, if interactive media ties emotion to action, the rage elicited by the child’s “unfair” death ensures grief is expressed in a legible way through the game’s violent mechanics. Furthermore, the player’s desire to influence the text beyond its encoded interactions attests to the child sacrifice’s power to intensify the value players place on agency and control.

206

E. REAY

Commenters demonstrate a meta-awareness of the rhetorical function of the sacrificial child. @AnyaHarret recognises it as a common, even tired, trope: In every single Assassin’s Creed game there are always children you love and they die

@Playa4Eva writes, She didn’t deserve to die but I get why they killed her off to give you motivation for destroying the rest of the cult, but tbh I didn’t need much anyhow!

While an in-game antagonist killed the character, the developers “killed the character off,” suggesting this commenter experiences Phoibe’s death as a transparent moment that reveals the intentions of the game’s developers. Annoyance at Ubisoft’s blatant manipulation of the player’s emotions aggravates feelings of anger but also elicits feelings of righteousness. Just as the Order of Ancients and the Cult of Kosmos are shadowy institutions that pull strings from behind the scenes, so too is the game’s system perceived as a callous, unjust conspiracy that opposes individual freedom and the right to self-determination for players. As assassins, players defeat “the system” and dismantle the ruling power that acts through proxies. Thus, mastery of the game becomes a metaphor for mastery of the Order or Cult. The player and the protagonist are the David to the system’s Goliath—their death-dealing is rendered brave and honourable because it defies an omnipresent, controlling power that oversteps its own authorial remit.

The Case of Kassandra One could argue that replacing the fridged wife with the fridged child creates a narrative framework within which the hero could be female, and that this might constitute a feminist challenge to sexist norms. In Resident Evil 2, for example, the male protagonist Leon is paired with a supporting female character, Ada, while the female protagonist is paired with the child-character, Sherry. The child-character creates a context in which the female character can be strong, courageous, and competent. Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey gives players the option of choosing a female hero,

7

THE KID IN THE FRIDGE

207

Kassandra. However, when played as Kassandra, Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey demonstrates that while a female hero is possible, feminine heroism is not. Feminine heroism can be defined here not in terms of biological essentialism but simply as a foil for masculine heroism—where the latter is hard, excessive, violent, and physical, and the former is soft, subtle, non-violent, and cerebral if not emotional. In Maria Tatar’s (2021) unearthing of the literary history of the female hero, for example, she finds that while male heroes are characterised by brute strength and athleticism that they use to inflict injury, female heroes are often characterised by their curiosity, their quick thinking, and their concern for others, which they use to redistribute social power. Despite their different genders, both Kassandra and Alexios are cast in the role of the powerful patriarch in relation to the sacrificial child. As many commenters noted, prior to Phoibe’s death players might choose to navigate the gameworld using careful strategy and stealth tactics, thereby avoiding unnecessary combat. They might choose to spend time away from the central, linear narrative, admiring the beautiful gameworld, finding collectibles, solving environmental puzzles, and completing comparatively mundane side quests for various NPCs. In short, players may exhibit the qualities Tatar connects to the female hero: curiosity about the world and concern for its inhabitants, and a proclivity for battles of wits rather than battles of brawn. Phoibe’s death, however, constitutes an almost irresistible push to single-mindedly pursue a homicidal campaign to eliminate every member of the opposing faction and reach the game’s narrative conclusion. As I argued in Chapter 5, the streamlined, linear shape of the latter experience speaks to Ursula Le Guin’s conception of the traditional, masculine hero’s journey. Terry Kupers (2005) writes, “contemporary hegemonic masculinity is built on two legs, domination of women and a hierarchy of intermale dominance,” which in its current Anglo-American iterations includes “a high degree of ruthless competition, an inability to express emotions other than anger, and unwillingness to admit weakness or dependency, devaluation of women and all feminine attributes in men, homophobia, and so forth” (p. 716). Kassandra and Alexios are defined in opposition to a cast of female characters, who fall into the categories of villainous hags, seductresses, wives, and mothers, but they are also both presented as more “male” than certain men. Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey features a prominent NPC named Alkibiades who is an effete, polyamorous, pansexual man. Alkibiades often appears scantily clad and is presented as promiscuous,

208

E. REAY

frivolous, and flamboyant. He can be added to the player character’s list of sexual conquests. Within intermale hierarchies, Kassandra ranks higher than this feminised character, who is another foil for her heroic masculinity. Tatar’s concerns seem especially relevant when applied to Kassandra. Tatar asks, “[d]o we risk installing a disturbing new archetype of female heroism, one that emulates the muscle and agility of classic male heroes?” (2021, p. 263). Playing as Kassandra strongly reminded me of Amanda Phillips’ suggestion that the gender selection feature in the Mass Effect trilogy is so superficial that for all intents and purposes ‘FemShep’ (the fan-coined nickname for the female version of the protagonist, Commander Shepherd) does not exist. Phillips notes that the feminine markers appended to the avatar are “not enough to hide the fact that her experiences make more sense in a man’s story” (2020, p. 138). Despite being visually smaller and slimmer than her male counterpart, FemShep is nonetheless known for “headbutting armoured aliens, carrying fallen comrades over her shoulders, and starting bar brawls” (p. 143). Her gestural vocabulary originates in a masculine body, suggesting she is simply a re-skin of the default, normative, male animation rigging. Phillips concludes her analysis with the provocation that FemShep is nothing more than a wilful, collective hallucination. I’m inclined to say the same thing about Kassandra. I have found that despite having a strong will and desire to play as a female character in the more recent Assassin’s Creed games, the hallucination is often difficult to sustain. When playing as a female Eivor in Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, for example, my suspension of disbelief was repeatedly tested whenever my character initiated a sexual interaction with a female NPC. My Eivor would lift up her love interest around the waist and plonk her on a hip-height map table, holding her in the kind of embrace that makes little sense if neither participant has a penis. Every time this animation began, I was made aware that the skeleton beneath my avatar’s female form was originally conceptualised as male. Phoibe is unmothered irrespective of the protagonist’s gender because mothering is not assigned an action. The only form of parenting she can receive is ‘protection from physical harm’, which as Cecilia Åse notes, is constructed as a masculine form of care (2019). Phoibe acquires a temporary, surrogate mother figure in the character of Aspasia—the courtesan-turned-politician’s-wife—who offers Phoibe employment when the child arrives in Athens. However, it is quickly affirmed that mothers cannot perform the role of protector. Phoibe goes missing shortly before

7

THE KID IN THE FRIDGE

209

her death and the protagonist reprimands Aspasia for allowing Phoibe to venture out alone, saying, “Aspasia, there’s a plague. You’ve seen the streets. She’s just a child.” Aspasia replies, “Give her the credit she deserves—she’s more a fighter than I was at her age.” Aspasia trusts in Phoibe’s ability to take care of herself, but by advocating for the child’s right to participate in the adult world, Aspasia undermines the need for a controlling father figure. Aspasia must be proved wrong with Phoibe’s imminent, horrifying demise so that protection through total domination can be established as both reasonable and necessary. The Assassin’s Creed series does envisage feminine violence, but it is characterised as fundamentally unheroic. The Crocodile, Shadya’s murderer, is revealed to be an old, rich crone who uses her wealth to command an army of gladiators. Although she usually bids others to commit violent acts on her behalf, one of her minions describes how the Crocodile tied Shadya’s ankles herself and threw her into the water. The disparity between her adult strength and Shadya’s childly weakness makes this murder unjust and despicable, but the disparity between Bayek’s adult, male strength and the Crocodile’s feminine, elderly weakness goes unremarked. In short, the presence of a sacrificial child does not alter relationality in a way that creates space for feminine heroism; rather, it functions to create circumstances for feminine villainy. To act in these gameworlds is to be violent—and violence that is heroic is also definitively male. The narrative conclusion of Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey reveals that the original leader of the Cult of Kosmos is, in fact, Aspasia. It was on her orders that the protagonist’s infant sibling was sentenced to be thrown from a clifftop, making Aspasia another child-killer. Aspasia’s femininity disguises her power, which is rooted in dissembling, duplicity, and disloyalty, and her subtlety and aptitude for social manipulation provide a final point of contrast between villainous female power and heroic male power. The sense that this character withheld vital information from the avatar and, by extension, from the player encourages a suspicion of feminised abilities and an affirmation of the apparent directness and honesty of physical, masculine combat. Again, although Tatar does not include videogames in her otherwise wide-reaching survey of female heroism, her line of questioning seems particularly apt for the games examined here: “What is the future of the female trickster, and how will she evolve? Does she run the risk of turning into an antiheroine, an outlaw force that turns toxic, using her brainpower to take charge and undermine in dark, devious ways? Now

210

E. REAY

that heroines have found their way into new arenas of action, will villainy, too, assume new faces and features?” (2021, p. 270). The proximity of the child sacrifice to the woman-in-the-refrigerator in the games discussed in this chapter becomes clear when one compares the child sacrifice to child deaths in classic literature. Robin Bernstein (2011) writes, “[b]oth romanticism and sentimentalism constructed the death of a child not as dispossessive but as preservative, as a freezing that paradoxically prevents the essential child-quality from ever dying through maturation” (p. 24, my italics). The language of fridging seems to underpin critical discussions of literary child deaths; however, the rhetorical effect of the dead or dying child—particularly in nineteenthcentury fiction—is at odds with the rhetorical effect of the child sacrifice in these Assassin’s Creed games. Karen Sanchéz-Eppler notes, “the power that adheres in the figure of the dying child may be used to enforce a wide array of social issues, and any reader of nineteenth-century fiction can easily produce a list of the lessons—temperance, abolition, charity, chastity, and most of all piety—underscored by the death of a child” (2005, p. 101). Although she nuances her arguments by discussing the increasing commercialisation of grief, Sanchéz-Eppler documents private poems, personal letters, essays, and novels in which the death of the child creates conditions wherein the patriarch can be soft, incomplete, lost, and vulnerable. She complicates the space between the dead child as a narrative cliché in fiction and “the acute pain, the unassimilable wrench of an individual child’s death” (2005, p. 101) by examining the private postmortem photographs of nineteenth-century children. She suggests that these posed images do not necessarily “fix” or preserve the child as a possession objectified by death, but instead function as “wounds” that are prevented from healing. In contrast, the child sacrifices in Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey and Origins represents the patriarch’s externalised weakness, and thus the symbolic burning of the child on the pyre has a cauterising effect on the adult’s vulnerability. The living child was the wound, and the child’s death heals that opening, affirming the imperviousness of man. With the child removed from the picture, softer emotions can be set aside in favour of the hardness of rage. Nuance and ambiguity are replaced by certainty and purpose, and the value of militarised masculinity can remain unquestioned. As Susan L. Mizruchi writes, “the social is defined by what is given up in order to reproduce it” (1998, p. 23). In the games discussed in this chapter, the blood of children is spilled so that videogames can

7

THE KID IN THE FRIDGE

211

continue to reproduce some of the most troubling aspects of patriarchy. J. Jesse Ramirez puts it beautifully: the child sacrifice “makes the future possible for everyone except herself” (2022, p. 20). Since the death of the child is figured as an assault upon the player characters identity as a paternal protector, the consequent revenge quest can be understood as a mission to restore the hero’s masculinity through the violent domination of others. In this way, the child sacrifice permits a return to extreme, aggressive forms of masculinity while side-stepping questions about the ethics of violence: ridding the world of child-killers cannot be wrong, and retaliatory violence is not only necessary but heroic.

References Åse, C. (2019). The gendered myth of protection. In C. E. Gentry, L. J. Shepherd, & L. Sjoberg (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of gender and security (pp. 273–283). Routledge. Berkowitz, R., & Cornell, D. (2005). Parables of revenge and masculinity in Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River. Law, Culture and the Humanities, 1(3), 316– 332. Bernstein, R. (2011). Racial innocence: Performing American childhood from slavery to civil rights. America and the Long 19th Century Book 16. New York University Press. brice, m. (2013, August 15). The dadification of video games is real. http://www.mattiebrice.com/the-dadification-of-videomattiebrice.com. games-is-real/ Carpenter, R. C. (2006). ‘Innocent women and children’: gender norms and the protection of civilians. Routledge. Conway S. (2020). Poisonous pantheons: God of war and Toxic masculinity. Games and Culture, 15(8), 943–961. Cross, G. (2004). The cute and the cool: Wondrous innocence and modern American children’s culture. Oxford University Press. Edelstein, S. (2018). Adulthood and other fictions: American literature and the unmaking of age. Oxford University Press. Gray, K. (2020). Intersectional tech: Black users in digital gaming. Louisiana State University Press. Hocking, C. (2009). Ludonarrative dissonance in bioshock: The problem of what the game is about. In D. Davidson (Ed.), Well played 1.0: Video games value and meaning. ETC Press. Houen, A. (2002). Terrorism and modern literature, from Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson. Oxford University Press. Isbister, K. (2016). How games move us: Emotion by design. MIT Press.

212

E. REAY

Kupers, T. (2005). Toxic masculinity as a barrier to mental health treatment in prison. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 4(4), 713–724. Meyer, A. (2007). The moral rhetoric of childhood. Childhood, 14, 85–104. Mizruchi, S. (1998). The science of sacrifice American literature and modern social theory (Course Book. ed.). Princeton University Press. Nussbaum, M. C. (1997). Cultivating humanity: A classical defense of reform in liberal education. Harvard University Press. Parker, F., & Aldred, J. (Eds.). (2018). Beyond the sea: Navigating bioshock. McGill-Queen’s University Press. Phillips, A. (2020). Gamer trouble: Feminist confrontations in digital culture. New York University Press. Phillips, L. (2017). Impossible journey: The liminality of female heroes. Roundtable, 1(1), 7. Robinson, K. (2008). In the name of childhood innocence: A discursive exploration of the moral panic associated with childhood and sexuality. Cultural Studies Review, 14(2), 113. Ramirez, J. (2022). Rules of the father in the last of us: Masculinity among the ruins of neoliberalism. Springer International Publishing AG. Sánchez-Eppler, K. (2005). Dependent states: The child’s part in nineteenthcentury American culture. University of Chicago Press. Sarkeesian, A. (2013). Tropes vs. women in video games. Feminist Frequency. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7Edgk9RxP7Fm7vjQ1d-cDA Simone, G. (1999, March). Women in refrigerators. https://www.lby3.com/ wir/ Tan, S. (2013). Burn with us: Sacrificing childhood in the hunger games. The Lion and the Unicorn, 37 (1), 54–73. Tatar, M. (2021). The heroine with 1,001 faces. Liveright Publishing. The Bleach Keeper. (2017). Assassin’s creed origins: Shadya death! YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3KQQPPUv-0&t=1s Wright, W. (2007, March). Spore, birth of a game. TED Talk. https://www. ted.com/talks/will_wright_spore_birth_of_a_game?language=en. Accessed February 2020. Zanar Aesthetics. (2018). Assassin’s Creed Odyssey death of Phoibe cutscene (PS4 Pro). YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iusokW-yxGg&t=2s

CHAPTER 8

Conclusion

Games Studies scholars Cameron Kunzelman and Michael Lutz host an excellent podcast called Games Studies Study Buddies that reviews canonical and contemporary works of Games Studies criticism. This podcast has kept me sane on my long commutes to work and so I am going to honour Kunzelman’s repeated plea to “Abolish conclusions!” by keeping this short. In the introduction to this book, I used a bridge-building metaphor to describe an interdisciplinary future in which Children’s Literature Studies and Games Studies engage in a mutually enriching exchange of ideas, methods, and texts. As an overused academic buzzword, ‘interdisciplinarity’ can provoke understandably mixed responses. I think this is especially the case within Children’s Literature Studies, where scholars are expected to be experts in a huge range of historical periods, multiple genres, and different research methods (Reynolds, 2011). Eugene Giddens comments that “children’s literature criticism demands a Pokémon-like inclusivity” that often results in “charges of failure” when a work cannot offer “complete coverage” (2018, p. 305). His videogame reference is an apt one because Games Studies scholars face a similar predicament. Since Games Studies draws from psychology, literary studies, film studies, social sciences, media studies, computer science, and media studies, games researchers can feel a comparable pressure to be experts in several domains. By pushing for a new interdisciplinary alliance, I’m aware that I’m contributing to this © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 E. Reay, The Child in Videogames, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42371-0_8

213

214

E. REAY

pressure. I feel it too—in attempting to map as much cross-disciplinary ground as possible, I know I’ve created a bridge that is missing some conspicuous treads, important nails, and qualifying handrails. However, I’m hoping that this book also contains some tools to help future researchers make this shaky structure more solid. The first tool this book offers is the typology I developed from my survey of child-characters in contemporary videogames. Scholars can use the categories of The Inner Child, The Mighty Child, The Side Kid, The Human Becoming, The Child Sacrifice, The Waif, and The Little Monster as a rationale for bringing different media into conversation with each other. I think of these labels as constellations rather than as closed, definitive classifications, but I’m happy for other scholars to use them as walls to push against—or to pull down entirely—in order to better locate their own work. I know that frequent iteration will enhance the practical use and theoretical value of the organising principles offered here. When devising these categories, I wanted to make sure that I didn’t elide race, gender, and ability in my analysis, but I don’t think I successfully captured these important dimensions. The best way to remedy this is for Games Studies researchers analysing representation in videogames to remember to include ‘age’ as a key identity marker, and for Children’s Literature scholars using feminist approaches, critical race theory, or theories from disabilities studies to expand their corpora to include videogames.1 For Game Developers, I hope this typology—in combination with my table of ‘features and functions’—will encourage greater criticality when designing a child-character and when scaffolding a childly subject position for the player. The second tool I’ve shared is a methodological plug-in for the close reading of videogames: the pretentiously named ‘critical ekphrasis’. Critical ekphrasis mitigates some of the difficulties associated with the archival stage of videogame textual analysis, and it encourages a reflective selfawareness in the player-analyst that rescues the non-verbal, ephemeral, embodied effects of interactions from the quiet margins of consciousness. Also, if I’m being totally honest, it rescues something else—the part of me that I mostly have to hush and pacify when I’m trying to write in a traditional, objective, distanced academic register. My brain 1 Several Children’s Literature scholars using queer theory are already integrating videogames into their studies, and I hope that this kind of intervention continues to be recognised and appreciated.

8

CONCLUSION

215

usually responds by giving me the silent treatment, petulantly withholding any inner monologue for me to transcribe. If I hadn’t allowed myself moments of creative, playful, personal writing in this book via critical ekphrasis, I don’t think I could have made it to the end on speaking terms with myself. I’m aware that stylistic norms exist for a reason—and I’ve done my best to comply with them here—but I still prefer writing that is vulnerable, passionate, hesitant, and human. I find it more transparent and, therefore, more truthful, despite obviously being more partial. Scholars looking to explore how young players experience the tropes, archetypes, and stereotypes associated with childhood could train participants to create ekphrastic anecdotes of short stretches of gameplay. This process could provide a set of stable texts for participants to reflect upon with researchers, and for researchers to cross-reference with their own autoethnographic playthroughs. Additionally, there is a growing number of videogame memoirs and autoludographies written for popular audiences that reflect on childhood videogame play. These contributions have a decidedly ekphrastic quality, and could therefore serve as an adjacent dataset for further comparison. The third tool this book presents is a sliding scale for conceptualising intersemiotic friction, which I adapted from picturebook studies. I hope that the spectrum of ‘symmetry, expansion, counterpoint, and dissonance’ will alert Children’s Literature Studies scholars to the poetic quality of videogames. If we think of literal, prosaic language as having a close, tight relationship between signifier and signified, and literary, poetic language as having a deliberately loose, flexible relationship between signifier and signified, then the polyphonic, choral affordances of videogames attest to the literariness of the medium. Videogames deserve more than a cursory summary of their plot points when they are being brought into conversation with other narrative media. Hopefully this tool will remind scholars who are new to games research to approach the medium as a dynamic ecosystem of meaning rife with interpretive gaps. For Games Studies researchers, this terminology can formalise discussions of ‘ludonarrative dissonance’ and move conversations about jank and glitch aesthetics beyond irony, subversion, and defamiliarization towards something less wry and more lyrical. I also hope that a more precise appreciation of intermodal friction might counter the fetishization of ‘flow’ that continues to dominate apologia for videogames. Game Developers looking to design child-characters that challenge stereotypes could consider how creating tension between semiotic planes might express a character’s complexity,

216

E. REAY

as well as how scaffolding interpretive gaps can reawaken players to their own habitual thought processes about age-based identities. The fourth tool that I want to hand to as many people as possible is the Inventory System Theory of Fiction. I feel that Game Design as a discipline is close to casting off the yoke of The Hero’s Journey as a dominant narrative structure, and I think importing Le Guin’s iconic reimagining of heroism will help. Jane Alison’s recently published writer’s primer Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative (2019) reminds its readers of all the natural, intuitive patterns available to structure our novels beyond the Aristotelian arc. It’s a brilliant book, but the whole time I was reading it, the word VIDEOGAMES was bouncing around my skull in booming, bold, capital letters. Games spiral around their core loops. As the fog of war lifts in strategy games, we mentally quilt patches of map together. Players scatter in firework formations across the world of a battle-royale game, only to collapse back together again when the gamespace shrinks. For every narrative pattern Alison suggested, I could think of a dozen videogame examples that fit the mould. In this book, I used the Inventory System Theory of Fiction to demonstrate how the shape of Röki diverges from the crooked arc or the clockwise checkpoints of The Hero’s Journey, but I would love to see someone else document the carrier bag’s omnipresence as a hallmark of videogame narratives. I think Children’s Literature scholars can contribute important insights to this discussion, specifically by applying theorisations of chronotopic texts that emerge from picturebook studies to videogames. The fifth tool that this book tests is conceptualising age as a space. Building on autoethnographic observations of games journalists, I have suggested that the ludic orientation of videogames combined with their spatial quality primes players for travelling backwards along their own timelines. I connected ‘sensory nostalgia’ to ‘spectral nostalgia’ to suggest that gameplay can exist between memory and imagination, and I argued that videogames can remind us of our potential, our multiplicity, and our childly indeterminacy. I know this all sounds vaguely utopian, and the technological determinist in me is rolling its eyes at the idea that Fortnite might liberate us from the age-based regimentation of society. But, equally, the optimist in me says it’s worth developing the critical tools needed to build the realities we want—even if the immediate utility of these future-oriented tools is tenuous. Speaking of the future, where do we go from here? There are so many things that I didn’t have space to cover in this book. I had to cut chapters

8

CONCLUSION

217

on the archetypes of The Human Becoming and The Sidekid, despite the latter category containing some of the most well-known videogame child-characters, including Ellie from The Last of Us series, and Atreus from the God of War series. The importance of these characters cannot be overstated, and I know that they will continue to generate critical interest: my hope is that future researchers will excavate the signs of childness in these landmark videogame series as part of their broader analysis. I would also love to see Children’s Literature Studies assist Children’s Media Studies and Games Studies with the definition of ‘children’s videogames’—perhaps beginning with Jack Zipes’ playful provocation that children’s literature does not exist (2001). This discussion could provide some useful terminology for recent debates about so-called ‘wholesome’ games and ‘cosy’ games, which tend to rely on ill-defined ideas of purity, safety, and morality. In this same vein, researchers using ethnographic methods to study gaming culture and gender could explore how many female streamers perform childhood as a protective or ingratiating contrivance. I’d like to see more Age Studies scholars collaborating with Games Studies scholars to explore adult paidia as it appears in Tabletop RolePlaying Games, Live Action Role-Playing Games, and digital role-playing games—perhaps with a focus on how ageist stigma is mitigated differently depending on cultural contexts. I am very excited about what might emerge from the conceptual collision of Young Adult Literature studies and Games Studies—particularly how these conversations might shape game development’s meta-narrative about artistic maturation. Since many recent games that have received widespread critical acclaim (e.g., What Remains of Edith Finch, Gone Home, A Plague Tale: Innocence, God of War: Ragnarök, Hades, Celeste, Mutazione) are essentially coming-of-age stories with teenaged protagonists, the label YA—with its association with female readerships—may disrupt the highly-gendered configuration of the game developer auteur in interesting ways. Overall, I hope that Children’s Literature studies scholars will see the relevance of their expertise to videogames and will, therefore, feel confident in constructing panmedial studies. Equally, I hope that Games Studies will realise that they do not have to engage with the fraught question ‘are videogames good or bad for child-players?’ in order to appraise the relationship between ‘the child’ and ‘the videogame’. They can instead ask, ‘how are videogames shaping contemporary beliefs about age-based identities?’ and use methods from representation studies to allow specific genres, development studios, or

218

E. REAY

individual games to contribute to a nuanced, grounded picture of the medium’s role in constructing childhood. I’ll end with an invitation: Games Studies scholars, come sit at the kid’s table. We can pull up an infinite number of chairs. Children’s Literature scholars, come play with us. This game can accommodate an infinite number of players. I keep referring to this book as a bridge. In fact, right now I’m imagining it splayed open, face-down, with its spine cracked on someone’s desk, held at a useful page. The low triangle formed by the book’s inclines and the flat table is a good shape for a bridge, but—in my mind’s eye—it also looks like a little pitched roof. Maybe I didn’t succeed in building an interdisciplinary bridge, but, at the very least, I built something that my research can call a home.

References Alison. J. (2019). Meander, spiral, explode: Design and pattern in narrative. Catapult. Giddens, E. (2018). Distant reading and children’s literature. In M. Nikolajeva & C. Beauvais (Eds.), Edinburgh companion to children’s literature. Edinburgh University Press. Reynolds, K. (2011). Children’s literature: A very short introduction. Oxford University Press. Zipes, J. (2001). Sticks and stones: The troublesome success of children’s literature from Slovenly Peter to Harry Potter. Routledge.

Index

A Aarseth, Espen, 9, 48, 50, 147 Aetonormativity, 6 Agency, 14, 16, 39, 61, 74, 77, 92–95, 98, 100–103, 105, 110, 111, 115, 116, 120, 125, 149, 163, 166, 191, 196–198, 200, 202, 203, 205 Alexander, Leigh, 11 Ambiguity, 46, 47, 96, 97, 111, 118, 189, 210 Animal Crossing , 26, 175 Antagonists, 28, 38, 39, 92–97, 99, 104–107, 109, 110, 112–116, 128, 131, 202, 204, 205 A Plague Tale: Innocence, 25, 126, 150, 217 Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, 38, 43, 187, 191–194, 198–200, 206, 207, 209, 210 Assassin’s Creed: Origins , 38, 44, 193–195, 201 Autonomy, 14, 65, 68, 77, 101, 102, 108, 149, 151, 191

Avatars, 17, 18, 25–29, 31, 32, 34, 59, 80–82, 92, 93, 101, 103, 105–107, 109–116, 125, 127, 146, 151, 158–166, 169, 171, 180, 182, 187, 191, 192, 194, 202, 208, 209

B Balanzategui, Jessica, 62, 67, 92, 103, 119 Baudrillard, Jean, 13 Bayonetta, 32 Beauvais, Clementine, 6, 34, 47, 48, 119, 125, 182 Bernstein, Robin, 4, 5, 165, 210 Beyond: Two Souls , 33, 46 Bioshock, 17, 39, 98–103, 189 Bond Stockton, Katherine, 10, 62, 68, 107 Brother in Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons , 44, 126

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 E. Reay, The Child in Videogames, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42371-0

219

220

INDEX

C Caillois, Roger, 11, 12, 181 Care, 17, 35, 60, 65, 66, 83, 97, 101, 120, 125, 143, 150–152, 161, 165, 176, 191, 199, 201, 208, 209 Children’s Literature Studies, 3, 6–8, 15, 16, 40, 41, 48, 213, 215, 217 Chris Jenks, 6, 23, 63–66, 73, 125 Comedy, 45 Cooperation, 47, 125, 127, 134, 151 Cuteness, 17, 160–165

D Dead Space, 16, 39, 45, 95, 96, 99 Death, 15, 18, 38–40, 64, 71, 73, 79, 80, 95, 98, 102, 105, 110, 111, 116–118, 137, 166, 175, 177, 178, 188, 189, 191–203, 205–207, 209–211 Dependence, 78, 118, 125, 128, 147–152, 191 Deterding, Sebastian, 12 Detroit: Become Human, 16, 33, 44, 59, 63, 69, 71

E Edelman, Lee, 10, 34, 62, 67 Edelstein, Sari, 60, 65, 145, 147, 148, 152, 182, 191 Eeriness, 103, 105

F FallGuys , 160–162, 164 Fisher, Mark, 93, 104, 105, 144 Fortnite, 13, 179, 216

G Gender, 6, 15, 28, 43, 133, 143, 147, 150, 187, 191, 192, 207, 208, 214, 217 God of War, 33, 37, 38, 217 Gray, Kishonna, 8, 52 Grief, 132, 137, 139, 177, 196, 197, 199, 205, 210 Gubar, Marah, 6, 62 H Heroism, 17, 18, 124, 127, 129, 136, 147, 150–152, 207, 209, 216 Holland, Patricia, 31, 41, 46, 67, 114 Huizinga, Johann, 181 I Innocence, 2, 11, 27, 46, 62, 73–75, 81, 84, 93, 95, 103, 107–109, 141, 165, 178, 191, 195 INSIDE, 17, 25, 59, 61, 62, 85, 93, 103–107, 109–117, 120 Interactivity, 60, 128, 205 Intersemiotic friction, 215 J Jenkins, Henry, 9, 30, 180 K Keogh, Brendan, 50, 133, 183 Knights and Bikes , 17, 44, 128, 132–134, 136, 139–141, 147 L Life is Strange 2, 45, 76, 77, 126 LIMBO, 17, 41, 45, 110, 113, 115, 116, 118 Little Nightmares , 17, 25, 45, 93, 103–107, 109–115, 118, 120

INDEX

Ludonarrative dissonance, 18, 28, 102, 134, 189, 193, 200, 215

M Mario Kart , 23, 158 Masculinity, 18, 30, 38, 187, 190, 191, 193, 194, 201, 207, 208, 210, 211 Materiality, 14, 159, 164, 165, 168, 172, 174, 176 Meyer, Anneke, 27, 62–64, 66, 73, 74, 85, 93, 107–109, 198 Monstrosity, 40, 46, 92, 94, 95 Morality, 34, 35, 59, 75, 82, 217

N Nguyen, Christopher Thi, 14, 61 Nicklin, Hannah, 128, 129 Nikolajeva, Maria, 6, 48, 125, 134 Nostalgia, 17, 160, 168, 170, 171, 173, 174, 178, 182

P Paidia, 11–13, 172, 217 Parasociality, 33, 44 Pikmin 3, 17, 160, 180

R Race, 3, 6, 28–30, 35, 191, 196, 214 Röki, 17, 128, 132, 133, 138, 140–149, 216

S Sarkeesian, Anita, 9, 41, 42, 189–191, 201 Scribblenauts Unlimited, 2–4, 12, 160, 165 Sidekicks, 28, 32–35, 37

221

Silence, 5, 45, 104, 105, 112, 113, 118, 139 Space, 11, 13–15, 17, 23, 24, 40, 42, 52, 59, 62, 75, 77, 80, 85, 95, 104, 105, 108, 114, 116, 142, 145, 146, 149, 150, 158, 159, 172, 175, 176, 178–183, 205, 209, 210, 216 Spatialisation, 181, 183 Spectrality, 160 Stealth, 22, 25, 45, 92, 93, 106, 150, 202, 203, 207 Stuart, Keith, 12, 13, 33, 179 Surveillance, 74, 114, 115, 119 T Tactility, 164 The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit , 76 The Daddening, 33 The Last of Us series, 149, 217 The Magic Circle, 135, 181, 182 The Walking Dead, 30, 33–35, 39 The Witcher III , 17, 97 Toys, 22, 26, 32, 46, 113, 158–163, 165–167, 172–175, 177, 178, 182, 183, 194 U Unravel , 17, 41, 44, 45, 159, 168, 169, 171, 172, 174, 176–178 V Violence, 10, 11, 17, 23, 24, 28, 33, 36–39, 71–73, 75, 79, 81, 85, 109, 110, 113, 132, 142, 144, 150, 158, 164–167, 189, 196–201, 203, 205, 209, 211 Vulnerability, 17, 74, 81, 82, 84, 85, 93, 99, 105–109, 111, 118, 128, 140–143, 191, 195, 210

222

INDEX

W What Remains of Edith Finch, 41, 217

Wordless Videogames, 105, 106