I have played video games pretty much all my life. I think I got an NES at age 5 (maybe 6), and Ive been a die-hard gamer ever since. Ive played the vast majority of touchstone games. I have, for the most part, been fairly emotionally detached from my games (I am generally emotionally detached from all but the most moving exemplars of any media I consume, be it games, movies, or literature). Aeriths death? It advanced the story, but otherwise, I didnt get the big deal. Dont get me wrong - I get that feeling of visceral satisfaction when the bad guys are brought to justice, but I dont experience emotional highs and lows from games (or books or film) as a general rule. There have been exceptions here and there in movies and books, but I cant remember a single example of a game triggering an emotional response. As I started playing Assassins Creed: Freedom Cry, I felt a visceral joy at the opportunity presented to slaughter plantation-holders and slave traders in and around Port au Prince (you might recall my post hoping that a future Assassins Creed will be set during the Civil War so that I will have the opportunity to do the same on Dixie-land plantations). Last night, the game wrecked me. ***HERE BE SPOILERS*** Last night, I reached a point in the game where the leader of the Maroons sends you to liberate a slave ship after the Port au Prince governor makes a vague threat about slave uprisings. During the battle to liberate the ship, its escorts, seeing the battle is lost, begin firing on the ship to scuttle it and deny the Maroons the 100 souls aboard. You sink the escorts and leap aboard the ship, which, uncharacteristically, has no defenders. Rushing below decks, you find the slave quarters flooding as the slaves lie chained and helpless. You rush from post to post, desperately trying to free the survivors as the sink ships, but even as you run, the hull buckles, splintering and killing more slaves. The ship takes on too much water and groans as it begins to sink, stern-first, into the deep. There is no more time. All you can do is escape, climbing out of the upended ship. As you climb, you see, to your horror, that there are slaves hanging upside down from their chained feet, desperately struggling to free themselves, and you know that they are struggling in vain. The ship is sinking, taking on more and more water. They have no tools with which to break their chains, and you have no time left to help them. The ship sinks, and you make a final, desperate swim out the hatch and to the surface of the ocean. As the mission summary shows up on screen, you find out that the very most you could have saved was 15 slaves. 15 slaves out of 100, and that 15 only if you play the sequence perfectly. I did not save all 15. I sat shellshocked, and then, in a cold rage, I rampaged across the Caribbean, sinking frigates and Men o War and slave escorts for a good hour until it was time to sleep. Until last night, I had never seen something in a game that left me feeling haunted. To a non-gamer, it may seem very silly to read that an image or sequence from a video game haunts someone, but it does. I loved Freedom Cry for the sense of power and righteous fury it gave the player, and this particular sequence stripped away that power and dared the player to simply survive as nearly 100 innocent souls sank to their deaths, victims of the imperialist arrogance that gave us the United States of America. I have never seen a scene so horrifying in any fiction I have ever consumed.
Posted on: Tue, 25 Mar 2014 15:20:02 +0000