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How Video Games Represent Attachment, Loss, and Grief Sabine Harrer Games and Bereavement Media Studies | Volume 55 I would like to thank all our passed mothers, lovers, kids, and those we miss each day. This book is dedicated to you. Sabine Harrer (PhD), born in 1984, is a game designer and media artist based in Vienna, Berlin and Copenhagen. As a member of the Copenhagen Game Collective, she has created experimental games and performative play experien- ces since 2014. Previously, she worked as a lecturer in media and game studies at the University of Vienna and at the IT University of Copenhagen. She was also a research fellow at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. In her work, she blends cultural studies and game design to explore the workings of human experience, social power, and modes of intimacy. Sabine Harrer Games and Bereavement How Video Games Represent Attachment, Loss, and Grief An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high quality books Open Access for the public good. The Open Access ISBN for this book is 978-3-8394-4415-3. More information about the initiative and links to the Open Access version can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Na- tionalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (BY) license, which means that the text may be be remixed, transformed and built upon and be copied and redistributed in any medium or format even commercially, provided credit is given to the author. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Creative Commons license terms for re-use do not apply to any content (such as graphs, figures, photos, excerpts, etc.) not original to the Open Access publication and further permission may be required from the rights holder. The obligation to research and clear permission lies solely with the party re-using the material. First published in 2018 by transcript Verlag, Bielefeld © Sabine Harrer Cover layout: Maria Arndt, Bielefeld Cover illustration: © Ene Es Lectorship by Simon Nielsen Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-4415-9 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-4415-3 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839444153 Table of Contents Credits | 7 Introduction | 9 PART 1: THEORY 1.1 Videogame Representation | 23 1.2 Understanding Bereavement | 45 PART 2: ANALYSIS 2.1 Of Limit Breaks and Ghost Glitches: Losing Aeris in Final Fantasy VII | 69 2.2 “You Were There”: Losing Yorda in Ico | 85 2.3 Conjugal Love: Losing the Spouse in Passage | 105 2.4 Losing Big Brother in Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons | 121 2.5 “Let’s All Be Good Mothers OK”: Losing the Badger Children in Shelter | 143 2.6 Designing Loss and Grief: A Summary | 161 PART 3: DESIGN 3.1 Grief-Based Game Design: A Case Study | 181 3.2 Ideation with the Bereaved: The Trauerspiel Workshop | 193 3.3 Designing Jocoi: A Game about Pregnancy Loss | 219 3.4 On the Question of Impact: Evaluating Jocoi | 239 Making Space for Grief: Conclusive Thoughts | 253 References | 261 Credits As any book, this one would not exist without the support of many. First, I would like to thank my mother Michaela Harrer for support- ing my work and for helping my grief-based ideation method off the ground. Her expertise as a mediator has especially helped me develop the toolset I have today. I am grateful for the support of my other fa- mily members, some of who passed during the completion of this book. Your love is being felt every day. I thank my doctoral supervisors Monika Seidl and Peter Purgathofer for helping me navigate a new research area and for showing trust in my experimental work. You have given me the required boost to finish a doctorate despite long stretches of isolation and self-doubt. There have been a number of ‘moral’ supervisors as well; friends and experts who helped me improve the quality of this study by sha- ring their thoughts and ideas. I thank Ida Toft who has helped my me- thods and ideas mature over the past years. I thank Doris Rusch for both inspiring and supporting my work, and Rilla Khaled for consul- ting me on the muse-based design model, which has helped me design with the bereaved. I am tremendously grateful to the self-help group ‘Regenbogen’ for joining this project and making a case study on grief-based game de- sign possible. Thank you for bringing your stories to life in the Trauer- spiel workshop and for developing a game with me. To the lovely pe- ople at the IGW Vienna, especially Katta Spiel, Geraldine Fitzpatrick, 8 | Games and Bereavement Fares Kayali, Naemi Luckner, and Florian Holzner, thank you for sha- ring your space and making me feel like a part of the family. Thank you, Oliver Rudoll, Raimund Schumacher, Christoph Binder, and Lu- kas Hasitschka for building the very first game prototype which sadly did not make it into this book. I do not forget. Thank you to Henrik Schønau-Fog from the Medialogy Depart- ment of AAU Copenhagen for inviting the Jocoi project and letting me work with a talented student team – Mihai Anton, Christian Anton, Rasmus Klaustrup, Andreas Nørby Simmelkiaer, and Camilla Grønb- jerg Jakobsen: you rock! Thank you, Nicklas Nygren, Dajana Dimovska, Alina Constantin, Henrike Lode, Hanne Nielsen, and Jakob Moesgaard for giving feed- back to my research and design process. Thanks to our brave playtes- ters, Babsi Maly, Anita Landgraf, Judith Kohlenberger, Martin Faster- holdt, Kathi Harrer, Johannes Harrer, and Gustav K. Hemmelmayr for your invaluable inputs. Big thanks to my PhD colleagues at the English department, espe- cially Jenny Theuer, Ranthild Salzer, and Tamara Radak for engaging with some of my ideas. I would like to thank Pedro Dalcin and Richard ‘Raxter’ Baxter for realising the literary review game Overcoming with me. Thank you to the rest of Kayakklubben and the Copenhagen Game Collective for grounding me and eating kiks with me during times of existential crisis. Thank you, Ludger and Carolien at Obras Portugal for inviting this project to their residency. Thanks to musicforprogramming.org and The Most Dangerous Writing App for actually making me write. Parts of the research in this book have been funded by the Austrian Academy of Science (ÖAW), and the University of Vienna (KWA). Finally, I am indebted to Simon Nielsen for his giant contribution to this book, both in the forms of long-time encouragement, mental support and meticulous proof-reading. His sharp observations and sug- gestions have been essential in making this book an enjoyable read. Thank you all for reading. Introduction Life does not have a reset button. Jane/Grand Theft Auto III Videogames are the medium of loss and death. Videogame characters frequently fall from cliffs (Super Mario Bros.), get shot (Space Inva- ders), and go bankrupt (Theme Hospital). Sometimes they die in swimming pools (The Sims), are butchered by rotating blades (Super Meat Boy), impaled (Tomb Raider), or flattened by rolling boulders (Crash Bandicoot). As the opposite of winning and mastery, loss and death seem to be built into the structure of videogames, and therefore make up much of their entertainment quality. At the same time, the mechanics of loss and death in many video- games seem to have little in common with the emotionally complex experience of going through loss in real life. Game death is presented as a preliminary state, a short moment of frustration in an infinite loop of trial and error. This is epitomised by the game over screen, which often appears after a character’s death, and typically includes the opti- on to continue. Rather than finality, this marks death as an opportunity to retry. Note how this differs from life, where the death of a loved one 10 | Games and Bereavement is inevitably permanent. As the fictional radio guest Jane in GTA III’s Chatterbox puts it: “Life does not have a reset button”1. In games where loss and death are used as incentives to play on, the focus is on optimising player performance rather than on the deep portrayal of a game character’s emotionality. Rather, emotion is co- opted to serve a narrative of success and mastery. Hardly a legitimate experience in and of itself, death is presented as a power tool for player improvement. The point is not to reflect on the transitory nature of existence. The point is to work on one’s jumping technique, so one can avoid the fall into the bottomless pit next time. Apart from being performance-oriented, the kind of ‘death work’ found in many games is framed as a solitary rather than a social activi- ty. This is a third contradiction to death in life. Loss necessarily raises the question of social connectivity, not least because the loved one was part of a social fabric before they died. So, while dealing with a loss may include self-management and introspection, it also affects social constellations and requires the bereaved to reframe their place in society. Finally, when we consider the narrative of the game over screen, its premise of immortality harks back to a limiting Western tradition of repressing death (Gorer 1960). Instead of being allowed to occur as part of ordinary life, loss is relegated to the side, becoming somewhat unspeakable. Game over frames death as an antagonist who can be successfully battled and overcome.
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