MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Few mechanics are as inseparable from typical video game narrative as failure. From arcade cabinets to modern PC and console games, the specter of dying and restarting—the most common example of a fail-state—is what lends many games their challenge and separates them from other more linear forms of media. My research investigates this omnipresent mechanic from a literary angle, examining the fail-state through the lens of psychoanalysis and trauma theory to identify games’ potential for modeling trauma and recovery. To do so, I engage with a broad array of video game narratives as well as critical texts from across game studies, narrative theory, and trauma studies, piecing together first an image of how games configure empathy and second how that construction might mirror certain understood aspects of traumatic repetition.

This structural survey and critical examination of video game narratives leads me to the conclusion that, through different modes of empathy in context with the dying as a fail-state, games can involve a player in the creation of a trauma while separating that player from that trauma’s effects. Then, by leading the player through the same events that caused that trauma’s creation—in essence, by facing the player with the same challenges that initially resulted in their failure—they can also model modes of recovery. Of course, differently configured narratives can manipulate or subvert this structure, resulting in games that involve the player in the perpetration of traumatic events, or that intentionally thin the boundary that protects the player from the generation of a trauma. These are only two possible alterations; ultimately, my research is not prescriptive, but shows that games carry an innate structural ability to represent and model dying, trauma, and recovery.