The Bodies We Leave Behind

Thoughtless looting

We sure do loot a lot of dead bodies in videogames, don't we? I first had this thought when playing God of War (2018). Kratos would run around and pilfer tombs for loot that would improve his own abilities. The age-old numbers-go-up type of game. I was thinking about this because the whole plot of that game is you are trying to bring your dead wife's ashes to be spread at the place she requested. There is a lot of respect for the dead when it comes to Kratos' wife. What would Kratos think if his wife was instead placed in a tomb and then someone came along and smashed it open and grabbed whatever she had been laid to rest with? And was taken in order to be crafted into a plus two strength equipment? Or immediately discarded as useless? I’d imagine he would be pretty pissed, yet here we are as Kratos doing that to countless dead bodies.

When I was listing out the best side quests in The Witcher 3, some were find a dead body, read a note that is on or close to the dead body, and that note will tell you a small story, always a tragedy about that person before they died. This continued in Cyberpunk 2077. A significant amount of time can be spent running around taking on odd jobs or just running into random crimes. A lot revolve around killing or finding dead bodies and looting them to take some note that has some text that tells a story, always a tragedy. Whether it's a couple trying to escape from their family and being killed by assassins or the consistent throughline of someone who has gone crazy due to cyberpsychosis and killed those closest to them. This is a common open world feature due to its simplicity. All are reliant on picking at a dead body, and being rewarded for it in the form loot or a text story adding flavor to the fictional world you are in. Environmental storytelling perhaps.

This persistent appearance shows that there is still a lot of value in text. We went from text-heavy games, RPGs specifically, to voice-acting for everything. You could plot this best in Bethesda's Gameography. Arena, Daggerfall, and Morrowind, a game that is still a majority of text despite barks of audio. Then Oblivion, Fallout 3, Skyrim, and Fallout 4, where the introduction of a voiced player character led to every conversation including three identical responses in their outcome. The flexibility of text was sacrificed for the perceived value of every line having voice acting.

Disco Elysium was another game that showed you can do so much with just plain text. You don't need everything to be voiced–even though they would go on to add voiceover for every line in The Final Cut release. You don't even need everything to be visually represented. Text can do more and is more powerful than a voice line or a rendered object. Control is another. Reading redacted documents, memos, bureaucratic letters, was one of the most pleasing parts of that game. They were something that you would pick up and immediately want to read. There is power in text.

However text is only relied upon because you cannot tell every story by having scripted or pre-rendered scenes. When it comes to filling out the world, you can't do that for everything. That is why we rely so heavily on the dead body. A dead body isn't something that you have to animate. And a text note that tells their tragedy is not something that needs to be voiced. It is cheap, therefore, to spread about dead bodies for the player to find and extract wealth from.

I wrote early last year about the bodies we leave behind, digital bodies being something we don't care much for. Sometimes they are even turned into comedic objects, think of Demon's Souls with its ragdoll physics. A body, once life has been extinguished from it, can be messed with in such a way that's comedic in how exaggerated its movements are. We value dead bodies for what they hold that will benefit us, to such a degree that we seek them out to eagerly pillage all that they have.

Avowed¹ is littered with skeletons and dead bodies everywhere. It is at such a volume that you begin to view them not as bodies but as just another chest full of materials or maybe equipment to equip. We take what is valuable from them for our own betterment. We look at them as a source of gain. We go and conquer and take everything that can be used simply because it is useful. This person is dead, they have no use for it. I will take it and sell it for a meager amount of gold in order to better myself. Does this not reflect and reinforce the thinking that has stripped countless lands of their natural beauty in order to enrich ourselves? Why do we thoughtlessly strip away everything from those who have died?

Loot and looting is such an apt term for this action in games. In games looting is done to bodies and lands the player seeks to dominate. In Diablo looting is done after vanquishing a foe as the reward for your action. Reality is not so different. Looting follows the successful conquest of an invading army, along with associated acts of violence that come with occupation by a foreign power. The propaganda required to push a person to take a life often musters such a furor that spills over into atrocities committed against a dehumanized foe. Violence begets violence in a vicious circle.

We have separated the term from the violence it inflects on a culture. Looting of historical artifacts, cultural objects, and art has been acted out immemorial. The sacking of Rome, the back and forth looting of art between Germany, France, the United States, and the USSR during and after World War II, and the decades long conflict in Iraq. The disappearance into private hands or outright destruction of culture following the loss of lives in conflict seems permanently paired. In spite of this deep and continuing history of violence behind the word, we now employ it to talk about the ingots of iron picked up from a dead body or the sword obtained from a chest in a cave. Videogames are uniquely capable of blunting the violence of a term to jargon to describe a gameplay system wholly irreverent to its origins².

1. I may also mention the recurrence of adventure films/games in which ancient cities and artifacts are discovered only to subsequently be destroyed to fulfill the thrills of the individual being followed.

2. thumbnail image is taken from: https://www.eurogamer.net/avowed-brentis-pod-choice-consequences