The Bodies We Leave Behind

Does our rendering of digital bodies reflect our attitude towards real ones?

While writing about Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, I asked the question, “Who comes and cleans up all the bodies you leave behind after flying away on a helicopter?” Throughout the series little regard is given to the bodies left behind. In Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, there is a mission in which you kill Ultranationalist Russian soldiers who are harassing an old man and his family. What of the bodies left at his doorstep? Does he dispose of them? Do other Ultranationalist forces come and execute the family? Games, especially the Call of Duty series, have been chasing fidelity in their visuals as a selling point in marketing for as long as they have been around. They have never come to terms with the fact that there are many things they will never be able to capture and replicate. The deafening noise and kickback of a gun firing. The weight and momentum of a car. This chase for photorealism will never capture the texture of reality. And yet the sprint continues. Red Dead Redemption 2 chooses to render many things as close reflections but not all. Specific clothes are required for different temperature environments but you instantly change into and out of them. A limited number of guns can be carried on your person but they all disappear into the bottomless horse pack. Food and drink give the appearance of survival games but it is only an appearance, and they are consumed instantly. Rockstar wanted to imbue so much with reality but never in a way that would frustrate the players ability to have fun. Similarly, Starfield dismissed consequences with its extreme atmospheric planets and rendered it to minimal debuffs when the player failed to equip the correct space suit. All can be sacrificed at the altar of player enjoyment, nobody has to think, just play.

Something video games have never been able to handle in a real way is the body left behind after the player has killed someone. One can go even further and claim that games fail to capture even the act of killing and the weight and finality that act has in reality, but that can be addressed another time. On older machines the body left behind after the killing would simply disappear. Its job was complete and it could no longer serve any purpose. Its continued presence was a tax on the system's capability to render images. As if the image of a corpse holds no power or value. This body existed to be killed, nothing else. What about now? What happens to the bodies we leave behind on machines capable of detail and breadth beyond the wildest imagination of developers only 20 years ago?

In Red Dead Redemption 2, killing a stranger results in a loss of honor and a corpse that will eventually be happened upon by another stranger. That stranger will be labeled a witness who will report the murder to the local law enforcement, who in turn will show up to the killing site searching for the killer, you. Should you linger you will likely be drawn into a fight, but if you keep your distance and watch from afar, the law enforcement will appear and disappear as fast as they came, the body will remain only if kept in eyesight, and disappear entirely when you go too far. Even in towns, a body, if you are able to evade the lawmen and stay within sight, will simply lay there as everyone goes about their business. Occasionally someone will look down at the body but make no moves to remove it or react to it. Is this simply the casualness of the wild west and its attitude towards death, or an ignored aspect of development from a studio who touted the daily schedules built into every NPC and whose title has brought about countless videos praising the “INSANE REALISM” of it.

For The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, dead bodies disappear into a puff of smoke, leaving behind parts for you to gather. Due to the gloom corrupting and degrading all pre-existing weapons, the game encourages you to fuse monster parts from defeated enemies to various wooden sticks and weapons in order to create new, better ones. This creates a grotesque world in which Bokoblins are being killed with the trophies of their dead brethren, whose corpses will supply the pieces of future weapons to continue the cycle. Nintendo has never been curious to ponder scenarios such as these, and are averse to depicting any form of a dead body. Animals alike disappear into smoke, leaving behind pieces of meat to be cooked. Squirrels puff into acorns as a comedic act of death.

Lastly, returning to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, specifically the Brazilian favela, the game plays fast and loose with bodies of even the living. Civilians appear sporadically in this mission, mostly to add to the difficulty of shooting enemies, as harming a civilian will cause an instant game over. The intention behind this is to slap the wrist and provide consequences to those who fail to follow the rules of engagement, even if that is an ideal that rarely occurs in reality. These civilians will quickly disappear, they are set dressing more than figures with substance, and the same rule applies to the bodies you leave behind, as they disappear once out of sight. The game has no qualms about providing seemingly endless bodies for you to place between your crosshairs, the bemoaned “monster closets” spawn system. Enemies will even perform elaborate death animations that exist for the player's amusement, clutching at the injured part of their body as they exaggeratedly fall over themselves.

Death is the end of the individual but not for the rest of us who remain. Bodies remain, linger, and decay if left unattended. They must be gathered, transported, logged, identified, claimed, burned, or prepared for burial. Belongings have to be sorted through, inheritances distributed, property divvied up. In Call of Duty once your mission is complete and you thoughtlessly move on towards the next globe hopping mission what becomes of the bodies left behind? The responsibility of their bodies are abandoned for someone else to deal with. The player is above such matters or thoughts. Was anyone else left unattended as a result of their death? Are these questions even asked by the player or developer? Does our blithe indifference to the digital bodies reflect our attitude towards tangible ones? How many Palestinians have been killed? Each was an individual with their own thoughts, memories, ideas, and opinions. They were as storied and complex and human as you or I, and now they are gone. Never again to speak or laugh or think. Cumulatively they become just a number to be reported. Does anyone responsible for their deaths care for the bodies being left behind and the lives ended in the wake of our violence across the globe?

These questions are seldom asked but I believe the collective effect of our disregard for digital bodies being erased or ignored reflects and enforces the reality of our lives. Games intentionally render certain things as close to real as they can or are permitted, and in doing so also have implicit renderings that reflect what we value. Unspoken and accepted truths. We should be more curious to question them, more importantly in the reality games are so desperate to chase after.