I feel, as a concerned lover of good narrative, that I must bring to light one of 2013's worst moments in culture. While I wish not to trivialize the real and current events that shaped the year, this must be brought up and re-examined, as I fear this is the next step in the recent trend of flippant and lackadaisical storytelling.
In 2013, the video game "Beyond: Two Souls" committed one of the worst atrocities a piece of narrative media could commit. Giving the player a good story idea; which was inhabiting the role of a girl named Jodie Holmes (voiced by Ellen Page), both blessed and cursed with an invisible, spectral, murderous psychopath of a companion named Aiden; and proceeding to do little (or absolutely way too much) with the concept. This ultimately led to the game failing in simple narrative law and presenting a plot so insane, I am now wholly convinced that the creator/director/writer, "auteur designer" David Cage, is suffering from a God complex in which he believes he is infallible in all he does and has a group of wind-up monkey yes men at his beckon call. The God complex is ironic, seeing as he is a hardline atheist, which will resurface later in this essay.
My experience with the game was limited to a YouTube Let's Play series conducted by Two Best Friends Play. These fine chaps are professionals in their work, despite their consistent commitment to a casual nature, and are in fact knowledgeable in a variety of topics regarding the video game industry. I trust them, along with other sources, to provide an accurate reaction of an intelligent, levelheaded, and most importantly unbiased view. I implore those interested in the topic of video gaming be subscribed to their channel, as they provide simple methods of explaining why games work or not. In addition, their commentary on various titles is invaluable and humorous. Previously, they slogged through Cage's previous gaming attempts of "Heavy Rain" and "Indigo Prophecy", the former of which I find to be Cage's somewhat good game, being the tale of a concerned father whose life is ruined by the death of one son and the kidnapping of the other years later. The latter of which was not as bad as "Beyond: Two Souls", but it certainly shall win no additional praise from me. Their reaction to both was tepid at best. As the team of Matt, Pat, and Woolie began to play the third installment of David Cage material, they and I were unaware of what we were about to witness. Both parties present gave the game a fair trial and decent leeway. In return, we were rewarded with scenes of strangely cathartic and amusing justice and genuinely heartfelt moments as Jodie struggled to make sense of a life she did not sign up. What followed was a convoluted and appalling mess of misogyny, ineptitude, disregard for human life, hatred, and overt nihilism.
As "Beyond: Two Souls" showed it's true colors, Jodie and Aiden exhibited telekinetic and extrasensory abilities, infiltrated an embassy, were abused by "friends", viciously committed retribution said friends through violence and arson, joined the CIA, murdered a SWAT team, dealt with a detestable stepfather and the flaws of the foster care system, fought off other worldly beasts, were forced to live on the streets, nearly sank to suicide and prostitution, fended off rapists (which followed swiftly with their murders by shotgun suicide), joined a family of homeless people, gave birth to a child, survived an apartment fire, resurrected an ancient Navajo ghost tribe to do battle with a demonic enemy, argued between one another over letting Jodie date, marked for death and executed an African warlord (who, in reality, was a democratically elected official that the CIA wanted gone), saved and orphaned a child soldier in a matter of hours, met with Jodie's birth mother in a mental institution (the player was then given the option to cut off the mother's life support), trekked the icy tundra of a former Soviet satellite, were captured and tortured by the Chinese military, escaped by means of James Bondian levels of ludicrousness, were betrayed by the CIA and an old friend who desired to bring the dead back to life, fought against the demons of an ethereal realm between life and death, and eventually were given a decision to leave this world behind or stay with those who betrayed them both.
It should be noted that because the video game was told in a non-chronological format, what I have just described was the actual advancement of events, and each chapter had little or nothing to with what came before or after.
In the end, the moral of the story is that life is a cruel mistress. This is clear in society, as the hum drums of the news tickers consistently bring bad news. However "Beyond: Two Souls" is much more than that. It is a demon, a demon that paints man as an unfeeling behemoth to those who do not fit into society. If this behemoth should impede your progress, then he must be eradicated. Nearly everyone in this game is guilty of this crime. Jodie, Aiden, the CIA operatives, the countless abusers, the demons of the ether, and the dim and indifferent faces of the common man.
In addition, the game continues further down a path of self-ruin when it introduces a moral that could only be conceived by a madman. Never, NEVER, have I seen any form of media advocate a brutal suicide as a form of release or a viable solution to pain. Yet, as seen in the last chapter, the old friend previously mentioned is given the chance to reunite with two loved ones that died years earlier. When his experiment to return them to the land of the living fails, there is a possible in-game option in which he shoots himself in the side of the head with a small service pistol. The man then calmly walks over to the deceased and dematerializes with them in a peaceful and almost serene manner. Let me repeat that. He shoots himself in the head and is rewarded with a release from pain and a happy end. This games dares to glamorize a morose act of desperation that leaves in its wake a multitude of sufferers and a cloud of desolation in the lives of those who knew the victim? That is simply and unequivocally unforgivable. I have, thankfully, not personally known any one person who has committed suicide. However, I have seen the affects this method of death has on others. When a middle school student dies in their own home and it is revealed that suicide is the culprit, the days following are overcast with lethargy and silence from a good portion of all who attend those halls. This happened while I attended middle school and, while I fail to recall the name of this victim (and for the best, they will remain anonymous), I rode the bus with one of their close friends. The days following the death, this friend refused to attend school as a way of coping. When she finally did muster the courage to appear to us, she appeared aged and tired, tear and mascara stains on her face from consistent agony. So I say to "Beyond: Two Souls" that your moral scale is skewed and your outlook on humanity's majority want for suicide is outright wrong. I understand the scene is one of many outcomes that could have stemmed from the same event, but to even include the option in the game is inexcusable.
However, none can compare to the ultimate slap in the face this game provides. As I have stated prior, David Cage is a flagrant and highly vocal atheist, denying all existence of a higher being. This is considerably challenging given that the game must operate on the idea that there is an afterlife. In response, Cage created the Infraworld, a miasmatic and formless realm from which Aiden and the demons that haunt Jodie were born. In addition, the final choice that the player is given the option of Beyond, causing Jodie to leave the physical realm and, in short, perish. What Cage failed to do was give any reason the Infraworld is a desirable option. As Jodie states through dialogue, the Infraworld is a place that is "neither heaven nor hell. There's no God, or Devil. Just a place where we continue to exist after we die. My soul explores it endlessly and I've only seen a fragment of it." While there is the potentiality of omnipresence in the Infraworld and Earth and the appearance of the realm is a dazzling scene bathed in calming light blue incandescence, Ellen Page was directed by her superiors to rattle off the existence of such a beautifully animated ether with all the stoic bravado of a food court cashier on a slow and lazy afternoon. This isn't necessarily committing any wrong, but if you want players to sympathize with your unique take on a seriously contested matter that has puzzled philosophers for millennia, then please it sound interesting. Give more reasons why we should care that we the player just sentenced Jodie, our main character and avatar, to a death sentence. Then it happened. Following the game's conclusion, at the very end of a series of unskippable credits, we are treated a simple screen that says "For Maria and Mercedes. From the Infraworld, I know you are watching me."
…
As Matt and Pat of Two Best Friends put it best, "That is disgusting. To use your own in-game dumb thing to make some sentiment to real world tragedy." Who am I to disagree, David Cage? You justified the existence of an afterlife within your game which, regardless of what your fanbase may say, has never under any circumstances been proven to exist. You used this mechanism to bring the player into the greyscale world you created.
*to be finished soon*
