The Pathologic Dialogues - Part III

Kevin: I'm glad you brought up the question of free will, because in the end that's what everything in Pathologic circles back to. The conversation with the Authorities, the final dilemma at the Cathedral, and (most important of all) the theatrical conceit on which the game is built—I believe that it's all designed to push the player to confront the implications of his or her ostensible freedom in the game world. Is it even possible to have true agency inside a world that is strictly defined by somebody else?

From the beginning, Pathologic made it crystal clear that I was not in control of the situation. It confronted me with fluctuating store prices, the relentless march of the in-game clock, and the casualty tally that skyrocketed regardless of my performance. It even went so far as to unambiguously spell out its inflexible, predetermined endpoint: "The morning of the second day has come. Less than eleven days remain." I was kept in a constant state of reaction to the world around me. Ice Pick Lodge made no bones about it: I was in their world now, and it would unfold as they, not I, saw fit. They were the directors; I was just an actor—or should I say gamer?—playing a character.

This is the key to the theatrical conceit running throughout the game, which means that it's the key to the game, period. The Rock Paper Shotgun review labels this aspect of Pathologic as "wussy thespianism," but I think that does it a disservice. It's only by using the language of theater—the realm of scripts and directors and fourth walls, the universe where blatant artifice is somehow given breath and life—that the game's ideas about free will and good vs. evil gain their peculiar resonance. Pathologic is one of the most unforgettable games I've ever played, and that's because it's not just a game but also a drama. It's a drama where the actors are continually made aware of the director's hand.

Not that this absolves you and me of responsibility for our actions. The thing that keeps Pathologic kicking around in my head, months after I finished playing it, is that it's not content merely to tell us that we're dolls at the mercy of some other being's whims. I mean, it does tell us that (in the meeting with the Authorities in the Polyhedron), but then it gives us back our agency. At the time, I called it "one of the most electrifying moments I've ever had as a gamer," and that's still true. In the meeting with the Developers at (where else?) the Theater, the circle closes, the switch is flipped on, and suddenly we see what all this was for.

Here the Developers gave me a chance to step fully into the shoes of the beaten-down, exhausted Haruspicus: "Yes, I am responsible for him. I will stay with him till the end. His words shall be my words. His deeds shall be my deeds." Essentially, I would become him, changing him from the Authorities' "scary doll" to a free agent, from a pawn to a queen. And lest anyone think this is a wholly positive, happy-ending choice that's out of keeping with the darkness of the rest of the game, remember that I took responsibility for everything the Haruspicus did. By choosing this path, I cast myself in the role of healer and rescuer, but I also became a cultist and a murderer. Free will is a double-edged sword.

Really, I think the game features one of the most elegant engagements with the Problem of Evil that I've ever seen in any medium. All the world's a stage, and while the director has put limits on what can happen, the player can still choose freely once the curtain rises: to protect the sets or tear them down, to support his fellow actors or destroy them. I was stuck in Ice Pick Lodge's game, but it was I and no other who chose how to act in that game. I had agency. I was responsible for the Haruspicus. His deeds—all of them, good and bad—were my deeds.

This is the beauty of Pathologic, but it's a complicated beauty. You and I, Duke, persevered to the end and saved the town, but we also committed a lot of sins on the way. We're not even sure we ultimately did the right thing. In its final scene the game pronounced victory for me, but I was still aware of the depths to which I could sink as I floated away from the closed-down theater into the void. There were stars in the void, but also plenty of darkness.

Stay tuned for a few more thoughts in the next few weeks. Read the full dialog or dig into our playthrough here [Bachelor or Haruspicus]. For those new to the blog, go here to see what we're all about. Feel free to put in your two cents in the comments, too.

The Pathologic Dialogues - Part II

Having finished the game, Duke and Kevin (Bachelor and Haruspicus, respectively) ask some questions and try to unpack Pathologic. Add your thoughts / questions in the comments section!

For those new to the blog, go here.

For Part I, go here.

Duke: As much as Pathologic gives players a stake in the lives of the townsfolk, it also works hard to drive home the worthlessness of the human animal. Bodies stacked in cattle corrals, the plague-ridden burned alive, the moans drowned out by gunfire: the game not only brings out the worst in the townsfolk, but in the players as well. The Apiary (a word for a collection of beehives) is teaming with men, expendable, soulless men. Bodies are so much meat lying on the ground, waiting to be burned off in the morning. As if to drive home their point, the Authorities appear on the last day to remind the player of their puppetry. We are mocked for how seriously we have taken the whole thing.

It's probably better to avoid the whole Problem Of Evil, and perhaps religion in general, but Pathologic is full of sacrifice. The Haruspicus performs sanctified murder. The Bachelor desecrates Kain's body in the hopes of finding a cure. Three of the endings are focused on exchange, as well. Destroy the Polyhedron for the children, he pleads. Burn the town for a new world. Or let things play out: sacrifice everyone to restore balance to nature.

Yet every large and small sacrifice is never enough to stop the evil in the Settlement. The bull at the Bone Pillar, which would have yielded panacea, is burned to a black hunk. The witch hunt on Day 6 leads nowhere. The succession of Bachelor to Inquisitor to General Blok: everyone wants someone to blame, a scapegoat, yet in the end the freedom of choice is given only to one person, much like in Dostoevsky's The Grand Inquisitor. The meat shouldn't be allowed to decide. It falls to the Bachelor, the Haruspicus, or the Devotress.

Kevin: Ah, now we're getting into deep waters. What do "good" and "evil" mean in games? This is going to be fun. Or perplexing. Probably both.

Here's the thing: Videogames take place entirely in abstraction. That is, the narratives, images, and mechanics are all just computer code being processed in the electrical depths of a machine. The significance we attach to these processes is entirely imaginative, similar to the imaginative ways we engage with the flickering pictures that a projector beams onto a screen at the cinema. Unlike movies, though, videogames give us an active hand in how this imaginative process unfolds. So the game's events are abstract—they are not literally happening in the real world to real individuals—yet at the same time they are being influenced by a real player who is situated in the real world. We're not just spectators—we're accomplices. So how much do the rules and morality of the real world apply to what we do in videogames? 

Before I (try to) answer that, it might be helpful to think about what "playing a game" really means. In order to play a game, you must first learn the rules. In the case of videogames, you do this by figuring out how to interact with the programmed world around you. Click the left mouse button and X happens. Two items combine to allow your character to do Y. The A.I. of other characters reacts in a certain way when you do Z. Most videogames start off with a tutorial section, designed specifically by the programmers to teach you these rules. By the end of these sections, you have gotten your sea legs. You've learned how you can and cannot affect the world around you, and you probably have a good idea of the game's tone and atmosphere as well.

But Pathologic didn't do this for me. There was no tutorial, no attempt by the designers to communicate to me the consequences of this or that action. After the brief opening cinematic, I was dropped in the middle of the game world and left to fend for myself. I had to construct my impressions about the town and my purpose in it from the ground up, without any outside force to contextualize what I experienced. Everything felt alien, right down to the labored, barely comprehensible dialogue translation. Essentially, Pathologic started me with a clean slate and left it up to me to determine what "normal" and "good" meant in this world.

I needed to have some orienting principles in order to make decisions, so I ended up extrapolating my own system of morality as I muddled through the first few days. I was tasked with fighting the Sand Plague, so I decided that my highest good was the salvation of the town and its residents. I was told that keeping my Adherents alive was important, so I prioritized their safety and wishes above others'. I discovered that my family was affiliated with the Cult of Bulls, so I sided with the people of the Abattoir against the supporters of the Polyhedron.

By the standards of my own in-game constructs, I made a moral choice (though perhaps not the best choice—acquiescing to the Devotress's suggestion at the Cathedral apparently offers true victory and healing for the town). I saved the children and allowed them to rebuild the town; my religious order jettisoned the corrupt influence of Fat Vlad and Elder Oyun; I frustrated the Kains' hubristic attempt to play God using the Polyhedron. To the Haruspicus, this was a righteous victory. 

Does that mean it was truly the right thing to do—that, if I were faced with an analogous choice in my real life, I would confidently make the same decision? At the time, I thought so. In my Day 12 writeup, I went on at some length about how the lives of the townspeople were valuable regardless of how evil they were—sure, they were small minded and selfish, but isn't everyone, to some extent? After reading what you wrote above, Duke, I'm not so sure. These weren't just people with everyday foibles, after all. They stole and lied and murdered without shame; they fastened like leeches onto the earth around them. Maybe I was working in service of a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah, so irredeemably wicked that the only true cure for its sickness would be total annihilation. 

The town rubbed off on me. Because the game designers forced me to adapt myself to the town instead of outright telling me how to behave, I conformed to the dog-eat-dog world around me. When in Rome, do as the Romans do—even if the Romans are okay with killing people, ripping out their kidneys, and trading them to cult members for healing herbs. 

Pathologic conditions the player to treat life seriously. It does this by making survival and cure the primary motives for the three main characters. On the bright side, this suggests to me that the game designers want us to be shocked by the game's treatment of people as (in your words, Duke) "so much meat lying on the ground." On the dark side, this makes it all the more damning that I killed people to further my "moral" goal of stopping the Plague. Was I acting normally—even morally—within the context of the twisted world created inside the computer? Yes. But that doesn't necessarily make it right.

So what was "good" and "evil" for you while you were playing? Or did your experience as the Bachelor cause you to view everything in a more detached, calculating manner? Put another way: What was going through your mind as you played?

Duke: Pathologic wore me away. My compassion, my good will, made no difference in the world Ice Pick Lodge had fashioned. After a few days, I came to the conclusion that the moronic people of the Settlement were not worthy of my compassion. They didn't deserve what I as a moral human and a moral character had to offer. Organic reason--humanity--was the first thing to die in Pathologic.

I came to Pathologic with a set of principles, the same principles I apply in most every game. Save every little sister in Bioshock and you will ultimately be rewarded. Deliver something in Zelda and you'll get something good at the end. I didn't think I needed to learn the rules of Pathologic's game world in order to survive, and I ended up being used by everyone in the town with very little to show for it. There was no room for a Dudley Do-Right or a Christ figure in the Settlement. Many argue that there isn't room enough for them in the real world, either.

In this world, logic--not mysticism or morality--made the most sense. And that was what I came to prize most: logic, and the ability to make my own decisions.

Knowing I was being manipulated by the major families of the Settlement killed off any sense of "good" or "evil" and replaced it with a dichotomy of independence and slavery. That's the whole nature of a game, I guess--the designers, the programmers, the authorities, put you into a controlled sandbox, choose what you see, don't see, what you can and can't do, and then set an objective for you, the player. Pathologic asks a question. In the Bachelor's scenario, the question is "What constitutes true victory?" True victory become independence: not synergy, not blind faith. There's a reason the Polyhedron is completely outside, grafted on to the Authorities' model of the town: it represents the freedom of man, the objectivity of reason, the power of innovation. It is independence incarnate.

Isn't so much of Pathologic driving home the notion that we, as human animals, don't have true agency? That the only chance to live is to give up our independence for peace, to sacrifice innovation for stability? Isn't this the story of every natural disaster, too? When the chips are down, when Katrina is coming or Vesuvius erupting, humans either A) run and pillage or B) huddle and wait. This is human nature. This is exactly the response of the Settlement to the plague, as well. The nobles strategize from within their homes, the townsfolk curl up and die, and the bandits loot and murder.

Where I was content to accept the world, to euthanize my better half and turn bitter, you, Kevin, decided to hope against reason. You chose to accept the townsfolk for who they were--yes, petty squabbling myopics--and you wanted to give them a future. Maybe not the best future—as you said, the "true victory" is the unification of progress and stability, keeping the Polyhedron and the Settlement. But you kept them alive.

Me? Even with grandiose logic, self-assurance and no small measure of pride, I made my decision for myself. I survived the Sand Plague, but by no means can I claim any measure of moral high ground. Pathologic illuminated the worst in me.

We're working on Part III for next week. Stay tuned.

Pathologic: The Ending, according to the Bachelor

If you haven't read the write-ups for Day 12 I suggest you go read them right now unless you've played the game through already. What we'd like to present to you right now is an overview of the endings.

As the Bachelor, I found three "choices" presented to me at the end of the game. I didn't have enough panacea to cure everyone's adherents, so the Devotress couldn't give me her input. So what I had--what I have to analyze here--is not the complete picture, though Kevin and Rory have filled me in, more or less.

The three choices I had were:

1. Let the Settlement be destroyed. But [the] Polyhedron may not be touched. The surviv[ors] will [rest] there until we vaccinate them, and the epidemic will finally [. . .] come to the end.
2. It is enough to destroy [the] Polyhedron to stop spreading of the infection. There is no sense to destroy the whole town.
3. So, I declare my decision to you. I refuse the choice. I shall not decide about the destiny of this town and [. . .] show my arguments to you.

Here's a quick summation of the results of each decision:

Destroy the Polyhedron; Save the Settlement.
We see the model of the town with the water jug that functions as the Polyhedron being slowly wrenched free.

It falls and lies, useless, on the ground. Then a vision of the Settlement with bluish skies, healthy. The kids, the Haruspicus, the turning of the wagon wheel: it looks like everything has turned out well.

"We aren't dying!"

After this, we're treated to an unsettling vision of the theatre, the three protagonists lying on stage like rag dolls with button eyes.

The game specifically notes that it "acknowledges the player's victory". We can walk around on stage, look at the dolls close up, before walking to the exit at stage left. Shimmering lights wait, suspended, in the void beyond the door, which slowly slips into the distance.

Destroy the Settlement; Save the Polyhedron.
The cutscene at the end shows the two Authorities--little kids--bashing the model of the town.

The artillery fires, the sun rises and Maria Kain stands looking very smug at the front of her entourage.

After a lovely view of the Polyhedron at dawn, silhouetted against the umber sky, the perspective shifts to the theater again, button-eyed dolls, the three protagonists arrayed at the back of the stage.

The game doesn't acknowledge the player's victory in this ending scenario. There's no text, no script. This ending is a defeat. The Kains won. The player let himself be manipulated, took the bait.

Again, floating lights, door, fade to black.

Refuse the choice.
The cutscene that plays exudes "bad ending vibes". The camera pans across the interior of a plague-ridden house, the light lingering on bloodstained bookshelves, the dirty floors, and so on.

Then we pull away to see the town bathed in red.

And eventually we see the corpses of the dead townsfolk.

The last shot is a fade-out on the Authorities' model of the town.

And then it's back to the town Theatre, on the stage with all the crumpled forms of the protagonists, buttons on their eyes. Door, fuzzy lights, fade to black.

Get this, though: at the end of this scenario, the game notes the player's victory.

(Others)
I'll let Kevin fill you in on the other ending--the one supplied by the Devotress. For now I have some thoughts.

Concerning Victory.
There's a lot of conjecture about what the endings mean, but it's pretty easy to see the trajectory of each character and how it lines up with their "ending"--the one they contribute to the final reckoning if you save all their adherents.

Artemiy Burakh, the Haruspicus, has grown from the steppe dirt and inherited his father's legacy as shaman and curate of the Settlement. His relationships with the town's children, the way the scenario is shaped, leads him to demonize the Polyhedron. His "ending", so to speak, is to destroy the Polyhedron so that the town can return to the status quo. While the cinematic paints the ending in a positive light, I can't help but be grieved, because it's just as it was before--no better, no worse. The ending is reflective of the traditions and perpetuity of life the Haruspicus seeks so desperately to protect: it's stayed the same.

There are so many unanswered questions I have about Klara, the Devotress, having not played her story myself. She's an enigma. She's a miracle, a curse: she's a cookie-cutter messiah, loved by some and hated by the rest. And apparently her ending functions as a sort of deus-ex-machina, allowing the town to both sustain its own life, do away with the plague, and keep the Polyhedron. Rory's playthrough on his blog will certainly explore this in-depth when he writes up Day 12. Like the Haruspicus' ending, Klara's ending fits with her character: enigmatic, paradoxical, out of the blue.

Daniel Dankovskiy, the Bachelor, is an outsider, a scientist: a reserved and judgmental young man who thinks he knows best. It quickly becomes evident that he has neither the experience nor the wisdom to defend the town against the plague, so the Inquisitor, and later the General, are brought in to mop up his mess. He views the Sand Plague as an enemy: winning is the goal here, rather than curing the disease.

The suggestion the Bachelor brings to the final decision in the other games is to preserve the Polyhedron. This decision leads to the Kains building their "utopia". However, this choice doesn't acknowledge the player's victory. It's not the right decision to make; in fact, I believe it's the only patently wrong choice the player can make at the end of the game. I don't say this out of opinion: every ending except the Kains' Victory has an explicit statement of the player's victory.

If you've read through my playthrough as the Bachelor, you should see how my thinking, both as character and player, shifted over the course of the game. I began bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, so happy to save the town, save the world, and somehow, around midway through, I decided I hated the town. They were not worth saving. The crime, the politics, the horror of basic human nature. The problem was not the plague: it was the humans who were scarring the earth, doing violence by their very existence. I resolved that, on the final day, I would destroy the town when the decision was presented to me. The Polyhedron was a happy little coincidence--an inhuman marvel--that I wanted to save, and in the end, it was only a tool that would be misused.

The true enemy in this was never the Plague. The Bachelor realized it. His character introduction at the start of the game reads, "This is the story of a man who performed a miracle and defeated an opponent when victory seemed impossible." Could the conniving, clamoring people of the Settlement be this opponent?

Nukes and artillery aren't enough to kill the enemy, though. Men can escape shells. They can hide, reproduce, and rebuild. But the Sand Plague is a natural mechanism that, perhaps, was never evil to begin with. How does the Bachelor achieve the victory he has worked so hard to obtain? He walks away and allows the human parasite to devour itself. He lets the fever burn out.

Mother Nature: 7,776  -   Humanity: 0

Is this the "right" ending? For the Bachelor, who calculates in cold math, whose empathy has been steadily burned away by the shit-storm that is human nature, this ending makes perfect sense.

Edit [1-27-2013]: We've been hearing from other players who have differing reports about the way the Bachelor's scenario ends. If you are interested in reading about them, a few of our readers have kindly posted their own experiences in the comments below (and elsewhere on this site). Feel free to join the conversation, fellow players!

The Pathologic Dialogues - Part I

Having finished the game, Duke and Kevin (Bachelor and Haruspicus, respectively) ask some questions and try to unpack Pathologic. Add your thoughts / questions in the comments section!

For those new to the blog, go here.

What was it all for?

Duke: Pathologic exists as a tightly-wound mechanism--exactly as Aglaja the Inquisitor put it in the game. I stick by what Ice Pick Lodge wrote in the first page of the game manual: Pathologic is an epidemic simulator. The game is constituted of many parts: an emotionally-draining scenario, mythology and meta-narrative, with symbols, philosophical rants, all adhering to gaming conventions. The game is an "epidemic simulator." Its purpose is to test players' moral fibre. We simulate the epidemic to test whether or not we would make right decisions amidst crisis.

At its base, Pathologic shares the same goal as good art: to show us something of ourselves we did not understand before.

Kevin: I'm not sure I'm fully on board with the idea that the point of Pathologic is "to test whether or not we would make right decisions" in certain situations. I tried to think about it that way at first and came away unsatisfied. It seemed to have the same problem as Bioshock: I would be presented with a choice between two mutually exclusive options, but the long-term outcome was the same regardless of which one I chose. As long as I completed all the main quests and made sure to save enough panacea for everyone's Adherents at the end, the in-game repercussions of my actions were fairly negligible (better/worse quest rewards, missed dialogue trees, etc.). Even when I was doing horrible things like stabbing innocent people for shopping discounts, the hit to my reputation meter was relatively small and my relations with other characters remained unchanged. Even the much-vaunted final dilemma at the Cathedral felt like more of a choice between abstractions than a genuine moral quandary. Where were the consequences? Where were the situations that forced me to pick the lesser of two evils? Pathologic never gave me a mind-blowing, everything-you-know-is-wrong twist like Bioshock's "Would you kindly?" reveal. I felt cheated.

But the more I thought about the experience after finishing the game, the more I realized that the consequences and morality I thought I was missing actually were there; they just weren't present in the game-narrative itself. When I killed that guy on Day Two, I felt like a monster, and it wasn't because the game punished me with a "bad" ending or decreased resources. I felt like a monster because my character had just acted like a monster. Somehow Pathologic had made me identify with my character much more closely than any other videogame had, to the point where my character's behavior and my behavior were one and the same. There was no comfortable distance between me and Artemiy Burakh. I couldn't act with reckless abandon and laugh it off as "just a game."

I think this gets at your larger point: Pathologic, like lots of other art, revealed me to myself. By playing as an organ-thieving shamanistic weirdo in an extreme setting, I was suddenly thinking about myself and my approach to games in whole new ways. Did it test whether I would make "right" decisions during a plague outbreak? Who cares. The point is, it made me think about what the concepts of "rightness" and "morality" actually mean to me. It made me engage in a far more immersive form of role-playing than any so-called RPG ever has. As you can probably attest, given the weird arguments we had with each other after our game sessions.

Duke: Those arguments were huge. I think that set the game apart to me more than anything else. I've gotten involved in some games before--I remember screaming in unison with some friends on the most intense scenes in Heavy Rain--but I've never fully synced with a character like I did with the Bachelor. This was a characterization that was carefully cultivated, both through situation and gameplay. Pathologic is engineered to make players desperate. It's not very hard to make a person care. Look at the success of Farmville. Millions of Facebook users are given an arbitrary set of assets at the start of the game--all of them the same--and suddenly people are waking up at 2 in the morning to feed their cows.

Most games give you a health bar you have to keep filled. Pathologic gives you hunger, exhaustion, infection and immunity in addition to health. Maintaining the survival of your character is a chore. Through that maintenance, you take ownership much more completely. The simulation is more demanding. Is this manipulative? Yes. But manipulation is gaming's specialty: as we affect the simulated reality, it affects us.

My state of mind in Pathologic is something that's difficult to translate into writing. I found myself in a constant state of tension. I was stressed at the mounting conflict in the town, the annoyance of the tasks with which I was being presented, while constantly worrying about the Bachelor's health. It follows naturally that I would become impatient with the petty squabbles I had to deal with. I think of myself as a compassionate person, yet by Day 6 I had settled into the cold, calculating method of the Bachelor, and had deemed the town not worth saving. Which, strangely enough, was exactly what the developers had intended for the Bachelor. It was not by choice but necessity that I started to hate the town--both as a player and character--and it follows that I would latch on to the one thing that made sense: simulated life, anesthesia, as embodied in the Polyhedron. I wasn't forced to dream of a better world--I chose to. With the simulated reality crumbling around me, I gravitated toward the closest thing to perfect that the game had to offer: the Polyhedron.

That's where it gets me, Kevin. As people, we have to impose some kind of order on the world around us. As ethical, empathic people, we brought our sensibilities to bear on Pathologic. And because of our different roles, our different treatments, we shored up different suppositions, different conclusions than the other. You turned into a weird mix of Pavel and Alyosha from The Brothers Karamazov, burying stray cats while espousing a universal hope--whereas I turned Ivan, the intellectual nihilist, consumed by the evil of the world around me.

Kevin: Consumed by evil, huh? I thought there was something different about you.

It was definitely interesting how we both could be absolutely convinced of our rightness despite being on completely opposite sides. Again, I can't think of another game that comes even close to offering that kind of multivalent storytelling (Deus Ex does, based on what I've heard, but I haven't played it myself—I know, I know). We both had good reasons for picking the sides we did, too. When I said in my final entry that I was almost swayed by the Bachelor to destroy the town, I wasn't exaggerating, and part of my uncertainty was due to the points you made during our discussions. You argued passionately for your side, probably because, at least at the time, you sincerely believed you were right. Neither of us was playing make-believe: we were in it for real. Pathologic made us feel that we genuinely had skin in the game.

So why did we care so much? As you said, part of it's because you and I have at least a basic sense of empathy and morals, and part of it's because we had to work so hard just to keep our characters alive. The big thing for me, though, was the fact that the whole game was predicated on the goal of saving lives. Most adult-oriented narratives in games these days have violence as the engine driving the story forward, as in "those aliens are attacking me so I must blast them in the face with my space-shotgun." There's violent combat in Pathologic, sure, but combat isn't the focus (I tried to avoid it whenever possible, if only because the control system made me want to throw my laptop through a window). At the beginning of each day, the game reminds you how many people have died, how many are close to dying. That's a great device; it was a constant reminder to me that the Plague was winning. It lent urgency to everything I did; even when I wasn't close to death myself (a relatively rare situation to begin with), I knew that other people were. Every quest and action felt terribly important, and I was constantly stressed out about the epidemic's tireless advance. No wonder I got so sucked in: lives were at stake.