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.

Pathologic: Infected Zones

I wrote this article for Kill Screen. So here it is--a piece on Pathologic. Like it on the website and your facebook page to get some buzz.


Read the original here.

In 1770, a strain of bubonic plague tore through Russian quarantine and infected Moscow. The plague took out maybe a third of the population of Moscow. As the dead piled up, city limits were extended to accommodate new graveyards. Quarantines were enforced and the economic paralysis sent shockwaves through the food supplies, until an army of starving and enraged Muscovites broke out into the streets and began the infamous Plague Riot. Once quarantine began to take effect, the plague died out relatively quickly, but at its peak, it was claiming a thousand lives per day. The event—both plague and riot—induced a complete breakdown of the infrastructure of Russian society, killing weak and strong, breaking down the economy, citizens’ rights, and basic human dignity.

In the manual for Pathologic, Russian developer Ice-Pick Lodge (which also madeThe Void) introduces its game with an appeal. Cataclysms and outbreaks of new diseases are the natural mechanism of pruning an overpopulated planet, it writes.Pathologic is a prototype of a “simulator of human behavior in the condition of pandemic”: it purports to test the user’s ability to make right decisions in times of crisis. It’s also agonizing to play, shoddily translated, and ugly as sin. Eurogamer’s John Walker called it “Oblivion with cancer ... a fascinating game. And a very broken one.” The game has cultivated a fiercely devoted fan base despite its poor reception in the West.

Pathologic shows the devolution of a society over the course of 12 days as plague overtakes a small, nameless Settlement. Events of the game closely mirror the real-world events of an epidemic. As the Sand Plague breaks, grows, and gradually consumes the settlement, characters research the cure and quarantine infected sections, until the military is summoned to suppress the growing chaos. By the end, it becomes nearly impossible to walk three steps without seeing a murder, as starvation drives people from their homes to be either infected or looted by raiders, and those raiders are in turn exterminated by soldiers.

Ice-Pick Lodge furnishes a mythologized restitching of the pandemic. Among the entrails of the Settlement’s history and the skeletal narrative, Pathologic paints a stirring portrait of the human condition and asks how we, as humans, have infected the earth. The Settlement in Pathologic is torn between past and future: the symbiosis of simple life on the steppe has been exchanged for modern life in the city. Innovation is bought by polluting the environment. In Pathologic, the environment retaliates through the natural mechanism of the Sand Plague.

It’s not surprising that a piece like Pathologic is distinctly Russian. Ice-Pick Lodge’s game functions as a sort of stylized reaction to key events in Russia and the Soviet Union’s history. Consider Chernobyl: the destruction of the reactor in 1986 scattered radioactive waste to the wind, resulting in untold deaths worldwide (the book Chernobyl estimates nearly a million premature deaths from the disaster). The testing, under direct orders from Moscow, is infamous. We won’t know the full effect of the disaster for years. It was inhumanly impossible to contain the radioactive fallout—400 times that of Hiroshima.

The Aral Sea was one of the world’s largest inbound bodies of water, yet 50 years of abuse under Soviet authority have reduced it to a fraction of its former breadth. Long piers extend over barren salt flats where the Aral has retreated. Between 1960 and 2008, the sea shrank from 26,300 square miles to a couple thousand, spread between several disparate lakes. The remaining waters are heavily polluted from chemical waste: the whole thing has been called one of the planet’s worst environmental disasters.

When viewed specifically as a Russian work, Pathologic becomes an apologetic of remorse. Mistakes made in the Soviet era were often glossed over or denied: Ice-Pick Lodge seeds Pathologic with increasingly overt symbolism. The Settlement’s districts are named for parts of the body, and the player’s map constantly evolves, tracking infected zones and objectives, until symbolism is thrown out the window and the map is replaced with a cutaway of the internal workings of a bull. The most powerful moments in the game lie in discovering, bit by bit, the extent to which the Settlement has ravaged the ground on which it was built. 

Pathologic acts as a statement, rising out of the Russian consciousness, that attempts to peel back the scars history has left and force players to ask questions. While it invites cliches like “humans are evil because they destroy the environment,” it doesn’t deserve such a simple interpretation. The developer invites players to spend 40 agonizing hours in a pandemic simulator not just to show how depraved and craven the human animal can become in such extreme circumstances, but to ask players what it is they want to believe. Do you believe in the power of logic and science? Do you cling to tradition? Or are you willing to trust in something more?

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.