I want to live

The clock won't stop and this is what we get...

One of the most powerful instincts that sentient life covets, whether the humble amoebae or human beings ourselves, is the desire to live. Hot and persistent, beating in our souls, flushing our limbs and being with undefinable purpose. That which brings us mewling into the world and sets us kicking on our way out of it. To be alive just is. No greater explanation needed, nor any more salient an exploration need to be conducted into a state so ultimately self explanatory. As such it can make for a very powerful draw within fiction, to put the very survival of a hero on the line and allow that most base and primal of desires to drag them through the pits of strife towards ultimate, unblinking, victory. It's a pretty powerful character motivation to build a story around.

But it can easily be a crutch. Afterall, the fundamental rules of building 'suspense' is to pair peril with opportunity and squeeze the margins between those two ingredients as thin as possible during a scene. But how many times have you watched a film in which the heroic protagonist has swooped in and out the clutches of certain death fifteen times already and you just don't care anymore by the sixteenth? When you no longer buy the peril in the first place because you become convinced that the script has conjured some unbreakable barrier around your pretty boy's skin? That's because the peril they present is illegitimate and/or presented in a fashion that is emotionally inauthentic. It takes a little more than throwing a knife at a character's head to make the question of the frailty of mortality a poignant issue in a story.

Which is probably why the interactive nature of games and gaming can work so well with presenting a story like this- as to get to the heart you need to tap into the core of the soul absorbing the media and no medium opens up to the individual quite as much as a good game might. Put the player in the shoes of one suffering the effects of mortality summoned and you're much more likely to reverberate against the walls of humanity's own, inescapable, existential ponderance. And in fact I've recently played two games that centrally toy around with just such a theme, albeit in distinctly different fashions to differing effects. Which is better? Neither, to be frank- but see if you find a preference.

Spoilers for the first act, but Baldur's Gate 3 is a game about being given a death sentence with a belated end-date. Before you're even given reigns to the character creator, you've been infested with a Mindflayer tadpole with the power to force a terrifying metamorphosis over the player turning them into a Mindflayer thrall, for which you are past due pretty much the second you take control. The sticking force that connects all the disparate heroes of the game is the desperate desire to wrest more life out of the jaws of what feels like impending and inescapable mortality as they search to cure themselves. Theirs lives, goals and life desires fall aside to secondary objectives over the true goal- not becoming a tentacle sporting monster man.

Now the actual theme of 'survival' is treated more like a spurring force in the narrative, rather than a spectre hanging over your every impulse and action. Quickly the impetus for action slips beneath the veneer of doing 'what's right' or 'seeking ultimate power' depending on your side of the moral scales, and even in situations where you can take massive steps one way or another there's precious little offered introspection into the weight of the decision you're making and how that might affect your immediate or long-term future prospects. Of course, this is perhaps because of the nature of a freeform RPG wherein leaving the purpose of the player in the minds of the player allows greater feeling of narrative control in the hands of the audience. But even then there's still a hint of life yearning left over in the OST, particularly in the aptly named credits song: 'I want to live'. 

Another prominent title with a very similar message is, I'm sure you've already guessed, Cyberpunk 2077- in which the pursuit of the protagonist to wrangle their lives out of a death sentence handed to them during the first act forms the impetus for the entire plot. Stuck as are with an invisible ticking clock in your skull, much of the pathos that V shares with their closet confidants and really anyone near by willing to listen to them is the pain of facing the inevitable and what aspects of life begin to really stand out in those moments. One of the most powerful moments in the entire game comes in the scene that V first discovers that he's about to die, and you witness the tough and confidant man you've got to know over the past ten hours or so just crumble in that first cold dose of shock and near-existential outrage; it's powerful stuff!

And unlike with Baldur's Gate 3, Cyberpunk is grounded to the hard reality of a semi-realistic worldspace. You're not on the warpath to save the world, you're driven by selfish purpose as you face the question of how many lives are worth taking in order to save your own. What is the worth of a life? What does more life even mean to the people it touches? This more than any other aspect of Cyberpunk forms the heart of it's morality, and by the time we reach those final credits there's an almost unspeakable apotheosis that drowns out the actual content of the moment with a contented pathos. It's genuinely a sublimely conducted epilogue, whichever direction you end up choosing in that final ending choice moment.

As the artistry around gaming allows itself to become more existential and ponderous, I revel in the fact that more mainstream developers are getting the opportunity to explore grand and effective themes of life in a manner that isn't just poorly strung together minigames complimented with awful slam poetry. (No offence, Indie Games.) That two of the biggest games of this gaming decade would ask questions about the worth of life, albeit to vastly different severities, marks an incredible contrast to the days where the only question worth broaching was whether or not Peach was really waiting in another castle or just trying to keep Mario busy whilst she and Browser went on various steamy date nights across the Mushroom Kingdom. (Afterall, for a state of government ruled entirely by a single Monarchy, why are there so many castles to begin with? And what Kingdom is Daisy Princess of? Are Peach and Daisy sisters? I'm getting off track...)  Life's utmost goal it to define itself, and if gaming can serve as another lens through which to view that, then I'd consider it as true an artform as any other out there.