Proposal 2019 Revenant Journal "Twyre is pain of the Steppe"

Twyre is pain of the Steppe: death, dying, and the player as writer in Pathologic.

R. Dorey


Pathologic offers a dying city. [...]. A pustule encrusted town where events carry on regardless of your presence, slowly wasting away despite you. This is a fascinating game. And a very broken one (Walker, 2006).

The 2005 survival horror video game ‘Pathologic’ sees the player take control of one of three characters (‘the Thanatologist’, ‘the Haruspex’, and ‘the Changeling’) attempting to prevent, manage, cure, and explain the outbreak of a plague. The game’s manual describes it as 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’ (Harrist, 2012).

The setting is an unspecified town bordered by a steppe, with an economy based around a huge slaughterhouse, and culture based on complex hierarchies and laws around death. The majority of a typical playthrough sees the player constantly on the verge of dying as they seek to understand the local cultures, navigate the conflicting narratives of the inhabitants, and acquire the knowledge, materials and permissions to stop the plague. Pathologic is offers a survival which is always a choice between ruinous or debasing options, searching waste bins for junk to trade with children or dissecting corpses for organs to sell to the doctor forms the game’s economy which never allows the player to accrue the capital to surpass this struggle. Outside of this, the game itself is a struggle to play, even in its 2015 HD remaster it uses deliberately limited graphics, awkward mechanics and restricted information, deploying the qualities of a broken game to further its exploration of apocalyptic crisis.

From Quintin Smith’s trilogy of articles (Smith, 2008a, 2008b, 2008c) which popularised Pathologic to English speaking audiences, to Harris ‘Hbomberguy’ Brewis’s 2 hour video analysis (Brewis, 2019) the common tension around the game is that it is both a work of art, and ‘agonizing to play’ (Harrist, 2012). I will argue that the latter is a feature of the former.

The developers ‘deliberately refuse to create a comfortable environment for the gamer. The addressee is not the consumer. [They are] the coauthor. Passing the deep game is a creative process’ (Ice-Pick Lodge, 2001). I analyze this player-role through game theorist Mary Flanagan’s concepts of ‘hyperknowledge’ and ‘rendition’, aligning the player’s navigation of game space from multiple irreconcilable points of view from a feminist philosophy of embodiment (Flanagan, 2002).

The player experience of difficulty, unreliable information, and constant proximity to death is theorised through the feminist writing practices of Hélène Cixous and Kathy Acker. Acker has conceptualised writing as dying ‘while remaining alive’ (Acker, 1990, p. 174) while Cixous approaches writing as ‘learning to die’ (Cixous, 2005, p. 10) and both offer ways of thinking of writing through its points of collapse and divergence. These writers offer a framework to examine the player-as-author while recontextualization the trauma of playing, the game’s collapsing and unreliable narratives, and the meaning of death and survival within such a creative process.

In conclusion, I argue that more than just being a game set within a nightmare space, where the environmental collapsed with the social and economic order, Pathologic demands active and complicit investment in these from the player. Pathologic is ‘hypo-ludic’ (Conway, 2012), as the game restricts conventional enjoyment through its mechanics, graphics, and morally compromising choices. The player of Pathologic is forced to engage in the creative process of roleplay in this apocalyptic waste, and in doing so both engages with feminist writing techniques and uses what game theorist Jesper Juul has identified as the unique capacity of games to make an audience complict in tragedy (Juul, 2013).

Acker, K. (1990). In memoriam to identity (1st ed). Grove Weidenfeld.

Brewis, H. (2019, November 21). Pathologic is Genius, And Here’s Why. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsNm2YLrk30

Cixous, H. (2005). Three steps on the ladder of writing (S. Cornell & S. Sellers, Trans.). Columbia University Press.

Conway, S. (2012). We Used to Win, We Used to Lose, We Used to Play: Simulacra, Hypo-Ludicity and the Lost Art of Losing. Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, 9(1), 27. https://doi.org/10.16997/wpcc.147

Dybovsky, N. (2005). On the Threshold of the Bone House, or as Game Becomes Art. (2005). I C E - P I C K. http://old.ice-pick.com/ore9_eng.htm

Dybowski, N. (2015). Pathologic Classic HD [Microsoft Windows]. G2 Games, Ice-Pick Lodge.

Flanagan, M. (2002). Hyperbodies Hyperknowledge: Women in Games, Women in Cyberpunk and Strategies of Resistance. In M. Flanagan & A. Booth (Eds.), Reload: Rethinking Women and Cyberculture. MIT Press.

Goodman, P. (2014, December 1). Pathologic Interview. The Escapist. http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/12333-Pathologic-Interview#&gid=gallery_3295&pid=1

Harrist, J. (2012, April 30). Infected Zones. Kill Screen. https://web.archive.org/web/20140815022720/http://killscreendaily.com/articles/essays/infected-zones/

Hiller, B. (2016, December 1). The new Pathologic is still one of the best games it’s no fun to actually play. VG247. https://www.vg247.com/2016/12/01/the-new-pathologic-is-still-one-of-the-best-games-its-no-fun-to-actually-play/

Hitorin, V. (2014, November 3). Pathologic: Saving the virtual world from a Russian plague. https://www.rbth.com/science_and_tech/2014/11/03/pathologic_saving_the_virtual_world_from_a_russian_plague_41037.html

Ice-Pick Lodge. (2001, March 18). Manifesto 2001. Ice-Pick Lodge. https://ice-pick.com/en/manifesto-2001/

Ilukhin, K. (2015, February 13). Pathologic: Interview with game creators. Sci-Fi and Fantasy Network. http://www.scififantasynetwork.com/pathologic-interview-with-game-creators/

Juul, J. (2013). The art of failure: An essay on the pain of playing video games. MIT Press.

Novitz, J. (2017). Scarcity and Survival Horror Trade as an Instrument of Terror in Pathologic. Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association, 2(1), 63–88.

Smith, Q. (2008a, April 10). Butchering Pathologic – Part 1: The Body. Rock, Paper, Shotgun. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008/04/10/butchering-pathologic-part-1-the-body/

Smith, Q. (2008b, April 11). Butchering Pathologic – Part 2: The Mind. Rock, Paper, Shotgun. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008/04/11/butchering-pathologic-part-2-the-mind/

Smith, Q. (2008c, April 12). Butchering Pathologic – Part 3: The Soul. Rock, Paper, Shotgun. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008/04/12/butchering-pathologic-part-3-the-soul/