wake up, rod

Lex, who I left ½ empty, on Daedalus ( after Bioforge ) half of something, left depleted, the master energy of that masterful thing – you bludgeoned him to death with his own arm, said a witty aphorism, breathed acid, walked among waste. master-switch death-ray meat, sing a wordless song on a pylon, left alone with a dying battery. you know damn well that if you shoot all those cyborgs I’ll die here. no do-overs. depletion, and I watch the world die. wake up with fingers bound by steel, with ten toes smelt to two. movement disorients. made of metal, but they left the skin on. gravity holds things to ground, minerals especially. a laser in the knuckles, a power cell in the arm – you decide not to find out where I came from. you forgot to put on my hazard suit before you ran...

The above is a quote from Prince of Persia, a remake of a classic 1980s video game. In the most recent iteration - as I understand it - the narrative elements are foregrounded throughout the game and the quote above occurs when one dies in the game. This got me thinking about consequences in video games. Recently I was talking to J.P. about a series of games wherein the goal is no less lofty than averting the apocalypse but the characters traipse toward their grim fate gingerly, languidly moving at the player's behest as if time was made of molasses. Video game worlds are fraught with this kind of unaccountability. In the Street Fighter series, people all over the world gather around to watch super-powered weirdos throw fireballs at each other with no thought that an errant fireball (they often miss) will plow through the crowd and toast the school girls hanging out (curiously) in a construction yard. Thankfully developers are starting to unpack this historical curiosity of video ...