I find it difficult to verbalize my emotions when reaching the final moments of We Become What We Behold. I felt as if the static on my computer screen was placed directly in my head; the game created a sense of realness—the initial shock succumbing to genuine, profound dread as the elements of the story clicked together. The passive movement of the NPCs stopped, and thoughts about race- and gender-based violence, media misrepresentation, and immigration and the rise of xenophobia flooded into my mind.
As the murder scene transitioned into the vigil, I was left with one question: how did one moment in a simple game leave such a poignant afterimage?
I read the chapter on procedural rhetoric in Ian Bogost’s Persuasive Games before playing We Become What We Behold, and I contemplated the notion of effective processes as I played. I periodically jotted down guesses what the game was trying to express—beginning with unfocused phrases such as “media influences people” and “media creates trends”—until the character in the hat pulled out a gun.
Through this twist, the game intentionally violates the players’ consent. In Play and Be Real About It: What Games Could Learn from Kink, Mattie Brice states that “play is actually an exercise in understanding context, and that that act of understanding is empathy.” Unlike the real world, a lack of consent in games is not immoral. Games, as defined by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman in their book Rules of Play, are “systems in which players engage in artificial conflict.” This barrier between real-world consequences and the gamespace allows players to explore the impact of consent. Asking players to empathize with identity-specific experiences—such as race- and gender-based violence—is an impossible task; one cannot share mutual feelings with another if they lack mutuality. Nicky Case finds a way around that obstacle by embedding an exercise in comprehending these contexts as both a witness to and enabler of violence, for the real-world contexts alluded to in the game involve a violation of the participants’ consent.
In addition to mimicking the suspension of consent in violence contexts, the game heavily draws on polarizing themes dominating American media—namely the demonization of minority populations such as Mexican immigrants, Middle Eastern refugees, and young African American men. I asked a friend—who is Singaporean—to play We Become What We Behold to determine whether the game’s emotional impact varies based on their relationship with media coverage. He came to a different conclusion: in response to the murder scene, he stated, “[this scene] reminds me of how World War 1 began. Tensions had risen so high that one death was enough to cause an explosion.” He also mentioned that “Singapore is more culturally homogenous than the US,” and “Singaporean news is regulated by the government; we rarely hear anything about domestic problems.” Our understandings are not representative of our respective nationalities; however, I believe our different readings of this scene demonstrate that the player’s background dictates the game’s emotional and intellectual affordances. This difference further begs the question of how other factors impact the player’s response. Why do I care about media misrepresentation, not just from the lens of an American, but as a minority woman born in the post-9/11 generation?
This association between the player’s identity and the game’s affordances introduces the idea of bidirectionality within a human-system relationship. Initially, the player makes changes within a framework—in this case, by taking pictures—and observes the outcomes. In the murder scene, this relationship reverses; the system evokes a response in the player. This transfer of control establishes a pseudo-emergent narrative in which the player believes their input mandates outcomes in the game. As indicated by the title, players become prey to the tools they create.
One critique I have heard about the game is that it does not change players’ perceptions about misrepresentation in mass media. I maintain that the game has a different intention. Ian Bogost defines procedural rhetoric as the method of using processes effectively. By this definition, the effect that a serious game strives to create does not need to involve making an argument or delivering a message, much like educational games. The effectiveness in We Become What We Behold manifests through an intentional violation of consent and connection with the player’s identity, giving rise to potent emotional impact. Thus, the game is more akin to art, carrying a type of interpretive openness that invites players to sit in its ambiguity and consider themselves alongside its inner workings.
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