kiki, do you love me

When playing Loved, I find myself often excited jumping into the barbed wires. In this game, it seems "death" is not simply "failing", being insufficient in technicity, to pass or beat the game. The crisp sound of porcelain breaking and falling onto the floor can easily be featured in the "oddly satisfying" Snapchat story. Moreover, unlike most games in which your past incarnations disappear, the gazillion pieces of you remain scattered over the cold battleground. In Loved, dying is vigorous, generative, and empathetic.

Look, the new me is really still the real me

Even though the game gives you endless lives, mortality is fully marked by each death experience. Unlike falling out of frame with a whoosh sound or disappearing after two flashes in other platform games, death as presented by Loved is total and absolute. You hear and see yourself whole self break into pieces--the entire ego fragment into pieces. And the pieces of yourself are always there: you were here, and then you fell apart. Dying reaffirms life, as pain heightens existence, the master recognizes the slave.

However, one does not at all feel unnatural or burdened when the icon reappears, and jumps over the remains of one's previous life. Unlike in Stanley Parable or Papers, Please, one does not feel the need to do something drastically different each time through; it does not seem as if one had gone through a heavy life. Part of it is the duration of the game, but it does guide you to relive your life/choices explicitly through the narrator's questions. On the other hand, each reincarnation is not a completely real new life path, but an extension, continuation of the past. Through all these performances of bodily shattering, "you" remain integral.

I swear you gotta feel me before they try and kill me The only other thing that breaks in Loved is the statues. When you touch them, their black outer shell shatters, making the same sound as when you die. From beneath emerges a pristine, stationary, white, female-looking statue in classic contrapposto--in other words, the epitome of pre-contemporary Western ideal of beauty.

Then there's you, a chubby cat/pig (?) figure who move semi-clumsily (with slippery control, or just my cheap wifi's lag). You are a "disgusting", "ugly creature". What does it mean when you touch the figurine, when their shell breaks? Why is it that these idols of class and beauty mark stages you make through the game? That the narrator oders you to stay away from it at one point? Why do you die as they break?

There could be multitudes of conjectures, but it's safe to say that beauty, art, and shattering are bound up in Loved. When you die, the shattering sound is like a statue breaking apart, signaling that "you" are an artifact, made from fragile material, forged by human hands. Yet you're not the "beautiful"--you're playing it. In kink, the sub is the objectified item of desire. It is clear, however, in game or kink play that "you" are not really objectified beauty. Still, in active shattering, one generates an extended self. To be touched and broken, then, is not to be erased, but to become something more.

Kiki, do you love me? In Mattie Rice's article, "the domme and sub have the same goals: to bring each other to the places on which they’ve agreed". Most games, in contrast, don't allow the players to feel out the context and become empathetic. This is where, I think, games departs from contemporary first-world BDSM practices. Even if one is familiar with the basic mechanisms of a genre, the player does not co-orchestrate the game. One has to dare go into a world where one knows nothing about to say whether one likes it or not. In this sense, this part of gameplay is more analogous to real masochism.

For me, real empathy is not going where you already know where you want to go. This version of inhabiting the other still maintains an isolated, autonomous individual who manages their emotions and feelings. One cannot merely venture outside "mainstream society", as Rice suggests, but also travel beyond their imagined worlds. To really feel, and live with others, is to allow oneself be moved as the other.

And this means accepting ambiguity and uncertainty, opening your "self" and feelings to become unkown. When discussing aftercare, Rice argues that people needed to be reminded that they are "good, loved people". Essentially, you are reminded that was just a game, the not-real, from which you should emerge unscathed but with "complicated views, complicated identities" (81). Essentially, solidified closure and assurance should come at the end of play. Knowledge is increased, but not destabilized. But this is not true with the ambiguity Loved offers. You still don't know why you did this, who you really are, what is meant by all this. Even as the screen says "I loved you", you're left wondering if such dry confession, after slurps of generic insults, really mean anything at all.

, do you love me?