The Virtual Life – Keeping The Peace In Dishonored

They took Emily Kaldwin’s mother from her first. A knife in the heart. Then they came for her father and for her kingdom, and now she’s alone in a strange place trying to pull herself together.

Emily sees a man with a sword in an alley. She watches him prowl, grunting to himself. She creeps behind him, her palm touching the handle of her blade. A pause. In a split second, Emily decides the kind of person she's going to be.

She moves past him, into the shadows. She creeps up the stairs. Tonight, that man will go home, perhaps to his family, perhaps to a bottle of booze – but he’ll be going home alive.

Emily leans into a stairwell, she sighs.

The night is far from over.

Since their Dungeons & Dragons inception, narrative-focused games have hinged on a single, powerful concept: be someone. Specifically, be someone else. Don’t be yourself. Be a bloodthirsty orc. A space marine chomping on a cigar. A nimble archeologist who’s good with guns. Video games have always tried to offer players fantasies that let them trade one identity for another, encouraging them to stomp around in massive, virtual theme parks – like Red Dead Redemption’s seemingly endless frontier or Mass Effect’s Milky Way – with the main thrust of such adventures being to kill as many hapless goons as you can before moving on to kill The Big Bad. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Many of these games endeavor to offer a particular kind of fantasy and often excel at creating it for the player to inhabit, even if restricts them to living out that one role for the duration of the experience.

However, immersive sims like System Shock, Deus Ex, and Thief are notable because of the flexibility inherent in their systems, with RPG elements dipping into stealth or action gameplay. Want to be a mass murderer? Fine. What about a sneaky rogue who slips past everyone? Maybe a conversationalist who chats and charms their way out of every problem? These are all options often offered by this sparse but special genre.

Dishonored is a special immersive sim. Probably my favorite one, actually, because it’s the only one that not only offers a variety of playstyles, but its flexibility is also tethered to the game’s story in an interesting way. Both Dishonored stories are ostensibly about revenge. Corvo and Emily have something taken away from them – a loved one, a kingdom, innocence – and the player decides over the course of a 10-hour campaign how they’re going to get even. However, what makes Dishonored’s narrative intriguing is that it doesn’t have to be a by-the-numbers revenge story. Instead, I argue that the series is ultimately about trauma and how we choose to deal with it.

Most of us have probably experienced betrayal or heartbreak, even on some minor level. How do you handle such situations? Do you burn the bridge with the person who hurt you on it? Do you walk away and never speak to them? Do you pick up the pieces of yourself they shattered and try to fit everything back together? Do you forgive them as much as you can? Being a stone-cold killer in either Dishonored results in the world becoming a darker place filled with death and despair, while those who tread lightly and place value on the lives of every person they come across make Dunwall and Karnaca better. However, neither option is really presented as good or bad, but instead in the classic RPG term of “chaos.” Dishonored’s citizens may judge you but the world itself doesn’t. It just exists, and you are allowed to romp around and do as you feel with your special abilities.

In this way, Dishonored’s morality system is powerful because we see ourselves as Emily and Corvo in this fantasy and we choose to guide them by a combination of our values and whims. As someone who’s played through Dishonored at least a dozen times, I often choose to be compassionate because I think it’s the more interesting playstyle, and because I want Corvo to strive to be a good person – often like I strive (and sometimes fail) to be. However, Dishonored 2 arrived for me in the midst of a terrible month with me burning bridges left and right in a rare case of interpersonal arson.

I chose to play as Emily and started a playthrough where I slashed people to ribbons—every single man, woman, and clockwork soldier thing I came across. It fit the mood of what I was feeling at the time while also being an understandable arc for a woman who spent her childhood as a political pawn, only to take her rightful throne and have it stolen from her. It’s interactive storytelling that works on multiple levels, but here’s the real kicker: about halfway through, I felt bad. Like, really, really terrible over slaying all these characters, many of them just people doing their job.

Eventually I decided to start over and do a non-lethal playthrough with Emily, with her being a compassionate person. Not only has this second time through been more fun, but it’s also arrived during a time when my heated feelings from last week are cooling down and I’m opening myself up again to the possibility that maybe people aren’t garbage. It’s a good feeling and the sense of satisfaction I’ve gotten from sneaking and sparing has helped me get to that place. Interactive storytelling works at its best when it runs parallel to our actual lives. The best games let us be someone else, but also let us inject ourselves into those characters in some small, meaningful way. Sometimes that means having a character creator capable of churning out a model who looks like you. Other times, it’s about the little touches – like having the option to sign a guestbook before you crash a masquerade ball or making time to play hide and go seek with your daughter.

Regardless of how, I hope to see more games in the future from all genres embrace the cleverness at the heart of Dishonored’s flexible gameplay in order to create surprising, perhaps even needed, experiences for the medium.