Hokkaido’s inferno – Empaty in videogames

I’ll start the post with a question, What is art?

In my opinion, the answer is simple: Any opera can be considered art if it is able to give you emotions.

There are plenty of movies, books, and video games that give you emotions and even paints, songs, nudes, the moon landing, the challenger, the first rover on Mars.

I could go on forever but you get the gist.

I wanna speak today about a really peculiar form of art: Videogames.

I recently finished my first video game even and even if I’m late, I was so proud of myself that when the main campaign ended I discovered after a couple of days that well, it wasn’t finished.

Just for this, it can be considered art thanks to the wide range of emotions and even profanities that I said but deep at the end of the second campaign, something happened (the mission of empathy as I’ll call it) where you had to make very nasty decisions.

The game is Hitman, the 2016 remake and the start of the new trilogy.

I always loved hitman because it is a stealth game by definition and I love stealth, it gave me the best experience in every game that introduces those mechanics.

But coming back in the game, there are only six amazing maps that run over every one of the stories within the game.

The first campaign is a basilar Hitman campaign where you have to kill your targets and reach the exit without being killed.

The second big campaign though is called “Patient zero” and if you, like me, are you living through 2020 and 2021, the plot will let you drop the keyboard out the window hoping you don’t have to play it.

The plot is simple: A deadly virus had to be stopped.

First mission: Killing two guys that plan to release it in the world.

Second mission: The same.

Third mission: here things start going south, you have to kill a bunch of infected people, and is not much problem because they are bad paramilitary soldiers that want to do evil stuff.

Fourth mission: in the masterpiece of the Japanese mountains in Hokkaido, you have to kill the patient zero, the vector of the virus itself.

It starts like a normal mission, going around, collecting things, and finding the route.

I was definitely taking my time because I didn’t know what was about to happen.

Less than a minute in the run I got the notification that one person on the map had just been infected and, in order to avoid the spreading of the virus I had to kill that son of a bitch before he got close to somebody else.

I made all the rounds of the facility and I found the nasty cunt and my heart simply stopped, it was a nurse.

That person, that poor person came to work that morning just to be hugged by a son of a bitch that wanted to destroy the world and she became nothing but a living target.

I followed her keeping my distance because I didn’t want to get infected myself.

She got outside to speak with a guy, just a guard who was doing his job.

He got infected too. I suddenly understood the impact of that moment, I had to contain the apocalypse so I did the only thing I could.

I shot them for the greater good because it was the right thing to do.

Did they have a family? I didn’t know but for the first time in my life, I cared about people made out of code and numbers.

But what if they had families? What if both of them were a family, could be a kid waiting for them?

I thought about what would have happened if that was real life and at the very end I realized that it wasn’t necessary to hire a hitman.

In those dark times, we are the patient zero, any of us can make the difference between life and death.

Any of us can determine the destiny of entire families or simply the life of human beings.

I don’t know why I felt the need to write this post but it happens sometimes that an event is so deep that it gives you the need to share the emotions with the world.

-ldmarchesi