The Hardcore Man

Where does the line stop with the Duty of Grieve? Is the over identification of avatar and gamer now enough to cross that line? Is it intentional for capital?

You know, we probably shouldn't become vampires. Nor should we probably let the system become one too.

Around June-August 2023, there was a big stink concerning Blizzard’s tokens and hardcore servers. Potentially allowing resurrecting or moving to a classic style server of “hardcore” characters. A hardcore character being permanently dead with everything lost once it dies. In this article, I tell you that this is entirely fine, it won’t turn you to into a vampire.  

This will be the complete opposite of the previous article on grief in Castlevania’s vampires – The Grief Man – because Cholbi’s idea of a duty to grieve and identity-ego-centric basis fails at the “hardcore” modes. Especially in the focus-tested-to-oblivion identification driven era of videogame development.

Because you are supposed to tie your identity to the character, you are supposed to grieve their one life. After all that’s what a lot of the representation discourse is about right? You’re represented. It’s what Druckmann and a bunch of the movie-game people like to wank about.

See, as much as bullies and kpop fans might point out, you can’t have a videogame as part-of-your-identity. Hell even “gamers” like to poke fun at other gamers for having videogame tattoos. (I went to undergrad with a man who had a Skyrim tattoo and got lit up on Instagram about it – despite the tattoo being for his dying little brother who would play it with him in hospital…)

Is that not the point of ‘hardcore’ modes?

To watch a clip on YouTube to see someone anguished at the loss of a hardcore ARPG character, to see those hours of work – and it is work – to get that point? Don’t let the alienated-from-their-product-wagies-in-a-cage tell you otherwise. You’ve put work into that Minecraft hardcore world, or Diablo character. Of course it would attach itself to your identity. My mother has been playing World of Warcraft since I introduced it to her sometime after I got scammed on Runescape. Even when my parents got married, I used the tailoring skill to make wedding outfits for their characters in game. They didn’t roleplay out the wedding, but my mother’s ugly Tauren is a part of her. Maybe not in the same way that young girl who made her Guild Wars character to look like her growing up. Maybe not in the same way the transgender woman sees herself in an anime create-a-character. It’s tied to her identity, regardless. That character, if it were to get deleted would break her heart. I don’t know if it would be akin to when our dog (born two days after me) died, but it’d be pretty fucking close. I think the character is as old as Tilly was now.

The thing is, if you answer “yes” that you have a duty to grieve for your lost hardcore character, then you’d also have to start looking at work or character adjacent interactions like lost save files.

I had one of those DS flashcarts, with the little micro-SD card slot. I had transferred all my GBA Pokémon and my legitimate copy of Pokémon Black on to a rom of Pokémon Diamond. I’d keep that MicroSD in a reader-stick, thinking I’d be smart by having a copy of my save file, only for someone to stole that USB stick. I mourned the loss of those memories but it didn’t hurt me as much as when Tilly wagged her tail the last time despite not being able to stand up. Worth noting that Cholbi is hesitant to even allow pets to be a part of the duty to grieve because of their instinctual nature. Mutuality, is the thing that Cholbi would reply. A Pokémon cannot love you back, this is what makes all the articles about Palworld’s barbarity rather amusing. Your MMO avatar or your hardcore necromancer cannot love you back. It cannot show you the same readjusting of its identity in reaction to you. You can mourn a pop-star who you grew up with or a celebrity, you could be a super-fan to your core but for Cholbi the lack of mutuality kills it.

I don’t know about this, perhaps it’s because I’m half his age and lived with people killing themselves over anime characters.

I agree para-social relationships don’t cut it. Twitch thots probably need more of that distance and protection, regardless of what they sell.

There is however, one last kink. You’ll notice that the characters and save files and Pokémon are distinct from you. They are not you.

Something customisable, something like Diablo or World of Warcraft, it is your avatar, as well as your time investment. I won’t say it-is-you, because that’s a whole other kettle of fish but it is attached to you. I had an abstract rejected from a conference once, looking at the death of suspension of disbelief in videogames. Not focusing on story telling or allowing surrealness, but how more and more “representation” and 1-on-1 matching of character to you is more important. A plus-sized lady in the 90s can relate into Laura Bow just fine and assume the role, but now we have a viral tweet and image of a plus-sized lady almost crying at her Diablo character looking like herself.

Just as on the older Internet, there was a separation between avatar-and-person. The whole controversy about the old ‘potato girl’ and the distinct nature between her being a placeholder for all non-neurotypical people and it being a direct attack on her. The mother converted it and saw it as vicious mockery of her daughter – rightly so – but that wasn’t the intention of the meme. The Sun’s article on it becomes almost humorous and creates more mockery directly at her because she now has identified herself, inserted herself in; instead of honouring the split between avatar and person. Mainstream media would laugh and make documentaries about Second Life partners meeting in real life. One I distinctly remember being shown in 2010 or so had multiple mocking “Are you expecting them to be different than their avatar?”. The lady laughs and smiles “of course”. It’s a fucking videogame, not a Meta-verse-hellscape-job-meeting.  I think as this attitude has died: The rise of acceptable catfishing; of no longer being just a transient avatar online; to an attitude of “you must have a real life photo or you can’t be trusted”. All this sought to destroy and take down that barrier. So now, that plus-size-lady’s avatar in Diablo 4 is her. This can not only become her identity in a way of actual body-relation, but she’s seeing herself. No split, no memory attachment, but raw identity. There’s so many World of Warcraft transgender players, after an update that allowed for body casting and pronouns saying how they feel at ease with their non-binary or transgender toons because now  they are getting the recognition that they deserve.

The Hegelian mirror test is now a create-a-character test.

You could perhaps, as I alluded to earlier, take it as the same role of a craftsman. A craftsman gets his recognition and place in society through the output of his craft. Yet we do not expect a person to truly grieve over a lost piece of craftwork. I’ve had many a time when Octane or Photoshop have cost me hours of work. We’ve seen what happened to famous artists who have lost paintings or manuscripts. In some cases, I think it could directly cause them great grief. It could even cause them to change or reformat their identity (Masamune Shirow comes to mind in a very negative way.) but that’s tied still to their process, to their craft, to some mastery in-between. That piece of recognition never goes away. Of course it’s not always useful to say “You can paint it again” but it’s because the recognition is at the process stage not the outcome stage. The hardcore Diablo character, the World of Warcraft character, the Minecraft world, they are closer to outcomes than a craft. The water is even more murky with something like World of Warcraft or any long-standing MMOs because there is a society within it. There is recognition within it. There’s a reason why many MMOs or Second Life-likes were popular, they gave you recognition in a society that outside of the computer you were probably alienated from. Fighting games do this as well. From arcades to netplay, weird melee scenes like Slippi, or community tournaments. It’s not recognition from the character or product but you as a fighting game player. Fighting games then and the grief associated, is probably closer to the craftsman or athlete angle. The grief for losing a tournament is not quite on the level of a duty to grieve.

But this all implies there is still a distinct line between the outcome and person. A tool as an extension of the man, does not make the tool the craftsmen.

So where does that leave the hardcore character? I have made an attempt to separate an MMO character (social), avatar (reincarnation) and representation (person). What’s interesting is the response to the death - Cholbi recognises that to memorialize the dead, fulfil wills or final promises can be a part of it but this does not directly relate to a duty of grieve owed to the dead. Which means you aren’t exactly breaking any sort of moral quandaries or duty to your dead character by buying your Diablo character back.

What Cholbi does instead, is re-orient this duty in terms of love and knowledge, a little bit to pull it further out of the social realm and into the personal realm. For Cholbi, he plays in the Kantian sphere where self-love and self-knowledge are playing a character-building tug of war, grief then represents an opportunity to rationally perfect our self-love by reaffirming our identities. Now this is a little bit too Kantian for me, and however I think it is justified a little in the notion that at least for some – a hardcore character does indeed pass the duty to grieve. You may not love them, but there is self-knowledge enough to a part of your identity, it is you, after all. You know yourself. That’s why the character looks like you.

There are other reasons to be sceptical about the duty to grieve, but play with me in this space because I think the rise of these modes, the headlines and the watching of reactions has become so widespread that it’s become a sort of pin in gaming culture.

And it’s really kinda bad.

For example, we wouldn’t have seen so much outcry over Blizzard allowing you to revive a dead hardcore character if it didn’t have some sort of moral-weight to it. This is one of the scepticisms about the duty that Cholbi does look at – accountability. Usually, in violating a moral duty to others, we render ourselves accountable to them, rightfully subject to criticism or even moral judgement/punishment. Truly, it isn’t for us or the gaming media to hold the person who buys back their dead hardcore character and chooses not to grieve, even if there are cries of “pay to win! 2echo in the background. It’s akin to cheating then, - you only cheated yourself.

Okay. There’s your moral hook. Cheating yourself, is a violation of reconciling the ego-centric identity within the Duty to Grieve .

However I think there’s a layer deeper than this. Something that I’ve been continually grazing at when I bought up the notion of re-adjusting your identity. Which is Blizzard wants you to feel emotion and make money from it but not to grieve. Oh no! A big company notorious for auction houses and in game shops is still greedy and praying upon your emotions?! A novel concept!

But remember, the Diablo lady. The over self-identification. Blizzard are selling you your own death. If the character dies, it’s her that dies.

Novel concept indeed when you reframe under the notion of Blizzard’s push for representation, making characters look like you and getting your self-representing self-life-self-care all confused is a dangerous game to play. Not a particularly old one either. An old Harry Potter mobile game, had the first out of energy paywall conveniently as your character – who is encouraged to look like you, have your wand, personality and other Pottermore equivalents -  is being strangled by giant roots in a panic. It’s meant to invoke a response because that’s you.

Now the two things against this are obvious:

1) Sever your attachments, return to the days of empathising with whatever character you have instead of having to make you 1:1 all the time no matter much it makes the Baldur’s Gate 3 devs write blogposts.

2) Grieve. Enact your duty to grieve and get over it. No more letting dead bodies wallow in pseudo-immortality on the internet.

Now 1) would be considered a step backwards in gaming with things like Dove and Epic putting out the whole women’s body types in games or Blizzards cynical diversity charts. And hell, you deserve to also play yourself, but remember there is a line.

2) is something that the world I think is going to have to deal with at some point. From Artstation having in memorial modes to digital cemeteries. Anti-grief immortality chambers are gonna keep infesting everything, even down to your hardcore characters. Death is the true finite thing that not even capitalism can truly make capital out of directly, so it has to be stayed and drawn out. Don’t fall for it. Say goodbye to those hours. They weren’t wasted. You had self-love with it, and now you gain-self-knowledge in your grief. Reconstruct your position with your character and go into the next game.

You probably don’t have a duty to grieve your hardcore character. But it’s good practice too.