
“You were a CHILD.”
I am an emotional person, but I am not someone who tends to cry a lot at media. I can mist up, sure, and I have emotional reactions; I would never pretend otherwise. But as a general rule I am not someone who is an easy mark for breaking down as a sobbing mess with a sad moment in a story. Even during my most emotionally fragile times, I am capable of recognizing when something is sad and well-executed while not necessarily being knocked off my axis by it.
Which is why it surprised me so much when Warframe made me break down sobbing, and it did so with a moment of storytelling that’s subtle and quiet and easy to miss altogether. And I think it’s worth talking about because it shows the ways that this game’s writing can go in surprising directions. If you’ve ever thought it’s a narrative-light game that’s just space ninjas shooting weird dudes, it’s a refutation of that.
In the 1999 segment of the game, a lot of the mechanics are built around talking with the characters via text message. This is, I think, a good decision. It’s period-appropriate, but it also allows for a lot of dialogue to pass between you and these characters, and there’s a sheer volume of discussion that would be difficult if not impossible to manage through voice acting.
Each member of the Hex has something to focus on, though. And in the case of Arthur Nightingale – who is, very much, the face of the entire group – his fixation is on Duviri, the fantasy realm within the player character’s mind that you have been more or less trapped in for ages, looping back on itself endlessly.
The point of Duviri, of course, is that it is a trauma response. Because before that, the player character was forced to personally kill the adults who were driven feral by the influence of the Void permeating the ship. So the player character, abandoned and alone, was trapped inside of a fantasy realm of torment… and it’s a fantasy realm created, ultimately, by the player character.
It’s a form of self-punishment. And the conversation with Arthur is explicit about that.
My father was an alcoholic.
This is not news to anyone who has read my work over the past decade-and-change; I’ve talked about it many times before. What I don’t tend to talk about nearly as much is what happened when my family held an intervention for him, had him check into a substance abuse facility that he didn’t have to pay for, and then took care of me for a month. And everyone in my family – including me – was eager to finally have my dad be Not Drinking All the Time.
Because of course I would be eager. When I moved in with my father, he was non-functional. I was 14 and very quickly had to get a job (yes, illegally) so that I could buy food and hopefully keep us housed on a regular basis. I basically had dropped out of high school because there was no time or space for that. My life was survival and balancing on the knife’s edge for that.
But it would all be all right now. My dad was going to be fixed, and it’d be good again. And the night he got out of the rehab facility, we had a celebration, and he seemed optimistic.
The next morning, we got word that my grandmother – his mother – had passed away after a lengthy battle with leukemia. And as I was timorously preparing to go back home with him, I found a bottle of liquor he had hidden in his truck from before he had checked into rehab. I knew I should just get rid of it, but for some reason I asked him first.
He wasn’t going to drink any more, but I let him know that was still there.
Now, I am 42 years old. I know full well that I was a child back then, that I was trying to be a good son, and that my decision in that moment is not what made the decision for an adult man. I know that I didn’t make him start drinking again immediately. I didn’t make him get worse. It isn’t my fault that three years later he would die because of alcoholism.
And if you’re wondering when I truly accepted this as truth, I will let you know the moment I start believing it. Nearly three decades later, my heart still doesn’t.
So I have not had to use magical space powers to fight back against my parents who were possessed by a malicious entity between dimensions that would lead to my becoming a space ninja. But I do know very well what it feels like to not just lose a parent but to feel, in your heart, as if it is your fault. And I know all too well what it feels like to descend into a fiction because how else can you deal with that? How else can you handle it?
Who else can possibly punish you enough for what you did?
And then this came up in a conversation in the game. And Arthur – a character who by all rights appears to be the edgiest edgelord to ever edge – treats it like exactly what it was. “You were a CHILD,” he says, overwhelmed and at the edge of tears. “I had no idea you blamed yourself for what you went through. I’d wager good money that most grown adults – myself included – would crumple like a house of cards.”
If this were a single-player game, it’d be a dark moment in the story. But the thing is that Warframe is not a single-player game or one you beat. It’s a game that is live and continually ongoing. And that’s what makes this moment even more resonant: After the moment happens, nothing changes. This isn’t The Breakthrough That Fixes Things. It doesn’t come at a dramatic moment; in fact, by the point you have this conversation, you’ve already finished the quest that involves saving Arthur and the rest of the team.
No, it’s just something you carry. Something you live with, every single day, and no matter how often you bring it up, it’s still true. Every day. You wake up every single morning with a weight that hangs around your neck and you just have to keep going, keep doing the same things. No swelling music, no closure, no resolution, and most of the people who deal with you are never ever going to know that you’re even living with it.
That’s why it stuck with me. That’s why it mattered. Because while Warframe is a game with a strange setting and a baroque style of telling a story, at the end of the day it is a game with something to say. It cares about the way that trauma impacts us, refracts within us down to our core and changes us in ways we aren’t able to always articulate.
But it also doesn’t want to tell you that surviving it makes you stronger or that it’s a good thing. It’s a horrible thing. The only good you can derive from it, that you can claw out of it, is the ability to care about other people on a deep, personal level. That it teaches us to understand how our actions and pain inform others, and lets us be kinder, gentler, more loving.
“You did the absolute best you could,” Arthur says. “You survived.”
And that was when a silly game about space ninjas killing weird dudes made me break down sobbing.
