Post IV: Undertale, an Anti-Oppressive Game (Train of Thought from “How Should Games Teach”)
While reading fellow classmate and publicist Rishi Basu’s post about the distinction between oppressive video games and humanizing ones (click on the link and check it out!), I found myself heavily resonating with the concept. While I hadn’t considered putting it into such confident terms, I noticed I’ve also always been drawn to games that trust their audience, and especially ones that defy ingrained standards for how video games “should” work. Ones that challenge their players’ autonomy. Ones that flip the meta upside-down and redefine what it means to play a game of such a genre.
Rishi claims: “For games to exist as a humanizing medium, we must respect players and their ability to think for themselves.” In my opinion, there is no game that encapsulates this idea more perfectly than Undertale. Much like the games I discussed in my WP2, it is a heavily story-driven game, but unlike those other games, Undertale’s ending forced me to completely stop in my tracks and question my ability to make independent choices as a player. It made me wonder: am I really self-governed while I play a video game, or am I bound by the conventions and expectations that have ingrained themselves into games for years?
Undertale challenged the morality of my decisions through its conclusion, in which the “progress” I made was examined by a close ally, Sans. For reference: in the sweeping majority of RPGs, a “leveling” system is introduced — a way to improve your abilities, vitality, and health. Undertale was seemingly no different: it introduced “LOVE” as a metric for your level of personal progress, increasing after defeating enemies and major villains. I thought nothing of it; the concept is practically a staple in modern gaming as I know it, and it seemed self-explanatory when it was introduced. It was possible to escape from enemies, but it would effectively bar you from making any sort of personal progress numerically.
Undertale, however, was well aware of that sense of restraint. It intelligently flipped everything I knew about video games on its head by grimly informing the player at the very end of their journey that “LOVE” is, in actuality, an acronym for “Level of Violence”: a way to measure the player’s capacity to hurt. I was judged for my every action and forced to reconsider the basic mechanic that I took for granted in video games: “kill enemy; become stronger.”
I’d argue that through the lens of Rishi’s article, Undertale serves as a tool of anti-oppression for video game players. Instead of dehumanizing them by reducing them to a quantity of time or a disposable metric, Undertale sets a foundation for entirely new thought and encourages the players not to make false assumptions about violence being justifiable due to common conventions and norms.
