I'm not sure how this post is going to turn out but it is something I want to write down. I'm not going to talk about the bullshit argument that videogames are bad for children or cause them to be violent murdering psychopath. I'm going to talk about my experience with one game in particular and how it relates to me and my situation.
First though a bit more background information about me. As I mentioned in my introductory post I am a married man with no children. My wife has always been certain she didn't want children and at the young age I was when I met and married her I had never given it much thought. This led to us never having any children and as time has passed I've started to regret that decision as the biggest mistake I have made in my life. As things are now in my life, due to a variety of reasons, I am never going to be a father.
Anyway, enough about that for now, I'll move on to the game I want to talk about, Heavy Rain . This is a game that I played last year that had more of an impact on me than almost any other game I have ever played and I've played a lot. The game revolves around four different characters and the search for a serial killer who kidnaps and kills children. Yeah, it's a pretty dark game.
The one character I'll describe is the one that pertains to what I have to talk about. At the start of the game he is a married man with two sons aged roughly 8 and 10. The opening chapter of the game is pretty simple, it shows this father doing some work, greeting his wife and children as they get home, helping his wife get dinner ready and playing with his sons in the back garden. Pretty normal happy family life. The end of the chapter however is where the game turns dark. The family takes a trip to the mall and the father and mother each take one son each and go to different parts of the mall to buy items. The son that is with the father then sees a balloon seller and begs his father to buy him one, which he dutifully does. However as the father is paying for the balloon the son wanders off and the father does not realise until he turns around and sees the balloon bobbing off in the crowds in the distance. The game then has you frantically pushing through the crowds, trying to find your son and leaving you feeling pretty helpless. It all culminates in a scene where the father spots his son walking out the front door of the mall, seeing his son run out in to the road and getting hit by a car. You don't actually see the child get hit, just the reaction of the father as it happens which makes it all the more heart wrenching.
The game then picks up a couple of years later and you are shown that the marriage didn't survive the death of one son and the father is now on a downward spiral. You are then given control of the father once again as he gets his scheduled time with his other son who seems withdrawn and distant from his father. In order to try and cheer up the situation the father takes his son to the local park to play. Again the father becomes distracted at one point and his remaining son gets kidnapped (you would think he would be more careful but this is one of the weaker plot points in the game) and it quickly becomes apparent that the serial killer has taken his son.
The next part of the game is where your emotions really get thrown around as through a slightly set of contrived circumstances the father is forced by the killer to perform a series of actions to see how far he will go to save his son. The killer gives clues as to the whereabouts of his son if the father will do some things. The first one is that the killer makes the father break the law in a dangerous way by driving the wrong way down the freeway. I could do that with relative ease since what the heck, its only a game right. The next couple involve getting through simple physical pain, one involving crawling down glass strewn air vents and the other by forcing the father to cut off a finger. I see no problem in doing those things to rescue your child since physical pain is transitory, emotional pain is what can scar you for life. The way I was empathising with the father at that point I pushed on.
The next and penultimate test is one I had to reject. You were asked to kill a man without knowing who he was, why the killer wanted him dead or anything like that. I'm a strictly non violent person, I've never hit a person in my life ever, I'll avoid physical confrontations by talking my way through them. You get the idea. The idea of killing someone, even in a game like this, was so abhorrent to me I couldn't do it even to save my child. Even if you decide to not kill the man as I did you never know who this man is, the last scene of the chapter is simply him clutching a picture of what has to be his young daughter to hammer home the point that you almost took away that young girls father.
The final test is the one that, thinking back on it now, impacted me the most. You are given the best opportunity yet to discover where your son is being held. All you have to do is drink something you are told will kill you soon after you find your son. I didn't even hesitate.
I drank the poison.
It scared me on later reflection that I didn't even consider what would happen to me (since at this point in the game I saw myself as the father so strongly) but I saw no other possibility. I didn't even look for a way to take the poison safely, I just did it. For me the moral, emotional and logical action was the one I took. There is nothing you would not do to yourself for your child.
I think what I'm trying to say here is that the most upsetting thing to me about not having children is that I will never have that bond to another human being. I'm in tears writing this because it hurts so much to think about it and it is why I say that not having children is the biggest mistake and regret of my life.
I'm sorry if this post has been a little down but this is something I have wanted to express somehow and I've used my experiences to try and explain it. I just hope that it helps guide anyone who ever ends up reading this to not make my mistake.
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