Kotaku had a very good article regarding the emotional attachment that we feel (or don’t) to characters in video games.  The gist of the argument, with the backdrop of Memorial Day*, was that video games very seldom allow you to make an emotional attachment to other characters in a game outside of the script.  However, some games can really convey a sense of attachment and subsequent loss when a character dies.  I’m not here to dissect the article itself (the author, Luke Plunkett, did a fine job), but rather add to it with my own personal experience of attachment and loss in video games.

The first game in which I developed an attachment to a character in a game was, strangely enough, was Close Combat.  This was a top-down real time tactical combat game, in which the player controlled small units of soldiers.  Each soldier in the game not only had a weapon and ammunition (which was limited, so it had to be used wisely), but also had a rather complex modelling system that tracked experience (which could affect accuracy), physical strength (how long and far they could run before tiring out), leadership (each unit had a leader that inspired, or didn’t inspire, his soldiers), and mental abilities (his ability to withstand the stresses of combat), among other things.  It also tracked the casualties each soldier inflicted on the enemy, and if they killed or wounded a significant number, or captured several victory points on the map, they could be awarded for their bravery (which increased their morale, leadership, and mental abilities).  Units carried rather accurate representations of WWII weapons and their capabilities, and ammunition was limited.

This was gorgeous in 1996. Also, whoever drove this tank along that hedge is an idiot.

The original game wasn’t perfect.  It suffered from random bugs.  The graphics were atrocious.  Units that ran out of ammunition couldn’t scrounge weapons off of friendlies or dead enemies.  The number and types of units you received as reinforcements at certain stages (usually the beginning of a map set) were totally random; sometimes you received 3 M4 Sherman tanks and a .50 caliber machine gun team, other times you received half a dozen Tommy gun-equipped recon squads.  Both of the last two were solved in later editions, but the first one was the one in which I developed my closest ties with my soldiers.  You carried your troops from one map to the next, and unless a squad was totally destroyed, a few soldiers would be carried over even as a casualties were replaced.  Each one of them had their last name and rank displayed in the squad status menu, along with their mental state and other important information.  If someone was pinned down by a German rifle team and they couldn’t move, their status would update.  Maybe they would cower.  Maybe they would act heroically, inspiring their squad to keep firing and break the suppression.  The fact was that before the battle, you didn’t really know.

I can still remember the soldier that really grabbed me.  I was advancing through hedgerow country (which, if you know anything about the breakout from the Normandy beaches, the hedgerows were not what we in the US consider to be hedgerows).  One of my objectives was a farm house and the attendant outbuildings, the first of which was only about 5 meters from the hedgerow my squad had taken.  I had supporting troops at the hedgerow behind them (they had covered the advance to that position), but since it was close and the stone building had better lines of sight and offered better protection, I figured that a little dash might carry the day.  While the .30 caliber machine gun team and the supporting rifle squads were moving across the rather large field that my squad had crossed, the rifle team popped smoke and began the dash into the building…

French Hedgerows ("Bocage") have a 3-4 foot tall dirt embankment at the base and have extremely tall and tangled brush growing out of it.

And right into a full squad of German landsers, supported by an MG42 in a hedgerow just to the south.  The initial fire dropped 3 of the 6 men in the squad, and 2 of the remaining soldiers, the ones that hadn’t yet left the hedgerow, stayed put.  The third man was still in the field and I thought he was certainly going to perish.  Instead, his status changed to “Berserk,” he let out a yell (and the voice acting was rather terrible, I might add), threw a grenade and charged the house.  Singlehandedly, he wiped out the entire German rifle squad that had opposed him, then he turned his attention to the MG42.  There was no tact involved in his action; he ran directly at them.  They failed to fire, their own mental status indicators changing to “Panic.”  He killed them all with his bayonet.  He took the house himself.  After the battle, I was astonished to see his award: the Medal of Honor.

I watched the whole thing unfold.  Even though he was little more than a rather small collection of pixels (it was 1996, remember), that little soldier had amazed my 13 year old mind.  And now I had this GI with a medal whom I had watched do the impossible.  What do I do?  I didn’t want to risk him in such a foolish move again.  In fact, I didn’t want to risk him at all.  But I couldn’t take an entire squad out of action for one man, and he was by far the most effective soldier I had (he also earned his Sergeant’s stripes and took over command of the squad, and his leadership stats were through the roof).  In the end, he was mostly relegated to supporting fires and flanking maneuvers that were well covered.  Until I reached St. Lo, that is.  It was there that he met his end, crossing a street from one building to the next.  He was hit by a mortar and killed.  I was actually quite sad; my hero died, and not in some heroic action, holding a building against a determined German attack or throwing grenades at a Panzer.  Instead, he was hit by a random shell, that could just as easily missed as hit.

This is the bridge my paratrooper took. This guy let the situation deteriorate a bit too much, with German tanks facing his British armor. That's why you have to take it on the first try!

I had similar experiences in later games, such as the paratrooper in CC2 that took the Eindhoven bridge by charging an 88, his squad dead around him, and wiped out the gun crew, a mortar team, and a recon squad to hold it (he actually did die epically, firing rifle grenades at a Jagdpanther).  Or in CC5, the M5 Stuart crew of death that earned no fewer than 7 Distinguished Service Crosses among the 4 crewmen.  But the later games had a vastly increased scope of operations, with multiple battle groups across various map sets, and thus they lacked the intimate connection you could have in the original game.  The scale was that of a platoon, and you could actually know the names of all of your squad leaders and vehicle commanders if you had the inclination to do so.  I took no small amount of pride in getting through Purple Heart Draw with only a handful of casualties, while costing the Germans dozens of their own.  But even so, I was always happier to see a soldier whose status read “Incapacitated” instead of “KIA,” because I could at least imagine that the little virtual soldier was getting shipped off to a hospital instead of placed under a white cross.  And it never made me envy the plight of the platoon leader or company commander, who knew the names and faces of the men he always put in harm’s way, and often times sent to their death.

The American cemetery overlooking Omaha Beach in Normandy. Visiting it is an incredibly moving and saddening experience.

Here’s to those who never came home.

It's likely we'll never know who you are, but we thank you all the same.

*- For those readers outside of the US that might not be familiar with it, Memorial Day is a national holiday set aside to remember those who have died in military service.  Despite the fact that many simply treat it as a day off from work and usually the beginning of summer, it is a solemn and touching day for those who actually know what it is for.