2024-08-20 I'm Tired of Being Asked to Care About the Robot

So I played Norco recently. It was generally a nice game. Certainly beautiful and made with heart. I think it was a bit too scattershot and had too many moving pieces to properly coalesce together into a coherent whole. But it was fine. As I've let it sit, though, there's a particular scene that stands out. Or rather just something that happens in the story that I've seen a lot of recently. Without going into specifics, at one point a robot that you trusted betrays you. And then later we see their broken body and are expected to feel sad about it. And that fell flat for me, so I wanted to think through why.

I feel this has come up quite a lot recently in pop culture in some way. being asked to humanize and care for the robots, the AI, the hosts, the whatever we're gonna call it in this particular fictional world. And to be honest, I think I'm done with that theme. It's not that I don't think it can be done well or anything. It's just that it's boring. What, at the end of the day, are we being asked to do? Essentially, feel empathy. And that's the beginning and end of it. Just feel a vague sense of empathy for a human-shaped piece of driftwood. I'm not the kind of person that wholesale dismisses the idea of singularity. I'm not saying fuck all the robots, kick em as they pass, they're not real people and they can never be. I'm perfectly open to the idea that technology could progress to a point that we could create an artificial thing such that the difference between what it is doing and what we are doing is no longer a very meaningful question.

Rather, what I am saying is that in 99% of cases, the actual implementation of this theme is not done well and I don't really find it interesting in the first place when it is done well. I don't find it interesting because for me, I'm starting to see this theme as follows: "This rock is sad. It has a sad face on it. You should feel sad about the rock." There's just nothing going on there. What's being asked of me is "Feel empathy." The problem is that that is not a hard task. The issue is that it is an easy one. It's one of the most basic aspects of being human. "Exercising" that muscle on the sad rock isn't doing me any good. It feels like I'm being asked to draw a house as a child would, with a triangle sitting atop a square with a small rectangle in the middle for the front door. You can ask me to do that exercise a hundred times and I'm never going to become a better artist for it.

Feeling empathy for the robots is not difficult, it's too easy. And so I think it's boring. You see the theme crop up all the time. Westworld, Soma, Detroit Become Human, the aforementioned Norco. But, the robots are never portrayed as absolute bastards. We always have them as stock-standard humans with the very slight change of needing to be plugged into the wall overnight. And that's so boring! We can do better. If your work revolves around wanting the player to feel empathy, expect better of them. I know I'm very Disco Elysium-pilled, but I really want games held to a higher standard. Harry is a fuckup by all measurements, but you feel an intense sense of connection and empathy with him because you get to know him. So even when he falters, or when you learn of something horrendous he's done in the past, you grit your teeth and narrow your eyes. You look at him and go "Goddammit...". But you look at his attempts to get better and try to look past the bad. And you think "Well maybe he can...". You see the better parts of him and think maybe there's hope. That there's still time. I want more Harrys and fewer robots.