Is tragedy in games impossible to achieve?

During Game Design class we came to a concept that it’s very common in the entertainment business, but it is seen mainly in books and movies and has always been a little absent in video games, this concept is tragedy.

The word tragedy if we look at it in the dictionary well find various definitions but let’s look at the following “A drama or similar work, in which the main character is brought to ruin or otherwise suffers the extreme consequences of some tragic flaw” . Taking this definition in mind, for achieving a successful tragedy, we need to involve a character in a succession of events and in the end, make him suffer in an extreme situation where the results will be terrible.

Keeping this in mind for a successful involvement with a character it is required some good storytelling which is why tragedy is most common in books, since it’s all about the storytelling but as the title of the essay implies this is also possible to achieve this in games. For this I am going to look for some examples on strong characters from games and analyze if we can relate enough to this character and with that be able to know if this type of characters is able to give us a tragedy event.
As a first example I am going to choose a game like Zelda. In this game our character is named Link and the bases if this story is that the princess has been kidnapped and the kingdom is in trouble. So to go directly to the point we want do we feel bad about the situation of this kingdom? Or do we feel worried about what might happen to the princess if we don’t get to save her in time. The answer to this questions is no, and the main reason is because of the lack of involvement we have with the character Link.

If we analyze this character there is not much depth to this one, for all we know he is an elf with a sword and a shield that is trying to save the day. This does mean that this is a good game, actually the Zelda franchise are considered some of the best RPGs that exist but none of the games in this franchise, have put us in a situation where we felt like a tragedy is about to happen.

For a second example let’s take a game like Devil May Cry 3, where we have the main character Dante and his brother Vergil. As an initial analysis we can look at the main character Dante if we look at it with the Lens of Character Traits (77) we can find that his main trait is being a powerful being with a dark past, which makes him an interesting and mysterious character. The second lens we can use for looking at this character is the Lens of The Character Web (78) where we find that the game is builds around the relationship between Dante and his brother Vergil.
Finally why did I added lens into this analysis, the main reason is because in the game there is a mayor point of tragedy that is able to match the sentiment that a book can make us feel for this character and this is all thanks to the Lens of Character Transformation (81) where our character is forced to fight at the end with his brother and slash him with his sword to be able to save the day.
If we compare this character to the last example Dante is also a hero that saves the day at the end of the game, but during the whole game we are given a story that tells us the details about his relationship with his brother, and the impact of the change at the end, with the help of great cinematography and soundtrack, make it a tragedy to see a character take the decision to finish his brother.

As a final example I will use one of the greatest tragedies in gaming history, and that is the game Final Fantasy VII. In this example we have our main character Cloud and a secondary character called Aerith, which form the beginning of the game we are shown that these two have a interesting relationship.
Thanks to this relationship that is build throughout the game we can not only see the characteristics of our main character but also like the lens mentioned before we can see his relationship that he has with this other character which makes us players build an involvement with the character to the point where we hope that the relationship works.

Thanks to this involvement with Cloud and Aerith is that we come to one of the best tragedy scenes in games, and that is in a moment in the game we are familiarized with the character we hope always for the best and since it’s a game we have an indirect control to usually do it (saving and loading always give us control over life in games). But at the end of the first chapter of this story we are surprised by a change of events where the character of Aerith is murdered in front of our eyes concluding in an unexpected, dramatic and sad change in the story. Thanks to this dramatic change of events is that we can say this is a real tragedy event in videogames, not only because it fits the description of tragedy in the first paragraph but also since this scene for most players was able to give a feeling of sadness and anger when this event happened.

Finally what can we conclude about the examples shown before? As they are good examples of tragedy in games they may have a lot of personal opinion since I’m telling the stories how I played them in the game. But if a story like this can awaken a feeling of sadness, surprise for a tragedy for a virtual character in a person, my point is that this qualifies as a tragedy event to the magnitude of a written story or to a movie looking at other media.

But as mentioned in the first paragraph the definition of tragedy is making a character suffer in a sequence of events, but looking at the Zelda example this is not enough, something else is needed for this and like the other examples showed, that detail missing is character involvement. So if in a video game just like in a book we are able to create a deep character that is able to create some sort of feeling of involvement on a person, whether its identifying itself with it or just feeling sad for him, those situations that happen to those characters, the player will be able to feel them just like if he was there.

To conclude the question, is it possible to create tragedy in video games? The answer is yes, and this had a lot of depend attached to it. Probably if the player doesn’t like the game that much he won’t be able to feel an involvement with the character, but the most important aspect to be able to create good tragedy in a game is being able to have a well created character with deep enough relationship and personal aspects that will be affected but a tragedy in the story.