PATHOLOGIC AND REDEFINING CONTROL IN

es the ability to bring out of the gamer what Aristotle calls ‘catharsis’” (Deep Game Manifesto 1). But what is this “deep game,”and what is Pathologic?

Давным-давно одна мышка жила, Которая увлекалась едой человека.

Вино и хлеб, Она опустошила погреб, И наполнила кошачью животишку.

Давным-давно одна мышка жила, Которая увлекалась едой человека. Вино и хлеб, Она опустошила погреб, И наполнила кошачью животишку.

“Why was I born? Why do we exist? It’s not about what you should do to make things better… but being aware of your own existence. And so Russians don’t drink to becomehappy, or to forget their problems. They drink to achieve toska.’

– NikolaiDybowski(SocietyofDead Poets59)

The Ice-Pick Lodge 2005 game Pathologic or Мор. Утопия is a difficult video game to write about. Game criticism is straightforward: you examine the mechanics, the graphics, the story, and you conclude with whether the game is worth playing or not. Writing about Pathologic is so problematic, primarily because nobody should ever play it; the graphics are hideous, the mechanics infuriating, the story is dense and exceptionally wordy (as a text-based game, it has more words than War and Peace), and the original translation was impressively poor. But despite these problems, it is also one of the most remarkable achievements of storytelling I have come across.

It is easy to say what Pathologic is not. It is not fun. It is not pretty. Most importantly, it is not “a video game” in the traditional sense. Pathologic’s aims are more ambitious than maximizing sales; IPL and lead designer Nikolai Dybowski are interested in “the deep game,” the part that “possess-

Pathologic is a 2005 survival horror game by Russian developer Ice-Pick Lodge, re-released in 2012 with an updated translation. The player takes on the role of one of three doctors, the Bachelor, the Haruspex, and the Changeling, who try to cure a plague in a remote town in the Russian steppe over twelve days. This is the basic definition but says nothing of the experience. Pathologic is about dying. It is rooted in the postmodern tradition, imbued with a distinctly Russian form of anguish, toska– a deep mourning and melancholy that Dybowski expresses in the opening quote. IPL spokesperson Alexandra Golubeva was once asked, “like Russia, in Pathologic everybody dies in the end? Isn’t that true everywhere?” She replied, “Yes, but in Russia - faster” (GamingBolt Pathologic Interview). This sentiment points to the spiritual heart of Pathologic– the removal of a player’s sense of control and the forced acceptance of their place in this constructed world. Modern story-driven games lean towards giving the player control over their experience, incorporating more RPG elements to make the player the masters of their experience. Pathologic, however, utterly strips the player of control. You have six stat bars; health, immunity, hunger, exhaustion, infection and reputation. These require constant maintenance and get worse over time. All either need money or time to improve, two things you do not have. And the clock never stops.

The player is constantly weak. Starvation hits in minutes, and the plague spreads over more and more of the town. Hand-to-hand combat is slow, does very little damage, and is inconsistent in the range of its attacks. Damage does not heal automatically and must be medically treated, which costs money and lowers other stats as well. Everything is a trade-off, which invariably hurts you later; even eating to stave off starvation becomes a difficult decision during hyperinflation. Once you acquire firearms, the situation does not improve much; higher calibre weapons have few rounds, take forever to reload, and all guns are very inaccurate. There is a scenario just after the player acquires a revolver that holds six bullets, and is immediately forced to face off with seven enemies. Good luck.

The game is a first-person shooter, but the best way to survive is to sell your gun the moment you get it. The game forces you to leave yourself vulnerable and powerless because of the danger of the other status effects.

Selling the gun works because of the game’s economy, and entire academic papers have been written on how Pathologic uses capitalism as a survival horror element (Novitz 63). Day 1 as the Bachelor is not that hard. You go to bed feeling secure, with enough money in the bank, wondering why everyone online told you this game was so hard. Then you wake up to find that prices have risen tenfold. To avoid starvation, the player is forced to sell the gun– the only item of value and the only means of protection.

The game is in constant dialogue with both the player and the genre of video games, playing off and subverting expectations. Certain things in video games are taken for granted, like the tutorial level. Early on in video games, the player is walked through the mechanics in a contrived scenario, and most players switch off here. Pathologic knows this and manipulates the player’s complacency.

The Bachelor is run through the tutorial by the two characters pictured in Figure A below. The absurdity of this episode demonstrates the most crucial aspect of this game’s storytelling; the player-character is not the player In most games, the lead character/player gap is minimized as they chase immersion, but here it is emphasized for maximum effect. In the tutorial, the characters address the player rather than the Bachelor, which plays out by explaining very concepts. The Bachelor is very confused when he is told that “hunger is sated with food,” for example. This is part of the game taking away the control you expect to have as the player. Many conversations will have you choose one of several rude, stupid and often humorous options; the Bachelor needs to build alliances with powerful characters, but the player can only choose to say to these characters, ‘I don’t believe you. And I don’t like you. Actually, that’s too mild a statement. I feel an innate resentment toward you,” or, “so you are a child, huh? I’ve just learned I don’t like children.” The player is forced to play a character so absorbed in his own ego that he discards opportunities to make valuable allies.

Pathologic’s “deep game” dialogue situates this game in Russian postmodernism. Lead developer Nikolai Dybowski is a practicing philosophy professor, so these ideas penetrate deep into the fabric of his art. For him, once a means of storytelling has accessed a method of creative expression that is only possible through that medium, it becomes art. He wants players to see his games as “events” rather than entertainment (Deep Game Manifesto). The real story lies between the developers and the player, not the pixels on the screen. According to Mikhail Epstein, Postmodernism, consists of “the production of reality as a series of plausible copies,” constructed using a series of signs and signifiers, and a sense of playfulness and irony (Epstein 189). Pathologic drips with both. It creates multiple realities by constructing multiple genres– a traditional first-person shooter game, a survival horror game, and an open-world game. But on a closer look, Pathologic is none of these. It is a first-person shooter, but you are encouraged not to shoot. It is a survival horror in presentation, but the real horror comes not from monsters but from the most terrifying stressors of all: resource management and capitalism. And while the world is open, your path is tightly controlled by the glacial pace of walking, the packed schedule of quests and the ever-spreading plague. You can go anywhere, but you will almost certainly get the plague. Even the quests are mere signs pointing toward a coherent game. According to some ancient Reddit threads, the player does not actually have to do anything. The game will reach an end state as long as you survive the twelve days, and if that is not the most deliciously subversive irony in video games, then I have misunderstood the concept. Only Pathologic can use mechanics like this to drag a story out of the player, messing with their emotions in ways no other art form can. This is the “deep game.”

Here we reach the core mechanic of the entire game– the plague itself. You will likely catch it at some point, and it is difficult to cure. There are scarce antidotes, occasionally sold by street vendors and at least once acquired by murdering a child in cold blood. However, it is in your best interest not to use them. The only way to get the “real” ending(s) is to save your cures and use them on the characters that depend on you. You must grit your teeth through hours spent on the edge of starvation, bleeding money on medicine and constantly losing health, while carrying on your person the very item that will immediately solve your problems. Everything about this game signifies a story about curing the plague, but it forces you to live with it for potentially over twenty hours.

At the end, you are invited into a walled garden by “The Powers That Be.” The player finds two giant children playing with a model of the town, who explain that the whole thing was simply a game they played with dolls; what you thought were your decisions were just part of their game. Though controversial, frustrating and absurd, this ending is fitting. For hours, the game has subverted your expectations, exploited the flaws and conventions of traditional video game logic and manipulated you with constructed mechanics.

It goes even further. If that scene breaks the fourth wall, it only leads to a new stage (literally). If you complete all the side objectives, the player is invited to a theatre by “The

People that Executed the Whole Thing.” There you meet two characters from the tutorial who appear regularly throughout the game. These ARE the game’s lead developers, directly addressing you through the screen. They executed the whole thing. They say, “the hero is a doll, but so are the children. The real game is what is happening between us.” Here, you are invited to continue the conversation as the player-character or as yourself. All games are dialogues between the players and the developers. Pathologic literally invites you onto the stage, taking away the medium through which this conversation is mediated. They built this town to have you experience their ideas, and now they take it all away. They strip you of the reality they created, leaving nothing between you and them. After so much time engaging in an implicit meta-dialogue with the developers, it is apt that the game ends in making it explicit.

The developers are open about the game’s failures, and how they feel about you finishing it. They apologize for the parts of the game that the technology or their budget could not accommodate, noting that this is not the exact experience for which they strived. They make it clear that none of it was real or truly mattered but tell you that that’s okay.

Imagine The Truman Show had ended with the director meeting Truman outside of the dome, only to talk through him to the audience in the cinema, and ask if they enjoyed the film, all while Jim Carrey flounders in confusion.

I opened this piece with an interview with Dybowski, found in “In the Society of Dead Poets” by Carl Johan-Johansson. Toska is an untranslatable Russian concept, a profound spiritual melancholy, an “unspoken, instinctive understanding on a different plane” (Society of Dead Poets 59). In his book on postmodernism, Epstein discusses how Russia was so open to postmodernism because its people were used to living in rapidly constructed realities: the Rurikids establishing the country from nothing, Peter the Great raising a new Paris in a “Finnish Swamp,” the USSR constructing a Soviet reality, and glasnost’ turning this world upside-down. Russia was a “country of facades” (Epstein 191). I think toska explains it– a deep, primordial understanding that the individual has no control. Dybowski calls Russia a “tragic nation” (Society of Dead Poets 60), a vast, empty steppe full of generational trauma. In the middle of that steppe, perhaps we we can find a plague-ravaged town where three doctors fight in vain to stop the unstoppable, not realizing they have no control. Maybe. It certainly isn’t anywhere else.

Pathologic achieves things that the medium has seldom matched in two decades, but it is a niche for a reason. It is riddled with problems, mostly due to the lack of funding and time. Today, eighteen years after release, it really isn’t playable. Luckily, another game that does everything this one does and more. That game is called Pathologic 2.

Works cited

Auerbach, David. “Pathologic 2 and Ostranenie.” Waggish, 2019.

Bailey, Andrew. “Critical Compilation: Pathologic.” Critical Distance, 2020.

Brewis, Harry. “Pathologic is Genius, and Here’s Why.” YouTube, uploaded by Hbomberguy, 2019.

Dybowski, Nikolay. “About the Studio and its Projects.” Teletype.in, 2022.

Dybowski, Nikolay. “On the Threshold of the Bone House, or as Game Becomes Art.” Russian Games Conference Report, 2005.

Epstein, Michael. After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 1995.

Ice-Pick Lodge. “Pathologic 2 Kickstarter Campaign.” Kickstarter, 2020.

Johansson, Carl-Johan and Tomas Gunnarsson. “Döda Poeters Sällskap | In the Society of Dead Poets.” Fienden #2, 2013.

Lotus, R. “Pathologic 2: The World Unsettled.” Bullet Points Monthly, 2020.

Lusk, Gerry. “How Video Games can Learn from Theatre.” YouTube, uploaded by Glusk, 2020.

Mitchell, Jared. “A Body, Divided: Pathologic.” Herotopiazine 2017.

Novitz, Julian. “Scarcity and Survival Horror: Trade as an Instrument of Terror in Pathologic.” Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association vol. 3, no.1, 2017, pp. 63-88.

Pathologic, Ice-Pick Lodge. 2005.

Pathologic 2 Tinybuild, 2019.

“The Deep Game Manifesto.” Ice-Pick Lodge 2001.

“Reading the Lines: Essays on Pathologic 2.” Grace In the Machine, 2020.

Sayed, Rashid. “Pathologic Interview: An Enemy You Can’t Kill.” GamingBolt, 2015.

Smith, Adam. “Secrets of the Ice-Pick Lodge: Pathologic Reimagined.” Rock Paper Shotgun, 2014.

Smith, Quentin. “Butchering Pathologic (Parts 1-3).” Rock Paper Shotgun, 2008.