Return of the Obra Dinn’s structure is a temporal snarl enclosed, ostensibly, by a set time limit established by the man who has brought you, the player, to the ship. In practice, however, time proves to be an infinite resource, represented both mechanically and in thematic elements of the UI. What is the point of this ludonarrative dissonance? If the man who brought you to the Obra Dinn is so anxious to leave, and a storm seems fast-approaching, why not impose a time limit on the player’s investigation? I argue that the disconnect between the ways in which various mechanical, narrative, and UI elements treat time is integral to establishing the story of the Obra Dinn as not an isolated incident, as the framing narrative would have you as player believe, but rather, as representation of a story repeated throughout history: this has all happened before, and in one way or another, it will happen again. Time’s false scarcity in Return of the Obra Dinn is not a development oversight but a way to draw the player’s attention to the places in which time can fold back on itself in infinite repetition.
The game’s framing narrative opens with the protagonist, an inspector for the East India Company, being rowed to the Obra Dinn, which has reappeared after five years lost at sea. The boatman, who remains in his boat next to the ship throughout the events of the narrative, tells the protagonist that a “company man woke [him] up” to provide passage to the ship, and that it “seems a bit late if you ask.” The first notion of time the player gets is of its lateness, along with the sense that they are spending someone else’s time to conduct their investigation. Once the majority of the events aboard the Obra Dinn are revealed via magical pocket watch, it begins to rain; the protagonist is reminded once again of the boatman’s presence off-ship, as the boatman calls, “Storm’s comin! / Finish your business and climb down here!” In terms of narrative and aesthetics, the storm’s arrival provides the player with a sense of urgency. Mechanically, however the storm changes nothing about the investigation in terms of gameplay. Once the player has viewed every scene in the game and discovered every body present on board, they have the ability to revisit each diorama to determine the fates of the Obra Dinn’s passengers. This re-viewing can occur as many times as needed: the oncoming storm remains an abstract threat, and the longer the player takes to complete their investigation, the more this dissonance becomes apparent. When the player attempts to heed the boatman’s warning, climbing back into the boat in preparation to depart the ship, their companion will allude to the finality of this decision to leave, telling the protagonist that “we won’t be coming back.” And this is true– partially. Once departed, the insurance form (i.e. the end result of the player’s investigation) will note that the Obra Dinn sank in the storm that at last arrived. However, despite the narrative’s insistence that the story is over and the final fates of the Obra Dinn’s crew and passengers are made clear, the player is free to escape the confines of time as it is told to them.
In the introduction to their book Video Games Have Always Been Queer, Bo Ruberg argues that queerness is inextricably linked to video games via the introduction of possibilities for “alternative ways of being” and “resistance through play.” While I agree that queerness can be read into game narrative, mechanics, and even how we play games, it is important to note that only over the last decade or so has it finally become possible to locate explicit queerness in video games. In mainstream (i.e. triple-A) release titles, queer representation is most often achieved with the inclusion of explicitly LGBTQ+ characters and narratives (e.g. The Last of Us 2, the Dragon Age franchise). This is all well and good for the visibility of LGBTQ+ identities, but representation in this way is not wholly representative of queer voices.When we shift our focus away from mainstream media and towards the queer indie games scene, a much more complex dialogue emerges, centered largely around how best to platform queer developers and put more thought and care into how queer experiences are depicted in video games. This scene, named the “queer games avant-garde” by Ruberg, shifts the focus from how best to tap into the LGBTQ+ gamer market via queer romances and playable characters to the lived experiences of actual queer trans people beyond the representational – in other words, queer indie games and the newly-emergent academic discourse surrounding them make queerness into a mode of play, transforming video games into a platform for resistance and transgression.
As an emergent field, the history of queer game studies is relatively short, and much of the discourse surrounding queer games in the last ten to fifteen years has revolved around the controversial notion of the “empathy game.” The notion of video games as “empathy machines” is a recent one, theorized as emerging as a response to the cultural zeitgeist in the early 21st century, which often characterized video games as isolating and violent objects. The idea that video games could in fact teach empathy to individuals, to bring together rather than to isolate, was at the time a hopeful thought – but as Ruberg notes, to hold up empathy alone as the savior of gaming is to believe “that empathy itself is incontrovertibly of value – that feeling with and for others is fundamentally and universally a good thing.” When Anna Anthropy (she/her) released Dys4ia (2012), an autobiographical Flash game about her experience with gender dysphoria and transitioning as a trans woman, the game was lauded by non-LGBTQ audiences for its perceived ability to help cisgender individuals understand the “trans experience”– which Anthropy has herself pushed back on with the subsequent release of Empathy Game, an art piece which asks audiences to literally walk in Anthropy’s shoes, and Ohmygod Are You Alright?, a Twine/Flash hybrid game that shows how little Dys4ia actually improved Anthropy’s life, despite its alleged ability to teach empathy for her experience.The theorized empathy game also ignores the emotional labor on the developer’s part in favor of a discourse around emotional labor performed by non-queer players and the affect produced by queer games. The labor expected of and extracted from queer indie game developers, particularly in the process of creating what are often deeply personal games, is largely discounted due to the perception that since these games are less complex to develop and frequently self-published, they are thus less worthy of compensation compared to studios with large budgets and established fanbases: “Who is feeling empathy, and who is the object of that empathy? Whose labor, affective or embodied, teaches empathy? Who consumes empathy?”