What Do Datafied Memories Dream Of? Memory in Games as Seen through Cyberpunk

The SF Genre and the Emergence of Datafied Memory

Norbert Wiener, the author of Cybernetics (1948), proposed in that book the hypothesis that the human brain and the machine differ only in their material substrate while remaining structurally identical — and supposed that if the workings of the brain’s nervous system could be understood, they could be applied to machines as they stood. On the basis of such theory, the “cyberpunk” genre came into vogue in 1980s America, grounding its imagination in worlds where human brains and machines are actively connected. And in cyberpunk, “memory” — converted into data and moving across networks and bodies of various kinds — emerges as a central problem. It appears already in William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), commonly called the genre’s representative work.

In truth, setting aside the cybernetic concreteness of datafied memory, the problem of memory had long been treated in the SF genre. In the representative works of the celebrated American SF writer Philip K. Dick — “Paycheck” (1953), “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” (1966), Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) — the problem of memory departs somewhat from its treatment in realist narrative: these stories are built by perceiving memory as something possessed of materiality and assigning it meaning on those terms. And this shows memory — long handled in the course of discussing human identity — being taken in a rather different direction.

The development of science and technology was necessarily involved here. As cybernetic theory and brain science advanced, it began to come to light that even the memory held by the human organism might admit of deletion or transplantation. Interlocking with posthumanist discourse, this line of questioning generated a rich imagination for speaking of human identity, producing the key motifs of SF fiction and film: the erased memory, the implanted memory, the false memory. Through a variety of SF works, the problem of memory thereby turned from a metaphysical concept into a kind of device with definite form and materiality — data. And in the process, what came to the fore as the core element defining human identity was not the soul, the body, or the brain, but the metaphysical element of memory.

Memory and Identity in Games

The problem of datafied memory that began in the SF genre opens new possibilities for establishing a character’s identity. The erased or lost memory has long been deployed on protagonists across all manner of works; add the premise that memory, through datafication, has acquired materiality, and memory can become an explicit goal and subject matter rather than lingering as mere backdrop or outcome of the story. In games, this change means that particular rewards follow from the player’s performance, and that this itself becomes integral to what makes the game a game. That amnesiac characters in games confirm their memories in the manner of loading stored data — even when the vehicle is magic rather than SF high technology — can be read as these theories given form within games.

In games, then, memory is very often identified with identity itself. And precisely for that reason, another question becomes possible: is the mere existence of memory as data enough to establish identity without difficulty? SOMA (2015) is a representative example of a game posing this counter-question. Its protagonist, brain-scanned, wakes in the future transplanted into another body. But as the game proceeds, the player confronts skepticism about whether brain scanning and body transfer — the methods humanity performed for its own survival — can in fact sustain the identity and ontological meaning that belonged to the original human. Through the course of play, the game makes one think through how difficult it is to define a being by memory alone, and the critical perspectives on uniqueness that arise once that memory is datafied.

* SOMA turns the experience of datafied memory being transferred, ironically, into a critical reckoning with the problem of identity.

Conversely, posthumanist questions become possible as well: if the accumulation of data is itself memory, and humans acquire identity through memory, might nonhuman entities likewise acquire identity as independent subjects through accumulated data? The representative figuration of this thought experiment is the premise, in the SF novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and its film adaptation Blade Runner (1982), that the androids — the replicants — have their service life capped at four years. Their term is so limited because, once memories and the experience of performance accumulate over a certain period, emotions like those of humans can arise — which is to say, they can become independent beings like humans. Through such premises emerged the possibility that, if memory is datafied, nonhuman entities too can become independent beings holding memories of their own.

And this premise is applied wholesale in a game like Detroit: Become Human. The androids of the game exist to perform the acts humans would otherwise perform. Yet the memories generated through the many episodes of that performance are experienced by androids and players at once. That the player carries out everything from resolving life-and-death crises to chores as seemingly trivial as housework is a process of embodying how such memories, datafied and accumulated, form an entity’s identity and establish the meaning of its existence. In the end, through the seemingly trivial acts we live through in the game, we come to recognize that memory composes a being — and that this applies identically to human and nonhuman alike.

On the other hand, datafied memory is also perceived as an object of control, generating problems within games. As shown in Detroit: Become Human, data is controlled not by state power but by a corporation like CyberLife — a typically cyberpunk arrangement, as with the Tyrell Corporation managing the androids in a film like Blade Runner (1982). Such control of memory grows more troubling still when it serves particular ends. In NieR: Automata (2017) and Goddess of Victory: Nikke (2022), where combat androids appear, memory is manipulated and erased to secure efficiency — to manage their performance as weaponry. Critical thought experiments about controlling existence itself by controlling memory offer sensations unlike anything before, in an age when datafied memory is becoming reality.

Datafied Memory Itself Becomes the Game

There are also games in which datafied memory, bound to character identity, shapes everything from premise to the story’s progress. Representative is Remember Me (2013), released by Capcom. The game is set in a society where memory, given materiality through digitization, has become tradable. The protagonist, Nilin, was one who possessed the ability to infiltrate other minds and steal or manipulate memories; the game begins from the premise that the governing authority, deeming that ability a threat, erased her memory. The goal is for the protagonist, waking without her memory, to recover it and escape the authority’s control. And the recovery itself proceeds by infiltrating the memories of others in the game, stealing them, and recombining them — the Memory Remix — to reclaim what she lost: her own full capacities.

The game reproduces, as they stood, the uses of memory that SF had introduced. Beginning from memory’s deletion, collecting others’ memories, above all infiltrating memory for clues, and remixing the memories of key figures to bend events in the story’s favor — here the implanting of false memory is deployed, intriguingly, as the protagonist’s own way of solving problems. Moreover, the game unfolds the manipulation and remixing of memory in puzzle form, making plainly legible that this is a problem the player must solve. Through remixing, clues that never existed come into being, relations between figures change, weaknesses appear in one’s adversaries. Even the techniques and combos for striking enemies are produced through this collection and remixing of memory. Datafied memory in Remember Me, in this way, does not remain a clue for inferring causal relations; it becomes the very possibility of actively solving problems.

* Datafied memory in Remember Me is at once the premise composing the game and its most important tool for progress.

The datafied memory shown in a game like Tacoma (2017) is likewise a key element forming the gameplay itself. In a crisis, under constrained circumstances, the protagonist resolves problems by absorbing the stored behavioral data of others — the many solutions she does not herself possess. In the end this is the same element as skills acquired in any game, but its distinction lies in the intriguing transformation: what one acquires is someone else’s behavioral data. Here memory receives its meaning not from the problem of identity but from the fact of being recorded as data. The trouble is that it is recorded and collected at all times, regardless of one’s will. In the game this becomes the precious clue by which the protagonist breaks through her crisis; transpose the same facts onto our own reality, and their meaning invites critical thought.

* The memories that appear in Tacoma are the behavioral data of others, rendered visually and put to use in solving problems.

The question of how to perceive memory that has been datafied into materiality does not stay within novels, films, and games. Contemporary people, intimately bound to technology, have already taken shape entangled with smart devices and all manner of technics. From the information that keeps us in touch with family and friends to the social media that record the everyday, our memory is already datafied through and through. And in a connected society, our memory is already supplying data to what Shoshana Zuboff called the behavioral futures market. Datafied memory is a key element composing the self — but, as so many games have pointed out, the fact that it can also control and constrain us is being proven in reality as well. If so, the problems of memory we have experienced in games may be aimed, more than any other form, at ourselves in the here and now.