Death as Memory, Death as Record: Return of the Obra Dinn

Visual media and memory stand in a relation that resists easy definition. Visual media rest on the explicit premise of showing. Memory, however, is something we recall — not something we can claim to see in any definite form. It only brushes past the mind for a moment, always as a vague shape, a soft-edged image. Nor is this merely a matter of the senses. The relation between memory and accuracy is every bit as confounding. Our memories are not laid out tidily, in the format of a physical medium. Memory mixes, weathers, distorts. “A definite memory” is not a phrase to be uttered so easily. Memory possesses no concrete, solid materiality.

That is what grounds the way visual media — video games included — confound the workings of memory. The cinematic form of the flashback makes memory’s operation feel as though it were being visually reproduced exactly as it was. Unless something says otherwise, everything unfolding before the eyes from the moment a flashback begins becomes, by fiat, fact. And a certain apparatus-context is lodged in this relation: the way visual media operate memory behaves as though our memory sat on the same plane as their machinery. Flip the switch on a device fit to summon memory, and it unspools before the eyes like a playback. Memory of this kind is hardly distinguished from record. Indeed — it is an attitude that does not distinguish memory from record at all.

Lucas Pope’s Return of the Obra Dinn (hereafter Obra Dinn) may be the most representative video game exhibiting this phenomenon. The game begins as an insurance adjuster of the early nineteenth century takes on the investigation of the Obra Dinn, a ship returned without a single survivor. Receiving from his client Henry Evans a blank logbook along with the pocket watch “Memento Mortem,” the protagonist gains the power to view the moment of death from its remains. The goal becomes to examine each crew member’s death and fill the logbook with their names and causes of death.

* Memento Mortem: the sense is close to “remember the event of death.”

This pocket watch is an explicit apparatus mediating the playback of memory. Pope’s conceit leads the player to perceive memory as something solid — replayable and fixed. The memory Obra Dinn replays is distinctive in taking the form of a diorama wholly fixed in time and space. The player strolls unconstrained through the world of a frozen memory, observing the middle of things — in medias res — exactly as they stand. In this form, which looks like a waxworks or a museum of everyday life, the essential softness of memory is nowhere to be found. And so, though there are questions that must be raised wherever memory is invoked, players scarcely come into contact with them. Is the memory this instrument reproduces true? Is there no possibility that the device’s function produces some distortion? Why does the game have us skip past such questions and understand the scene as definite?

The video game’s “solid memory” carries an even more emphatic definiteness than the cinema’s. The crux lies in the process of verifying memory. Consider films built as one vast flashback — Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, James Cameron’s Titanic. Now try denying every memory the film projects. Of course, the moment you take it that way, whatever moving power or theme the viewing yielded will fall apart, and depending on the person the exercise may cause real displeasure — but it is not something one cannot attempt, is it? Suppose Jack and Rose were in fact bitterly at odds, and Rose shoved Jack aside to board the ship — who could verify otherwise? You might fall into an argument with another viewer who loves Titanic, but no one could declare this “possibility of a misled memory” absolutely impossible. That such an absurd claim can be made at all is because there are films — Tim Burton’s Big Fish, Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects — that premise the possibility of the flashback itself being deceptive. It is worth recalling that between the former films and these, the only difference is that the possibility of doubt is narratively posed; in the editing of the flashback itself there is none[1].

Obra Dinn, however, presupposes the truth of a definite correct answer. On the basis of gathered clues, the player enters each sailor’s name and cause of death into the logbook, and the game’s mechanics adjudicate whether the entry is correct. (Judgment falls each time three correct answers accumulate, and a confirmed answer can no longer be revised.) The game, that is, settles the question of truth a priori, before one can fall into doubting it. As a past that has an answer, Obra Dinn still holds fast to memory’s solidity. Memory is replayable, and within it lies no possibility of error.

What games with mechanics similar to Obra Dinn’s memory-playback have in common only deepens the question about this solidity. Fullbright’s Tacoma and KeokeN Interactive’s Deliver Us the Moon handle memory-playback mechanisms akin to Obra Dinn’s. The two SF-themed games happen to share the same device — a holographic record-and-replay apparatus — through which one reconstructs what happened aboard an emptied space station and a lunar base. Their protagonists stand in positions much like that of Obra Dinn’s. In Tacoma, an employee dispatched by the Venturis Corporation, owner of Tacoma Station, must investigate the station’s failure to respond. In Deliver Us the Moon, likewise, one becomes an investigator for the World Space Agency, sent to determine the state of a lunar base gone silent. All three games feature figures dispatched under investigative orders from a particular corporation or agency — deployed carrying, without exception, an economic mandate (capital, or energy) on their backs. The games’ goals seem to forge some link with the concreteness — the solidity — of the memories they reproduce.

Games of Soft Memory

It is worth pausing to survey the games of memory set apart from this solidity — representatively, Dontnod Entertainment’s Tell Me Why and Giant Sparrow’s What Remains of Edith Finch (hereafter Edith Finch). Unlike the games above, these two deal substantially in memory’s softness. In Tell Me Why, visiting the family home long after their mother’s death, the protagonists see the residue of memories of her. These visions are presented as the product of a supernatural sense held by the twin protagonists, Tyler and Alyson. Tyler carries bad memories of a mother who denied his identity, but as the story proceeds he comes to realize those memories are not accurate. The visions Tell Me Why replays do, to be sure, retain a certain quantum of solidity. But the game’s posture is really about the incompleteness of memory as a form. Memory generates truth within a complex relation to what surrounds it. Tyler’s journey is, in a way, a reconsideration of Obra Dinn’s proposition: does memory carry truth in itself? His journey is nothing other than the process of that proposition being progressively demolished.

* Tell Me Why

Edith Finch goes further. Its protagonist, Edith Finch, follows the records her mother left to the house where her mother lived as a child. In this house, where each member of the family met a strange death, Edith recalls what they went through in a variety of sensory modes. The sensibility of Edith Finch approaches magical realism. Through the family’s records, Edith re-experiences the “events” they underwent in an unreal register — becoming an animal, becoming the hero of a comic book, or living the fairy-tale world exactly as the person imagined it. In the experience of Edith Finch, truth is sensory. Edith does not see their past as it was; she experiences only its sensory essence, by detour. What the player perceives by way of Edith’s body is not recorded fact but something distilled of the freedom, confusion, pain, and loneliness they must have felt. Inside the game, accordingly, no definite fact exists. Every expression is only Edith’s imaginative transference of a recorded sensation.

In both games, the two figures who pursue memory are bound up with the troubles of family history. Their problems are wholly private, and the value the memories generate carries into the life ahead. For them, one might say, the past is preserved not as record but as intact “memory” — a past without the concreteness of a record, the concept that holds the softness proposed above. And are these “memories” not closer to the memories of our own experience? In the film Marjorie Prime, Michael Almereyda has a character observe that when we remember something, we recall not the original but only our most recent memory of it. We all already know that memory’s value is received in translation, through the subjective lens of the moment at which it is recalled.

Why Does That Memory Become a Record?

Then let us return to the case of Obra Dinn. Why does this game use “solid memory” as its medium? Because, as explained above, what the game’s premise requires is a past that must become a record. And because Tacoma and Deliver Us the Moon alike (unlike Tell Me Why or Edith Finch) pose a “public” duty to be discharged through the record. Finally, because that public duty is bound wholly to an economic — or productive — problem. To set the correct value; to normalize productivity.

Into the relation of Obra Dinn and memory, in the end, intrudes the mediation of a specific concreteness: calculability. The record is a degraded format that has converted memory into something calculable, and calculability is the video game’s fated terminus. This condition tells us why Obra Dinn’s art had to be the 1-bit dithered image. The bit is computing’s most microscopic unit. The death-ship that is Obra Dinn’s setting is presented from the outset as a countable — “digitable” — space, determined by the bit of Y or N.

But the discussion could hardly end there — no one takes Obra Dinn for a cold-blooded insurance simulation. The interesting fact is that Obra Dinn, together with Tacoma and Deliver Us the Moon, all end by leaving behind doubt about, and resistance to, this “countable world.” Yet unlike Tacoma and Deliver Us the Moon, which depict the pursuit of a better life within such extreme worlds, Obra Dinn takes a far colder stance, for it withholds any interpretation of, or attitude toward, the situation of the figure presented as its “protagonist.” Through that protagonist’s shell, the player ends up watching a dry conclusion in which all these unquiet deaths are simply priced into claims and filed in a report. Dante Douglas of The A.V. Club calls this ending “violence cleansed of meaning”[2]. Douglas’s point is that the very structure that reduces the atrocious deaths the player has witnessed directly to a dry report — permitting no gesture of commemoration or mourning — makes palpable the coldness of capitalism, epitomized by the East India Company. Melissa Kagen, too, writes along these lines in her book Wandering Games:

The final tally records what took place, but players flinch before the limited truth each entry holds. The few words written of each fate and deed do not seem enough; the monetary value assigned to each death feels entirely wrong. The very notion of accounting for events so extraordinary and fantastic in so cold a calculus, in so limited a notation, appears bewilderingly inexact[3].

* In the end, every death is reduced to a dry sum of restitution.

Obra Dinn begins from the problem of solid memory reproduced by an apparatus. The game’s fluent structure of play immerses us too deeply to recognize this misled definition of memory, and in the process we are firmly cut off from the most universal of questions — why can this memory be pronounced true? But when it is then reduced to something far more solid still, a document of record, the player takes a hard shock at the merciless step between memory and record. And it is this process that brings home a subtle nuance about the very foundation of “memory as record.” What, after all, was the gaze of the adjuster who strolled numbly through dioramas of fixed memory? Does he feel nothing, and merely enter the correct figures in a ledger? Is the “memory” that I — the player — sensed in playing to be shrunk, inside the game world, into nothing but the cold “record” of a report?

In “Excavation and Memory,” Walter Benjamin wrote that memory “is not an instrument for exploring the past, but rather a medium”[4]. This is likely the more accurate description of memory as we feel it in reality. Yet at times, reality inverts Benjamin’s intent and turns memory into an instrument. Its harshness — or coldness — is easily softened by a shared sense of purpose: memory as a “language of necessity,” something that at times must be used just so. But when that necessity keeps shrinking the world — when it narrows all the way down to the bit-level question of Y or N — we begin to feel that something is going wrong. Obra Dinn is, in the end, a game of memory — quite literally, “remember the event of death”: memento mortem. And when the event of death (mortem) has dried past all further reduction, only then do we find ourselves wishing to imagine, and to feel our way back into, the life within those diorama-like scenes. In that respect, is Obra Dinn’s way of using memory not akin to the soft memory of Tell Me Why? Only, what Obra Dinn mobilizes are not other conditions within the diegesis. It takes instead, as memory’s other condition, the player’s own senses — the desire, the longing, the gloom felt while walking among all those landscapes of death.

The pocket watch’s name, then, is a kind of command issued to the player. Remember the event of death (memento mortem). And in order to remember, imagine the concept of death. Upon the death that will be “recorded,” recall the “memory” of death. And so, in the end: remember death (memento mori), not the scene of dying (mortem). The command is also a voice aimed at our world beyond the game — meaning: from all the records of death scattered across this world, too, retrieve the memory.

[1] This is not to claim that Saving Private Ryan or Titanic actually speaks in deliberately false memories. Unless the possibility is planted inside the film as a cinematic device, doubting its truth is, admittedly, a perverse mode of reception. If anything, it is this very posture — treating a given memory as perfectly true — that renders the flashback more suspect.

[2] Dante Douglas, “Return of the Obra Dinn Starkly Renders the Violence and Greed of Colonialism,” The A.V. Club. https://www.avclub.com/return-of-the-obra-dinn-starkly-renders-the-violen

[3] Melissa Kagen, “Late Capitalism: Caring for Corpses in Return of the Obra Dinn,” in Wandering Games (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022).

[4] Walter Benjamin, “Excavation and Memory,” in Selected Writings, Volume 2, Part 2, 1931–1934, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 576.