Memento Mori in Roguelike Games

In Humanities lecture, we learned about the latin phrase “memento mori,” which means “Remember that you will die.” In lecture, it was used in paintings by painters in order to remind the viewer of their mortality. This part of lecture reminded me of roguelike games. Most roguelike games have a goal that players aim towards and where death leads to the loss of the character and reset of progress towards that goal.

Don't Starve

Sword of the Stars: The Pit

In roguelike games such as “Don’t Starve” or “Sword of the Stars: The Pit,” dying in the game completely resets the players progress, and often removes the world so the player has to make a new save. This makes the player constantly mindful of placing their character in excessive risk. “Realm of a Mad God” portrays this idea in a large scale online multiplayer game. In this game, players pick a class, and then set out fighting random monsters to level and find more equipment to progress further. The player is given a limited inventory and is only allowed to keep that inventory as long as they are alive. The players in the game all attempt to find better gear to continue to more difficult areas but it ends if they die, which makes them restart with nothing unless they saved a few items from their previous character in a chest, although they will have to restart collecting levels. This forces the player to be cautious of risking their character in dangerous areas that are more difficult than the character can manage. Many people consider video games as an art form, making this one modern form of art under the phrase “memento mori.” This relates to the lecture since although rather than reminding the players of their own mortality, the game creates a mortality for individual characters the player uses. Although in many games the players strive to keep their characters alive in order to progress, some games have the character inaccessible even after completing the end goal. “Relic Hunter Zero” is a game where you select a character and fight your way through levels to eventually combat an end boss with various weapons that you find around the levels. Despite defeating the boss, the character is still lost after and the game then brings the player back to the main menu, after displaying that the player has unlocked endless mode. The end portion of the game represents “memento mori” because even though the player is victorious, the player no longer can use the character and the character is moved from being a mobile entity in the game, to being a statistic. But this genre of games does not only have a connection to lecture during the character’s lifespan, but also after the character has died.

Realm of the Mad God

Often times, roguelike games give players some satisfaction from losing their character, even though the players lost their progress to the end of the game. The game developers give this satisfaction through unlockables. These unlockables are typically given after the player completes a challenge. The game, “Risk of Rain,” has multiple challenges that are used to unlock more items and characters for the player to enjoy. “Risk of Rain” is a game where the player chooses a character to shoot, slash, or punch through levels to fight an end boss to escape the planet. The game contains items that give the player various effects, ranging from raising attack speed, to causing explosions. Some of the items are locked and require the player to do specific actions to collect these items, although they are unusable by the player in the same run. By making the items and characters utilizable after the current character, the eventual fall of the current character displays another factor of “memento mori.” While the player will lose the current run, later runs will be able to benefit from its remains by letting the player have more experience, knowledge, and items. This relates to lecture because of the explanation of how the Enlightenment was able to happen. Professor Steintrager explained that Rousseau disapproved of the arts and the sciences as Rousseau thought that they created a weak and lazy people, who indulge in luxuries. While Professor Steintrager was lectured about Rousseau arguing that the Romans became weak from absorbing the Greek culture, he stated that the Enlightenment occurred because of fleeing scholars from Italy fled to France, and spread their knowledge. Although Rousseau would not find this as an improvement, to me, this demonstrates the remains of one empire benefitting another, since the Greeks fell to the Romans and spread their culture to the Romans, which then lead to the French gaining scholars from scholars from Italy.

Risk of Rain

All of this information stems from the phrase “memento mori.” While it is made in order to have viewers of paintings to remember the fragility of their lives, it also has a hidden reminder that even after their death, someone has inherited something from them, whether it is children learning life lessons or people becoming more educated from a scientist’s research.