By Sarah Borne
Death is rarely discussed due to its dark connotations. When speaking about after-life care, for example, people often hush each other in an attempt to psychologically elongate life; they do not want to plan for the death of someone they love. With conversations surrounding death being deemed taboo, many people do not realize their after-life care options or rights.
Source: Steam
In A Mortician’s Tale, a video game that explicitly takes death and the processes surrounding death as its focus, many of these traditional views about death are challenged and unsettled. The game offers a positive view on death and educates its audience about various options for after-life care. Drawing on Mary Flanagan and Helen Nissenbaum's framework for analyzing values in games, I argue that A Mortician's Tale effectively promotes values of equal opportunity and environmentalism through its narrative, characters, and aesthetics. By weaving values into the game’s design, the creators use a death-positive approach to simultaneously educate players about environmentally friendly after-life options and disclose the truth behind funeral home practices.
In the game, players take on the role of a funeral director named Charlie and complete daily tasks such as embalming and attending funerals. The story begins when Charlie receives a new job at a funeral home. When the business is sold to a corporation, Charlie quits her job and opens her own funeral home. She quits her job after being scolded by her new boss for trying to upsell funeral goods to a family seeking a home burial. Upselling is when a funeral director tries to persuade a family to purchase more expensive goods, despite the deceased’s wishes. The game’s narrative conveys the value of equal opportunity. As the funeral home becomes more driven by profit, Charlie starts to dislike her job and quits. She opens a funeral home open to all forms of burial and all kinds of bodies (even pets), a move which solidifies the designers’ explicit vision and value of equal opportunity burial. The designers are intentionally uprooting traditional funeral norms through the conflict and resolution of the narrative, demonstrating how burial equality is not as easily achievable as people assume.
Source: Steam
Throughout the game, the narrative is supplemented by email threads that display burial norms in multiple cultures, as well as articles that promote more environmentally friendly forms of burial. These forms of burial are not well known. Alkaline hydrolysis, for example, is a process that uses alkaline chemicals to decompose a body quickly. Charlie’s funeral home also specializes in green burial and self burial, which are forms of after-life care that the corporation does not sell. Combined with Charlie’s actions in a green burial cemetery, the informative email chains about the environmental benefits of green burial make clear the designers’ values of environmentalism and environmentally-friendly forms of burial. Overall, the game supports environmentalism through its narrative, subtly in the emails and explicitly in the game’s ending.
Characters in the game are also woven into the narrative to depict the values of equal opportunity and environmentalism. The shift in owners of the funeral home, for example, is extremely important in conveying the designers’ value of equal opportunity. The original owner of the funeral home, Amy Rose, was empathetic to relatives of the deceased and Charlie; she wanted families to have a say in how their loved ones’ bodies were disposed. When the corporation takes over the funeral home, however, the new manager blatantly tries to undermine the families of loved ones, seeking cost over equal opportunity. Through the managerial switch, the designers implicitly demonstrate the truth behind funeral practices by providing examples of the reality of upselling.
Source: Steam
Different characters also send emails pertaining to different forms of burial. The game promotes environmentalism through these characters by utilizing them to communicate the benefits of environmentally-friendly burial to Charlie. In a way, the emails and mail-outs function like a game inside the game. The player never knows what they will receive, creating a loop that sparks interest and thought. The characters’ emails speak both to the value of environmentalism and the purpose of education by weaving environmentally friendly after-life practices into their dialogue. Building off of the characters, these emails and exchanges contribute to the game's broader aesthetics as they cohere the values of equal opportunity and environmentalism.
The aesthetics of A Mortician’s Tale also complement the designers’ death-positive approach. The game surrounds death with bright colors, an aesthetic which contrasts with popular images and representations of death, specifically dark colors such as black and gray. More specifically, the game utilizes shades of purple to convey a feeling of wisdom and peace. The music also feels incredibly peaceful and creates a serene ambiance. All of these aesthetic aspects of the game associate the value of environmentalism with positive emotions. For instance, during the final scene, the green burial cemetery is expressed as a bright, cheerful place to be put to rest, whereas the funeral home has a dull and sad aesthetic under the corporation. To the player, this subconsciously communicates that green burial cemeteries are more positive and uplifting.
Source: Steam
Another area of the game’s aesthetics that generates values of equal opportunity is its character models. Each character has an average build, a simplistic face, and wears all black. The characters are extremely simplistic, with very little variation. While there are noticeable differences in skin color, age, and details such as wrinkle lines and hairstyles, the predominantly uniform design of the characters communicates that all people can be affected in the same way by funeral practices. This aesthetic choice of universal characters also advocates for equal access to burial options.
Overall, A Mortician’s Tale exposes the inner workings of the funeral industry and educates the public on environmentally friendly burial options. The creators understand how equal opportunity and environmentalism go hand in hand, and they reinforce these values through the game’s narrative, characters, and aesthetics. In the funeral industry, environmentalism will never be reached without equal opportunity. Without opportunity, the world will continue to maintain structures linked to commercialism and pollution, with the ultimate goal of maximizing profit. As A Mortician’s Tale makes clear, profit and pollution are just as important obstacles in the funeral industry as they are across the globe. People like to claim they won’t stop fighting until they are dead. But who fights for the dead?
References
A Mortician’s Tale (PC version) [Video game]. (2017). Laundry Bear Games.
Nissenbaum, H., Flanagan, M. (2014). Values at Play in Digital Games. MIT Press.