One of the unique properties of video games is their ability to put us in someone elseâ??s shoes. But most of the time, those shoes are bigger than our own. When we play video games, we are like children clopping around in their parentâ??s loafers or pumps, imagining what it would be like to see over the kitchen counter. As I argued in my last column, this trend corresponds with video gamesâ?? tendency to fulfill power fantasies.1 Video games let us wield deadly weapons. They let us wage intergalactic war. They let us take a shot on goal in the World Cup final. They let us build cities, and then they let us destroy them.
Darfur is Dying, created by USC graduate Susana Ruiz as part of her MFA thesis, is a game that breaks this tradition. In one part of the game, the player takes the role of a Darfuri child who ventures out of the village to a well to retrieve water for his family. To accomplish this task, the player must run across a sparse desert in search of a well, and then back again, while avoiding jeeps of Janjaweed militia that easily overtake the slower, more vulnerable child. The player can hide temporarily behind shrubs and desert trash, but staying still for too long leads to inevitable capture.
On first blush, it would be tempting to call Darfur is Dying a stealth action game. This increasingly common subgenre of the action/adventure game rewards covert action over overt action. Common examples abound: in Thief, the playerâ??s character must hide in the shadows while pilfering mansions. In Splinter Cell and Metal Gear Solid, the player must obscure evidence of his actions, such as by asphyxiating guards and hiding their bodies. And in Deus Ex, the player can choose whether to be stealthy or not, such as by hacking a computer to pass a locked door, or by killing a guard to gain passage. Darfur is Dying, one might argue, offers a similar challenge: the player must avoid contact with militia, such as by evading or hiding behind barriers.
But Darfur lacks a feature crucial to the stealth action genre. In stealth games, covertness is a skill imbued with power. The thiefâ??s furtiveness and the secret agentâ??s craftiness are honed abilities that separate them from the brutes they battle against. Conversely, in Darfur is Dying stealth is a weakness. The playerâ??s character hides because he must do so to survive, not because doing so gives him an advantage over an orthogonally powerful enemy. The player does not sneak, he cowers.