The Weirdest Thing A Video Game Has Ever Asked Me To Do

The Weirdest Thing A Video Game Has Ever Asked Me To Do

“A man chooses, a slave obeys”.

The ending of the original BioShock is powerful. Playing — or more aptly, watching — the final confrontation is powerful. You bounce a putter off Ryan’s domepiece and it’s all very dramatic and symbolic. It has a lot to say about the way video games guide us through these arbitrary tasks. In video games we rarely choose, we obey. And even when we do choose, those choices exist within a set of pre-determined matrices. In video games our choices are never made with a complete freedom of agency.

That’s sort of what BioShock’s really about, isn’t it?

Now would be a good moment to lean back in your chair and stroke your chin thoughtfully. Go on then, I’m waiting. A man chooses, a slave obeys.

Now, let’s talk about Dark Souls 3. It wasn’t BioShock that made me question video games and issues of determinism. It was Dark Souls 3.

There I was, deep in the Grand Archives, a cavernous library of ghouls and wizardry. I stood in front of a sizeable pool, filled with a substance I couldn’t identify. Then, a prompt. Possibly the weirdest video game prompt I’ve ever seen in all my decades spent holding a controller:


“Dunk Head In Wax”

Dunk head in wax. That’s it. No explanation. No attempt to talk round the fact that you haven’t been dipping your head in pools of wax, water, blood or whatever liquid you’ve stumbled across. Nothing.

“Would you kindly take your head and dunk it in this fucking big pool of wax thank you please? I realise you’ve mostly been slashing at monsters and exploring castles and shit for the last 30 hours but now I would like you to dunk your head in wax.”

Imagine your boss walked up to you, right this second. Normally your job entails… I don’t know — let’s go with the stereotype and say you’re in IT. Normally your job involves telling people to restart their computers over the phone. Then one afternoon your supervisor walks up to your desk, he’s carrying a bucket filled with wax. He doesn’t say much, he doesn’t explain shit. He just says…

“Dunk head in wax.”

He doesn’t offer you a promotion, he doesn’t say a single goddamn thing except:

“Dunk head in wax.”

Can you imagine a situation where you would step away from your desk and, without question, dunk your head in that wax?

I sure as hell can’t.

What choice do I have? It might do something!

I’ve done a lot of weird things in video games. I used a literal monkey as a monkey wrench in game called Monkey Island. I’ve pushed ‘X’ to ‘pay my respects’ at a dead man’s funeral and I’ve pressed ‘X’ to ‘Jason’ in Heavy Rain. Video games have asked me to do a lot of strange shit but honestly…

“Dunk head in wax.”

That might be the weirdest. It’s definitely the video game prompt that forced a certain level of self-awareness upon me.

Dear video game, you are – without context – asking me to partake in an act that makes no goddamn sense whatsoever. There is no foreplay here. This isn’t a video game about Wax. This is out of the blue. Dunk your fucking head in this wax because we asked you to, because we’re extending this once in a lifetime chance to coat your head in wax. And if you don’t do it? Well just wait and see. We’re not going to tell you what happens if you don’t dunk your head in this wax. You may never know what happens if you don’t dunk your head in this wax, so just fucking do it.

Did I dunk my head in the wax?

Of course I did. This is a video game. What’s the worst that could happen?

A man chooses, a slave obeys.

Dunk head in wax.

This article has been retimed since its original publication.


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