The Spectacle of Suffering

At first glance, BLOODMONEY! seems innocent. All you need to do is click on the smiling face of Harvey Harvington to raise money for an operation, with 25,000 clicks to reach the objective. While you keep clicking your mouse, accompanied by a cheerful tune, a shop appears and offers you the first upgrade, a feather, to make the clicking more efficient. Soon more tools are unlocked, fastening the pace of money-making, and with each purchase, Harvey’s body is bearing the pain inflicted on him. The once gentle and welcoming face of Harvey gradually gets grotesque: A trickle of blood seeps from the corner of his mouth, a pair of scissors stab him right in the eye, and then come deeper mutilations until he is reduced to a mass of bruises and despair.

Thanks to Dexter Manning’s voice acting, the interaction with Harvey feels strikingly tangible and unsettlingly real. Through frequent fourth-wall breaks, Harvey confronts the player, mocks their indifference, and questions the validity of treating him as “a bunch of colored lines.” Remarkably, the game does not adopt a reflexive posture by forcing me down a single, inevitable path to the heart of darkness. After all, it is my desire for quicker rewards and faster progress that drives me to trade the money I earned click by click for a hammer, a match, and a knife.

In this way, the game deftly avoids making “not to play” the only winning move and liberates the player from a cycle of pretentious interrogation about their own actions often found in games with linear progression. Instead, it tears away the veneer of hypocrisy and directly presents you with brutal realities, gamifying a critique of the self-imposed inertia of knowing the right choice but remaining passive. This is achieved not through a single shock, but through a series of subtle, incremental choices that culminate in a point of no return. It is only then that you are left to ponder in horror: Since when did I become a creature capable of this?

Tragically, the game’s commentary on the blurred line of exploitation found its devastating real-world expression in the case of Raphaël Graven (Jean Pormanove). The French streamer who, according to BBC, had more than one million followers across his various social media platforms, died in his bed in front of the live camera after suffering from physical and psychological humiliation including but not limited to physical abuse, sleep deprivation, paintball shots, and toxic substances. Though trauma is ruled out as the cause of death, he is not the only person that voluntarily or involuntarily go through agony without a just cause, an open-air abuse business under the disguise of “games” or “challenges.”

Susan Sontag once noted in Regarding the Pain of Others that violence and sadism have become increasingly acceptable in mass culture, and for many, mayhem entertains rather than shocks. Decades later, there is no sign that this trend is about to diminish. Players torturing Harvey is essentially no different from viewers enabling Jean’s self-destruction, both of which strip suffering of its gravity and collapse compassion into entertainment. In comment section, there are people calculating how many clicks are needed to finish the game with these lethal tools. In live chat, there are viewers leaving words to fuel further escalation of abusive acts. Across the screen, pain is spectacle. Participants are detached from embodied existence within the scenes, where sympathetic pity is ceding ground to a perverse enjoyment of morbid curiosity and schadenfreude.

Compassion, in the eyes of Susan Sontag, is “an unstable emotion” that quickly withers if not translated into action. At the heart of this dynamic lies the recognition of others. The ensuing practice must be clearly oriented towards an external object. In other words, effective agency requires that we consciously separate the self from the suffering other. If we fail to delineate the boundary between the two, our response will accordingly lose its focus and therefore its potency. Unfortunately, the crucial distinction is obscured by the ubiquitous presence of black mirrors. Knowing that a person is able to inflict pain for the consumption of another’s flesh only serves as a trigger of a multitude of impulses screaming within you. Knowing that each step is to execute a program of brutal human disfiguration, the resonance of injury and wound and all the grievous bodily harm is light and even negligible. This sense of futility results in a rapid burnout. More despicably, this repeated exposure breeds learned helplessness, until we are reduced to passive observers who let boredom, cynicism, and apathy take hold.

Sontag used to consider showing sympathy as a proclamation of “our innocence as well as our impotence.” Still, I refuse to take the latter for granted. It is always easier to downgrade the level of dignity than to uphold it. By turning suffering into entertainment, we not only victimize others, but ourselves. Much like Harvey’s curse, we may have become “sad, lonely souls” who are “so comfortable sitting on that chair” and “clicking away on that little mouse,” insulated from consequences in our own miserable lives.

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Zonghang Zhou is a small-town boy from one side of the Pacific. He likes to talk about games and culture with a critical concern. And he is waiting with great anticipation for people to find him @zhzhou86.