Sometimes video games help you lose yourself in their worlds and stories, using the power of interactivity to bring you into the life of a character and give you the opportunity to experience at least some version of their emotions. And sometimes, you get “Press F to pay tribute.”
If you’re somehow unfamiliar with a video game prank that became a fairly widespread meme, the “Press F” moment came in Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. At the beginning of the story, tragedy strikes, and the lead character attends a friend’s funeral. As the scene unfolds, Advanced Warfare throws in a bit of interactivity to add some gravitas, prompting you to press a button to allow your character to express their pain. If you are playing on the PC, the default password to honor the dead in this case is “F”.
It’s not even Call of Duty’s fault – many games have had very similar moments with very similar prompts, or allowed you to do silly video game stuff at exactly the wrong times, but the instance in Advanced Warfare just feels particularly silly, probably because appears in such a high-profile game. Here you are at a digital funeral for a fictional character in what the game hopes will be an emotional and moving moment, but a fleeting attempt to add some interactivity to the scene really works to completely undermine it. “Pressing F to pay tribute” just yells at you that you’re playing a video game, and that the video game is trying to get you involved in something as essentially human as dueling, and you don’t. It’s an obvious reminder that many AAA games just don’t have a good idea of how to make it natural to interact with the world in a way that isn’t about killing things.
Which brings us to Ghost of Tsushima and his opinion on pressing F to pay tribute.
Ghost of Tsushima is quite emotional, for an open-world game about sneaking up on and stabbing the soldiers of an invading army. His themes include sacrifice, what you owe to others and yourself, and not meeting the expectations of those closest to you. He spends a lot of time building relationships between Jin and various characters, and then explores how much it can hurt to lose those relationships, either through tragedy or through the characters’ own actions.
It is a surprisingly introspective and contemplative game, and that is reflected in various moments when Jin visits graves. When you walk past, say, Jin’s father’s grave, you get Tsushima’s “Press F to pay homage” mark, but it’s more than just pressing a button to trigger a momentary grim animation. Instead, Jin sits quietly at the grave for a moment and watches the scene around him. A second later, he is encouraged to participate with one of the most interesting Ghost of Tsushima ideas, and write a haiku.
Before continuing, more than one person has criticized the implementation of Ghost of Tsushima’s haiku mechanics and the quality of the haiku that allows him to build, and those criticisms are correct. (Our own Kevin Knezevic discusses everything that is wrong with Tsushima’s haiku quite completely, in fact.)
Yes, haiku is historically anachronistic during the period covered by the game, which makes them feel, at least intellectually, as the idea of an element of Japanese culture rather than a more skillful use of it. And Tsushima doesn’t help you write particularly good haiku, it must be said. The system gives you a warning (such as “Reflect on loss”) and then allows you to pan the camera around the surrounding landscape, where you can choose one of the three lines. Repeat the process until you create a small poem 5-7-5 out of the nine total options. As described by Austin Walker in an episode of Waypoint Radio, he is essentially Mad Libs, and as Kevin wrote in his article, all the poems are meaningless.
Considering all that is read, Tsushima is still very successful in rolling out his haiku idea for these emotional moments – it’s less about the haiku he produces and more about what he’s spending time producing one. When you visit Jin’s father’s grave, you actually visit her grave. You sit there for a while. You look around the scene and you get it. You reflect on their relationship and what it means to Jin, something that has been incorporated into the development of his character. You take a second of the sneak fight and sword to just sit back and think. And you write a bad poem.
In trying to find a way to add interactivity to a human and personal moment, developer Sucker Punch actually had a very good idea, or at least a creative solution to the problem. The haiku system is still a pretty darn video game, but at least it actually feels like paying homage, anyway, more than pressing a key to advance a scene.
Tsushima is an action game that is ready to slow down and put its players in quieter, more introspective moments to serve its story. If the games are going to keep trying to make these moments meaningfully interactive, you could do worse than piecing together some silly verse to honor your dead father in-game.
