Despite Virginia Woolf’s (12) famous proclamation that a “poverty of the language” exists in the description of illness, the most common form of pathographies is likely literature. Woolf’s essay On Being Ill argues that illness, compared to topics such as grief and love, remains rarely written into narratives due to the vocabulary itself. Yet, Carel’s work focuses on a more acute limitation. Language in books inherently offers limited bearing on temporality and pacing. While it is true that skilled authors can decide the pace of paragraphs, quickening tension with staccato and parataxis, the reader is ultimately given control regardless. As Roland Barthes (11) writes in The Pleasure of Text, “the author cannot predict tmesis: he cannot choose to write what will not be read.” In other words, the writer’s intentions matter little if a reader decides to skim over what they deem to be unimportant. Thus, the act of writing itself involves a willful relinquishment to the reader, and this act of surrender betrays a core tenet of the illness-experience: removal from control, particularly over time and space.

Video games complicate this dynamic, since some strip the very control Barthes describes back out of the player’s hands. Perhaps no game better exemplifies this removal of player control, especially over time, to depict illness than Before Your Eyes., released in 2021 by GoodbyeWorld Games. Before Your Eyes is not a typical video game. At no point does the player use their hands to control the game. Rather, the opening minutes require the player to set up an eye-tracking system, which lends itself to a simple conceit: with each blink in real life, once a metronome-object appears, time passes rapidly within the video game.

The first half of the game acts as a type of memory play. The main character, Benjamin, whose eyes the player inhabits, awaits judgment after death and must recount their life story to a mythical Ferryman to continue to the afterlife. The scenes begin playing out. Blink – Benjamin, as a baby, playing with rubber ducks. The scene plays out, then a metronome begins ticking down. Blink – watching parents argue about money. Blink – a piano recital. Blink – nervousness about talking to a crush. Evoking how memories work in real-life, each of these moments has a fleeting quality to them, as these scenes can only last if the player does not blink. Life goes by in a blink of an eye, literally.

While this perspective on memory alone makes Before Your Eyes an intriguing musing on memory, the second half of the game recontextualizes what comes before it in the context of medical humanities. As the scenes continue to play out, eventually Benjamin becomes a highly successful musician and artist, garnering worldwide acclaim. Yet, the story increasingly becomes fantastical, until it’s revealed that the story up to this point has been false. Rather, Benjamin died at 12 years old due to an unspecified terminal illness. The game plays out again; this time, the scenes are of Benjamin confined to his hospital bed. Blink – a growing illness. Blink – his parents visiting him at the hospital. Blink – dreaming of playing the piano. Blink – a fading interaction. In this second half, the scenes become ever more fleeting as the metronome signaling the scene is ready to pass appears more rapidly, triggering in the player a desire to avoid blinking. Often, before a moment can conclude, one blinks; time progresses, closer to death.

Before Your Eyes demonstrates the ability of other mediums, particularly video games, to use interactivity to disrupt typical temporality. This technique is not unique to Before Your Eyes by any means; the works of Samuel Beckett employ a similar technique of stripping audience control to simulate the constricted present Carel describes. For example, Beckett’s Not I (1972) features a disembodied mouth that delivers a fragmented monologue about past trauma at a pace too fast for an audience to fully process, let alone control. In video games, Red Dead Redemption 2’s protagonist, Arthur Morgan, develops tuberculosis over the game’s final chapters, which alters gameplay mechanics, including reducing stamina. As Marshall McLuhan famously argued, a medium’s structure shapes the way it delivers experience, independent of its content. Removing description of illness in favor of depicting its phenomenology, whether that is through Beckett’s compression of time or Red Dead Redemption 2’s diminishing of gameplay abilities, aims to cause the audience to experience illness. Before Your Eyes heightens both of these experiences, for time and space are tied to the player’s physical body, as occurs in sickness. In binding the passage of time to the player’s own involuntary blinking, the player’s body becomes a mechanism of failure. Thus, the player is made to inhabit Carel’s claim that illness is lived from within the body rather than observed from outside it. While literature can recapitulate the experience of symptoms, it cannot impose the conditions of it. Before Your Eyes suggests that the truest representation of illness may not be a representation at all, but an imposition of the phenomenological conditions of illness.

References:

Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Macmillan, 1975.

Carel, Havi. Phenomenology of Illness. Oxford University Press, 2016. Silverchair,
https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199669653.001.0001.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. MIT press, 1994. Google Scholar,
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=4603169387763961023&hl=en&oi=scholarr.

Woolf, Virginia. “On Being Ill.” Family Business Review, vol. 6, no. 2, June 1993, pp. 199–201. SAGE Journals,
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-6248.1993.00199.x.

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