Great moments in PC gaming are bite-sized celebrations of some of our favorite gaming memories.
Year: 2012
Developer: Arkane Studios
When you're playing a stealth game or immersive sim there's nothing more fun than defeating all the NPC guards (whether with chokeholds, tranq darts, half a brick in a sock, or whatever), then dragging the bodies to a hidden corner of the map where you can collect them together in a great big pile.
It's been observed by others that plenty of videogames are really about tidying up, whether they have us wiping icons off a map or deleting bad guys from a level. They tickle the part of our brain that feels satisfaction because we finally scrubbed that gunk off the stove top, only without actually providing anything as valuable as a hygienic cooking surface in return.
It's the same when you take a dangerous game space—whether a factory for rendering intelligent whales down to oil in Dishonored, or Lord Bafford's Manor in Thief: The Dark Project—and declutter all those messy guards someone carelessly left around the place. You can't just leave them where they fall any more than you can sweep all the dust then not put it in the bin. No, the next step is to take every single one of those guards to a room you've told yourself is safe and organize them in a pile.
In the first Dishonored there's an element of risk to this. Unconscious bodies make great targets for swarms of rats, who may munch on them once your back's turned. This ruins your no-chaos run and makes you feel guilty that some of the people you gave traumatic brain injuries to subsequently died. But if you find a dumpster that doesn't have rats in it, that's a perfect place for a body pile, both because it's safe and because it fits in with my tortured metaphor about cleaning up. Bathtubs are good too, of course, and the guards seem happy stacked together there.
(Let's just ignore that the first Dishonored would sometimes save on memory by erasing unconscious guards from the world if you heaped too many in one spot.)
A lot of things we do in videogames are strange when analyzed, whether it's hoarding items then never using them, or quicksaving so compulsively the F5 key gets worn down to a nub. But I really think this obsessive need to make sure unconscious guards are neatly arranged is a perfectly normal and healthy way of expressing ourselves through the medium of videogames, and definitely not something we need to explain to a therapist.
If you don't pat the dog in a game though, you're unwell and should seek help.
