V Rising: the Sunlight Mechanic and Empathy
By: A. Ko (they/them)
The recent hit game V Rising offers plenty of unique and exciting mechanics. After all, as a vampire, you take on the various different strengths and weaknesses inspired by folklore of your mythological kin. Of course that includes the ability to suck blood, the potential to shapeshift, and an aversion to garlic. So what is there to speak of, then? Mechanics are mechanics, after all, and each game has its own gimmick.
I was finally alerted to something being different when I logged back into Destiny 2 after a particularly extended session of terrorizing villagers and commanding thralls from my ornate gothic castle. It’s always taken me a while to switch tracks from game to game, adapting to the different mindset and key bindings that would invariably change between titles. So of course, when I tried to interact with vendors in Destiny 2, I pressed “F” instead of “E”, and I slowly relearned how to interpret my surroundings from a close-following third person camera instead of a top-down view.
But one mechanic remained glued to me for nearly 10 minutes of playing Destiny, right until it struck me; I was avoiding the sunlight like the deadly, cell-destroying radiation that it was. My robotic Exomind Guardian, who wouldn’t need 10 SPF sunscreen if the light of five suns was bearing down on her, was gingerly tip-toeing around spots of sunlight and scurrying into the forgiving shadows with a unique desperation you would find in…
If you guessed “gamers”, no points to you. Yes, I’m talking about vampires, who are popularly portrayed as having a deadly vulnerability to sunlight. In fact, this very weakness was an important mechanic in V Rising, which I had just come from playing. So no mysteries there—my brain had simply not yet changed gears. The question, instead, was what had V Rising done to so potently imprint this fear of sunlight into my brain, such that I had played nearly a full Nightfall in Destiny 2 without realizing that fear neither made sense in the game I was playing, nor belonged in my brain in the first place?
As amusing as the situation turned out to be, this incident proffered an important observation. I realized that I had been vigilantly avoiding the light with the exact same paranoid mindset that I have in real life, in regards to my allergy to peanuts and tree nuts. The same anxiety lived in my chest, that same uneasy nervousness that I would experience when in the assorted nuts aisle at the grocery store or while sitting near a friend enjoying a particularly vile and despicable peanut butter sandwich. In fact, for ten full minutes I was flinching from sunlight in Destiny 2 like I genuinely had a life-threatening allergy to it. How had this mechanic been so successfully nailed into my mind?
The sunlight mechanic in V Rising is, in and of itself, quite simple. The light burns you. Step out into the angry glare of the sun, and your screen starts to ominously brighten. Stay out there for too long, and you begin to burn, ultimately leading to the ignominious demise of your thousand-year-old vampire legend. The mechanic seems like a no-brainer. And yet this mechanic had been, thematically so, seared into my brain. There’s a few factors why.
First of all, it hurts. Physically. As you step out of the shadows you can hear the uncomfortable sound of your character’s flesh sizzling. The screen gets brighter and brighter, and when you start burning, a loud gong sounds jarringly and the screen becomes viciously bright to the point where you can barely see your surroundings. To make matters worse, the damage your character takes from the sunlight is insane. It can kill you, no matter your level or progress in the game, within the space of a few heartbeats; you can practically feel the huge chunks of health it tears from you every second. Couple all of these things, and you get a nasty case of potent operant conditioning. Audiovisual cues to notify a player are nothing new in video games, but V Rising does especially well to communicate the amount of pain your vampire feels when under direct sunlight; to compare it to other games, being roasted by the sun is akin to being perpetually flashbanged and lasered by the sort of damage your would normally take from an endgame boss. It makes those precious moments before catching fire all the more intensely anxiety-inducing, and punishes you for activity during the day.
That’s the second point, too. Such a simple mechanic changes the entire way you have to play the game. The sunlight is harsh enough that until you obtain faster modes of transportation besides walking, you are seriously disincentivized from making excursions during the daytime. Boss fights are doubled in difficulty during the day; you might go into a showdown that would already be a bullet hell, and now you’re restricted from most of your available arena space as well, forced to dance like a desperate court jester on the verge of being tossed to the dogs. Exploring the world requires planning along one additional parameter: time of day. It’s not a new feature. In Minecraft, Terraria, and Don’t Starve Together, there are certainly times of the day where exploring is less opportune; namely, the nighttime, where monsters come out, or in the case of Don’t Starve Together, you go insane and get snatched by the shadows. But V Rising is especially punishing in this respect; in the aforementioned survival games, planning your excursion to synchronize with the time of day is more of a gentle suggestion. Minecraft and Terraria may throw increased numbers of monsters at you, but that isn’t anything you can’t handle. Don’t Starve Together is definitely more punitive, but even then you can carry a torch around with you and easily set up a campfire right before the sun sets. V Rising’s sunlight mechanic is less a gentle suggestion and more of a brutal beating. There’s no parasol, no sunscreen, no ability to freely construct shelter where you stand. The only options you get are to flee or scramble the shade of a nearby tree, and those trees get chopped down very quickly by the barrages of arrows and spellfire thrown at you. To avoid all this you have to plan your outings, time your transit so you get to bosses or troublesome areas by sunset, and so on. In this way, sunlight goes from being an interesting mechanic and device for immersion to a central, all-influencing roadblock.
While it is certainly a very painful mechanic, V Rising’s sunlight mechanic also offers us an interesting inversion of the “safe times” mechanic in survival games like the aforementioned trio (Minecraft, Terraria, Don’t Starve Together). In these games, daytime is the period of safety for your character, and while the sun still smiles down on you, you have a bit of room to breathe, sharpen your resources, and gather your weapons. With the onset of nightfall comes the danger; more creatures hunt you under the dim stars, and you suffer from poor visibility and possibly insanity. With V Rising, the hours are swapped; daytime is the period of danger, where every sunlit inch of ground is hateful to tread and the armed mobs roam freely to hunt you down. V Rising challenges the player to take on a perspective outside of the way we as both humans and gamers are hardwired to think: the light is full of life and the dark is full of uncertainty. After some hours of playing as a vampire, the player can become temporarily entrenched in a new perspective of viewing the world: the light is searing hot, and when darkness falls it is a soothing and welcome relief where you can relax and nurse your wounds from the day. You know this mechanic is done right when it so potently imprints an instinct into your mind that runs counter to the way you inherently and naturally think. What is safe and what is not safe is flipped, made the complete opposite; and yet, with the appropriate implementation of this video game mechanic, the player’s mind adapts.
A final thought. V Rising helped me understand, in even some small and odd way, the plight of our fictional vampire friends and their allergy to the sun. In what other ways can gameplay mechanics help us take on new perspectives? For one, I felt a distinct echo of my anxiety around my food allergies in the same clang of the gong that would herald the sunlight’s burning touch on my vampire character’s skin. In a funny way, it helped me fundamentally empathize with an otherwise fantastical race of magical beings that I had barely spent much time thinking about. After all, my allergy is just as detrimental and hurtful as the sunlight is to vampires, and similarly forces me to centrally adapt the way I live my life around it in the same way I had to plan around daytime in V Rising. If a game can so effectively help establish empathy with fictional characters, can it not also help connect players to the perspectives of other real-life people? Are there ways in which a game mechanic can help someone truly and genuinely understand various mental illnesses, allergies, and disabilities, moving beyond simple externally sourced observation and into actual, in-their-shoes experience? It’s a delicate balance to tread, to be sure. But if this experience has taught me anything, it’s that the interactive medium has an unprecedented power to establish immersion, rapport, and empathy. Perhaps it is worth taking a look.