Note: This post contains spoilers for Pragmata.
Pragmata is a “dad” game, but it is part of a broader lineage. In Pragmata, the player protects and guards an NPC throughout its runtime, like many other of the most popular games of recent years. Possible entries in this subgenre include God Of War (2018), Bioshock: Infinite, Resident Evil 4, The Last Of Us, A Plague Tale, Prince Of Persia (2008), and several more. Many of these games’ marketing campaigns touted how little their NPCs got in the way, in contrast to oft-maligned escort quests, which offer a multitude of frustrations. But Ico, still easily the best and most profound of these games, features constant interruptions. Companion Yorda is in frequent danger. If the player lets go of her hand, they’ll have to call her back to them or make a path for her to follow. Though Pragmata lacks that exact sort of friction, it emphasizes a symbiosis which recalls the genre’s roots, even as it also underlines the gap in power between parent and child.
In Ico, both the player and the NPC companion are children. They have different abilities, different roles, which are cut along gendered lines. But they are also equally vulnerable beings, who must protect each other to survive. In most of the games inspired by Ico, the player is a parent or otherwise experienced person, guiding a child. These are two very different configurations. One is about power. The other is about vulnerability.
Pragmata is at the intersection of both these models. In plot, Pragmata borrows from western games more readily. Hugh, a regular guy and software engineer, accompanies a team of tech officers to a moon base. After a massive moonquake, the rest of his team dies and vicious robots stalk Hugh through the corridors of the base. But one such robot is friendly. Diana, modeled after a little human girl, is a titular Pragmata. She can hack the bots which populate the moon base and let Hugh take them out with heavy weaponry and thruster dodges. The primary difference between Pragmata, and say, The Last Of Us, is that Hugh is not really sad or tortured. His adoption at the hands of a loving family gives him the right tools to relate to Diana and their relationship is easy-going and excitable. Diana has only known a small part of the moon base, so Hugh is her portal to a broader world. To her, he represents the freedom the life of an ordinary girl might grant. So far, Hugh is both mentor and protector to Diana, fully the weaker party.
However, mechanically, Pragmata feels tied to Ico in surprising ways. Through its shooting and hacking, which players do simultaneously, the game articulates how Hugh and Diana need each other. Diana is small and weak and any robot could crush her instantly, but Hugh could not dent the robots without her hacking abilities. When the player is out exploring the lunar base, Diana and Hugh move together; she rides on his back. This means that Diana never gets in the way—she is always useful. Yet, Pragmata’s combat is made from a multitude of miniature frictions. Hugh is always running out of ammo; Diana is always having to rehack an enemy. The excitement of the game is found in the interplay between these frictions, which reveal how vulnerable both Hugh and Diana are. They are both player characters. Their mechanical interplay reflects their relationship.
This is in pretty major contrast to other “dad games.” In The Last Of Us, Ellie (daughter) mostly stays out of the way of Joel (father). When you play as her, there are no differences in how it works. Generously, this can be seen as reflective of how they mirror each other. In GOd of War (2018), Atreus is regulated to a single button press (though he is a player character in the sequel God Of War: Ragnarok). In Bioshock: Infinite, Elizabeth is pure help-meet for the player, never needing assistance, never really being anything other than helpful. Her moments of power are all outside the game itself and, thus, almost never really feel threatening or real. Pragmata gives its child real power over Hugh, something very few of these games have managed.
Yet, Hugh remains the sole protagonist, at least in terms of how the game presents him. Back in the Shelter, the hub where the player can rest from Pragmata‘s hectic action, they control him alone. Hugh can talk with Diana, give her gifts found throughout the station, and play hide and seek. They are fully separate beings here. Players upgrade Hugh via weapons and equipment, but upgrade Diana directly. She is an object. There is an assumption that the player does not, and cannot, identify with her.
At the center of this are probably correct ideas about Pragmata’s audience. A new big-budget action game, in the lineage of Resident Evil 4, has a specific set of grown men at its heart. Hugh—gruff everyman, sweet boy incarnate—is more easily identified with by them than a lonely little girl, the game assumes. But is that really true? Everyone alive was once a child. Every abuse of a child, every oppression, is a denial of this profound fact. All were once so weak that they could not live without help (perhaps all are still so weak). Why could Diana not be the one players inhabit back at home? Or why could the game not fully embrace its two protagonists and let players swap between them? The answer is as simple as fatherhood. Men act; girls are protected.
Still, Pragmata directly addresses Diana’s objectification. Diana’s creator discarded her because she was insufficient to the task of curing his child. She was only a means to an end to him. Towards the last part of the game, Diana begins to remember this. She calls herself useless. “Don’t think like that,” Hugh says, “Think about what you want.” It is right to be cynical about Pragmata’s cloying sweetness, about the fact that Diana’s only peer, Eight, is a sympathetic villain who must regrettably die, about how neatly it slots into a certain kind of “cinematic” action-adventure. Still, in the hour of her most desperate need, Hugh asks Diana what she wants. And in the end she takes it, with or without him.
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