Immigrants and Blood-Suckers: Vampyr and the right to healthcare
Vampyr is an action RPG from DontNod, the folks that brought us the beloved Life is Strange. It’s a game with overwhelming potential: A combat system that mostly works because of how well it ties into the RPG mechanics, but is held back by poor encounter design; a once-surely-sleek traversal system that feels all but gutted; random load times in the middle of combat sequences.
Vampyr excels in using a distinct and diverse cast to flesh out a world and a worldview. It is operating on a smaller scope than your standard globetrotting Western RPG. Not a sprawling gorgeous galaxy, but a dense, dirty city.
In plague-ridden London, 1918, you play as Jonathan Reid, a doctor from a wealthy family who becomes a vampire. Bitten, but by whom? His first act of hunger is to unknowingly feed on his sister. He stumbles through a tutorial to find himself the newest practitioner at Pembroke Hospital, where the head doctor has taken a particular interest in his kind. The game is a healthcare management sim, where you learn about the inhabitants of the hospital and other districts, solve problems and provide them with care.
It is not the pulpy trudge through Vampyr’s core mystery that speaks to me, but what the game spends the most hours on, the plight of immigrants and the class struggles of the citizens. Jonathan is power incarnate. How to use that power and the resulting consequences drive the game‘s biggest question: Who deserves care and who deserves death?
These questions are the players to answer through the game. You decide who stays sick, who gets better, and who dies. You are Jonathan Reid, the great arbiter of healthcare and you are very explicitly playing an empathy game. Vampyr is almost prohibitively difficult unless you feed on citizens. The result is rewarding as a game system but undercuts what could have been a core criticism of the systemic issues prevalent in healthcare.
Throughout the game, the limiting factor in keeping communities healthy is resources. Can you supply, through combat and exploration and crafting, enough materials to create the medicine your patients need so badly? That is the single restrictor in Vampyr, but reality is much more complicated than resource management.
The problem is not that games cannot translate real-world issues into readable mechanics, but Vampyr communicates so much with its systems that when it tells the player “we don’t have enough resources to cure everyone” it falls on deaf ears to an audience primed to believe otherwise. By focusing on immigrants, organizers, and income disparity, Vampyr’s cast of characters lays the thematic groundwork for capitalist critique that the systems don’t quite back up.
In the early 1900s, England saw an influx of immigrants due to the fallout of Eastern European revolutions. Hundreds of thousands fled from Russia, Austria, and Prussia. Many were Jewish, a result of post-war religious persecution. Chinese and Indian immigrants made up a much smaller, but still notable, population.
Vampyr replicates this, creating believably diverse and tight-knit communities, highlighting the poor and hungry immigrant working class as the game’s main NPCs and succeeding in building a city full of sympathetic, morally complex human beings. There is a period appropriate diversity that creates authenticity and lays the groundwork for a richness of character. So often, the game defines characters, not by what they lack, but what they still have and the action they take to regain what they’ve lost.
As you uncover clues about each NPC by engaging in dialogue across the city, first impressions come quick and subverted even quicker. Giselle Paxton is one of many residents of the docks who shows a distrust of Jonathan, of his status, of his profession, of his appearance. Her initial hostility was soon offset by my learning of her work with a local trade union, a fact that forever endeared me to Giselle.
The first journey outside of Pembroke takes the player to Whitechapel and focuses on a group of immigrants whom you discover to be secretly distributing medicine to those who can’t afford care. The grassroots movement is led by Dorothy Crane, a Romanian immigrant. She is a nurse at Pembroke who is stealing supplies. Darius Petrescu is the second in command, another Romanian who has roots in communist activism in his home country.
When you confront Dorothy at the chapter’s climax, you are given the choice to kill her, wipe her memory, or spare her and let her continue the operation. It’s a situation where the latter option, aside from being morally enviable as a leftist, leaves the community intact and makes Jonathan implicit in illegal, but virtuous activity.
The game trades in these situations, presenting opportunities for the player to subvert the expectations set by the admittedly hamfisted metaphor that serves as the premise. If doctors are vampires, then you are given the choice to be a dirty blood-sucker or a merciful man of the people. The systems don’t just give you this choice, but in classic RPG fashion, they provide checks and balances. In Vampyr, the XP curve is severely hamstrung if you don’t feed, mechanically replicating Jonathan’s struggle and his weakness.
Now take another look at each of the character interactions I’ve described through the context of a player who is constantly weighing the moral values of everyone. It becomes a game where lack of information, first impressions, and rash decisions can unnecessarily take lives and impact communities in unforeseen ways.
Here’s another. Milton Hooks comes across as a bit of a standoffish prick. He happens to also be extorting money from Pembroke patients. But Milton has something to live for, his love for Pippa Hawkins, a nurse at Pembroke. Of course, this romance is kept secret due to the stigma around their interracial relationship. They are sympathetic, but they are complicit in the fucking-over of the poor and sick by charging for beds and extorting patients, weeding out the immigrants from Pembroke and making room for those who can afford care.
If you neglect certain NPCs, either out of negligence or malice, their conditions will worsen. It becomes increasingly resource intensive to treat these more severe conditions. The easy alternative? Just treat those who are barely sick. Cure five headaches with the medicine you can use to cure one citizen of Neuralgia. Go ahead, play God.
In the first conversation you have with Cristina Popa, a sex worker whose immigrant status restricted her freedom to choose her profession. Cristina assumes Jonathan wants her services, that that is the only reason people of “his type” come to Whitechapel. The remark encapsulates the overwhelming first impression that Jonathan gives. Jonathan is not shunned for his secret vampire status, but his public, professional status, implying affluence and the implication of ambivalence towards the other. It is impossible to trust anyone with a comparatively unlimited amount of power.
It’s here that Vampyr is most at odds with itself. You spend hours talking to people, people who comment on Jonathan’s status, but who ultimately are dependent on him. What you glean about the inhabitants of the world has no impact on how Jonathan fixes the world: by doing his damn job.
For a game so concerned with power and inequality, a game that has some of the most fascinating and diverse characters I’ve ever seen, Vampyr still can’t escape the trap of player empowerment. You are the white, upper-class, wealthy savior to the rest of the world. It is period accurate and it is, in that way, empowering. It is where the fun is, to be the one who will leave an imprint on the world, whose actions can provide healthcare to all, who can make 20th century London just a little more communist. In the real world, progress is not achieved single-handedly.
Perhaps the game simply obfuscates the possibility that, with enough grinding and exploration, you can gather the proper resources to heal everyone. It is saying we must work harder to get everyone the care they need, but at the end of the day it never asks for systematic reform.
It was disappointing, then, when my actions over the course of 30 hours resulted in an ending for Jonathan, but not an ending for the districts I so carefully cared for, for the citizens I grew to love and hate, for those whose loved ones I took and left to mourn. It asks “how much did you kill?” and responds “well, this is how good that makes you,” before slapping on one of four possible endings.
I envision endings where Pembroke becomes a beacon of hope… or it doesn’t. The more Jonathan turns into an animal, the more that the city would reflect the vicious uncaring nature of the hospital, letting patients die from lack of care, turning away the sick to die in poverty. But alternatively, in a different world, if you were human enough, Pembroke would be a start, a revolutionary utopia in an alternate history where maybe, just maybe, access to healthcare would be afforded to all.
Bryn Gelbart is a journalist and writer on ~the internet~, but his body resides in Brooklyn. If you’d like to read his work, start a podcast with him, or just be friends make your way on over to @feelthebryn on Twitter.
Deorbital is a videogame-aligned journal for insightful articles on games, culture, and society. This Spring Quarterly has been funded by readers like you.
