The Cost of Caring: The Powerful Impact of ‘missed messages.’
It’s often difficult to argue that certain video games are “important” in the same way that knowing how to read and write is important. It’s furthermore difficult to convince a skeptic that some video games can teach you ways to save someone from suicide. This difficulty is compounded by the often high barrier to entry of time and money that most games require. With most games, teaching a lesson isn’t as simple and quick as pulling up a statistic. But I think Angela He’s Missed Messages is a powerful counterpoint to that skeptical point of view. For Missed Messages, no more than half an hour in length, toured me through the vital importance of acting out the worry and concern you feel towards the people you care about.
Missed Messages directly confronts burnout from work, aimlessness in life, unrealistic parental expectations, and self-harm, but relationships and suicide are its central themes. Through simple exchanges of inner monologue represented in both words and abstract clouds, and dialogue often resembling that of a text message, Missed Messages creates a unique kind of intimacy and vulnerability within one main set piece, a tiny apartment. It contains those themes within this tight space as to not overstep itself as a multifaceted but grounded tale about human vulnerability. This isn’t a doctrinal pronouncement about the importance of human life. Rather, this game sets up conversations that neither roommate could truthfully have without the camaraderie implied within their physical closeness.
At first, you have very limited interactions with your roommate May. She is locked in her bedroom and you are in bed attempting to complete some math related work on your laptop. From the outset, this is a very cozy space with pastel colors, soft shapes, and loving little atmospheric details that add personality to the room like LGBT flags, a cacti collection, and some blinking string lights – not to mention the welcoming chillhop music.
Breaking the Cycle of Work
Your interactions with May arise in response to when you choose to take a break from your laptop. You can try to grind away at work, continually burning out and losing focus, wanting to take periodic breaks, or you can eavesdrop on your roommate as she gets viciously scolded by her strict Chinese parents who have rigid expectations for her career and life success. You can ignore your roommate entirely, accepting a random Airdrop from a stranger named “goth gf” that you’ll later hang out with on a dreamy rooftop. However you choose to spend your time leads to one of two primary interactions with May. At first, I chose to be a workaholic for some reason, ignoring most of the character development that this terse game offers.
The first interaction that I encountered was probably the one most people arrive at last, which is a tragic encounter in the roommates’ shared bathroom. May is staring vacantly in the mirror, cut marks streaking her forearms, an open pair of scissors casually abandoned on the counter. She doesn’t even notice you right away. Despite having no interaction with her until this point, aside from knowing it was May’s room across the hall, I immediately went into damage recovery mode. Having verbally coaxed friends from suicidal thoughts and even a few attempts, I felt a kind of knot in my throat tighten – the kind where you have to fight back your own emotions for the sake of someone else – a feeling I hate because of how I associate it with the lowest points in some of my friends’ lives.
Dealing with Self-Harm
Despite hating the feeling that this moment in the bathroom initially created, I appreciate Missed Messages all the more for how it handles the scene. There are two common reactions (arguably three, the third omitted until later in the story) to encountering a friend self-harming. One reaction is to show immediate concern, throwing all kinds of methods of care at them, asking them questions, trying to help them and make them feel valued or at least okay. Another common reaction, however unfortunately real, is also available for the player to choose. You can shut down and escape the tense situation that you obviously don’t know how to deal with. You can leave your friend in that bathroom by herself because it creates such an anxious awkwardness that you’d rather save yourself the burden than confront the terror directly. You want to ignore it because you hope that ignoring it will make the menacingly confusing emotions disappear. Fortunately this is not the decision I made in the game.
Another way this relationship with your roommate can be established is by checking in on her after she is scolded by her strict mother on the phone. Though her door remains closed and locked, I chose on a second playthrough to knock on her door to check in on May. At first, May fends you off a bit, talking about work and saying everything is okay. But if you persist and eventually relate that you’re also taking a moment of mental sanity away from work, she will join you on your bed for a lengthy chat about some deeply important topics.
Trying to Save a Life
While laying in bed together, you may be as shallow or probing as you’d like towards May, and I got the sense that it was better to keep the conversation going, even if we’d just hit a meaningful juncture, than let it fade away for another time. Keeping her previously bloodied forearms from the first playthrough in my mind, I wanted to give her as much space to talk as possible, even if that came at the expense of work or my own time.
The only thing I don’t like about this game is the achievement system. There are four achievements: missed, survivor, forgive, and hope. Before sounding sanctimonious, I went out of my way to earn 100% of the achievements after my first playthrough. But there is something vaguely pernicious about two of the four achievements ending in May’s suicide. The game never fetishizes the death, nor attempts to glorify and justify it. I just worry that some people might miss the message – so to speak – thinking in terms of achievements rather than the deeper implications that dominate this experience.
You can play this game very selfishly, and there are multiple ways to ignore the “messages” that May “sends,” missing you. You might end up at lunch with a friend or a newly Airdropped blind date. But even knowing the deep topics this game wants to confront beforehand, I was still stunned into silence when reading May’s suicide note for the first time. Losing a friend, someone so meek and kind, who went out of their way that same day to wish you well and remember important personal details like your birthday, is gut wrenching.
Considering Missed Messages is a video game that could be completed in 15 minutes, I now refuse to believe that length has any correlation with the impact that stories can have on how we live our lives. Losing May enabled all sorts of horrible memories to freshly return to my mind. Rather than resenting Missed Messages for the return of those memories, I’m grateful that a game could make me care about a fictional character that I had seen for all of 30 seconds in a way that reminded me of why suicide is so devastating and personal for all who survive – and why the people most dear to us are so important.
Fragile Humanity: How Young People Face Self-Harm
I speak with a lot of young people on a daily basis, and beyond the subject I’m expected to teach them in the classroom, I am ultimately confronted by their utterly fragile humanity. It reminds me of how I struggled as a teenager – how we all struggled – and how many times I came close to some irreversibly dark thoughts. My students have been told stories of physical and verbal abuse, of horrific loss of siblings and parents far before their time, of the ceaseless grind of everyday life that never seems to come to a stop, of loneliness so intense that they cannot sleep, of how their best friend since Kindergarten committed suicide the previous night. And many times these thoughts aren’t expressed – aren’t able to be expressed – in a way that feels safe, leading some of these kids towards thought of suicide and self-harm.
So many times, my students walk in with defeated body posture that gives them away. I always stop what I am doing and ask them what’s wrong. Sometimes they open up to me and I can tell it helps. Sometimes they open up to me and I tell them, “I don’t know if that helped, but I can tell you’re suffering and I want you to know that you’re important.” And sometimes they won’t tell me and I have to do my best to reach out to others around them to help.
My time with Missed Messages wasn’t precisely my experience navigating the mental lives of the young people I try to routinely help, but it feels like something that so easily maps onto their lives. Missed Messages feels like something I could reference to the friends and family of someone who recently attempted to take their own life to help them understand and come to terms with how trapped that person feels. My experience with Missed Messages was a brief but visceral vignette of why it’s so important to check in with people whether you can completely understand what’s wrong or not.
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