A New ‘Sad Dad’ Game Fails to Make Its Ancestors Proud
Pragmata features a grizzled soldier and a robot child but doesn’t have the emotional bond of The Last of Us or The Walking Dead.
The “sad dad” game has a long history.
The genre was rooted in games like
Ico, a 2001 adventure in which a boy helps a young girl escape from a dangerous castle. It found its maturity a decade later in the surrogate father-daughter relationship between Lee and Clementine in
The Walking Dead. It soon reached a zenith in games like
BioShock Infinite,
The Last of Us and the rebooted
God of War, all of which feature father figures shepherding vulnerable young charges.
These action heroes weren’t the nameless and voiceless soldiers of the Doom era, nor the unaging Peter Pan types of Nintendo franchises like Zelda and Super Mario Bros. Video games had grown up, it seemed, and their heroes were growing as well (as were the mostly male creative directors coming up with these narratives). It was time to shed the crusty, hardened exterior of the video game character — though not the violence — and find a bit of softness and dramatic tension thanks to having a child to serve and protect.
But playing the newly released Pragmata, which takes place in the wreckage of a futuristic moon colony, many years into this parent-child phenomenon, feels a little uncanny.
Pragmata doesn’t recognize how the genre has shifted, how
Death Stranding and
its sequel continue to tinker with the idea of what fatherhood looks like in an uncertain future. Instead it rests all of its dramatic weight on the original “sad dad” formula, on the simplistic and base assumptions of what adding a child does to a story, unable to deliver a narrative as interesting or nuanced as even the worst of its inspirations.
It is a gimmick to add a layer of complexity to an otherwise generic and dull shooter, where enemies wait around to be shot or hacked, and where you must constantly search the ground to replenish your meager ammo supply.
In Pragmata, a corporation has discovered a way to use the moon’s resources to 3-D print whatever it wants: skyscrapers, cars, trees, the video game standbys of guns and robots. This technology is also used to construct Diana, a robot child with the memories and mental development of a 6-year-old girl. Diana soon teams up with Hugh, a security officer sent from Earth to investigate what went wrong. She rescues him after his team is wiped out by the colony’s murderous robots.
Diana is a curious creature. Her cherubic features and cascading blond locks present her more as a life-size doll than as an A.I. pretending to be human. She bounds around, manically grinning, reacting to everything with awe and fascination. She is girlhood epitomized and turned up to 11.
Her frantic energy contrasts with the human stack of bricks that is Hugh. After expressing a loose approximation of despair upon losing his crew and closest friends, Hugh more or less stops emoting. An opaque mask covers his face. His fancy spacesuit zips all the way up.
Here’s where Pragmata employs the dramatic tools of the genre at their basest and most blunt. Hugh is a grizzled soldier type. We learn very little about him, save for vague allusions about loving travel and adventure (watch out, ladies!). We never learn if he wants a family, or if he ever had one. All we get is a little blond child and the assumption that he will drop everything to protect her.
The narrative never rises above this reductive calculation. It pales in comparison to The Last of Us, with its story of a man overcoming the trauma of one lost child with another, ignoring the world in the process. Next to The Walking Dead, whose main character is forced to handle the responsibilities of fatherhood while learning how to survive the zombie apocalypse, Pragmata feels rote and inconsequential.
It does little more than drop this child onto Hugh’s lap (or rather, the convenient footholds on the back of his spacesuit) and expect a narrative about reluctant fatherhood to unfold. What emerges instead is an awkward and inhuman story in which a grown man adopts a robot child — a bizarre relationship at best and a questionable one at worst.
Diana, however, is not really sufficiently formed as a character to justify the darker readings. She is a nonentity, exhibiting agency only insofar as it helps Hugh’s mission of getting off the moon. She is a fawning playmate who hangs off his every grunt and far-fetched bedtime story.
Mechanically, she is even less distinct. In other “sad dad” games, the child is often scripted to navigate the world semi-independently. In Ico, if you don’t hold down a button to grasp your companion’s hand, she’ll eventually break free and wander off. In both BioShock Infinite and God of War, your young ally might refuse requests. Not so in Pragmata. Diana is, in every way that matters, an extension of Hugh. Pressing the left trigger on the controller will aim Hugh’s gun just as it will prompt Diana to open up her hacking grid. Who does what in the chaos of battle is similarly indistinguishable.
With vanishingly rare exceptions, Diana never leaves Hugh’s back, to the extent that they joke about how she doesn’t walk on her own. Her weight never seems to affect Hugh, who can leap and dash around. The only indication he has a child on board is a cloud of yellow hair floating just over his right shoulder.
Pragmata invites natural comparisons to
“M3gan,” a camp horror film about a robot doll child who starts murdering the neighbors. The doll is developed to provide companionship for a lonely young girl, but she becomes overprotective, her base programming creating an instinct closer to something animalistic and maternally protective.
Every detail about Diana — her frantic blue eyes, the rictus of her grin — seems to set up Pragmata’s story for a similar subversion. But where “M3gan” seeks to undermine its aesthetic, showing us how intelligence and self-awareness inevitably produce agency, Pragmata falls into the sexist and patriarchal assumption that women and children are objects, ready to serve, as long as you love and look out for them.
The player is expected to find something magical in this cute little robot child. But I look at her porcelain cheeks, the elongated lashes on her rolling eyes that blink realistically, and find nothing. Diana and Pragmata are both utterly devoid of life.
