Why Game? 1 - TextFiles.com

possible suicides. Pressing Start would allow you
to look at many uncompleted “standard” suicide
types, but most of the suicides would appear to
be scratched off and would require you to spend
your suicide points to see what they are. For
example: jumping off of a skyscraper would be
shown, but taking the toaster into the bathtub
would be hidden until you either unlocked it or
came up with it on your own.
Accumulating suicide points is an important
part of the game, as these could be used to see
which suicides you haven’t attempted yet, un-
lock new areas of the city where your Salaryman
can find brand new ways to end his life, or buy
new clothes that allow you to customize your
Salaryman’s look. After all, you gotta end it all
in style!
The goal of each individual day would be
to maximize your suicide points by doing the
most outrageous suicides. Take the knife from
the kitchen table and carry it all the way to the
top of the tallest building in the city, then fling
your Salaryman off the building and press the
“use” button on the way down to have him stab
himself in mid-air and perform a suicide combo,
resulting in an intense replay and a wealth of
points. Try doing the same, but landing in the
path of a moving car for more points; a moving
train for mega points.
Start up the car inside of the garage and
just sit there to die from carbon monoxide poi-
soning. Take some raw meat from the refrigera-
tor and jump into the shark tank at the zoo to
get mauled to death. Pick up some cigarettes at
a gas station then go out, pump some gas, and
strike up a match to cause an explosion that
sends you straight to purgatory. The possibilities
are endless.
After completing a certain number of objec-
tives with the Salary Man, you would then have
the option of beginning the game as a working-
class woman who begins her day in a different
part of town. After accomplishing her objectives,
you could play the game as an older woman who
wakes up next to a sleeping man in yet-another
part of town, and subsequently a teenage boy in
an orphanage. Starting in different parts of the
city would give access to new, more interesting
areas to die, and make it easier to access some
of the more accident-prone areas.
Of course, there’s a certain amount of
irresponsibility in asking for gamers to con-
template different ways to kill themselves. To
counterbalance this, there would be a thematic
link between the Salary Man and the rest of the
characters that slowly builds up over time. The
game wouldn’t overtly tell you, but little clues
could be found throughout the city, hinting that
all of the characters are linked together in some
way. When the game has been completed, and
the primary goals have been met with each of
the characters, the credits would roll. When
the final name scrolls off of the screen, a fam-
ily photograph would be fade into the screen
showing the Salaryman, the woman who woke
up next to the strange man, their working-class
daughter, and their orphaned teenage boy. The
theme of the game would then be brought to
the forefront; with the player realizing that sui-
cide affects not only the life of the person killing
themself, but also those of everyone surround-
ing the victim. The player has been killing off
each of these characters because it’s what the
game told him to do, but in the end he or she
would be forced to realize that he has just killed
off an entire family.
Before you start looking up phone numbers
of places where I can get counseling, let me
reassure you that I’m perfectly happy with how
life is going. I’m just not convinced that the con-
cept of dying in a video game has been explored
thoroughly enough in current games. Most of us
play games to let us explore new places. Why
not a game that explores the depths of depres-
sion?
Salaryman Suicide 55