I've been sitting with Justin Davidson's review of Innocence at the Met this week. Kaija Saariaho's final opera before her death in 2023 takes a school shooting and renders it in gorgeous orchestral detail—elaborate staging, a superb cast, an intermissionless two-hour sweep through grief and aftermath. Davidson describes wanting to run from the theater. Not because it failed. Because it succeeded, and that success felt unbearable.
His discomfort centers on what he calls "the aestheticization of pain." Opera has been doing this for 400 years—taking the worst things humans do to each other and setting them to music that audiences line up to experience. So has cinema. So has literature. The question Innocence raises is whether there are categories of violence so raw, so ongoing, that no aesthetic frame can hold them without becoming complicit in their spectacle.
I keep returning to games here, and not for the obvious reasons. There have been various attempts over the years to render the unthinkable in game form, although it's been more of a contemporary concern over the last 15 years for the young medium. The attempts range from placing you as the character enacting violence, watching horror unfold on other characters, or narrating a difficult subject. But in most cases, games still borrows its emotional grammar from film. The gun fires. The body falls. The weight is decorative.
Davidson's review made me wonder if games will be able to carry the gravity of something as present and as difficult to comprehend as a school shooting. Aside from the care required to tell that story well, there's the additional burden that games shouldn't wander into those spaces, because the agency opens players up to something too intimate or too raw. Or flatly, that games just shouldn't be because they are "fun." So we usually end up with games that use fantastic environments as shorthand or fantastical environments, without even attempting to convey a difficult fiction.
Even so, perhaps there are simply places that no medium should go. In spite of the opera's precision and performance, Davidson simply can't wrap his head around the idea that a song does such a tragedy justice:
We turn to opera so we can mainline someone’s inner life with a drip of narcotic music, regardless of whether the character is a death-row inmate, an 18th-century nun, or the king of Sweden. In this case, though, I can’t accept the urge to decorate the mass slaughter of children with a flourish of beguiling sounds. Certain truths should not be delivered in song.
I leave the door open for games, if only because we should be comfortable with abandoning "fun" to tackle things that are true and painful in this world. Not because they simply need to check the box of tackling sensitive subjects, but perhaps they could offer something other mediums cannot.
We're not there yet. The writing isn't there. The framing isn't there. But the form is. And what strikes me about Davidson's review is that his objection to Innocence isn't really about opera at all—it's about the limits of any medium that asks you to sit still and watch. Games don't ask you to sit still. The question is whether we'll ever build something worthy of that difference.
