Bloodborne and the price of wanting to know too much

Bloodborne (FromSoftware, 2015) had an idea no other game from the studio pushed this far: turning knowledge into a stat. It is called Insight. The more Insight you accumulate, the more you see. Bells that were not there. Invisible creatures clinging to walls. Babies crying in an empty sky. And the more you see, the more fragile you become. The game charges you for knowing.

A stat that makes your life worse

Consider the scale of the inversion. In practically every RPG, a stat is a gain: it goes up and you improve. In Bloodborne, Insight goes up and the world gets worse. It raises certain enemies' resistances, lowers your defence against frenzy and, above all, reveals what had been there all along without your seeing it. Yharnam does not change. You start seeing Yharnam. That is the most economical definition of an unbearable truth: it does not arrive from outside, it was already there, waiting for you to have eyes.

The drive for knowledge has a less noble origin than it seems

We tend to treat curiosity as a clean virtue, the engine of knowledge, the most civilised thing there is. Freud did not find it so clean. In a 1915 addendum to the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality of 1905, he describes the instinct for knowledge, Wisstrieb, and takes care to say that it cannot be counted among the elementary instinctual components, nor classed as belonging exclusively to sexuality. It functions as a sublimated way of obtaining mastery and draws on the energy of scopophilia, Schaulust. In plain terms: wanting to know is a close relative of wanting to look and wanting to dominate.

Klein: wanting to know is wanting to get inside

Melanie Klein went further. In her 1928 paper Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict, she states that the early connection between the epistemophilic impulse and sadism is very important for the whole of mental development, and that this impulse, roused by Oedipal tendencies, at first concerns itself mainly with the mother's womb, assumed to be the scene of all processes. The infantile wish to know, on her reading, is the wish to get in, to find out and to take possession of what lies inside the mother's body. Knowing, at its origin, is an invasion.

Hold that image and look at Bloodborne again. The Healing Church is an institution that pursues knowledge by invading bodies. Blood is simultaneously the medium of research and the medium of contagion. The scholars of Mensis pulled a Great One into the world and had their minds ruined. The whole game is an allegory of research that does not respect the limits of its own object.

The maternal everywhere

It is no accident that what Yharnam produces most abundantly is deformed motherhood. The nightmares are populated by crying babies nobody can find. There is the Umbilical Cord as the item of highest progression. There are the Queens, the Vicar, the nurse guarding a crib, and there is Kos, the deity found dead on a shore with a child in her womb, whose desecration by researchers generates the central curse of the game. The Kleinian synthesis is all there: knowledge goes after the interior of the maternal body, and what it finds is the ruin it caused itself.

The hunt as a defence

It is worth noticing what the city offers as an alternative to knowing, which is the hunt. Killing beasts is a simple, motor activity with a clear target and no ambiguity. It is also a very efficient way of not thinking. While hunting, nobody asks where the beasts come from, who made them, or what the Church knew. Violence there works as a defence against knowledge, and the night repeats precisely so that nobody has to reach a conclusion. This is more familiar than we would like: keeping busy tends to be the best way of not knowing.

Knowing without being destroyed

If the game stopped there it would be elegant nihilism and nothing more. But the highest ending asks for the opposite of what one expects. To become a Great One you must have consumed three Umbilical Cords, which is to say you must have searched, gathered and crossed through. The game rewards neither ignorance nor impulsive curiosity. It rewards whoever went all the way deliberately, paying the price in small instalments along the road.

It is a reasonable thesis, including outside Yharnam. There is protective ignorance, which works until it stops working. There is knowledge swallowed all at once, which breaks you. And there is the third path, slower and far less glamorous, in which things are discovered gradually, with some company, bearing to see a little more each time without having to switch the light off again. Bloodborne charges dearly for Insight because knowledge really does cost. The question is not whether you want to know, it is at what pace you can manage it.