For some academics, philosophy and video games are seen as an oxymoron. Philosophy is the discipline that cultivates the noble art of knowing. Video games are often regarded, at best, as a means to waste time and entertain oneself. This article aims to shed some light on this new medium and its possibilities. To achieve this, I will establish a dialogue between What Remains of Edith Finch, a video game released in 2017, and philosopher Martin Heidegger.
What Remains of Edith Finch is a video game that features death as the central axis of its narrative development. In other words, the objective of the video game centres solely on the deaths of its protagonists, presenting an antagonistic perspective compared to most digital recreational proposals. In the first scene, a seven-year-old boy travels to what we later learn is the tomb of his mother, Edith. He holds a journal with his mother’s name in one hand while, in the other, he holds water lilies, flowers associated with purity, spirituality, peace and memory. The child begins inspecting the diary on the first page and discovers messages Edith directed to him regarding the family history. After this image, the player goes back in time and explores the history of the Finch family through a teenage Edith Finch. The young woman expresses her desire to uncover the family memories that her mother, Dawn, had vetoed. After the death of one of Edith’s brothers, Lewis, their mother concealed all family keepsakes. They abandoned their family home and left the past behind. However, silence ends with Dawn’s early death. At just eleven years old, Edith has the key to the family house that her mother gave her before she died. The young woman’s curiosity compels the player to step into the walls of memory. Cobwebs, dusty dishes, and rooms that Dawn sealed after the disappearance of her other son, Milton, remain in the house. The player can only track the rooms of Edith’s ancestors, but the life snapshots presented always depict the last moments before each ancestor’s death, in different circumstances and years. The player cannot take any action other than that which unknowingly precipitates the deaths of each of them. Edith is able to research what happened to her entire family tree. The video game concludes when the player has led Edith’s eleven family members to their deaths.
What Remains of Edith Finch invites the player to dive deeper into Martin Heidegger’s philosophy. On the one hand, the video game proves, as Heidegger proposes, that Dasein is being-in-the-world, an existential entity, that is thrown into the world because it is launched to its potential. Humans are always, and first and foremost, in relation to the world, and this relationship conditions their possibilities. That’s why Heidegger uses the Dasein (being-there) concept; before obtaining awareness, every individual is thrown into the world with the possibilities for their life project already determined. Among the different possibilities, there is a possibility that defaults in all possibilities: death. This, therefore, means to cease being a possibility. Every individual in the Finch family, every Dasein, is thrown into every possible possibility. What remains of Edith Finch shows the player that authentic existence is the one that assumes the idea of death. The video game in no way suppresses the idea of death, but as mentioned above, places it as a central element. This idea is in tune with what Heidegger wrote in Being and Time on the possible being-a-whole of Dasein:
“Something is always still outstanding in Dasein which has not yet become ‘real’ as a potentiality-for-being. A constant unfinished quality thus lies in the essence of the basic constitution of Dasein. This lack of wholeness means that there is still something outstanding in one’s potentially-for-being. However, if Dasein “exists” in such a way that there is absolutely nothing more outstanding for it, it has also already thus become no-longer-being-there. Eliminating what is outstanding in its being is equivalent to annihilating its being. As long as Dasein is as a being, it has never attained its ‘wholeness’. But if it does, this attainment becomes the absolute loss of being-in-the-world. It is then never again to be experienced as a being.” (Heidegger, 2010, pp. 227-228)
In this sense, What Remains of Edith Finch poses a metaphor about the possible being-a-whole of Dasein. From Heidegger’s point of view, Edith’s family members are beings who have achieved the integrity of Dasein. By being dead, they have concluded all the possibilities of their being, and therefore Dasein has become not being anymore. However, the video game allows us to recreate and pose the moment of each Edith family member’s death as an act constituting young Edith’s life project. For Heidegger, Dasein reaches its integrity with death. The video game revolves around how Edith is a passive subject who attends to the remembrance of her family members’ Dasein completeness. At the same time, the player guides each Dasein to their last possibility. In Dasein, there is always something incomplete. For the player, completing the Dasein is completing the video game. For Edith, however, her family members have not completed their Dasein, as she does not know what happened to them. She needs to ensure that her ancestors have reached their final possibility, death. Every time we witness a death, that Dasein reaches its integrity while a kind of closure in its history is created, which seems necessary for Edith. She needs her family members to complete their Dasein, complete their story, so she can sever her family ties as well. Information about her ancestors has always been denied, and her curiosity prevents her from moving forward. When Edith learns how each of her family members died, so does her curiosity about the past. The goal is, then, to close the circle.
On the other hand, the video game demonstrates through all the protagonists that death is non-transferable. Each individual faces his or her own death: “no one can take the other’s dying away from him” (Heidegger, 2010, p. 231). In the video game, each character meets his or her death. Neither the player nor any other character can assume another’s death; it could only be possible, according to Heidegger, to die for, to die instead of another, but this replacement does not take away the other’s death.
“Someone can go ‘to his death for an other’. However, that always means to sacrifice oneself for the other ‘in a definite cause’. Such dying for… can never mean that the other has thus had his death in the least taken away. Every Dasein itself must take dying upon itself in every instance. Insofar as it ‘is’, death is always essentially my own.” (Heidegger, 2010, p. 231)
Thus, the player’s role in What Remains of Edith Finch is to accompany each Dasein in discovering what isolates them, which is non-transferable: their own death. Although Edith, and, consequently, the player, can investigate and relive the deaths of the different characters, it is not a reliving as such. The video game demonstrates this by providing a unique setting for each case, illustrating that death is distinct for every Dasein. Death emerges as a loss, but not for the deceased. Instead, it is a loss felt by those who remain: “we do not experience the dying of others in a genuine sense, we are at best always just ‘near by’” (Heidegger, 2010, p. 230). According to Heidegger’s proposals, neither Edith nor the player truly experience the deaths of the other characters; however, through the mechanics of the video game, we find ourselves caught between “being nearby” and “experiencing”. This creates a stronger emotional response than reading about these events would elicit. What Remains of Edith Finch strives to evoke the feeling of experiencing each character’s death in the player. Each time Edith investigates the passing of an ancestor, the player embodies that character. The player is immersed in a life (one that is not their own) in the most precise sense of the Heideggerian term. When the player begins to act, they are already connected to the world and are a person within their context, which the player cannot influence. Although the player has various options, one stands out in every story for its inevitability: death. It may appear that the player guides the character to death, but if they do not, the game will not progress. The video game seeks to make Edith, and consequently the player, experience the deaths of others, but according to Heidegger, the most Edith can hope for is to attend to the deaths of others.
In short, What Remains of Edith Finch is a video game that materializes, through different characters, scenarios and arguments, the question of being. This question is the question asked by the individual man, the Dasein, and that the video game raises to the player from the beginning. What Remains of Edith Finch stands out as a great tool to reflect on two of the concepts Heidegger poses in Being and Time: the possible being-a-whole of Dasein and the possibility of experiencing the death of others.
References
DALLAS, Ian (2017). What remains of Edith Finch. Video game. Giant Sparrow and Annapurna Interactive.
HEIDEGGER, Martin (2010). Being and Time. State University of New York Press. Translated by Joan Stambaugh.
Recommended citation: ROCA TOMÀS, Gerard. What remains of Edith and Heidegger. Mosaic [online], April 2025, no. 203. ISSN: 1696-3296. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7238/m.n203.2505
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