How Pragmata Made Me Reconcile With The Hardest Part Of Parenting
Overview & Key Takeaways
Pragmata is the latest in the lineage of quintessential "dad games." The everyman protagonist Hugh taking the naive young girl android Diana under his wing follows familiar trappings.
It finds variation within that formula--Hugh and Diana's relationship is fairly sweet from the start rather than slowly warming up, and Hugh's own experiences with adoption inform his sense of responsibility to Diana. But the tropes are well-worn regardless.
What struck me most in this telling, though, was how Pragmata explores the notion of growing up and how experiences can shape a person.
Pragmata is the latest in the lineage of quintessential "dad games." The everyman protagonist Hugh taking the naive young girl android Diana under his wing follows familiar trappings.
It finds variation within that formula--Hugh and Diana's relationship is fairly sweet from the start rather than slowly warming up, and Hugh's own experiences with adoption inform his sense of responsibility to Diana. But the tropes are well-worn regardless.
What struck me most in this telling, though, was how Pragmata explores the notion of growing up and how experiences can shape a person.
Spoilers follow.
When you meet Diana she refers to herself as a Pragmata, as much a title as it is a technology. An early data log describes a Pragmata as an "high-functioning autonomous prosthetic body," but at the time it's unclear what implications this carries. Is she the host for another mind? Being a prosthesis would certainly seem to imply that she is an assistive tool meant to substitute for something else.
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Pragmata Video Review
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As you continue through the game you discover that Diana is not the only Pragmata present in the Cradle when you meet Eight. Eight is very similar to Diana but different in key ways. Her hair is shorter, she's more adept at using the tech in the base--she first attracts your attention by appearing as a holographic cat--and most importantly, she's slightly older. Diana was a prototype Pragmata, built to approximate a 6-year-old, whereas Eight was the new-and-improved version built to approximate an 8-year-old.
The Cradle and all of its medical research are the brainchild of the unseen Dr. Higgins, who has a personal stake in all this. His own real-life daughter, Daisy, is on Earth, stricken with an incurable disease. He went to the moon in part because he felt his best and perhaps only chance to save his daughter was to run medical experiments on digital duplicates of his daughter--the Pragmata--using lunafilament inside the patient's body. Diana and Eight are both essentially android clones of Daisy, approximating different points in her life at 6 and 8 years old. But significantly, this plan is scandalous. Other researchers on the base are uncomfortable with an AI built to represent a real human being, while others remind them that the ban on such human imitation is only in effect on Earth. Hence Higgins sequestering himself on the moon.
Dr. Higgins was brilliant but singularly obsessed with saving his daughter, to the point that he abandons her on Earth. Diana was a first draft, probably created when Higgins' daughter was actually six years old, but his medical experiments hit a roadblock with her. Diana was built with the ability to expunge degraded lunafilament, also known as "dead filament," but that made her problematic for testing since a human body--Daisy's body--can't do that. So Higgins put her into storage and ultimately discarded her for the new model, Eight.
Research with Eight was more promising, and Higgins was on the verge of a breakthrough when his company jumped the gun and attempted actual human testing on one of the few humans on Earth who had the rare condition he was trying to resolve--his own daughter. The treatment didn't work, and his daughter died. Higgins was wracked with grief, and dying himself due to his own exposure to dead filament. After he died, Eight took control of the Cradle's automated systems and started formulating plans to export the dead filament to Earth in a fit of pique. She had known Higgins when he was blinded with anger, and so she became a reflection of him. After piecing together his memories, she concluded that he would have wanted Earth to see the horror of the degraded "dead filament" for themselves.
This philosophical split is at the heart of Pragmata's climax. Diana and Eight both knew Dr. Higgins at different points in his life--Diana when he was full of optimism and hope, and Eight when he had turned cynical, cold, and bitter. Neither of them is a complete picture of Dr. Higgins, but those impressions shaped both of the girls in different ways.
This split comes to a head near the very end, when Hugh and Diana are approaching Eight for a final confrontation. Diana starts to doubt herself and asks, bluntly: What if Eight is right? What if this is what Dr. Higgins really would have wanted? What does that mean for her now-recovered memories of the doctor who was decent and kind?
Pragmata
At this point, Hugh could have moralized or given a fatherly speech, but instead, he does what more parents should do in this situation. He asks Diana: what do you think? After a moment of reflection, Diana concludes that this isn't what Higgins would have wanted. They need to stop Eight for the sake of Earth, of course, but also for the sake of Higgins' legacy. He doesn't deserve to be remembered for how he felt at his lowest point.
Underlying all this is the age difference. Though it's only two years, the split represents a real change that happens as children grow up and start to get hardened by the world around them. Diana, the younger, is bright and optimistic, while Eight is more guarded and cynical. That makes the conversation with Hugh at the end that much more poignant. Rather than giving her pat aphorisms, Hugh invites Diana to really think through how she wants to engage with the world. At that moment, she makes an active choice to believe in the Dr. Higgins that she knew. That moment is Diana crossing from childlike naivety to understanding the darkness in the world and deciding how to live within it.
As a parent, and especially one with children near Diana's age, it was impossible not to feel a layer of unexpected resonance to this. It's hard watching your children grow up. It's difficult to see their optimism and joy give way to realism. It's natural to want them to hold onto that childlike innocence for as long as they can. And maybe all that you can do, as they reach the threshold of maturity, is hope that you've taught them how to be in the world, with all of its pain and darkness and evil, and choose to believe in the best in people.
