I can't think straight enough to say anything about the world right now so I'll talk about video games.
Video games have always fascinated me, like from a distance because when I was growing up we could never afford a recent console (don't worry I'm not going to use gaming to demonstrate closed access to leisure-as-commodity, though obviously that's a thing). When I was a kid we picked up a decrepit sega system from the late eighties at a garage sale and that was me for the summer, addled by an increasingly violent world (post 9/11) and the then inarticulable suspicion that I was a raging homo. It was the system that had in-built game Alex The Kid, which anyone familiar with the console and that particular era of gaming will tell you brings back fond memories; which in reality is a retroactive sugaring of what were probably reasonably dissociative childhoods with high instances of trauma (lol).
But whatever the reasons people throw themselves into games, and at whatever age, I find myself immersing in Legend of Zelda; Breath of the Wild like I haven't since I was a kid, whether on our ancient sega system or on a neighbour's or cousin's more up-to-date unit. This probably has something to do with the fact that we are in lockdown yet again, a combination of excess time on my hands coupled with the lure of escapism against a backdrop of societal collapse (which of course is the founding gesture of this blog). There's no way of knowing if I would be as readily embracing this Zelda game without a pandemic, without a lockdown. But that remains beside the point, the point being I am so enamoured of this game that spending time with it, pouring over it's narrative devices, it's eerie and desolately beautiful landscapes, meandering between it's loftier quests in details so infinitesimal you'd swear they sprouted from their own immaterial ecologies; the point is, this game has the sublime feeling of bonafide literature, the transcendent aura of high fantasy which works as both political and spiritual allegory, and then goes further than metaphor in being a numinous property all it's own.
Literally another world.
Again, my haphazard experience with games means my opinion falls short of what I imagine is the male-ish purview of more 'committed' gamers. That said, my respect and druggish thirst for pop artefacts won't let me ignore gaming. I mean, it's a billion dollar industry and still only of marginal interest to cultural studies. I feel like the internet happened, so arbitrary demarcations of high and low culture are exactly that; arbitrary. So why the nearly total lack of critical attention to gaming?
I used to have this absent notion of video games as indoctrinating media that was persuading a generation in it's youth to think and feel reality in certain ways. Of course mass media does this to a certain extent anyway, or attempts to; but for some reason I had this bias around video games, that they were particularly insidious examples of 'immersive propaganda'. Nowadays the fractal deluge of information is so great that I wouldn't deign to pretend to know from where and in what ways I'm being manipulated into this or that mindframe. And I wouldn't peg video games with being particularly responsible for this state of affairs.
If anything, perhaps the haphazard accessibility of gaming offers alternatives to mainstream narrative-building in as much as it's audience is less managed, and in that respect retains radical potential where cinema and television (and even News) reside in agendas of mass-produced homogeneity.
A scarier (expansive?) thought; I pertain to criticality but in all seriousness, what does that even mean? Where did my register of alleged criticality come from? How do I know that criticality itself, as a mediating looking relation, isn't another methodology of mediated knowledge-formation; of designer world-building?
Ironically this ability games have to world-build easier than any other medium is the source of both my suspicion and adoration of gaming, perhaps because the worlds of games are 'given', disguising their biases more easily than in the mediums of cinema and literature. Or so you'd think.
Could this possibly be because we are more familiar with the diagetic methods of cinema and conventional text, as opposed to being a textual feature of gaming itself?
One of the reasons I think I love Breath of the Wild so much is because it's so gorgeously rendered, the world so layered, and yet the questing of it's protagonist is so gently imbued with what feels like organic exploratory relations that you're barely aware of the story moving around you as you follow your own whims; basically picking a point and heading out with the faith that eventually everything will tie together. What makes Breath of the Wild so special is that a lot of breathing space is allowed between player autonomy and story; and I do mean a lot. At times the map seems so vast that it's like throwing yourself into a high-resolution void. Am I meant to be here? Should I double back and find some path, some recognisable gaming feature; a side-quest, a boss level. That sort of thing.
While these features exist in Breath of the Wild they are few and far between, and also end up feeling secondary to the pleasures of wandering.
It bears similarities to another recent release, Death Stranding.
For starters, both games are set in a dying world, or worlds that have seen a cataclysm and are subsequently inhabited by survivors. In both games players learn the history of each world's fall, and it's with this knowledge that you 'wander', always with the sense of being in a fallow aftermath. The painterly construction of both games is in this respect Gothic with a capital G, as much as the genre of gothic storytelling spends time flashing back to tragic histories juxtaposing memory with a present laid waste (Wuthering Heights, Frankenstein etc).
The most striking similarity here is that Death Stranding and Breath of the Wild, while bearing elements of gothic storytelling, offset an ambience of gothic despair/desolation with the possibility of reconstruction. In Death Stranding you are literally rebuilding America which has been laid waste by a legion of science-magic demons, connecting fortress cities by putting an old communications system back online. This is done by physically visiting regional sites and re-activating the network terminus by terminus. Between sites you wander, which comprises the majority of game-play.
To any die-hard gamer reared on violent button-mashers such as Doom or even God Of War, this might seem boring. To anyone not habituated to the tropes of gaming this might seem esoteric, considering the shoot-em-up formula dystopian science fiction normally hews to (in film and television anyway).
And to the discerning aesthete, this gorgeously experimental and oddly high-profile provocation is the gaming equivalent of an Andrew Tarkovsky film. I'm not even kidding.
Breath of the Wild also opens on a broken world, ravaged a century ago by a demonic entity named Ganon. And just as in Death Stranding you're tasked with visiting and bringing back online a grid of ancient technological sites, shrines and towers which belonged to the kingdom of Hyrule before it was destroyed. And between these sites which are numerous you wander, traversing vast swathes of empty lands that are riddled with interactive flora and fauna. And just as in Death Stranding, for huge stretches of the game you are entirely alone.
Though both games have other characters for the most part the biggest character is the land itself. After a while, and without the didactic trappings of games in which story oversees a players every action, gameplay becomes meditative. The minutest fluctuation in weather, a change of the wind or bolt of lightning or fresh veil of rain all becomes a phrase of the game itself, standing in for story in when moves towards narrative coherence are absent.
This has been a dormant possibility of gaming ever since 'open-world' became technically possible with last decade's rash of consoles, from the PS3 to the XBOX ONE. Nintendo missed out on a console with open-world capability so they're reasonably new to the party, but whatever the reason for the wait it was well worth it because in my opinion Breath of the Wild takes the existing formula, more conventionally explored in games like Dark Souls and Batman's Arkham Trilogy, and elevates it.
What comes through more strongly in Breath of the Wild than Death Stranding is a romantic loneliness, a sensibility of sweeping-spiritual environmentalism harking to colonial conceptions of the commons, of the wilds as mirrors of the human psyche. On top of this we have two worlds whose destructions were brought about by industrialising gone awry; in Death Stranding a subtle weapon which rent the seam between the worlds of living and dead, and in Breath of the Wild a kingdom whose guardian-machines were hacked and turned against them. Both doomsday scenarios were ushered in by measures of war, and both can only be remedied by rehabilitative wandering from post to post, a gradual rebuilding on an intimate scale as opposed to the oppressively totalising metrics of Defense.
When 'open world' first started being thrown around to describe this new type of game I thought it sounded like a gimmick. But now I think it's nothing short of a new art form, a medium which 'game' falls short of describing in all it's possibility. If a book or film or television show makes allusions to vastness, it is gaming now which can actually approximate it. I think we've only just scratched the surface of what profound implications these open-world statements are making.
Anyway, I've gone full rabbit-hole with Breath of the Wild. Wading through a mythical place where new life pushes through the rubble of ancient ruin kind of makes me want to lay waste to this world rather than endure the long, slow, agonisingly drawn out demise. Is that the appeal of utopian/dystopian fiction? I would call my relationship with Breath of the Wild escapism is I wasn't having such an intensely emotional reaction to it.
Maybe I need to up the ante on my cardio game.
