dreamworlds

Yesterday I tossed up a quick post on the fading of what I feel was a surreal, dreamlike quality that earlier Grand Theft Auto games benefited from. Since then, I’ve been thinking about the difference between those game worlds I can enjoy and admire and those that really get inside me, and while I’m not sure I can clearly articulate what the difference is, it definitely has something to do with a kind of structural fuzziness, a kind of dream logic, a permeable barrier between the game world and that part of my mind that feeds on myths and magic. 

It doesn’t really matter if the genre is fantasy or science fiction or “male crime world.” I see this in my relationships to film and television, too. I admire many aspects of Game of Thrones, but with its focus on complex political schemes, it doesn’t get inside my soul in the way that John Boorman's Excalibur does, with its unexplained lady of the lake, its unseen dragon, its surreal grail quest. In the same way, I’m less of a Star Trek person than a Star Wars person, and I’m not even so much a Star Wars person as someone who appreciates what the series approaches in that one scene in The Empire Strikes Back where Luke goes into the cave and faces a spectre of Vader, a spectre of himself. I’m also someone who thinks that, in films like Heat and Miami Vice, Michael Mann shoots cities so beautifully and sets scenes to such transcendent music that the people and places take on an aura of the sublime that’s just not present in the average, grounded crime film. 

But I think one of the greatest potentials of video games is their ability to let us explore worlds that nourish our own subconscious, and to inhabit the mythical hero’s journey. Not all games should do this, and this isn’t an evaluative distinction. We need different kinds of stories and different kinds of game worlds. Dragon Age is fantasy in the vein of Game of Thrones–the sort that’s concerned with a rich sense of history and politics, where anything truly inexplicable would undermine rather than contribute to the world, and so you find lore entries explaining just about everything. It’s all been very carefully thought out, very carefully planned. You can almost feel the rigidity of the design documents. And I admire it a great deal. But lately, what I’m craving more is a sense of real wonder, a sense that things can and do happen that can’t be explained. That feeling you get when you happen upon a rock concert in a fantasy world.

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(from Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery)

The Zelda game Link’s Awakening is one of my favorite video game dream worlds, both because it is home to a hero’s quest, that ultimate story of the subconscious, of self-discovery and self-actualization, and because it seems to not only be a dream of Link’s, but a dream of Nintendo itself, with all its strange, surreal references to Mario and Kirby and, heck, the mayor from the SNES version of SimCity. 

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But we need games to foster a sense of wonder about the world we actually live in, too. This year gave us the third act of Kentucky Route Zero, a game that I think is actually, in part, about giving a real sense of life and wonder back to video games. It takes place in a beautiful and broken country that is recognizably the real America, a place of crushing capitalism where corporations profit as people drown in debt:

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…and at the same time, is a dream of America, a place where magical, inexplicable things happen…

…a place where Conway’s quest to deliver his last piece of furniture can take on mythic significance and suggest something about how, in modern America, we’re all a little lost, we’re all looking for something.

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