It’s 2020. COVID-19, lurching authoritarianism, mass atrocities. Chances are the political and human rights conditions of your country – or the one you are stuck in, like England – have become so farcically obscene that you are challenged to hold together the sanity, let alone the words, to coherently critique it.
For the majority of reasonable people, the recent years have been anywhere between troubling and downright wretched. What we are experiencing is no less than the breakdown of the promise, indeed the premise, of modernity: of a world where tomorrow is supposed to be better than yesterday. Instead we have let yesterday's darkest horrors return and put our tomorrow at their mercy.
We each do what we must to survive and make meaning in this nightmare. For me it has meant looking once more to video games, which are full of such meaning and have helped me so much to navigate the madness of humankind before. Here I would like to pay respects to five of my recent discoveries, and explore some of the power they offer to struggle on through an impossible world.
There may be mild spoilers in this article for each of these games.
1) The Power of Freedom: The Legend of Zelda – Breath of the Wild
2) The Power of Perspective: Fire Emblem – Three Houses
3) The Power of Distance: Animal Crossing – New Horizons
4) The Power of Presence: Assassin’s Creed – Odyssey
5) The Power of Will: Xenoblade Chronicles
1) The Power of Freedom: The Legend of Zelda – Breath of the Wild (Nintendo, 2017)
You can go anywhere. That is the basic principle of the latest in Nintendo’s venerable Legend of Zeldaseries, which drops you in a vast and stunning post-apocalyptic wilderness then more or less leaves you to it.
The Zelda games have done me considerable service over the years. Their recurring journeys to confront authoritarians contrast so starkly with the exasperating tendencies of populations in this world to prostrate themselves before the abusers of power while blaming their victims for their own suffering. But Breath of the Wild takes this psychological liberation to a whole new level. Its title, which it never explains, captures it best: it provides a world in which to breathe. And what a world.
| Everything you can see here, that is to say, absolutely everything, can be reached and explored. |
| In every environment there are views to take in, plants and materials to forage, deep geological histories to ponder, and secrets to unearth – humorous secrets, chilling secrets, profound secrets, and secrets that will stay with you long after. Also there are wild bears. |
This wilderness was Zelda’s Hyrule as you had never seen it: a full-resolution massiveness of fields, forests, mountains, lakes, rivers, ridges and deserts more akin to the random enormity of the wild places of Earth than the attractive but typically more abstracted subzones of the Zelda tradition. And where its earlier games tended to nudge you along a fairly linear plot and character growth trajectory, Breath of the Wild dispenses with those altogether. If you can see it, you can reach and explore every corner of it in any order you please – so long, that is, as you can shows the strength, ingenuity and equipment to survive a world whose tough rocks and sharp teeth better bring to mind Alaska than the Hyrule that returning Zelda players thought they knew.
They would typically learn this the hard way early on at the hands not of fearsome monsters but of physics itself, which, so suppressed for the convenience of players for more than thirty years, finally exacted its long-pent-up revenge. Where people unbothered to climb down a tower might have simply leapt off, expecting a deft forward roll and mere one or two hearts’ worth of damage like in the old games, they instead got a crunch and a Game Over screen. Those who got over the shock of that could look forward to hours of blowing themselves up with their own bombs, getting one-shot by lasers after accidentally waking up ancient death-machines, or rolling ignominiously down hillsides when shoved by even minor monsters if they weren’t paying attention to positioning. This was freedom like you had never known, but with it came beautiful responsibility. Just as the old restrictions had gone, so too had the ability to take your survival for granted and you now had to sneak, scavenge, forage, cook and calculate your every step of the way up the hero’s path.
| Abstract hearts no longer drop from monsters or grass to replenish your health. Freedom means actually learning to prepare food now. You can cook any of dozens of mushrooms, meats, fish, fruits, condiments and monster parts you obtain out in the world, and some combinations bestow bonuses like extra endurance or temperature resistances that help explore more challenging environments. |
| A later update added the ability to track your movements on the world map. This was mine after about a year. |
And yet, this was still The Legend of Zelda. It had enough familiar elements to root you in the classic Zeldaexperience: the diverse characters and cultures (many likewise explored in finer resolution than before, from Zora inter-generational caste politics to the Gerudo desert economy); the aesthetics, motifs and symbols; the explicit narrative connections with the preceding games; and of course, the overarching framework of a heroic struggle to overthrow a world-ruining dictator. Most of all, the gameplay held tight to the same sense of underlying fairness in spite of its hurling open to the bruising wilds, making the effect refreshing, indeed breathtaking, rather than cruel.
It’s possible this game saved my life. After a full-scale mental demolition in Japan, it was to this demolished Hyrule that I managed a retreat to piece the shattered fragments of my psyche back together. I recall reading in the same period of many other traumatised people finding relief and healing in Breath of the Wild’s wild wild winds of freedom: a case, yet again, of video games making up for the mental health failings of governments and societies.
Three years later, that title – Breath– acquires yet another layer of meaning in the mounting reckoning for our racist world. It hardly seems coincidence that the phrase I can’t breathe, with its origins in white police officers literally choking people to death for being black, has become such a resonant expression against both structural racism and the broader atmosphere of oppression in our time. We have created a world which suffocates people – so honour and respect to anyone who creates air-pockets like Breath of the Wild for them to come up to breathe.
2) The Power of Perspective: Fire Emblem – Three Houses (Intelligent Systems, 2019)
‘Both arguments are acceptable’, said the ancient Chinese lawyer and philosopher Deng Xi, who represented both sides in legal cases and, it is said, upset those who believed in fixed standards of right and wrong by demonstrating that through skilled manipulation of words and definitions all sides of an argument were defensible.
Such relativity is not comforting in a world where, to take just one example, many seem convinced that COVID-19 is some imagined conspiracy spread using 5G phone masts and possibly orchestrated by George Soros. Yet there is always, even here, another side of the story. Though there may be one common reality, people experience it differently, and from these divergent paths grow different narratives and different frames of reference. The conspiracy theorists might be blatant in their errors, but their beliefs make sense to them as framed within the rules through which they have learnt to interpret the world.
A failure to grasp this, a preference instead to insist to the point of violence that one’s own story alone is correct, is found behind every conflict in human history. Who has ever gone off to fight while believing themselves to be the villains?
To bridge these differences requires empathy, a resource in which our societies find themselves impoverished (never minding how they enjoy to boast in the faces of autistic people about its imagined plenty). Even with the best of intentions all round it is not easy to reconcile the stories which grow from people’s contradictory experiences. This is demonstrated, spectacularly, in Fire Emblem: Three Houses when its world collapses into total war.
Three Houses is a turn-based role-playing strategy game in the Japanese Fire Emblem series, known for taking the player on an epic journey through the hopes and tragedies of a world at war alongside a growing roster of characters, exploring along the way their relationships and personal journeys amidst great political and military upheaval. It has been suggested that Three Houses is three games in one, but perhaps it is more accurate to call it one game from three perspectives, because what it shows is precisely the power thereof: how even a slight shift in viewpoint can invest you in completely different attitudes to the same story, leading to radically different choices on your part and outcomes for the world.
In this game you are a mercenary who gets a professorship at the Officers’ Academy of the Garreg Mach Monastery, a place in the long tradition of artistic treatments of English public schools. Your role is to instil the military and magical arts into the aristocratic children – along with a few token commoners – of the three great powers that dominate the game’s continent of Fódlan. These begin at relative peace, and you and the students build rapport and fight alongside one another over a year of instruction. But Garreg Mach is a privileged bubble, not necessarily reflecting the poverty and injustice of the world on whose highest peaks it is perched. Dark clouds gather, and events transpire; eventually all hell breaks loose. After a five-year timeskip you are brought back to find the circumstances have changed classroom buddies into bitter enemies, crushed youthful dreams into grim determinations, and derailed gallant scions into unhinged maniacs. Your position in this conflict, and its outcome, are determined by the choices you have made but there is no holding back the broader chaos of war. Inevitably, you must soon cross swords with former students and colleagues attempting to kill you by means of the very skills you taught them.
| Garreg Mach monastery, where you spend time in each chapter to develop relationships with staff and students and make decisions that affect their performance on the battlefield. |
| Battles take place via the latest version of the Fire Emblem series’s turn-based battle system, in which your grasp of choices and consequences is put to high-stakes test. You are responsible for keeping your students alive. |
Three Houses carries this off compellingly because aside from a few obligatory sinister cults and suchlike, its story has no caricature villains. Fódlan is an oppressive, violent, prejudiced and profoundly unequal land trapped in the abusive power structures of a magical feudalism, in response to which different characters, often driven by their own traumatic experiences of that world, each come up with conflicting analyses of its problems and visions of how they ought to be solved. Your choice of house to run at the start, so seemingly innocuous, determines which of these visions you end up responsible for as things unravel: that is, which you will feel committed to fighting for even as its shadow of corpses and war crimes lengthens; and which you must seek to vanquish, even when it means striking down those who once trusted you and question you to the last with disgust as to how you could possibly side with “those monsters”.
| The seminal decision: Edelgard of the Adrestian Empire, Dimitri of the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus, or Claude of the Leicester Alliance? None is exactly what they seem. Your choice of which one’s house to lead has far-reaching repercussions. |
It’s also effective because of how well it intertwines the personal and the political. Because in Fire Emblemit’s very personal: you witness the story through the individual experiences of the students and faculty, the knights and clergy, and the very human web of relationships that grows up between them. But these are shaped, if not dictated, by the complex and shifting politics of the world which, to the game’s credit, it refuses to dumb down, rather trusting the player’s intelligence to take on board the dynastic intrigues, competing factions and unburied historical grievances that pockmark all three nations’ political landscapes. These directly bear on the interactions of a student body comprised of heirs to some of their most powerful families, leading to all kinds of uncomfortable my-dad-killed-your-dad situations and their like. At the heart of these political struggles is Fódlan’s suffocating class system and the heavy-handed theocracy that maintains it, to which every character has to work out his or her response, often from a place of life-changing suffering on its account. Indeed, the game has received much commentary for how it handles a range of the sorts of complex mental health problems you would expect such a world to produce.
| Prince Dimitri, a gripping study in trauma. Some of this game’s most potent characterisations can be considered Shakespearian. Trauma underlies so many characters’ behaviours in the world of Three Houses; making sense of it could be good for your empathy in the world outside it. |
As you might expect from all this, Three Houses is emotionally hard work. I am one of no few people that its tougher experiences brought to the verge of tears. At one point, stuck in what was supposed to be a glorious revolutionary war against a corrupt system that had in fact started to mean a war against old students and friends, I had to put the controller down for an hour, psychologically unable to go on, as I reflected on what the hell I had done. Which is not, make no mistake, an argument against revolutions – yet one can only imagine how much better our actual revolutions might have gone had their participants had the chance to give this game a go and factor its lessons into their struggles.
It is no surprise that debate between players about which of the three nations has the best case, or what actual historical figures their leaders correspond to, has raged ever since and will likely never conclude. Three Houses claims to be set in Fódlan but is as much as anything about Earth, and with its multiple perspectives on complex realities it is the perfect work for our time of mass retreat into silos of Us and Them, each with its own story of why it is right and all the others are wrong.
| Although, if you ever cause someone to tell you 'your dismissiveness regarding cake is inexcusable', they are probably right. |
Of course, no level of empathy can excuse the atrocities of some of the barefaced evil to which humans have handed power whether now or in the past. There can be no accommodation with those who would deny the humanity of marginalised groups or wilfully inflict cruelties to get their way. Yet even in their cases, standing in their shoes if even for a moment is vital for understanding the conditions of pain and fear that created them – conditions we are each and all responsible for. Then, and only then, will we find the healing power to walk together toward that essential though as yet never-fulfilled aspiration: never again.
3) The Power of Distance: Animal Crossing – New Horizons (Nintendo, 2020)
Escapism. In the rain of prejudice against videogames this is a most common drop of disdain. The term carries a brutal stigma. It is a charge of immaturity, of cowardice, treachery even: of a failure to live in “reality”.
But is that fair in a fraudulent reality manufactured brick by brick by the collective psychopathy of our kind – built, that is, specifically in order to break people? Is it justified to heap shame upon those who, if merely in order to survive, reach for other realities – any reality other than this! – any more than to slander the child who escapes abuse or the dissident who flees from jail?
Perhaps the dramatic events of this year have shifted many minds on this matter. For as COVID-19 dumped unto our sorry arrogances a new reality of lockdowns, cuand stay-at-home regulations, all of a sudden millions of people discovered a new meaning to the desire to escape. On top of that, when questioned on where they would like to escape to, only a marked few – what a surprise! – seem to want to go back to the old “reality” whose pretensions this virus has done in.
By way of witnesses, we could do worse than call on one Mr. Tom Nook: esteemed and disarmingly friendly tanuki(Japanese raccoon dog), estate agent, respected financier and wealth creator and by no means a sinister corporate godfather of the Nook Inc. conglomerate with secret control of skyscrapers, helicopter fleets, mafia organisations and the sovereign debt of half the nations of the world. This charming fellow popped up in March – by complete coincidence, just a week after COVID-19 had grown menacing enough to be declared a pandemic – and offered anyone with a Nintendo Switch a simple proposition: a package deal to escape to their own deserted island in the middle of nowhere. (The only catch, so reasonable of course as to go unstated, was that they then developed that island as they saw fit, with Nook Inc. naturally the sole and trusted partner in all matters of credit, capital and infrastructure).
Within two months, more than thirteen million people around the world – the same world that disdains videogames for escapism– had chosen tanuki.
| This is how it begins: just you and your tent on an island covered in bush. |
New Horizons has been the artistic face of the COVID-19 world. Its persuasive formula follows in the footsteps of its predecessors in the seminal Animal Crossing series: you, a cutely-rendered human, set up in a remote village or wilderness and build it from the ground up into a thriving community of anthropomorphic animals. Every aspect of this life – your appearance and clothing, your house, your community’s layout and landscape, the animals you invite to live in it, even its flag and anthem – is yours to shape out of the nigh-limitless DIY recipes and customisation options available to you. The experience is open-ended, there is no finish line or win condition: how often and for how long you proceed is entirely up to you.
Retreating to your own island might sound, well, insular, but this could not be further from the truth. Your island comes with its own airport and registered seaplane, manned by two dodos with rigorous experience in the aviation sector. They are your gateway to any of the millions of islands on which other players have likewise established themselves, and you can visit one another’s islands to take notes and marvel or gloat at their unique and colourful development ideologies. Each island has its own native flowers and fruit, which you can trade to diversify the natural resources grown on yours. With a network of island-hopping friends and a little imagination, there is no limit to the trading, scheming, fishing, bug-catching, raving or shooting-star-watching events you can hold together in your happy archipelago of exile.
| Come to my island instead of England. England doesn’t have coelacanths. |
| Arriving in England, you get abused and deported because of your skin colour. Arrive on my island instead and you get bears. |
I took up Mr. Nook on his deal in April at the same time as countless other people stuck in quarantine. In a period when people who consider video games beneath them have been gleefully handing power to murderous macho-clowns who don’t believe in face masks and call tens of thousands of preventable deaths a success, I do not feel alone in attesting that my sanity, mental health and thus ability to operate in (and against) that corrupt reality outside have been done tremendous good by having this island of good works and charming animal friends to retreat to when needed.
My approach has been relatively solitary: I have kept a step back from the community to build a space that reflects a peace unique to my experience. It has been small but indispensable comfort, after a given day of raging and suffering, to be able to return to this pocket of reality and perhaps commission a new bridge here, rearrange some flower beds there, every touch making small improvements to a lasting expression of my time in this world, as, I suspect, most people’s islands are of theirs.
| If you cross the bridge out of my island’s town and head for the hills you will find yourself in the Rawr Rawr Woods. |
| In the upper reaches, a Memorial to the Victims of All Authoritarianism. |
| This one is the Memorial to All Victims of a Gendered World. |
| And this? This is Newgrange. |
The politics of Animal Crossing– because everything is political – is delightfully light-hearted. It has not escaped veterans of the series that its gameplay is at its core a capitalist exercise. Much of your time is spent extracting raw materials – plants, fruit, fish and so on – to sell to the little raccoon twins Timmy and Tommy, who run the community’s shop on behalf of Nook Inc. and categorically deny any dynastic relation to Mr. Nook despite looking exactly like him but smaller. You do this in order to amass the funds to buy fixtures and infrastructure off Nook himself while paying off the chain of mortgages he has so charitably granted you (at zero interest, to be fair to the fellow) to expand your house. What is this game’s charming genius, indeed, by which it manages to make paying off a mortgage fun?
As you invest in your island, more dimensions open up with further enticing political food for thought. On reaching a certain administrative complexity Nook brings in his number two, the cheerful golden Shih Tzu dog Isabelle who is really the perfect expression of the Japanese office lady: an eagerness to serve with a butterflies-and-sunshine smile that never fades, even as it surely conceals the mountain of pent-up rage that has made her the
