December Talking Meme: Day 4

[jaggedwolf]

flowersforgraves asked "What video game has been most influential, impactful, or meaningful to you this year (whether you played it this year or previously)"

Man, I really like this as a question. Because sometimes things linger in your head regardless of when you last touched the source of them. Like for the past few weeks I’ve kept thinking “aim for the gaps, not the trees”, and I got that from a kid’s novel about skiing/snowboarding that I read in middle school. Or that I’ve lately been thinking about part of a Taliesin Jaffe interview I watched in 2018 about friendships cycling in and out based on physical proximity and life stages.

Anyway, video games.

This year I played a lot of Uncharted and Ace Attorney, but I would be lying if I said they were the most influental/impactful/meaningful, despite how I’ve generally enjoyed them. Solid games, not the sort to linger emotionally in my head. Butterfly Soup 2 was very good but I think it would have personally wrecked me a lot more if I’d played it in college or earlier as opposed to right now where I’m settled re:the relevant topics.

So instead I’m going to highlight Horizon Zero Dawn, even though I still haven’t played the sequel. It’s not my favorite video game story of all time nor is it my favorite video game gameplay of all time, but this year I’ve kept thinking about one of the final lines of dialogue you hear in the game, where a major character talks about her mother insisting that “You have to use your smarts to count for something, to serve life, not death.”

I dunno, “Serve life, not death” is a solid ethos. A good thing to ponder.


I love the way it ties together Sobeck and Aloy’s arc in the game. While Sobeck as we learn about her is flawless, Aloy’s arc to being the big damn hero is much more complicated, and I love the way that she arrives at it: that she’s annoyed at Ross’s insistence that being a Brave is about serving the tribe and not merely a path to answers, but by the end of the game she’s raging at the Nora for not understanding that the whole world is filled with people just as good at them, just as deserving of being saved, of living full and happy lives.

That it comes from someone who grew up in exile purely due to the circumstances of her birth is even better. How seriously the game takes exile as a punishment is also very good. People cope very badly with isolation, it takes a fucking toll on anyone of any age.

Unlike Sobeck, Aloy will never naturally be of her world’s groups, I don’t think. Not the Nora who cast her out or the Carja whose civil war she helps resolve or any of the other tribes she encounters. But I’m glad she gets to hear that log of Sobeck’s at the end of the game, and at least have that. (Though Elisabet also seems to hold herself apart from the world too - the only personal connection of hers we hear about is her mother, and it seems she has no one she's leaving behind when she settles in what's supposed to be the Alphas' final home.)

Comments

[jaggedwolf]

The scenery is very pretty!