Pinocchio
(Part 1)
I go to Fourside to play pick-up games. There’s one or two other kids there with abilities like mine. The townhouses peter out as they come towards the bay, and there is a stretch of grass, mostly dirt, that follows the dead-end street right to the shore. We hop the fence and go into the field, and almost any afternoon you care to show up there’ll be someone to play with until it’s too dark to see the ball.
One day—when, exactly? You tell me: not a Beatles song, but XXday—I teleport downtown to look at the dinosaur bones awhile instead of going straight to the field. The bones of an animal that once lived, so long ago, so terrifying, so sublime, so alive. Now just bones…but I have seen dinosaurs. Good times. They’re still lumbering around down there where few people go. It is quiet in the museum, a good place to think. Then I go outside.
I walk to the northwest of that diamond-blocked metropolis, to the outskirts. I think about dinosaur bones, and about living. Of course dying is at the beginning and end of my thought, but I’ve had my head handed to me a few times, I’ve been to the hospital for my fallen friends and I’ve awakened in hospital beds to see their faces first thing of all, relieved and then accepting. I’ve blinked in the light. I always get up again and “go for it”.
At an intersection, Jackie’s ahead, I happen to glance down the street to my left. I see a building I remember, with a striped awning like a café’s and a sign out front. Instead of going to play baseball, this is where I stop. I ignore the sign and come under the awning. I turn a key in the lock and go in.
You want to know about the key? It couldn’t be more simple. You don’t have to do anything like spend the night in the seaside shack with the Bad-Key machine in Jeff’s inventory while outside Ghost of Starman lurks, or perform with the Runaway Five at Everdread’s funeral in the Chaos theater then pack his ashes into bottle-rockets and watch the fireworks for exactly as long as it takes to recite his last haiku, after which Carpainter transforms the Key to the Cabin into this key—you don’t have to do that to get this key. To think and imagine these things, or something like them, is enough—and voila, you have the key to this café-looking place, it’s like a metaphor or something.
When I unlock the door it makes that cool sound effect. I remember dreaming of Jeff opening lockers in Snow Wood…I have very clear and very strange dreams: for all I know this may be one of them. It is a freeing thought, or it would be if I ever felt anything but utterly free.
Inside it is dim and silent and calm as an attic. Nobody has been here for so long that the objects, the desks and chairs and lamps, having no one to share it with, have soaked up all the reality. They have become something to study and lose yourself in, like exhibits in a museum, or rather artifacts still at the dig site. We are kindred spirits.
Across this front work-room is a door. I go in.
The lights come on slowly, work for a few seconds, and then stop working. That one is harder to get so I’ll just tell you—think of when I first stepped out of my room after the meteor landed, how the lights came on—but then think also of how news about the next one comes in short-lived flashes is never reliable—and that is the lights in this room.
It is a seminar room. A projection screen hangs perfectly still on the wall, wall and screen stitched with the daylight slanting through the drawn blinds. I check the projector. A scene comes up: a baby in a red cap. The next one is a cute puppy. They are gently blurred around the edges, with colors like you see in your mind. I notice another door, not the one I came in. That would be in the fourth wall, if you’re counting—first door; screen; windows; new door. Some people seem to think that’s significant. Whatever. I open it.
It is a stairwell, just one flight. I go up hearing my footfalls. The second noise, if you’re listening.
(2)
I’m in a hallway with a carpet and two doors. Warm, lit by a skylight, but narrow, this hallway. I hear a toilet flush and a sink running; whoever it is whistles. The far door opens.
He looks a lot like the man on the cliff. He nods. “Who do you think I modeled him after—‘when I do a job, I do it well; I’m a man’s man’.” And his voice: my Dad’s. “OK desu ka. None of that. You know who I am.”
Itoi regards me a moment, then goes through the other door. I follow.
A typewriter, books and magazines. Clay figures. A sketchbook. A guitar. Itoi nudges a pile of papers and they fall, collapsing into a flurry of individual scraps of light and airy noises. He watches sardonically and offers me the chair thus cleared, himself dropping onto a mattress on the floor. He gets his legs under the blanket and leans against the wall. I sit. There’s a nice breeze from the open window, real nice; a few sheets flutter out on its draft. What would you think if you saw papers spilling out of the second-storey window of a café?
The top page on the pile had read:
“EarthBound 2 – complete storyboards, assorted sketches, etc.”
and there followed an illegible scribble of signature.
Itoi speaks: “It’s been awhile. I see you sometimes, I won’t lie, sometimes I sneak out to the lot where you play baseball. You know the bushes by the water? That’s where I hide. No, Ness, don’t look sympathetic. I wouldn’t want you to let me play, I’m too old, that’s just sad.
“I guess you saw my title page. I’ll let you in on a little secret, only you: every page in that pile said exactly the same thing as the one on top. Look at them scattered over the floor.” He’s right. “But I didn’t sign a single one of them. Every signature is unique, each one is by a different person. I think there may be a hundred thousand pages or more. Although it really could be less.
“It’s not that I haven’t been able to think of ideas for the next game. Give me some credit. I could have storyboarded at least two or three sequels by now, as good or better than EarthBound—in fact, they’re all in my head, even now, and it is a great effort to leave them there. And it isn’t that I couldn’t have worked out the technical side of things, though I admit that’s harder and more time-consuming. No, I’ve negotiated the programming and the marketing business before and I could do it again.
“I will never make EarthBound 2 for the same reason I will never play baseball with you. Do you understand?”
I shake my head No.
“You are as exceptional as I expected you to be. Yours is so vigorous and purely active a nature that you could never know my trouble, and I am glad you admit that. You know whose signatures those were, though? Of course you do. Mostly people like me, but a few like you. All the people who are waiting for EarthBound 2, who in the meantime make provisional stand-ins for it, fan-art and websites, hacks and even full-blown games, or who, if they are more like you, just think about it fondly once in a while. But something amazing is happening. They’re growing up.
“I wasn’t sure at first my plan would work—I kind of took it for granted they would grow up, heh; that’s not what I meant, that’s not the part I was worried about—No, I thought it was essential to work on the sequel for awhile, to lead them on and then abandon them, but now I see that even silence from my end would have provoked them enough, though perhaps not as many of them. So I may have been cruel, over-the-top. Or maybe I just wanted so badly to make the sequel that I had to wrestle with myself to stop. Making little announcements now and again is plenty to keep them at a high pitch of intensity.
“These people who love EarthBound are more important to me than my own art. Sometimes when I am very weak I ask myself, ‘What would it hurt to give them EarthBound 2?’ But I think of them, and of what they will make, and I console myself by thinking how puny the ideas shackled inside my head will seem then. By frustrating them, I’ve given them a problem to solve. Each of them, in pursuing his talents, will solve it in his own way. Think of all the art I’ve inspired as EarthBound 2—and for these kids, it’s all just practice. When they really get going…” He sighs. “My holding back now will be worth it.”
He trails off. The giddy affectation of ease and confidence passes, having worn him out, and it leaves in its place a blank frown. I think he knows he’s lying to himself.
(3)
I could reply: There are not “people like you” and “people like me”. There’s only people. I’m complete the way you could, with luck, with guts, be; but I’m perfect the way only someone you love and idealize can be perfect. Your signatures are growing up, you were right about that—look at the coordination and skill of some of these drawings, the thought that goes into some of these stories, the complexity and subtlety—the sheer length of some of these articles!—but as they grow up their tastes will mature, too. Not many of them will always love EarthBound, they’ll outgrow it; and even if they don’t, the way they will love it won’t be the way they did as children.
You’ve caught them in a web, I don’t deny it. I don’t deny you’ve done it ingeniously. But you were wrong to do it—if it was really because you value these artworks of theirs so highly, the ones you’ve inspired and the ones they’ve yet to make, the potential you’ve helped stir up. But I don’t think you care about that. This is only how you try to console yourself, pretending this is your noble aim, and you are not consoled. I think that if you are honest with yourself you’ll see: any inspiration, any subsequent “leading-on” was incidental, a result of your own dissatisfaction with your life, one you’re finally confronting. If this is true, you did the right thing. By the by, my own opinion is that you overstate how deeply it has affected most fans: if they have that creative impulse in them, it will be expressed, demand expression, with or without you, however strong your influence…
So when you say you won’t make EarthBound 2 for the same reason you won’t play baseball with me, what do you really mean? That you are ashamed of yourself. I admire you for it, it’s a start, but this shame too is a crutch. It’s easy to feel sorry for yourself; managing to remove the cause for that shame is hard.
You’re trying. It’s a struggle for you right now, but you are making progress. You don’t have a computer anymore, only a typewriter. No studio, only a guitar. I hope you blushed when I looked at your clay figures—hopefully they’re your daughter’s, maybe you’re just holding onto them for her, that wouldn’t be quite as bad as a grown man playing with toys.
But when you are really happy, you’ll love your clay figures again, and your projector slides. When you’re happy, you will make EarthBound 2. You won’t lie to yourself and say that you have some grand selfless scheme and that a bunch of kids’ admiration and imitation means so much to you. Take heart, Itoi. Believe what I say.
I could say that to him. But he knows it all already. Just give him time. Itoi has a home and a family, he has a life most would think satisfying—a life most would frankly envy. He makes videogames for a living. But think about what that really means. He is an entertainer of children, a toy-maker. He has to confront more directly than most men his doubts, his feelings of insufficiency. He by his talents has perhaps contributed to the triviality he perceives in the society and culture of his world. He can’t ignore it all like some people do, those who get rich making the same game over and over and so don’t ask questions.
Behind everything that fascinates people in the game stands this man. His imagination might have led him to poetry—or indeed has, only his language is the game and everything in it. He has drifted among modes of expression, newspapers and movies and books, and the game is newest and least limited. But being most powerful and most immersive, it most detaches its audience from life. Can the game really aspire to be nothing more than a “prostitute”, to relax the body and annihilate for awhile the mind? Can it engage the imagination only artificially, with pleasant forgettable distractions, or can it find the heart through it?
Now Itoi has seen this last is possible. If anything this has been his lasting impact, simply showing that a game can spill over its narrow conventions and be unique, and be loved so much by so many. A game done right, for its own sake and for ours, can endure. The very success of his vision has become his dilemma. Is his daughter perhaps to grow up in a world where the best of human achievement will no longer be reflected in literature or architecture or music, but in games?
(4)
Itoi nods almost drunkenly. “Ness, what can I do? The natural world is decaying, and humanity is finally in harmony with it, if only in that respect. That the earth is dying—that is the theme of all the Final Fantasies: the crystals, you know, very heavy-handed—and what do people enjoy best about those games? The fighting. The graphics. The story. All are awful: the fights have no drama, it’s all unimaginative monsters lined up in a row to cursor over and tell to lose HP, while the redundant exciting music thumps away; the graphics are all for atmosphere or dazzle, towns are ‘peaceful’ and caves are ‘mysterious’ and there is never anything to find except what you already knew you would, since it is necessary for getting to the next area or situation; there are no real characters, only things that started as stereotypes and have since degenerated into androgynous caricatures of themselves, and the plots are pure escapism with no truth about anything human to be communicated—save perhaps an ironic, unintentional comment on the decadence we display in buying these things.
“I did what anyone with a shred of dignity would have done, simple little things. I made enemies you could at least see before they could hurt you, and not all tired monsters, but tiny ironies like cops and hippies and cultists, and a final boss representing the only real evil in the world, that evil in people that makes them hate; I broke the graphics down into what a child would draw if he had the coordination, so it would charm and not distract, not waste my time or anyone else’s, and I made sinister music play in some houses and made bizarre items useful; I let the characters be sublimated into the people playing, gave them no angst and many unexpected, memorable adventures. I improved on it all in such a small way, and they call me a genius.
“Other people make games without thinking at all. I made them thinking to mock those people, pointing up their idiocies, and even this little amount of thought resulted in something classic. If I approached the game seriously, ignoring everything that has come before except what I learned from my mistakes on my own projects…I could create not mawkishness but pathos, characters who could walk down the street without being laughed at, enemies who are actually dangerous and who are frighteningly plausible as humans, battles that mean something for the story, a story that hasn’t been told before quite in the way I will tell it—because I can make you live it, the game being a world I’ve made to the smallest detail to reinforce that experience and nothing else. No one has even tried to make a great game yet, Ness.
“The theme of the natural world’s decay…” I feel the breeze from outside and remember that the earth is my mother and how warm the sun is, and the peace to be found in certain places you make your own. The destruction is accelerating now, but it is still so slow, it’s like a man’s descent towards the grave, never leaving his ordinary experience, hardly ever appreciating even that. Though he would never admit it, his life is defined only by the sharp moments of clarity when he admits to himself that time is running out.
“…that one theme is all that’s there, and people ignore even that. They memorize lists of classes and equipment with all their attendant statistics. These are not the people I’ll make my game for. There also exist, I must believe, people who are the antithesis of these. An audience waiting for a game like mine…” Itoi, there’s only people. You talk too much. Just make your game and go home to your wife and daughter. You’re more than a voice on the telephone.
(5)
No media, no art or technology or any mixture of the two is really a threat to life. Only people are; a person is also what is best. A person makes the art, a person interprets it and responds; a person makes the TV, watches awhile to see what’s on then turns it off, picks up the phone and talks to his friend on the other side of the country or hears his mom’s sweet voice. No stream of advertisements, neither the contemplation of a masterpiece, can drown us or make us perfect; and, such is life, no amount of talent can make the beauty we envision when undertaking a work emerge quite entire and true when we’ve finished. Itoi, do you accept this?
Most games are awful. Is that any of your business? Look to your own work and stop worrying about the society, the culture. Those words don’t even mean anything anymore the way they’re tossed around. It’s not that important, really. Do you accept this?
Itoi, it’s getting late. Leave it alone. Take a break.
He has fallen silent. Then he grins. “You jerk…Because…heh heh he…heh heh heh…I wrote that, even though you’re mixing up the order. Take a break? I will, in a way. But never completely, not until I die. Until my consciousness goes for good, everything I do, resting or working, goes nowhere but into me.
“The lineage of my ancestors can’t haunt me. They can’t paralyze me. They are only my memories now. The things they’ve made I can use or learn from, just like the rest of my experience, but I live for my descendants. Everything I am shapes my daughter’s memory of me, and when my consciousness goes, that’s where I will stay.”
That’s more like it. Itoi, yeah, you’re cool. Of course, you don’t resolve anything in an afternoon, nothing is really as neat and tidy as it seems—even those old fables they tell children have their Moonside, just like the games today can. There’s always loose threads, or how could we keep knitting away, all down the ages?
I stand up and so does he. There is some daylight left. “I’ll play baseball with you. I’ll bring my daughter and we’ll teach her to play.”
[These were helpful: Tomato’s article “It’s Not Bokista”; Hotel Dark Moon’s Quotes section; Tim Rogers’ “the literature of the moment” - a critique of mother 2]
(Part 1)
I go to Fourside to play pick-up games. There’s one or two other kids there with abilities like mine. The townhouses peter out as they come towards the bay, and there is a stretch of grass, mostly dirt, that follows the dead-end street right to the shore. We hop the fence and go into the field, and almost any afternoon you care to show up there’ll be someone to play with until it’s too dark to see the ball.
One day—when, exactly? You tell me: not a Beatles song, but XXday—I teleport downtown to look at the dinosaur bones awhile instead of going straight to the field. The bones of an animal that once lived, so long ago, so terrifying, so sublime, so alive. Now just bones…but I have seen dinosaurs. Good times. They’re still lumbering around down there where few people go. It is quiet in the museum, a good place to think. Then I go outside.
I walk to the northwest of that diamond-blocked metropolis, to the outskirts. I think about dinosaur bones, and about living. Of course dying is at the beginning and end of my thought, but I’ve had my head handed to me a few times, I’ve been to the hospital for my fallen friends and I’ve awakened in hospital beds to see their faces first thing of all, relieved and then accepting. I’ve blinked in the light. I always get up again and “go for it”.
At an intersection, Jackie’s ahead, I happen to glance down the street to my left. I see a building I remember, with a striped awning like a café’s and a sign out front. Instead of going to play baseball, this is where I stop. I ignore the sign and come under the awning. I turn a key in the lock and go in.
You want to know about the key? It couldn’t be more simple. You don’t have to do anything like spend the night in the seaside shack with the Bad-Key machine in Jeff’s inventory while outside Ghost of Starman lurks, or perform with the Runaway Five at Everdread’s funeral in the Chaos theater then pack his ashes into bottle-rockets and watch the fireworks for exactly as long as it takes to recite his last haiku, after which Carpainter transforms the Key to the Cabin into this key—you don’t have to do that to get this key. To think and imagine these things, or something like them, is enough—and voila, you have the key to this café-looking place, it’s like a metaphor or something.
When I unlock the door it makes that cool sound effect. I remember dreaming of Jeff opening lockers in Snow Wood…I have very clear and very strange dreams: for all I know this may be one of them. It is a freeing thought, or it would be if I ever felt anything but utterly free.
Inside it is dim and silent and calm as an attic. Nobody has been here for so long that the objects, the desks and chairs and lamps, having no one to share it with, have soaked up all the reality. They have become something to study and lose yourself in, like exhibits in a museum, or rather artifacts still at the dig site. We are kindred spirits.
Across this front work-room is a door. I go in.
The lights come on slowly, work for a few seconds, and then stop working. That one is harder to get so I’ll just tell you—think of when I first stepped out of my room after the meteor landed, how the lights came on—but then think also of how news about the next one comes in short-lived flashes is never reliable—and that is the lights in this room.
It is a seminar room. A projection screen hangs perfectly still on the wall, wall and screen stitched with the daylight slanting through the drawn blinds. I check the projector. A scene comes up: a baby in a red cap. The next one is a cute puppy. They are gently blurred around the edges, with colors like you see in your mind. I notice another door, not the one I came in. That would be in the fourth wall, if you’re counting—first door; screen; windows; new door. Some people seem to think that’s significant. Whatever. I open it.
It is a stairwell, just one flight. I go up hearing my footfalls. The second noise, if you’re listening.
(2)
I’m in a hallway with a carpet and two doors. Warm, lit by a skylight, but narrow, this hallway. I hear a toilet flush and a sink running; whoever it is whistles. The far door opens.
He looks a lot like the man on the cliff. He nods. “Who do you think I modeled him after—‘when I do a job, I do it well; I’m a man’s man’.” And his voice: my Dad’s. “OK desu ka. None of that. You know who I am.”
Itoi regards me a moment, then goes through the other door. I follow.
A typewriter, books and magazines. Clay figures. A sketchbook. A guitar. Itoi nudges a pile of papers and they fall, collapsing into a flurry of individual scraps of light and airy noises. He watches sardonically and offers me the chair thus cleared, himself dropping onto a mattress on the floor. He gets his legs under the blanket and leans against the wall. I sit. There’s a nice breeze from the open window, real nice; a few sheets flutter out on its draft. What would you think if you saw papers spilling out of the second-storey window of a café?
The top page on the pile had read:
“EarthBound 2 – complete storyboards, assorted sketches, etc.”
and there followed an illegible scribble of signature.
Itoi speaks: “It’s been awhile. I see you sometimes, I won’t lie, sometimes I sneak out to the lot where you play baseball. You know the bushes by the water? That’s where I hide. No, Ness, don’t look sympathetic. I wouldn’t want you to let me play, I’m too old, that’s just sad.
“I guess you saw my title page. I’ll let you in on a little secret, only you: every page in that pile said exactly the same thing as the one on top. Look at them scattered over the floor.” He’s right. “But I didn’t sign a single one of them. Every signature is unique, each one is by a different person. I think there may be a hundred thousand pages or more. Although it really could be less.
“It’s not that I haven’t been able to think of ideas for the next game. Give me some credit. I could have storyboarded at least two or three sequels by now, as good or better than EarthBound—in fact, they’re all in my head, even now, and it is a great effort to leave them there. And it isn’t that I couldn’t have worked out the technical side of things, though I admit that’s harder and more time-consuming. No, I’ve negotiated the programming and the marketing business before and I could do it again.
“I will never make EarthBound 2 for the same reason I will never play baseball with you. Do you understand?”
I shake my head No.
“You are as exceptional as I expected you to be. Yours is so vigorous and purely active a nature that you could never know my trouble, and I am glad you admit that. You know whose signatures those were, though? Of course you do. Mostly people like me, but a few like you. All the people who are waiting for EarthBound 2, who in the meantime make provisional stand-ins for it, fan-art and websites, hacks and even full-blown games, or who, if they are more like you, just think about it fondly once in a while. But something amazing is happening. They’re growing up.
“I wasn’t sure at first my plan would work—I kind of took it for granted they would grow up, heh; that’s not what I meant, that’s not the part I was worried about—No, I thought it was essential to work on the sequel for awhile, to lead them on and then abandon them, but now I see that even silence from my end would have provoked them enough, though perhaps not as many of them. So I may have been cruel, over-the-top. Or maybe I just wanted so badly to make the sequel that I had to wrestle with myself to stop. Making little announcements now and again is plenty to keep them at a high pitch of intensity.
“These people who love EarthBound are more important to me than my own art. Sometimes when I am very weak I ask myself, ‘What would it hurt to give them EarthBound 2?’ But I think of them, and of what they will make, and I console myself by thinking how puny the ideas shackled inside my head will seem then. By frustrating them, I’ve given them a problem to solve. Each of them, in pursuing his talents, will solve it in his own way. Think of all the art I’ve inspired as EarthBound 2—and for these kids, it’s all just practice. When they really get going…” He sighs. “My holding back now will be worth it.”
He trails off. The giddy affectation of ease and confidence passes, having worn him out, and it leaves in its place a blank frown. I think he knows he’s lying to himself.
(3)
I could reply: There are not “people like you” and “people like me”. There’s only people. I’m complete the way you could, with luck, with guts, be; but I’m perfect the way only someone you love and idealize can be perfect. Your signatures are growing up, you were right about that—look at the coordination and skill of some of these drawings, the thought that goes into some of these stories, the complexity and subtlety—the sheer length of some of these articles!—but as they grow up their tastes will mature, too. Not many of them will always love EarthBound, they’ll outgrow it; and even if they don’t, the way they will love it won’t be the way they did as children.
You’ve caught them in a web, I don’t deny it. I don’t deny you’ve done it ingeniously. But you were wrong to do it—if it was really because you value these artworks of theirs so highly, the ones you’ve inspired and the ones they’ve yet to make, the potential you’ve helped stir up. But I don’t think you care about that. This is only how you try to console yourself, pretending this is your noble aim, and you are not consoled. I think that if you are honest with yourself you’ll see: any inspiration, any subsequent “leading-on” was incidental, a result of your own dissatisfaction with your life, one you’re finally confronting. If this is true, you did the right thing. By the by, my own opinion is that you overstate how deeply it has affected most fans: if they have that creative impulse in them, it will be expressed, demand expression, with or without you, however strong your influence…
So when you say you won’t make EarthBound 2 for the same reason you won’t play baseball with me, what do you really mean? That you are ashamed of yourself. I admire you for it, it’s a start, but this shame too is a crutch. It’s easy to feel sorry for yourself; managing to remove the cause for that shame is hard.
You’re trying. It’s a struggle for you right now, but you are making progress. You don’t have a computer anymore, only a typewriter. No studio, only a guitar. I hope you blushed when I looked at your clay figures—hopefully they’re your daughter’s, maybe you’re just holding onto them for her, that wouldn’t be quite as bad as a grown man playing with toys.
But when you are really happy, you’ll love your clay figures again, and your projector slides. When you’re happy, you will make EarthBound 2. You won’t lie to yourself and say that you have some grand selfless scheme and that a bunch of kids’ admiration and imitation means so much to you. Take heart, Itoi. Believe what I say.
I could say that to him. But he knows it all already. Just give him time. Itoi has a home and a family, he has a life most would think satisfying—a life most would frankly envy. He makes videogames for a living. But think about what that really means. He is an entertainer of children, a toy-maker. He has to confront more directly than most men his doubts, his feelings of insufficiency. He by his talents has perhaps contributed to the triviality he perceives in the society and culture of his world. He can’t ignore it all like some people do, those who get rich making the same game over and over and so don’t ask questions.
Behind everything that fascinates people in the game stands this man. His imagination might have led him to poetry—or indeed has, only his language is the game and everything in it. He has drifted among modes of expression, newspapers and movies and books, and the game is newest and least limited. But being most powerful and most immersive, it most detaches its audience from life. Can the game really aspire to be nothing more than a “prostitute”, to relax the body and annihilate for awhile the mind? Can it engage the imagination only artificially, with pleasant forgettable distractions, or can it find the heart through it?
Now Itoi has seen this last is possible. If anything this has been his lasting impact, simply showing that a game can spill over its narrow conventions and be unique, and be loved so much by so many. A game done right, for its own sake and for ours, can endure. The very success of his vision has become his dilemma. Is his daughter perhaps to grow up in a world where the best of human achievement will no longer be reflected in literature or architecture or music, but in games?
(4)
Itoi nods almost drunkenly. “Ness, what can I do? The natural world is decaying, and humanity is finally in harmony with it, if only in that respect. That the earth is dying—that is the theme of all the Final Fantasies: the crystals, you know, very heavy-handed—and what do people enjoy best about those games? The fighting. The graphics. The story. All are awful: the fights have no drama, it’s all unimaginative monsters lined up in a row to cursor over and tell to lose HP, while the redundant exciting music thumps away; the graphics are all for atmosphere or dazzle, towns are ‘peaceful’ and caves are ‘mysterious’ and there is never anything to find except what you already knew you would, since it is necessary for getting to the next area or situation; there are no real characters, only things that started as stereotypes and have since degenerated into androgynous caricatures of themselves, and the plots are pure escapism with no truth about anything human to be communicated—save perhaps an ironic, unintentional comment on the decadence we display in buying these things.
“I did what anyone with a shred of dignity would have done, simple little things. I made enemies you could at least see before they could hurt you, and not all tired monsters, but tiny ironies like cops and hippies and cultists, and a final boss representing the only real evil in the world, that evil in people that makes them hate; I broke the graphics down into what a child would draw if he had the coordination, so it would charm and not distract, not waste my time or anyone else’s, and I made sinister music play in some houses and made bizarre items useful; I let the characters be sublimated into the people playing, gave them no angst and many unexpected, memorable adventures. I improved on it all in such a small way, and they call me a genius.
“Other people make games without thinking at all. I made them thinking to mock those people, pointing up their idiocies, and even this little amount of thought resulted in something classic. If I approached the game seriously, ignoring everything that has come before except what I learned from my mistakes on my own projects…I could create not mawkishness but pathos, characters who could walk down the street without being laughed at, enemies who are actually dangerous and who are frighteningly plausible as humans, battles that mean something for the story, a story that hasn’t been told before quite in the way I will tell it—because I can make you live it, the game being a world I’ve made to the smallest detail to reinforce that experience and nothing else. No one has even tried to make a great game yet, Ness.
“The theme of the natural world’s decay…” I feel the breeze from outside and remember that the earth is my mother and how warm the sun is, and the peace to be found in certain places you make your own. The destruction is accelerating now, but it is still so slow, it’s like a man’s descent towards the grave, never leaving his ordinary experience, hardly ever appreciating even that. Though he would never admit it, his life is defined only by the sharp moments of clarity when he admits to himself that time is running out.
“…that one theme is all that’s there, and people ignore even that. They memorize lists of classes and equipment with all their attendant statistics. These are not the people I’ll make my game for. There also exist, I must believe, people who are the antithesis of these. An audience waiting for a game like mine…” Itoi, there’s only people. You talk too much. Just make your game and go home to your wife and daughter. You’re more than a voice on the telephone.
(5)
No media, no art or technology or any mixture of the two is really a threat to life. Only people are; a person is also what is best. A person makes the art, a person interprets it and responds; a person makes the TV, watches awhile to see what’s on then turns it off, picks up the phone and talks to his friend on the other side of the country or hears his mom’s sweet voice. No stream of advertisements, neither the contemplation of a masterpiece, can drown us or make us perfect; and, such is life, no amount of talent can make the beauty we envision when undertaking a work emerge quite entire and true when we’ve finished. Itoi, do you accept this?
Most games are awful. Is that any of your business? Look to your own work and stop worrying about the society, the culture. Those words don’t even mean anything anymore the way they’re tossed around. It’s not that important, really. Do you accept this?
Itoi, it’s getting late. Leave it alone. Take a break.
He has fallen silent. Then he grins. “You jerk…Because…heh heh he…heh heh heh…I wrote that, even though you’re mixing up the order. Take a break? I will, in a way. But never completely, not until I die. Until my consciousness goes for good, everything I do, resting or working, goes nowhere but into me.
“The lineage of my ancestors can’t haunt me. They can’t paralyze me. They are only my memories now. The things they’ve made I can use or learn from, just like the rest of my experience, but I live for my descendants. Everything I am shapes my daughter’s memory of me, and when my consciousness goes, that’s where I will stay.”
That’s more like it. Itoi, yeah, you’re cool. Of course, you don’t resolve anything in an afternoon, nothing is really as neat and tidy as it seems—even those old fables they tell children have their Moonside, just like the games today can. There’s always loose threads, or how could we keep knitting away, all down the ages?
I stand up and so does he. There is some daylight left. “I’ll play baseball with you. I’ll bring my daughter and we’ll teach her to play.”
[These were helpful: Tomato’s article “It’s Not Bokista”; Hotel Dark Moon’s Quotes section; Tim Rogers’ “the literature of the moment” - a critique of mother 2]
