Reading EarthBound
Reading EarthBound
(Writing it, I go back and forth – sometimes I give it a b, sometimes I go with the B. That’s another story.)
By ‘Reading Earthbound’ what I’m talking about is – as always – the experience of it. There is a tendency to want to re-imagine the game, isn’t there? Some would go for a straight ‘Novelization’, others prefer the ‘remix’, which carries over to writing or art as well as music; just as ‘Novelization’ likewise describes more a method or intention than a concrete result. On the one hand there is a close retelling, on the other a freer use of the Earthbound world or some aspect of it.
There is a tendency to do something along these lines, then – the way in other cases an experience might be recorded as a story? Conversely, the way a story would inspire children to play it out; or the way in rituals a story was made manifest and the spirits possessed men wearing masks…
The greatest of all artists in the opinion of many – the greatest human being ever, if we would believe his most ardent scholars, or Borges’ wry, dry, yet strangely childlike voice – Shakespeare worked in a form that most nearly marries the aspects of art and life: the drama. Is it possible that the game, which seems to mix the two, could take its place beside it?
It brings in that other thing, of course: technology. Shakespeare had his Globe, but today we make worlds…Interesting thing about high-tech, postindustrial nations, though: For all our advancement, who is happy? We must leave the poor out; they might be happy, but they do not participate in the technological field under consideration. Among the well-to-do, then, the haves – what do they – we – have? The grown-ups, on the whole, can’t claim much. They work at jobs they don’t like, rat-racing. On either side of this long desert, there stretch the Happy Isles, childhood and old age. Pensions are such that the old must work longer and longer to afford a retirement in which to feel lonely and unvalued and to regret a misspent life, compensating themselves by living longer than ever and pestering the young in a new and frightening way: voting en masse and giving the AARP obscene leverage in that mausoleum city. And ‘Death closes all’. So much for them.
Suffer then the little children to come unto me, and say, are they not the ones in whom we are well pleased? The capitalist rejoices, for a child is a massive investment on the part of the adults who raise it. It is the way to ensure the adult does not abscond from the world entirely into either ennui or enlightenment, but maintains the economy and a narrow sort of interest in the sham of politics. Having a child causes the parents themselves to act like children, buying, spending, wasting, wanting, preening, doing everything so that they will impress the ones they love and the ones they hate – their families, children, coworkers, neighbors – doing everything so that their children may do the same, and learn the skill of it well and never forget it. In other countries, as at all other times in history, the vast majority of children simply work to live – in a land of privilege, we find subtler ways of persuading ourselves that we need more, always more – when what we really need, need badly, is to have less…Isn’t the icon and the art proper to this childish age, then – the toy?
It is, actually, a close parallel indeed to Shakespeare’s theater. That too was a popular entertainment; it was decried as immoral; there were child actors, as I expect before too long there will be children quite involved in game production – why? They know what other children want; they will work for less cost to the company than the educated geeks they will replace, working for love of the thing and pride more than money; they have already shown their precocity via, and will be facilitated in all further endeavors by, the internet. I know Nintendo for one has already tested the waters with their Sage reviews. But these are only the brightest kids – and there will still be a place for the adult in the industry. To write the script, as it were. To bring to bear the experience of life to dazzle the innocents and to inflame them with wants…Wanting to make something new, to create – that was a favorite thing of Nietzsche’s.
And now for more harsh words of the sort he delighted in – the Novelizations and fan art and fan on and on and on – most of it is terrible. But so what? Most games are terrible, and most music – terrible – most books, too, and there are more of them than anything. Then take heart, if you are young and your talent is yet inchoate. So I believe of myself. And look around – the book, the Hamlet, the Bible of out time is - Harry Potter; our theater – the game. So you have a fortunate taste. Is this decline and decadence? Again, ask yourself. What you feel when you play Earthbound – what inspires you, does that feel like decadence – or its opposite?
No! I am not Nietzsche, nor was meant to be;
Am a student, bored, one that will soon
Play once a game of Hearts, and shoot the moon.
High five to the person who gets the allusion. Who has ears to hear, let him hear.
I’ll be writing a companion piece before long; I know, right, you’ll all be waiting with bated breath…
Reading EarthBound
(Writing it, I go back and forth – sometimes I give it a b, sometimes I go with the B. That’s another story.)
By ‘Reading Earthbound’ what I’m talking about is – as always – the experience of it. There is a tendency to want to re-imagine the game, isn’t there? Some would go for a straight ‘Novelization’, others prefer the ‘remix’, which carries over to writing or art as well as music; just as ‘Novelization’ likewise describes more a method or intention than a concrete result. On the one hand there is a close retelling, on the other a freer use of the Earthbound world or some aspect of it.
There is a tendency to do something along these lines, then – the way in other cases an experience might be recorded as a story? Conversely, the way a story would inspire children to play it out; or the way in rituals a story was made manifest and the spirits possessed men wearing masks…
The greatest of all artists in the opinion of many – the greatest human being ever, if we would believe his most ardent scholars, or Borges’ wry, dry, yet strangely childlike voice – Shakespeare worked in a form that most nearly marries the aspects of art and life: the drama. Is it possible that the game, which seems to mix the two, could take its place beside it?
It brings in that other thing, of course: technology. Shakespeare had his Globe, but today we make worlds…Interesting thing about high-tech, postindustrial nations, though: For all our advancement, who is happy? We must leave the poor out; they might be happy, but they do not participate in the technological field under consideration. Among the well-to-do, then, the haves – what do they – we – have? The grown-ups, on the whole, can’t claim much. They work at jobs they don’t like, rat-racing. On either side of this long desert, there stretch the Happy Isles, childhood and old age. Pensions are such that the old must work longer and longer to afford a retirement in which to feel lonely and unvalued and to regret a misspent life, compensating themselves by living longer than ever and pestering the young in a new and frightening way: voting en masse and giving the AARP obscene leverage in that mausoleum city. And ‘Death closes all’. So much for them.
Suffer then the little children to come unto me, and say, are they not the ones in whom we are well pleased? The capitalist rejoices, for a child is a massive investment on the part of the adults who raise it. It is the way to ensure the adult does not abscond from the world entirely into either ennui or enlightenment, but maintains the economy and a narrow sort of interest in the sham of politics. Having a child causes the parents themselves to act like children, buying, spending, wasting, wanting, preening, doing everything so that they will impress the ones they love and the ones they hate – their families, children, coworkers, neighbors – doing everything so that their children may do the same, and learn the skill of it well and never forget it. In other countries, as at all other times in history, the vast majority of children simply work to live – in a land of privilege, we find subtler ways of persuading ourselves that we need more, always more – when what we really need, need badly, is to have less…Isn’t the icon and the art proper to this childish age, then – the toy?
It is, actually, a close parallel indeed to Shakespeare’s theater. That too was a popular entertainment; it was decried as immoral; there were child actors, as I expect before too long there will be children quite involved in game production – why? They know what other children want; they will work for less cost to the company than the educated geeks they will replace, working for love of the thing and pride more than money; they have already shown their precocity via, and will be facilitated in all further endeavors by, the internet. I know Nintendo for one has already tested the waters with their Sage reviews. But these are only the brightest kids – and there will still be a place for the adult in the industry. To write the script, as it were. To bring to bear the experience of life to dazzle the innocents and to inflame them with wants…Wanting to make something new, to create – that was a favorite thing of Nietzsche’s.
And now for more harsh words of the sort he delighted in – the Novelizations and fan art and fan on and on and on – most of it is terrible. But so what? Most games are terrible, and most music – terrible – most books, too, and there are more of them than anything. Then take heart, if you are young and your talent is yet inchoate. So I believe of myself. And look around – the book, the Hamlet, the Bible of out time is - Harry Potter; our theater – the game. So you have a fortunate taste. Is this decline and decadence? Again, ask yourself. What you feel when you play Earthbound – what inspires you, does that feel like decadence – or its opposite?
No! I am not Nietzsche, nor was meant to be;
Am a student, bored, one that will soon
Play once a game of Hearts, and shoot the moon.
High five to the person who gets the allusion. Who has ears to hear, let him hear.
I’ll be writing a companion piece before long; I know, right, you’ll all be waiting with bated breath…
