PART 2
IV. Moving on is not enough: forgotten depths (2018)
One of the worst movies I've ever seen is called The Descent (2005, Neil Marshall). The story follows a group of friends who decide to explore a remote cave, unaware that the place is inhabited by bloodthirsty creatures. Eventually, the friends get stuck down there — and the rest you can imagine.
Spoilers ahead in the next paragraph (that is, if anyone cares):
To complicate the situation a bit more, we soon discover that there's a cheating scandal involving one of the friends and the (already deceased) husband of the protagonist. I'll argue, by the way, that perhaps this cheating subplot is the highlight of the film: that is, the issue of how the dead continue to interfere in the lives of the living. At a crucial moment in the narrative, when the protagonist has the opportunity to save the cheating friend's life (after discovering the affair), she decides to abandon her — which makes little difference, as all the characters end up dead by the end of the film, one way or another.
I talk about The Descent, but what I really want to discuss is these "hauntings" from the past that, displaced in time, effectively torment the present: as absent presences, they push historical consciousness off the rails — like the protagonist of The Descent, who continually glimpses the ghost of her dead daughter wandering through the dark tunnels of the cave, but also like Hamlet, the Danish prince, who, upon the visit of his father's ghost, exclaimed: "Damn, time is crazy!"
The ghost is a "novelty" (Ernst Bloch) "cognitively strange" (Darko Suvin) precisely because it represents a time outside its time. And, as Marx explained in that famous passage from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852), in all times, "the tradition" (I could say: our ghosts) exerts a force that "presses on the brains of the living."
As for Marx himself, whom everyone thought had been dead for about 140 years, it seems that only about thirty years ago his true whereabouts were discovered: he didn't become just one, not two, not three, but several "ghosts" — or "specters," to speak fancily — that remain "haunting" contemporary thought, as explained by Jacques Derrida in the most boring book I've read in 2024 so far (Specters of Marx, 1993).
***
Back to the game: similar to the group of friends in the movie The Descent, here you control an explorer (your helmet protects and conceals your true nature) who must enter the ruins of an abandoned past.
In our case, however, the past is unable to cause harm, at least not physically. And as we encounter these remnants, we are almost able to (re)experience a presence that is now absent—after all, it is the ruins of the castle itself that we are revisiting, returning from a post-diluvian world where civilization presumably managed to rise from the wreckage of its glorious past.
In a Derridean manner, and as the cultural debris we shattered on the stone altar (or would it be more appropriate to say that we "deconstructed" them?) also attests, everything becomes haunting—there's even this frequently pointed out phonetic correspondence between "hantologie" and "ontologie" in the original French. Hence, the reason why, for the historian, the ghost represents a moment of hesitation, a threat against the oath he promised to uphold: "down with counterfactuals," "away with this 'what if,'" he insists— "give me only the 'facts' and nothing else."
Meanwhile, the ghosts remain estranged: they are neither here nor there. Regardless, they no longer simply represent a memory of the past—often, in fact, they return to the present precisely to demand our stance toward the future.
And what can we, whether professional historians or not, do about our dead?
Well, we write—to begin with.
The French Jesuit Michel de Certeau, undoubtedly one of the most interesting polymaths of the 20th century, once framed the situation as follows: historical narrative not only imparts to the past its teleological sense, which practically makes it knowable, but also confers its own character of accomplished totality, that is, its "made-up" appearance of a plot; because of this, we could even add that the writing of history, this superficial construction that serves to conceal the always incomplete nature of our perception of reality, always retains something "strange" (Chklovski), if not "sublime" (Kant).
That's why Certeau identifies an extraordinary social, almost religious function in the writing of history: that of "burying the dead." The task of history, therefore, is to delimit the past, formalize its "reality," give it its own place—a unique tomb, so cozy that it discourages it from leaving to haunt us: in other words, History exists so that the present can be freely inhabited (The Writing of History, 1975).
Basically, Certeau is trying to say: by writing history, the historian is able to reconcile the opposites (present and past), as if "internalizing" (in discourse) the presence (of the past) that can no longer be present (material)—thus, this discourse produced by the historian, his science, performs (falsely) the past, as if it, the past, could speak for itself: as if it were an "event" (historical), a happening, a "ghost"—that is, a metaphor.
In the end, therefore, the cognitive value of the historiographical text lies in the historical experience, never solely in the cold "fact" expressed by the text—hence, knowing history is not enough; one must give meaning to this knowledge in the context of an experience at the phenomenological level of a specific historical consciousness (which Ankersmit situates within a kind of "intellectual empiricism," etc. blah blah).
***
And here we go back to the game. Once again.
Descending the castle towers—now you must descend them instead of ascending—you encounter another apparition. She says, "The danger is still present in our time, just as it was in theirs." But, after all, which time are we talking about?
Next, another ghost explains, "The foundations of this castle go very deep, much more than the memory of those who last lived here. Countless came before, each building upon the previous. The ocean draws a new horizon, but isn't it true that it still rests upon these stones?"
As cultural critic Fredric Jameson has written somewhere, the recurrence of narratives about mass extinctions is a cheeky reminder for us to ask, reflectively: "what if...?"
Every now and then, as Nietzsche suggested, all we need is a bit of forgetfulness. As another decaying body affirms, now in the deepest parts of the castle: "A new face for a new era."
But what is the limit of this forgetfulness?
If anything so far makes sense, I hope it's at least one thing: that within every sign, there are always traces of "others" absent, continuously haunting the present. Hence, my point follows in the following way: perhaps the "others" are us, here on the other side of history, cognitively engaged with a essentialy digital semiotic practice, doing no more than playing with our (historical) consciousness, shifting our perception from one point to another of the metaphor and vice versa, from the "figure" to the "ground," from the syntagm to the paradigm, etc. The insight is that the video game is, among other things, a discourse regulated by "syntagms" that immediately seem accessible to the player's consciousness, in a literal or metaphorical sense, but are effectively regulated by "absent paradigms" (Marc Angenot, 1979), in the most literal sense of the word: there is "absolutely nothing" outside the screen.
Outside the screen, then, the question remains: is there also nothing outside of (historical) consciousness? In this sense, we need to surpass Nietzsche and forgetfulness.
V. A future is possible: shoal (2018)
At this point, you must have understood that almost nothing is what it seems to be: that the train is not a train, that the castle is not a castle, that the wreckage is not wreckage, but only metaphorical ghosts.
Now, at the last point of our journey, all previous experiences return as if superimposed—you can hear the sway of the wagons, the rain splashing, the musical instruments resonating—all at once. We are once again where the castle once existed, and the harmony of these multiple historical layers seems to express, loudly and clearly: we have made peace with our dead, now we can celebrate. Our avatar no longer needs to wear a helmet, symbolizing that the present is inhabitable again.
A cat is waiting for us. He says: "Here we are once again; it's been a long time."
People are gathering to celebrate, but before we do that, we need to explore this new society, become aware of the extent of its transformation. Again, it's a navigator who tells us: "Long ago, a dense fog enveloped this land, the stars were taken away, the sky forgotten, the sun diluted... [and] people lost sight of everything around them, knowing only the stones at their feet. But now, the stars have been returned, lost futures have been rediscovered, and we are watchful of the fog so that we do not lose the stars again, and each other with them."
Just like the navigator, all the other characters also return from a new perspective. This time, the man with the coffee cup expresses the opposite of what he had expressed before when we first encountered him on the bridge; now he says: "The castle built in our image crumbled before the designs of nature. We must rebuild ourselves in these designs, in this image, or else: simply sink."
Much less proud of itself, humanity now maintains a harmonious relationship with nature, channeling the flow of waters (its ghosts) in a transformative way towards the future. Taking care of the gears, the guardian reflects: "Well maintained, these wheels can turn for centuries. But if the trees have different ideas, who are we to disagree?"
At the end of the journey, the avatar is once again in front of the cat, who asks the player: "In the end, it seems they succeeded, right? But does it all end here? Or does it begin once again?"
Regardless, the cat concludes: "It is not up to us to know the answer, so let's enjoy the festival." The last message of the game says: "The future awaits, as long as we remember" -- after all, we are humans, and our dead depend on us.
VI. Etc.
The commitment that video games historically maintained to the task of mimesis, that is, to the representation of reality, in many ways favored an incomplete understanding of its own expressive potential. For a large part of people who grew up playing in the context of the "console wars," especially between the 1990s and 2000s, the situation was always very clear: the more "realistic," the better. Therefore, games like "no destination," "the last days of our castle," "flotsam," "forgotten depths," and "shoal," with their fundamentally antithetical modes of expression in relation to the audiovisual "realism" of more commercial works, challenge the traditional definitions of what a video game is, ultimately requiring the creation of absurd labels like "poetic games."
The first to articulate the notion of a "game poem" significantly was the critic and game designer Ian Bogost (Persuasive Games: The expressive power of videogames, 2010), originally to explain why certain games are not boring but rather poetic. In this sense, Bogost observed that these games often draw the player's attention to their own formal structures, aiming to provoke specific reflections on the nature and operation of the game itself as an experience.
Another game designer, Jordan Magnuson, recently published a very interesting book precisely on this topic, Game Poems: Videogame Design as Lyric Practice (2023). As he astutely notes, "calling a game 'poetic' is often like admitting a lack of words rather than expressing a moment of special insight." Seeking to fill this gap, he attempts to define "game poems" from a perspective that understands poetry not as a specific media or literary form but as "a mode of intervention that can exist in any media," including digital games.
In a way, what Magnuson offers are elements for a "lyrical" analysis of certain games that would otherwise be undervalued (likely by those seeking a more "realistic" narrative experience).
Although I cannot fully embrace the category of "poetic game"—precisely because I consider it redundant—it is undeniable that many of these "game poems" shed new light on the issue of representation and reinforce the need to rethink video games as a poetic experience, beyond the ludic.
On my part, I would like to go further and argue that the ludic and the poetic correspond in many points—if Johan Huizinga is correct (and I think he is) and poetry indeed has much of play, the reverse is also true.
To conclude:
In one of the most brilliant passages of the film Waking Life (2001, Richard Linklater), the protagonist watches in the cinema as director Caveh Zahedi talks to poet David Jewell about the "holy moment," quoting director François Truffaut. "Cinema has a narrative because it is in time," says the original quote, "just like music has a narrative. But, you know, you don't first think of the story of music and then make the music. It has to come out of that moment. And that's what the film has. It's just that moment, which is holy."
For Truffaut, the best films are those that can break free from the literary prison of the script, conveying what we could call the film-in-itself, that is: that series of "holy moments" that the work intends to highlight from ordinary reality. And in multiple senses, I might add: this is also a kind of "cognitive estrangement," of "defamiliarization" (Chklovski). Moreover, I could complement: alongside the best films, the best games are those that can break free from the narrative prison, abandoning appearances to reach the essence of the game-in-itself, which is nothing more than the series of "holy moments" that are alternatively set in motion in the player's consciousness. And, guys, there's a lot of "holy moments" in these games here.