Cable television, on the whole, baffles me. Twenty years ago, the joke went that there’s fifty channels and nothing good’s ever on. Now it’s one-thousand channels. You do stumble on something great here and there, though. For example, I watched three episodes of Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern this past weekend. The deal is that chef Zimmern travels all over the earth and eats every bizarre local delicacy he can get his hands on. It is awesome. In one episode, he went to Iceland, and dined on puffin. I was fascinated. Not by the unusual choice of fowl, but by the process and ritual behind how puffins are hunted. Puffin hunting is apparently an old, Icelandic father-son bonding tradition. The men go out to one of the insanely remote islands where puffins nest and they catch them with small nets on the end of giant poles. It’s all they eat for days. They hunt on the edge of huge cliffs beside the ocean.
Naturally, this got me thinking about videogames.
Persona 4 is coming out in the United States in December. The Personas, and every title in their parent franchise Shin Megami Tensei, are intensely Japanese games, steeped in religious iconography distinct to the archipelago. The games’ common motif, modern urban Japan, is foreign but still familiar thanks to the way Japan is commonly depicted in western media. People think of Tokyo when they think of Japan. Persona 4, however, is going to be as alien to the average American as puffin hunting. The game is set in rural Japan, a choice intended to evoke nostalgia according to the developers. But how do you translate that idiosyncratic experience to a player who isn’t Japanese?
The nostalgia, the image of a simpler life meant to recall summer vacations and innocence for Japanese Persona players, can carry over to anyone in the world because the game can put them there, in that place, and let them explore. The emotional tone can be influenced by visual and aural cues and then the player can experience it for themselves. Andrew Zimmern showed me Icelandic tradition, he explained its history to me. But he couldn’t let me feel it, touch that place.
I can see a game.
I could press start and be me. I’m in New York, but I decide to move to Iceland. I need a change. So I have to find transport. I find a plane, I find a boat, I find a way to get there. Then I make my life. Get a little of that Will Wright, Sims action here. Let me find a home, find work, learn the language, find a wife. Let me get to the halfway point and have a son. Then have the whole game shift gears, go from sim to adventure game. Let the game be about my great-grandson living his life. He could bring my great-great-grandson puffin hunting.
This is what games can do. The experience of a culture, the experience of a place, an experience most likely cut-off from you, can be touched. Not read about, not seen. Touched.
Isn’t that exciting?
Related links:
Yeah, But Is It Art?: Persona 3 FES
The Ten Videogames That Should Have Been Controversial