I
Two of the greatest games of all time, Disco Elysium and Final Fantasy VII, set perhaps their most memorable scenes on a playground.
Both playgrounds are ironic. FFVII’s is a playground stashed in the wasteland slums of a brutalized city; Disco’s is trapped in the post-Soviet ruins of Revachol. Neither city, and therefore neither playground, is really a place for children at all. (The most notable child in Disco Elysium, Cuno, is not exactly the playing-on-the-playground type; rather, he helps tutorialize Disco’s innovative mechanics through his capacity to call you slurs until you literally die.)
And your characters in both are definitively no longer children. FFVII’s Cloud is possibly the most adolescent game protagonist of all time, and Disco’s protagonist (whose name you do not learn until partway through the game) is almost certainly the most middle-aged. In no small part, both games are about learning to inhabit a stage of life you did not enter gracefully and do not want to be in. They are games about how hard it is to learn how not to be a child.
II
Both FFVII and Disco are also games about games. Each is attempting to metabolize the histories of their particular subgenres: with FFVII, the studio which helped invent and codify the JRPG, must now bring the genre into an entirely new technical domain; in Disco’s case, a small team of writerly Estonian developers are attempting to wring new levels of expressivity from every classic CRPG mechanic they can find.
Each of these games is a contender for my favorite of all time, but neither is especially “fun” – at least not in the sense that, say, Mario Kart is fun. In both cases, this is thematically appropriate. FFVII is a game, crammed with broken minigames and long-winded, clunky combat, about a cadre of freaks led by a moody and intermittently psychotic young man who is not nearly as powerful as he wants to believe. And Disco’s gameplay persuasively puts you in the shoes (assuming you can find them) of someone who sucks so much at being alive that he can die from looking in the mirror.
Both, however, are unabashedly games. FFVII is utterly in love with the fact that it’s a videogame. (I can’t think of an RPG as giddily stoned on the history and possibilities of video games until NieR: Automata.) Each of its annoying minigames can be frustrating in its own right, but taken together they convey a kind of ecstatic enthusiasm for the technical and expressive capacities of the then-new PlayStation, with its fancy soundfonts and beautiful backgrounds and sweeping camera angles and a quantity of disc storage that can contain, for example, a whole-ass busted tower defense game. And like its predecessor Final Fantasy IV, FFVII knows that gameplay is a way of getting us invested in characters and their world. We steer them around, urge them to talk to NPCs, decide how they will conduct themselves in combat: we roleplay as them.
And Disco Elysium derives its power from how much meaning it is able to wring from old RPG ideas like character builds and stat rolls. Disco understands that the reason we roll dice in tabletop games is to simulate chance, and it understands that chance is the terrible engine of human life: what makes everything possible and brings everything down. The game understands that a “character build” in a CRPG is a way of representing the fact that each human person is, in a real sense, composed of a specific and limited set of strengths and weaknesses, of these and not those capacities and beliefs. Disco drags this metaphorical structure into a world much more like ours. A real person in real life might not be a druid healer, but they might be a clinically paranoid Communist. Characters have builds because no one person can be everyone; the game understands that this limit is both tragic and generative. We are finite: we cannot be everything, but we can try our best to become the best version of what it is we can be.
III
So: the playgrounds. In Disco, you’re on the playground because you’re waiting for the pond to recede to reveal the car your character totaled before the game started. Importantly, you—the player—don’t have any control over whether or not the car was totaled. Your character did it before you took over. By the time the game has started, it is part of his condition, a condition you are attempting to navigate. Even if, as some have argued (https://academic.oup.com/book/32137), a game is a work of art constructed from the medium of agency, you didn’t have agency over the decision (“decision”) to total your car; and you don’t have agency on the playground, because waiting triggers a cutscene.
Cutscenes! People hate cutscenes. Why? Because they strip players of agency. Instead of doing stuff, you have to sit there and watch. I am a relatively patient person when it comes to art (I didn’t ever really get annoyed at FFVII, to be honest), but unless a cutscene is fantastic, I’m almost always tempted to skip it and get back to the agential part.
Luckily, this is a fantastic cutscene. You have to wait to see the damage you (the character) did, back when you were out of your mind, and the game makes you (the player) wait to see it. You (the character) wait by sitting on a swing, a swing you’re too big for: a game you’ve outgrown; you (the player) wait by watching your avatar sit on a swing, playing a game like the games you might’ve played when you were a child. But you aren’t a child anymore. The limits imposed by the passage of time—time you wasted; time you spent doing things you regret—have made an old mode of play impossible.
But something happens while you’re waiting. You share the moment with Kim, your stalwart, weary partner, probably the best sidekick character in the history of games. It’s a genuinely transcendent moment, this cutscene, and it’s precisely because you cannot play as you once did: because you have been forced to do something else. Because you are too old for the playground, the playground gets to mean something else. The game gets to mean something else.
IV
In FFVII, protagonist Cloud has just met Aerith. (Spoilers for FFVII ensue!)
Aerith is almost always described as Cloud’s romantic interest, the last corner of a love triangle between herself, Cloud, and Cloud’s childhood friend Tifa. I guess this is true enough. There’s undeniably a spark of some kind between Cloud and Aerith; their interactions on the playground, like others they have, are blatantly flirty.
Still, romance is not, to my mind, Aerith’s ultimate structural or emotional role in the narrative. Aerith’s death isn’t sad because Cloud might have married her. The eventual romance with Tifa feels both appropriate and inevitable. I tend to think Cloud loves Aerith because he can’t but love Aerith, because everyone loves Aerith. Her presence compels love—not through power or will, but because she represents, in a literal sense, the possibility of the world, of its continuance in the face of all-encompassing environmental catastrophe, and without the world, love is impossible. This is her structural role in the game.
Within the game’s mythology, Aerith is the last of the Ancients, the only being intrinsically capable of restoring the dying planet to health and wholeness. It’s for this reason that the area around her house is the only area in Midgar capable of supporting growth and life; she makes a living by selling the flowers she grows there. (While I wouldn’t necessarily call FFVII children’s art, the game, like the best fantasy written for children, brings its symbolism so close to the surface that the whole thing accumulates a strange, tangential grandeur, one completely out of proportion to the material itself. It’s why you wind up sounding as insane as I sound right now when talking about a game that looks like some Michelin men walking around a diorama or whatever. Or at least I tell myself it’s why I sound this insane.)
This conceit—that Aerith embodies the possibility that the world could continue—literalizes something true about human relationality, which is we construct our sense of what is possible through and with others. To love someone is to love the world they show you, the world they are; a world at once present and future; the world the world is and could be—and when they die, they take that world with them. When you lose someone important to you (and so many people are important to each of us), the world shrinks. Less is now possible than it was. And because we are made not only of what is actual but also of what is possible—because what might be (or what is, but elsewhere) is as constitutive of ourselves as anything in our tangible day-to-day lives—a part of us is snuffed out when they die, too. We are no longer possible in the ways we once were. The world we knew, as we knew it, has ended; the world we looked forward to is closed to us, forever.
V
The world as we knew it. Video games are supposed to be sites of immersion and play: the stuff kids do. I don’t think childhood is some enchanted thing—in my experience, being an adult is better in most ways—but it’s impossible to deny that adulthood brings with it a different mode of self-awareness, a breadth of experience which can crowd out its depth. We’ve done so many things so many times. We’ve judged and been judged. We’ve probably lost places, loved ones—worlds—in the years since childhood. (Ralph Waldo Emerson: “After thirty, a man wakes up sad every morning, excepting perhaps five or six, until the day of his death.”)
FFVII and Disco Elysium each arose from a different moment in which video games were figuring out what they could be. At the time of FFVII, console video games in particular were weird, liminal things: the Famicom came out in 1983, and the PlayStation came out in 1994, meaning ten-year-olds who’d gotten the Famicom near release were adults, with adult responsibilities. They hadn’t necessarily put games away forever, but—in a way that is foreign to us now—it seemed they might.
While the market had stabilized by the time of Disco, the game itself was far from a guaranteed proposition. There wasn’t really anything like it before it existed. The game straddles a line between artier writing-first indie games and big-tent RPG releases. It was set in a secondary world not rooted in Dune or Tolkien, but which instead threw together the rich, seedy urban setting of Planescape: Torment with “bootleg Finnish D&D” modules and noir detective books and Soviet science fiction. It was a gambit, an attempt to push a medium forward, and it’s still surprising to me on some level that it performed commercially as well as it did. Both FFVII and Disco were uncertain efforts to make games something they hadn’t been. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that both games are about self-consciousness.
VI
As someone who got into video games in my late twenties, after a lengthy season of agonized, thwarted striving, I still experience a great deal of guilt and shame about “wasting my time” on video games. I mean, I’d be lying if I said this shame didn’t partially motivate me to start writing these posts. At least writing, I figured, would allow me to convert a totally profligate pastime into something “worthwhile.” Sometimes when I’m playing a game the thought flashes through my mind that I will regret having spent so much time on them. I imagine myself lying on my deathbed, ruefully contemplating the thousands of hours I’ve logged on Steam.
One of the lessons of my adult life it’s been hardest to learn is that I am a very limited person, capable of relatively few things. I think this is true of everyone, but it feels acutely true for me. I don’t work hard enough. I’m not active enough in my community. I don’t reach out enough to my friends. I’m very easily overwhelmed. I don’t have a lot of energy. It takes immense effort just to get basic, precarious routines in place, and these routines fall apart at the slightest touch. I’m bad about doing the things I’m good at and terrible at doing the things I’m bad at. I disappoint myself many times a day. I waste time.
Beating yourself up serves many psychological functions, but one of them is that you get to disidentify with the part of you that is disappointing. This is why it can be harder to realize it is okay to fail than to hate yourself for failing. When you beat yourself up for failing, you retain a kind of identificatory independence from the part of you that failed. I’m not the stupid child part of me who wants to play video games all day! I’m the wise, productive adult part, the part which understands that such pastimes are frivolous. The stupid goof is the part that my true self is whipping into shape.
But no matter how deeply we try to inhabit our self-loathing, how lovingly we cultivate our self-directed negativity, we don’t get off the hook that easily. If our haranguing worked—if we were fully coterminous with our “better” selves—it wouldn’t hurt. Unfortunately, the failure remains obstinately actual. No matter how full-throated my self-denunciations, the silly frivolous part of me doesn’t go away.
The only way out is through. I’ve grown into my limits a lot in the last year in particular. I feel livelier and more capable than I ever have. People, including me, are capable of changing; I’ve felt that change and I believe in it. But there’s a grief that comes with acknowledging that you don’t get to identify wholly with the voice in your head beating yourself up. You can’t outrun the part of you that’s failed.
VII
Both FFVII and Disco Elysium are games about realizing the bad part of yourself is you, in the same way that the part of yourself you like is you. We are all we are, including the bullshit we hate. You cannot lie (FFVII) or drink (Disco) yourself away.
One of the reasons I love video games so much is that you can’t justify them on other terms. Because I came from a more “literary” background, I used to privilege games that were narratively sophisticated (like FFVII and Disco) over more mechanically-oriented games. I’ve since come to regard that hierarchy as bullshit. (As I’ve spent more time in Games World, I’d say this idea’s inverse—that narratives are basically superfluous—has a lot more currency generally, and is equally silly.) The lightness, intricacy, and singularity of a game like Spelunky (or Asteroids, or whatever) feels as aesthetically worthwhile to me as the narrative ambition of, say, NieR: Automata.