Dispatch #2: On Longing
How long can this last without actually acquiring the game?
This is the second dispatch in my series on the video game Xenoblade Chronicles X. To read from the beginning, check out the link below:
Now I must be upfront: to date, your correspondent has failed to acquire the game in question, despite the passing of some weeks. An unorthodox approach, to be sure. Is this becoming a shaggy dog chronicle? Does the game even exist? Is this all just a Xeno fever dream?
I had been planning to say that I was simply too busy, but that wouldn’t be strictly true.
Friends, I stood before the game.
I had gone to a physical shop for this (rather than the simpler recourse of buying online) because the larger part of the purchase was to be covered by a gift voucher. I easily located the object of my desire, in its own display stand with a couple of dozen copies of the same game, all shimmering in the fluorescent lighting that bounced crassly off their cellophane wrappings. And I hesitated.
In
’s All Things Are Full of Gods, an immortal’s decision as to whether to pluck a perfect rose from its rosebush or leave it well alone prompts a week-long discourse on mind, matter and the irreducibility thereof. My own indecision, I regret, did not inspire a newfound appreciation for the majesty and mystery of my own human agency. No, the immortals of my imagination discoursed less eloquently, their bon mots mainly along the lines of ‘sixty euros is a bit bloody steep.’ (Or, in the parlance of Dave Bentley Hart, ‘the levy, some sixty coin strong, is indeed a burden très lourd.’)And to give the gods their due, it was a bit more than I had thought: in the constrained budget of a newborn baby, the purchase felt more than a little decadent. This was not helped by the fact that my other half had earlier sought my blessing over her acquisition of a pair of trousers at half the price. I was starting to feel uncomfortably like some foppish minor aristocrat, spending the dwindling family gold on fripperies in town while his hardworking better half toils in rags.
There may have been something, too, in the naked capitalism of it all - those identical plastic game covers each with an identical mech surveying an identical fantasy landscape under identical gunmetal clouds.
And, more practically, the fact that my chances of spending any time with this game in the immediate future are very much pegged to the sleeping schedule of the aforementioned newborn, mean the cover art might as well have featured a magic eight ball with ‘outlook not so good’ peering mockingly through the gloom.
But acquire the game I shall, God willing, when the times are more auspicious. This is almost certainly the last update on the series until I do: writing twice on a game I’ve never played already constitutes a sizeable loan from the Bank of Chutzpah and I lack the credit for a third run around the block.
The promise of worlds
Practical reasons notwithstanding, perhaps there was something else that stayed my consumerist hand. What I encountered in that shop was, over and above the aforementioned, a particularly acute case of coming down to earth with a bump. It was the sublime promise of an experience, as related by breathless reviews, versus the bathos of those mass-produced and unremarkable plastic boxes.
In my youth there was an animated TV spinoff from the original Jumanji film (a film which, you may recall, saw hapless players of a mysterious board game unwittingly visit assorted perils from another world upon our own). From memory the cartoon itself was just so-so, but a strange thing happened every time the end credits came up. To the strains of some epic and beguiling music, the names rolled next to fantastical hand-drawn images on yellowing paper: strangely altered elephants dressed for battle, outlandish buildings, war machines and the like. In a way the series itself could not achieve, those pencil drawings in the closing moments gave a tantalising glimpse into an ancient and fully-realised world, more real than reality. I couldn’t understand why, but it gave a glimmer of something indescribable that seemed to speak directly to my soul.
As I grew up and into adulthood I would catch the glimmer again in various forms. The aching soul cry of Beethoven’s 7th symphony. The otherworldly yearning of Borodin’s On the Steppes of Central Asia. The melancholy soaring of Chen Gang and He Zhanhao’s Butterfly Lovers. Coleridge’s evocative Kubilai Khan, and those ‘ancestral voices prophesying war’. Fog-shrouded Chinese scroll paintings of mountain heights; as much about what lies undepicted in the white void as in the beautifully inked details.
C.S. Lewis used the word Joy in his own technical sense for this experience of strange yearning:
It was a sensation, of course, of desire; but desire for what?… before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased. It had taken only a moment of time; and in a certain sense everything else that had ever happened to me was insignificant in comparison.
— C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy
As I write, a little Mech-shaped devil on my shoulder scoffs sardonically, “We are talking about a video game?”. And it’s true that there is something sort of incongruous about the whole thing. Video games that seem to promise an epic if not transcendental experience are inevitably mediated through plastic controllers and a little onscreen character taking its cue from the unceremonious wiggle of a joystick. In all likelihood, as with the cartoon Jumanji, the full-colour exploits will fail to live up to the pencil sketch promises.
And yet we strive onwards, in pursuit of that glimmer — the brave new worlds, the high-stakes quests, the fellow adventurers. Join me for the next edition as I finally get my hands on a copy of the game (and this time get it all the way to the counter to complete the purchase). Then time will tell whether the elusive glimmer is to be found in the glowing horizons of the Xenoblade world, or if it’s nothing more than refracted strip lighting on joyless cellophane wrapping.