shoal

PART 1

Well, what follows are some of the main reflections that this series of vignettes has prompted me to ponder over the past few days. I played them all in sequence for the first time at the beginning of this year, but only now have I managed to put (almost) everything that these experiences set in motion within me into place.

I've made the notes in chronological order, from the first to the last game. To avoid any interference with the experience of other players, they all go here on the page of the final game.

As I originally wrote in my native language, and then retranslated into English, some original quotes may sound somewhat altered, anyway.

Let's go.

I. A purgatory of abandoned memories: no destination (2017)

Imagine yourself back in the 19th century when railroads were still a novelty. In the distance, you hear the whistle of a train, rapidly approaching, carrying with it all the dreams of Progress. Interrupting the natural silence of the fields, the whistle sounds like a shout, that typically bourgeois and liberal intonation—it says, "I've arrived, damn it, I've arrived!"

Such was the utopian force of the modernizing spirit of Progress. As highlighted by the historian and literary critic Leo Marx in his book "The Machine in the Garden" (1964), in the 19th century, "no one needed to spell out the idea of Progress to Americans. They could see it, hear it, and in a sense, feel it as the idea of history closest to the growing rhythm of life."

In 1846, the American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson would express a similar sentiment in his journal: "I hear the whistle of the locomotive in the woods. Whenever that music comes, the sequence comes next. It is the voice of the civilization of the 19th century saying, 'Here I am.' It is interrogative; it is prophetic, and this Cassandra is believed: 'Phew! Phew! Phew! How is the real estate market here in the swamp and the jungle? Let's go to Boston! Phew! Phew! Phew!... I will plant a dozen houses in this pasture next month, and a village soon...'." In a much more emphatic and grandiloquent manner, the sensationalist engineer of Fernando Pessoa, Álvaro de Campos, would assert in the final verses of his "Triumphal Ode," written in the same month as the outbreak of World War I, in July 1914: "Hup-la, hup-la, hup-la-ho, hup-la! He-la! He-ho Ho-o-o-o-o! Z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z!"

Then, in an instant, the train departs—and you with it.

***

The train seems to move through complete emptiness.

Thus, Modernity shapes a new temporality, expressed in our accelerated relationship with space-time.

In this sense, the railway serves perfectly as a metaphor for Progress, encompassing the key vectors of an expansive capitalism: the speed and force of the machine, the triumph of human ingenuity over relentless nature, the 'civilized' versus the 'wild,' exploration, colonization, and the shrinking of space, and so on.

In a certain sense, the disturbing sound and constant rumble of the wheels on the tracks have already been naturalized. Unlike the overcrowded train you usually take to reach downtown, this train is navigable—meaning, habitable. So, you decide to interrogate each passenger, peep through each window.

Seeing the mountains looming on a still-distant horizon, you hear a hooded guy say, 'For centuries, we gazed at the stars, dreaming that one day we could look down again; but the mountains are not the place to thrive.'"

Nevertheless, the mountains are tall: they surpass the clouds and almost touch the stars.

However, upon getting a bit closer, you realize that the clouds might not be clouds but rather the smoke from the chimneys of a bustling city, nestled between the sea and the mountains. An elderly man in a hat explains, "We couldn't make peace with the ebb and flow, and we sank further at the edges; will we rise again?"

Suddenly, once again, the train departs — but now you are alone above the clouds, heading towards the stars. Only one question still echoes in your mind: "who will remember?"

II. On the precipice of a reckoning: the last days of our castle (2017)

Now, I recall another one by Pessoa, the portuguese poet: 

"Oh salty sea, how much of your salt
Are tears of Portugal!"

Comparing the turbulent sea to the tears of Portuguese widows, no one can deny that Pessoa enriched the possible senses for both the sea and tears. Because metaphors exist, it's easy to understand that language is a "living" thing, as they like to say: through an infinite reformulation of familiar words, new meanings can always be (and will be) constituted.

Just as that train was not really a train but a metaphor for Progress, this castle where you find yourself now is not really a castle but a metaphor for the inevitable fact that time brings everything down.

The only inhabitants still lingering in the castle are a few cats who, being here to retell a tale of past glories and present ruins, progressively contextualize your presence in this place of abandoned dreams.

Somewhat tragically, one of the cats observes, "We built with insatiable lust, enchanted by the fury of our own impulse; but these stones were not ours to build, and now that fury turns against us multiplied tenfold." Further along, another cat says to you: "This castle must be revered; it falls like a martyr."

By this point, you've likely realized that the castle relates in a non-trivial way to the message the cats are trying to convey, as if a hidden truth about the nature of historical time itself is at stake.

Often, this is precisely what metaphor accomplishes: it transforms a subjective referent into something more concrete using other, more objective referents.

While the two-dimensional exploration of the castle doesn't pose a cognitive challenge to the player, encounters with the cats eventually prove the impossibility of a meaningful interpretation of the game without a conscious juxtaposition of text reading with fictional world exploration. As new information is added to the player's repertoire, the abstract representation that the castle seemingly conveyed becomes progressively more concrete— even if its concretization, at the end of the process, signifies the realization that the castle is not literally a castle but an intangible metaphor about something that, only abstractly, can represent the solidity of civilization's legacy.

As the saying goes, one thing leads to another— and when you're close to reaching the top of the tallest tower, finally, the metaphor embodied by the castle gains an even more palpable relief when another metaphor comes into play: rain as a representation of time.

Thus, the poetic intervention that the game performs is very similar to that carried out by Pessoa in "Portuguese Sea," when the poet equated the sea to the tears of Portuguese widows: just as the sea is not literally made of tears but constitutes one (or perhaps the greatest) of the reasons to cry, rain is also not literally time but an expression of its entropic action on all matter.

The castle and the rain are the most evident metaphors in the game, which does not imply that they are the only ones:

a) On the audiovisual presentation level, the juxtaposition of the minimalist pixel art style with the aristocratic imagery of medieval European nobility highlights the mutual interference between multiple temporalities (in the sense of being-in-time) that are part of our diffuse relationship with historical past;

b) On the gameplay level — and this can be said about any game — all the most basic logical operations, such as moving the avatar's sprite across the screen, raise to a greater or lesser extent some foundational philosophical questions about the player's agency within the game's universe. In the case of avatar movement, the physical action of pressing the button corresponds to the illusion of locomotion, as if "you" yourself were moving across the screen, based on a metaphor that equates the transformation of pixels on the screen to the subjective projection that the player invests in the avatar figure.

Note that this relationship favors a specific expectation in terms of gameplay, which means that poetic intervention can emerge from its defamiliarization (Alex Mitchell has been associating Viktor Chklovski's "estrangement" with the analysis of video games for over 10 years. However, for Mitchell, estrangement is not a universal quality of the medium but rather a specific technique that certain games employ).

Undoubtedly, the most "strange" moment occurs in the last screen of the castle when the world is almost completely flooded. At this point in the game, the sea level starts to rise according to the avatar's steps on the screen until the waters finally take over the entire space. The situation is defamiliarizing, especially because it forces the player, for the first time in the journey, to reflect on the impact of their actions. By subordinating the rhythm of time - its flow - to the player's agency, the interpretative process that was aroused at the beginning of the gameplay can finally be concluded with the realization that, although the player is free (including not to act), an irresistible force compels them to keep moving - ultimately prompting reflection on their own relationship with historical time outside the game world.

III. Relics of the old world haunt the shores: flotsam (2017)

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in 1874: "European super-proud man of the nineteenth century, you are beside yourself! [...] Compare, at least once, your height, as a man of knowledge, with your baseness as a man of action" (Unfashionable Observations, Second Consideration; forgive any translation errors). For the Prussian philosopher, the primary target of this denunciation was the "poison" of historicism, as he called it, whose ultimate synthesis took the form of Hegelian Absolute Spirit, the "God created by history". The discipline of history, as we know it, was undergoing a process of scientification, with significant figures like the also Prussian Leopold von Ranke laying the foundations of historiographical method and criticism. Thus, confronted with a Weltanschauung ("worldview") deeply numbed by the "power of history" and immobilized by the "idolatry of the fact," Nietzsche suggested, in a practical and ethical sense, that it might be a good idea to set aside the "fact" and try to forget things a bit: after all, why should we be aware that there was a "past" in the first place? Why not try to live "a-historically," at least from time to time, like a sheep frolicking around, irrationally happy, without future or past? To forget, therefore, is the remedy Nietzsche offers to the history-saturated consciousness that ails the modern subject.

I speak of Nietzsche only to introduce the question of historical consciousness, but what I really want to talk about is the sublime of History, about this experience that gives meaning to the very questions like "should I really care about the past?", which underlie that even deeper question: "what is the place of the past in the present, that is, how does it remain alive in my consciousness?"

For Immanuel Kant, as established in his Critique of Judgment (1790), the sublime is felt whenever the normal exercise of the categories of understanding fails to provide an adequate representation of experience, giving rise to a spontaneous association between reason and imagination. In the 21st century, philosopher and historian F. R. Ankersmit will assert that this conception of "sublime historical experience," understood as an anthropological condition, is at the basis of all possible historical consciousness, preceding even "all questions of historical truth and falsehood" (Sublime Historical Experience, 2005).

Basically, Ankersmit is saying: first, we feel history, then we write about it, question its truth, its plausibility, etc.

Here, another question unexpectedly arises before us: how does language determine our relationship with the past? Or, as Ankersmit asked – "Can we rescue the past itself from the way we talk about it?" Far from attempting to offer any unequivocal answer to Ankersmit's question, I feel safe to say at least that these games here are not committed to a faithful representation of historical past but precisely to a reflection on the nature and purpose of historical experience itself, as nuanced by historical consciousness and experienced through historical sublime – the greatest proof of this being the highly metaphorical nature of all the games, where a train is not a train, a castle is not a castle, and, as we will see, maritime wreckage ('flotsam') is not really wreckage.

***

One day, or night, in an undetermined future time (or even past, as time is not measured here in the same way), humanity thrives upon a completely flooded world.

On a stone altar rests an ornate hammer. A lady hands you a locket. With the ornate hammer, upon the stone altar, you destroy the object — the woman does not react. "My burden has been lifted," she says, "but there is still more for you to do"

Nearby, there is a navigator who tells you, "If only I could gaze at the stars!". Further on, a custodian exclaims while polishing a stone wall, "A monument to our glory!".

Next to the custodian, you pick up a lens and a broom. Back at the stone altar, you strike the objects with the ornate hammer — the navigator appears relieved; the custodian exclaims in dismay. "The stars show us the way: our path through time, our path through space," says the navigator, "But they are gone, and our path leads elsewhere; thank you."

There are still other objects to be destroyed, other spirits to be exorcised: a violin bow, a sign of abstract arts and immaterial culture; a plumb bob, a sign of mathematical arts and material culture; an old ring, a sign of forgotten nobility; a metal bead, a sign of artifice and human ingenuity.

On the bridge, literally suspended over time — that is, over the sea —, a person sips their cup of coffee. They tell you, "Time and tide may bring down our works, but we will continue to build; isn't it beautiful?"

Thus, through successive interactions between the ornate hammer, the stone altar, and the objects representing the multiple dimensions of human culture, you gain access to the main tower, where you must finally bring down the very ontology of this world — and here, by chance, I can't help but think of Nietzsche and his other book, Twilight of the Idols (1888), whose subtitle is "How to Philosophize with a Hammer": his definitive attack against the major metaphysical illusions of the Western world.

Lovely! Need to check: are there only the four characters and no end screen? The last bit of dialog reads as final, but I'm not sure if I messed up or am missing something