Development Blog

As I mentioned in the last post, a couple of weeks ago we had a nice little interview with Joshua from Pixels and Death. It just went online today!

During the interview, there was a section that went over some of the notions from Heidegger and Nietzsche that I’ve found very useful for creating the world and story, but this couldn’t be included in the article. Namely, what it means “for things to be” for each culture. If there’s any interest, I could post a link to that section, and maybe talk a bit about how this was brought into the world of the game. I find this kind of stuff very interesting, but I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. Let me know in the comments or otherwise.

Hope you like the interview!

Update (30-apr-2014): I’m copy-pasting a segment of the interview that deals with the stuff I mention above. I’m not sure I agree with it anymore (I wrote it about a year ago), and some of the wording and examples are not very good, but if you have any thoughts on this, let me know.

It feels odd to quote myself (as if I had actually said something worth the while), I apologise if it comes off as pretentious. Regarding a question about the game’s story:

…The belief of this epoch [today] is that we must strive for balance in order to get the best of both worlds, but I think we should rather seek to generate a conflict between two opposites, and make them overtake one another so that each one makes the other shine at its best. Seeking for a middle-point, or balance, usually just gives us the worst of both worlds.

What’s also interesting about the story is that it’s built from some of Heidegger’s and Nietzsche’s notions. There are epochs in the world of the game (the world is called Éatar), and each culture has its own historicity of being and disclosure of being. This means each culture has its own way of understanding itself in the world and, at the same time, it takes the world to be already a “something”. That is, it already assumes the world is something. And this changes from epoch to epoch. And what’s more interesting, they’re all “true”; they’re all perspectives of “reality”, assuming there’s no ultimate reality.

For instance, if you’re a christian (around Aquinas’ time), your understanding of your own being (‘being’ as a verb, not a noun) is that you were created by God, and the thing you must do with your life is try to find out why he made you and what purpose he has for you. That is the thing “one” does if you’re a christian from that time. “One” is not a hero (as with the Greeks), because heroes are sinners now. One is a saint, which were slaves with the Greeks.

But if you’re “one” from today, from this epoch (Heidegger calls it the epoch of technical nihilism), you think that there is nothing that ultimately grounds your life, and that you’re free to find your own meaning of it. All the things you encounter today, instead of wondering why God put them there, you know are there just because something happened before—and you might not care why. Things are meaningless in themselves. And you might treat those things as potential reserve: things that you can stash for later use. Look at what we do with electronics, or food. Our home is a huge stash-place. We do this with animals; we farm them and put them in reserve at supermarkets. We have museums with “art”-reserves.

Even our own things, our clothes, even the people we meet, we put them in reserve until we need them. That’s where this interview’s going. We go about trying to find good use for our “stuff” depending on the situation. This, of course, happens in the background, and it only works if you don’t notice it happening. Also, there’s nothing inherently wrong with taking reality to be whatever your epoch takes it to be. It just means you’re able to see some things some cultures weren’t able to see, and you can’t see anymore some things other epochs were able to see quite well.

So, with this in mind, it’s interesting to experiment with how some cultures might not understand each other, and might get in conflict with each other simply from their different groundings or understandings of themselves in-the-world. A video-game medium gives you the opportunity to add very little details (such as sidequests, small characters and the like) that would otherwise be excessive in film. And, sometimes, the details add a lot to the general content. This is another reason why I think this story might have something new to bring to the genre. But it will be interesting to see if all this is actually visible to players. I’ve prohibited myself from lecturing the player, so it all comes down to characters and their actions…