A lot of choice games have an ephemeral quality. If a work does not support saves, there is no way to get back to a previous passage without starting over. This used to bother me, as a person who grew up playing parser games. I wanted transcripts! I wanted to maintain twenty saved games with a hard-to understand naming convention!
I think this was occasionally reasonable. Games with a heavy mechanical emphasis or with fail states can get frustrating after a while. But most of the time, that wasn’t the case. I was just habituated to seeing any part of a text whenever I wanted. In a lot of cases, what I needed to do was try to embrace an aesthetic of ephemerality. Time is a one-way trip, and perhaps some works are best experienced that way.
As the Eye Can See
Skyshard
spoilers
Those of you who follow my work already know: my mother “passed away one week before Christmas, 2020, at the height of the COVID outbreak in the United States.” That being so, I experienced As the Eye Can See as a kind of terrible sweetness. This review isn’t about that, but it is an opportunity to question the concept of the “objective review,” in which audiences can supposedly experience things as blank slates, as empty vessels.
Thematically and structurally, As the Eye Can See is potently ephemeral. The past is slippery, mirage-like. Time moves forward with clarity, but the past is hard to access. There is something mournful about it sometimes, it comes to us as loss. It makes sense that we readers cannot flip back and reread an earlier passage; we only have our memories of them. Are they clear? Were we paying attention?
Were we paying attention to the right things.
I strongly feel that, as in all good poetry, its structure is its meaning, inseparable from its content.
Go back far enough, and the voice of a mother emerges from an unseen source. The memory is only the memory of a sound. It grows indistinct behind us. Can it remain ours? Can we hold onto it? I’m reminded of one of my favorite John Berryman lines: “Fall is grievy, brisk.”
I think there is more to say, but perhaps I am not the one to say it. Quite moving.