The
pandemic has brought us many works of art that have tried to definitively
capture humanity’s struggle. There was that movie with
Leonardo DiCaprio
turning pink as he shouts at the top of his lungs for people to look up at the
comet hurtling toward Earth. It was so on the nose that it provoked little
thought: Yes, we are divided, likely doomed. What of it?
اضافة اعلان
No medium has
come as close to perfectly encapsulating our situation as video games.
In the beginning,
when many of us were in lockdown, we played Animal Crossing, which involves
finding comfort in simple tasks like fishing and gardening while stranded on an
island. This year, we are playing Elden Ring, a ruthlessly difficult game that
gets only harder the more you play it.
That about sums
up what it’s been like to live in a pandemic.
Elden Ring has a
story that has something to do with a ring, but more important is its design:
It’s an open-world game, meaning you can do whatever, whenever you want.
Players will ride a horse through a poison swamp, sprint across molten lava,
and traverse a crumbling bridge surrounded by tornadoes, fighting, or evading
enemies along the way.
No matter what
you choose to do, you will probably die again and again trying to do it,
sometimes for hours. That’s because the slightest mistiming of a button press
will make you fall to your death or open you to attack. Even the most
experienced gamers will die dozens of times in a dungeon before reaching the
boss — the main villain at the end of a game level.
None of this
makes
Elden Ring sound like a crowd-pleaser, but the video game — a
collaboration between creative director Hidetaka Miyazaki and “Game of Thrones”
author George R.R. Martin — is on track to become the bestseller of the year,
with 12 million copies sold within a month of its release in February.
At some point in
the game, you face a dragon. You have a choice to fight or flee. At first, you
will probably retreat, and eventually, after acquiring enough strength and the
proper weapon or magic spell, you will return to slay the dastardly
fire-breather and relish your victory. Moments later, though, you will be
ambushed and killed by something nasty, like a hawk that’s gripping razor
blades in its talons.
It’s difficult to
imagine Elden Ring having this sort of cultural cachet in any other era. In the
third year of the pandemic, as vaccination rates have risen and hospitalization
cases have dipped in some areas, offices, schools, and restaurants have
reopened. To many, the dragon has been slain. Yet to others, a new variant of
the coronavirus is driving another wave.
As some of us let
our guard down to have some semblance of a normal life, we are bracing
ourselves for that stupid bird around the corner that still might kill us. Our
hard-learned lesson of the pandemic — to expect disappointment and more
struggle — has trained us well for Elden Ring.
Where the
DiCaprio movie, “
Don’t Look Up,” was polarizing because it picked a side that
criticized anyone in denial of the apocalypse, Elden Ring’s
choose-your-own-adventure format is more inclusive for a populace that cannot seem
to agree on anything. In Elden Ring, there is no right or wrong.
To defeat a boss,
you can carefully study its moves and plan an attack, or you can “cheese” it
with a cheap trick that requires no skill and ensures victory. Either way, a
win is a win, and this flexibility can resonate with players worldwide and
bring them together.
Players mostly
suffer through Elden Ring alone, but there are parts so difficult that people
will need to get help from others online. To accommodate this, the game erects
small statues in challenging areas that act as summoning posts to bring in a
cooperator. Once the mission is complete, the good Samaritan disappears.
Struggle has
always been a central theme in the games of Miyazaki, but so is the need for
people to turn to one another.
Miyazaki, has
said in interviews that he was inspired by a personal experience many years ago
when he was driving up a snow-covered hill. A car in front of him got stuck,
and so did he, and one behind him, but then another car in the back drove
forward and started pushing the third car. Similar assistance eventually got
everyone over the hill.
“We come into
each other’s lives for a minute and disappear and still make an impact,” said
Keza MacDonald, the video games editor for The Guardian and author of “You
Died,” a book about Miyazaki’s games. “It’s not really one player versus the
game. It’s the entire community of players versus the game.”
Many of us have endured
the pandemic alone because restrictions and health risks make it difficult to
travel and gather indoors. It has been an impossible situation to navigate, and
the struggle goes on, but we’re in this together for the long haul. Why not
turn to one another?
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