Cookie Consent by FreePrivacyPolicy.com
JAAAS logo

Articles

Vol. 2 No. 2 (2021): Mediating Mountains

Thereness: Video Game Mountains as Limits of Interactivity

Submitted
May 19, 2020
Published
2021-06-30

Abstract

This article theorizes the abstract quality of "thereness," or a challenging presence that both invites and resists being engaged by humans, which is central to the ludic and symbolic function of a number of related video games in recent years. I will discuss games that deliberately resist the mimetic approach of an ever-increasing "realism" in this popular medium but rather explore the allegorical aspects of the mountains, notably without turning them into "mere" metaphors but insisting on their own distinct existence as something beyond ourselves. As virtual mountains that are not really to be played with, they invite a philosophical, cultural, and aesthetic interpretation as human mediations of what resists both mediation and the human, as something always just beyond our full cognitive and epistemological grasp, a limit rather than an object of our consciousness. I will discuss how games such as Celeste (2018), Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy (2017), and Mountain (2014) use their unique audiovisual, tactile, and ludic qualities to convey this elusive "thereness" of the mountain as something that both challenges and rejects human interaction. Instead of offering their players the fantasy of power and control that so often underlies contemporary video games, these games evoke the otherness of mountains to take their players to the limits of interactivity within a medium that is fundamentally defined by this very interactivity.

References

  1. Barker, Tim, and Conor McKeown. “Unearthing Techno-Ecology: On the Possibility of a Technical Media Philosophy of Ecology.” Digital Culture & Society 1, no. 1 (2015): 21-37. https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/636
  2. Beaulieu, Braydon. “Conceptualizing Mountain.” First Person Scholar. March 2, 2016. http://www.firstpersonscholar.com/conceptualizing-mountain/
  3. Bogost, Ian. “You Are Mountain.” The Atlantic. July 17, 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/07/you-are-mountain/374543/
  4. Buchanan, Ian. “Becoming Mountain.” Revista de Filosofia Aurora 29, no. 46 (2017): 215–230. https://doi.org/10.7213/1980-5934.29.046.DS12
  5. Bunting, Basil. “On the Fly-Leaf of Pound’s Cantos.” In The Complete Poems, edited by Richard Caddel, 114. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
  6. Carr, Diane. “Ability, Disability and Dead Space.” Game Studies 14, no. 2 (2014). http://gamestudies.org/1402/articles/carr.
  7. Celeste. PC. Matt Makes Games, 2018.
  8. Chakraborty, Joyram. “How Does Inaccessible Gaming Lead to Social Exclusion?” In Disability, Human Rights, and Information Technology, edited by Jonathan Lazar and Michael Ashley Stein, 212–24. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812294095-015
  9. “Climbing Mount Everest is Work for Supermen.” The New York Times, March 18, 1923, https://www.nytimes.com/1923/03/18/archives/climbing-mount-everest-is-work-for-supermen-a-member-of-former.html
  10. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: HarperPerennial, 1990.
  11. De Koven, Bernard. The Well-Played Game: A Player’s Philosophy. 1978. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013.
  12. Donigan, Wyatt. “That Time Celeste Made Me Realize I Had Depression.” Medium. June 29 June, 2018. https://medium.com/@wyattdonigan/how-celeste-made-me-realize-i-had-depression-66570faa9067.
  13. Everything. PC. David OReilly. Double Fine Productions, 2017.
  14. Frasca, Gonzalo. “Simulation versus Narrative: Introduction to Ludology.” In The Video Game Theory Reader, edited by Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, 221–35. London: Routledge, 2003.
  15. Foddy, Bennett. “Eleven Flavors of Frustration.” Foddy.net. Jan. 15, 2017. http://www.foddy.net/2017/01/eleven-flavors-of-frustration/.
  16. Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy. PC. Bennett Foddy, 2017.
  17. Gibbons, Sarah. “Disability, Neurological Diversity, and Inclusive Play: An Examination of the Social and Political Aspects of the Relationship between Disability and Games.” Journal of the Canadian Game Studies Association 9, no. 14 (2015): 25–39. http://journals.sfu.ca/loading/index.php/loading/article/view/150.
  18. Gilbert, Brian David. “Celeste Will Make You Better at Every Video Game.” Polygon. Dec. 16 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eo7FaVLET3k.
  19. Grayson, Nathan. “Celeste Taught Fans and Its Own Creator to Take Better Care of Themselves.” Kotaku. April 16, 2018. https://kotaku.com/celeste-taught-fans-and-its-own-creator-to-take-better-1825305692
  20. Grodal, Torben. “Video Games and the Pleasures of Control.” In Media Entertainment: The Psychology of its Appeal, edited by Dolf Zillmann and Peter Vorderer, 197–213. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers, 2000.
  21. Juul, Jesper. The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013.
  22. Klepek, Patrick. “The Small But Important Change ‘Celeste’ Made to Its Celebrated Assist Mode.” Vice.com. September 16, 2019. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/43kadm/celeste-assist-mode-change-and-accessibility.
  23. Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949.
  24. Macfarlane, Robert. Introduction to The Living Mountain, vii-xxxiv. By Nan Shepherd. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2014.
  25. Macfarlane, Robert. Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination. London: Granta, 2003.
  26. Marder, Michael. “On the Mountains, or the Aristocracies of Space.” Environment, Space, Place 4, no. 2 (2012): 63–74.
  27. Messner, Reinhold. “Direttissima—oder Mord am Unmöglichen.” Alpinismus, no. 8 (August 1968): 17–18.
  28. Mountain. PC. David OReilly. Double Fine Productions, 2014.
  29. Paul, Christopher A. The Toxic Meritocracy of Video Games: Why Gaming Culture is the Worst. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018.
  30. Pöhlmann, Sascha. “Whitman and Everything: Playing with the Poetics of Scale.” In Revisiting Walt Whitman: On the Occasion of his 200th Birthday, edited by Winfried Herget, 55–80. Bern: Peter Lang, 2019.
  31. Sailors, Pam R. “More than Meets the I: Values of Dangerous Sport.” In Climbing. Philosophy for Everyone: Because It’s There, edited by Stephen E. Schmid, 81–92. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.
  32. Shepherd, Nan. The Living Mountain. 1977. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2014.
  33. Simon, Jonathan. “Taking Risks: Extreme Sports and the Embrace of Risk in Advanced Liberal Societies.” In Embracing Risk: The Changing Culture of Insurance and Responsibility, edited by Tom Baker and Jonathan Simon, 177-208. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
  34. Stone, Kara. “Time and Reparative Game Design: Queerness, Disability, and Affect.” Game Studies 18, no. 3 (2018). http://gamestudies.org/1803/articles/stone.
  35. Suits, Bernard. The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia. 1978. Third Edition. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2014.
  36. Tejada-Flores, Lito. “Games Climbers Play.” Ascent 1, no.1 (1967): 23–25.
  37. Wästerfors, David, and Kristofer Hansson. “Taking Ownership of Gaming and Disability.” Journal of Youth Studies 20, no. 9 (2017): 1143-60. https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2017.1313969.
  38. Wolfe, Mitchell F. “Mountains in Gaming,” Medium. February 5, 2018. https://medium.com/super-jump/mountains-in-gaming-2cb888786b0c.