This is Your Father's Blade

Ghost of Tsushima and the Uneasiness of Sharp Motivation

Right now, I’m looking at the charmingly minimalist map screen of Ghost of Tsushima. I’ve just started playing the game. I’ve made it through the cleverly designed tutorial phase, which contains an impressive amount of combat and story—you storm a castle! And I’ve liberated an inn from Mongol invaders. Now I’m standing on an overlook above a Mongol camp, searching for a way to get in.

Let me make a confession about my gaming failures: I never finished Sekiro. I put dozens of hours into FromSoftware’s famously challenging Feudal-Japan epic. I was intrigued by its world and its combat system, but I never got good enough at the latter to finish. Instead, my roommate at the time, who had allegedly retired from his gaming days, got obsessed and poured himself into beating the game. And he did so. Dan, I know you’re reading this, and I want you to know I still envy your skill with the blade.

“Sekiro for people who can’t beat Sekiro” is one of the prevailing quips about Ghost of Tsushima. The two games have similar katana-based combat systems, meant to simulate realistic, largely defensive swordplay. But Ghost is much easier and actually lets you adjust difficulty, something FromSoftware legendarily considers anathema to the challenge of gaming. The comparisons between the games probably end there. Sekiro is all about bragging rights. Ghost is a gorgeous open world you’re supposed to enjoy.

Give me one paragraph to grind my katana before I get to the actual point of this piece.

Somehow, at this late date, there’s still a debate about whether video games are “art” or “good.” Most people answering either point in the negative would cast their disagreement in more flattering terms, but the basic aesthetic validity of games is what we actually end up talking about. There’s always confusion about whether emerging creative media that happens to be widely popular and commercially viable should be taken seriously. (Taken seriously by whom? A lot of the people consuming it take it seriously, with or without your permission.) We had this fight about novels when they were considered a morally subversive and aesthetically pedestrian form. And to this day, lo and behold, there are good novels, bad novels, and a lot of mediocre novels. Please get in the comments if you believe Middlemarch should answer for the crimes of Twilight. There’s an argument I’d love to have.

One day we’ll end these battles and exalt games for their unique power to free us by entrapping us. Ghost of Tsushima is so absorbing that it’s partially liberating me from my terminal Twitter addiction. For that alone, it was worth the money. It’s on sale in the PS4 store for a few more days, if you could use a break from [gestures around].

I do have one significant reservation about a game I’m already loving. It’s more of a me problem than a Ghost problem. The initial proximate motivation in Ghost is that samurai Jin Sakai wants to save his uncle, a decorated warrior who has been taken prisoner by dastardly Mongol invaders. This origin story is paralleled and deepened by Jin’s mourning for his father, whose life Jin believes he failed to save as an adolescent.

Jin is not, at least at first, a particularly dynamic or three-dimensional character. He wants to be a good samurai, and that desire springs from his feelings about the two older blood relatives who raised and trained him. When I learned that Jin would have to travel two grief-inflected revenge arcs, a very un-samurai-like chill travelled down my spine.

My novel also involves grief leading to the pursuit of vengeance. Without getting into too much detail, let’s just say that there are dead parents and fixations on retribution. The great thing about using revenge in a story is how purifying it is. The risky thing about using revenge in a story is how reductive it is. Characters risk collapsing into a single pointillist daub, all their other traits nothing more than doodles around a deep-but-tiny mark.

Jin will probably resolve into a more finely rendered image. I went back and played a bit further, attacking the Mongol camp and then exploring a hot springs, and I can already see complicated outlines forming. And I should say, my two favorite games of all time—Morrowind and Horizon: Zero Dawn—are both straight-to-the-vein Chosen One narratives. Games can get away with a lot because the gameplay is the real point, the story itself simply being the road beneath the player’s hooves. The real fun begins when you feel yourself start to leave the path, even if that feeling is always and forever an illusion. Once again, the best games make us feel most free when we’re most trapped.

What I find myself wanting from Ghost is a blurrier sense of why I’m trapped on this exact path. Ghost does the sharp, polished-blade storytelling that’s the usual goal of mass cultural narrative art, but my favorite stories also have some tarnish and chipped edges. Morrowind achieved this by being supremely confusing, mysterious, and perilous unless you read tips online in a time before WiFi was widespread. It was a story about a lonely, vulnerable moron stumbling around the map and getting killed by cliff racers the first several times I played it. And it’s stuck with me as much as any story in any medium, precisely because it felt disorienting and rudderless enough to be real.

I wish I could achieve something more like that sense of displacement in my own fiction. I can’t, not yet, partly just because I’m insecure. Conventional plotting makes me feel safe, and then it makes me feel inadequate. It’s my own creative anxieties that make me uneasy about Ghost. The game promises to be great fun, but in a way that makes me think about how the form can go beyond glittering proficiency. Puzzling over that conundrum might help my own work start to be at least proficient. Aim for the stars, so that if you fall, you land on some lovingly rendered sunset cloud textures.

So the solution here is to keep plunging forward. If I gut enough invaders, I might start to forget why I started doing so in the first place. And then it’ll just be a game.

A continued request: Last week, I put out a call for questions. I’ve received some great ones! I’m looking to collect a few more, so I can devote a full newsletter to answering them next week. If you have anything you’d like me to delve into, please drop it into the comments.

Calvin and Hobbes Corner

We’re still out in the night:

Things have gotten emotional. Hobbes is still lost, after his fight with Calvin blew up their Yukon expedition. Calvin can’t resist getting his shots in, of course—“mangy fuzz-brained lunkhead”—but it’s just further proof of how much he loves Hobbes, as captured by that second frame, where he worries poignantly against the moon and stars. I’ve said it before, and I’m sure I’ll be saying it for as long as I write about Calvin and Hobbes: It’s easy to forget that this kid is six years old.

What I find most interesting in this strip, aside from that striking image, is the rapid traversal of different models of parenting. Calvin’s mom lays down the law and gets him in bed, but her next move is to prod his dad. Dad is stuck in the mode the mom was nominally in earlier—distant from Calvin’s concerns, focused on firming up boundaries. And then the mom reminds him that they’re a liberal professional family in the Nineties and he needs to bleed from his heart a bit more. (I’m inferring a lot there, but Calvin’s dad is a fanatical bicyclist, which, then as now, was a radical statement in an exurb.)

So then it’s dad who’s out in the night, doing the eternal dad thing of asserting that kids used to be tougher. Maybe he’s right. But the times they are a’changing, and Calvin is lucky enough to have parents who have the time and energy and inclination to go tiger-hunting late at night.

A poem

Keetje Kuipers works the yard