So I am back to this, to the forum actually.
I do feel a bit the need to justify myself so… here goes.
JUSTIFICAAAAAAAATION
For two days I became obsessed with animating Excalibur dancing (SIG, Soul Eater char, first anime character in my life for which I have a “cute” madness going). Tuesday I had a surgery to take out my last wisdom tooth. It grew forcing the jaw bone, but it was fine until some food got between the tooth and the gum that was partially covering the top… resulting in a terrible gum/mouth infection. The surgery was simple, quick, but very hard because the tooth didn’t wanted to come out, and supporting itself on the bone… Well… it was messy and bloody. Yesterday I was still too much in pain, and the painkillers prescribed were not suited for a guy over 100kg. I understand that an adult male is around 75kg, but even if it weighs 80kg I still have 1/4 of it on top.
Today I can function to some level, so here we go.
First don’t ask for forgiveness over over-typing. I’m loving it, and I can only see for your actions that you feel the same. Let’s ban excuses.
Second, the girl was pretty much revived after everyone was gone. Everything got quiet for a few moments and she simply wakes up. I have difficulty believing that she was alive before because no one would be able to sleep through that caos… but that’s very subjective. Still under this assumption, she was revived after, but could perhaps just be unconscious???
Right to the point now, I’ll go around what you wrote and pick up points as I’ve done previously.
You previous stated that Dormin was, at the very least ambiguous to you. I can’t personally say that I saw it that way (Dormin is an it, perior >_<… let me make my life easier).
For me he was from the start just there. I was ready for fantasy and the a higher entity was there. Common, expected, even a bit boring.
For the very least Dormin had shown some level of empathy for the protag’s lost. I guess I focused on that, good or bad didn’t matter, Dormin was helping me achieve the protag’s objective (to which I empathised, even admired).
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Wonderful that you mentioned those last moments of interaction of “fighting against being sealed”. Again I forgot to mention it (thought of, forgot, because I’m not too good going for the details, which most readers “about video games” value more than general “opinions”).
That moment reinforced even further the idea that the “beast” was at least half the protag.
At that moment the character doesn’t have movements to which you haven’t given any input. You are just fighting “game physics” (I might be wrong but I remember that on the beast part I laid down the pad and the beast kept making movements). In retrospective, seems that with his last action of extending the hand to the girl that the “hate” from Dormin spirit was mostly gone. He focused again sonely on what he wanted. Her alive and well.
I find it understandable, at least empathic, that Dormin was full of hate. Being in “jail” and forgotten for an undetermined period of time… I can see that developing to less noble feelings…
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And here I can follow this trail pretty easily to the next point, the “scary unconditional love”.
I will probably be doing this point along with the “colossi alive” questioning, and the “enjoyment of the game”.
I can see your point… but not with such clarity in this game. The game, and the world itself, doesn’t push or allow you to provoke much pain beyond the destruction of the colossi.
You can mention the lizards… which I can justify as food. You can mention the clerics or whatever… to which I tend to see that was half Dormin.
Again mentioning the protag’s last interactive moments, he is focusing on life.
Her life. As you said it yourself, his hand was pointing to the girl (to hold her?!?!?), and not to one of the clerics throats.
I see that his love focus on life, and not death. In pleasure, and not pain. Specially taking into account the possible “Dormin’s possession of the protag”.
The discussion of the dangers of love, I think, is too dependant of judging how much the colossi are alive. Apart from that… he was pretty benigne.
But focusing on that point, and as a reaction to what you said, I see cats as “state machine with finite transitions”, but not dogs. That is because of the social relations dogs create over their biological capacity for empathy.
It is a hard defined line that I created for myself to define “intelligent life”, and I don’t wish to impose it to anyone (but I am more than willing, even excited over the perspective of discussing it). However both are ALIVE in my book.
The colossi are an interesting subject in regards to “defining life”, and we can proceed with a discussion of that alone for a very long time. I think that raising those questions was the purpose of the colossi in game. Seeing the general opinion just went straight to “they were alive” makes me sad. A discussion lost over “easy deep thinking”… which is an oxymoron.
Maybe it’s just a result from “gamers lingo” in saying “you killed that box”.
I personally tend to be resistant to humanising pets, animals of any sort, or whatever just because it has a face. I dehumanise humans in my mind many times, which most of the times leads to other’s pain. But also allows me to see humans as a part of a hole shades of grey beyond the tiny definition of humanity that our minds created (which I believe are ultimately flawed and prone to create dogmas… also known as stupidity).
A question to push this discussion forward popped in my mind.
We have no idea to what extent the colossi were actually holding memories. I have seen no proof beyond them following a set of simple pre ordained instructions.
The storing of memories and experiences plays a huge part on my definition of life, being the my focal point on discussions like abortion (the life part of the discussion at least).
So we end up with 2 points, capacity for empathy, and capacity for storing memories/experiences.
Funny that you mention that episode with toups. I guess I would be more surprised at him not be willing to deactivate automatons to save someone the protag (he) loved. I said in a previous post I also don’t agree with destruction of property. For me it wouldn’t be lives vs life, but destruction of buildings over life.
For my personal experience, my judgement was mostly motivated by love.
Love plays a huge role in who I am as a person, and admit to the huge number of stupidities I did over such “justification”. It is dangerous, and it might have been what colored all my judgement of the entire game, being all the rest just good justifications.
That would make my analysis of the game, itself, a good point of discussion of the dangers of love.
But keeping this train of thought over moral judgements, I agree very much with you as to that judgement was forced upon the player because… yeah… you couldn’t kill them by accident. Maybe what toups was uncomfortable with was that the judgement was forced on him, to which I can also empathise.
Questioning said judgement… I think that it is not as much questionable (if at all, the player decides and that’s that) as it is interesting.
Why?
Well… look at this topic.
I believe all this questions were raised from that judgement alone, but very few are about the judgement itself. That is fantastic. All these questions do eventually lead to a moral opinion on the judgement. But why focus on that singular objective that is so… finite, while all those other questions still remain to be discussed over. They go so far beyond the game itself and we can learn so much from each other.
Seems a bit like guilty tripping, or the search of the guilty, which again takes me again to christianity and related social “psicosis”… LIKE WITH SEX
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Finally I’m lead to the “enjoyment of the game” (which I meant to put on the previous part, but now I think it should be by itself).
Even “joy” seems to me as… “lack of words”. I don’t really understand this need to put all the eggs in one basket, all the weight into one word.
It was way more than enjoyment or fun. I had them both, and yet together they were about a third of the emotions I felt through the game (if as much). Emotions that ultimately were a pleasure to have experienced, even pain itself (again good and evil, pleasure and pain, and the grey lines… any quick description falls short).
If I go a bit into “troll mode”, it is as insulting to reduce a creation of that size to such simplistic emotions, as to evaluate a painting (of at least moderate execution) as “pretty” and put it in the wall of your living room as decoration. Seriously, how far is that game from the latest “screen toucher” you installed on your mobile?
That was not how I was educated to understand art. I probably should be sorry for calling it art but years of study of various fields of philosophy around art, art history, and whatnot that goes way before the periods of ancient Greece… just checks all the boxes on this game (even the non physical presence of the work, and thank you Duchamp for that one).
Mind you… a very classical work, totally inside a profoundly outlined genre of “epic tragedy” that existed before the roman empire, also a bit boring for that fact. Just the medium is different of other more acceptable works. Inside video games the execution was quite different from previously created works as well. I think those two factors were the point of rupture… which again was a big word on defining “art” after the first world war era.
Yeah… this game really doesn’t make it easy for you to come with a simplistic definition, which is “thumbs up”. But I don’t think that a “simplistic look” should be applied even to “simplest” of the arcade games.
That’s pretty much it. Your analisis was very interesting, and I ate it up like good pasta (simple, healthy, and fulfilling).
I will risk to pinpoint the differences in our perspectives to the colossi were alive or not.
The girl’s death being natural or not, the possibility of religious/authoritarian implications or not, the righteousness of the protag’s actions, and the moral ambiguity of Dormin, can probably “stream” out of that discussion alone.
Again, if we take a train that way, I would like to focus on giving proof of stored experiences/memories from the colossi, and the important of such to define life beyond a simple mechanism as a cell (which is life… but I don’t think many people have problem killing germs).
This approach provides a nice canvas to pinpoint plot-points provided by the game, the setting of the game can be nicely categorized … so maybe that’s why i like it so much?
…), and escaping while the sole path out of this barren landscape is closed off forever(?).