Dreams, Empty Rooms, and Transcribing to Tape

I’ve had video games on my mind, lately.  This train of thought pulled out of the station after I wrote that post about the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series a few weeks ago, and has been trundling back and forth between the near and far regions of my brainpan ever since.  I don’t think it’s going to stop if I don’t post this, so here it is.  Why I play video games.

The movie Inception has a metaphor about filmmaking at the heart of its action: movies are like shared dreams.  Not a bad metaphor, and certainly a good movie.  But while movies map easily onto the controlled dreaming that Dom Cobb’s team uses, not all of the every day sorts of dreams that you and I might have don’t.  You can have dreams that are as plotted and wonky as Inception, sure, but you can also have dreams about stacking blocks in the corner of your attic while your grandmother berates you for miserable breakfast you made her — while she dances back and forth, applying clown makeup.

Video games are dreams.  I’m not the first to suggest it, and honestly a lot of the thinking I did about games these past few weeks was based pretty solidly on the contents of that article.  (I read it many years ago.)  But it’s a much more accurate metaphor, I think: video games are solely concerned with the the moment, and very little else.  The internal logic of a video game only matters insofar as it is used to construct the next moment.  Instead of being a narrative controlled by an external creator, the narrative of a video game is constructed, moment to moment, by the player.  The rules are set up beforehand, and sometimes they are as inscrutable as a dream logic.

When I was young, there was a long stretch after I discovered that I could use the tape deck to record things where I did this constantly.  I would make mixtapes from the CDs I got from the library, or record video game music for myself, piped directly from the console into the tape deck.  But I would also transcribe my dreams to tape.

I don’t remember how many tapes I filled up with my own verbal accounts of dreams I’d had the previous night.  Quite a few, if I had to guess.  There is a value to saving a record of those dreams, a place that you went once, and will never be able to properly return to.  But even the imperfect copies that I dictated to audio tape in my parent’s living room were captivating.  I didn’t often listen to them once I’d made a record.  My accounts were meager, and retreading the same ground always paled in comparison to the fuzzy memories I had of the original.  I had to satisfy myself with trapping my dreams in a vessel I could set on the shelf.

But with video games, you can go back to them, and the signal will not have degraded quite as much.

That’s the strength of the medium: to impart a dream, to hammer home an emotional state as simple as the satisfaction of stacking an attractive pile of blocks, to the complex loneliness and impending dread of Shadow of the Colossus, or the layered  horror and descent into James Sunderland’s guilt in Silent Hill 2 – and to do it in a completely visceral way that books and movies cannot.

 

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