The Lament of the Open World Game
It used to be that games like Skyrim, The Witcher and Fallout 3 were the experiences I sought out to completely escape the real world. It was high escapism in a time when I lead a dull and solipsist lifestyle. One where the characters who spoke to me felt like their words carried weight and their intentions felt opaque and tangible.
I spent full days during an entire summer vacation sitting on the edge of a bed playing The Witcher 3. I sought out every treasure hunt, I located every question mark. I fulfilled every task and finished every side quest. I was a busy, busy person within the game while my corporeal self rotted at time’s own pace. My mind remained sealed off in its skull vacuum, reacting optically to stimulus from the television. I received no nourishment from it. I observed no innovation.
But I got all the things and I killed all the guys.
It wasn’t until those moments that I really got a feeling for what exactly the act of playing video games was. I stepped away from gaming for a while, coming back here and there for a couple of rounds of Enter the Gungeon, maybe an hour or two of Burnout: Paradise. Even booting up Geometry Wars a couple of times to get the fingers buzzing. But by the time new DLC for The Witcher 3 came around (Blood and Wine and Hearts of Stone) I couldn’t look at the game at all. And it was shameful, because I had put so much time into the narrative of the game, I’d breathed so much life into the world and the characters [at the expense of my own time] that it felt like a betrayal to not go back to them. Sadly, like a man forever scorned by a Tequila Weekend, I just could not lay eyes on the cursed media without suffering some heavy heaves and a little bit of sweat on the brow.
I think that was the moment that it started to be over.
Most recently, I spent a good amount of time playing Ghost of Tsushima. I was following in the same footsteps that had stolen my life’s blood in The Witcher. I was doing side quests for people who would stop me in the middle of other side quests. I was suddenly finding urgency in any request that simply anyone found for me. It was no longer about the piles of human corpses I was building a muscle-memory timing against. It was no longer about the faceless hordes of men that wanted me dead (I guess?) at every turn. It was no longer about the low stakes giant melees I’d enter as I strolled into low-level fortifications. It was about the peasant who said he had lost a statue on a road somewhere. It was about a woman who said bandits had ransacked her home again.
As I tried to stray back to the main quest that the story had obscured from me for a greater part of the entire plot, I started to realize I cared less and less about the fate of my island or my uncle or myself or my homestead. I cared just as much about the vitality of the place I lived and lorded over as I did about the foxes who strangely led me to statues of themselves. I cared just as much about my uncle who I looked up to my entire life as I did about artifacts that glowed in pulses and shook my controller as I approached them. I cared about as much about nothing as I did about something.
And that simply shouldn’t be the way that I feel about anything.
Several years ago, I started being hyper-aggressive about how I was ranking my end of the year records. Not only was I keeping a google docs list in the order of which I first impulsively enjoyed the records I heard from that year, but I also started sitting down with them and writing preliminary reviews as I was listening to them. Just in case it ended up on the end of the year list. I started out wanting to do a Top 10 and it grew into a Top 20 because I wanted to fit a few more in there. And by the time all was said and done, I expanded the list to a TOP 100. Each record had a review, a song to check out, and a unique “genre” applied to it. You can find those on this same Medium.
But writing that Top 100 was fairly miserable. I think I sat in a Panera Bread cafe near my workplace and sat at a corner table writing. To be honest, this is the kind of career I want. I want to stress and struggle with music. I want to try to find ways to help navigate records that artists create to the consumers themselves. I want people to think about how they feel about the music they hear, whether it’s in single song form, during a playlist, or along an entire album. I want to help mediate the relationship between listener and creator. I want to make it a beautiful union because there is not one without the other.
The following year, I knew I wasn’t going to do a Top 100, so instead I chopped the thing in half and did a Top 50. And instead of leaving my house and going to a cafe and separating myself from it, I stayed home and sat in my loft and wrote. Over time, I started to have my mind roam. I opened up a peacock fan of tabs on my web browser of sites and articles I didn’t necessarily want to read, but had just wandered over to. I had to find a way to focus otherwise on the music and the words I wanted to share about them without having my mind siphon and funnel into other avenues that were numbing them in their own separate opioid method.
Here’s where open world games are helping me bridge the gap.
That year (2018) I wrote my entire Top 50 list while playing Fallout 3 again. There was something about the familiarity of the game that allowed me to have my mind completely shut off and able to listen to the music that I was listening to. But also something that kept the impulses stirring, it kept my mind from wandering into black holes of aspartame information. I was simultaneously able to enjoy BOTH the music in a heightened way as well as enjoying the game in a whole new way.
I revisited the same method in 2019 while playing Death Stranding, a game I definitely would not have enjoyed had it not been for listening to my own independent music while playing it. Let’s be real, Death Stranding’s few and far between musical moments were brilliant. Low Roar became an artist to forever keep my eye on because of it. But the monotony of the in-betweens serrated my mind into a drone existence. Having some of my favorite records of the year spinning while playing the game kept me engaged. And it created new molecules. Some records will forever be linked with the terrible snowy mountains the Sam Porter Bridges had to traverse. Some moments in those records will play visual cinema of vast epic wastelands that I was personally able to cure and breathe life into.
Over time, I realized that blending music and video games has always been my preferred intake method. At least when it came to games. Revisiting many of those memories, I wrote a piece about which pieces of music reminded me of certain games. And I think that might have been an element I had been ignoring for a long time. Maybe it wasn’t games I was after for so long. Maybe it was simply a way for me to stimulate my brain while digesting these pieces of music.
We’re about 75% of the way through the year and I think I have hit a major realization. I think I have hit my max capacity for the open world video game in its raw form. Perhaps there will be another that gets me excited the way that it used to. Maybe Cyberpunk will be able to do something to me that makes me want to stop the turntable or not link my Spotify to my Xbox while I play. And I do hope so! But I am not necessarily optimistic that this will be the case.
That being said, that doesn’t mean that I don’t look forward to getting my hands deeply entwined in that world. I have had a blast playing older games while listening to music this year. Days Gone, Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning, Borderlands 3, Enter the Gungeon (forever and ever a favorite), Animal Crossing. But all of these games have had their volume turned to next-to-zero and I’ve listened to some of my favorite records while exploring their worlds. It feels more like what I’m actually doing is listening to music and these games are just the destinations that I’m surrounding my eyes with.
That being said, there have been some more “linear” games that I’ve played completely wrapped up in, volume and all. The Last of Us 2, Final Fantasy 7 Remake, Paper Mario and the Origami King. The ways that things play out in those games seem so much more engaging. But I believe, at least in the game design of these current generations open world experiences have hit a wall that I just can’t get around without a little help from external music.
