eightysevenkeys

Two days into Animal Crossing: New Leaf, I was convinced the series had lost its hold on me. Moving around the village, picking up fruit for some start-up cash, fishing for fast money once I’d acquired a rod—nothing felt quite as rewarding as I had remembered it being back in the original. But, after a few days of opening the 3DS every morning and night, it slowly became apparent that, somewhere between my initial boredom and my current enthrallment, it had gotten its hooks in. At some point between installing a new bridge in my town, enacting an ordinance which makes my town wake up (and open their businesses) earlier, getting a funny hipster outfit together, and being serenaded en route to a tropical island getaway—I was in. I was in deep. I remember now why some people don’t like Animal Crossing. It isn’t necessarily fun until you’ve played it every day for a week. I can agree, to some extent, that initially AC can come across as a player hostile game. But once you acclimate to the way the game works, and how best to play it (short 15-30 minute bursts), it becomes something immensely endearing, and the kind of gameplay experience that burns slower than your typical AAA spectacle. With this in mind, I’m going to hop on the bandwagon of Animal Crossing travelogues and start chronicling the growth of Ilium, my town that lives in a blue, plastic clamshell.

Day one, I awake from what I presume to be an eternal slumber to find myself on a train, headed to a town I get to declare, if not outright name, the geography of which I’m given a chance to reshape by telling Rover, nah dude, that ain’t it. Yeah, that one, that’s the map, the one with the river that runs through it real evenly, the one with just one bridge on the east side of town, but don’t worry, we’ll fix that once we have the bells, the raw scratch to make that possible. That map, that map right there, Rover, is Ilium.

I arrive to some confusion. I’m the mayor of this ‘burg, and after some bashful hesitation, I take on the position with steely gaze. Actually, the expression on my face was determined by a series of questions Rover just asked me on the train, so I have these half-closed, sort of stoned looking marbles planted on my face, which I guess I got from being shifty and deflective. Poetic justice is something Animal Crossing will trade in, if given the opportunity.

So there I am on the first day with a tent because Tom Nook is in the real estate game, and he’s over those days of just giving you a house wholesale. No, he needs 10,000 bells just to give you a dinky 4x4. For now, tent. Yellow tent that screams Get Out There And Earn Some Bells, Boy. After scrounging up all the apples I can find, I buy myself a shovel and a fishing rod, happily noting that these are the first two items I can acquire, the best tools to get your cash influx moving. Somewhere along the initial scurrying to pay off my initial debt to upgrade to a brick and mortar abode, I note that the town has two pig residents, one of whom is named Truffles, a vain, pink number of a hog who, we all agree, is the towns most egregious occupant. I talk to her less than the others, hoping that, in a month or so, she’ll pack up and move to some other town where she can wax philosophical about her beauty regiment to some poor soul who isn’t—and I’m going to pause on this point, because it’s important—who isn’t me.

After upgrading my house to a decent size, I get to work on public works projects. According to a survey conducted by my loyal assistant (and secret mayoral puppet master) Isabelle, the people (people?) of Ilium demand more investment in public projects. So, first thing first, I build a bridge on the west side of town. That has the added benefit of speeding up my fishing runs for faster cash. Second, let’s throw down a bench by the riverside. Boom, done, cheaper than my second mortgage (I’m on my third). Finally, let’s get a streetlamp going. Yeah, that’ll be nice by the bridge to the east. Suddenly, my peoples are loving me once more. I’m a popular mayor, for sure. I even planted a bunch of flowers at places that aren’t my house and donated fossils to the museum instead of selling them at ReTail. I’m a philanthropic S.O.B.

Then suddenly the BugOff comes to town. Now, though I’m narrating this as if I’m living in the game world entirely, let’s take a moment to reflect on our real life responsibilities that take place outside of Animal Crossing. Okay, now forget about that entirely, because that’s a bummer, I know, and we’re in make-believe land right now, okay? But so anyway, I missed the BugOff entirely. I had a work engagement. No problem, right? There’ll be another one. I’ll participate in that one. Deirdre can have the gold BugOff trophy for all I care. ‘Cause I don’t care. Not one bit.

Not until the whole town starts mocking my performance, or lack thereof, in the BugOff. Seriously, these ungrateful buggers have the audacity to start ragging on my no-show, poking fun at me, the Mayor, the Big Cheese, the Bringer of Bridges, the Harbinger of Benches. Butch lays it on real thick:

So I’m like, that’s it! That’s it for tonight, you guys. Any hope you had of me pumping all my bells into that streetlamp—poof, gone, no way. You’ll have to wait till tomorrow, when your coding stops telling you to harass me.

I spend the next day in KOOLKATS with my friend Karen. People haven’t heard of my embarrassing no-show there. They leave me right alone as Karen and I tour the tropical island (but not before I unfruitfully try to find her money rock while she changes into a more summery outfit). We compare outfits and abodes. She wins on both fronts. She’s got a second level in her house which holds, among other things, a gold BugOff trophy.

Week two begins, and my residents have forgotten about the BugOff and are back to asking me for catchphrases and outfit tips, both of which I will give expert opinions on when asked. Seriously, I’m your guy for that sort of stuff. Just ask anyone around here, they’ll tell you I’m the guy.

I’m taking a break from funding public works to get the second floor of my home going, paying that extortionist Nook one more time. Just one more time.

He waved to the cat, recognizing the absurdity of the gesture, but nonetheless wishing to denote to the beast that he was grateful that they both were alive at the same time and place.

I’ve begun reading The Broken Estate, by the formidable James Wood. It’s tickling that part of my brain which deals with both my love of fiction, and my inability to separate myself from those theological traditions which formed me and my conception of myself. (I have a hard time saying that I’m religious, though that may be the truth.)

From the introduction:

I think that distinctions between literary belief and religious belief are important, and I am drawn to writers who struggle with them. Around the middle of the nineteenth century, those distinctions became harder to maintain, and we have lived in the shadow of their blurring ever since. This was when the old estate broke. I would define the old estate as the supposition that religion was a set of divine truth-claims, and that the Gospel narratives were supernatural reports; fiction might be supernatural too, but fiction was always fictional, it was not in the same order of truth as the Gospel narratives. During the nineteenth century, these two positions began to soften and merge. At the high point of the novel’s rise, the Gospels began to be read, by both writers and theologians, as a set of fictional tales—as a kind of novel. Simultaneously, fiction became an almost religious activity (though not of course with religion’s former truth-value, for this was no longer quite believed in).

I’m not too far into the book yet, only through the first essay, but this interplay is something I feel in my own life, as a writer and reader. I have read more fiction than I have read of the Gospels, unless you consider hearing it read in church each Sunday a form of reading. In which case, it might be about equal. But my approach to theology (especially Episcopalian, heady theology), has altered in my early adult years, in which I have been exposed to a bevy of fictional texts which offer, to me, a similar kind of “truth assertion.” From the trashiest novel you can pick up at the grocery, to the most unintelligible bit of intellectual showboating, I believe fiction makes claims on reality which the reader must either accept or refute. This is the difference between what goes on the bookshelf and what goes in the attic. In the case of fiction, though, the question of the fallibility of the author is never in question. The author is fallible. Full stop. And so, I, the reader, can slip in and out of believing her.

Or, as Wood puts it,

Fiction requests belief from us, but we can choose not to believe at any moment.

I came to associate this with narrative in general, and, as revealed in the introduction to The Broken Estate, Wood would¹ agree. And, having come to this conclusion, my relationship to the Gospel, a narrative (with a capital N, perhaps), changed. It became historical narrative, which I believe to be based in actual historical events, but, nonetheless, an authored bit of work. And, moreover, a translated bit of a translated bit of a translated bit of authored work².

There is something about narrative that puts the world in doubt.

While I’m still a regular churchgoer, I’m also now a regular writer. A young person in the Episcopal church is something of a unicorn these days, I know. It is much more popular to be a secular humanist, and I’ve swung that way at times. But, I’ve come to understand my struggles with faith in a different light. I assumed, like a lot of teenagers do, that science had invalidated the claims of the bible. Instead, I think, for me, literature might have done it.

For it was not just the ascent of science but perhaps the ascent of the novel that helped to kill off Jesus’ divinity, when the novel gave us a new sense of the real, a new sense of how the real disposes itself in narrative—and then in turn a new skepticism toward the real as we encounter it in narrative.

As I live into what belief is or isn’t for myself, I find this skepticism to be a tool, not an impediment. It trims the fat and leaves a leaner cut. It discerns, I think, and strengthens.

-gm

1. Lordy, Lordy, it’s homophone time. ↩

2. The situation is more complex than this, but you get the point. ↩

Playing Fire Emblem: Awakening, my very first taste of the series, I retry a lot. My file says that, so far, I’ve played for a total of 18 hours, 6 minutes, and 54 seconds, but I know I’ve played at least double that. Even though I had never played a FE game before this, I started the game on Hard/Classic, meaning, the game is doubly difficult, and when a character falls in battle, they’re gone for good. Okay, some “retreat” for story continuity,¹ but even then, they disappear from your roster for good.

In this fashion, I’ve lost some good men out there. More accurately, I’ve lost some boring archetypical characters that I didn’t care that much about. Despite choosing the classic mode, in which death is permanent, I’m not often willing to live with the consequences. I’ll be 3/4ths of the way through a hard-fought battle, just decimating the computerized opposition, when, bam, down goes Lon’qu, a character in whom I’ve invested personally, both in terms of playtime and faux-personal history. I mean, I married the dude to Cordelia, the stoic Pegasus Knight. They have a future-kid together, guys. They fence in their spare time. It’s cute stuff, and I’m the matchmaker deity of the whole operation. So I hit the requisite combination of buttons to hard reset the game,² taking me back to the title sequence to start the battle again. I do this, again and again with each battle, until I come up with a victory in which I either lose no units, or sacrifice some doofus I don’t give two hoots about.

The problem with this method, which is in no way unique to my play style, is when you remember your own existence outside of the boundaries of play. I’ve retried a current battle at least six times at this point. I’ve got one save file (the game affords you three) in which I’ve beaten the battle, but, during it, I lost a character I cared about. Down went the hero’s daughter during this optional side-quest, falling to a jerk with a bow in the final three turns. Statistically or strategically, I don’t need her. At best, I was going to re-spec her as a Knight, hopefully moving her to Grand Knight in the late-game sequences. But her current class, Lord, isn’t too useful to my strategy. But her relationship to her father, her supporting role of him on the battlefield and in the storyline—that’s why I keep retrying.

But then you reach a point where you realize how much real-life time you’re wasting for a fictional character. While ludonarratives allow for player agency, there comes a point where one’s control over minor aspects of the overall plot are forsaken in lieu of one’s actual existence. While there exists one linear narrative within the game in which I have only lost the characters I meant to lose, there exists, outside the game, a more complex, non-linear narrative in which multiple fictive histories have been pursued which run parallel to one, nonfictional history.

In simpler terms—

Sorry, Lucina, but it looks like you’re staying dead forever. Because, in the end, I’m sure as hell not getting any younger.

-gm

1. The plot, like many JRPGs, involves time travel. And, like, future-children, or something. ↩

2. L+R+Start. ↩