This post is brought on by two facts this week: 1) video games can be powerful rhetorical tools and 2) I lost someone who means the world to me this week. So if it gets a bit rambly bear with me.
I had been playing through Freebird Games‘ Indie RPG, To the Moon, in the hopes of writing about coming to terms with the loss of two family members who died at the end of last year and about the choices that one makes in life. And then this week the unthinkable happened, I lost my grandmother. Folks will say that she lived a full life and left a great legacy, but that it probably shouldn’t have been the gut shot that it was since she would have been 95 in April. But in my mind, even in these last weeks and months as her health worsened, my grandmother was still the oil changing, purse-snatcher chasing fireball who helped raise me. A few months of illness does nothing to erase 40+ years of memories of robust livelihood. But, I don’t want this to become that post so I’ll stop there. Thanks for bearing with me and my memories for a moment. Memories…that’s the segue.
To the Moon is a great story. I am hesitant to call it a game in the traditional sense even though it has gaming elements thrown in (sometimes haphazardly), but it was definitely a beautiful story. In the game you play two Dr. Kevorkian type characters (Rosalene and Watts) who come in when folks are gravely ill and perform a procedure that allows them to go back to the beginnings of their lives and relive them in order to achieve their ultimate dream. The big catch is that the severity of the procedure ends the patient’s life when the goal is achieved.
The next part I’ll try to describe with only minor spoilers, but it you don’t want even those skip down to the next paragraph (and I apologize if this paragraph is a run on). The client, Johnny, that you work with in the game always wanted to go to the moon, but never did, so Drs. K1 and K2 (not their real names in the game) step in do their jobs. In order to program the requested memories they need to go back through actual memories reverse chronologically to extract mementos to make the new memory stream. Through this little trek down memory lane we get to see that Johnny has lived his life by choosing the things that made him most happy. Very real things like a wife, a house, etc, but what we also know from the end (which is where we started) that it does not end with what some people might call the best of circumstances.
So for me, the last few days are where my original plan for writing this post all broke down. I was using this game to think through the choices that I might have made concerning folks that I had lost along the way. And this is something that I never do because I have always been a firm believer that while I am in no way happy about every single things that have transpired in my life that I am at a place right now that if changing any of those things would change where I am today that I wouldn’t change any of them. Not one…for fear of breaking the chain that has brought me my joyous bits. When I look back over my own life, what may have seemed to be at the time failures now present themselves as re-directs. Re-directs that have changed my path to something different, something infinitely better. I would not take back one moment of sorrow if it meant losing any of my joy. And that is one thing that Johnny seeks to teach us all through his story. Life is a series of connected events and from the joy comes sorrow (and vice versa). By changing one event in that series we can change an entire life and (metaphorically if not actually) kill the person that you have become. I won’t tell you how Johnny’s story plays out in the end, that is something that you will have to see for yourself (or not). This is an experience that you will have to have, but one that I think can change the way that you think about several things…not the least of which are video games and memories.
In Memorium: E.N.W. (1918-2013)
