I had 1.5 weeks until my partner got back from spending the winter with her family in Puerto Rico, and I was trying to save money. This led into two feverish, short-term obsessions: Hamburger Helper (I wanted to try every flavor) and the massive AAA open-world game Horizon: Forbidden West.
One winter several years ago, minus the Hamburger Helper binge, I had a similar experience of surrendering to childish videogame dissociation & played through Horizon: Zero Dawn, the first game in the series, over the course of the two weeks I was staying with my parents. I felt a guilt towards the encompassing nature of this “play”, but in my defense today’s Biggest Budget (BB) games are designed to sprawl & consume. They demand a certain amount of attention in order to be read and you’re incentivized to invest that attention all at once to avoid losing track of what page you’re on. When returning to a game of this sort there’s a feeling of “wandering the labyrinth without love,” as Natalie Mering puts it in her ballad lamenting one’s birth into our world’s destructive web of desires.¹
It’s easy to write BB’s off as vile capitalist traps for slurping up your free-time, or to criticize them for telling violent histories through Problematic aesthetics, but at the same time it’s hard to deny that they accomplish a uniquely sprawling, time-compressing, impressionistic affect. No matter the tepidity of the stories told through them, I’ve had few other experiences with art that evoke the sort of melancholic, big-time emptiness that BB’s accomplish as a possibly accidental result of their vast form.
Videogames certainly don’t have a monopoly on this; the scale of temporality I’m describing is sometimes also found in comics, especially manga. In Blame!, Tsutomu Nihei’s existential exploration of life in a solar system-spanning superstructure built by out-of-control robots, the time between each illustrated frame fluctuates as the main character wanders endless staircases & vast plateaus.² Berserk, Kentaro Miura’s classic dark fantasy series, has taken decades to unravel its multifaceted depiction of its characters’ memories and the fissures trauma places in them. In Attack on Titan, Hajime Isayama’s nihilistic epic about humanity toiling to survive the onslaught of massive mindless humanoid monsters known as Titans, abrupt scene endings skip huge swaths of time, only showing the highlights of those periods in flashback sequences of subsequent chapters. These works have had a great effect on me, but not because of their prose, imagery or composition. Similar to BBs, they leave you feeling like you’ve just experienced something so inexplicably vast that you can’t help but mourn its absence when it’s over.
The scope of the production timelines & the sheer manpower required to produce BBs with the state of contemporary development paradigms affords a predilection towards big shapes rather than minute detail. In the 2020s the Sony Mocap Universe (SMU) seems to be at the forefront of executing this form. Starting with the God of War reboot**¹** Sony Interactive’s web of projects that share a mo-cap space seem to align in their execution of big-time, impressionistic situation designs. I think it is through the lens of SMU BBs make the most sense. For example, the new God of War projects are at their best when they use the scope of their timescale to depict masculinity’s collision with the will to change. In a similar vein, Death Stranding seeks to pronounce the feelings of loneliness imparted upon people through our digital society by placing vast treacherous distances to be covered by virtual foot. Horizon’s impression of time is less active, as its storyline involves a slow unraveling of the game’s context of post-post-post-apocalypse, situating the present as the game world’s ancient past’s-past’s-past, which in turn reflects the main character Aloy’s discoveries back at the player in rich and complex ways. I would never have been willing to read any of these works in this light unless they had taken on the scale that feels implicit to BBs.
I played Horizon: Forbidden West the same way I played all the other SMU projects I just listed: unhealthily, for 40ish hours over the course of 5-7 days, following my intuition to self-determine the unraveling of the digital space. Like Marvel movies, all SMU projects share pacing and shape. Their opening acts occupy a uniquely narrow separate world from the rest of the game, seemingly to allow the player to start by holding the first part of the world in their hand. The initial freshness of the experience & the restraining of scale suggest you should to engage with everything to completion. Then, Something Happens, and everything balloons, in Forbidden West’s case it’s a gate at the mouth of a constricted valley opening out into an expansive field. At this moment it’s easy to imagine the game director smirk a bit and open his arms out wide…. In many ways this moment in these games is the climax. It ends up the beginning was just price you had to pay to smooth over the 30 more hours you have to go. Of course those last 30 hours go by as fast as the first 10 since the world has already melted away a bit for you. The middle 20 hours of Forbidden West are a blur for me, the start of the blur marked fittingly by the crossing of a previously impassable mountain range. You know you’re getting close to the end of the game because you stop being encouraged or pointed towards “side” directives. In Forbidden West the equivalent is gaining the ability to fly, circumventing any need to follow paths winding around impassable terrain or through dangerous rebel camps, expediting your ability to arrive at landmarks and distant story directives. You complete that last bit of the game and stare through the credits for a couple minutes as 2000 peoples’ names scroll by. In that time I couldn’t help but think that I’d never experience that again, the feeling of the gates opening in the valley & the unfurling of the what amounts to speculation of our far future. I snapped out of it as my partner, now returned from PR & witnessing the tail end of my time sink, remarks “oh you’re done, how was it?” and I struggled to decide: could I describe what just happened?