Mountain and Humanity

First off, let me just say that Hodge’s “Sociable Media” has continued to be a really fascinating piece to me ever since I first encountered it last semester in Scott’s ENG 5075 class. It’s got a whole bunch of nuance to it, and Hodge’s notion of the phatic is both something eminently relatable and confounding.

In this reading of Hodge (and my reading of Joe’s post on some of the games we played this week), I began to think about what makes games like Mountain feel so strange and so special. Mountain’s emphasis on pure phatic communication establishes it as a clear outlier in the field of video games, and I think, as Hodge does, that this style of “object-oriented existence” makes Mountain, for all of its separation from the realm of the human, feel so goddamn real, a coexistor instead of a mere object.

To put a finer point on it: Mountain is special because it feels like it is not merely an experience for the player, like this is a world that will exist without our input.

I think that it might be easier to establish Mountain’s greatness through a game series that, after some thought, I consider its exact antithesis: the Assassin’s Creed games. For those who aren’t familiar, the Assassin’s Creed franchise can be summarized as a historical simulation/action game in which you climb lavishly detailed buildings (the series has attempted to represent Renaissance Italy and Victorian London, to name a few) and assassinate historical figures. Despite all of this detail, however, what most players begin to notice after a certain point is that these worlds feel empty without your input; every character has a designated function to further the protagonist, no action occurs without some intervention on behalf of the player. While there is no doubt an appeal to this sort of total control, after a while Assassin’s Creed (and most other open world games, despite my enjoyment of them) begins to feel lonely, isolating with the exception of cutscenes, and, most shockingly, limited.

I think that the most important feature of Mountain is that it feels kind of like somebody else.