Erin Lager
Being a hobbyist digital artist, I have strong opinions on art. For the sake of this blog post, I will be describing art as any creative medium of human expression. Naturally, this definition applies to video games as well. Therefore, I decided I’d spend my hour of media consumption playing an indie game titled Darkest Dungeon by Red Hook Studios. It is described as a challenging, roguelike turn based rpg, and features a washed-out, gothic art style. I immediately fell for the game’s atmosphere and mechanics. Unlike most conventional rpgs that follow a party system, the heroes I employ for dungeon expeditions are not well-adjusted people. They are drunks, thieves, and sexual deviants. They get stressed after witnessing death and bloodshed and react irrationally when pushed to their limit. When a hero dies, they are gone forever. You can’t heal or resurrect them. Despite the gothic fantasy setting, it feels very grounded in reality because of this.
I spent an hour outdoors in my backyard. It was a very nostalgic experience because I played in this backyard often as a 10-year-old girl, one of my favorite pastimes was catching and observing insects. So, I decided to repeat this experience as a 22-year-old woman. Because it’s late January, there weren’t many insects outside, but I did observe a pair of cardinals searching for earthworms, and a squirrel frantically digging up a nut. It was relaxing watching life around me go about their daily business. I could hear numerous birds in the trees above me, and a dog barking in the distance. I think I heard the repetitive tapping of a woodpecker, but I couldn’t confirm if that was the source of the noise.
Overall, I think the takeaway from this experience is that survival is something incredibly essential to all forms of life. Animals are very instinctual creatures; they react to the world around them from a basis of survival and eventual reproduction. Similarly, humans aren’t too different in that we are very reactionary creatures. I think the video game I played was a good reflection of humanity’s basic responses under copious amounts of stress. The world is flawed, we are flawed. Nothing is perfect and everything around me will one day cease to exist, it will wilt and die and there is nothing I can do to prevent that.