American Bloodborne

Hello everyone,

If you didn’t know, I play video games. I’ve done it all my life, and while almost everyone else I know grew out of it, I didn’t. It gets a bad rap often, and gets treated as something that children do or just for entertainment. I am pretty studious about everything I do, and yeah, it is that sometimes, but often I perceive much more. I see it as a form of narrative and potentially art, and I am intrigued by all such things. And one of my favorites is Bloodborne (hence the title of this blog post). Before I get into what I have to say, I’m going to talk about how I judge video games and why Bloodborne is special. Just FYI I’m going to divide them into sections so you can CTRL+F 1. Video games and their meaning; 2. What’s special about Bloodborne; or 3. American Bloodborne (or just the numbers because that’s easier).

1. Video games and their meaning

There are going to be two parts of this, what is similar about video games to other media of humane expression and what is dissimilar.

For the similar I’m going to talk about movies because they’re the closest thing to a video game. In fact, some video games style themselves as more or less a movie plus interactivity. So then we must ask ourselves what are the components of a movie? Well, it has set design, choreography, scenography music, writing etc. In my opinion, movies don’t do any one of those aspects as well as some work intending to do it entirely (such as a musician composing music and not for the theater), but it’s how they’re put together that creates a unique piece of work. It’s really hard to argue that, for example, a movie like La Dolce Vita doesn’t pay attention to every aspect of itself.

What makes video games fundamentally different from everything else is the concept of gameplay. The audience directly interacts with the game, and the game reflects the impact of their actions. I’m going to get into the importance of this more in part two so let’s continue on with a general idea. I said some games are like movies, and a lot aren’t because they focus on gameplay over any visual/music/etc.

The best example of the latter is probably Pong. It and many early video games are based off of physical games, such as, obviously table tennis or card games. But what sets video games apart is they happen effectively in an abstract space. Just like painting occurs on a canvas, books on paper, video games occur within computers. The media occur in the real world, but limitations are put on how they can be expressed. For example, writing occurs in a language. Dancing occurs on a stage (this definition is quite flexible) and has limitations put on it (for example ballet has certain, defined movements).

I like this quote by Michelangelo, (supposedly, I couldn’t find the original Italian after a bit of searching so it indicates that what I have isn’t actually the quote, but I had one professor in college repeat it so whatevs): “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” Michelangelo’s saying he didn’t create the sculpture but rather took away from the block of marble until he got what he desired. Making a video game is about taking away from infinite possibilities until you get to a certain combination of rules and constraints that accomplish your vision. These are the rules, such as how large a tennis court is, how quickly your paddle moves in Pong, how many bullets it takes to kill you in Call of Duty, etc.

The number one objective of most traditional game is making it fun to overcome the obstacles created by the rules to accomplish your goal. For video games fun actually takes a back seat to the point of the creator (because the game is abstract, as I said, and any rules are arbitrary rather than physically imposed, such as the inability to run at the speed of light).

I’m going to take an extreme example of how the beautiful takes a back seat to the point and not in terms of video games: Picasso’s Guernica. Is it pretty? No. You may like it aesthetically, but that’s not supposed to be its point. It’s about the horrors of war, not an impressionist landscape. Now fun or the point’s the primary goal of every well designed game, but back in the day it wasn’t. I’m thinking of the 90s, where supposed artistic vision overwrote gameplay and game design. Obviously, I’m poo-pooing that, not because I despise artistic vision but because it’s fundamentally misunderstanding the medium in which the artist is operating.

I’ll give some examples to illustrate my point from something I was recently thinking about: Command and Conquer, where you build an army and harvest resources to do so. The resources are poisonous… what does that mean? It starts off with your army, which is basically modern armies (of the 90s) but a little futuristic) so it consists of infantry, tanks and planes. If infantry walks on top of the poison they get hurt. Also when infantry is shot they dive and take less damage but walk slower. There’s no manual way to control that. It makes sense in the game world, but does it make it fun? Or, more importantly, what’s the point of it? Is it about the disposability of humans? How generals have little regard for those under them or the chaos of war? But you can still command those soldiers to stand over your poisonous resources until they die pointlessly. The game doesn’t dwell on such ideas or have anything else that supports such interpretations. It’s incidental, not intentional, and isolated, not common. Both of those things are the opposite of what an artist should want. One simple ting they could do was given the individual soldiers more personality, and you command them to their death in spite of it. And any technological limitation should have been worked into the greater message.

So what’s a good counterexample from a similar game? Starcraft! It’s very similar in that you are a commander over an army and have to gather resources to do so. It’s far in the future. There are humans, but it weaponizes the amount you’re supposed to be apathetic about those you command. It encourages you to treat the situation entirely arbitrary like The Art of War.

I’m just going to go on a rant about Ready Player One (okay, I haven’t read it or seen it, but if you know me I despise it). As far as I understand it, the virtual reality people go into allow them to do anything. Much like the book itself, it’s misunderstanding art as a whole. An artist accomplishes their goal because of their constraints and because of their inabilities to do everything. Otherwise they’d hand you a blank canvas and say it’s the best they’ll ever do because it could show everything. If, for example, someone is showing you a religious work that is really supposed to be about human capacity of everything, that’s not what it’s saying. On the most basic level, humans are mortal, and it takes time to create anything. The artist is closer to death by producing it and so everything, because of human existence, cannot be perfect. As a side note, a game being an accurate representation of reality (or some sort of paradise/utopia) doesn’t mean it’s artistically bereft, just that its message has to rely upon what is failing (such as the inability for humans to transcend like the Buddha). ‘Everything’s great!’ isn’t a message.

2. What’s special about Bloodborne

Well, I like Bloodborne so much because it deftly combines its message with its gameplay. To explain that, the very first thing I need to explain are the limitations. You see it on a screen and use a controller to interact. What the game is creating uses more or less a computer to output information, effectively an artificial mind with one small job to do, which is the interactivity. The developer of the game’s question this is: how to use your controller to represent you. It’s actually not too complicated. By now it’s become ingrained in people who play what buttons do what. I’m not going to get into the technical aspects of it, but this is probably the least important part. You have a few buttons that are readily accessible and a stick that lets the character move where you want.

Onto how the game plays. Your perspective is from behind that of a person. The game happens in real times, and there is no way to stop it. You command the person to move, to talk (rarely) and how to hit things. The commands, at least the basics, are very simple. You only rely on two or three buttons most times. You can move around your guy or your camera (along a circle with its axis being your character). The message is this: there isn’t anything too complicated you can do (at least on a fundamental level), and the value of your actions is based on timing. You choose between nothing, defense or attacking when facing your foes. And when you don’t, you have no meaningful way of interacting with anyone besides the binary of non-interaction or interaction.

If I like it so much, it has to have a story then, right? How can it be strong without any sort of meaningful interaction if the medium is about that very thing? It reflects how the story is not important whatsoever to playing the game through on a surface level of victory conditions. You can go through the game and quite easily not learn what’s going on in any meaningful way. It’s all subtle, not directly said or stated in menus on unimportant text. There is a world out there, and it’s rich, but it doesn’t ask you to discover it. You have to want to see more. That incidentally is a mechanic, that the more you are exposed to the world, the more your constitution fails. But it’s secondary and not too important.

What makes Bloodborne art? The game is a metaphor for human existence. There is little choice (you either kill or be killed and you must progress in a linear way to get to the end); the greater, true narratives are unsaid (such as there are only a handful of companies that control virtually ever consumer product, so even if you buy an ‘ethically-made’ product from some alternative brand you’re still supporting a corporation that engages in unethical practices in its other sub-brands), and the only ones explained are the lesser, easier ones (such as you work to earn money and then you pay that for goods); and absolutely no one knows the entire picture.

3. American Bloodborne?

The story, what it actually says, is strikingly similar to America right now! By that I mean the details you have to hunt and peck for. In your fighting, you’ll occasionally (or often) get hurt, and you inject strange blood to recover. It is, in the introduction and its exposition, the essential plot of the story. People come from afar to partake in the special healing properties of a blood transfusion from Yharnam (the city you find yourself in).

Well, things quickly go downhill when you wake up, and the city’s in chaos. You go about and investigate, fighting your way through a mob of people who want to kill you. They’re on the hunt of beasts, you see, and will attack anyone in their way. In your first insight into the truth of the world, you find out as you kill them you can more or less make yourself better by using their blood to empower yourself.

Soon, you discover that the blood that you consume is what transforms you into a beast. Those who hunt the beasts and use the blood vials to keep themselves alive are dooming themselves to become what they hunt (you can supply the Nietzsche quote here). And the healing church, the organization that creates the blood, is obviously covering this up because they want everyone to transform into monstrosities. They even went so far as to have half their town burned to the ground to hide the truth. For you to prosper others must suffer, and that what makes you able to live longer causes you to lose your humanity (that isn’t a gameplay mechanic, which is one of the game’s biggest flaws).

Going forward you make your way up the strata of the healing church, only to find it led by a figurehead. You investigate it more, and things spiral completely out of control. The real leadership is long dead and another plane of existence, completely uninterested in bettering the situation. They’re worshipping gods that cannot comprehend our reality, and their slightest interaction causes humans to either become beasts or hideous abominations. And the people who empower the healing church are encouraging this in order to convert everyone else into worshippers of these strange gods. For the beings themselves or those who have come close to apotheosis, their actions are fundamentally incompatible with rational thought or what normal people need or want. There isn’t even a man behind the curtain. There is only nothing or, at best, a callousness that will inadvertently destroy you and everything you care about.

I hope you understand the allegory.