Millions of people have, by now, seen the Harry Potter movie. Each of them, all of them, have had some experience with it. Our baggage we carry around, our emotional state, our differing amounts of empathy, sympathy, and numbness all create a variety of emotions that will be tipped by something in this movie. Really, any movie could fit this bill but Harry Potter has a special place for you to sit in. I head back to that phrase again, "Multiple experiences of one experience."
It's so silly a concept when we think about it, post modernism. How is it that we can each be living in our own reality, how is it that we can all exist as ourselves in this world without any true means through which to connect, truly connect, to each other. We try so hard to do it. Books, movies, epic stories from olden days all hint at a love, a thing, an event, a place that all of humanity was on the same page, doing that one thing that did us all any good. I head back to that phrase again but with it comes a bit of a longer explanation. "Multiple experiences of one experience; tragedy is the easy way but hope creates the means through which we connect meaningfully."
We're in such a strange world right now. The enlightenment way of thinking has failed. We can't measure everything, we can't fix everything and worst of all, we can't make everyone be modern. We're at war right now with a group of people so different from us that we can't do anything but villainize them. We can't do anything to them but call them terrorists forgetting the fact that we too, once had to be like them. Once upon a time, we were much worse than them. The only problem is, we don't worship god the way they understand god to be. "Hope creates the means through which we connect meaningfully."
I'm going to posit something here that is probably obvious. Harry Potter allows us to feel a connection to the people in the movie theater to us. I think this is obvious. He's been around for 6 years now, longer if you take in the books. However, the setting that Harry Potter takes place in is the thing that keeps us together. It keeps us together through hope. We watch, those of us who are willing to, and wonder what it must be like to sling magic around. What would it be like to conjure up some Patronus charm. What would it be like to repair a broken house with a flick of the wrist?
We have hope that some magical world exists out there for us to connect to each other with. We hope that some new world to explore will help us connect to each other and forget this insane amount of misunderstanding and a priori assumptions about people who aren't like us. We hope that we can just magically make all of those misunderstandings go away through magic, through some thing that people just haven't noticed yet. We connect to each other, we, the so-called moderns, connect to each each other modern through the hope that movies like Harry Potter brings. It's this hope that keeps us going. It's this hope that at some moment, that feeling of being part of something amazing appears. It's warm, it brings a smile to our faces and we don't know why. We feel like each and every person in the room is feeling the same way we do. We feel it in our stomachs. It feels weird at first but it takes us over.
It's so unlike tragedy. Tragedy brings us together but it feels hollow. We might see that person we shared tragedy with later and, if we didn't know them before, we probably won't say anything, or if we do it's too uncomfortable to want to continue. With hope, it doesn't matter. We experience it, we live it, we take it in, and we move on with our lives. The fact that we all lived in the same moment, regadless of what we brought to the experience, doesn't take away that magical feeling of togetherness; it's just so fleeting.
Video games have lost this magic, if they ever had it at all. Video games are terrible, horrible, awful things. Unlike movies, unlike books, unlike music, video games cling to tragedy. We have to overcome a challenge, we have to overcome horror, we have to overcome adversity. We do this, we subject ourselves to it and when we're done we're rewarded with an ending that reflects how well we watched the story unfold, how attentive we were. The magic, the feeling, that hope isn't there. We didn't share it with anyone, we didn't experience any sort of togetherness, we just shared a single moment of tragedy with a person we will never see, with a team of faceless people we will never meet. It's as uncomfortable as meeting that person who was there when a friend died. It's as fun as meeting a person at a high school reunion that used to go out with a friend who shot themselves in a hotel one June evening. It's as fun as bumping into the sister of the guy who flew out of the truck and broke his neck when heading back into the woods.
If video games want to be taken seriously, they need to figure out how to capture this magic. They need to figure out how to introduce an impulse for action, that hope that creates the truly happy feelings that we live out in those random times. Video games can't be, can't always be about tragedy. It's the easy way out, the cowards way out, and it's getting boring.
With not a single indignent bone in my body, I ask you to prove me wrong.
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