For years I have had a recurring dream: I am woken in the night by a booming knock. I stumble through my room in the dark and make my way downstairs to the door. The stairs lead from a split-level loft down into an open, high-ceilinged den. Moonlight spills in through a window wall, which opens to a stilted deck that looks out over the backyard.
The details are always the same. The style of the home is modern rustic, and I can see the coniferous trees of the mountains, an impenetrable wall of hemlock and fir sloping off into the distance through the window wall. I reach the bottom of the stairs and turn around towards the front of the house. I walk through the den into a small foyer toward the front door. Crystals of ice collect around the threshold gap and creep slowly across the floor like a shadow cast by the setting sun. With a cool burn beneath my feet, I open the door into the blackest hour of night. A spotlight shines from out of view. The flat ground, colored the blue-black of solid ice, stretches as far as I can see. The howl of the wind beats against my ears, nearly deafening me. Through the flurried haze, a hooded figure in a black cloak stands beneath the spotlight. I can’t make out its face, but I feel its eyes meet mine from beneath the hem of the hood. It beckons. Across the frozen earth, I follow. We are eventually swallowed by darkness.
Emerging from the pure dark, I step into a familiar scene. An empty beach at low tide, lit by the flat white light of a giant, papery moon. The sky is uncannily clear, and a warm breeze carries the sweet, nostalgic scent of summer. I feel at once that I’ve been here before. At the beachhead, a warped palm swoops long and low, forming a natural bench. The hooded figure is sitting there. I approach the tree, clamber up its goosenecked trunk and sit down next to it. We watch the tide gently ebb in silence. The figure turns to face me, but I see nothing beneath the darkness of the hood. It reaches out and places its hand on my shoulder, and I wake up.
From the moment I first awoke from this dream, I knew the beach: Destiny Islands from the 2002 game Kingdom Hearts. The shadowed figure was cloaked in robes similar to those worn by members of the game’s mysterious Organization XIII. I knew who it was, too.
If you’ve played Kingdom Hearts, you know that you leave Destiny Islands quickly. A wave of shadow sweeps your friends away, and you set out to try and get them back.
From the start, though, it is clear that these quaint shores are too restrictive for you to remain there for long. This place was designed to be left behind; to linger in the shared memory of its characters as an everlasting symbol of unspoiled youth. Your time there with them is brief, but the two-hour tutorial zone is steeped in the sweet sadness of impending change. This is the beach at high tide. When these waves return to the sea, life as you know it will be swept away with them no matter how desperately you try to cling to it. You get the sense that these are the good ol’ days, and that they are swiftly coming to an end.
Has there ever been a more perfect metaphor for growing up?
In 2007, I was 14. My best friend, Allen, was learning to play the piano. He had found a YouTuber named Kyle Landry who would cover songs from his favorite anime and video games and use them as a template for improvisation. He had already exhausted all of Kyle’s videos of songs from Naruto, an obsession that had wholly consumed him at the time. Scanning the other videos, he found a few songs from something unknown to us: Kingdom Hearts. I remember walking into his house one day after school to find him (predictably) in the nook to the right of the front door, seated at his piano. The desktop computer behind him was playing Kyle’s first cover of “Dearly Beloved” on a loop. We were enamored, and rushed to play both of the existing mainline games. They became a palpable part of our friendship, the Destiny Islands a shared virtual treehouse of the adolescent soul.
I think of Allen often. We haven’t spoken in years, but the places that we inhabited together, tangible and intangible, still inhabit me.
Virtual worlds are much like dreams; they are informed by our world without being bound by its material constraints. They can burrow into the walls of our minds and permeate our waking lives.
Years after I left Destiny Islands behind, I felt similarly connected to the cold, demanding realms of Myst. These places were quietly chaotic; the disparate wreckage of other worlds crudely reassembled, impractically constructed and absurdly interconnected. Who would design such obtuse machinations? This was clearly the work of people struggling to make sense of the world, so much that they created a world defined by logic of their own. There is nothing easier for a 20 year old to comprehend than that.
Thoughtfully designed environments such as these, ones that weave their narrative themes into their explorable spaces in such a way that they are expressed before any narrative properly begins, are the most crucial thing that video games have to offer. Both video games and dreams run parallel to our waking lives. They serve as analogous spaces in which we can process our experiences unrestrained by the limits of corporeal life.
Both video games and dreams run parallel to our waking lives. They serve as analogous spaces in which we can process our experience unrestrained by the limits of corporeal life. A dream, its nature inextricable from our own, draws directly from our sensory experiences. It can evoke and mimic them. A virtual world, however, bereft of scent, flavor, and texture: what defines its sense of place? We are quick to credit “immersive” visual fidelity, or granular interactivity, or a grounded simulation that makes the world feel more “real.” Though valuable qualities, these are far from what makes a virtual world special.
The world of a video game is defined by its connection to our own humanity. While the origins of our own universe continue to elude us, in virtual universes, by contrast, there is no denying intelligent design. We can reshape our tangible world, but we are forced to work with finite materia. In shaping virtual worlds, the stuff of creation is practically infinite. These places are sculpted from human experience, created by people for other people to inhabit – navigable projections of self, broadcast from soul to screen. A video game invites us to walk the halls of someone’s dream. In turn, it can become part of our own. These digital landscapes are a part of me, virtual threads enmeshed within the fabric of my life. The strata of the human experience contain both tangible and intangible layers. There is no make-believe. It’s all real to me.
That same dark wave that separated the kids of Kingdom Hearts cast Allen out to some shadowed sea beyond my reach. I have struggled to make sense of his absence, just as I struggled to make sense of what a model ship floating in a birdbath has to do with the locked door of a planetarium on the island of Myst. I hadn’t seen him in years until he showed up, cloaked in hooded robes, knocking on the door of my dream. I still don’t know why.
