Not being Japanese, I can't help but feel just a bit weird as I reach out for some Japanese concept to make some point. (Actually, I don't even know what the point is going to be, but...) Still, I can't help but take a little bit of what has been pelting me for the last two decades as games and anime and talk a bit about: hatsuyume.
Now, hatsuyume is a uniquely Japanese concept; the dream occuring the night of New Year's Day reveals whether the coming year will bear good or bad fortune. Apparently, having dreams of Mt. Fuji, hawks, and eggplants portends blessings.
My dream didn't have any of those. It was a lot less simple than visions of mountains and birds.
It was also very video gamey.
It started with a mission: Team up with a couple seeking to protect their son from another couple. Protecting the son, as is fitting a game, was simple: navigate a pair of buildings connected by various bridges while avoiding the other couple that roamed the navigable area. This was, of course, a very intricate network of bridges and hallways, beautifully built and insanely tight, creating lots of harrowing scenes of me with a kid in tow barely escaping from almost certain doom.
This, of course, does not matter.
Eventually, just like in that Robotron game at the pizzeria that always seemed to get you just when you thought you were ahead, I was grabbed. Game over. The bad guys win.
And then I woke up and was quite surprised to be engaged in conversation with: the "bad guy."
"What are you doing?" I asked, nonplussed that the game feeling here was largely the same as the earlier sequence.
"I'm putting away these knives." He said. And from where I stood, it seemed to be all he was doing, grabbing numerous knives of all shapes and sizes from the ground, from chairs, from end tables, from couches, from shoe boxes, from stereos, from every place I could set my eye on. As he moved around, knives moved into his hand and immediately disappeared into nothingness.
"Why?"
"I can't talk unless these knives are put away. It makes me nervous."
And so I started to walk around and magically gather these knives from the landscape.
"I can't talk about anything meaningful unless these knives are away," he said.
"Meaningful?" I wondered.
"Things that matter," he said.
"Doesn't this matter?" I asked. "Picking up knives?"
"Not really."
"But you said..."
"I can't talk unless these knives are put away. But that doesn't make putting them away very meaningful."
"Have you ever thought of going into politics?"
"I can't talk..."
"Do you know John and Peter and those other guys from yesterday?"
"I can't talk..."
"Know where I can get a really good philly cheese steak?"
"I can't talk..."
And so I continued, mysteriously turning knives into nothingness.
After what seemed like eternity, there were no more knives to be collected and I presented myself again before the bad guy. (He was the bad guy, after all; trying to rip some boy away from some couple...)
"So! Now what?"
"Sweep me up," he said before bursting into a geyser of people, clones, each one poring over the landscape, searching for...
...I'm not sure. I woke up before I could even being to realize their collective or individual objectives.
Now, I am not much of a dreamer; when they come up, I tend to take notice. This one, which felt like a video game in the way I felt and observed myself, which came as the first dream after the completion of E3 was more than enough to get me to think about what it means for me...and possibly the larger gaming world (forgive what I see as necessary obliqueness).
The increasingly savvy player has grown used to the increasingly fuzzy line between barrier and resource. Shooting game fans almost naturally gravitate toward bullets instead of away. Katamari Damacy players continuously readjust their paths as they wander, bounce off of, roll through things that could be either obstacle or power-up.
And child kidnapping bad guys present Kierkegaard before violently reproducing.
In an industry that has grown used to absurdity serving as a reasonable substitute for what many audiences would like to interpret as maturity, relationships are being reforged between the abstractions that have become second nature and things familiar and unfamiliar from outside this video gaming sector.
I think.
I really have no idea what video game dream symbols are supposed to mean.
I personally like the hawks and eggplants. Makes everything simpler.
Vincent Diamante finds inspiration in Mt. Fuji.
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