Evil incarnate, looming apocalypse, the heroic team-up of a magic-wielding princess and a pure-of-heart knight. It’s a tale as old as time—or at least as old as 1986, when Nintendo released the first Legend of Zelda game, marking the start of what would become one of the most widely recognizable and critically acclaimed video game franchises to date. This May, Nintendo released the highly anticipated nineteenth installment in the franchise, titled Tears of the Kingdom—and, more or less, the plot remains unchanged from the previous eighteen. Some may call it lazy rehashing. I call it a mark of samsara.

Tears had some big shoes to fill. Its 2017 predecessor, Breath of the Wild, was heralded as a near-perfect game, and Tears recycles both Breath’s engine (the coding framework that the game runs on) and its map of Hyrule, a sprawling kingdom that is as much of a character as Link—the game’s protagonist and sworn protector of Hyrule’s princess, Zelda. As the game opens, Link and Zelda are exploring ancient ruins beneath Hyrule Castle and accidentally stir an ancient slumbering evil. Link is knocked unconscious, awakening some time later with Princess Zelda nowhere to be found and a dusty old mummy-ghost arm in place of his own.

But it ain’t just dusty, old, and mummy-ghost-y—the spirit of the arm’s original owner, who happens to be the first King of Hyrule, bestows Link with some nifty magical powers to aid him on his quest. They’re not quite what you’d typically expect from a fantasy game—they’re more like tools for interacting with the game’s physics-based world. One lets you telekinetically grab almost any object in the game and fuse it to something else. Another lets you reverse an object’s passage through time. Need to get across a chasm? Try breaking some trees and fusing a couple of logs together. Or move one log across, bring it back, jump on it, and reverse its pathing.

After a brief tutorial section to introduce players to the new bag of tricks, Link is told to visit four major Hyrulian cities. But it’s more of a suggestion, really—at this point, you’re pretty much free to do as you please. And damn is it fun.

It’s hard to describe how expansive and alluring the game’s world is, but imagine being dropped in an interactive Miyazaki film—that pretty much sums it up. Hyrule is just as gorgeous as it was in the last game, with stunning environments that vary from rolling dunes and sand-swept ruins to frigid, mountainous expanses; from lush green plains to volcanic crag. But with Tears’s additional two maps—one below Hyrule and one above—what was already a massive game world to begin with has been tripled. Sky Islands dot the horizon, while below Hyrule lie The Depths—a nearly pitch-black, sprawling void that curiously mirrors the terrain of the surface world (mountains become valleys; valleys, mountains).

Given the open-world, nonlinear format of the game, you can easily ignore the game’s main story and spend hours simply wandering. But in a way, that is the main point of the game: every mountain, every cave, every lake is fully explorable, and you are intentionally given tools to do just that—climbing, swimming, hang gliding. The game rewards you for treating its world with the same care that it was crafted with—for taking the time to investigate and appreciate all of your surroundings, no matter how unimportant they may seem. All sorts of hidden treasures, puzzles, and whimsical side characters can be uncovered by the inquisitive and attentive player. 

That feeling of adventure—of a world filled with mystery and awe and the simple urge to explore and appreciate it—is the core of the game. Creator Shigeru Miyamoto says that the series is imbued with his childhood memories of adventuring through the forests, caves, and “secret doors and pathways” of his hometown, Kyoto.

Perhaps our heroes are just as responsible for the apocalypses they continually avert.

The world we explore in Tears is also directly modeled on Kyoto: “I took a map of Kyoto and overlaid it on the game world, and I tried to imagine going to places that I know in Kyoto,” director Hidemaro Fujibayashi said about designing Hyrule for Breath of the Wild. “You have all of these famous temples and shrines and whatnot. . . . [I]t made it really easy to envision how that would translate to the game map,” art director Satoru Takizawa added.

The exploration is almost necessary. In order to increase Link’s maximum health, players must find Shrines of Light—of which there are a whopping 152 scattered across the map. When I ran into my first group of tougher enemies, I quickly realized that I needed more health to stand a chance. So I made my way up to the highest nearby vantage point, opened up my hang glider, and charted a course for all the shrines that I could see. It was hard not to feel like Basho, wandering the countryside from shrine to shrine on my own pilgrimage of sorts.

Resembling real-life Shinto rock shrines, each Shrine of Light transports players to a puzzle. Some are trickier than others, but all put your perception, creative problem-solving, and mastery of the game’s core mechanics to the test. Because there are so many ways to approach the game, it can be tough to find the appropriate solution. I’ve caught myself stubbornly throwing one method at the wall over and over again, trying to force the puzzle into submission. But when I notice that frustration, I can take a step back, clear my head, and try it a different way—and voilà! The solution is right there, clear as day—a stark reminder of Suzuki Roshi’s beginner’s mind: “If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.”

It’s a concept that applies to the game’s combat too. Every weapon has a set durability, meaning that they’re bound to break after felling just a few baddies—a mechanic that reeks of impermanence. But you can also fuse items to your weapons on the fly for different effects. Sure, you can fuse plenty of stuff onto your weapons to just make them hit harder. But for the creative player, this mechanic provides endless ways to approach combat. If there are monsters standing in water, try attaching a Shock Fruit to an arrow to stun them. Or put an Ice Fruit on a spear to freeze enemies and keep them at bay. 

And then there’s one of the game’s most compelling new features: robotic engineering. Man and machine convene—players can collect various basic components (a steering wheel, a fan, a flame emitter) and combine them however they please. If you’re resourceful, you don’t even have to fight at all—you can just build a giant mech to do it for you. Or if you’re in a rush to explore a cave, you can just barely see partway up a mountain, build yourself a hot air balloon, or maybe a hovercraft.

Though Tears excels in its gameplay and environmental storytelling, its plot is by far its weakest point. Yes, there are fun characters and a couple of unexpected turns, and the plot is certainly enjoyable enough, but overall it’s much the same as the other installments: Link and Zelda fight the big bad to save Hyrule.

But if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. (Or if it is broke, fuse it back together.)

And there’s a reason the series can get away with it: the games aren’t really telling the story of Link and Zelda, but rather a Link and a Zelda—two entities stuck in samsara, doomed to repeat a never-ending battle between light and dark, good and evil. 

Skyward Sword, the series’s 2011 installment, follows the pair’s first iteration. They battle the demon king Demise, an “eternal being” that has “conquered time itself.” Having previously been defeated by the Goddess of Light—who we learn Zelda is the mortal incarnation of—Demise is out for vengeance. When the duo finally best him at the end of the game, he utters the curse:

My hate . . . never perishes. It is born anew in a cycle with no end! I will rise again! . . . An incarnation of my hatred shall ever follow your kind, dooming them to wander a blood-soaked sea of darkness for all time!

In a 2021 paper titled “I Coveted That Wind: Ganondorf, Buddhism, and Hyrule’s Apocalyptic Cycle,” University of Pennsylvania professor Kathryn Hemmann dissects the lines in their original Japanese. The word translated above as “hatred” originally reads as on’nen, a Japanese Buddhist term “used to refer to the effect of lingering hatred within the cycle of samsara”; the word “incarnation” was translated from gonge, a term used by the heavily syncretic Shugendo sect to describe Shinto deities as “temporary manifestations that a Buddha or bodhisattva takes in order to save living beings.”

The “curse” is more of a warning: the karmic repercussions of striking down hatred—of hating hatred—ensure that it will rise again, just as its return ensures that our heroes (or iterations of them) will be around to usher in a new era of peace. Perhaps Demise and his gonge are indeed bodhisattvas, for without the apocalyptic decline that they bring, there is no great renewal—and perhaps our heroes are just as responsible for the apocalypses they continually avert.

It’s a profoundly Buddhist metanarrative that mirrors the cyclical cosmologies found in various schools: from kalpa to kalpa, the “good” perpetuates samsara just as much as the “evil” does. I say bring the kalpas on—so long as Nintendo keeps delivering these delightful Zelda games.

The post Link in Samsara appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

When the psychic spy adventure Psychonauts was released in 2005, the big-budget game was not very popular, with its then-publisher, Majesco Entertainment, taking a major financial hit. But despite initially poor sales the title attracted critical praise, numerous awards, and a devoted fan base—which resulted in a massive spike in sales nearly a decade later when the game became available for digital download. This belated success recently resulted in the release of Psychonauts 2, a whimsical exploration of a subject at the center of Buddhist thought: suffering.

Psychonauts’s mental saboteurs are essentially meditators turned outward. Through deep concentration, they delve into the minds of suffering individuals, traversing the latter’s metaphor-laden inner worlds, slaying their inner censors, and sorting through literal mental baggage (a sobbing suitcase or downtrodden duffle, for example). This is not a game that wears its Buddhist influences on its sleeve—its creator Tim Schafer has described it as Jungian, if anything—but there are hints of the dharma throughout the narrative: the Psychonauts meditate on cushions, one character is clearly modeled on Allen Ginsberg, and there is a sense of roving, mindfulness-like awareness throughout the game. Indeed, it’s dissolving the illusions of self that often stands at the heart of Psychonauts 2.

The game explores, time and again, how the narratives about ourselves that we carry around never fully encompass what it is to be a conscious being. Its levels play as symbolic manifestations of various characters’ hang-ups, humiliating secrets, and most wrenching disappointments. An old man plagued by loneliness might imagine himself stranded on a psychic desert island, marooned by memories of a painful childhood and separated from friends by oceans of his own inadequacy. Yet these stories, these attempts to create an unmoving monolith to represent our experience, inevitably fail to tell the whole truth.

The psychic spy adventure is a whimsical exploration of a subject at the center of Buddhist thought: suffering.

As we venture through the game’s levels—grand psychic set pieces demonstrating each character’s metaphor of self—we are nagged by the sense that something is not quite right about them: The stories seem off. When we enter the mind of a gambling-addicted doctor, for example, we can’t help but ask, “Why is there a casino in this dilapidated hospital?” Inside the mind of a jaded romantic, we question, “Is this unsent love letter really so important, so terrifying, that it needs to be hidden under a literal tornado of mail?” Eventually we discover that these scenes have their own dream logic that reflects the dreamers’ mental hang-ups but certainly not reality.

Of course, the player can see through these flimsy narratives. But the game’s isolated characters live inside their own vacuums, unpenetrated by the probing light of awareness. Because of this, they are stuck within the stories they’ve too long told themselves; left clinging to their past experiences for guidance, they fail to see—as the psychologist and mindfulness writer Arnold Kozak puts it—that “no moment of self wholly equals another.”

This is the brilliant truth illuminated by Psychonauts 2. We eventually see all of these unmoving inner universes as the prisons they are and understand how awareness can move us toward a more flowing and loving conception of what it is to be.

That’s the potential inherent in video games: We, the players, are always present, participating in the proceedings. One could argue that our role in Psychonauts 2 is nothing less than awareness itself.

Pervading the game is the sobering sense that we are behind the scenes on a theme park ride, looking around on a psychic backlot where we shouldn’t quite be. The same experience can arise in meditation. We become aware of a repetitive pattern of thought or a particular emotional reaction we’ve carried around for years, and we think, “How have I never looked directly at this before? And what made me cling so closely to it?”

Much of the game’s emotional depth comes from this sudden awareness of something lacking, some greater emptiness within these mental worlds. We have the poignant sense that we are seeing some source of great pain that not even the sufferer knows about. In a sense, this arises because we are peeking behind the veil of the illusion of self. These mental spaces—where mindless habits and circular narratives have too often dominated—are being exposed to our awareness, and awareness finds them to be lacking. In this way, the game raises the question of what happens when we just observe the self closely, bringing to mind Chan master Hsu Yun’s famous meditation prompt: “Who drags your corpse around?”

What, in other words, has been shouldering the great burden of sensation, attachment, suffering all along? It is the self. But when we look at the self directly, in the right light, the entire facade collapses like a house of cards.

The post Diving into the Mind in Psychonauts 2 appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Not all video games fit our expectations of what video games are or what they are supposed to be. Some bend the rules, even break them, on their quest to surprise us, make us feel something, or free us from a fixed mindset. Bird Alone is one such video game that encourages you to explore not as much what’s on the screen as what’s inside you.

Bird Alone can be best thought of as a simulation—think Tamagotchi pet, but with a more philosophical bent. You’ll name your bird friend (I chose Lotus), feed it oranges, even rub its belly. You’ll also write poetry together, make music, cherish memories, and exchange contemplations of some of life’s biggest questions. There’s enough here to keep you surprised each time you return to say hello, something I found myself often looking forward to. But the thing that sets the game apart is its second half. (Stop right here if you don’t want spoilers.) Your bird friend starts to die, and you are forced to grapple with the truth of impermanence.

As taught by the Buddha, impermanence refers to the truth that everything—physical, mental, and yes, even virtual—is in flux, unreliable, and subject to decay. All the game elements work together to foreground this truth and keep it active in your mind. The first and most crucial hurdle that Bird Alone must clear is getting you to care about a simulated bird friend.

The game is fairly brief, clocking in at around three hours, but it is designed to be savored in bite-sized chunks over days rather than binged. Bird Alone restricts you to playing this way, as the bird informs you it will have new content only once or twice per day. Push notifications let you know when your bird friend has something new to share: “Hey, best friend!! Quick, I want to ask you something!” So while the actual playtime is short, Bird Alone stretches into an experience that lasts weeks, weaving itself into the fabric of your everyday life. And it doesn’t hurt that the game’s colorful art is the perfect home for a feathered friendship: the sounds and music are a delight to hear, and the design includes small joys, like the fact that the game’s sky matches the weather where you live.

Yet beyond any given activity or aesthetic touch, the thing that will keep you coming back to Bird Alone is a real feeling of connection—dare I say friendship—that you will find growing as you play. If you’ve never experienced a virtual friendship before, you may find this element hard to believe. But the game’s excellent writing and masterful use of psychology make for some clear and powerful heartstring tugs. At times it even seemed as though my friend Lotus had had some meditative training in compassion and sympathetic joy. For example, each day it asked me how things were going, providing me with two options for my answer, such as “Always good” and “Not good anymore.” When I reported that things were good, Lotus would exclaim in delight and celebrate my happiness. But when I reported things were not so good, the bird consoled me with statements such as “I’m here with you—the good times are coming.”

Once you’re immersed in the world of Bird Alone, the game switches over to its main project of getting you to notice and accept impermanence. One day Lotus seemed surprised and melancholy to see that life is full of change, even after it had noticed small changes from one day to the next. This left me having to decide whether to join Lotus in its melancholic contemplation of change (“Nothing lasts forever”) or to report instead that “I like the change!!” When I chose the latter, Lotus perked up, so that my own embrace of change appeared to be rewarded by the cheerfulness of my bird friend. The encounter lasted but a minute, underscoring its message. Through encounters like this, Bird Alone transforms the phone or tablet in your hand into a sort of hand mirror, offering you pauses for self-reflection. As your friendship progresses, this gentle inquiry into impermanence deepens, allowing you to view it from different angles. You’ll laugh, commiserate, and yes, even grieve the death of your virtual friend.

Related: “Press X to Awaken“

Why, you may ask, would anyone want to play a video game like this? According to the Buddha, noticing and contemplating impermanence is actually an essential part of a fulfilling life. The Buddha considered impermanence to be one of three marks of existence—the others being no-fixed-self and dissatisfaction—that characterize each and every moment of our lives. When we are asleep to impermanence, we are likely to cling to things that won’t remain, causing unnecessary pain and suffering. Learning to stay awake to impermanence takes dedicated time and practice, but ultimately it can offer us more freedom and delight. As the Buddhist teacher Ajahn Chah said once while drinking tea, “To me this cup is already broken. Because I know its fate, I can enjoy it fully here and now. And when it’s gone, it’s gone.”

In this way, playing Bird Alone may be seen as an ally on our journey toward accepting and embracing impermanence. Each time you open the game, you’re choosing to lean in—to a fleeting yet touching connection, to reflections on the meaning of life, and to working with many kinds of emotions. Choosing to play Bird Alone is not unlike choosing to sit down and practice meditation. Sometimes you find freshness, connection, and delight, and sometimes you find stuckness, loneliness, and sorrow. Whatever you find, seemingly good or seemingly bad, issues an invitation to appreciate your humanness for what it is. As Lotus often reminded me, everyone has both good and bad days, and difficult moments can serve as inflection points leading toward more genuine connection.

It’s there, in the emotional and existential impact of Bird Alone, that you will either fall in love with this game or decide it’s not for you. I for one don’t think there’s any shame in not wanting topics like loneliness, impermanence, and death to infringe on your playtime. Maybe you simply prefer to keep these topics a bit closer to your meditation cushion. Then again, if you think you might be open to exploring something like this in a video game, Bird Alone—with its unique gameplay, charming aesthetic, and meaningful contemplations— is likely to prove worth your while.

♦

The post A Virtual Pet with a Painful Lesson appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Crawling through a dystopian Seattle street, a battle-scarred young woman pauses when she spots a passing enemy. She equips her bow, aims in his direction, then lowers it. Any sign of disturbance would just draw more guards. But more importantly, she knows that this guard has a name. She understands that he has motivations as complex as hers and moves on, realizing that she had almost succumbed to the mindless habit of dehumanizing the Other. One might say that she—or the player controlling her—is thinking about karma.

A zombie-slaying video game like this year’s blockbuster The Last of Us Part II might not be the most expected source of karmic insight. It could even exemplify the negative side of karma—what American mindfulness pioneer Jon Kabat-Zinn described as an “accumulation of tendencies that can lock us into particular behavior patterns.” In the popular conception, at least, video games may turn us into hungry ghosts, driven by the habitual impulse for another trophy earned, another quest completed, another enemy vanquished.

It’s remarkable, then, that over the course of The Last of Us Part II ’s roughly twenty-hour campaign, developer Naughty Dog uses exactly this facet of video games in a deeply purposeful way. Introduced as a simple tale of revenge, the game takes an abrupt turn in its middle third, when we are unexpectedly removed from the perspective of the series protagonist, Ellie, and instead dropped into the shoes of a member of the Washington Liberation Front militia group, the same enemy we have spent the past four hours tracking, bludgeoning, and brutally killing. During this unexpected arc, we meet the same cast of enemies seen in earlier hours, but now we come to understand their motivations. We pet their dogs. We share meals with them. We fall in love. We see past our habit of labeling them as the enemy.

Then we are abruptly shepherded back into Ellie’s perspective to continue her revenge against these now humanized enemies.

Many reviewers bemoaned the strange dissonance produced by this stretch of the game. It’s a reasonable criticism. The game offers no real option in its closing act to get around killing these suddenly sympathetic enemies. Look, I get it, you may think. Killing these people is wrong. But you designed this game so that I had to do it! Again and again! So why do this? Why would writer and director Neil Druckmann—who has said the game was partially inspired by his childhood in the West Bank—want to force players to experience the discomfort of knowing an act of violence is wrong yet repeatedly perpetrating it?

I would argue that the game is showing us the habits of our own minds.

The game forces us to ask: How often do we truly exercise agency in our own lives?

By creating dissonance between the violence being performed on-screen and the player’s own feelings, the game illuminates the stubborn nature of karma. We feel frustrated at our own lack of agency, our inability to avoid the game’s violence, and yet we are forced to ask: How often do we truly exercise agency in our own lives regarding such matters? How willing are most of us to simply cede responsibility because it feels easier and to accept instead the ingrained patterns of behavior passed down to us through culture, biology, and history, no matter how harmful they may be?

Seen in this way, we are stuck in the same rut as Ellie. It’s simple to say that violence is wrong or that vengeance only begets more vengeance. It’s far harder to break the chains of cause and effect in our own lives that have conditioned so many cycles of oppression and hate—the same chains that bind Ellie to her inexorable path of vengeance.

The ethical dilemma we face in The Last of Us Part II harkens back to a breathtaking moment in 2015’s deeply philosophical interactive game The Beginner’s Guide. At the midway point of its simulated walk, you enter a cozy home on a wintry tundra. An offscreen narrator begs you to help tidy up the house by clearing the table, straightening the bookcase, and making the bed. More of these genial requests pile up—to clean the couch, mop the floor, scour the dishes, scrub the tub. What’s remarkable about the scene, and what illustrates its karmic dimension, is that it never has to end. The requests loop infinitely, and the game provides no prompts suggesting how to move on. Theoretically, you could stay inside these warm and welcoming confines forever.

With time, however, the realization dawns upon you: This is the state of an unmindful life: an endless litany of tasks, performed solely because the chain of cause and effect has demanded it of you. You as the player have been automatically reacting to these requests, asleep within the pleasant illusion of the digital world.

Here is the rare opening the game has given you: Now you can take responsibility for your actions. You can open your eyes to the profound role old karma has played in your life, stop your mechanical responses, and make a decision to step outside this illusion and into the bracing cold outside. Or you can stay within the endless loop of reactivity that will keep you imprisoned within a warm and deluding dream.The choice is yours.

As we can see, video games are remarkably good at performing this kind of sleight of hand: luring the player into a reactive mind state through the magnetic pull of interactivity and then throwing back the veil of ignorance to reveal exactly how constricting such habits of mind are. Though rare, such moments in gaming can be literally revelatory. They open our eyes toward a singular truth—that we, the players, are alive and that with effort we can transcend the bonds of habitual living into the expansiveness of the present. In this way, games bring us back to ourselves.

Of course, given the infancy of the medium, such moments in gaming are uncommon. Far more prevalent are the experiences offered by popular open world games like Red Dead Redemption 2 and The Witcher 3. What such games accomplish is to immerse the player deeply in the experience of being a desperado or vigilante. And yet a nagging sense lingers in the background that we are spending hours of our lives merely responding to our karmic drives, imprisoned by a digitally manifested monkey mind that urges us to collect the next item and conquer the next task. What such games lack is the momentary awakening that allows us to grasp that this moment is everything and that the possibilities from this digital vantage point are infinite.

Nobody should expect the creators of every hack-’n’-slash or shoot-’em-up adventure to leap at the possibility of making us, their fans, reflect on our own karma. But as gaming grows as an art form, a number of independent developers and studios have taken it upon themselves to reflect on the medium’s hyperviolent past and move toward a more nuanced ethic. Games like The Last of Us Part II and The Beginner’s Guide raise the possibility that more developers might use interactivity to help players pause, be still, watch their impulses, and escape the prison of mindlessness.

It may seem like a stretch that a controller could guide someone toward this sort of awakening. But in the current moment, when so many homebound Americans are turning to video games as an escape, perhaps being pointed toward the world before our own noses is exactly what we need.

The post Press X to Awaken appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.