End of Hiatus and the Beginning of Escapism

I am done with my examinations for this semester and I am exhausted.

I cannot voice properly the realization of having no more obligations to meet for several weeks. The idea that I am not in school for winter break has not yet set in. But I am very ready to return to doing the things that I enjoy most. To give an idea of what I've been working on to build credits in undergrad, back in November I had written ~1200 words on executioners and the life of Meister Franz Schmidt, in comparison to a bad 2002 Matrix derivative. The film could have been improved by cutting its action scenes altogether, but it was ultimately its preoccupation with the spectacle of violence that made it relevant to the discussion of execution, torture and state control. Over the following weekend I hurriedly completed two other papers for a course on a survey of French history from 1789 to present, papers on nouvelle vague cinema and the socioeconomic changes brought about by the Great War. This was followed by another paper on structural violence and poverty in the slums of Mumbai for an anthropology course, and then one on the historiography of the archaeology of Chinese writing. Some of these papers were better put together than others, but in all I felt them to be some of the driest, most regurgitated writing I had ever put to paper. I'm sorry I wrote the one on Mumbai and made the TA sit through it, but only two days before I turned it in she had mentioned offhand to a student that she hadn't actually started reading the book yet and none of the other graders had either. This is the systematic paper mill we live in, a Frierian nightmare of inputs and outputs and meeting academic criteria for spitting up information as quickly as we can swallow it.

It's this kind of thing that compels people to escapism. We want to put ourselves in a different pair of shoes. Like Kafka beleaguered by his breadjob and wanting to pursue his true calling, people are compelled to wonder if they could be something else. If they could be born in another time, place or world entirely, and step into the shoes of someone who occupies a completely foreign social role. The allure lies in the idea that this role may be better than one's own.

This fantasy is at the heart of games like Crystal Chronicles. You roleplay in the most in-depth fashion possible, becoming a self created from the ground up from a pool of fantastic races so far removed from your own reality, that you can treasure the character without having to put a second thought to why the game was created with the idea of race as something other than socially constructed already built into its system. Myrrh is the sacred lifeblood of this game's world, and as a caravanner it's your responsibility to go out and gather it each year to keep an encroaching toxin from breaching your village's walls. Crystal Chronicles is completely noncommittal. You can walk away from this second life at any time, then come back later and resume freely at your own leisure.

In spite of it being so noncommittal, choosing your family's profession can be as paralyzing a choice as naming one's character. I remember spending a half hour or so deliberating over the options as a child. I knew what race I wanted to play well in advance because I'd been reading about the game for months in Nintendo Power magazine, but nothing I'd read prepared me for this other decision well enough that I could call it informed.

When I first rented Crystal Chronicles from a local Blockbuster back in '04, I played a solitary Selkie boy, the son of an alchemist's family, who led his town's crystal caravan out into the mist entirely heedless of the dangers at work. The Selkie race has a particular reputation as outsiders even within the villages they've settled in for generations, perpetual vagrants and thieves that will drive unfair bargains and pick the wallets of anyone dumb enough to look the other way. As I found out in a string of embarrassing letters from my in-game mother that made me grateful to be caravanning alone, the stereotypes are pretty much true. I think I received a single letter from Rah Sie that did not at some point urge me to swindle every poor sod that crossed my path, and I think I made a rather disappointing son to a clan of thieves. And for the longest time, I didn't understand everybody's complaints online about Leuda village because--well, Selkies don't steal from other Selkies.

This act of roleplay colored my outlook significantly. When The Crystal Bearers came out in 2009 I was ecstatic to receive it for Christmas, having followed the hype train for Crystal Chronicles' many sequels much as I had the original game. Yet I found myself sympathizing not with the game's Clavat protagonist, but with Keiss, Belle and Vaigali: the local Selkies. I had sufficiently internalized the race values of Crystal Chronicles to the point of excluding the other in-game races. The fictional culture of Chronicles' world had been instilled in me as it had in others, creating preconceptions about races and professions that do not exist.

The game world thus acquired a kind of presence as a location and space that people have interacted with but never set foot in. Coming out of the early 2000s push for social gaming on Nintendo's then-newest console, Crystal Chronicles has an Animal Crossing-like atmosphere. You're supposed to play with two to four other players using one of the jankiest hardware setups money could buy, plugging in up to four separate GameBoy Advance handhelds through an equal number of GBA link cables into a single GameCube. Any lesser number of players means that the houses in the starting village of Tipa are unoccupied, with only a single Moogle doing the housekeeping while they wait for residents to move in. Like Animal Crossing's Gyroids bouncing around outside of homes, waiting for new families to arrive, the Moogles encourage you to find friends to accompany you or otherwise face the journey alone.

Crystal Chronicles came out right as I was moving cross-country into a section of Orlando that was caught up in the craze of video games as being the work of the devil, so I never got to take part in the collective player experiences that Nintendo Power had been hyping me and my school friends up for. Nevertheless, I could indulge in the feeling of being part of a living world interconnected by fragile roads of trade and the exchange of Myrrh. Perhaps the most startling thing I realized about this world is that the story begins and ends inside of a self-professed dark age. With its reserves of iron long since dry, the last great civilization of the Lilty empire had already collapsed about a hundred and fifty to two hundred years before the game's start, and by its end there are no signs of the empire returning. The world of Crystal Chronicles is idyllically disconnected, barely more than a handful of settlements struggling to keep the Myrrh supply sustainable.

In finally freeing the world from the grips of the toxic miasma, and so also removing its dependence on Myrrh, you both set the stage for this idyllic setting to be destroyed by urbanization, and erase your own social role. With the caravanning done, the world doesn't need you anymore. So it becomes tempting to ignore saving the world even once you know how to do so, and instead keep on caravanning forever as part of an endless line of Myrrh-hunters. At some point though, you'll inevitably feel pressed to know how the journey ends.

I don't know how quickly I'll get back into Shin Megami Tensei, but I'm considering TJB live again.