Video games, like all art, are a practice
in translation. Yes, many games are localized, teams of people
work to make sure that the pun that worked in Japanese can also work in English. But long before that, there are people translating
the way the sun filters through the leaves of a forest into code. There are groups tuning the wind whistling
through the grass, the bird songs from the canopy, the crunch of the leaves underfoot,
into audio tracks to play seamlessly along with our actions. The particulars of this process may be specific
to games, but the effort- turning a specific feeling or experience into a constructed medium-
is absolutely not. German composer Robert Schumann wrote an entire
collection of pieces called “Waldszenen,” each which depicts a different experience
one might have while wandering through the woods. Painter Tomás Sánchez builds deceptively
surreal forests that feel more like dreams the more you stare at them. And in the 8th Century of the common era,
during China’s Tang Dynasty, a poet named Wang Wei wrote the following: This poem is a 20 character, 4 line, description
of the experience of being in a forest. It roughly translates to- Well that’s the thing. This is a 1300 year old poem, written in a
language fundamentally different than the one I’m speaking now. If you’ve heard of Wang Wei, it might be
because you’re just really into Tang dynasty poets, which, hell yeah. Or it might be from Eliot Weinberger’s book,
Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, in which he deconstructs the many many ways this short
and superficially simple poem can be translated. So lone the hills; there is no one in sight
there. But whence the echo of voices I hear? The rays of the sunset pierce slanting the
forest, And in their reflection, green mosses appear. Something of a modern myth in the video game
world is the inspiration for the original Legend of Zelda series. As many of you already know, Link’s adventures
around Hyrule come in part from Shigeru Miyamoto’s own childhood romps around nature in Japan. It’s fascinating, in 2020, to look at the
original Zelda and find the spirit of that exploration. While the game is primitive from today’s
standards, you can still see the efforts to translate a very specific type of experience
onto the screen; an overwhelmingly big world, in which you play a very small character,
with surprises and dangers hidden around every corner. Even on something like the NES, there are
hundreds of ways of depicting a forest. The way Miyamoto and that team chose to do
so tells us a lot about their motivations, goals, and personal experiences they wanted
to communicate. Although Contra also starts in a forest, it’s
functionally just a backdrop. Contra certainly doesn’t seem like it stemmed
from a childlike feeling of exploration. As the Legend of Zelda series continued, the
spirit of whimsy and discovery did as well. But if the first game was an interpretation
of how it felt to explore outdoors, the feeling that the later games are attempting to translate
becomes more complex. Let me give you an example: several games
in the Zelda series- including the very first one- have a “lost woods,” a mysterious
area that can only be successfully navigated by solving an environmental puzzle (or by
stumbling around and getting lucky). As the games progress, the various lost woods
obviously become more visually complex; time and graphics march forward. But in essence, they’re still references
to the Lost Woods of the original Legend of Zelda- and this raises the question of what,
exactly, the designers are attempting to translate. When making the first game, the question was
simple: “how do we make a game that feels like exploring outside?”. But by the time you reach Breath of the Wild,
which is more important? The feeling of exploring outside, the reminder
of previous lost woods, the undefinable zelda-ness of it all? Miyamoto’s childhood is just one of many
ideas, all of which are attempting to fit into a cohesive-seeming whole. The lost woods, as they exist in the modern
era, are the result of dozens of different aspects of translation, touched and affected
by countless different people along the way. If you wanted to get away from the self-reflective-ness
of it all, you could simply go back and play the original game, of course. But even that is nowhere near as ideologically
pure as I’ve made it out to be. How much of any Zelda is the experience of
a forest, of nature, compared to all the other things they’re trying to accomplish? How many other pieces of translation have
they been mixed with? There seems to be no one on the empty mountain… And yet I think I hear a voice,
Where sunlight, entering a grove, Shines back to me from the green moss. Translating Wang Wei, or any poets of the
period, is notoriously difficult. Weinberger writes that a single character
may be noun, verb, and adjective. He points out that character 2 of line 3 could
be literally translated to light OR shadow. And, of course, a literal translation of a
poem is missing, I’m sorry, the forest for the trees. It can’t just be words, interpretation of
the sentiment is necessary! This can result, if done poorly, in true mischaracterizations. The previous poem we heard, translated by
Bynner, leans into mysterious maybe-so, maybe-not language. There seems to be no one...and yet I think.... Weinberger notes that this lack of definitiveness
isn’t present in the original poem. Wang Wei does not see anyone, and he does
hear someone, no ifs. Bynner’s poem isn’t bad in its own right;
plenty of my experiences in nature have been marked by not being sure of something. But when applied to a translation, he imparts
a feeling that wasn’t originally present. In this specific instance, Bynner leans into
the myths of the “inscrutable East,” when in fact, it is scrutable. But this take on it seems to adapt much more
of what the translator thinks it should be, rather than what it actually is. We see this with other translations as well. A 1958 attempt at the poem by Chang Yin-Nan
and Lewis Wamsley quite literally adds adjectives- in their version, the sunlight doesn’t simply
shine on the moss, it casts motley patterns on the jade-green mosses. As Weinberger says, with a delightful level
of snark, “such cases are not uncommon, and are the product of a kind of unspoken
contempt for the foreign poet. It never occurs to Chang and Wamsley that
Wang could have written the equivalent of casts motley patterns on the jade-green mosses
if he wanted to. He didn’t.” Wang Wei has a very concise, very specific
take on the feeling of being in a forest. Can other people have different experiences? Of course! But the danger is erasing Wang Wei’s original
feeling by saying “this is what he meant to write,” rather than simply...creating
a wholly new thing. Far from the puzzle-driven lost woods of Zelda
is a game called Proteus, a world full of flowers, grass, trees, ducks, owls, wind,
clouds. There are two major things, other than the
obvious visual differences, that separate Proteus from the lost woods. First, Proteus has no objectives. If you’d like, you can follow the same directions
you did in Zelda. You can walk North, West, South, then West
again. You can watch the wind and follow its direction. But there aren’t treasure chests or forest
temples hidden within, it’s just an island. The other difference between Zelda and Proteus
is that Proteus’ whole world is procedural, and completely temporary. Each time you open the game, it generates
a new island, one that exists for only you and only that playthrough. In a way, the exploration of Proteus is endless;
you finish touring one island, you can just start up another. Of course, the procedural generation of this
game makes that more intellectually interesting than in practice; each island will be basically
the same building blocks of trees and hills and critters. But still! It’s not hard to imagine an alternate universe
where Proteus, instead of Zelda, becomes an early representation of childhood romps outside. Rather than the carefully-plotted levels of
Zelda, we get an infinite number of permutations. Instead of finding treasure in every cave
and danger around each curve, players could be swept up in that wonderful sense of potential,
that they are truly in a world of their own. There’s a brilliant piece by Rosa Carbo-Mascarell
about mapping her islands in Proteus, tracking the trees and topography and shapes of the
coast. Of course, thousands (if not more) have mapped
the Legend of Zelda as well, but they all ended up with a map of the same place, whereas
she has something all her own. Proteus and Zelda are, in a loose sense, interpreting
the same basic feeling. What does it feel like to find and explore
a forest much bigger than yourself? How can you translate that experience onscreen,
and to a player? Unlike Wang Wei’s poem, which has one very
specific take on a forest that can be lost through poor translation, the intricacies
of a forest itself have no such requirement. Two people can enter, find something completely
different, and both be correct Empty hills, no one in sight,
only the sound of someone talking; late sunlight enters the deep wood,
shining over the green moss again. Sculptors of some of my most memorable digital
forests are, to no surprise to regular viewers, Fumito Ueda and the developers at Team ICO. What I like best about the woods of these
games are how...unexpected they feel. Both ICO and Shadow of the Colossus start
with a cutscene showing a horseback ride through the woods, but the game worlds themselves
are barren, and/or almost fully artificial. You spend so much time clamoring over castle
walls and rooftops in ICO that, even though you’re theoretically trying to escape, it’s
easy to forget the outside world exists. For me, I’m always taken aback at the same
point in the game; this outside balcony, on one of the towers that extends out from the
castle gate. There’s not really anything interesting
on this balcony, no switches to pull or traps to avoid, and so my gaze is always drawn out,
towards the cliffs and the dense forests growing out of them. It is so completely different than the environment
I’m standing in that it’s almost like looking at a different planet. And, because I’ve spent almost the whole
game defining my character by the castle surrounding him, imagining this kid being out in those
woods is almost like imagining a different person entirely. In Shadow of the Colossus, the forbidden land
almost seems defined by its lack of anything resembling a forest. Your border-crossing is pretty explicit about
this. You ride through dense woods before the game
starts, and then enter a land of desert and smooth rolling hills. It comes as a surprise, therefore, when hours
into the game, a narrow pass between two rocks leads into a dense patch of trees. Even more disorienting is when your sword,
which typically points you in the direction of the next colossus, is snuffed out by the
shadows of the forest. For a minute, you don’t have a direct line
to your goal anymore; for a minute, you have no choice but to take in your surroundings. The forests in Shadow of the Colossus seem
like they’ve survived almost by oversight. They’ve been allowed to exist because they’re
hidden away, sheltered from the great blasted plains that make up most of these lands. Ueda uses his forests as a reminder of what
his characters are denied. Wilderness, as seen from artificiality. Shelter, in a land that has none. The Last Guardian is maybe most explicit of
all, with the protagonist shown being violently ripped from his forest home. I have, I promise, spent time in the woods. I have run wildly through them as a kid, I’ve
hiked around them as an adult. I’ve found unexpected pockets of life and
surprising vistas, I have found plenty to feel just being there on my own. But the value of observing these translations,
pulling apart how they differ from each other and why specific choices were made, arguably
teaches me just as much about the thing as the primary source itself. I could, theoretically, study for the requisite
thousands of hours to be able to read Wang Wei in the original language. But would that be all I needed to interpret
the poem? I don’t think so. Reading dozens of translations of it has illuminated
aspects I wouldn’t have noticed on my own. In seeing what translators have deemed core
to the poem- the way the light enters the scene, the distant sounds of others- I feel
I understand the original intent a little better. I could spend dozens more hours in real-life
forests, and yet I don’t think I’d get the specific feeling I do on that balcony
in ICO. On some level, this boils down to “art can
show us things from a different perspective,” which, duh. But it means, when I return to the forests
of my actual life, I’m not bringing just myself anymore. Seeing how artists have translated this space
reflects back on the original source that they were translating; that is, the forest
itself. That physical space holds more for me now. No one is seen in deserted hills,
only the echoes of speech are heard. Sunlight cast back comes deep in the woods
And shines once again upon the green moss. New technology has, of course, brought with
it the ability to replicate forests to an uncanny degree. Particularly impressive in this regard is
an early level in The Last of Us Part II, one that opens in the middle of a dense forest
around the outskirts of Seattle. Rendered in the predictably staggering detail
of this game, I can imagine making an argument that this is the closest a game has come to
perfectly replicating a forest. From the most minute textures on the trunks
of the trees, undoubtedly pulled from careful scans of real woods, to the way the light
bounces around, to the soundscape. Even navigation in this thicket feels realistically
confusing, with none of the far-off landmarks you can usually use to plot your path. And yet, this is no less a translation than
anything else- and I would argue against my strawman’d self, not objectively “closer”
to a real forest either. Its densely-plotted trunks and seeming multitude
of paths will always lead you out of the woods, delivering you to the same place and in the
same amount of time, no matter what. I like The Last of Us Part II’s forest! It is a beautiful diversion in a game made
bearable by its beautiful diversions. But while it looks like the real deal, my
experience in these woods is just as tuned and tailored as the rest of the game, more
like being on an already-smoothed-out trail than truly in the wild. This isn’t true of 2017’s Marginalia,
a small indie title made by Conner Sherlock and Cameron Kunzelman. Marginalia is what I’d call a “wander
simulator,” a game with only the barest of instructions that takes place in a truly
vast amount of land. There are segments of text to find in Marginalia,
a story of sorts to unravel. But in my first playthrough of the game, I
took a wrong turn somewhere and ended up in a forest. And the important thing here is I didn’t
know I took a wrong turn. I thought I was supposed to go into the trees. I had been making my way forward for a full
5 minutes before realizing that maybe the game wanted me to go somewhere else, but I
didn’t want to turn around, because I figured there must be something on the other side,
so I kept pushing onward, ten minutes, fifteen, and I started to realize there might be nothing
on the other side of the forest, there might not be an “other side” at all, but by
that time, the idea of turning back seemed absurd. If I did it perfectly, that would be another
agonizingly long walk out, and I had absolutely no confidence I’d be able to retrace my
steps at all. Marginalia does not seem particularly interested
in making sure you get out of the forest where it wants you to. It’s much more invested in that chilling
interim; wandering, alone, wondering just how far deep in you actually are. Firewatch, Campo Santo’s 2016 forest-ranger-hands-simulator,
presents one of the more visually striking virtual landscapes in recent memory, and yet
I’d argue that its aesthetics have as much to do with our perception of American National
Parks as they do with those parks themselves. The intentionally modest number of colors,
simply-shaded backgrounds, and strong silhouettes parallel the iconic posters made by the Works
Progress Administration (or WPA) as a part of the Thirties’ New Deal. These posters depict the National Parks as
vast, untouched swaths of nature, just waiting to show visitors sights they’ve never before
imagined. It’s easy to see why Firewatch would want
to adapt this aesthetic- the game takes place in Shoshone National Park in Wyoming, and
a large part of its appeal is getting away from it all, retreating into untouched nature,
just like those posters imply. Firewatch is a really wonderful interpretation
of those iconic images, put into motion. But we can go further back, because I’d
argue that even those posters were, at least in part, contemporary translations of earlier
colonial depictions of the landscape, like those of the Hudson River School. In Hudson River School paintings, a hyperbolized
American frontier frequently towers over the subject, light spilling out in divine rays. Like the WPA posters, these present American
wilderness as an untouched, pristine land to be explored. This was not presenting things as they were,
really. The Hudson River School in particular, as
beautiful as I find it, doubled as more-or-less propaganda for manifest destiny-era expansion
(surprise! There were already people living in those
“untouched” landscapes!). But they do present a powerful mental picture
of nature, one that’s carried through our cultural consciousness for hundreds of years. When Firewatch builds a world that dwarfs
the player in the striking silhouettes and exaggerated topography of a National Park,
it is both genuine to how those parks feel and a translation of a translation of a translation. What a forest is, what role it serves, what
feeling it communicates, does not have a perfect version. A forest, in nature, is no single thing. How could it be then, when refracted through
the millions of experiences of humans creating art? Empty mountains:
no one to be seen. Yet— hear—
human sounds and echoes. Returning sunlight
enters the dark woods; Again shining
on the green moss, above. There are two megaton giant AAA games that
I think have performed a sort of magic trick with their translations; both Red Dead Redemption
2 and Ghost of Tsushima have several forests spread out over their massive worlds, but
what I find so magnetic about them isn’t their breadth, but their malleability. I don’t think I’ve played anything else
on this scale that understands how the light and weather and time of day can change the
feeling of a place. I remember fleeting moments in Red Dead Redemption
2; walking through a foggy wood just as the sun rose, and the mist caught and reflected
the light until everything was blinding, surrounded by shimmering white- and then, just as quickly,
it was gone. I returned to those woods many times, and
each time they felt different, the long shadows of the trunks at sunset or the muffled roar
of a thunderstorm above the branches. I’ve actually seen people wishing that the
game had longer sunrises and sunsets, a slightly distorted day/night cycle to give them more
of those beautiful golden hours. But for me, the power is in how easy it is
to miss, how it feels like you might have caught the forest in the light in a way it’s
never looked before. The forests of Tsushima are never still. The everpresent wind is, of course, a much-touted
gameplay mechanic, guiding the player to where they need to go. But it also effortlessly interacts with the
host of weather patterns that can sweep in at a moment’s notice, and the grasses and
flowers that blanket the island. A light mist after rain in wetlands moves
one way, while dense snow in the mountains might move another. When you select a location on the map and
the wind picks up and starts to move in that direction, it doesn’t feel like a white
dotted line showing you were to go. It feels like you, and the many moods of the
island, are in sync. Seeking to capitalize on this natural wonder,
the game actually presents the ability to “write” haikus while focusing on small
aspects of the greater whole of a scene. See what's looking back, sit beneath the golden shroud, replace what was lost And while it’s unfortunate that, in an essay
kind of about poetry, I have to say that the metaphor-heavy, historically-anachronistic,
5-7-5 haikus didn’t really do anything for me (links in the description if you want ‘em),
I did truly appreciate the invitation to stop, breathe, and step outside myself for a while. My disappointment with the poems really just
speaks to how hard it is to guess how a person will want to interpret it- building a virtual
world is one thing, guessing how someone will want to write about it is a whole nother ball
game. In a luxury allowed by the photo mode, you
can actually experience any of the islands moods at any given time. You can flip through each of these effects,
watching the countless ways the same vista presents itself under different conditions. And, the only time I’ve seen this in a photo
mode, while the characters pause, the wind does not. Ghost of Tsushima knows that to capture the
feeling of its spaces, you can’t remove the movement from it. These landscapes do not feel like multiple
separate pieces, but one ever-changing whole. I was once backpacking in New Mexico, and
set up camp for the night near a ridge with an overlook. I, and the folks I was camping with, walked
to that ridge as the sun set; when we got there, and looked over towards the next row
of jagged hills, we realized that the preternatural glow behind them wasn’t just the sun. Miles away, a forest fire was rolling through
that area. There have been other sunsets and other forest
fires, of course. But the luminance we saw there, a mix of the
disappearing sun and the rising flames obscured by the trees, is probably the only time that
specific perspective has been seen by...anyone. Ultimately, Weinberger writes: The point is that translation is more than
a leap from dictionary to dictionary; it is a reimagining of the poem. As such, every reading of every poem, regardless
of language, is an act of translation; translation into the reader’s intellectual and emotional
life. As no individual reader remains the same,
each reading becomes a different- not merely another- reading. The same poem cannot be read twice. Walk out into the forest. Take with you the thousands of translations
you’ve had the privilege of experiencing, the knowledge of the thousands more you haven’t
yet seen. Create one of your own. --
My new year's resolutions last year was to read more poetry. It was always something I wanted to be into,
but never really given myself the proper channels to do so. And as I explored artists, different poets,
I kept hearing the same thing. Which was that really, these should be read
out loud. Hearing poetry read out loud gives you a sense
of the throughlines of the poem, a more complete sense of it as a whole, and it can also just
be an incredibly chill experience. It can help you enjoy it in a way you didn’t
think you would. And luckily, this episode was sponsored by
Audible, who are pretty good at this sort of thing. Right now, Audible has a ridiculously good
deal for everyone’s favorite holiday, uhh, President’s day, where you can get a full
6 months of service for less than 10 bucks a month. And when you do that, by going to audible
dot com slash jacobgeller or texting jacobgeller to 500-500, you also get an audiobook on the
house. They’ve got a bazillion titles in every
possible genre, but if you want something I think is good, I suggest going with one
of the collections by Mary Oliver. Oliver is probably my favorite nature poet,
her prose is simple but emotionally rich, and she actually reads all her own books,
so you can hear the poems exactly as they were meant to be read. Picking up a thick tome of poetry might be
intimidating, but listening to a few poems or two a day is not intimidating at all, it’s
really easy to do. And by going to audible dot com slash jacobgeller
or texting jacob geller to the number, you can give yourself that experience and let
yourself feel a little bit more while you’re in nature. Or, I dunno, listen to all 25 Jack Reacher
audiobooks in a row, I’m not your mom. Just listen to some books!
