In the last two years, the pandemic has brought us many works of art that have tried to definitively capture humanity's struggle. There was that movie with Leonardo DiCaprio turning pink as he shouts at the top of his lungs for people to look up at the comet hurtling toward Earth. It was so on the nose that it provoked little thought: Yes, we are divided, likely doomed. What of it?
No medium has come as close to perfectly encapsulating Our Situation as video games. In the beginning, when many of us were in lockdown and baking mediocre sourdough, we played Animal Crossing, which involves finding comfort in simple tasks like fishing and gardening while stranded on an island. This year, we are playing Elden Ring, a ruthlessly difficult game that gets only harder the more you play it. That about sums up what it's been like to live in a pandemic.
Elden Ring has a story that has something to do with a ring, but more important is its design: It's an open-world game, meaning you can do whatever, whenever you want. Players will ride a horse through a poison swamp, sprint across molten lava and traverse a crumbling bridge surrounded by tornadoes, fighting or evading enemies along the way.
No matter what you choose to do, you'll probably die again and again trying to do it, sometimes for hours. That's because the slightest mistiming of a button press will make you fall to your death or open you to attack. Even the most experienced gamers will die dozens of times in a dungeon before reaching the boss — the main villain at the end of a game level.
this is the type of incisive media critique one can only get from the venerated new york times. thank you.It's difficult to imagine Elden Ring having this sort of cultural cachet in any other era. In Year 3 of the pandemic, as vaccination rates have risen and hospitalization cases have dipped in some areas, offices, schools and restaurants have reopened. To many Americans, the dragon has been slain. Yet in other parts of the world, a new variant of the coronavirus is driving another wave, and in New York, cases are beginning to climb again.
As some of us let our guard down to have some semblance of a normal life, we are bracing ourselves for that stupid bird around the corner that still might kill us. Our hard-learned lesson of the pandemic — to expect disappointment and more struggle — has trained us well for Elden Ring.
Where the DiCaprio movie, "Don't Look Up," was polarizing because it picked a side that criticized anyone in denial of the apocalypse, Elden Ring's choose-your-own-adventure format is more inclusive for a populace that can't seem to agree on anything. In Elden Ring, there is no right or wrong.
In Elden Ring, the Struggle Feels Real (Published 2022)
The video game evokes the hardship and disappointment of the pandemic, but also the hope of human communion.
www.nytimes.com