Photograph: Nintendoĭavid O’Reilly’s Everything, released earlier this year, encourages empathy with other living creatures in the simplest way imaginable: offering you the chance to embody a moose, a rabbit, a cockroach, a raspberry, a pebble, a tuba, a star, through the spectral act of possession. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: ‘a sweet wind of change’. They cost ever larger sums to build, require ever greater numbers of talented minds to make, and distract ever more humans from the practical issues of reality.Īnd yet in video games we often perceive some of the mathematical building blocks of existence, often follow the logical chains of cause and effect that follow our actions and reactions, and occasionally catch ghostly, flitting shadows of how life works and maybe even what it means. Surely the king’s ransom it takes to fund a blockbuster film would be more usefully and perhaps profitably applied to combating climate change, or Boris Johnson’s gaffes? What is a commissioned oil portrait if not the most extravagant of all selfies, taken in a world to whose indignities and injustices no one can claim to be blind? In this context, video games can seem like the hollowest endeavours of all.
A s social media shrinks and quickens the world, and the threats we face seem to grow ever taller and closer, the relevance of entertainment (and, whisper it, art) appears to diminish.
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