I Got Daddy Issues, That’s on Kratos: Game-World-Literature(s); Call for Pitches
My son’s interest in the Norse pantheon has, so far, delimited my own exhaustion with the genre. We are both playing God of War: Ragnarok. Everybody knows what happens. But it feels good, lugging around the big brick Kratos. His lighter, though now more developed son Atreus striking out on his own, who is a son next my own heart, as in the next room my own son fathers Atreus too, eager to abolish the law of the father and put the All Father in his place. In our place.
Kratos grunts.
In the living room, he watches me.
“Dang daddy, you just lettin em whoop you like that?” and
“You still in Midgard? Let me know when you step ya game up.”
Both comments, under the right circumstances, could work, if the game’s difficulty were up to the standards implied by comparative assumptions of experience. I was petting the dog while toying with this particular Wulver, and similarly in an unwinnable “fight” against Heimdall. I also felt the need to remind boul that four score and twenty minutes ago he’d run to my door crying because he was stuck in the third area of Lego Jurassic World, whereafter he and his sister watched me beat the whole game and later revised this as their own victory. But I digress.
What’s actually important about these games is the interstices: the godly dromedies whispered from Mimir’s severed head to Kratos and Atreus’ nubile ears as Kratos pushes their boat off to neverwhere. And then later, in Ragnarok, between a crew of JRPG-style alliances which includes the goddess Freya, Tyr, and a few goodly dwarves unbound from their mythico-stereotypical fates the world over, wherein they are trapped making weapons and offering light purgatorial discourse. (Consider the blacksmith—though not a Dwarf—in Elden Ring who literalizes this trend of entrapment in the forge, the slave cook cats in Monster Hunter, etc.)
The overarching theme is simple: Kratos is washed and needs a little help from his friends, a little brain power from his son. I am exhausted, and perhaps almost as hard on my son as I am myself. Or too soft on him; the extremes vary depending on whom you ask and, a day or two into playing, my father, more of a grandfather, or Popop, in the technical sense, dies on the very same day I receive hardcovers of a book in which he is Odin, though black and far less powerful. This is not a surprise, but it feels sudden.
My sister calls me while I’m writing this in the back of Uncle Bobbie’s, drinking a matcha love latte and trying not to buy shit before I read the shit I already have. She’s crying, and too frazzled for me to make out anything more than “you need to come home right now.” It could be anything, I think. Juju with a another horrifying seizure, dead dogs, kid hit by a car, dead uncle, brother, mother. When I show up she’s broken, but manages to say Popop died, which breaks me. Kids are in the living room, Eva holding Lala, Jojo playing the game, Leah chasing the dogs, Juju slapping Kenny with graham crackers, and Popop dead. From what can be pieced together, it was a heart attack. Not uncommon. I am drawn back into working at the hospital when, in the span of a week, Popop, his brother, my mother, and his were all at some point under my care in the emergency department at Einstein, or on Tower 6, all with a plentitude of chronic conditions which include problems of the blood, deep sadness, and a determined fury to leave the hospital and never return. Freya tries to kill us for killing her son. Atreus runs away. Jojo is inconsolable. Leah is meh about it.
The game offers an infinity of violence. Kratos is heavy-handed, like Popop or Thanos. My knuckles are small, and prone to breaking, like a heart. The distinction between types remains thin. The Family reasserts its need to be made whole, if only under slight variation: patriarch adorned, drawn and quartered, castrated or face sliding outta concrete like Bone Thugs N Harmony’s “Crossroads,” still hard, still lonely. I think of Jevick’s dad dying in Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria and the easy joy of his passing, the man’s dull brutality assuaged by inheritance of all the bread won. Every nigga deserves, I think.
There is something troubling in the easy repudiation of masculine ethos and the way it revolves around work. That work is not only done in the workplace, but more so at the home. That to be a man is to work too often, and to place work above all else, particularly social relationships. That the male of the species will not accept help, which assumes of course that help is offered. And I think of how if I quit working, how many people will be destitute. I think of how, after quoting Kendrick’s lyric of just this foible Mitch (1) continues to work, and I wonder how often what passes as help is the lazy assumption of good will and well-wishes and talk therapy that, no matter how much of it we engage or endure, will never feed my children or my sister or her children, will never house my mother, and has never lessened the servitude to labor for which Popop seemed so so angry, drenched in blood and acid and tiny mouths to feed. But again, more on the loss of real material thinking from the public realm in favor of often terrifying forms of affirmation.
It feels good to smash things as Kratos.
My son and I murder the father, which is to say, we both complete the game’s primary iteration. The interpersonal lives of its characters serve as one window into a semi-open world of discourse between us, how he might feel in relation to that world, how he might feel locked out of it, despite the overuse of my body in attempts to change it for him, despite the sensitivities I am developing far too late in life, despite the past and future tense of my mistakes. Ajay (2) was mad they tried to rehabilitate Kratos, the genocidal rapist, into a family man: give ’em a boy, why don’t they? I’m not sure it functions in the manner intended.
Every day I am more interested in the social and aesthetic lives of video games, and where those games might intersect with literature and the world: forms of writing over explanation, modes of experience over representation, intensities of feeling over rote justification. In this spirit I wish to convene a call for writing on Game-World-Literature(s) here at the Cleveland Review of Books. The forms, I hope, will be loose. The questions are simple enough:
How are conceptual meanings of the world—worldmaking, worldbuilding, world literature, World (3) as in difference / ontology / relation, etc.—related? Through wide-ranging cultural objects, be they cult or occult, how is experiential play changing language (I know, I know, Derrida) in the epoch of video games? Or, thinking next to Sylvia Wynter, how might games help us learn to sit down together and talk about a little culture? And why might any of this matter beyond the obvious fact that video games are now the most popular aesthetic medium in the world?
My hope for this call is to ordain all kinds of sloppiness, weak theories, hard arguments and amateurism, humor and counter-intuitiveness between the folds of doctorally educated precision on one hand, and my favorite blerds who know and play culture on the other, where the seams of these two cultures meet and diverge, meet, and diverge, untidily.
The strange, unexpected, deeply felt and flustered are welcome. Specificity regarding your cultural objects, frame of reference, or experience, is next to godliness, though it need not come with a dictionary or self-appointed translator. Difficulty is also next to godliness. Your inversions of language are greatly appreciated, as are your returns to play with the overwrought.
To pitch a Game-World-Literature(s) piece to CRB, see our guidelines.
(1) This section of Mitch’s essay also broke me, as his essays in Survival Math often do.
(2) Ajay Singh Chaudhary, beloved colleague and executive director of BISR.
(3) Here I’m thinking back to Tyrone Palmer’s essay: “Otherwise than Blackness: Feeling, World, Sublimation” which uses the world as a conceptual apparatus dependent on affect to ask questions about blackness, affect, and relational possibility.