Video Games Are Dreams Made Out Of Bridges
Or: How I Learned That Kentucky Route Zero Doesn't Work in the Daytime
Ever since I became a father, there are aspects of my life that have lived almost exclusively in twilight: in the hours between 9pm, when my wife usually goes to bed, and when I finally stumble up the stairs around midnight.
One of them is writing. As I type this sentence, the sky outside my office window has shifted from a bruised orange to a deep, inky blue; the trees across the field beyond my back garden are now only faintly visible. The other one is video games. Ten years ago I could — and often did — spend an entire day in front of the TV, immersing myself in a digital world. These days the game I play most frequently is the New York Times crossword on my phone. For anything else, I need to wait for the witching hour.
I’m aware that this is starting to sound like a bit of a moan, and I feel like I should take a moment to clarify that I really don’t mind this new arrangement. As much as I love writing and playing games, I love spending time with my family even more, and as I watch my daughter rapidly grow from a toddler into a little girl, I find myself desperately trying to squeeze every drop out of every day. The part of me that isn’t a father is content to wait until the evening to be allowed to come out to play.
There are advantages, too. Recently, for example, I finished playing Kentucky Route Zero, a game I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since I finally put the controller down — and one that almost seemed tailor-made for my new schedule.
Kentucky Route Zero is a hard game to describe. If I had to give it a shot, I would say it’s as if someone tried to turn The Great American Novel into a video game — or maybe if someone tried to turn a video game into The Great American Novel. It’s an elegiac piece of fiction about the struggle of Middle America against the forces of time, entropy and capitalism. It’s a thousand tiny struggles for redemption that might not even be necessary or might not be deserved. It’s one of the most haunting stories I’ve ever read.
The plot similarly defies description, but at the most basic level, it’s the story of an ageing truck driver trying to make a delivery of antiques to an address that might not exist. His journey eventually takes him along The Zero: a dreamlike stretch of highway where the rules of time, space and logic are all negotiable at best.
“Dreamlike” seems like the most appropriate word. Every new twist across the game’s five chapters seemed weirder than the last. I met a trio of ghosts playing a board game in the basement of a gas station. I floated down an underground river in a tugboat with a robot mammoth welded to the stern. I attended a funeral for a pair of horses that was so unexpectedly moving, I thought I might weep. And yet, as I sat in a darkened living room illuminated only by the soft glow of the television, every new development felt perfectly logical; as if it was the only thing that could have happened next.
The phrase "walking simulator” is often used in a derogatory way to describe games that are heavy on plot and light on interaction, but even that feels too “video gamey” as a description of Kentucky Route Zero. My interactions with the story felt more like lucid dreaming than playing a video game. I occasionally guided a character through a space or chose which of a few lines of dialogue they would say next but I never felt like I was controlling them so much as gently nudging them as they drifted in and out of the narrative.
It was a unique experience, but also a delicate one. Earlier in the week, while I was working from home one day, I decided to boot the game up on my lunch break and was dismayed to find that in the cold light of day, the spell had been broken. The dream no longer felt like a dream; it just felt like a videogame. I turned it off after 10 minutes and promised myself I wouldn’t pick it up until night had fallen again.
Like all dreams, Kentucky Route Zero eventually came to an end. Like all dreams, it seemed to end in the middle: its characters teetering on the precipice of a decision as I was pulled from their world with the abruptness of a hypnic jerk. Like all dreams, I am starting to forget its finer details. One day soon, all I will be left with is the sense of having experienced something beautiful and mysterious and profoundly sad. But right now, typing in the twilight, I will hold on to the memories for as long as I can.
And now… a poem.
Speaking of staying up into the small hours… Last year, when my daughter was going through one of many sleep regressions, I wrote a poem about the tension of waiting for the other bootie to drop.
Late Night Jazz
The static from the baby monitor
snaps, crackles and pops
like the liminal space
at the start of an old vinyl record.
I lower myself
into the grooves
of my chair
and pray to God
that the music
never starts.