The Way of Nature

On Ghost of Tsushima, and the manufactured sublime

NOTE: This is easily one of my more critical essays to date, and as I generally maintain a pretty strict principle of abstinence from writing “negative” pieces, I feel it’s my responsibility to proactively assert first and foremost that in writing this article I am, by no means, attempting to disrespect, denigrate, or devalue any individual work or craftsmanship that’s gone into the creation of Ghost of Tsushima, nor am I seeking to discourage anyone from playing and forming their own experience of the game.

NOTE 2: Spoilers ahead.

I’ve gotta admit upfront: Ghost of Tsushima is not what I would consider to be a particularly interesting game. I mean this both in the sense of treating it as the big-budget, brand-licensed commercial product it needs to be; as well as the exquisitely-crafted, carefully-researched masterwork of art it seems like it really wants to be. This is not to say either that I consider it to be a bad game, necessarily; but rather, it’s the best example I’ve encountered in a while of no more or less than a Perfectly Adequate one: a remarkably unremarkable, but otherwise enjoyable take on an open-world formula perfected by Ubisoft, with little of the latter’s trademark ideological dilettantism for flavour.

Due to the apparent similarities between both their presentations and their premises, I initially approached Ghost of Tsushima the same way I approach Ubisoft’s open-world titles: with a cautious blend of scepticism and curiosity, expecting a well-researched work brimming with provocations and flirtations, constantly struggling (and in most cases falling short of its ambitions) against its nature as a corporate product designed for mass appeal. I was especially impressed with Ghost’s somewhat unique historical decision to portray the first Mongol invasion of Japan, an event that’s largely uncovered in Western narratives but which carries significant weight in the history of Sino-Japanese relations, not the least as a kind of turning point for the nature of warfare at the time. Some of the topics I was particularly interested to see how it would handle include:

• How it’d choose to portray the Mongols as an invading force, who aren’t often given much attention outside of the legacy of the Khans (spoiler: not well, to put it lightly)
• Whether it’d actually succeed in creating the compelling and nuanced character study of the samurai which its marketing practically begged to convince me of (spoiler: it doesn’t, at least in any meaningful way)
• And, more directly in line with my personal interests, how it would grapple with our present knowledge that the legacy of the samurai — honour and nobility and swordfighting and all that — was an almost entirely fictionalised myth conjured up and perpetuated by spoiled aristocrats attempting to justify their increasing irrelevance; imperial fascists wishing to reclaim a mythical lineage of divine descent; and self-effacing orientalists seeking to render their own nation as a docile and noble culture, palatable to and compatible with the interests of Western missionaries (spoiler: it not only completely fails in this regards, but actively embraces in virtually every dimension the cliches, tropes, and stereotypes of its ill-begotten legacy)

What I discovered, however, was a much thinner work: one which barely bothers to exercise the slightest attempts at interrogating its ideological and historical premises, and which offers so little apparent effort at acknowledging, let alone examining even its most blatantly questionable decisions that it begs the question of whether it’s worth addressing from a critical perspective at all.

So why then, we’re all probably wondering at this point, have I bothered to write at such length about a game I otherwise feel and care so little about?

Nearly every review I’ve encountered of Ghost of Tsushima seems to share a remarkably unanimous set of observations: a beautiful, occasionally even sublime, world filled with all manners of visual delights, slightly tempered by a rote, by-the-numbers approach to mechanical design. The following excerpt from The A.V. Club’s review of the game captures quite eloquently what appears to be the most common response to the game, as well as the level of genuine awe at the game’s visual splendour:

[Ghost Of Tsushima] is a perfectly enjoyable riff on the Far Cry/Grand Theft Auto/“map game” genre, with an enjoyable story and some pleasantly chunky combat. And yet it still sometimes feels like there’s a trick being pulled here, a subconscious seduction that operates entirely in those moments when the game’s world designers suddenly flex, and the player’s jaw drops at the sight of another lush meadow of crimson flowers, lit with a perfect approximation of just-before-a-rain-shower sun. Or a cloud-wreathed mountain, looming far off in the distance. Or a golden forest, shot through with sunset light as the wind lifts and spins the amber leaves. It can’t be denied: Ghost Of Tsushima is one of the most beautiful video games ever made. It’s other things, too — not all of them good. But its beauty is irresistible, ostentatious, almost rude. It’s a preening peacock of a title, one that knows exactly how hot you think it is. And yet, that awareness doesn’t stop the jaws from dropping anyway, the next time it decides to take a twirl.

Even more interestingly, however, at every and any level of response you’ll notice a single focal point of praise that unambiguously rises above all the rest: the tremendous success of the game’s photo mode. Available at nearly any moment, mapped to its own dedicated face button on the D-pad (compared to the photo modes of many other AAA titles, which require the player to press some specific and unique combination of buttons, or can only be accessed through an immersion-breaking pause menu), Ghost’s photo mode is one of, if not the most impressive of the game’s selling points. It’s even been called “the best [photo mode] in any game ever” (IGN) and it’s not really too difficult to understand how one could arrive at this conclusion: thousands of photos, both static and moving, abound on the likes of Twitter and Reddit and elsewhere showcasing astonishing landscapes filled with motion and vibrancy and interplays of light and shadow and colour, simultaneously dramatic and serene, contemplative and brimming with energy and violence.

One of Ghost’s most striking innovations is the implementation of cinemagraph-style motion effects while using the photo mode, which freeze the action but preserve the effects of wind and particles upon the landscape, allowing players to capture highly dynamic snapshots of moments frozen in time yet still perpetually in motion, like real-time dioramas. According to the game’s creative/art director, Jason Connell, this feature (as well as the very intentionally curated design of the photo mode in general) was seen as an integral element of the game’s overall design thesis, “something more than a fun additional feature, but rather a way for players to further express themselves in the worlds they are crafting”:

“The idea that we came up with was, like, fucking motion, man […] Motion and movement. We had to utilise the motion, the movement, our particle systems, the wind, the capes… we had to utilise what makes our game unique and have it come through.” (GamesRadar+)

The result is an incredibly accessible yet also robust system, complete with all sorts of traditional photography elements such as focal lengths, aperture widths, and even a built-in tracking shot timeline; and a versatile suite of tuning tools granting precise control over virtually every aspect of a scene, from the time of day to ambient weather to angle of lighting to the direction and strength of the wind(!).

Photography, of course, is not just about excellent composition and technique, but also how those are applied in choice of subjects as well: and Ghost of Tsushima certainly isn’t lacking in this regards, either. As IGN writes:

[P]erhaps the greatest asset to Ghost of Tsushima’s photography is the virtual landscape itself. Sucker Punch did such a great job laying the game out, it’s almost impossible to find a boring backdrop or ho-hum scene to snap a quick photo. Even if you aren’t familiar with compositional concepts like dynamic symmetry or the rule of thirds, the game is laid out to make nearly every angle feel cinematic. It’s astonishing in its beauty.

It’s a work which seems to take that whole idea of “every frame a painting” quite literally as its unifying ethos, with no shortage of lush meadows and sprawling vistas, fields of grain and dense patches of forests billowing in the wind: in short, all the things that I as a player otherwise love and actively seek in games. The Evening Standard corroborates IGN’s praise of the photo mode’s sheer accessibility, owing just as much to the design of the world as to the specific versatility of the tools:

This is the first time we ever bothered to use the photo mode in any game, and it is simply because Tsushima looks so beautiful. […] [B]ecause of how Tsushima [presumably addressing the game, but this also applies to the in-game location of Tsushima as well] is made there is literally no boring backdrop. Whether your [sic] a pro and know your rule of thirds or if you’ve never composed a scene in your life, anyone can take a breathtaking shot in Ghost of Tsushima.

By all means, Ghost of Tsushima should have been a game that I — someone who has a long history at this point of being perfectly willing and content to spend $60 on brand new games just to turn off the HUD, walk around a bit, admire the views, take some photos of trees and flowers — would love, the kind of game that I could look at and say, “yes, this is it, this was made for me.” And yet, for all its undeniable beauty, something about all of it just feels unshakably, unignorably off.

This article seeks to examine the role of the natural landscape as cinematic subject in Ghost of Tsushima, and the ways in which I believe the game’s understanding of cinema and beauty alike reflects a cynical approach to aesthetics more interested in the construction, cultivation, and consumption of beauty as a discrete image; than the organic and experiential nature of beauty as a means of contemplation, as well as the epistemological role of cinema in facilitating such experiences. I will be examining Ghost’s treatment of the natural sublime as a fundamentally American perspective of sublimity against Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, specifically looking at ways in which each work approaches the subject of the natural landscape as the site upon which the violence of warfare is enacted on both the literal (ie, spatial) and representative (ie, cinematic) level.

Despite its tremendous efforts in insisting upon the magnitude of the influence of its source material in Japanese cinema (its most egregious demonstration of this being the much-touted and somewhat kitschy visual filter based on and named after the cinema of the lesser Kurosawa, who himself was often accused by his contemporaries of making the most Americanised films of his lot), everything about Ghost of Tsushima’s actual execution suggests a much different source of primary influence. From the frequent comparisons in open-world design to games like the Assassin’s Creed series and Horizon Zero Dawn; to the director’s explicit admission that the greatest influence upon the game was Red Dead Redemption; even to its (hopefully) facetious description by one reviewer as a kind of “anti-Dark Souls”; for all its pretensions otherwise, Ghost of Tsushima is a thoroughly American work, dressed up in the veneer (however respectful or genuine the attempt wishes to be seen as) of another culture’s cinematic and historical legacy.

(This doesn’t even begin to cover the game’s steady reliance upon virtually every trope of post-WWII samurai cinema, which itself was significantly influenced by American Westerns in a kind of cross-pollinating cultural exchange, with deep roots in both national cultures of imperialistic expansionism and right-wing revisionism; or that the game’s plot — about the son of a tragically-slain nobleman who, while singlehandedly defending his homestead against the threat of foreign invaders, struggles between the philosophical values of his sanitised and aristocratic upbringing and the crueler realities of war — has far more in common with the Vietnam-era revisionist Westerns than with even the most cynical and bleak entries in the samurai genre. This subject, however, is unfortunately beyond the scope of the article.)

Plenty of publications have discussed at length the game’s place in the mechanical tradition established by its peers and predecessors. However, far less attention has been given, at least critically, to its distinct focus on visual, and particularly cinematic aesthetics, and more significantly, the seemingly central role of the natural sublime to the game’s overall identity. I strongly believe that its understanding of aesthetics is rooted far less in the purposeful minimalism and elegant restraint of traditional Japanese aesthetics; as it is in the stark visual maximalism of the American pastoral tradition, with the latter’s intense twofold focus on a pictorial sublime formed from the confluence of a rugged wilderness under threat from the emergence of industrial complexity and, in a broader sense, human presence. This distinction is important not just because I believe it helps to reframe and potentially even clarify the feeling of “emptiness” which some have noted as supposed “deficiencies” of the world; but more importantly, because I believe it offers a more useful framework in which to parse its construction and presentation of a kind of “nature” very deliberately designed to evoke a feeling of sublimity, as an extension of the traditional American myth of the empty landscape as the site of potential occupation rather than contemplation.

The genre of the romantic sublime has always depended on the embracing of irreconcilable imbalances: the smallness of man and the grandeur of the mountain; the dense dimness of the city and the sprawling golden fields, awash in the pale moonlight. The perception of greatness central to the idea of the sublime requires, after all, the drama of scale in order to work: and what greater, more immense presence is there than that of nature itself, the very work of God?

The idea of the experience of the sublime is not a new one — the earliest known formal treatment of it is, after all, nearly two millenia old at this point— and, like virtually all objects of sustained philosophical inquiry, the general consensus seems to be that it’s a largely discursive phenomenon, whose precise meaning and application is largely contingent upon the sociocultural context of the time. Although a full undertaking of anything even remotely resembling a comprehensive historical overview of the evolving discourse surrounding the philosophical positioning of sublimity is basically out of the question for the scope of this article (as well as my time, energy, and interests), I do think regardless that it’d be valuable to at the very least attempt to identify a general trend of determining mechanisms in the discourse surrounding the romantic sublime. This will be especially helpful when it comes time to assess the comparative properties of the cinematic vs the digital sublime, and reckon with the somewhat unique nature of virtuality and representation when it comes to video games.

The earliest recorded work discussing at length the idea of the sublime is a Greek work of literary criticism called, well, On the Sublime, dated to the 1st century AD and credited to an unknown author who’s generally referred to nowadays as Longinus. While On the Sublime overall is — as one might naturally expect of a work of literary criticism — largely concerned with the locutory and literary manifestations of the sublime, Longinus’ treatment offers a solid foundation from which to evaluate further definitions.

Longinus’ work itself, of course, historically sits on the back of a longer tradition stemming from the ontological and epistemological aesthetics of Plato; which is not really too important as a subject for the sake of this essay overall, but which does offer an important set of fundamental distinctions, which hopefully I’ll be able to present in a palatable, however reductive manner heretofore:

• Plato deals extensively with the nature of poetry as mimesis, a very specific kind of representation/imitation, in relation to ideal Truth.
• Through a metaphor involving three beds — the first made by God (representing Plato’s Ideal, roughly comparable to what we’d consider to be “Nature” nowadays); the second made by a workman, in the model of God’s bed; and the last, made by an artist, imitating the bed made by the carpenter— Plato suggests that poetry is little more than an imitation of an imitation, a form of deception that intentionally courts both authorial and subjective detachment.

Longinus, however, neither sharing in nor outright rejecting Plato’s disdain for the artifice of the poet’s craft, instead refocuses the conversation to a much more intimate approach focusing on the role of poetry next to the spirit. A great writer, Longinus believes — distinct from the artist — is one in constant simultaneous struggle against, and communion with that “ancient greatness”: the accumulated mimetic legacy of all those great writers who came before, with the ultimate original authority and inspiration, of course, being Nature itself. Art may be limited by the accuracy and precision of its imitative abilities; but the genius of poetry, which strives constantly for the sublime, is unbound from and untethered by mortal error: “[W]e admire accuracy in art, grandeur in nature; and it is Nature that has given man the power of using words. Also we expect a statue to resemble a man, but in literature, as I said before, we look for something greater than human.” Longinus firmly rejects the necessity of practical value in assessing the genius’ “unconquerable passion for whatever is great and more divine than ourselves”, “whose grandeur is of a kind that comes within the limits of use and profit”.

This wholesale rejection of the “useful or necessary” in appraising “the extraordinary, the great, the beautiful” is essential in recognising that the sublime is something that exists utterly beyond human reason or purpose, a presence or perhaps even force which doesn’t so much offer itself as it enraptures and enthralls the spirit, what Plato himself years earlier in the Phaedrus had called the “divine madness” (theia mania), or a madness sent from the gods. The greatest kinds of writing, Longinus notably argues — those which can embody the necessary “weight, grandeur, and urgency” in order to produce the experience of the sublime — are the ones which deal in “visualisations” (phantasia) or, as others apparently put it, “image productions”:

For the term phantasia is applied in general to an idea which enters the mind from any source and engenders speech, but the word has now come to be used predominantly of passages where, inspired by strong emotion, you seem to see what you describe and bring it vividly before the eyes of your audience. That phantasia means one thing in oratory and another in poetry you will yourself detect, and also that the object of the poetical form of it is to enthrall, and that of the prose form to present things vividly, though both indeed aim at the emotional and the excited.

What’s remarkable about this assertion is that, while it seems to almost paradoxically hold that the most direct and powerful means of experiencing sublimity is rooted in a deeply visual sensation, this process of visualisation does not occur either literally, within the physical space, or even metaphorically, in the space of the literature itself; but in a very thin liminal moment where the suggestion of an image crystallises in the subjective imagination into something elusively concrete, immaterial yet also astonishingly real in feeling: the frenzy of new love, the pull of a great chasm, the gravity of the mountain looming above you. The lone wanderer, belonging to neither the sea of fog lying before him nor the observing watching behind him, trapped perpetually in the nowhere-space of art: and for a moment maybe, we’re standing right there with him.

It’s worthwhile to note that the European discipline of aesthetics — the now dominant approach to such topics — did not formally “exist” until the eighteenth century, with the peak of the Neoclassical era and the slow but steady slide into Romanticism. Less concerned with the intrinsic properties of “art” — which itself, some claim, emerged around around this time as well, as a distinct and novel social process invented as part of the increasingly bourgeois and capitalist European culture — as with the continuous interrogation of the subjective boundaries between reason and emotion; this new mode of theory saw a revival of interest in the subject of the sublime, with a greater focus on its empirical qualities as a cognitive process/modality, than the purely affective spiritual experience described by Longinus, and the classical tradition of proto-aesthetics.

The two defining works typically associated with this era of European reckonings with sublimity are Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), whose most notable contribution is its scientific approach to the metaphysical causalities distinguishing the Beautiful — that which embodies good form, and is pleasing to experience — and the Sublime — that which, through its form, compels and even crushes the one experiencing it; and Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1790), which drew upon the limitations of Burke’s work to propose a more robust taxonomy of aesthetic judgement as a cognitive process, with the sublime resulting from the active appraisal of noumenal (very roughly, incomprehensible) entities, whose presences overwhelm human agency and incite fear as the initial response. Kant makes the acute distinction here that the sublime is not necessarily the experience of fear itself, but one’s recognition that an object may be “fearful, without being afraid of it”. It is this bare retention of reason in the face of awe that allows this experience of fearfulness to become transmuted in the moment into a sensation resembling a kind of pleasure, the sensation of being utterly swept away without the actual trauma.

The sublime for Kant was “a mere appendix to our aesthetic judging of the purposiveness of nature”: no more or less than a means of continuously testing and affirming the boundaries and, more importantly, the powers of our empirical reason, as “what even to be able to think proves that the mind has a power surpassing any standard of sense”. The sheer magnitude and scale of sublime experience — which Kant distinguished as, respectively, the dynamical and mathematical sublime — triggered within the human mind a process by which the imagination, suddenly overwhelmed by the presence of the awesome or the immense, became dislodged from the observation of any intrinsic or sensible property of the object on its own, and instead retreated deeper within itself, producing a “pleasure that arises only indirectly […] produced by the feeling of a momentary inhibition of the vital forces followed immediately by an outpouring of them that is all the stronger.” (Critique)

Embedded deep within Kant’s understanding of the sublime is a kind of intentional trickery, in which the imagination, upon confronting a force so enormous as to utterly defy its abilities, essentially short-wires itself trying to process such a presence and in that moment, triggers a more primal or perhaps even primordial response that occurs independent of the will. Like the others before him, Kant believes that the most powerful and abundant source of this can be encountered in nature, beyond any ready narrative or framework of understanding, as something utterly indifferent or even anathema to human exposition. This has arguably long been one of the appeals of supposedly great art: that it should possess the power to draw us into itself, to immerse us so thoroughly in the logic of its metaphor, that we are led to believe that we are amongst its subjects, and that the frame itself is an illusion. But nature, the bed crafted by God, acts as its own frame, and creates its own art; through which the lives of humans simply pass: unobserved, and also unrepresented.

If the Europeans saw the natural sublime as something to be contemplated from a critical distance as a mode of philosophy— whether for the enrichment of their moral and epistemological understandings, as within the Enlightenment tradition; or as a seductive medium for the introspection of their psyches, as amongst the Romantics, who actively courted the sublime’s ability to induce a kind of temporary dissolution and erasure of the self — the Americans experienced it on a much more literal level, as a distinctively modern and acutely physical presence closely associated with the hostility of the frontier, and all its concomitant sociopolitical, economic, cultural, and even theological implications.

It is firmly in this novel (well, at least for the time) and uniquely potent sensibility of the sublime that the tradition of the American pastoral — and Ghost of Tsushima, to return from a rather lengthy digression — is situated. Key to this definition of American pastoralism is the trope of America as a (dubious) “virgin land”: a frontier wilderness populated sparsely by shepherds and homesteaders (and notably, erased of the memory of native and indigenous presences), distinct from the earlier “savage” wilderness of the New World encountered by European interlopers. The American sublime emerges directly out of the discourse of Manifest Destiny, in which the machinations and movements of men come into direct conflict with the harsh natural landscape. Wilderness is recast as the site of an epic struggle to overcome and “tame” the land; natural splendour not only becoming deeply intertwined with, but in many cases indistinguishable from the technological apparatus constructed to facilitate further mobility and expansion.

In the American pastoral, the generative source of the sublime is rarely nature itself — which is frequently framed in utopic terms, referencing the bountifulness of the new land, its untouched and pristine condition (in the sense, of course, of indicating fresh potential for sovereign occupation) — but the tension and conflict generated from the disappearance of the frontier, caused by the aggressive industry of other humans. The wilderness, for all its beauty, is no longer primarily a source of contemplation or stillness; but the place into which you flee while trying to escape others, whether it’s because you shot a man in Reno or you’re just sick of the air in Chicago.

Nature and technology come increasingly into tension as that fabled middle-land of Eden vanishes, subjugated by transcontinental rail-lines and telegraph machines. Walt Whitman, struggling to capture a song of himself as a body produced by a vast, ever-evolving set of cosmic processes dating back to the beginning of the universe, writes that, “I believe a blade of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars, / […] And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery”; yet also rhapsodises to a locomotive in winter of its “Fierce-throated beauty!” and “lawless music”, “[l]aw of thyself complete”. The awe of nature first becomes indistinguishable from the awe of the industriousness of man, and then utterly overwhelmed by it; the wonder of the mountain diminished and then demolished by the roar of dynamite.

The American sublime is fundamentally a technological sublime, one in which the most omnipresent source of alienation is not to be found in the works of God, but in the imitations of men. The upright cowboy is replaced by the noble outlaw, and then the wretched bounty hunter, each riding westbound into some perpetual sundown, fleeing from past and future alike, from the encroaching monolith of the railroad and the mining towns, the deputies and the marshals and the federal agents, the government and bureaucracy and banks and district courts they represent: from the lumbering, crushing mass of civilisation itself, and a future at once shining and bleak.

At first glance, Ghost of Tsushima seems to be a game all about nature, and the experience of the individual within it. On the technical level alone, an incredible amount of detail and attention has gone into crafting its world and ensuring its authenticity — down to the specific topography of the rocks, to the availability of eggs and certain meats at that time in history — and creative director Jason Connell says that, “We ended up treating our environment like a character. It’s moving, it’s breathing. It’s giving you directions.”

These claims certainly don’t seem to be exaggerations in practice, either: the game’s fundamental navigation systems are quite literally built into the world itself, with various creatures, including birds and foxes, leading the way towards hidden hot springs and out-of-the-way shrines. In an interview with Polygon, studio co-founder Brian Fleming says:

Then there’s the sense that nature itself, maybe, is playing a hand in this story that you’re playing. And there’s a few moments that for me are sort of magical: the moment you realize the wind might lead you somewhere. That’s a really impactful thing because it feels like nature herself is on your side. And there’s a sort of kinship that you can feel with the natural world that I think is kind of cool as well.

Perhaps the most remarkable, although a bit heavy-handed, of these design decisions is the inclusion of the Guiding Wind, which summons a powerful current of wind (supposedly, according to the game, a personification of the spirit of Jin Sakai’s late father) to, well, guide Jin to his tracked destination.

(It’s difficult to refrain from mentioning the uneasy proximity of this “Guiding Wind” to the historical typhoon — a so-called “Divine Wind”, that later became co-opted by the Imperial Army in a form much more recognisable to Western audiences as the kamikaze — which was in reality what actually finally drove off the Mongol invaders, not an exceptionally skilled saboteur in a mask; but I won’t say anything more about that here. EDIT: Apparently the developers have acknowledged this exact point, concluding somewhat dubiously that, “Our hero isn’t a hurricane, he’s a man, and we actually acknowledge that change with his sword that’s engraved with storm wind designs.”)

For all of its visual splendour though, Ghost’s beauty seems to be little more than just that: a remarkable beauty, lacking a certain kind of substance. Although its environments are frequently awe-inspiring on the visual level, one can’t help but notice after some time an increasingly present feeling of a certain absence. I don’t mean this in the usual sense however, in regards to the game’s mechanical structure (which to be honest I didn’t find meaningfully lacking in any regards). Rather, I believe that Ghost’s approach to imagining (and constructing) its idea of nature as, first and foremost, a place of tremendous beauty while failing to offer a genuine means of contemplation has resulted, intentionally or otherwise, in one of the more overtly cynical depictions I’ve encountered as of late of beauty for its own sake, beauty as designed to be consumed and shared rather than distilled into the self.

Beauty, as the saying goes, is skin deep. Often this is framed in a pejorative way, to suggest a kind of duplicity or dissonance between the surface and the interior; but really, at the end of the day, it’s just an observation. Beauty is a pleasant quality, discerned, or so Burke tells us, through those “sensible qualities” that inspire “love, or some passion similar to it” (On the Sublime and Beautiful). Kant seems to basically concur with this, adding that the pleasantness of beauty lies in the “mere judgment” of the subject: a somewhat passive and neutral appraisal, “there not by the medium of sensation in accordance with a concept of understanding” (Critique). It neither arouses nor stirs the senses, but simply stimulates them modestly, requiring no further participation.

The sublime, on the other hand, is that which threatens to utterly pull the observer into its own frame, which exerts a sense of gravity so immense that the distinction between the observer’s sense of self and the object’s presence becomes indistinct. Art, as defined in the Enlightenment imagination, simultaneously courts this sensation of sublimation while also attempting to maintain a comfortable distance, diluting its power to the palatable level of “fine art”, readymade for convenient contemplation.

Video games, with all their focus on “immersion” and “authenticity” and “escapism”, have subsumed into their very definition the expectation of fine art to act as a medium for the contemplation of the sublime, capable of utterly dissolving the player’s ability to maintain critical distance between subject and interface. This is no more immediately obvious than in the tradition of the “open world” video game, defined by such verbal modalities as “exploration”, “discovery”, and “open-ended freedom”.

What an “open world” really is, at the end of the day, is a mathematical illusion — the promise of scale — very intentionally designed to inculcate through clever repetition and a fastidious tendency towards verisimilitude the illusion of vastness, and spatial liberty. It’s a trick which at the end of the day operates no more or less differently, in either cause or effect, to techniques such as fixed linear perspectives in painting, for example, which summon the illusion of depth. This is the primary function of art as mimesis: through clever application of technique, it simulates the conditions in which an appearance of the sublime can be encountered and experienced, softening the spatial constraints of the frame so that the viewer’s faculties become so overwhelmed by the apparent magnitude of the illusion that their implicit recognition of its symbolic/fictive nature— that they’re not actually viewing a train barreling towards them, that they’re not literally shooting and maiming other human beings for fun — becomes literalised in the potential of what their imagination believes is going on.

This, I would argue, is the primary draw of not just open world games — which just so happen to embody one particularly transparent manifestation of the overall intent — but all video games in general, that distinguishes them from other form: their insistence, from the very beginning of their history, in the abundant potential of their techniques; and their direct courting of a certain kind of technological sublime in which the viewer is overwhelmed not by the grandeur of a natural force, but by another person’s ability to imitate, and potentially even transcend the original.

To its credit, Ghost of Tsushima recognises exactly what it is, and what it’s set out to do. It is a work concerned first and foremost with indulging the fantasy of the cinematic samurai; and the developers have been very transparent about this. In an interview with GameSpot, Sucker Punch’s co-founder Chris Zimmerman states:

The way I think about it is: we’re going to deviate from historical truth, we just want to do it intentionally. […] If you have an idea about what samurai look like or how they act or how they think we’re going to give that to you. […] It’s not just about your expectations of what a samurai is, which are really more formed by watching movies than by careful academic study. It’s also, whether people know it or not, people’s experience playing games — samurai games, fighting games, or whatever sort — your expectations are kind of set by that. So we have to play within that set of expectations to make you [think], “I feel like a samurai!” You don’t want it to be jarring, you want it to be natural. There are so many natural barriers between you and this time-machine experience that we’re going for, that we have to be careful to take all the barriers that we can get rid of and get rid of them.

Although I don’t necessarily begrudge Sucker Punch for its ambitions nor do I wish to judge the work for anything but what it’s set out to do, I do find that the intent itself is in many ways disingenuous, in a way that feels somehow “dirty”. Essentially, what Ghost of Tsushima is by its own admission is a work which sincerely embraces its own cynical approach to its subject manner, fully recognising that it’s a pastiche of a pastiche of a deliberate embellishment — and perfectly content to deal exclusively at the level of appearances for the sake of appearances.

Its failure is far less of execution, as it is I believe of intent. It would be one thing to have set out to make a samurai game and, out of a general lack of research and attention to detail, produced a work that was ignorant and cynical out of its own foolishness; but it’s an entirely different thing, I reckon, when a work which otherwise invests so much time apparent time and energy into accurately reproducing certain kinds of details while intentionally ignoring others ends up as cynical and hollow as Ghost of Tsushima feels.

Consequently, when I encounter Ghost’s vast beauty, my reaction isn’t one of awe, as it expects of me; but an increasingly mounting sense of frustration stemming from the knowledge that I’m being manipulated, and that the work is actively, consciously trying to dupe me into believing in its sense of sublime. The glowing pampas fields blowing in the distance, the bamboo trees shooting up from the ground, the mist hovering over the face of the mountains: the trickery behind the illusion here is too transparent, the world too obviously and artificially beautiful to convince me of its sincerity, its authenticity as a space that has any purpose or nature beyond existing as something purely designed to stimulate my viewing pleasure.

Of course, this is not to say that the manipulation in itself is the problem — as every work is manipulative at its core, every one of its effects illusive — but more so, that the game seems fundamentally unconcerned with the implications behind that sense of wonder, and is interested solely in extracting from me a reaction of wonder of having been presented such an obviously beautiful thing. One can compare Ghost’s depiction of Tsushima to the worlds of games such as Ghost Recon Wildlands, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, or The Witcher 3, and the differences are starkly apparent: although the environments of the latter titles lack the immediate visual dynamism of Ghost, they ultimately feel much more believable as spaces whose wildernesses and vistas are simply allowed to exist for their own sake, their unremarkable beauty and vastness the result of natural (well, probably algorithmic) processes instead of as justifications for wallpaper fodder.

When discussing any kinds of experiences, it’s custom to review the verbal modalities that mediate those experiences. What this means more simply is to ask ourselves how exactly something is experienced: a painting, for example, is viewed rather than touched (well…) or, I dunno, smelled; a perfume is smelled rather than viewed, etc. Within a game, however, where actions are not literal but deeply symbolic — a mechanical action such as pushing forward a stick moves the character forward; the gradient of the joystick’s rotation determines whether the character onscreen walks or runs etc — the variety and scope of verbal possibilities expands significantly, so that the primary action is not taking place from the perspective of the player themselves (compared to a film, for example, which could be argued to inherit the perspective of the camera), but from the player’s perspective as projected into the representational perspective of the player’s avatar within the character.

Put much more simply, all of this is really just to say that our primary experience of a work is mediated through a set of fixed, pre-determined actions. These actions, taken together, act as a kind of interface between the thing being represented, and how we respond to that as an experience.

I would argue that Ghost of Tsushima’s most egregious decision lies in its co-option of natural contemplation into a mechanical modality, stripping it of its intimacy and recontextualising it as just another action. This is most present in its collectible side activities, especially evident in the haiku and hot springs events, which see Jin taking a moment to reflect upon the landscape and his interior thoughts respectively.

While I find the idea behind these events interesting and a bit clever from a gameplay perspective — they’re a nice variation on, and change of pace from the traditional game collective, which at best just plays a short non-interactive cutscene upon being picked up — conceptually, I find them frustrating, especially in context of the rest of the game’s understanding and presentation of its own beauty.

I get (I think) the rough inspiration behind these activities: they’re meant to offer less inquisitive players an opportunity/framework to reflect upon the vast beauty surrounding them in which the developers have invested no small amount of impressive labour, without departing substantially from the game’s familiar structures. But I would argue however that it is precisely through this attempt of… transliteration, perhaps, that what ends up happening is that the complex and ongoing processes of contemplation crucial to the emergence of the sublime experience becomes effectively tokenised, into a series of laughably finite actions rendered in the awkward and somewhat cheap syntax of the game’s modal language.

Ghost wants desperately for the player to acknowledge at every moment the sublimity of its setting, not only in the continuous beauty of its virtual environment, but also implicitly in the work and craftsmanship concealed behind this as well — and yet it somehow fails to remember that the sublime does not require attention, but simply seizes it. No part of its design ever really seems to quite trust the player to recognise on their own its aspirations, and as a result, it feels the constant need to resort to the language of exposition when what it really lacks is a sense and language of the poetic. Never really quite able to transcend its own fixation on a certain kind of cinema, the world of Tsushima ends up being no more (or less) than a landscape of pretty moving images: best experienced at a slight distance through the lens of a camera, perfectly satisfied by the pleasure of its own spectacle.

During the entirety of my forty or so hours spent in the empty beauty of Ghost of Tsushima’s fantasy, I found my attention returning repeatedly to a single work: Terrence Malick’s 1998 film The Thin Red Line.

At first, the two don’t seem much at all comparable: one is an action-adventure video game portraying a fictionalised account of the 1274 Mongol invasion of Japan; and the other is an (according to Wikipedia) “epic war film” portraying a fictionalised account of the Battle of Mount Austen in the Pacific Theatre of World War II. One is about a lone man, noble and dignified and ruthlessly powerful, defending his home from invaders; the other, about a group of largely nameless and interchangeable men, scared and confused and hopelessly out of their element, on a campaign to invade another’s home for reasons they can’t quite understand. In many ways, however, on both thematic and aesthetic levels, I believe the two works serve as excellent companion pieces as near-direct antipodes of one another.

Both Ghost and Line are works which ostensibly take, at least at the surface level, attempt a deeply contemplative approach to pondering the relationship between warfare and the landscape; each following brief periods in the lives of young men who find themselves, for various reasons, thrust into vicious combat amidst sprawling Japanese landscapes. Considerable effort is spent on the visual presentation of this surrounding scenery, drawing continuous attention to the relationship between the explosive (in both cases, literal at times) violence of the works’ respective battles, and the disarmingly serene nature of the worlds surrounding them. Where the two works differ most significantly, however, is in their understanding of the relationship between their subjects, and the worlds around them.

We were a family. How’d it break up and come apart, so that now we’re turned against each other? Each standing in the other’s light. How’d we lose that good that was given us? Let it slip away. Scattered it, careless. What’s keeping us from reaching out, touching the glory?

To call The Thin Red Line a “war film”, with the implication of a certain genre based solely on its choice in subject matter, comes off as disingenuous; not least because, to fall back on a classic cliche, it never so much attempts to be a “war film” as it is a film that just so happens to take place in a war.

One of the most immediately apparent things about the film that distinguishes it from its would-be relatives within the broad genre of films about wars is that it demonstrates a near-total lack of interest in any and all tactical, historical, or even really ideological concerns. The all-too-familiar patriotic bravado and rousing speeches about the righteousness of the American way and freedom and brotherhood and all that other shit so deeply engrained within the tradition of WWII films is conspicuously absent. Barely any more attention is given to the actual logistics or even strategic importance of the battles the soldiers stumble through. Instead, every single one of the film’s most meaningful and enduring conflicts are ones of spiritual struggle: between love and longing, the fear of dying and the fear of living; between the world that is and the world to come; between the natural goodness in men’s hearts and the pettiness of their cruelty against one another. In the opening lines of the film, a man’s voice, filled with both weariness and wonder, asks out loud, maybe to us, maybe to someone we can’t see, maybe to God or to no one at all:

What’s this war in the heart of nature? Why does nature vie with itself? The land contend with the sea? Is there an avenging power in nature? Not one power, but two?

This direct invocation of a dual sublime, explicitly addressing both nature as well as the “war in the heart of it”, seems at face value to echo the American sublime’s dichotomy of nature, and the violent incursion of technology as usurper. But the war here, which is in the “heart” of nature “vying” against itself, doesn’t seem to be the literal war taking place onscreen in either the physical or even human (ie political, ideological) sense; and the camera itself doesn’t depict violence of any sort, but instead pans neutrally over shots of sunlight leaking through canopies, of the roots and vines of ancient trees moving ever so slightly in the wind; and of the Melanesian natives, untouched by the war or the behemoth of its technological and ideological apparatus.

The entire film — much like with the rest of Malick’s filmography — is positively charged with these moments of contemplation, the primary action occurring not on the level of visual imagery alone but in the interplay between the spoken text, recited from a place beyond the present moment by a multitude whose voices intentionally seem to lack clearly identifiable narrators, blending together into a larger unified voice while retaining the touch of the profoundly intimate and personal; and the drifting attention of the camera’s image, which with its unsteady (but never distracting) handheld quality and languishing gaze, never quite feels fully invested in what’s actually happening, less interested in painting a certain portrait so much as it’s content to simply observe, indifferent to the nuances between landscapes and actors, human bodies and blades of grass.

A later scene, set at the conclusion of a particularly violent battle, depicts American soldiers wandering around a smoking dirt field littered with the half-naked and malnourished bodies of dead, dying, and surrendering Japanese soldiers, as one of the Americans recites the following:

This great evil. Where does it come from? How’d it steal into the world? What seed, what root did it grow from? Who’s doin’ this? Who’s killin’ us? Robbing us of life and light. Mockin’ us with the sight of what we might’ve known. Does our ruin benefit the earth? Does it help the grass to grow, the sun to shine? Is this darkness in you, too? Have you passed through this night?

Unlike in other war films, where such monologues typically come off as gratuitous and a tad hypocritical like they’re trying to punch above their proverbial weight, the solemnity of the delivery here feels far more genuine. The questions the soldier poses are not so much accusations or even inquiries as they are feeble attempts at reaching out towards that great enormity, the distance between himself — small and fragile and pathetic against the meadows and forests and morning mists— and the tremendous expanse of the natural world, sublime in its indifference to the lives and deaths of those within it. It is to this irreducible grandness that he directs his thoughts; and although his questions, particularly within the context of the scene, may seem desperate, there is little unevenness or trembling in his tone. His voice is not that of someone who’s been overwhelmed with the wretched cruelty or inhumanity of battle, who is in the midst of “passing through this night”; but of someone who has already given in — or perhaps succumbed — to the wonder, who no longer speaks as just one but also a part of the all.

Arguably, the greatest strength of The Thin Red Line (and the rest of Malick’s oeuvre, for that matter) is that it’s a film which largely discards of the trappings and expectations of both its genre and even its form. It demonstrates a broad disregard for the conventions of cinema, with its privileging of narrative logic and “coherent” shot progression, in favour of an approach that emphasises the affective experience of its subject matter. Malick does not make the mistake of trying to recreate or imitate, or even represent through exposition the sublime subject of his films; but rather, is content to just enframe them as they occur, never dramatising or narratising them but simply providing them a space in which they can reveal themselves on their own.

In doing so, Malick manages to bypass the inherent limitations of cinema as an essentially mimetic form, and is able to successfully invoke the ineffable experience of the natural sublime without either diluting, or altering the nature of its potency. Liberated from exposition and ornamentation, his films demonstrate not only a profound reverence for, and faith in the natural landscape as an enduring source of sublime inspiration in its own right; but they are able to consistently locate within even the most seemingly ordinary and unremarkable of scenes the traces of the sublime, demonstrating to us a direct, however momentary glimpse of the world that was, the world to come— even if it can no longer offer us the grace we may need to get there.

In a moment of respite between firefights, one of the soldiers, surrounded by the wounded, wonders:

Maybe all men got one big soul everybody’s a part of, all faces are the same man, one big self. Everyone looking for salvation by himself, each like a coal drawn from the fire.

It’s a question with profound spiritual significance, and which I believe to directly address the film’s first mode of sublimity: the awe of the vastness of human experience, triggered by the contemplation of one’s existence in isolation. It’s the ecstasy of the individual voice, suddenly confronted by the realisation that there are billions of voices just like it, that have come before and will come after it, all whispering the same refrains, each desperately reaching out for salvation, trying to grasp a hold of that glory. Every man fights his own war, the film’s tagline claims; and this is the war in the heart of nature, embodied both within the literal combat the film depicts, and the one raging at all times within ourselves, against ourselves: that our existences are solitary and we will struggle alone, surrounded by one another — and that this is what we’ve chosen.

It is the horror in recognising that this is not who we were meant to be, not how we were meant to live at all. That we could’ve been kinder, we could’ve been stronger, more loving towards and understanding of one another. That these systems we’ve built for ourselves, to master and displace each another, the immensity of the violence they inspire with their presence, have robbed us of our life and light. That this is what we’ve chosen, and that all we have left now is the world we’ve got — the world as is, just this world. Just this rock.

The film’s second sublimity is even greater. It is the realisation that even the vastness of humanity is just a speck: that there is a whole greater than any of us, that there is something which will outlast every one of us. One soldier, who has left a wife back home, promises desperately to her in a monologue: “I want to stay changeless for you. I want to come back to you the man I was before.” His promise, however, is futile: even if he himself could somehow remain unchanged by the war so that he could return to her the same man; we discover by the end of the film that his wife has also changed anyways in his absence, having fallen in love with someone else and left him behind, reaching for her own salvation. All of our wars and works, our endless numbered days — each soldier’s life and death, the little wars waged within them, are no more than the scattering of leaves in the presence of nature. The ground will swallow the dead and the sea will claim everything. The explosions that tear apart the bodies of men also tear open the earth itself, uproot the trees and maim the birds; and yet still, the world remains fundamentally unchanged, infinitely patient and utterly indifferent to any one creature, living or dead.

Welsh: In this world, a man himself is nothing. And there ain’t no world, but this one.

Witt: You’re wrong, there, Top: I’ve seen another world. Sometimes I think it was just my imagination.

Welsh: Well, then you’ve seen things I never will.

By the end of Ghost of Tsushima, the once-honourable Jin Sakai has fully embraced his role as the mythical Ghost. Marked for execution by the Shogunate, who despise his dishonest techniques, and having slain his own uncle in a reluctant duel to the death; Jin is forced to live the rest of his life in the ignominious shadow of his deeds. Once the credits finish rolling, Jin is returned back to the world of Tsushima, with all its fields and meadows and streams and mountains, seemingly none the wiser. The implication seems to be that although the Ghost repelled the Mongol invasion, the island will never return to peace as long as Jin lives: the shadow he has cast is too long, the legacy of his actions so sordid so that they have stained the land.

And yet, the world remains exactly the same. All concessions for technical limitations excused, the Tsushima during the Mongol invasion and the Tsushima after it seem functionally identical: its beauty is uncompromised, its human structures still in ruins. Numerous flashback sequences throughout the game hint at the Tsushima of Jin’s youth, presented to us in particularly dramatic lighting:we watch as he inherits the namesake and estate of his father’s lordship, as he trains with his uncle in swordsmanship and reflects upon the meaning of tradition. There is the implication that before the Mongols arrived, Tsushima was a place of quiet peace, a sort of idyllic island paradise, which the natives fought so hard to preserve: but it was not the Mongols who killed Jin’s father, but a nameless Japanese bandit.

It begs the question then: what was the point of any of it? What was it that they all bled and killed and died for?

I spent most of my time with Ghost of Tsushima feeling deeply frustrated by its relentless reproduction of the tropes of its source material, viewing with suspicion every golden forest and stretch of meadow that I came across, every gust of wind and plume of leaves at my back. Between all its posturing about honour and loyalty, tradition and courage; all the stunning valleys that looked too good for their own good, all the little yellow birds that constantly chirped around me, goading me towards whatever new activity the game wanted me to see; I struggled to find a reason to look past the game’s pretensions and seek within it something worth my time and effort. For whatever reason though, in my final moments with the game, I decided to do something which I usually just reserve for the games I enjoy the most: I fast-traveled to the southernmost point of the island of Tsushima, set a waypoint at its northernmost point, and walked the entire length of the island.

For over an hour, with no Mongols or shrines to distract me, no birds to draw my curiosity or plumes of smoke from villagers in need of my help, I walk alone and undisturbed through dense deciduous forests and meadows full of brilliant flowers, black sand inlets and paddy fields lush with taro plants. It rains a few times: light at first, and then heavy; and then later in the afternoon, a few showers. The final one is particularly dramatic, with beams of sunlight leaking through the dark clouds, lending to the rain a golden shine. Always, the wind rushes past me, hugging the contours of the land, hissing through the branches and leaves of the trees. Lacking any specific objective this time though, I let it stay its course.

When I finally reach the northernmost tip of the island, I come across a narrow stretch of beach where the snowy hillside gives way to mud, and then to the water. Further down, a few large boulders stand in place; but otherwise, the view to sea is uninterrupted. All around me, billows of snow drift past me towards the water and waves unfold and churn against the mud. The evening has just begun to set in, and way out in the distance, where the sun is beginning to disappear beneath the horizon, the blueness of the sea seems to recede seamlessly into the purple of the sky.

I sit there for a while on that beach with Jin, watching a mass of clouds form in the distance, and the moon slowly ascend into the sky. As I stare out at the sea — much like I did often before the pandemic, any time I felt a need to clear my thoughts— I spend some time wondering if maybe I’ve been too harsh on the game, if my perceptions of its artifice were mistaken, too clouded by what would ultimately probably just end up to be a few moments of frustration, of poor first impressions.

I think about giving the game a bit more time, about spending some more time in the world, maybe picking up the last few collectibles I have remaining; hell, maybe even taking a few photos of my own. Looking towards the end of the shoreline, I remember the clusters of rocks, and in the distance, I spot a small islet. You know, this doesn’t look too bad at all, I think to myself. I start walking towards the rocks, mildly pleased that my final interaction with this game (at least for a good while) will be a positive one.

And that’s when I see, perched upon the exact rock I wished to take a photo from, the familiar glow of a haiku.

Slowly overwhelmed

The mind recalls its teachings

I yearn for guidance