THE HARDER THEY FALL:

HOW A VIDEO GAME LED A SUNDAY SCHOOL TEACHER TO SECULAR HUMANISM

Grey, crinkled clouds swathe the sky in a shifting monotone; an imposing game bird haunts overhead as an otherworldly choir swells with melancholic exhaustion; amidst a stark and lifeless landscape, mysterious stone buildings loom lonely, and a solitary young man trudges forth in reluctant duty.

Sorry, I should probably start this article off by saying something about the opening scene in the game Shadow of the Colossus – I was reminiscing on a memory of heading to teach Sunday School with a hangover a few winters back.

I used to teach at Ashton United Methodist Church, centered smack dab in the middle of desolate, mid-Maryland suburbia.  Despite my station, I’ll be the first to say I wasn’t the greatest example of a religious scholar – far from it: I admit I’d often have late nights on Saturdays and would show up with a few slipshod Christian history crosswords to take the pressure off.  I may have even worn sunglasses to class a time or two to dull the unpleasantness that processing residual alcohol and the flickering of fluorescent lights tend to conjure.  But I thought those things as forgivable, since at its core, I was doing “God’s work.” 

That lackadaisical attitude didn’t last long, however – that was the year I played Shadow of the Colossus, a game that not only forced me to reflect on the role of my avatar in-game, but also my role as a physical embodiment of my eternal soul.

Pretty heavy for a PlayStation 2 game.

A quick catch up on the plot of the game for those of you unfamiliar with it (and brace yourself, spoilers are coming): a young man, Wander, brings a deceased young woman, Mono, to a temple in a forbidden land.  A god in that land, Dormin, makes a bargain with Wander, and will resurrect the fallen Mono if he slays the sixteen colossi that populate the otherwise barren kingdom.  Outside of these sixteen giants and the direct instruction to slay them, the game has no other enemies, characters, dialogue, or items during your first play-through.  It is just you, your horse, and these sixteen unique boss battles.

The game has an overwhelming weight of nihilism towards your actions.  The first pangs of existential dread come from details well-discussed by other writers: the eerie atmosphere, the sense of guilt after beating each boss, and the ending which turns you into colossi yourself all combine to create a dissonant role reversal on the usual “good vs. evil” presumptions that infect most video game narratives.  The moral ambiguity even is even embroiled in the soundtrack; every time you slay a colossus, this is the tune that accompanies their passing – a far cry from other iconic videogame victory anthems.

And those details were already unsettling enough as a gamer, believe you me – moral relativism and your own blind corruptibility as an autonomous, interacting conduit of the story are tough pills to swallow for gamers weaned on Crash Bandicoot and the simple moral black-and-whites of The Legend of Zelda.

Being an involved Sunday School teacher with a faith waning in enthusiasm, Shadow of the Colossus provided a cathartic way to step out of the presuppositions that plagued my upbringing and shocked me by forcing me – as a player – to play devil’s advocate against my own convictions.  It challenges the things I lazily defined as good, evil, and “God’s work.”

As in the video above, the game begins by following the protagonist, Wander, as he approaches a skyscraping structure in an under-saturated landscape.  According to the game’s manual, the structure is known as the “Shrine of Worship” – but it bears a striking resemblance to another significant structure:

The multiple stories, the ersatz design, the open-air ground floor, and its sense of being perpetually “under construction” are shared between both of these spires.  Not only that, but extra-biblical descriptions of the Tower also include waterfalls and entire gardens tucked away in its highest ledges – features that the Shrine of Worship also shares.

According the Judeo-Christian mythos, Nimrod the hunter built the Tower of Babel in defiance of God.  Many believe he wasn’t doing it out pure blasphemy, however: Nimrod was a descendant of Noah, who survived the genocide of The Great Flood, so it is argued that Nimrod wanted to provide an elevated safe haven in case of another catastrophe of that caliber.

Whatever his intentions, after God interpreted the building of this grand construct as symbolic of man’s impertinence and decided to destroy it, separating humankind both geographically and linguistically so they could never band together to create as sacrilegious of a structure ever again.

The parable of the Tower of Babel is a poster boy for moral ambiguity in religious doctrine.  Neither Nimrod nor God saw themselves as doing anything wrong, but merely reacting to the other side’s transgression (i.e. Nimrod to The Great Flood and God to Nimrod’s hubris).

In the last chapter of Shadow of the Colossus, both Wander and Dormin are attacked by an interloping religious leader, Lord Ermon.  Lord Ermon believed that Wander, by making that black bargain with the forbidden god Dormin in exchange for his lover’s life, was now a blasphemer and had to be smitten.  Wander, however, was only reacting the sudden death of his beloved Mono.  Dormin, the God who commands your quest, only proposed this contract because the colossi acted as a living cage, imprisoning him in the forbidden land.

Both gods and men can find ways to rationalize their wrath.

It is also worth noting that “Nimrod” backwards is “Dormin.”  But I suppose we can call that a “happy accident” for now.

The story of Nimrod isn’t the only biblical tale that depicts God’s sociopathic retribution.  After reflection, the fables of Noah, Lot, Abraham, and Job all seemed much, much darker than a Sunday School teacher normally presents when explaining them alongside word finds and sticker sheets.

All of these characters were trialed and punished, and I accepted these judgments with a sort of lazy logic under the assumption that “God knew best.”  But if he did, he wouldn’t kill a man’s family to prove a petty point to Satan or demand that a man to kill his own son as a gesture of his blind devotion.  In Shadow of the Colossus, I similarly thought that slaughtering the titular creatures was an admirable undertaking because, well, I knew best.

And then that’s when it hit me – this game makes you, the player, God.

I suppose many games do that, but few do it in a way that begs you to be aware of that responsibility.

With this focus, Shadow of the Colossus goes a step further than making you question your morals – it makes you question the foundation on which your hold them.  The game faces you with the realization that most of your beliefs come out of a sense of entitlement as a unique, thinking being in a world of automatons: on earth as a Christian in a world of hedonists, in the bible as a deity above disrespectful mortals, or in a video game as an player amongst programmed NPCs.  

Much of how we view “right” and “wrong” comes from this solipsistic entitlement, because we identify ourselves as entitled enough to make that moral distinction.

Despite realizing that I was doing more harm than good to the game world by slaying these colossi, I still kept playing.  It was a morbid endeavor, and I realized that I could stop committing “evil” acts by simply turning off my PlayStation 2 – but it’s hard to fight the curiosity that the game’s atmosphere piques.  There was no explanation or back story given, the world was just there, and I had to learn or deduce my own logic for its creation, for its existence, or for its meaning.

The game was essentially challenging me to define it, to make up my own history for it to satiate my personal curiosity – to make answers where there are none and to give further meaning to my actions when there were none.

Just like we humans did, in biblical stories.

Or rather, just like humans still do.

And that is the genius of Shadow of the Colossus: the brilliant mechanics, poignant minimalist plot, and melancholic aesthetic are parts that make a whole, a sum that crafts a playing experience allegorizing man’s desire to believe in something greater – even when faced with evidence to the contrary.

The game fills you with the same curiosity as the first man who wondered about forces greater than himself, and made conclusions regarding forces outside of his immediate sensory experience – just as the player deduces a game’s story and message outside of the confines of game’s explicit exposition.

Shadow of the Colossus ends with the protagonist’s lover, Mono, revived and relatively safe.  The game also ends with the protagonist, Wander, reincarnated as a baby and branded with horns, and with very few questions answered – concluding that the player must answer his own.

“Mono” and “Wander.”

“Theism” and “pilgrimage.”

More “happy accidents.”

The resonance of themes like these are why a game so stark has such a thriving Wikia page and hundreds of message boards debating its meaning to this day.  This is why so many players continued killing the often gentle and vulnerable colossi, even when it made them uncomfortable to do so.  This is why Shadow of the Colossus is so often cited as one of the greatest games ever made.

And this is also why so many holy books exist answering the same questions, why so many conflicts have taken place over religious dominance, and why almost every leader in the world has been informally required to be a theist (well, outside of a select few Scandinavian countries).

We, as humans, want answers – not just answers, but answers that make us feel secure in our past and future choices.

Without those answers, we’re just floating automatons waiting to die – NPCs waiting for the PlayStation to power down.

It’s scary reality, and Shadow of the Colossus capitalizes on this fear of the unknown and embraces this existential insecurity.  By forcing me – as a player and a Sunday School teacher – to face these hard truths, it wrestled me into a mindset of critical thought I had never considered up to that point.

In a way, the game’s designer, Famito Ueda, was a bit of a prophet to me, and this game is his doctrine… and at the end of the day, if I can follow a dogma of thought while racking up a few PlayStation Trophies, well then, it can’t all be heresy.