Trigger Happy
Steven Poole embarks on a cosmic trip with Genesis Noir
Recently, a headline in a scientific publication announced ‘Dark matter might enable exoplanets to glow’, which is more or less equivalent to saying ‘Thing we know nothing about might be able to do cool stuff in a way we don’t understand’. Still, the reaching beyond our current limits of ignorance is itself exciting. There are more things in heaven and earth, as Hamlet chided Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. (He wasn’t, by the way, accusing Horatio of being especially closed-minded: here, ‘your philosophy’ essentially just means ‘science’.)
The romance of space travel has been around at least since Lucian’s second-century Greek satires on travellers’ tall tales: in his True Story, the narrator and his friends are blown to the Moon by a whirlwind, where they encounter strange new life-forms such as giant fleas and half-women, halfgrapevines. Space exploration is, of course, a staple of videogames too. It might have started in part simply because you can efficiently evoke the vast black emptiness of space by simply drawing nothing on the screen save a few white star-pixels, but the long road from Elite to Elite Dangerous and beyond has enabled us all to become spacefaring philosophers, pondering the deep meaning and structure of the cosmos.
Indeed, when No Man’s Sky was first released in 2015, Marcelo Gleiser, a theoretical physicist, hoped that such games could take such a pedagogical turn: “With some modifications, different versions of the game could turn into amazing educational tools to explore cosmology, astrophysics, chemistry, biology and life’s evolutionary history,” he wrote. “If we have the power to create a hypothetical universe in a game console, we can unleash the human exploratory drive to go where no one has gone before, learning as we wander about.”
And while we are wandering about, why not do it wearing a fedora and listening to cool jazz? Such, at least, is the possibility afforded by the remarkable Genesis Noir (PC,
Switch, Xbox One), a game that evokes more cosmic wonder in a palette of (mostly) black, white and gold than many games can with all the colours of the rainbow. It might seem from its lugubrious opening, as glowing white rectangles form into an angular cityscape, that you are simply selling watches on the street in order to raise enough cash to buy food at the diner (called the Hopper, after the American painter Edward Hopper’s celebrated diner paintings). But then it gets much weirder, in ways that it would be a shame to spoil. Suffice it to say, perhaps, that the beginning of the universe is intimately involved.
This is a game of deep artistry, with seeming visual nods to the dreamlike credits sequence of Mad Men as well as the mindbending hypercubist finale of Interstellar. And to call it a point-and-click adventure is to do an injustice to the creativity of the game’s mechanics, which vary according to a dream logic all its own: you might be pulling petals from a flower to the accompaniment of pizzicato string plucks, or wrenching rocks and underwater junk out of the way of a plant’s roots thirstily seeking a subterranean stream. You might use the analogue stick to rotate an entire world, or yourself (depending on which Einsteinian frame of reference you choose), or use a radio dial to tune into a perfect sine wave out of a spectrum of jaggy sawtooth noise. For a game that is (in some ways) about the unbearable lightness of nothingness, it is unusually weighty.
“Out of this unknowable haze, a world emerges wrapped in familiar forms,” states the game’s introduction. “Your mind transforms the wisps of preternatural smoke into bodies and steel and concrete. Your experience reshapes the world and makes this form eternal.” Bishop Berkeley, the 18th-century Irish philosopher whose motto was ‘esse est percipi’ (to be is to be perceived) would approve. And so too, I suspect, would the antic minds behind Automata’s hippie 1984 classic Deus Ex Machina, the game I was most reminded of by Genesis Noir, in terms of its imaginative range and conceptual daring.
Why, after all, did the universe begin? Why was there an imbalance of matter and antimatter that led to everything as we know it being formed rather than instantaneous mutual annihilation? Why is that saxophone player so threatening? And what do doves and a bass clef have to do with it all? As I write this, another science headline pops up in my feed: ‘Star cluster lurking in the shadows may help explain galactic mystery’, it reads, tantalisingly. Sure, and also it may not.
The long road from Elite to Elite Dangerous and beyond has enabled us all to become spacefaring philosophers