The Sources of Exploration: Miyamoto, Philip K. Dick & The Heart of Art

In Philip K. Dick's 1965 sci-fi classic, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, the earth has become an unbearable fireball, a perpetual Texas summer that is barely livable. The United Nations is colonizing planets and moons, sending millions of twenty-first century John Smiths to kickstart agriculture on the harsh, cold, crystallized soil of places like Mars and Europa. In these dark and miserable habitats, removed from the comparative bounty of Earth, the colonists find redemption in Can-D, a drug that "transforms" the user to an imagined paradisiacal beach in southern California. The Can-D users are, in their minds, transformed to another world in an experience described as wondrous, mystical and even religious. In Palmer Eldritch, Dick imagines a world in which drug-induced simulation is the only source of natural wonder for a race that has destroyed its own habitat.

I was reminded of Dick's work today while reading Nick Paumgarten's "The Master of Play," a profile of Nintendo game guru Shigeru Miyamoto from the December 20 issue of the New Yorker. Miyamoto is more or less THE man behind Nintendo, engineering not only its classic and still popular games like Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda and Wii Sports, but also its philosophy - the fun first, complexity later purity that Nintendo is known for. Paumgarten's profile details Miyamoto's inspirations for games like Mario and Zelda as emerging out of his childhood explorations in the woods of a rural Japanese town:

[Miyamoto grew up] thirty miles northwest of Kyoto, in a river valley surrounded by wooded mountains. As he got older, he wandered farther afield, on foot or by bike. He explored a bamboo forest behind the town’s ancient Shinto shrine and bushwhacked through the cedars and pines on a small mountain near the junior high school. One day, when he was seven or eight, he came across a hole in the ground. He peered inside and saw nothing but darkness. He came back the next day with a lantern and shimmied through the hole and found himself in a small cavern. He could see that passageways led to other chambers. Over the summer, he kept returning to the cave to marvel at the dance of the shadows on the walls.

I was familiar with these stories of Miyamoto and had always thought of the Mario and Zelda games as exploratory masterpieces. To me, they were alternate universes, interactive versions of Alice's wonderland, accessible only through the application of the player's imagination. Such games, rendered in now-rudimentary 16-bit sprites, require a certain willingness to play along, to "fill in the gaps" as Wolfgang Iser might say, a willingness that likely benefits the young over the intellectualized and habituated, a willingness perhaps only accessible to adults through hallucinogenic drugs. It seems almost foreign to me now, and I'm sure even moreso to adults divorced from the experience or who never had it, to consider them in this way. It was a later part of the article, however, that brought Dick's work to my mind. Paumgarten continues,

There may be no starker example of the conversion of primitive improvisations into structured, commodified, and stationary technological simulation than that of Miyamoto, the rural explorer turned ludic mastermind. In his games, Miyamoto has always tried to re-create his childhood wonderment, if not always the actual experiences that gave rise to it, since the experiences themselves may be harder to come by in a paved and partitioned world. “I can still recall the kind of sensation I had when I was in a small river, and I was searching with my hands beneath a rock, and something hit my finger, and I noticed it was a fish,” he told me one day. “That’s something that I just can’t express in words. It’s such an unusual situation. I wish that children nowadays could have similar experiences, but it’s not very easy.”

It's hard to argue that the world we live in is not more "paved and partitioned" than the world Miyamoto grew up in, fifty-some years ago in rural Japan. Living in New York City, I frequently reflect on the effects of my concrete environment and the feeling that everything has already been discovered a thousand times before. Even the structure of public transportation can make the world feel small; by necessity, a subway prevents the ability to wander off somewhere of your own choosing, as any destination must be one that someone decided it was worthwhile for people to go, and worthwhile enough that millions of people would be regularly going there. No discovery, nothing new. This is, of course, a selective analysis of New York and the subway system, but one that has its roots in real feelings. As the world becomes more urbanized and more and more people grow up in cities, or comparatively urbanized areas, I wonder what avenues will be available for the sense of play described by Miyamoto.

I'm sure the problem feels especially acute in Japan, the world's most urbanized country, but the idea pops up again and again in Western fiction as well, especially in science fiction. In Dick's Palmer Eldritch and a host of other apocolyptic or pseudo-apocalyptic literature, a depreciated natural environment deprives us of essential aspects of our humanity. Dick's Do Android's Dream of Electric Sheep offered a similar vision of the future in which religion was practiced through computer simulation. While I'm not so much concerned here with religion, I do worry that the feeling of wonder that perhaps burgeons into spiritual elation and intellectual curiosity is increasingly inaccessible in an increasingly urbanized world, and, along with this dearth, available only in simulated form.

Link encounters The Deku Tree in The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time(1998)

Even looking beyond the medium of computer games, roller coasters, playgrounds, Discovery Zone franchises, and most obviously literature and film provide human-created opportunities to explore other avenues of experience. While video games and other forms of media built on newer technologies are in their infancy, to what degree will we become reliant on them, or more advanced versions of them, for sensations that mirror the ones discussed by Miyamoto? Or, once they are not presented to us through our environment, will we even notice that they are gone?