the world sure is full of things (one of many)

Metaphysics: the philosophical branch devoted to study and understanding of existence. metaphysicians seek to know the things in the world and their nature. Ontology and Cosmology divide study into the realms of what individuated stuff exists in the world and the totality of all matter and temporality.


Namco's Katamari video game series seems to exist to answer many of the great metaphysical quandries expressed by history's greatest minds in coherent, brightly colored, whimsically-soundtracked packages.

Katamari Damacy (2004, PS2), the series' debut allowed the player a view into this world; not only a view, but a task to understand and stake a claim in the space and temporality of the cosmos. The avatar is the Prince of the Cosmos, son of the King of the Cosmos, and is charged with using the katamari to roll up a new set of planets (the existing ones having been destroyed in an absent-minded wave of havoc by the King himself).

The Prince's task hurtles him into an epistemological journey whereby the player virtually takes inventory of the video game world by empirically "rolling" it up. The contents of this subsequent ball of knowable objects may be inspected later, to understand the finer details of the objects whose sum creates knowable world. It pays to note that this task is in itself a quest emerging absurdly as the Prince's (and by virtual extension the Player's) simultaneous birthright and freely chosen quest. The Prince is in the unique position to right the wrongs of his father's carelessness, but also requires tools of his father to properly and meaningfully reorganize the ruined universe.

Are we not similarly endowed with the twofold inheritance of a ruined universe, so presented to us as marred by our predecessors, but in many ways reliant on the tools they themselves provide us?

Perhaps.

And perhaps it is only by such a recognition that we may be able to take up the tools and reorganize the tattered spoilia of a knowable world, and by approaching and rolling up its pieces eventually arrive at a new and meaningful organization of pieces.

but there's much more to be said about such things.

I didn't even mention the cousins...

from whence it came

an identifiable and meaningful undercurrent intrinsic to the creation and maintenance of this collection of missives is that of a cogent philosophical and critical approach to a relatively new aesthetic: video games.



my experience and understanding of this field is easily traceable to one source, a novel by D.B. Weiss. Lucky Wander Boy is a foray into the world of protagonist Adam Pennyman, shaped as it is by what could be known as the golden age of video games, the classical period of coin slot arcade cabinets. Pennyman's life changes drastically as he attempts to create an "Encyclopedia of Obsolete Entertainments", in which he approaches several arcade classics from a critical stance, analyzing their technical specifics, but more importantly, delving into aspects normally reserved for more classical aesthetic judgments: motif, myth, symbolism, et al.

Weiss' detail in the parts of Lucky Wander Boy devoted to Pennyman's Encyclopedia struck a chord in my own understanding of video game content and culture, as well as their intersection with reality and other cultural media. What followed was my own meager advances into aesthetic and critical theories, beginning with the most meaningful and symbolically dense games in my repertoire.