I approach a video
game the same way
I approach a novel.
It’ll take me about
two weeks to get through
one, and I’ll spend about an
hour or two on it a night,
usually later at night before
masturbating and then bed.
AC: III
is about
colonization
and
war.
The beauty about that game is that
you start the game wanting to go
to war and by the end of the game
you understand why war is never-
ending and depressing.
Playing that game sure
makes me want to play
AC: Black Flag, though.
Man, AC: Black Flag.
Good game.
In that game you’re a
pirate, named Kenway, and you
can go off and explore
hidden islands and find swords
and gold and ship upgrades,
and that’s all awesome.
Or, you can follow the game’s
main storyline where your character
joins a group of pirates in Havanna,
and you all get drunk and agree,
“Yes! Why can’t we all just
get along? Why can’t a human being
live as he or she was born? Naked and
expressive and free!”
But soon enough everything goes
to shit and everyone’s in-fighting.
You find that true freedom,
no matter where you’re from
or when you’re born,
is something more than having
the lack of restraint
from other things.
And out of the pack of pirates
you’re around,
one guy goes crazy on an island.
And another reacts to all this by
turning his back
and joining the British
and he says, “At least their kind
of freedom allows a man
a proper purpose and a clean bed!”
But as soon as he gives
up the names of his friends
the British put him in a dungeon
and he dies there and no one talks
about him after that.
Then there’s another guy,
Blackbeard, who tries to go
back to the way things were.
“In a world without gold, we’d be heroes!”
he screams before dying in a ship battle.
But he wasn’t being
a hero. He was
being a coward.
And the last friend, Captain Kidd, was
an assassin and would go on and on
about this Creed thing, and it’s interesting,
because Kidd dies in a dungeon, too,
only with friends and with a smile
and that surely is worth something, isn’t?
And maybe that’s the thing
about AC: Black Flag.
Out of all of your main character’s
original friends, not one of them survives,
but each dies and is remembered
in strikingly different ways after
all of them die chasing the
same thing.
And I don’t know, man.
That kind of story
got me thinking.
About death.
About freedom.
About having the freedom
to choose one’s death.
About having the freedom
to choose one’s life.
About having the freedom
to express what you feel.
But what is freedom if you’re free
to feel nothing, free to do nothing, free to
to be nothing?
Is freedom nothing but a word
some people use in the absence
of a purpose?
Or, perhaps, freedom is the ability
to choose a purpose?
These kinds of questions: you
can’t run away from them like
Blackbeard did.
And you can’t just trust
blindly in the benevolence
of some external entity like
that one guy who died alone
in a dungeon, either.
But you can approach these
questions with a sense of peace,
a sense of inner-calm that combats
the chaos in the world.
And to pursue this purpose,
this pursuit to not change
the world but to instead
change yourself to adapt it,
this pursuit is at the heart
of this Creed-thing that has allowed
a video game franchise to influence its
immediate culture and inspire those
who inspire the masses.
Because believe it or not,
when I was
in my early twenties
and struggling to deal
with these issues,
sometimes pop songs from pop
artists just didn’t help.
That Black Flag game did,
though.
Both games did.
The Compendium 