So this one's gonna be pretty armchair philosophical, feel free to remind me to remove my noggin from deep within my posterior if you are so inclined!
In the simplest possible terms, absurdism is acknowledgment of the fact that we yearn for meaning, and yet the universe has no meaning to offer us. Growing up, and learning about the absurdist style of comedy, I'd always attributed it to silly things. Like The Amazing Digital Circus and The Amazing World of Gumball are obviously absurdist worlds with strange rules and clashing character designs that create a strange harmony, and while those do appeal to me, they don't speak to something deeper within me like the massive, foggy structure in this video by Obsidian Soundfields:
I'm not sure I can properly convey why these things speak to me so. These huge industrial structures in thick fog. I get the same feelings from many shots in Blade Runner 2049, or shots on Caladan in the recent Dune films. Vast, grand spaces with no measurable relation to any others of their kind, with only a single feature.
When I started out trying to make a game and had no idea what I was doing, I knew at some point that these vast spaces filled my heart in a way nothing else would. And besides that, it's easy to look at something like this and think yeah, I can throw some cubes together. But when I tried to make one of my own, I got caught up in reality. I felt it had to be a lived-in space, something constructed for human beings to traverse and make use of, daily, as a simple matter of course. Something real and lived-in. And I got nowhere. That thought persisted for quite some time, haunting me, thwarting my every attempt to creatively express a place.
But... I got to thinking tonight. What if heaven is real, and we could never hope to understand its intricacies as we understand our neighborhoods, or our cities, or tectonic plates, or gravity? What if many of the rules are taken for granted because we have no means of empirically measuring the objective relationship between two spaces? What if going somewhere means simply intending to go there, and walking into the fog? What if a world map is an impossibility? What if our dreams take place in this world, giving us the briefest glimpse of what might come next?
I imagine a place where we simply are where we mean to be. There is no getting lost, there is no boundary, there is only dreaming. A new garden, an abandoned dwelling, an infinite road, these are all places reached by simply willing them to be ahead of you. And yet, they offer only what the dreamer may make use of. Someone who isn't intimately familiar with caring for crops will not find a fertile field. Someone inexperienced in craftsmanship will never find a forest teeming with many different types of wood. An inexperienced hunter may never find prey. But those who have found spaces of their own may share with others, and thus, society can indeed exist in these bizarre realms as we have our own grand designs, yet in turn, participate in the grand designs of others, who seek to achieve things we would never dream of on our own.
I think that's about all I can muster off this idea, at least for now. I just wanted it off my chest, I wanted this idea to exist somewhere other than my head for the time being.
I don't know how to end forum posts
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