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With its sheer game design and mechanics, Outer Wilds ensures that at each step, the player is intrigued by the mysteries of the narrative where the surprises push them even to the point of terror. Looking for sublime moments in Outer Wilds is an interesting venture, to say the least.
The sublime is characterized by awe, reverence or even dread when one faces a power beyond imagination. German philosopher Immanuel Kant posits the state of the sublime as the encounter of the ego with an overwhelming and unfathomable force of nature, the threatening possibility of annihilation, and the re-assertion of the self in the face of such chaos.
A possible source for this sublime can be explored while looking at the endless horizon from the top of a mountain, like in Caspar Freidrich’s 1818 painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, or by other events in nature, like mountains and storms.
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The question arises herein - can video games evoke this sense of sublimity in the players?
Can there be sublime in video games?
Video games are virtual constructs specifically designed by humans to be consumed by others. It is as far away as possible from where Kant exclusively posits the sublime to be – in nature. In this technological realm, a player is provided with a limited sense of agency and a digital avatar to interact with the game world – acting almost as an extension of the body and mind.
The construct of a video game ticks one of Kant’s conditions for experiencing the sublime – a distanced observer. The object is not sublime in itself, but it is the interaction of the self with the object and the gap in between which evokes the sublime.
Video game history is full of moments that would fill the viewer with dread along with a subtle pleasure, because they are not themselves in the game. Metal Gear: Phantom Pain, the big BT in Death Stranding, and Dahaka in Prince of Persia are fitting examples, as is the particular mission in Plague Innocence where players are required to cross a field of dead bodies.
The possibility of immersion, at the moment of a Csikszentmihalyi’s flow – described as where “a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits” in a collision of pleasure and pain - makes it possible for the player to experience this sublime, provided the developers have been careful to make it so.
Looking for the sublime in Outer Wilds
The idea of camping in space is what becomes the underlying drive in Mobius Digital’s 2019 indie Outer Wilds. This notion is intricately brought out in the poster of the game, the screen of the menu, the starting point of each gameplay, and the main ending of the game. It is a serene idea of sitting by a campfire, roasting marshmallows, and playing music in space.
The player wakes up as an unnamed astronaut. It is the day of their first launch into space. The gameworld is a small solar system filled with five planets and a couple of other objects.
The player is part of the Outer Wilds Ventures, which consists of five others who, before them, had gone into space in search of adventure.
Once aboard the spaceship, which feels more like a glorified tin-box lander, the player can roam around the solar system. There is no linear way at approaching the game. Players can visit any planet they want to, in any order they prefer. The general aim would be to collect information and slowly piece the narrative together.
In taking a heuristic approach, the developers also ensure that the players have to learn the basic mechanics and rules of the game. The players are left without any clear-cut clues, and the only way to learn seems to be by doing something, failing, and repeating till one gets it right.
It is only when the player gets up in space, gently floating and looking around that the first sense of dread and the sublime slowly descends onto the player.
The protagonist is part of a species that has barely mastered the basics of spaceflight. They joke about the crashing and burning of the spaceship, yet the player is aboard it, separated from a sea of nothingness by merely a few inches of aluminum. The player is intentionally dwarfed and made to feel almost powerless against the terrifying vacuum and the unknowable vastness of space.
The distinct designs of Outer Wilds' Planets
Each planet of Outer Wilds is uniquely built to evoke a sense of awe and even terror, which Edmund Burke associated with the sublime.
Brittle Hollow is in fact a hollow planet with a volcanic moon.
The moon spews out rocks that are crashing onto the planet’s surface, slowly breaking it and pushing it into the black hole that is at the center of the planet.
The Hourglass Twins are binary planets connected by a column of sand that see-saws between the planets – thus the hourglass effect. One of the scariest moments in the game has been when one encounters the sand column.
It is visually massive, and the sound bellows and grates into the ears as the falling sand sweeps the player off their feet and throws them to the other planet.
In Giant’s Deep, once players get through the murky atmosphere, they are greeted with tumultuous seas, raging tornadoes, and little islands that they have to explore. Periodically, the tornadoes, which move around, throw these islands up into the sky along with the player.
For the first time, it is sure to catch the player unaware as they suddenly find themselves shot upwards and then free-falling with the whole island.
The scariest part of the game resides in Dark Bramble, the remnants of a planet infected from within by a vine-like growth. Within this planet, in milky space and an eerie sound, resides the Anglerfish.
All the player can see is their little light bulb before the terrifying creatures eat the player because they made too much noise. Information regarding these events is clarified in different parts of the solar system, within Nomai Ruins and their conversations.
The Sun and End Times
And yet, the purest sense of the sublime that one can experience within Outer Wilds is the end of the time loop as the End Times music begins to play.
For the first time, it is a bewildering event for the player to experience. They are trying to make sense of a world that is not really helping them, where nature is uncompromising, and mistakes are severely punished.
At the 22.00 minute mark in the loop, the sun, which will be growing bigger and turning redder all the while, will shrink in size, turn blue, and go supernova – exploding and killing everyone.
The first time it happens, it is sure to elicit at least a little yelp out of the player. Before they know what happened and why, they will wake up again at the campfire.
With each occurrence, the sense of dread lessened. Even though the time loop meant that the player is technically not dying in Outer Wilds, they still have to hurry and complete whatever they are doing so they don’t have to come back there again next time.
And yet, this event of unbridled chaos that the player has no mastery over evoked a subtle sense of pleasure. The constant chance of failure, repetition, and death destabilizes the gamer by problematising their relationship with the object, that is the game.
Repetition here is instituted both in nature – that is the supernova – and by the actions performed by the players each time, and the differences in them. Failure and repetition, according to J. Juul, add to the experience of playing and ensure more engagement from the player.
It is a punishment given out when the player fails, dying from crashing against something, falling down, getting eaten by the anglerfish, cracking their visor, or running out of time. The punishment is thus a source of both pain and pleasure, harking to the Burkean sublime.
The Orchestra
For the final part of the playthrough of Outer Wilds, attention must be drawn to the essay by Barbara Bolt titled “The Techno-Sublime.” This kind of sublime differs from the Kantian notion by the simple fact, according to Bolt, that there is not a re-assertion of self while facing great peril. In contrast, there is the dissolution of the boundaries of the self. The subjective self ‘I’ dissolves into the collective techno-experience.
Her essay is based heavily on Ben Malbon’s 1999 study Clubbing: Dancing, Ecstacy and Vitality and his subsequent diary entries. Bolt quotes Malbon, who wrote in his diary:
"4 a.m. – lost for words, lost in time and space, just lost.’, We all seemed to want the music to take us over; to become us in some way.. Clubbers were losing it all over the place … people are just so close to each other; proximately and emotionally.. The intensity of this fusion of motions and emotions was almost overwhelming."
Bolt states:
"This diary entry, in particular, speaks of an experience in which his sense of identity and rationality is subsumed in the experience."
What Bolt connects with the sublime in her study of techno-sublime is the nature of clubbing and dancing. A similar understanding is being used in this article while looking at Outer Wilds' notion of camping.
The choice of the instruments, drums, banjo, flute, harmonica reflects the developer’s idea of ‘camping in space’. The game’s story is made of planets moving around in space while playing their own distinct music.
The creator of these music pieces, Andrew Prahlow, discusses the use of folk instruments beside a campfire to bring out a sense of nostalgia – "a callback to games that used simple motifs."
Each member of the Outer Wilds Ventures has an instrument they play that the players can hear through a signalscope in space. Each of the instruments in the game is playing different parts of a single song. This piece - titled Travelers - is finally brought together at the end. It becomes a subtle statement in exploring the idea of connections and how different parts come together to make a whole.
This gestalt of the video game includes the different tunes and instruments the player has heard in space. The player gathers all the members of the Outer Wilds Ventures and another NPC. They sit around a campfire in a gentle, homely scene, waiting to play one last time.
The player goes around asking each one to play for one last time. The player asks each of them separately and as they start, the whole theme comes into play.
The Pervading nature of the Techno-Sublime
Bolt alludes to A. Storr and the 1992 Music and the Mind in saying that:
“the power of the music, particularly when combined with other emotive elements such as the light, heat, beat and rhythm of bodies en masse can be ‘terrifyingly impressive’."
This place at the end, out of bounds of space and time, is akin to what Malbon says –
“The space itself, which fleetingly seems as though it has no edges, no end in time or space, yet at the same time only stretches a far as you can see into the lights, the black walls.”
In The Eye, where the player is at the end, whatever they see does not exist. The identity of the player is subsumed into this collective performance. The player is now acting as the conductor.
This final performance does not have any impact on the game story. It exists beyond the bounds of space and time. It almost feels like it was willed into existence by the protagonist before everything ends.
There is no more failure or repetition to deal with or trigger. It is an absolute action that will irreversibly lead to death and life. This pleasure upon pain – the nature of a simple celebration of life with friends made along the way against the background of impending annihilation of everyone involved – invokes both the sense of sublime.
The self comes face-to-face with its own, no longer merely possible but absolute, annihilation. The player, in the swansong, is not a detached observer but an eager participant, the one who coaxes the action to take place.
Barbara Freeman points out that there is an internal contradiction present in the Kantian sublime, since the very nature of the sublime experience involves a blurring of the distinction between the observer and the observed and contradicts the supposed detachment of the sublime encounter.
In Conclusion
The game has been a long and arduous journey of failure and repetition and death, which was just a reset.
For the end game, the player has to take the artifact, which is powering the timeloop, and bring it to Dark Bramble. As the player rushes through alongside a haunting piece of melody, that is when the realization dawns upon them. One mistake will result in Death, with a capital emphasized D. It will be game over.
But during the performance in the dreamscape, the player is now all but aware that their death is certain.
In the performance, there is no longer a re-assertion of the self but a dissolution of it into a collective experience. The identity of the player in the real world is also overwhelmed by the collective existential dread and loss of this moment. Numerous Reddit posts will support this statement.
That Outer Wilds is a clever bit of video game design is of no doubt. It throws the player into an unforgiving, unknown, visually terrifying world bound with death at every step. But nature is not malevolent here.
In Outer Wilds, there is no evil to fight and defeat. No combat, no skill points, no upgrades. The very nature of the gameplay is to induce that flow in the player where they can experience the sublime present within Outer Wilds. To figure out and posit this virtual sublime in a game is a difficult process.
In games, we have the player, the player surrogate within the game, which is the game avatar, and the game world. The relationship between these three plays out in the gamescape and gives rise to the sense of sublime.
In Outer Wilds, this is achieved through its world-design and gameplay mechanics. It is a game of exploration and curiosity marked by this sublime esthetic and the grand horror experienced visually and aurally about life and death and everything in between.
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