Simplicity

I watched The Boy and the Heron on Friday. For a while after leaving the theatre, real life had an odd dimension to it. I feel like my brain was straddling the line between reality and fantasy still. People looked odd.

“Isn’t it sad that our lives will never be as beautiful as a Ghibli movie?” I said to my friends after watching Kiki’s Delivery Service. We watched the Bonus Features on the DVD, which explored the city where Miyazaki and his partner traveled to gather inspiration for the film. Shots of animated, clean, and color-saturated streets faded into shots of the real city, grey and dull in comparison, choked with noisy cars. It was depressing.

Discussions about video games always end up talking about game feel. The term isn’t quite self-explanatory. It’s not directly about what emotions the game makes you feel. It’s firstly about how does the game feel to control. A car enthusiast might take a new car for a test drive. If the car handles well and feels tight to control, this might make the driver feel joy, elation, or freedom. If the car is slow to start and stop, and heavy to turn, the driver might feel safe, comforted, or relaxed. Game feel is about the psycho-tactile response that you get when playing a video game. When you press a button, what feedback does the game give you? When you turn the wheel in a car, what sensations are you met with? These sensations lead to an emotional response. But when we talk game feel, we talk about sensations first, emotions second.

Gratitude has been enshrined into modern society’s ethos over the last decade. I’m resistant to gratitude as a self-practice. Gratitude can be used by oneself to dismiss their own negative feelings. It can be weaponized by people who are rankled by others’ negative emotions. If mindfulness asks you to “think about the things you’re thinking about”, gratitude asks you to “think harder about things you don’t like”. American Gratitude asks us to think positive. A busy street suffocated with noise and exhaust might have a silver lining if you position yourself juuuuuust right.

If we find a movie more beautiful than real life, is it because the movie is truly so beautiful? Or is it because we’re sitting in a darkened room, the whole world muted outside of it?

Many video games are designed to feel stressful, and yet people can’t put them down. A movie’s climax doesn’t feel satisfying unless there’s been tension in the second act. A film can have beautiful cinematography throughout, even while your emotions flow from intrigue, to stress, to relief. Emotions are independent from, yet adjacent to sensation.

The world we live in is fundamentally touched and shaped by humans. Designed in the way a story is written. Life is a profoundly rich series of interactions with objects. Simple pleasures and simple frustrations. A cup filled with a warm drink. A fingernail not filed down perfectly that scrapes instead of scratches. The sound of a sharp knife through a carrot. A doorknob that snags your belt loop. Thousands of tactile interactions each day, each soliciting their own unique internal reaction. A life feel.

To appreciate the natural world does not mean to enjoy all of it. A rose simply is. We’re the ones that feel it is beautiful. Walk through a botanical garden and you’ll find plants with shiny, smooth leaves that choke other plants with their creeping tendril-roots. A simple comfort and a simple discomfort that cannot be disconnected.