Kicking off the visual contexts series, I have watched the Studio Ghibli (not originally, but widley understood as part of it) movie: Nausicaa. The valley of the wind. And it was amazing. I remember watching it back with my friends, back in middle school, and I have remembered the awe that this movie put me in. It may be an overdone thing to say about Studio Ghibli, but the animation, though older (1984), did not dissapoint.
Nausicaa’s story tells us about the enviroment and how the people of the world have destroyed it. The world is desolate, toxic and abandoned. In it all, the Valley of Wind stands still, sustaining life in the times of utter destruction of civilisation. Most of the world is uninhabited, destroyed. The society is collapsed, with the people of the Valley of the Wind trying to get by, scavenging, developing new technologies, greener, safer.
Nausicaa’s story is also the one of rebirth. 1000 years have passed since the fall of the industrial civilisation and the world has became something different. It has transformed and lives in a different way than before. It is a time beyond guilt and remorse.
The movie talks about different ways of handling the enviromental crisis. The Valley People are trying to live a life of peaceful cohabitation, scavenging and taming the benevolent winds. People of Tolmekia (or Pejite) are militaristic, trying to bring back the industrial era, looking for abandoned weapons and mass destruction from the old world – purging fire to cleanse the new world. This dichotomy shows us the range that people can feel and understand the problem. For some, the Sea of Decay is the ultimate evil, for others, there is no evil in the world, except the one we create ourselves.
Nausicaa collects seeds from the Sea of Decay. She finds it intresting that the plants grown with pure sand and pure water are not toxic. She unknowingly discovered something we are presented with later in the movie – the Sea of Decay is just a huge filter, cleaning the world from the toxins in the Earth – toxins put there by the human machines. A message of enviromental understaning. Things we don’t understand are not always our enemies or bad for us.
The movie talks about friendship, humility and empathy as ways to understand the world and to live in it in a healthy way. In the movie, power fails, fire is not cleansing, it only empowers the conflict.
So, what about the game design?
Valley of the Wind is in itself a special place. It is warded off from the Sea of Decay by the Ocean’s Winds. Nausiccaa is its princess – in a weird mixture of postapocalyptic tribe, feudal relationships and nomadic culture. It makes me wodner if my game should have a special geological place for the base, or should it be built with the might of player choices. On one hand, that would make sense and the primary reason for all the people abandoned by the rich, to go, seek shelter with our player and their family. On the other, it would be better to have a place be significant for other reasons – narrative reasons, such as an abandoned LaunchPad or similar. I could try to combine them, or make the player choose the place on their own – both with their upsides and downsides.
Another thing worth looking at is creating the players path through the stroy. What is the goal of the game – to survive? But how. Can we survive in a different way? Nausicaa tells us that the road to life is through understanding and empathising with the world around us. But it is her story, told to warn us from the path of destruction. For example in a game Sid Meyer’s Civilisation Beyond Earth, we have three paths to choose from for our space colonits: Supremacy, Harmony and Purity. It is a dilemma between becoming part human, part machine, part human, part alien, or taming the enviroment to serve us as fully human. In my game I feel like there should be a choice, paths that can lead to various outcomes. I believe that this can enrich the experience and make the player think of what is worth preserving and what was the error of our ways.
