The Modern Sublime? Gaming and the Romantic Imagination

Edmund Burke

Perhaps the best-known definition of the sublime is from Edmund Burke's 1757 work A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Here, Burke described the now-familiar dichotomy between the "feminine" beautiful and the "masculine" sublime. Beauty is found in objects or landscapes which are visually 'smooth' (rolling hills, for example); beauty is "that quality or those qualities in bodies by which they cause love, or some passion similar to it". The sublime, on the other hand, is accessed through experiences of the 'terrible'; that is, objects, landscapes or experiences which invoke fear or notions of vastness: "it is impossible to look on any thing as trifling, or contemptible, that may be dangerous". Felix Baumgartner's recent jump from space may be identified as a sublime experience: his view from the top of the jump incorporated the vastness of the globe, and the jump itself was undeniably sublimely terrifying.

Clearly, not all of us - not even most of us - are able to access sublime experiences in this way. Like the Romantic poets before us, we must find more everyday ways of locating the sublime. Unlike the Romantics, however, we are not looking to the natural world to access it, but to a virtual one. Jane McGonigal, from the Institute for the Future, describes in her 2010 lecture "Gaming can make a better world" how "we" currently spend 3 billion hours per week playing online games like World of Warcraft. She argues that the reason that spending such vast amounts of time in virtual worlds is appealing is because it is in those online landscapes and as part of those gaming communities that we can become "the best version of ourselves". Games like World of Warcraft, so McGonigal suggests,  allow gamers to experience deep bonds of trust as part of a collaborative community who work together to achieve world-changing goals, or an "epic win". In light of the 10,000 hours it is estimated many gamers will have already been interacting within such gaming communities by the age of 21, McGonigal asks how the skills learned in these virtual worlds may be applied to solving real-world problems like climate change and global hunger.

Part of the map of Skyrim.

World of Warcraft first came into existence back in 1994. It has since constructed (and continues to expand  upon) an "epic story"; players of WoW have accumulated a staggering 5.93 million years of gameplay, and have contributed to the second largest Wiki after Wikipedia. It is this vastness of time and resources that make WoW a sublime experience: as Burke suggested, "when we go but one step beyond the immediately sensible qualities of things, we go out of our depth". If the player's individual experience is that "immediately sensible" quality, then the huge virtual world, and its vast number of inhabitants, is something "out of our depth". Gameplay on this scale is in itself a sublime experience.

Game designers now are increasingly exploring the sublime possibilities of gameplay. Bethesda's 2011 game The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim is the latest installment of The Elder Scrolls series which, like WoW, also emerged in 1994 (although this is not an online multi-player game). Like WoW, The Elder Scrolls series is formed around a central epic narrative which stretches back thousands of years. Like WoW, too, it has its own impressive Wiki. Skyrim takes advantage of the rapid graphical developments of the last few years; the player may go almost anywhere on the vast map, and the mind of the Skyrim player is, in Burkean terms, "bounded by the bounds of the object" - in this case, the map. Skyrim re-imagines the sublime mountainous landscapes of the northern hemisphere into this virtual world: the natural experiences of the Romantic poets are transfigured into the virtual experiences of the modern gamer.

Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above a Sea of Fog.
This image became iconic for Romantic explorations
of the sublime.

Ikmik the High Elf surveying the Skyrim landscape.

Arguably nothing encapsulated the Romantic sublime experience more than the re-imaginings of the mountain experience. Whether it was Percy Bysshe Shelley's Alpine descriptions, Frankenstein's polar excursion, or Wordsworth's climbing of Snowdon, the Romantics almost universally located the sublime in the ice-tipped peaks of the highest regions of the world. Wordsworth described his ascent of Mount Snowdon in The Prelude (1850):

There I beheld the emblem of a mind
That feeds upon infinity, that broods
Over the dark abyss, intent to hear
Its voices issuing forth to silent light
In one continuous stream; a mind sustained
By recognitions of transcendent power,
In sense conducting to ideal form,
In soul of more than mortal privilege.
One function, above all, of such a mind
Had Nature shadowed there, by putting forth,
'Mid circumstances awful and sublime,
That mutual domination which she loves
To exert upon the face of outward things,
So moulded, joined, abstracted, so endowed
With interchangeable supremacy,
That men, least sensitive, see, hear, perceive,
And cannot choose but feel.

 The awe-inspiring landscape ignites similarly vast thought's in the poet's mind; his imagination becomes "mighty" through its contemplation of this "awful and sublime" sight. The mountain is sublime because it excites sentiments of eternity: the mind "feeds upon infinity", and the poet can look into "the dark abyss"; that is, his mind can reach inestimable heights and unfathomable depths, and the fear inspired by both is sublimely terrible. The poet's mind is formed through its experiences of the natural world.

More scenes from Skyrim.

Similarly, in Skyrim the inhabitants are frequently described as being necessarily hardy: their approach towards romantic love and marriage encapsulates the effects of the inhospitable landscape on their lives. The people of Skyrim, we are told, marry quickly once they have decided on a mate, because lives are precious in a land of extreme weather and unstable politics. The player is, then, submerged into a narrative predicated upon this imagined landscape, but the game goes further than this. The game seeks to enthrall the player through its use of the virtual, visual sublime; the player who remains stationery inside can nevertheless vicariously experience the "awful" natural world. Just as the Romantics seemed to retreat into the natural world, the modern gamer, according to Edward Castronova, is partaking in "a mass exodus to virtual worlds and online game environments". If McGonigal is to be believed, these gamers, like the Romantics, may use their experiences in these imaginative or virtual landscapes to impact upon the real world.

If, as McGonigal suggests, gamers partake in these worlds because there they can become the best they can be, then they can also use these worlds to engage in experiences they will probably never have in their own, real lives. The modern gamer does not need to leave their home in order to experience the "mode of terror" which, Burke argues, "is always the cause of the sublime". Games developers can involve them in a world whereby they can access both the vast landscapes of the natural world, and those of their own "mighty mind[s]".

Grasmere

Photo: Jo Taylor. One of the exhibitions at the
Wordsworth Museum. The shape of the
River Derwent, with manuscript and typed poetry
overlaid within it.

Anyone who says that poetry is dead should come to Grasmere. The economy of the village is predicated upon poetry; Wordsworth haunts the visitor, whether or not you really want him too. Every street corner has a different quotation from either his poems or Dorothy's journals; every bar and eaterie seems to be seeking authentication through a connection with the family. And, of course, the various Wordsworth abodes surround the village, from Dove Cottage to Rydal, and the newly-opened Allan Bank. Thomas Hardy, on a visit to Grasmere in 1911, wrote that

Wordsworth's grave and headstone are looking very trim and new. A group of tourists who have never read a line of him sit near, addressing and sending off picture postcards…

Not much has changed, apart from the tourists' reading habits; even if you've never read a line of Wordsworth before you arrive, you'll have read several (and several family members' besides) by the time you leave. This written presence is supplemented by the oral, in the guise of regular poetry readings organised by the Wordsworth Trust and patronised by locals and tourists alike. Last night (Tuesday), Grasmere welcomed former-laureate Andrew Motion to St. Oswald's church. It was an appropriate venue: Reading from his new collection The Customs House (thanks to Faber & Faber for the advanced preview) Motion conjured up the literary ghosts of, among others, Siegfried Sassoon, Keats and, naturally, Wordsworth. He spoke from beneath a plaque, Wordsworth's marble head gazing down, and Wordsworth's grave (lying amongst those of Dorothy, his wife Mary, and several of his children, with Hartley Coleridge nestled amongst them) just outside the window. Motion read from his novel, Silver, a sequel to Treasure Island. Motion explained that he thought sequels only work if they are far enough removed from the original to allow the audience to gain a fresh perspective of the new story. This theory of a novelist fit well with the poet standing in a graveyard of poets, putting his own spin on talking in the 'language of real men' to evoke emotions his audience could really feel. It was inevitable that this reading would be coloured with comparison; in a village where you're constantly reminded of the dead poets of the canon, the modern poet must push through these ghosts to make their own voice heard.

Photo: Jo Taylor. St. Oswald's Church

Motion's talk this morning, on the poetry of Edward Thomas, fulfilled a different function. Here was Motion the academic, returning to the topic he did his MPhil in, and bringing a new audience to the poet. As he said of his old English teacher, he invited the audience 'into his head'. And that, too, is what Grasmere seems to be doing. If its heart is the landscape, its head is the poetry inspired by it, and Grasmere is then in a constant state of issuing invitations to enter it. It seems to work; the descendents of the tourists Hardy encountered visit today, take photos of the graves, and leave feeling a little more connected to the poets who lie there. This process of passing on interest is in itself a form of inheritance; I was amused, and not a little gratified, when I went to take photos of Hartley Coleridge's grave (much more unkempt than those of the Wordsworth clan) to notice that when I left, my attention to the stone had piqued the interest of a lady standing behind me.

Photo: Jo Taylor. Hartley Coleridge's grave

Grasmere now, then, stands as a monument to poets past and an invitation to poets now; simultaneously, it recalls readers of the past, and invites modern readers to join them. And what's more, it seems to work.