Marriage & Video Games

ISSUE #115

Today, I lie buoyant on my summer sheets, television screen paused on the video game I just can't stop playing. Its pause gives me a little break from dying—at the hands of giant insects; in puddles bubbling with acid; on the spikes placed in pits laid by deranged urban planners. Somehow I find the resolve to come back to life, every reset its own act of bravery, thumbs branded with the pain of the deaths before.

It's a hard game—hence all the dying—and its name is Hollow Knight. In it, I hold the reins of a tiny bug warrior, dressed in a white helm and tattered cloak. It is my job to protect this avatar; I guide him as we fight through worms and beetles deep in the tunnels of an underground city. Artful and engaging, the game is flush with purples and the vivid blues of a decrepit kingdom that's no longer safe.

In form, video games are unique in that they reward confronting your failures. The only way out is to try again. Hollow Knight excels at this, its large interconnected map filled with passages which are blocked the first time you pass them, only to open when you find the right tools—wings that help you jump or a charm that helps you run. This forces you to retrace your steps, to double-check every dead-end until a new door opens—much like the epiphanies that reveal themselves as we age.

Though we like to pretend otherwise, the real world is less eager to reward those who try again.

Between deaths, I was reading An American Marriage, the story of a black couple in Atlanta whose marriage is upended by a wrongful conviction. Roy and Celestial are forced to try again and again to jump the obstacles of a world that's rigged against them. When facing the power and privilege of reality, there are no power-ups to be gained; you have to forge them yourself, with whatever love you can find.

Those with the cheat codes—be it skin color or symmetry of face—play this game with thirty lives, while Roy, Celestial, and the Hollow Knight have but one. This is what it means to understand the struggle. Think of the rich friends you visited as a child, with their dozens of video games compared to your paltry three. There are those who can afford the options; if any game is too hard, simply reach for another, hit reset and enter the shiny new.

But Roy and Celestial are people, and their marriage is not a game. Real couples face evils we've coded into this world, with consequences too grave to be rendered by pixel. It's rare that a marriage can withstand that trauma, and no one should be forced to start again. Yet we watch as these two retrace their steps—they see walls not as ends but as doors simply hidden. Failure does not mean game over. In the end, there's a choice: Continue? Yes | No.