To change the established order of things, to rebel against a way of doing that the majority consider correct, to fight against the norms that some established years ago and that are followed without allowing for other options, to change the plane of importance of the human being with respect to the world, going from being considered the center of the universe to part of it, embracing the most outrageous feelings without complexes, not being afraid to try to seek beauty, fear or the sublime .
The Romantics changed the rules of the game in the art of the early nineteenth century , decided to break with neoclassicism and embraced without fear the ability to feel that human beings possess. Rebels, dandies, worshipers at the end of the mystical and capable of feeling in the extreme and trying to make the viewers of their works do it too, we in the field of videogames are not spared from their influences. Without going any further, we have all surrendered to the majesty and romanticism that emanates from ‘Shadow of the Colossus’ . The great romantic game par excellence.
And it is that saving the distances, the moment in which it arrived and everything that we learned with it, we can draw parallels with what was lived at the end of the 18th century . I do not pretend, of course, to be a lecturer and this text should be taken as a personal analysis. For me, as a designer, it helps me to explain why ‘Shadow of the Colossus’ is so special and why its aesthetics, its idea, its development and its feeling managed to captivate me for so long . Perhaps, I admit, I was already predisposed to it since I am a great admirer of the work of Caspar David Friedrich. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves and start this beautiful story where it deserves, at the end of the 18th century , just when neoclassicism was at its peak.
Breaking the established rules
The ideal beauty, aspiring to resemble Classical Rome, rationalism, neatness, white marble, the perfection of the circle and the line , the conception of man as being all powerful, the recovery of ancient mythology … follow these guidelines it was to follow the Law. The influence of neoclassicism was overwhelming and only a few rebels began to consider other things.
And what if to so much use of the head and reasoning, we put the heart and feelings first? Man not only has the gift of thinking, reflecting and solving complicated mathematical problems. Yes, we are all that, but we are much more than that. The human being feels , is carried away by rage, has fears, phobias, falls in love and, in short, is a nobody when compared to the magnitude and power of the planet we inhabit.
What is a man against a mountain? Nothing but an ant. What is man in front of the immensity of a sun-drenched desert? A minutia.
Romanticism was born (for this example we are interested in taking only the painting part, although the movement began years before in literature) and with it many artists began to break the ties that tied them to neoclassicism. A new way of doing things, a new generation that no longer wanted to achieve beauty through the representation of the classical world and the perfection of forms. Instead they preferred to look for it in feelings, in the sublime, in the individual, such as being capable of suffering, feeling, imagining and being awed by the environment.
Express human emotions through the landscape, brushstrokes, light, contrast, mist …
And now think about our beloved video games and go back in time five or six years ago. It was about amusing or proposing heroic, epic actions. Full adrenaline, ability to solve a puzzle, game mechanics that ask us to have feline reflexes or travel to fantasy worlds in which to collect eight hundred objects, eliminate two hundred enemies to get a certain key and thus earn the gift that allows you to cross a door. Yes, I’m exaggerating, I know. But try to close your eyes and blur the picture (with its honorable exceptions) for the simile to work.
And suddenly, when the rules are set, ‘Shadow of the Colossus’ comes along and breaks them. A game with only a few enemies to defeat, a title that asks us little more than walking and contemplating the grandeur of the landscape versus the diminutive nature of the protagonist , an epic adventure in which we move by impulses and feelings, a capacity for get into its history and make us “feel” like no other title before.
There was neoclassicism to delight us with the contemplation of classical beauty and romanticism came to make us feel. There were video games, using more or less classic formulas for the sole purpose of having fun and ‘Shadow of the Colossus’ came to make us feel.
We have already drawn bridges. Now let’s meet Caspar David Friedrich.
I am not going to talk about the life and miracles of the German genius. I prefer that we stay with a general concept of his work in which a simple man, who had experienced the pain that death causes and the defenselessness of the human being in the face of destiny, faces the unknown and tries to make us feel the same than him contemplating its landscapes.
Skilled draftsman and best landscaper he walked for years through the rough corners of Germany and Sweden while taking notes and reflecting on how small the human being is. Of how insignificant it is before nature, before destiny, before the course of life. Therefore, contemplating the immensity of a plain or the thick mist that flooded the meadows of Greifswald, he decided to share that feeling with us.
They had nothing to do with classical icons or scenes from Greek mythology, no. Simply the human being, with his back to the viewer to position ourselves even more in the painting and very small to highlight the enormousness of the landscape, facing the unknown. To the terrible waves, to a sunset among dead trees, to misty mountains, to a storm, to the immense sea, to an infinite meadow, to the ruins of a church that once existed, the vegetation defeating a Gothic construction …
Memories that again and again evoke the small of the human being and how defenseless it is before the hazards of nature (a terrible moment to remember this just a few days after the terrible tsunami that hit Japan). Solitary, majestic landscapes, full of mist … a laudable attempt to reach the category of the sublime.
Now think about what ‘Shadow of the Colossus’ proposes, blur the view and you will see that it is not very far from what Friedrich tried to teach us with his paintings.
A man, Wanda, on the back of his horse, who must travel a majestic world, lonely and without inhabitants. Man against nature, or rather. Man dwarfed by vast nature. There are no characters to interact with, you cannot do a lot of things … it consists of moving slowly towards an inexorable destiny through arid, almost desert landscapes, bathed in mist and with such peculiar lighting that it has not been repeated in another game.
The sun burns more than ever, the feeling of restlessness does not take long to appear, the Agro company becomes the only thing that keeps us alert and crosses plains with it for minutes and minutes of play in which nothing happens (apparently). becomes commonplace. Yes, the game has tricks so that we do not get bored and Agro every so often wants to go in another direction and forces us to correct it, but in essence we are facing the same experience that Friedrich proposes.
Contemplating how nature appears majestic and imposing before a simple human being who also has the difficult mission of defeating it.
And like Romanticism, ‘Shadow of the Colossus’ aspires to the sublime
We have talked about the sublime, but what the hell is it? It does not have a clear explanation or simple enough to be reflected in a few lines. Throughout history various movements and thinkers, beginning with Longinus in ancient Greece, have defined it in various ways. An extreme beauty capable of taking the viewer into an ecstasy and even damaging it, its attraction being precisely there, in the observation of objects that threaten to destroy or harm the viewer (such as damaged nature) according to the latest studies by Schopenhauer. Its meaning has been revised so many times that we are going to stay with the most romantic study of all.
It was made by the German poet Joahnn Christoph Friedrich Schiller and in it he distinguishes three phases in the scope of the sublime. The contemplative phase , in which the subject faces the object, which is greater than his capacity (see nature, for example), the “pathetic sublime” in which the subject realizes that his physical integrity is in danger and finally the “overcoming of the sublime” in which man wins thanks to the fact that he is intellectually superior and assumes his own insignificance.
Three phases. A man against the immensity of nature, a man who understands the risky and recklessness of his affront and finally a man who somehow manages to overcome the impact thanks to his intellect and realizes its true and minuscule importance.
Three phases. Wanda overcoming the immensity of the arid landscape that she has to cross, Wanda understanding that facing her colossal opponents (representations of nature after all) is something terrifying and finally Wanda winning thanks to her ability and intellect, not thanks to her brute force or the mastery of weapons, to end up understanding that he was fighting against the impossible.
‘Shadow of the Colossus’ represented for many a before and after. For me it did. A game that did not ask me to be attentive from the first moment, that did not offer me traditional mechanics and that, unlike others, invited me to walk, to let myself be carried away by the enormous, unexplored and immeasurable of that world. A world in which the application of light was done in a pictorial way, a world of ancient and almost forgotten constructions, a world in which Agro (my faithful horse) was my only ally, a world in which nature had defeated man and had reduced him to a sad whisper … an unfathomable world that I contemplated from a hill, leaning on a rock, as in “The walker on a sea of clouds.”
PS All oil paintings and sketches are by Caspar David Friedrich.
Wikipedia | Caspar David Friedrich, Romanticism, Neoclassicism The Sublime in Romanticism, Johann Christoph Friedrich Schiller
