Grey and crinkled clouds swathe the sky in an unnerving monotone; a large game bird haunts overhead as an otherworldy choir swells with melancholic exhaustion; amidst a stark and lifeless landscape, mysterious stone buildings overlook, and a lone boy rides toward them in reluctant duty.
Sorry, I should probably start this article off by saying something about the game Shadow of the Colossus – I was just caught up in a memory of heading to Sunday School a few winters ago.
I used to teach it at Ashton United Methodist Church, smack in the middle of desolate, mid-Maryland suburbia. Despite my station, I’ll be the first to say I wasn’t the greatest example of a religious scholar, far from it: I admit I’d often have late nights on Saturdays and would show up with a few slapshod “Jesus crosswords” to distribute and keep the 7-year-old students busy. But I thought those things as forgivable, since at its core, I was doing “God’s work.”
That lackadaisical attitude didn’t last long, however – that was the year I played Shadow of the Colossus, a game that not only forced me to reflect on the role of my avatar in-game, but also my role as an avatar in this plane of reality, and the ones that I assumed would follow after.
A quick catch up on the game for those of you unfamiliar with it (and brace yourself, spoilers are coming): the young man, Wander, brings a deceased young woman, Mono, to a temple in a forbidden land. A god in that land, Dormin, makes a bargain with Wander, and will resurrect the fallen Mono if he slays the sixteen colossi that populate the otherwise barren kingdom. Outside of these sixteen giants and the direct instructions to slay them, the game has no other enemies, characters, dialogues, or items to really explore with during your first play-through. It is just you, your horse, and these sixteen trying boss battles.
The first pricklings of existentialism came from sources well-discussed by other writers: the eerie atmosphere, the sense of guilt after beating each boss, and the ending which turns you into colossi yourself, facing an army of warriors who are slaying you out in a frustrating role-reversal of assumed sense of good vs. evil. The moral ambiguity even comes down to the music; every time you slay a colossus, this is the tune that accompanies their fall – a far cry from other famous videogame victory anthems.
And those were unsettling enough as a gamer, believe you me – moral relativism and your own blind corruptibility as a player are tough pills to swallow for gamers weaned on Crash Bandicoot and the comparatively simple goods-and-evils of The Legend of Zelda.
Being an involved Sunday School teacher with faith that was waning enthusiasm, Shadow of the Colossus provided a cathartic way to step out of the presuppositions that plagued my upbringing and shock me with by forcing me, as a player, to play devil’s advocate against my own convictions.
As in the video above, the game begins by following Wander as he approaches a skyscraping structure in an under-saturated landscape. The structure is known as the “Shrine of Worship” in the game, but it immediately reminded me of the Tower of Babel.
 |
| The Shrine of Worship. |
 |
| The Tower of Babel. |
Nimrod, the mighty hunter, was the one who built the Tower of Babel, supposedly in defiance of God. I believe he wasn’t doing it out pure blasphemy, however: Nimrod was a descendant of Noah, who survived the genocide of The Great Flood, and Nimrod didn’t want his people to succumb to the same fate. God, upon witnessing the building of the Tower, saw this as a sign of man’s impertinence and destroyed it, separating humankind both geographically and linguistically so they could never band together to create as sacrilegious of a structure ever again.
The parable of the Tower of Babel is a poster boy for moral ambiguity in religious doctrine. Neither Nimrod nor God see themselves as doing anything wrong, but merely reacting to the other side’s transgression (Nimrod to The Great Flood and God to Nimrod’s hubris).
In the last chapter of Shadow of the Colossus, both Wander and Dormin are attacked by a religious leader, Lord Ermon. Lord Ermon believed that Wander, by making that black bargain with the forbidden god Dormin for Mono’s life, was now a blasphemer and had to be stopped. Wander, however, was only reacting the death of his lover, Mono, and Dormin only made the bargain because the colossi acted as a cage, imprisoning him in the forbidden land.
Oh, and Nimrod backwards is Dormin. But we’ll call that a “happy accident” for now.
The parallels between these stories made me recursively question both, until I began deconstructing other biblical tales with a similar sense of cynicism. The fables of Nimrod, Noah, Lot, Abraham and Job all seemed much, much darker on reflection. These characters were trialed and punished and I accepted them with a sort of lazy logic under the assumption that “God knew best.” But if he did, he wouldn’t kill a man’s family to prove a petty point to Satan or tell a man to kill his own son in blind devotion. In Shadow of the Colossus, I similarly thought that slaughtering the titular creatures was an admirable undertaking because, well, I knew best.
And then that’s when it hit me – this game makes you God.
With that, it goes a step further than making you question your morals – it makes you question the foundation on which your hold them. The game faces you with the realization that most of your beliefs come out of a sense of entitlement as a unique, thinking being in a world of what compare to automatons: on earth as a Christian in a world of hedonists, in the bible as a deity above defying mortals, or in a videogame as an avatar amongst NPCs (non-playable characters). Much of how we view “right” and “wrong” comes from this entitlement, because we identify ourselves as entitled enough to make that moral distinction.
Despite realizing that I was doing wrong by slaying these colossi, I still kept playing. It was morbid and I realized that I could stop doing “evil” by turning off my Playstation 2, but I was just so curious about the world the game took place in. There was no explanation or back story given, the world was just there, and I had to learn or deduce my own logic for its creation, for its meaning.
The game was essentially challenging me to self-define it, to make up my own history for it to satiate my curiosity as its player; to make answers where there are none, to give further meaning to my actions when there were none.
Just like humans did.
And that is the genius of Shadow of the Colossus: the brilliant mechanics, poignant minimalistic plot, and melancholic design and architecture are parts that make a sum, a sum that crafts a playing experience allegorizing man’s desire to believe in something intangible and greater than himself.
The game fills you with the same curiosity as the first man who wondered about forces greater than himself, and made conclusions outside of what his five senses told him – just as the player deduces a story for the game outside of the raw information it gives you.
And the game ends with the girl, Mono, revived; with the boy, Wander, reincarnated as a baby and branded with horns, and with very few questions answered – concluding that the player must answer his own.
“Mono.” “Wander.”
“Theism.” “Pilgrimage.”
More “happy accidents.”
And this is why a game so stark has such a strong Wikia page and hundreds of message boards debating its meaning. This is why so many people continued killing the often gentle and vulnerable colossi, even when it pained the player to do so. This is why Shadow of the Colossus is seen as one of the greatest games ever made.
And this is also why so many holy books exist answering the same questions, so many wars have been fought over religious dominance, and why almost every leader in the world has been informally required to be a theist (outside of a select few Scandinavian countries).
We, as humans, want answers – not just answers, but answers that make us feel secure in our past and future choices.
Without those answers, we’re just floating automatons waiting to die – NPCs, if you will, waiting for the game console to power down.
It’s scary reality, and Shadow of the Colossus capitalizes on this fear and insecurity. By forcing me, as a player and a Sunday School teacher, to face these hard truths, it wrestled me into a mindset of critical thought I never considered up to that point.
That year, I resigned from Ashton United Methodist Church and bought a Quran, a Bhagavad Gita, a few texts from the Dalai Lama and, eventually, one of Stephen Hawking’s books. Though my faith was a big part of my life and identity before this game, it fell hard when confronted with concepts that never approached it before.
You could say that the game’s designer, Famito Ueda, was my prophet and this game is his doctrine… and you know, if I can follow a dogma of thought while earning more Playstation Trophies, well, it can’t all be heresy.
