Video games have been
treated as ephemera more often than they have been treated as art. We
use video games as entertainment, but then we are done with them, and
then they are forgotten. Only a few video games have been
contemplated as artworks.
Bushido Blade
might be art, it might be history, and it might be something more. It
is, conventionally speaking, a fighting game, centered upon realistic
one-on-one weapons-based combat informed by the Bushido tradition.
Bushido refers to the honor codes of the samurai, dating back to sixteenth-century CE Japan.
Bushido drew from many
sources, including Zen Buddhism. As a Mahayana Buddhist tradition,
Zen was an interpretation of the teachings of the ninth-century CE philosopher Nagarjuna. Nagarjuna articulated the doctrine of
emptiness. This doctrine holds that everything and anything is empty
of own-being. No conventional thing, from the human soul to the
setting sun, has an essence independent from everything else.
Everything, like any given video game, arises then passes away. Even
emptiness is empty.
This realization about
everything's emptiness is essential to enlightenment. Part of the
Buddhist project then, was about clearing the mind of conventional
thinking so as to make way for this insight. In the Zen school,
insight can happen suddenly. For that reason, Zen masters tried to
disrupt conventional thinking to spur conceptual breakthroughs. This
could involve sharp, sudden vocalizations, or even unexpected blows
from sticks—a technique sometimes referred to as "Zen
kindness." Less dramatically, the focus on clearing the mind
also informed an aesthetic of minimalism in Zen. This aesthetic is
embodied by the Zen garden—rocks and shrubs surrounded by “rivers”
of raked sand—and Japanese line drawings—trees and mountains
done entirely in black and white save for the vivid red cherry
blossoms.
Bushido Blade's
graphics and gameplay appear to be informed by these Zen
sensibilities. With just the two combatants and a sparse background,
be it a hall or courtyard or cherry blossom grove, and sparing
soundtrack making room for little more than the duelists’
footsteps, the game's artistic style is minimalistic. (Likely, the
original PlayStation's limited graphical capabilities informed this
backdrop.) On the gameplay side, Bushido Blade is not about
button-mashing; indeed, "mashing" is a gerund rarely
connected to art. Rather, duels typically end after two or three
well-placed blows. Sometimes, a single blow will end a contest via
instant death; victory or defeat, like enlightenment, can happen
suddenly. This does not necessarily mean that duels end
quickly—rather, the contestants may circle for quite some time
before attempting an attack. This makes playing Bushido Blade
a strangely contemplative experience—almost a meditation in itself.
Each duel, then, carries
the possibility of insight. The duel is non-dual. The defeated
duelist passes away. In the end, there is only one combatant. The
combatant is no longer a combatant, however, as he has eliminated the
adversary that constituted him. He fights again, and if he loses, he
too is proven empty. If he beats the game, the game is over, and it,
too, proves to be empty. The player turns off the game, and it is
empty, like everything else. In its capacity for spurring this
insight, Bushido Blade endures.
Emptiness is empty, said
Nagarjuna. What does this mean? Many interpretations have been
offered through the centuries, spawning many Mahayana schools. For
our immediate purposes in this review, your correspondent suggests it
means there is hope. Indeed, a game like Bushido Blade gets
turned off, only to get turned on again and again. If everything is
empty, then the concept of "ephemera" is also empty. Some
things have the potential to live anew and to in that way endure. And
so there is hope for some video games as art. Turn on Bushido
Blade again and realize as much.