Bushido Blade

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.