Eric Roxas Group 2 12 Dec 2011 WB/PE: Lysandra Tan

“Of Zombies, Alternate Dimensions, and Resurrections”

John Marston rides across the Wild West in his ever-trusty stallion, a ten-year old black War Horse. He’s a bounty hunter. That means he ties criminals up and brings them to the sheriff’s precinct in the town he got the bounty order from – or if necessary, he kills them. That’s how he makes a living. As he rides on his horse across the vast deserts, prairies, mountains, valleys, glades, forests, defiles, ravines, and all other terrain found in the United States during that era, where the first cars were just being invented. He occasionally finds beavers, squirrels, coyotes, rabbits, foxes, cougars, buffalos, bears, and other animals he hunts down – and skins for valuable meat and fur he can sell to general stores.

The above paragraph is a brief description of a video game I have at home on my Microsoft Xbox 360, a gaming console. In the video game, Red Dead Redemption, you play John Marston. It has a story of pretty much killing people who did bad things to you and those you love, in order for you to be reunited once again with your wife and child. You might now be wondering why I picked this video game as the (changed 'a' to 'the') topic of my personal essay of what I found poetic. There are several reasons. The first is that playing this video game has brought me to the realization that institutionalization can make zombies of people.

There is a side story in the game where John Marston has to kill zombies because an insidious zombie disease has spread out in the whole country. I can quaintly and humorously parallel that supposed “disease” in our modern lives - institutionalization. Because of the daily grind of Math long tests to study for, Accounting quizzes to burn the midnight oil for, English papers to labour on, Lit stories to read, and all other labours of school, to see life beyond the next school requirement can be difficult sometimes. Playing this video game as John, in a way, kills or at least tries to kill the “zombie consciousness” that is taking over me when I fail to see the big picture when I am absorbed into the tiny pinhole of school requirements.

In the game, you can do whatever you like and no one tells you what to do. Now, I am not saying that we should kill people, because you can do anything at all, even kill people. What I am saying is, because of a fast-paced life in the modern era, and especially because of the institutionalization of our way of life through school and other similar, repetitive, and mechanistic activities, we tend to take for granted our freedom. I mean, take a look at our lives in school. We spend each day taking up the same classes we took yesterday, talking to the same people at the same time each day, in the same place. Sure, this approach to learning may make us memorize things quickly, but we also forget them quickly, and the sameness is simply boring.

I’m not saying that institutionalization is all bad though. It has given us a rigid and reliable system to produce experts in different fields with a minimum standard of know-how. With it, we can be sure that we have fairly the same curriculum as other lawyers/doctors/engineers/(insert occupation here).

What struck me in the video game is that John Marston does not have the word, “institutionalized” in his dictionary. He lives life the way he pleases, going where ever in the United States, even if it is several hundred miles away. He sleeps on the sand, under the stars, having no qualms about sleeping beside a horse and a thousand other species of wild animals. He kills the criminals or catches them because he wants to earn a living, and because that is his understanding of justice. Every day, the life he leads is not like any other. At least, that is what I made his life to be.

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This experience of living the life of another person; making him walk, talk, see, feel, touch, hear, and do whatI tell him to do using the controller , it makes me wonder whether I really am free too . How would we know if we are not just brains floating in a nutrient-rich vat of chemicals, being sent electrical impulses from a computer through electrodes attached to the neurocortex which make our brain have sensations, experiences, and memories? How would we know if our lives are not just video games for people or people-like things in a higher realm of consciousness? Maybe we are just zombies that think that we can walk, talk, see, feel, touch, hear, and do what we want, but in truth someone on the other end of a TV screen has a controller making us do those things? This query is epically poetic, no doubt. Well, if so, at least I control this guy, John Marston, in this realm of consciousness.

Does John Marston know that he is just a character in a video game, wandering about and living out a story which game developers wrote for him? It kind of makes me wonder if our lives are predetermined long before we even existed. Are we just actors in a game whose story is final and unchangeable?

The second reason I think this game is poetic, is that it has reminded me that the world is bigger than the few square kilometres I inhabit in my daily life. As I have mentioned, John Marston travels the world as he pleases on his trusty and agile stallion across all kinds of terrain, encountering all kinds of people and animals, and experiencing a whole gamut of things. I have travelled a bit in the past, myself. Traversing some parts of Asia, Australia, and the United States, but because of how school can sometimes make us busy, unable to travel, I forget how big the world is.

This gives rise to a new musing: Where does John Marston live? Is it within the machine which we call the Xbox 360? Is it in the minds of the game developers and players who cannot get enough of him? Or is it in some other place entirely, where John can live in peace without human, divine, or whatever kind of intervention ? Now, you might be thinking that this is a simple question about technology and that once the Xbox 360’s memory unit is destroyed, John Marston and all he stands for would already be dead and forgotten.

How are we so sure of that, though? If you are familiar with the story, “Sophie’s World,” by Jostein Gaarder the protagonist , Sophie, said that she will live on even if the story is finished and the book is put down. Increasing evidence has been found by quantum physicists that millions of parallel universes or dimensions exist in the same space which we inhabit right now. That means at the same time, at the same place, but in a different parallel universe or dimension, some other thing is happening. Maybe in one of those parallel universes, John Marston lives on - or maybe he lives in a higher or lower dimension.

Maybe we are just thoughts in the mind of another consciousness, and that consciousness is what we call, “God”. Now, we can see this clearly because we have played “God” in the life of John Marston and countless other characters which we have made from the creativity of our minds, developing these characters, emplotting their life stories, and making them live through the hands of eager video game players. If we really are just being “controlled” by a higher consciousness, I do not think we should be angry because we ourselves our doing it to these virtual people we create.

This meta-analysis of life afforded me by this video game has worked wonders to my grasping the fact of my smallness and my ignorance of how little I really know about life. I do not know how my consciousness was created, just like John. I do not know for certain the composition of my maker/s, just as John does not know the faces of his game developers. I also

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do not know what befalls me in the future, just as John does not know what awaits him in his predetermined life.

The third poetic thing I saw in this video game is the resurrection that takes place each time the character is killed. As we all accept and have come to believe, once we die, we go someplace else than this physical realm. For some people, it is hell; some, heaven; some in a place full of light or darkness, etc. The bottom line is a lot of people believe it is some other place than here, and we are going to be without a physical body. In the game, when John dies, he comes back to life at the last save point or the last time you save the game.

However, this makes me ask, “How are we certain that we do not come back to life once we die?” Now that I have introduced the concept of parallel universes, we can imagine that when one dies an untimely death in Universe A, s/he can be resurrected in Universe B – which is similar to Universe A, so that her/his life is basically the same entity as in Universe A - sometime before s/he died, so that s/he can live and have that possibility of surviving the death when the point in time of her/his untimely death in Universe A comes again. This reminds me of that movie where Jake Gyllenhaal, using a machine called the Source Code, relives over and over the life of a passenger in a train which exploded in order to find out who the bomber was.

If the aforementioned definition of resurrection were real (and we have no way of finding out but for us to die ourselves), then we are doomed to relive our lives until we achieve the purpose or storyline which our “game developers” have set out for us. The lives we live now maybe resurrected ones, after we accidentally stepped into a vat of boiling oil, forgot to turn off the gas, looked down from the car which hit us while we were crossing the street, etc.

If resurrection were real, I would live my life to the fullest every single day. I would confess my immense love to my crush, try to capture the world’s most wanted criminals, engage in deep sea diving, embark on a dangerous naval journey across the world, skydive daily, run blindly into the streets just for the fun of it, etc. If I do not like the outcome of my actions, I can just sleep in a car turned on and poof. I can do all of those things again.

As unsettling as these ideas sound, we never really know what comes after death, unless someone from the other side comes back and tells us Maybe we get resurrected to the same save point that our Maker/s or Player/s determine for us. Maybe we are living in one of the many multitudes of parallel universes in reality. Maybe we are just brains submerged in a vat. Maybe we are just zombies. Maybe.

It is funny how much a simple video game can make one think about life.

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