Game Diary: thoughts on bowing, tipping my hat, and using my turn signal

I'd be lying if I said the foxes in Ghost of Tsushima weren't a major selling point for me; not only could you pet them, but they did a happy little fox-dance when you did. It's very cute. However, actually playing the game, I was surprised by how much I loved bowing.

Ghost of Tsushima is a 2020 game where players are tasked with taking back the titular Tsushima Island from invaders in the late 1200s. Part of this takes the form of Assassin's Creed-style stealth and fort infiltration—an affront to the character's samurai traditions and point of moral conflict—as well as exploration. This exploration includes aforementioned fox-tracking which ultimately leads to fox-petting, writing haikus, and, more importantly here, bowing.

When not actively in combat, swiping down on the PS4 controller's touchpad causes the main character, Jin, to bow to whatever is in front of him. The game implicitly encourages this behavior through a trophy that's rewarded for bowing at altars found around the island, but you can bow to anyone and anything—and I did. I bowed before altars; I bowed when I found a torii; I bowed to the foxes; I bowed to sacred deer; I bowed to refugees I encountered on the road—all of whom, I'm happy to report, bowed back. It was definitely inappropriate and possibly offensive how often and indiscriminately I bowed, but if I were to play the game again (which I may given they've added more animals to pet), I'd do it all over again.

Why do I find so much joy in these simple actions? It's not as if Ghost of Tsushima's bowing or haiku-writing do anything for realism. As I said, my indiscriminate bowing is culturally inappropriate, and the haiku wasn't defined as a poetic form until the 19th century. We could choose to view this through a (pretentious) semiotic lens; at the simplest level, these are symbols that I understand as a white American in the 21st century, not accurate relics of 13th century Japanese life. This understanding is primarily fueled by other pieces of popular culture, which were in turn the primary sources for the game itself. The game even has a “Kurosawa Mode” that changes the color palette to a grainy black and white imitation of Akira Kurosawa's most famous films in the West. The combination approaches what Umberto Eco may have considered a “metacult” object¹—a text that is less an unconscious confluence of culturally engrained symbols and cliches, and more a deliberately designed pastiche by “semiotically nourished” developers. In otherwords, developers who have watched a lot of Kurosawa films and are deliberately referencing them. In this view, I'm performing my role in the pastiche based on my own knowledge of these texts when I choose to bow or write a haiku in Ghost of Tsushima.

Another historically dubious but symbolically gratifying example can be found in Red Dead Redemption—the 2010 old west game. While I was never able to stick with RDR or its 2018 sequel, I'll be damned if I didn't hit the button to tip my hat and say “mornin', ma'am” to everyone I passed. Even though I ultimately bounced off the games, I left them feeling satisfied. I had set out to play the Cowboy Game, and I've seen westerns on TCM; being a cowboy to me means swaggering through town and saying good morning, apparently.

In other games, though, this feels less tied to a specific cliche or genre expectation. For instance, I found similar pleasure calling out a greeting to other post-apocalyptic couriers in 2019's Death Stranding, or even just using my turn signal while driving in 2010's Deadly Premonition. There is no measurable reward in-game for doing either of these things—there no trophy for greeting, no punishment for not following traffic laws—but I felt compelled to do them anyway. While there is a role-play component, I can't discount the instant gratification that comes with the micro-action of hitting the button itself: when I wave hello, the couriers wave back. My action is recognized and reciprocated. I am, for a brief moment, not alone in my journey and fully grounded in the space.

I came back to thinking about Ghost of Tsushima after recently playing and disliking Horizon Forbidden West. Horizon is another Assassin's Creed-style map-defogger, and if I had to choose two words to describe it, it would be “a lot.” There's more of everything in Horizon—more characters, more collectibles, more space, but it all felt empty to me. Despite having pages of codexes and dialog explaining why things were the way they were, I didn't especially care for any of it. Would I have liked Horizon better if I could bow to people and they bowed back?