Consoles
A video game console is an electronic, digital or computer device that outputs a video signal or visual image to display a video game that one or more people can play. After being exposed to and enthralled by Alejandro Miguel Justino Crawford's Diana Hamilton's Dreams, I was reminded of a 2017 South African video game, n Verlore Verstand, that is accessible on several different consoles such as Xbox One, Playstation 4, and PC. Developed by Skobbejak Games, 'n Verlore Verstand is Afrikaans for "a lost mind," and this sense of unhinged madness is the very essence of the game. As Diana Hamilton's Dreams attempts to unlock the subconscious and 'approach the truth of dreams...through the navigation and connection and layering of sounds and stories that, half-recognized, slip away when we try to tie them down...' (Kill Screen), n Verlore Verstand similarly seeks to journey through an uncanny, subterranean consciousness, one that falls outside of our immediate focal awareness. While gameplay varies across the different levels/worlds, from walking through barren and desolate fields to navigating murky and dungeon-like labyrinthine corridors, the fundamental theme is this realm of the unknown. Here, the player must navigate through networks of broken and distant memories in order to unlock the truth.
Diana Hamilton's Dreams is not just a collection of poems in the form of a game but is itself a poem as n Verlore Verstand functions as its own set of beautiful images and sounds. Both games have a type of 'literary aspect' and essentially fracture all preexisting knowledge of what constitutes 'literature' in general. Video games such as these access something about us that words on a page cannot do, perhaps due to their overload of sensory information, cognitively demanding environments, and other reasons I am still trying to figure out...
