An unhelpful and personal review. The poetry of procedural generation, or the use of procedural generation for a poetry of time.
What does it feel like to have your (virtual) body die? Of course our virtual bodies die in videogames all the time, positioned as they are as fleeting moments of play atop an enduring game-world. To die in most videogames is to experience death as an imagined possibility before the real, which is the unfolding of new environments or new possibilities within the same. The virtual body then is a catalogue of mistakes. When the virtual body dies but the game-world persists, it is calling for another body, and another. It is difficult to say whether the virtual body ever actually dies when the game-world is immortal, because the virtual body always comes back. The traditional virtual body is like Sisyphus, eternally enacting a task predetermined by the unchanging physical world. But Proteus is the god of rivers and oceans, of the water that appears always the same because it is always changing. Proteus is vitality; the spark that animates all life. It is for this reason he is connected to the anima mundi or 'world soul', the world as a living being containing all living things. In Protean reality both world and entity are inextricable, and always actively changing together. The player is the body and the island. In Proteus, the game-world dies when the virtual body dies.
Nights in Proteus' day/night cycles don't introduce new mechanical threats like Don't Starve or Minecraft, instead they leave us fighting against the dark itself. Accounts of Proteus that describe the game as calming do not do justice to its sense of always encroaching cold. Because new days bring new mutation within the protean island, each night serves as a reminder of that impermanence; that we belong to time as much as space, or that our experience of space is moored to the living moment, each receding quicker than any of us can ever grasp. In Proteus, as in material reality, procedural generation comes through procedural disintegration, the loss of everything known for the ever-advancing unknown. The strange thing about night in Proteus is that this loss gives meaning to the day that came before it. Night draws the world in closer, making for an intimacy only available in resistance to the coldness of night and deletion of time. It is unsettling the way that we are subject to the passage of the sun and moon, but then Proteus is about belonging. Experiencing the ungroundedness of the game-world is to experience the mortality of the virtual body: they exist together, and they die together. The ever-encroaching cold is necessary for the emergent warmth of belonging in time and space.
It might be strange but the dramatic colouring of Proteus' blocky forms took me right back to seeing the world as a child. I have always had family in the farmland to the north, which is where the country grows narrower and narrower, and the sun-bleached pine trees stand alone in the paddocks, haggard and contorted. In the day the smell of silage, dirt, and cow shit imbues the landscape with a stillness and proximity that at night recedes, the moon distorting the familiar as it dances through the branches to the grass and rocks by the shed. I remember playing tag with my cousins and seeing my breath condense into fog and thinking the one thing scarier than being found and chased is being left alone out here. My uncle would tell us about the boogeyman by the window and the woman in the fields, and I thought about how I prefer that to the alternative, which is that there is nothing. We always left to drive home in the afternoon, so that by sunset we were surrounded on either side by distant fields, macrocarpa lining the perimeters and pointing at us with their bony fingers. My favourite time was the brief window after sundown and before darkness, where everything is stained the purple of wet running ink, and the smell of mud and grass rises from the ground. The safeness of being inside of the car, driven by someone else, was only enhanced by the horror of nightfall on the other side of the window. What growing up makes you realise, however, is that no such barrier ever existed.
To move through this space is to age with it, to grow ugly with it, and not even your parents can save you from the passage of the moon and the sun. But then this is the divine contradiction of youth: the total safety promised by parental figures is predicated on a belief in total danger out there: mud and rain and stone bridges that run into black water with trolls waiting to grab your ankles, and boogeymen, and the woman in the fields you hear sometimes calling even though you never said it. Like many children I was raised on cartoons, and this meant the painterly rural landscapes of One Hundred and One Dalmatians and The Aristocats augmenting the images of the nocturnal countryside gleaned from the window of my parents' car. A sense of total belonging that only increased the more grotesque the trees and farmhouses, the grimier the cobblestones and ruined fences, the greater the likelihood of being sucked into that cold black river and never seen again. Like a candle in the darkest room of the darkest house imaginable. What Proteus makes manifest with its imminent cold nights is the realisation that in order to be caught, one must first be falling. In order to find warmth, a moment of intimacy must first be carved out of uncertainty.
It makes sense that Proteus' development team were inspired by visits to Avebury. Every night the player is met by the island's stone circles which, as others have pointed out, seem anthromorphic, almost like watchers, as the game goes on. Your greatest friends in the climbing night are these monuments that somehow prefigure your arrival and even, gasp, remember you. What the stone circles of Avebury point to is that the ground beneath the feet is similarly enchanted, haunted by the monuments since removed, and that were always unknowable any way; traces left in traces of a forgotten people. The creepiness of enduring monuments to something lost but always there is at tension with Proteus the game which is about the becoming and disintegration of everything. Proteus the pagan god of sea-change, of life as current, is also important in alchemy where all matter is transmutation. In Proteus the body dies and the world dies too, never to be seen again. It ends in apocalypse, and its procedural generation ensures that every life-cycle is solitary as its death. Every world generated algorithmically is the sum of every possibility it is not. What the haunted monuments do is remind that what dies is never fully lost. That every world and every body generated by Proteus swims in an ocean of everything that ever was and will be. What does it feel like to die in Proteus? It feels as though I belonged somewhere.
What does it feel like to have your (virtual) body die? Of course our virtual bodies die in videogames all the time, positioned as they are as fleeting moments of play atop an enduring game-world. To die in most videogames is to experience death as an imagined possibility before the real, which is the unfolding of new environments or new possibilities within the same. The virtual body then is a catalogue of mistakes. When the virtual body dies but the game-world persists, it is calling for another body, and another. It is difficult to say whether the virtual body ever actually dies when the game-world is immortal, because the virtual body always comes back. The traditional virtual body is like Sisyphus, eternally enacting a task predetermined by the unchanging physical world. But Proteus is the god of rivers and oceans, of the water that appears always the same because it is always changing. Proteus is vitality; the spark that animates all life. It is for this reason he is connected to the anima mundi or 'world soul', the world as a living being containing all living things. In Protean reality both world and entity are inextricable, and always actively changing together. The player is the body and the island. In Proteus, the game-world dies when the virtual body dies.
Nights in Proteus' day/night cycles don't introduce new mechanical threats like Don't Starve or Minecraft, instead they leave us fighting against the dark itself. Accounts of Proteus that describe the game as calming do not do justice to its sense of always encroaching cold. Because new days bring new mutation within the protean island, each night serves as a reminder of that impermanence; that we belong to time as much as space, or that our experience of space is moored to the living moment, each receding quicker than any of us can ever grasp. In Proteus, as in material reality, procedural generation comes through procedural disintegration, the loss of everything known for the ever-advancing unknown. The strange thing about night in Proteus is that this loss gives meaning to the day that came before it. Night draws the world in closer, making for an intimacy only available in resistance to the coldness of night and deletion of time. It is unsettling the way that we are subject to the passage of the sun and moon, but then Proteus is about belonging. Experiencing the ungroundedness of the game-world is to experience the mortality of the virtual body: they exist together, and they die together. The ever-encroaching cold is necessary for the emergent warmth of belonging in time and space.
It might be strange but the dramatic colouring of Proteus' blocky forms took me right back to seeing the world as a child. I have always had family in the farmland to the north, which is where the country grows narrower and narrower, and the sun-bleached pine trees stand alone in the paddocks, haggard and contorted. In the day the smell of silage, dirt, and cow shit imbues the landscape with a stillness and proximity that at night recedes, the moon distorting the familiar as it dances through the branches to the grass and rocks by the shed. I remember playing tag with my cousins and seeing my breath condense into fog and thinking the one thing scarier than being found and chased is being left alone out here. My uncle would tell us about the boogeyman by the window and the woman in the fields, and I thought about how I prefer that to the alternative, which is that there is nothing. We always left to drive home in the afternoon, so that by sunset we were surrounded on either side by distant fields, macrocarpa lining the perimeters and pointing at us with their bony fingers. My favourite time was the brief window after sundown and before darkness, where everything is stained the purple of wet running ink, and the smell of mud and grass rises from the ground. The safeness of being inside of the car, driven by someone else, was only enhanced by the horror of nightfall on the other side of the window. What growing up makes you realise, however, is that no such barrier ever existed.
To move through this space is to age with it, to grow ugly with it, and not even your parents can save you from the passage of the moon and the sun. But then this is the divine contradiction of youth: the total safety promised by parental figures is predicated on a belief in total danger out there: mud and rain and stone bridges that run into black water with trolls waiting to grab your ankles, and boogeymen, and the woman in the fields you hear sometimes calling even though you never said it. Like many children I was raised on cartoons, and this meant the painterly rural landscapes of One Hundred and One Dalmatians and The Aristocats augmenting the images of the nocturnal countryside gleaned from the window of my parents' car. A sense of total belonging that only increased the more grotesque the trees and farmhouses, the grimier the cobblestones and ruined fences, the greater the likelihood of being sucked into that cold black river and never seen again. Like a candle in the darkest room of the darkest house imaginable. What Proteus makes manifest with its imminent cold nights is the realisation that in order to be caught, one must first be falling. In order to find warmth, a moment of intimacy must first be carved out of uncertainty.
It makes sense that Proteus' development team were inspired by visits to Avebury. Every night the player is met by the island's stone circles which, as others have pointed out, seem anthromorphic, almost like watchers, as the game goes on. Your greatest friends in the climbing night are these monuments that somehow prefigure your arrival and even, gasp, remember you. What the stone circles of Avebury point to is that the ground beneath the feet is similarly enchanted, haunted by the monuments since removed, and that were always unknowable any way; traces left in traces of a forgotten people. The creepiness of enduring monuments to something lost but always there is at tension with Proteus the game which is about the becoming and disintegration of everything. Proteus the pagan god of sea-change, of life as current, is also important in alchemy where all matter is transmutation. In Proteus the body dies and the world dies too, never to be seen again. It ends in apocalypse, and its procedural generation ensures that every life-cycle is solitary as its death. Every world generated algorithmically is the sum of every possibility it is not. What the haunted monuments do is remind that what dies is never fully lost. That every world and every body generated by Proteus swims in an ocean of everything that ever was and will be. What does it feel like to die in Proteus? It feels as though I belonged somewhere.