Mountain

Mountain is a curious indie game that came out a bit ago in which you sit and watch a randomly generated disembodied mountain rotate slowly in space. There is disagreement about whether this is even a game; it certainly raises the question of what a game should actually do.

The game is closer to a screensaver or a virtual snow globe. You watch and listen and wait. You can spin the mountain around, or zoom out to space, or re-locate objects which have fallen on to the mountain (more on this later), but that is about it. The developer tells you there are no controls. No controls. He tells you to relax. To have patience. This short-circuiting of the traditional mode of gaming in which you are constantly active and feverishly striving toward some goal or metric is unpleasant to many players. Many casual passerby take a sniff, grimace, and move on.

The sun rises and then falls rhythmically, changing the lighting on the mountain. Trees grow and die. All of the seasons are cycled through complete with spring rains, buzzing summer nights with crickets and fire flies in the trees, autumn tree colors, and winter snow and bare trees. Clouds pass over the peak and condense to produce the rain and snow. 

The ambient soundtrack is wonderful. There is a steady hiss of wind, crickets at night, rainfall, those sorts of things. And they continue on, and on. You can put the game on and let it run in the background, with the sounds continuing on. 

There is something mysterious and intoxicating about the game. You find yourself coming back again and again to watch this mountain, to see what happens. I think part of this is because the mountain has occasional thoughts, which are often quite touching, with some of the thoughts evoking serious existential issues. 

The mountain often expresses its loneliness. It wonders to itself: "Am I alone because I'm not good?" Or "Am I alone because my trees are ugly?" It has metathoughts. It asks itself whether this is all just a simulation. Sometimes it is just content with a beautiful day. It has its ups and downs. It is certainly a sensitive mountain. 

It is these little hints that keep you coming back. It is that glimpse of substance which glimmers beneath the surface, which tells you to keep checking back, because perhaps this person is trying to tell you something. Otherwise the novelty would have worn off long ago. So you sit and watch, and then something makes you think, or the simple beauty just puts your mind in a relaxed, meandering state.

You do start to get bored here and there. But then these random objects of differing sizes begin falling out of the sky and embedding themselves in the mountain. You get planes, and blocks, and fans, and keyboards, and a record player that actually played a couple of songs to my surprise. So you sit and wait to see what else is going to land on the mountain. 

But then something interesting happens. As more objects fall and embed themselves on the mountain, you begin to feel uncomfortable. They start to look less like fun random objects and more like clutter, littering your beautiful mountain. And they just keep coming and coming over time, aggregating on the mountain surface. Soon there are no pristine surfaces for you to enjoy the natural expressions. The objects go from interesting things to just garbage. You grow more agitated and try to pick them off the mountain, but they keep sticking on.

Some of the objects do mysteriously disappear after a certain amount of time, perhaps to address memory concerns and keep things running smoothly? Other random things happen: some plants grow to freakishly huge proportions with no discernible explanation.

Mountain ends with a sudden eruption of anguished groans from some demonic choir, which signal the arrival of an incoming meteor that obliterates your mountain. The event is actually very sad; there is a deep feeling of loss. The player thinks back about all of the thoughts this sensitive mountain had – thoughts both mundane and profound – and feels a regret for the loss of an entity with character.

This is certainly anthropomorphizing the mountain, which is precisely the spirit of the coming era, and which will most likely form the basis of a future spiritual sensibility. It is all quite appropriate in any case. There is no telling what the rest of the universe “feels,” though it follows that we are certainly products and expressions of the universe itself, and that we are indeed the universe 

“feeling.”

A mountain, a landscape, strip-mined and littered with dead objects, appears to be "sad" or "dying." Human beings look upon the rapid deterioration of the environment, and the suffering of what were once considered “lower” lifeforms and a new tenderness and compassion for surrounding living systems is restored after a millennia of alienation from the natural world. Suddenly the world around us is buzzing with tender feeling; the solipsistic human self-pity is retracted from its deep inner existential recesses and is cast out over the cosmos as a glowing fabric, in the hopes of restoring this multitudinous connection.

A necessary feedback mechanism considering the catastrophic damage we have done and continue to do at a brisk pace, but which, in the end we must admit, is something the universe has done to itself. And so the healing process itself continues on even as we grind ourselves firmly into past ruts – both in a physical and metaphysical sense. The question now is what forms of life exactly will make it out intact, and what will be ground down into the chaotic and elementary dusts that are to be recycled back into the life system as the earth rights itself. 

Is this the sort of line of thought the developer intended? Well maybe some of it, maybe not. That's the point of a good work of art: it leaves room for extrapolation, so that the audience can participate as well. It was a nice experience anyways.