On Adventure
"Reality is the Kingdom of No Stories; the adventures in reality are merely imaginations that don't rise to the level of stories."
Yesterday I was roaming Teyvat on a quest that required six raspberries, of which I had exactly none. Raspberries aren’t easy to buy, so I had no choice but to wander around Guili Plains.
Guili Plains has always felt this desolate, from time immemorial. Hilichurls popped up now and then, and for someone who has cleared the Spiral Abyss they’re dispatched in a single strike. But I couldn’t help recalling the novice days, when it took forever to grind through even one daily commission. When did I start to find Genshin Impact tedious? Was it when I had walked every inch of the map and there was nothing new left to discover?
This brings to mind the Western adventure novel, whose history begins in the 18th century with Wilhelm Meister—also called the “novel of education.” Goethe certainly wrote the series to teach virtue, though its romantic appeal is obviously more attractive. Bakhtin typically divides the structure of the novel of education into adolescence—apprenticeship—the journey, and so on. But like Don Quixote, this novel too is about the shattering of Wilhelm Meister’s illusions. Zhang Dachun put it well: “The hero’s self-realization in tension with society is undoubtedly the crux of the Bildungsroman; the two will ultimately coalesce toward a balanced conclusion, though the necessity of this conclusion is full of uncertainty; thus the ending of the Bildungsroman has never really mattered.”
And so with Genshin Impact. Though the dominant discourse is about character strength, Genshin is in fact a story-driven, open-world game. Open-world, of course, means made for exploration; story means guiding exploration. Exploration is the game’s true theme.
Apparently miHoYo’s goal is to build a Honkai Realm—a fully virtual world. This is the lifelong goal of miHoYo’s three founders. That may be “thrice released and thrice recalled”—wishful thinking. Yet for an individual, wishful thinking is the most romantic thing of all—to create a world. Exploration, too, is a process of creation: moving knowledge from the intellectual to the rational, while “wishful thinking” moves from the rational or even the sensory outward.
The distinction between classical and modern fiction is that classical fiction aims at building an entire world, while modern fiction focuses more on individual circumstance; even popular fiction today is mainly classical. Its appeal lies in perfection: a perfect world, and the desire to dwell in it poetically. High culture is always in tension with social reality.
Marcuse said that art is a protest against what exists; art’s magic lies in its power of negation. Art interrupts everyday experience and casts the person into a non-everyday, critical world; it is in the process of exploration that the person feels the power of the self. But when the book is closed and one returns to the everyday world, the person feels their own powerlessness again. Sublimation becomes a cognitive force that resists the banality of the everyday while remaining subject to it. This is exactly the negative emotion I feel when I’ve grown accustomed to the daily “clocking in” of Genshin commissions.
Given that, the virtual worlds people love are of course best when they differ from reality as much as possible. Warcraft’s trampling, dragons roaring, wizards cursing; space odysseys, epic compositions; to create a world is to create its order, to give oneself freedom. In this virtual process, one distinguishes oneself from the imagined world and thereby obtains being-from-the-self—in short, feels the self.
Human beings are creatures that grow, and even growth in a virtual world is still growth; but in the end it all falls into the ending “And they all lived happily ever after.” That ending seems lacking in imagination. A slightly more interesting ending: “And so they continued on endless adventures.” But adventures do end.
Think of Genshin Impact. The map has only reached Sumeru, yet we all know that in the end the Traveler will surely recover their power, defeat the Sustainer of Heavenly Principles, and reunite with their sibling; and then? Then they will leave Teyvat and go on to the next world, never to return; or, after a thousand years, return to find—“I longed to buy osmanthus wine and share it; but alas, where are the old friends now?”
Writing this, I recall the three fairy tales in The Three-Body Problem:
After that, the people of the kingdom never received any more news of Princess Dewdrop and Changsail. In fact the kingdom received no news from outside at all; the princess had taken away the kingdom’s last bar of Hershey’s soap, and no one could ever again break through the blockade of Devourer Fish. But no one complained; people had long since grown accustomed to this way of life, and when the story ended, the Kingdom of No Stories was forever without stories.
But sometimes, in the deep of night, people would tell stories that were not stories—imaginings of what Princess Dewdrop and Changsail had experienced. Everyone’s imagining was different, but people all believed the two had visited countless magical lands, and even a land as vast as the sea; they were forever sailing and journeying, and wherever they went, they always lived happily together.
Reality is the Kingdom of No Stories; the adventures in reality are merely imaginations that don’t rise to the level of stories.