Magical Realist Gameplay in "What Remains of Edith Finch"

*A snippet of a much longer work-in-progress*

At once, Edith Finch and One Hundred Years of Solitude seem to both celebrate the possibilities of imagination and warn against complete detachment from reality. This warning appears in Edith Finch in the form of Lewis’s story, in which the player controls Lewis as he slices fish in a fish cannery. Using the right joystick, the player repeatedly performs the mundane action of moving his hand to drag the dispensed fish into a slicer. The story is narrated by his psychiatrist, who begins to detail the coping mechanism Lewis develops to escape the mundanity of his life. He begins imagining himself in a fantasy world where he’s in control of everything. While simultaneously using the right joystick to slice the fish, the player uses the left joystick to guide an imaginary version of Lewis through this world as it grows in visual detail and complexity. As this section progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that Lewis is losing his sense of reality. This reaches a climax when the player transitions back into the fish cannery and walks up to the real Lewis, who solemnly makes chopping motions without actually chopping anything. During this last moment of lucidity, the psychiatrist says the following:

“He knew the world was all in his imagination. But he was so proud of having created it. In his own eyes, he'd become something greater than a king. For someone who'd never known success in the real world, I think it was overwhelming. And then it struck him that the real Lewis was not the one chopping salmon, but the one climbing the steps of a golden palace. ‘My imagination is as real as my body,’ he told me. It was hard to argue with him. He began to forget the world we know. I think it pained him to remember Lewis, the cannery worker. He began to despise the man with a royal contempt.”

The story ends with Lewis returning to his fantasy world and bowing his head under a guillotine.

            Magical realism’s blending of the real and fantastical is meant to bring the reader into a state where the two appear indistinguishable from one another. This may lull the reader into a state of complicity where even the most outrageous ideas can appear “real.” And yet, in this story, Edith Finch doesn’t portray a magical death as if it truly happened; instead, it portrays the real circumstances of a character equally as entranced as the player. Instead of being told through a poem or a diary entry, Lewis’s story is told through the objective lens of a letter from his psychiatrist. The fantasy in this story is truly just a fantasy; and yet, the gameplay continues to confuse the player by splitting their focus between real and fake tasks. The real task of slicing fish is simple, grotesque, and requires almost no focus, while the fake task of navigating Lewis’s world is represented through vibrant visuals that gradually take up more and more screen space. The player, just like Lewis, naturally ends up feeling more interested in the fantasy. Furthermore, Lewis’s insistence that his “imagination is as real as [his] body” is a literal dilemma for the player, who controls both his imagination and his body. The gameplay here establishes a very interesting dynamic between player and player character in which the player can empathize with their character’s delusions despite knowing that they are just delusions.

            One Hundred Years of Solitude similarly portrays a character driven to madness by his imagination. Jose Arcadio Buendía, founder of Macondo and patriarch of the Buendía family, begins to question the passage of time:

“He spent six hours examining things, trying to find a difference from their appearance on the previous day in the hope of discovering in them some change that would reveal the passage of time. He spent the whole night in bed with his eyes open, calling to Prudencio Aguilar, to Melquíades, to all the dead, so that they would share his distress. But no one came. On Friday, before anyone arose, he watched the appearance of nature again until he did not have the slightest doubt but that it was Monday.” (78).

He feels that time is at a standstill, and in response, he has a mental breakdown and destroys the workshops in his house. His family detains him and ties him to a tree, where he spends the rest of his life speaking an unrecognizable language. Similar to Lewis, the mundanity of life drives Jose Arcadio Buendía to completely lose his sense of reality. His form of escapism initially involves speaking to the ghost of his old enemy, Prudencio Aguilar; however, once he realizes no one is left to “share his distress,” Jose Arcadio Buendía succumbs to his imagination. Throughout the novel, he’s portrayed as a creative, passionate person that obsesses over what he doesn’t understand. Why is it that, in both of these texts, the person with the greatest imagination is the one driven to insanity?

            Loss could be a motivating factor, as both of these characters recently lost people they were close to. Lewis’s brother, Milton, disappeared without telling anyone. Edith notes that when Milton disappeared, Lewis “blamed himself” and “spent more and more time in his room” (WRoEF, 2017). The loss clearly impacts him and causes him to withdraw into himself more. Jose Arcadio Buendía, on the other hand, loses his close friend Melquíades to old age. Melquíades was similarly imaginative and influenced his friend to continue learning and creating in his workshop. Soon after his death, Jose Arcadio Buendía obsesses over fixing a mechanical toy while suffering from major insomnia; after successfully repairing it, he begins to feel that time is stagnant. It seems that these characters are driven away from reality not just because of the pain of mundanity, but also because of the pain of loss. The psychiatrist in Lewis’s story states that “it pained him to remember Lewis, the cannery worker.” If Lewis blames himself for Milton’s disappearance, then the hatred he develops for “Lewis the cannery worker” must partially be due to this feeling of blame.

            The difference in medium creates an interesting difference in how the reader/player may react to these similar characters. Playing through Lewis’s story and experiencing the captivating visuals of his fantasy world elicits a strong sense of empathy. The player knows he’s delusional, but because the player witnesses and plays through these delusions, they can better understand how he was driven to that point. Reading about Jose Arcadio Buendía’s delusions, however, elicits a stronger sense of pity than empathy. The reader may relate to these feelings of mundanity and repetition, but they’re witnessing this character’s delusions from a detached, third-person point of view. When Jose Arcadio Buendía “spent the whole night in bed with his eyes open, calling to…all the dead,” the reader doesn’t experience this; they read someone experience this. Even in first-person literature, there’s a sense of detachment between the protagonist, a character who’s written to think a certain way, and the reader, who may not relate to those same thought processes. In playing as Lewis, the player is complicit in accepting that, in the game space, they are Lewis. The player actively does the things Lewis does, walks through the fantasy Lewis creates, and shares the out-of-body experience that Lewis undergoes. This close relationship between player and character fosters a strong empathic link through which the magic in magical realism can feel more real, even if the player knows it’s fake.