Horizon Zero Dawn, Memes, and Tropes

There are small things that I found strange coming into Horizon Zero Dawn that kept putting me off liking it: the facial animations are strange and uncanny; the child you play as for the first ten minutes is crazy ugly; the dialogue can be an acquired taste - several (hundred) times in the first act it is repeated that Aloy and Rost are not just “outcasts”, but, “outcast, to be shunned”.

HZD did one thing wrong though, above all else, that I just can't forgive it for: there's no Adam Driver Creator at all. You just have to play as this lady, Aloy. In an open world game? No Adam Driver Creator? In an open world with a Hipster Medieval Fantasy Aesthetic? Hipster Medieval Fantasy is like my boy's number one look!! You gotta be kidding me…

Section 1: Introduction

The most obvious flaw to open-world design is that the game spams you with an impossible amount of choice and possibility and you’re just there like “but I’m just a babie” totally overwhelmed by it all. Horizon Zero Dawn makes a bold choice by not giving the player character choice and locking into one story, and although I’ll never forgive the game for excluding my precious boy, it definitely solves that issue. Similarly in Fallout: New Vegas, even though you can design your character, you are necessarily Courier Six and you play their story. Playing necessarily as Aloy is a success here in Horizon Zero Dawn the way Courier Six is a success for Fallout: New Vegas.

Horizon Zero Dawn looks at a world a thousand years after the end of our own, where machine lifeforms walk the earth and highly advanced technology is akin to a sort of magic in the eyes of the humans of the new civilisations. In this subsistence society, different cultures have arisen. Aloy lives in the Nora tribe, who have a deeply religious society built around an animist faith. Aloy is an outcast (to be shunned) because she has no mother, so is raised by Rost who chose to break Nora law and become an outcast. Aloy has a special doohickey called a focus that is essentially a holographic heads-up-display, that she found in “the metal world” - ruins of the old world that Nora are explicitly forbidden from exploring.

Via a coming-of-age ritual called The Proving, Aloy can become a brave of the tribe and end her isolation, and if she is the single victor of The Proving she can make a special request of the elders, which of course for her would be knowledge about her mother. An attack by an unknown enemy leaves many Nora dead and sets Aloy on her way to seek revenge, and ultimately find answers about where she came from, but a sickness that has been corrupting machines provides an extra mystery, while also showing Aloy a way to override and tame the mechanical beasts.

As you progress into HZD you might well find yourself absolutely falling in love with it. There are lots of great mechanics and beautiful settings, and just straightforwardly charming moments. For example when Aloy first overrides and commandeers a machine to ride, she says “woah, this beats walking” and at first your reaction might be what a weird thing to have a character say, but then you realise that in this world nobody has ever done what she just did before, and her people don’t seem to use horses, which means quite possibly nobody she has ever met… ever, has travelled faster than their own legs could carry them, and suddenly it’s actually pretty funny that the thing she said when getting on a robotic horse for the first time was as nonchalant as “woah, this beats walking.”

Horizon Zero Dawn doesn’t stop. It doesn’t stop at being a game about robots or a medieval fantasy game, it’s a medieval fantasy robot game. 

Horizon Zero Dawn doesn’t stop at having one ‘z’ in its name - scientifically, the coolest letter - It has two.

Horizon Zero Dawn doesn't stop at telling an interesting story: it conceives of an interesting story, then imagines the consequences to that story, then develops a whole society, radically different to ours, then tells a story in that society 1000 years in the future, after the original interesting things happened. The scale of the storytelling in HZD is practically tolkienesque.

Something really clever about the open world design vs the planned interaction of the game is the way that it subtly pushes you back out into the wilderness without making you feel excluded. The game encourages you back away from player interactions, towards playing with the machines, taming the machines, uncovering the mysteries of where they come from and the forgotten world. Even though the characters you meet are delightful and honestly in a lot of cases as well written as the NPCs of Fallout New Vegas, a lot of your conversation with them involves them saying “woah you’re the cool machine lady right?” On top of establishing an interesting rapport whereby everyone Aloy meets is pretty much in awe of her, this just tells you again and again what you should really be doing has nothing to do with the people. Aloy’s place is with the machines. It doesn’t push you away from the humans, it doesn’t keep you apart, it just subtly tugs you to follow the call of the wild.

That’s pretty interesting to me, because I’d probably describe Horizon Zero Dawn as like a Zelda game, but with machines, but you know what came out a month after it? Zelda: Breath of the Wild. A Zelda game… but with machines… there are even very similar mechanics like populating the map by climbing a tall thing and overriding it with your techno-gadget.

There’s something delightful about the eerily empty open world of Horizon Zero Dawn that reminds me of Shadow of the Colossus, and especially when the best parts of the game tend to be navigating old ruins and climbing enormous creatures. But… In Zelda you climb big stone machine creatures too… and...

Wait are these all just the same game?

Honestly something that was off-putting to me in the first place was how clearly similar to other games Horizon Zero Dawn was, because it looked like it might not have anything new to say. 

I want to look a little at how video games influence one another, and on a larger scale how everything influences everything.

I’ve seen some people pretty mad at the suggestion that Dark Souls is inspired by Zelda, because Dark Souls isn’t a game for children and Zelda is a game for children. It’s okay though, lots of things take inspiration from things in different age brackets. The Lion King is really obviously inspired by Hamlet, and The Revenant is a pretty transparent rip-off of Finding Nemo.

You might be familiar with the idea of something “being canon” in a franchise or piece of media, meaning “it officially happened”, but I’d like to talk about the concept of a canon. Here’s a pause for you to make a joke about a big gun… okay. A canon, in media, takes after the canon of the catholic church - canonising a dead person means deciding that they were a saint all along. A canon in media is a collection of works that are considered influential and important. The obvious problem of course with saying “these works are the most important” is that… no they aren’t. What?

I do however think that a canon is developed even without an official council - like the catholic church has to decide who get to be saints. I think that a canon is formed colloquially, by people talking about a piece of media they find to be good, important, moving, powerful. Much as all matter in the universe acts upon all other matter in the universe through gravity, every work influences every other work. Obviously though, planets have more pull than single particles.

In Tradition and the Individual Talent, Tyrannosaurus Snape Eliot wrote “No poet, no artist of any art, has their complete meaning alone. Their significance, their appreciation is the appreciation of their relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value them alone; you must set them, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.”

We might assume there is no canon in the medium of video games, but we might also eat things that we find on the ground on a busy street and it wouldn’t necessarily be a good idea.

Something that might obscure the presence of the canon of video games is what wanky thought-mind people would like to call “intertextuality”, but we might call “the endless circle jerk of blatant god damn plagiarism”. When Twoop Spoop Eliot writes about the “dead” poets and artists, he doesn’t necessarily mean dead dead, but he wasn’t anticipating people making art the way games are made - alongside a multitude of living contemporaries constantly influencing and changing the medium.

The fact that Videos Gameses™  are being made constantly and are made as part of series by capitalist corporations that are accountable to profit means that an interesting thing happens to the canon of games as a medium. Something totally seminal can be published, influence another work, that influenced work can become so popular and also seminal that it achieves recognition as part of the canon and itself becomes influential, and then it can influence a later game in the same series that was the original seminal work. Taking an example from earlier, look at how Legend of Zelda was the obvious inspiration for the world and setting of Shadow of the Colossus, and how the more recent Zelda games such as Breath of the Wild include elements that are, it’s fair to say, reminiscent of Shadow of the Colossus, such as the big empty open world or climbing on big enemies to find a weak spot or fucking useless horse mechanics.
For that matter, Breath of the Wild and Horizon Zero Dawn have some spookily similar elements. There’s the use of advanced technology as quasi-magic, the climbing to the top of a big thing to scan the area and fill in the map, there’s total fucking garbage horse mechanics. Not saying that Horizon Zero Dawn was an influence on Breath of the Wild, it only came out a month before, just saying that things which were in the collective consciousness fed into both things.

I guess what I’m trying to say is: plagiarism is good actually.

To analyse this you’d really need to make a series, maybe on a popular online video platform. You could call it “patterns vs computer games” or… hmmmmm… okay I was gonna make a joke about becoming the new Anita Sarkesian, but she’s come back to make a new series and now it’s redundant. Typical Anita Sarkesian ruining everyone’s fun.

Section 2: Tropes, huh, yeah, what are they good for?

In art galleries, works of art are displayed often with little descriptions, explaining the context of the creation of the work, something from the artist’s life that is relevant, or simply the artist’s intention. To me that’s kind of odd, actually, because there’s maybe an implication in that, that the artwork has an intrinsic meaning. Art galleries didn’t always used to be like they are now. In Ways of Curating, Hans Ulrich Obrist - good book name Hans, it’s a play on Ways of Seeing, I get it… I’m sure there are dozens of people who got that one. Dozens. In Ways of Curating Hans talks about how the art gallery has evolved over time moving from clustered displays of all the art owned by wealthy nobility, designed to simply show off how much art they had, to the modern art gallery giving carefully considered amounts of space to each artwork. Okay I don’t wanna imply that you should be reading every niche obscure book in the world, so let’s get the same ideas straight from an accessible and charming sweater-boy instead.

Big Joel discussed in a video about a court case, the metaphysics of objects - that is to say, whether objects have meaning inherently, or whether we get meaning from their context, whether we can… let’s say, aggressively read meaning into things.

That’s right I’m Back On My Bullshit™©®

So do objects have inherent meaning or are they given meaning by us? I think if you’ve ever seen my videos before you know that I think we give objects meaning, even objects - like in Big Joel’s video - that have explicit text on them that seemingly dictate one. 

The original meaning of the word “meme” comes from “mimetic theory” describing the way that ideas can act exactly like living organisms, in the ways they spread and propagate. When a person communicates an idea to another person, the meme of that idea gets bigger. When an idea is totally lost, the meme dies. 

As for “trope”, tropes are often used as a shorthand for clichéd or lazy, but why? Well, a trope is essentially a style or fashion - a recurring and popular motif that people use in writing, art, music, or really anything we do. When “trope” is used as a pejorative it’s tied to the idea that doing something obvious just because it’s what everyone else does is inherently bad. Because of that idea, recognising obvious tropes in media can make that media off-putting, because it feels like rather than writing with originality and meaning the author is just repeating what they already saw elsewhere.

So now let’s put memes and tropes in our words… bin… (???) along with canon.

I think advertising has been fascinating to me for a long time because often advertising has to rely on a cultural shorthand to communicate ideas, and that either means using, or subverting, tropes. If you watch a given ad you can deconstruct it as a conversation of tropes. Often the best ads will make only a very simple statement, either engaging with our expectations or surprising us. For example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3y2UCTtL_qQ 

My brother actually worked on that ad. He works in advertising. There’s… that’s all.

One of my favourite things to do with ads is to always imagine Don Draper from Mad Men pitching them to the client like “because it’s more than just a detergent tablet. It’s security. It’s happiness. It’s knowing that your dishes will be clean, and life is easy. Because: Washing Machines Live Longer… With Calgon”

When it comes to memes, there's no certainty in what will catch on and thrive and spread. Sometimes totally accidental or unsolicited things become utterly iconic, but it's also far from impossible for things designed intentionally to be appealing, or cool, or just catchy, to grow and flourish. Especially in games, where you hear the same little noises and see the same icons over and over it can be easy for little things to take on a much bigger importance.

That’s why, and… you’re really going to have to put on your tinfoil hats and bear with me on this one… the triangle button is actually deeply meaningful in Horizon Zero Dawn. Okay, honestly, I know this sounds silly, but hear me out: the buttons on the PlayStation controller are four basic symbols in order to have four buttons that aren’t numbered or otherwise ordered, but symbols can’t not remind us of things, we automatically assign meaning as human beings, or even by virtue of the way that games happen to utilise those buttons most often, we get used to them meaning something.

For example when Machine Games set out to design Wolfenstein as the most immersive combat experience possible, they eliminated down inventory, they designed levels, and ammo, and weapons, all with immersive combat in mind, and they also made everything revolve around the square button. The square button is, and this is just my take based on no data, so feel free to leave your angry comment now: the aggression button. Square is most commonly used in FPS games for either melee combat or reloading weapons, or both. In Wolfenstein however, square is character interactions, object pickups, opening doors, accessing plans, and yes - melee combat and reloading weapons.

It isn’t necessarily meaningful to Wolfenstein that they used the square button, it just reflects the ongoing use of it for combat in games, and makes that pattern more apparent. In Horizon Zero Dawn however, there are triangles absolutely everywhere. There are triangles in the designs of the creatures, of the devices, of the world itself. The Cauldrons that you explore - the hubs of machine technology that create new machines that you explore in order to unlock the ability to override more of the machines - are just jam-packed with triangles, there are triangles absolutely dang everywhere in there! I can’t help but feel like in the cases of where it relates to the technology from the past, the triangles are meant to gently remind us of the pyramids. Aloy is looking at these bases that the machines come out of - these ancient relics of a lost society - and through her eyes we don’t know whether they were really put there by people or some sort of alien force. The pyramids have long been a wonder of the ancient world because the sheer enormity of their construction and the complexity of the architectural engineering involved, and has lead some people who have no confidence in how insanely cool the ancient egyptians were to believe they were built by aliens.

The great pyramid of Khufu is 200 metres along one side and the ground underneath it is so level that it doesn’t vary in height by more than a few inches at any point. That’s… I don’t know how to do that. The ancient egyptians were really cool, guys.

Anyway, with triangles being such a densely saturated motif in the game you can’t really get away with playing it for hours and hours and not at some point think huh, I’m interacting with everything through the triangle button… that’s… something...

As Aloy progresses into the world and uncovers more of the history of the world that came before, she meets Sylens, an enigmatic figure who is researching the old world too. He is uncovering the history of their world and that’s what she wants to find out about, because as it turns out, the mysteries of the sickness in the machines, the men who attacked her tribe and who her mother really is are all tied in together. The reason this unlikely pair become quick friends, I’d posit, is not just that they both love researching the past, but that their interest in the past gives them a common language. They’re digging up the long-forgotten memes and tropes of the old world, the cultural debris of the end of human society.

In Patricia Lockwood’s article/lecture/performance discussing the collectivisation of experience via the internet, The Communal Mind, she lays out a fantastic account of the wonderful and scary and totally weird experience that being very online is. Rather than a direct commentary her piece is more a stream of consciousness, only pausing to explicitly ask questions at particular moments, for example: “did we help bring back fascism by liking fascist haircuts?” and “What is binch?” She refers to herself in the third person throughout, except where she refers to herself as part of a whole. She calls herself “she” or she says “we”, but never “I”, never “me”. Humans are naturally social animals so even without the internet I think the way that tropes and memes create this common cultural reference is inherently tied to the surrendering of the individual identity into the collective one. By sharing common references with others, by creating an in-group, we aren’t creating a stronger sense of “me”, we’re creating a stronger sense of “us”.

Aloy discovers as she uncovers the story of the past that she is the clone of a woman called Dr. Elizabet Sobeck. Elizabet was a brilliant scientist who worked with Ted Faro, owner of a company manufacturing robots for war. As the robots rose up and quickly moved toward dooming the entire world, Elizabet and Ted worked toward possible solutions. The robots are repeatedly referred to as a “plague” in expository dialogue, which I guess mean that they’re… Faro’s plague? Nice.

A program was implemented to create a time capsule that would repopulate the earth after the apocalypse, so that an AI, Gaia, created by Elizabet could defeat the machines, reform the world using the machine creatures so the new humans could live in it, and then start the repopulation program. The only problem was that the people brought together to preserve the existing culture of the world via the education of the new humans were cruelly murdered by Ted… which I guess is technically the Mummy’s Curse?

Ted felt that human culture didn’t deserve to be saved - that the history of civilisation had only so far lead to the impending demise they were facing anyway, so saw nothing good in it.

After the restart, when things started to go wrong in the new world, when something disrupted Gaia’s function and posed a threat to the survival of the new civilisation, Gaia created a biological copy of Elizabet, the only person she felt could possibly help, and that clone was ALBERT EINSTEIN Aloy.

So Aloy is an outsider not just because she’s the cool lady with the machines, not just because she’s an outcast (to be shunned) but because she’s actually one with the old world, and the machines. She is there deliberately to uncover these mysteries and piece together the truth from the fragments left behind. She is the bridge between the new world and the old one. Everyone is her “us” and nobody is her “them”. Even the threat in the story comes from a subsystem of Gaia gone rogue - the enemy is not an outsider but a clearly related part of their world.

This kind of ability to move from place to place and build genuine and interesting bonds with the NPCs each time, and relating everything back to an understandable connected world is a fantastic foundation for a game, and I say that especially because it’s the foundation for Fallout New Vegas, the only good Fallout game. Okay fine, that’s not fair: at least Fallout 76 made Country Roads popular again. That songs fucking slaps and I will not be made to apologise for the truth!

Section 3: I’m already eating from the garbage all of the time, and the garbage can is called “Tropes”!

The thing that makes tropes useful and good - marking out a common language for people, shaping a community, a society, a culture - is the same thing that makes them hard to break free from and therefore can make them so bad.

What’s fascinating and funny about Patricia Lockwood’s Communal Mind account is also a little scary, because it shows how easily, as a group, we can take on a point of view. It used to make sense to make fun of ad campaigns like This Girl Can because it was feminist and feminism was silly.

Now that doesn’t make sense to me at all. Now it makes sense to make fun of ad campaigns like Nike or This Girl Can because it’s a company trying to sell products by exploiting a “woke” message.
Well, not This Girl Can specifically… it’s not technically an ad for anything… and my brother also worked on that one…

Exactly what’s good about quickly defining cultural common language and touchstones is also what’s bad about it. It easily builds up stereotyping and prejudice.

It’s tropes, memes, living and evolving ideas that inform how we think of people who we have very little information about. There are gonna be some people who think that every english YouTuber they watch lives in a country populated by people who talk like “Oh crumpets it’s bloody cold outside, god save the queen and what not. Anyway must be off, the arsenal’s playing today, tally ho!”

There are cultural ideas that come up for people who live in the west when they think of different perceived racial groups. If you, as someone living in the west, think of a black man, certain behavioural attributes might come to mind. For example: nearly or totally asexual, docile, obsessed with gambling.

What?
Okay, you can probably see what I did there. I took a small bet on what perceived negative characteristics you would be thinking of and I said different ones, right? Well, not just that: these characteristics are all labels that American culture put on black people in the early twentieth century. I wanted you to think about these totally non-sequitur racist tropes, because there’s a tendency I think, for people to hear discussion of the racist ideas they’re familiar with and say “yes, I know that’s a racist trope, but…”

That just now was confusing because racism is confusing. That just now made no sense because racism makes no fucking sense. What I want to communicate is that people in the 1900s believed this weird racist moon logic exactly the same way people now believe other weird racist moon logic.

Tropes and memes can also be hijacked, and used in insidious ways by people who understand how the attention economy works. In recent years, fascists, white supremacists, have adopted seemingly mundane things such as the OK hand gesture, Pepe the frog from Matt Furie’s comic Boy’s Club. Their adoption of these mundane things is a simple but frustratingly effective way of creating dogwhistles - things that have a certain meaning only to people who are tuned in to the possibility of noticing it. Adopting a pre-existing mundane reference for your nazi purposes means that you get a lot of people who look absolutely crazy because they’re furiously insisting “No the frog means racism. It’s not a racist frog -- well sometimes it’s a racist frog but when people share it, it’s a… racist.. thing..” and you, if you’re a nazi, get to smugly retreat to the defence that it’s “just memes”, and you’ll even rope a few innocent bystanders who aren’t even Nazis into defending your memes too. Some meme enthusiasts, some real meme connoisseurs. And then, in an absolute master stroke, you claim subscribing to a popular YouTuber as a dogwhistle. You make the instruction to “subscribe to this person” a secret code that you know is for nazis, and the left know is for nazis, but his whole pre-existing fanbase doesn’t know, and whenever anyone brings it up they think that the YouTuber they’re a fan of is being accused of being a racist and will defend them.

So when it’s the most popular YouTuber in the world, you can imagine this gets pretty tiring, because whenever we try to talk about how “subscribe to Pewdiepie” is a racist dogwhistle… yup.

I didn’t really want to have to talk about the OK symbol, or “subscribe to Pewdiepie”, because although these methods of subverting existing memes for fascist signalling are interesting, and a fascinating case study of how the attention economy works, how the society of the spectacle can be manipulated, it just felt like an inconsequential thing that we all argue about online sometimes. I say “hey that’s the racist frog” and they say “no that frog’s just a meme”.

I didn’t want to have to talk about this, but then a meme enthusiast, a real meme connoisseur, a nazi scumbag shithead piece of trash went to two mosques in New Zealand - where I was born - and murdered 50 people. An australian fascist, seen in his court photos doing the OK hand symbol, told viewers on his livestream to subscribe to Pewdiepie before shutting it off and committing the largest massacre in New Zealand in almost 250 years.

It doesn't matter if the ok sign is ironically a fascist symbol or a genuine one because a genuine mass murderer with a fascist ideology used it as one.

And yet, somehow, people are still defending these things, calling them “just memes”, and it’s because of that mechanism by which tropes, and memes, a shared common cultural language become the boundaries of “us”. People see these memes and tropes as a part of their identity because their existence validates their sense of self, as part of the in-group.

As another example, a few years ago a vocal minority of gamers conducted a campaign of harassment and attacks against a perceived threat from feminists.

Feminism can be viewed by people as a threat to the validation they get from their in-group, from their validation gang, when the feminists come to take away their games question the tropes present in media that are harmful to people of all genders by perpetuating a negativity towards femininity.

I still see these reactions now - even when the games themselves are trying to tear down harmful tropes, these gamergate weirdos still see it as part of some agenda by “fake gamers”... people who don’t really…? They make the games, what are you talking about? For example, when Wolfenstein II came out, there was a narrative in it which really compassionately developed a character who was a black activist and feminist: Grace. Grace is great, and a badass, but when you are first introduced to her, the game takes a moment to show that Blazkowicz, the protagonist and player-insert, is put off by her rhetoric. The game gives you a moment to go “MYEEEEGHHGHH” at the thing you don’t like, if you don’t like it, and then shows Blazkowicz’ friendship and respect for her developing, in the hopes that you’ll progress with him and reach at least a more “meh” point about her worldview. I really think the game handled this masterfully and in a way that is incredibly empathetic and gentle, and still there were people who never really progressed beyond “MYEEEEGHHGHH”, or even just started going “MYEEEEGHHGHH” louder and more. This, I’d say is a really good example of how we create an in-group that’s “real” and if we see people moving to turn off the validation tap, we spin a narrative where they’re “fake” - not a real part of our in-group, and therefore de-facto part of the out-group.

This same thing can be the reason intersectionality can be so hard to achieve. The collaboration between leftists, feminists, anti-racists, lgbtq advocates can involve every group telling the others the ways in which it perpetuates things that are harmful, and that questioning feels to every one of those in-groups like an attack by the out-group. I’ve talked before about validation clashing with validity - how people view the things that validate them as part of their identity, and therefore see an attack on their validation as an attack on them personally, and therefore equate it to attacks on other people’s validity. The sense of self related to the identity, and to validation, feels like the sense of self related to your actual rights to exist, and to validity. 

So that’s where we see validity and validation clash when trying to achieve intersectionality, where someone feels like someone else saying “hey that thing you like is kinda harmful. It makes me feel invalid and unsafe” is an attack on them.

Which brings us back around to Horizon Zero Dawn, which subverts tropes masterfully. It keeps showing you where you think it’s going to go and then suddenly changing course. It sets up The Proving, a coming-of-age ritual that you really think is going to be the start of a classic coming-of-age story. It introduces this shithead character who’s mean to Aloy and just the worst generally, and I thought - seeing as we’re looking like we’re about to enter futuristic bronze age hogwarts - that this character would be developed into someone we’d be asked to at least tolerate if not like and respect. Then though, when the anonymous raiders attack the camp, they kill many of the Nora braves including him, and I’m so shocked but so happy that they deliberately didn’t do that and I just get chills right through my whole entire bod. 

When Sylens keeps helping out Aloy it feels like he’s going to betray her, or he’s going to fill this mentoring role that we’re really familiar with, but then, when he’s gotten the information he wants, he just sort of recognises that it’s her story, and she’s gonna be fine, and he leaves. I just think that’s really neat.

Sylens: “All this I leave to you. As it turns out, it was yours all along. I was merely trespassing.”

My favourite way that HZD subverts our expectations though, is the underlying use of dramatic irony. 

Section 4: On the Horizon

Dramatic irony, if you aren’t familiar, is a plot element where we the audience know something characters in the story do not know. It is irony arising from the knowledge we have that they are characters in a story. If Harry is in one room with a gun, and hates Henry, and in the other room Henry is declaring loudly “gosh I love to be alive”, then we can see an irony because of knowledge Henry isn’t privy to. The thing about dramatic irony is, it usually requires a payoff, which is bad news for Henry.

In Horizon Zero Dawn there is a colossal dramatic irony, based in the fact the game is set in the future. We know that Aloy is seeking to discover the truth about the past, and so the fact that she lives in a matriarchal society, that the people in her world aren’t grouped by race seem like things that she will discover are in conflict with the old world. We think she’s going to learn about the way the world used to be and be “corrected”, but there is no payoff to the dramatic irony because the old way is not correct. It's just a forgotten thing that used to make sense to people who died a long time ago. 

This game is deliberately packed with familiar elements. The things I thought at first were off-putting - how similar it was to familiar media - are actually what makes it kind of fucking genius.

The names in the game aren’t subtle at any point really - Aloy (alloy) is a meld of different societies and helps bring people together; Rost (rust) is old and worn out; that shitty kid I mentioned earlier is just called Basta… I can only assume because he’s a bastard…
But there are elements that are chosen either by the game makers or by characters in the past in the game, that have meaning that Aloy and others are oblivious to.

Gaia the AI is named for the greek goddess who is the embodiment of the living world - “mother nature”. Her subsystems are all named after other greek gods like Apollo, Hades or Hephaestus. The way that these references are scattered through the lore run parallel to the way that Aloy will occasionally discover items like “ancient glowing bracelet” that have no explanation, but you can see from the icon for the item that it’s a digital watch. There is a process by which the game takes things and removes their context and asks us to imagine them without any cultural significance at all.

Elizabet Sobeck is named after Sobek, the egyptian god of fertility, pharonic power and military strength, which is like incredibly apt for what they’ve done with the character. Like she’s the adviser to Faro and then becomes the mother of the machines and the new humans.

We spotted the naming from a mile out - literally as soon as Elizabet Sobeck is mentioned.  I swear I’m not pushing these Hbomberguy comparisons the game just has this character called… fucking hell. Granted, it is a bit of a strange transition going from “huh, her last name is like that Egyptian crocodile” to “Oh no, this woman isn’t just called Sobeck, she actually is the master of creation, the mother of all mankind, THE GOD OF FERTILITY, THE EMBLEM OF PHARONIC POWER AND MILITARY MIGHT. ALL BOW BEFORE--”

Okay I maybe need to just take five…

Granted, that is a bit of an odd transition, subtextually speaking, but there's something charming about the on-the-nose-ness of HZD's winks at mythology.

It feels very fitting that as you run around in this big empty world, in the ruins of the old civilisation, robbed of their meaning by a lack of context, you are presented with names, ideas and stories that the game never comments on explicitly, because Aloy would never have a reason to understand the meaning behind any of it.

I keep comparing HZD to Fallout: New Vegas - a game that I adore, a game that in many ways is my favourite game. Why is that? Post apocalyptic stories often contain a message about hope. On the one hand there’s this sadness, a mourning for what’s been lost - everyone suffered and they died and it didn’t get better in the end. But on the other hand, much more than that, usually there’s excitement for the idea of being able to start fresh. That’s why I keep bringing these two games together, and it’s not just because they’re both post-apocalyptic stories: it’s because they’re both westerns.

The western as a genre is defined by an era of change - the actual period of history in which all the cowboy adventures and gunfighter stories took place was really only a little over a decade, making this cultural idea we have of the wild west exist on a knife-edge between the world before and the world after. Plenty of post-apocalyptic fiction, as a result, is the natural successor to the western.

Vonnegut wrote at the start of Breakfast of Champions that he was “trying to make my head as empty as it was when I was born on to this damaged planet fifty years ago.” As he discarded some things that he felt had no value, and kept others. He was in the process of leaving behind one world and taking with him to his new world the things he actually found valuable.

Horizon Zero Dawn seems to say that the core of some stories, that some fragments of our culture, might be worth remembering, and taking on to the next world, but there are tropes that are trash too, that we can throw away to make room for better. 

The Nora society is matriarchal, and the protagonist of the game is female. Subverting tropes and representing powerful women is something HZD has clearly decided has value. The game retells elements of stories we’re familiar with, superficially flashing us with references to grasp at, if only to signal that we should be choosing what to take with us to the new world.

As well as the greek god names and the Ancient Egypt nods, there are elements of other mythologies encorporated too. Elizabet and Ted allowing the old world to be destroyed and then creating a new one is reminiscent of the biblical flood, the time capsule is like Noah’s Ark. The cloning is immaculate conception, but flipped so that the female creator has a daughter without a man. The ultimate gender flip, gender flipping the gosh darn nativity!

She’s the mother, the daughter, and the holy ghost in the machine! It’s a gender flip of the holy trinity! Which is why the triangle button is so significant.

I can tell this is gonna be the hot take that ruins me. “Eric what happened to your YouTube channel?” “I tried to say that the triangle button has subtext and now there’s only three subscribers left.”

I think this game is saying something pretty awesome, and I think it has to do with tropes and memes.

The game is made up of used pieces, recycled from known elements to say something new - or rather to say that nothing is new and we should put forwards and propagate the things that we want to see succeed.

Even at the end of the world, you can be an optimist, because every moment is a new chance for the future to be better. Even with everything from the past still being with us, every moment is an opportunity for us to let some of the past die, and learn from the parts we find meaningful, validating and constructive. If only there were like a big budget movie that had that message, I could write a really good essay about that...

So what does Horizon Zero Dawn have to say - on the meta level - about tropes and mimetics, about living in the cultural trash of an imagined, ruined, perfect past?

It tells us don't worry, because every second is the end of the world, and every second is the start of a new one, so each moment is an opportunity for us to create for ourselves the best future possible.