Source: Private email correspondence.
A Smokey Bear T-shirt meme upset a friend of mine: “Only you can prevent forest fires! Seriously. We’ve been defunded. It’s just you now.” She’d recently been in the Shoshone National Forest, working through personal issues, and the memories of that special place, still fresh in her mind, felt threatened. The friends she had made there were threatened. Even if they weren’t real.
She wasn’t herself in Shoshone; she was Hank. And she wasn’t there three weeks ago, but 1989, catching a flight on Campo Santo’s ticket to Firewatch, their acclaimed 2016 game. This highlights the soft power of art, its ability to engender empathy with place as well as person. It makes you care or at least take notice. Unlike a paper on ecology, a book or game provides experience, narrative, intimacy. It makes the topology personal: this valley is where I told Delilah about my wife’s dementia; this scree slope’s where my rope broke chasing careless teens; this cave is where (you’ll have to go yourself to find some truth).
Games done well create intense experiences and lasting memories. They take little fact-bricks and build fiction. They make you sad for Smokey Bear, even though he’s the mascot of the US Forest Service and the National Association of State Foresters, not the National Park Service in whose employ you watched for fires, made a friend, and found a trail through your grief. My friend’s pain may not be rational, but it is real. It’s another little test of humanity passed.
