Procedurally Generated Faith: Searching for Spirituality in Moon Hunters
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Sometimes with faith, you just have to start over.
Or at least that is what I say to myself, as I load up my game of Moon Hunters, which I had deleted off my hard drive a month ago, along with everything else my old, barely humming laptop had to offer. But as I download the files again and float to the start menu, I realize that my save file had actually been saved to my online profile. It turns out that sometimes faith is the one thing you *don’t* need to start over.
The first time I played this game was a year prior. I was looking for something cute to play, and while Moon Hunters doesn’t exactly qualify as “cute”, its lush pixelated graphics and calming 90’s sounding acoustic lesbian folk music was exactly what I was looking for. My husband joined me, and although the game has up to 4 player collab play options, he opted to just watch what happened. We immediately got sucked into an incredibly dense world building environment where everyone we ran into was, or could be, queer. Usually we choose a game because it has queerness involved in it, so on the rare occasion we are surprised by queer content in a videogame, it is almost a strange, surreal experience.
So we began the game, chose a gothy looking sorcerer, and fairly quickly met another magical woman. We immediately shipped them, and then were surprised when they instantly shipped each other. Better yet, the game is procedurally generated (meaning all towns, environments, names, and characters are randomly rolled up and selected each time you play). So queer characters were not just written into the story of this world, but queerness was stitched into the very fabric of the world itself. The building blocks that the programming uses to create a new playthrough are gay. The coding itself, is queer.
Beyond being a fantasy game with multiple endings I read Moon Hunters to be a beautiful piece of art about faith, revolving around the search for hidden, mysterious connections to things we do not understand and don’t need to. The main meat of the game can be played and beaten a hundred thousand times, you can “win” the game within the span of an hour or two at most. But no matter how many times you defeat the villain of the game, the missing goddess you are looking for doesn’t come back. The game instead asks you to search deeper within itself, and ourselves, to find the pattern, and break it open, to find some greater meaning inside.
In the meantime, while you are searching for divinity, generations of heroes will fly by, make a name for themselves for being compassionate or cunning, strong or wise before rising to become a series of stars with the help of the missing deity the whole world is looking for. The only way to find this omnipotent presence is to live a full life and then ascend to the rest of the galaxy, because she is unreachable until then. Or at least, it seems so from the vantage point of a player that has yet to fully, 100% complete the game. You play the game, you build this character, and you both create a path to search for a spiritual connection that has left your beautiful world, and after a short playthrough of the main plot (4 days game time, 1 hour real time), the character skips the planet altogether because they have found it, and so you begin again, crafting a new identity. This “old self”, who figured out the meaning to life and the sacred wisdom of the universe ascends to the stars to become a constellation, and the new self, the “you” who continues playing, becomes a little flame, somewhere in the ethereal realm between playthroughs, which like life are small and short: but full of possibilities. When you are reborn into the world again, you can find the small statues erected to your old incarnations and heroes and gain a power-up from them, much like connecting to a higher self: we are our each our own gods, with perfect versions of ourselves waiting to emerge, that we can learn from.
Lately I have been trying to figure out what the hell I am doing with my life. When I turned thirty I hung up my hat on the only job I had ever really held down from year to year: that of a full time, touring, performing, musician. It’s all I did for ten years, and to tell the truth, it was more of a glorified version of being poor & homeless. I gave it up for plenty of reasons that bitter punks always cite: not enough pay, my back hurt, and I was jealous of everyone around me. But really, the real reason that I felt I had to stop was because I just couldn’t figure out why some artists make it and some don’t, why some bands are chosen and why others are not. I just did not understand the mechanics of success, and if I was going to fail at something, I had a deep need within my body to know why I failed, and how I failed. That closure never came, so I dropped off.
This left me at quite a crossroads. Now that I was giving up the only thing I had ever known, what else should I do? In the video game world, if you have no idea what to do next, there are guides. You can look online and find out how much of the game you have left to play. To find hints and tutorials to confirm a hypothesis about various demons seen floating in the woods, or the spirit sightings. Cheat codes are everywhere, waiting in the wings to assist you in defeating a particularly nasty boss.
In a game world, you have the benefit of stepping in between the fourth wall to search the data of the game world matrix-style for what to do next. Debug rooms, once made hidden secure locations for game developers to mess with the limitations and boundaries of a universe to make sure that everything worked before shipping to customers, now are easily accessible to gamers. This makes it much easier for players to make sure they have uncovered every nook and cranny in a game’s script before deeming it “100% completed”, and posting the results online for everyone else to see. Forums exist everywhere on the web that you can check up on whether you really did the right thing or not. There are less consequences because you can just reload an old save file and make the right decision next time.
In real life, however, everything is trial and error: such as ending up 1000 miles from home with nowhere to sleep. You see, when you are passing through town like some sort of banjo-playing fairy creature, sometimes people will take you in and offer you crash space. Sometimes they won’t and you will end up on a park bench, but when you get lucky, some nice couple at a gig will think you are charming enough and let you sleep on their couch. And when they do that, if they are friendly, you will cook dinner together and do their dishes for them and generally stay as far out of the way and be as small as you possibly can. But in between all that cooking and cleaning and trying your best to not be annoying, they will open up to you about the wishes and secrets and shames that they hold in the darkest places of themselves, the little tiny burdens that weigh more than their bodies do. And you will listen, and you will tell them they are doing great, and then you will hug and in the morning you will leave early enough to only say goodbye in the form of a note- so that they will not have to look you in the eyes again after sharing their most vulnerable selves to you. They are a little lighter, but you are a little heavier. That is the price of living off the generosity of the world.
And so, after a lot of introspection, I finally figured it out. After staying stagnant for awhile and working the same shitty minimum wage jobs that I did when I was a teenager, I eventually figured out that what I was put on this earth to do was to be compassionate. That all that time on the road, music was not really what I was accomplishing after all. I realized that I wasn’t failing at playing guitar, but learning and getting training for something else entirely. So I looked into several fields to figure out what would be best for me to reach the most people who just needed someone to listen. I read tarot cards but clients were always hard to get. I looked into therapy and psychology, but navigating health insurance is still something that works against many people from getting the care they need. Finally, my eyes and ears came across churches and chaplaincy, on a more established spiritual career in giving people affordable support in their mental health. And I was sold.
On my own spiritual journey towards compassion and being of service, I had come to a meeting place with my very first Deity: a private, sacred connection to a god I won’t name here. I had always been very against any form of communion with anything remotely resembling a “god energy”, but here I was. Sure, it was a witchcraft sort of divination-induced meditation version of belief, but it was my first, real, touch of faith in something “higher” that I had ever had in my life. It was much easier to relate to a sense of religion when I had permission to build my own mythology. I started figuring out how people who believed reacted to their faith, how they interacted with their gods. It was an interesting journey, because most writing about this kind of narrative involves finding out “who” you are attached to, but not “what” to do once you get a name on the godphone. The name didn’t really matter to me much, it was just putting a face on a feeling of being connected.
Which made me think: if I was put in the position to help more people, say at a church or something like that, would I be able to use language and words like “god” to describe how I felt, even if that was too simple? Is that an ego thing? That I need to call this feeling by one word, my word, my claim to that feeling, to that presence, or can I add to my spirituality what I have been adding to my compassion all these years: wanting so badly to meet people where they are at?
This is when I discovered the power of not understanding, of having faith instead of investigating, of “knowing” through “not knowing”. It has made my life a lot easier to live, having surrendered certain parts of myself to bliss. I still have not surrendered myself to the idea of “God”, and I am still very active in being aware of how the world works and my part in it: how I make it better as well as the ways in which I make it worse. But there is a certain freedom to having faith, of throwing your hands up in the air and saying “well, I may not feel like I am an instrument of my own divinity right now, but I can have faith that I don’t need that feeling to still be changing for the better”. It is important for my own personal growth to strike a balance between reflection and moving forward: as humans we have the tendency to rip ourselves to shreds. The world is a terrible enough place as it is for us to live, and it certainly does not need our help in bringing us more suffering.
In Moon Hunters, the “not knowing” I mentioned before is the compelling nature of the game. It is in character for the protagonist to dutifully search for her Moon Goddess, even though there is a very real chance that divinity has left the universe for good. And staying “in character” is so rewarded in this game, literally no video game I have ever played rewards exploration like Moon Hunters does. You receive bonuses to your stats for displaying different character traits, and the more you play within the same paradigms, the higher those rewards become. It only makes sense then, that because the mechanics themselves integrate a search for faith into the very development of the gameplay, that I would be sucked in, or “suckered” in as I would formerly say, back when I was a rebellious-anarchist-pagan-atheist-teenager. I want to believe there is more, and I am willing to live all the lives I need to until the right combination of compassionate wisdom and emotional strength leads me, body AND soul up unto the constellations to find out what happened to The Moon, why she no longer rises, and what new songs we can sing to bring her back around to the gravitational pull we all know exists.
However, I have not beaten Moon Hunters, even after over a year of off and on delving into its random worlds. I might never actually find the “real ending”, and I might never need to. I don’t really need to know the answers to everything, and in the meantime, I can have faith instead.
