There’s this rabbit-hole of youtube I stumbled upon during the start of the Covid-19 pandemic two years ago that helped me get through some of the early days. I found my imagination and calm tested in those quarantine times stuck at home, empty streets to gaze out at, when not doomscrolling away on my phone. As a child raised in a city with long stretches of twisty hilly roads, it was the first time I was unable to just look out a window and see some kind of scenery moving by. This was remedied somewhat by discovering long, sometimes multiple-hours-long videos of people walking around cities, often in steady, crisp 4K using cameras like the DJI Osmo Pocket. It was not the equivalent of a brisk walk or car ride, but it would do.
The algo did its algo-ing, and soon I was being served ‘ambience’ videos, of countrysides, and cities, and mountains. Static camera, or aerial drone work, maybe some music sometimes. An adjunct to th Lo-Fi Hip-Hop to study to stuff. It wasn’t really for me, but once in a while I’d put one on while doodling and trying not to succumb to the call of sourdough breadmaking.
Eventually, youtube put two and two together about me watching these and a lot of video game essays and presented me with video game ambience videos: shots of Skyrim, or the Witcher, or any number of other virtual worlds, some of which I’d traipsed through on the way to some map marker.
I didn’t get it.
I mean, I got that it must be appealing for someone (and judging by the views, many thousands of someones), but unlike real life people-watching, I just didn’t get the appeal of putting something like that onscreen, and for background noise I would rather have something with more motion like the street walks. This was very much a me problem, so I left that particular tunnel of the rabbit-hole unexplored and went back to my street walks.
But now we come to Elden Ring. For the first time since Cyberpunk 2077, I let the hype get to me and had actually pre-ordered the game. And just like Cyberpunk, I was quickly swept into the game, despite knowing that I would probably not be very good at playing it. Elden Ring has that perfect level of intentional game design where its initial areas seem completely natural and unplanned, but there’s dozens of little design decisions to funnel you towards adventures big and small, critical path and off the beaten one, while making it all seem like your idea, and your personal discovery.
In those first hours I died — a lot — but I also had memorable encounters I often barely escaped from, surviving with a sliver of health and a nervous giggle as I summoned up my steed Torrent and went off to explore more. A part of this expert discovery design of Elden Ring is that it is one of the few games to reward you when you retreat. Let me explain: You can, as I did, feel like the path forward to the first big dungeon and boss was a bit much for a Souls-newb, so I went away from it, exploring the area south of the starting point, a little nugget called the Weeping Peninsula, quite literally a mini-world with many adventures and challenges of its own. And in those first few hours of exploration, I found myself at last, catching my breath, on a calm shore at the end of this world, where I got off my horse, turned around, and just took it all in. There were a few random enemies, beachcombers who didn’t bother me. And it was there, with nothing to do at that moment except exist in that world, that I finally got video game ambience videos.
Games are transportive. Even the most primitive pixel adventure like, well, Adventure, does take you on a Journey (yes, that’s an intended pun). I can remember the exact feeling I had playing Resident Evil 2 for the first time and making it to the police station, its calm music and the echo of your character’s footsteps. After the horrors of the streets, that was a space I welcomed, a place I wanted to be in, forever. And so was this beach at the south of the map in Elden Ring. There were dozens of spaces like that in games over the years that could not be replicated by real-world spaces. And so I found a quiet place and sat my character down, pressed record on the PS4’s screen capture, and just waited. While my thoughts mulled over using the footage for an eventual timelapse, there was something to be said for it all in its lengthy form.
I don’t know if I made a good video game ambience video. It’s probably an abomination according to connoisseurs of the art form. But it helped me understand that sometimes, you do need to just stop, and smell the pixels.
-VKB