The name Harvest Moon is synonymous (at least for me) with a franchise of role-playing video games, created by Natsume, where you play a character that operates a farm. The farm is generally adjacent or in some ways close to a town. Most of the titles feature a marriage option, a horse-back riding option, and a diverse farming experience including the ability to raise cattle, sheep, chickens, crops (of all kinds). The first Harvest Moon title for the Gamecube is the title that I will be performing my sacred (later-to-be-described) injunction upon. An injunction sanctioned and perfunctorily blessed by the most dysfunctional face of Divinity ever to grace a non-descript Wal-mart: Teddy-the-titterbear. Now, if you’ll excuse my proclivity towards fragmenting the Sacred into easily dismissed, loosely defined personas we can move on to the heart of the matter.

I plan on spending an average of 1 hour a day on this video game over a period of two months and if I’m to do that I’m going to have to derive a deep understanding of what I am gleaning from such a commitment. Hence, I am putting the video game on trial, so to speak.

The game, for me, represents a complex enigma that has persisted with me throughout all my formative years, right on into these glory days of relative old age. The question, the very average question, has stuck with me all this time: Why are you playing a video game which involves petting and riding an imaginary horse, interacting with imaginary people, creating imaginary relationships, engaging an imaginary interpersonal, and milking an imaginary economic structure when all of these things are imperative to what makes a functional, acceptable human being in today’s North American society? Why are you continuing in this irrational, seemingly unethical use of time? (the one ‘real relationship’ that this type of question/questioner might permit validity to is the relationship I would have to the video game creator whom I would feel an instant kinship for based on the fact that the video game is a pretty complete exterior correlate/reflection of/manifestation of that particular individual’s interiority)

The justifications to using my time this way are too many to count; the first of which being that the indulgence of myself in this video game brings about these very writings, this very inquiry. And the value of these introverted introspective musings cannot be taken lightly. Or can it?

Let me start by broadening the scope of the video game with a few valid perspectives, lightly held and not necessarily mine:

- the video game is an exterior mechanism in which certain economic propensities are impersonally measured

- the video game represents an opportunity for contrasting the two seemingly different spiritual methodologies of self-transcendence. Judaism’s conscious immersion as opposed to Buddhism’s unattached realization of impermanent transient/illusory-natured reality

- the video game is a means by which line-specific hierarchies can be derived and corresponded with/seamlessly integrated into stage-specific hierarchies; the integration process of bringing a model of hierarchically ordered streams into a model of hierarchically ordered centres of gravity is a large cognitive step and would initially require an assessment of a given stream’s psychospiritual calibration (implying that one line of consciousness development has a higher relative value than another) and would follow with a cognitive requirement of close, holistic observance of what emerges as a result of contact with a given line (which would determine the line’s correlating stage value)… e.g. the desire for travel brings about a de-centering from a semi-ingrained (obviously unexamined) identification with ethnocentricity as a result of a great deal of contact with said ethnic groups.

- the video game is a complexly drawn analogy to Earth (evidenced in that it opts to be more of a model of reality than a subset). As an analogy to Earth my relationship to the game becomes a part-holistic representation of my relationship to the Manifest universe. In a many ways, however, this isn’t quite accurate, because the manifest universe has more to offer and engages more senses than a pale video game, but in other ways it makes perfect sense.

So now you see how the video game can be more than a video game and more than an incomprehensible relationship with either one person or a load of imaginary people and animals (people and animals that are available to me in ‘real life’). But have I answered the real question yet? No. I’ve just offered alternative viewpoints.

Still.. I feel good about it all, for now. So I’ll run along.