"dreaming in an empty room"
by Tim Rogers, 30.07.2004

Does the description of a "videogame character" fit Jack?

If Jack is a videogame character, who are the "Patriots"? The players? What does this all have to do with Napster?

More importantly, if a videogame character had a bedroom, what would it look like?

What does Mario's bedroom look like?

What does Sonic the Hedgehog's bedroom look like?

For that matter, what does a real person's bedroom need to look like?

Why have posters on your wall at all?

I found this train of thought especially profound. At the time I played Metal Gear Solid 2 , I was living in a Tokyo apartment the size of my closet back in Indianapolis; my one room was big enough for a futon and a nine-inch television on the floor.

I had nothing on the walls except for the Muji price sticker that was came on my pillow, which I saved because . . . I don't know why I saved it. I do things like that sometimes. I lead a postmodern life. Playing Metal Gear Solid 2 , to me, mirrors sleeping -- dreaming -- in an empty room. "Dreaming in an empty room," then, is what I'll call my model.

There are two aspects to dreaming in an empty room:
1. The dream
2. The empty room you see immediately after waking up

Neither the dream nor the empty room is fully "real." The "dream" isn't real because we're in control, and it feels like we're not. The "empty room" isn't real because we can put whatever we want in it. Something just doesn't feel real without personal touches. That's Rose's complaint in Metal Gear Solid 2 . She thinks posters or personal effects will make Jack more "real."

In this way, we can compare Metal Gear Solid 2 to Ico . We can say that the nature of reality is established in neither Metal Gear Solid 2 nor Ico . Ico reminds me of the "End of the World" section of Haruki Murakami's novel Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World .

The "nature of reality" is not established in Murakami's "End of the World" -- a man in a village into which unicorns are being herded every night, where he and a girl have to "read old dreams" out of skulls to discover his lost "self," his lost "dreams," and his lost shadow, literally cut off his body when he first enters.

This story is weaved into the story of the "Hard-boiled Wonderland," in which a futuristic accountant evades gangsters and kappa demons beneath the Tokyo subway system, checks out books from a pretty librarian, and spends his last day on earth watching laundry that isn't his in a Laundromat.

"Hard-boiled Wonderland" is rife with little details -- gorilla-sized gangsters, kappas, a fat girl's overly pink laundry, the narrator's shattered whisky collection.

"The End of the World" is very spare, with a narrator who speaks in short sentences without contractions.

In Japanese literature, there are generally two types of postmodernity: "Hard-boiled Wonderlands," and "The Ends of the World."

I'll call them, respectively, "dreams" and "empty rooms." Which may or may not be ironic -- the "End of the World" segment of Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is actually the narrator's dream-world. In my model, it's an "empty room." "Hard-boiled Wonderland," the novel's reality, is what I'll call a "dream."

By this model:
Metal Gear Solid 2 is a "dream."
Ico is an "empty room."
They are both postmodern masterpieces in their own right.

Now, if your dreams are more like Ico than Metal Gear Solid 2 , well, more power to you. The term "dream" doesn't apply to your dreams, or anyone's dreams, in particular. When using a term to describe something postmodern, expect the term to be used postmodernly.

The empty room is a clean slate. You can put anything in the empty room.

Even a horned boy leading a princess through a castle. Even a language that doesn't exist.

A dream, however, is always grounded in reality. Dreams have . . . well, not rules. Not constructs. Not even "logic." All they need to keep us from waking up is a sense of the real.

Dreams have terrorists. Dreams have presidents, hostage situations.

Ever dreamed you witnessed a bank robbery? I have.

Dreams, sometimes, even have terrorist/hostage situations involving vampires.

Dreams mix the real, and the unreal. Dreams mix whatever is in our minds. We can drift off to sleep in a recliner while half-reading the Lord of the Rings and half-listening to the NBC nightly news. Tom Brokaw can be talking about a hostage situation in Israel one second, and a breakthrough in health care the next. We can fall asleep, and hear his voice say: "Ninjas officially kidnapped the president at six o'clock this morning." That happened to me, once. (Except I wasn't actually reading Lord of the Rings .)

Do your dreams resolve, without fail , before you wake up?

Mine don't.

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