![]() Drawing from Deleuze and Guattari, I locate affects “in the midst of things and relations and, then, in the complex assemblages that come to compose bodies and worlds simultaneously.” 3 I understand intimacy as an affective weight that a relationship-or any relation within the “complex assemblages” Deleuze and Guattari outline-can take on. ![]() Intimacy, I argue, is an apt framework to understand the pleasure to be found in games in losing control, vulnerability and precarity. Drawing from Lauren Berlant, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Aubrey Anable, I define intimacy as an affect and read The Last Guardian for the formal and structural ways it renders an intimacy that stems from frustration, waiting and incapacity. The connection between Trico and the boy is drawn through an affective assemblage consisting of the aesthetic, haptic, proprioceptive, and mechanical elements of the game. Moreover, I believe that the frustration of Trico and the boy’s relationship exposes something crucial about intimacy that prompts a definition of the term that accounts for these negative sensations. In this essay, rather than pushing these experiences of frustration to the margins by framing them as failures, I argue that the intimate relationship between the boy and Trico could not have come about without those moments of frustration, slowness, and the inability to move properly. ![]() The Last Guardian exposes and complicates these tensions by framing them in the context of an intimate human-animal relationship. ![]() This troubled reception speaks to a broader tension in video games culture with losing control, being patient and accommodating, and having to wait. This is amplified by the game’s structure, in which the player can often do nothing but call out to Trico and wait for it to understand and follow their commands-sometimes for long stretches of time. It makes for a realistic depiction of my favorite house pet, but it’s terrible gameplay.” 2 Kollar’s criticism encapsulates an issue expressed by many players online: unlike the vast majority of animal companions in video games, Trico does not always respond in the way that one expects or wants, and this is deeply frustrating. Philip Kollar for Polygon writes, “if the main character annoys because he moves exactly as you’d expect a little boy to, then Trico annoys because it acts exactly as you’d expect a cat to act. ![]() The boy and Trico, neither fully able to traverse the space they find themselves in, must work together to locate food, overcome obstacles, and defeat enemies.Ĭritical and audience responses to The Last Guardian were mixed: though the game was praised for its map design, graphics, and for the emotional resonance of the bond between the boy and Trico, many critics took issue with the game’s controls, particularly as they pertain to Trico. Meanwhile, Trico, who accompanies the boy, protects him from danger and is essentially impervious to harm however, Trico is vulnerable to hunger, distraction, fear, and to the lingering effects of traumas it has apparently suffered at the hands of something in the ruins. 1 The player controls the boy, who is small and weak-he is incapable of fighting the ghostly suits of armor that he and Trico encounter throughout the game, and he often cannot physically traverse the massive, vertical ruins in which the game takes place without falling or stumbling. The Last Guardian is a 2016 single-player adventure game that follows the relationship between an unnamed young boy and a giant gryphon-like creature, referred to as Trico, as they navigate the ruins of an ancient, apparently technologically-advanced civilization. ![]()
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