![]() ![]() Why did you steal our pint glasses and throw them in the canal, Goose? Well, what answer can you hope to receive that you will comprehend? The Goose is as The Goose does. The game’s tagline/premise may announce “it’s a beautiful day in the village, and you are a horrible goose” (emphasis mine) but in truth The Goose’s horribleness is relative: following Lewis Hyde, The Goose is “ amoral, not immoral”-they simply do not conform to our human codes of ethics, politeness, and law, because, again, they are a goose. It remains true that The Goose is an excellent example of a contemporary Trickster character: they’re a liminal figure, pushed to the fringes of normative society (living in the woods rather than the town, because they are a goose) they aren’t part of the dominant structure of power (because they are a goose, not a human) they use cunning and sneakiness rather than traditional modes of straightforward strength (because they are a goose) and they use these methods to gently poke holes in the established order (by doing things only a goose could do). I’m perhaps overthinking that, but hey, that’s what we do here. Don’t you wanna revert to your animalistic desire for chaos? Don’t you wanna steal some carrots? Don’t you wanna let out your suppressed emotions with a good old honk? Part of what made Untitled Goose Game so outrageously popular and fun is, I think, that it took that psychological, philosophical question quite literally. You’re a functional, polite member of civilised society, sure, but don’t you sometimes just wanna… listen to your latent feline instincts and see what happens when you knock that vase over? Metaphorically speaking?Īre you tired of being nice? Don’t you just wanna go apeshit? I’d hesitate to call anything universal, but there is a degree of human nature at play here: sometimes it’s fun to cause some trouble, says the deep, subconscious, archetypal part of our brain. This Customisable Bastardry, was, for a long time, incorrectly cited as an example of how video games encourage violence and bad behaviour but more recent studies (and general popular opinion) reveal that getting our inherent Bastardry out of our systems within virtual environments can actually reduce violence and crime.īeing A Bit of a Bastard in a video game scenario doesn’t mean you’re a bad person with horrible urges, necessarily-Jung and folks who follow him might say it’s just an expression of your natural Trickster Impulse and an exploration of the subconscious desire to Cause a Ruckus within what you understand is a safe space where it’s not going to actually have any consequences. Many RPGs also (famously) provide you the ability to play as A Bit of a Bastard, in a manner that affects the overall story in big and small ways. It’s long been said that video games can fulfil fantasies for the players who insert themselves into their worlds, such as having magic powers, finding romance with smokin’ hot aliens, being able to control how many hours of sleep you get, and getting immediately tangibly rewarded for completing a task. With all that in mind, the idea of Trickster player-characters becomes very interesting. I keep saying that we come back to this character type again and again because it means something to us, and whether I intend to or not I’m being pretty Jungian with that statement: maybe Trickster characters have such a strong appeal because they scratch a deep subconscious itch, call to us on a fundamental psychological level, and are ultimately “fantasy figures who do what we cannot or dare not” ( to quote Lori Landay), fulfilling an ancient and intrinsic yearning for power and playfulness, and, well, to be a bit of a shit now and then. ![]() Creativity can be considered a “trickster impulse”, as can the urge for rebellion (a combo of the two is perhaps the most powerful modern Trickery there is-Helena Bassil-Morozow talks about this a fair bit in The Trickster and the System). But this phrase has also been used in more psychological contexts, specifically those drawing from the work of Carl Jung, who played with the idea that we each have our own inner Trickster, a manifestation of our playful, childlike, perhaps even animalistic subconscious. When I talk about “the Trickster archetype” here, I’ve been using it to refer to fictional characters, with “archetype” being essentially a synonym for “really old codified trope”. ![]()
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