Indika The Folk Hero (Gamify Your Religious Trauma)
Sensitive material disclaimer: Indika is a game that deals firsthand with religious trauma. It uses several graphic real-world scenarios to propel its plot forward. This essay will warn the reader before these scenarios are discussed. Sensitive material includes sexual assault and rape. If readers wish to skip over the parts of the essay that address these topics, they will be instructed to skip to a further paragraph where mention of these topics will cease. Reader discretion is advised.
The mountains blocked out any chance I had of experiencing a real thunderstorm. The purple majesties parted the clouds like the Red Sea, that’s what I told myself. Meteorologically speaking, it’s true: the decade I spent living in Montana and Colorado drastically reduced my chances of experiencing the severe storms I grew accustomed to growing up in the Midwest. I call the Chicagoland area home once again, and I’ve spent my summer longing for those storms. Tonight, one hit. I stood watch at the front door, nursing a beer. Half Acre Beer has some good stouts, but this lime lager I picked up isn’t doing it for me—like a fool, I picked up a 12-pack, and I’ve convinced myself to finish it before getting anything else. They’ve gotta get gone, and a storm is a good enough reason to drink: like my favorite Koozie says, “Might as well be drinking.” Between sips, I tempt a God I no longer believe in to deliver me a real storm. “Come on, you old bastard,” I mutter. “Hit me with everything you’ve got.” This antithetical, sadistic spurn is probably the best descriptor I could give of my faith, or lack thereof. It’s a sentiment I see across folk music, and it’s also a sentiment I see in the heart of Odd-Meter’s Indika.
When I was 16, I saw Inside Llewyn Davis, and I found folk music. It was a far cry from my usual pop-punk, Midwest-emo, and Chicago-hardcore-influenced supply, but I felt a gravitational pull towards these ballads of old. It grew exponentially: my first rotation involved little beyond the performers featured in the Coen Brothers movie, expanding ever so slightly when The Wonder Years singer Dan Campbell launched side-project Aaron West and the Roaring Twenties. Eventually, I circled back to Dave Van Ronk, the folksinger who loosely inspired the events of Inside Llewyn Davis. I say loosely here, as Llewyn Davis is an asshole, no two ways about it. Van Ronk is very much not that, being a sort of grandfatherly figure to the American folk revival of 1960’s Greenwich Village. He was kind and virtuous, a folk hero in his own right: he was one of 13 people arrested in the Stonewall riots that marked a new chapter in the gay rights movement in America.
Dave Van Ronk subscribes to a certain folk ideology that I tend to agree with. In his 2005 memoir The Mayor of MacDougal Street, he describes the music as “a process rather than a style,” referring to the tradition of musical inheritance in preliterate communities. Songs were passed down generationally like a game of telephone, creating as many deviations as you’d expect from such a practice. Van Ronk is, by his own admission, a “folk purist” who would argue against calling a narrative project like Aaron West folk music, but his definition rings true to the broader historical context of storytelling. We don’t often consider modern pop culture to have this type of mythic reputation, though we can see it even in the largest parts of the zeitgeist. Star Wars is rife with it. The Force Awakens is a newer telling of A New Hope, itself a reskinned version of Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress. Folk is the means by which Springsteen tells the stories of the downtrodden working class to deliver the beautiful potential of the open road, and it’s the bizarre domino effect by which he’s at least partially responsible for 50 Shades of Grey (The Boss was My Chemical Romance singer Gerard Way’s first concert).
There’s one piece of folklore that, statistically, most of us have encountered: the Bible. It’s regarded as the best-selling book of all time, and its true origins are somewhat of a mystery. The book most familiar to today’s readers is based on the Leningrad Codex, copied around the year 1,000—a millennia after its events are said to have transpired. Beyond that, things get a little harder to pin down. Thousands of years of cumulative research have informed us only that a majority of the stories in the Old Testament began as songs and stories (performed by persons unknown) that persevered until writing became widely adopted and they could be transcribed (by persons unknown). While the New Testament fairs a little better in regards to authorship, both halves of the Bible have undergone numerous revisions, translations, and canonizations.
That’s folk. It might seem brash to say that deliberation done by the most powerful heads of church in history compares closely to what New York City hippies were doing on drunken afternoons in Washington Square Park, but both are the act of doing folk: a process of passing down stories. It stands to reason—and I’ll get dangerously close to blasphemy here—that the susceptibility of folk to alteration (like in the game of telephone) may be present in the Bible as well.
Take the story of Samson from the Book of Judges: a man granted superhuman strength by God, who could slay a lion with his bare hands and defeat entire armies single-handedly. These are impossible feats that would feel more at home in a collection of folk hero stories like John Henry and Paul Bunyan than in the Bible. It isn’t entirely unreasonable that as the story of Samson was passed down orally, alterations and embellishments were made to enhance his feats—or they were misremembered entirely. Perhaps he slew a feral dog, and not a lion; over time the exaggerations grew to mythic proportions. I’ll borrow some more of Dave Van Ronk’s words to speak on this further:
“If one follows songs that have been passed down through the oral folk tradition, one finds that lines like ‘Savory, sage, rosemary and thyme’ become ‘Miss Mary says come marry in time,’ and ‘Jordan is a hard road to travel’ becomes ‘Yearning in your heart for trouble.’ The cumulative effect is a sort of Darwinian evolution that first produces different versions of the same song, and eventually leads to entirely new songs.”
In the case of Samson, these phylogenetic branches can be observed via the stories of Heracles (or Hercules) and Gilgamesh, two other mythically strong figures from the Near East region; though it would be most fitting to call Samson and Heracles deviations of The Epic of Gilgamesh, as it predates them by at least 1,000 years. All three stories involve lion killing, devotion to Gods, and lovers that trick away the strength of the hero. There’s a school of thought that purports the cultures and religions of the Middle East as being descended entirely from Babylonian myth (Panbabylonism), and while this is largely discredited, it exists! People noted strong enough connections between these stories to ponder upon their significance. That’s folk in action—fittingly, one of my favorite Dave Van Ronk songs is his rendition of “Samson And Delilah.”
Indika is a videogame that is very much aware of the folkloric distortions present throughout the Bible. Let me walk you through the plot of the game. Indika, our titular nun, is sent from her convent to deliver a letter to a far-off monastery. Along the way, she encounters Ilya: an escaped convict with a brutally wounded and frost-bitten arm who claims to be on a mission from God. Should Ilya travel to the Temple of John of Damascus and see a holy artifact called the Kudets, God will heal his arm. Indika joins Ilya on his mission. The pair encounter and kill a feral dog attempting to maul them, before traversing through a fish factory near the temple. Here, Indika amputates Ilya’s diseased arm, fearing infection will soon kill him. Ilya takes his severed arm and sets off for the temple alone, feeling betrayed by his companion intervening in his holy mission. Indika follows. The two reunite before the Kudets, where Ilya prays for his arm to be healed.
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