Some geese aren’t looking for anything logical … Some geese just want to watch the world burn.
-Alfred Pennyworth [paraphrased]
A central tenet of existentialist philosophy throughout the years has been that being, in general, is broadly absurd and that we may as well embrace it. ‘One must imagine Sisyphus happy’, says Camus at the conclusion of The Myth of Sisyphus, cementing his consideration that the mythical figure condemned to endlessly roll a rock up a steep hill – only for it to slip and fall as he nears the summit, then to return to the bottom and begin anew quite literally ad infinitum – is free of the shackling idea that there might be some ‘master’ at work in the universe, but knows rather that every act, no matter how seemingly futile, is an exercise in human will that confers meaning. This is perhaps the only way to overcome absurdity, or the onset of the awareness of meaninglessness: the struggle towards the heights, as Camus says, is enough to fill a man’s heart.
Sisyphus himself, of course, probably disagrees. I mean, he’s got to roll a rock up a hill forever. ‘One must imagine Sisyphus happy’, says Camus; ‘you must be joking,’ Sisyphus probably wails in response.
Still, it’s hard to imagine how Sisyphus could be anything other than authentic while he’s doing all that rolling, which is another primary concern of existentialism. I can’t think how one could endlessly roll a rock up a hill inauthentically, at any rate. Authenticity, depending on who you ask, involves recognising a couple of things: that conscious beings are unlike most other sorts of things in that our existence precedes our essence – in other words, we aren’t made for a purpose in the way that a chair is made to be sat on or a pen is made to be written with, but rather we come into the world undefined and have the opportunity to define our own selves – and that it means something other than ordinary existence to truly, properly be in the world. Martin Heidegger extensively explored the concept of Dasein, which roughly translates to something like ‘being’ or ‘existence’ but which is usually left in German to indicate that it’s significant, in relation to this ‘being-in-the-world’: a conscious, authentic being becomes neither a separated thing on its own nor a simple part of the world but a process of continuous reflection, the two engaging with and changing each other, mediated by the intention of the subject.
Intention (or consciousness) is special, is kind of the point. Everything else is just a bit weird: bad things happen to good people, in a cosmic sense there’s not really any such thing as a good person (or a bad thing) anyway, and really anything could happen to anyone at any point and send them freefalling into meaninglessness and absurdity – if not for directed will, authenticity, and intention.
Now, it might seem a bit of a peculiar transition to go from the preceding paragraphs to the next, but it’ll make sense. Maybe. Bear with.
Untitled Goose Game is a game about being a goose. Specifically, as per developer House House’s promotional material, a horrible goose. (I’m just going to stop at this point, by the way, and take a few moments to reflect on how absolutely sterling House House have been in promoting this game; their astonishingly good social media work skyrocketed Untitled Goose Game from ‘another indie’ to ‘the thing I am most looking forward to in the entire world’ for me and probably many others. I didn’t even really know what the game was actually going to involve; I just knew that I needed it. Marketeers, take note.) In fact, the goose is perhaps the ultimate embodiment of authenticity, of continuing to Be-In-The-World and exert acts of will on the absurd universe in which one finds oneself… just because.
Our journey begins with a beautiful, gently plonking piano sting (on which more in the audio section a little later) and a smooth fade in on a little field surrounded by friendly-looking bushes. ‘Press X to honk’, the game instructs, and your first interaction with Untitled Goose Game is to cause the goose to exert its will on the world in a uniquely goose-ish way: its beautiful little face pops out from the bush, a triumphant hawnk bursting forth, and if you’re not smiling by this point in the game then you are a person who knows not the true meaning of joy and freedom. (Or you’re just not hugely expressive, and that’s cool. The point is, it just made me feel happy.)
Thus begins a treatise on being-in-the-world, an adventure in aqua-avian absurdism and authenticity, a far-flung feathered feat of fowl and fun. The goose (I want to call it the titular or eponymous goose, but if the game’s ‘untitled’ I suppose it… isn’t?) exists in such a free way – it’s a pure example of that phenomenon of engaging with the world, affecting the world and being affected by it, and conferring its own meaning on the broadly meaningless universe around it simply by doing what it wants. It’s weirdly exhilarating. Humans take the role of Sisyphus here, labouring in endless cycles of trying to complete their chores in the face of circumstances conspiring to make it impossible – in this case, a goose who just doesn’t like letting people get on with their lives. Perhaps they, like Sisyphus, are being punished for their hubris, for daring to think that they might be any better than the humble goose.
Gameplay: 8/10
The player, via the goose, is directed to complete a series of whimsical tasks in a well-assembled world which strikes something of a balance between sandbox and sequential levels or areas. You’ll pass through gardens, streets, pubs, and riverside fields in a sweet little village – a thoroughly rural English village, or so it seems to me as someone familiar with such places, and whether that was the vibe that Australian developers House House were going for or not, they really nailed it – and encounter various people who are just trying to get on with stuff. A notebook filled with very sweetly hand-written jobs, crossed off as they’re completed, lets player and goose know what needs to be done in order to proceed to the next section. Tasks range from making an old man fall on his bum to throwing a mug in the river to tricking someone into dressing the goose up in a beautiful ribbon, and there’ll usually be one fetch quest per area: ‘have a picnic’, for example, achieved by carrying a bunch of foodstuffs, a napkin, a thermos, and a radio over to a blanket.
All of this is achieved with a blend of stealth and sheer audacious goosery; I’m not the first to observe that Untitled Goose Game frequently feels like a lower-stakes (in that nobody’s life is at risk) take on the Hitman gameplay formula, in that you’ll need to watch people’s patterns and work out when to get in there and make nefarious goosings while their back’s turned – or, indeed, when to solve the problem through simple force of honking.
The goose’s only means of interacting with the world are the aforementioned honking, a beak which can pick things up or move them, a long neck able to crane down to reach near the ground, and big proud goose wings which can flap merrily. It’s a simple, limited set of options for the player, but it really works. You can’t fly – that’d be too easy, although the ability to reach up high or do a little jump might have been nice – but you’ve got just enough essentially goosesque movements to feel that you can do all you need to do and do it in quintessential gooseish fashion.
Challenge: 8/10
The puzzles the goose needs to solve are just in that sweet spot: it’ll take a little bit of thought, and perhaps a few attempts, to figure out how to string together some of the more complex sequences of events in order to drop a bucket on someone’s head (for example), but it doesn’t feel frustrating. The limited controls available to the goose help with this, since there are only so many things you can be expected to do in order to make something happen, as does the fact that people reset their cycles quickly enough that you won’t have to wait too long to try again. You’re never punished for failing to complete a task in any number of tries; you just get to keep refining your approach, teasing the locals ever-closer to harmless ruin.
(That is, apart from two lovely women sat on a bench in a pub garden, who’ll give the goose a flower in return for it giving them a nice honk and flapping its wings for them a bit. They’re my new favourite characters of all time, and the goose notably leaves them unharassed. Even a goose whose stated raison d’être is to be ‘horrible’ has standards.)
Visuals: 9/10
It’s really hard to ever feel too bad for wrecking people’s days, though, and I think a lot of that perpetual feeling of whimsy and good-nature is owed to the beautiful, simple visual design of the game. Notice that in the initial Slack conversation which eventually led to Untitled Goose Game actually being developed (yeah, it began as an in-workplace joke and turned into this – imagine if all workplace jokes ended up being developed into games), one person’s immediate reaction to the idea of making a game about a goose is ‘the whole animal is just two colours’. That simple observation results in a gorgeous, vibrant colour palette depicting every person, animal, and object in as few blocks of solid colour as possible, and it gives the whole thing tremendous personality.
You’ll never struggle to tell what’s going on, whether you’ve got your Switch docked or are playing on the smaller screen in handheld mode; the stark white goose stands out beautifully against almost everything else, his sweet little orange feet clear against the green grass. I also never spotted any noticeable framerate drops, even when the goose was moving and people were doing things and there were lots of thoroughly charismatic overlay/particle-style effects indicating their various states of distress.
Audio: 9/10
Untitled Goose Game doesn’t have a soundtrack so much as it has an accompaniment, and it’s so good. Debussy’s ‘Preludes’ (more like De-goose-y, amirite) are reappropriated for waterfowl shenanigans in the most wonderful way: I really recommend reading this piece, which goes into much more depth than I can here about how it all works, but suffice to say that charming piano snippets ring out in time with the action on the screen, lending a Charlie Chaplin/Buster Keaton sort of slapstick comedy vibe to the whole thing. As you do your best to remain hidden the music will stay quiet, leaving you in total silence while you hold your breath in anticipation; snatch something stealthily and you might get a couple of jaunty bars; get spotted and the tune will start up in full swing as you desperately waddle as fast as your little legs will carry you, valuable item clutched in your beak and its owner chasing with plodding steps and outstretched arms. It’s amazing.
As with much of Untitled Goose Game, it seems that this most efficacious of implementations was pretty much a happy accident: the trailer – what with being premade rather than live footage – had little musical stings reacting to the action on the screen, and so many people just thought that was great that the developers basically decided they had to work out a way to create this effect for each player during live play. So… they did!
It’s a fantastic technical achievement to have taken such a deceptively simple concept, figured out such a complex solution, and implemented it in a way that feels endlessly smooth, always adding to the experience and never distracting. It’s also an artistic achievement, turning Untitled Goose Game into a truly special, all-around interactive experience.
(It’s a real shame that – for reasons that I hope have been made clear – I can’t include a link here to the soundtrack, or parts thereof, as we usually would in the audio section; just go and watch any gameplay footage and you’ll get an idea.)
Sound effects, too, are top-notch, with the goose’s honk being a noticeable example of quality that carries through to small details like the pitter-patter of his little feets.
Replayability: 5/10
Untitled Goose Game is short. It’s really short. You’ll probably finish it in four or five hours max, and while that means it doesn’t overstay its welcome you will probably find yourself wondering whether that’s really all there is to it.
Fortunately, it isn’t quite all there is: a New Game Plus of sorts allows you to traipse back through the village completing more difficult tasks, sometimes involving objects and people from multiple areas who’d otherwise never interact, and this is pretty rewarding but just not quite as fun as the first time. I’m almost certain to eventually decide to simply play through Untitled Goose Game‘s main mode again from the beginning, just for the fun of it, but it’s not the sort of game that demands to be revisited and explored. You’ll see all the most interesting things your first time through; you might want to come back just to mess with the crochety burly man who won’t let you in the pub garden a little more, but you’re not going to be able to relive the satisfaction of the first time you got him to sit on a box of tomatoes and dropped a bucket on his head.
Accessibility: 7/10
Thanks to its clear visuals, and a really nice touch allowing the player to change the font in the task-keeping notebook from cursive to something more easy-read, I think Untitled Goose Game should be possible for anyone to enjoy. It doesn’t feel overly simplistic, but owing to the small number of actions and the lack of punishment for taking your time or having a few goes before successfully completing a task, it also feels possible for someone with any level of ability to pick up and just have fun with.
It’s a testament to this simplicity (as with the music, it comes across to the player as simplicity but was surely anything but to design well, so props to the UX people) that Untitled Goose Game almost never explains anything other than by letting you have a go. It’ll tell you which buttons cause the goose to do what, but I don’t think it ever spells out that certain actions will cause people to react in certain ways or anything like that. It’s just intuitive; you inhabit the personality of the goose, and people respond to that much as you’d expect them to, so figuring out how to string those actions and reactions into results is never difficult for the wrong reasons.
Uniqueness: 9/10
I’ve never played anything quite like Untitled Goose Game. I’m not sure there’ll ever be anything quite like it again – I’m convinced that there will be a slew of imitations on the back of its popularity, but I don’t expect that any of them will feel quite the same. Its uniqueness is in its idiosyncratic whimsy, in the sheer joy of it, and I think that anything that tries to capture that from here on out is going to be easily identified as an imitation, not something new and unique and original.
Play Untitled Goose Game, ideally with a friend, and just observe how different it feels to playing most other games. It’s a joyful experience, an interactive slapstick movie, not a goose simulator so much as an opportunity to experience gooseness, or a peculiar archetype of inconsiderate gooseness. It’s really hard to explain, but the true success of this game isn’t in anything it does mechanically but in the feeling it cultivates in the player: such a rare, pure enjoyment.
My Personal Grade: 9/10
I love this game. I really do. It’s far too short, and I hope that perhaps there might be some future additions to the content to keep me coming back to experience the life of a goose anew; I don’t think playing the game for a second time would elicit the same feeling that the first experience brought out, because while it doesn’t exactly have any plot twists there’s just such a wonderful satisfaction summoned up each time the goose successfully completes a new task for the first time.
It’s not a perfect game, and indeed in terms of the game there’s not even all that much to it. You don’t need to learn any combos, or level up, or even get particularly good at approaching the situations it presents. You just need to be in the world, as a goose. That’s exactly what I wanted from Untitled Goose Game, and it delivers that absolutely perfectly.
Aggregated Score: 8.0
Though he’s been known by many names across the vast and peculiar landscape of the Internet, every iteration of The Sometimes Vaguely Philosophical Mage has shared an urge to look far too closely at tiny details and extrapolate huge, important-seeming conclusions. These days, in addition to Mage duties, he can be found discussing gaming and other pop culture (and occasionally sharing some of his own musical and fictional creations) at the Overthinker Y blog and on Twitter.
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Loved your review! I’m sure the Feathered Lord of Chaos would be proud.
This is going to be my next Switch buy. I think it’s only around $15 and within a week the internet was full of memes for it. That’s good enough for me(me).
A great review you’ve written Chris. You can really feel your passion throughout the whole piece, which cannot help but make me smile and think deeper into what the Untitled Goose Game brings out from its gameplay to simple storytelling in its environment.
Though I must point out something I feel different towards which is this: “Authenticity, depending on who you ask, involves recognising a couple of things: that conscious beings are unlike most other sorts of things in that our existence precedes our essence – in other words, we aren’t made for a purpose in the way that a chair is made to be sat on or a pen is made to be written with, but rather we come into the world undefined and have the opportunity to define our own selves – and that it means something other than ordinary existence to truly, properly be in the world.”
I believe we are made with the purpose to be born and to expire at certain points in our lives, now what happens in between are what you point out, the chance to define and shape ourselves through conscience and the opportunity to choose what actions we’ll take in the world we live in. But there is a purpose for us, the same way it is for all manners of life.
(Ramble over)
Once again, love the review and look forward to playing it myself.
Hmmm. Made with the purpose to be born and to die. Red and I are having a similar conversation, but I think I would take issue with the idea of assigning ‘purpose’ in the sense of the individual’s own directed will to birth and death. I’m a non-religious humanist, though, so if we differ on our thoughts about ultimate purpose then this may be why!
(Also, I don’t *necessarily agree* with all the philosophical points I bring up in reviews. They’re fun context, and I’ve made a shtick out of basically overwanging pseudo-academic points for the sake of humour and occasionally thoughtfulness, but I reserve the right not to agree with every idea that gets a mention!)
Oh don’t worry, I wasn’t trying to stir something up. Just how my mind works in weird ways. I’m not really a religious person either, though I don’t disagree on the fact that there must be something out there. Just not one for certain kind of religious being that many believe in. The more the merrier I say 🙂
(The review was fun, could see the humour behind it but I couldn’t help but overthink it as well.)
hehe; overthinking is something we have in common, I think!
I remember one chasing my dog and I across a country path once, terrifying!
The whole design is brilliant, takes me back to holidays as a kid and my nan telling me “don’t go too near that goose, it’ll break your arm with its wings”, not even MIGHT break it, it WILL break it… Absolute psycho
Geese are unpredictable, but swans are even scarier! They’ll hiss at ya and have your chips
Excellent game, excellent review! I agree with all points, glad that you picked up on his little feets making noises too, that never gets old!
his pitter patter is so cuuuuute ❤️
YES! Glad to see this review up at last, especially for this game. I’ll be downloading it today.
Also, I didn’t miss the irony of describing a meaningless universe in which the only meaningless meaning is what a human being creates for themselves, related to a game about a goose creating its own meaning in a meaningless game-universe, created by an agent outside of that universe which afforded the capacity to explore meaning and which the goose likely isn’t itself aware of. I think there’s probably an analogy about some kind of primacy of meaning or allowing for expressions of meaning within meaninglessness, but I don’t think that’s really what your review is about (though I was troubled by the idea that there are people less good-natured than the goose who create their own meaning by actually ruining lives).
Taking the issue of the external agent and the idea of purpose for physically: having kids and literally making them for the intended purpose of themselves purposing, discovering meaning, and experiencing life (provided they are intentionally conceived) is one way in which you can say, I think, that humans are indeed made for a purpose, though of course, that’s not in the same way that a chair or pen is made.
Yeah, existentialist readings of any fiction get a bit weird if we start accounting for metatextual properties: the essence of any fiction did in fact precede its existence, barring some incredibly spontaneous act of creation wherein the author somehow didn’t think at all about what they were doing.
I think the point about intentionally-conceived children being thought of, and thus in some sense in essence, before they exist is… interesting, but overly reductionist. No matter how hard they might try, parents can’t define how their child’s consciousness and intentionality will exist!
Like the proverbial monkey’s recreating Shakespeare?
To the second point, what I’m saying is not that parents are defining how their child’s consciousness and intentionality will exist, certainly not in direct detail, but defining *that* their child’s consciousness and intentionality will exist, or in other words having a child in order to intentionally bring a human life and its consciousness and intentionality into the world, whatever shape it takes. That’s intending the possibility for intention, not the details of the intention.
Yeah, I suppose that would be an example of that!
I don’t think deciding that something will exist and defining what it is are equivalent (or sufficiently near-equivalent) in this context – I don’t believe we owe our wills to our parents, even if in some sense we do owe our existence to them – but it remains an interesting point!
Oh this is interesting! So I mean, in the words you picked here, that we owe the existence of our wills to our parents, and our existence to them, not that we owe the things we will to our parents. In this sense, deciding a child will exist as the definition of a human being with a will, separate from what they actually will. So bringing a child into the world for the purpose of it willing, whatever it wills (sounds Seussian! XD). Made for the purpose of willing: being human. The capacity to will being the purpose for which the parent makes the child, innate in the child’s humanity.
I don’t disagree, except to observe that this still doesn’t mean that the actual will itself precedes existence. It can be anticipated, but not pre-determined.
I don’t not do not disagree lol 😉
I definitely don’t assert that will precedes existence, literally, just that parents can purpose a child into the world for the purpose of being a human life which is partly defined by the capacity to will, since conception normally and pretty reliably results in producing more humans. I think I was just trying to draw a distinction between given the capacity to will and having one’s will forced or constrained by one’s parents.
So… I don’t think we’re actually in disagreement on any points, then? If your observation about parents having some preconception of the purpose of (having) a child is addressing a related but separate principle, which I think it is, rather than being an objection or amendment to the original position, then I think we’re all merrily wandering, and indeed wondering, in the same direction on the same (or closely parallel) lines!
Well, maybe? My original assertion was that human beings *are* made for a purpose (that purpose being to explore purpose/have will/be human/experience the world/be a new life/add to the family/bring the parents joy), but not in the exact same way that a chair is made for the purpose of sitting on (though some chairs are ornamental and not made for sitting, or are in miniature and too small for sitting). So the meaningless search for meaning is actually a meaningful allowance of capacity for the search for meaning by the agent of our predecessors.
Our main points of disagreement are probably in describing the nature of the universe as inherently meaningless, the cosmic sense of good and bad things (being either an atheistic or theistic assumption), or our coming into the world without purpose. In my view, we come into the world with the opportunity to define ourselves within the context of the definition of human, which itself is an opportunity only afforded to us by pre-extant agents, not ultimate meaninglessness.
(administrative note: looks like the ‘reply’ button disappears as you reach a certain level of nested comments, so I’m having to do this via notifications!)
so
You’re probably right that if we do disagree fundamentally here it’s on the grounds of an overarching worldview point – your belief in a deity allows you to posit answers (or at least that there are some) to questions of ‘ultimate’ meaning, good and bad, and so on, whereas my sort of starting point is that there is no greater intention behind existence, or things, or reality, or whatever, so we’re naturally going to diverge a little bit just because of that initial axiom!
I think the distinction you make between the *way* in which you might refer to a human and a chair as being made for a purpose is understated but critical. We’re not using ‘purpose’ as a verb here, but analogically it’s as if the former is an intransitive verb while the latter is a transitive one, which is broadly to say that a chair is defined by another thing’s experience of it while a human is (I think) only defined by its own experience of itself, and that’s inalienable and impossible to infringe upon. I think it’s not inconsistent to suggest that a person is made with a purpose in mind, as it were, but ‘purpose’ here is someone else’s, not their own, and doesn’t refer to the person’s ultimate ability to self-define.
Plus, whatever purpose was intended (or whatever capacity for purpose was allowed for, to borrow your phrase) by the parents is, I think, an act of will on their parts which is equally self-defined, albeit that part of their expected or intended life in their own parents’ view might have been procreation. Whether it was or it wasn’t doesn’t come into what they do in fact decide to do, though. (Granted that parents might pressure their children into doing the things they wanted *for* them, and that that might have a really significant influence on what the child decides to do, but the parent cannot directly affect the child’s consciousness.)
All of which is basically to say that I consider each person’s own intentionality unique and entirely incorrigible, no matter where it might have come from!
(thanks for the admin note! I’ll look into that!)
I knew the longer reply was coming sooner or later! I’ll respond per paragraph:
Am I correct in stating though that your worldview is *not* that there is no greater intention behind existence/things/reality/whatever but that you don’t *know* if there is or not? That’s based on observations and memories from our previous discussions on the matter, especially as it pertains to uncaused causes, first causes, and necessary beings.
I think here there’s still a point ahead of the point that’s being made, namely that the self-definition of a person is itself, without infringing, allowed by the agent before that person. The capacity to self-define is allowed by the prior agent, even without any actual defining by that prior agent, since humans do not spontaneously generate out of nothing. I think both kinds of purposes you’re talking about co-exist: a parent’s purposing of the child into the world for the purpose of being a self-defining human, but in that sense, the human being is made with a purpose “to purpose”. It’s not exclusively that the human is defined by the human before it, but neither is it exclusively that the 2nd human can completely redefine themselves (they’ll always, say, be human, be of the ethnic race of their parents, will have inevitably learned from their parents, etc. and many of those things directly affect the child’s will and capacity to will, such as merely being human).
Those definitions go beyond what a parent intends for their child. They might intend for them not to have the same genes, but that’s not how the process works, for instance. The capacity to self-define at all is defined by by the self-definition of the parents before, defined by the self-definition before and so on.
Your last statement is one I completely agree with. All for individualism. My goal, if I have one in this expression, is not to diminish individual human will in any way by attempting to explain that the purpose of (some) human beings may be that they are willed into the world (requiring an agent) to will, themselves. I’m certainly not for parents controlling their kids with anything close to tyranny. My only point is that (some) humans are made with a purpose and come into the world with the purpose of being parents’ kids (at least initially).
My wife’s cousin actually just had a surprise baby yesterday. She didn’t know she was present. I thought about this conversation. Wife’s cousin unintentionally had a baby but in giving the child a name and hoping for their future, they begin to reach toward a purpose for the child: that they would grow into a self-defining adult that can themselves self-define.
Ha, good old longer responses! I wasn’t intending for it to get longer, just sorta happened.
I’ll continue to respond here for now – since you’ve asked the question, and because I know you, I’m assuming you’re OK with these discussions continuing and continuing to be in this format and space, but do let me know if that changes. I think we might be reaching something of a conclusion anyway!
My view about A Greater Thing (which I’m using as an unsatisfactory way of summing up all the things that might encompass) is that it may well be completely impossible to know whether there is, or even could be, such a thing, and equally and conversely impossible to know that there isn’t, but that I don’t see any reason to think that there is. It seems reasonable, then, for me to say that I don’t believe in such a thing and to act as if there is not such a thing. In that sense, it’s occupying a similar space as, say, a teapot floating in space, or a billion invisible pink unicorns that take up no space constantly galloping around my head, or the fact that whales can read my thoughts; I can’t disprove any of them, but I have no reason to act or think as if any of them is true. (I don’t mean these examples as irreverent, by the way; they’re just the best I can quickly come up with as analogies for this ‘not disprovable but less likely than not so I’m gonna sort of go with *isn’t a thing* until I’ve got a reason to think otherwise’ situation. I still don’t think I’m explaining it brilliantly, but hopefully you see what I mean!) I think what I’m trying to get at is the gnostic-agnostic/theist-atheist distinction; they’re two perpendicular axes rather than being different ways of describing the same line, so while I’m happy to maintain that I don’t believe in any such things (and thus I’m on the atheist side of that axis) I am also happy to think that such things might not be knowable in principle (and thus, separately but not unrelatedly, I’m on the agnostic side of *that* axis).
That was a way longer ramble than I intended. Sorry!
As for the remainder, which is probably the more important part of your comment in this discussion, I don’t actually have all that much to add! (Now watch me write a thousand words about it…!)
I’m on the fence about whether it’s coherent with the inviolability of individual will to suggest that someone or something else has ‘allowed’ that will to exist. It’s certainly a biological and chronological fact that I’m only here as a willing being because my parents ‘made’ me, in some sense, but I’m not sure whether they had anything to do with my intentionality coming into being! I can’t disagree that it wouldn’t exist without them causing me to physically exist, but I’m not sure whether there’s a meaningful distinction to be drawn there. Intuitively I feel that there is, but I’m not sure what; perhaps it’s something along the lines of ‘my physical birth is a necessary cause of my conscious will, but not a sufficient one (mental existence being, in a sort of pseudo-Cartesian sense, a separate *kind* of existence)’.
I do agree that there can be external purposes conceived of, and sometimes even imposed by, people or circumstances beyond the individual, and that that probably extends to simply ‘being born as this other person’s child’. Maybe the distinction I’m trying to get at, and not quite snagging it, is an external-versus-internal ‘purpose’ sort of thing, in which case humans being ‘willed’ into the world is totally not inconsistent with their own inalienable wills being separate from any other. (Or perhaps ‘purpose’ hasn’t been the right word to use at all, and we’re just getting caught up in our impressions of the meaning of that one word and using it differently to each other.)
TL;DR: I actually still kinda think we’re basically in agreement, albeit perhaps approaching it from different angles! We’re expressing slightly different details and points about something where our views are mutually compatible, I think, or putting emphasis on different bits of the something. (Then again, I’m not sure I ever really thought we were disagreeing, as such, just having a very interesting chat together.)
Excellent review Vaguely Philosophical Mage. This looks like the kind of game I’d definitely pick up on the Switch and play on long journeys, simply because it doesn’t feel that heavy and looks so entertaining. I’ve heard a lot about this game, and I think I just might pick up this game soon. Would you say this is somewhat similar to “Goat Simulator”?
I actually haven’t played Goat Simulator but I don’t think it’s that similar. They might capture a similar spirit, both just being about inhabiting the animal and going a bit ridiculous with it, but Goatsim looks very freeform, just kind of throwing yourself around, while the best bits of UGG are when you work out how to complete an amusing task in classic goose style.