* * * Reload and Try Again
The channel of the Twitch streamer Nyxipuff has 59,400 followers. I know this because last night a friend (a playwright and maths teacher who I was not expecting this from) confessed that he is one of them. He explained how he finds her clips to be a safe haven, because when he watches them he forgets about almost everything that is troubling him. While admitting that he harbours an unrealistic crush on Nyxipuff (she lives thousands of miles away and is gay), he is adamant that this is not his primary reason for consuming her work. She is a favourite, he says, simply for the mental solace her content offers, an analgesic quality which, more than anything, is rooted in the sort of homesickness we call nostalgia. Recently, one of Nyxipuff’s videos left him in tears.
While my friend was telling me what the clip in question was about, namely the Japanese video game Final Fantasy VII (1997), I discreetly opened the Notes app and tapped in its creator’s username. Apparitions of pixies, nymphs and breakfast cereal flickered to mind. I wanted to be able to find the channel later, and didn’t want to have to send a text asking to be reminded of its name because I was concerned that, outside the sanctity of this late-night conversation, such a request would end up feeling like a transgression. Not quite ‘please can you tell me your new girlfriend’s Instagram handle,’ but the same family.
The mention of Final Fantasy VII, with its story concerning a blonde mercenary named Cloud Strife who gets talked into joining a group of eco-terrorists, had triggered a memory, which, on some level, simply consisted of an atmosphere. It was the emotional texture of me as I was some years ago, a time in which I worked in Covent Garden, an area of central London known for its buskers, an elite set of jugglers, violinists and conjurers who, taken as a whole, precisely reflect the median taste of the average crowd.
I worked in an office in a building with a blue plaque on its exterior informing the passer-by or scholar-pilgrim that this was where Thomas De Quincey had written Confessions of an English Opium Eater. Given his decadence and lack of willpower, it is likely that, had he been born in 1985 rather than 1785, De Quincey would have owned a Playstation, and in fact his book is filled with appeals to something like the nostalgia that brought my friend to tears. For example, he describes attending a performance at the famous nearby opera house, less in the hope of succour for the ears or eyes, more so as to experience ‘the whole of my past life … but as if present and incarnated in the music: no longer painful to dwell upon: but the detail of its incidents removed, or blended in some hazy abstraction; and its passions exalted, spiritualized, and sublimed.’
This was not a particularly significant time in my life. The reason it came to mind was that I’d remembered the moment a colleague in that Covent Garden building had asked me if I was alright. I’d been very quiet all day, she said. I evaded the question with the excuse ‘I’m just tired,’ as the reason for my dark mood was hardly one I wanted her to know: that I was in mourning for Aeris, a character from Final Fantasy VII.
Aeris, who in some versions is called Aerith, had been killed, as far as I was concerned, the previous night. Her death had not been in the ‘video game way’ whereby I could simply reload the level and try again, but as part of the linear narrative that underpinned whatever freedom I had within the game. It was irreversible.
The word ‘limerence’ means ‘a state of being infatuated or obsessed with another person, typically characterised by a strong desire for reciprocation of one’s feelings but not primarily for a sexual relationship.’ It was a source of shame that I felt the way I did, like I’d been abruptly removed from a limerent relationship. I confided in nobody about this. I’d have been either comforted or disappointed to realise my reaction had in fact been replicated in millions of players, that the death of Aeris would later be recognised as one of the shocking moments in gaming history. Last night my friend the Nyxipuff subscriber said: ‘If I had to choose one work of art that has meant the most to me, it wouldn’t be a book or a film. It would be Final Fantasy VII.’
* * * I Have Sat in This Cafe a Million Times Before
My great-aunt left notes in her house, not for herself but for those of us who would come after she died. This says a lot about my family, who have always been masters of the unspoken. Hoarders by nature, we leave our most interesting thoughts beneath piles of tea towels in drawers we never open or stirred in with the cables of obsolete personal computers. I honestly believe that every human being expects the past to return some day. Perhaps in my family, we think this only happens if you never say much about the
past at all.
A novel that was ubiquitous at the time I was playing Final Fantasy VII was The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) by Milan Kundera. In its opening pages, Kundera, who is a favourite of Kylie Minogue, considers Friedrich Nietzsche’s theory that time is in fact a circle, which is to say that everything that happens has happened before and will happen again. ‘The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one,’ he writes, ‘and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?’
Kundera, or his narrator, thinks that for any given shower, conversation or sexual encounter there is a profound difference between it taking place in a world that repeats itself versus one that doesn’t. I’ve never been sure that I agree. If neither I nor anyone else remembers the fact I have sat in this cafe a million times before, it may as well be the first time I have done so. Stuff can mean something to the universe as a whole without being important to those stuck in some parochial corner of it.
The million-year-old waiters in the cafe are wearing cheap white shirts, black trousers, black shoes, sometimes with a tie and sometimes with a waistcoat. The room is organised concentrically around a central bar, behind which the kitchen can be glimpsed and heard. The kitchen is very loud. In the corner are pinball machines. The plat du jour is spaghetti bolognese. A man with a trilby and a red shoulder bag leans against the glass divide leading down from the bar area, watching the plasma TV suspended above the room next to a cheap white wall clock. On the TV: Michael Jackson, ‘Rock with You.’ Down the steps: tables for two, all occupied. Most of the patrons are drinking espresso (€2.40). The boyfriend of a woman in denim drinks beer. Brasserie depuis 1911 the menu says, because people like to know things like that.
Among my great aunt’s papers, letters, leaflets and sketches was a black-and-white photograph of a man in a suit and a sailor’s cap. His somewhat stern face and small round glasses were almost comical on someone so young looking and clean shaven. A handwritten caption read, ‘Your Swedish friend Gunnar.’ What did Gunnar mean by ‘friend’? The photograph was dated ‘Stockholm. 1948.’
Some of the notes she left were merely practical: ‘Spare screws for lamp on my desk.’ They would often include a date, and this date could be as long ago as, say, 1992. Others were scraps of history: ‘This book was a favourite of my mother’s.’ The annotations accompanying her VHS collection were on the more expansive end of the spectrum: ‘Unfortunately, not feeling well, I fell asleep and missed most of the programme. I believe it was well known but not made public that this was not a happy marriage. A very kind nurse in the UN medical service, Geneva, told me that she had stayed on a yacht in the south of France in the 1950s and heard dreadful quarrelling between Edward and Wallis (ex-Simpson), who were on another yacht.’
The notes were mostly for us, but I think they were also ready for another possibility, that a time would come when the past could be reassembled, and the lamp on the desk would be useful in exactly the way it had once been.
* * * Eternally Returning Universe
It’s hard to say why Final Fantasy VII had the effect on me that it did. The name is strange of course, the ‘final’ and the ‘VII’ being mutually incompatible. Strife has an oversized sword that he must use in repetitive yet hypnotic battle scenes, whose orchestral soundtrack speaks of ‘nothing much happening really excitingly.’
I had, during that Covent Garden era, never played a Final Fantasy game before, and would never do so again. I didn’t notice when they released Final Fantasy XVI last year, nor did I see ads for it: the guys down at Meta knew not to bother. VII was the last time I gave myself up to the narcotic effects of solo gaming, because once I had finished I couldn’t justify nor understand the time I’d spent on it, especially given that Aeris dies quite early in the storyline.
The videos of Nyxipuff which really affected my friend didn’t in fact concern the 1997 original version of the game but a remake, the first instalment of which was published during the pandemic months of 2020. Cloud Strife, Aeris and the others would do it all again except in an updated guise benefiting from the improved graphic and gameplay possibilities offered by the PlayStation 5. They would retread the original storyline, remembering nothing, exactly like the people of Nietzsche’s eternally returning universe. But for those on the outside of the game, the past could finally return, accompanied, if we wish, by the commentary of someone who knows when to say ‘my heart is exploding’ to cosiest effect.
One of Nyxipuff’s unique selling points is that she owns a pair of rabbits. A recent video, ostensibly about the game Hollow Knight (2017), begins with a montage of the rabbits as they patrol the floor of her home or look over the walls of their litter tray.
Later in that same video she produces an old analogue photograph of a much younger version of herself sitting at a desktop computer. On the desk in front of her, between a keyboard and a monitor on which a game involving numerous green rectangles is paused, is a guinea pig. Its eyes are the technological white of a camera’s flash. Nyxipuff’s cheek is pressed against it, her face displaying a beatific smile. For the purposes of Twitch the photograph has been superimposed over the Hollow Knight start screen. In a smaller box to the left, contemporary Nyxipuff is sitting in a different room, delivering a commentary on the image.
She is both authentically and ironically moved by it. ‘Look at Ginger! She’s my best friend and I miss her. This photo makes me want to cry. It’s so funny how this picture is almost a prophecy. I was ten in this picture.
There’s even a little camera on top of the monitor. I’m playing a video game. I’m hanging out with a creature. This is exactly what I do right now.’