Homeworld and Evoking the Numinous

There are very few stories in video games I would call truly great. Personally, I think the medium has yet to see a true renaissance. Besides the obvious hurdles of time, talent, and funding, too many games want to be movies instead of games. The desire for the prettiest graphics and cinematics often leads to a flawed product. So many games focus on ripping control away from the player just for something awesome to happen on screen. And then the mechanics in turn trip over the narrative, usually in the pacing.

I just don’t think video games are well equipped for the breathing room stories typically need to reach something we would call masterful. In my opinion, we would be better served by about 30 or 40 percent of the games industry moving into digital filmmaking.

It’s rare to find a game that’s truly balanced. It’s rarer still to find a story in a game that exceeds what could probably be done in a book.

I am here to tell you Homeworld is that game.

As far as stories go, Homeworld is rather unusual. There are not so much characters in Homeworld as there are representations of people or factions. The story is not a personal arc, or really anything resembling what you would learn in an English literature class. Everything is abstracted up to tell the story of the exodus of a people. And through music, presentation, and yes, gameplay elements, you have a product that goes beyond lightning in a bottle and into the realm of unsurpassable.

Skip to 0:56 for Kharak is burning.

But this is not a review of Homeworld. If you want that, I can happily suggest MandaloreGaming’s video on the subject. He breaks down the franchise in way more detail than I can do here.

What fascinates me about this game is that it is one of the few modern stories to get religiosity right. There’s never any specific rituals or practices mentioned in the main narrative. In fact, I can’t really tell you a single thing about what the Kushan people believe. However, that doesn’t stop the game from delving into deeply religious themes. The story is about the destiny of a people, from the destruction of their world to a journey of reclaiming their long-lost home.

There’s a sense of eminence and history that you rarely get in other media. I think it’s a modern predisposition to focus on the individual and the individual saving the world. You get stories about people in a culture, but you don’t get stories about that culture.

When was the last time you read/watched a modern story about the struggles of a particular people with a particular history and a particular culture? I don’t feel that I’m grasping at straws when I say most stories I encounter usually put forward versions of the same materialistic, atheistic, vaguely democratic societies where people are demographic widgets and not a people.

And this applies to religiosity as well. For how many people is Christianity showing up to Church on holidays and maybe a Sunday every now and then? How many stories treat it as such? And then how many stories present Christianity as a radical force on the world stage, as something locked in an existential battle with the fallenness of mankind?

How often is religion framed as something an individual chooses and not something that chooses the individual?

And there’s so much texture that’s lost in making religion just a Sunday thing. You have a narrative that encompasses the length and breadth of history, heroes, villains, saints, devils, nations rising and collapsing, the death of empires, emperors and kings and princes, ancient and venerable traditions, bizarre and exotic art, epic poetry and prose, countless stories of war, love, and triumph as well as heartbreak, the struggle of men against the world, and you’re a particular part of that story. You’re not some faceless npc, rootless and cosmopolitan.

It is in grounding a story sometime somewhere that it properly comes alive. There’s this progressive belief that people are allotted by random chance, that you could’ve been born anywhere else at any other given time. They think as if we are just blank slates being randomly chucked down into human bodies.

This isn’t true in the slightest. You are a walking culmination of history, a product of every decision that was made to come to this point. There’s no theoretical you that could’ve been born anywhere else because then it wouldn’t have been you. You change any part of that great chain of existence, all those lives who were born and loved and died before you, and you’ll have a different person. And that same principle applies to peoples and cultures on a macro scale.

There’s a sense of place and time that Homeworld captures that is utterly lost on so much modern fiction. And that’s not for lack of worldbuilding. It’s about the ability to tell a story about a people and the future of a people as distinct from others. The Kushan struggle in Homeworld is so powerful because they’re the last of their race. If they perish, everything about them, and everything they hold dear perishes as well.

When Alderaan gets destroyed in Star Wars, no one cares because Alderaan could’ve been any other planet in the galaxy. When Kharak gets firebombed, people care because there is only one Kharak.