Video games, like fiction, are a medium through which we can explore evildoing without real-world consequences.
Indeed, Untitled Goose Game so well captures the quality of the English village, with its concentrated lives and circular routines, that it’s difficult to believe it was made by Australians.īut it also taps into a broader quality. The setting is sleepily parochial, but it also has the sotto note of unease often found in idyllic country towns. In the mode of a silent slapstick film, these everyday tableaus imply their comic potential, although the designers provide a list of tasks for those players who require more explicit direction. There’s the waitress setting her tables with gleaming cutlery for the day’s business. There’s the shopkeeper fussing in a garage, from whose door a rope invitingly dangles. There’s the gardener tending his beds next to a sprinkler system connected to a remote tap.
To this end, the village is divided into areas that are rigged with a number of opportunities for mischief-making. Through this trinity, you terrorize the villagers, partly in pursuit of a goal that is revealed only in the game’s final moments, and partly just for the sheer hell of it. Your palette of interactions is limited yet sufficient: you can grasp at objects, flap your wings, or honk. The game, which is drawn in the style of a children’s book and scored by a whimsical piano, sees you play as a single-minded goose making her terrible way through a village. Into this tradition steps Untitled Goose Game, an independently produced video game for PC, Mac, and the Nintendo Switch that, in the weeks following its release, has become a viral sensation, the darling of celebrities and rock stars. (A photograph of the incident is enough to ruin a childhood.) In 2015, Buzzfeed published “ 19 Of The Most Traumatizing Stories About Being Attacked By Canada Geese.” In 1995, the United Nations published a paper that called the animal “the unbridable watchdog.” In the popular imagination, the goose has always been a fiend. “They’re not something to be trifled with,” an ornithologist told USA Today last year, after a high-school golfer was forced to the ground by a vengeful specimen. The goose is the hooligan of the waterways. This, as anyone who has been chased by a goose knows, is a patently false connection. The incident left me with an enduring association between geese and tragic vulnerability.
The older boy wandered off, leaving me to decide whether to bury the body naked or in a plastic bag, and whether or not its grave on the hillside should be marked. It was the first time that I’d watched anything larger than a beetle die, and it became, in my pubescent mind, an event of immense gravitas.
After the shot, the creature took three or four faltering steps forward and then sank to form a white puddle in the grass. Would I accompany him to the execution? I followed him down the hill, where he shoved the goose with a muddy boot and pressed the barrel of an air rifle to the back of its head. Late one morning, one of the farmhands explained that there was a sick goose that needed dealing with. It was summer, and I was helping out on a farm run by a friend of my grandparents. When I was eleven years old, I watched a teen-age boy shoot a goose from point-blank range.
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