Immersion Through Ruins: Entanglement, Pleasure, and Struggle in Celeste

Abstract

Abstract This article argues that the 2D side-scrolling adventure platformer video game Celeste (2018) mobilizes the tradition of ruin-gazing to provide a metaphor for selfexploration and then crucially transforms the psychoanalytic “cure” into a gamified experience. Video games that contain ruins inherit the tradition of “ruin-gazing” from the eighteenth century and expand on the affective experiences ruins produce through immersion and play. Ruins disabuse players of the notion of stability or safety, and assert the significance of player actions in spaces that, when ruined, become culturally, socially, or psychologically destabilized. Thus, they are readable spaces that strategically engage the player, and the ludic actions taken by players constitute the act of reading the game as text. This article analyzes the ruined spaces of Celeste and how the actions available to players within those ruined spaces reinforce the game’s narrative themes of self-healing. It also aims to demonstrate how the ruins that Madeline (the player avatar) navigates are a representation of her fractured psyche, mind, and identity. The player’s success is dependent on their capacity to navigate Madeline’s (literally) ruined sense of self, which through their ludic subject-position and entanglement with Madeline, invites the player to participate in and experience Madeline’s emotional and mental catharsis. (RC)