Horizon: Zero Dawn - Poetry in the Postapocalypse

A little-known fact about me: I started college as a math and computer science major, not an English major. I wanted to work in video games. What I realized, as I found myself frustrated by the numbers and code, was that the reason I wanted to work in video games was because of the narratives, not the mechanics. All that is beside the main point, which is that I've played video games since I was a child. But my favorite is probably Horizon: Zero Dawn by Guerrilla Games.

I'll describe the game in a spoiler-free set of generalities for now, as the context behind the game's story does not need to enter into the project. Suffice to say that our civilization ends in the 2060s and roughly a thousand years later, humans live in tribal societies hunting machine creatures and salvaging technology they do not understand. The apocalypse has led to a complete lack of knowledge of the cultures, technology, or art of our present times. We play as Aloy, a young woman outcast from her tribe, but who becomes a brave through the rite of the Proving. Aloy is curious and recovers a small piece of technology as a child. a Focus, which lets her interface with ancient technology and learn more about the world before than anyone else in her time can.

One of the collectible items in the game is a series of Metal Flowers. These flowers have a mysterious purpose and origin, but are recent growth. Examining the Metal Flowers in the inventory, however, reveals that each flower contains a fragment of code, quoting a poem. Each poem is a real poem from our time, thus these poems are the only art to survive the apocalypse.

I'll soon be running, in addition to the Beowulf annotations, posts providing close readings of these poems from the perspective of Aloy, who does not have the original context of these poems. So that'll be next Tuesday. Check in Friday for another Beowulf annotation.