No Lands Beyond: Kirby Air Ride and the Inescapability of Systems
Growing up, I was fascinated by stories about glitches and unexpected phenomena in games. I envied people who claimed to find Missing No. or a Mew hidden under a truck, and I wanted to find my own way of breaking a game’s rules.
That desire shaped how I played one of my favorite GameCube games: Kirby Air Ride. Air Ride was a deviation from the Kirby formula, a racing game instead of the usual platformer. In the game’s City Trial mode, players battled their way through a city littered with items, alternate vehicles, and randomized events.
At first, I thought of City Trial as a free-form sandbox. I laughed at some of the vehicles’ beleaguered turning, launched airborne attacks on the near-invincible Dyna Blade, and chased down Kirby’s resident cat burglar, Tac, to nab his bag of power-ups. But as subsequent sessions began to repeat events, the formula of searching for and upgrading vehicles grew stale. Repetition wore away the illusion of possibility.
Though Kirby Air Ride is an innocuous racing game, the play of City Trial centered on loops of self-optimization undertaken for a later competition. The inevitability of that formula and context slowly leeched my sense of freedom, and play began to resemble work. Feeling trapped within the City, I began to look for some way to bend the game’s systems. I began to plan an escape.
From the City’s industrial coast, I could see the misty silhouette of a distant mountain. The mountain was beyond the game’s map, but I thought that this was my chance to glitch past a game’s rules. To prepare, I gathered the power-ups and vehicle I would need for a voyage across the sea. When I finished, I launched myself to the highest point on the map, pointed my vehicle towards the industrial coast, and took off. Tilting all the way back on the stick to maintain altitude, I soared out of the city’s heart and over the waves that broke upon its beach. From there, I caught a glimpse of my goal: the towering mountain far beyond the city’s shores.
Then, I hit an invisible wall and plummeted into the ocean.
Incidentally, that perfectly captures what looking for work after graduation felt like.
At first, I was cautiously optimistic. Though several of my friends were struggling with finding employment, I hoped that, if I just applied myself hard enough, I could work my way through any difficulties that arose. As the child of an immigrant Latinx family, I had always strived to be considered hard-working in the way that my family was. Successfully navigating the uncertainties of post-grad life, then, felt like the next step in demonstrating my commitment to hard work, to my family’s values.
Just as I had with Air Ride, I consigned myself to the labor of self-optimization. I picked up a daily routine of employer research, resume polishing, and cover letter writing. Thinking that I also needed to be more personally productive, I tried to develop multiple creative projects at once. But time went on, and each application and interview produced nothing. When night fell, I’d be too stressed to sleep easily, so I’d lie in bed and scroll through LinkedIn until the early morning. I genuinely felt like I’d hit an invisible wall, as though I were blind to some critical delineation between where I was and where I was pushing myself to be.
My focus swiftly led to burnout, which completely robbed me of my interests even as it demanded that I engage them as a way to recover. Trying to rest did me little good, as I knew that I was only trying to recover so that I could return to looking for work. I felt guilty for not living up to the expectations I held myself to, for spending time trying to de-stress instead of continuing to seek work, and for forcing myself to keep striving towards work when I was already burned out.
Parts of that cycle closely mirrored my time with Air Ride. In both work and play, my efforts revolved around endless self-optimization undertaken in the context of competition. That repetitive cycle engendered my dissatisfaction with the game, as no amount of vehicle optimization could have given me the exploratory play that I sought. Similarly, while finding long-term employment would have ended my cyclical search for work, it would not have lessened the pressure from my relationship to labor.
My attempt to escape Air Ride’s City was rooted in the belief that escape could free me from the game’s limitations. Though I failed further attempts to breach the invisible wall, I was spurred on by the thought of new environments, new vehicles and powers, new ways to experience the game. But even if I had escaped the City during my first, fifth, or twelfth attempt, the actions I could have taken would still have been restricted by the mechanics of the game. No glitch can introduce new mechanics to a game. Even under duress, the system functions as intended.
Just as disillusionment had led me to want an escape from Air Ride’s City and systems, it also led me to desire an escape from the physical city and economic systems I found myself in. But just as I could not leave behind the fundamental rules of Kirby Air Ride, I could not instantaneously free myself from the values imprinted onto me by American late capitalism.
Even if I were to escape to an entirely new place, I would still be consumed by the anxiety to produce. I would still suffer from a tendency to work until burnout. I would still struggle with pursuing projects for extended periods of time. I am cognizant of my tendencies towards unsustainable labor, but cognizance does not equate to liberation. Both political systems and game systems continue to influence and constrain an individual’s behavior long after they have escaped from the system’s supposed boundaries. Even beyond borders, those systems function as intended.
I understand now that while escaping from Kirby Air Ride’s map would have satisfied my desire to break a game’s systems, it would not have provided me with a deeper experience. Escape would have merely been a self-serving novelty, something to boast about to my friends. My later desire for reprieve from cycles of labor was as hollow as the first, as escape inherently fails to address the effects that an active system has already rendered or can continue to render.
Shifting my focus away from escape has enabled me to more carefully consider how to respond to systems. In the case of playing Kirby Air Ride, I eventually realized that the solution was just to switch to another game. Though I can’t exactly replicate that for my relationship to labor, my time playing Air Ride helped me to let go of my wish for escape, for an easy external solution. After all, the mountain that I was once so eager to reach wasn’t really there — it was just a silhouette painted over an empty skybox.
Aaron Lascano is a Latinx writer and game designer based in NYC. You can follow his work over on Twitter.
Deorbital is a videogame-aligned journal for insightful articles on games, culture, and society. This Spring Quarterly has been funded by readers like you.
