Black Myth: Wukong, the first big-budget single-player video game produced by a Chinese studio, has been a major event in many respects. Developed by Game Science and released in August 2024, the game sold more than ten million copies within its first three days and twice that by the end of the month. Arriving after the thaw of a two-decade-long ban on video consoles, it carried the full freight of national and diasporic expectation. For some, it signified the long-awaited coming of age of Chinese game development; for others, a soft-power salvo in the theatre of global cultural competition. Unsurprisingly, the stakes that the game is made to bear make careful discussion of its politics – and of the political uses of myth as such – difficult. This essay steers away from facile dismissals of the game as mere nationalist kitsch, focusing instead on what in it remains inassimilable: the irreducibly queer, chaotic figure of Wukong, harbinger of a community that cannot be domesticated, circumscribed, or codified in national terms.
1
Order of Time: Wukong the Undead or Wukong the Undying: Two Faces of Nostalgia
‘Nostalgia is experienced when one fondly aches for the past. Foreverism, on the other hand, will implore you to revive the past and save it from ever dying again in order to maintain capitalism in the perpetual present, with its promise of now forever. Nothing haunts this eternal instant, no ghosts rattle their chains. To exist in a foreverised void is to never die, to produce and compete under watchful eyes, drifting through an infinite universe where conversations never end, wondering if spring will ever come.’
– Grafton Tanner1
‘Novalis’ definition, according to which all philosophy is homesickness, holds true only if this longing is not dissolved into the phantasm of a lost remote antiquity, but represents the homeland, nature itself, as wrested from myth. Homeland is the state of having escaped.’
– Adorno & Horkheimer2
We now live in a post-historical age where past and future collapse into a sterile morass of codified information – so argues Grafton Tanner in Foreverism, his excellent meditation on nostalgia in the information age. With history now instantly formatted and available for consumption, and amidst the upheavals of the climate emergency, pandemics, displacement, and economic crises, nostalgia invariably emerges as a symptom: a fantasmatic projection that makes an increasingly inhospitable present bearable through a homesickness for the past. In this way, nostalgia can also be read as a protest against the present, a plea for rest and refuge as everything solid melts into air. Weaponised by recrudescent fascisms and commodified by a culture industry that cannibalises on the past, nostalgia closes the openings from the present, replacing memory with a fabricated image fully compatible with the systematic imperatives of the present.
Certainly, all the brouhaha around China’s premier big-budget video game production, Black Myth: Wukong, would have one believe that it can be construed, even dismissed, as another hackneyed invocation of an imagined past, harnessed for commercial gain and nationalist fantasy. From a certain vantage point, the game can be construed as exactly this. By virtue of the fact that this is China’s first big foray into the most profitable sector in the global media landscape, it necessarily has to assume the mantle of such aspirations in staking a claim to territory in an increasingly saturated environment.
Amidst the sheer magnitude of national and diasporic expectation upon the release and reception of a game imagined as an opening salvo against generations of American and Japanese video-game hegemony, discussions over the merits or demerits of Black Myth: Wukong appear to be of secondary significance. Instead, the game is situated squarely in a host of intersecting polemics around the geopolitics of empire, trade, and market share, the ominous shadow of soft power, and the red scare of gaming as propaganda, the liberties or lack thereof afforded to Chinese developers under the supervision of a state anxious to commandeer a burgeoning gaming industry to the benefit of advancing ‘cultural confidence’ worldwide, as well as the caustic (and often tiresome) minefield of the culture wars in the West.
The compacted weight of all of these implications is felt upon even a cursory scan of the game reviews in mainstream gaming outlets. While this has often been at the expense of a temperate assessment of the game on its own terms, the unprecedented publicity it has granted to the game has been extremely welcome to a team of developers who have navigated the turbulent currents of public opinion with considerable guile. Like Wukong, the phantasmal, shapeshifting protagonist at the heart of the game, the game (as a fetish object) is allowed to be anything for anyone. Paradoxically, the intrinsic polyvalence of the Monkey King as a sign means that it can be appropriated and cited for interests and enterprises which are entirely at odds with one another, for orthodoxies and heterodoxies of various stripes. And yet, there is an errant, restless remainder that cannot be appropriated or codified, and it is this very aspect of the Monkey King that ‘we’ continue to be fascinated by – ‘we’, the progeny of the Monkey King, reared generation upon generation on stories of his impudent exploits.
This essay, therefore, while offering a brief survey of debates surrounding the game, focuses on the ‘mythological’ itself – as a genre and as a temporality different from the historical – which escapes the rabbit hole of the discursive and evades capture by the foreverising algorithm, by introducing a fugitive and insurgent ‘ghost in the machine’ that cannot be subject to any national or political project. It is significant that the ambivalent figure of Wukong, the god of chaos incarnate subdued by the precarious fiat of the Buddha, can be read as an allusion to any state laying claim to sovereignty in an originary revolt and the primal will of the people born from revolt; while the invocation of that chaos will always enrapture the popular imagination, it also mobilises an excess that cannot be easily contained. This essay is about this excess and its mercurial, anti-economic effects, and how this curious commodity engenders inchoate forces that cannot themselves be commodified. That is, while the choice of building a landmark game around the most recognisable, notorious figure in Chinese mythology seems patently obvious, the inexorable, fatal allure of Wukong undermines this obviousness and transports us to a place that is much more nebulous.
Wukong, the Monkey King, has always been an avatar of eternal insubordination and anarchy, the coruscating flame of insurrection – even invoked by Mao in a series of versifications3 (Wukong being the poetic sign that cannot be flattened into the linearity of the prosaic). Wukong’s very nature resists domestication: the repeated insistence upon the eternal correctness of revolt precisely renders the subjection of the Monkey King to the dictates of the market and nationhood impossible. It is the refusal of the past to be neatly subsumed into the present, the persistence of an untimely force that disrupts, distorts, and undermines any economy of historical representation. That the protagonist of this game is literally the embodiment of this disruptive force – undermining the painstakingly ordered domos and cosmogony of Chinese folklore – means that any sort of fidelity to the figure of Wukong on the developer Game Science’s part would open the game to a futurity that confounds representation and explodes the framework of the game altogether.
Over the course of the game, Wukong undergoes a metamorphosis: from a fully manipulable character at the mercy of the player’s whims, into a (re)awakened god of vengeance, the memory of nature’s suffering incarnate. The confines of what is otherwise an entirely unremarkable game are placed in parentheses, and the game calls the limits of its own mediality into question. It gestures towards the ‘homeland’ of which Adorno and Horkheimer speak – the terra incognita situated beyond the siren’s song of fantasy, where the historicity of human action is given form. Wukong here becomes the futurity of an ancestral mythological past, unfettered, making war against the myth of the supposed fixity of the present. In doing so, he opens a path beyond the inertia of the game’s staid gameplay towards a virtual space that defies existing categories and coordinates.
The text traces how the game’s invocation of the Monkey King repeatedly brings to light a rogue, transversal element that sabotages the fixity of time, language, law, value and form, bringing each of these orders to ruin and opening a space that lies beyond their reach.
2
Order of Language: Wukong, Sign without Signification (Introductory Preamble on Journey to the West)
At the conclusion of the classic novel Journey to the West,4 Sun Wukong, an irreverent monkey god – who shortly after having been born from a rock in Huaguo Mountain, attempted to launch a one-man insurrection against the heavenly hierarchy in an effort to forcibly enthrone himself at the very apex of creation – prostrates himself before the supreme authority of the Tathagatha Buddha. He humbly accepts the mantle of the Victorious Fighting Buddha upon fulfilling his pilgrimage to obtain scriptures from the Western lands. In what amounts to an Eastern equivalent of The Pilgrim’s Progress meets a proto-bildungsroman, the entire epic revolves around the teleological travails of Wukong the Monkey God: from a birth that appears entirely fortuitous (the rock which gave birth to the monkey god was produced from a chance admixture of celestial energy, yin, that descends from heaven, and chthonic dark energy, yang, emerging from the earth, giving shape to a mineralised womb charged with explosive deific force) to his insurgency against the heavenly court for its refusal to recognise his claim (and the claim of his monkey brethren writ large), to canonisation as recognised immortals, concluding with his progressive indoctrination into the workings of Buddhist theology, defeating demonic avatars of hubristic desire, and the apotheosis of his alchemical quest, the consummate dissolution of the will and initiation into the eightfold path of the Buddha.
Spiritual surrender, tortuously won from a series of trials that serve as signposts in Wukong’s alchemical ascension, earns the very thing that he had attempted to wrest by force at the outset, the glory of official recognition in the immortal register ( 仙籙 ) and certified renown across the cosmos. However, with the extinguishing of the ego, the enjoyment that would entail deification also vanishes because the title does not bestow anything substantive upon its bearer.
As anyone with a passing acquaintance with Buddhist practice knows, one cannot reach Buddhahood through willed aspiration or intention, for the Buddha nature, while ubiquitous throughout creation, is no-thing that the mind can fathom or conceptualise. Once one attains the Buddha nature, the title of Buddhahood itself is a sign that signifies nothing, a terminal non-concept that indicates the inconsequentiality of language. Yet despite the revelation of the esoteric truth of nothingness and an-arché at the heart of heavenly authority, the bureaucratic nature of the heavenly government and the force of its despotic law is not suspended on an ontic level; for however hollow such a title might ring on a metaphysical level, it is only through its authority that Wukong is granted a stay of execution – an imperial reprieve from being deemed a threat to public order. The glory of its light is what bestows being upon Wukong, giving him full actuality and legitimate claim to divinely sanctioned right and personhood.
Wukong, like Odysseus, is an errant sign in desperate search of its place in the significative, onto-theological architecture of the novel (here, it is significant to note that Wukong’s famous cudgel was a foundational pillar literally torn from the architecture of the Dragon King’s place, upsetting the equilibrium of the Four Seas). The title is the sublimation and transfiguration of this itinerant sign into a transparent bearer of sanctified/salvific meaning. Buddhist theology and imperial bureaucracy coincide to create a governmental machine that operates through the pure angelic language of command, a language evacuated of substantive meaning but charged with the full force of the law to administer and dispose, to grant or revoke being. This is what makes such a language both empty and full at once, its fulsome grandiloquence being exactly proportional to its vacuity, a language of the acclamation of glory and pure force.
The political stakes of the entire novel revolve around this mechanism of nomination and a contestation over its constitutional power. Before he takes the name of ‘Wukong’ from his master, the monkey king dares to call himself ‘The Great Sage Equaling Heaven’ ( 齊天大聖 ), becoming an immortal by erasing his name and those of his band of monkeys from the lists of the mortal in the Underworld. Hearing that the palaces in the oceans contain armaments fit for a god, he storms the Dragon King’s manor – before the imperial heavenly court, recognising him as a legitimate threat, dispatches courtiers to subdue him by bestowing an empty title upon him, ‘Keeper of the Heavenly Horses’, a euphemism for celestial stable boy.
Initially placated, the monkey unleashes his wrath upon the gods upon discovery of the effective nullity of his accolade, defeating each of them in turn prior to meeting his match in Erlang-Shen, the three-eyed warrior god, before being ambushed and imprisoned in Laozi’s hexagram crucible. It is this revolt that would later be immortalised in a propagandistic foreshadowing of the Cultural Revolution, the classic 1961 Maoist animated film Uproar In Heaven ( 大鬧天宮 ). Tried before the Buddha, the monkey is tricked and imprisoned once more in a rock at the foot of a mountain.
Five hundred years after these events – so the story goes – the monkey offers to serve Tang Sanzang ( 唐三藏 ) on his pilgrimage to the West in exchange for his freedom. The bodhisattva Guanyin gives the monk a magical golden fillet to be placed on the monkey’s brow, which would constrict whenever the monk recites a mantra. It is here that the monkey is given a name that marks his initiation on the path of penitence, ‘Wukong’ ( 悟空 ), or ‘gnosis of emptiness’ . In this way, this cosmic accident is retroactively given a destiny and a destination: the defiant monkey bearing this name will become gnosis in corpore,5 the recalcitrant flesh will be transubstantiated upon arrival at where he was always meant to be.6 At the conclusion of the novel, having been baptised by the Buddha, Wukong affirms his inauguration into the celestial court and the authority it grants to his speech by consolidating it with a pact, swearing blood brotherhood with the very god that subdued him, Erlang-Shen. By this very act, Wukong performs a sort of amor fati,7 a voluntarist authorisation of the enclosure of his career into a redemptive, predestined narrative arc.
It is no accident, then, that the very first cut scene that opens Black Myth: Wukong, the first AAA game8 from a burgeoning Chinese game industry, involves Wukong desecrating this oath and repeating his mutiny on the celestial court once more. The first instance of actual gameplay is in taking control of Wukong himself in a fight to the death with Erlang-Shen, a fight one will invariably lose, resulting in Wukong being cast down once more into a rock by the Tathagatha Buddha. The circularity of this trajectory is, as we shall discuss, itself significant, and central to the mythological structure that the very title of the game situates at its ontological heart.
It is incidentally also ironic, given the supposed ‘message’ of Journey to the West, that virtually all of the known temples that have been devoted to the worship of the monkey king in Southeast Asia and Taiwan worship him under the name ‘The Great Sage Equaling Heaven’, the illegitimate title he claimed for himself rather than the one he was bequeathed by heaven; in effect, this renders these temples into sites of pagan and sacrilegious worship of a blaspheming usurper. Some have claimed that the title of Victorious Fighting Buddha is shared by another Buddha inducted into the canon of Chinese saints often invoked in rituals of purification of conscience, Yuddhajaya, but that still does not explain why Wukong has been venerated through the centuries under the presumptuous title that he claimed for himself in outright defiance and denial of the gods.
3
Order of Value: Wukong against the Economy
Whatever the case is, it is difficult to deny that the incendiary, magnetic force of the figure of the monkey king lies in his resistance to capture by any existing order of signification. In any case, rebellion has always been the sexiest and most rousing commodity of all – particularly as gamers of the last decade have, for better or worse, imagined themselves to be rebels of one stripe or another, believing that their advocacy for video games as a legitimate art form is inherently subversive. As such, it is very easy to imagine a game about Lucifer’s banishment from heaven, but hardly anybody would find playing Archangel Gabriel in this scenario as being an attractive prospect. It is also banal to remark, however, that this nebulous, larval anti-establishmentarianism, when voided of any concrete ideological coordinates, has a marked tendency in the digital climate of today to drift rightward as an imagined going-against-the-grain of diversity, equality, inclusion, and what some perceive as the dictatorship of ‘wokeness’.
In this climate, a Chinese developer hitching its wagon to the chariot of China’s duplicitous, relentlessly cunning trickster god – the paragon of inviolate/inviolable singularity – is a sure bet from a commercial perspective. In the case of this particular game, rebellion can mean, and has meant, anything to anyone anywhere. To the more nationalistically-inclined, the sheer fact of Black Myth: Wukong existence is a precursor to BRICs nations producing their own games, affirming pride in one’s national cultural heritage (echoing Xi Jinping’s strategic priority of consolidating, disseminating, and transmitting ‘cultural confidence’) while contesting the cultural hegemony of Western or Japanese imports. For Western conservatives, Chinese games and their freedom from political correctness as observed in the West represent the possibility of returning to the ‘old-fashioned fun’ of being able to control buxom, scantily-clad women without being shamed. For foreign-born, ethnically Chinese gamers, Black Myth: Wukong represents a cathartic homecoming. Multiple reviews on the PC gaming platform Steam’s database by users describe the sense of feeling profoundly moved after seeing scenes from a mythical, originary text that they had encountered in one form or another as children growing up remote from the motherland – as though the game opened a wellspring flowing outwards from some ancestral, trans-historical womb, offering a panacea for all the dislocation and bewilderment of growing up estranged from one’s ‘people’.
It would be remiss of me not to mention my own position, insofar as I was born in Canada to parents who had migrated from Hong Kong and had been living in North America for the better part of two decades, and that Journey to the West (alongside the Water Margin 水滸傳 ) was a foundational part of my childhood and adolescence. For my part, I feel bemused, even antipathetic towards such reactions, having witnessed firsthand how this need to identify with an imagined, majoritarian national community in cultural and geopolitical terms can assume either the form of ‘anti-imperialist’ neo-Leninist campism (unconditional support for nation states, from China to Iran and Syria, opposed to the interests of the Western hegemons) or fervor for the expansion of Chinese empire, which in practice amount to the same thing. However diverse the three forms of imagined rebellion outlined in the previous paragraph appear, they all treat the game as a salvo in the service of an identitarian, often nationalised community. Prior to the writing of this essay I had not properly reflected on how curious a sociological phenomenon the release of the game really is, affording as it does an opportunity for Chinese-born millennial tankies,9 Trump-voting gamers, and native Chinese nationalists alike to align under a common cause.
This very fact has caused a paranoiac backlash in the opposite direction on the part of the more ‘progressive’ quarters of the gaming press, anxious to dismiss the merits of a game beloved by the enemy. One prominent gaming outlet devoted considerable space in the review underlining the fact that the game does not feature a single female character in the first two chapters. Given that some of the yaoguai you fight in the first two chapters are demonic bats, snakes, and frogs, it hardly seems too important whether they are gendered male or female to begin with.10 Then there are the multiple screencaps of WeChat updates by the lead programmer at Game Science, Yang Qi, repeatedly likening his anticipation at the prospect of the game’s release to his throbbing member aching for ecstatic release.11 All this, for that said reviewer, was offered as proof of inexcusable barbarity on the part of a team of heteronormative developers from a dictatorial ‘backwater’. Taken together, these are revealing symptoms of the psychopathology of the ‘culture wars’ in which we are regrettably enmeshed, but none of them deal at all with the real matter of the game itself, and none of them truly take up the ways in which Game Science engage with Wukong as an avatar of chaos, or the philosophically sophisticated fashion in which the ontological implications of his defiance is treated.
An Aside on the ‘Ice Age’ of Chinese Gaming and the Game’s Form
It bears reminding here that the very existence of the game itself should not be taken for granted, given how inhospitable the climate for single-player game development in China has been, with a ban on the sale of video gaming consoles across the country from 2000 to 2015. This is emblematic of the state’s previous position on what it regarded to be compulsive, addictive forms of media that could affect the development of school-attending youth. The first AAA release from Chinese shores is not a tentative wading into the treacherous waters of big-budget game development, however; it is a thoroughly polished cultural commodity, boasting perhaps the most marvelously-detailed graphics I have had the pleasure of gawking at across a lifetime of gaming, together with immaculate, bug-free technical performance and, perhaps the most remarkable achievement of all, an inordinate amount of care devoted to the minutiae of the world, its lore and its exposition in both classical Chinese and English, with the poetry of the original language coming through in the measured metre of the English translation.
The format itself is strategic, an action RPG of the ‘soulslike’ variety. In brief, the sub-genre, pioneered by the Japanese cult developer FromSoftware, involves exploring oppressively bleak environments, sprawling with hordes of demonic creatures and crushingly difficult bosses. The notoriety of these games lies in their punishing difficulty, with the combat requiring a precise grasp of the timing required to dodge and parry enemy attacks, as well as an exact feel for the often slow and ungainly rhythm of wielding weaponry.
Most significantly, the choice of this particular subgenre affords Game Science a number of distinct advantages on both the level of form and content. Since ‘soulslike’ games are not narrative-driven, a hallmark is that the storytelling is as obscure as the environments themselves. The allure of the game therefore does not hinge on the need for compelling narrative exposition and development, which in turn means that non-Chinese gamers can dispense entirely with the vast expanse of cultural intertextuality in which the game is enmeshed, engaging exclusively with the immersive fidelity of the hyperreal environments and the intensity of the combat. Such gamers would not feel at all compelled to read the reams of exegetical text hidden in the game’s optional menus or attend to the fractured, aporetic bits of story disclosed in the cut scenes. What Black Myth shares with other ‘soulslike’ games is precisely this cryptic allusiveness that affords an abyssal feeling of depth that is atmospheric and ambient, without requiring the player to properly engage with it to enjoy or even advance in the game. This is what allows the game to circumvent any problems that might arise in translation, allowing the game to, at one and the same time, situate itself as a richly allusive text ensconced in a discursive field that stretches across centuries, while also affording players the choice to approach this arcana with exactly the amount of (in)attention or (dis)regard as they feel comfortable with. At the same time, the very fact that the game is steeped in this history lends the authority of cultural authenticity to the depth of this atmosphere; folkloric ‘Chineseness’ lends a luminous halo to every clearing, marsh, and dune that one finds oneself in.
Correspondingly, the nameless protagonists in ‘soulslike’ games typically have no backstory of their own and do not require one, being but a blank cipher that the player gradually attaches attributes to – in the form of skill points – that advance the protagonist’s skill set (in hand-to-hand combat or ranged magic) in one direction or another. The ‘build’ of the protagonist becomes purely and simply a customised reflection of the player’s preferences. Fittingly, the character that the player controls throughout the game, then, is not in fact Wukong, but the ‘Destined One’, a devotee of a Huaguo Mountain cult intent on resurrecting the Monkey God by wresting six relics from a host of demon kings scattered across four worlds in the game, representing the six aspects of Wukong’s being (Craving Eyes, Fuming Ears, Hubris Nose, Envious Tongue, Grievous Body, and the ‘Free Mind’, which can only be secured after finally defeating Erlang for the true ending). Tellingly, the name of each relic indicates that the senses intrinsically tether the suffering, sentient being to the world of transient attachments, all except the free mind which attains liberation through gnosis.12
4
Order of Law: Wukong, Vengeance in Defiance of Justice
Significantly, the Destined One is an entirely mute spectator of the events that unfold throughout the game. While he wields a cudgel, shapeshifts, and moves with the effortless ease of the Wukong of our imagination, he has none of the insolence, functioning as a tabula rasa upon which the will of fate is written. He patiently heeds the sages who gradually disclose the import of his quest to him, always listening, not once speaking. Throughout the game, it is as though one is a student being indoctrinated in the basic rubric of metaphysics and Buddhist-Daoist theology that governs the utterly opaque world that you are traversing.
This order of things is a cosmology governed by hierarchy, station, and proportion, an economy where each genus and species observes its limits and certainly does not engage in miscegeny. As a sage puts it in the opening chapter: ‘Men, beasts, Buddhas, yaoguai,13 each bears a distinct root from birth, superior and inferior. None should disturb what’s decided.’ One is made to understand that the yaoguai that you fight are incarnations of outsized desires and undead blind drives that have consumed them whole, compelling them to demonic repetition for eternity. Defeat of each yaoguai yields a long tale of their slow descent into monstrosity (which you can peruse at your leisure in the game’s user interface). The overriding feeling that one gets playing the game as you make agonising progress through these beautiful but beautifully sterile worlds, arrested in a purgatorial state without end, without hope of redemption or reprieve – overgrown marshes and algae-choked swamps, desert steppe, glacial tundras, volcanic wastelands – is one of being imprisoned in a world of blind compulsion, the pitiless world of unregenerate nature in lamentation, as in Walter Benjamin’s analyses of German tragic drama. It is this which points towards a possible ontological interpretation of the title of the game (‘Black Myth’) because the world of the game is precisely the realm of myth, the space of an inchoate, a-historical miasma of magic, the frog awaiting the beneficent kiss of the princess (an especially salient metaphor given one of the bosses you must vanquish is a frog yaoguai awaiting the deliverance of a killing blow).
In this world, extinction is mercy, and the Destined One is the compassionate bringer of deliverance, releasing the yaoguai from the stranglehold of their native obsession, whether this is idolatry (some demon kings found their own cult, pretending to be Buddhas leading the devout to a millenarian paradise), greed (straying from the path of the Buddha developing a fatal fetish for some shiny bauble objet a14 or piece of clothing) or earthly love (the path of Zhu Bajie15 himself, the former celestial general rose above his station daring to fall in love with Chang’e, the moon goddess, and who continually forsakes the path of Buddhahood by playing the infernal part of Don Juan, willfully falling for fairies, spirits, and mortal women, thereby transgressing the ontological taboo of miscegenation).
All of this comes to a climactic head in the fourth world, when the Destined One confronts the Bull Demon King, former sworn brother of Wukong. After besting his wife Princess Iron Fan and seizing the fan once more, the cut scene which concludes this chapter revisits the defeat of the Bull King in the original novel, with Nezha and Devaraja Li subduing him, his son and his wife by raining fire and thunder from the heavens, leaving the familial home a heap of ash. With the Bull King laid low and reduced to a bloodied heap on the floor, Wukong caresses the snout of the sworn brother that he was commanded by divine edict to betray, telling him: ‘Find a master and walk the path of the righteous. Don’t you see that this is the only path left for us now?’ All that wretches like Wukong and the Bull King can do is obey to survive. While Wukong is speaking these words, flame continues to rain from the sky and Zhu Bajie triumphantly informs his brother that he has struck the Bull King’s helpless wife with a swing of his rake. Hearing this, the Bull King unleashes a howl of lamentation and is struck down by a wrathful Nezha. Then, Wukong remarks bitterly that he, too, will not find release, for he bears the mark of irredeemable sin, and no amount of performative surrender will gain him and the Bull King the peace that they seek: ‘The way I saw it, with enough merit and a position before a Buddha, they would leave me be, and you as well. Now I see, for someone like me, staying alive is itself a transgression.’ That is, Wukong’s piety-cum-penitence must be proven ceaselessly in acts of imperial violence which abase himself through the abasement of others. Absolution is never complete, and Wukong’s destiny is instead an eternity of a debt of irrevocable guilt that can never be paid in full. It is here that he comes into agonising awareness of his kinship with unregenerate creation itself, steeped in sin and subject to unremitting punishment, inflicted by the hand of executioners like himself desperate to escape karmic retribution.
As such, the game offers two solutions towards the problem of redemption with the game’s two endings. As the Destined One journeys towards the rock in which Wukong is imprisoned, intent on awakening him through the restoration of five of his six senses, the Sage from the opening chapter delivers a precis on the precepts of the game’s cosmology:
‘For ages, countless gifted souls have walked this earth. Yet of them, how few have forged eternal greatness? Do you know why?’
‘Injustice?’
‘Ha, never has it been just!’
‘Misfortune?’
‘Fortune is simply humility in the mighty . . . gifted they may be, but strive they not; content with little and lost in lust, seek the ease yet crave the renown, they yearn for freedom yet aspire to Buddhahood, they always want both, and yet nobody can and nobody should. Such was the folly of Sun Wukong. Destiny’s favour calls for the resolution to sever all desires.’ Wukong is errant, and for that errancy he shall be punished in eternity, however many times he rises up he will be cast low upon the killing floor of the earth.
In the game’s supposed final set piece, the Destined One faces off against a re-animated vessel of Wukong, and besting the demonic aspect of himself, kneels before the Sage to receive the golden fillet, the headband which connotes surrender of the will and submission before his vocation as a servant of the imperial court. The Destined One once more assumes the role of heaven’s sword of wrath, accepting his place among the gods as a mere executioner. This is the first solution that the game offers to dealing with the ineliminable mark of sin that Wukong bears: that of resignation.
The secret ending, however, adds a Hegelian-Benjaminian twist that comprehensively subverts this conclusion, fully restoring the Monkey King of our childhood in all of his exultant willfulness. By fulfilling certain requirements in the game, there is an ultimate boss fight after defeating Wukong’s fleshly vessel. When one finally defeats Erlang, the Destined One discovers that the final (and most integral) item, the Free Mind of Wukong, is hidden in Erlang’s third eye. The Free Mind in fact contains the entirety of Wukong’s memory, lacerated by the wounds of all the suffering that he has borne slaying yaoguai, bearing the insupportable weight of the mercy that he carries for creatures ground beneath the bludgeon of heaven. This epiphany, recovering in a flash the whole of this memory in all of its explosive emotional excess, transforms the Destined One once more into Wukong, reborn as the messianic avenging angel of suffering creation, the one who will shatter the false eternity of myth and cast it into the furnace of time and history. This is the true meaning of the Victorious Fighting Buddha, a sort of self-authorised synthesis of bodhisattva and Nietzsche’s call to be true to the earth: ‘And so ends the last tale of Sun Wukong, a hero who treasured freedom above all else. Buddhahood he attained yes, but cumbersome he found the Celestial Rules, for he yearned to come back and revel in the simple joys with us.’ The blackness affirmed in the title of the game, then, is the blackness of the abyss (and Agamben’s potentiality), the generic/genetic black void of the virtual from which possibility emerges, blackening the fixity of myth and returning it to the chaos and becoming of time. Wukong ( 悟空 ), or the ‘gnosis of the void’, is not the acceptance of sterility and predestination of the first ending, but an opening to the emptiness of presence, hollowing out the now and reckoning with the spectres of the past so that the indeterminacy of the future may come.
5
Order of Form: Wukong in Revolt against Representation
In the final scene of the game, Wukong returns to Huaguo Mountain and delivers a speech before his monkey brethren: ‘Bottoms up, brothers! One final feast before we crash the Celestial Palace!’ In the final shot, Wukong prepares to stride forth beyond the waterfall curtain that serves as the entrance to his royal cave, and turns back to address his brothers, but the shot that we see is a cavern stained with blood and littered with bloodied halberds and scimitars. This shot renders the ending of the game ambiguous – is this assault upon heaven ultimately futile and waged by Wukong himself in full knowledge of its futility? In which case are we returned to the space of myth, with Wukong being the eternally antagonistic force of unrest, the Manichean Yang that balances the Yin and merely provides balance – rather than the bearer of a messianic violence that will rupture the bases of this mythic cosmology? It is here that the game gestures reflexively towards its own mediality as a game, since the Destined One and Wukong have effectively been sport in a cosmic game, subject to the constraints of an established design with its attendant rules, laws, and circumscriptions, and this fact is literally dramatised here by being transposed into the form of a soulslike game with a compulsively addictive gameplay loop.
The game effectively makes the player aware that the continued playing of a game invariably involves endorsement and affirmation of the economy of its political grammar: start the game again, and you are again thrust into a world where the accursed are forever crying for deliverance from the cycle of rebirth. The Destined One is compelled, in vain, to find himself through the eternal labour of the negative, exacting unceasing violence upon that part of himself and others that cannot be accommodated by the established order. In the end, the question remains as to whether Wukong is condemned to be a Sisyphean cosmic clown, entrapped within the mythic confines of this cosmic game ad aeternitatem, or a bearer of the novelty of revolutionary time, breaking entirely out of the spatio-temporal frame of the game altogether and gesturing towards Nietzsche’s ‘divine table of the earth’, the open, utterly contingent virtual field where agencies of chaos conspire and precipitate the roll of the dice that is historic transformation. Here, the singular intransigence of Wukong from capture explodes the representational space of the game itself and reveals its paucity as a representative medium, pointing towards that which cannot be represented or claimed as the ontological property of a nation or an ethnos. Wukong is the ineluctable, irreducible excess in ‘our’ history, exposing a transversal remainder beyond any state-sanctioned codification of identity or belonging.
It is this gesture towards an openness outside of the game itself that, to my mind, Black Myth: Wukong, from a serviceable if forgettable commodity with cultural trimmings to a provocative/evocative commentary on the political and ontological constellations that surround it. It also raises questions about the possibilities – and limitations – of video games as a means of engagement with such questions, being essentially commodities intensely beholden to the volatile caprices of funding, publicity, and turbulent market expectation16 across years-long production cycles.
Few games have the luxury of having one’s cake and eating it, as Black Myth: Wukong does: the conditions of its release having virtually guaranteed its commercial success, its open-ended form surreptitiously smuggles what might be called subversive contraband content into a perfectly unassuming Trojan horse of a chassis. It functions perfectly well as a ‘good’ game for the global market without compelling most consumers to engage (even minimally) with the more esoteric aspects of its textuality. Yet the fact that the game manages to operate as a commentary on perhaps the ur-text of Chinese mythology, fashioning a gnostic allegory that sets the genetic/generic time of the mythological against the mythic present, as well as being a successful commodity that ticks all the boxes of commercially viable games, is entirely to its credit.
Some of the resonances that the game produces might ultimately be entirely inadvertent, especially for partisan gamers such as myself, but such are the risks that a developer assumes when invoking a trickster god. Whatever the case, this essay suggests that a game’s ‘politics’ might lie beyond rudimentary questions of representation. As a means by which the moorings that constitute the fixity of nation, people, and state can be exposed and rendered inoperative, they continue to be one of the most powerful means by which we can mobilise cultural resources and affects for the purposes of creating new cartographies and mythologies in defiance of the imperatives of the present.