Near the end of Bokura’s Planet, two people stand together laughing. They are convicts, strangers thrown together by a crashed spaceship on an alien planet. But by the time they reach that moment of laughter, they have carried each other through everything. They have protected each other, and found something neither of them expected to find: a person they care about. And then, minutes later, one of them is dead, and the other’s been taken over by a parasite that entered through his open, grieving mouth.
The grief: the most private, interior thing a person can feel, is what leaves him open.
This is a game about what it costs to love someone you can never fully know.
Nagel wrote an essay asking a strange question: what is it like to be a bat? His answer was that we simply cannot know. To know what it’s like to be a bat, you would have to be the bat. You can observe everything about another creature from the outside and still have no access to their inner experience. The gap between one mind and another is not a problem that effort or intelligence can solve. It is just the condition of being a separate conscious being.
Bokura’s Planet understands this. In fact, it builds the argument into the game itself. The two players each receive information the other cannot see. The dad’s secret conversations, where a computer explains his rewritten memory, his mission to make sure the son gets home even if it means dying, are completely muted to the son. The son’s relationship with the parasite-child living inside him, the tenderness he feels toward this creature the dad doesn’t even know exists, is invisible to the dad. You are not watching two characters fail to communicate. You are one of those characters, and the wall between you and the other player is built into the game itself. You feel the gap rather than just observing it.
But here is where the game goes further than Nagel. Nagel describes the gap and stops there. He says: this is the condition of consciousness, minds are private, the end. What he doesn’t ask is what happens when people have to live inside that condition. What happens when you need someone, or love someone, and the gap is still there?
What the dad and son do, what they have to do, is act as if the gap doesn’t exist. The dad treats the son as his real son, not as a mission objective, because that is the only way to actually be there for him. The son trusts the dad completely, confides in him, leans on him, even though there is an entire secret life inside him that the dad will never see. They build something real across a gap that never actually closes. And it works. The warmth between them by the end of the game is genuine. When the dad says that working together with the son is the one thing in his life he is proud of, you believe him. When the son says he wouldn’t have made it without the dad, you believe that too.
The tragedy is not that they failed to connect. The tragedy is that they succeeded, and that the connection required a kind of openness, a willingness to be vulnerable, that could not be switched off when danger appeared.
When the son dies saving the dad, the dad’s grief is total and unguarded. It breaks him open. And the parasite, which has been waiting, enters through his mouth while he is crying. The most interior experience a person can have, grief for someone they loved, becomes the exact point of entry for something that destroys him. His love was real. His grief was real. And both of those real things were built on the necessary fiction that he knew his son, that the gap between them had been crossed.
He was not wrong to love the son. He could not have done otherwise and still been the person he became. But love requires acting as if you know someone from the inside, and you never do. The dad held the son as if he understood everything about him, and inside the son, invisible, was a parasite-child the son had been raising in secret. Two people, each carrying a whole interior world the other could never see, loving each other across a gap that was always there.
Nagel’s essay ends with a kind of resignation: the gap is real, we should take it seriously, and we currently have no way to bridge it. Bokura’s Planet ends with something harder than resignation. It ends with the suggestion that the gap doesn’t stop us from loving each other, it just means that loving each other is always, in some way, an act of faith made without full information. And that faith, that necessary pretense of closeness, is where we are most ourselves, and most exposed.
That is what it costs to cross a gap that cannot be crossed.
