I was going to bring this up in class, but it’s a bit long, so I decided to make a post about it here with the professor’s permission. There were two interesting topics I wanted to cover: pirates and art. For those who are interested in playing the following games, there’s spoilers ahead: Persona 5 (and P5 Royal) and Detroit: Become Human. This doesn’t count towards the grade, it’s just me wanting to ramble about some things.

Pirates are one of the many dangers of the seas, but interestingly they’re not from them. An amazing point was brought up in class that pirates essentially practiced diversity long before everyone else followed, as a sort of rebellious act against the laws that wrong them. I’ve played Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag and the game showed how different the pirates were compared to politicians, religious groups, and other society members. Okay, but what does that have to do with this class? There’s a minigame I love and hate at the same time and it’s harpooning. One of the animals you can hunt are whales, which are the most difficult animals to get materials from. In fact, it’s because of this experience that my curiosity of Moby Dick increased. If it’s already so difficult to hunt regular whales (based on how the player character was behaving), Moby Dick, or Mocha Dick, must have been more than twice perilous.

“Life imitates art more than art imitates life.” The first few references I thought of were Persona 5, Detroit: Become Human, and Dead By Daylight’s “The Artist.” These don’t relate to Moby Dick or whales at all, but I wanted to share how I saw this quote in three different video games.

Persona 5 had a segment about the morals of artists as a conflict. One of the characters, Yusuke, had ambitious goals, but he was exploited by a famous artist known as Madarame, who only saw art as profit. Madarame in-game was known to be the greatest artist at the time. But this was a lie: when Yusuke opened his eyes to the truth, he said Madarame “knew nothing about art.” Madarame stole countless people’s works and depleted their artistic drives. He showed their efforts in a museum, claiming all of it was drawn by himself. The biggest plot device of interest was the painting of Yusuke’s mother, who had died before Yusuke could remember her face. Madarame not only used Yusuke’s artworks, but even tampered with his mother’s painting before releasing it for the world to see. It was about herself holding a baby, her son Yusuke. But Madarame erased the baby from the painting, making the woman’s expression mysterious. As an artist (writer) myself, I could see myself in Yusuke as a little boy who was afraid of trusting anyone with my creations. How this relates to the aforementioned quote: it’s the content in the paintings. Yusuke once drew one that depicted a dark abyss and an eye in the middle. It symbolized his despair under Madarame’s mentorship, how it hurt to see people think his efforts were orchestrated by someone else. These two paintings effectively show that art is another way to show life.

One of Detroit: Become Human’s first chapters started with an android named Markus. He worked under an artist named Carl Manfred, but unlike Madarame, Manfred was a kind soul who taught Markus how to be a human, and art was one of those mediums. When Manfred asked Markus to paint, he said “painting is not about replicating the world. It’s about interpreting it, improving on it, showing something you see.” The player then chooses two sets of themes, and Markus draws a painting based on what the player chose. In all of these paintings, Markus showed artistic skill, but the content of the paintings themselves depict emotions, as if life itself finally had tangible meaning.

Finally, a character from Dead By Daylight known as the Artist, real name Carmina Mora, is a tragic heroine who used her experiences for black-in surrealist art. She also exposed a corrupt company by painting a mural, depicting them as a grim reaper “harvesting the fields of Chilean families.” This also slightly reflect Yusuke’s story, as both wanted to escape and expose the people who exploit others for personal gain. It represents the quote because the lives they lived were represented in art, which encapsulates the meaning.