PERSPECTIVE
Trigger Happy
Shoot first, ask questions later
STEVEN POOLE
What does it mean to be human? Plenty of fat nonfiction books profess to hold the answer. It is to believe in what is only imaginary; it is to cook one’s food; it is to use language, or maybe contraception. The huge audience for such tomes – an old genre, but one rejuvenated in our time by the success of Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens (2014) – speaks to a deep identity hunger in the modern alienated human of late capitalism. Who am I? Who are we, shuffling around on this planet? How does any of it make any sense?
Perhaps what it really means to be human is simply to love Goldy and to hate the Others. That, at least, is the bleak reading one is drawn to at points deep within Humanity, the miraculous and beautiful new game from Yugo Nakamura’s Tha and Enhance. To call one’s game Humanity is a swaggering act of creative hubris; the miracle is that after playing it the title seems entirely justified.