The Many Ways of Composing Memory: Why Games Take Up Memory — When the Past Was Around

What is the most universal, most popular subject of stories the world over? Probably the word that has just come to mind: love. Love is the commonest subject of stories, and its forms are accordingly many. And since stories of love abound, stories about the place love leaves behind are bound to be just as popular and universal. We commonly call it parting.

Parting is the place love has passed through. Some, after parting, wish to erase the memory of that love forever; others endlessly retrace, in memory, what that love was like. Strangely, those memories always remain accompanied by feeling. So they are imprecise, and may differ from fact. Perhaps all memory is alive precisely because it has not been datafied. This must be why the emotion called love and memory always surface together. Memory is not data; it is imprecise; and because it comes with feeling, it finally becomes remembrance.

What happens when such memory and feeling are made into a game? Apart from any designer’s intent, have you ever imagined what a game that structures love and parting as memory would look like? When the Past Was Around, made in 2020 by Mojiken Studio, is a game in which the player, standing in the protagonist’s place, traces the remains of love and parting, with memory and feeling at its center. Play proceeds through simple, escape-room-style puzzles without a single line of dialogue, yet this form — climbing back up through memory, recalling the decisive moments of a relationship — makes for a finely wrought work that unravels the entanglement of feeling, memory, and relation with great delicacy. It is not simply a gamification of memory; it is a work that shows how memory takes digital concrete form, and how that returns again to each player’s own memory and remembrance.

The Restructuring of Memory, Followed through Play

The game opens with the story of its protagonist, Eda. It is distinctive in having no dialogue — the story advances on melody — and play begins in earnest at the scene of meeting a shadow-like being locked in a golden cage. Free him from the cage and a door opens; the feathers collected in solving puzzles gradually reveal who he is. The player, in other words, is brought face to face with the memories and feelings Eda has hidden away, and plays out how those memories are to be remembered. With its short playtime (about two hours) and simple puzzles of key-finding and code-breaking, the game is not especially difficult. It is, in truth, the story of Eda retracing the memories of love and parting to overcome the pain of loss after her lover’s death.

The player experiences Eda’s memory through space. Solving puzzles gathers feathers, through which we see Eda and her late lover, Owl, meet, go out together, and — musicians both — resonate with and remember one another. Perhaps because the two are musicians, music threads the game’s central narrative: repairing a music box, playing notes in the right order — most of the puzzles are bound to music.

Within this narrative carried by music, Owl — the beloved locked in the golden cage — is somehow not quite right. The early rooms are bright and cozy and their puzzles very easy, but as the game moves into other spaces — that is, as it draws nearer the present — it darkens. The play itself becomes a play of grief and pain: objects hurled, flowerpots smashed. With the lover’s death, at last, the player comes face to face with the fact that the memory of love was a parting. Only then do players understand why Eda locked Owl — her lover — inside the golden cage. The memory caged to evade pain and grief, this game makes us witness directly, reconstructing it and facing it again. Only so can the next page be turned.

Why We Play Memory

Henri Bergson distinguished memory into the whole of the past, preserved virtually, and the image-memories summoned by the needs of the present. Parting is a process in which the object must be gradually released — sent away from oneself. In Freud’s language this is normal mourning; fail to pass through it, and one becomes trapped in the state of incorporating the object into the ego without letting it go — in melancholia.

This game lets us know, through play, what it is to be unable to receive loss as loss. Perhaps it is a consolation for those who have lost, and a guidebook to how one might separate the lost object from oneself. Eda quietly shows us that letting go is something made from remembering.

Players send Eda’s memories off by recalling them one by one, and in the end Eda detaches Owl — the object of mourning fused with her — from herself and faces her whole self. A game that begins from the universal narrative of love and parting becomes, through play, the lived experience of one person’s process of mourning. The concept of looking into private memory and carrying mourning forward through play is also an operation that makes the gamer recognize that accepting loss is never something “natural.”

Traditionally, mourning has been regarded as an eminently passive process of enduring the passage of time. The pain of loss will fade as time passes, so what matters is to endure — that was the prescribed resolution. In this game, however, loss and mourning are performed through play. Mourning, too, can be a labor and a practice. Loss is never healed naturally; it demands conscious, repeated work.

Gamers undo locks, open drawers, gather feathers, and meet memory. Facing it, Eda learns that holding the past captive in a cage is no way to move forward. Eda had, moreover, given up music after the death of the lover who was her companion. In the fourth chapter she tries to play, alone, the song that holds their memories; when the notes will not come, she hurls her instrument to the floor. In the final chapter Eda does not simply grieve the past: she faces why she was engulfed by grief, how after her lover’s death she lost not only him but herself, and how clinging to the past has been shaking her present life entire. Eda’s personal memory, through play, becomes a shared one, lets us live the process of mourning vicariously, and comes to work as a communal consolation for a universal grief.

Digitized Information, the Act of Remembering

What the game provides are datafied fragments; recalling love or loss upon seeing them is entirely the player’s own doing. By the same token, clearing Eda’s memories means Eda’s mourning has ended — not the player’s. That may rather be the moment the player’s own memory, and mourning, begins. Perhaps, after the credits end and the screen goes dark, we will find ourselves recalling the golden cage of memories we have kept in our own hearts. Paradoxically, at the moment the game’s structure of memory reaches completion, real remembering may begin in the human head beyond the screen.

We digitize, on the whole, a great many memories. Memories within countless social media accumulate as photographs, video, audio recordings. Yet recalling those masses of datafied photographs and clips voluntarily — or feelingly — has become, if anything, harder. The mere fact that memory is already stored in the digital has numbed the process of calling those days back. The digital can store memory with limitless precision, but that is information, not remembrance. Human experience may be alive precisely because it never reaches completion.

Indeed, the lover is remembered in Eda’s memory as an owl precisely because he is not a stored photograph or datum. To her, Owl was a lover, and a beautiful bird who kept watch over the night. The aesthetic of remembering that When the Past Was Around extends may be just this: the memory of the past always makes its appeal together with a person’s own, subjective feeling. To play a game is not merely to receive a digitized game world; it is to retrace what belongs to the human alone, made in the playing. Within precisely engineered pixels and code, the player — the human — summons feelings of their own that cannot be coded. To play may be to remember; and remembering, in the end, may be something only humans can do.