Reworking Folk (Horror) Traditions for the Anthropocene in Ice-Pick Lodge’s Pathologic (2006) and Pathologic 2 (2019)
Delivered at 'Folk Horror in the 21st Century' at Falmouth University, 2019
When I was 21, at the end of my undergraduate degree at the University of York, a combination of OCD and poor time management skills led me to stay awake for three days straight without sleep. During the third day I no longer perceived myself as having freewill. Superficially I was able to function normally – walking down stairs; eating food; going to the bathroom – but I was disassociated from these experiences, watching myself as though on autopilot. This profoundly uncanny experience – the daily routines around my family home having become unheimlich – could also be likened to a sense of déjà vu, recalling memories of watching my brother sleepwalk as a child. In these moments, my brother appeared like an automaton, chanting incomprehensible phrases or sequences of numbers as though to a pre-ordained script. But now, in this moment, I felt as though I were the automaton, the daily surface reality of "free will" revealed as a sham. The only time I have had a comparable experience was during an episode of temporary psychosis. Losing any sense of self, I found myself locked into a thought loop, walking and rewalking down the same corridor, seemingly trapped eternally out-of-joint from time. Both experiences felt like being the playable character in a videogame, but not the player.
Pathologic, or Mor. Utopiya in the original Russian, is a plague simulation game within the survival horror genre developed by independent games studio Ice-Pick Lodge and released in 2004 to critical acclaim across the Russian gaming press, receiving the award for 'Best Russian Game of the Year' from Games Life and 'The Most Non-standard Game' award at the Russian Game Development Conference 2005 (pathologic-game.com, 2008). The story of the game concerns three healers who arrive in an alternate universe Russian town in the Eurasian Steppe. At the start of the first day in the town you are informed through narration and a message on the screen that “after twelve days, the game ends”. In-game hours correspond to approximately twenty minutes, though time passes significantly faster when your character is sleeping. As one of the three healers it is your task to save the town from an epidemic of “the sand plague”, which threatens to kill all of the town’s
inhabitants.
Pathologic is seemingly set sometime between 1900 and 1915, judging by the signs of modernity, such as the presence of Webley-Fosbery Automatic revolvers and
armored locomotive trains, as well as the pre-Revolutionary storyline.⁽¹⁾ Furthermore, Russian Steam-user 'thotamon' (2019) has observed superficial similarities between the events of the game and those of the Great Manchurian Plague of 1910-1911. With regards to location, Pathologic’s promotional materials and the game itself refer repeatedly to “the Steppe”, however the exact location of the Town-on-Gorkhon is imprecise, even hybridized, since the level of precipitation (which is regular) suggests a Northern-Westerly location, while the fact that the language of the nomadic peoples of the game draws heavily from Mongolian suggests a more Southern Siberian setting, East of the Ural Mountains, perhaps upon the Mongolian border. This reading is strengthened by my personal correspondence (July 2019) with Nikolay Dybowski, founder of Ice-Pick Lodge and lead writer of Pathologic, in which he informed me that Mongolian, Buryat and Siberian folklore and mythology had a significant impact upon his original conception of the game.
The difficulty of placing the location of Pathologic with any precision and the anachronistic, even heterogeneous, elements of its setting makes the Town-on-Gorkon compatible with Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, a space that is at once "no space" and a hybrid combination of many spaces. In their paper which theorizes childhood subjectivity as a form of heterotopia, Chang-Kredl and Wilkie (2016) describe heterotopia as “a site that juxtaposes incompatible spaces” (p. 308). Indeed, children’s play has been linked to the concept of heterotopia from Foucault’s earliest theorization during a radio broadcast in 1966 on the theme of literature and utopia where, to quote Peter Johnson (2006, p. 76), “his opening illustrations of the concept refer to various children’s imaginative games, mentioning tents and dens in gardens as well as all the games played on or under the covers of the parents’ bed. The children’s inventive play produces a different space that at the same time mirrors what is around them.” In a paper from 2018 which considered a playground quarry in Ann Turner’s 1988 film Celia as a heterotopia, I provided the example of the child’s game where the floor of a room or the tarmac of a playground becomes lava (p. 148). From an adult’s perspective, the floor or the tarmac is real, while its state as lava is imaginary. For the child, the commonsense world of "reality" is suspended so that the tarmac or carpet both is and is not lava simultaneously, existing in this liminal state for the duration of the game. We might relate this to Melanie Klein’s concept of child’s play as an extension of “phantasy” (1952), in which somatic experiences of the infant’s body are not differentiated from the external objects of the world (melanie-klein-trust.org.uk, 2019). However, we should also allow for the possibility that such metonymic playfulness does not arise primarily from the individual unconsciousness, but from the material world itself. Tim Hwang (2018), for example, describes how some children’s folk games, such as "the floor is lava", may have their ecotypic origins in shared physical spaces rather than social interactions. He writes of “[t]he presence of games lurking within the penumbra of physical architecture and made manifest by the activity of play” (p.16).
About two-thirds into Pathologic’s runtime it is revealed that the Town-on-Gorkon is, at a secondary level of reality, a sandcastle built by two children with the deliciously "folk horror" names 'Barley' and 'Mushroom' (and I think it is no coincidence that these names are also those of a fermented grass distilled into an intoxicant and a fungi that can contain various psychedelic compounds). The Town as a structure made of sand is "real" from this level of external reality, but the Town as a living organism composed of hundreds of non-playable characters and the three playable characters (occupied by the player at yet another step of reality up) is now revealed, from our perspective as a rational adult gamer, to just be an imaginary children’s game. A certain stagey, almost uncanny quality of Pathologic, due in reality to the graphical limitations of 2005, is now ironically naturalized as being "more real" than photorealistic fidelity would have been. Many non-playable characters are clones with the same model and skin? Well, of course, just as toys off a production line are! However, any depth of revelation the player experiences at this moment quickly dissipates with the further realization of the revelation’s ontological flatness. After all, surely we always already knew we were playing a game on a laptop or desktop computer, requiring us to suspend disbelief as we treated an imaginary location as though real, right?
At the diegetic level of the game’s world-within-a-world where we spend most of our play time (what might be referred to as the hypodiegetic level) the Town-on-Gorkon is divided into three zones (the number three being a recurring motif and structuring device in Pathologic). The Eastern part of town, the 'Earth Quarter', comprises districts known as 'The Skinners', 'The Hindquarters' and 'The Crude Sprawl', where the Abattoir slaughterhouse, hub of the town’s industry, squats. The middle part of town, sat between the Guzzle and Gullet tributaries of the Gorkhon River, is called the 'Knots Quarter' and includes the so-called "backbone" of the town in the form of its Town Hall and, furthermore, its train station, from where the plague-stricken town would be evacuated late in the game if not for a military blockade. Finally, the Western quarter, 'The Stone Gullet', might be considered the "head" of the town and includes the Polyhedron, an architecturally impossible structure at the town’s edge that resembles a geometric hornets’ nest with a metallic stem that punctures deep into the earth, allowing it to stand upright.
Quentin Smith, writing for Rock, Paper, Shotgun in 2008, divides his review of the game into three parts, entitled: 'The Body', 'The Mind' and 'The Soul'. Knowingly or unknowingly, this tripartite structure reflects not only the Town’s three districts, but also the split allegiances and concerns of the game’s three playable healer characters:
'The Mind', corresponds to the scientific Bachelor, Daniil Dankovsky, who takes lodgings in the 'Stone Gullet' at the head of the town. He is an expert in Thanatology investigating the elimination and reversal of death, with his face to the future, a modernizer through-and-though.
'The Body' corresponds to the shamanistic Haruspix, Artemiy Burakh, allied to the past and tradition and vested – in the taxonomy of the game’s universe – with the symbolic authority to "read the lines", which allows him to perform autopsies upon corpses and interpret their entrails.
Thirdly and finally, 'The Soul' finds its equivalent in the Changeling, Klara, a miracleworker born from the steppe itself, who, notably, first appears in the graveyard outside of the town proper. Klara transcends the empirical conception of time held by Dankovsky, who is forwards-looking, and the metaphysical, but fundamentally linear relationship to time held by Burakh, who is backwards-looking, through her adherence to faith; which, I would argue, addresses itself to the noumenal world in which time stands revealed as subjective intuition rather than an objective phenomenon.⁽²⁾
These three playable characters in their relationships to time might in turn be mapped onto the three-part split the Buryat – the Mongolic people upon whom the town’s folklaw practitioners are based – identify within the social world, the spirit world and the souls of men (Krader, 1954, p.326). To quote Lawrence Krader, after Podgorbunskiy: “Man is conceived as being composed of three parts: the body, beye, i.e., the physical organism of man; amin, the breath and life-principle resident in the living organism; and hünehen, the soul of man” (Krader, p.327, in reference to Podgorbunskiy, 1891, p.18). According to this schema, the Haruspix is devoted to the physical organism of man; the Bachelor seeks to uncover the hidden principle that governs life; while the Changeling is a manifestation of the soul. So, once again, as per Smith’s tripartite review, we arrive at a split between the Body, the Mind and the Soul.
Finally, the three varying solutions each character arrives upon exemplify their different relationships to time. In the Bachelor’s ending, you decide to sacrifice the Town and its Steppe culture, for the sake of the utopian future promised by The Polyhedron, shelling the former to the ground and using the latter as the basis for a new society. In the Haruspex’s ending, you decide to raze The Polyhedron in order to preserve the Town and its culture, reaffirming its weakened relations with the natives of the Steppe and their folk customs from which the town’s industry developed and then deviated. The Devotress’ ending is far more enigmatic, but seems to negate both the past renewed and preserved by the Haruspex, and the future envisioned by the Bachelor, instead requiring certain marked non-playable characters to sacrifice themselves in a leap of faith which allows the town to continue in what seems to be a timeless perpetuity.
To briefly explain these three different endings, I will quote from a significantly truncated version of the pivotal moment of Quentin Smith’s 'Butchering Pathologic' article. He starts by describing a moment two thirds through the game in which you press the 'M' button to bring up the map and are instead confronted with an anatomical diagram of an aurochs bull:
First, you see that […] district nicknames actually apply to the parts of the animal. You see the spine, the veins, the heart and the neck, and more besides. You see that the Aviary is the kidneys, the Abattoir is the bowels, the train yard is the genitals. At last you understand what the town is, and it’s all the worse because you’re trapped inside it. And because you understand the town, at last you can understand the disease […] It’s the earth that’s fallen ill […] All flesh is earth, all earth is flesh. As the Haruspicus you eventually get access to the Abattoir. There you find out that whenever a cow is killed, the blood is always drained into the same hungry pit where it slips away into the darkness. You figure out that over thousands of years the blood has pooled beneath the town, and now it’s that same blood that’s become infected […] As the Bachelor you talk to the architect who designed the Polyhedron, and you learn what allows the Escher-like structure to stand. The spike at its base pierces deep, deep into the earth, where the bull’s brain is on your map. It’s that wound that’s gotten infected.
So, to clarify, like the floor-as-lava in the children’s game, the Town-on-Gorkhon is metonymically, not metaphorically, Bos Turokh, the "World Bull" at the heart of the creation myth of steppe culture in the game.⁽³⁾ Metaphor divides the world; metonym unites it. In relating this moment in the game to the folklaw of the Siberian Buryat, I am less interested in the “cult of the bull” as elucidated by Caroline Humphrey (1973), most famously encountered in the myth of the Buryats’ ancestral bull deity BuxaNoyon (pp. 16-18), than I am in what Humphrey, after Levi-Strauss, describes as an underlying structure (p. 15) of Buryat culture and society (p. 16), which is the use of linguistic or pictorial parallelism to draw into being equivalences between human and non-human actants.⁽⁴⁾ Humphrey explain this with reference to a traditional Buryat wedding speech that makes an equivalence between the figure of the groom and the bull-ancestor: “The structural arrangement of these items in the ritual language becomes an objective, meaningful model for the contemplation of the actors, and here it is irrelevant that it may say things that are manifestly unreal: for example, that the subjects draws his umbilical cord from heaven. The point of the wedding speech lies in the fact that, by ritual=linguistic means, the bridegroom is identified with the bull-ancestor” (p. 25).⁽⁵⁾
Humphrey goes on to draw a comparison between the parallelism of the wedding speech to the fact that in Buryat shamanic ritual, the Black or White shaman will
become the mythic bull so that they have “no mental or physical reality other than that of the bull” (ibid.). Humphrey takes pains to point out that the relational logic of the wedding speech – what she calls “equivalence” or “identification” (ibid.) – “does not equal oneness” in precisely the same way that it would for the shaman becoming the bull, but rather maps (as a practitioner of Actor-Network-Theory or Object Oriented Ontology would) the transformative influence that bull and man have upon each other during the ritual.
So, while differently inflected, this common focus upon an ontological transformation is confirmed by an account of the Shanar ritual given by Shaman Bayir Rinchinov, who explains: “When I am being inhabited I change from the inside out, from the bone out. I change totally” (Bayir Rinchinov, in Tkacz, Zhambalov and Phipps, 2016, loc 1368). Treading lightly and so without being disrespectful here, one might draw a comparison between the transformation the shaman undergoes in a trance, and the experience of a videogame player when in flow state, at the point at which the player’s identification with the playable character is such that the player has become them.
Brad Lang (2019), in his review of Pathologic 2, touches upon the immersive quality of the game when he writes that, “[t]he world of Pathologic doesn’t exist around you; you exist within it”. In a paradox perhaps especially typical of folk horror, he goes on to explain: “The town will change, events will occur without you even knowing about them. The game world is totally separate from the player, existing in a realm all of its own.” This is in much the same way as Timothy Morton (2013) calls global warming a “hyperobject” that we are in. The player is at once both inextricably intertwined with the world of Pathologic and utterly alienated from it. To quote Ray Porreca (2019) in his review of the game; in Pathologic, “contradictions don’t just exist; they flourish”. The example Porreca gives of this is the line the creators of the game draw “between folk legend and hard science that can unify people or tear them apart” (ibid.).
Exploring this line, trying to reconcile faith and science, was arguably the grand project of mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, the founder of "process philosophy" that underlies much of modern ecology. David Ray Griffin explains that, “[f]or Whitehead, the notion that the individual is a microcosm, somehow containing the whole universe within itself, is not limited to human beings but applies to all individuals whatsoever […] The world is this radically interdependent; there are no wholly independent substances” (David Ray Griffin, 2012, p. 139). From Bruno Latour (1993; 2007) and Graham Harman (2007; 2018) to Extinction Rebellion and indigenous speakers like Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, innumerable activists and thinkers have decried the separation of humanity
from "nature", which is situated within its own separate sphere, an assemblage of resources over which man (and it is generally man) has dominion. Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee (2019) perhaps expresses this idea most simply when he calls for a “profound revolution of consciousness” through which humanity must shift from “seeing the Earth as something separate—whether as a resource to be exploited or a problem to be solved—to a living being to which we belong, who is in distress and needs our love, care and attention”. Nick Estes (2019) illuminates a nuance to this idea that might be missed by non-indigenous scholars like myself and Vaughan-Lee. He warns against the mystification of the concept of “relationality” (arguably present, say, in Humphrey’s account), explaining with regards to the buffalo relations of the Sioux tribe:
It wasn’t just this mystical kind of thing where we were communing with them outside of history. They represented a source of life for us in the sense that without the buffalo, we wouldn’t be the Lakota people, by mere fact that we wouldn’t have a food source. Our relationship with the buffalo wasn’t just one-way; they weren’t just providing for us. We managed those herds; we cleared out the land for pasture […] That is a very material relationship. There is reverence in our stories and our songs [for the buffalo], but I think those cultural protocols were created to prevent us from overexploitation and from throwing out of balance that relationship.
Pathologic too is concerned with material relations. In 'Butchering Pathologic' Quentin Smith (op cit.) refers to a “de-mystifying” of meat in the game. Smith seems to be using the term in a Marxist sense of bringing material relations to the fore where they have been obscured through ideology. He notes that while the religion of the Town’s native population (the Kin) revolves around a bull cult, the town’s industry relies upon the beef trade, so that ultimately, “the town is eating and selling the same meat that they consider their God” (op cit.). Here Smith risks not differentiating between different factions of the town’s population such as the Worms, from the Herb Brides, from the Butchers, from the industrialist Big Vlad. Indeed, I would argue that some of the tension (or even contradiction) between the sacred and the profane in Pathologic derives from a cultural and somewhat geographical split between the nomadic pastoralists (such as the Herb Brides and Worms) who live in the Steppe outside of the Town, and the citizens of the town itself, who depend on trade and live within the kind of settled habitation traditionally associated with post-agrarian industrial societies. Notably Fat Vlad has managed to shackle the yurt-dwelling Kin to the Abattoir on the Eastern edge of the Town, but this is framed as a form of imprisonment or slave labour.
Klara, the Changeling, born of the Steppe itself, is distrusted in the Town. Playing as her, one’s 'reputation meter' is falling almost constantly, necessitating the player to circumvent the Town whenever possible. The Bachelor, by contrast, agent of scientism, immediately takes comfortable residence within the Town and is elevated to a respectable position by the Authorities. The Haruspex is in the most ambivalent position – while he is by ancestral inheritance a menkhu, and thus a member of the Kin, he has also been away training in the city for some half-a-dozen years and, as such, finds himself distrusted by both those who belong to the Town and those who belong to the Steppe. A few days into the game he takes up residence in one of the Town’s factories and, in terms of the three playable characters, is most closely aligned with the Abattoir, which he opts to save along with the Town at the end of the game.
By contrast, the Bachelor opts to save the Polyhedron, the giant structure that pierces deep into the ground (the horned earth mother) to the reservoir of black clotted bull blood that causes the Town to become infected because the earth is sick. Ewan Wilson (2018), in an article on eerie locations within games, stresses that, “[t]he link between [t]he Town’s unsustainable animal slaughter industry and the Sand Plague is explicit”, concluding that, “[p]estilence is the environment rising up and striking back at us”. To return to the figure of the Polyhedron, in imagery that rhymes symbolically, thematically and visually with that of oil drilling, that which industrial capitalism abjects as waste (in this case, the blood of bulls) bubbles back to the surface, ensuring suffering, contamination and death. Likewise, the oil extraction industry at the heart of industrial capitalism is fast destroying the biosphere and with it the possibility of continued life on Earth. To quote Robert MacFarlane’s influential article upon the eeriness of the English countryside, “Digging down to reveal the hidden content of the under-earth […] what is discovered is almost always a version of capital” (2015).
Capital is value that has a corrupted or pathological relationship to time. This is because 1.) Capitalism ossifies the time-process of labour into commodity and 2.) Excess of the working time necessary for the labourer to produce his own subsidence is required by the capitalist to achieve surplus value and thus profit. Profit so extracted is then only fed back into the system to produce more capital. This is why Marx describes capital as “vampire-like” because, to quote Marx, it “only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labourpower he has purchased of him” (2008, p. 149). So, the labourer is not only giving away his time, a portion of the time he gives is stolen from him. If, then, the capitalist hoards or stockpiles this frozen-labour (p. 85), leaving it in a bank to accumulate interest, say, the labourer’s lived experience of time has been doubly removed from the flow of life itself. It is as though the capitalist is a sleeping dragon who has trapped the labourer within his dream like Alice within the dream of the Red King (Carroll, 2003, p. 164). It is this deathly ossification that led, I believe, post-Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre (1992) to spend the end of his life attempting to identify the rhythms of consumer-capitalist societies and demarcating the circular rhythms that tend to characterize natural time from the linear rhythms that tend to characterize labour and the accumulation of capital. Much of Lefebvre’s late writing reads (surprisingly for a post-Marxist) like a guide to mindfulness meditation. This is, I believe, not a coincidence, but a sign that, for Lefebvre, healing the sickness of capitalism endeavored healing our relationship to time. For Lefebvre, instead of time being instrumentalized (think of its forcible conversion into ever-functional, worker-ready, spatialized time in the form of the clock) it should be mindfully inhabited. This was, perhaps, what the late Mark Fisher (2018) had in mind when he envisioned 'Acid Communism' as occupying “a certain mode of time, time which allows a deep absorption” (p. 760). If capitalism demands an ever-accelerating utilitarianism in service of the endlessly cannibalistic process of converting the world into capital, an opposition to capitalism might be a slow realization of our immersion in deep time and the adoption of circular economies that better reflect and respect the circular rhythms of the biosphere. We must, to quote Morton (2019), be careful not to confuse time “with the measurement of time”, especially not just with a few specific types of measurement “convenient for humans” (loc 752).
How this all relates to Pathologic comes in changes made in its sequel Pathologic 2.
While Pathologic 2 is officially a sequel to the original Pathologic, it is more a reimagining of the first game, a kind of repetition with difference. As the Haruspix you arrive in town at the same location, killing the same three men in self-defense; but the graphics are immediately sharper, more textured; street layouts are approximately the same, but tend to curve back on themselves and sub-divide more; doors in particular seem weightier, disclosing realer spaces behind them. Playing Pathologic 2 for the first time, therefore, felt like an uncanny restaging of my experience of playing the first game. Having played the first game, I knew what to do and where to walk – at least in the game’s first half-an-hour. As such, while I was making choices within the game, they were also already predetermined by my choices made the first time round – the main difference, was that this time, the world felt more vivid, but perversely more dream-like, as though I were sleepwalking. Experientially it was equivalent to my state of extreme sleep deprivation or psychosis.
One of the first moments in the game that broke me out of this sensation of sleepwalking (or, perhaps more accurately, made me aware I was sleepwalking) was
when I first encountered the new mechanic of watering trees with human blood, without which you cannot harvest the herbs needed to produce healing medicine. This is the mechanic that Ray Porreca (op cit.) refers to in his review when he writes: “I can hear the earth speak. It cries out with a low rumble, begging for blood to anyone who knows how to listen.” This is also reflected in the observation Quintin Smith (op cit.) makes to the reader when he remarks: “Chances are you only know how to take from games. Truth is, the real fun only starts when you let part of yourself be given away”. That is to say, you have to make a sacrifice.
While the Changeling’s path has yet to be made available in Pathologic 2 [EDIT: It seems most likely she will be the PC of Pathologic 4] recall that in the original Pathologic her ending hinges upon the importance of sacrifice as a present act of faith. When Buryat shamans make sacrifices they tend to do so to ancestral spirits. Norton notes that for someone from the West the notion of one’s ancestral spirits being "unhappy" might seem confusing. He asks: “In what world does this [concept] make sense? What do you need to know, what do you need to expect?” (loc 107). I would answer that part of what one needs to know in found in a statement given by Shaman Bayir Rinchinov: “[N]othing on earth is eternal […] We descend here for a given time and then we depart […] Our ancestors are eternal” (loc 1361). So, facing backwards, the past is telescoped into the present. And, in the other direction, facing forwards, as per the philosophy of the Iroquois, we should live in such a way as to ensure our world remains sustainable for seven generations hence (Vaughan-Lee, 2019).
This does not require complacent certainty or resignation. Over and over again in Tkacz and Beery’s account of the Shanar Ritual of the Buryats, ancestors do not provide what is asked of them. Sacrifices and offerings of milk and vodka are made and the ancestor spirits remain unmoved. In Pathologic, offering blood to the trees does not guarantee you the herbs that you need. Likewise, you can work as hard as you can trying to save all the townspeople or the Kin and the death toll will keep rising and when each morning bell tolls you will be told that there are only so many days remaining until “it all ends”. The way you forge a livable present within this forward-march of living death is not to rush ever faster looking for a cure – there is no ultimate cure – but to slow oneself in such a way as to hear the earth cry out and to sit with (really sit with) what both our ancestors and descendants require of us. In Being Ecological Timothy Morton strikes a note of perverse (perhaps even uncanny or eerie) optimism when he claims: “We are beginning to trust the tactic of not waking ourselves up from the nightmare, but allowing ourselves to fall further into it, beyond horror” (loc 703). For Morton, climate change is like a Chinese finger trap – the more we struggle the more we seem to ensnare ourselves. Instead, maybe we should try staying with the liminal, the uncertain, the weird.
When I was trapped in my psychedelic thought loop, the more I struggle to break out of it, the more scared I become and the more I found myself running down the endlessly looping corridor I was seemingly stuck in for eternity. When I started to slow myself down and allowed myself the freedom to think that maybe my perception of the present moment was not a full and complete encapsulation of eternity, I started to gain more flexibility and found myself able to step outside of the corridor. I did not deny that the looping corridor was there or that I was trapped within it, but I allowed myself some curiosity about it. I stayed with the present weirdness.
To finish – under Vladimir Putin, Buryat national sovereignty has been diminished. In 2008 autonomous Buryat districts were dissolved and assimilated into the Russian state (Chakars, 2014, p.2 70). Melissa Chakars notes that in the 21st century, the Buryats have had to engage with processes of modernization, even while they have made practical choices about the implementation of such processes (p. 271). She reflects that Buryat culture and society has transformed significantly in the hundred years since the beginning of the 20th century (p. 272) when Pathologic is nominally set, becoming less nomadic and more "modern".
However, as Nick Estes (op cit.) cautions, it is a dangerous mistake for those of us in the West to dismiss as primitive those practices and beliefs of those people who have survived in conditions we might envision as pre-civilisational (or, after colonial exploitation, post-apocalyptic). In Steppes: The plants and ecology of the world’s semi-arid regions (2015) Panayoti Kelaidis warns the presumed Western reader:
Humanity is experiencing a homecoming of sorts […] [T]he fragile landscape, once graced by vast herds of ungulates and sparse tribes of humanity, is transforming rapidly and radically thanks to resource extraction, marginal farming, and geopolitical wrangling. The warrior has returned to the steppes armed with a panoply of technology this time […] shall the steppes help us become wise stewards this time around? (p. 31)
These are lessons we can also learn from the characters of the Haruspex and the Changeling as we return to Pathologic once again (likely, as players, from a position far closer to that of the Bachelor), practicing wisdom for and from the past and the future. Only then, when we realise we are sleepwalking, can we act in the present
moment in ways contingent and impactful upon the ecological networks in which we are inextricably intertwined.
(1) On the Steam discussion forums 'Pancakes' (2019) has noted the presence of the Fosbery – the exact model was determined by me. Likewise, 'Gor Mor' (2019) drew my attention to the railway, but I determined the presence of a Soviet armoured locomotive in the game.
(2) As per Andrew Janiak's description of Kant's view of time in the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (2016).
(3) Remember, in Pathologic, this cosmology is implicitly filtered through the perspective of two children playing a game. That is not to say that there is not a potentially problematic conflation between spiritual beliefs taken from Buryat culture and childs’ games at work here, despite the valorisation of these beliefs in the game.
(4) Bruno Latour’s (2007) term is used here in place of the more-conventional "actors" since actants includes both human and non-human actors within a network (architects; blades of grass; bulls etc.) without automatically ascribing intentionality to either.
(5) Though he would never use the phrase "manifestly unreal" as Humphrey does here, Humphrey's attempt to describe the ontology of Buryat ritual here from the "inside-out" might be considered a less radical precursor to the central line of argument taken up by Martin Holbraad in Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination (2012).
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