Astro Bot

It is easier to make a sad movie than a happy one. It is easier to write a tragedy than a comedy. It is easier to design a horror game than a joyful one, easier to direct a prestige drama than a screwball romance, easier to compose mournful music than music that produces durable delight. This is one of the more persistent observations about the practice of any cultural form, and almost every working writer, director, composer, and designer who has tried both has reported it. The standard explanation in casual conversation is that audiences prefer misery, or that misery is more serious, or that joy is harder to take seriously. None of these is quite right. The actual reason is more interesting, and it is the reason Astro Bot, the 2024 PlayStation platformer that became one of the year's most-praised games, deserves more careful attention than its surface charm has trained the conversation to give it.

The frame this essay wants to give the reader: the contemporary commercial environment in almost every cultural form has been steadily drifting toward the easier of two registers, the heavy one. The drift is not because the audience prefers it. The drift is because heaviness is the default condition of language, image, and design under gravity, and lifting against the gravity takes more sustained craft than letting it do its work. The cultural products that resist the drift, and that do so successfully, are doing harder work than the surrounding conversation tends to credit them with. Astro Bot is one of these. So is Paddington 2, the 2017 film that became a kind of cultural test case for the same proposition in cinema. So is the music of the contemporary Norwegian songwriter Aurora, the early Pixar films, the late Beach Boys, the novels of Iris Murdoch when she was writing well. The list is short. The works on it are doing something most of the surrounding cultural production has stopped being able to do.

The reason joy is harder is not subjective. The reason is, on the available evidence, a fact about how language, image, and design actually work under the conditions of cultural production. Italo Calvino, the Italian writer whose 1985 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard were never delivered because he died of a stroke the month before they were to begin, left behind drafts that were published posthumously in 1988 as Six Memos for the Next Millennium. The first of the six memos, on lightness, is the only one to have had sustained influence outside Italian literary studies. The argument of the memo is roughly the following.

Heaviness, Calvino argued, is the default condition of language working seriously. Words accumulate. References thicken. The world's actual gravity pulls every sentence toward the page. To write with weight is to allow this gravity to do its work; the writer's labor is to direct the gravity toward useful ends. To write with lightness is to work against the default. The light writer has to lift the same world the heavy writer is letting fall. The lifting takes more, not less, sustained craft. Calvino's models for the lightness register were specific: Lucretius's atomism, Ovid's metamorphoses, Cavalcanti's lyrics, Cervantes when he is moving easily, the eighteenth-century novel of sensibility at its best. None of these were trivial writers. All of them had achieved, through sustained craft, the appearance of effortlessness in a register the world's gravity is constantly trying to flatten.

The principle generalizes beyond writing. In any cultural form, the conditions of production are exerting a constant pull toward the heavier register. The visual artist who paints sorrow is working with the body's physiology, the cultural inheritance of European painting, and the gallery system's preferences all moving in the same direction. The visual artist who paints joy is working against all three. The same is true of the composer, the filmmaker, the novelist, the playwright, and the game designer. The heavy register has the structural advantages of cultural prestige, professional respectability, and the audience's pre-existing emotional vocabulary for receiving heavy work. The light register has to earn its reception. The earning is what makes the light work harder.

This is the part of the analysis the contemporary cultural conversation about games has been least equipped to handle. The past decade and a half of the prestige register in commercial games has been, on a careful read, a long sustained commitment to the heavier register. The last two Last of Us games are tragedies. The Souls games are funereal. The recent God of War games are about grief. The last two Resident Evil mainline entries are horror. Cyberpunk 2077 is dystopia. Disco Elysium is meditation on failure. Death Stranding is elegy. The list goes on. None of these are bad games. Most of them are accomplished, several of them are masterworks, and the medium has been better off for their existence. The medium has also, in the process of producing them, been gradually losing the capacity to produce work in the lighter register. The studios with the budgets for big productions have, increasingly, defaulted to the heavier registers. The audiences have, in the same period, gradually forgotten that the lighter register was even on the menu.

Astro Bot arrived into this. The game is a Sony first-party platformer made by Team Asobi, the small Japan-based studio that had previously produced Astro's Playroom, the technical-demo platformer bundled with the PlayStation 5 at launch in 2020. The 2024 game is twelve hours of bright, kinetic, deeply considered platforming distributed across forty-one levels, each of which is themed around a different PlayStation franchise from the platform's thirty-year history. The cameos are the part of the surrounding conversation that has been most visible. The cameos are not what the game is for. The cameos are the surface charm. The substance is the underlying aesthetic position the game has committed to and sustained for the full campaign length.

The position is the position Calvino was describing. Every design choice in Astro Bot is in service of the lightness register. The level design rewards exploration without punishing failure. The combat is satisfying without being tense. The animations have a quality of buoyancy that the platforming-genre history has not consistently achieved. The music is by Kenji Watai, the Sony Japan in-house composer whose work across multiple PlayStation projects has been the platform's clearest sustained example of music that produces durable delight without becoming saccharine. The controller-feedback work, made specifically for the DualSense, is one of the most precise demonstrations in the medium of how careful physical feedback can produce specific emotional outcomes. The game is, in every paragraph of its design, doing the work Calvino was describing the light writer as doing. The result is a game that produces, in its players, the specific affect the surrounding prestige register of the medium has been increasingly failing to produce.

Why this matters extends past the game and past the platforming genre. Barbara Ehrenreich, the American writer and social critic, devoted a substantial book to this question in 2006. Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy traced what Ehrenreich called the gradual privatization and pathologization of joy across the past four hundred years of European-and-American cultural history. Ehrenreich's argument was that pre-modern European cultures had elaborate public traditions of collective joy: festivals, carnivals, dance traditions, communal eating, and shared ritual celebration that the early modern state and the early modern church had together spent several centuries suppressing. The suppression was, on Ehrenreich's reading, not accidental. The state had specific reasons to want populations less collectively organized around their own pleasures; the church had specific theological reasons to want pleasure routed through institutional rather than collective channels. The suppression worked. The contemporary developed world has, by Ehrenreich's careful documentation, structurally less collective-joy infrastructure than any developed culture in human history has had.

The cultural consequences of the suppression Ehrenreich documented have been gathering across the past several decades. The contemporary adult population in developed economies, on the cumulative evidence of multiple cross-national studies, reports less joy than its grandparents at the same age. The studies have been replicated enough that the finding is no longer controversial. The conversation about why is unresolved. The standard explanations include the obvious candidates: declining religious participation, declining civic engagement, increasing social isolation, the corrosive effects of digital media on attention and affect, the well-documented stresses of contemporary work and housing economics. All of these are real. They are also, on Ehrenreich's longer historical reading, not the root cause. The root cause is the cumulative effect of a multi-century process by which the conditions for joy were systematically removed from the structure of developed-world adult life.

This is the cultural-historical situation Astro Bot enters. The game is one of the small commercial cultural objects of the contemporary moment that has chosen to commit, at the level of every design choice, to the production of joy as a sustained aesthetic experience. The game has succeeded at producing joy. The audience that has played the game has, on the available evidence, responded to the production with the specific kind of relief that is the body's response to receiving an experience the surrounding cultural environment has been failing to provide.

The relief is the part of the game's reception that has been most visible. Players have repeatedly described the game in registers that suggest something more than enjoyment. The descriptions cluster around words like "needed," "missing," "recovered," "remembered." These are not the words audiences use for typical enjoyable platformers. These are the words audiences use when a cultural object has delivered an experience the audience had not realized was unavailable in the surrounding environment until it arrived.

The reader who has the frame can now apply it more broadly. The cultural products that produce durable delight, against the surrounding gravity, are doing harder work than the surface of the work makes visible. Recognizing this changes which works deserve serious attention. The Marvel film whose surface is light but whose actual register is the standard mass-cultural drama in a colorful coat is not, on this framework, an example of the light register. The film is using lightness as decoration. Paddington 2, the 2017 Paul King film, is. The film commits at every level to the production of joy and earns it through every choice in the script, the casting, the pacing, the cinematography, and the small specific gestures of warmth that are present in almost every scene. Most people who have seen the film recognize it as something specific without quite being able to name what makes it different. The thing is the sustained commitment to the lightness register Calvino was describing.

The same applies to the small list of contemporary musicians who produce music in the lightness register without becoming saccharine. The same applies to the small list of writers who produce comic novels that are durably re-readable. The same applies to the small list of game designers, of whom Nicolas Doucet at Team Asobi is now one of the clearest current examples, who can sustain joy across many hours of design without producing fatigue.

The implication for the medium of games is straightforward. The medium has, over the past fifteen years, accumulated substantial craft in the heavy register. The medium has, in the same period, lost substantial craft in the light register. The studios with the budgets to attempt either register have been defaulting to the first. The studios capable of executing the second are, mostly, small. Astro Bot is, on the available evidence, the most accomplished commercial example of the light register the medium has produced in over a decade, and the game's reception has demonstrated that the audience for sustained light work is substantially larger than the publishing arithmetic has been assuming.

The reader who finishes this essay can carry several useful frames forward. The first frame: when a cultural product feels light without becoming trivial, the production almost certainly required more sustained craft than the surface makes visible. Recognize it as the achievement it is. The second frame: in one's own cultural diet, ask whether the diet has been weighted heavily toward the heavier register, and whether the weighting has been producing the cumulative emotional effect the contemporary cultural conversation has been increasingly documenting as a generational mood. If yes, the small handful of contemporary cultural products that work successfully in the lightness register are worth seeking out. They will, on the available evidence, do something for the body that the heavier register cannot do, and the doing is the part of cultural-product consumption the surrounding conversation has been least equipped to talk about.

The third frame: when a studio, a director, a writer, a composer, or a designer has demonstrated they can sustain the lightness register across long-form work, the demonstration is rare enough to be worth tracking. The next project they make is, on the available evidence, more likely than the surrounding cultural-product field to deliver the specific experience the contemporary moment has been failing to make available.

Astro Bot is in motion where Sony's first-party heavy register had been pinned. The bot leaps. The boxing-glove extends. The DualSense buzzes a small pleasure into the player's palms. The Patapon silhouette nods. The serious register of the medium has been, for one entry, allowed to be light, and the lifting turned out to be the work Calvino had been describing for half a century. The work is harder than the heavy register, and the medium has not been producing much of it lately. The fact that this game found its audience suggests the conditions under which more of it can be produced are still available. The audience is hungry. The studios with the institutional confidence to commit to the register are rare. Where they exist, and where they ship work as accomplished as this, the medium deserves to recognize what has been done, in the specific terms the doing requires.