Phil W. Bayles

Or: How I Learned A Song Is Worth A Thousand Words

I’m a sucker for an untranslateable word. English is a bizarre and often unwieldy language, and I love discovering the ways that other tongues try to make huge and complex ideas understandable.

Over the years I’ve collected many of these words. There’s kummerspeck, the German word for the weight we put on when we comfort eat; kalsarikännit, the Finnish practice of staying home and drinking in your underwear; tsundoku, the Japanese art of buying books and not reading them.

The word I’ve been thinking about most recently is hiraeth: a Welsh word that describes a very particular feeling of homesickness or nostalgia — a sense of yearning for a place or a time that one has never visited, and which might not even exist at all. It’s a feeling that’s been on my mind ever since I played Mixtape, the new game from the delightfully-named Australian studio Beethoven & Dinosaur, which I finished this week in a single sitting.

Some would argue that to call Mixtape a ‘video game’ would be a stretch. It only takes three hours to beat, and even by the standards of most ‘walking simulators’ there’s not a lot to do. Mostly you wander around spaces, interacting with objects until the next story beat happens. Some sections basically play themselves. But none of that matters, because the vibes of Mixtape are immaculate.

The story is a classic coming-of-age narrative. It’s the 1990s, we’re on the West Coast of America, and Stacey Rockford is leaving her small town to head to New York. She wants to have one more epic night with her two best friends before her plane leaves in the morning. Inevitably, life will get in the way. What makes this story different is that Stacey has dreams of being, of all things, a music supervisor. Blessed with the ability to pick the right song for every occasion, she’s crafted a playlist of non-stop bangers to shepherd the trio through the night and remind them of their exploits together.

Maybe this is a sign of my lack of musical education, but I’d barely heard any of these songs before I booted up the game. And yet, when Stacey told me in a fourth-wall break that ‘Just Like Honey’ by The Jesus and Mary Chain is “the perfect bedroom hangout vibe”, I believed her wholeheartedly. It wasn’t just that the song gave me memories of hanging out in a teenage bedroom: it made me feel like I had hazy memories of hanging out in Stacey’s room, bored out of our skulls waiting for the rain to end, or making plans about how to sneak out to go to a party across town.

It’s yet another example of the power of video games to function as empathy-generating machines. None of the sequences in Mixtape are entirely original: the fingerprints of John Hughes and Richard Linklater are visible everywhere. But the simple act of putting a controller in my hands made each one feel like a real memory I was recalling. When I ran across town to rescue my friend from her cop dad, I felt exhilarated. When I inexpertly shared my first kiss with a boy, dragging my tongue over his braces, I felt unbearably awkward. And when the final prompt of the game told me to release my best friend’s hand, I wept.

It’s basically Hiraeth: The Video Game — especially when the flashback sequences take on a more surreal quality. When the right song starts playing at just the right moment in your life, you really do feel like you’re soaring through the air, or conducting fireworks, or riding on the back of a giant purple brontosaurus. Put another way, the music translates a feeling that mere words are incapable of expressing.

I don’t know whether Mixtape would work as well on a second playthrough. You can only listen to a new song for the first time once, and repeat plays aren’t going to kick open the doors of your mind in the same way. But you may have noticed that once you’ve added a new word to your vocabulary, you start finding places to use it wherever you go. So maybe when someone else feels a strange sense of longing for return to somewhere foreign, I can point to Mixtape and say “there’s a word for that.”

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