I first played Kirby in Kirby's Dream Land 3. It quickly became one of my favourite games. Playing it raised many questions for me, like, what is Kirby? I know that there are a million Kirby games, and that Kirby gives developers free-license to experiment with the platformer format. Where there is Kirby, there is the destabilisation of the platformer. People say Kirby is 'versatile' in this way. It's complex though: Kirby appears so that future games might learn from the experiment, but at the same time, Kirby points us back to the confines of the format. This means that Kirby occupies the space of an unassailable surplus within what's already there in the platformer, what's already known, what already makes-pretend stability, and is already about to come apart. Kirby in other words gives tangible shape to an invisible force that appears to determine the path of things in reverse.
What struck me in Kirby's Dream Land 3 was that I could hold the 'up' button and make Kirby float. I associate the sidescrolling platformer with cruel intentionality: the ground that allows you to move doubles as an obstacle, a stepping stone before or after a lethal jump, an angle that throws off easy traversal. In the platformer, the means by which we work to establish space as space will also be the thing of our undoing. But Kirby can float over all of this. Kirby can float and glide and drift above the treacherous games of entrapment and traversal below, and there is no penalty for doing so. Nor is there a penalty for sticking to the ground and playing it as a conventional platformer. Kirby is air, if the player thinks Kirby should behave as air. And Kirby is the platformer, with the caveat that they are strictly a decisive imitation, a performance, of the platformer. Kirby is only Kirby when Kirby copies something else.
What struck me then and strikes me now that I'm playing Kirby: Canvas Curse is Kirby's ability to consume and then copy some of the characteristics of Kirby's prey. What we know of Kirby is that Kirby can become air from a platformer, and a platformer from air. We also know that Kirby is hungry and that Kirby will never stop being hungry. The essence of Kirby is hunger and mimesis. It's important to remember that neither of these things are stable properties. Kirby is essentially void in the positive sense, for if Kirby could become full, then Kirby would lose the power to consume. Kirby then is the empty set: not nothing, but a set with nothing inside it. If Kirby could be known by a stable property or set of properties, and if Kirby could ever contain some thing within themselves, then Kirby would lose the boundless mimetic capacity that defines, in a paradoxical way, Kirby.
There is a purpose to all of this. When Kirby imitates, we are able to briefly experience the active capacities of another, albeit in Kirbied form. Kirby is less a mirror to the world than a field of infinite plasticity that inhales and then re-presents the world's forms as corrupted, now playable matter. Kirby translates form to matter, code to sensation, architecture to space.
I was thinking about this formless form, this power of instability, in relation to chora --- the space between the formal idea and worldly matter. (It's in Plato's Timaeus --- I'm only going off its appearance in Judith Butler's Bodies that Matter and Rebekah Sheldon's Form/Matter/Chora). Simply described in a deadbrained regurgitation of Butler and Sheldon, Plato must answer the question of how eternal forms come to be manifest in transient matter. His answer is there must be in-between space that can barely be named much less conceptualised: a receptacle (hypodoche) that translates eternal forms into matter. How this happens is the chora receives "potentially … all bodies, and so applies universally, but its universal applicability must not resemble at all, ever, those eternal realities (eidos) which in the Timaeus prefigure universal forms, and which pass into the receptacle." What's curious about this is that the receptacle cannot entirely resemble the eternal forms it receives and produces as matter, and cannot in fact have a proper shape or body, given that it needs to retain its power as receptacle. Butler writes:
This receptacle/nurse is not a metaphor based on likeness to a human form, but a disfiguration that emerges at the boundaries of the human both as its very condition and as the insistent threat of its deformation; it cannot take a form, a morphe, and in that sense, cannot be a body (41)
The chora cannot hold ontological status, for it receives forms but cannot itself be one. Its mercurial nature becomes disturbing for Plato, and conceptually interesting for us, if we question the primacy of original/copy form/matter in Plato's thought:
This is citation, not as enslavement or simple reiteration of the original, but as an insubordination that appears to take place within the very terms of the original, and which calls into question the power of origination that Plato appears to claim for himself (45)
What Kirby does is consume, imitate, and perform materially the forms encountered in play. What allows Kirby to do this is an ontological status not dependent on formal legitimacy; a body defined not by boundary but by plasticity ---- formless in one sense, infinite in another. Kirby's choratic insubordination comes not simply from Kirby's mimetic capacity as a kind of empty set, but from Kirby's place within the videogame. When Kirby consumes and mimics Link for example, either Link is as ontologically unstable as Kirby, or Kirby has always been as stable as Link.
Butler ultimately dismisses the possibility of an irruptive chora as a cheap, strictly conceptual 'way out'. Rebekah Sheldon holds onto it as a means of thinking new materialism. Sheldon's understanding of chora is doubly useful in Kirby: Canvas Curse, because the Kirby-ness of Kirby does not reside strictly in the Kirby-avatar, but in the game's articulation of space, its undoing of the ludic gesture, and its jettisoning of agentive centrality.
What I mean is that as a game it's fucking difficult! Kirby keeps messing with me! And of course that's how it's supposed to be. The bit-crushed sound and image seems to have emerged from another game, broken and discarded, now alive. To play it, I am helpless. I'm reminded of those games that were at fish and chip shops where you'd put a coin in and bash the plastic flippers on the sides. They must've been popular in Australia --- someone made a thread on aussiearcade.com looking for more of them.
In this game Kirby is no longer the choratic avatar, but a force within the game we must try to direct, or at least work to mitigate, like a train that won't stop or like gravity. In this sense we forgo identification with the destabilising capacity of Kirby and become more like the architecture of the level, trying to manage the force that works through it.
This is important because there appears to be no 'prime mover' --- we do not control but rather intervene in motion that belongs only to Kirby. The level/code/space similarly does not dictate action, but is given its form by the indeterminacy of Kirby in conjunction with the indeterminacy of the player's hand. The often panicked articulation of the lines the player draws to intervene in Kirby's movement is proof of the fact that, however the levels are designed, no two plays or even moments are ever the same --- that the game is always becoming otherwise. The choratic emptiness of Kirby is extended to the entirety of the game apparatus --- no individual meaning is pre-given, instead all centres on, all works toward, all is undone by Kirby.
The choratic body in the Kirby's Dream Land games extends to a choratic apparatus in Kirby: Canvas Curse. I think of the agitated lines I've drawn when I read Sheldon describing how this 'third thing' "transmits and transforms dynamic form, the chora both enables and distorts the autopoiesis of apparently incorporeal matters like thought." What is embodied thought in the platformer but the lines, now made tangible, wavering indecisive between motion and inertia. And I think of the fact these lines are only ever responding to something out of my control, out of the control of the game, out of control of even that destabilising force of motion, Kirby.
27 Feb 2025
