To play a videogame, to control a digital avatar, often means treating that avatar as an idealized version of oneself. In role playing games like Skyrim and Final Fantasy, the player becomes the unknown hero with those newfound powers, and internalizes that character’s elevated stats and ultra-rare gear. In fighting games like Street Fighter the player becomes the duke’s-up heavy hitter, maps their brain to the exact inputs required to pull off a super move, the right order of buttons to execute a flawless combo chain. In shooters like Call of Duty, the player becomes the invincible super soldier, lugging around an armory’s worth of weaponry, soaking up bullets and making impossible headshots from dozens of yards away. Through these digital representatives, the player leaves behind their own sorry flesh and embraces the temporary perfection of an idealized double.
In 1949, the French psychoanalyst Jaques Lacan coined the concept of the mirror stage, the moment when a toddler is first presented with their reflection in a mirror. Before this point, the child is boundless, a formless mass of sensations. Looking at their reflection allows the child to manifest a sense of self. The mirror image allows the child to visualize themselves, and in so doing, to idealize themselves, to see themselves as whole, as a person who makes sense, not merely the confused miasma of drives and anxieties they were composed of mere moments ago. “...this form,” writes Lacan in his original essay on the subject, “...situates the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional direction…” The mirror lies, or, more accurately, the subject uses the mirror to lie.
Similarly, the player uses the videogame to lie. Most games lie and promise the player that he or she can do anything; that if he or she keeps bashing themselves against a problem, he or she will inevitably solve it. Baby Steps is not interested in affirming this lie. Though aspects of the game are as artificial as anything else in the medium—like the protagonist, Nate’s, thighs of steel, or his unbreakable teddy bear body—the game rings truer than most. It depicts a gross, unfriendly world, explored by a chubby man-child, in soiled pajamas, trudging along on the slimy permafrost, stubbing his toe, and farting. He must climb up taller and taller mountain slopes, survive mudslides and rushing rivers, all while being an all-around ungainly mess, a stiff-limbed nincompoop, stubbornly refusing wisdom or guidance, afraid of his shadow, afraid to ask for aid, afraid to be seen. Reflected in this image is the frightened, disgusting child in each of us, normally hidden behind the bluster and bravado; the hollow performance behind faking it ‘til you make it, the painful kernel of truth embedded in imposter syndrome.
Before seeing themself in the mirror, the subject has no way to align their perception of the world with the experience of being a body living in that world. The mirror establishes, according to Lacan, “...a relation between the organism and its reality.” “In man,” he continues, “...this relation to nature is altered by a certain dehiscence at the heart of the organism, a primordial discord betrayed by the signs of uneasiness and motor unco-ordination of the neo-natal months.” We are born too soon. Thrust out of the womb, unable to properly survive, unlike most animals, humans must be nurtured, and protected before they can feel capable. As a part of this development, the mirror allows the subject to wrap themselves in the illusion that they are functional and whole well before they might authentically feel that way.
Achievement Unlocked. You are a person. Congratulations. Your thoughts and desires make sense. You are the hero of your story. Just… don’t look too closely at your reflection’s gleaming surface, or you’ll make out the indentations where the paint has been layered over the cracks, like spackle laid over shoddy drywall.
An important aspect of the mirror stage theory is that the toddler, being so small and inept, cannot physically stand on their own in front of the mirror—they must be supported by a parental figure who helps and cajoles the child into recognizing their image, enforcing their own values and worldview onto the child as a result. In his tenth seminar, Lacan describes how the child “turns round…to the one supporting him who’s there behind him…” and “with this nutating movement of the head… he seems to be asking the one supporting him… to ratify the value of this image.”
Baby Steps is full of references to the maternal figure and the nature of growth and development with (and often without) her comforting support. The game kicks off with a brutal moment of birth: Nate is zapped away from his embryonic basement hideaway and flushed out into an underground lake before swimming sputtering to the surface. Later in the game, he wanders through a dream-like looping vision of his family’s home, stumbling after the disembodied voice of his mother calling to him. In the snowy mountaintops, a giant woman sits waiting. When Nate approaches, she picks him gently up and rocks him slowly, letting him drift briefly off to sleep. These visions and fantasies reflect Nate’s yearning for a maternal presence to hold him up, to tell him it’s okay. Without that necessary support, the child staggers and falls, unable to properly gaze at their reflection and make sense of themselves.
Baby Step’s world is populated by unmothered men making due through expressions of nonsensical masculinity: stomping around nude, badgering the noobs for cigarettes, gorging on what looks to be milk or cum, reeling in desperate, frivolous abandon. Forced to stand on their own, these men shape their own twisted reality: they swim in shit and build massive, silly sandcastles, temples of pointless, manic production, made from the residue of loss.
As for Nate, and the player, all there is is to keep climbing and never stop. Press one button, lift Nate’s left leg, press another, lift his right one; continue and continue and continue. Keep climbing the mountain to get to the top, to get to a place where things might possibly make sense.
Just before the mountain’s supposed peak lies the solitary cabin of Moose, the one donkey-man who is ever truly friendly or warm to Nate during his journey. Working up the nerve to finally ask for help and companionship, Nate may end the game here, and, in the warmth of this welcoming space, find rest.
Yet: the game immediately fades up an interstitial menu which offers the player the prompt to “go for a walk.” The player must press it several times before Nate is finally roused, complaining of “Ants in my pants,” as if noticing the unseen player, who forces him up and out of the safety of the cabin. Nate is, after all, the player’s reflection. If he cannot serve to mask the player’s internal discordance, what good is he? He must become infected with the player’s anxiety, become more perfect and more ideal. He takes a few steps out of the cabin and inevitably falls on his face. A few more steps and he unceremoniously slides down a ravine. Every step in Baby Steps is an act of resistance, a movement away from the supposed ideal sought after in the game’s image. The image in this mirror retreats, leaving the player alone with its absence.
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Yussef Cole, one of Bullet Points’ editors, is a writer and motion graphic designer. His writing on games stems from an appreciation of the medium tied with a desire to tear it all down so that something better might be built. Find him on Bluesky as @youmeyou.