Katamari Damacy: A human game

Graphic by Amy Luo

When it comes to organization, I’m a messy person by nature.

Sure, the first few weeks of moving into a new room or apartment are great. Everything is in its place, clothes are in their appropriate drawers, and beds are made. Even the floors get vacuumed every once in a while. Slowly but surely, however, things fall apart.

There’s a concept in chemistry called entropy. The simplest explanation is that entropy is the tendency for nature to prefer disorder over order. Gas particles spread out to be at their most disordered in a container rather than being confined to a small portion of that same container. Logs on a campfire burn and turn into CO2, ash, and H2O. A room occupied by a messy college student goes from clean to cluttered. The universe ordains that things must fall apart.

On the opposite side of that same coin, it takes energy to keep things from becoming disordered. To make a diamond out of carbon soot, you need to provide a lot of energy to turn something disordered into something as ordered as the carbon bonds in a diamond. With how ordered biological systems are, it’s a wonder life exists at all.

These ideas might seem disorderly but bear with me.

“Every day we create order from disorder, whether it’s just making your bed every morning or creating meaning from the disorder in our own lives.”

I was walking home on a cool September night with a friend of mine. I just happened to get a notification on my phone from Steam letting me know that Katamari Damacy REROLL was now on sale. I exclaimed my excitement to my friend and how I’ve been waiting for this to go on sale for a while now. To my surprise, they replied, “What’s that?”

The trouble with Katamari Damacy is that the concept itself seems so simple and boring that any attempts to explain it are often lost on the listener. While I’ll attempt to do so here, it might be better to simply show what exactly I’m talking about.

Clip from Nintendo Insider

Katamari Damacy is a game about cleaning up clutter. You play as a tiny green “Prince” that rolls a “katamari.” This round adhesive ball picks up anything you touch, as long as its mass is big enough. While on paper this may not sound very impressive, the game is greater than the sum of its parts. With an iconic soundtrack and whimsical cut scenes, Namco (the publisher and developer of Katamari Damacy) creates an experience so unique it defies explanation. The transliteration of “Katamari Damacy” from its original Japanese is “Clump Spirit”, which is fitting given the goal of the game. Each level has you growing your “clump spirit” larger and larger until you reach the goal mass, at which point your katamari can become a star. Oh, did I mention that your dad wiped out all the stars and other celestial bodies from the sky in a drunken haze?

With 14 games in the series on multiple different platforms, Katamari Damacy has reached a massive audience. After its 2004 release, it got awarded numerous awards (“Outstanding Innovation in Console Gaming” from the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences) and nominations for “Game of the Year” and “Console Game of the Year.”

This simple concept of cleaning clutter has completely enamored me and millions of others. I think, on some level, it reflects the human drive to fight entropy. Every day we create order from disorder, whether it's just making your bed every morning or creating meaning from the disorder in our own lives. While not everyone that plays Katamari Damacy is organizationally minded (me included), there’s something comforting about collecting everything off the floor into a massive ball of stuff. Making sense of the chaos around us, all to the tune of songs like “Lonely Rolling Star”, feels oddly human. While it might not be as simple as just rolling everything into a ball and launching it into space (though there’s a metaphor in that somewhere), at least Katamari Damacy gives us a simple reprise from this unimaginable complexity.

I’m reminded of a quote from Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek that says,

“I am sitting under a sycamore by Tinker Creek. I am really here, alive on the intricate earth under trees. But under me, directly under the weight of my body on the grass, are other creatures, just as real, for whom also this moment, this tree, is ‘it’…”

There is so much in this world that is not us, that lives and breathes chaotically independent of whatever we do. But I think Katamari Damacy is like that sycamore tree. It lets me live in the moment, allowing me to be grateful to be alive on this intricate earth.

You can pick up Kamatari Damacy REROLL on Steam for $29.99, although it goes on sale frequently.