Planet Horse Game

[Elisabetta Buendia]

Allseveral months ago now we read CS Lewis's The Horse and His Boy together. At the time I meant to reread the relevant chapter in Michael Ward's Planet Narnia, but other things happened and I have only just got back to this.

Ward's main thesis is that Lewis constructed the entire Narnian series - seven books - based on the Medieval astrological view of the world as made up of seven concentric spheres surrounding our Earth. The seven in order ascending from Earth are Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn - in astronomical terms broadly heading through the inner system first and then the outer one, but that is an entirely different way of looking at the phenomena.

If you're interested in this very compelling attempt to unravel Lewis's imaginative and metaphorical construction, the book is well worth it ( -Narnia-Seven-Heavens-Imagination/dp/019973870X) and is now available in a variety of formats (years ago when I bought it it was hardback only ). Briefly, Ward looks at key themes, recurrent words and phrases, prominence of particular objects and what they are made of, and a whole diverse mix of bits and pieces to establish connections between each book and one or other of the seven planets.

So The Horse and his Boy is characterised by a heavy pairing of twins or associations - Gemini the Twins being ruled by Mercury in medieval thinking. Indeed, the whole plot is driven by the reuniting of sundered twins, and in Archenland, apparently, twins are common. Not only that, but mythologically speaking, Castor and Pollux are respectively said to be a great horseman and a great boxer, a direct parallel to Cor and Corin. Beyond specific human pairings, the journey is constantly being forced to confront paired choices of direction etc.

Mercury is also, of course, the messenger of the gods, and Shasta's primary role is as messenger. Again more widely, messengers and messages fill the book, along with a need for haste and being fleet-of-foot. There are also frequent references to language, and in particular contrasting the dullness of (most, not all) Calormene poetry/song with the liveliness of that of Narnia and Archenland. But not only are words important - on specific occasions silence is the appropriate response... recognising the limitations of language as well as the potential. And arguably, Lewis's own use of language on multiple levels is at its best in this book (or Dawn Treader, for different reasons).

Anyway, I was convinced by Ward's arguments, and rereading the book made it seem altogether compelling that both The Horse and His Boy and the whole Narnia series had this underlying metaphor behind it. At very minimum, the book sheds some fascinating lights on Lewis's use of language and his ability to draw on Medieval and earlier imagery and metaphor - this is nowhere near so obvious in Narnia as it is in Lord of the Rings, but arguably that's because Tolkien wanted to make it much more in-your-face than Lewis did. One of my favourite examples was Lewis's use of "tingling" in a variety of places. Now, one of the Old English words for star was tingul (or tungol) from which Lewis's mind went to "twinkle twinkle little star" and hence a linguistic pun between "tingle" and stellar influences. Ward's book is full of these little, rather delightful derivations and etymologies (sometimes false etymologies used for their punning effect) that Lewis's academic studies would have suggested to him.

The Shire draft horse represents Jupiter, first and largest of the gas giants, and the largest planet in our solar system. It is named for the king of the Roman gods, the god of sky and thunder: the Roman personification of the Greek Olympian god Zeus. The astronomical symbol for the planet Jupiter rests in the upper-left corner, while the wave pattern border echoes the swirling colored bands of storm systems that encircle the planet

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Following on from Farming Simulator and The Antiques Roadshow, my appetite for high-octane, adrenaline-fuelled gaming entertainment has become insatiable. I MUST HAVE MORE! I must play the demo for Planet Horse.

Let's think that world through for a moment. An entire world devoted exclusively to horses. What evolutionary path would they take if neither tamed (nor eaten) by humans, nor preyed upon by predators? Would they have developed cars? If they did, would they have gone via horse-drawn vehicles? Subjugated horses forced to pull along carriages containing the privileged ponies? Surely the size of elevator button necessary to accommodate a hoof would limit the potential height of buildings? These are all questions I would want answered by a game with such a name, but absolutely nothing in this demo indicated the matters would arise.

In fact, this appears to be a planet of horses and humans, with once again humans in control. This is a game so squarely aimed at young girls that it doesn't even contain an option to play as a boy. Only girls like horses. You can create your own horse at the start with a reasonably detailed horsey-character creator, that for some reason also includes a zebra. Clearly I chose to play as a zebra. Called Gluey.

In the demo you have access to a brief example of a few bits and pieces the full game (15) has to offer. You can go for a walk picking up freakishly large pinecones, floating on some sort of alien column of mystical light, brush the dirt off your horse in the stable, practice jumping some fences, and spend some "coins" on new equipment for your horse, or even your own character. I bought her a nice straw hat.

If this is any representation of the full game, then it's about as involving as an empty shoebox. The nearest you get to anything approaching a game is the jumping, and this requires you to click your mouse three times. Don't have your hand mysteriously fall off midway through and you'll likely win the event.

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