It doesn’t take a long time of playing The Binding of Isaac to realize that this is a game that consistently — and some might say callously — confronts the player with death. If you play this game, you are probably going to die a lot of times. Sometimes you might even choose to die. I’d like to focus on this aspect of the game, and how that can relate to our larger reality.

Interpretation

When looking at the structure of life and death in The Binding of Isaac, it is definitely a system based around reincarnation; in spite of being heavily influenced by Christianity, it does not follow the Christian idea of an afterlife. Before getting too deeply into this, I’d like to establish some useful ways of interpreting a few forces in the game.

There’s The Player, the person who’s playing the game. The Player is a persistent awareness through each run. To connect it with other models, we can see this as the awareness or soul that participates in a cycle of reincarnation. Next, we have Isaac (or whichever character is chosen). Isaac acts as a temporary vessel for us to act through. The Player’s goals become aligned with Isaac’s goals, and their identity is basically defined within his circumstances. Isaac is our incarnation — the physical body that our “souls” are born into. Finally, we have the world, which is randomly generated. This includes the items and power-ups that Isaac finds, as well as the physical and social layout of the map. This can represent each incarnation’s unique situation — a combination of physical uniformity and circumstantial randomness.

Comparison With Christianity

As the Binding of Isaac is a game that is heavily influenced and inspired by American Christianity, I think it’s valuable to point out a few ways that the Isaac model diverges.

There is no heaven or hell. There is no punishment for your actions within an incarnation outside of that particular incarnation. However, there are fundamental and lasting changes on the universe that affect and shape future incarnations. The specifics of the reality are different each time, but it is always built within the context and definitions of the realities that have been discovered by previous incarnations. If you unlock a new power-up, every incarnation following will be constructed with the possibility of that power-up. You don’t just get one incarnation. You have as many as you want. When you die, you either play again and continue participating in the cycle, or you choose to put the controller down and live your life. The choice of whether to play the game or not is always there. There is no divine law. There are conditional statements that are almost absolutely true (if you touch a spike, you will be hurt; if you have no more hearts, you will die), there is no such thing as a rule that absolutely should or should not be followed. Your goals of the game are constantly shifting and realigning, and each time this happens the rules that you follow shift as well. Everything depends on what your goals are, and your goals constantly change.

How The Forces Interact

Each of the participating forces I mentioned before (The Player, Isaac, and The World) is alive and evolutionary. As each individual situation changes, the arising motivations, rulesets, and emotional triggers also change. An item that is incredibly useful and game-changing in one incarnation can be completely useless in another, depending on the motivation of the player and the circumstances which have led to the item’s arrival.

A couple examples:

When the player is first starting to play the game, any item that raises the character’s HP is incredibly useful. However, after the player becomes skilled at avoiding dangerous enemies, raising HP becomes less and less useful because the player rarely actually gets hurt. If The Player finds a callous (which allows the character to walk on dangerous ground, such as spikes or acid, without getting hurt), but they have already found an item that provides them with flight, that callous is completely useless.

The interplay of these previously defined forces is what creates the context for our experience of the game. As The Player plateaus in skill or motivation, aspects of the game may start to solidify. The Player might start to associate Dead Cat (which gives the player 9 lives, but only 1 heart for each life) with frustration, because they find it nearly impossible to beat a certain room without losing a heart. However, once The Player tries to beat the game with The Lost (who does not hold any hearts and must beat the game without ever being hurt), it is nearly impossible to associate Dead Cat with any emotion but absolute elation. Our emotional reality can become deeply entrenched, but the more we become aware of how these three symbols affect each other, the more we are able to take control over our experience and evolve the way we interact with the game.

How Can We Apply This?

I have played this game nearly every day for the past year and a half, and there’s a lot of subtlety to what I’ve learned that I’m not sure how to describe. Like any game, you have to actually play it to learn the lessons it has to offer. Regardless, I’m going to write down a few important take-aways:

Keep your reactions flexible and versatile. Nothing deserves the same reaction 100% of the time. If you are solidified in the way you react, you will miss out on opportunities. An awareness of infinite incarnations provides you with an emotional stability as you navigate the world. If your mind is focussed on your current run, you will take less risks, and you will take each failure far more intensely. With an awareness outside of your current life, the game becomes significantly more fun, which also tends to lead to far more productive and effective playing. An awareness of infinite incarnations significantly changes the way you prioritize your goals. If your actions are exactly aligned with each run, your goals change significantly. It’s impossible to achieve every goal in the same run, but if you are restricted to one life you’re still going to try. An awareness of having infinite opportunities allows you to prioritize your actions in a way that not only benefits your current run, but will assist the existence of every future incarnation.

The Binding of Isaac rewards risk and experimentation. If you play the game enough you will learn and realize these three points, along with many others, and the game is going to keep opening up as you do. You’re going to discover new secrets, item combinations, and strategies of playing. The game in general is going to keep getting deeper and more interesting.

Whether or not you believe in reincarnation as a framework for your life, through playing The Binding of Isaac we can learn the effects of acting from that perspective. I don’t think this game can fairly be viewed as a metaphor or description of objective truth, but I do think it is incredibly valuable as an evaluation and exploration of a possible reality tunnel that can be as relevant to us as we would like it to be.

For fun: Try taking this game and imagining it through a Christian framework of life and death. How would this change your experience?

Thanks for reading!