Since
the conception of the medium, video games have shown promise as an Art Form by
tackling such Universal Human Themes that are intrinsic to the Human Condition
and that have been the focal points of all the classical disciplines of
Education that preceded and leant height to it, from Theatre to Contemporary
Scientific Inquiry and the Social Sciences. Some of these themes were intrinsic
to the medium itself, such as Free Will. Others used games in order to tell an
extrinsic story, such as simulators for space stations and flying aircraft. And
then there were those games that rested in between, within a nebula whose
intrinsic quality was dubious, and this was when games dealt with themes such
as War and Beauty, both of which could be argued to have been around at the
conception of the Human Game Itself and therefore both of which might have been
responsible FOR its conception, inalienable from the genetic programming of
their mind-child.
One theme that is at once Universal to the Human Condition and
that is intrinsic to the quality of Video Games is the matter of Free Will and
Choice. J.K. Rowling says through the voice of Albus Dumbledore that “‘It is our choices, Harry, that
show what we truly are, far more than our
abilities.’”(Rowling). It is easy to see why Free Will is so
intrinsic to what Games have to Reveal to us about our existence, in a manner
that neither the Hard Sciences nor the Greek Tragedies do. Both the former and
the latter tend to fall into the snare of Determinism. The Greek Actor is bound
by social convention to deliver the lines PRECISELY as they are written unto
the audience, as though he were merely a mouthpiece for the Gods, without which
the Play would cease to be a Play and the Tragedy would become external rather
than internal to the play itself, given the disaster of a poor performance. The
Physicist, similarly, might lose himself in the Newtonian temptation of
Structural Functionalism, regarding every organ of his own body and mental
apparatus as simply an equal and opposite reaction to an overlying, godlike
action. It is only in the game that we find refuge. In fact, it was by appeal
to the medium’s integrity that all ways I found not only an escape from the
illusions of powerlessness (an “escape” that transcended escapism, for it could
be applied outside of the game itself in a manner much less tragic than the
poorly acted Greek Drama) but all so a definitive counterargument to Newton’s
Laws of Reciprocity: if I jump but nothing changes in the game, there was no
equal and opposite reaction. It was without consequence. It is rather my CHOICE
to jump in an EDUCATED MANNER that produces consequences, and only once my
maneuvers gain in both SUBTLETY and INTELLIGENT INTENT.
Games deal intrinsically in the classic existentialist
question of Human Freedom because they are by definition Interactive. One can
never write a Deterministic Game, simply because it would become at best a
Movie. And no movie, however great in its artistry and surpassing in its craft,
can be a game until it becomes an Interactive Experience. This is not to say
that film has not in its short time transcended games in various strains of
artistic credibility; movies are in no ways the artistic inferior of games. But
it is usually the very PROCESS OF CHOOSING A COURSE OF ACTION, even if it is so
inconsequential as whether or not to jump in place, that sets games
Categorically Apart from such Art Forms. It is for this reason that critics of
Roger Ebert, who infamously proclaimed that “video games can never be art”
(Ebert), usually retort by referring to Braid, BioShock, and Shadow of the Colossus. The former explores the theme of Free Will
when it is no longer defined by conventional, Newtonian physics, and it tells
the tale in the context of a series of “mistakes” that protagonist Tim had made
PRIOR TO the start of the game, which he is striving to undo. “Whenever you
rewind time, you’re reminded of the main character’s desperation to change the
past.” (Helgeson).
BioShock is a little less Absurd than Tim’s adventure because its
mistakes are not prefigured. The protagonist is born instead into a set of
circumstances wherein his choices are criminally limited. However, the
masterpiece by game designer Ken Levine redeems the Will by liberating the
protagonist through the help of a supporting character named Tenenbaum, a
solitary female voice in the wake of a narcissistic patriarchy and one that
leads you to redemption to the DEGREE THAT YOU COMPLY WITH HER REQUESTS. The
genius of the game’s three-pronged approach, which produces one of three
endings that seem reminiscent of Hell, Heaven, and Purgatory, is that the most
pivotal decision occurs when the protagonist is still under the influence of
hypnosis. The game’s antagonist can control him up until a point, but in his
hubris he underestimates the influence of Tenenbaum, so that even as the player
is confined to a fatalistic and linear story he can still USE what little
leeway he is afforded by the antagonist’s diabolical negligence to choose
either the path of Good or Evil, in an environment wherein the identity of
either choice is nebulous to the intellect (which knows not whether to trust
the pragmatic devil in one ear or the deontological angel in the other) and
appeals instead to the player’s conscience. If the player wishes to reach the
Best of All Possible Worlds, he must forego the instinct to SEEK the best of
all possible worlds, and such a fervent commitment, even in the wake of
repeated trauma, psychological torment, and treachery, would have to begin when
the protagonist is most vulnerable to suggestion. This means that whilst the
PROTAGONIST has very LITTLE if any Free Will, confined to a Fatalistic Trap
where every personal decision serves the antagonist, the PLAYER can REDEEM the
Protagonist as Spirit redeems Flesh and Nature, simply by CHOOSING the
Righteous Path instead of the Diabolical Diversion, thereby producing a
different outcome ultimately. Ken Levine, despite claims towards personal
atheism, writes a Religious Fiction worthy of Dante and Beckett all at once,
and he tells the story in a manner that is believable only AS a game.
Similar heights are attained in the relatively linear but
nonetheless breathtaking Shadow of the
Colossus. Wide, open spaces and glamorous vistas create the illusion of a
totally open world, but it is not long before this paradise is wasted on the
prescribed agenda of the extremely Dubious Disembodied Spirit that is Dormin.
Whilst the game has only one ending, its nature is thought-provoking and
earth-shattering in many senses. The cinematic quality of the final cut scene,
extended to a cinematic length, is such that audiences are all most invariably
moved by feelings of betrayal and misplaced faith. Yet what sets this game
apart from film is that the player has to actually GO THROUGH THE MOTIONS of
fighting the Colossi in service to the pact in order to see the outcome.
Despite its fatalism, the game makes ample USE of the MEDIUM ITSELF to
illustrate the effects of nebulous acts of faith in a manner that is most
convincing once the player CHOOSES to play it, and to play it implies an other
series of choices necessary to finishing it. Hence the game serves as an ample
warning and a lasting message.
One game that lampoons this entire trend and takes Fatalism
to an extreme is The Stanley Parable.
Game Informer Magazine describes this game as the two-hundred-and-fourth best
game to date, claiming that it “boldly delved into philosophical questions
about the nature of choice, and yet it was never pretentious” (Game Informer
Staff). Of course, we ought not to take too seriously the claims to
non-pretension by a staff that omitted Spyro the Dragon from the same list and
that topped itself off with a Zelda Sequel. Yet the praise was not from a
remote elite. Plenty of players found the Stanley Parable’s simulation of a
dead-end job to be at once aesthetically and intellectually stimulating, but
that’s in part because the anti-game can only BE aesthetic and intellectual;
its Absurdist, fatalistic nature, which forces players to make decisions
without actual, visible consequence, precludes the possibility of Spiritual
Transcendence of any kind, and this is made sadistically clear in the Free
Demo, which ends with an elevator that leads into an Office Building only after
a disembodied voice (by far more eerie and untrustworthy than Dormin) weaves a
mental image worthy of Shadow of the Colossus. The reason that Game Informer
Staff writers regard this as an unpretentious thought experiment lies in that
the concept of Choice and Consequence is so overplayed in psychology, inside
and outside of games, that any attempt to act as a moral authority over what
little will science can prove we have rings of religious pretension to the
post-modern contemporary mind. Yet this is as much a reflection upon the lives
and lifestyles of corporate writers and designers as it is a typically
post-modern position; it is in fact a pretension that condemns all genuine
inquiry to pretension. By reducing the process of Character and Player Identity
to random button-pressing, the tailors of the Stanley Parable deconstruct game
design to its remote basics. Stanley sits at a computer and presses buttons in
the proper order because the computer tells him to, and as we all know this
tendency for computer games to “tell” the player exactly what to do is annoying
on average. Jonathan Blow, the designer of Braid, even mentions the infamously
annoying fairy guide Navi from the Legend of Zelda as an example of “bad
design”, simply because she takes away the challenge of figuring the puzzle out
for yourself.
The Stanley
Parable, which was released several
years after he made these statements, and in the midst of the Games-as-Art
Debate, suggests that when that little guiding faerie disappears and the player
is left to his own devices, the Experience becomes Absurd, and the overtone to
this leitmotif is that, as Camus had posited in the Myth of Sisyphus, to align Art with its only proper purpose: to
illustrate the Absurdity of Actual Life as it is lived outside of Art Herself.
Yet there are several fallacies at work and play here. If we presuppose that
games are only REPRESENTATIONS of Life, then we can reasonably hold a debate as
to whether or not the best game is one that is hopeful or hopeless. Yet even
the act of debating, which is in itself a sort of game, reveals this salient
fact: that games are not merely remote, transcendent REPRESENTATIONS of Life,
their escapism tempered by their realism; they are all so imminent ASPECTS of
Life. All of Human Life can be described as a “Human Game” a la Watts or even
Wittgenstein or Carl Jung. Most religious questions of Choice and Divine Will
can be resolved through the metaphor of a Game whose Creator had a specific purpose
in mind for the Player, whereas the alternative form of theological inquiry is
not only laborious but often futile and demoralizing, even maddening at times.
The very act of PLAYING a Game implies, as I have proven so far, the end of
Determinism and the possibility of transcending Fatalism. Even so old a game as
Chess or Go – both of which should have struck Ebert as Art Forms in their own
right, so that a generation gap is no excuse for the miserly critic – can
unequivocally prove that any one “fumble” or misstep can irrevocably alter the
course of play for the remainder of the game, and the memory and other
consequences of this might haunt the player for the remainder of his CAREER. By
the same token, if a Debate COULD be regarded as necessary to settle the matter
of realistic game design, as well as the proper function of realism, that
school of literary thought which fetishized the “illusion of free will”, then
we have all ready chosen to agree that games are of consequence. Even if such a
Debate could produce a fatalistic outcome (either for or against fatalism),
arguing that it is NECESSARY towards our understanding of Games is all ready to
presuppose a Purposive Teleology.
What the Stanley Parable achieves is that it holds the
mirror up to nature for jaded desk jockeys, much in the same manner as had
films from the late nineties and the television show The Office. Yet what its demo fails to offer, and what I hope the
main game will supply, is transcendence. The game is all ready transcendent in
the sense, of course, of its being a remote representation of Life. Yet
transcendence must all so offer a new WAY of Life. Office Space, American Beauty,
The Matrix, and Fight Club, all of which came out in 1999, expressed the yearning
for a New Millennium that would put an end to the corporate consumer way of
life, long before the term “millennial” became diminutive in the mainstream.
If the Stanley Parable implies by its design that we CHOOSE
to live in a Kafkaesque labyrinth of cubicles where all of our decisions are
secondary to the whims of a Higher Worldly Power, and that we can choose
instead a life of consequence, rather than using our God-given freedom to limit
itself in Sartrean Bad Faith, then it attains the spiritual heights of those
films as well as the other Decision-Based Games that precede it and the remaining
Art Games that I’ve mentioned. However, if the player comes away from it
feeling that this maze is the eternal prison of ephemeral and earth-bound
creatures who can never escape this yearly rock around the Sun, then the
parable does what Kaufmann’s Synecdoche,
New York does: it creates a game within a game within a game, just as that
film creates a play within a play within a play, but it can only ever have the
effect of two mirrors facing one an other and reflecting nature infinitely and
indefinitely. If that were the case, at least perhaps Ebert, who praised Synecdoche, might find it relevant to
his interests. But ultimately even if that is the case we have the comfort of
knowing this: that we might still CHOOSE to feel differently, whether this choice
has a foregone criterion in the manner of MacIntyre’s Virtue Ethics or it is
without criterion but in Good Faith, a la Sartre. At any rate, the game
succeeds insofar as it lampoons the false Sartreanism that is intrinsic to the
very programming of the corporate state, as it is expressed through law,
business, behaviourism, and psychiatry. Yet again: this will only truly hold
existential value if it offers a WILLFUL ESCAPE from these demoralizing agents;
otherwise, it would just be further input being read by the human computer.
What the player loses in modern anxiety he supplements in anomie and despair.
All ethical choices are reduced to aesthetic whims.
Yet if the mind examines itself closely, it discovers that
it is never MERELY the expression of godlike whims. Even whim itself must be
chosen; as Dan Gilbert proves in his talk on synthesizing happiness, we adapt
our hedonic preferences to our choices, in a manner not unlike Sartre’s
choice-without-criterion, and this is so overlying a principle that salespeople
still teach it to their pupils. The life of the pure aesthete, as Kierkegaard
had described in Either/Or, is
tragic, because he is perpetually trying to rid himself of personal identity
and accountability by chasing his whims, yet the very PROCESS OF CHASING
implies the CHOICE OF WHIM, hence perpetuating the self-responsible ego,
whether or not it chooses to be responsible to OTHERS. Yet when the mind
considers any choice, there is not only a sense of integrity that would not be
found in the absence of an ultimate criteria or authority, but there is all so
a sense of HOPE that any jaded aesthete will have long ago given up on. On some
level, we as players and people in general KNOW what the Right Thing is. And
the task of a good game designer is not merely to deconstruct this knowledge,
but to reconstruct it in the context of a heroic adventure that is at once
transcendent and imminent. Its transcendence is not only in its quality as an
“escapist” representation of our shortcomings, but all so in its offerings of
transcendence IN THE REAL WORLD of these same shortcomings. Its imminence is
not only in the fact that it simulates Choice, but that it DEMONSTRATES Choice
and by so doing makes POSSIBLE the recognition of a PROPER, RIGHTEOUS Choice.
Dm.A.A.
Works
Cited:
Blow,
Jonathan. “Video Games and the Human Condition”. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqFu5O-oPmU)
Camus,
Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus.
Ebert,
Roger. “Video Games Can Never Be Art.” (https://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/video-games-can-never-be-art)
Game
Informer Staff. “The Top 300 Games of All Time”. Game Informer Magazine. Issue
#300.
Gilbert,
Dan. Stumbling on Happiness.
Helgeson,
Matt. “The Great Debate: Are Games Art?” (http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2012/05/01/the-great-debate-are-games-art.aspx?PostPageIndex=5)
Kierkegaard,
Soren. Either/Or.
Rowling,
Jo. Harry Potter and the Chamber of
Secrets. Scholastic Press. © 1998.
Sartre,
Jean-Paul. Existentialism is a Humanism.
Dm.A.A.
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