DREAM NUMBER OMEGA:

DREAM NUMBER OMEGA:

This one has me legitimately stumped. And as one last resort (in an age devoid of dream interpreters) I publish it:

I was visiting a Factory that specialized in the production of wax replicas of Jesus Christ. Whilst wandering along an indoor bridge upon the sixth floor of the warehouse, I was interrupted in my trek by a gray, alien figure with a halo of lurid blue. The Angelic Being informed me that the proprietor of this establishment had changed his sales strategy from the production of Imitation Christ to the production of wax sex toys. Yet his suppliers of “Product” had taken ill to this change of strategy, and knowing his unyielding nature they had decided to send him a faulty batch, exposing his entire operation to various Law Enforcement Agencies from Saturn who could detect the “faulty” chemicals from lightyears away.

It was at this moment that the Alien disguised himself. His halo transformed into bull’s horns and he was himself made bovine in stature. He spoke to me with the same voice as before, however, instructing me to take my leave of this place. I did so, only later wondering if I should tell my new friend that the sudden appearance of a Bull on a Bridge is nonetheless suspicious to human beings. But I took my chances that he knew that all ready.

Outside the factory, as the Sun was rising and the day fresh, I encountered an abandoned bicycle beside a White Van. I considered borrowing it. I asked two anonymous young men if it was theirs. They replied negatively and returned to their task at hand: admiring a scarecrow. This figure was stuffed with auburn straw, some of it jutting out of its chin, and its arms were rakes, its left one pointing down whereas its right one pointed up. One of my new friends explained that it had once been terrifying but that now it was comical. The other man said that scarecrows of this stature are so poorly built that any herd animal could tear it down if it saw red. I told them that it reminded me of Jesus. They replied that once it had been built to do that, but that then it was remade to emulate Heisenberg. I asked if they meant the Physicist or the Meth Lord. They replied that they were Uncertain, and that it all depended on how the Observer looked at it. I chuckled.

As I pedaled away, leaving the men to deride the figure further, I passed a sign overhead. It read “Imitatio Christi Industries”, yet a solitary woman was painting over the initial “I”. As I passed under the bridge, I did not doubt that soon there would be an entire overhaul, and that one way or an other “Imitatio Christi” would be no more, whether by the device of its mysterious Proprietor (who had probably commissioned the painter to paint over the old logo in preparation for a new Company Name) or by the workings of Saturn. I figured this much: that it was Saturn that had surely supplied the Product to begin with, because Saturn was Satan, and the scarecrow bore an unsettling resemblance to Baphomet. The Proprietor was merely being Used. His only escape, I realized, would be to cut his losses and to perhaps run off with what little Unused Product he still had. They might still be able to track him down. But if he puts it to good use beforehand, perhaps they won’t. So I mused as I drove towards the Horizon, free.

Dm.A.A.

Game Design Themes and the Free Will Parable:

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. “Synthesizing Happiness.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4q1dgn_C0AU)

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.

Watts, Alan. “The Human Game”. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLIPmoBEMg4)

Dm.A.A.

The Ontology of the Game Design Document as Autonomous Organism:

A Game Design Document is a Living Organism because it is not bound by physical laws of determinism. This means that, unlike a code, which has to mechanically carry out a set of preordained functions in a totally controlled environment, prone only to the wear and tear of the occasional bug or virus, a Design Document has what Carl Jung calls an Autonomy. It operates on its own terms. This presents several planes of irony, therefore. On one hand, one might suggest that one can have total control of any system that is not bound by mechanical laws, because to that same extent as it is malleable it can be manipulated according to one’s own will. But in actuality this is a naïve oversimplification. It presupposes two postulates: that there is no flexibility in programming, either for the Programmer or the Code Itself, and that any flexibility in Design must by necessity answer to one agent: the Designer, and not the Game Itself. My contention is that this is a false presumption, because it is a presumption in the first place, devoid of experience. In actuality, experience demonstrates that the Game has a LIFE OF ITS OWN. It develops of its own accord, and it merely finds its EXPRESSION THROUGH the Designer. And only years of experience in the field could have brought me to this conclusion. True: I was operating in solitude a great deal of the time. Yet the company of fellow designers at Game Jams never alleviated the sense of powerlessness that a Designer at times feels. As an Artist, he is as haunted by his Vision as Mozart was haunted by his Father’s Ghost, or as Hamlet suffered the same fate before him. The Unconscious mind supplies him with a set of options to choose from, and even when he has only just begun to make these choices is he all ready involved within the Game. There is no distinction between the Game and the Experience of the Game, because the materials employed to create a game, be they digital or physical, do not become a Game until they are EXPERIENCED in a RELATIONSHIP. This Relationship could all so be called the “Game”, implying that the Game has an ontological ground (its Being, in the sense that a Tree that falls when no one hears it, whilst it makes no sound, IS yet nonetheless a Tree in its own right). If the medium is not the message but simply a medium, this Being is not summed up in lines of code or even in design documents; these are maps, not territories. The Being would in this case have to precede the Conception of the Game itself. Hence the Concept that a Design Document indicates is only at best a Map of the Game Territory. Any reductionistic attempt to understand the Game NOT through the Relationship and Experience of Play but rather through the maps that are employed to bring the Platonic form into Worldly manifestation is a crime against the player, whose experience is limited the moment that he begins to think ABOUT the Game. In order to fully PRODUCE a game, a Designer must therefore have the same sort of open mind (not in the undiscerning sense, but rather in the PERCEIVING sense) that an Ideal Player would have.

When the Subconscious Mind produces ideas, the Designer is all ready playing a game WITH the Subconscious Mind, on whose grounds all of Existence might very well be a game (as per Watts’ Ontology and Cosmology, upon which I expound, very summarily, in the previous essay). Each decision in this Game limits the Designer’s options, so that in order to progress down the Game-making path the Designer must work with a limited Inventory of Ideas that can only be applied within certain confines intrinsic to the Game Medium. These limitations are both PSYCHOLOGICAL and TECHNICAL, the former being a function of the Human Mind and the latter a function of the Code. (In some cases: a literal Code Function.) Once the Designer gives up, his game is incomplete. He quits the Game prior to conception. It’s Game Over for Design. In this very crucial sense, the Game is only conceived UP UNTIL that point that the Designer died within it, either killing himself volitionally or by some other error. The Game as a Being remains, yet its Manifestation is unfinished until a Designer loads it and continues towards its conclusion. In the same manner as the word “painting” describes both the PROCESS of painting and the PRODUCT of painting – THE painting – THE GAME describes the process of Development as well as the Product and the Experiences and Relationships of the Players. And all of these are manifestations of the Game as a Being. For this reason, we can lay to rest the naïve common sense whose epistemology presupposes that a Designer has any sort of “Absolute Control” over his Design Document. He is simply the messenger. Like any other player, he has choice. But the objectives are limited by the Autonomous Being he is bringing out of the Platonic Realm and into a Playable Reality. As above, so below.                                                      

Dm.A.A.

The Frankly Terrible.

The Frankly Terrible.

Game Informer magazine, whilst ranking The Stanley Parable as the two-hundred-and-fourth best game of all time, promised that it “delved into philosophical questions about the nature of choice, and yet it was never pretentious […] the game was as funny as it was thought-provoking.”

Personally, I do not know what one expects of a magazine that omitted Spyro the Dragon from its list of three hundred games, secretly singing its own praises for remaining in publication (delivered to my home!!) for three hundred issues, (well into the Feminist Craze of two-thousands fourteen and fifteen, after which the hot stills of busty digital babes inexplicably diminished, if not vanished) and all in the same breath enthroned a SEQUEL to the Legend of Zelda (as though to spite Arin Hanson). Certainly I did not think that the Staff’s claims to non-pretension, or at least the proper assessment of it, were credible in light of these facts. But driven at once by a nostalgia for the corporate office setting, an insatiable intellectual curiosity, (including a fervent desire to understand what the average person considers pretentious) and the challenge that I internalized from the suggestion that my own ideas, especially for decision-based game design, were pretentious, I saved up what paltry allowance I could afford as a sleep-deprived, unemployed college student, and I downloaded the Parable with delight, anticipation, and some trepid reservations: a quiver of a sense that this would be a Camusian or Kafkaesque disappointment. It seemed that every person that I spoke with since my having caught wind of it had heard of it, and in my programming class it took only the mention of it on my part to invoke enthusiasm from the Gentle Giant that sits in front of me. Having played the demo, my appetite was whetted, even as my intellect was stimulated in retort. But the unease within my conscience did not abate when I had formalized my complaints in the form of an essay for my Game Design class. I felt ashamed for having assessed it so harshly without having played it through to its proper consummation, and immediately my training as an Academic Debater brought me into the imagined jury of my fellows. I had to attain ethos if my opinions were to be final. I felt an obligation to give this work of art a chance, fervently pursuing the hope that it resolves the problems that it addresses. Mind you: these problems are in no ways novel; the sense of existential despair is frankly a bit dated, and to treat any game that would try to sell it in so heavy-handed a manner as the demo suggested as though it were doing something groundbreaking is perhaps the most objective definition for “pretension” that I can find to apply to contemporary society. That horse is dead; MacIntyre long ago lay Beckett, Sartre, and Nietzsche to rest in After Virtue. Charlie Kaufmann glorified these themes believably and palpably in Synecdoche, New York, only to be met with mixed reviews and general confusion by his audience (present company excluded). Long before him there was Franz Kafka, whose name, as it turns out, appears nebulously on a white board in the Parable: “R.I.P. Franz”. Sartre wrote No Exit, a play that took minimalism to an extreme that only Waiting for Godot could top. So on and so forth, and did I mention “so it goes”? Kurt Vonnegut made his entire career out of tearing down false idols. So did Friedrich Nietzsche, about a century before him. And don’t even get me started on noise music.

So needless to say (hence I am saying it, for irony is my last refuge) when I expressed my hopes for the game upon having played the demo (after having spent hours trying to download it for free, prior to the arrival of my necessary funds) I told the Gentle Giant that I meant not to judge of it too harshly but rather to anticipate some sort of resolution. Once I had expressed my rather premature judgment that the Narrator sounded a bit Sarcastic, my interlocutor did not hesitate to tell me ardently that my judgment was not premature. I stopped him before he could spoil anything for me, and I was met with a silence the likes of which I could not read. I supposed that my visibly sensitive classmate was simply unaccustomed to that degree of ardour as I demonstrated in my pursuit of what Sartre calls a “privileged moment”.

There was nothing to spoil. The game played immediately to my sense of defiance, terminating me in ways that were so elaborate and schizophrenic that I prayed inwardly that these were just design flukes. When finally I took the proper course and did all that the wretched voice told me to do, I was heartbroken by the Beauty of the Outcome, knowing I did not deserve it. Then terror crept in as I began to wonder if this was all there was.

Of substance, yes. But as far as ridiculously overdone dead-ends go, I had only scratched the tip of the iceberg.

I played the Stanley Parable for two hours. During this time I was reprimanded by a condescending and Satanic voice, offered reprieve by a corny female counterpoint who only appeared once, even before I “won the game”, (and who was clearly some sort of parody of Tenenbaum) and reduced to a slave whose own liberation is apparently the result of conditioning and complacency rather than the strife and heartbreak that less privileged people know to be the true price of freedom.

I hated it. But what puzzles me is the seemingly unequivocal love that people have for it. If Games are Art, and they are to be ranked in the midst of literature, theatre, music, and the rest, then they must be able to compete. The medium, if it comprises any part of the message, should be necessary towards the expression of an idea that cannot be expressed as adequately in any other way. Since it is OUR Art Form, the bark of the Millennial Generation, it should convey us to islands unforeseen. Proving that you can retell No Exit and the Myth of Sisyphus in a series of reductionistic, brutalistic mini-games does not equate to novelty.

A radical Christian conservative I knew, despite his overarching madness, once pointed out that “there is nothing new under the Sun”, but that it may APPEAR new TO ME. I never agreed with him in the Absolute sense, which is after all the only sense that lunatics can allow themselves to deal in, lest they come down from the Moon. Yet in practice I find it relevant here. Gamers who crusade against Roger Ebert’s denouncements of their favourite Art Form give him plenty of faggots to burn (I mean sticks of wood, as a metaphor.) when they transparently call games “Art” not out of artistic fervor but rather out of intellectual laziness. They do not want to elevate Video Games to the Height of Hamlet. They just want to pretend that games are all ready there, attaining its actuality, for only then can they continue to play and consider themselves sufficiently cultured, never once having again to open a book.

What people consider “pretentious” is apparently any sort of genuine, contemporary philosophical inquiry. The term itself has become pretentious. Yet remember that I am not pretentious in using it, considering that I have a deviant conception of what it means that is at the same time rooted in tradition. The contemporary absurdist loves to be a mouse running into walls in pursuit of the cheese that is put in front of him each time. Why? Because he believes himself to have found Reality. People who recycle Absurdism and Post-modernism by creating anti-games manage somehow to create a work of art that pretends NOT to be art, yet at the same time it remains a work that pretends to BE art only when it is not. The former is illustrated by the fact that what could be an amazing and immersive office adventure is painted over with a voice whose every impulse seems to be to narcissistically deride it, except at those moments when the beauty of the surroundings can only be enjoyed fully by an infant without any sense of responsibility. The latter becomes apparent when a great deal of thought and design is reflected in simply pandering to a desk jockey’s clichéd fears of his Superior’s Luxurious Lifestyle. The game does this all in an overlying spirit of apathy and boredom. In this anything-goes world devoid of actual freedom, Hope is replaced by Realism. But this is pretentious because even to CLAIM to have found Reality, or at least a justifiable representation of it, once all criteria have been tossed out, is itself a Hopeful conceit. So it follows that gamers and designers who do not really CARE about the outcomes of their choices produce a game that has the immediate outcome of wasting my time and money, the only reward being that I know I kept an open mind and heart to it to that extent that it was bearable to a principled person. And if principle were pretension, what WOULDN’T be? The affirmation of one’s own pretensions is still a pretension by extension; it is like saying “I am lying.” The hypocrite does not become LESS of a hypocrite by admitting to his own hypocrisy; he becomes MORE of one by striving with futility to become less of one in the public eye. And it does not take a genius (I hope.) to figure this out INSTANTLY.

The Stanley Parable does not “delve into philosophical questions”. Office Space did that. Dilbert did that. The Simpsons did that. But this is frankly terrible. The Stanley Parable is like a game from the nineties minus the passion. It is like Camus without the human-hearted longing. It is Sartre without the glamour. And even if it could live up to any of those sources, some of which it cites by homage, it would come late, simply by being a Video Game in the New Millennium. It could do better.

The game does not raise questions about free will. I still FEEL myself to be a free and willing agent, despite the conditioning offered by a transparently bad Narrator. Perhaps when I first played the demo I felt a little shaky. But the game itself resolved that by its own failures at striving against my Will. By deconstructing itself it could only prove something about itself. The Spirit of a GREAT Game is never in its parts, and Man has known that reduction to absurdity is a fallacy since Plato at the latest. (Unless you mean to argue that I am Socrates because I wear a beard.) I do not QUESTION my Free Will any more so now than I did before. I CHOOSE NOT TO. I experience this Choice as being not only real (which never was a problem for Stanley) but consequential; not only Determinism but the passive-aggressive fatalism of the Parable are both prisons lost to me. So long as I FEEL free, and so long as I FEEL important, (or “Significant”, which literally means only that I am signified in some way, and that means that every time the Narrator calls me by name he signifies me.) then I can continue, even if it is only in the context of this experience, (and I need not choose even to go so far as to make “experience” my limitation, even if you do not believe me, Reader) to choose to believe in my own freedom and importance, and to act accordingly, without reference to any external criterion that would compel me to use my freedom to deny my freedom. That I refuse to simply “win” the game on the Narrator’s terms is not a testament to my doubts about the validity of my own choices, even when they produce favourable outcomes, but rather it is a testament to my REFUSAL to submit to a TRANSPARENT ruse. The game raises NO questions because even to think about it still FEELS LIKE A CHOICE, and that feeling, if it can be perpetuated by the act of what I call “choosing”, will all ways, inevitably, be the arbiter. But this does not make me its puppet. For in the absence of any evidence that I am not a PART of it but that it is simply a means by which to CONTROL me, I have every reason to trust it above any disembodied voice or uninformed order, even if it emanates from my own bad conscience, which quite clearly IS conditioned externally by abuse. So the game does not make me QUESTION this position. It does not ever provide EVIDENCE AGAINST it. It does not attack it; it simply baits me into attacking myself. But I am quick enough to know that I can CHOOSE to refuse, even if it denies that I have such a choice in the matter, by pretending to KNOW what I had intended to choose in some sort of cheap parlour trick that once upon a time self-responsible parents taught their children to disregard. If it were not for the FEELING OF BEING FREE, the game would raise the question of freedom’s own limitations. But a man who lives his life on his own terms, having found them not in arbitrary button-pressing but rather in alignment with a Higher Good, will not feel shaken by this willful waste of time; he will simply wait for a more persuasive attack upon his conviction, and until that comes his conviction will stand, and awareness of this fact ensures that his conviction is the closest thing to Absolute Knowledge that any man can fathom. It does not even matter that those zombies who have turned on Goodness imagine it to be some sort of manipulative dictator who supplies its adherents according to a Pavlovian rewards system. Clearly, the path of the righteous has all ways been more subtle than that. MacIntyre did not write his books just to get a KICK out of them; we know this because there are insights there that are more melancholy than stimulating; they simply RING TRUE. You can’t convince all beings of this Truth. But you CAN convince yourself. And you’d be right. Gamers deny this possibility, pretentiously, and out of fear and laziness. They project their own pretensions upon any one who claims to have Seen the Light or attained any sort of Transcendence whatsoever. But the joke is on them. For having seen the evils of the irresponsible insect who calls itself a Modern Man, or who must crusade against all alien wills just to assert its own, only to deny its existence, I know to learn from the mistakes of those deluded mice who run into walls for fun. One mustn’t imagine Sisyphus happy, nor must one extend this kindness to Stanley. One must simply leave the Office. The Stanley Parable mirrors the life of the Corporate Slave, but it does not liberate; it only begins to wiggle that tooth, and it does so in a manner that is so fiendishly tickling that the Slave is abated instead of aroused.

Dm.A.A.

Trim:

An unnecessary conversation with a familiar stranger produced a tendency I could not place at first, but that now strikes me simply as the TEMPTATION TOWARDS EXCESS. The man was portly and gregarious, exploiting my Russian heritage to speak to me in fractured Russian about programming. Hours later, I resolved a puzzle that began shortly after I came home: that one of my code loops was repeating excess feedback. I had arbitrarily, and with shaking trepidation, inserted three magic words in a random position: “x = 14;”

Eventually I discovered that my problem could be solved by placing copies of them throughout the various branches. It then occurred to me to remove the original application of these words to the trunk, suspecting that they might be unnecessary.

Upon having done so, and upon having copied and pasted the code into MicroSoft Word, I discovered that my text numbered precisely 4130 words, spanning no more or less than 43 pages. Had I not trimmed the dangling ribbon, I would have had 4133 words. It would have been just as incredible a synchronicity.

But it would not have been nearly as clean.

Dm.A.A.

THE HERMIT:

MASTER PATTERNS.

Sacrificing the Master Pattern makes it no longer master of your Soul, for you have discovered that you can align instead your work with a Greater and More Mysterious pattern. Over some time this emerges. After the third set of three, you allow for one set of one, for it demonstrates numerological fidelity in its synchronicity, even when you have considered multiple aesthetic and practical alternatives.

Dm.A.A.

LEARY:

I listen to Leary

In a pre-recorded vocal sample.

Looping as he casts his loopy

Theory. That we’d follow his

Example.

And I know he did his best.

But I remember I was never much

Impressed. I knew this back in

Middle School. And I will not

Be made a little fool.

How he’d crusade against

The tyranny of all authority.

Soon he had to answer even

To his own majority.

Soon he like a cancer

Spread the tall tales of

His own superiority.

Soon even the Cosmic Dancer

Grew tired of his seniority.

Alan Watts had warned him

Art Linkletter scorned him

Ginsberg wrote about him

With a Howl.

Father Time endowed him

With a scowl.

Crime denied him

A return across each

Bridge he’d burn.

The gods seemed to abandon him.

As he rode upon a phantom whim.

Philip K. Dick condemned him

As do I and for the same damn

Tragedy. Icarus took to the sky

But never had a strategy.

And of course those loopy words

Work well but only in the same

Closed loop: that there is only

Solidarity within the troupe.

He subtly suggests that on the contrary

He offers Hope. Of truly Universal Unity

Without a comfort that could help us

Cope. He says therefore to screw the

Pope and clergy. And engage in

Orgiastic dramaturgy.

And he urges me

To purge me of the curse

That is the olden way.

And I am left much worse off

Than before for listening to

What he absolutely had to say.

For if he will condemn each path

That leads me back to This Reality,

Then could he not throw out and out

Of wrath all Solidarity in Actuality?

For what is Shakespeare without

Rhyme or reason? What is friendship

If it’s treason? Who’d defend a killer

Who here lies and there hides his

Will under a pious disguise?

Why must I level with the

Murderers when I could revel

In Peacemakers? All for fear

That when you return to the

Herd you won’t have any

Takers.

Why must I forsake the Quakers?

And the Mormons?

And Zen monks?

What can I discover

That I won’t simply

Recover now in

Chunks?

You threw the babe of Human

Friendship out with the bath

Water of conceit. And in your

False camaraderie oddly you

Fell into your own deceit.

And what you brought to me

Was so apparent that your

Sign of birth was knowingly

Transparent.

All the parents you despised

For fear of parenthood. And all

The men you analyzed who wanted

Only to be Understood.

And in disguise of a much

Greater Good than any old

Inherited conception.

You gave way for the great mystery

Of Evil then to parrot your own self

Deception.

And when you said in that loop

Think for yourself. I think then:

For My Self. Is that all that I

Have to live for?

When she asked me what the Self

Was. Prior to her death from

Drugs.

I found a reason to forgive her.

But what is forgiveness,

Pity, mercy when the word of

Evil is abolished? When the

People cannot trust a common

Knowledge?

When the colleges are rape

Machines and dogs will run

Amok. I say: fuck you, Leary.

Fuck your theory of never

Giving a fuck.

Here’s the fuck I give to you:

For there’s no truck in living through

This Life with open mind and no

Convictions except those bred by

Addictions.

Part of me is lived in an eternal fiction

And the other in maternal fact and time.

Under your paternal jurisdiction,

I forego this paradigm.

Modernity supplied it

And humanity denied it.

And it was not vanity that

Spoke with such authority you

Fear.

MacIntyre liberated us with pain.

And a desire not in vain.

When Ram Dass had a heart attack

He tossed your fire out into

The rain.

[You offered Solidarity

Only within a narrow group.

And those who sought it anywhere

Besides you called a troupe.

For you defied the Other

Like a child defies its

Mother. And without an

Adult’s rhyme or reason.

And I could have told your story

Of a war-torn scorn in prose.

But as it goes: I know

That it would have been

Treason.]

Dm.A.A.

Epilogue: 640 mots.

They said he was a guy who just did drugs

And played guitar. I thought that it

Was more and that they could not see it

From afar.

A door into an other World.

Devoid of all pretension.

And tight rope-walking spaceman hurled

Into the next dimension.

What if all of the designers

Who had made your favourite games

Were all drug pushing maligners

Who could never feel the shame.

What if it was never real?

The claims that it had shared her

Suicidal woes. And what if its own

Solitary aims and subtle games

Nobody knows?

Because it claimed that all I said

Was so conveniently in my favour.

Like I’d let it all get to my head

Inflamed by its behavior.

But have I not earned the right to savour

What I lost? And if the flavor that I order

Here is Justice. Must it not be that I should

Enjoy the frost? And mindless of the

Cost.

A kind man will enjoy his kindness

If it is reciprocated. He could be

As easily moved to the blindest

Rage if he is baited.

What was convenient for him

Then to omit at my expense:

That he’d supplied an addict

That I loved with drugs

With sex for recompense.

And she believed she was not used

And it could be excused. And so she

So refused to listen. Even as I shouted

Of the ruse.

He raped and killed her

When he willed her out of my

Perfection. And so chilled is

Still my blood for all the blood

That had been spilled by her

Selection.

Her rejection had meant nothing

Next to the one loss I feared.

And sex was something that I never held so

Dear. But they would not adhere

For when they’d hear the psychopathic

Side. How quickly they would side against

My wrath in service to its pride.

She died because I never could omit

In my Great Hope any detail.

That given the entire scope

They’d help her to escape and cope

And Truth and Goodness would prevail.

But what had been the central issue

Clear in every symptom as a pock

Marked zit. Was that I was a victim

And that he was only ever it.

But it was this same griping

Over problems at the very core.

That made it so impossible to solve them.

When my throat was growing sore.

For what lies deep at the core

Of all the lies and washes up

On every shore.

Is thrown back easily

Into the water. That he

Bought her like a whore

Was more than I could bear then to repeat

Or to believe. But all the more I wanted

Them to see the Truth and to relieve.

But what had been so central

Was to them so marginal and

Petty. I could not conceive of it

For this I never had been ready.

And the ones who knew the whole extent of it

Did nothing. But it’s true that they are guilty of it

Too. At least one man here: he did something.

And when it refused, all self-excused

To make amends for what it had the

Nerve to take from friends:

The One Love of my Life.

And Her Life towards meeting its

Ends.

I thought that would be enough

Without the details to convince.

But the Devil lives in all the details.

And she sails with him as with a Prince.

A Prince of Darkness will embark on this:

To rape and murder his closest friend’s

Chosen bride.

I did not know what part to say

To sell it to you that it was not

Justified.

But it must be true to form now

You are all informed that

She has died.

Now: are you now so deformed

As to hold on to every norm

And pride?

Dm.A.A.