orthogeeks

When I was doing research about one of my essays, I talked to someone kind of randomly – a game reviewer who was  rather astute – about choice in games. He pointed out that in most games, freedom is not genuine. If you do believe in free will but not in providence, you may feel chafed as you ‘kick against the goads’ in some more story or movie-like games. You would like to be able to really shape the future of that virtual world; after all, the point of being the hero is being the decider, the turner of tides and the shaper of futures.

I once pointed out to my roommate that games – most anyway – offer you the freedom to fail. That is to say, situations arise where the player can make choices that will cause the game to end in loss. Because we’re ‘in’ the world, we tacitly assume for the sake of playing the game, that it is, if not real, a kind of consistent reality. We use our imagination to fill in the gaps. When playing a role playing game, for instance, the player only has ‘freedom to fail’ (apart from turning off the game system) during combat, or at particular crisis points outside of it. Normally you are not given the freedom to fail; you are restricted, like bumpers on a bowling alley.

Lacking the freedom to fail would produce an interesting result. A high score table always presents the opportunity for failure, no matter how good you are: You can always get a lower score. (Unless you couldn’t. What would a high score mean, then? Play time?) It seems to be part of our fallen experience that the intensity of the satisfaction of success rides on the intensity of the possibility of failure. This, I do not think, is our natural state. But beyond that speculation, it is definitely clear that trial and challenge, with failure and success are characteristic of all forms of training or schooling. So whatever our natural state is, which I cannot say I know, it is clear that our lives, which are in all ages filled with trial and error, success, danger, failure, progressive difficulties, and on until the end, must be trials of some kind.

Games reflect this, this kind of trial, formation, development of character in an inner struggle. They outwardly reflect what people sense is true inwardly; and for this reason they are often ‘unrealistic’ – our inner fights are more extreme than most outward ones can be. And outwardly we get one chance, inwardly we often fail and get to try again. Therefore, the analogy of games to real life activities is at best tenuous, and seems to occupy what I would call ‘middle spaces’ – places where reality is simulated so it can be experienced without the consequences that might go along with those experiences.

The first game of this sort is the sport; some are more dangerous than others, but the idea still holds true. Even in deadly sport, you are simulating having an enemy. As a society, having real battles with a real enemy who losing to could result in the enslavement of everyone is too great a risk to take continuously; so blood sports exist to simulate situations that might otherwise only occur in that situation. But they are also simulations: The gladiator arena is a far more ‘fixed’ space than a real battlefield – whether with many combatants or few – would be.

When people began to value individual lives more, deadly sports became less popular. It is likely that the influence of Christianity in many places hastened or sparked this change. In any case, fencing need not be deadly to be real swordfighting; but clearly as I said above there is an aspect to severe failure penalties that makes success more glorious. In a time when it becomes impossible to kill another person in sport and be accepted as a hero, it still is acceptable to risk killing yourself. Extreme sports are interesting for this reason, they are both civil (they do not involve the barbarism of killing or harming others) while still being deadly. People will not fault nature for killing a man; you cannot indict a cliff for being tall and straight, or a mountain for being full of tall, unyielding pine trees. The ground is hard anyone who falls knows it without question.

Part of the modern way of thinking is encapsulated in a line from W.H.Auden quite nicely:

Instead of saying, ‘Strange are the whims of the Strong,’
We say, ‘Harsh is the Law but it is certain’:

No doubt we consider all men reasonable and thus find that any man who is a killer must be reformed; it is only the law (the abstract) which is permitted to be harsh and absolute and still be excused for this. A medieval would think nothing of a King’s ability to execute his subjects but rather be grieved by the obvious politics behind the execution. In this day, we find the politics excusable, but the idea of the executions grievous.

The only solution to this dilemma (other than extreme sports) is virtual sports. Video games. At first the games were merely electronic games, like pong: wysiwyg. But later on, starting perhaps around Wolfenstein, the idea of virtualizing the experience of war becomes a reality. I do not know how long the military has been using video / computer simulators: I do recall playing combat flight simulators in the early nineties. This advances quickly. The idea of realism catches on with graphics advances. Blood sport is reborn and for a brief moment, a guy called Thresh is the king of this new kind of gladiating.

Always, though, nagging at us is freedom. The virtual sport is great entertainment for awhile, but it has too fixed a goal. You have the freedom to fail and to succeed, and the freedom from the real life consequence of dying. Life is already a trial; what about an escape? Books already provided this, and many games arose which were elaborations of those ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books. Adventure games and others display compelling story and world, but they are mere escapism. In them man is robbed of some of his freedom, the freedom to imagine, that books permitted in their absence of video.

Books are more interactive than movies, because more work is required on the part of the person to experience the story. These video games are like interactive movies, following the line of plays and story games since antiquity. They never reach quite being a co-authored book; they maybe reach the level of the games played by wise storytellers with their audiences where they would ask a person what they would like to have happen next in the story. They simply amplify the power of the storyteller a thousand-fold, through digital copies.

Massively multiplayer online games held great promise. Get a lot of people together and you will create a real virtual world – where people interact and tell stories to one another – or even better, live those stories out in text, images, or later, interactive role-playing action. From early muds and mushes to Second Life and World of Warcraft, the problem still was, the most free (the Mush to Second Life) mainly offered a ‘freedom from’ the restrictions imposed by the least free (the Mud to World of Warcraft.) As such, the former tend to be occupied mostly by people looking to be free from restrictions against certain behaviors, more than those interested in accomplishing things. The most notable thing I found in all circumstances was the tendency of guys to play female characters in these environs. That itself says a lot.

Perhaps the reality is that we are unable to conceive of this higher freedom, except as a negation. Freedom to succeed is not merely a freedom from want or a freedom to fail; freedom to create is not merely a freedom from restrictions on what you can create (art in all forms is often ‘techniques’ that go along with aesthetic sense to overcome the limitations of a medium. Do we know how to create without restrictions?) And it does not follow that removing all needs or wants produces success or removing restrictions on what you’re permitted to do produces creativity. Such is the mystery of this ‘negative freedom’, this white space around our dual lower freedoms.

For it is not a freedom which requires or proscribes failure as an option, nor is it a freedom which needs removal of restrictions to be ‘free’. Thus it should be obvious why my acquaintance found the freedom offered in games so unsatisfying.

This freedom is simply, ‘to be undetermined’ – and each character creation and ‘new game’ offers the first step of it: Existential freedom. But it is always virtual, and thus, not complete: The desire for it then I think we can agree is a desire for our freedom in God. Hierotheos Vlachos has commented that the primary form of freedom is simply the freedom to determine one’s own existence, which only God naturally has. We as Christians would seem to have this too by grace, as Paul says, ‘You are new creations.’ And if you do believe in free will, then you may recognize that God leaves the choice to us whether or not we wish to be reborn. (He still does all the work.)

To be truly undetermined in a virtual world! It would take not just a genius to sub-create this thing, but a spiritual genius.