Wrongly considered by many to be strictly a form of children’s amusement, the medium of the video game is actually a rich field for academic inquiry. This field has been exploited rather famously in recent years by psychologists and sociologists studying the effects that gaming may or may not have on human behavior, and the graphic design aspects of games have also been explored to some extent, although there is a certain reluctance on the part of academic and cultural establishments to take that particular endeavor very seriously. Likewise, there has been a general neglect in the field of game studies to look at games in relation to the humanities, particularly philosophy, and yet to anyone familiar with games, they raise profound questions in those areas. While this paper does not seek to correct this neglect, it is with some of these questions that this paper is concerned. Specifically, who plays video games and why? How do games define reality or shape our perception of it? Finally, are games art and therefore valid forms of expression?
The first question: who games? As noted, there is a general belief that video games are the domain of children, or of teenagers at the very least. There is a coincident belief that the people who play games are overwhelmingly male and socially dysfunctional. However, according to the Entertainment Software Association[1], 69% of American heads of households play video games. The average game player, or gamer, is currently 33 years old, with the majority of gamers, approximately 44%, ranging in age from 18 to 49. Gamers aged under 18 account for 31% of the market and those aged 50 and up make up 25%, which is the smallest share. In terms of sex, males currently have a slight majority at 62%, with females at 38%, a difference of only 12 percentage points. This disparity is more likely a matter of marketing than of interest; magazines and television networks and programs that are male-oriented feature prominent game advertising as opposed to those geared to females. In terms of socialization, 44% of gamers play games online in large gaming communities. Gamers constitute a sophisticated culture with its own linguistic norms and code of conduct. Of course, we must remember that these numbers come from a biased source—the ESA is the game industry’s chief public relations organization—but these numbers are generally supported by gamer experience. Gamers can vouch for them.
Why, then, is it assumed in the popular imagination that gamers are children? Certainly, children do play games, though not apparently to the extent that would justify this belief. It has been suggested that since video games are a relatively new medium they appeal to youths and have been a part of youth culture more or less since their inception. This does not make for a compelling argument, however, because since their early days video games have been directed traditionally at an adult market. Pong, for example, the first commercially successful video game, was first installed in bars, which one would presume would be devoid of children. Home gaming consoles have been relatively expensive, even today costing hundreds of dollars, being priced not for children but for adults with disposable income. The vehicle for games, whether it be the home console, the personal computer or the cell phone, is likewise geared to adults. The video game is and has been an adult medium. The notion that it is a medium for children likely comes from a cultural bias regarding the term “game.” “Game” connotes “play” and playing is regarded as juvenile behavior. Video games are toys, the thinking goes, and mature adults don’t play with toys. Of course, we all know that this is completely untrue. Adults have always loved games and toys; the games and toys just get bigger and more sophisticated as we mature. It is this fact that may help explain the appeal of video games to children; children play video games because adults introduced the games to them and to play the games is to emulate adult behavior.
But if video games appeal to children because adults like the games, why do the games appeal to adults in the first place? Why do adults feel compelled to engage in play? Probably for the same reason that children do: play is a form of interaction with our social environments that allows us to identify, formulate and practice our social roles. In his thesis on the game Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Marshall Smith shows that a society’s leisure activities reflect the forms of work that is done within that society.[2] People in industrial societies which emphasize physical labor tend to spend their leisure time playing and following athletic sports. Members of technological societies, by contrast, whose work is less physically demanding and more mental, play games that likewise employ less physical and more mental exertion, such as board games, cards and gambling, darts and billiards, and video games.[3] The games that we play reflects the work that we do. This is especially true with video games. Gonzalo Frasca, one of the leading theorists in the field of ludology, or the study of play, points out that video games are simulations.[4] They are models that allow us to explore cause and effect, right and wrong, winning and losing. They allow us to do what we cannot do or are discouraged from doing in our everyday lives. This is especially true in MMORPGS, in which gamers fashion avatars to represent themselves more or less out of whole cloth, imbuing those avatars with the characteristics that the gamers want to possess themselves. It is a process of self-fashioning at a most literal level. Games are thus simultaneously a means by which we engage in wish fulfillment and achieve a sense of agency and power that is frequently absent from reality.
And that brings us to the issue of reality and our relationship to it. According to Plato, most people have an imperfect grasp or perception of reality, one that is limited by our lack of intellectual rigor. In his Dialogues, Plato articulates what is referred to as the “Allegory of the Cave.” He describes a scenario in which prisoners are chained in a dimly lit cave and are forced to watch shadows projected on the wall; these shadows constitute the conception of reality for these shackled cave-dwellers. Because they don’t know better, because they have such a limited frame of reference, they accept the representation of reality, the projected shadows, in place of the real thing. Now consider how complicated the issue becomes if instead of looking at shadows they played video games. Whereas Plato’s shadows were merely representations of reality, games and virtual reality raise the representation to the level of simulation. Games don’t simply represent reality, they let you interact with it and control it, to experience it in a way that a shadow, or a painting or a film for that matter, do not. Plato felt that representations were dangerous because they tricked people into accepting their false versions of reality instead of forcing people to search for the truth of reality and experiencing the real thing for themselves. What about the simulation? Does it pose a similar or greater threat? Will we come to prefer it to reality, or fail to make distinctions between the two? Opponents and critics of video games think so. We hear horror stories all the time of people who become addicted to games, preferring to interact with virtual people rather than real ones. We are warned that violent games promote violent behavior because gamers, particularly younger ones, cannot distinguish between fantasy and reality. This idea is conveyed in the many reports about how the Columbine shooters played a version of Doom in which they had modified the game world to resemble their high school. Can this be true? Can games reconfigure our perception of reality to such an extent that reality itself becomes a simulation?
Aristotle would have said no. Unlike Plato, who felt that the representation served to distance people from truth, Aristotle saw it bringing people closer to truth through the vicarious experience of it. In his Poetics, Aristotle discusses how poetry, specifically tragedy, is an imitation of great men and how these characters’ experiences and changes of fortune are internalized by the audience. Through these characters, the members of the audience are given permission to explore their own darkest desires in a socially acceptable and safe way. The ultimate effect of this exploration is catharsis, the purging of those dark and negative desires and drives. The internalization of the imitation acts as a safety valve, letting the audience blow off steam before they explode. If this is the case, then games should fulfill the same function, but to a greater extent. Because the interactive nature of games makes them more real than mere representations, then the vicarious experiences they impart should result in more satisfying catharsis, one that is potentially even more socially responsible than that derived from drama or other forms of art. It would seem better for people to work out their aggressions in a virtual environment than in the real world. When people cut you off in traffic, don’t run them off the road; just go home and run cars off the road playing Burnout Revenge. The streets will be safer that way.
Of course, this line of thought is likely to raise objections. For one thing, both Plato and Aristotle were considering specifically the value of art to society. There is a reluctance in our culture to consider video games as art, and so it’s questionable whether the arguments Plato and Aristotle put forth can be applied to games. Can games be considered analogous to other forms of art? There is, as has been explained, a fundamental difference between games and shadows or plays: the latter are representational whereas the former is simulational. We don’t consider physics simulators or shooting galleries or games of chess, for that matter, to be examples of art. And yet, video games employ many of the elements that we find in more traditional art forms. There is design, for one thing, although that design frequently has more in common with architecture than painting. Still, architecture is considered to be an art form. Another element is a sense of narrative. Although many games don’t tell stories in the traditional sense, many of them do, and those that do not can be read as narratives, albeit simple ones. Fighting games like Mortal Kombat have characters in conflict with each other; there is a crisis point at which the gamer’s avatar (the protagonist) is in danger of losing; there is a logical progression of events from start to finish that displays a logical chain of causality: if the avatar gets hit, it falls down. Games also convey messages and function as a form of communication. In order to finish games successfully, the gamer must enter the mindset of the game designers and learn their logic.[5] Even the early and relatively simple and primitive games (Pac-Man, Space Invaders) communicated meaning: these games were not about winning; in fact, winning was impossible. The goal instead was to play a good game and earn a high enough score to have your initials recorded for posterity or until someone better came along and beat your score. That’s a profoundly Classical ideal, akin to Achilles setting out to attain glory in the short lifetime that is allotted to him. Finally, the best games showcase creative thought and originality, operating in surprising ways, sometimes even to the designers themselves. The celebrated game creator Peter Molyneux describes an experience he had programming the game Black and White: one of the game’s creatures was programmed to eat the most edible items in its environment, a program that it tried to fulfill by eating its own leg.[6] The game’s AI, or artificial intelligence, showed emergent behavior, taking the rules of game play that he had programmed and interpreting them in an unexpected way. If the purpose of art is to make you think, then that is certainly what happened here.
To be sure, I am biased when it comes to these issues. I love my games and do not like to have my beloved pastime denigrated or disparaged. But even with that in mind, it would seem that video games do meet the criteria for works of art and that games have much to teach us about ourselves and our own world. Descartes famously asserted “Cogito, ergo sum”: “I think, therefore I am.” He felt that the only fact that could be truly knowable, the only thing of which he could be certain, was his own existence, an existence that was defined by thought. For us gamers, existence is increasingly determined not by thought but by play, not by what we think but by what we do. Our avatars provide us with a sense of volition and self-awareness; they are an objectified form of ourselves. For the gamer, Descartes’ maxim is revised to read, “Ludo, ergo sum”: “I play, therefore I am.”
[1] All statistics come from “Game Player Data,” Entertainment Software Association, 20 January 2007
[2] Marshall David Smith, Ideology and Interaction in Internet Action Video Games (master’s thesis for University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 2004), 23.
[3] Ibid., 24-25.
[4] Gonzalo Frasca, “Simulation versus Narrative: Introduction to Ludology” in The Video Game Theory Reader, ed. Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron (New York: Routledge, 2003).
[5] Mark J. P. Wolf, ed., The Medium of the Video Game (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 4.
[6]“The Frankenstein Factor,” in Video Game Invasion: The History of a Global Obsession, dir. David Carr and David Comtois, 2 hr., Game Show Network LLC, 2004, Digital Video Disc.
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