Games and reality

In the tradition of Plato, Wark uses the inverse of the truth to set up his parable. Plato used the metaphor of the cave as a thought experiment: if we were in a cave and we saw shadows on the wall, this somehow wouldn’t be so different from reality. Wark, on the other hand, points out that if we were gamers in a cave this would also be similar to reality. He discusses the many ways the world can be point-based and otherwise gamelike. But there is slippage in the form of the extrapolation. Plato suggested one could see the imperfect forms of the real as shadows cast by ideals in another plane. Wark says games are “colonizing reality.” Really, as in the original Platonic construction, viewing the real as structured along game-like lines remains a different way of looking at reality. Wark claims reality is different than it was at some before-time, stating that “stories no longer opiate us…” But stories haven’t changed… just culture and understanding.

Wark seems to be trying to demonstrate that reality has changed… but I believe he is more effectively showing that the perception of reality has changed. In the same way the introduction of the computer changed the perception of information, the introduction of the game as an externalized, self-contained entity (in contrast to games orchestrated by human players, computer games are mediated by machines and are thus physical inevitabilities once put into operation) has changed the perception of causality and power. Games are programs designed with two layers, as I wrote earlier when talking about Pokemon. They consist of a narrative layer rooted in human psychology and perception as well as an operational layer rooted in symbolic logic, physical law, and mathematical ‘truth.’

Games form an aperture between ourselves and worlds we make for ourselves. Games are necessarily fabricated, and while they contain the narrative flows and themes that draw human interest, they are really just carefully constructed frameworks for the manipulation of algorithms. All possibility within the narrative layer of the game is underwritten by the algorithmic possibility of a symbolic manipulation. In contrast to this, there is no algorithm underlying reality: quantum mechanics’ probabilistic foundation precludes it (or at least, I believe it does—Stephen Wolfram, for one, does not). Nonetheless, the very fact that humans have always created narratives to explain chains of events—and, for that matter, that we perceive distinctions between events, between nouns and verbs, between times and places—exposes the disjuncture which has motivated the pervasion of the concept of the game. Where reality offers only randomness and chance, games are always algorithmically founded and more or less predictable (note the difference between the horror of actually dying of dysentery and the feeling of irritation at Oregon Trail’s pronouncement “You have died of dysentery”). Just as the concept of the computer allowed us to conceive of information as infinitely iterable and ourselves as machines—both fallacies driven by a neglect of the consequences of embodied reality—the concept of the game allows us to rationalize the chaos of the world. They thus embody the essential disjuncture between the human mind and the operation of reality.

To bring this back to Plato, the impulse to scaffold reality—which seems shaky, dirty, and impossible upon close consideration—with a system of rationality which exists solely in the human mind is an ancient one. Computers have allowed us to perpetrate another iteration of the tradition, and the externalized game (a microcosm of an idealized reality) allows to perpetrate another. But, of course, the game can only ever be a model. After all, mathematical systems are demonstrably incomplete. I believe computers and their programs should be seen as another part of a holistically regarded reality, rather than external or idealized models projected, as shadows, onto the rock of our cave.