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On Video Game Death and the Possibility of “Extra Life”
Greg
Esplin (bio)
gesplin@purdue.edu
1. In uttering
the words “I’m dead” a speaker cannot be accurately
describing the current state of his own existence: to speak anything
at all, of course, requires one to be alive. Analyzed in this way,
the statement shows itself to be self-referentially inconsistent,
because the very fact that the speaker makes this claim demonstrates
that he cannot be as he says.
2. What, then, are we to make of this utterance when it is spoken
within the context of video game playing? In the essay that follows,
I address the complexities of this statement, exploring how it centers
a player at the heart of a fundamental ontological issue regarding
the question of virtual reality: what is the relationship between
the physical, non-simulated reality and our digitally-mediated perception
of it?
3. The straightforward
solution to this paradoxical use of language, in which a player
describes his current state as non-existent, lies in the recognition
that the universe to which such words refer, when spoken in the
context of one’s status within a video game does not, in any
fundamental sense, exist. The imaginary realm of the video game,
one could argue, does not correspond to the external, physical world.
The universe of the game, such a line of thought might progress,
is by definition an artificial, conceptual space, its parameters
being defined by a set of certain rules that do not necessarily
correspond to the nature of the world existing outside of the imaginary
game-world. Such an ontological orientation governs not merely the
way in which players interact within computer-rendered virtual realities
operating in video games, but even more fundamentally it lies at
the core of the very notion of any game. In chess, for example,
if my Rook is captured by my opponent, it would not be appropriate
for him to take my physical body captive, bind me in my chair, and
hold me against my will: instead, his move only functions to circumscribe
my future possibilities of play within that particular match as
I no longer have that particular piece at my disposal. Similarly,
my success or failure in a game of Monopoly does not alter my actual
financial situation when I leave the parlor: I cannot, of course,
find a banker in the real world who would accept my deed for “Park
Place” as collateral.
4. We cannot,
therefore, simply assume that a seamless congruence exists between
the everyday world and the imaginary realm of the game. Yet, to
suppose that the simulation world of the video game has no influence
on the nature of the ‘real’ world, that the two are
entirely distinct binaries, is also problematic. While simulation,
by definition, has no inherent referential correspondence, at least
in the ontological sense, with the external, “real”
world, our experience of the digitally modeled realm may well shape
how we interpret the non-simulated world.
5. In his first
Critique, Kant inverts the binary originating from ancient Greek
philosophy that emphasizes the superiority of a thing’s “essence”
rather than its mere “appearance”: his “Copernican
Revolution” radically disallows the possibility of any knowledge
regarding the nature of the noumenal world, the world-in-itself.
Instead, Kant insists, the only realm that we can have epistemic
access to is the phenomenal world, that is, the universe as it is
experienced through the conceptual schema of human perception. Disallowing
the capacity of knowledge of things-in-themselves, Kant effectively
focuses all speculative thought on the world of perception. If we
apply this orientation to our investigation into the ontological
status of virtual realities, our attention would shift from the
question of a referential relationship between simulation and the
external world to the phenomenological aspect of playing such video
games. Put another way, simulation merely adds another intermediary,
an additional layer of epistemic refraction, through which we are
removed from the world-in-itself. An essential aspect of video game
play, though, remains problematic to the Kantian metaphysics: how
time can be rendered reversible within simulation. Before exploring
how this element complicates matters, however, I first want to contextualize
my suggestion against the existing intellectual currents surrounding
this debate.
6. Closer analysis
of the phenomenology of digital simulation is timely, I believe,
given the overwhelming influence of Jean Baudrillard’s understanding
of simulation, driven as it is by a mourning the loss of the ‘real,’
by a longing for a past epoch in which representation operated in
a more straightforwardly referential manner. To oppose this Baudrillard-sort
critique that characterize contemporary life as somehow ontologically
hollow, a more thorough engagement with the notion of reality and
its opposite is called for. Let us first, though, examine a characteristic
passage from Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation with the
aim of discerning what it is that he finds so problematic about
simulation:
The era of simulation
is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials—worse:
withtheir
artificial resurrection in the systems of signs, a material more
malleable than meaning, in that it lends itself to all systems of
equivalences, to all binary oppositions, to all combinatory algebra.
It is no longer a question of imitation nor duplication, nor even
parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for
the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring every real
process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable,
perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real
and short-circuits all its vicissititudes. Never again will the
real have the chance to produce itself—such is the vital function
of the model in a system of death, or rather of anticipated resurrections,
that no longer even gives the event of death a chance (p. 2).
7. The primary
objection I am interested in raising within the context of this
paper lies in questioning Baudrillard’s understanding of the
relationship between simulation and death, playing as it does such
a central role in his analysis of the larger ideological schema
he diagnoses as central to the contemporary iteration of capitalism.
Against Baudrillard’s argument that the simulation of death
stands in rivalry with an authentic connection to human life, I
want to explore the possibility that simulated experience, enabled
by advances in computer modeling, complicates our relationship with
death in a manner that requires more careful attention, its implications
ultimately requiring more nuanced articulations.
8. That death
can feature so prominently in video games—from Pacman to contemporary
action-adventure titles such as Halo and Half-Life—speaks
to the inherently simulated nature of dying within a video game.
Although the possibility of death shadows our existence, we cannot
properly experience the state as such: by definition, once we are
in fact dead, we would not possess any faculties capable of perceiving
it. In his foundational work Being and Time, Martin Heidegger explores
how human beings live in an odd state of anticipation of their own
death, Being (Da-sein) providing the foundation for his understanding
of human existence as a sort of “being-towards-death,”
in which the mortal exists suspended over the abyss of the "not-yet"
state of future death. Essential for Heidegger’s metaphysical
orientation is the fact that each person’s death is unique,
insofar as there remains no possibility for the substitution of
one for another.
Heidegger argues
that this authenticity between the mortal and his death is guaranteed
by the unbridgeable gap isolating each human being at the point
of thecollapse
of one’s self into the anonymous state of Being (Da-sein)
at the moment of one’s dying. While explaining that representation
is able to convey some of the complex circumstances surrounding
another’s relationship with death, Heidegger explains that
“this possibility of representation gets completely stranded
when it is a matter of representing the possibility of being that
constitutes the coming-to-an-end of Da-sein and gives it its totality
as such. No one can take the other’s dying away from him…Every
Da-sein must itself actually take dying upon itself” (p. 223).
9. For Heidegger,
then, the authenticity of each person’s existence is a function
of an individual’s unique standing with regard to death. Because
there is no substitution possible, the individual connects to his
existence by the fact that it must be only hethat
dies. Baudrillard’s anxieties about simulation and its implications
for representing death could be understood largely as an extension
of Heidegger’s sense of the non-exchangeability of dying.
Heidegger’s philosophical project is not invalidated by the
existence of digital simulation, but complicated in a manner that
encourages us to revisit the assumptions upon which it is rooted.
10. The impossibility
of experiencing death cannot be surmounted by more sophisticated
computer modeling, as the phenomenon is by definition the state
in which no experiential perception will ever be possible—the
lacunae between its representation and the lived experience cannot
be bridged. Simulation can, however, allow other humans to experience,
by way of complex modeling, the circumstances leading up to the
physical death of another. We could, for example, program the sort
of computer simulator used to train industrial truck drivers for
the variables in which a particular fatal accident occurred: the
speed and location of the other vehicles, the relative slipperiness
of the road surface, the mechanical condition of automotive components,
and so forth. Setting up the simulator to begin at a particular
temporal position, we can, assuming our modeling is accurate, experience
a fairly accurate simulation of the sequence of events that lead
another to his death.
11. The heuristic
potential of simulation is of course what makes such computer modeling
systems particularly attractive to the military. Tim Lenoir (2002)
has recently demonstrated the close ties among the Department of
Defense, research universities, and private contractors that lead
to the emergence of 3-D computer modeling and its corresponding
interactive spaces, technology that would later find expression
in computer games, as something of commercial spin-off from its
intended military use. Digitally modeled interactive environments
allow pilots, for instance, to encounter—and learn from—experiences
that, if real, could well result in physical death.
12. In the artificially
created digital realm of video games, one generally finds a different
orientation toward the threat of death than is usually evident outside
of the modeled space. In general a more daring attitude to risk
is adopted, because the game by virtue of its modeled nature does
not inherently impose lasting consequences that carry over into
ordinary life. I want to explore the way this gaming orientation
operates by way of examining the historical influences shaping the
parameters of the video game.
13. In traditional
video game design, the player is allotted a finite number of “lives”
that one can utilize in the endeavor to pass each level and move
to the next. Once the player has exhausted all his remaining lives,
then the game is over. The paradigmatic example here could be Super
Mario Bros. (1985), the flagship game of the Nintendo Entertainment
System that was first sold in the same year. The player was to guide
Mario through a series of levels, each of which was inhabited by
enemies capable of killing him. In the final stage, one could rescue
Princess Toadstool from captivity in Bowser’s castle and “win”
the game. If the player died, he could try the level again as long
as he had “lives” to spare. While the player could add
to his reserve of “extra lives” by accumulating “1-up’s”
(“extra lives” that were usually found in the form of
mushrooms), the player could only advance through the game as long
as he had not exhausted all of Mario’s supply of lives.
14. This “finite
lives” model of video game design continued in popularity
throughout the 1980’s. Two PC games released by id Software
in the early 1990’s, however, drastically altered video game
conventions: with Wolfenstein 3D (1992) and Doom (1993), not only
did the First Person Shooter (FPS) become the preferred manner of
visual presentation, in which the player “sees” in his
monitor what the game character could be imagined to perceive, but
in addition the “quick save” function allowed the user
to save his particular temporal and spatial location within the
game. If one were to then die, one could reload the last saved position
and try again. In essence, the player could now replay without limit,
functioning through a sort of digital reincarnation that insures
that one could continually replay the game from the saved location
until one had progressed past segments of the game that were particularly
challenging, after which one would typically save one’s progress
again, providing yet another subsequent entry point from which play
could commence when death befalls the player again.
15. The possibility
of saving one's game allowed one to more freely experiment with
one's strategy, developing and refining techniques without concern
for one's progress being lost by running out of extra lives. When
the player was limited to only a finite number “lives”
(often three) the imperative of avoiding game death demanded that
one be immensely cautious in one's play, so as to preserve one's
limited number of opportunities to successfully progress through
the game’s advancing stages. When game design shifted in favor
of saved progress, either by way of a predetermined checkpoint system
of discrete levels or an on-demand save function that could store
any possible point in the game’s spatiotemporal location,
players were encouraged to adopt new orientations toward game playing
that were more audacious and experimental.
The risky approach
engendered by the ability to infinitely repeat from a saved position
offers a radically different orientation to experiential reality,
insofar as death no longer exists only as a limit point past which
no one can live through. Regardless of how many times one dies,
such an approach allows one to try again. Freed from the anxiety
of having to start at the game's beginning, the player, fully assured
that he can subsequently embark on innumerable future attempts by
simply looping back to the place safely stored in the computer memory,
playing with an attitude of anarchic disregard for the finality
of a potential "game over."
16. As I have
attempted to established, this element of repetition, a principle
central to the design of contemporary video games, engenders in
the gamer an attitude of trial-and-error unlike the approach to
risk demanded by the non-simulated world. Christopher Douglas, in
an essay where he inventively analyzes this aspect of video games
with reference to Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus, pays particular
attention to how the realm of the video game is structured by a
super-human orientation to events: “This is the experience
structured into the gaming process—the multiple tries at the
same space-time moment. Like Superman after Lois Lane dies, we can
in a sense turn back the clock and replay the challenge, to a better
end” (sec. 8).
17. Douglass
is right to stress how fundamentally different the experience of
time is within realm of the video game and in ordinary human life.
Drawing on this recognition, we can contrast the video game with
Attic tragedy, paying attention to how they employ differing sorts
of conceptions of the limiting forces shaping experience. If we
were to think of dramatic tragedy as a form that, at least in part,
emphasizes the limitations of the human being—his inability
to change the past often coupled with the recognition that it was
his own actions that brought about his downfall as with Oedipus—then
the video game would be its antithesis, stressing above all else
the repeatability of experience.
18. Here, we
can find an instructive connection by way of recalling the distinction
that W.H. Auden makes between ancient Greek tragedy and those belonging
to the Christian era: “Greek tragedy is the tragedy of necessity;
i.e. the feelings aroused in the spectator is ‘What a pity
it had to be this way’; Christian tragedy is the tragedy of
possibility, ‘What a pity it was this way when it might have
been otherwise’” (p. 258). In other words, while the
Greek hero finds glory in his affirmation of the fact that the circumstances
of his downfall could not have been otherwise, the Christian hero
operates in a universe in which free will allows him to exert his
influence and change the contours of his world.
One could easily
reformulate Auden’s schema to differentiate not between Greek
and Christian tragedy, but more fundamentally between tragedy and
its absence: tragedy as a narrative that accepts the inescapable
force of necessity, of fate, while its contrast would lack this
quality. We needn’t, then, accept the theological underpinnings
of Auden’s viewpoint to employ his recognition of the importance
of fate to ancient tragedy to recognize a contrasting logic functioning
in the imaginary worlds of contemporary video games. The orientation
toward “possibility” Auden ascribes to Christian model
is consistent with the gaming attitude I have explored here: one
of supreme playfulness, insofar as the contingent nature of events
is always emphasized against the intractable forces of necessity.
19. My analysis
of the repetition involved in video game play has been grounded
primarily on the single-player mode of action/adventure games, in
which the human competes against the “computer,” that
is, the player must contend with enemies, or “bots,”
whose actions are guided by the routines written by the game’s
programmers. I have left out the other, perhaps even more popular
manner in which one can typically play a FPS: the online, multiplayer
mode, in which the player battles with other human players who have
connected remotely to the same internet server. While some games
contain both a single player and a multiplayer “deathmatch”
component, as is the case with the latest releases of the Doom and
Half-Life series, games designed only for the multiplayer mode have
emerged in recent years: Joint Operations, which can host up to
one-hundred-and-fifty players in each particular game, and the Battlefield
series, which has a capacity for sixty-four.
Because the
actions of human-, rather than computer-, controlled adversaries
cannot be easily predicated based on one’s previous experience
within the game, each encounter demands a unique approach, responding
to the particularities of the given situation. In this sort of game,
one does not progress through levels to conquer a particular “boss”
or to accomplish a specific end such as “saving the princess”;
rather, the player only competes against the others to score the
most points in that round. Thus, we encounter repeatability in a
different sense than examined earlier: the game can always be played
again, as one can never definitively “beat” such a multiplayer
game, just as chess players can only win particular matches, but
cannot ever play a match to “beat” chess and surmount
the game itself, for the game is nothing but the rules that govern
its play.
20. I am, however,
beginning to stray from my intended focus on digital simulation
and its experiential implications. Thus, I shall end my series of
moves here, giving any willing opponents a turn to play.
References
Auden, W.H. (2002). The
Christian Tragic Hero. In Edward Mendelson (Ed.) The Complete Works of W.H.
Auden: Volume II 1939-1948 (pp. 258-261). Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton
University Press.
Baudrillard, Jean. (1995).
Simulacra and Simulation (Sheila Faria Glaser, trans.). Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press.
Douglas, Christopher. (2002).
"You Have Unleashed a Horde of Barbarians!": Fighting Indians, Playing
Games, Forming Disciplines. Postmodern Culture 13. (online)
Heidegger, Martin. (1996).
Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit (Joan Stambaugh, Trans.).
Albany: State University of New York Press.
Lenoir, Tim. (2000). All
but War is Simulation: The Military-Entertainment Complex. Configurations
8, 289-335.
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