On “Desert Landscapes”

I don’t know why the introduction to Kyle Derkson’s proposed column “Desert Landscapes” bothers me so much–it’s just a couple paragraphs, a quick gloss over a couple of topics written for a new, extremely niche videogame site. I found out about it through Twitter, shared by someone who diagnosed Derkson as a “sad, sad man”, specifically because of Derkson’s assertion that when “we place our controllers down…we place ourselves in a word with less vibrancy and less imagination”–an assertion that videogames are a Technicolor paradise that’s more fulfilling than the black-and-white Kansas of the real world.

I can only say so much about Derkson’s aims. He’s explicitly just writing an intro column–regular entries seem like they’re going to be discussions of metaphysics through the lens of videogames–but I find myself strangely offended by the whole philosophy behind it–the contrast between videogames as a medium of limitless imagination while the world is a strict net of rules. Not only is that troubling from a “go play outside” perspective, it’s also one that’s based on fallacy–a complete misinterpretation of the way that rules work in both videogames and real life.

Videogames are nothing but nexuses of rules.

Woven into the very fabric are grammars of what can and cannot be done. Every videogame ever made is composed of possible actions and sets of choices. Games can be severely constrained–something like Guitar Hero, where you’re simply graded on how closely you’re following the script the game is laying out for you–or extremely open–Nethack’s developers work hard to anticipate any possible player actions and are constantly updating the game based on player responses, in order to create an extremely flexible game. But either way, they do operate under constraints.

In part, this is due to the fact that time and resources are finite and that a game is limited to the skill and talent of the people creating it. No matter how broad a game is, reality is so rich and detailed and the possibilities so varied that they can never completely map onto a finite set of buttons. These things tend to work on a sliding scale: The more constrained a game is, the more able a developer will be able to anticipate an action; the fewer constraints, the more opportunities for a player to do something unforeseen. 

But that’s not a problem, because it is the navigation of rules that forms the very core of what we call games. In all forms, video or card or board or ball, games are challenges whose success or failure depends on adherence to a set of rules. Rules are the physics which underlie the possibilities in a game. And while it’s possible, sometimes, to break rules, we have a name for that: cheating. In nearly every case, a player cheating invalidates the game, rendering the win nonexistent.

I find myself so confused by these references to the “laws of the material world” which “impede our choices”. Is he talking about legislation or social codes? As a philosopher, Derkson should be well aware that one is always free to break these–although of course one must accept any related negative consequences. I think it’s a bit simpler than that: I think Kyle Derkson is upset about the fact that he can’t cast magic spells or whatever. That instead of viewing games as a comment on our world, or as a momentary distraction, he views it lamentable that out of all of the wonderful possible worlds, we got the boring one.

Derkson does say that he’s writing from a “Christian perspective” and attributes God an existence that is “outside the parameters of a merely material construction”. His assertion–”reality is less than videogames”–comes from a contradictory if not outright blasphemous place in this regard. Reality is necessarily lesser than a creator god, who stands separate from its creation both in substance and ability, assuming the traditional divine attributes of omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence.

It is the realm of Reality that has created videogames–their existence is a subset of reality. As with any creative medium, humanity’s relationship to videogames can be seen as almost an analogy of God to Reality; a game developer is the creator-god of a videogame. And while a developer is limited in his abilities in Reality, he enjoys relationships of omniscience (knowledge of all of the game events and rules), omnipotence (the ability to create any desired game universe), and omnipresence (the fact that videogames do not have an existence apart from both hardware and the player) to the realm of videogames. Logically, just as God by definition surpasses Reality, Reality by definition surpasses videogames.

Perhaps one of my biggest contentions with the geek community is its automatic and widespread acceptance of escapism. I guess it’s like any other addiction: Doing it recreationally is one thing, but it’s a problem when you use it as a substitute for reality. Derkson’s piece is written from the point of view of one who does not simply view videogames as a fun diversion–as an imaginative “what if” that may shed some light on but does not replace reality. It’s written from that viewpoint that I and nearly every gamer friend of mine wishes to disassociate from: The viewpoint of one so uninterested in reality that he’s unwilling to leave the fantasy world behind, so mundane is his life. What’s more troubling than that is his attempt to justify this viewpoint. What’s more troubling than that is that said attempt doesn’t even hold up to any logical scrutiny.

Look. I love videogames. And I certainly appreciate ones which allow me to transcend the limitations of real life–I’m extremely fond of ones which let me explore places that can’t exist. But it goes both ways: The constraints upon videogames allow me to appreciate the freedoms that I have in my life. That, yes, I’m limited by gravity and the fact that I don’t speak any foreign languages and the fact that I can’t shoot fireballs out of the tips of my fingers, but that the world provides a response for literally everything you put into it. Philosophy is useless unless it’s applicable to the world–unless it leads to understanding, or a system of ethics, or a sense of our place in the world. That Derkson is not using videogames as a way of understanding the world but is, rather, using his dissatisfaction with the world to justify withdrawal into videogames seems to me almost a betrayal of the entire point of philosophy.

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