Glad You’re “Here”: Hidden Dimensions and Virtual Worlds
Hello, I’m glad you’re here.
Where is ‘here’, you ask? Certainly not at my house while I’m writing this, but ‘here’, in this particular space we call Deorbital, in this shared virtual world we call the internet — a strange place that allows me to write in the past, what will hopefully be read by you, in your present. Maybe from your bathroom, if you’re into that kind of stuff.
This was the first thing the videogame Here, by Stefano Gualeni, made me question. I’m told that JRPG characters usually don’t need to pee, so most inns don’t bother to build a bathroom. Imagine that. And the second thing was: what does ‘here’ even mean in a virtual world? It’s a strange thing when a videogame questions your presence there, which in turn leads you to question the videogame itself. It’s also strange that we don’t do that more.
Stefano Gualeni is a philosopher and game designer based in Malta, a small island country south of Italy. He works at the Institute of Digital Games, where he researches, among other things, how interactive media can be used to convey philosophical notions.
And while at it, his work challenges our assumptions and expectations of videogames: if they can be used to communicate and spread complex philosophical ideas, what other ideas have we been playing with? “If you take media conventionally, the tend to echo dominant ideologies. And the proper way of thinking is remaining aware of ideology and not just be lulled by it into a pretense of thinking”, said Gualeni in a voice call. His work points out novel ways to bend videogames for humanistic purposes — and the contrast can help us to perceive how other videogames might fool their players.
In the case of Gualeni’s game Here, through a short JRPG style game, puzzles, and a song, Gualeni and his team chose to explore the concept of indexicals, “a linguistic expression whose reference can shift from context to context”. The game drives you to an awkward thought: when you hear a character in a game saying the word ‘here’, does that mean in proximity to that character in that fictional space, the place where the line was voiced, or where the words were first written?
“It probably was a nice thing to use videogames to explain indexicality because it is immediate, it’s almost obvious when you encounter this in a videogame”, Gualeni told me. “There are other advantages [to doing philosophy with videogames], like: they give you the possibility to try materially your ideas and not just speculate about it. They give you more granular aesthetic detail to the problem you’re trying to solve, or the idea that you’re trying to convey. But in this case, I went to the most conceptual advantage: the computer is necessary to make this philosophical point, because it is a philosophical point about our use of computers”.
It’s important to not overplay the uniqueness of videogames, though. Videogames are not the “ultimate medium” as many in marketing and advertising agencies would want you to believe, nor are they necessarily better than written text and other media in communicating their message.
As Gualeni puts it, “Every media form is inherently limited, and they’re shaping our possibility to discuss and think in very particular ways. I’m not trying to say that videogames are the ultimate philosophical tool, but rather, that all forms of thought mediation are limited and we should be open to using several when a certain need arises.”
The idea that media shapes our thoughts is an eerie one. It’s easier to accept that our language shapes the way we think, as language is collectively owned to a certain extent — language shapes us, but we also have the power to shape language. But if media and virtual worlds can also have that effect on us, how do the worlds we routinely inhabit teach us to think? It’s frightening to think that my Twitter persona or my avatar in a MMO could help mold my cognition without me ever realizing it.
“We can do more with videogames than just entertain and ask people to repeat the same old actions, such as accumulate, optimize, manage, win, succeed — this kind of resource-oriented mentality pervades society because it’s an outcrop of capitalism. So even if those games don’t want to be philosophical, or political, they still contain the ideology which make them philosophical and political, only in a very blind and unidirectional way. Which is that: society works like this, so your entertainment should work like this, because this is the way of thinking, this is thought. What I’m trying to do is show that no, that is not thought, that is one form of thinking, and a particularly dangerous one”, Gualeni explains.
A conventional videogame, for example, conditions you to expect rewards for your progress, even when your actions are meaningless, or potentially harmful to others inside the fiction of that world. Universal Paperclips, by Frank Lantz, comes to mind as a critical example of that. The program keeps rewarding you, even though you are destroying absolutely everything. As you are rewarded, you start to think a little bit like the AI you have embodied, and soon all you can see are paperclips.
Hopefully, along the way, you realize you are being kind of a shitty person (or a very good AI, depending on how you look at it). The player is willing to kill everything for a reward, without even thinking about what it is they are destroying. Universal Paperclips drives you think about your own actions, but also about how other clicker games reward you, without ever presenting their grim backdrop: that the world might be starving, and all there is to eat are cookies.
In Gualeni’s games, there’s an intentional lack of clear rewards. Here almost has an anti-reward, while a previous game by Gualeni about language and definitions, Something Something Soup Something, tracks your actions and choices “and eventually poops out a mirror: this is who you are in relation to soup”, says Gualeni.
The interplay between this soup mirror and ourselves makes it self-reflexive, it motivates us to think about ourselves, and about our own experiences. Meaning, here, isn’t something that you take from the experience, it’s not something focus tested to guarantee profits and revenue so we don’t feel cheated for the time we have invested. Meaning, here, is something you create for yourself. Your own, personal soup.
To Paolo Pedercini, game designer in La Molleindustria, “learning a new game is a significant exercise in interpretation”, and he thinks that Gualeni’s games “leverage that process” to make their argument. A lot of Pedercini’s work creates that same self-reflexive effect, through a twisted representation of conventional game mechanics. If videogames usually ask you to do what you’re told, to accumulate and to maximize — what happens when you take out the usual moralizing narrative that tells you that you’re doing it for good? When you frame those mechanics in the ways that they actually appear in society? What happens when you simulate McDonald’s, and the oil industry?
“I always maintained that games can excel at illustrating complex dynamic systems because they are complex and dynamic systems themselves. Nicky Case’s Explorable Explanations are a great example of that. But even regardless of the specific educational/rhetorical goals, I believe games can teach us to think in non-mechanistic, non-reductionist ways: in terms of feedback loops, networks of cause-and-effect relationships, and limited agency and control over chaos”, says Pedercini.
One thing that connects all these critical games, is the way they maintain certain videogame characteristics recognizable, and that is precisely what allows them to show what games are, or could be, in a different light. Gualeni provides an apt analogy: “We couldn’t speak a language that was never spoken, because nobody would understand us. So you might want to take as much as you can from the tradition and twist the parts that are interesting to reveal something else.”
“Like poetry. You will use many words that are recognizable, in a way that makes sense, but perhaps in a way that is not common. In art and literature, this is one of the oldest tricks in the book: defamiliarization, estrangement. I think that sorts of upset you and asks you to reframe your experience and to think about what is going on until now, which you wouldn’t had you just been consistently praised. So these moments of rupture are very important.”
Gualeni’s philosophical games; Lantz’s thought experiment in Universal Paperclips; Pedercini’s radical work that functions as counterpropaganda; other titles such as Nicky Case’s Explorable Explanations — these are all pieces of digital media that push the boundaries of what learning could be through doing, interactions and experiences. They also ask you to re-examine what you have been learning through these methods, without explicitly being told you were doing so.
These kind of works give us tools to understand ourselves and the world around us better. They function like keys that can open up a part of our mind we didn’t know existed, and point us to clutter that we didn’t know was there. With new ways of understanding, maybe they can help bring forth new worlds, ones that truly embody the potency of our imagination and of what it means to be human right here.
Henrique Antero is a brazilian journalist and videogame critic trying hard to not complain too much at @herniquetxt
Deorbital is a videogame-aligned journal for insightful articles on games, culture, and society. This Winter Quarterly has been funded by readers like you. To support Deorbital in creating more space for under-represented voices in games writing, we are currently raising funds for a full year of publication. Please consider supporting us and our work, by donating HERE.
