Virtual Unreality

There's a gap, somewhere, as necessary as a space between words, yet perplexing all the same. Video games are unique in many ways, but the most important here is the unreality of the experience, connected via a tiny umbilical cord (now wireless) streaming from the participant to the spectacle. This is not 'naïve realism' versus 'representative realism' or any other philosophical thought experiment. Instead, this is the real experiment of what can constitute definitions of reality, but placed inside of a virtual realm.

The game is flat, despite having 3D graphics (or the redundant title of 'stereoscopic vision' being added to give the illusion of dimensional depth to games). The game is silent, despite having 7.1 Dolby Digital sound pumping through the speakers. The game is independent, despite being a console attached to a wall attached to a TV attached to a gamer. Perhaps in a quasi-Buddhist way, we could ask, “If no one is around to play the game, is it still played?”

We can ask 'What is real?' for eons (as philosophers already have) and still come up with only partial answers and glimpses of potential subjective truth, but let's look at it from a more physical standpoint. We sense ourselves, we sense the couch beneath us, we sense the controller in our hands (for now). We can see the screen, hear the fans whir as the game loads, the click of the buttons as we impatiently wait to begin the next step in Petitor's adventure. If we take this sense (everything the mind gives us, from the level of hunger in our bellies to the amount of irritation we have at the boss to the other things we're ignoring to play the game) as real, as the benchmark, as the first level, what happens when almost everything else is pushed aside for the unreality of the game?

Level One: The game is real in terms of visibility: The screen changes from black to blinding, high definition white, filling the room with a paleness akin to death. The colors change and flicker, refreshing themselves 60 times per second, playing the player a simple play of who designed the play itself, the producers, the distributors, the creators, the self-advertisements sliding past as fast as the Start Button is pressed. The game is real in terms of touch: Tactile senses are limited to that of the controller, regardless of Force Feedback or Motion Sensors, but still real for the input. Even games that don't use such gimmicks are relegated to the sensation of the rubber analog sticks and plastic buttons beneath the thumbs. The game is real in terms of sound: The chimes as the cursor slides from 'New Game' to 'Load Game', the click as the depressed button is released, the sound effect as the game acknowledges the selection. The game is real in terms of these three senses, leaving out the senses of smell and taste (for now).

But the gap persists. There is something within the game that cannot be extended outwards, a boundary that is as much an algorithm as the mathematics dictating the way the game starts. Petitor cannot break free of his square prison, cannot turn about to face an outward reality, a focus only on the internal reality that Petitor can perceive. Here is the world where creatures attack him; he is compelled by the X Button to respond with violence. The digital world celebrates the vanquishing of the digital creature, none of which is real to the gamer, all of which is real to the game. This dichotomy of 'our real' versus 'his real' only exists in level one.

Level Two: The game is unreal in terms of visibility: The screen puts up a veneer, a facade, a fiction that is then believed by the player to be the game. Here we have Plato's Allegory of the Cave in a traditional sense, of the shadows on the wall being taken as real, perceived as real, but in reality are completely unreal. (This is the pun, that the game's graphical fidelity to the fiction of the game's own world is rendered by an engine of the same name.) The game is unreal in terms of touch: Forever distant, the only connection between the gamer and the game is molded plastic, clasped in sweaty hands and sometimes receiving the fury of a mistimed jump or the superior skills of an opponent. The weight of Petitor's sword does not numb our arms after hours of violent swinging. Heat reflecting from the sands of a vast yellow desert does not prickle our brows to sweat. The crunch of the gravel road is not felt beneath our feet. The game is unreal in terms of sound: Recorded at time apart from the experience, every sound is like the image--pure digital. There cannot be the sound of a wagon wheel creaking in front of Petitor, for no such wheel exists. The foley artists (true artists in their craft) deceive with simplicity--what sounds to be a broken bone is really a rent stalk of celery; what sounds like a footstep in a roofed amphitheater is but a footstep in a darkened room, perfectly recorded.

This world of Petitor's seems real to him, and we lie to ourselves to say that it seems real to us. The thin, transparent material that divides his world from ours is only semipermeable, and then it's such only one way. We can control him. In Level Two, he cannot control us.

Level Three: The game is real again: The console is turned off. The screen has gone black. The controller is put away. The speakers fall silent. Within us lurks Petitor. We can see him, as Hamlet does of his late father, 'in [our] mind's eye', an avatar of what once was and is now dead. Petitor's experiences become ours; his memories one with our own. The experienced recollection of the game has replaced the action of the game. As in Coriolanus, 'For in such business/action is elegance', an elegance that has extended backward through the game and into the gamer, whose very business is action. Thus the gamer is rescued from lack of the real upon reversal and reflection. Petitor becomes a second-generation control, one that harnesses the gamers' mind and thus indirectly manipulates those who thought they were controlling him. The unreal becomes real as the reverse asserts itself.

The game itself is gamer-less, yet gamer-contingent for perception. The same can be argued for ourselves; that the world itself is without us to perceive it, yet us-contingent for perception. The opposite can be argued, too: The game itself is only real when perceived by the gamer (the world itself is only real when perceived by humans).

Petitor doesn't know the difference. The creatures he fights are real to him, no matter what the Man Behind the Controller would say. Hence Raiden is correct (to an extent) when he yells at the Colonel in Metal Gear Solid 2: “We're out here, we bleed, we die!” To Petitor, reality is what is in front of him, all digital, all binary, all yeses and nos. He is compelled at all times--that is part of his reality. When the game is off, he does not perceive, he does not dream, he does not exist, he does not suffer. He is in the same status as when the game was saved. He is not real, not only because his game has not been (nor, indeed, can be) made, but because the digital manifestation of him is unreal.

Bonus Level: The game is unreal again: This is a different type of unreal, one that is called such not because it does not exist, but because it is the anti-real--hyperreal, a type of real that has become much more (and, paradoxically, much less) than the real itself. It is the currency of our times. Baudrillard would say that the hyperreal is “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality” (1). Is this not the game, then? 'Models of a real' person, such as any 'realistic' avatar (Petitor), who is without both origin (the gamer can give an address, but what about Petitor--or any avatar, for that matter. Where is he located? Where on the disc can one point and say, “There, there is Petitor, in all his potential!”? Scattered over the reflective plastic, the only traceable, significant locus for a character is inside the gamer, in Level Three) and reality.

The hyperreal is the evolution of reality in modernity. Symbols and signs argue for significance, an argument that stifles itself with its own bombast and ferocity. Within the game, comes the ideal once more, the idea that what matters in the world of the game is noticeable above all other signs. This impossibility in the 'real world' is easily and frequently invoked in the 'game world.' Keys sparkle, healing items shimmer, important documents are the only readable areas of the desk, arrows point the way to the next destination. Would that such a convenience existed in the 'real world'!

Thus the hyperreal of the video games reterritorializes what has been subsumed in the hyperreal of modernity, a standing against oversaturation of symbolism by limiting significance into the confines of the game. Little wonder, then, that morality within the game is limited, too.

Moving away from the theory, a question is raised by Petitor, who has just killed his father (a common enough motif in a game). Now is the chance for the narrative to assert itself, to make Petitor seem real as only fiction can be. Now is the chance for the avatar to wonder what he has become, who he truly is, why he does what he does. Instead, Petitor grabs the sword his father wielded and hurries away, not a backward glance, for the gamer wants to get some more orbs in order to level up.

Why is there no ontological crisis of reality in most games? Why do most games avoid the question of selfhood, the duplicity of potential reality, the wonder at existence? Games aspire to hide behind natural human desires--of violence, destruction, sexuality, creation--yet cannot come to grips with what it is--or is not? Perhaps this is why MGS2 is so important and difficult a text. Perhaps this is why the ending of Resident Evil 5 is simultaneously correct (Chris comes to an answer that has plagued him throughout the game) and erroneous (Chris fails to realize the price that must be paid for the thousands of human lives he and Sheva have snuffed out). Until the game is brave enough to consider the repercussions of the dark side of the human soul, instead of just its outward forms of violence and depravity, the genre as a whole will be unable to step into and accept the very hyperreality that it embraces--one in which signs are one more thing under human control.