Ideal Individuals

I don't have the time to transcribe what a couple of students and I discussed yesterday after class, but I wanted to put, as it were, a place holder here of the concept.

Video Games as the Ideal

McKenzie Wark, in his fantastic book Gamer Theory, posits an interesting possibility: video games are the ideal world, the almost-Forms of Plato's Allegory of the Cave. It's a major twist to an ancient allegory, and it fits in very well. The whole book makes a very creative argument for the purpose of gaming.

My students and I, while studying video games in our month-long course in January 2009, decided that the game is the ideal way of living, for all of the inconveniences of 'real life' are swept away. Irritations like eating, drinking, sleeping, cleaning oneself, and even dying are reduced to nil or an almost there.

Individuals and the Ideal

A couple of days ago, I realized (again, thanks to one of my students) that it's even more than that. Games tap into the full realization of the American promise of individual selfhood and power. The avatar--the character that the gamer controls--matters. More than any other digital NPC in the binary world, the gamer's avatar matters the most. Every decision that the gamer makes via controls over the avatar will continue the world's existence--or destroy it.

In my mind, the great conflict between Western and Eastern thought is that of the purpose of the self. Is the self of greatest consideration (as the Bill of Rights and American society posit), or is the self merely yet another representation and reincarnation of consciousness that is destined for nirvana (as Hinduism and Buddhism posit)? One of the reasons that games are so intoxicating is because the individual--the promise of America--has been given greater power than ever before.

Quick Example

Have you heard of Fable II? In it, the gamer takes an avatar and then creates choices to be either good or evil. If, as a young potential hero at the commencement of the game, the gamer makes drastic wicked choices, when the avatar returns as an adult, the town in which the character had started the game will change. Instead of being a thriving, bustling village, it will be a squalid, run-down slum, prostitutes lining the corners and a depressed people inhabiting it.

How many choices do we make that never have any sort of lasting consequence? The rebellious go away, often harming themselves more than the authorities against whom they rebel. No town sinks into oblivion just because one person decides to be 'evil' as a youth. Yet in the game, the individual gamer is acknowledged to be that powerful, to have that much worth, to be that important.

More to come....