Loading the cave-culture-game: Plato puts down the controller

The last post was an attempt to outline the scope of this series of posts about Plato’s cave and video games. In this post, I want to make the connection between the homeric material I’ve been discussing through most of the Main Quest and the cultural move that Plato makes in the myth of the cave, the one I started talking about in the last post—a move that’s usually overlooked. Briefly, Plato makes a special and peculiar effort to make the cave’s shadow-puppet play interactive.

Socrates: I said, “ . . . if they [that is, the prisoners of the cave] were in the habit of conferring honours among themselves on those who were quickest to observe the passing shadows and to remark which of them went before, and which followed after, and which were together; and who were therefore best able to draw conclusions as to the future, do you think that [the man who had seen the real world outside the cave] would care for such honours and glories, or envy the possessors of them? . . .

“And if there were a contest, and he had to compete in measuring the shadows with the prisoners who had never moved out of the den, while his sight was still weak, and before his eyes had become steady (and the time which would be needed to acquire this new habit of sight might be very considerable) would he not be ridiculous? Men would say of him that up he went and down he came without his eyes; and that it was better not even to think of ascending; and if any one tried to loose another and lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender, and they would put him to death.”

What does Plato mean when he has the prisoners of the cave interacting with the shadows they see in that rudimentary game of observation, remark, prediction, and measurement?

It’s important to remember that when Plato introduces the idea of the shadow-puppet play itself (the play, that is, that's all the prisoners know of the entire world), he’s drawing on well-known cultural material. Socrates’ interlocutors know what a shadow-puppet play is, and Plato’s readers know what a shadow-puppet play is.

But when Plato says that the prisoners have competitions in observing, remarking, predicting, and measuring, he’s making stuff up, the way someone in the modern world would be if he said, “Imagine a movie theater, where everybody is tied down and can only see the movie. Now imagine that the people in the theater have contests in figuring out what’s going to happen next in the movies.” Movie theaters we know. Contests for predicting plot twists we don’t know, but can readily conceptualize.

So what does Plato mean? He means culture, obviously: the things that people do every day, in particular of course the things they do in Plato’s Athens, are for Plato like contests about a shadow-puppet play. Our lives, our never-ending quests for success and prosperity for ourselves and our families, are like a game in which we’re trying to get rewards for our interactions with the stuff we find in the world.

Life, Plato is saying, is like a video game.

Ken Wark has recently done some pretty interesting work along precisely these lines. His book Gamer Theory can be read as a meditation on the theme of interaction introduced into the myth of the cave by Plato.

My own mission in this post-series, though, is to use Plato’s insight not to talk about culture in general but to talk about games themselves.

But (you might object) isn’t that reading the myth of the cave incorrectly? Plato didn’t want to say anything specifically about video games (or shadow-puppet-plays, or imaginary contests at shadow-puppet plays), did he?

Actually, he did. Because the shadow-puppet play is very clearly an instance of mimesis, the cultural practice Socrates and his interlocutors have already spent a lot of time talking about, in the context of their discussion of education. Socrates demonstrates to his interlocutors satisfaction, if not to ours, that epic—that is homeric epic—Iliad and Odyssey—and especially tragedy and comedy make use of mimesis. The word is usually translated “imitation,” but in order to grasp what’s really going on in the cave we need to translate it as “performance as somebody else” or “identificative performance.” Mimesis is, more or less, playing pretend.

That discussion, again, was about education, and another overlooked part of the cave is the way Socrates introduces it. When we understand that introduction, however, we understand much more about what’s really going on in the cave, and how it relates to the rest of Republic. I’m going to give it to you in Greek, first, because there’s a word in there that doesn’t have a good single translation:

meta de tauta, eipon, apeikason toioutoi pathei ten hemeteran phusin paideias te peri kai apaideusias.

“After this,” I [Socrates] said, “liken to the following sort of state our nature concerning both education/culture [paideia] and non-education/non-culture [apaideusia].”

The cave is about education, and because Plato’s problem with education is mimesis and the shadow-puppet play is mimesis, the cave-culture-game is in fact not just about culture in general, but also about the mimesis’ that go to make up culture: Homer, tragedy, video games. It’s very much worth noting by the way that I’ve already spent a lot of time on this blog making it clear that homeric epic was essentially interactive, and that tragedy too was highly interactive in the way the city participated in putting on the productions and in judging them, and that there were highly prestigious competitions in both homeric epic and tragedy, for which the city awarded major prizes. The analogy with the cave-culture-game, that is, is quite exact.

That’s enough Plato for one post, I think, but it’s really only half the set-up, because although Plato puts down the controller of epic and tragedy, he picks up the philosophy-controller at the same time.

It’s very interesting, though, to turn at this point and look at a game like Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion, where a an ethical scale of “fame” versus “infamy” partly determines the course of the story. A microcosmic way to look at this side of Oblivion and games like it is to consider the example of the Dark Brotherhood storyline, which only opens to the player-character when he or she has committed a murder—something the player-character is not obliged by the game to do.

On the face of it, such an efficacious choice—that is, the choice to commit murder has a decisive effect on the narrative—seems to make Oblivion different from the cave-culture-game, which consists only of observation, remark, prediction, and measurement of shadows. The choice to commit murder would seem to be a mimesis of a real ethical decision, capable of making the player think about things that matter from an ethical point of view.

Aristotle would almost certainly agree that the choice to commit murder in Oblivion is capable of that. Viewed inside Plato’s cave, however, the choice looks much less efficacious than it might at first seem. Getting to do the Dark Brotherhood storyline is a reward like other rewards in the game—the choice is measured in terms of the reward within the game, and not in terms of whatever real rewards there might be for making real ethical choices.

Plato’s point is not just that Oblivion and homeric epic are only games (or epics) and thus have no effect on the “real world,” but more importantly that games and epics deceive their players into thinking that they and their choices matter in the “real world,” when in fact those things only matter within their closed systems. As film studies recognized in the 1970’s, the cave, like the cinema, is an apparatus along the lines of what Louis Althusser called the ideological state apparatus, among whose functions is to catch people in culture.

Like Oblivion, like homeric epic, the cave-culture-game is a mimesis that immerses its players so deeply that they’re committed to believing it real. As I proceed in this post-series, I’ll seek to show that Plato wasn’t out-to-lunch in seeing a danger there, but that he and Aristotle each give good reason to hope to avoid that danger and create constructive art in the process, and that game-designers and gamers alike, often unwittingly, are realizing those hopes.

Dangerous Immersion

This post takes us from homeric epic to a key moment of its reception in classical Athens, Plato. In it, I begin mini-series about Plato’s cave that’s pretty much a more fun version of a chapter I’m writing for an IGDA volume. Here’s what you need to know starting out:

1) Plato loved Homer—the sheer number of quotations from Homer, made in passing by Socrates and others, almost always provided to give unquestionable support to a commonly understood point, proves that beyond the shadow of a doubt.

2) Plato hated Homer—the sheer number of times Socrates tells us, especially in Republic, that Homer (whom he thought of as a single person, though at this blog we know better) was pretending to be something he was not, proves that beyond a shadow of a doubt.

3) Plato kicks Homer out of the ideal city in Republic on the grounds that his poetry does what Plato calls mimesis. Most people translate mimesis “imitation,” but I would prefer to translate it “identificative performance.” If you want to jaw about that, let’s do it in the comments. In any case, one of the things I’ve been trying to do in the Main Quest is show that that kind of identificative performance is also what we usually call “immersion.”

Plato’s idea, put forward in Republic, is that if you pretend to be somebody, or watch others pretend to be somebodies, you will become like them. For Plato, this power of mimesis presented dangers that, when he wrote Republic, seem to outweigh any possible positive impact. Looking at Plato and video games together, then, can be a way of looking at an essential question in video game criticism: How can, and how should, immersion fit into the rest of culture?

Even a brief look at Plato shows us that that question is both very old and very contentious from its beginning. Looking a little closer will do two things, I think—add complexity to our discussion of what video games are up to in our own culture, and give us some traction over that complexity.

Socrates: I said, “ . . . if they [that is, the prisoners of the cave] were in the habit of conferring honours among themselves on those who were quickest to observe the passing shadows and to remark which of them went before, and which followed after, and which were together; and who were therefore best able to draw conclusions as to the future, do you think that he would care for such honours and glories, or envy the possessors of them? Would he not say with Homer, “Better to be the poor servant of a poor master, and to endure anything, rather than think as they do and live after their manner?”

“Yes,” [Glaucon] said, “I think that he would rather suffer anything than entertain these false notions and live in this miserable manner.”

“Imagine once more,” I said, “such an one coming suddenly out of the sun to be replaced in his old situation; would he not be certain to have his eyes full of darkness?”

“To be sure,” he said.

“And if there were a contest, and he had to compete in measuring the shadows with the prisoners who had never moved out of the den, while his sight was still weak, and before his eyes had become steady (and the time which would be needed to acquire this new habit of sight might be very considerable) would he not be ridiculous? Men would say of him that up he went and down he came without his eyes; and that it was better not even to think of ascending; and if any one tried to loose another and lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender, and they would put him to death.”

It’s important to remind ourselves (and it will be even more important down the road) that Republic is Socrates’ first person narration of a very long day he spent at a friend’s house. The great dialogue—perhaps the greatest philosophical dialogue ever composed—is thus itself an identificative performance, a mimesis. More, it is a mimesis of a dialogue, which according to Plato’s own scale of harmfulness in Book 10 of Republic should be about as bad as representation can get.

The familiar myth of the cave, that is, is a mimesis in a mimesis in a mimesis. It finishes with the above passage, in which I contend Plato becomes the first video game designer. My point, as this mini-series develops, is going to be that the game of the cave—the competition for honors in commenting on the shadow-puppet play—gives us a framework for evaluating video games’ cultural potential and for shaping their cultural effects.

Even the choices, for example, of a game like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic(KOTOR) (often praised, of course, like other Bioware titles, for its “openness” in allowing the player to choose different ethical paths) appear from the perspective of the cave-game not to matter at all, since, like the honor-contests of the cave, the choices of the game are bounded by the game. We can argue with Plato on this score—as Aristotle argued with him in Poetics—but it’s hard to deny that whichever ending you finish KOTOR with, you’ve come to power and brought order to the galaxy. Light or Dark, you have reinforced a key part of a dominant ethic. While the cave-game doesn’t exhaust, by any means, the expressive power of KOTOR, it gives us a compelling index to its ethical dimension.

On the other hand, the relationship of the cave-game to the main point of the myth of the cave—philosophic education—tells us that there is in fact a way in which game ethics might be made to matter in culture: by making them disruptive. The ascended man is put to death, as Socrates was put to death, but look at the game Socrates is playing now: a game called Republic.