Andrew Ryan, shadow-puppet master

I think it’s now probably time to tackle Bioshock. My chapter on ethical education in the cave and in games, featuring the same reading of Bioshock I’m doing here, looks set to appear in the Fall, in what’s going to be a very exciting IGDA volume on ethics and game design. I think, with that academic version completely under my belt and in my rear-view mirror, I can without my eyes crossing too severely work up a version that’s more fun.

Here’s the claim I’m going to make: the much-discussed ludonarrative dissonance that constitutes Bioshock’s ethical system does not rob the game of ethical meaning, but rather enacts a decisive and meaningful disruption in the player’s performance of the cave-culture-game. That disruption, I claim, has the power to bring about in the player of Bioshock the same sort of ethical reflection enabled by Republic.

There’s a context for this argument that I’m going to spread over several posts; the context has to do with how Bioshock is different from games like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR) and Oblivion and GTAIV. It seems, though, to make sense to lay out the big claim first, and thus give the elements of the whole argument-cum-context some breathing space and some time for others to comment. Right now, I want to put forward the central pillar of my argument.

Please be advised that this argument is necessarily chock-full of spoilers of the worst sort.

The central pillar: the harvest/rescue dynamic of the game must be understood in association with the interruptions of interactivity that arise in what I call, as shorthand, the death-disarm sequence. Only when we understand them together can we grasp the critique of objectivism (and the various versions of it that undergird important parts of our culture) enacted by Bioshock.

The harvest/rescue dynamic is the usual focus for critique of the ludonarrative dissonance of the game. The central characteristic of the dynamic, as Clint Hocking pointed out, is the equality of effect on gameplay of doing the “bad” thing (“harvesting”—i.e. killing the Little Sisters) and of doing the “good” thing (rescuing them). Hocking argued that this equality of effect renders the ethical system of the game meaningless, and that it creates a dissonance between game and story that he found blameworthy.

The death-disarm sequence has attracted some critical attention as well, most cogently I think from Iroquois Pliskin, but perhaps not as much or as contentious as harvest/rescue. By the shorthand “death-disarm” I mean to refer to the entire sequence of the cutscene in which your character kills Andrew Ryan and the gameplay sequence that follows, in which the game will not progress unless you obey Atlas and disarm Ryan’s auto-destruct sequence.

At that point in the game—the disarm part of death-disarm—from the standpoint of the your world (your culture, really), you certainly have a choice of actions. You can do any number—an infinite number, really—of different things in the narrow space of Andrew Ryan’s office, like running around, jumping, and shooting at targets. You can also cease playing the game at that point, and turn off your PC or console. From the standpoint of the mimesis of Bioshock (see this post for more on mimesis), however, you have only one choice: to disarm the self-destruct sequence, thus verifying and enacting Atlas’ control over you.

In death-disarm, that is, Bioshock enacts a failed disruption of its closed ethical framework, which is exactly analogous to the failed disruption of the released prisoner in the cave.

For the thinking player of Bioshock, the crushing ethical blows of frustration in being unable not to kill Andrew Ryan, and then of being unable not to disarm the self-destruct, serve to expose the ethical system of the game—and thus of all games—as being like Andrew Ryan’s objectivist dystopia: instead of a world where every man can be a king, Ryan created a world where that very notion made every man a slave. As he is accepting death at the player-character’s hands, Ryan repeats over and over “A man chooses; a slave obeys.” He, and Bioshock, however, demonstrate just as Plato’s cave-culture-game demonstrates, that the dangerous illusion of choice presents the true ethical problem.

Here the harvest/rescue “choice” comes into its own. Precisely in that it is not a choice at all, in terms of the actual gameplay of Bioshock, it enacts through its ludonarrative dissonance itself the dangerous futility of choice. Choice, that is, is exactly analogous to the cave-culture-game, and to the ethical system of games like KOTOR. We must somehow find a way to make ethical choices that does not presume that those choices are freely made, that understands how determined by culture our “free” choices are.

How can we do that? The lesson of the cave-culture-game and the lesson of Bioshock are the same, paradoxical, frustrating precept: you can’t do it in the game you’ve got—it would break the game to try; find a new game. Republic has the benefit of containing the cave-culture-game within its over-arching, brilliant performance of Republic. The reader of Republic can take some comfort in knowing that the dialogue he or she is reading is at least Plato’s best attempt at the new game with the better ethics. But Plato’s need to return to the ideal city in Laws, a work written at the end of his life, indicates very strongly that the perpetually dissatisfying lesson that realizing a better ethical framework requires breaking the old one is as much a part of Republic as it is of Bioshock.

Plato's new console: dialogue and mimesis

Even as Plato condemns the cave-culture-game, he expects the philosophical reader to understand that they (Plato and the reader together) are at that moment engaged in a culture-game of their own—the game called Republic. We’ll come to recognize that Republic features a next-gen logic engine and truly emergent gameplay that provides an unparalleled philosophical thrill-ride.

Republic is a game that, like 2K’s Bioshock, brings the player face to face with his or her own cultural constitution through gameplay. The most obvious example of Republic doing that—perhaps the most obvious example of any Platonic game (that is, dialogue) doing it—comes in the return of the ascended man to the cave. Indeed, as we continue, we’ll see that the philosopher’s return demonstrates just how thoroughgoing is Republic’s attempt to make the reader see him or herself as a prisoner of mimetic culture.

For in the light of the philosopher’s return, the figure of that doomed dissident, the figure of Socrates himself, pushes his arguments both forwards and backwards through the entirety of Plato’s majestic ten-book edifice.

Republic begins, after all, with Socrates telling his unknown interlocutors (that is, the interlocutors of the dialogue itself—the unnamed characters to whom Socrates is narrating the story of the cool conversation he had with Plato’s brothers et al. at the house of Cephalus: that is, us, the players of the Republic game) that it all started when he went to the feast of Bendis, a new cult where there was going to be a thrilling new ritual: a night-time torch race on horseback—such diverting games, Plato expects the reader to realize, go to make up the cave-culture game.

Republic ends at last with the massive, enigmatic myth of Er, in which none other than problem epic hero Odysseus is shown gaming the system of reincarnation, and we are expected to learn from his example to game the system of myth and mimesis. People usually don’t read the myth of Er. If you want an idea of how different Plato is from what you thought, go read it—it’s at the end of Republic 10. I’ll wait.

Republic is one big mimesis: one big game. How do we deal with that?

If we decide not to do what most platonic scholarship through the course of history has done—if we refuse simply to ignore the clues that tell us we’re supposed to understand that Republic and all Plato’s dialogues are in fact themselves mimesis--, we could still say that what Plato in fact is trying to tell us with those clues is something different, that his dialogues may look like mimesis, but really aren’t mimesis. We would lose a great deal of the irony that makes Plato wonderful instead of mind-numbing, but we would gain a philosopher who makes the kind of sense we tend to like in a guy upon whom our livelihoods depend.

We would also, however, be ignoring an absolutely crucial piece of evidence.

In the work generally acknowledged to be his last, Laws, Plato returns to the themes of Republic and once again tries to imagine an ideal city-state. In Laws, however, the role of mimesis is fundamentally different.

Athenian: And, if any of the serious poets, as they are termed, who write tragedy, come to us and say-"O strangers, may we go to your city and country or may we not, and shall we bring with us our poetry-what is your will about these matters?"-how shall we answer the divine men? I think that our answer should be as follows:-Best of strangers, we will say to them, we also according to our ability are tragic poets, and our tragedy is the best and noblest; for our whole constitution [politeia] is an identificative performance [mimesis (or what did you think?)] of the best and noblest life, which we affirm to be indeed the truest tragedy. You are poets and we are poets, both makers of the same strains, rivals and antagonists in the noblest of dramas, which true law can alone perfect, as our hope is. Do not then suppose that we shall all in a moment allow you to erect your stage in the agora, or introduce the fair voices of your actors, speaking above our own, and permit you to harangue our women and children, and the common people, about our institutions, in language other than our own, and very often the opposite of our own. For a state would be mad which gave you this licence, until the magistrates had determined whether your poetry might be recited, and was fit for publication or not. Wherefore, O ye sons and scions of the softer Muses, first of all show your songs to the magistrates, and let them compare them with our own, and if they are the same or better we will give you a chorus; but if not, then, my friends, we cannot.

“Constitution,” politeia, is a word frequently translated “republic.” It also happens to be the title of the work of the same name. I don’t think Plato could have said any more clearly that his work, whether you want to call that work “philosophy” or “dialectic” (which really just means “conversation,” for goodness’ sake) or “meta-musical mimetic,” is the same kind of thing the people in the cave are doing. It’s mimetic. It’s ludic.

It’s going to take a few posts to unpack the implications of this passage. Let me wind this one up by telegraphing the connection to games a bit more clearly.

Bioshock.

Alright, fine--even I am willing to admit that Bioshock has received more than enough attention, so although I’m going to be talking in detail about its signal moment, the confrontation with Andrew Ryan, as I continue this series, let me say that despite Bioshock being the only mainstream game thus far that emphatically thematizes the disruption of the cave-culture-game, games are increasingly making use of their closed mimetic constitution to make at least a part of their meaning.

The example of Tale of Tales’ The Path (2009) (see also Kieron Gillen's extremely lucid review of the game), whatever we think about the game’s content (Plato’s lawmakers would, I believe, most certainly not approve) comes in nicely here. The theme of that game is arguably the inevitability of corruption, and the game uses the falsification of its own interactivity to express that theme. There is no way to avoid the wolves and yet play the game (to avoid the wolves is, precisely, not to play): to play the game is to go to meet your characters’ corruption, willingly or unwillingly. The theme itself is tragic, as opposed to philosophical, and thus precisely what Plato would seek to disqualify from enactment in the city of Laws.

The situation in Republic is much more complex and interesting. From the standpoint of Republic, The Path would seem to be disqualified not because of its theme but because of its mimetic nature. But here we come up against it, because Republic itself is mimesis—a mimesis that carries the story of how the philosopher tried to get the prisoners in the cave to turn their heads away from the shadow-puppet play, and failed. While The Path has no such grand and urgent intent, it’s nevertheless a game to be played on Plato’s new console: it makes the player perform as characters under the compulsion of mimesis. It’s an act of mimesis as Republic is an act of mimesis: both games make us sensible that, as The Matrix puts it, the world has been pulled over our eyes.

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.