Lately, games have taken a new form, one that is multimedia and arguably more interactive than games ever were: so-called “video games”. Anyone who lives in a technologically “developed” country nowadays is unlikely to have escaped them. The youth, especially, seems fond of homoerotic depictions of muscular men fighting other muscular men, aliens or zombies, in a stilted world bound by rules that tend to lose their meaning – if they ever had one at all. Oddly, these are of very little interest to me.

But wait, that just might be a slight oversimplification of what “video games” are about. At least, I’d wish to believe that video games, like books, drawing or movies, are nothing more than a medium that ultimately serves to express whatever the makers wish to express. As with other means of conveying meaning to the masses, what the masses seem to like is a sad parody of the creative potential of the medium: predigested, normalized, artificialized absurdity that seems to strive for a total lack of whatever could challenge the beliefs, norms and even aesthetics of the consumers. Merchandisation of the human mind at its worst.

That doesn’t mean, however, that video games as a whole are to be dismissed. That most box-office hits are unimaginative and uninteresting in no way means that no movie is worth watching. This said, here are my reviews of the only two recent games which have, in my opinion, been worth playing.

Braid

Playing Braid, which I originally acquired through the second Humble Indie Bundle, led me to reconsider my standards for video games; I have stopped playing any since then, as it set said standards quite high. I genuinely didn’t imagine a video game could be that good – its relative success gives me some hope as to where humanity is heading. The premise of the game, which could be simplistically classified as a “puzzle game”, is time manipulation, beginning with the ability to go back in time. This allows for a game-play devoid of “save points”, “lives” or any clear incentive to compete. Success, as with other puzzle games such as Myst, is built around a process of discovery and reflexion.

Unlike any other puzzle game I know of, however, this learning process that constitutes the core of puzzle-solving barely has an artificial feel at all. Playing Braid is not only an immersion in an alternate universe – dare I say, this alternate universe has a philosophical, metaphysical relevance to everyday life. The rules that guide the player’s actions do not seem to be attempts at creating a “safe” fictional playground. There is no way of competitively “winning” in Braid, lest you invent one yourself. That is the true strength of Braid: rules designed to teach the player something somewhat relevant to self-transcendence, rather than pointless, nietzscheean self-gratification.

All of the above, I had globally inferred from simply playing the game. It had such a strong impact on my views of video games as an artistic medium that I wanted to find out more about it, starting with who it was that created such a masterpiece. Now, let me take back everything I said above about Braid, as these were more or less, it appears, the intentions of the brilliant mind who created the game. I have found myself agreeing with everything developer Jonathan Blow says about video games, for example:

It’s considered best practice: schedule rewards for your player so that they don’t get bored and give up on your game. That’s actually exploitation. [1]

What can I say? I love his philosophy, and fully agree with him on ethical aspects of game development, if not on art as a whole. Even though I am obviously influenced by critical theory‘s view of art as a means of liberation, leisure built around uses and gratification – or “power”, which is ultimately the same reductionist logic as uses and gratification – appears to be quite alienating. Not that it prevents it from being the norm.

I am eagerly awaiting The Witness, the next game by Blow.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent

Ever felt disgusted? Anxious? Abhorrent? Playing Amnesia will probably make you feel all that at once. Intensely. You may even be a bit scared at times. If you can still be offended despite living in the 21st century and reading this post, do not play this game. In fact, I am not even sure one can call this a game. Amnesia, if anything, is a controlled visit to Hell – the quintessential experience of “horror”. At first glance, the main reason why one would want to go through this is to enjoy the “thrills” resulting from artificial, controlled situations of pseudo-danger.

So, why do I recommend this game, despite being far from a “thrill-seeker”? I certainly didn’t play Amnesia for its aesthetic qualities. Or if I did, it is because Amnesia might be the most brilliantly ugly piece of art ever created. Indeed, seeing Hell can make one enjoy the aesthetic qualities of the ordinary world more fully. The Amnesia experience, which also relies on puzzles – not anywhere close to the brilliance of Braid’s, but still decent – pushes the boundaries of what one can experience. As such, it is a high-density learning process, and can serve a purpose of psychological or emotional liberation.

Playing Amnesia doesn’t leave you feeling good; in fact, it might leave many feeling quite sick. It doesn’t make you feel more stronger; if anything, it makes one feel powerless. On the other hand, after playing Amnesia, you certainly have this impression that you have learnt something that transcends words – it is somewhat mentally cleansing. If you are able to stomach it, playing Amnesia can be a uniquely enlightening experience, in a very twisted way. It has been for me. I wouldn’t play it again.

[1] http://www.smh.com.au/news/articles/ethical-dilemmas/2007/09/19/1189881577195.html

Given that the amount of information that can be processed and stored by the human brain is finite, I suggest that “understanding” is nothing but a change of perspective, or interpretation (cf. Nietzsche), often for practical reasons, but possibly for emotional reasons, environmental reasons, or any reason imaginable as we subjectively perceive it. In a context where the global population becomes constantly greater, saying that the “total knowledge” becomes greater would be fallacious, as we have no reliable way to assess the size of knowledge.

Knowledge is not a finite, objective concept. At most, we can hypothesize that information available is becoming slowly more diverse. I believe that it is essential for the purpose of this theory to distinguish information from knowledge: information is whatever is available to our senses, whilst knowledge could be tentatively defined as the processed form of information as it is organised and stored in the human brain. Paradoxically, knowledge therefore has meaning only through knowledge.

But how was/is meaning originally created? What about love, happiness, or existence itself: these are hardly constructs available in ambient information. However, I would argue that such essential concepts cannot be understood – they can only be subjectively experienced. Fearful of what it doesn’t understand, the modern human too often disregards subjectivity and focuses on rules and roles – so-called “objective” laws that purportedly make the world tick like a huge clock. Love is no clockwork still.

However, the diversification of information that I claim is happening – through several successive revolutions in the ways humans communicate, the most recent being the Internet (cf. Lévy) – has the direct result of allowing greater freedom of thought, and incidentally of behaviour. That is, more diverse information available implies more freedom in constructing one’s personal reality.

Can the way humans see knowledge and information change? And most importantly, should it change? Would people actually gain from greater cognitive freedom? I would be inclined to say that they would, but that is irremediably biased by my consistently labyrinthine mind and my views of happiness, peace, love and everything else…

I think that human consciousness – and especially that of the modern human – is way too complex a phenomena to be significantly influenced by factors such as sex. I believe that the differences we observe in the life of men and women are for the most part the result of societal paradigms originally born of biological constraints and the quest for the survival of homo sapiens.

It was first the “patriarchy”, then through several decades of “feminism” was implemented a new policy that women should be “equal” to men. Which came to mean to some that they should be treated as “different”: that as many women than men must play any role in society that is viewed as “awesome”. Regardless of their actual contribution to society. Women should be judged as women, and men as men. We don’t mix these.

This social attitude appear to stem from an odd philosophy of debt towards the oppressed of the past – comparably too seldom of the present. It is absurd. There is no “magical balance” in the sky that requires us to do “good” in return for the “wrongs” of the past. Right and wrong are socio-individual constructs. The radical feminists of nowadays are no better than the patriarchs of the past.

Even if I think they can become so in a more or less distant future trough science and the end of systematised ideology, women and men are not “identical”. Thousands of years of biological and social evolution have relayed certain differences between sexes to the current generations. It might be better to attempt to simply destroy prejudice and not create another, making the world even more unfair in the process. The ideology of “sexism” apparently can go both ways.

Something similar happened with ethnocentrism. Slaves in the past, some “races” are becoming favoured by the machine in a form of “reverse ethnocentrism” that is only arguably more fair than the systems of the past. What was “racism” again?

Sex shouldn’t divide people, it should unite them. Races shouldn’t compete against one another, they should build the present and the future of humanity collectively. I call for a system where no human would be seen as more than a human; where the arbitrary limits of sex and “race” would have sunk in the depth of human consciousness. Maybe in a century or a few.

Lonely souls, seeking a lighthouse on a foggy day. It is unknown where the lighthouse is, yet masses are walking towards that fleeting goal… could be born of one’s mind and never have existed at all… even if it did exist, the direction could be completely wrong… however, no word can stop the motion of the ruck as through it, purpose is given to otherwise absurd existences.

Such is the human quest for truth and knowledge. The glimmers of light some claim to see may be in fact the Sun. The stars. The pure product of a fertile imagination.

The lighthouse of the metaphor – the truth – is seen – if it is at all – from a different angle by each human. Furthermore, it should be noted that nobody in the tale knows what a lighthouse is. Which makes matters yet again more complicated. And that’s not all.

The lighthouse can be not only on the planet humans walk on, but anywhere in a potentially infinite Universe. Although, in fact, it will necessarily have to be found – again, if it ever is – somewhere within an infinity of finite universes.

That is because everything travels at a finite speed: what can be perceived by each human is no more than the information that had the time to travel sufficiently far to reach him/her. An individual’s “personal reality” is therefore the varyingly distant pasts of reality – both may be much more vast than what little our senses can interpret – surrounded by the infinity of the unknown.

Within this small universe that is accessible to a single human consciousness, truth is whatever one believes it to be. Define your own “lighthouse”.

That would be the main truth of my own universe.

If the mere fact of writing these lines appears to be no more than stating evidence, adding that the same is happening with the Internet might look slightly less obvious. And seeing such fast evolution in the past, we can easily predict than there will be other “innovations” in the future. The form that these will take is of course the object of crazy speculation…

Again, the media themselves have no effect on people. The changes we can witness are rather the result of how people use these new technologies. That is, they mostly communicate. Human beings are social animals, and they communicate with an ever-increasing speed and efficiency. The collective consciousness – and unconscious – of humanity is therefore gaining an unprecedented level of variety as most tend to isolate themselves from all but the people that are the most similar to them. The Internet and such platforms that rely largely upon user-selected/user-generated content allow for the creation of smaller, more homogeneous sub-cultures.

And yet, we can also witness that never before has the world been so alike no matter where we go. Knowledge travels around the globe at the speed of light and so does the information that makes up the concept known as “culture”. Thus, I predict that soon, culture as we know it today will merge with what we see as “folklore” if not completely disappear in due time to the profit of communities that will no longer be bound by one’s birthplace. That is, the sub-cultures will progressively become smaller until there is a “sub-culture” fully specific to each individual.

This has already begun.

But, I wonder how such changes will affect the way humans interact on a long-term basis. The relative end of culture-based groups is likely to enlarge further the gap between generations. Let us not forget that culture implies tradition; it is obvious even today that the importance of tradition is steadily decreasing…

Furthermore, if the people of developed countries have never been so “social” – spending a truly staggering proportion of their time communicating – and everything points to an increase of this tendency in the future, I would be inclined to assume that this will make each person much more lonely as the long-lasting interpersonal bounds formed through direct interaction slowly disrupt in favour of, for example, the fleeting concept of “friend” brought about by the use of technologies such as Facebook.

It is not my goal to condemn or condone this social mutation that is taking place, merely to analyse it from a morally neutral standpoint – to the extent where that is possible. Symptoms of this change can already be observed in the “death of romance” to the ephemeral relationships formed through numerous social networking websites, and teens’ use of live chat protocols, among many others. I believe that people should at least be aware of it.

I consider it to be the most depressing piece of text I ever wrote…

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Dreaming beyond dreams, of a thirst to exist through another medium than ink on a governmental chart.

Why is time so long and life so short?

Downtown, the air is heavy with smog. Everywhere: people, too many for one’s sanity. All look-alike androids, mindless parts of the social tissue under the neons’ cold lights.

They cannot see the world and its realities – that might be how we managed to create a “civilized” society.

My eyes met the firmament eclipsed by the city lights.

“Then I defy you, stars”, Romeo said. If my future has to be written in these lights that reflects such multiple pasts, it is no wonder that my present reflects my broken memories.

Stella Maris, life has deceived me. Shall death be deliverance or continuation of my misery?

Couldn’t my existence by the dream of a fevered mind?

Aren’t we reborn at each instant of our lives?

After all, the first step to death is none other than the beginning of life.