Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Games and Philosophy!

There are few cultural conceits are nebulous and ubiquitous in their scope than hip hop. From the violent socialism posited by intellectuals such as The Coup and Aesop Rock to the rampant commercialism implied in the works of more mainstream artists such as Jay Z and Kanye West, with plenty of middle ground in between, hip hop is always espousing a world view, even when it doesn’t seem to try to. From high art to low art hip hop is there, and one of the few things it does consistently is voice concerns about the individual in relation to society. The individual’s place, or lack thereof, his commitment to cultural institutions or his duty as a free thinking individual to reject, reform, or adhere to them. When you dress up the concept of thug, the idea of free-expression through a diverse art form, hip hop grows into a cross section of intellectualism and social commentary that, even at its worst, without thinking, reflects on the people producing it.

Not so much for video games.

I’m not even going to try and bridge this with a tie in to the nerdcore movement and its awkward little brother relationship with hip hop. But I will say that video games are a similar perceptibly “low” form of art (with often high ambitions and, very rarely, accomplishments) to hip hop that play to another isolated or maligned group, granted one with markedly different problems. To say that nerds are socially accepted is to ignore the function of a society which actively attempts to reject its intellectuals, seeking to silence its wisest voices, and it’s no less crippling a fact of our lives as Americans than the manner in which we have historically attempted to dismiss our diversity and enforce a socio-economic hierarchy counter to our purported national identity. Did you make it through that grandiose statement? Bear with me, it’ll be worth it. I promise.

Video games suck at what hip hop is great at: purporting a given philosophy or presenting a means of perceiving a given philosophy as valid or invalid without making it into a straw man argument. Even good attempts at doing so, such as Bioshock, inevitably deliver their philosophical viewpoints as muddled extremes rather than nuanced, acceptable perspectives. Video games are the medium of self-projection, and unlike books or music which excel at conveying abstract concepts and pressing participants towards a given conclusion, games mostly just reinforce the conceit of isolation fundamental to their core. Games consist of a self and an other, and the other is nearly always hostile. If the other is not hostile, they will usually serve as some sort of obstruction.

The few exceptions to this rule, games like Left 4 Dead, Dawn of War II and Starcraft 2, games with a focus on multiplayer play which makes teamwork an absolute necessity, are so devoid of theme and content as to be asinine in a discussion about its delivery in the medium at large. Every single video game which attempts to convey a theme does so by placing you at odds with that theme or its opposing viewpoint. It has to. Games are about overcoming a challenge, and that challenge is almost always either the framework of the game or the content of the game. Sometimes both.

This is how they illustrate their point. Doom II is fundamentally a game about subverting authority, from its lame back story to its final battle, which involves shooting the lead developer of the game in the head through the mouth of a giant hellbeast commanding an army. Far Cry 2 is a game about subverting expectations, where you are forced to manage a bevy of conditions that video games normally omit: debilitating physical illness which strikes unexpectedly, scarce resources and currency, limited supply, constant danger and the necessity of travel and reconnaissance. It ends with the ultimate subversion of expectations, the complete inversion of its initial goal. All of this is established through conflict, and while they generate some interesting experiences that can illustrate some fascinating ideas about who you are and how you respond to a mixture of beauty and horror, none of them make a single philosophical point aside from the asinine conceit that the military industrial complex of the developed world has ravaged Africa.

Perhaps it is this reliance on external conflict, born of necessity, which prevents games from illustrating and espousing points particularly effectively. When you can only make points by presenting concepts and demanding their annihilation rather than constructing the conceit of a concept and forcing players to grow into it it through action (the way that say Jonathan Franzen constructs, deconstructs and re-establishes a set of ideas about the American nuclear family in The Corrections) you really can’t make the ideas too convincing. If you make someone eliminate a concept they believe in you’re going to make the game unpleasant to play. If you make it too easy to follow, too asinine, you’re going to make the story boring, a chore to slog through. It’s a delicate balance.

Which brings me to perhaps the only effective example of effectively conveying a viewpoint in a video game. This is a game I haven’t mentioned in a while, a game that has been buried to some extent by more recent releases and a lack of progress towards its sequels which remains a golden standard in the manner in which developers should aside to convey ideas about theme. I’m talking about Half-Life 2.

Half-Life 2 doesn’t visibly espouse any concept, except perhaps the indomitable nature of human spirit. You and your plucky resistance buddies just keep getting back up no matter how hard you get hit, and no one ever talks of quitting. They despair, they give up hope, but they never collapse. They’re a cohesive unit which, when you get right down to it, isn’t very good at accomplishing their purpose.

Nor is the Combine for that matter. They’re inexplicably reliant on humans, a people they crushed effortlessly, subject to arbitrary rules about how they can fight and when. They’ve got these weird invulnerable containers that they don’t make armor for their giant war machines out of for whatever retarded reason. They love sending trickles of units against you through tangled corridors where you’ve set up defenses, they have a prison where they turn people into paraplegics with laser eyes who are generally not inclined toward rebellion, or even violence. And they have tremendous trouble beating a plucky twenty-something girl. Let’s face it, what great empire (aside from England) has ever been undone in a conflict by a teenage girl?

And even these invulnerable characters are unreliable sources of assistance. They’re limited in use, they’ll never really save you. They’ll distract your foes, provide opportunities for you, but in the world of Half-Life you’re beset by a series of mechanical forces, overwhelming in scope on all fronts, and your lone saving grace is the ineptitude of these forces. In this portrayal Half-Life 2 espouses a philosophy in that only a video game ever could give proper treatment to: anarchism.

I’m not talking about “we use a symbol” teenager anarchism, the conceit that being part of a deliberately anti-authoritarian group makes you any less a slave than following said authority or the Sacco and Vanzetti proto-tea party asinine rebellion against established systems. I’m talking about tried and true individual determination without regard to membership in a given group anarchism, the conceit that you are inevitably responsible for your own actions and destiny even if there are certain things you must do, want to do, or are pressed into experiencing.

Half-Life 2 delivers this philosophy in spades, presenting you with a number of groups with goals of varying nobility and a consistent degree of ineptitude. It admits its own arbitrary systems, undoes its authority figures with an incredible willingness without ever endeavoring to replace them with new ones. And it calls attention to the fact that it gives you lots of options, lots of toys to resolve your various violence-related challenges, toys that subvert conventional thought and generate unexpected results, all while never letting you forget that you’re a player in a game.

Of course, this is a philosophy based on a departure from all viewpoints presented, a philosophy that illustrates the fallacy of accepting or opposing the view of another without regard for your own. It’s a game that makes you work with unpleasant elements in order to attain your goals, and it’s a game that portrays the various extremes of philosophies (Piecemeal robo-dogs and space slugs fighting? FUCK YES!) as patently absurd. It’s also a game written by some of the most brilliant games writers, illustrated by some of the most deft artists and considered more carefully than any other game in the history of games as an art form.

So it’s hard to say just what’s causing the problem with games conveying complicated ideas. Early film had a similar problem, if we consider Metropolis as an example of a film espousing a viewpoint poorly. It could be our immaturity as a medium, a lacking awareness of how to utilize it. It could be a lack of writing and character, a lack of talent aimed at creating these things in games, that prevents the framework’s potential from being fully realized. Or it could be that the medium itself is problematic, with its obsession with self-determination and definition. Perhaps we’ll one day see a trend of games that make lucid points, games that offer up cogent perspectives instead of generating straw men and insisting that we destroy them. Until then, I’ll be getting my low-art philosophy infusion from hip hop, the way I have since that art burst onto the cultural scene like a car on fire, bursting through a wall into a crowded theater filled with young people, who thought the image, and the preceding terrible analogy, was cool.