What do we implicitly agree to when we start playing a videogame? What sort of concessions do we make that allow the experience to happen?
In Thursday’s reading (Pugh and Wreden’s The Stanley Parable and Bradley J. Fest’s “METAPROCEDURALISM” article) and discussion, we talked and thought about the nature of consent/agreement/complicity and the structure/medium of the videogame—all tied up in the idea of “authority”.
A videogame will tell me, “This red rectangle is brick and it’s solid,” and I’ll walk on it. It’ll tell me, “Collect coins to win,” and I’ll race around trying to get them all. This is because the structure of the game—the processes—lets my avatar not fall through the block of grass and gives me points for each gold coin I collect. Fest talks about the need for rules in videogames, comparing them to a sonnet, and when we talked about the definition of a videogame all the way at the beginning of the quarter, “a set of rules” was a requirement we all settled on. Processes also function as rules or guides of sorts in terms of crafting the boundaries of the videogame experience.
A videogame will tell me, “You’re an insurance claims investigator whose mission is to discover what happened on this ship,” and I’ll believe that (the notion) and believe it (the videogame). Obviously, I’m sitting on my bed, hunched over my computer, staring at 2bit-rendered world on my screen for homework. But I’ll concede to the videogame and accept this as a version of reality (not in the multiverse way, but in the mimetic way). At this rate, I assume that VR will eventually get so good that videogames will be able to achieve complete and total representation of the ‘real world’, but for now, representation of the real world for videogames is impossible. The LED screen and the button-clicking and the ability to press the off button… the very mechanism for videogames prevents it from total representation—just like all other mediums do in different ways.
I spend a lot of time in the theater from running rehearsals to watching plays. With the exception of highly-produced Broadway-esque shows with elaborate sets, most shows don’t even try and represent “reality”. Rather, a stage will show us a piece of wood shaped and painted like a tree and a friend from your Hum class and say, “We’re in a forest and this is Robin Hood,” and we will accept that. Sounds are piped in through speakers and artificial lights cast shadows across a painted floor. We’re all sitting in the audience in seats that probably creak if you move too much. But the show asks us to believe that we are somewhere else and that this drama is real, and we agree. This is a requirement for theater, and for literature, and for videogames. By booting up any videogame, we’re agreeing to accept it as a reality, to accept the stakes as mattering and the world as true, even when at the end of the day, we’re on a screen.
