Video Games and Consciousness

Just how connected are we to our video game counterparts? And do their deaths affect us more than we think?

Surely Bob Dylan never imagined his classic refrain, “How many roads must a man walk down…” being adapted to the language of video gaming, but here goes: “How many games must a man walk down, before they call him a man?” The answer is probably non-denumerably infinite, but for the sake of brevity I’ll just offer the more reasonable, and decidedly finite, 361! (factorial), which happens to be the number of possible moves extant at the beginning of a game of Go. Now rumour has it that’s a number larger than the total quantity of particles in the entire universe (a figure also exceeded by the possibilities of synaptic combinations in the brain, interestingly enough). What does this tell us?

Probably nothing. But we’ve got to start somewhere, and where better than with a modest analogue of consciousness transcribed into the language of mathematics? Sure, sure, been done. But really, there’s something going on here. Consider for example the question: What happens to us when we die in a game? I mean, we’re not really dying, but our avatar is. Again, and again, and again, at a rate inversely proportional to our decaying motor reflexes. That’s got to affect us somehow, right? Let me make the connection between numerical vastness and consciousness a little bit stronger.

When we die in a game we experience that death vicariously. Vicarious is precisely the word, too: it comes from the Latin vicarius, meaning a substitute. A vicar is likewise a person who is authorized to perform the functions of another. Our video game alter-ego is perhaps more like a vicar than an avatar (which by contrast means a deity descended into an embodied form in the world; but I won’t deny the capacity of some gamers to believe themselves gods in their limited domains – why deny them such pleasures?).

It goes without saying we are connected to our vicars. They stand in for us, assuming our duties and responsibilities within the game, and like true servants of a deity receive their instructions as if from on high. We input data into a gaming system by means of haptic (or touch-based, physical) interfaces. The game interprets the data according to various more or less complex algorithms, and in turn our characters, the vicars, react and respond with the appearance of immediacy. One of the great accomplishments of gaming is condensing an extremely complex causal sequence, beginning at the user’s end and concluding with the behaviour of the game itself, into the form of a single and direct transaction. But these transactions are anything but direct causal events.

One of the characteristics of complex systems is that they can only be fully understood by other complex systems. The mind is inordinately complex, and is therefore extremely good at understanding other examples of complexity. Doubtlessly, however, it does not require a game of extreme complexity to create an impact (whether emotional or simply informational) on the consciousness of a user. Many people have very fond memories of playing Tetris, for example, which is so simple that it is one of the very few games that can be coded entirely in the browser-endemic programming language JavaScript. But the complexity of these relatively simple earlier games is tied together inextricably with the innate and self-reflexive structures and meanings of human consciousness.

When we play a game, no matter how ornate or simple, we are automatically imbricating it with layers of personal meaning and inherited signification. The game occurs therefore in a non-linear sequence of events that extends back to the beginning of our lives, and even beyond that to the earliest inception of consciousness. As soon as the lineage of human thought began to haul itself above a basic state of necessity and ask certain fundamental questions about itself, and the world, we set in motion a system of complex, essentially self-referential, thought. Heidegger talks at length about the notion of the dasein, which translates simply to that-being, and in a very crude sense can be understood as a being for whom its existence is an issue, a point of concern or interrogation. A question.

How then do video games interface with the questioning existence of dasein? We are all that-beings, who propagate complexity by breathing and thinking, and who are ideally positioned to do so by being the inheritors of a long history of thought. The combinations of synaptic processes in a single brain can be compared in a way to a miracle of physics. That thought occurs is alone a breathtaking source of wonder. But these synapses are not merely burned into history and then discarded. They carry on, like the continuation through time of a vastly intricate and polyfurcated electric chain.

To return, and rephrase, my original question: How do games affect who we are? How does a death in a game impinge on our sense of self? When we die is our consciousness affected? What proximate values do we impart to our gaming vicars? What parts of ourselves do we transmit to them in their corrals of programming and data? Our consciousness persists when the vicar is extinguished, sure, but because we are complex and games are ever-increasingly also complex, the relationship between these two must necessarily (I argue) be complex. It seems unlikely to me (though admittedly, probably not impossible) that two complex systems in interaction would produce a simple outcome.

If we accept, at least provisionally, that the interaction between user and game is definitionally complex, does it follow that the individual events that occur within each of those systems are likewise complex? Not necessarily. It is true in a sense that the individual units of data that comprise a game system are at their most fundamental level totally simple (binary ones and zeroes). Nevertheless, the meaning produced by the interactions of those basic units will register on a higher, much more elaborate level. There are orders of complexity, ranging from the top-most level of system-wide organization, right down to the most basic and unitary substrate of raw, particulate information.

So when I paraphrase Dylan and ask how many games must I play to be a man, I am not attempting to bastardize a good song or invoke traditional gender norms, but rather trying to assert that the boundaries of consciousness are permeable and responsive to interactions with complexity beyond the protean boundaries of mind. The very presence of possibility represented by the number 361! changes how I think. To stare at a Go board is to come face to face with the incomprehensible vastness of mathematics. When we play a game we are likewise also engaging with a monumental tapestry of potential variation. The events that occur in a game may be rigidly defined and finite, but the combinations that occur between a game and the ever-changing infrastructure of my mind are essentially infinite.

The best answer I can come up with to that question is thus: An infinite number. We are who we are in the becoming of ourselves. By engaging with the world and its manifold variations we are simultaneously defining who we are. Games contribute to this definition in more ways than I can describe. Death in games is likewise only one event among many, but it has the unique and paradoxical quality of being understood by the living as the absolute cessation of consciousness. How then are we defined by an experience of death that is perpetually repeatable, almost transient and inconsequential?

I’ll continue to examine this question in a subsequent article.