1.
Introduction
Having
its origins in the 17th-century English and French utopian modes,
politically focused on pragmatism and optimism respectively (Racault
1991, 33-150), and initially rejected by the Marxist left before
being appropriated by philosophers like Ernst Bloch and Herbert
Marcuse in the 1960s (Monticelli 2018),
the utopian genre represents a reliable index of the capability of
societies to envision their best possible future. More specifically,
when understood as a product of humanism, the utopian genre attempts
to overcome the historical contradiction between intellectual autonomy
and political dependence (Balasopoulos
2008).
In this regard, the imposition of
capitalism’s own interpretation of such an overcoming has brought on a
decadence of the genre’s principles. As for the nature of utopia, the
insertion of videogames in this context is of semiotic interest in at
least two regards: as a form of expression, i.e. as a cybertextual
medium characterised by its singular expressive faculties, and as a
form of content, i.e. as an enunciable discursive device within the
limits allowed by its singularity as a medium.
This article has the purpose of answering two
specific questions: 1) can we strictly speak of the possible existence
of a link between utopia and videogames? and 2) what are the
possibilities offered by this link, in case it does exist, of
transcending the formalist conception of ludology?
To answer these
questions, this article is organised into the following sections: in
Section 2 (Background), the current state of the concept of utopia in
neoliberal society is estimated and its possibility is found in the
epistemological reality of game studies, consequently considered to have
inherited the cybernetic project of neoliberal society in that it was
collectively founded in the principles established by ludology. Finally,
the role that the cultural reason plays in capitalist societies and the
resignification, from the onset of economic liberalism, of said reason
as a means of escape are analysed. In Section 3 (Case and Methods), the
research question is found in the sociological problematic originating
from erasing the borders in the work-play relationship. Additionally,
two historical occasions in which videogames were focused around a
utopian purpose are referenced: procedural rhetoric videogames and
walking simulators.
In Section 4,
these variants of videogames – a style and a genre respectively – are
analysed in a separate manner in relation to the utopian potential of
the medium. In the first case, a critique of proceduralism is made based
on the enthymemic foundation of its proposal, the latter a result of its
strictly formalist structure. In the second, the reflective effect that
occurs in utopia when it refers to a dimension strictly belonging to
daily life is analysed. This effect takes place when it moves away from
the possibility of a global systemic change: a distinction is also made
regarding the sense in which this effect, while implying a
‘from-the-bottom-up’ construction, opposes the set goals and economic
performance-dominated formats. In Section 5 (Discussion and General
Conclusions), the research questions will be answered and discussed,
using the conclusions of each part of Section 4 as a reference.
2.
Background
Posing a question about the programming of utopia in the title of our
article is a statement of intent; indeed, such an enquiry demands that
videogames possess a degree of responsibility of a social, political,
and human complexion identical to that historically expected of
literature and film. Just as has been a fundamental objective of both
of these media, the goal of videoludic expression should be to
transcend the very form of the videogame by demonstrating an
integrated approach to human values, thereby participating in an
active form of humanism. Such a demand does not seek to bring the
expressive autonomy of videogames into question, nor does it intend to
put strain on their ontological nature or sustain such a nature at any
cost. We are aware of the theoretical resistance emerging from certain
sections of the game studies community, which are extremely
preoccupied with compartmentalising, delimiting, and prescribing
attempts to put videogames on a level with literary and filmic
experiences. Such resistance, always legitimate and
undoubtedly necessary in a specific moment in game studies history,
occurs especially in the ontological resource to ludology. The nature of
this resistance is drawn not from an intentional opposition, but instead
from the unintentional omission of the humanistic power –
which
this article considers a synonym of the narrative power – of the medium. As an example, the recent works by Juul (2013),
Costikyan (2013) or De Koven (2013)
represent an approach to videogames in their nature as a designed
artefact, undertaking their arguments in terms of rules and mechanics or
focusing on other types of purely formal aspects such as what is called
the “art of failure” (Juul 2013) or the value of
the “uncertainty” (Cosikyan 2013) of the
ludic execution. Differences aside, it would be quite surprising if in
the field of film studies there were a singular, never-ending debate
regarding eyeline match and off-camera, i.e. concerning an essential
part of cinema which, as such, cannot be renounced.
As far as we are aware, such opposition serves to highlight the
unconscious subordination of any kind of ideology to the market, a
common practice in the West that is prescribed by the capitalist
system. Indeed, game studies was founded in 2001 from a purely
formalist standpoint, with its foundational text written several years
previously (Aarseth 1997). The struggle to
distinguish videogames from other expressive media is not only
demonstrative of a legitimate academic position in the defence of this
new medium’s ontology; it is also a devastating victory for the
capitalist system. After all, surely the birth of an expressive medium
yielding tremendous profits and with universal reach is a capitalist
triumph? Indeed, it is a medium geared exclusively towards
entertainment, confined to its own form, distinct to any form of
reality, and, in consequence, locked in a perpetually non-critical
state. Moreover, is the articulation of a science in its name,
ludology, not an even greater triumph for capitalism, exhausting
itself in a perpetual reverberation of its own arguments over the
course of the past decade?
It is no secret that there is an inextricable link between videogames and
dystopia, the very antithesis of utopia, in which the alienation of
man is depicted in a wide range of ways. Nonetheless, this association
is not motivated by a critical spirit; instead, in such cases,
dystopia is used as a fictional façade. As Schell notes (2014),
videogames need to place characters in new contexts that can justify
the player’s learning of rules of the gameworld. Dystopia, despite
having become a recalcitrant common space for modern fiction, grants
this type of licence to the apocalypse, amnesia, or exile. In our
view, there is a fundamental distinction between utopia and dystopia;
as such, while utopia allows us to envisage situations that are
beneficial to humankind, starting from the current state of man’s
place in society, dystopia has a tendency to disconnect from this same
reality by representing stories with negative characteristics,
unconsciously inciting us to embrace the virtues of the current
system. Dystopia appears to enjoy its confinement to the realm of
videogames’ innocuous ideas; in contrast, utopia’s exile should
encourage us to value the present, unique force of the videogame
medium as a centrifugal expressive form, and not as a simple
centripetal entity. This is, of course, the objective of this article:
to reflect on the capacity of videogames to spread theories of a
better world from the inside out, starting with the world as it
currently is and, if possible, distinguishing the causes of its
successes or failures in this titanic task. Before delving deeper into
our investigation, we must begin by highlighting one of the factors
responsible for the present latency of utopia.
Capitalism
constructed
a never-ending range of possibilities based on money as quickly as it
consumed our real capacity to make decisions about our own existence;
to paraphrase Touraine (2001), we are
extras with serious difficulty in becoming protagonists. As Jameson (2005) affirms, adapting that famous phrase
uttered by Margaret Thatcher, there is no alternative to capitalism.
Once the collapse of the so-called ‘Second World’ threw its woes into
clear view, utopia – associated by some on the Western left with
Soviet communism – lost all its previous potential and prestige. This
defunct utopia gave rise to incalculable financial losses, millions of
lives lost at the hands of totalitarian terror, and environmental
degradation on an apocalyptic scale (Gray 2005).
Following its failure, we have been left alone with capitalism. As
such, only the new enemy of religious fundamentalism stands against
Western imperialism, though it does not articulate an anti-capitalist
thesis in doing so. This situation of mandatory imposition has been
explained by Fisher via the notion of capitalist realism. The
British-born writer and critic believes that there exists “the
widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political
and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine
a coherent alternative to it”
(2009, 2).
The system reigns supreme, bolstered by armies of consumers who have
confused the idea of progress with that of being on-trend. Man has
deserted his capacity to imagine future worlds in which the notions of
progress and wellbeing may once again possess a true meaning, the one
which was passed down by the fathers of the Enlightenment or the
proponents of UNESCO following the Second World War (Finkielkraut
1996). The roots of this desertion may well be found in the
global imposition of the free market in accordance with the model of
liberal Western democracies, an act that was difficult to replicate in
countries such as China and Russia owing to the idiosyncrasies of
their situations. The consequences have been as catastrophic as those
of the false communist utopia, resulting in tens of millions of
Chinese peasants being forced to become migrant labourers and millions
of people being excluded from work in the more advanced societies (Gray 2005). In these countries, the
materialisation of a global free market economy has not been
accompanied by institutional development or the extension of Western
values; in contrast, it has signalled the end of the epoch of global
Western supremacy and the advent of a point-of-no-return for past
levels of prosperity and social cohesion in the West (Gray
2005). Ultimately, free rein has been given to capitalism.
In this neoliberal and anarcho-capitalist epoch, the concepts of progress
and wellbeing possess a purely material meaning brought about by the
market’s excessive presence in our lives – and this will continue to
be the case owing to the unrelenting hypertrophy of capitalism as an
economic system. Its cyclical nature, infinite in character, is based
on the union of capital and its subsequent investment, with a desire
to accumulate profits that are then re-invested (Boltanski
and Chiapello 2002). It is no surprise that, in this context,
utopias are met with indifference and astonishment. Today, they have
been replaced by one supreme vocation: that of the machine wanting to
possess everything by means of money. In capitalism, needs have been
replaced by desires; such desires are not biological, but
psychological – and, like capitalism, they are infinite. From a
philosophical perspective, Deleuze and Guattari (1972)
warned that we are all machines in capitalism, a terrible connective
organism whose sole desire is production-produce, in which nature and
man are one and the same non-differentiated entity because the
distinction between them, which once defined our place in the world,
has been absorbed by the activity of machines that desire or produce.
Capitalism is a machine of infinite activity based on infinite
desires; unfortunately, our capacity to generate utopias has been
superseded by the belief that capitalism, in its execution of
never-ending sequences, will itself result in a superior state of
progress for humanity. This notion has eradicated the political
capital of utopia, relegating it to the realms of fantasy and of
science fiction.
It has been debated whether utopia pertains to the field of politics or
literature; as Jameson (2005) notes, utopia
as a genre has always been a political theme with a literary form.
Today, in any case, it is a solely literary concern. This definitive
displacement of the concept of utopia toward the cultural sphere, and
its fusion with the genres of fantasy and science fiction, is
demonstrative of two transcendental factors. Firstly, it shows the
existence of a separation between the economic, political, and
cultural spheres in capitalism. Bell (1996)
affirms that in capitalist society, these three spheres are governed
by contradictory principles, even if, historically, they were born
from the same impulse. For example, the bourgeoisie and experimental
art both expressed a mutual, unconditional rejection of each other,
despite having both emerged from their rebellion against the past. In
consequence, the principles that regulate these spheres are opposed;
where the economic sphere is concerned with efficiency, the political
sphere is concerned with the search for equality and the cultural
sphere with self-gratification. It is not difficult to imagine that
this triad of objectives would prove to be contradictory and result in
a perpetual source of conflict in capitalist societies. In the past,
it was possible to conceive a holistic definition of society, but this
is no longer the case. These three realms, albeit distinct, can
interact with each other but almost always act in accordance with
exclusive norms. In consequence, and in the second instance, the
present innocuousness of the utopian genre, now yet another member of
the ineffable and extensive cultural network of our societies, is
motivated by an exceptional fact. Indeed, though utopia (or any of the
other illustrious members of the cultural sphere) can be used to
critique aspects of the world associated with the other spheres, it
cannot modify the future behaviour of said spheres. Marcuse (1968)
noted how the unbridgeable gulf separating these three realms
provides, on one hand, necessary perspective for the cultural sphere
to act as a tool of critique and objection to any political or
economic factors, yet, on the other, condemns all its interventions to
be futile, relegating culture to a frivolous and trivialised space in
which the intersections with other spheres are non-operational.
A reassessment of this classic argument by the Frankfurt School can be
found in Jodi Dean’s works, expressed concretely in her notion of
communicative capitalism. The current situation, in which ideas and
political content are circulated through means other than those
offered by institutions, such as social networks or websites with
syndicated content (RSS), proves a paradoxical inoperability in
opposing the official political agenda and thus transforming the
environing reality via citizen activism, using these new media as a
support.
On the basis of the concept of communicative
capitalism, Bulut, Mejia and McCarthy (2014)
have analysed the online game Free Rice (developed by World Food Program, 2007-2018) under the critical
perspective known as “the rise of the ludic sublime”. Naturally,
videogames are acclaimed in neoliberal societies as a plausible
solution to complex political problems, forming part of the philintainment
practices. Nevertheless, as stated by the authors, Free Rice
depicts the abandonment of social problems by the states and
recalibrates the value of citizen participation in techno-consumerist
terms (2014, 347).
As Dean notes, the matters brought to the
public debate by the counterhegemonic model, among which these kinds
of games would be included, rarely find answers due to the abandonment
by official institutions of this function, hiding behind the existence
of this circulation of ideas:
Today, the
circulation of content in the dense, intensive networks of global
communications relieves top-level actors (corporate, institutional and
governmental) from the obligation to respond. Rather than responding to
messages sent by activists and critics, they counter with their own
contributions to the circulating flow of communications, hoping that
sufficient volume (whether in terms of number of contributions or the
spectacular nature of a contribution) will give their contributions
dominance or stickiness (Dean 2005, 53).
The most
immediate consequence of this phenomenon is that it renders culture
symbolic, that is, it places it in a metaphorical limbo that is
disconnected from the real world. Hauser (1969)
believed that artistic
forms of a symbolic nature principally develop in capitalist
societies, perhaps as a means of eluding any real critique of the
system. However, it is no surprise that an emancipated critique of
real issues flourishes in this context, an ‘other-worldly’ examination
focused on the formal investigation of works or the ludic element
concerning how the textual relations woven between them are
established. Is this not a fundamental definition of videogames: a
pure form so distinct from reality that it requires its own rules and
emphasises its ludic nature?
Coinciding with this social
mitosis, Hauser (1969) also observed that
since Romanticism; in other words, coinciding with the practice of
economic liberalism, the symbolic fictions of culture and of art have
become a means of compensating for the unlived, becoming valuable and
meaningful for individuals who had been unable, or who had not known
how, to make the most of their life’s journey. A discrepancy between
social function and aesthetic function is formed within us,
transforming cultural or artistic works into a microcosm used as a
refuge from our own life experience and, therefore, rendering it
materially separate from this same reality. The exacerbated use of
symbols in capitalist cultures – effectively a masking of reality –
implicitly carries with it an escape towards a fictitious world. This
idea of escape through fiction created by art or culture is an
aesthetic possibility that is completely alien to a pre-Romantic
conception of both of these realms. For Nietzsche, science was the
source of nihilism as it provoked the destruction of unreflexive
spontaneity in the world (Bell 1996). Today,
we can assert that it was, after all, capitalism, without a doubt a
concept that is in many aspects tied to science, which triggered a
definitive separation between culture, politics, and economics and
dealt the final blow to this irrational spontaneity. As a result, it
is no surprise that utopia, relegated to the cultural sphere, has
become a purely imaginary and fictional concept with no real
transcendence nor any transformative capacity.
On one hand, utopia is incapable of affecting the political and economic
realms, given that it pertains to the cultural sphere; on the other,
the enunciation of its discourse, transmitted via artistic media such
as literature, film, or videogames – featuring equally in this sphere
– is geared towards the creation of fictitious worlds bearing the
hallmarks of a refuge from this brave new neoliberal world that has
been handed to us (Table 1).
Table 1.
Capitalism, utopia, and videogames.
Ultimately, at present, utopia is
no longer characterised by its capacity to envisage or construct
better worlds. In its new form, the notions of progress and of
improving the conditions of our existence have been supplanted by the
idea of going on a voyage – the farthest flung and costlier the
better. Bauman (2006b) describes an
anecdote that cannot pass without mention: when you enter the word
‘Utopia’ into Google, the first entry that appears is a videogame. Far
from being cause for satisfaction, this fact serves to demonstrate the
widely-held opinion of videogames as a form of ‘holiday retreat’,
refuge, or means of escape, while simultaneously emphasising utopia’s
impotency and, in so doing, relegating it to the mere role of a ludic,
fictional framework.
However, not everything is bleak. The separation between these three
spheres is regarded by other researchers not as a tragedy, but rather
as an integral feature and cause of optimism. McGonigal (2011)
proposes a fluid communication between everyday reality and the
reality established by videogames, to the point of underlining the
influence of the latter on the former. In McGonigal’s perspective, the
key issue of the matter is discovering whether the principles of
compromise and reward, essential in the design of any quality
videogame, can function in a similarly efficient manner in
problem-solving situations in the real world. The answer is strongly
affirmative: “Gamers who have grown up being intensely engaged by
well-designed virtual environments are hungry for better forms of
engagement in their real lives” (2011, 245).
Far from maintaining that there exists a trivial space for culture,
McGonigal states that players are a natural source of participation in
citizen journalism projects, collective intelligence or humanitarian
actions. Proving this phenomenon to be an unstoppable and growing
process, McGonigal speculates that the era of crowdsourcing
videogames will spur the masses to social mobilisation with the aim of
solving real world problems in the same manner as in the ludic context
of virtual worlds (2011, 246).
3.
Case and Methods
In this bleak context, can
videogames bring new life to utopia? This would appear to be a
difficult task. Videogames are a medium erected in the image and
appearance of capitalism: they simulate the remunerative essence of
the system when placing us in the role of an avatar that spends money
or that receives payment for his or her work (Dyer-Witheford
and De Peuter 2012). Moreover, videogames obliterate the idea of
realistic, human worlds that are tied to reality. It is no surprise
that the worlds generated by videogames always appear alien to us,
especially in the most successful games or those received most
favourably by the public. Videogames become locked into the complex
symbolism highlighted by Hauser (1969),
trapped within themselves and revealed to be unabashedly cloaked with
an enticing ‘other-worldly’ nature. Videogames’ strength as a refuge
rests in the fact that they are detached from the everyday, yet this
is also the source of their weakness as an expressive form of social
vocation. The medium’s power to create and change the world was
stripped away at its inception, as it was instilled with the ideology
of its creators, who were essentially engineers and programmers
fascinated by unreal worlds (Anthropy 2012).
Indeed, owing to their mastery of information technology, these
pioneers’ transformative abilities became a simile for the role of
magic in fictional universes, an ostensibly innocuous fact that forced
the medium into exile in the realm of fantasy.
Conversely, the centripetal formalism that is characteristic of the
medium is tied to an ideological evolution where, owing to a sentence
once again handed down by the economic system, our way of relating
ourselves to the world abandoned the domain of ‘knowing’ in favour of
‘processing’. Videogames
synthesise this cultural transformation in the extranoematic effort
required by players during gameplay or in the games’ configuration
based on menus. It is easy to identify any number of human activities
which, in this new ‘processing’ culture, promote the use of
configurative systems based on interfaces akin to those used in
videogames. Such acts of configuration are indispensable in our daily
lives, as much with work as with leisure (Galloway
2006).
Likewise, it is no coincidence that many of the processes and routines
that we carry out in different contexts of our daily lives bear a
resemblance to videogames. As we will see below, the first serious
attempt to connect the medium with the utopian genre rests squarely in
the so-called procedural rhetoric of videogames.
The existing problematic relationship between work and leisure in modern
societies has been thoroughly examined in the scope of game studies. From a strictly ideological perspective, it appears
that the fade of its dividing line is a victory for the current
cultural theory. In our opinion, though, it is misleading to consider
this a triumph. As Eagleton observes (2003, 16),
traditional academism has ignored the daily lives of common people for
centuries. Nowadays, however, we can observe within academia the
synthesis of these formerly irreconcilable instances in a gapless
continuity between intellect, work and daily life. According to market
demands, leisure activities are reintegrated and mixed with labour
activities, thus invalidating the puritan, secular dogma that
establishes that work and play are two different matters. Once again,
the elimination of this boundary has helped the capitalist economic
system and especially the industrial sector of videogames, where most
of the current fans are eager to work voluntarily to fulfil their
entirely emotional and nostalgic wishes. Thus, this new paradox in the
system gives meaning to studies by authors such as Kücklich (2005),
Wark (2006), Lund (2014)
or Bulut (2015).
Kücklich employs the concept of playbour, a blended word composed
of the lexemes ‘play’
and ‘labour’, to
re-evaluate the relationship between play and labour in modding
(computer game modification), where its precariousness “as
a form of unpaid labour is veiled by the perception of modding as a
leisure activity, or simply as an extension of play” (2005, 1). Kücklich tries to clarify the
changing relationship between work and play in the present era, as
well as study its ideological ramifications.
Likewise, we consider the relationship proposed by Wark (2006)
to be substantial; that is, the relationship between the perfection
assigned to videogames and the imperfection of the gamespace, the
latter being a result of the changes that the free market forced into
daily life. The gamespace would be an ideal place for a new figure to
appear: that of the player, transformed into the logical nexus of both
communicational
realities:
Here is the
guiding principle of a future utopia, now long past: “To each according
to his needs; from each according to his abilities.” In gamespace, what
do we have? An atopia, a placeless, senseless realm where quite a
different maxim rules: “From each according to their abilities – to each
a rank and score.” Needs no longer enter into it. Not even desire
matters. Uncritical gamers do not win what they desire; they desire what
they win (2006, 14-15).
The latest research by Lund and Bulut is
focused on the framework established by the writers mentioned earlier,
while simultaneously adding to said framework. Lund argues that an
analysis-based model on the notion of playbour “will help me to
analyse and criticise the contemporary use of the term” (2014,
735), whereas Bulut introduces the fitting concept of
“Degradation of fun” to highlight the way in which “testers’ passion
about video games is contested vis-à-vis the hegemony of precarity in
the profession” (2015, 241).
In spite of the ominous panorama highlighted above, it is
possible to specify at least two moments in the history of videogames
associated with utopia; by describing and analysing both of these
moments, we will be able to conclude whether these associations are
effective. When forming these two categories, specific videogames with
some utopian aspirations but which do not, in themselves, conform to
one of the trends have been omitted (Table 2).
Table 2.
Videogame moments associated with the utopian genre.
As noted previously, it was
paradoxically at the very heart of the formalism derived from the
capitalist imprint on the medium that the first attempt to connect
games with aspects of real life emerged. This school of thought, to
which many ‘serious games’ pertain, is called ‘procedural rhetoric’.
It offers an interesting theory of the expressive power of videogames
by using a rhetoric pertaining to the medium itself, erected on the
basic processes derived from its technological nature. In this sense,
we can say that this is a style rather than a generic category, as a
result of which it is susceptible to appearing in a wide range of
games. It was thought that this special capacity of videogames was
sufficient for their achieving a connection with a diverse range of
human issues. Conversely, a decade after the birth of this first
attempt, a new discussion emerged with unexpected momentum concerning
the medium’s capacity to connect with reality. This phenomenon was
associated with a growing number of videogames deemed to be actively
political purely because they drew away from the ludus that is bound to
characterise them in formal, structural, and ludological terms. This
debate involves so-called ‘walking simulators’, a label that refers
both to a generic category and to a style. Understandably, the
propensity of such games to human issues diminishes the significance
of their form – resulting in fewer rules and mechanics – and increases
their narrative value – resulting in a more emotional slant to their
plots. As we will see, these games have sparked a debate concerning
the limits of what does and does not constitute a videogame, and have
led to their association with the moniker ‘social justice warriors’, a
pejorative designation intended to highlight the superficial treatment
of some of the ideas they espouse.
4.
Two Videogame Moments
Associated with Utopia
It
is important that our choice of two particular moments in videogames
associated with utopia be clarified. The first moment, focused solely on
analysing videogames of procedural rhetoric, should be understood within
the context of this article as the epitome of all practices –
ludic, procedural or otherwise, and hermeneutic – that we believe to be unsatisfactory in trying to show and
analyse the videoludic medium as an ideological weapon capable of
revolutionising the strong and reigning neoliberal system. As will be
shown, assuming this impossibility leads to the second moment: the
relationship between walking simulators and a utopian stance that we
have designated as diffident. This is possibly the only true way towards
achieving a utopian construction in videogames.
Despite this
decision, it would be unfair not to acknowledge other writers'
invaluable efforts in recovering, defining and tagging a certain ludic
praxis as an act of dissidence against the Institutional Mode of
Representation and therefore a fitting one to convey the utopia
understood as an alternative to capitalism. Galloway and his concept of
“countergaming” (2006) or Dyer-Witheford and
De Peuter and their notion of “games of multitude” (2010),
are good examples of this. In fact, we cannot ignore the way in which
certain ideas of “games of multitude” are in clear opposition with our
main thesis of a videogame apart from reality. Unfortunately, it is also
important to acknowledge that many of the means proposed by these
authors do not lead to a real electrolysis of the neoliberal system, due
to those means being in the minority and distanced from the mainstream.
Labels such as ‘marginal’ or ‘peripheral’ contribute both to their
definition and to the limitations in their groundbreaking nature. In
capitalist society, using labels to define a phenomenon means that the
system has managed to absorb it. However, the comparisons of some of
these ludic paths with those followed by other means of expression like
cinema or Godard’s “countercinema” (Galloway
2006, 109) are not very useful. We believe that this search for
similarities further highlights the incapability of videogames to change
their destiny. It is important to remember that the Nouvelle
Vague movement established a mode of representation different from
that of the institutions – the
Modern Mode of Representation, with its roots in neorealism in the
Second World War – and its critical project reconstructed the historical sense of
cinema. Are videogames or any other critical project established in
their name prepared to undertake such a task? It is possible that the
only hope lies in the paths known as “counterplay” and “dissonant
development”, outlined by Dyer-Witheford and De Peuter and understood as
“acts of contestation within
and against the ideologies of individual games of Empire” (2010).
The system can only be undone from the inside.
4.1. Are Games with Procedural Rhetoric a Useful Vehicle
for Utopian Ideas?
The key question that predominates
in this type of videoludic discourse is: what problems can videogames
bring to light? One of the genres that is best suited to this social
initiative are so-called ‘newsgames’, which have an informative
purpose tied to current affairs and which originated with the game September 12th (Frasca 2003). Broadly speaking, these games
have resulted in other ludic practices designed to raise public
awareness about topics such as citizens’ rights and responsibilities,
the denunciation of situations of injustice, or educational and
environmental proposals. Many of these ‘serious games’ use procedural
rhetoric, accentuating the principle of simulation specific to
videogames and conferring maximum freedom to the designer to create a
meaning for the game. Nonetheless, this level of control does not
ensure that a correct
meaning about the simulated reality will be generated. As such, our
principal objective is to question the procedural pathway’s capacity,
as a form of game design, to achieve a plausible approximation to
utopia.
Drawing from the definition of the essential properties of digital
artefacts espoused by Murray (1999), Bogost
reveals how videogames function by executing a series of rules (2007).
This
proceduralism is not a practice exclusive to computers; human
societies put a multitude of institutional processes into play. In
consequence, procedural rhetoric is the ideal means of revealing how
any process works by simply adjusting the logic of real systems –
based on processes – to the internal and procedural logic of the
programming languages upon which videogames are based. In consequence,
procedural rhetoric offers a new way of making statements about how
the processes governing human activity function.
Bogost describes the role of the player in the logic of a procedural
rhetoric videogame by using the simile of a truncated syllogism or
enthymeme. A truncated syllogism is one that avoids one of its
premises purely because its absence does not stop the syllogism from
being understood. As such, the syllogism ‘Socrates is a man, Socrates
is mortal’ elides the main premise or general rule that ‘All men are
mortal’ because this is obvious or, in other words, because it is the
receiver’s responsibility to reach this conclusion. In the case of
videogames, it is the designer’s task to hide the message so that it
can be revealed by the player when playing the game. In both cases,
for the simulation to be produced with guaranteed success, the game
must overcome what Bogost coins “simulation fever”. The culture of
simulation has given rise to certain reactions to simulated works: on
one hand, ‘simulation resignation’ supposes a blind acceptance of any
simulation, even one that is defective; on the other, ‘simulation
denial’ is the rejection of a simulation on the basis of it being a
replica (Turkle 1997). The true value of
simulation emerges when these reactions are overcome: “A simulation is
the gap between the rule-based representation of a source system and a
user’s subjectivity” (Bogost 2007, 107).
In order to reveal some of the contradictions of proceduralism, we will
proceed to analyse a procedural game geared towards understanding
certain social, economic, and political processes that keep countries
in the so-called developing world in a currently irrevocable position
of inferiority. 3rd
World Farmer (Hermund et al. 2008)
is a game that demonstrates the difficulty of generating a stable,
profitable means of agriculture in African countries. What are the
problems this game reveals – and, above all, does it really shed light
on obscure areas whose revelation will allow for change and progress
in these countries? Finally – and an essential question as it is a
regulating idea in proceduralism – which contradictions in the real
system, that is, of African agriculture, does this game expose?
Developed by a group at the IT-University of Copenhagen, the game begins
with the slogan ‘a simulation to make you think’, and its main premise
is managing a farm run by an African family. The difficulties the
player is faced with are based on chance and on the political,
economic, social, and natural circumstances that shape the destiny of
the family’s crops. As such, the success of a crop that is essential
to the family’s survival not only depends on the appropriate or
inadequate distribution of resources – different crops, farm animals,
farming tools – but is also affected by numerous variables of a
negative complexion, such as wars, political changes, and natural
disasters, that almost always conclude in the death of one of the
family members or, worse still, its entire disappearance. The game is
organised into turns that simulate the duration of a crop, in which
the decisions made by the player – lawful or illicit, good or bad –
are seen to be disrupted by these uncontrollable negative variables.
Other decisions, such as sending the children to learn at school,
simultaneously entail a considerable financial toll and reduce the
family unit’s work capacity, accentuating how fragile the family is
and effectively condemning it to extinction.
So, does 3rd World
Farmer really make us think? Let us consider this point in
greater detail. Firstly, and following the proceduralist maxim of the
enthymeme, the syllogism that allows for the videogame to be
understood is portrayed in Table 3.
Table 3.
Syllogism in 3rd World Farmer.
The syllogism appears to be
truncated in the game owing to the absence of its general rule: it is
in the act of playing that the player is able to understand this rule,
that is, the gloomy revelation that, in Africa, it is impossible to
generate a stable economic system based on agriculture – a fact that
would surely already be common knowledge for a player who is
interested in the mass media’s political agenda in the ‘First World’.
The omitted general rule is the effective presence of a dominant
ideology that has imposed an inexorable sentence on these countries,
an ironclad law that stops the player from considering other
possibilities that are not contemplated by this law.
What we learn and think about as players of a procedural rhetoric
videogame such as 3rd
World Farmer is not distinct from what we already know as
members of a specific ideology that looks on Africa with a certain
degree of scepticism. As such, the game itself stigmatises an entire
geographical zone that is as large as its problems are varied,
adopting the historical and Eurocentric judgement of African unity
and, if this were not enough, equating the label ‘Third World’ with
the realities of the African continent. To consider its nature in
greater detail, perhaps we can assume that all the problems in the
underdeveloped world relate solely to agriculture and that they are
all represented in this game? The response can only be in the
negative, and the subjective distance between the simulation and the
simulated reality is too vast for us to suspend our disbelief.
Conversely, the type of thinking generated in the player during the
act of playing moves within the reassuring realm of deduction (Vargas-Iglesias
2018), where the framework erected by this general, described
rule impedes the emergence of any form of creative or conjectural
thinking that may allow for the simulated reality to be modified. We
consider ourselves to be incapable – as is also the case for our
family in the game – of contemplating other possibilities that could
help us find solutions to the problems that are identified. What,
then, is the purpose of a game that reaffirms and highlights an
ideology without proposing any kind of investigation that could
alleviate, modify, or transform the situation in question? The
videogame is revealed to be both futile and dependent on a complex
real experience that acts as a burden from which it cannot extricate
itself: it is in this same burden that its meaning lies. The
relationship that the videogame upholds with its simulated reality is
that of an incomplete object owing its comprehension to a reality
structured around hundreds of variables that it cannot entirely
simulate and, worse still, that it is unable to modify. Both
simulation and simulated reality share the same general rule that
precludes individuals and governments from finding creative solutions
to the problems faced by these countries. Indeed, it is this shared
factor that plunges us into the true dilemma of procedural rhetoric
games: their incapacity to generate an appropriate poetics of meaning
and significance.
4.1.1. Results and Conclusions
Our critique of proceduralism is
comprised of two fundamental ideas, converging in a crisis concerning
this pathway’s ability to act as a vehicle for utopia with guaranteed
success. In the first instance, what is the purpose of a game whose
meaning effectively rests in the process being simulated, rather than
in the simulation itself? Effectively, the simulation of a real
process via the procedural rhetoric of a game can be perceived to be
an intertextual correspondence where, on most occasions, the
significance of the game exists outside itself, that is, in a specific
ideology that keeps the game in a relationship of servitude.
Consequently, in the second instance, procedural games do not transmit
new or conjectural ideas, but are instead blinded by a specific
ideological perspective that ultimately comes to define them.
Therefore, if procedural rhetoric always acts at the behest of an
ideology, it follows that it rarely serves to generate new solutions
to the issues that are presented. This is the case because, in terms
of their constitution, these games are based on deductive cognitive
processes that refute the abductive nature of videogames (Navarrete-Cardero
et
al. 2014).
The heuristic incapacity of procedural games is a consequence of their
strictly formalist structure; as such, they must be judged according
to structuralist criteria. Genette (1997)
alludes to the classic distinction introduced by Michael Riffaterre in
the relationships that texts uphold with meaning and significance. To
summarise, Riffaterre shows how all texts have their own meaning; that
is, they have a specific interpretation, but they do not control its
significance. In order to access a poetics of significance, works must
transcend their limits and reveal the connections they maintain with
other texts – or other realities – in textual or relative terms; it is
only in this way that we can know the genre to which a work pertains,
the genealogy of its structure, or why its protagonists are
constituted in a certain way. It is, of course, here where the
procedural proposal fails to produce serious videogames associated
with utopia. Let us imagine the following cases:
A. A procedural videogame is well
designed and the player is unaware of the simulated reality. In
this case, the player can access the realm of meaning, that is, a
specific interpretation of the game, but not the game’s significance.
The pretence that a player can access the realm of significance – that
is, that they can grasp the simulated reality because of the game – is
to think of learning as a simple process of content absorption:
“Picture that sequence from The Matrix where Neo has new skills downloaded directly into his
head and can use them instantly” (Jenkins
et al. 2009, 448). In our opinion, it is only in a serious game
that seeks to inform the player about something they are unaware of –
an omitted general rule that they are required to deduce – that a
satisfactory simulated experience is plausible. However, even in this
case, though the game would succeed in achieving a certain degree of
utility, we must recognise that it would only do so because of the
player’s lack of knowledge about the simulated reality. As such, how
can the player calibrate the utility of an experience that is forged in absentia of their
knowledge of said reality? Are they expected to blindly trust a
message accessed by deductive means that reveals the dominant
ideology?
B. A procedural videogame is
poorly designed and the player is aware of the simulated reality. In
this case, owing to the incorrect implementation of the mechanics or
another kind of imbalance, the game generates a meaning that does not
reside in the game itself, but which surfaces solely because of the
player’s knowledge of the simulated reality. The impossible suspension
of disbelief, that is, the appearance of simulation denial, annuls any
contract of significance between game and simulated reality. Instead,
such a situation results in a pointless game based on a deductive type
of thinking, where only knowledge of the general rule – in the form of
an enthymeme of the game – justifies the game’s meaning, underlying
its scant heuristic value and negating any expansive type of knowledge
concerning the simulated reality.
C. A procedural videogame is well
designed and the player is aware of the simulated reality. In
this case, the videogame generates its own meaning and accesses the
realm of significance, connecting with the simulated reality in a
pertinent manner via simulation resignation. This would be an ideal
situation were it not for its deductive structure, which, as in the
previous case, will never give rise to a new perspective on that
reality. As such, the heuristic value of this pathway is trivial and
only serves to emphasise a predetermined ideological framework.
Moreover, if we consider the affinity between the ideology of the
player and the ideology of the game, new dissonances are created both
in the realm of meaning and in the realm of significance. For example,
in this case’s ideal situation, can we speak of the emergence of
significance if the player’s ideology does not coincide with the
ideology of the game? Would all the connections geared towards the
constitution of significance not short-circuit in the case of an
ideological clash? In such a situation, would the player not reject
the simulation owing to subjective impertinence, resulting in a
situation similar to the one we are exposed to by a poorly designed
game? And even if we were to imagine a situation where there was an
ideological meeting of minds, what purpose would a game celebrating a
specific ideology serve if this ideology were not discussed or
interrogated?
D. A procedural videogame is
poorly designed and the player is not aware of the simulated
reality. In this case, the videogame does not generate a
meaning, nor does it access the realm of significance.
4.2. A Fluid Game: Are Walking Simulators a Useful
Vehicle for Utopian Ideas?
The term
‘walking simulator’ has its origins in the early 2000s, with strictly
negative connotations. However, these connotations eventually
disappeared, thus demonstrating the creative possibilities of this new
ludic genre. Although this positive reframing of its meaning in gamer
culture still has no influence in academia, it is possible to find it
in specialised journalistic criticism, more focused on detecting
fluctuations in the player's taste and choice (Clark
2017; Muriel 2017; Ortega
2017). Evidence of this conceptual revitalisation can be found
on platforms like Steam, GamersGate or Itch.io, where games bearing
this tag can be searched without any negative connotation attached to
them.
The origin of
this genre is possibly found in the 2003 proposal of artist and author
Mary Flanagan, Domestic. “[Domestic]
uses a software engine normally used to generate violent first-shooter
video games in order to reconstruct a remembered childhood space where
a dramatic event has taken place: a house fire” (Flanagan
2003). In recent years, examples of this type of games have
increased exponentially, not only as a commercial strategy to reach a
broader and more casual audience, but also as a relatively easy and
inexpensive means for independent studios to access game development.
In the field of specialised criticism, walking simulators have
revitalised the old debate, perhaps also noticeable in this article,
between ludologists and narratologists. Bogost sets an example of this
trend when commenting on Dear
Esther (The Chinese Room, 2008), Gone
Home (Fullbright, 2013) and, especially, What
Remains of Edith Finch (Giant Sparrow, 2017):
What
are games good for, then? Players and creators have been mistaken in
merely hoping that they might someday share the stage with books,
films, and television, let alone to unseat them. To use games to tell
stories is a fine goal, I suppose, but it’s also an unambitious one.
Games are not a new, interactive medium for stories. Instead, games
are the aesthetic form of everyday objects. Of ordinary life. Take a
ball and a field: you get soccer. Take property-based wealth and the
Depression: you get Monopoly. Take patterns of four contiguous squares
and gravity: you get Tetris. Take ray tracing and reverse it to track
projectiles: you get Doom. Games show players the unseen uses of
ordinary materials (Bogost 2017).
Nevertheless,
in our opinion, Bogost forgets the fact that there are three different
and concomitant dispositions in What
Remains of Edith Finch, though not exclusive to the genre and
shared across many other games: the hunter’s gene, the scopic drive of
the flâneur, and the investigator’s thirst for knowledge. It
can be argued that, aside from the clear relationship that these
activities have with the ludic sphere, these three dispositions have
the same principle: searching for a way to control the surrounding
reality, an attitude that can be inferred from the nature of fluid
games and their relation with the utopic genre of walking simulators.
The player has inherited the spectator’s wish of seeing it all, now
enhanced by their ability to eavesdrop, examine and touch many places
of the setting. The key difference, and not a trivial one by any
means, between the Baudelairean flânerie and the motion of the
wandering player in walking simulators is manifested in the role of
presence in capitalist modernity, as pointed out by Benjamin. Thus, to
Baudelaire, Poe or Benjamin years later, the wanderer is a man of the
crowd (Benjamin 1972). On the other hand,
the man who wanders in walking simulators is a solitary man, a
searcher of signals and traces. Our interest in this genre lies in
this search.
As stated in Section 2 of this article, the current dominant ideology,
based on an economic system that is immune to any form of attack,
renders all actions destined to modify specific realities ineffective.
Videogames based on procedural rhetoric are destined to fail owing to
their lack of practical utility. If a lesson can be learned from the
inefficacy of procedural games, it is fact of the impassable divide
between the inflexible processes of our society and any agenda or
stratagem geared towards modifying their status. The present general
order and its underlying processes do not allow for options: there is
no clear route to utopia. As Bauman notes: “[…] it is far from clear
what such options could be, and even less clear how an ostensibly
viable option could be made real in the unlikely case of social life
being able to conceive it and gestate” (2006a,
5). The systemic critique of contradictions in the processes of
capitalist society is shown to be futile because the power to modify
them has been liquidated by the new, inflexible, and immutable order
of neoliberalism. A videogame geared towards exposing the
contradictions of certain processes in our reality purely to show them
to us – given that they possess no capacity to eradicate them – thus
becomes the most accurate symbol for the new human condition.
What is this new human condition? Using Bauman’s terminology, procedural
rhetoric games have been geared towards the impossible objective of
modifying the most solid order that has ever existed, one established
by an economic system that has thrown off all the remnant shackles of
previous orders by melting its ‘solids’. All the political or moral
powers capable of combating or reforming this new order have been
destroyed or rendered too weak for the task (2006a,
4). The present system’s solidity cannot be modified by a
political agenda because this same system has dissolved the
previously-existing nexus between individual choices and collective
projects. Indeed, due to deregulation, liberalisation, market
flexibility, and the fluidity of the labour and real estate markets,
the system’s strength is rooted in a total freedom of human agents,
facilitating an absence of cooperation between these agents – that is,
us – and the system. Instead of bending to us, this system appears to
elude us (2006a, 5). In consequence, for
the first time since the dawn of modernity, the construction of rules,
customs, or norms for the success or failure of our existence is not
incumbent on the system: it is a responsibility that has expressly
fallen onto the shoulders of every individual. This new condition of
man, defined as ‘liquid modernity’, is characterised by its
malleability and the notable effort exerted by individuals to endow it
with an almost-always transient form of stability (2006a,
8).
In this new, liquid dimension of modernity, people have abandoned their
dream of modifying systemic processes upon which they exert no
influence. They conform and are simultaneously forced to turn within
themselves, with an urge to transform the search for stability into
their sole life’s project. With the possibilities for building a new,
better order extinguished, a forced internalisation of utopia is
produced, motivated solely by a desire to generate a favourable
personal world in an unfavourable context. This internal search has
its correlate in a type of videogame that is less ambitious than
procedural games, dedicated to narrating – yes, narrating
– our small place in the world. The current incarnation of this type
of game is the walking simulator, a fluid videoludic discourse that
renounces the utopia of impossible global change to instead focus on
the infinitely small aspects of our daily lives, identifying the
emotions experienced within them, highlighting their successes and
failures, and intending to supply our lives with the stability that we
crave (Table 4).
Table 4. Fluid
videogames: walking simulators and utopia.
It is no coincidence that these
games have emerged within a community of independent developers, just
as it is that games in this pathway construct – in a purely humanist
sense – a space dedicated to reflection. We classify this utopia as
‘diffident’, that is, a utopia that is timid, fearful, and
fainthearted if we compare it with genuine utopian vehemence. Perhaps
it is this utopian diffidence, present in many walking simulators,
that has led many videogame critics to associate these games
negatively with the label ‘social justice warrior’:
A pejorative
term for an individual who repeatedly and vehemently engages in
arguments on social justice on the Internet, often in a shallow or not
well-thought-out way, for the purpose of raising their own personal
reputation (Urban
Dictionary 2017).
It is, of course, true that some of
these videogames use sensitive social themes as a mere ludonarrative
context, rarely proposing solutions to them or reflecting on them.
Such games use these topics as a superficial plot device without
answering the questions that they inevitably elicit in the player.
Nonetheless, we believe that to extrapolate this behaviour to all
fluid videogames is an act that is as small-minded as the excessive
and unjustified praise that is sometimes lavished upon them. This
dualist critical perspective of walking simulators, fluctuating
between panning and flattery, has stretched the debate to other
elements such as their artistic capacity, their ludic nature, or their
social commitment:
These types
of games are beloved by Feminist Frequency types who hail them
as brilliant alternatives to the “male power fantasy” inherent in most
big budget violent games. Many jaded, liberal, gen-X reviewers inflate
the scores of these titles, saying these are finally games made for
“adults,” and chiding the wider industry for its perceived immaturity (Hicks 2016)
[…]
story-focused games [are] more like films than games, goes
the usual critique, and games are supposed to be games. Worse, these
games often tackle themes like race, class, identity, and so forth,
inevitably offering up some sort of progressive message — they’re
political, which is just about the worst and most annoying thing a video
game can be (Singal 2016)
Yet, paradoxically, these games
prove to be extremely enriching in a personal sense when they root us
in existential universes, put us face-to-face with cancer, or give us
a closer insight into psychosis. These games humanise the medium of
videogames, tie them to reality, and invite us to empathise with
situations that we may not have experienced. Despite this enormous
power, they are accused of not being authentic games due to the lack
of actions available during gameplay. Indeed, the actions in a walking
simulator do not occur ‘from the top down’, which is the usual
framework for actions that can be performed in a traditional
videogame; instead, this type of game attempts to simulate actions
‘from the bottom up’, a decision that distances it from the pure ludus
and from a strictly ergodic goal and draws it closer to abstract
objectives that are often purely emotional. Is this relocation of
actions a sufficient reason to expel walking simulators from our
videoludic paradise? (Table 5).
Table 5.
Actions in traditional videogames and fluid videogames.
The characteristics of fluid
videogames can be seen in any walking simulator. In order to
demonstrate some of their qualities, we will focus on a game from the
latest generation that has an ambiguous, hybrid nature. Indeed, Hellblade:
Senua’s
Sacrifice (Ninja Theory 2017)
intersperses a realistic and human complexion with the façade, and
certain ludic hallmarks, of a triple-A title. This game boasts an
enthralling plot concerning the protagonist’s psychosis, and a bipolar
form of gameplay that oscillates between a prototypical walking
simulator and a ‘hack-and-slash’. The latter aspect reveals a hidden
tension in the player derived from their preference either for Senua’s
story, concerning the psychotic process and the game’s walking
simulator nature, or for the moments when the protagonist has to
fight, a remnant of its hack-and-slash origins that entails a break
from the narrative discourse by obliging us to take up the sword and
act in classic ludic fashion. This strange case of ‘Dr. Walking
Simulator’ and ‘Mr. Hack-and-slash’ can be summarised as shown in
Table 6.
Table 6.
Fusion of fluid videogame and triple-A title.
The player’s ludic reality is
nothing other than Senua’s psychotic crisis, produced by her shock at
the death of her loved one. Through her heroic quest, transformed into
our ludic experience, the player is able to discover the possible
genesis of Senua’s psychosis, her relationship with her evil father,
and the significance of the absence of her mother. Perhaps our
adventure is no more than a hallucination produced by Senua’s
tormented mind, or maybe the struggle against darkness takes place
only in her psyche.
4.2.1. Results and Conclusions
Does Hellblade
break any new ground with regard to psychosis? In the game’s
narrative, there is evidence that rigorous research about the disorder
was undertaken, a fact that is subsequently emphasised in the
execution of its visual, acoustic, and ludic components. As such, the
voices heard by Senua or the puzzles resolved by the player during the
game are closely tied to the symptoms, hallucinations, and delirium
caused by this illness. It is clear that the way psychosis is dealt
with in the game draws on the advice of health specialists and people
experienced in working with individuals suffering from the disorder,
as Ninja Theory has itself noted in a self-produced documentary. As a
result, the game’s main virtue is the discovery of psychosis by those
who know nothing about it and who do not have to live with its harsh
realities. Senua’s ludic incursion into an increasingly dark world is
the figurative antithesis of the path to knowledge pursued by the
player vis-à-vis this mental illness. Is this fact sufficient for
recognising this game’s social validity? Does the game help to
construct a better world in the terms defined earlier in this article?
Does it merely use psychosis as a means of constructing a lifelike
character, or are there philanthropic interests at play? In our
opinion, what is most important is not the content of these queries,
but instead the very possibility of articulating them in a mass-market
videogame.
5.
Discussion and General
Conclusions
This
article aspires to provide answers to two questions: the first asks if
it is possible to identify a link between utopia and videogames; the
second focuses on the possibility of transcending the formalism of
ludology and thus the cybernetic groundwork found in the neoliberal
paradigm of control.
The
identification of two historically significative forms in which both
concepts have built their relationship (rhetorical procedure and walking
simulators) has been useful to answer affirmatively to the first
question, although the appeal of the first case to the enthymeme and
thus to narrow and preconceived discourse differs from the humanist
performance of the second case. Regarding the second question, as a
consequence of an analysis of the said difference, a utopian potency
which transcends the formal limitations of proceduralism has been found
in walking simulators. This videoludic formula inaugurates what we term
a ‘diffident utopia’, consisting of an intimist version of the old
utopia in that it is based on microprocessual dynamics that, by means of
being based on a certain ethics of care, moderate the medium by making
it stray away from ‘strong’ structural logics. This helps this formula
to become the most solid candidate to the expression of utopia according
to the options suggested by the cybertextual logics of videogames.
These
conclusions suggest certain questions. On one hand, the exclusive association of two moments in
videogames with utopia –
procedural
rhetoric
and walking simulators –
at
the
expense of other analytical possibilities is both a risk that
researchers are to take and a way of saving effort. Clearly, this
decision does not exclude other possibilities, as new relations
between the utopic genre and other videoludic genres and styles can be
found. As such, we assume the successes of this decision, but we also
assume responsibility for its shortcomings. We have considered that
these two methods are the most logical ones with which to undertake an
initial approach to the videogame’s relationship to utopia, and we are
also willing to admit that they might be guided by a criterion of
obviousness: the high amount of political content of most of the
procedural games and the deep influence of moral compromise in many
walking simulators made us choose this path, clear and expeditious to
us. Likewise, we do not believe that it is necessary for there to be a
definite utopic intentionality in the creation of these games. As
suggested by Deleuze (1968, 125), Eco (1979),
and Foucault (1969), the work, once
abandoned by its creator, stands on its own, and thus the researcher
has the responsibility to determine its social function and grant it
critical value via the rules of academic debate.
From a quantitative perspective, the
affirmations in this article related to procedural rhetoric games are
based on a case study of very limited scope. This fact, otherwise
conscious, lies in the certainty that both the structure of procedural
rhetoric games and their ideological nexus with simulated reality
remain intact in any game designed according to its principles.
Although they are not directly referenced in this article, many other
games were taken into account when exploring the shortcomings of this
ludic typology in relation to its capability of creating plausible
solutions to real problems that can connect it with the creation of
utopias. For instance, the games by La Molleindustria – from McDonald’s Video Game (2006) to To
Build
A Better Mousetrap (2014) and Nova
Alea (2016) – cannot escape the formalism and the logic of their
structure per se, since
they are based on an enthymemic scheme. Therein lies the greatness and
the hardship of these games: they can denounce dissonant processes in
our society, but they must always do it under a specific ideology they
serve, whether akin or opposed to ours, that is eventually established
as a premise or main rule of its syllogistic base.
Table 7.
Methods of human-scientific reasoning.
This
happens because procedural games have excluded every definition of the
word “game” that relates to leisure, since they must move in a
deductive frame. It is important to remember that the greatness of the
medium lies in its abductive power (Navarrete-Cardero
et al. 2014). As critic Stanley Fish states, no theory (rule or
norm) in post-modern society can change our personal beliefs (Norris
1998, 108). This fact greatly hampers the purported rhetoric
effectiveness of these games (Table 7). In our perspective, procedural
games could never serve as a means for the utopia, due to their
deductive frame preventing the establishment of a rule, i.e. an
ideology, from which all other plausible premises emanate in a
restrictive and analytical manner. In these games, there is no room
for conjecture and hypotheses, i.e. fundamental drivers of change and
transformation of any given reality into a distinct one. Without
abduction, there can be no change; without change, there can be no
utopia.
It is paradoxical that a genre like that of
walking simulators, whose origins were fraught with infamy, could have
a specific and special seed of utopia. On the other hand, it is
disheartening that the nature of this possibility of change can only
be conceived in internal and personal terms, in a very individual
manner. Certainly, as we have ascertained, the reluctance of the
neoliberal society of today to accept any modifications or
alternatives (Jameson 2005; Fisher
2009) has eliminated the utopic action in our lives. A single
look out of the window is enough to prove that this statement is
certain and substantial. As we have seen, the systemic criticism of
the contradictions in the processes of our society is useless since
the power to change them has been taken away from us by the new,
inflexible and immutable order of the present neoliberalism. A
videogame – in the
case of those based on procedural rhetoric – attempting to demonstrate the contradictions of certain processes of our
reality just to show them becomes the most accurate representation of
the new human condition, as it lacks the ability to eliminate said
contradictions. Everybody seems to have abandoned their dream of
changing systemic processes that they bear no influence on. People
fall into conformism and are forced to look inside themselves, urged
to consider the search for a certain stability to be their only
purpose in life. Without any possibility of creating a new, better
order, a forceful interiorisation of the utopia is produced and this
is eventually identified with the sole wish to create a personal,
favourable world in an unfavourable context. In our opinion, walking
simulators are the correlate of this existential phenomenon and its
videoludic expression.
In conclusion, it is important to ratify one of the fundamental ideas of
this research: the current inability of the videoludic medium to alter
the environing reality underlines the separation, in modern societies,
of the spheres – cultural, economic, political – advocated by Marcuse
(1968) or, more recently, by Dean (2005)
through his concept of “communicative capitalism”. This problem is not
exclusive to the videoludic medium: cinema and novels are, to this
date, also unable to do so. The difference, as interpreted from the
statements by Bogost (2017), lies in the
unconscious existence of a global drive to distance videogames from
any utopian attempt, i.e. its narrative aspect – the data suggests
that this goal can only be pursued via narration – to reaffirm it in
its nature as an entertainment device and artefact. In our view, the
unique situation of videogames is not coincidental, but rather a
condition induced by systemic determinations that can be considered a
triumph of neoliberalism.
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About the Authors
Luis Navarrete-Cardero
Luis
Navarrete-Cardero has a PhD from the University of Seville, Spain. He is
Coordinator of the Master
in Videogames of the University of Seville and director of
the collection on videogames of the publishing company Síntesis.
He is also the author of numerous articles and books related to game
studies. His latest publication is the book titled Spain Ludica.
The Romantic Image of Spain Through Videogames (UOC, 2017).
He is currently professor and coordinator of the subjects Hybrid Narrative Formats in the Digital Age, New
Technologies of the Audiovisual Media and Videogame
Script, belonging to the Department of Audiovisual
Communication of the Faculty of Communication of the University of
Seville.
Juan J. Vargas-Iglesias
Juan J.
Vargas-Iglesias has a PhD from the University of Seville, Spain. He is a
professor in the Audiovisual Communication and Advertising Department of
the University of Seville, where he teaches subjects about postmodern
fiction, digital culture and media criticism. He is the author and
editor of some books related to media studies. His research articles
have been published in peer-reviewed journals like Games
and Culture and Semiotica:
Journal of the International Association for Semiotic Studies. His
current research focuses on the semiotics of genre in videogames.