hyperreality and video games - lesson plan
Baudrillard wrote in a time where the world was becoming less abstract, where concrete notions of existence and value were being replaced with larger systems that you needed a degree just to understand.
Now there is no way we’ll get at all deep into Baudrillard, but we can at least touch on some basic concepts.
The first of which is the simulacra. Everyone knows what a simulation is, but simulacra according to Baudrillard, are meant to replace the real.
and Baudrillard goes a bit further, saying that we live in a world where simulacra don’t even refer to real things anymore. Disneyland, for example, isn’t real, but not only is it not real, it doesn’t even refer to anything real at all.
Thing is, nobody cares that Disneyland isn’t real, and in fact, there are a lot of simulations out there where it might be a simulation, it might be real, but it doesn’t really matter.
And this is what Baudrillard calls “the hyperreal.” Something that sits in the middle of simulations and reality, where the question of “is it real, or is it a simulation”, just kind of… doesn’t matter.
If you’re a small child in a museum, learning about dinosaur bones, does it matter if the bones in front of you are made of plaster or are actual fossils? The question is irrelevant, so irrelevant that it’s not even worth bringing up.
So again, I’m not an expert on Baudrillard, nor am I a Baudrillard scholar. I’m already done enough bastardizing of his work, so let’s talk about something I do know a bit more of, video games:
Video games are a great medium for presenting philosophical thought because they’re interactive. You’re complicit in them, you’re engaged with them. They can take your philosophical views and dynamically challenge them, unlike a static book.
The game LAYOFF has you play bejeweled with employees, employees with backstories and faces and names. The dehumanization inherent in playing games with these icons in order to optimize your score is reminiscent of the games real bosses play with their employees in order to maximize profits.
September 12th simulates the U.S. approach to world peace, namely “blow the terrorists to smithereens”. Thing is, in the game, every time you kill a terrorist, you inevitably kill a few civilians in collateral damage. And for every civilian you kill, a few more get angry and become terrorists themselves. Without actually saying anything, the game is poignantly bringing up the message that the warlike approach to solving terrorism doesn’t stop anything, it just perpetuates a cycle of violence.
Now let’s come back to Baudrillard a bit, and talk about a new approach to design. Games are supposed to be immersive, right? Well, a lot of work done by game philosophers like Wilson, Sicart, and Khaled is actually showing that, if you want your game to comment on real life issues, then maybe the best way to do that is to intentionally pull the player out of the experience.
In the game Undertale, you might be tempted to save a certain character by abusing the save system, but if you do, another character will directly comment on that. Even though your canonical playthrough may have that character live, your actions were still meaningful, in a sense.
A game un-immersing you doesn’t have to as explicit as breaking the 4th wall. The game Sisyphus has you rolling a boulder up a hill, your score increasing with each step you take, falling to zero if you mess up. Just by playing the game, you inevitably become un-immersed and begin thinking about the nature of the game, wondering why you’re playing, why you play games at all.
So, when games are designed to be weird, thoughtful, and un-immersive, well, they’re certainly not reality, but they also cease to be this separate thing, this fake world. They aren’t reality, they aren’t a simulation, they are hyperrealities.
That’s unfortunately all the time I have for you, but I’m always happy to talk about my work, thank you!
