Opinion
The Conciousness Of Pebbles
Steven Poole suggests that videogames' tendency to personify objects is key to their appeal.
“She’s a princess pirate.”
“A princess pirate? There’s no such thing!”
“You know, a pirate princess.”
“Oh! There is!”
It was cute, I thought, as the top-hatted Les Paul-botherer strutted once more down my ear canals, but it also illustrated perfectly the fact that we demand a certain sort of logic even in fantasy (as far as I know, the predatory ships prowling off the coast of Somalia are not staffed by actual royals), and these children – no more than six or seven, by the sound of it – were already in the habit of debating possible and impossible ontologies of entirely made-up worlds.
One way in which a world may be magical, yet still obliged to obey certain criteria of coherence, is if objects are alive. The animism of the Japanese Shinto religion, according to which natural objects such as trees and mountains are inhabited by spirits (so many, indeed, that there are ‘eight million gods’), finds an elaboration in many videogames – most obviously, of course, the Zeldas and Marios, where virtually nothing is a ‘dead’ object but will harbour the potential for transformation, or a communicating mind, friendly or otherwise.
An animistic game is not entitled, however, to do anything it wants. If an electric kettle were to transform into a werewolf, a six-year-old girl would rightly protest: “A werewolf kettle? There’s no such thing!” In the Mushroom Kingdom, by contrast, everything makes sense: transformations and uses of objects or animals may be unpredictable, but retrospectively slot perfectly into a logical matrix of changes. (Of course a wooden barrel is shattered by a spiky iron ball; of course jumping on a turtle’s head makes him retreat into his shell.)
And so playing New Super Mario Bros Wii with a friend is a delightful experience, as tricky parts prompt the temporary cessation of bitchy hostilities (it’s all too amusingly easy to kill your co-op partner, deliberately or otherwise) in favour of strategic discussions couched in terms of “What if?” or “Maybe we can…” Can you jump on a bomb that walks around on its little legs in order to light its fuse and then quickly pick it up and throw it before it explodes? Of course you can. This is what we would expect from bombs with legs, even though such things don’t exist in real life – though it can only be a matter of time before Nintendo is prosecuted for providing inspiration to terrorists. If one of the virtues of videogames is the pleasure of experimentation and discovery, moreover, then an animistic world has the advantage that there is simply more stuff worth experimenting with.
This is an important general difference between Japanese and western games: in the former, the assumption is that everything you see might be alive; in the latter, the rule is more generally that everything is just decor, unless an action-button prompt appears when you hobble up to it on your avatar’s bandy legs. Some of the greatest British or American games build architecturally awe-inspiring vistas that are totally inert, the rats or shadow-beings that flit around them appearing to belong to a completely different order of existence. By contrast, one of the joys of Miyamoto’s games (among others) is that the distinction between environment and character is never quite so clear-cut or easy to second-guess. This is not merely a philosophical difference but one that leads to greater density of play potential.
One might be tempted to think that animism, while providing a rich seam for videogames, is merely a cultural hangover of ancient superstition, yet it has an intriguing and respectable analogue in modern western philosophy. This position, known as panpsychism, holds that all matter is imbued with consciousness, to varying degrees. Thus, the matter that comprises the human brain has a lot of consciousness, but the matter that comprises a tree has some too, and even the matter that comprises a pebble has a tiny bit. This doctrine (lately espoused by the British philosopher Galen Strawson among others) is an audacious attempt to solve the old mind-body problem while granting the truth of scientific materialism. If consciousness is a property (to a greater or lesser extent) of all matter, then the puzzle doesn’t look quite so insoluble, even if measuring the consciousness of a pebble seems rather hard to do.
Do you hear, at this moment, a small voice piping up: “There’s no such thing as a stone that thinks!” Perhaps; but perhaps not. Children are natural animists and panpsychists, and it’s possible that their favourite videogames are so beloved not because they happen to be brightly coloured and cartoony, but because they provide confirmation of this worldview. PR-speak about artificial intelligence in games is all very well; what about pervasive intelligence?