I have been unpacking, opening boxes, removing their contents and flattening what has remained, piling cardboard together in an effort to make this new house a home. My partner and I, individually and together, wandering around this new space we find ourselves in as we contemplate where items are to live, becoming accustomed to our new surroundings in the process.
The space is domestic, or will be. The new kitchen feels strange to cook in but has the beginnings of familiarity. The bed is new, but we have laid in it. The books on the shelves are the same but now they are stacked in unfamiliar ways.
The game consoles we own have also been unpacked. One of the consoles is upright now, a new orientation from how it was before, placed beside a sideboard. I sit on an unfamiliar couch holding a familiar game controller. I turn on the console and continue from a previous save. Something feels different though, not the same as it once was.
I am looking at a screen, controller in hand, thinking about the actions I need to take next in the digital environment I find myself interacting with, but my awareness of the couch I sit on, what lies outside the window beside me, is heightened. The domestic setting has changed. My in-game actions are the same as before, or at least I think they are, yet I still find myself in an unfamiliar environment. I want to say that my experiences with the game are the same, but at the moment I feel insecure about making such a claim.
As I sit in this new house, controller in hand, what can be said about my relationship to the games I interact with? How are they affected by this new setting?
McKenzie Wark (2007) argues that gamer theory, theories surrounding what it means to interact with videogames, involve a renegotiation of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave (McKenzie Wark, 2007: s. 019). In brief summary, this allegory, renowned as an argument for the enlightenment that educational acts should aim to achieve, describes the movement of a ‘subject’ from the realm of shadow and image, to the realm of light and objects (Plato et al., 1993: 240 – 245). Education, in an ideal sense, can be deemed successful if such movements are facilitated, or hastened, through the actions of the educator. The subject is able to differentiate between the image an object makes with light on a cave wall, and the object itself illuminated by the light’s source, in this case The Sun (ibid.).
McKenzie Wark continues that videogames offer gamers an alternative path to follow, a re-orientation from the path of purported enlightenment. Describing the afflictions of modern society, they write:
No one out there in the “real world” really looks all that different to the stereotypical gamer, thumb mashing the controller. Now you are an enlightened gamer, you see how the world beyond the games of The Cave seems like an array of more or less similar caves, all digital, each an agon with its own rules, some arbitrary blend of chance and competition…The gamer arrives at the beginning of a reflective life, a gamer theory, by stepping out of The Cave – and returning to it (McKenzie Wark, 2007: s. 018 – 019).
This is a reformulation of Plato’s allegory, re-imagining where enlightenment can be found. For Wark, the spaces of shadow and image that we occupy as gamers presents us with an environment that contains controllable variables. It offers more sense of the world than the world itself possibly can.
I imagine then that, in using Plato’s metaphor, Wark provides us with a division between the gaming space and what lies outside of it. These spaces could be navigated between, for instance, through placing the game controller aside, putting it down in order to remove ourselves from whatever digital environment we were navigating through moments before. Arguably, this bears similarity to Hannah Arendt’s (1958) division between the public (or working;/political) and private (or domestic) realms, while also offering a reconsideration of Plato’s description for how enlightenment may be achieved.
As I play games in this new domestic environment, I wonder how clear the divisions between the gaming world and the real world really are. Perhaps it is the case that enlightenment is not necessarily to be found in the gaming world, as Wark’s use of The Cave allegory implies, but rather in the domestic setting that allows me access to these digital environments.
Currently, I am in an environment that is new and under development, but is being developed so that it can afford me and my partner the comforts required to access the digital worlds that various videogames offer. However, as this environment is being created, I am conscious of the labour that is required in its creation. I pick up the controller, but not without the work and care of others.
This leaves me with the thought: while Plato claims that education allows for us to leave The Cave, whose work is it that affords me the freedom to pick up the controller and re-enter?
Bibliography
Arendt, H., (1958) The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Plato (1993) Republic. Translated by R. Waterfield. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wark, M. (2007) Gamer Theory. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
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