When we were little kids tossing a football or shooting a basketball, we rarely stayed ourselves for long.  Even if we didn't know any popular athlete's names, we were the star of the game; kicking the ball through the defense, knocking out the winning home run, slamming the puck into the net in our imagination.  If we weren't pretending to be Michael Jordan or Arnold Palmer, we were a superior athletic version of ourselves, making all the right moves and showing off our skill to the crowd of our mind's eye.

Even for sports-challenged adults, such as I, a good book or movie takes us to a different place or time, our thoughts vicariously transporting us somewhere else for awhile.  The potential benefits of such mental journeys extend well beyond escapism and can be informative, reflective, inspiring, even transforming.

Being the newest media on the block, video games embody much of the potential and problems of its siblings.  As technology grows in leaps and bounds, so too grows our toolsets to create previously unheard-of experiences in the interactive entertainment realm.  And yet, we can still use many of the same methods of examining our perspective as in other media.



Video games are at an interesting cross-section when it comes to perspective.  Early games, limited by the devices available, were only able to produce very simple, abstract objects to be manipulated.  As anyone who has played the original Atari 2600 will tell you, the actual game graphics required a bit of imagination to reflect the box art.

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A problem thankfully corrected by later games.  Source: Giantbomb

Without the ability to simulate detail and multiple objects, most early video games were of the third person perspective by default.  Move a simple blip or stick on the screen, interact with a few other blips or sticks on the screen, douse the crude shapes with a heavy coat of pretending, and you had the earliest video games.  The whole process was abstract by design necessity. 

By the time we got to Space Invaders, the onscreen objects became recognizable enough that the previously required abstraction was toned down a bit, as it has with each successive generation of video game hardware.  And this is where the perspective construct of video games create interesting differences and challenges unique to the medium.

For example, most movies are viewed from a sort of semi-omniscient passive perspective.  We, the audience, observe the scenarios played out by the actors onscreen.  In a way, the actors, sets, effects, and other elements of a movie replace what our imagination would work to create if we were instead digesting the same story through a book instead of watching a movie.  (Hence, the criticism that a movie can rarely if ever be as mentally stimulating as a book.)  There are movies that play around with first person perspectives, fourth-wall breaks, and other devices used to tell the story, but while abstractions are sometimes used or required, books and movies often gravitate around relatable preset constructs.  There are the occasional exceptions, naturally, but by-and-large movies and narrative-led books follow the same concrete ideas we are familiar with in storytelling.

Video games, on the other hand, have developed their own concrete ideas and rules from the beginning.  See those two white lines and that dot?  Those are the paddles/hockey sticks/tube-shaped spaceships.  That dot?  A ball, puck, or something you just don't want past you.  A third-person perspective, simple rules, and an idea made abstract by presentation and the method of interaction. 

Ah, but by the time we get to Space Invaders, what's happening?  It's third person, so that tank at the bottom isn't "me" in the first-person perspective sense.  Fine, I'm controlling a little soldier in a machine, shooting down the evil- wait, I just blew up.  Well, not me, the little tank thingy.  Wait, I have another "life?"  Is that the same guy in there?  Didn't he just "die?"  Was I just playing a thought experiment and this next "life" is the real deal?  Does each life represent another little soldier whose family will be devastated each time I lose?  What do those "extra lives" represent?  Once the thread is pulled, the unraveling doesn't stop.

[img width=700 height=437]http://perpetualgeekmachine.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/1245688044041.jpg[/img]
My grandmother was right; it really was all about drugs.  Source: perpetualgeekmachine.net

Once video game graphics became sophisticated enough to add detail to the characters, virtual actors of a sort were "born."  The earliest, such as Spike, Pitfall Harry, Pac-Man, and even Mario, began starring in multiple games.  We are so completely accustomed to the gameplay language of the media, we don't really question how this is supposed to work; all of us have "killed off" these characters, countless times, often pretty quick into the respective game.  The explanation of how Mario can star in other games if I led him to his demise twenty seconds into our first adventure is pretty easy; he's a 'virtual' actor.  Nobody wonders how Sean Bean keeps popping up in new movies; we all get that he's an actor with the same agent as South Park's Kenny.

Where this breaks down is when Mario 'dies' repeatedly in a single game.  The same conundrum occurs as mentioned in Space Invaders, only now that we know it's always Mario and not just nameless soldiers "dying," what exactly is happening here?  Does Mario rewind time?  Is this a 'many worlds' interpretation, and out of infinite universes, there is a chance that in one of them Mario wins?  If that were the case, why have a limited amount of lives? Does this mean that, in games such as Super Meat Boy and the 2008 Prince of Persia, which have instant, unlimited restarts, there is a purposeful form of manifest destiny to succeed?

Before moving on, I'd like to note that as much as this is all admittedly goofy and 3 a.m. hipster college coffee-shop talk, it touches base in the real world in surprising ways.  For example, when my oldest son was first introduced to the idea that a loved one died, his young mind couldn't understand why the deceased couldn't just respawn.  His only understanding of death was how his virtual avatar would lose, then reappear without any more effort than someone pressing a button.  While he was too young to grasp the permanence of death, the framework of video game "death" was all he had to work with, and for better and worse, it shaped his interpretation of the real world, and very likely to some degree, still does. 

This is not inherently negative.  That vacuum of understanding will be filled with any input around him, and the common understanding of video game mechanics provided an excellent common ground to approach such a difficult topic.  By using the familiar as a reference point, there was a visible bridge to cross between us on a topic of which we'd overwise have little to connect over.

Of course, game designers rarely have any actual metaphysical explanation for the philosophical constructs suggested by the design language of video games.  To be fair, there really isn't much request for one.  Games are naturally obtuse in these ways, without much issue taken.  And some games, to their credit, do give a little thought to this and address it in different ways.  Puppeteer and Super Mario Bros 3, for example, represent the entire game experience as a stage play, complete with curtains, hanging scenery, and a distinctive background/foreground element.  The later Burnout games notably do not feature a driver in the vehicle, a nod to the idea that the intense vehicle carnage is all a sort of pretend play, our Matchbox toys taken into digital form.  Most of Nintendo's popular characters are treated as virtual actors, with the entire cast playing together in various sports or rivals starring together in different games.

In a sense, every video game character is a virtual actor. If the perspective is first person, the idea is usually that we are some form of ourselves, like the aforementioned idea that we're a better version of ourselves scoring the touchdown or saving the world.  Or, we are the actor, donning Master Chief's Mjolnir Armor or Chell's jumpsuit and portal gun, and playing through the game pretending we're the hero in question.  Third person perspectives give us more of a form of traditional theatre, directing and guiding our avatar through their adventure.  Some have an invisible-force manipulation abstraction, like positioning Tetraminos in space.  What all these have in common, what makes interactive digital entertainment unique, is the player interaction with a set of consistent prescribed rules, with the idea of some form of progression.

And thus we get to where perspective references more than just the gameplay control method or 'window' into the digital sandbox.  Much like how my oldest son came to create his ideas of death by the vacuum of his experience taking in the suggestions of the input around him, so too are game creators making media that has natural byproducts of themselves.  Worldviews, prejudices, morality, thoughts both concrete and abstract are all absorbed into any art media, and video games are no exception.  Some subtle, some unintentional, many projected by both creator and consumer.  It is theoretically impossible for an artist to not imbue some element of themselves into their creation, and that is part of the great beauty of any medium.

Even if unintentional or rather stretching, games teach theories of worldviews.  Missile Command's creator Dave Theurer has commented that the theme of his game was the futility and inevitable end of a nuclear war, while games like Battlefield imply wars of equal numbers in synchronous conflict, a skirmish of symmetrical force.  Action-RPGs have a running theme of building strength and power through constant fighting, until the character is powerful enough to overcome any obstacle.  Something as innocuous as Tetris?  There is order to be made from chaos, though if we let it go endlessly, chaos upends our progress.   

[img width=684 height=367]http://static.fjcdn.com/pictures/What_bea0d5_2576323.jpg[/img]
But it sure helps when packing the car.  Source: Funnyjunk.com

Of course, its easy to answer that often the philosophy or projectable perspective of a game is unguided.  There's no overarching plan, no conspiracy.  Things were and are often because of technical limitations, what seemed fun, gameplay controls, and a myriad of other factors. This is just where we end up when we produce what we'd naturally produce.  And for me, that's even more telling, teaching, and informative than if it were some larger force at work using this media to its own end.  These products, the thoughts they generate, and the distance or compulsions they reveal are a more true and honest reflection of us.  This media of expression, and our reactions to it, are a voice.  Are we listening?

A few examples I've dwelled on lately include watching friends come over and play the Battlefield: Hardline Beta, and while I've enjoyed most games in the series, I'll likely skip this one.  In part because of fatigue from the last game in the series, but also because previous Battlefield games featured national armies in a context that made the 'morality' of the violence more personally palpable.  The new one is centered around cops and criminals, often around large-scale heists or obvious crimes.  Some have taken issue to the 'warrior' cops the game allows you to play; I just didn't enjoy playing the crooks who constantly slaughtered digital representatives in the police force.  Is this much different when the polygonal texture is representing one mesh of colors instead of another?  On a technical level, of course not.  In personal context, the thought of what was occurring was enough to make me lose interest.  Not that I assume gamers who play it are doing something wrong, per se; it's a personal conviction that, once triggered, just made me less interested in perpetuating the fantasy the game provided.

Another is my current favorite, Destiny.  I really enjoy the game, despite the many aspects of its design that work against it.  Those have been covered in detail and are out of the context of this piece, but there are two things about it that get under my skin that I haven't seen addressed (and likely won't.)  The first is that, by game design, your character gains 'levels' initially through experience.  This common trope represents an avatar's personal growth and development and is a well-worn idea in gaming.  However, after getting to level twenty, the game design takes a completely different turn.  Now, no amount of 'experience' through gameplay advances the level; only through equipping specific equipment and 'leveling' that gear counts toward reaching higher levels.  My character is level 31; take off a few pieces of gear, and he instantly drops to the permanent limit of 20.

At face value, this is just a different mechanic that keeps players in a gameplay loop, searching for rare drops that allow progression.  It's a tweak on a well-known system, and other games, particularly MMO designs, often feature something similar.  But while an experience-leveling through gameplay system implies that the character is getting more powerful through actual experience in combat, this system implies that hard work and 'real-world' experience will top out; after that, only very specific material possessions will make you more powerful.  You can't 'work' to get better, you need the special bling to be superior.  Any game with equip-able gear suggests a real equivalent of this, as it makes sense that someone wearing armor can take a hit better than a hero in a T-shirt.  But the vast majority of Destiny's gameplay revolves around the idea that no matter how much time you spend, no matter what your character is capable of, unless they have the right toys, they can't even enter the 'real' game.  There is a materialism element there that, while admittedly abstract and present in perhaps most games to some degree, annoys me at times.  You can't even share or give gear to help out someone; it's all about what stuff you acquire for yourself.

The other element to Destiny is how it is, at heart, a gambling simulator in First Person Shooter clothes.  The all-important past-20 gear is tied to random number generators.  Essentially, various systems are all part of a complex, multi-tiered lottery for getting rare gear drops that allow progression.  Few give the gear outright; many involve repetitive actions in order to roll the digital dice for a chance at a bounty or trinket that require more of the same lotteries, up the chain to eventually get the item in question.  Just like normal lotteries, the more you play the more of a chance you'll win what you're looking for, but I know many who have spent countless hours and still have no luck of the dice.  It's all chance; in theory you'd get it eventually, but there is never a guarantee.

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Never realized Barney was colorblind. Source: Funnyjunk.com via StretchDestiny

The game is incredibly fun for me, but I do have to put it down every now and then because the mentality I develop from those two elements eventually get under my skin.  It's all part of the game design, and I'm not trying to say the game is actively promoting materialism.  But, I also can't deny the double-edged sword of how video games effect us.  We as gamers often want the best of both worlds; while games like Journey, Shadow of he Colossus, Papers, Please, and This War of Mine stir emotions and resonate with us, we can be completely unaffected and untouched by the thoughts behind dark, violent, or disturbing content in games.  We often look at them as  an artistic medium, video games only give us material of worth, and gamers easily dispense with anything negative.

Neon Genesis Evangelion's creator Hideaki Anno has been open about his struggles with depression as he wrote his seminal anime.  Anyone who's watched the entire series can certainly attest that depression bleeds into the bulk of several characters, themes, and the entire feel and message of the series.  The anime undeniably adheres to a specific worldview, and preaches it both openly and with subtlety.  This type of artist-to-medium input is true of many, arguably every art medium, including video games.  Large scale game projects such as Assassin's Creed even go so far as to have a disclaimer at the beginning to announce that the content was created by people of many faiths and beliefs, just so the content won't feel as an attack on a faith or worldview.

And here is where I have to specify that it's going to affect everyone differently.  I have personally found that the older I get, and the lens of real-world events take more focus and concern, the more I realize how my intake of virtual violence has changed.  If it's not somewhat cartoony (Mario), separated by several degrees (shmups) or in context (sci-fi abstractions on the theme like Destiny) then I have a much greater sensitivity to it.  That frankly came as a surprise for me.  I've GM'd many a pen-and-paper RPG, including a few campaigns that lasted for over a year, so playing villains and evil characters are in no way a new thing.  I've also noticed I'm not the only one; my beloved tried and couldn't 'renegade' Shepard through a Mass Effect playthrough after our initial paragon run.  I'm not at all saying this is or should be universal, and clearly it isn't, but it is a reflection I feel worth a discussion. 

Games don't make us who we are, but likely form part of the background noise to the conversations our minds are already having.  I value freedom of expression, not just as a fundamental human right, but also because I believe it is a valuable communication method, both externally and intrinsically.  Without freedom of expression, we can struggle to even know what we fully believe or understand.  With it, we can let it out and then observe what that means, what's behind it, and what it represents.  And perhaps most important, what we are going to do about it.

I never taught my boys to put little Lego guns on their Lego creations.  They were doing it long before we had any toy guns in the house or cartoony violence on TV.  While I wasn't particularly trying to shield them from such, I'm honestly clueless where they even observed the concept of a gun.  But given a mostly free-range creation method, their thoughts and character produced that creative expression.

Which was something like a T-Rex in a submarine with pointy rail-guns in every direction.

[img width=576 height=432]http://www.toyarchive.com/BattleBeasts/Playsets/ShockingShark1c.jpg[/img]
Since the original was destroyed, this is what pops up when "dinosaur submarine gun" is put into Google.  Source: Toyarchive.com.

Any creation's inherent worldviews and perspectives are, in a large-scale way, a result of that same kind of freedom of expression, including the thoughts put into and generated out of a video game.  Whether intentionally placed or seemingly projected upon, I believe they are best served when neither ignored nor shut down, but instead replied with, "alright, a conversation is started, where do we go from here?"

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