Tag Archives: games

Levels of Separation

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Under the right state of mind, or way of looking and thinking about things, sometimes I find it difficult to enjoy certain games. A number of diverting past-times are particularly well designed, capable of creating an immersive experience that, even if just for a brief moment, leave the one experiencing them unable to differentiate between their obvious fictional basis and their potential real world basis.

Case in point (and this is going back a little while now), but when Halo 4 was first released, I did a marathon run through. It took me awhile ’cause I like deliberating, taking my time, checking over everything, and basically just wasting time. No big deal, usually, except that this was one of the first video game titles that I played from beginning to end while high.

For the record, I enjoy a little weed from time to time. Mind you, I’m a ridiculously easy bake, and I can easily make $10 worth last me an entire month. I know tonnes of people who can’t even make that much last them half a day. So.

I don’t need much, and since I use so little, I develop almost no tolerance over time whatsoever. This helps keep it affordable. Usually, when I’m out, I’m out and it’s no big deal. Life goes on. I manage. However, I enjoy having some on hand for specific uses. I find that it really does help lubricate the cognitive machinery, and allows me to think of things with greater depth, or from unusual angles, or whatever. I’m not really sure what exactly it does do, but the TL;DR version is that it really helps me out in the creativity department.

We’ve all heard that before one time or another.

As much as I know from first hand experience the truth of that, there are instances of pot use which have other, unintended effects, such as while gaming. It helps me achieve a heightened degree of focus. Textures seem more vivid. Progression seems slower, allowing me time to take more details in as I go along. Events that happen in game seem more believable. Encounters with enemies seem much less like targets presenting themselves on a screen (to which I respond by pushing buttons in order to dispatch) and more like legitimate contact with some sort of supposedly hostile alien life form.

And of course they’re hostile! Don’t you seeing them firing at you? A voice of reason in my head might insist, if there were voices in my head. Testing that hypothesis is silly. I’ve played countless FPS titles before, not the least of which were prior titles in the same bloody Halo series. I know when the game is presenting me enemies and when it is presenting me with friendlies (or, more rarely neutrals).

As a gamer, my instincts are automatic. There is absolutely no moral imperative to question what it is that I do in the name of fun. If ever I found myself in doubt, all I would have to do is fail to return fire in response to being fired upon. The character that I play, the iconic Master Chief, drops in defeat. Dead. I restart from a previous check point, losing progress made.

Sounds awful! How dare those moving polygonal meshes execute scripts which generate coded beams of colour which just so happen to inconvenience my ability to get from various, vaguely similar A-to-B points in a rapid fashion! THEY MUST ALL BE DESTROYED!!!

And, because I’m just a gamer playing a completely fictional character in a completely fictional, computer-generated universe, pitted again completely non-sentient, computer-controlled AI, why on Earth shouldn’t I just enjoy the strongly implied acts of violence I’m evidently encouraged to carry out?

You see how describing it with alternative language sheds a different light on what a gaming experience can sometimes feel like? At almost no time do I ever question my actions playing First Person Shooters while not baked (I’d say ‘sober’, but it seems that alcohol only emphasizes the ‘okay-ness’ of simulated violence, so…). However, while baked, I find myself questioning everything.

The fact of the matter is that I have almost no understanding of what I’m really doing. I believe there are companies which hire artists (something I want to be!), programmers, designers, creative directors, and tonnes and tonnes more besides who spend ridiculous hours and funding to put a game together for the eventual enjoyment of gamers.

I don’t write code. I wouldn’t be able to interpret a block of C++ to save my life. And with the rate that technology is advancing (careening steadily closer and closer to Turing-approved AI), how do I know that I’m not actually playing a role in the deliberate destruction of a variety of under-credited artificial life forms, hmm? It wouldn’t be a stretch to attribute the tag ‘alien’ to such life forms, would it?

That’ll be a blog for another day.

For now, the point is to provide a basic commentary on what makes a game a game. If a game turned out to be a real and truly violent activity on some poorly-understood (likely informational) level, then I, among countless other well meaning gamers, would be guilty of cold-coded murder on multiple counts. If, however, a game is just a game, well then… Have fun! As for me, the lesson I think I’ve learned is to really limit how often I play games baked in order to still be able to enjoy them as they were intended to be. Otherwise, the layers of separation feel like they become stripped away, the experience becomes uncomfortably raw, and the immersion at times feels all too real.

Learning Curve

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K, I’ve said before that I’m an adherent to (a rather bastardized version of) the Multi-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, and to parallel universes by extension. Don’t ask me to elaborate on that in anything approximating a technical jargon, but I can spin loose and fast notions and concepts together all night if I had to. Certainly not with any authority, but with wonder and awe to anyone willing to listen.

More importantly, I have a hard time stating up front whether any of what I’m about to say next is “real” or not, because, for all I know, it very well could be. What I can do is assert that I have no bloody proof one way or the other, but, in classic fashion, I won’t hesitate to speculate and conjecture up some ideas as they come to me.

I wonder about the collective conscious. If it exists, it’s notorious for being invisible, intangible, and otherwise non-directly knowable. We can only infer it’s supposed qualities based on it’s perceived effects, which are highly subject to, well, subjectivity. But like most things, it’s difficult to disprove completely. It may be more sensible to discount it until we discover something more concrete about it, but doing so could be limiting our full view of what might really be going on.

In the meantime, I’ll take the difficulty in disproving negatives (or rather, the art of ignoring established improbabilities) under advisement and proceed, regardless, with a suggestion that the collective conscious may, in fact, exist. In some senses, it may be indistinguishable from certain concepts of “God”, if that helps (it doesn’t, I know, but just humour me).

Here’s my supposition: I can’t help but wonder if there is not some kind of over-arching consciousness that serves as a memory or experience bank for us temporal beings, one that allows us to draw on future learning without necessarily being aware of what we’re accessing or even when.

Think of it this way: A large majority of non-open world videos games still follow a vaguely linear progression. Hell, even open-world games still have fairly established event sequences, only with more flexibility. But in whatever case, when something goes wrong, the power is in the player’s hands to revert to a prior save or check point, and redo certain actions, only with a heads up. Knowledge gained from prior attempts now carries over and allows the character to accomplish things they might not have before.

The thing is, the character, even though they’re the ones directly living out the events, does not retain memory of their actions or of the events they experience. All of that lies within the domain of the player (in so far as I am aware of the level of sentience typical video game characters possess. Please correct me if I’m wrong). It’s a classic divide that anyone who’s ever played any table top RPG’s, having given it any real thought, has probably stumbled around.

Player-character lines may also make up a wider relationship dynamic within a larger multiversal structure. I have no idea what exactly that structure looks like, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the collective conscious is (at least from our perspective) a kind of passive monitoring system.

Maybe that’s a bit of an ego-centric head trip. If we’re the character, and the collective conscious is whatever passes for a player on that level of existence, then we’re the passive sensory platforms feeding information back up to it, and it, whatever it is, is ultimately what may be calling the shots.

But who can say for sure? Maybe it has nothing to do with ‘up above’ and ‘down below’. Maybe it’s no more a lofty, executive-level operating system overseeing our lowly, experiential-level of existence as yin is to yang. Perhaps it’s just two (possibly interchangeable) sides of the same coin.

What I would assume, however, is that there is a multitude of alternate versions of ourselves out there in the multiverse, not only in same-moment parallel universes (where similar events are happening in sync), but also dynamic-moment parallel universes (where similar timelines are being experienced at different points along their sequences). So, this would mean that the me that I was 3 years ago, say, is experiencing the events of 3 years ago, only that it is doing so presently. Equally true, potentially, is that the me which is experiencing events taking place at the tail end of 2016 (3 years from now) is also doing so presently (albeit without my direct awareness of it, of course) as well.

In fact, any point in time that has happened, any alternate version of events which might have happened, any version of events which could be happening now instead of those which presently appear to be actually taking place now, as well as the host of all possible future events which the present me has no direct knowledge of as of yet… all these things and more would be plain to whatever over-arching collective consciousness (or god-like being) may or may not exist.

What’s fascinating to me is not so much that it brings my free will into question so much as that I feel safe trusting it, whatever it is (could be nothing, and I’m wasting my breath and effort even trying to describe it. Who knows?). As far as I’m concerned, this collective conscious behaves in such a way that I can only infer to be for my good, in the same way that a player, more often than not, conducts a character’s actions in such a way so as to lead towards favourable events and outcomes more often than not.

I believe that “luck” is a direct result of unknown collective conscious processes

I don’t feel compelled or controlled by anyone or anything in particular (that doesn’t exclude the possibility that I actually am, only I am unaware of that fact or incapable of perceiving it), but I do see that my life, for the most part, is good. I understand that an untold number of other versions of me could very well have met unfortunate demises in other universes, but that an over-arching, memory-and-experience-banking side of me (whatever my place might be within the collective conscious) learns.

It believe that it (that I?) makes mistakes and adapts, and as a result, there are an equal number of untold versions of me (including this one that I have explicit awareness of, the one that I call ‘me’, the one that is typing this up right now), who benefit from the ability of my collective self to learn from my collective experiences in order to realize beneficial outcomes whenever possible.

I don’t know what all there is to learn, but if it’s good, then I don’t want it to be for just me. I see no reason why this dynamic wouldn’t also be true for every person rather than just me. Perhaps there’s an ever wider enveloping collective conscious that not only looks over all versions of a single person at all points in their multiple existences, but also a grand collective conscious that brings together all of the collective consciousnesses of all people.

[Edit: I believe the classic sense of “collective conscious” refers to something consisting of the conscious impressions of many souls in a given realm or area, such as perhaps that of humans — or of all life — on Earth. The description of “collective conscious” I have been talking about instead looked at an isolated individual’s potential collective self spread across multiple universes/timelines first before giving consideration the more classic sense second]

Now I begin to wonder if there wouldn’t be a perpetual blur between where one person ends and another begins… Perhaps this is evidence for the need for what feels like immutable separation of persons. Or, perhaps, that is just a natural side effect of being ego-centric. Maybe other versions of myself have absolutely no trouble feeling a fluid sense of oneness amongst ourselves and likewise with others. Such a concept eludes my ability to imagine vividly, but I find the idea fascinating nonetheless.