POPULAR
CULTURE
STORY MODE
to do to survive and prosper materially, and the truly impractical life of the mind is the place where this recreation takes place when people are unsuited to or uninterested in physical play. And so the poetry, novels, and games that occupy the mind and shock the
Video Games and the Interplay between Consoles and Culture
productive conscience proliferate even as they are attacked by their cultural and moral critics. These attacks have roots that are millennia old. In his Republic, written around 325 BC, the Greek philosopher Plato recounts a dialogue involving his teacher Socrates in which Socrates explains why poetry needs to be heavily censored in any perfect state. Plato and Socrates are, as is typical, on the same page about this, and much of current cultural critique takes its inspiration from these two ancient philosophers, particularly concerning “imitation.” For both philosophers, imitation is a philosophical problem because it cannot fully
Video games are now and have always
replicate the model it means to reproduce. Even
been on the cultural defensive. From their
if I take an ideal chair as a model for my attempt
introduction in the home through the Atari
to build a chair as an untrained carpenter,
2600, they have been viewed as a waste of time
for instance, the latter will not live up to the
or a frivolity. Further back, they served as the
former—neither in function nor appearance.
fun counterpart to the real computational
Similarly, Plato and his teacher tell us, the poet
revolution—Deep Blue, the famous early
or author’s imitations of reality cannot live
supercomputer that took on chess grandmaster
up to the model of truth. Since a young mind
Garry Kasparov, may have been playing a game,
“takes the impression that one wishes to stamp
but the match counted for industrial, political,
upon it,” any sort of lie that could influence
and, most importantly, economic stakes; your
those young minds away from truth should not
average game of Pong did not. The intelligence
be told.
that could be marshaled by supercomputers
In the typical nature of a Socratic dialogue, the
promised advances in automation, calculation,
question-and answer cadence regarding truth
and efficiency, after all. In comparison, the
and representation leads us down the road very
gaming that invaded the home and arcade
quickly to “a censorship over our storytellers.”
marketplace might have had profit-making
And if this all sounds a bit antiquated to you,
potential for its creators, but it was ultimately
maybe Socrates’s reasoning will sound a bit
considered a pastime in the tradition of whist
more contemporary. He argues that stories
or charades—unremarkable at best, actively
should be sanitized and free of satire or
distracting and trivializing at worst.
ambiguity because “the young are not able to
But there’s more to the story than productivity
distinguish what is and what is not allegory.”
and profit when it comes to cultural and social
This line of thinking—that children won’t or
impact. Indeed, the consistent presence of
can’t distinguish between fantasy and reality—
cultural objects that are in and of themselves
is what drives almost all reactive critique
unproductive has been a fact of life throughout
against media, from Fredric Wertham’s screed
recorded
need
against comic books in The Seduction of the
recreation to balance the daily work they have
Innocent to Jack Thompson’s decades-long
history.
Human
beings
34
Above: The book’s cover Facing (top): The Super Nintendo Entertainment System sold almost 50 million units globally Facing (bottom): Dedicated Pong consoles made their way to various countries, like this Russian console named Турнир
