Roger Travis
Everyone misses the point of Plato’s cave. What a coincidence, because everyone also misses the point of BioShock. Let’s start with the latter. The moment your interactivity with the game is revealed as a fake isn’t the moment when you kill Andrew Ryan in a cutscene. It’s what happens after that. Atlas tells you to abort the self-destruct sequence, and tacks on a “Would you kindly?” (the phrase that you’ve just realized controls your actions in the game). At that point, you can run around Andrew Ryan’s office as much as you want, shoot at the walls, look at stuff, jump up and down, all to your heart’s content. So you don’t have to obey Atlas, really.
But the self-destruct sequence won’t end either in success or in failure, and the game won’t proceed, unless you insert the relevant item in the requisite slot. You have the choice of whether to abort the self-destruct sequence or not, but, positioned as it is, that choice has been exposed as meaningless within the basic fabric of the game’s mechanics.
It’s like when you’re a prisoner in Plato’s cave—and you are in fact a prisoner in Plato’s cave, take my word for it. It’s like when you think you’re getting up, and you think you’re going outside, and you think you’re seeing this thing called the sun.
Let’s back up a second and talk cave. Socrates, in Republic 7: here’s a story about education and non-education. There are these people, chained to seats in a cave, looking at the wall, and on the wall they’re watching a shadow-puppet play. They can’t get up, they can’t turn their heads: this is their universe, this shadow show. They have contests to decide who gets stuff: if you can name what shadow is coming next, you win. Somehow, one of the prisoners gets freed and is forced to go up into the sunlight; it’s painful, but he figures out what’s going on, and he comes back down and tries to get the others to stand up.
That’s when the real trouble starts, though, because none of it’s real, because reality is created by the world down below. When you go down, and you try to persuade your fellow prisoners that they have to get up and come with you and go see this amazing thing you found outside, it doesn’t go so well. First you try to play their games, the ones where they name which shadow on the wall is coming first, and which second, and get the prizes. (You know, the stuff you get in the “real” world: money, power, gift cards to Amazon.) You think, presumably, that if you can get some of the prizes, the people will listen to you, and they’ll come share your amazing discovery.
Unfortunately, though, your eyes are having trouble getting adjusted to the light, and, well, you get owned. Then you get mad. You say, “These games are stupid. Everyone needs to stop right now. It’s not real!”
And they kill you.
Actually, BioShock does it better, because instead of killing, there’s just blah. Blah is running around Andrew Ryan’s office, hearing Atlas say, every so often, “Would you kindly abort the self-destruct sequence?”
It would be one thing if the self-destruct sequence actually completed on its own if you didn’t abort it. That would be yet another fake meaningful choice in a game universe. The choice means life and death. It would be a little more like Plato’s cave, but it would also mean that there was no point: the idea that, as Andrew Ryan himself says, “A man chooses; a slave obeys” would remain, if not intact, at least plausible. You have heroically decided to take a stand for your free will, and you will go down with the, er, town, your rights as a free human individual remaining.
But the genius of BioShock is that the possibility space of the game doesn’t give that possibility. The rule set of the game says that as a player entering into a fictional universe in which your decisions and manipulations of the gamepad determine some part of the course of the performance of the narrative, you may not fail to abort the self-destruct sequence, as implausibly stretched out as the time taken up by the self-destruct’s achievement may become.
The narrative that comprises the universe, and the universe that comprises the narrative—both must have the sequence aborted as an ineluctable feature. Every game creates its possibility space by foreclosing certain choices; that function of rule sets lies at the base of designer Sid Meier’s famous definition of a game as a series of interesting choices. Those choices develop their interest precisely because they are available while other choices have been foreclosed. The moment of the self-destruct sequence in BioShock, however, is different from most, and precious for its philosophical effect.
It is different and precious because of the way BioShock contextualizes it, because of the precise way all the other choices are foreclosed. With the words of Andrew Ryan—“A man chooses; a slave obeys”—ringing in the player’s ears, the player, who feels him- or herself to be a man, must obey.
Now we get to confront the two other choices the player does have: leave the game running, but don’t disarm the self-destruct; or turn the game off, play a different game, break the console, break the monitor, and so forth.
Let’s call the first of these choices “active inaction.” As noted earlier, while the self-destruct alarm continues to go crazy, the player can run his or her character all over Andrew Ryan’s office and do anything that can be done in what we might call the “normal game state”: jump, shoot, change various in-game settings like what skills are active, and so on. Active inaction in the game would be like Plato’s escaped prisoner running around in the outside world looking at things. For the escaped prisoner, after having borne the terrible trial of the ascent—the pain of his feet on the stones, the pain of his eyes at the unfamiliar bright light of the sun—this kind of active inaction would have its own great pleasures. In fact, the escaped prisoner may be tempted to stay outside and contemplate the sun, which Plato tells us represents the form of the Good.
For the player of BioShock, having spent the game to this point gaining abilities, the analogy might be firing off those abilities to her heart’s content.
It is the uselessness, though, of active inaction that poses the problem both to the player of BioShock and to the Platonic escaped prisoner: to think about the sun and to fire lightning bolts at furniture are fine as far as they go, but are they really choices? The answer, of course, depends on the definition of “choice,” for certainly those things are something that the player may select, and do, in preference to disarming the self-destruct sequence. But BioShock and Plato’s cave demonstrate that even though active inaction may meet the obvious definition of “choice,” the idea behind that definition, which the definition itself cannot capture, is not fulfilled by such things as thinking about the sun (the form of the Good) and making evanescent dents with virtual bullets.
The idea behind choice is what Andrew Ryan means when he says, “A man chooses.” As erroneous as the normative tone of the sentiment is (who is he to say that a man is someone who chooses whereas someone who obeys is a slave?), it corresponds to our most deeply and instinctually held beliefs about who we are. Choosing doesn’t mean doing nothing: choosing means doing something. To do nothing, active inaction, fails to advance the world, just as it fails to advance the game state.
Meaningful choice is choice that has something to do with the possibility space. That’s why the philosophers of Republic have to come back down to the cave—the cave is culture, the place where significant ethical action takes place.
The second way to avoid disarming the self-destruct sequence is to stop playing the game. I call this “refusal.” Even better than the choice of active inaction, the choice of refusal exposes the basic flaw that both the cave and BioShock point out in the very concept of choice, both as we conceive it in our own lives and as it exists in particular cultural fields like video games and philosophy. To refuse to play the game negates the possibility space of BioShock as a stage for ethical critique, the same way as ceasing to read Plato negates the reader’s capacity to engage in the critique of culture that Plato makes the purpose of the practice of the love of wisdom (that is, philosophy itself).
Refusal is a choice that negates choice even more thoroughly than the game and the cave do. We could take upon us what the great Greek tragedian Aeschylus (525–456 bce) calls the “yoke of necessity” to disarm the self-destruct sequence, because we must do so to continue in the possibility and make future choices that feel more like choices. But if we instead refuse BioShock itself, and put down the controller, we have acknowledged that the state of manhood, as defined by Andrew Ryan’s “a man chooses,” does not include players of BioShock, because players of BioShock cannot make meaningful choices.
Thus, the non-choice of disarming the self-destruct sequence ends up in the same place as the other, more famous ethical dilemma of BioShock; that is, the choice of whether to harvest the Little Sisters or to save them. That’s the part that everyone really, really gets wrong where BioShock is concerned, and so it’s the part where comparing the game to Plato’s cave can really help us get both of them right.
Famously, to make the “evil” choice and harvest the Little Sisters and to make the “good” choice to save them end up functionally equivalent within the game mechanics, because the loss of ADAM attendant on saving them is made up by gifts from Dr. Tenenbaum. Generally, critics have viewed this equivalence between the choices as a flaw in the game’s ethical system. In fact, just as Plato’s cave culture, with its contests among the prisoners, shows how the choices presented to us by our experiences in culture are meaningless, so too does the game-mechanical equivalence of harvest and save. Seemingly ethical choices in games are meaningless, because those choices exist within a possibility space whose very nature is to constrain the player’s choices within the predetermined limits of the game’s rule set.
But it’s where we can go from there that makes the project of bringing the cave and BioShock together worthwhile. The thing that happens inside the cave—the shadow-puppet play that makes up the entirety of the cultural world of the prisoners—is specifically designed by Plato to help us figure out things like video games. The culture of the cave is a shadow-puppet play for the very good reason that a shadow-puppet play is a form of playing pretend, what Plato calls mimesis. Mimesis in Republic is a very complicated subject, but playing pretend is the best way to think about it in both the positive and the negative lights in which Plato is trying to cast it: negative because Plato thinks that when you pretend to be bad you become bad; positive because doing it right (pretending to be good, for example) can help you learn more effectively than just about anything else.
Playing pretend is what they do in the cave; it’s also what we do when we play BioShock. If we didn’t have the cave to which to compare BioShock, we might well despair not just of the possibility of meaningful choice existing, but also of the possibility of doing anything meaningful about it. That’s where Republic itself, and the rest of Plato’s dialogues, come in. It’s the reason Plato wrote in dialogue form in the first place.
One of the other things about Republic that people generally ignore is the way the entire thing is framed. Socrates tells the story of a conversation he had in an old guy’s house. When you remember that ancient readers regarded reading silently either as impossible or at least as a very odd thing to do, you realize that the reader of Republic has to play pretend as Socrates, who is himself playing pretend both as himself and as the people he had his conversation with. That is, doing Platonic philosophy itself involves playing pretend, doing mimesis, but of a different kind from the kind engaged in by the prisoners of the cave.
We can’t avoid playing pretend. We can’t avoid games. For one thing, they’re fun. But if we want to have something to do about our possibility spaces, we need to play pretend with more purpose, and we need to pretend to talk about it. That’s not a joke. We can definitely actually talk about it, of course, but what Plato saw is that it’s even more important to pretend to talk about it, to stage ourselves as people who talk about this stuff. To play philosophers.
How does that work when you’re playing BioShock? Actually, it’s a lot easier when you’re playing a video game than it is when you’re reading a Platonic dialogue. Do stuff. Talk about stuff. Listen to the audio diaries in different orders, or while you’re fighting a boss, or while you’re fighting a Big Daddy. Equip a set of tonics that makes an ironic comment on the importance of the shooting mechanic to the BioShock games.
Everything you do as a player of a video game talks about that video game, if you’re willing to see actions as having significance in the same way words do. If you were to capture what you were doing on a video, you could spell it out for an audience, the same way Plato has Socrates, at his most memorable moments, take apart the dialogue in which he’s been engaged, dissecting the rhetorical strategies his interlocutors have been using.
But it all begins with the dialogue, with the playing pretend in the cave, just as doing philosophy in BioShock, when we see the possibility space of the game as a cave like Plato’s cave, begins with playing the game. Pretending to do philosophy, in Plato or in BioShock, may in the end be the only thing that can lead us toward actually doing philosophy.