The paradox of computer games is that the best of them offer a kind of limitless freedom to the player, but one which is, of course, tightly regulated by way of a predesigned architecture: all elements of subjective freedom have in fact been—in almost authoritarian, heavy-handed fashion—predetermined, hard-coded by a designer. It is a “very dependent, paradoxical kind of freedom” one enjoys in such games, as one commentator, Gabriel Winslow-Yost, has pointed out, where each “‘choice’ has to be coded in advance—each option something the designer wants you to do, to display this aspect of their creation” (August 18, 2022, NYRB, p. 44).
Computer games are in this sense theological: they confront us with the paradox of freedom-with-constraint, with agency-contra-creation, the structuration of will within the framework of a prefabricated, ready-made reality. Just as human existence contains a kind of freedom-within-creation, so too do computer games - at least the best of them - exhibit a kind of freedom-within-code. One is free to act, but only within the limitations set by this code: the code itself remains strictly off-limits (unless one has the competence to engage in modding, which must usually be facilitated by the game’s designers). You can kill as many monsters as you like, but at the level of ordinary consumer experience, you cannot “kill” undesirable lines of code, or remake them. In games like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and the series’ fifth installment, Skyrim, players are able to roam around vast tracts of virtual land, exploring both hard-coded and script-generated “dungeons,” pursuing adventures both generative and predesigned—though, of course, even that which is probabilistically generated must obey a predetermined set of variables and constraints laid down by the game studio’s designers.
In the old days of computer gaming—the 1980s and 1990s—game “maps” were by and large hard-scripted. Every landscape was bespoke, every world fabricated to a specific, unchanging form. The boredom and limitation of this approach lies in the fact that each run-through of the game must necessarily follow more or less the same lines; one plays the same game—within certain bounds at least—as everyone else. With the possibility of generating “random” terrains—not truly random, of course, but generated within particular parameters fixed by the designer—elements of chance, unpredictability, and equally importantly, variability are introduced into the possibility-space of a game.
The limitations of this wider, more flexible design approach, however, lie in the fact that too much of the designer’s hand still remains in play. What this option fails to accomplish is to transcend generativity-within-constraint, to attain a fundamentally more plastic generativity-of-constraint-itself: that is to say, the very architecture and “design” of the game—its rules, objectives, its fundamental form, and therefore its subjective “feel”—has not yet been subjected to quasi-randomization or generative principles. This, I claim, would make for a far more interesting video game experience, perhaps one that is yet to come. We have maps that are made by the game’s creators, but we do not yet have a game that makes and remakes itself, perhaps in ways unimagined even by its creators.
Darwin discovered that organisms evolve into being from earlier organisms and forms by way of natural selection. But what Darwin could not have imagined is the more radically upsetting idea that even the principles underpinning life and reality itself may in some sense have evolved—have been selected for. We do not yet want to hold that this speculative notion bears the stamp of scientific truth. Perhaps some day the idea that the parameters of the Universe as such have been “worked through” to some more perfect stage of being. But as a speculative principle applied to other, lesser domains of social life, it surely contains some value. The future of gaming lies not only in evolving, or iterating, new locations, sets, and spaces within a predetermined framework, but in allowing the very framework itself to evolve, twisting and turning into hitherto unforeseen directions. A game that makes itself: now that would be a game worth playing.