 Every journey is a series of choices. The first is to begin the journey. This is what the game Anti-Chamber greets you with. Then it presents you with one, right or left, red or blue. We've seen this choice before. Morpheus presented Neo with this very conundrum. Live in blissful ignorance or face reality. Here though, you choose one way, and you return to where you were. You choose another, and the result is the same. What is going on? What is the nature of this choice? Fortunately, there is a conveniently placed placard telling us what this all means. The choice doesn't matter if the outcome is the same. Remember, every journey starts with a choice. The choice to make a choice to begin with. Of course, this is hardly original. The Stanley Parable presented us with this choice as well, except it did us the courtesy of providing a whimsical British narrator. Whether left or right, whatever door you enter, whatever action you commit to, the narrator knows there is no freedom. The game makes explicit attention between designer and player, between their plans for us and our plans for ourselves. Subordination is not subversion, it is predicted by the author. We've seen this illusion time and time again. We think we are making the choice to save one or the other in The Walking Dead, but the result is always the same. We think saving little sisters is a sacrifice that makes us a hero, but your resource allocation is the same. We make choices in Detroit become human surely, but of course, the state space is map. The game is an illusion. I suppose it is true as they say, a man chooses, a slave obeys. An interactive art form, that's what they call it, so how could this be? As Sid Meier said, games are a series of interesting decisions, a robust place for dynamic problem solving to test our faculty. The simple game Tetris illustrates this. We choose between risk and reward every time we pile up blocks to score a Tetris, and we constantly have to adapt owing to the random tile generation. Surely we are making choices here. Warren Spector extends this argument to the narrative of a game. He views games as a collaborative story generator, a domain of distributed authorship between player and designer. In his game Deus Ex, we choose how to play. We choose between action, stealth, or diplomacy. We choose the endings of the game, right? Consequences both in the gameplay and narrative of a game. That is what Miguel Cicard argues as necessary for a game, to have a player who is playing ethically, acting meaningfully. Tetris must fuse with Deus Ex. Undertale shows this perfectly. Your choice to either kill or not kill both impact the gameplay and narrative. We are an embodied agent who sees what they do as intrinsically meaningful. We are not making binary choices. We are not just thinking about strategic optimization. We are acting in the game assuming every action we make has weight. And yet, this is all designed. The illusion of freedom is in fact design formalism in games. In Jesse Schell's The Art of Game Design, one of the lenses he presents is the illusion of freedom, the idea that the player must be deceived so. He presents psychological evidence like decision paralysis, where people are stunned into an action if presented with too many options, to suggest we must subtly guide players without them noticing. The mountain and journey, the salient red objects in Mirror's Edge, the cries of an overbearing NPC in a Naughty Dog game, these are all there to guide the player and engage them. Non-verbal communication is seen as good design, crafting space in such a way as to guide the player without telling them. Super Mario Bros. was heralded as a revolution in implicit learning, teaching players how to jump, maneuver and avoid enemies, by the design of space and objects. Even the revelations players have in puzzle games, are carefully contrived sequences of implicit communication. In Portal, you may think you had the insight to use a portal on the ground as a way to propel yourself over a gap, but the previous rooms were configured to imply this solution. In fact, the whole game was. Mathias Warsh presents this same argument. Human beings have a finite capacity for choices, and we need to optimize decisions in games in accordance with this. The design of the enemies in Doom adhere to this, creating what is known as orthogonal unit differentiation, to create clear prioritization puzzles for the player. The designers have in mind a particular experience, and they conspire to leverage these tools to force you to have fun. In his book Beyond Choices, Miguel Cicard argues that we need to think of choice differently when we design games. Beyond Choices, because he claims we should frame choice in the context of the game's fiction, like how Spec Ops the line gives you the option to break free of the supposedly binary decisions. But Beyond Choice is also in that constraining choice is also a powerful storytelling vehicle. Much like how Shadow of the Colossus's structure helps it communicate its tale of tragic descent, because it limits the choices you have. It seems strange that we can design experiences to make people feel free, but this is exactly what our psychology suggests is true. In his GDC talk, Scott Rigby illustrates how self-determination theory, a framework in psychology that studies human motivation, shows us how if we have a sense of competence, autonomy, and relatedness, we feel fulfilled, and hence free. It doesn't matter if you are in a rich, expansive world like No Man's Sky, a game which supposedly infinite freedom. If you don't make the player feel competent, make them feel loved, and ultimately, make them want to do what they are doing, they will never feel free. That's right. Freedom is an illusion that is created when we feel fulfilled, and so we can design experiences in such a way so as to craft this. Of course, when we bring philosophers into this discussion, things get a little more tricky. The debate over whether we are free has raged on for centuries, known as the debate between free will and determinism. Determinists suggest that all our actions exist in a sequential causal pattern, so no matter which way you slice it, we are determined. In support of this, neuroscientists present data about how the brain indicates we are making decisions in our head before we do consciously. In opposition to this, scholars like Daniel Dennett present the compatibilist argument, the idea that free will and determinism are not mutually exclusive. In his book Elbow Room, Dennett suggests that even though we are not infinitely free, we are free within constraints, and this is a form of free will worth having. He uses control theory to illustrate that there can be degrees of freedom to an agent. We have less control in certain instances than others, and hence, there is elbow room for free will to exist. Games live in this strange zone between freedom and determinism. In his book Uncertainty in Games, Greg Kostukin argues that without uncertainty, there would be no point to playing a game. It is the governing principle of play. We don't know if we will succeed. We don't know what our opponents will do, and we have no idea who will win. Perhaps it is here in the randomness of games that we can assert our freedom. And again, this could also mean that we have even less control. Like free will and determinism, luck and skill are not mutually exclusive, with different games invoking both in different measure to configure a rich possibility space. Poker may have luck, but it is a game of profound skill. The better player usually wins given enough time. But if this is the case, then the game starts seeming determined once more, so either games are random, or they are mediated by skill, which renders the outcome mostly certain. Game designers present us with rules, we accept them, consent to be mediated by them. But sometimes, the hand of the designer is resisted. Emergence is the phenomena where things arise from a system, like say rocket jumping and quake. Other times we change the rules we play by, modding communities take the game and structure it differently, and speedrunners impose their own rules to make the game fascinating once more. We see the contours of resistance here. A game isn't simply what the designers encode, it is the act of play that players bring as well. When players play a game, they don't just have different play styles, they also interpret play differently, and create a dynamic meaning that is a collaborative effort between designer and player. Computers came and we played with them. But what if in this simple fact lays the seeds of a revolution? A revolution to reclaim our agency. In his essay, Play Computers, Miguel Sucart argues that both play and computers are re-ontologizing activities. Both play and computers change the world. Today, according to Johann Wazinga in his seminal work Homoludens, is how we got culture. We transform and reinterpret elements in a magic circle, and imbue it with meaning. Computers were a new genesis of meaning though. When computers entered the world of interpersonal connection, human beings were both more connected and disconnected. We ignore those in front of us, but keep tabs on more people. As Sherry Turkle argues in her book Alone Together, technology substitutes and overrides human connection. A game like Death Stranding pushes this analogy to a post-apocalyptic extreme. According to Sucart, because play is re-ontologizing the way computers are, it becomes our means of resisting the transformation of our world against our will. Video games in particular can reveal this process to us. We can bring this out of the magic circle and interface with a computerized world. We see an arbitrary social process in SimCity, so we are more privy to the manipulation of our real cities. We see a ludic interface encoding history and civilization, and so the arc of history can be sensed more keenly, and how it may not bend towards justice. Video games may not save the world, but they may endow us with the sense we need to understand a world transformed by computation. Jean-Baudrillard didn't like the matrix. Even though the movie was inspired by his work, he disliked it for a very simple reason. The movie suggested that there was a meaningful way to distinguish between being inside and outside the matrix. Is it any surprise, then, that it is a video game that better appreciated these ideas? Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear Solid 2. Nothing is as it seems both for the characters and ourselves, and Kojima uses meta-fiction and meta-text to break the division between player and avatar, game and reality. Information manipulates every character in the game. No one can tell the truth, including us, the player. However, we play the game to construct meaning out of this. We define our own reality regardless of the manipulation. Raiden rejects us, and now it's our turn. Time to turn off the console. Frank Lance has argued many things. He claims games are the art form of thought itself, revealing how meta-cognition and problem-solving are instrumental towards changing the world. His most recent claim, though, is that games might be integral to our ascension. Lance cites Robert Keegan's model of development he created in his book, The Evolving Self, and suggests that games can aid us up this hierarchy of development. Order Zero is the objectless infant world. Order One is the world of reflexes. At Order Two we can develop durable categories. By Order Three, we are a social being. We have what Michael Tomasello calls shared intentionality. We can play with others. Order Four is reflexive and meta-cognitive. We are capable of generating our own ideas by generalizing across abstractions, selecting between different values and ideas. By Order Five, we see how we are a part of a larger system and how to construct meaning out of it. Putting it another way, it is a frame of thinking that pushes us past selfish thinking. There are many futurist movements, religious denominations, and philosophical traditions, all claiming they can steer us towards a better future. Another movement called Meta-Modernism, the popular books of Yuval Noah Harari, and Derek Parfit's idea of climbing a mountain to reconcile all of ethics, fall within this purview. It is the project of humanity post-post-modernity, and supposedly, games are supposed to be useful to this project. How would we even make this case? Well it comes back to the illusion of freedom. By creating games that reveal the rules that permeate their reality, games can activate meta-cognition. This is the first stage of reflexive thinking. In his book Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman argues that dissonance and incongruity can activate meta-cognition. It is a way to give us more elbow room by enhancing our self-awareness. When we play games, we have to all accept common rules and goals, and in many instances, we negotiate these rules to accommodate others. This requires trust, shared communication, and mutual understanding. Children eventually grow out of rigidly abiding by rules, to question what their higher purpose is. They negotiate the instantiation of rules themselves. The very active play has built into it ideas about morals, law, ethics, and shared purpose. However, what is the specific utility of video games and pushing us towards order five though? Let's take Frank Lance's own game, Universal Paperclips, tasked with assembling and selling paperclips. Eventually, strategic optimization within this game leads to the conversion of the entire universe into one. Our obsession came at a price. What we should have done here was evaluate the purpose of play, not just optimize our strategy. This same idea existed in Brenda Romero's Train, a game that also chastises us for strategic optimization by showing us how we blindly contributed to genocide. In each of these games, we need to break free of the systems of the game and pay attention to what purpose they serve. This shows us the outline of rebellion. We are escaping the matrix. But as much as games can help us escape systems, they show us how we can reconfigure them within the magic circle. Journey creates a version of reality where meeting our fellow human is a joy, elevating our abilities when we encounter another and making us long for companionship. MMOs, Dark Souls, and recently Death Stranding all explored versions of this idea. How do we use technology? How do we re-ontologize using play within a computer to get us to rethink our real world? The trick may not just be escape, but creation. In the game English Country Tune, you turn from puzzle solver to puzzle creator. You have to start designing games to solve puzzles. If we ourselves become the designers of new realities, what sense does the illusion of freedom mean anymore? In David Graber's book, The Utopia of Rules, he argues that we are now being entrenched by an overabundance of rules as we impose stifling regulation upon ourselves. He also claims we love rules, but the seeds of revolution can appear in play in the spirit of creativity and redesign. In Minecraft, we play by the rules established by the designers, but we also create our own dynamic stories and then craft new worlds out of digital building blocks. In Eve Online, we are under the purview of the laws of a new digital universe, but we can also set our own rules in governing institutions, redesigning reality as it were. In the forward to our 2004 edition of her book, The Second Self, Sherry Turkle argues that the way we interact with computers can change how we think, and if we are stuck interfacing with the simulation of games, the abstraction, we are condemned to never be free. Instead, we need to dive into the code and redesign games. We can't just passively play SimCity and accept that the laws governing taxation and urban decay are inevitable. We need to interface directly with its programming and change the rules themselves. We need to become the creator to assume control of design. The final stage of our development is a new genesis, the genesis of our instinct to create new worlds. The only way to escape being a player is to become the designer yourself. It was a simple choice, left or right, but we rejected the false dichotomy. Freedom comes not from submission but escape, not from optimization but design. We break free of the system by realizing it doesn't have to be the way it is, and we reach our potential only when we start to have discussions about how we should redesign reality. However, rejecting to choose is a choice. It is always inevitably a dichotomy. We can take the blue pill and continue to play games uncritically, or we can take the red one and start analyzing, deconstructing and designing them anew. The choice is yours.