We love the “The Matrix” and have given its creators blillions of dollars because of our infatuation with all the tight black leather, balletic violence, cool robots, glorious special effects and the possibility that all the psychocybermysic babble actually might be meaningful. And even if there are no deeper truths or hidden messages of any importance buried behind the CGI, at least there is the eye-popping CGI.

Many critics, whether panning or praising “The Matrix” have pointed out that the film has obvious roots in and similarities to video games. “The Matrix”, it seems, isn’t just a clever metaphor for Cartesian solipsism, it works pretty well as a big budget cinematic formulation of a video game.

If you pick up this possibly philosophical thread as winds through slick Hollywood filmmaking and into video games you can stitch together an interesting thesis that ties some of the earliest philosophical concerns together with the soul of video games and provide some interesting reasons why “The Matrix” might be more conceptually related to games that it seems at first.

The argument I want to make is not particularly obvious, and relies on some creative connecting of themes. Sort of like “The Matrix”, it might pay off, or it might just be some cool ideas that befuddle rather than enlighten. But, if you will, take the blue pill, and I’ll show you how the roots of Western rational thought might just be expressing their truest nature in video games and how “The Matrix” is actually a good parable of how video games reflect our deepest philosophical concerns.

The Matrix, B.C.

Pythagoras lived around 500 B.C. and generated a body of thought that included figuring out some of the basic physical principles of musical harmony, several fundamental geometric theorems that are still used today and postulated a unique perspective in the nature of reality.

Like many of the Pre-Socratics, Pythagoras was looking for some key principles or laws to describe the physical universe. Unlike some of the other early philosophers, Pythagoras and his followers had come to the conclusion that the world wasn’t fundamentally made of water, air or fire but rather of numbers. Or, as a Pythagorean sect motto held: All is number

Like a lot of the Pre-Socratic philosophers, either he didn’t write down much, or what he did write down was lost to the ravages of time. But we can refer to a fragment of writing from a Pythagorean named Philolaus, who lived maybe a 100 years later, about the same time as Socrates, to get a quick summary the Pythagorean perspective on numbers:

"Whatever can be grasped by the mind must be characterized by number; for it is impossible to grasp anything by the mind or to recognize it without number."
(The Presocratics, Philip Wheelwright, ed. p 231 1960 Bobbs-Merrill)

It’s not easy to say what Pythagoras and his followers exactly made of this conclusion because in addition to having little remaining of what they may have written down, they were a sort of secret society that didn’t seem too terribly interested in sharing ideas with others. Still we can take this central Pythagorean thought and move to the next trace of this circuit of ideas.

Driven by their conviction in the fundamental place of number, the Pythagoreans invented a basic system of geometric representation of the world. They realized that by drawing a line between two points you could create space out of nothing. Adding two more dots and three more lines, you can create 2-D space—a square. Finally, by adding four more points and the remaining eight lines, you can draw a 3-D cube. The Pythagoreans understood, then, that mathematical (well, geometrical) abstractions could represent reality. Using numbers, you could draw out the world. Pythagoras would easily understand the notion of a 3-D virtual world. He pretty much invented the idea.

If you watch “The Matrix”, the film’s central idea of a world built out of number is very Pythagorean. A perfect illustration of this effect is when Neo sees through the unreality of the matrix to the structural numbers underneath (this example and illustrative graphic is borrowed from Chris Crawford’s site).

Plenty of people have noticed some of the philosophical similarities of “The Matrix” and video games. Typically, the connection made is that the Wachowski brothers played a lot of video games, so their movie looks like a video game. And without diminishing the stylistic influence game play probably had, Pythagoras provides an more interesting conceptual bridge between the two. The world is made of number, the numbers are the world—or at least as much of the world as the mind can grasp.

What this means to game theory is very simple—the notions of reality represented as number flow back to some of the earliest recorded philosophical writings. What concerned Pythagoras and his followers in ancient times is relevant to what concerns us today—even in the area of video games. Or taken another way, the core Dickian mind trip at the heart of “The Matrix” is a descendant of the philosophical thought of 2500 years ago—what is real? Does mind make reality? Can we tell the difference?

Video games are also the progeny of that history. Pythagoras was trying to understand the universe and man’s place in the cosmos through numerical representation. The entire thrust of rational Western thought is kicked off in the speculations of these early philosophers, like Pythagoras. Video games are becoming the penultimate entertainment form of rational society, I would say, because they still deal in some sense with the earliest questions the rational mind posed. But more on that in a minute.

The Leap of Reason

This small point about the startling similarly of Pythagorean conceptions of reality to the structure of video games is a (possibly long) way of setting up the main point of this excursion—to understand how some of the earliest rational considerations people made were in the same contexts that we consider video games today.

Anthony Gottlieb’s “The Dream of Reason: A History of Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance” is a smart synoptic history of Western philosophy. While attempting to put a context around the earliest forms of philosophy, he offers the following example from the Roman orator Cicero written in the first century B.C.:

"Leon [the ruler of Phlius, a centre of Pythagoreanism in south-east Greece]...asked him to name the art in which he put most reliance; but Pythagoras said that for his part he had no acquaintance with any art, but was a philosopher. Leon was astonished at the novelty of the term and asked who philosophers were...Pythagoras...replied that the life of man seemed to him to resemble the festival which was celebrated with most magnificent games...for at this festival some men...sought to win the glorious distinction of a crown, others were attracted by the prospect of making gain by buying or selling, whilst there was on the other hand a certain class, and that quite the best type of free-born men, who looked neither for applause nor gain, but came for the sake of the spectacle and closely watched what was done and how it was done. So also we, as thought we had come from some city to a kind of crowded spectacle...entered upon this life, and some were slaves of ambition, some of money; there were a special few whole, counting all else as nothing, closely scanned the nature of things; these men gave themselves the name of lovers of wisdom (for that is the meaning of the word philosopher); and just as at the games the men of truest breeding looked on without any self-seeking, so in life the contemplation and discovery of nature far surpassed all other pursuits."
Gottlieb (p27 ) quoting Cicero, "Tusculan Disputations" V 3,8 Loeb Classical Library edition, trans J.E. King p.433

Now the mention of games in this quote might seem to be a trivial artifact of the example, a trick of the light caused by Pythagoras’ choice of analogy. Perhaps he didn’t mean to say anything particular about games other that to use the idea to get quickly to his point.

But I see something here—the consideration of games as a certain complex human activity that encompasses more than notions of play and competition but also that of contemplation.

Winning and gain—whether money, prestige, title, etc—are a common aspect of gaming. They are so key in most conceptions of the notion of “game” that some have included in their definition of “game” via the inclusion of some sort of necessary victory condition (See Jesper Juul’s blog for a typical example). The idea is that for something to be a game, you have to have a winner—or at lest the chance of winner.

But Pythagoras saw something different. He saw the chance to enjoy a game for another reason, “… for the sake of the spectacle … what was done and how it was done.”

“What was done and how it was done” corresponds in computer terms to the algorithm, the programs that govern how a video game works. I think Pythagoras would have been quite happy with the notion of computer game software and the enjoyment of the game system—the algorithm—without any regard for the eventual outcome. Think of riding a scooter about in Grand Theft Auto III, pulling tricks in Tony Hawk without a score objective or of sliding down a mountain in free play mode in SSX 3. In each of these cases, the player enjoys playing with the game system, with the algorithm, with “what is done and how it was done”. Players can and do enjoy the algorithm without regard for victory conditions. A game can be the enjoyment of the exploration and contemplation of the rules, of the algorithm as much as or more so than of the ultimate winning or goal achievment.

What Does It Mean Morphius?

If this linkage holds—between Pythagoras’ example of the nature of philosophy and games, then a couple of key ramifications stand out.

First, there is now a clear historical precedent for thinking of games as something other than a contest with an objective outcomes or victory conditions. The notion that game should have goals because they have always had goals would then be a false proposition.

Second, this example points out that the consideration of a game in and of itself, and not just as a mechanism for coordinating an outcome, is a deep concern and one central to philosophy itself. That is to say, those of us interested in the study of games and what they mean at some fundamental level have antecedents. In practical terms, I think this points to a field of research that has so far been underserved—connecting modern game thought back to the key questions and answers from the great thinkers of the past.

Perhaps I am seeing shadows in fragments of ancient writers. Then again, these examples serve a bigger idea I have been working on—one that argues that the real appeal of games is the algorithm (the rules, in a general sense). I think that people are, and have been, perplexed and dazzled by the potential of rational systems. Even in Pre-Socratic times, when cybernetics and computational mathematics were thousands of years in the future, thinkers were considering how to describe the world as an active system of rules. Even more, they were trying to understand and decipher the puzzle of human experience from the platform of those rational systems.

This is a point that Gottlieb raises in his book—that Western thought is rational in precisely the way that the early Greek thinkers worked to move from theological (narrative) explanations for phenomenon and instead on toward rational systems based on observation. The ancient Greeks were fascinated by the idea of understanding the rules of reality, even to the degree of making up rules that might fit.

This is the invisible strand that ties “The Matrix” to video games—in the Pythagorean model that numbers define reality. Both “The Matrix” and video games are concerned with the system, with the algorithms or rules. In “The Matrix” part of the entertainment is found in exploring (narratively) what the matrix is and how it works. The idea of a perfect world of rules both resonates with our rational seeking in the physical world for fundamental, systemized explanations for phenomenon and our hopes and fears about the power of these systems of rules that we encode into our machines. Video games are the most like the matrix of any of our digital systems in the sense that they provide active worlds that we know must run on rules, their souls knitted into in their algorithms, stored as numbers on digital media.

In a loose sense of the terms, the pursuit of philosophy is a video game—people tackling rule systems, trying to understand the rules, trying to find themselves inside the twisty results the rules create and attempting to generate personal power and spiritual enlightenment inside the rules. This is what, I’d argue, Pythagoras was getting at in his example of games and is a good description of the core area of interest to all video game researchers.

If all of this is on the right track, what can we do with it? In addition to casting light on some new research possibilities, I do think this way of thinking opens up the notion of what a video game is and what they mean. No longer are games simply bottled contests that transfer wealth and/or power to the player (or at least the winner). No longer are games simple play that exhaust negative emotions (ala Brian Sutton-Smith) but are entwined into our being (ala Huizinga). This could have positive implications to questions of censorship and regulatory control, impacts to the notion of games as some new technique for education and even game design.

More on those topics in the future!