As the press release put it,

“Twenty-five years after NVIDIA invented the programmable shader, we are reinventing computer graphics once again,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “DLSS 5 is the GPT moment for graphics — blending hand-crafted rendering with generative AI to deliver a dramatic leap in visual realism while preserving the control artists need for creative expression.”

As evidence of their new technology’s effectiveness, they presented side-by-side screenshots of games like Resident Evil 9: Requiem.

From a purely technical standpoint, DLSS 5 is a remarkable step forward. I am reminded of the way gaming was when I was a child. Growing up, every new generation seemed like a dramatic visual improvement.

I remember my jaw dropping when I saw the water in the first Uncharted game, or the first time I played Warframe on my brand-new PS4. Every time, I told myself graphics could not get better. And then they did. DLSS 5 feels like a return to that era.

At the same time, this technical accomplishment has created backlash. There is no shortage of bloggers blasting Nvidia for creating more AI slop.

The conflict over DLSS 5 is a conflict at the heart of the video game industry. By its very nature, video games are both an art and a science. They blend together the humanistic, expressive side of our being and the technical, scientific side—the “right brain” and the “left brain.”

Sometimes art and science conflict with each other. The scientist wants to innovate. They want to push the technology as far as it can go. The artist, however, wants to imagine. They want to invite others into a space that does not yet exist.

These goals stand at cross-purpose with each other. The better technology gets at visualizing ideas, the less space there is for the audience’s imagination. They no longer have to imagine Grace Ashcroft because there she is, in glorious 4K resolution.

Video games, then, embody a duel between the Artist and the Scientist. This is a duel over how best to reach Reality. Is the faculty for perceiving reality our imagination, or is it our senses? The Artist will defend imagination as the prime way of perceiving Reality. Consequently, their main tool for perceiving reality is art. The Scientist, by contrast, will argue that our senses are the only way to truly grasp Reality. In cases where direct perception is unavailable, then, the best way to perceive the Real is through simulation.

I am going to argue the side of the Artist in this essay. My argument is that the quest for realism in games is a mistaken pursuit of simulation over art. It is a mistake because true meaning resides in the art, not merely the simulation of some event. And games are at their best when they communicate meaning.

The Impertinence of Detail

Why think that art, rather than simulation, is the best way to encounter the Real? To answer that question, it is actually better to start with the study of oratory.

Richard Weaver was a 20th century rhetorician. Today he is most often remembered for his seminal book, Ideas Have Consequences, a key text in conservative thought. But his main scholarly contribution came in the field of rhetoric.

Weaver was a Platonist. He believed that language had its own existence. The goal of rhetoric is to use the power of language to create a desire for the Good in the audience. Thus, the art of rhetoric was about learning how to work within the confines of language to create this “appetition for the Good.”

His project of Platonist rhetorical theory led Weaver to ask why great oratory had disappeared. We live in a world of TED Talks and long, meandering political speeches. But it was not always so. Once upon a time, men like Martin Luther King Jr., Abraham Lincoln, and Cicero walked the Earth. Their oratory was epic in its power— “spacious,” to use Weaver’s term. Why are there not more of these guys?

Weaver thought that one factor contributing to the decline of great rhetoric was an obsession with detail. Details, he argued, can actually detract from the main point.

If one sees an object from too close, one sees only its irregularities and protuberances. To see an object rightly or to see it as a whole, one has to have a proportioned distance from it. Then the parts fall into a meaningful pattern, the dominant effect emerges, and one sees it “as it really is.”1

Great oratory disappeared, in other words, because audiences got nit-picky. They started demanding proofs of every little claim instead of giving the speaker room to tell a grand story. And when the speaker is too caught up in the detail of statistics, the epic meaning disappears from view.

The great speech requires what Weaver called “aesthetic distance.” The audience stands far enough away from it for the whole epic speech to hit them. They are not so hung up on one aspect that they miss the forest for the trees. The pieces of the speech only come together into a spacious whole if the audience is distant enough to see that whole.

But when the audience cares more about soundbites than thematics, the culture of great oratory dies. The audience is too obsessed with the parts to experience the whole.

Detail, then, is “impertinent” when it distracts from the unity of a great speech.2 And that’s one reason great oratory has disappeared.

The Distortions of Photorealism

I believe something very similar has happened to video games. As technology has advanced, the gaming community has become overly concerned with the details of games, rather than their aesthetic unity. The result has been more games that sacrifice interesting ideas on the altar of visual fidelity.

Game developers strive to make games at the highest graphical fidelity because they believe that more detail makes a better game. They assume this because they implicitly accept the Scientist’s ideal: That reality is fundamentally something you perceive with your physical eyes, not your mind’s eye. But as Weaver pointed out, that is a dubious assumption. Meaning is perceived through the mind’s eyes—the imagination.

Ultimately, people care about what the details mean, not the details themselves. And as games get obsessed with detail, they tend to forget this important point. That is how you get a game that looks photorealistic but is utterly uninteresting from a visual perspective.

Grace Ashcroft from Resident Evil 9: Requiem is a great case study in how detail can actually distract from the conceptual Reality in a game. Consider her appearance as Capcom designed her:

Look at her frayed, straw-like hair. See the subtle bags under her eyes. These stand out against her smooth skin and round face.

More detail than these notable features are impertinent to the character’s design. That’s because her round face, smooth skin, dark eyes, and messy hair communicate the truth of Grace. She is a terrified, innocent young woman in a nightmarish situation. And that situation is taking its toll on her soul. Everything works together to communicate the idea of Grace Ashcroft.

Now, take a look at DLSS 5’s reimagining of her:

Notice how the higher resolution adds details.3 Her hair has more dark streaks, her face is more angular, and her lips are fuller than Capcom’s design. You can also see the wrinkles in her hand and the ligaments beneath her skin.

Details like these have to exist at a higher resolution, for higher resolutions convey more information. However, the addition of these details does not at all improve the design.

This version of Grace seems less innocent. Her hair is darker, her face is less round, and her lips are pulled almost into a vulpine smirk. This is not a woman out of her depth. This woman is more like Jill Valentine or Claire Redfield, someone experienced with difficult situations.

The expert artists at Capcom would probably have rejected this design for the character. It does not convey the truth of who Grace Ashcroft is: A traumatized young woman barely surviving a harsh world. The bleach-blond, thin-lipped, round-faced version does—even if she has less detail.

The Truth in Imagination

What this exercise shows is that the real Grace Ashcroft does not exist in the player’s field of vision. She is only visible in the imagination. The details on screen are only helpful as guides to the player’s act of imagination, which pulls them together into the character of Grace Ashcroft.

Gaming, like all artistic endeavors, requires an act of the imagination. The true meaning is not passively received; it is actively deduced. Everything a player sees, hears, or interacts with merely serves to inspire this act of imagination, which unifies the elements into a coherent whole.

Pursuing visual fidelity for its own sake robs the player’s imagination. It makes the imaginative act harder by adding extra details that distract, rather than empower, the player. Consequently, the player is barred from the meaning present in the game’s design.

The AAA gaming space has fallen for this trap over and over again. Game development companies have tended to treat simulation as the goal. They keep building games that requires as little imagination as possible—big, shiny, and bland. These games lack deep meaning because they are too caught up in the details.

Meanwhile, indie games and AA games go from strength to strength because they cannot afford too many details. They cannot show the pores on character’s faces, so they have to make the face look interesting instead. They are forced to rely on the player’s imaginative abilities.

And then there are the rare few who truly understand that art is the goal, not simulation. The developer that comes to mind is Fromsoftware.

The genius of Miyazaki is that he understands gaming is an act of imagination. The truth of a game is apprehended through effort, not passively received. Therefore, he deliberately creates games that are ambiguous and obscure. His worlds have stories; the designs have meaning. However, he will not just give them to the player. They must actively play with the world to understand it.

Games like Elden Ring are so good partly because they have the resources of AAA games while retaining the philosophy of indie games: That truth resides in the imagination, not in the senses. Games should be art—not simulations.

Conclusion

It is unlikely the world of game development will ever truly internalize Richard Weaver’s insight. The quest for graphical fidelity is too deeply built into the industry. Even if artists grasp Weaver’s point, tech executives will not. It is all too easy to equate more detail with more value. And value sells.

For this reason, the technical side of game development and the artistic side will always exist in tension with each other. The technical side is dominated by Scientists who think in terms of simulation. The Artist thinks in terms of imagination.

This tension is embodied in Nvidia’s press release. Jensen Huang wants to reconcile the imagination with simulation. He wants to find a balance between AI technology and “the game developer’s 3D world and artistic intent.”

But the very decision to AI-alter Grace shows where this technology’s heart really lies. DLSS 5 is currently a tool of simulation, not imagination. It is a device prone to generating impertinent details that detract from the meaning of characters like Grace Ashcroft.

It need not be this way. I encourage artists working in the game development world to appropriate this tool to empower new designs, not just add details to old ones. Use it to capture the essence of characters and worlds previously hidden to us. Create art to stir the imagination, not mere simulations of observable reality.

As Weaver taught us, Reality exists in the whole, not just the collection of parts. And if we are to reach that whole, we will need our imagination as well as our senses. Hopefully, one day the industry will learn that lesson.

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Archetypes are a critical element of character creation in roleplaying games. Usually, these show up in some sort of class system, e.g., choosing between a Rogue, Wizard, or Barbarian in Dungeons & Dragons. But even in games without an explicit class system, archetypes seem to be everywhere.

Consider Skyrim. Despite not choosing a class at the beginning of the game, the player’s skills are still organized into the archetypes of Thief, Warrior, and Mage. However a character is created, they seem to develop along archetypal lines.

From a game design perspective, the value of archetypes is obvious: They neatly organize information for a player. Players who want to be sneaky can build a Rogue, whereas players who favor direct combat can build a Warrior. They thus clearly highlight what sort of abilities the player is choosing.

But I think RPG archetypes go much deeper than merely being a pragmatic tool. These archetypes are, in fact, an ancient way of thinking about the nature of the human person. They make sense of human life in the context of a larger cosmos.

Set against the backdrop of the premodern world, RPG archetypes are a way of resisting modernity’s obsession with liquid identity.

Liquid Identity in the Modern World

We live in a world where people assume identity is flexible. Identity is not a given; we act like we create it for ourselves. We are individuals; we must individuate ourselves through identity-shaping choices. This obsession with identity is a feature of what the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman described as Liquid Modernity.

From the moment they can speak, adults ask children, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”1 The question assumes an awful lot. It assumes, for example, that the child has a choice about the direction of their life. It assumes that the world even offers such choices. Nonetheless, we act like a child has these choices because we assume that identity is malleable—a person can choose their professional identity.

The question would not make sense until very recently. Historically, a person’s professional identity was tied to their family. John Smith is a blacksmith, just like his father and his father’s father. It was possible for someone to pursue a different career, but it was difficult.

Contrast John Smith’s experience with mine. My father was a jeweler for thirty years. At sixteen, I decided I wanted to become a professor, and I began making life choices to prepare me for that career. I spoke to professors, I studied hard, I visited grad schools, I went to conferences, etc. Eventually, through providence, I achieved my goal.

From the perspective of Liquid Modernity, I am a success story. Unlike John Smith, I did not have to take up my father’s trade. I rode the currents of society and chose my professional identity.

Many cannot say the same, however. For many, the circumstances of life dictated their career. Others try different careers but cannot find one that satisfies them. Still others cannot find a career at all. Instead, they struggle to make ends meet in the “gig economy.” Some of these people would probably prefer being in John Smith’s position to driving an Uber.

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Professional identity is one of the many ways Liquid Modernity is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it emancipated people like me from the straitjacket of tradition. On the other, it forces choices on people who would rather not make them. It inclines us to ask absurd questions to children about their fate they cannot hope to answer.

Under Liquid Modernity, identity is precarious. It lacks stable meaning. For example, my job as a professor is not nearly as well-defined as my professional ancestor’s was. I do far more than teach and research. I also recruit, advise student organizations, livestream events, run the department Instagram, and define the direction of my program to meet student needs. Being a “professor” is not as clear-cut as it once was.2

And if an ancient, institutionalized position like the professorate has become malleable, you can bet everything else has, too. Virtually every aspect of identity is treated as negotiable in today’s society. The topics that dominate public discourse often boil down to negotiating racial, gender, religious, and class identities.

As with professional identity, some of this negotiation is good. It is probably a good thing that people have more choice on how they want to sell their labor than their grandparents did. But the constant anxiety about choosing identity is a cross Liquid Modernity foists on all of us, and we all bear it in some way.

Liquid Modernity and Identity in Video Games

I have noticed discourse about video games reflect the assumptions of Liquid Modernity. Game critics and theorists sometimes treat playing games as a process of identity formation. People are “playing with” identities when they play games, which in turn helps the player forge their own identity.

For example, perhaps playing Grand Theft Auto is an exercise in identity formation. The player identifies with the player character, who goes off on reckless (and illegal) adventures. The player will probably never commit any of these crimes in real life. However, the Grand Theft Auto sandbox is a medium for expressing their rebellious side. It helps sustain a sense that they have a “wild side,” despite working a 9-5 job. In that case, Grand Theft Auto would be a tool for forging a “rebel” identity. In an open world sandbox, you can do anything—so break the rules!

I can think of similar games that might serve as a sort of identity formation tool. Games with heavy player character customization could serve as a medium for forming all aspects of identity—racial, gender, religious, and even class. It is the ultimate medium of self-expression. In games, you can be who you want to be, and these choices can carry over into your “real life” identity.3

For some, gaming is important because it renders identity malleable. It lets players explore different identities, and perhaps even choose to adopt those identities in the real world. Gaming is yet another structure of Liquid Modernity.

Video Games as a Return to the Archetypal

I am not convinced.

Video games, but especially RPGs, strike me as very un-liquid. They are just the opposite of Liquid Modernity. Instead of identity being this unending, fluid stream that constantly requires redefinition, identity in games comes as a series of boxes.

Box 1: Do you start as a Rogue, Warrior, or a Mage?

Box 2: Which attributes do you invest your points in?

Box 3: Which gear do you equip? Sorry, not that one—wizards can’t wield greatswords.

Japanese RPGs have their own set of boxes in the form of party membership. In addition to the Chosen One, the player also has the plucky fighter girl, the burly knight with huge armor, the cool thief, the kind priestess, the magician, etc. These characters tend to have set abilities or stats that favor particular playstyles. They are not infinitely malleable.

For these reasons, I think RPGs tend to embody a way of living that stands against Liquid Modernity. They allow the player to enter what Mircea Eliade called “the Paradise of Archetypes,” a mythical space where the “terror of history” cannot reach.4

Eliade thought that primeval religion psychologically protected ancient people from historical forces. Famine, war, and plague may strike the community, but the world could be renewed by re-enacting an archetype. The “real world” is not the world before our eyes, but the world that exists in myth. The myth is simply reinscribed in our world through ritual.

For example, suppose there was a war that destroyed much of Babylon. The Babylonians could always ritually recite the creation myth, Enuma Elish, at a New Year festival. The ritual does not physically restore what they lost. However, it symbolically renews the world to its original existence in the archetypal narrative. This symbolic renewal granted them psychological resilience to evil historical forces, like war.

Archetypal thinking of this sort was common throughout the premodern world. Among the Medieval Danes, a manipulative man might be considered an incarnation of Odin.5 Great warriors are remembered as dragonslayers, and wise men are thought of as magicians. Archetypes like these subsume the historical into the mythical. In the process, they give history meaning.

I think RPGs archetypes can function somewhat like the archetypes of myth. Like mythical archetypes, they precede experience. The choice between Rogue, Warrior, and Mage is in the game’s code before a player picks up the controller. The player’s experience is therefore shaped by the game’s archetypes.

Character Formation vs. Identity Creation

Player choice in RPGs is also slightly different from that in a total sandbox game. It is less a matter of self-invention and more a matter of answering a call. The archetype calls to the player, and the player responds to the call. For example, in Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, the player has a choice between various “mythic paths” like becoming an Angel, an Aeon, or a Demon. Characters grow into one of these paths; they do not really mix and match.

Contrast this experience with a game like Second Life, where the player can make and remake their character’s identity at will.6 I once knew an older white woman whose Resident (the player character) was a Black man. This was not expressing some serious desire to be Black, but the avatar did invite accusations of digital blackface.

Some were offended that a White woman would play with identity in this way. But under a game design influenced by Liquid Modernity, one should expect radical self-experimentation. There is no transcendent archetype in Second Life to guide character formation.

Thus, while players do still have character-shaping choices in RPGs, their choice is more akin to responding to a vocation than picking a set of clothes. It is more like becoming a priest than scrolling through majors and settling on a business degree.

The subtle distinction between vocation and career points toward a deeper rift: that between character and identity. My doctoral advisor, Nathan Crick, noticed that discussions of character have largely been replaced by discussions of identity.7 I am inclined to agree.

The difference is that character is about aligning oneself with a transcendent archetype of who one ought to be. Identity is about forming oneself into a personally satisfying and socially accepted role. Character has a vertical dimension that identity lacks. Identity is purely about the horizontal: What do I think of myself, and how can I get everyone else to think that way, too?

RPG class systems seem to incentivize character formation over identity creation. The player is not trying to get their character’s identity to be accepted by other NPCs. They are trying to grow the character into a better version of where they started. They can see the skill tree; they can envision who their character can become. They just have to gain enough experience to reach that higher archetype.

In other words, the skill tree is a way into Eliade’s “paradise of archetypes,” where experience is given meaning by transcendent narrative. It resists the free-flow of experience by channeling it through the archetypes inherent in the game’s design.

RPGs Against The Terror of History

If I am right, then the real appeal of RPGs is precisely that they are not spaces for identity exploration. They are instead a symbolic bulwark against the “Terror of History”—in this case, the incessant demand of Liquid Modernity to justify one’s identity. The player character’s identity is already justified by the archetypes inherent in the game’s design.

The real question is character formation: How does this character become the best version of a thief or a paladin? The answer lies in the game’s implicit archetypes. As the character advances down the thief skill tree, they increasingly embody the archetypal Thief. This progression toward the archetype justifies the experience of playing as a thief, not the fact that other thieves accept the player’s character as one.

I do not know whether this is an actual motive for players of RPGs, but I think they can be used in this way. Just like the Babylonians entered the Paradise of Archetypes by reciting the Enuma Elish, players can enter it through RPGs. By creating a character, they inscribe an archetype onto their experience of the game, giving it purpose. Games thus become a brief escape from the tyranny of Liquid Modernity.

The main difference between the Babylonian reciting the Enuma Elish and the player of an RPG is that the player never fully commits. In the end, they are only playing with an archetype. They are not fully inhabiting it. In the end, they must leave the simulated Paradise of Archetypes and return to the messy, liquid world of late modernity.

Conclusion

Or do they? Perhaps RPG archetypes point toward a higher reality, one that still exists above the sea of Liquid Modernity. While the profane world of identity negotiation fills our day-to-day, the Sacred exists beyond its confines. The Paradise of Archetypes is still there, waiting for us to renew our world.

To enter again the lost Paradise, we will have to reconceive our place in the cosmos. We will have to trade our slippery process of identity creation for the hard work of character formation. We will have to conceive of ourselves as participants in a grand narrative, not self-created sailors on a formless tide of social life. Only then will the gates of this symbolic Paradise open to us.

Reforming the mind to think in this mythic, archetypal way is not easy. But it is worth the effort. Liquid Modernity has alienated us from our natural way of thinking. By nature, we are archetypal creatures who think in terms of cosmic narrative. We long to fit the mold of beings higher than ourselves. Instead, Liquid Modernity tempts us toward a myopic concern with this world—how I feel, and how others feel about me. It can look left or right, but not upward. Only myth can accomplish that.

I do not pretend that RPGs are the only key through the gates of Archetypal Paradise. But they are one technique for training the mind to think in terms of character formation, not identity creation. They are a tool for adopting the resilient mindset of our ancestors. And for that reason, RPG classes are a space for resisting the tides of Liquid Modernity. They are a pathway back to the Paradise of Archetypes.

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Battlefield is a series that has been close to my heart since I was a teenager. I have always enjoyed its combination of smooth gunplay, squad tactics, and clever map design. It all coheres together into, in my opinion, the finest multiplayer first-person shooter on the market.

Unfortunately, I cannot praise its singleplayer campaign the same way. Battlefield 6 has a baffling narrative. It attempts to tell a technothriller story about a military crisis in the near future. In practice, it shows how hard it is to tell such stories, and in the process teaches us something about the nature of narrative.

In this post, I am going to use Battlefield 6’s campaign to discuss Walter Fisher’s theory of narrative fidelity. This theory will teach us about what makes a good narrative, and why that matters.

Battlefield 6’s Bizarre Campaign

But first, some background. Battlefield 6 tells the story of a team of commandos and their battle against Pax Armata, a private military company. Pax has been dismantling NATO through a combination of terrorist attacks and diplomatic pressure. Dagger Squad, the commandos trying to stop Pax, interrogate their former CIA handler—Mills—to figure out why Pax is so powerful.

The interrogation of Mills serves as the narrative’s framing device. Dagger Squad asks her tough questions, which lead to flashbacks of missions the player plays through. The conflict begins with the protagonist, Dylan Murphy, getting ambushed by Pax. The rest of the game is about him rising to the occasion to lead Dagger Squad.

I actually like Murphy’s character. He does not get enough background, but his decisions make sense in the context of the story. I also am a fan of the “Soldier rises up to become squad leader trope.” He felt like an appropriate hero for this kind of story.

The real problem, however, is the antagonist: Kincaid. Kincaid is a Scottish terrorist who once served with NATO. Now, he helps Pax Armata win its improbable victories against the United States.

He fits some familiar tropes: A scorned ex-soldier, a man with evil political ambitions who is willing to use force, a man who calls out the hypocrisy of the United States. A similar (and better) version of this guy is Makarov in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

Dagger Squad eventually defeats Kincaid after a series of harrowing battles. Kincaid manages to assault Brooklyn, nearly kills the President, and does invade Gibraltar. But in defeating him, they discover that Pax Armata is not his creation. Someone else is behind it, and they have an idea who.

This leads the squad back to Mills’ house, the present moment. Mills finally reveals the secret: Pax Armata was created by the CIA to unite the American people against a common enemy. Unfortunately, Pax managed to throw off the CIA’s reigns. It now threatens the whole world.

Dagger Squad executes Mills after this revelation. And…that’s it. Pax Armata is still out there. The war is not won.

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The Impossibility of Technothrillers

This series of events is deeply implausible. For some people, that’s not a problem: It’s just a game. But when you are trying to appreciate a story, it is important that events make sense. It is especially important for the kind of story Battlefield 6 is trying to tell.

Battlefield 6 is a technothriller, a subgenre of thriller set in the near future. These stories tend to be characterized by how eerily plausible they are. They use real technical data about military tactics, hardware, and geopolitical crises to imagine a scenario that seems like it could happen.

Now, I love technothrillers. I read through nearly the entire Tom Clancy canon when I was a teenager. But I also recognize this genre has a unique problem: History does not cooperate. A technothriller is only as scary as its premise is plausible. And these days, the very concept of a technothriller is not very plausible.

The hey-day of technothrillers was in the 70s and 80s, when the Cold War loomed over everyone’s head. In those days, a nuclear apocalypse seemed far too likely. The Soviet Union was an appropriately powerful bad guy who could oppose the United States.

That world does not exist anymore. Not long ago, the United States managed to extract Venezuela’s head of state without so much as a major land invasion. Think about that: Despite all of Maduro’s efforts at evading capture, the U.S. just spirited him away in the middle of the night. The U.S.A. can routinely intervene in conflicts all the way around the world. America’s last major war flattened Saddam Hussein’s regime like a tin can.

The hard reality is that there is no real military threat to the United States. Sure, if America tried to regime change Russia or China, it would have a problem. But those countries could not even try to do the same to America. There is no power on Earth that could prevent America from sending SEAL Team 6 to capture the Prime Minister of the U.K., for instance. Norway would be powerless if America really did capture Greenland.

Thus, when Battlefield 6 wants us to believe that a private military company can launch missiles into Brooklyn, I just can’t believe it.

In Battlefield 6’s universe, a random Scotsman and a private military company can inflict more damage on America than the Soviet Union. The closest historical parallel is 9/11, an event that swiftly brought the retribution of the U.S. government. Even with all the handwaving about cyberattacks, the idea that Kincaid could force American ships to fire on Brooklyn does not ring true. Consequently, it fails the “thriller” requirement of a technothriller.

I am not trying to be political here, but I think the historical facts do not permit the kind of story Battlefield 6 is trying to tell. America may fail to occupy regions in the long term. But when it comes to short-term hard power, it is second to none. And for that reason, any technothriller that has America seriously threatened by a foreign power is simply bemusing.

The Importance of Narrative Fidelity

“So what?” you ask. “It’s just a game.” In one sense, that is true. However, it is also more than that.

Video games, like all stories, are a way we can interpret reality. They are a sense-making tool. Interpretations can be good or bad. It therefore behooves us to ask whether a given story is useful for interpretation. If we do not interrogate stories, we might find bad stories slipping into our interpretations, leading us astray.

This is how propaganda works. It creates a narrative that twists peoples’ perception of reality in favor of the propagandist. When the public’s sense-making tools are controlled by the government, the government has power over their worldview.

Walter Fisher, a theorist of narrative, argues that one way we can test a narrative is through narrative fidelity. This is the degree to which the story being told coheres together with all the other stories we believe. If someone tells a story about the Sun orbiting the Earth, we are rightfully skeptical because that claim does not cohere with all our other knowledge. It does not “ring true” to our experience of the world.

Narrative fidelity is precisely why Battlefield 6, and most technothrillers, fail as sensemaking stories. Against the background of countless military victories, the idea that America could be threatened in this way lacks narrative fidelity. It is not “realistic,” as gamers sometimes say. There simply is no Soviet Union analogue capable of serving as this kind of story’s antagonist. And when the game tries to make one in Pax Armata, it raises an eyebrow.

Battlefield 6’s story could work in another genre. If it were set in a sci-fi world, or an alternate reality where America is much weaker, or some other scenario, it might not struggle so much with narrative fidelity. But in trying to follow in the footsteps of Tom Clancy, it presents a vision of the near future that simply does not make sense.

Conclusion

I try to avoid commenting too directly on politics in these posts. Usually, I am trying to avoid leveling a direct judgment of a game’s quality, too. However, I feel that Battlefield 6’s campaign calls for such critiques.

It is one of the few games where the story made the multiplayer feel worse—not because the gameplay was bad, but because I knew it was framed by such a bewildering tale.

More importantly, I am concerned that games like Battlefield 6 can warp our view of reality. They may convince us, however subtly, that the world is far less safe than it really is. By most measures, things are getting better across the board.1 There is no Pax Armata threatening our shores. But the belief that there might be a Pax Armata equivalent could be used by unscrupulous actors to manipulate the American public. It could be used to justify infringing on our freedoms in the name of security, for example.

None of this means that Battlefield 6 is overall a bad game, or that you are wrong to play it. All it means is that we should be careful not to let it influence our perceptions too much. With that out of the way, I’m ready to go play another round of Conquest.

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The most profound game I’ve played in 2026 is a Soulslike about a hermit crab.

Another Crab’s Treasure is about a hermit crab, Kril, and his quest to regain his shell. After being informed he has unpaid taxes, a Loan Shark repossesses it until he can pay off his debt. To that end, Kril must venture into the ocean and collect microplastics, the currency of the ocean economy.

All the while, a mysterious Gunk is corrupting the ocean’s citizens. The Gunk drives them mad. The feral creatures attack anyone and everyone, even people they just met. To get his shell back, Kril will also have to confront the source of the Gunk and avoid succumbing to it himself.

There are many ways to approach Another Crab’s Treasure. It can be played in light of the Anthropocene, as an Eco-Marxist critique, or even a Libertarian tract. There is certainly something to all of these.

However, I prefer an angle that is less obvious. I will focus on the first act of the game since it especially stood out to me. Kril’s first forays into the wider ocean begin with his arrival in the Duchy of Slacktide. Here, he faces the realities of a world that has changed since his days in the tidepool.

The first act of Another Crab’s Treasure is a critique of Thomas Hobbes’ social contract theory. It argues that the State, far from securing people’s welfare, makes their lives worse. To understand this critique, I will first explain Hobbes’ theory of the social contract, then interpret the game accordingly.

Hobbes’ Leviathan and the Social Contract

Where does society come from? It’s an old question for which there is probably not a single answer. However, one of the enduring explanations comes from a 17th century thought experiment: The State of Nature.

Thomas Hobbes, the name most famously associated with this idea, asks us to imagine a world without any governing order. In this world, it is every man for himself:

Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man.

— Thomas Hobbes1

As Hobbes sees it, the ordinary state of the world is chaos. There is a finite number of resources, and people have infinite desires. Even if one or two people should be friendly, the competition for resources will make violence inevitable. That is not even counting the other causes of conflict. Humanity, in its natural state, is at war with itself.

Hobbes’ solution to this problem is Absolute Monarchy. The only way to prevent total anarchy is to have a singular Power capable of putting everyone in line. That power is the government, the source of laws. Thus, to avoid violence in the State of Nature, everyone must agree to cede some of their rights to the central power. Only then can there be peace.

Technically, Hobbes is proposing a social contract theory of society. Society does not just exist out there in nature. It comes into being by a sort of contract individual members of a society make with each other. Hobbes’ version of that contract is a trade the people make with the sovereign: Freedom for security. By this joint agreement, the Leviathan of the state puts an end to the war of all against all.

Most Americans would view this version of the contract as tyranny, but it is important to remember that Hobbes wrote Leviathan in the midst of the English Civil War. When the fabric of society is unraveling around you, it is tempting to imagine that a powerful figure could just pull it all back together again. That temptation is not peculiar to his own time.

Hobbes’ argument is a foundation stone for the rhetoric of authority. It is less important for its logical soundness than its imaginative power. The State of Nature conjures images of dense forests, filled with headhunters hurling darts against frantically fleeing men, who themselves carry treasure they took from another tribe not moments before. Such a maelstrom of brutality calls out for someone to stop it.

From this rhetoric of authority comes many familiar ideas—that laws require a supreme enforcer to exist at all, that civilizational progress depends on a powerful state, that freedom and property are in peril unless a sovereign can guarantee them. These premises often simply slip by unquestioned on the back of anxiety about the State of Nature. That is the true power of the Leviathan.

Another Crab’s Treasure calls these premises into question. Kril stares into the face of the Leviathan and dares to ask: Is the State of Nature all that bad?

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Interrogating Slacktide’s Social Contract

There are many places Another Crab’s Treasure questions the importance of authority, but none are so Hobbesian as Slacktide. This early game level meditates heavily on the validity of authority. The Duchy of Slacktide sets side by side the supposed merits of authority and the harms that authority creates.

The game uses this section to argue that the State is not necessarily better than the State of Nature—in fact, it could be worse.

Slacktide is a frontier territory. In other words, it is a prime candidate for Hobbes’ State of Nature. Before the Duchy is established, no state steps in to interfere when someone takes someone else’s stuff. Theoretically, this means it should be a whirlpool of violence. Our protagonist must be running for his life, right?

Well, it’s not that simple. Kril does seem afraid of birds, but otherwise he enjoys the freedom to sit in his shell. That is, he is free until the Loan Shark shows up to repossess it for unpaid taxes.

When Kril says he is confused, the Loan Shark relies on some very Hobbesian rhetoric to justify his actions:

Ookay, so basically the Duchess of Slacktide owns this whole area now. And she puts a lot of effort into keeping it safe. So everyone who benefits from that has to abide by her rules and pay up once per tide.

In other words, Kril benefits from the social contract, so he must sacrifice for it. Kril objects that the area is not safe, but the Loan Shark ignores him and demands the taxes, ultimately repossessing his shell.

Note the theme here: The intervention of the State makes Kril less safe, not more. Now, without the protection of his shell, he is forced to manage the privations of Nature by himself. He is worse off than he was before. For all the Hobbesian rhetoric about the State securing the safety of its members, it has manifestly failed.

The failure of the Duchy’s social contract becomes even clearer in other conversations. For instance, the crab Verne gets trapped in a tower surrounded by feral enemies. Kril rescues him and asks him why he does not move somewhere safer.

Verne: And give up this prime land the duchess offered me? No way, moray!

Kril: The duchess gave you…land? Isn’t there land all over the place?

Verne: Ah, the simple insights of country folk! This really is the life!

The exchange says a lot about the Hobbesian rhetoric of authority. Verne can patronizingly dismiss Kril’s observation because Hobbes’ theory lurks in the back of his mind. Kril simply does not understand how the world works, Verne thinks. If he understood the social contract, then he would know that land is distributed by the Duchess and protected by her—despite that “protection” not being there when he needed it.

Even creatures who otherwise dislike the social contract have been brainwashed by its rhetoric. One snail commiserates with Kril about their taxes. When Kril says he is trying to get his tax burden relieved, the snail instantly turns against him:

Snail: Oh, I see how it is. You’re some kinda freeloader, aren’t you? Bet you think you can skirt your taxes while the rest of us keep this society together, do you?

Kril: You just said—

Snail: You hermit crabs are all the same. Wearin’ the shells the rest of us worked so hard to create with our own mantles!

Herein lies a key element of why social contracts hold together, even when people do not like them. They make its members feel like they are contributing toward something, a common good. They resent people who seemingly don’t contribute toward that shared good. Sure, no one likes taxes. But they like people who dodge taxes even less.

The epitome of the game’s Hobbesian rhetoric of authority is Captain Nephro, leader of the Duchess’ guard.

When Kril makes the mistake of taking a can from the vending machine, Nephro storms out of his castle and accuses him of breaking the law. Kril reasonably objects that he did not know and offers to give the can back. Nephro remains dissatisfied. Kril must pay for his transgression with his life.

For Captain Nephro, Kril’s affront is a threat to the validity of the state. The Leviathan depends on everyone fearing it. If anyone can break its laws without suffering punishment from the state, the Leviathan dies and the social contract falls apart. This is why Kril cannot just return the can. The harm is not that he took something that did not belong to him. The harm was that he damaged the fear the Leviathan depends on to survive.

When Kril finally does get to see the Duchess Magista, he finds someone utterly uninterested in the welfare of her subjects. She cares only about how beautiful her palace is, and whether it outmatches her rivals. Little wonder that her supposed “protection” is so limited: She is busy protecting herself.

The ideal Hobbesian society does not look like this. It is supposed to be a harmonious place where the sovereign protects the lives of its citizens in exchange for their obedience. Every individual joins together into a single, interlocking whole, an unstoppable dragon that conquers the State of Nature—a Leviathan.

But the Duchy of Slacktide resembles nothing of the sort. All the dangers of Nature are still around, with the additional danger of Loan Sharks and the Duchess’ guards. These additional dangers rely on Hobbes’ argument to justify their actions, but they do not provide the benefits Hobbes says they should.

The game’s point seems to be that in practice, Hobbes’ rhetoric does not fulfill its promises. The state does not protect individuals from the State of Nature; the social contract merely compounds the misery they already suffer. The state does not transcend the war of all against all. It is simply another participant in it. For that reason, it cannot fulfill the function Hobbes outlines for it.

A Prelude to Marx

I think the most interesting thing about Another Crab’s Treasure is that it shows how Hobbes created the intellectual conditions for Marx. Karl Marx, the (in)famous founder of Marxism, critiqued capitalism on the grounds that it alienates humans from their labor. It is not right, Marx thought, that a whole class of individuals should sit around and profit off the work of others simply because they invested money.

But Hobbes would argue otherwise. The elite are justified in taking the fruits of others’ labor because they protect the ability to labor at all. Without the Leviathan, no one could farm or build factories. They would be too busy trying to survive the State of Nature.

Another Crab’s Treasure, while not fully embracing Marxism, seems to come down on the side of Marx. Over and over, Kril suffers the injustice of powerful people harming him in the name of property rights. The elite care more about wealth than Kril’s wellbeing.

The second section of the game leans more strongly into a Marxist direction than the first, but Kril’s experiences in Slacktide show where those Marxist sympathies come from. They come from the social contract, the sense that the individual has been forced into a bargain he never wanted. Kril never asked for the Duchess’s “protection,” but he has to pay for it anyway. The social contract says so.

The game suggests that the social contract is ultimately a lie, a smokescreen used by the powerful to justify their oppression. The Leviathan does more harm than good. Sure, Kril had to endure the dangers of Seagulls in the tide pool. But he is certainly no better off under the Leviathan’s watchful eye. The Hobbesian social contract, and the rhetoric of authority that goes with it, is a dangerous falsehood, the game thinks.

Conclusion

There is much more to Another Crab’s Treasure than this opening act, but it struck me as an interesting critique of Hobbes. The game rejects the thesis that a social contract bound by the authority of a sovereign secures the individual. On the contrary, the social contract is an illusion that justifies oppression. The Leviathan does not conquer the State of Nature; it simply becomes another player in it.

The game articulates this critique through Kril’s experiences in the Duchy of Slacktide. The injustice he suffers there shows how the social contract can be used as propaganda for a tyrant. The Duchess Magista, far from protecting Kril, makes the world more dangerous for him.

But I want to end by revisiting the context Hobbes was writing in. Leviathan was written as an antidote to civil war. This was a man who understood what it meant for society to break down. He saw something like the State of Nature with his own eyes. It is easy to sit back and accuse him of supporting tyranny from our comfy, modern states. If we have experienced civil war, it might not be so easy.

Thus, I think it is important for games to approach these topics with nuance. There is a side to this story that Another Crab’s Treasure does not tell, or at least, does not dwell on. I would like to see a game tell that side with the same brilliance Another Crab’s Treasure articulates its critique.

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In the previous post, I explored how Elden Ring’s two original factions position themselves as the guardians of the Sacred.

The Golden Order and the Hornsent both legitimized their regimes by claiming they had a special connection to the source of the Cosmos. For the Golden Order, this was their veneration of the Erdtree and the Elden Ring. For the Hornsent, it was their quest to build Enir-Ilim and harness the power of the Crucible. The two regimes’ beliefs formed the central worldviews of the setting.

But a wide variety of “profane” factions occupy the Lands Between as well. According to the Golden Order, these factions lie beyond the boundaries of the Sacred. They defy the Elden Ring’s Order and therefore have no place in the Cosmos. To the dominant powers, they occupy the profane space of monstrous chaos.

Despite the monstrous imagery, I want to argue that Elden Ring does not position these “profane” beings as objectively outside the Sacred. On the contrary, their supposed “profanity” is more of a rhetorical strategy than an objective fact.

In reality, all of Elden Ring’s main factions have their own vision of the Sacred and the Profane. This vision is embodied in key characters and important places. These places are “cosmic pillars,” to borrow Eliade’s term, that serve as the center of the world order they wish to found.

Victory in this conflict of visions boils down to who can declare the others unclean. The one who succeeds will inherit the earth. Everyone else will suffer the shame of profanity.

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The Concept of Uncleanness

First, what does it mean for something to be “profane”? The religion scholar Mircea Eliade defined profanity as a state of homogeneity: Everything is the same. Nothing marks out one place as more special than another, or one time as particularly important. The profane is without order, and thus without meaning.

If you have ever gone a long time without a job or something to do, you know something about the experience of profanity. One day fades into the next. You have no agenda, nothing important to invest in, nothing ordering your life beyond momentary whims. Every direction leads to nowhere. It is a thoroughly demoralizing experience.

Now, imagine applying that sense of aimlessness to the entire universe. To the religious person, a wholly profane world is unbearable. The structures that make up the world give meaning to life. Their disappearance would mean disaster. Hence, the religious man must regularly make contact with the Sacred to maintain contact with cosmic meaning.

This is where the concept of “uncleanness” comes in. Profanity is sticky. It clings to a person as they go about daily life, especially when they encounter cosmic breakdown. Death, disease, excrement, even childbirth—events like these exposes someone to entropy. That entropy sticks to the person, rendering them unfit for an experience of the Sacred—in a word, unclean. Disorder cannot exist in the presence of Order. Getting rid of the uncleanness requires some sort of cleansing ritual.

To the Western mind, the most obvious example of uncleanness is the Mosaic Law’s many prohibitions on food, touching corpses, dealing with lepers, etc. These were not exactly the same as moral violations; a leper was not sinning by having leprosy. They were simply tainted by cosmic disorder.

Japan is also quite familiar with ritual cleanliness through the concept of kegare. It is a key element of Shintoism.1 Like in other religions, it is possible to pass out of cosmic harmony by becoming polluted with profanity, which requires ritual purification to remove.

I am far from the first person to discuss kegare in the context of Fromsoftware games.2 However, I think I am the first to point out that kegare exists in two levels in Elden Ring. It first exists on an objective, Cosmic level. It second exists on a subjective, rhetorical level. While the world of Elden Ring does objectively become full of ritual pollution, the game’s factions also see each other as embodying that pollution.

The Allegedly Profane Factions

My focus is on the second level of kegare—the subjective level. The Golden Order, the dominant power of The Lands Between, tries to delegitimize competing factions by describing them as unclean. But this is a rhetorical strategy, not objective reality. The truth is that these non-human factions are only “profane” in the eyes of the Leyndell elite.

In reality, the “monstrous” factions have their own vision of the world, their own center of the universe, their own ideas about purity and cleanliness. They seek to establish their own axis mundi—their “cosmic pillar,” in Eliade’s terms. And as the Golden Order crumbles, they rise to take its place.

The Servants of Rot

The Scarlet Rot is an Outer God, a spirit of nature, that has afflicted the world since time immemorial. Once confined to the Lake of Rot, its influence has recently spread into the wild swamps of Aeonia.

It would be easy to mistake the Rot for pure kegare, and the Golden Order certainly would. But the Scarlet Rot is not antithetical to life. Far from it, for it is the source of a whole host of new lifeforms. These creatures are bound in essence to the Outer God and are champions for its vision of the cosmos.

The foot soldiers of Rot are the Kindred. These insectoid halberdiers patrol places where the Rot has invested itself, such as the Swamp of Aeonia and the Lake of Rot. They can even be found worshipping the Rot (see the previous picture).

The Scarlet Rot’s true champion, however, is Malenia.

She was born an Empyrean, carrying the scarlet rot. An Empyrean...is no mere demigod. In the age of the Elden Ring, and Queen Marika, the precious Empyrean was born. A new god to forge a new Order.

Since Malenia fought Radahn, and the great scarlet flower blossomed in Aeonia, I have dedicated myself to her. And to the resplendence of the Order of Rot. The cycle of decay and rebirth.

— Sage Gowry

Malenia is unusual among the demigods in that she can become a true god. In Elden Ring terminology, that means she can embody a new order for the cosmos. Just as Marika embodied the Golden Order, Malenia may embody the Order of Rot.

In this new Order, the unrestrained process of “decay and rebirth” would be held Sacred. The Golden Order sought to arrest this cycle through manipulation of the Elden Ring. The Scarlet Rot wants it to run free. It wants the carrion bird, the scavenger, and the sickly to be the pre-eminent beings in the Lands Between. The Golden Order and its stifling cleanliness would be profane.

Malenia is not a willing participant in this plan, but she is an effective one. She spreads the Rot wherever she goes. Her actions brought the entire region of Aeonia under the Rot’s influence.

She even created a new axis mundi for the Order of Rot. During her legendary battle with General Radahn, she embraced the Scarlet Rot’s power and bloomed a new cosmic pillar into existence: The Heart of Aeonia.

This withered bloom is the Scarlet Rot’s equivalent of the Erdtree. For the Kindred, the Cleanrot Knights, and the other Rot-blighted creatures, it is the center of the world. It is a throne waiting for the Goddess of Rot to return.

From this new cosmic pillar, the Servants of Rot might free the entire Lands Between of the Elden Ring and restore the cycle of decay and rebirth. This would not be the end of the world. It would be the beginning of a new one—a world where “vermin” are no longer hunted.

The Scarlet Rot, therefore, does not necessarily represent the dissolution of the cosmos entirely. It is not an embrace of the profane. Instead, it represents an alternative vision of what is Sacred and what is Profane. To the Golden Order, the Servants of Rot are the epitome of kegare. But to the Scarlet Rot, it is the Golden Order that is unclean.

Those Who Live In Death

Godwyn the Golden, most beloved of Marika’s children, was betrayed. The Black Knife Assassins used the power of Destined Death to murder the immortal demigod.

But Godwyn’s was not a true death. The assassins killed his soul, but his body lingered. The undead corpse warped into a monstrous creature who spread death throughout the Lands Between. All who came into contact with Godwyn’s Deathroot were inflicted with his condition. Unable to rest, the dead returned to haunt the living.

These are Those Who Live in Death.

At first glance, these skeletal creatures seem like a good candidate for an unclean faction. And from the Golden Order’s perspective, they certainly are. However, just like the Servants of Rot, Those Who Live in Death simply reflect a different ideal of the Sacred.

The player learns what Those Who Live in Death stand for through Fia, the Deathbed Companion. She is their unofficial spokeswoman.

The best articulation of the Dead’s view of the Sacred comes from the Baldachin’s Blessing Fia provides.

Favor bestowed by a deathbed companion. Protection of a hidden temple in the guise of a bedchamber.

Uses FP to temporarily boost poise.

The favor allows one to forget any aches and pains. In Death, there is only peace, for in Death, there can be no sensation.

This Blessing articulates an ideal that is precisely the opposite of both the Scarlet Rot and the Golden Order. The Scarlet Rot desires a wholly unrestrained cycle of rebirth driven by decay. The Golden Order also wants a cycle of rebirth, but bound to the Erdtree.

In contrast, Those Who Live in Death desire to end the cycle altogether. They want to usher in a world where everyone is blissfully unconscious, as though in a dreamless sleep. Godwyn was the first to achieve this ideal but the rest of the Dead follow in his footsteps. Though their bodies may be restless, their soul has entered an eternal rest.

It is hard to miss the Buddhist connotations lurking behind Those Who Live in Death. The standard Buddhist story is that everything is trapped by their ego in a cycle of rebirth—samsara. Escaping the cycle requires transcending the ego by recognizing there is no essential “you.” By liberating oneself from the ego, one fades back into the whole, free of all sensation and thus free of pain. This is enlightenment, or nirvana.

It would be a mistake to equate nirvana with nonexistence in the Western sense of the term. Rather, it is often compared to the snuffing out of a flame. The ancient Indians theorized that fire sprang forth from some mysterious, unseen substance. When the fire goes out, it does not cease to exist. It returns to its original, peaceful state.

For the same reason, Those Who Live in Death should not be thought of as mindless corpses. They are not dead; they are undead. This vague state between life and death is an excellent metaphor for the quasi-nonexistence of nirvana.

The behavior of Those Who Live in Death also suggests they have not quite achieved the complete cessation of desire. Fia describes them as suffering from persecution and longing for a Lord.

Only Godwyn has achieved the ideal of liberation. Only he has achieved total end of sensation. He cannot be harmed any longer by the cruel world.

For this reason, Godwyn’s warped body has become a cosmic pillar for Those Who Live in Death. It represents all that they wish the world to be. If Fia and the Dead achieve their Age of the Duskborn, it will mean all will become as Godwyn is: Enlightened.

Again, this is not the total dissolution of the Cosmos. Despite their monstrous appearance, Those Who Live in Death do have a vision of the Sacred and the Profane. It simply differs from the Golden Order’s ideal of deathlessness.

Ranni and the Age of Stars

The last “profane” faction I will cover is Ranni’s Court, and I will cover it all too briefly.

Ranni is the unseen agent behind many events in the Lands Between. The daughter of Radagon and Rennala, Queen of Caria, Ranni was blessed with a special connection to the stars. She is fated to alter the world forever, if the night sky has its way.

Like Malenia, Ranni was also born an Empyrean. She is capable of taking Marika’s place by embodying a new order for the Cosmos. This fact has driven her entire life.

The gods of the Lands Between are not the supreme power. That is supposedly the Greater Will, an unseen cosmic deity who rules through the Two Fingers. The Two Fingers carefully keep their grip on whoever becomes a god. When Marika’s time ended and Ranni’s reign began, they would be the ones controlling her destiny.

Ranni sacrificed everything to free herself from their control. She murdered Godwyn’s soul so she could escape her own flesh. She plunged the Lands Between into civil war to escape their power.

Most importantly, she forged a pact between herself and the Nox, a subterranean people considered unholy by the Golden Order. The Nox were star-worshippers who envisioned an alternative not merely to the Golden Order, but to the entire system the Two Fingers created.

Their equipment tells some of their story.

Silk hood worn by the monks of the Eternal City.

Long ago, the Nox invoked the ire of the Greater Will, and were banished deep underground. Now they live under a false night sky, in eternal anticipation of their liege. Of the coming age of the stars. And their Lord of Night.

The Nox wish to usher in an epoch free of the Greater Will’s control. Their agent for achieving this is the “Lord of Night.” They tried various experiments to artificially create this Lord, but none succeeded.

Ranni presented an alternative. Her hatred of the Two Fingers made her a natural ally of the Nox, who helped her perform the Night of Black Knives and kill Godwyn. But it was not to last. Ranni would be no one’s pawn—not even for the Nox.

Despite her independent spirit, Ranni still bears the hopes and dreams of the Nox. She remains aligned with them on what the Lands Between should regard as Sacred, and what should be considered Profane. That is, she still believes in an Age of Stars.

Ranni explains what she aims to achieve with the Age of Stars. She begins with her introduction:

I am the witch Ranni.
I stole Death long ago,
and search now for the dark path.
That I might one day upend the whole of it,
and rid the world of all that came before.

For Ranni, it is not enough to merely tweak the Elden Ring to fit her vision. The Elden Ring, the source of the Two Fingers’ power, is the problem. She seeks total revolution.

What will her revolution achieve? She explains again:

Mine will be an order not of gold,
but the stars and moon of the chill night.

I would keep them far
from the earth beneath our feet.
As it is now, life,
and souls,
and order
are bound tightly together,
but I would have them at great remove.

And have the certainties of
sight, emotion, faith, and touch...
All become impossibilities.

The darkness metaphor is key to interpreting this somewhat obscure speech. Ranni is offering the opposite of the Golden Order.

The Golden Order promised an age of light. Through dogmatic faith in the Erdtree, they would provide the world with ironclad knowledge of reality. What you are, why you exist, and what you should do were all answered by the fundamentals. The individual has no real existence; “all things can be conjoined.”

The Age of Stars is a “dark” age in that the questions are not answered for the individual. Like Ranni, everyone is forced to go on a journey of self-determination to find their own meaning. That is not a comfortable path. It is dark, and cold, just as Ranni says. But it is the one she and her companions consider Sacred.

Just like all the other factions, Ranni has her own cosmic pillar to signify her worldview. In this case, it is Ranni’s Rise.

This expertly built tower is in the highlands beyond the lakes of Liurnia. It is a frigid place, revealed by the huge crystals flanking the door. The Glintstone Dragon Adula lurks in the surrounding region. Reaching Ranni’s Rise is far from easy, for it requires passing through the deadly Carian Manor. Only the determined can persevere through the many obstacles—a perfect symbol for self-determination.

Ranni’s Rise is where her court gathers. Together, they join her pursuit of the Age of Stars. Iji and Blaidd both share Ranni’s conviction that the freedom to choose one’s own fate is Sacred. For this reason, they are willing to sacrifice even their lives to ensure her plan succeeds. That is their own act of self-determination.

For all members of Ranni’s Court, the influence of the Two Fingers and the Golden Order is loathsome. The Age of Stars is their last, best attempt to cleanse the Lands Between of the Greater Will forever.

A War of Cosmic Pillars

There are many more “profane” factions in Elden Ring, but I think these three are sufficient to illustrate the point. The Golden Order portrays the Scarlet Rot, Those Who Live in Death, and the Nox as kegare—unclean. But to these factions, the Golden Order is the one that is unclean. Kegare is used as a rhetorical strategy to denigrate one’s enemies. It is not necessarily an objective state of the world.

Kegare is the product of cosmic breakdown, but what that looks like varies depending on one’s worldview. All the factions have different ideas of what should count as Sacred and Profane, and thus different ideas of kegare (pollution).

For Ranni, kegare is a product of the Golden Order seeking to control everyone’s fate. For Those Who Live in Death, kegare results from the suffering caused by the Golden Order Fundamentalists. And for the Scarlet Rot, kegare comes from the sterile cycle of rebirth promoted by the Erdtree.

The Erdtree is the central pollutant for these rival ideologies. It is the source from which all kegare flows. In order to purify the world, the Erdtree must either be displaced by a new Cosmic Pillar or captured. That, or these rivals must go extinct.

Conclusion

I previously described the Problem of Pluralism as the problem of incompatible worldviews trying to coexist in the same society. This Problem is zero sum—for one side to win, all others must lose. The Golden Order’s massacre of the Hornsent showed the horrific violence that can follow such a victory.

But the contest between the Golden Order and the “profane” factions reveals the rhetorical, symbolic element of the Problem. The ruling power’s enemies must be killed symbolically as well as physically. Their meaning must be erased from the universe.

This symbolic destruction extends even to the physical production of space. The enemy’s center of the world must be replaced with the new regime’s center. The Problem of Pluralism can result in a rhetorical, as well as physical, battle.

In the final analysis, Elden Ring shows how the concepts of Sacred and Profane can be weaponized politically. It shows us how kegare can be deployed to justify horrific cruelty to enemies. The logic is simple: If the enemy is pollution, then we are justified in purifying the world of their presence. Every faction’s atrocity stem from this simple calculation.

My prayer is that weaponizing kegare remains confined to the Lands Between.

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The idea of the sacred is everywhere in Elden Ring. Churches, magic groves, heroic tombs—The Lands Between is filled with places that demarcate the sacred from the profane. These are places where existential meaning has been concentrated. They show what life is for, and why it matters. This much is clear even from a gameplay perspective. If you ever wonder where you are supposed to go, walk toward the giant glowing tree.

Many games play with an idea of the sacred, however. Fromsoftware is not the only developer to realize that putting a giant object in the center of the map orients the world, and that this object ought to have religious significance. These center points, these axis mundi as Mircea Eliade called them, are a way to provide coherence to the world.1 Games have long used these ideas in their design.

What makes Elden Ring a cut above most games is a simple insight: Not everyone agrees about what the sacred is. The Lands Between is a place chock full of competing factions, all with different ideas of the sacred. And this, it turns out, is a source of conflict.

In other words, Elden Ring is obsessed with what we might call the problem of pluralism. What is one supposed to do when there are competing ideas of the sacred? Part of the game’s genius is the way it explores this problem.

The Problem of Pluralism

But first, a word about the problem of pluralism.

The Problem of Pluralism is the simple fact that people have dramatically conflicting worldviews. A worldview is a configuration of space, time, and agency oriented around something that is considered sacred. When worldviews diverge enough, coexistence becomes difficult, if not impossible. A community cannot form when people live in entirely different worlds.

For a real-world example of this problem, consider World War II. World War II was a clash between three contradictory worldviews: Fascism, liberalism, and communism. No society can be founded on more than one of these at the same time. A liberal society might have fascist sympathizers, and a communist society may have liberal pockets, but only one of these can rule.

The reason worldviews become incompatible is that they hold different things sacred. As Mircea Eliade argued, the sacred has a world-making power. It imbues space, time, and people with structure and meaning. When those structures dramatically conflict, someone has to lose.

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The Two Foundational Worldviews of Elden Ring

Fortunately, video games let us engage in this kind of conflict without actually harming anyone. Elden Ring is one such example. It creates an environment where players can experiment with different worldviews.

Elden Ring’s factions all hold different things sacred. I will try to break down a few of these to show just what they value, and where that appears in-game.

What follows are analyses of the two central belief systems in Elden Ring. Everything else in the game exists either as support or as a response to them.

The Hornsent

The Shadow of the Erdtree expansion introduced the first historically powerful faction in the Elden Ring universe, the Hornsent. I am covering them first because their worldview is foundational to everything that happens in the base game.

The Hornsent were a race of horned warriors. They once ruled the land under what is now known as the Scadutree. They were cruel masters, having enslaved a tribe of peaceful shamans. They tortured the shamans by lashing them with whips and stuffing them into pots.

The future god Marika was one of these shamans. After making a deal with the Two Fingers, she escaped and founded her own movement. She eventually sent her son, the warlord Messmer, to burn Hornsent civilization to the ground. The Land of Shadow was sealed away from The Lands Between, a gloomy netherworld guarded by Messmer and his fiery knights.

The Hornsent considered the Crucible sacred. It was the foundation of their worldview. While the game is somewhat vague about what the Crucible actually is, it seems to be some kind of primordial force the spurs life onward and changes it.

Consider the description of the Fine Crucible Feather Talisman:

A talisman fashioned from thin feathers that embody the aspects of various creatures. Said to have grown on the human body long ago.

Improves backsteps but increases damage taken at all times.

Hornsent view the Crucible as sacred for the refinement wrought through its evolutionary gifts. Most prominently, their tangled horns.

This paints the Crucible as a wild, vibrant force that produces change. No form is static; one creature is always turning into another under the pressure of evolution. The Crucible is nature, red in tooth and claw.

But the Hornsent believed that the Crucible was not arbitrary. The Crucible was “refining” the things it changed. It improved them. That raised an important question: If the Crucible was making progress, what was it progressing toward?

The answer, of course, was divinity. If one could absorb all the power the Crucible was putting into life, then that person would be as sacred as the Crucible itself.

The Hornsent’s entire sense of space and time oriented around channeling the Crucible’s power. The spiral became a sacred symbol. Spirals were circular, yet they progressed upward. Their horns, too, were markers of sacred status. It showed that the Hornsent had been touched by the Crucible themselves.

All of this culminated in the Hornsent Manhattan Project, the Gates of Divinity. Their vast tower, stretching up to the heavens, was forged from the malleable flesh of shamans. All those bodies congealed together would channel the power of the Crucible to produce the god they were waiting for. This was their centerpoint, their axis mundi.

Unfortunately for them, it produced Marika instead. It is not entirely clear how Marika got her power, but it had something to do with passing through the Gates of Divinity. Perhaps the Gates allowed her to absorb the Elden Ring within herself. Whatever the case, it greatly empowered the Hornsent’s worst enemy, ultimately leading to the destruction of their culture.

The Golden Order

Marika’s faction succeeded the Hornsent as the masters of the Lands Between. Followers of the Erdtree, they conquered their rivals and established their dominance. The Erdtree’s bounty seemed to promise an epoch of unending plenty.

What sort of “bounty” did the Erdtree provide? Lore experts have suggested that the Erdtree’s gift was life itself.2 Under the reign of the Erdtree, natural birth ceased or dramatically dropped. People were literally born from the Erdtree, seemingly a product of the unending life-energy produced by the tree.

It was not to last. In time, the Erdtree’s blessings ceased to flow. The Erdtree became more an icon of religious faith, and the religious power enforcing it was the Golden Order. While life continued to be recycled by the Erdtree, new life was scarce.

The Golden Order was a stark rejection of the Hornsent’s ideology. Where they prized the proliferation of new lifeforms, the Golden Order valued only traditional “human” organisms. Only the life born from the Erdtree, the life that resembled Marika, was valid. Everything else was an aberration—the artificial Albinaurics, the Omen with their feral horns, and the Fire Giants with their evil fire worship. These beings have no natural place within the order of the Erdtree. Contra the Hornsent, there is only one respectable form of life.

The central tenets of the Golden Order explain why they cared so much about life forms. They boil down to two: “The Law of Regression” and “The Law of Causality.” Both of these are also Incantations that scale with the Faith stat.

The text of the Law of Regression states:

Incantation of the Golden Order fundamentalists. One of the key fundamentals.

Heals all negative statuses, dispels special effects, and reveals mimicry in all its forms.

The fundamentalists describe the Golden Order through the powers of regression and causality. Regression is the pull of meaning; that all things yearn eternally to converge.

Put simply, the Golden Order believes reality is a fundamental unity. The appearance of distinction is merely a mask for deeper Whole. Or, to borrow an Indian formulation of this principle, atman is brahmin. The Individual only manifests an aspect of the Whole.

Miriel, our favorite Turtle Pope, also articulates the Law of Regression in some of his dialogue.

The idea that “all things can be conjoined” betrays the Golden Order’s totalitarian tendencies. Nothing exists that the Golden Order cannot subsume into itself. Logically, this produces the second tenet of Golden Order Fundamentalism: The Law of Causality.

One of the incantations of the Golden Order fundamentalists. One of the key fundamentals.

Manifests a small ring of causality within that allows the caster to automatically retaliate upon receiving a certain number of blows.

The fundamentalists describe the Golden Order through the powers of regression and causality. Causality is the pull between meanings; that which links all things in a chain of relation.

This Law’s central claim is about the fundamental nature of meaning. Meanings are a bit like magnets; they are trying to come together into the Golden Order’s Whole. Nothing in the final analysis is truly contradictory. It all fits together in a perfect Order.

The metaphysics underwriting this entire philosophy is the Elden Ring itself. The Elden Ring is to the Golden Order as the Crucible was to the Hornsent. It is the centerpoint of reality, the natural law belying all things. The runes that abide in everything are but the outworking of this magnificent engine. It is the holy of holies to the Golden Order.

The vision of reality the Golden Order Fundamentalists believes is therefore highly structured. The world is fundamentally Order, not Chaos. Life ebbs and flows from the Erdtree in a cycle of rebirth. And this entire Order revolves around the Elden Ring, perfectly contained in the vessel of Marika. Therefore, life forms ought to reflect that perfect Order: Two arms, two legs, no horns, and the Erdtree’s light shining in their eyes. All else is an unacceptable aberration.

There is one small problem with the Golden Order’s theology: Many creatures exist outside the Erdtree system. Their very existence seems to refute the Law of Regression. Not everything longs to fit together into the Golden Order’s Whole. Some creatures cannot be subsumed into the Order.

Rather than adjust their beliefs, the Golden Order fundamentalists opt to destroy the evidence. Hunters like D ruthlessly persecute Those Who Live In Death, and no more mercy is shown to the Albinaurics, creatures of Scarlett Rot, the Omens, or any number of other “profane” species. But their fates will have to wait for another post, as space does not permit treating them all here.

Conclusion

The Hornsent and the Golden Order hold two diametrically opposed worldviews. One believes in the primacy of Chaos; the other the supremacy of Order. Their differences literally go down to the very bedrock of reality.

The Crucible represents the vitality of nature to the Hornsent, but it represents rampant chaos to the Golden Order. And the Elden Ring, while a reassuring source of divine providence to Golden Order Fundamentalists, represents tyranny to the Hornsent and their successors.

These two cultures hold two very different things sacred. Consequently, the worlds they seek to build are fundamentally incompatible. How is a pluralistic society supposed to accommodate such deep divides? In the case of The Lands Between, they could not.

Knowing the land is doomed to conflict, is tempting to ask which worldview Elden Ring thinks is right. But I think the game does not give any easy answers. Both the Golden Order’s tyranny and the Hornsent’s lust for violence are critiqued. Neither walks away as the unalloyed good of the story. Whether one pursues Order or Chaos, there is always a cost.

The challenge of a pluralistic society is learning how to balance those costs. Ideally, one can create space for seeking the best worldview without resorting to total tyranny. The question of our time is whether that ideal is achievable, or as has happened too many times before, the public sphere will collapse under the weight of worldviews vying for supremacy.

I do not know the answer.

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Like Knights of the Old Republic 2, the original Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic has a rich set of themes. Everyone has already discussed the obvious ones: Memory, guilt, the Hero’s Journey. But I want to discuss how the character of Revan represents the movement of history.

The philosophical movement of history is, I think, the most profound theme of the entire Star Wars Legends continuity. In this pre-Disney version of the saga, Star Wars spans thousands upon thousands of years. It is not just the story of one family. It is a story about the titanic clash of spiritual and political forces. These forces are not driven purely by material concerns, like economics. They are driven by ideas. Hence, history in Star Wars is moved by philosophy.

No one better embodies the movement of history in Star Wars than the player character of Knights of the Old Republic, Revan. He is a microcosm of the Star Wars Legends continuity as a whole. Therefore, it is worthwhile to look at his character development.

To help understand Revan, I am going to draw a bit of theory from Hegel. This will not be a truly Hegelian analysis. However, I think Hegel’s dialectics can illuminate some of the ways philosophy moves events in the history of Star Wars. Revan is what Hegel calls a “world historical figure” who embodies the Hegelian dialectic as it moves through history. His journey from being a Jedi, to being a Sith, and finally returning to the Jedi represents the philosophical movement of history.

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Revan, The Jedi (The First Moment)

Revan began his journey as a Jedi. Like all Jedi, he was trained from childhood by the Jedi Order. He learned at the feet of many Masters and cultivated his talents in obscure Force abilities like Force bonds. He was, by all accounts, an exemplar of the Order. He had learned everything they had to teach him.

Most of his mentors would have passed on the orthodox Jedi teachings. These were formalized in the Jedi Code:

There is no emotion; there is peace.

There is no ignorance; there is knowledge.

There is no passion; there is serenity.

There is no chaos; there is harmony.

There is no death; there is the Force.

This creed is shorthand for everything the Jedi Order believes. For the Jedi, the Force is ultimately good. It is the manifestation of the whole galaxy’s life force. The Jedi religion is therefore about becoming One with the Force. The goal is to align oneself so strongly with the Force’s will that one becomes its servant.

And since the Force is in all things, this means living a life of altruism and service. Hence the Jedi Order is an order of selfless paladins, serving the greater good. In the Code, all the “There is no…” lines represent obstacles to unifying oneself with the Force. Emotions, ignorance, passions, chaos—these trap a person in an individualist perspective. They cannot transcend their own ego to see the big picture. They cannot abandon the self to become part of the Whole.

The contrasting lines, “There is…” represent the antidote to this egoist perspective. Pursuing peace, knowledge, serenity, and harmony help a person get outside of their own head. They allow a person to transcend their individual perspective and embrace life on a galactic scale.

The final line, “There is no death; there is the Force,” shows the ultimate result of this philosophy. Death is not the end for those who unify with the Force. By transcending their individuality, they live on through the cosmic lifeforce after their bodies are dead. Only those enslaved by their ego can truly perish upon death.

Revan, the Jedi par excellence, embodied this code.

Here is where Hegel comes into play. Hegel was a genius philosopher whose writings were massively influential on all later European philosophy. Virtually everyone was either building on Hegel or responding to him. Since he was notoriously dense, a lot of creative misinterpretation also followed in his wake. Nonetheless, his influence is undeniable.

One of Hegel’s key ideas was his dialectic, a process of unfolding logic that drives an idea. Traditional dialectic is a simple back-and-forth debate over the merits of some idea. Hegel’s innovation was that dialectic does not merely go back-and-forth; it moves forward. In other words, arguments do not just have two sides and battle it out until one of them wins. Arguments are continually unfolding, building upon themselves to form new and more encompassing insights.

In Hegel’s dialectic, concepts move through three “moments” that collectively drive philosophical progress.1 The first of these moments, the starting point for it all, is the “moment of understanding” or “fixity.” At this stage, the concept is thought to be understood. There is nothing considered problematic about it. This is the default state of an idea.

For most people, the idea that the Jedi are the good guys is in a moment of understanding. Of course they’re the good guys! No one even questions whether Darth Vader is worse than Luke Skywalker. Your average Star Wars enjoyer thinks this is just understood. It is fixed knowledge.

Revan the Jedi represents this naive, first moment of Hegel’s dialectic. At this stage in his journey, the Jedi Order is understood as an unalloyed good. The galaxy is defined by the Order and their Code.

Darth Revan (The Second Moment)

Revan began to have a crisis of faith in the Jedi Order. His faith was further shaken when the Mandalorians began sacking the Republic, yet the Jedi Council would do nothing.

All ideas face the test of history. In this case, the Mandalorian Wars put the Jedi’s philosophy to the question. Which action better fit the Code: Patiently waiting for the true threat, or fighting to save lives? The Jedi Council decided patience best fit the Code. They did not want their passions to rashly drive the whole Order into a trap.

Revan, however, could not stomach the idea of letting billions of innocents die. He decided that a good Jedi should act. He launched the Revanchist movement to fight the Mandalorians. Many Jedi, including his friend Alek, joined him.

As the war dragged on, this initial splinter between Revan and the Order grew into a chasm. The horrors of battle made Jedi ideals ring hollow. What was the “greater good” when one is forced to choose between one planet and another? Where were the rest of the Jedi? Billions died in the Mandalorian Wars. Revan’s faith in the Jedi died with them.

Revan became convinced that the problem was not just the Council’s application of the Jedi Code, but the Code itself. He began to look for an alternative. And there, on Malachor V, he found the Sith.2 Revan turned to the Dark Side, along with most of his followers.

By becoming Darth Revan, he entered the second moment of Hegel’s dialectic, the “negatively rational.” This second moment is when the previously unproblematic concept is revealed as limited. Cracks appear in the old ideology, doubt festers. The concept is negated, yet without being wholly destroyed—what Hegel calls “sublation.”

The Sith Code Revan learned is an example of sublation in action.

Peace is a lie, there is only passion.

Through passion, I gain strength.

Through strength, I gain power.

Through power, I gain victory.

Through victory, my chains are broken. The Force shall free me.

Like the Jedi Code, the Sith Code is a summary of Sith philosophy. The Sith believe in the primacy of the ego. They are hardcore individualists. Man was not made to serve the Force; he was born to bend it to his will. The goal of the Sith religion, therefore, is not to achieve passive unity with the Force. The goal is to master the Force for individual empowerment.

Notice how this philosophy negates the Jedi Code without wholly destroying it. On one hand, the lines of the Sith Code are directly contrary to the Jedi Code— ”Peace is a lie.” On the other hand, the Sith Code is built upon the remnants of the Jedi Code it rejects. “Peace is a lie” is a clear allusion to the Jedi’s “There is peace.” Thus, while the Sith Code rejects the Jedi Code, the Jedi Code is still contained within it. The Sith Code sublates the Jedi Code.

Darth Revan, likewise, is a sublation of the Jedi Revan. Unlike most Sith, who abandon their birth names upon becoming a Dark Lord, Revan kept his. That is because there is a deep continuity between Revan the Jedi and Revan the Sith. Darth Revan may have rejected the Jedi Code but he did not reject his initial goals. He still wanted to bring order to the galaxy. He was just willing to use increasingly ruthless methods to win.

The same could be said of many Dark Jedi, but what makes Revan different is that he is what Hegel calls a world historical figure. He is a person who embodies the Hegelian dialectic, a vehicle through which the spirit of history itself is moving.3 Darth Revan’s sublation of Revan had consequences on a galactic scale. Not only did he turn to the Dark Side, he turned his entire army to the Dark Side. He split the galaxy in two. Lesser beings could not achieve this level of impact.

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Revan’s galactic-scale sublation is an example of how Hegel’s dialectic can move history. Remember that for Hegel, dialectic moves forward. That’s why sublation is so important: The original idea is still there underneath the new, opposing idea. The conversation does not start over from scratch whenever someone objects. Likewise, the ideas that defined previous historical eras do not simply disappear. They form the foundation for new ideas that oppose them.

In Revan’s case, the first moment of historical understanding is defined by the Jedi Code. The second moment complicates the Jedi, producing Darth Revan. But there is always a third moment.

Revan, The Prodigal Knight (The Third Moment)

The events of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic pick up during the third moment of Hegel’s dialectic. The concept of the Jedi has been sublated by the Sith. Now, it is time for the last step, the definitive step forward in the dialectic between Jedi and Sith. Darth Revan was betrayed by Darth Malak, his former friend-turned-Sith Apprentice. Thanks to this betrayal, he was captured by the Jedi Bastila Shan.

The Jedi Council used this opportunity to do something profoundly un-Jedi: They erased Revan’s memory and gave him a false identity as a Republic soldier. Over the course of the game, the amnesiac Revan, Bastila, and his other crew of companions set out to undo the damage Darth Revan had done. They hunt the Star Maps, leading to the source of Darth Malak’s unstoppable armies: The Star Forge.

The truth could not remain buried forever. Revan eventually discovers his old identity, and having been retrained in the ways of the Force, must face his past. He defeats Darth Malak in a climactic battle aboard the Star Forge, putting an end to the Jedi Civil War. The canonical ending has Revan restored to the Jedi Order, hailed as the Prodigal Knight.

But as players of Knights of the Old Republic 2 know, this was not the end of Revan’s story. Revan could not comfortably bask in his redemption. His life with Bastila was interrupted by memories. Something terrible waited in the Unknown Regions, beyond the Outer Rim. He’d met something out there in the Dark. He had to confront that threat, or he would never truly rest. Some wars must be fought alone.

And so, Revan disappeared. He left behind everyone he knew and loved. He left them because he knew where he was going, they would only be a liability. The Sith—the true Sith—were monsters. He could not fight them and protect the people he loved.4

Here is the third moment in Hegel’s dialectic, the union of opposites into a more encompassing whole. Hegel’s system is a universalizing system. With each movement of a concept, it encompasses more and more fully the nature of its subject. The original idea is sublated into its opposite. This produces a third moment, the “speculative” moment, where a more universal idea arises from the clash of opposites.

The same is true of history. As ideas in history work their way through the dialectic, they carry history along with it. The French Monarchy is sublated by the tyranny of the French Revolution, which enters its speculative moment with the rise of Napoleon. Each of these moments is embodied by a worldhistorical figure through whom the ideas are working—Louis XVI, Robespierre, Napoleon. The Hegelian dialectic is in everything, including history itself.5

In the case of Star Wars, Revan is the world-historical figure who mediates the dialectic in all three moments. The first moment, characterized by the orthodox Jedi, was represented by Jedi Revan. The second moment, characterized by the Sith, was embodied by Darth Revan. Now, in the third moment, the Prodigal Knight Revan reveals a new era that draws a unity from the previous eras.

The later Revan revisits the ideas in the Jedi Code. In his heart of hearts, he believes them. He believes in altruism, in defending the weak, and in unifying with the Force. But he no longer believes them uncritically. Having lived the Sith Code, he has gained an awareness of the Jedi’s limitations. While the Sith were mostly wrong, Revan realized that they were right about one thing: Individuals have power. Sometimes the best way to fight is not to bring a spaceship full of friends. Some problems, armies cannot solve. Some enemies are best fought alone.

Revan’s decision to face the Sith in the Unknown Regions without his friends is therefore a moment where the Jedi and Sith Codes converge. He combines the altruism of the Jedi with the individualism of the Sith to forge a new path for the galaxy. Revan’s new war would not be a thing of fleets and armies; it would be a battle in the Dark fought by a few with faith in the Light. In this new era, the Star Wars are a quiet thing, but no less significant. That is the era where Knights of the Old Republic 2 picks up.

Notably, this is a genuine step forward for the galaxy far, far away. Revan is presenting a model of conflict that doesn’t end in galactic conflagration. His model of the Jedi as a collection of heroic individuals, rather than an institution, unifies the clash of opposites his entire career embodied. He is showing a way the Jedi and Sith can fight without the collateral damage Kreia complains about. That is historical, and philosophical, progress in Star Wars.

Conclusion

Or it would be, if the rest of the galaxy cooperated with Revan’s model. The very un-Hegelian reality of Star Wars is that history runs in cycles. That is why I claim this is a quasi-Hegelian reading, not a true one. A truly Hegelian take would be that history is always progressing. In Star Wars, that is not necessarily the case.

Still, I think the dialectic is part of why Revan is such an interesting character. He is a Hegelian hero in a profoundly un-Hegelian world. He has seen both the Light and the Dark Side of the Force, and he came out stronger in the end. He tried—really tried—to make genuine historical progress in the galaxy far, far away. He failed, but he arguably got closer than any other character.

Revan is in many ways the better version of Anakin Skywalker. He more completely embodies the Jedi-Sith-Return to Jedi dialectic. Just as importantly, he shows how these ideas manifest in the galaxy at large. We know what a historical epoch characterized by the Jedi Code looks like. We know what it means for the Sith to rule. Through Revan, we know what a synthesis of these might look like.

I think there is something we can learn about our own world from Revan’s story. The lesson is simple: Ideas matter. History is not merely economics, or who wins battles, or some other material force. History is at least partly a philosophical conversation. That conversation is embodied in people, and the dialectic they represent. In that respect, I think Revan is a solid exemplar of Hegel’s philosophy.

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Mircea Eliade was the thinker who most famously theorized religion along these spatial lines. For him, religion is largely an exercise in navigating the world-making power of the sacred. Where the sacred appears, space is transmuted. The spring is not just a spring; the mountain is not just a mountain. These places become centerpieces for the entire cosmos, windows into a higher world.

He called such a centerpiece the axis mundi, the center of the world. These axes mundi give structure to the entire cosmos by providing a central point of reference. You know where everything else is in relation to the axis mundi. And the closer you are to the center point, the more sacred the space becomes.

Moreover, the axis mundi does not just tell you what matters on the mortal plane. It is also a “cosmic pillar” that connects you to the transcendent worlds of heaven and the underworld.1 That’s partly why the axis mundi is so important: It makes possible traffic between the realm of the gods, the realm of mortals, and the realm of the dead.

The axis mundi is not literally the center of the universe; it is the center of one’s subjective cosmos. Remember, religious studies is not interested in whose cosmos is actually real—that’s a matter for theology. What matters is how the world appears to a certain religion. The axis mundi is a skeleton key to a religion’s worldview.

This concept is everywhere in video games, yet it is hardly ever discussed.2 In today’s post, I want to give a few examples of axis mundi and show how they contribute to their games’ symbolic infrastructure.

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Skyrim: The Throat of the World

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is one of the classic games centered around an axis mundi. Skyrim is full of tall mountains, but the tallest mountain is the Throat of the World. This is not only a geographically central point; it is a sacred space. The ancient Greybeard order makes their home on its rocky peaks. There they practice the Way of the Voice.

The Throat of the World is a classic example of the Cosmic Mountain variant of the Cosmic Pillar archetype. Like all Cosmic Pillars, it centers the world and connects the profane to the sacred. But unlike some other types of Cosmic Pillar, the Cosmic Mountain has certain important features.

Cosmic Mountains are importantly mineral. They are natural and immovable. There is no threat of change. They are also incredibly tall, which makes them ideal locations for communing with the gods. Hence, mountains have long been conceived of as the home of the gods, or at least places to meet with them. Moses meets God on Sinai, the Greek gods dwell on Mount Olympus, and the Watchers of Jewish myth descended on Mount Hermon. Mountains are the meeting grounds of the divine.

In Skyrim, the idea that mountains are the abodes of gods is shown through the figure of Paarthurnax. This ancient dragon is the “deity” of the mountain. He dwells at the very peak of it, guarding knowledge of godlike power.

The Throat of the World serves an important symbolic function for Skyrim. It symbolizes the ascent from profane to the sacred. As an open world game, it is easy to get lost in “profane” pursuits—looting dungeons, fighting bandits, killing bears. But these profane activities primarily happen along a horizontal axis. The Throat of the World is a vertical axis, an area set apart from the profane concerns of everyday life. It is specially dedicated to plot-relevant events in the main quest.

To ascend the Throat, the player must embrace the Dragonborn’s divine powers. It is not enough to be good with a bow or a sword. The Dragonborn must master the Thu’um to dispel the winds guarding the peak. They must leave the profane behind and enter the sacred realm.

Thus, the Throat of the World is a Cosmic Mountain version of the axis mundi. It centers the world by elevating the player out of the profane world and into the sacred world of gods and dragons. This symbolizes the player character’s growth from being an ordinary, profane mortal to being a sacred Dragonborn.

Elden Ring: The Erdtree

A more recent example of a game relying on an axis mundi is Elden Ring. The game is almost synonymous with the Erdtree, the giant glowing tree visible from nearly everywhere. This tree is yet another type of Cosmic Pillar.

Like Skyrim’s Throat of the World, the Erdtree is a link between the abode of the gods and the mortal races of the Lands Between. Divine beings like Marika, Godfrey, and Margit once made their home at the Erdtree.

But unlike the Throat of the World, the Erdtree has a much stronger connection to the Underworld. We see this in the concept of the “Erdtree Burial.” The heroic dead were interred in tombs where their bodies would gradually be absorbed by the Erdtree’s roots. In time, they would be reborn with the Erdtree’s dew, the Lands Between’s own version of samsara.3

The reason for this stronger connection to the Underworld has to do with the fact the Erdtree is a World-Tree variant of the Cosmic Pillar. Unlike Cosmic Mountains, which are static and unchanging, World-Trees are cyclical. They change with the rhythm of the seasons. Trees “die” in winter and are reborn in the spring. The cycle of the World-Tree mimics the cycle of life and death, destruction and renewal. Thus, World-Trees not only have a connection to life-giving power, but also death.

The two obvious World-Trees in historical religions are Yggdrasil and the Biblical Tree of Life. Both of these trees have profound connections to life and death. Yggdrasil is the foundation of the Norse cosmos, connecting the various realms—including the realm of the dead. The Tree of Life in the Bible is the source of eternal life. Those who have access to the Tree will live indefinitely; those who lose access are doomed to die.

The Erdtree plays on both of these concepts to explore one of Fromsoftware’s favorite themes: Stagnation. Like all World-Trees, the Erdtree was meant to go through cycles of rebirth. This would have signaled the changing of the political order.4 But Marika prevented the Erdtree’s renewal by destroying the possibility of its death.

Marika evidently hoped removing the Rune of Destined Death from the Elden Ring would preserve her reign. Instead, the Erdtree stagnated, entering a state between life and death. Its life-giving power ceased. Undeath spread throughout the Lands Between. Without the Erdtree’s cycle of rebirth, the cosmos could not be renewed. Neither could Queen Marika’s regime.

The game’s solution to the problem of stagnation is purification. For the cosmos to be reborn, the Erdtree must die. The World-Tree’s stagnation must be purged by fire. This is not a permanent death, but it will restore the concept of death that Marika removed, enabling the World-Tree symbol to operate properly.

Elden Ring thus provides a unique spin on the concept of the axis mundi. Miyazaki uses it not only as a means of orienting the world, but as a symbol of what is wrong with the world. The whole story of the game is contained in this one place—a masterpiece of spatial narrative.

I intend to write a longer treatment of sacred space in Elden Ring, but this will do for now.

Sword of the Sea: The Tower

The last example of an axis mundi I will show comes from Sword of the Sea. This is a much simpler game than Skyrim or Elden Ring, but it is nonetheless an interesting case. It shows how even non-open world games can use an axis mundi to great effect.

Sword of the Sea is a game about renewing an ocean world destroyed by a cataclysmic battle of the gods. The player character must surf through the ruins, unlocking sources of water and bringing life back to the desert.

Its version of the axis mundi is a vast Tower stretching all the way to the heavens. It is a literal Cosmic Pillar, a central point that founds the world. The player spends the whole game making progress toward it. Here is where the whole quest culminates; here is where the entire cosmos can be renewed to its former glory.

Unlike Skyrim’s Cosmic Mountain and Elden Ring’s World-Tree, Sword of the Sea’s Cosmic Pillar is constructed. What makes it an axis mundi, not just another building, is that it was built by the gods. It therefore has a connection to the sacred realm that lesser buildings do not have.

The fact that the axis mundi is a building plays into the game’s core theme of renewal. Mountains do not need renewal, and trees renew themselves. But ruins must be rebuilt. That’s why the player is important: It is their responsibility to restore what was broken.

Pluralism and the Axis Mundi

Eliade is one of my favorite thinkers for a reason. I think his theories of symbolism and religious experience hold up, despite widespread criticism. However, his theory of the axis mundi could use a bit of tweaking.

For all its utility, the axis mundi concept seems to struggle with accounting for multiple sacred places. There can only be one “center of the world” at a time, but this is hardly ever true. Just think about Christianity. Many places could qualify as Christianity’s axis mundi—Calvary, Mt. Sinai, Mt. Zion, Eden, etc.

To account for this plurality, I re-theorized the axis mundi as what I call “cosmic sources.” A cosmic source is like an axis mundi, but it does not exclusively bear the world-making power of the sacred. There can be many cosmic sources, or just one.

I think cosmic sources make better sense of video games, too. While the Throat of the World has a strong claim to being the central point of Skyrim’s world, there are other places that can fit that claim. After all, the Dragonborn goes to Skuldafn in order to reach the afterlife. It makes more sense to say both the Throat of the World and Skuldafn are cosmic sources than that the game has a single axis mundi.

Cosmic sources are an incredibly useful tool in game design, especially for open world games. The problem with most open world designs is that they are de-centered. Everything feels the same. Cosmic sources fix this by anchoring the world around points of significance—places that “found the cosmos.” If a player ever wonders where they are supposed to go, they can just walk in the direction of the giant glowing tree.

My re-theorizing of the axis mundi is very slight, however. The core concept of Eliade is still right: Sacred spaces provide a center to reality that grounds our experiences.

Conclusion

Whatever else religion is, it is about space. It divides our experience of space between the sacred and the profane. It organizes our experiences by giving us a center point that acts as the world’s foundation, what Eliade called an axis mundi.

These central places unlock the symbolic infrastructure that creates our world. Everything orbits around them. The desert matters because of how close it is to the mountain, and the mountain matters because that is where we go to meet God. This is the religious logic that imbues our environment with meaning beyond day-to-day survival.

Video games, perhaps uniquely in media, let us play with sacred space. Game designers can create different organizations of space with different religious symbols. Whether they use a Cosmic Mountain, a World-Tree, or some other kind of Cosmic Pillar, they can present us with a vision of what the world might look like if something else were sacred.

This is a valuable exercise for no other reason than that it forces us to ask what we consider sacred. What is our axis mundi? Do we even have one? What gives meaning to our spaces beyond the daily grind?

If you cannot answer those questions, then it might be a sign that you are trapped in the profane. Perhaps it is time to turn the mind to higher things.

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For this week’s post, I want to dive into a bit of the theory behind my game critiques. This post features some of the ideas I explored in my dissertation.

I think these ideas matter because they systematize game criticism. It is one thing to post hot takes about whether a game is good or bad. It is another altogether to understand what a game means. Both have their place, but having theories of criticism make the hard work of finding meaning in games easier.

Theories of criticism are like lenses. When you look at a game through them, you see things that you previously missed. You learn something you did not know before. Theory, then, is an approach to the game that gives the critic insight.

One of these approaches I like to call ratio criticism. The basic idea is that many games exist along three axes: Space, time, and agency. However, these three categories are not always equally emphasized. Some games focus on one at the expense of the other, and this tells us something interesting about the game—and the human condition, too.

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The Fundamental Categories of Existence

The reason I chose space, time, and agency as the categories for ratios boils down to our own experience of reality. All human beings exist within these three dimensions. There are no spaceless men, or atemporal people, or people who are not agents. We may have different understandings of these categories, but we all have them. They are fundamental.

If we want to understand the human condition, then we ought to scrutinize each of these categories.

And philosophers do scrutinize them. Some philosophers tend to focus on time (e.g., Heidegger, Gadamer, Hegel). Other philosophers, like David Lewis, Leibniz, and Gunter Figal, tend to emphasize space. Still others tend to orient themselves around agency—Sartre, Rawls, and Dewey, to name a few.

Everyone who deals with these subjects has to touch on all three, but they are rarely considered equally. For example, I would say time and agency preoccupy Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, while space tends to stay in the background. That is because meaning is bound up in a historical-linguistic tradition for Gadamer.

In contrast, David Lewis’ Modal Realism—the thesis that all possible worlds concretely exist—is highly spatial. This obviously has implications for agency. If Lewis is right, then there is a nearby possible world where I am arguing something different.

The point is that considerations of space, time, and agency exist in ratios. Therefore, any understanding of the world will have to fill in these categories, and may emphasize them to different degrees.

Ratios in Video Game Worlds

Game worlds are not different from the real world when it comes to ratios. They also consist of space, time, and agency. Further, they tend to play with dramatically different ratios, resulting in different types of games. Let me name a few examples of ratios that strongly emphasize one of the three axes.

Spatial Games

By far, the most common ratio in the AAA gaming industry is a high space-to-agency/time ratio. These are your typical open-world action/adventure game. Most survival games are in this territory, too. In these games, space is so dominant that it tends to subsume every other category.

Consider a game like Horizon: Zero Dawn, for example. The game is in many ways the epitome of the open-world style that prioritizes space over everything else.

The player commands Aloy through the post-apocalyptic ruins of America. Most of the game is spent hunting robot animals in exotic places. Sure, there are other activities—side quests, minigames, and dungeons. But hunting in a ruined world is what the gameplay loop is basically about.

A lot happens in the game’s story, too. It features political intrigue, ancient conspiracies, and mythical battles.

The observant player will notice, however, that these epic events make virtually no difference to the game’s world. Aloy cannot hunt the animals to extinction, nor is the landscape fundamentally reshaped by her battles. For the most part, enemies respawn and the world continues as before.

This is an example of how space can dominate every other aspect of a game. The world’s general lack of reactivity gives the impression that nothing really happens, or else all change happens on a local scale. Time is not all that significant to the game’s overall structure. Nor is agency, for that matter. Aloy’s ability to change the world is still usually limited to a local scale. Everything is subsumed into a fundamentally static, unchanging world.

Open world games do not have to be so space-dominated. Dragon’s Dogma, for example, has a fairly even Space-Time ratio. The game has an open world but that world changes fundamentally at a certain point in the story. Time has a real presence in Dragon’s Dogma, where it does not have much of a presence in Horizon: Zero Dawn.

I think spatially-dominant games are making a philosophical statement, whether they mean it or not. They suggest a vision of a static world where all meaningful action happens within the person, not to the world.

The Greco-Romans were famous for this sort of worldview. Hannah Arendt suggests this quasi-timeless vision belied Ancient Greek heroism. Achilles fought in the Trojan Wars not because he wanted to change the world, but because he wanted his name to live on in a world that ultimately does not change.

Stoicism is an example of highly spatial Roman philosophy. Its emphasis on ruling the self comes from its belief that one cannot ultimately control what happens. Events lie at the hands of fate. One’s character, however, remains in their own power.

I believe Horizon: Zero Dawn may be saying something like this. Ultimately, slaying a great beast does not change the world. Civilization is still lost. Yet it does change something about Aloy. It makes her a part of the world she was once separated from. That is what the game is really about: Integrating the self into space.

Temporal Games

Games that emphasize time are comparatively rare. Prior to the rise of 3D graphics, extremely time-focused ratios were more common. Time mechanics added another layer of depth to otherwise simplistic game mechanics.

The rise of 3D graphics, however, reduced the need for such contrivances. Developers could add more depth through space. The time-based game became more of a novelty than a standard design.

However, time still plays a starring role in some well-known games.

Final Fantasy XIII-3: Lightning Returns is a great example of a game where time dominates every other category. An apocalypse threatens the world, and our hero only has a week to stop it. A timer starts counting down when the game officially begins. If Lightning does not fulfill her mission within the time limit, the Apocalypse wipes out the world.

Time is thus a constant presence in Final Fantasy XIII-3, overwhelming even factors like space and characters. Every action is weighed against the time needed to complete it. Space itself becomes scarce because it is threatened by destruction.

Other time-heavy ratio games tend to belong in the racing and puzzle genres. Game modes like time-trials are literal races against time, whereas puzzle games use timers to force players to think quickly.

Lately, it has become more common to dilute time-heavy games with a healthy dose of agency. I call games with a roughly even time-agency ratio kairotic games, from the Greek kairos. These games are all about teaching players to seize the opportune moment.

Sekiro and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 are both good examples of kairotic games because of their parry mechanics. Despite being very different games, they both encourage the player seize moments of opportunity to deal massive damage.

Time, then, is not homogenous in kairotic games. It varies between the qualities of opportunity and obstacle. Kairotic games teach the player to distinguish between these kinds of moments.

Time-heavy ratios tend to have an affinity for similarly temporal worldviews. Apocalyptic religions like Christianity, for example, believe in a similar experience of time as kairotic games.

For the Christian, time is not neutral. It is inevitably progressing toward a supremely important moment, the Last Judgment, where one’s life will be tested. Every moment up until that point is a kairotic moment, an opportunity to reshape one’s life to reflect the will of God.

Temporal games, therefore, have the fascinating power to simulate an experience of time like that described in the Christian religion, where time has a real presence.

Agent-Oriented Games

The last point of the triangle is Agency, the category that deals with action.

I define agency as agent+ability. An agent is anything that can act on the world, and abilities are the ways an agent can act. For example, Spider-Man is an agent and his abilities include web-swinging, super strength, his Spidey Sense, etc. Only together do these make the agency we call Spider-Man.

Agencies are very similar to being-in-the-world. Just like being a professor is a mode of being-in-the-world, the agency of Spider-Man is a mode of being-in-the-game.

The main difference is that players have no real identification with agencies in the game. To the player, Spider-Man is more of a tool than a costume. He is a way of interacting with the fictional space of Marvel’s New York City. The joy of playing Spider-Man is not so much in pretending to be him, but in acting on the world through him.

Agency-heavy games lean into empowering players. They tend to provide players many different ways of engaging the game world, rather than railroading them into one option.

Immersive sims are a genre heavily oriented toward agency. Their primary appeal comes from tackling the same situation in many different ways. J.C. Denton from Deus Ex can handle the terrorists on Liberty Island through stealth or by going in guns blazing, for example.

Games with heavily customizable factions or characters tend to be agency-heavy, too. Stellaris lets players create factions that range all the way from mystical peace-loving hippies to robotic space fascists. These all represent different agencies for interacting with the game’s world.

Philosophically, high agency games have a strong affinity with various humanisms. They all embody an upbeat, can-do attitude toward the world. The simple belief that humans can make a difference in the world makes such philosophies high-agency.

I also think Utilitarianism has an affinity for some of these games. Utilitarian ethics fits perfectly into a 4X game where all of reality is quantifiable. What is the right decision? Why, the one that feeds the most people for the lowest price! And the player can calculate that decision precisely by looking at how much food their cities are bringing in and how much production it takes to build a new storehouse.

I do not think it is a coincidence that some Silicon Valley technologists love these kinds of games, either. The quest for AI is a technical quest for the ultimate agency. What better mental equipment for imagining such an agency than high-agency games like Deus Ex?

Agency is therefore a key category for understanding games. It has profound implications for their meaning.

Finding the Ratios

The examples I listed above are all examples where one category basically dominates the rest. However, it is rare for a game to be totally dominated by one category. More commonly, games play with these ratios in different degrees.

The critic’s job is to get a rough sense of where games land along the three axes of space, time, and agency. To what degree does the game prioritize space over agency, or time over space?

This is not an exact science. The degrees are more qualitative than quantitative. The point is to paint a general picture, however, and this is entirely possible by closely scrutinizing the game.

Practically, the critic should play the game and pay attention to what systems the game emphasizes. One could ask questions like…

• Does the game have an open world?

• How many ways can I approach the game’s challenges?

• How customizable are the characters?

• Are there quick-time events?

And so on. Answering questions like these will give the critic a sense of what categories the game leans towards. One might even make a list as they go.

Once the critic has a solid grasp of the game’s categories, they should write up their findings. They might plot out the game along a diagram to help them visualize the game. In doing so, the critic will gain an understanding of the game’s general ratio.

Consider Skyrim as an example. Skyrim is a game with a vast open world, brimming with opportunities for exploration. Yet it also is well-known for its open-ended character development systems. There is no time crunch—the quests will wait indefinitely.

Based off these observations, I might plot Skyrim’s ratio like this:

This helpfully visualizes how Skyrim configures its world.

Discerning the Meaning

The final step is to figure out what the ratio means. For this, it is helpful to read widely on the history of philosophy and religion. The critic can use that background to compare and contrast ideas the game plays with.

Now, it is important not to rashly sort a game into some pre-existing philosophy. For example, the critic should not say “This game is Marxist!” just because it features class conflict. The game may be Marxist, but establishing that requires going beyond pure ratio criticism. The critic would need additional evidence.

Video games should be understood as their own contribution to philosophical discourse. They are not merely manifestations of some pre-existing system.

That’s why I prefer to use language like “tends toward” or “has an affinity for.” Games may have similarities with certain worldviews. However, they should first be understood on their own terms.

The job of the critic is to dive into the game and understand what it is saying. Sometimes the game is joining a chorus of voices, but sometimes it is trying to say something entirely different.

The real payoff of ratio criticism is its power to expand our philosophical imaginations. It broadens our ability to form our own worldviews by showing us other worldviews arranged along different ratios. We can use those ratios to decide which combination makes the most sense.

Conclusion

Space, time, and agency are fundamental categories for human existence. Everyone exists within them. However, not everyone agrees on which categories are most fundamental. Philosophers and theologians have argued about this for centuries.

Video games are new to this debate, but the medium has its own advantages. They expand players’ philosophical imaginations by showing us worlds where the ratios of space, time, and agency are configured differently. This broadens our ability to think about what our own world truly is like.

Through the ruins of Horizon: Zero Dawn, we can see what a world dominated by space looks like. We can feel the pressure of time in Final Fantasy XIII-3, and we can experience the power of agency through Deus Ex. Video games help unlock all of these categories.

It falls to the ratio critic to find how games configure these fundamental aspects of existence. It falls to all of us to examine them in our own lives.

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In a previous post, I argued that Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II helps us understand evil. It shows us what Evil would look like if something like the Force existed.

Now, I want to explore the opposite theme: What does KOTOR 2 say about the good life? Does the game offer any resources for thinking about what it means to live well?

I think it does. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II equips us to think about what it means to be a hero. Through the symbolism of the Lost Jedi, it presents a vision of the Good Life.

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The Jedi with a Thousand Faces

It is impossible to talk about virtue, heroism, and Star Wars without bringing up Joseph Campbell. The man is the primary intellectual source of the original Star Wars. His theories of myth and fairy tales profoundly influenced George Lucas, and consequently, the rest of Star Wars media.

Yet Campbell is an increasingly obscure figure to the 21st century mind. Today, most people encounter him in English class. That’s because teachers love using his Hero’s Journey structure to analyze literature.

But thinking of Campbell as primarily a literary theorist is to misunderstand him. Campbell was not interested in literary structure for its own sake. He studied myth because he believed it was a skeleton key to the Good Life. In fact, the closest living analogue of Campbell is Jordan Peterson.

Like Jordan Peterson, Campbell was deeply influenced by the psychoanalytic theories of Carl Jung. He believed that myths were the “public dream” of the collective subconscious. By reading all the world’s myths together, they could be averaged out into a singular structure, the Monomyth.

The Monomyth is the voice of the human subconscious, trying to guide us to a better life. Individuals who make its story their own become Heroes. The Hero’s Journey, therefore, is not merely words on a page. It is Joseph Campbell’s idea of the Good Life. Living well is about aligning oneself with the collective wisdom of humanity by becoming the Hero with a Thousand Faces.

Luke Skywalker is a classic example of a Campbellian Hero. Indeed, the original concept of a Jedi is synonymous with the Hero. Luke becomes a Jedi (Hero) by performing the stages of the Monomyth. With each stage, he acquires more of the Heroic virtues, until he finally transcends subconscious passions altogether.

None of this is news to any hardcore Star Wars nerd. However, it does suggest a certain vision of the Good Life. The orthodox Star Wars Good Life is to align oneself with the will of the Force (i.e., collective subconscious) by overcoming the allure of the Dark Side (i.e., leaving the Hero’s Journey).

Knights of the Old Republic II ruthlessly interrogates this vision through the archetype of the Lost Jedi.

The Lost Jedi Council and The Crisis of Heroism

Structurally, KOTOR 2 is organized around a quest for the Lost Jedi Council who exiled our protagonist. It initially appears that the Jedi Exile has her own Monomyth, and each step in her Journey unfolds by learning from the Jedi Masters. These Lost Jedi, hiding from the Sith, are to be the Exile’s equivalent of Yoda. They are the wise teachers.

But the game throws the Monomyth into doubt almost immediately. Kreia, who structurally should be the Exile’s Obi-Wan, keeps threatening basic Campbellian principles. She questions the validity of the Force, the wisdom of the Jedi, and even the Sith.

On top of Kreia’s zeal for undermining everything, the Council reveals itself to be a fraud. Their appearance of wisdom masks deep foolishness. They were technically correct about the Mandalorian Crusades hiding a greater threat. However, they were clearly wrong to sit around while the galaxy burned.

Between Atris’ contempt, Vrook’s disapproval, Zez-Kai Ell’s cowardice, and Kavar’s false friendship, it is hard for the Exile to trust any of the Council. The Jedi demonstrably failed to protect the galaxy.

The problem is not merely that the Council is full of bad Jedi. On the contrary, the Council is full of good Jedi, in the sense that they lived out the Jedi Code. They were all good little Campbellian Heroes. They had resisted the call of the Dark Side, whereas Revan’s Jedi fell. They embodied the collective wisdom of the Light.

Yet these Jedi Masters failed the galaxy because something was wrong with their teachings. Something about the Hero’s Journey is wrong.

Kreia, ever the gadfly, is the game’s main critic of the Hero’s Journey. Her critiques of the Force are the game’s critiques of Campbell. What value is the Journey if it produces complacent fools like the Jedi Council? Why follow the Monomyth if it means an eternal war against those who reject it? Why should one be a slave of the collective subconscious?

The Lost Jedi Council has no answer. When these Heroes hear the echo of the suffering caused by their Journey, they simply hide. They rationalize to themselves that these echoes are a bug, not a feature, of the Force. The public dream cannot be wrong.

The Council is thus Kreia’s foil. They are the embodiment of Campbell’s philosophy, and the subject of her most biting criticism. Through them she rejects Campbell’s call to merge with the collective wisdom of the subconscious.

Instead, Kreia believes in the power of the individual. In place of a Journey, she offers Exile—exile from self-doubt, exile from society, exile from Nature itself. Only an Exile can attain the radical autonomy necessary to spit in the face of the collective subconscious. Only the Exile can live on their own terms.

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The True Lost Jedi

Kreia’s critique has caused a crisis of faith in the Force for many Knights of the Old Republic II players. Her arguments hover like a shroud over the setting. It is impossible to go back and watch the original Star Wars trilogy without her voice in the back of your mind. Did Luke really accomplish something by becoming a Jedi? Or is this yet another revolution in the Star Wars, an eternal battle between Heroes and their corruptions?

A crisis of faith in the Force is more significant than it seems. To doubt the Jedi is to doubt the Hero’s Journey. It is to call into question Campbell’s entire theory of the Good Life. Star Wars may be fiction, but it embodies a real philosophy of life. When we doubt the fiction, we doubt the philosophy.

If the best interpretation of the game is that Kreia is right, then Knights of the Old Republic II amounts to a total rejection of Campbell. But I think that is a rash interpretation. It does not take into account the true Lost Jedi, who counter Kreia’s argument.

Throughout the Exile’s journey, she gathers an eclectic cast of companions. None of them are what they seem. However, they can be divided into two groups: The droids and the Jedi.

The droids—characters like HK-47, G0T0, and T3-M4—are fairly static characters. They do not experience any fundamental shifts in their worldviews. That is because they do not really have an interior self to shift. They have been programmed to fulfill a function, and that is what they will do until re-programmed. They are incapable of growth.

Even Mandalore fits this category. The new Mandalore has been so thoroughly programmed by Mandalorian tradition that he cannot change. He does not even think it was wrong for the Mandalorians to attack the Republic. He has no capacity for growth because he has no interior life. He is little more than a living droid.

The other characters, in contrast, have a rich inner life. Atton, Mira, Visas, Bao-Dur, Brianna, and Mical all wrestle with their thoughts. Through this wrestling, they gain the power to change.

In each case, the Exile helps guide them through a personal crisis, and on the other side lies the Force. Each of them can become Jedi. I won’t cover each of them for the sake of space, but I think Atton, Mira, and Visas are good examples.

Atton, the Redeemed Fool

Atton Rand begins the game as a slightly less lovable version of Han Solo. He’s crass, annoying, and whiny. However, he has hidden depths.

Atton was once a soldier, first in the Mandalorian Wars, then in the Jedi Civil War. But he was no war hero. He was an assassin for Revan. He hunted Jedi, tortured them, and killed the ones he could not break.

Then one day, a Jedi found him. She tried to save him from the Dark Side. If Revan knew of Atton’s talent with the Force, he would be compelled to become Sith. She came to take him away from that terrible fate.

A good man would have followed her. Atton tortured her to death instead. But in her last moments, she awoke him to the Force, made him feel the Light she told him about.

Atton tried to run from the guilt of his murders. All his running merely led him to the Exile, someone who had every right to kill him. Instead, she offered him redemption. She offered him the Force.

Through the Force, Atton’s vices became virtues. His love of gambling became a faith in a higher power. His guilt became fuel for altruism. When he felt dead inside, the Force gave him new life.

Mira the Huntress

Much like Atton, Mira first appears as a familiar Star Wars archetype: The edgy bounty hunter. Yet she, too, is more than she appears.

Mira was once a slave of the Mandalorians. Her people were conquered by them, but she was eventually adopted by the warrior race. She found new family with them, learning their ways and fighting their wars.

Her adopted family met its end at Malachor V. Like so many others, she was set adrift in the galaxy, eventually landing in the crime-ridden moon of Nar Shaddaa. There she became a bounty hunter.

She excelled at her craft enough to catch the attention of Hanharr, a psychotic Wookie. The two ended up in a chase that nearly killed Hanharr—nearly, because Mira saved his life. This was a mistake. The enraged Wookie now owed her a life debt.

Ever since that day, Mira has been hunted by Hanharr. Her spunky exterior is a thin veil over a soul wracked with anxiety and grief. She’s a young woman, alone in the galaxy, chased by a monster. And no one cares.

No one, that is, except the Exile. The Exile peeled back her jaded exterior. She showed her how to face her pain, not just block it out. She opened her mind to the Force and gave Mira the chance to become a Jedi.

She said yes.

I want to become like you. I want to be strong! I don’t want to be afraid or alone any more. I... I... I don’t want to keep running, and looking, and never feel like I’m finding what I’m looking for. I’m tired of being hunted.

When the galaxy takes something from me, I want the power to let go... and I want the power to heal the echo when it’s gone.

Kreia tells us that one day, Mira will die on an obscure world saving innocent lives. But she will be at peace with her death. By becoming a Jedi, she transcended the hunt and could live a life protecting others from the monsters that once stalked her.

Visas, the Blind Seer

Visas is an unusual case in that she could wield the Force when the Exile finds her. However, that is because Darth Nihilus had enslaved her. She was compelled to become a Sith apprentice, and as an apprentice, she was sent to kill the Exile. She failed.

The Exile easily could have killed her. Instead, she took her under her wing. Having lost her family, her homeworld, and most of her Force sight, Visas could barely comprehend the kindness. The overwhelming darkness that clouded her future finally lifted. In the light of that new morn, she could see a world without the tyranny of Darth Nihilus. She could see a world where she was free.

Visas shed her dark path with the Exile’s help. Together, they defeated her former master and opened a new path for her. Visas was no longer Sith, but a Jedi.

The Exile’s Journey

These Lost Jedi, the true Lost Jedi, are the game’s counterargument to Kreia. They stand against Kreia’s belief in radical autonomy. Each of them finds their way not through individual struggle, but by joining with others. They find meaning by aligning with a higher power, not by opposing it.

For all Kreia’s insight, she failed to realize that her cure was worse than the disease. She believed she could free the galaxy from suffering if she destroyed the Force. She did not consider that the Force is what makes that suffering meaningful.

To the Lost Jedi, the Force redeemed their misery. It made sense of their suffering. It imbued reality with a moral cause-and-effect. The Force provided something like the Hindu concept of karma, an overarching moral logic to the cosmos. Without that logic, there would be no framework for living.

Kreia failed to see that the only thing worse than suffering is absurdity. And radical autonomy, apart from some grand narrative, is absurd. The Hero’s Journey is one possible solution to absurdity.

Yet the Lost Jedi are not a resounding affirmation of Joseph Campbell, either. Campbell believed in one Myth, one public dream. The differences between stories are just accidents. What matters is the deeper unity. There is only one Hero; he merely wears a thousand faces in our mythology.

The Lost Jedi call the Monomyth into question. While their journeys share similarities with it, each of them has important differences with Campbell’s proposed structure. Their journeys begin not in some farm village, but in a galaxy full of regret. All of them have touched the darkness in one way or another. They are not unalloyed Light, like the Jedi Council.

In place of a Hero’s Journey, the Lost Jedi embark on an Exile’s Journey. Trauma forces them out of the life they once knew. They wander the galaxy, broken and alone, until they meet the someone who teaches them to redeem their pain. Their journey refines their suffering and summons them to a higher calling, to redeem the suffering of others.

The Exile’s Journey is a journey beyond the world-system, that system of meanings jointly constructed by people. Only the Exile can see the world as it truly is. Cast out from every structure that contains them, the Exile can behold the echoes that shape reality. They know the value of light because they have seen the darkness.

But where Kreia would use this unique space as an opportunity for radical autonomy, the Exile uses it to help others. They are guides, teachers, who return to the world-system to heal its fractures.

The Lost Jedi are thus a nuancing of Campbell. They agree that achieving the Good Life requires a kind of Journey, and that Journey consists of a departure, an initiation, and a return. But they disagree about what that Journey ultimately means.

For Campbell, what makes the Hero’s Journey worthwhile is the treasure one claims from the public dream. That treasure allows the Hero to renew the world once they return from their Journey. They belong more fully to the world once they complete their quest.

The Exile, however, cannot ever truly return. One who leaves the world-system can never truly belong to it again. Their path ultimately leads outside of society. To borrow a symbol from the game, the Exile must eventually take Revan’s path and venture beyond the Outer Rim, out of the world entirely.

Thus, the Exile’s Journey is Knights of the Old Republic II’s vision of the Good Life. One unlocks the power of the inner self not by mindlessly following a Monomyth, but by transcending the psyche and the social structures born from it. By leaving this world-system behind, the Exile arises to a higher plane of being. They see more, feel more, and care more than so-called Heroes trapped in the myopic structure of the Monomyth.

The true path to Heroism is Exile.

Conclusion

I have tried to reveal Knights of the Old Republic II’s vision of the Good Life in this brief post. By my lights, the game presents living well as getting outside of social structures to reach reality. Only by escaping the world-system can one see the true architecture of reality, the echoes that move all things. This means that the Good Life is one of Exile. The Exile’s Journey, not the Hero’s Journey, is the path to fulfillment.

The game is therefore a critique of Joseph Campbell. It rejects Campbell’s theory that the public dream is a skeleton key to the Good Life. On the contrary, the Hero’s Journey itself can obscure reality by getting bogged down in the subconscious. It threatens to subsume the individual into the collective subconscious. The Monomyth can become a kind of prison for the mind.

Knights of the Old Republic II, then, strikes a curious balance. Kreia’s belief in radical autonomy is not uncritically embraced, but neither is the Jedi Council’s Campbellian wisdom vindicated.

The Lost Jedi represent the game’s middle ground. Characters like Atton, Mira, and Visas show how to walk the line between Kreia and the Council. They are individuals without rejecting the collective entirely. They rise above psychological and social structures to dwell in a higher, cosmic structure. They live a Good Life by looking at the world from the outside—through the eyes of the Exile.

I do not claim that Knights of the Old Republic II’s philosophy of the Good Life is right. But one cannot doubt its power. This game resonates with so many people because of its message. It tells everyone alienated from the world that their perspective matters. It is a call to the outsider, a philosophy for the Exile. And for that reason, its echoes will carry on in the lives of those who play it.

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Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II (henceforth KOTOR II) is a compelling meditation on the Problem of Evil. This is one of the game’s core themes, discussed time and again. The game contemplates how evil exists as both a cosmic and a human phenomenon.

The game’s commentary is significant for many reasons, but mainly because it broadens our ability to think about evil. Westerners are used to thinking of evil in the context of a Christian cosmos. KOTOR II interrupts our usual framing by placing the Problem of Evil in an entirely different understanding of the cosmos, that of Star Wars. This stretches our ability to think about the Problem of Evil—or rather, the Problems of Evil.

Spoilers for KOTOR II throughout.

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The Traditional Problem of Evil

The problem of evil in the West has traditionally been understood as an argument against God’s existence. If there is an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good Being, why is there evil? Surely such a God would wipe out all evil.

The usual next step in this dialectic is for the believer to show how evil does not disprove God. Alternatively, the atheist begins theorizing what it means to live well in a universe empty of the supernatural.

But notice that all of this assumes a certain vision of the cosmos. Its starting point is the Christian cosmos, a created world that is marred by sin but ultimately good. Human beings occupy a special place in this cosmos as the beings of ultimate moral significance. This is a world finally managed by God. Evil is not a thing unto itself; it is a lack of obedience to the divine will.

Even when the atheist rejects this view, their sense of the world—their “cosmic imaginary,” as Charles Taylor puts it1—is influenced by Christianity. The very rejection of Christianity leaves a Christianity-shaped abscess in their image of the world. The start of the conversation—Christianity—controls its overall trajectory.

Evil and the Metaphysics of Star Wars

But what if we thought about evil from a different starting point? What if the beginning of the conversation were not the cosmic imaginary of Christianity, but that of Star Wars? Here is where KOTOR II can help us.

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II takes place shortly after an apocalyptic war between the Jedi and the Sith. The galaxy is in ruins; untold billions lie dead. The Republic—the supposed winner of the war—is on the brink of collapse. The Jedi have all but disappeared. A new Triumvirate of Sith Lords stalks them from the shadows, killing all that remains.

The Jedi Exile, our protagonist, is their latest target. She bears her own scars.2 Like many Jedi, she joined the rogue Jedi Revan in his war against the marauding Mandalorians. Unlike her comrades, she alone returned to face the Council’s judgment for defying their order to not fight. She left that meeting an exile and deafened to the Force.

In the years since that moment, she has wandered the galaxy running from her past. The memory of one battle haunts her more than any other. Malachor V was where Revan finished his war against the Mandalorians. It was where the Exile ordered the activation of a superweapon, and the death of millions. Ever since, the Exile has been drifting, coping with the guilt.

The game’s story begins against this backdrop of personal and galactic misery. The Exile finds herself hunted by the Sith, and her only help is the rag-tag group of companions she finds along the way.

Chief among them is the mysterious old woman, Kreia. This blind philosopher dresses like a Jedi but speaks like a Sith. She seems unpleasable. Acting like a good Jedi earns the Exile nothing but scorn. Conversely, following the Dark Side does not necessarily earn her favor, either. Her moral compass seems to skew toward unfamiliar horizons. Together, Kreia and the Exile set off to find the missing Jedi Council and reawaken her connection to the Force.

As the story unfolds, we learn more about the evils driving the Sith, too. Darth Sion is a zombie-like Sith Lord who is utterly unkillable. His rage holds his broken body together, healing him no matter how badly he is wounded. He is unable to find the love and rest he desires.

Darth Nihilus is a walking Wound in the Force. Consumed by an insatiable hunger, he consumes the life of entire planets. But no matter how much he feeds, he cannot fill the gnawing void he has become.

The mysterious third member of the Sith Triumvirate is Darth Traya. This identity belongs to not one person, but two, both suffering similar traumas.

The first Darth Traya is none other than Kreia. Once Revan’s teacher, she fell to the Dark Side after she found the Jedi teachings untenable. She founded a Sith academy on the ruins of Malachor V. There she trained Nihilus and Sion until they betrayed her, stripping her of the Force and casting her out to wander the galaxy.

The second Darth Traya is Atris. This overzealous Jedi was part of the Council that exiled our protagonist. Yet that moment led to her own crisis of faith in the Jedi teachings. Secretly, she wished that she had made the Exile’s choice, that she had gone to fight the Mandalorians instead of cowering in the Temple.

The Exile’s decision to face the Council’s judgment tore open her seared conscience. Her doubt festered into anger, then hatred, until Atris turned to the dark wisdom of Sith Holocrons. She did not realize it then, but in her sanctum, Atris the Jedi had died and a new Darth Traya was born.

I could go through the rest of the cast, but I think these are sufficient for the point. Everyone in the game is afflicted by horrendous evils, be they personal, political, or cosmic in scale. And the cold heart of these tragedies is Malachor V.

Now, in a Christian cosmic imaginary, diagnosing the Star Wars galaxy would go something like this:

All of these people are God’s creations, and they suffer from the effects of sin. Some of this suffering they brought on themselves by failing to obey the divine commands. Otherwise, they are suffering from the Creation’s general Fallen state. Creation is not living up to its design. But one day, all things will be restored thanks to the redeeming work of Jesus Christ.

But Star Wars has a different cosmic imaginary. In the galaxy far, far away, Good and Evil are aspects of a single, impersonal Force. This Force emanates from all living things. Acts of good and acts of evil shift the overall concentration of “Light” and “Dark” in the cosmos. When one side becomes too dominant, the Force attempts to restore Balance through a cosmic battle between Light and Dark-aligned beings.

History in Star Wars is thus cyclical. It is not progressing toward a definitive end. Instead, the galaxy will always cycle through ages of Light-dominated Republicanism and Dark-dominated Imperialism. When the Jedi guard the Republic, the Sith plot their downfall; when the Sith rule, the Jedi prepare to return. The setting is fitly named: The “Star Wars” never end.

Therefore, the Star Wars cosmic imaginary has a somewhat different concept of evil than the Christian cosmic imaginary. The problem for the characters in KOTOR II is not the lack of good; it is the presence of evil. All of their lives are made worse by a literal substance that acts on the galaxy. It empowers bad actors to increase their harm, warps their bodies, and corrupts environments.

Yet even the Light side, supposedly the Good, is harmful in the grand scheme. Sure, it is bad to live under the Dark Side’s tyranny. But is it better for the galaxy to plunge into an all-consuming war every epoch? Is bringing Balance to the Force worth the sacrifice of billions?

Even worse, this cosmic imaginary implicitly contains an unsettling theory of human nature. Since the Force is all that matters, the most significant characters in Star Wars will always be the Jedi. They are the figures of greatest moral significance because they have the strongest connection to the metaphysical source of morality. Everyone else is an NPC. They just exist as fodder for the Star Wars.

Star Wars Atheism

What is the equivalent of atheism in the galaxy far, far away? Kreia shows us.

As the ultimate villain of KOTOR II, it turns out that Kreia’s plan is to deafen the whole galaxy to the Force. The particulars are not clear. However, it somehow involves spreading the Wound in the Force from Malachor V using the Exile. The Exile is uniquely able to accomplish this because she, too, is a Wound in the Force. Kreia’s plan is to do the Star Wars equivalent of killing God.

She explains her reasoning in the most underrated speech in Star Wars:

It is said that the Force has a will, it has a destiny for us all. I wield it, but it uses us all, and that is abhorrent to me. Because I hate the Force. I hate that it seems to have a will, that it would control us to achieve some measure of balance, when countless lives are lost.

But in you... I see the potential to see the Force die, to turn away from its will. And that is what pleases me. You are beautiful to me, exile. A dead spot in the Force, an emptiness in which its will might be denied.

After being betrayed by Jedi and the Sith, Kreia conducted an analysis of evil like the one I did above. She came to the conclusion that the real problem was the Force itself. Light and Dark are not the same as Good and Evil; they are instead the engines of the Star Wars. To secure the freedom and welfare of the galaxy, the Force must die.

Kreia’s heresy, from the Jedi perspective, is that she decouples values from the Force. The Jedi assume that altruism is correct no matter the case because that is what the Light side empowers. Likewise, the Sith assume that the path to personal freedom is always growing deeper in the Dark Side’s cruelties. The Force does not reward moderation. You either become an extreme altruist or an extreme egoist.

Kreia rejects these extreme value systems. She denies a transcendent ground of morality. However, she realizes that in order to change the galaxy’s values, she has to destroy the metaphysics empowering them. She has to shift the cosmic imaginary away from the Force. Thus, Kreia is something like a Star Wars atheist—not in that she disbelieves the Force, but that she rejects it as an authority.

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The Many Problems of Evil

The actions of every character in KOTOR II are shaped by their response to the Problem of Evil. Atris’ turn to the Dark Side, Nihilus’ unending hunger, Sion’s undying rage, and the Exile’s guilt are all different ways of dealing with this Evil in their lives.

But no one in the setting understands the Problem of Evil in Star Wars like Kreia does. Her analysis is uniquely insightful, and it is hard to play the game without admitting she has a point. Star Wars—especially in the Legends continuity—is an unending battle between Light and Dark. The cosmos does not care how many people die in the quest for Balance.

Notice how different this Problem of Evil is from the Problem of Evil in a Christian cosmic imaginary. In the galaxy far, far away, the Problem of Evil is about the unstoppable conflict between opposing sides of the Force. It is about the personal suffering caused by an impersonal spiritual power. The Christian Problem of Evil, conversely, is about the seeming absence of a good God. In a world curated by a benevolent Creator, why do so many suffer? These are not exactly the same Problem.

I think this comparison between Christian and Star Wars cosmic imaginaries yields three observations.

Observation 1: The Problem of Evil depends on one’s metaphysics.

It is useless to talk about evil without situating it within a larger story of the Cosmos. One’s theory of evil heavily depends on one’s understanding of its source. And the source of evil varies depending on one’s cosmic imaginary.

Observation 2: There is no singular “Problem of Evil.”

An implication of the first observation is that there is no THE Problem of Evil. There are many. Rather than understanding the Problem of Evil as a single topic, it is better to view it as a family of topics.

What unifies all Problems of Evil is a mismatch between flourishing and the cosmos. Some feature of the world results in a worse outcome, especially for humans.

Observation 3: There may not be a world without evil.3

I cannot prove this in this post, but I think comparing Star Wars to Christianity raises an interesting question: What if there is no world without evil?

We often suppose that evil is an argument against God because if God existed, evil would not. But what if there is no such thing as a world without some form of evil? What if every cosmic imaginary entails a Problem of Evil? Star Wars is an imaginary, but possible, world. What if every world we can imagine is like it, once we do a close study?

If true, then the Problem of Evil would not be unique evidence against God’s existence. The Problem is a feature of every worldview, and therefore evidence against none of them.

The only difference is that in some worlds, Evil is a solvable problem. It is not in others. Star Wars and Christianity illustrate this. Kreia was blackpilled because she realized there was no way to stop the eternal struggle between Light and Dark. In Christianity, at least, Evil is temporary. It will eventually face a final defeat.

Pragmatically, it is probably better to believe we live in a world where evil will ultimately be defeated, rather than a world where evil is eternal and necessary.

Conclusion

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II is one of my favorite games, and its philosophical examination of evil is partly why. It explores the different ways Evil manifests in individual lives, and the different ways we cope with it.

But I think KOTOR II also shows that there is not just one Problem of Evil. Problems of Evil all emerge from one’s cosmic imaginary. The Christian cosmic imaginary is different from KOTOR II’s, so it has a different Problem of Evil. Regardless, these Problems confront us no less powerfully than they do KOTOR II’s cast.

Instead of trying to discard cosmic imaginaries on the basis of whether they contain evil, I think we should consider whether our cosmic imaginary empowers us to deal with Evil. On that calculus, I greatly prefer Christianity.

Regardless, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II is valuable because it expands our moral imaginations. It shows us that evil is a complicated concept. It does not exist apart from the cosmos it inhabit. In that respect, the game is a call to deeper reflection on our own world.

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I spend a lot of time pondering the value of video games. We live in an era when many argue games are useless. For some, that’s a good thing: Video games can drain stress from our lives because they are not real. The famous media theorist, Marshall McLuhan, believed something like this. Although he did not write on video games specifically, he thought games in general act as a release valve for the pent up stress of society.

But others interpret video games as a waste of time. James Lindsay, for instance, suggested video games were a childish distraction. He’s hardly alone in his sentiment. It seems like everyone from Congress to Joe Rogan has it out for the medium. For these critics, McLuhan’s argument is not enough. Games need to be more than a release from social stress.

Both McLuhan and Lindsay are making the same mistake, albeit in opposite directions. They are focusing too much on the medium and not enough on the message, to warp McLuhan’s famous slogan. They consequently miss the way games speak to us. Critics focus on the media of video games at the expense of the rhetoric of video games.

I want to suggest that video games are valuable because they provide “equipment for living,” to borrow Kenneth Burke’s phrase. They provide symbols for thinking through and dealing with the challenges of life. The value of video games is thus rhetorical. They give us a language for influencing the world.

Media Studies Inside the Box

Before diving too deeply into rhetoric, I want to illustrate the limitations of traditional media studies critiques with an example.

Imagine it is Christmas and there is a box with your name on it under the tree. Excited, you are about to run over and investigate, only to be stopped by a roving band of professors in tweed jackets.

“Now now,” they say, “you must realize that investigating the box will do you no good. The box and the gift are totally distinct. You are wasting your time.”

In steps Marshall McLuhan, the father of Media Studies.

“All of you are wrong,” he says. “The box is not a neutral container of a present. Its size and shape constrain the kind of gift it contains. In fact, the gift itself is incidental—the box is what really makes Christmas!”

The whole gang descends into a spirited debate over the relative importance of boxes, while you stare at the gift you long to open.

This is Media Studies at its worst. Historically, the discipline arose to challenge the idea that media are neutral containers of information. Media shapes information and thereby shapes us. The box is not distinct from the gift, in our example. Or, in the words of McLuhan, “The medium is the message.”

McLuhan’s argument is a needed corrective in a world that too quickly dismisses media. He’s right: Media is not neutral. It powerfully influences the “scale, pace, and pattern” of human existence, to borrow his terms.

But media is not the whole story. What matters most in this discussion is not the box, but what lies inside the box. We care most about the stories, images, and games media contains. Any analysis of media at the expense of these has gone wrong somewhere.

The fallacy of doing media studies wholly outside the box is that it homogenizes what media carries into blank “information.” It thus overlooks the rich variety of information types available to us—testimony, quantitative data, revelation, etc. It all becomes random stuff inside the “box” of media.

Good media criticism needs to include criticism from inside the box. What is the gift it contains? What testimony about the human condition does it share? What scientific insights does it provide? Put simply, what is it saying to us? These questions are how one does criticism from inside the box.

The problem with much discourse about video games is that it is mostly “outside the box”—or in this case, the Xbox. It focuses on the number of hours played, whether video games increase aggression, if playing games increases hand-eye coordination, and so on.

Too few stop to think about what games are saying. What is so compelling about Fortnite that people will play for hours everyday? How do games shape our understanding of aggression? What if games help us beyond some measurable trait like hand-eye coordination?

Answering these questions forces us to go inside the Xbox. It requires us to understand the symbols, narratives, and arguments embedded in the games we play.

I call this kind of internal criticism rhetorical criticism.

Game Criticism as Rhetorical Critique

Traditionally, rhetoric has been the art of persuasion and public discourse. The rhetorician—a scholar of rhetoric—studied the techniques famous speeches used to shape history. Then they debated about the relative health of public discourse.

Rhetoricians still do this kind of criticism, but the discipline has come a long way from the Athenian agora. Today’s rhetoricians study everything from movies to architecture. It’s a discipline trying to discern the discourses creating society, and how to reshape them.

I think contemporary rhetoric is best defined as the study of symbolic power. A good rhetorical critique uncovers how symbols are configuring society in a certain way. It is not concerned about the symbol for its own sake; it cares about how the symbol shapes us.

For example, a rhetorical critique of Stop signs tries to understand how they stop people without physically forcing them. What about the Stop sign channels the concept of stopping at a driver? That’s symbolic power—the power of representing something else.

One can study video games in the same way. Video games are symbolic machines that let us play with meanings. They empower us even as they use symbolic power on us.

This kind of critique requires us to approach games from inside the box. You cannot see the symbolic machinery from the outside. To understand it, you have to open it up and examine the imagery, discourses, and narratives in the game. Only then can you ask how they relate to us.

If done well, the payoff for this kind of game criticism is what rhetorician Kenneth Burke called “equipment for living.” The idea is that everyone faces challenges foisted upon them by the times they live in. We all have to find a way to rise to the challenge. To that end, we need “symbolic equipment” that empowers us psychologically to live well.

Burke was thinking of literature when he was writing, but the theory applies just as well to games. Playing games can give players the symbols, stories, and language needed to build a compelling worldview. This empowers them to face the challenges of their lives.

Death Stranding as Equipment for Living

I can personally attest to games’ ability to provide equipment for living.

In early 2020, I was in my second semester of grad school. COVID was still a distant threat. Yet I was intensely isolated. I was alone in a city where I knew no one, in a program full of people who did not share my beliefs, at a school whose culture was alien to my own.

Kojima’s Death Stranding released a couple of months before. The game is about a lot of things, but it is certainly about loneliness. The protagonist, Sam Bridges, crosses a haunted wasteland to connect America’s shattered fragments. The survivors of this ghostly apocalypse dwell in their private bunkers. Yet through the network Sam builds, they are still connected.

Along the way, Sam finds connection, too. He meets characters like Fragile, Deadman, and Heartman. He even becomes the adoptive father of Lou. The edgy loner finds a reason to keep going.

Toward the end game, Sam delivers a short speech to his new friends explaining how his perspective changed. He used to be a nihilist,

But somewhere along the way, I started changing. Started meeting people that made me think that maybe it wasn’t all bad. People that put their faith in tomorrow and in me. That kept the lights on and waited for hope to arrive. So I gotta deliver, for their sake.

I must have watched that scene a hundred times. In Sam’s journey across the Icelandic-inspired wastes, I saw something of my own life. I too felt like I was venturing into a forbidding wilderness, cold and alone.

But Sam wasn’t alone. He had more friends than he knew. He kept crossing rivers and climbing mountains because he still held a sliver of faith that things could get better. That faith was validated by the friends he made.

I took Sam’s sliver of faith for myself. Weeks later, when the lockdowns came and we were forced to huddle in our own bunkers, I still listened to that speech. I didn’t have much hope, but I was willing to keep the lights on so it had a chance to arrive.

Thus, a strange thing happened during COVID. The more our world resembled the gloomy world of Death Stranding, the more powerfully it resonated with my situation. I didn’t feel good about what was happening, but I understood it. The game gave me resources for making sense of things.

The point here is simply that video games equip players for life through the meanings they contain. The main benefit of playing games is not better hand-eye coordination or some other “outside the box” good. Rather, the main benefit is the symbolic tools the game provides for making sense of life. The value of a game primarily comes from inside, not outside, the “box” of media.

Conclusion

Doubtless, some will maintain that video games are a waste of time. Many will say that they are an artifact of childhood, best left behind by responsible adults.

These critics, however, are too focused on the outside of the media box. They are too fixated on external factors like hours played. Consequently, they overlook the rich narratives and meanings contained within the games.

If we care to look inside the box, we may find video games provide symbolic equipment far more valuable than meager improvements in faculties like hand-eye coordination. They give us the tools for building a worldview that makes sense of life’s challenges.

Video games, like literature, film, and other great artistic media, are equipment for living. For that reason, they will always have value.

Violence in video games is one of those perennial topics. From the beginning, the public has wondered about the ethics of playing games where you gun down armies of enemies.

The ethics of video game violence took on added urgency after the Columbine High Shooting. In the wake of this tragedy, the media discovered the shooters were avid Doom players. Doom is a now-classic first-person shooter (FPS) that has a reputation for extreme violence. The player fights his way through Hell, mowing down enemies with all kinds of guns. The game seemed obviously connected to the massacre.

To a public unfamiliar with them, the Columbine shooting raised a question: Were video games turning kids into killers?

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Libraries worth of research have been written on this question. The short answer is no, playing video games does not turn gamers into raving murderers.1 Video games can make people more aggressive, but so can any competitive activity. As an empirical question, it is hard to argue that video games directly cause people to become violent.

But there is a deeper question about the ethics of playing violent games. Regardless of whether it causes actual violence, is there not something wrong with pretending to hurt people? If you discovered your neighbor spent eight hours a day stabbing an effigy of someone, you would think that is disturbing behavior. Why is killing virtual people any different? It seems like a vice to enjoy this kind of game.

I want to call this vice argument into question. Violent games can be instruments for building a virtuous character. They create a space for imagining evil’s destruction, thereby cultivating the virtues of zeal and hope.

Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun is a good example of how violent games cultivate these virtues. As a game modeled after classic shooters like Doom and Castle Wolfenstein, it is an ideal test case. It shows how even extremely violent games can serve as a useful contemplative exercise.

The Emperor Protects Boomer Shooters

Boltgun is a throwback to the classic shooters of the 90s—games like Marathon, Doom, Castle Wolfenstein 3D, and Quake. The central concept of this genre is fairly simple. You are an epic dude who has been dropped into a maze full of monsters and you have to shoot your way out. Today, this type of game is called a “Boomer shooter.”

What sets Boltgun apart from its ancestors is that it is set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. Warhammer’s tagline says it all: “In the grim darkness of the 41st millennium, there is only war.” Set far into the future, a decaying Imperium of Man rules the human race. The Imperium is a ruthless theocracy that worships the God Emperor of Mankind, whose half-dead body sits on the Golden Throne.

The Imperium faces threats from all directions—alien elves, Space Communists, robot mummies, and more. But the Daemons of Chaos are their worst enemies by far. Spawned from the hellish Warp dimension by the four Chaos Gods, they threaten to consume the galaxy.

The Space Marines stand athwart the tide of Chaos. These elite super soldiers, designed by the Emperor himself, fight humanity’s enemies with their trusty boltguns. One of them—Malum Caedo—is the game’s protagonist.

Caedo is sent to a vital industrial planet to root out Chaos and their heretic allies. It turns out a sorcerer is behind everything. Having made a pact with Chaos, the sorcerer is trying to open a rift between the real world and the Warp’s hellscape. Malum Caedo, loyal Space Marine he is, cannot allow this.

Much bloodshed ensues.

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The Critique of Violence

Boltgun makes no apologies for being an extremely violent game. Enemies erupt into pixelated blood when shot. The melee attack whips out a chainsword, which the player can rev as it carves through daemonic flesh. Clearing an area of enemies leaves the floor slick with gore.

Here is where the critic of violent games levels their charge. Surely these games are bad for us, for they encourage us to love inflicting harm upon others. The love of harming others must be a vice, a bad character trait, and we should avoid activities that cultivate it.

The critic can even bring in a religious dimension. I am myself a Christian, and Christians like me should not ignore Jesus’ teaching on murder:

21 “You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘You shall not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ 22 But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to a brother or sister, ‘Raca,’ is answerable to the court. And anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell. — Matthew 5:21, NIV

For Jesus, murder is not first an outward, physical act. Murder happens inside the murderer’s heart. No one deliberately shoots someone else without first willing their enemy’s death. But even if you stop short of pulling the trigger, that murderous rumination, that ill intent, is still murder. It is the outworking of a wrathful heart.

A critic of violent games might apply this logic to games. It does not matter that no one is really dying. What matters is the wrath the player leans into in order to play the game. The player is committing spiritual murder, even if he is only killing pixels.

Therefore, a critic can argue on both virtue ethical and religious grounds that violent games are bad.

I do not want to dismiss this critique too quickly, for it gets something right. The critic is correct that playing games with ill intent is bad for a person’s soul. If someone plays Boltgun because they really want to hurt someone, then they should stop. That’s no different from burning someone in effigy. It is harming a representation of someone they wish they could harm in reality. In one sense, then, the critic is right: Some people should not play some violent video games under some circumstances.

But does this really describe most gamers? Probably not. Most gamers are not trying to satisfy murderous urges they cannot indulge in real life. Instead, they are playing for far more benign reasons. That critical element that makes violence murder—person-oriented ill intent—is missing from the vast majority of gamers.

The critic also misses that violence is not the same as wrath or some similar vice. Swatting a fly is not an exercise in wrath because there is no person-oriented ill intent. In a similar vein, shooting daemons in a video game is not wrath.

The critic’s charge that violent games are universally wrong seems indefensible. At most, what such virtue-oriented critiques show is that some people ought not to play some games.

Contemplative Violence

But even more importantly, the critic misses the way violent video games might help players develop good character traits, also called virtue. Properly interpreted, these games can function as aides for cultivating a healthy hatred of evil.

Sometimes games contain symbols of primordial evil, which I call the Infernal. These characters are cosmic evil personified. They incarnate the vices of our nature—wrath, sloth, envy, greed, pride, lust, and so forth.

Games use the Infernal to talk about evil. When the Infernal talks, it is evil itself speaking. When the Infernal fights, it is evil acting on the world. And when the player slays the Infernal, they kill not just an evil person, but the concept of evil the Infernal represents.

For example, the Infernal in Boltgun is a Sorcerer who has made a pact with two Chaos Gods, Tzeentch and Nurgle. These gods represent different vices—pride, greed, and sloth, at the very least. The Sorcerer and his minions represent those vices, too. They are symbols of evil.

Gunning down the Sorcerer’s daemons and heretics is part of the game’s moral grammar. Boltgun is making a statement: The vices these enemies represent have no place in the world. They are Infernal, representations of a cosmic evil that a good person must repudiate. This is why the player’s “shield” mechanic is called Contempt: Caedo’s contempt for Chaos protects him from it. In like manner, our contempt for vice keeps us from succumbing.

The brutal violence of Boltgun, therefore, can be a call to contemplation. It is a call to more zealously expunge the evil in our nature. One must kill the evil within with all the brutality Caedo executes daemons. The pleasure of carving through symbolic evil stokes zeal for defeating actual evil. Most importantly, it inspires hope that such a victory is possible.

Crucially, this is not a call for real-world violence or malice toward anyone. Your annoying neighbor is not the Infernal. Healthcare executives are not the Infernal. Politicians are not the Infernal. None of your enemies are the source of cosmic evil.2

Instead, contemplative, symbolic violence like that of video games is always directed against evil itself. It symbolizes a personal rejection of evil. The goal is never to kill an actual prideful person; the goal is to kill the vice of Pride, especially in ourselves. The proper telos of contemplative violence is repentance from the evil we symbolically slay.

Conclusion

If you are looking for a simple answer to the question, “Should I play violent games?”, I cannot give you one. The ethics of violent video games depends heavily on what that violence represents. If your purpose in playing is murder—person-oriented ill intent—then it is wrong. But video game violence does not have to be murder.

Players can interpret video game violence as a form of contemplation. By symbolically slaying evil in video games, we visualize the defeat of evil itself. This inspires hope that we can overcome evil—not through real-world violence, but through the pursuit of virtue.3

Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun is a good example of what contemplative violence looks like. Malum Caedo’s zeal for destroying Chaos is an opportunity to contemplate what it is like to kill the vices within each of us. The quest to defeat the Sorcerer is a quest to destroy sloth, pride, and envy.

Therefore, games like Boltgun contain the power to elevate our characters. Some people, like the Columbine shooters, tragically miss that lesson. But not everyone does. We all must choose: Kill the vices within ourselves or let them kill us. There is no third way.

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Minecraft is, by some metrics, the most popular video game in history. Its player base lives everywhere from Russia to Latin America. For well over a decade now, it has entranced players both young and old. I began playing it as a teenager and still play to this day.

What accounts for the enduring appeal of Minecraft? Why is it that, despite changing tastes, advances in technology, and the invention of more sophisticated game designs, we keep returning to this game?

One answer to these questions might have to do with its basic design. Minecraft gamifies what the philosopher Martin Heidegger calls “being-in-the-world,” also called “Dasein.” It therefore speaks to our fundamental condition as human beings.

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The Player for Whom Being Matters

Perhaps it is an act of tremendous hubris to integrate Heidegger and games in a single post, but I am going to try.1

We can start with a question: What does it mean to exist? This question marks humans as the strangest of all beings. Other animals go about their day, never worrying about their place in the larger cosmos. But we care about such things. We ask questions not just about day-to-day existence, but about Existence in general. We look for some kind of justification for our existence. We are the “being for whom Being matters,” or to put it in Heideggerian terms, Dasein.

The question of Being, or “fundamental ontology,” arises from at least two general features of human existence.

First, we are sort of “thrown into” the world. No one is born with the perfect worldview downloaded into their brain. We have to arrive at an understanding of our place in the world through interpretation. Heideggerian philosophy calls this the “hermeneutics of facticity.” “Hermeneutics” refers to the practice of interpretation, whereas “facticity” refers to the facts of life. We are tossed into the facts and we have to figure out what it all means.

Second, we are creatures who care. By this, Heidegger means that we actively relate to the world; we are not mere passive observers. We approach the world as “ready-at-hand” to interact with, not merely “present-at-hand” to watch.

A consequence of this approach is that we “have a care” about the things we interact with. An avid gamer cares deeply about the game, for instance. Their “being in the world” is funneled into “being in the game” as they play. The same goes with all activity—being a doctor, practicing law, building a table, etc. These are all ways in which our cares funnel us into particular kinds of being-in-the-world.

Thus, we are thrown into a messy and confusing set of facts that we interpret into a useable world. Our interactions with that world shape Being into many particular kinds of being.

But which way is the right way? The confusing nature of factical life is enough to tempt one to despair. What’s more, all of us are heading towards death, which will ultimately close us off from being-in-the-world. This “angst”—the realization of the vast possibilities of life, but the knowledge that one cannot pursue them all—is a fundamental predicament for Dasein.

To make a long story short, Heidegger thinks the solution is “authenticity.”2 Popular culture has dumbed this down into trite sayings like “You do you,” but Heidegger adds a layer of nuance. Authenticity is not really about being true to some mysterious inner self; it is about being true to the overall “project” of one’s life.3 In the final analysis, what really matters is that the individual owns how they are being-in-the-world.

The meaning of life, on this view, is different for everyone. We all have different stories. The authentic person takes responsibility for that story; the inauthentic is swept away by general modes of being.

Being and Timecraft

Minecraft gamifies many concepts from Being and Time. It does not do it perfectly, of course, but it plays with the same ideas.

Consider how starting a new world subjects the player to the hermeneutics of facticity. Back when I first played Minecraft, I remember being terribly confused. The game dropped me into a world I knew nothing about. Where was I? How did I make things? What was I supposed to do in this game? The terror of that first night added to the chaos. Zombies wandered the forest, skeletons shot me from all directions, Creepers ambushed me unseen and unheard. I knew I was not at home in this world.

Gradually, my hermeneutic abilities increased. I learned how to more deftly navigate the world. I learned how to make tools like pickaxes, shovels, and swords. I discovered techniques for reshaping the landscape.

My relation to the world of Minecraft changed. When I first started, the world was largely present-at-hand. I could only observe the world and hope for the best. But as my skill increased, the world became ready-at-hand. I realized that Minecraft was composed of raw materials I could reshape to take control of my destiny. I could fight back by making swords. I could build castles, sail oceans, plant crops.

Growing mastery over my tools turned Minecraft from a hostile wilderness into a canvas for self-expression. I no longer had to build just to survive. I could embark on genuinely creative endeavors—statues, towers, floating cities, etc. And as I overcame the challenges of existence, I became ever-deeper immersed in the world I was creating.

Herein lies the Heideggerian spirit of Minecraft. The game gives you no overarching goal, not really. It tosses you into factical life and tells you to overcome it—not through some pre-existing story, but by creating your own.

Minecraft is fun to the degree the player is authentic. Once the player rises above mere survival, the game’s appeal depends on their ability to commit to a creative project. They have to turn Being into being-in-the-world. This project is the kind of self-expression that builds an authentic life narrative. It’s a way of taking ownership of one’s life, rather than having it dictated to you by some external structure.

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The Inescapable Cosmos

Or is it? While much of this Heideggerian interpretation is compelling, it has some problems.

Heidegger’s philosophy is a type of Existentialism.4 This is a broad family of philosophies united by the conviction that humans must choose their own meaning of life. Accepting a meaning provided by the universe, or God, or society is not merely inauthentic; it is impossible. The universe has no meaning to give. We must heroically reach inside ourselves and create the meaning that is right for each of us. There is no “the meaning of life,” there is only the meaning of each individual’s life.

This is a flat rejection of an older view one might call “Cosmos.” In Cosmic philosophies, the external world is infused with meaning by some transcendent Being—God, the Platonic Forms, or spiritual power like Polynesian mana. Humans find meaning by finding their place in the order of the Cosmos. This order is revealed through philosophical contemplation, divine revelation, or ancestral tradition.

Existentialists claim to have escaped the Cosmos. In its place, they have entered the Universe, a neutral space that is a blank canvas for human action.5 They have to make this claim or else they must deal with the prickly problem of why human, created meaning trumps Cosmic meaning.

Minecraft does not neatly fit the Universe model of space. On the contrary, it has many Cosmic features that press meaning on the player. Not least of these is the game mechanics themselves. The game, at least in Survival mode, is designed to produce this story of triumphing over factical life and finding meaning in creation. That is why so much of the Minecraft world is easily converted into useful building materials.

Then there are the narrative features of the game. We do not usually think of Minecraft as having a narrative, but clearly one lurks in the background. The world is full of undead monsters. The landscape is dotted with abandoned temples, small villages, and broken portals to the hellish Nether dimension. The dimension-hopping Endermen seem to come from yet another realm, the End, where a powerful dragon dwells. This place has a past.

The world of Minecraft is an “enchanted world,” as Charles Taylor would call it. It is haunted by otherworldly beings of great power. The order is not an impersonal one, empty of all but human agency. On the contrary, supernatural agents intervene all the time. The way Endermen steal blocks is something out of German folklore.6 It calls to mind gremlins absconding with the turnip crop.

In other words, Minecraft is not a Universe but a Cosmos. The very structure of the world has meanings that impose themselves on the player. The player has no choice but to rise to the challenge of the evils the Cosmos throws their way.

On this reading, then, Minecraft is about a Hero arising to embody the pinnacle of the Cosmic order. There is, in fact, a Good Life the player pursues by mastering their power and assuming control of the world. This does not vary from player to player like Heideggerian authenticity. There is but one golden path to a worthy life: Mining and crafting.

It seems, then, that the Cosmos is inescapable in Minecraft. But this does not render the question of Being pointless. Rather, it suggests that living a meaningful life is about arising to an ideal embedded in the Cosmos. We ascend to the ideal by surrendering to the Cosmos’ demands upon our lives.

Daseincraft

Perhaps Minecraft is better thought of as Daseincraft, a model of Cosmic self-cultivation. It is more than a simple gamification of Being and Time. While it takes seriously Heidegger’s central concerns, it also goes beyond them. We care about Existence not because we are trying to cash out Being in our individual lives, but because we are trying to unite with something greater than ourselves.

And this is where my interpretation parts ways with Heidegger decisively. For Heidegger, the meaning of life is found in the ordinary. It is found in the day-to-day decision to forge one’s own authentic path through the Universe.

I believe the meaning of life is found in the extraordinary. It comes from a conscious effort to embed oneself in the order of the Cosmos. Our ordinary actions build toward moments where we touch the transcendent sources of meaning, where the curtain of the profane falls back and we experience the Sacred. These moments sustain us when all seems dark and cold.

But this openness to the transcendent does not just happen. Dasein tends to look down, not up. One must pursue a lifestyle designed to cultivate it. And as silly as it may sound, Minecraft provides a model of what that might look like.

Think of how the experienced Minecraft player approaches the game. The player has a program of improvement. One is continuously embarking on projects to tame the chaos and reshape the world. With every torch placed, with every new tool, with every new crop, the player embodies the creative impulse that organizes the world. By the late game, forces that once easily destroyed them are powerless. The whole world is ready-at-hand. They thus arise to the pinnacle of Minecraft’s Cosmos.

The experienced player’s mastery of the game is a model of what I referred to as “Daseincraft,” an effort to align our being-in-the-world with the Cosmic structures of meaning. Just as a Minecraft character lives a maximally meaningful life through embracing creativity, we live maximally meaningful lives by cultivating the virtues given in the Cosmos.7 This requires a “crafting” of our imaginations, thoughts, and behavior to inhabit the grand design.

Minecraft is, then, a model of Daseincraft. It is a model of what it looks like to embody the Cosmic order through mastery of virtue.

Conclusion

Doubtless there is more to say about the relationship between Being and Minecraft. I have only scratched the surface. Moreover, it’s entirely possible I misinterpreted some of Heidegger’s philosophy—Being and Time is notoriously dense. Nonetheless, I believe my basic analysis is correct.

Part of Minecraft’s enduring appeal is its ability to interrogate our relationship with Being. Regardless of where we live or when, we are all confronted by the question of what it means to exist. We want to know what it is to live a life that means something.

While I part ways with Heidegger over how to live a meaningful life, I think that Minecraft provides an interesting way of modeling it. It shows how one can climb out of factical life’s confusion and embrace meaning. Minecraft is Daseincraft, if you will. It is an effort to reshape one’s imagination and habits so one sees the larger significance of things. And this grander view allows one to embed oneself in the Cosmic order through virtue.

I did not know all this when I was a teenager, of course. But all this time, I believe this is what kept bringing me back. Minecraft speaks to us about the fundamental questions of life. It contemplates what it means to be human. For that reason, it deserves its popularity.

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In a previous post on Civilization VI, I promised that I would return to discuss the game’s religion mechanic in more detail. This post is meant to make good on that promise.

I last discussed the Religious Victory as embodying a concept of spiritual progress. Religion in this ending is described as a sensemaking process. Its job is to help us find “meaning in the cosmos,” as the narrator puts it. To make spiritual progress is to integrate oneself into the cosmic order, to find belonging in relation to the whole.

This vision of religion stands in stark contrast to how the game actually plays with religion, however. The Religion mechanics in Civ VI are not presented as an idealistic quest for meaning. On the contrary, the game represents religion in a very materialistic, almost cynical way.

Civilization VI communicates the idea of religion through the metaphor of war. By borrowing game mechanics from the military side of the game, it structures religion as a type of violent conflict between factions.

There is some truth in this portrayal—religion involves a battle between conflicting narratives of reality. However, the game’s mixture of religion with war metaphors also distorts the reality of religious debate.

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The Metaphor Behind Meaning

To see where I am coming from, it is helpful to have a grasp of Mark Johnson’s theory of metaphoric maps. The gist of it is that metaphors are the product of overlapping concepts. One concept is explained, or understood, or otherwise made intelligible by another.

The classic example of a conceptual metaphor in Johnson and Lakoff’s (1980) Metaphors We Live By is ARGUMENT IS WAR.1 It turns out we usually think of the concept {Argument} in terms of the concept of {War}. Think of how we talk about arguments: We “held our ground,” we “defeated their argument,” we “won the debate.” All of this language is a manifestation of ARGUMENT IS WAR. We make sense of argument in terms of war. The two concepts overlap into a metaphor.

According to Johnson, conceptual metaphors are the basic building block of “metaphoric maps” that structure our entire understanding of the world.2 Concepts link together in these vast chains that render each other mutually intelligible.

I am not aware of any literature on this subject, but it strikes me that conceptual metaphors express themselves in gameplay, too. You might call this a ludic metaphor, from the Latin “ludus” for play. When one concept is structured in terms of another through game mechanics, the mechanic functions metaphorically.

Just like other metaphors, it makes sense that these would overlap within the game into a ludic metaphoric map. The game mechanics link together to explain concepts in terms of each other.

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Playing with Religious Metaphors

Civilization VI’s religion mechanic strikes me as a perfect example of a ludic metaphor. It borrows the game mechanics of war to play with religion.

The most blatant instance of RELIGION IS WAR is in the “theological combat” system. To convert other civilizations, players purchase Missionaries or Apostles with Faith. Those units spread the player’s religion to cities. However, if they encounter other religious units, they engage in “theological combat.”

Theological combat is portrayed as a violent, cosmic struggle. Lighting falls from the sky, presumably sent from the opposing gods. Both sides lose health. Of course, if one loses enough, the unit dies. The losing religion’s presence in the surrounding cities diminishes, while the winner’s increases.

The ludic metaphor undergirding theological combat seems to be MISSIONARIES ARE SOLDIERS. That’s why they function like one: They have health bars, they fight other units, and they even capture territory. The Gurus are even analogous to medics in that they heal damaged units.

Other metaphors link {Religion} and {War} in a more oblique manner than theological combat. Consider FAITH IS CURRENCY. Unlike resources such as Beakers, Notes, or Hammers, Faith does not build toward anything in particular. It accrues until the player decides to “buy” something with it—religious buildings, missionaries, even military units and Great People.

Faith is more akin to Gold, which can mostly do whatever Faith can. But the main reason anyone would specialize heavily into gold is to afford a large army. Military units cost gold to maintain, making it a priority for all the warmongers out there. In other words, Faith is conceptually similar to a game mechanic whose main purpose is war.

Lastly, CONVERSION IS CONQUEST. One wins the religious victory by converting a majority of the world’s cities. As cities “fall,” they paint the map the color of the dominant religion.

Turn-by-turn, religion in Civ VI is about seizing space from opponents. Again, this is conceptually similar to a military playthrough. The warmonger, too, is trying to claw territory from his enemies by force. The only thing different about religious conquest is the kind of benefit the player gets from it. That’s what makes it a metaphor, not a synonym.

Put together, Civ VI’s metaphoric map of religion looks something like this: RELIGION IS WAR. Therefore, CONVERSION IS CONQUEST and MISSIONARIES ARE SOLDIERS. FAITH IS the CURRENCY used to fund the WAR.

Flaws in the Metaphoric Map

I said the metaphoric map “looks something like this” because it is probably more complicated than three ludic metaphors. Indeed, one could make the case that the game includes RELIGION IS CULTURE, since Faith is so useful for buying Great People.

Nonetheless, I think RELIGION IS WAR dominates Civ VI’s understanding of religion. The ludic metaphors fit together too well, and there are too many, for it to be anything else. The game understands religion as a cosmic battle. And given how Faith is primarily used to purchase material benefits, such as soldiers, buildings, and similar bonuses, it’s hard not to see some cynicism here.

All these observations force the question: Does Civ VI understand religion?

On one hand, I think that the game’s metaphoric map captures something true.

Religion is, in one sense, a cosmic war. Not all religions can be true. Nonetheless, they battle each other for the world’s allegiance. The world’s major religions are trying to unite humanity behind a shared understanding of the cosmos. This is a competition with only one real winner.

Moreover, the game is even mostly right about how religion plays out. Missionaries really do go to foreign cities and try to convert the population. They really do engage in debate.

Yet on the other hand, I think Civ VI suffers from profound misunderstandings.

Even if RELIGION IS WAR, its object is emphatically not to kill the other side. The goal is to convert them. Religion ultimately spreads via persuasion, not violence. This is why those stubborn Christians wouldn’t go away when the Romans fed them to lions. Killing a person is not the same as killing their worldview. Civ VI completely misses this.

If the game wanted a more accurate ludic metaphor, theological combat would end with the enemy unit joining the winner. That would convey the idea of “theological combat” more accurately.

The FAITH IS CURRENCY metaphor is doubly problematic. I cannot think of a single religious person who treats faith this way. People treat faith as many things—an energy, a power, even a tool—but never a currency.

Commercial concepts are inimical to faith because faith is about the intangible world. Faith deals with promises, not products. Commerce is about trading material goods, even if those goods are some form of electricity. Using faith to buy material advantages completely misses the point.

Civ VI seems to have trouble with the idea that faith is a virtue. Faith is better represented the way the game represents Science or Culture. It builds up over time and produces benefits, but only if a person cultivates it. The game would be better served by a “Faith tree” than treating religion as a commodity. There are other ways of gamifying Faith, but that’s one example.

FAITH IS CURRENCY also suggests that RELIGION IS A MARKETPLACE—or a gun shop, if you want to mix metaphors with RELIGION IS WAR. The game presents religion as this giant stockpile of scarce beliefs. If you don’t get the belief first, someone else will and they’ll use it to conquer you.

Civ VI’s commodified view of belief leaves no room for the idea that religions might share beliefs. Religious beliefs are not copyrighted; nothing prevents religions from sharing ideas. Syncretism—mixing religious beliefs—is common in history. But the commercial metaphor stops syncretism from appearing in the game.

Lastly, the game never considers that certain religious beliefs might be bad for a civilization, not good. The FAITH IS CURRENCY metaphor obscures this possibility. After all, we buy things we perceive as valuable, and we are usually right.

But not all beliefs are valuable. Widow burning, for example, is a worthless belief that negatively affects societies that embrace it. Yet there is nothing like widow burning in Civ VI’s Pantheon choices. Some beliefs might result in a sub-optimal build, but none are designed to be intrinsically bad. The game never countenances the possibility that some forms of religion are simply harmful to a society.

Conclusion

Civilization VI remains one of my favorite games. However, I think it contains some serious misunderstandings about the nature of religion.

The Religious Victory treats religion as an idealistic quest for meaning, yet the actual gameplay is structured around material domination. The ludic metaphor RELIGION IS WAR lurks behind most of the religious game mechanics. Combined with FAITH IS CURRENCY, the game presents religion in a rather cynical light. It is either a mere commodity or a weapon for destroying one’s enemies.

I do not mean this critique as an indictment of the game. Firaxis, like all developers, was just trying to ship a fun product. Judging by my hours played, they succeeded.

But when we turn to games as a source of reflection, we have to remain aware of their flaws. We have to realize that most metaphors are imperfect reflections of reality.3 In Civ VI’s case, I think its ludic metaphors fail to grasp the heart of religion. It falls to future game designers to think of better metaphors. Civ’s ability to reflect on the most important subject in history—religion—depends on it.

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Plenty of journalists and commentators have written on Elon Musk’s fascination with Deus Ex, the classic cyberpunk game. The Independent published a lengthy article exposing the numerous links between Musk’s worldview, motives, and his admiration for the franchise.

Connections are everywhere. Musk keeps a version of Adam Jensen’s pistol by his bed. He interprets historical events, like the COVID-19 pandemic, through the lens of Deus Ex. Then there is Musk’s deep involvement in transhumanist technologies like AI, Neuralink, and robotics.

The writers of the game are uncomfortable with the connection. Grossman, who worked on the original game, said,

“Musk plainly imagines he's the JC Denton of this world—a plainspoken everyman, standing up to the elite. As is obvious to everyone, Musk is the one with power and he's just pathologically incapable of honest introspection.”1

He’s hardly alone in his sentiment.

But for all these claims, I have never seen anyone do a systematic comparison of Elon Musk’s ideas with Deus Ex. To what extent does the Deus Ex shape how he sees the world? That’s what I want to explore with this post.

I want to suggest that Deus Ex is a source of symbolic categories that structure Musk’s imagination. They help him tell a story that explains the social order and his relationship with it.

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Deus Ex and the Social Imaginary

The theory I am drawing on is what scholars call the imaginary. Imagination is a faculty individuals use to invent ideas. Imaginaries, similarly, are the collective imagination. They use symbolic systems to create a unified worldview out of disparate beliefs and experiences.

Charles Taylor famously theorized the “social imaginary,” which he used to explain the differences between how secular moderns view society and premodern people.2 For him, the social imaginary was what united many individuals into a common society. It also defined the nature of that society. A people’s literature, laws, arts, and discourse can all shape the social imaginary.

Video games shape the social imaginary, too. They are symbolic machinery that help players imagine the world. Games provide the player with a set of lenses for thinking about human nature, society, and the future. Through games, players arrive at a common language for discussing these topics—a language that shapes their understanding.

Full Spoilers for Deus Ex (2000) Below

The game franchise Deus Ex is one such language. I will focus here on the first game, since that is what Musk seems most familiar with. Deus Ex (2000) is a conspiracy thriller starring JC Denton, a nanomachine-powered superspy.

A lot happens in Deus Ex (2000). The following short summary should suffice for our purposes: A government agency called UNATCO dispatches JC Denton to stop a terrorist group called the National Secessionist Forces (NSF). The NSF has been trying to steal Ambrosia, a cure to the deadly Gray Death plague.

To the surprise of no one, UNATCO is the bad guy. It is controlled by even worse guys called Majestic 12 (MJ12), which was formerly controlled by the Illuminati.3

Unfortunately for the Illuminati, the archvillain Bob Page killed them and took control of MJ12. He is using their resources to create a super-AI that he can merge with to rule the world forever. One version of this AI, Daedalus, decides to help JC Denton. Its other incarnation—Icarus—helps Bob Page. Eventually, the two AIs merge to form Helios, a godlike superintelligence that can control the world.

The game climaxes with JC Denton storming Area 51 to stop Bob Page’s plans. From there, he can choose three endings.

Option 1: Steal Page’s thunder by merging with Helios. JC Denton becomes a godlike being who pledges to enlighten humanity. Page dies, and the Illuminati becomes irrelevant. JC Denton now guides the world as a cyberdeity.

Option 2: Denton can destroy the global telecommunications grid and Return to Monke. Advanced technology disappears, leaving humanity to the purity of tribal villages. No more evil megacorporations, no more tyrannical governments, only freedom. The character who advocates this ending sees it more as an anarcho-primitivist paradise than a dystopia.

Option 3: Denton can join the Illuminati. He kills Bob Page and uses the Illuminati’s resources to rebuild the world. A little influence here, pull a few strings there, and the whole world will forget about the Gray Death. The Helios project is put away—the world is not ready, they decide. Henceforth, humanity will carry on with help from the Illuminati’s invisible hand.

Together, these events and characters can function as symbols. They are a way of thinking about topics like technology, human nature, society, and the future. Which begs the question: Is Musk using any of these symbols?

Muskian Parallels

The answer is yes, of course. The articles I cited picked up a few examples from his tweets. He obviously sees the COVID-19 pandemic through the lens of the Gray Death, and he has explicitly compared some of his technological ventures with Deus Ex-style human augmentation.

But these are low hanging fruit. The game’s influence goes much, much deeper than providing mere frames for interpreting current events. It plays a structural role in how he understands social reality by outlining “defeat” and “victory” conditions for humanity.

Imagining Defeat

Let’s start with Defeat Conditions. Deus Ex helps Musk imagine what it would look like for humanity to get the “Bad End” of history.

What does Musk fear more than anything in the world? Bob Page. Musk is afraid that some malevolent billionaire will create an AI superintelligence and become a cybergod. He is terrified that a shadowy cabal of influencers are pulling the strings, creating misaligned AI technology that will ultimately destroy the human race.

In short, he is afraid that the villain of Deus Ex might become a reality.

This is not mere speculation on my part. Karen Hao’s Empire of AI documents in detail how Musk’s fear of superintelligent AI drove his business decisions.

A meeting with Demis Hassabis, CEO of AI research lab DeepMind, first seriously triggered his concerns. Hassabis suggested that the AI he was building could follow Musk to Mars. Alarmed, Musk vehemently opposed Google’s acquisition of DeepMind. One meeting of its ethics board was enough to convince him that these people had to be stopped.

Musk helped found OpenAI as a counter to DeepMind’s ambitions. The narrative he sold OpenAI employees was that they were in a race to stop an “evil genius:”

“He literally made a video game where an evil genius tries to create AI to take over the world!” Musk shouted, referring to Hassabis’ 2004 title, Evil Genius. “And f**** people don’t see it! F**** people don’t see it! And Larry, Larry thinks he controls Demis but he’s too busy f**** windsurfing to realize Demis is gathering all the power.”4 [Censorship mine]

It does not take much to see Deus Ex supplying the categories for Musk’s imagination. Hassabis is Bob Page, the shadowy genius building an AI to enslave humanity, and DeepMind is Majestic 12. If Musk wants to be the hero of this story—if he wants to be JC Denton—then he has to stop them.

Musk could conveniently reuse these symbols as circumstances changed. When he left OpenAI over its plan to become for-profit, Sam Altman became Bob Page and OpenAI became MJ12. The same categories will get used again and again as needed.

For Musk, then, humanity loses if someone like Bob Page succeeds at creating Helios—the ultimate AI. This is the Bad Ending he is trying to avert.

Imagining Victory

What would it take for humanity to “win” with AI? Deus Ex shapes Musk’s imagination here, too.

Musk seems to think the best way to solve the AI alignment problem is through greater symbiosis with AI. The more closely connected AI is to human will, the less likely it is to do something dramatically terrible to humans. He says as much in an interview with TED:

You know, that’s sort of the idea behind Neuralink, is to try to more tightly couple collective human world to digital superintelligence. — Elon Musk5

If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is. He is describing a version of the Helios ending. More specifically, he is describing the version in Deus Ex’s sequel, Invisible War. In that ending, the entire human race merges with Helios, not just JC Denton.

The ideal end-state for humanity, a “Future Worth Getting Excited For,” is an age of “abundance” brought about by the alignment of superintelligent AI with the human good.6 It is the final abolition of scarcity by technology.

The trouble is that the Bob Pages of the world threaten to derail this plan. If they can, they’ll seize Helios for themselves. Therefore, Musk needs influence of his own. He needs his own cabal of agents working to bring about humanity’s union with superintelligence.

To that end, Musk has dabbled in politics as well as industry. If Bob Page seeks to monopolize the world through telecommunication, Musk will simply buy Twitter. If Bob Page’s cronies are working to undermine Musk through the Deep State, he’ll join DOGE and root them out. If Bob Page tries to use foreign governments to control the information, he’ll fight them in court with high-powered law firms.

In other words, Elon Musk seems to have chosen a combination of the Illuminati and the Helios ending. He wants to align superintelligent AI to humanity through symbiosis, but he cannot risk letting just anyone pursue that project. He has to guide the process with a special cabal he trusts to do the right thing.

For Musk, “winning” means that the Illuminati beats MJ12 to Helios, then shares the benefits of Helios to the world—not the technology itself.7

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The Power of Imagination

On their own, these threads might merely be interesting nuggets of information. Together, I think they demonstrate how foundational Deus Ex is to Elon Musk’s social imagination. The game provides a set of symbols he can use to imagine society as a coherent story.

In Musk’s eyes, society is an epic shadow war between techno-heroes and the Man. He is JC Denton. He’s a super-agent who uses his technical skills to fight back against secretive government agencies, evil geniuses, and rogue AIs. He’s formed his own Illuminati (Tesla, SpaceX, Grok, etc.) to defeat MJ12 (Google, OpenAI, Twitter, etc.). In short, he’s managed to translate his life into the symbolic world of Deus Ex.

I think this narrative is an unseen source of Musk’s power. Beyond his incredible technology, beyond his immense wealth, beyond his business success, Musk has a powerful imagination. He has used Deus Ex and stories like it to gamify his entire life.

And other people want to be a part of that story, too. There are legions of people who want to be JC Denton, unmasking the conspiracy and fighting Bob Page. They want to share Musk’s social imaginary.

But for all Musk’s imagination, he seems to have overlooked an important question: What if he is Bob Page?

The Real Bob Page?

When Sam Altman and Musk fought over the future of OpenAI, Ilya Sutskever and Greg Brockman tried to make peace. They tactfully pointed out the flaws in Elon Musk’s proposed corporate structure.

The current structure provides you with a path where you end up with unilateral absolute control over the AGI. You stated that you don’t want to control the final AGI, but during this negotiation, you’ve shown to us that absolute control is extremely important to you.

As an example, you said that you needed to be CEO of the new company so that everyone will know that you are the one who is in charge, even though you also stated that you hate being CEO and would much rather not be CEO.

Thus, we are concerned that as the company makes genuine progress towards AGI, you will choose to retain your absolute control of the company despite current intent to the contrary. We disagree with your statement that our ability to leave is our greatest power, because once the company is actually on track to AGI, the company will be much more important than any individual.

The goal of OpenAI is to make the future good and to avoid an AGI dictatorship. You are concerned that Demis could create an AGI dictatorship. So do we. So it is a bad idea to create a structure where you could become a dictator if you chose to, especially given that we can create some other structure that avoids this possibility.

(Ilya Sutskever & Greg Brockman)8

As one might expect, this did not go over very well. The business reasons are obvious: Musk felt he was getting conned into funding a startup.

But even if the business details could have been worked out, Sutskever and Brockman’s appeal was doomed. They failed to consider Musk’s social imaginary. It is inconceivable to Musk that he might have been Bob Page all along.

On this reading of Musk’s social imaginary, he is something of a tragic villain. By trying to become JC Denton, Musk accidentally fell into the role of his archnemesis. He became the villain of the world he was trying to create. That, or he is one of the richest hypocrites who ever lived.

Most commentators on Musk’s relationship to Deus Ex seem to have landed on this interpretation. Grossman, one of Deus Ex’s devs, thinks Musk can’t accept who he is in the story.

But I have a different take.

Conclusion: Finding a Better Story

The real lesson to draw from Musk’s Deus Ex-ified imagination is that it is not nearly powerful enough. The truth is that Musk is not JC Denton or Bob Page. He’s Elon Musk. Like all men, he has virtues and vices. A worthy social imaginary is capable of capturing these fine-grained subtleties, rather than flattening people into simplistic heroes and villains.

Heroism and villainy are real, but real people are rarely complete exemplars of either. Most people have a mixed record when it comes to the conventional scales of morality. If our social imaginary requires us to neatly sort people into “Heroes” and “Villains,” we will miss the reality. We will overlook our own flaws and exaggerate the evils of others. The inevitable result is a society of dueling factions, perpetually locked in a struggle between the “Heroes” and the “Villains.”

Games like Deus Ex give us ideals to aspire towards, not simple categories for people. No mere human is JC Denton; we simply aspire to be JC Denton. Likewise, no one is Bob Page. He is an example of what to avoid. The average person exists between these two poles.

Elon Musk is somewhere between those poles, too. But to see that, we have to stop imagining society as a battle between JC Dentons and Bob Page’s shadow cabal. We have to search for a better story to organize the social order. Until we do, we will continue to rationalize our own Page-like behavior and overlook the JC Denton in our enemies. And that is ultimately unsustainable.

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Japanese Roleplaying Games (JRPGs) tend to follow a common plot structure. A plucky band of heroes sets off to fight an evil ruler, only for the game to reveal midway that the real villain is God. Examples abound: Ultima in Final Fantasy XVI, Yu Yevon in Final Fantasy X, Grandia 2, etc.

Even in cases where the villain is not literally God, games tend to portray them as divine figures. Sephiroth from Final Fantasy VII, Kefka from Final Fantasy VI, and Mammon from Chrono Trigger are all examples of villains with a divine aesthetic.

What gives? Why are JRPGs obsessed with killing God?

This is a favorite topic of the video game community. While many good essays already exist, I want to focus on an angle I have not seen explored: The Myth of Disenchantment.

My hypothesis is that JRPGs uphold what Jason Ananda Josephson Storm calls “The Myth of Disenchantment” as a legacy of Japan’s quest for modernity. While I am by no means certain this is the case, I want to argue that it would be a compelling explanation for why JRPGs love to make God the final boss. I will break down this claim in the following sections.

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The Myth of Disenchantment

First, let’s start with Storm’s (2017) theory expressed in The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences.

Most people vaguely familiar with the history of ideas have heard a story about the rise of Modernity. It goes something like this: People used to universally believe in gods, spirits, demons, miracles, and so on. Then the Scientific Revolution happened in Europe, and Materialism became the dominant worldview. In other words, Europe became disenchanted, leading to the era we call Modernity.

Storm (2017) questions this narrative. Through a careful historical analysis, he shows that Europe never truly gave up its belief in an enchanted cosmos. Prominent alleged disenchanters, like the Vienna Circle, also did things like paranormal investigation, occult rituals, seances, and magic. The intellectuals who supposedly championed disenchantment were themselves enchanters.

Yet many still believe that the supernatural faded away under the onslaught of science. How did this belief—this “myth”—spread?

Storm traces the Myth of Disenchantment to the arrival of the human sciences—disciplines like anthropology, comparative religion, critical theory, and so on. These disciplines needed standing to analyze “primitive” cultures. Therefore, they gradually manufactured the Myth to demarcate Europe from indigenous cultures. Europe was different, they claimed, because it had given up its belief in magic and polytheism. The “savages” of Polynesia, however, still kept their strange beliefs.

The politics of 19th and 20th century loved this line of argument. Europe’s supposed disenchantment obviously meant it was more “rational” than everyone else. Therefore, it had carte blanche to colonize the Premodern “savages.”

Modernity, it turns out, is just a useful fiction. It never really happened. It was always a story Europe told about itself to justify why it was special compared to the rest of the world. On close inspection, however, that story breaks down.

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The Myth of Modernity in Japan

But Storm (2017) neglects to mention Japan in his analysis. This is surprising, for Europe and America were not the only places trying to become “modern.” Starting with the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan began a quest to become the equal of the European powers. It, too, sought Modernity.

There is not nearly enough space here to flesh out a full intellectual history of Japan. However, it stands to reason that the same ideological pressures that created the myth of Modernity in Europe were around in Japan, too. Just like Europe, Japan needed a way to separate itself from other nations.

I do not think Japan ever embraced the Myth of Disenchantment to the degree Europeans did in the early 20th century, but that seems to have changed after World War II.

It would not surprise me if, in the wake of defeat, a strand of Japanese society embraced the Myth of Disenchantment. Perhaps they felt that the only way to reassert Japan’s equal status with the West was to abandon traditional Shinto and Buddhist beliefs in favor of Science.

I do not know if that actually happened. However, it would make tremendous sense of dominant JRPG developers’ taste in video game plots.

Slaying the Premodern

Video games are part of the tech industry; an industry perpetually obsessed with the future. No one wants to be more modern than software companies. That means leaving behind “superstitions” that slow down progress.

The “God is the Final Boss” trope may be a leftover symbolic expression of Japanese desire to be seen as a Modern nation. Just like Europe and America, the Japanese have left behind “primitive” beliefs and embraced the power of science to secure progress. To slay God is to slay the premodern, making way for the Modern world of science and technology.

Eventually, the historical reasons for their desire to become Modern faded, but the logic remained the same. Achieving progress requires rationality, rationality is a product of Modernity, and Modernity is incompatible with a supernatural worldview. Ergo, God must die.

Again, I do not know if this hypothesis is right, but it would make sense of games like Final Fantasy XVI.

Spoiler alert for Final Fantasy XVI

I single out Final Fantasy XVI because no other JRPG (to my knowledge) leans so hard into the Myth of Disenchantment. The game consistently portrays magic as the source of evil in the world. It literally bleaches the world and motivates a horrific slave system. The creator deity, Ultima, seeks mastery of it.

Meanwhile, the good guys—Clive, Cid, Jill, and the others—all suffer from magic. Over the course of the story, they are either enslaved or fall ill from their magical powers. They only make true progress through engineering advances.

The end of the game sees Clive banish magic from the world. The story leaps far into the future, where we see a family using flint and steel to start a fire instead of magic. The clear implication is that this is good. Magic is gone, replaced by Science.

I cannot think of a blunter way of expressing the Myth of Disenchantment in a game than Final Fantasy XVI. It is so eager to convince the player that God and magic are evil that it comes off as anxious. “See,” the game says, “Look at how Modern we are! No room for that Premodern superstition about gods and magic. It’s all Science here.”

Final Fantasy XVI, and other JRPGs like it, are a straightforward expression of Modernity’s logic from an industry that longs to be Modern.

The Trouble with The Myth

So far, I have presented an educated conjecture about why JRPGs care so much about killing God. I suggest it is a symbolic destruction of the Premodern that grew out of Japan’s desire to be a Modern nation, just like Europe and America. Everyone eventually forgot the reasons for the trope, but not the logic of Modernity embedded in it.

But whether I got the reasons correct or not, I think the “Kill God” trope is deeply problematic, and for several reasons.

First, it forecloses the imagination to the existence of a good God. Healthy discourse on the nature of religion ought to consider that God is possibly good. That can’t be dismissed out of hand. However, video games have overwhelmingly portrayed God as a villain. The medium is far out of balance on this topic. Given the cosmic significance of the question, “What is God like?”, we ought to approach it with the utmost care.

Second, the trope perpetuates the myth of Modernity. I cannot recapitulate every argument social theorists have leveraged against Modernity here. However, the themes and values of Modernity are increasingly under attack for a reason. Both Left and Rightwing theorists have found fault with it. For the Left, Modernity disguises structures of oppression with metanarratives of scientific rationality and inevitable human progress. For the Right, Modernity is an attack on traditional institutions like faith and family.

Whichever value system you subscribe to, it is hard to argue that Modernity is faultless. The quest to kill God is a quest to reinscribe the triumphal narrative that scientific rationality is all we need, when history has shown the opposite. Science without a guiding set of values produces tools like the atomic bomb, mustard gas, and the guillotine. It encourages leaders to prioritize efficiency over human value. Science without values is dangerous, and we cannot arrive at those values through science itself.

The myth of Modernity also prevents the genuine advance of knowledge. So long as we cling to the idea there is a distinct set of periods—Premodern, Modern, and Postmodern—we fail to see the larger unity of intellectual history. We create alienation between our own society and the societies of the past. We hastily discard the wisdom of tradition on the grounds that it is unscientific, irrational.

I believe in the power of science, but I do not believe in the myth of Modernity. Science is a powerful instrument for pursuing certain kinds of knowledge. It is not the only approach to pursuing knowledge. There are questions beyond the boundaries of the scientific method—spiritual, humanistic, and aesthetic—that we should not ignore. Foremost among these is the existence and nature of God. To the extent Modernity obscures these questions, it is problematic.

Conclusion

What, then, should we do with JRPGs? Commit them to the flames?

No. Playing a JRPG is not necessarily an immoral act. Moreover, many JRPGs participating in the Myth of Disenchantment are great games. To say a work is problematic is not the same as saying it has no other admirable qualities. Most of the games I have listed are, overall, excellent.

I am simply trying to point out an enduring flaw common in an extremely influential genre. While not all JRPGs participate in the Myth, enough do that it casts a shadow on the genre. JRPGs are held back by the genre’s general refusal to expand beyond this trope.

It is time for JRPGs to let go of the Myth of Disenchantment. It is time to embrace the fact that intellectual history is more complex than the trinity of Premodernity, Modernity, and Postmodernity. The existence and nature of God is a deep question that calls for exploration, not an obstacle to blithely ignore. JRPGs can explore those questions with the dignity they deserve—but only by abandoning the Myth of Disenchantment.

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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (2025)

Developer: Sandfall Interactive

Publisher: Kepler Interactive

This article contains spoilers for the entirety of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.

Without doubt, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is one of 2025’s masterpieces. It is a breath of fresh air in a medium that sometimes seems starved of creativity. Part of its genius is the themes it explores—grief, escapism, perseverance, among others.

Despite all the discourse around it, I think critics have barely scratched the surface of Expedition 33. In fact, I think the dominant interpretation of the game—that it is about facing up to the reality of tragedy—is wrong. At the very best, it is incomplete.

I think that Clair Obscur’s themes drive deep into ontology, or the study of reality’s basic nature. The game deeply interrogates our ability to shape reality through imagination. And the game presents a startling thesis: Fiction may be real.

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On the Reality of Fiction

The existence of fiction has long puzzled me. A certain paradox lies at the center of the concept. On one hand, fictional beings clearly do not exist. Spider-Man, for all his popularity, is just a product of our imaginations. On the other hand, Spider-Man clearly has some existence, or else we couldn’t even talk about him.

Additionally, fictionality and existence don’t seem to contradict one another. A large part of our everyday lives take place in an “imagined reality.” Buildings do not just grow out in nature. They are imagined by architects. The same goes with literally every human-created thing. Culture just is an imagined reality we experience every day. One might even call it a shared fiction.

One solution to the paradox of fictional existence is quite profound: Reality comes in degrees. Some things are “more real” than others, but that does not render the “less real” non-existent. When we say “Spider-Man does not exist,” what we really mean is that Spider-Man is less real than we are. This thesis—that there are different “modes of being,” as Turner (2009) put it—is called ontological pluralism.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a game about the ethics of ontological pluralism. The game explores the reality of fiction. It asks us to consider the ethics of creation, and how imagined realities influence our lives.1

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The Tragedy of a Painted World

Expedition 33 is about Gustave, a citizen of the shattered city of Lumiere. The city suffers a unique curse: Every year, an entire generation gets wiped out by the mysterious Paintress. She paints a new number on her Monolith, and everyone older than that number dissolves into flowers. The people of Lumiere call this the Gommage.

The story drives home the Gommage’s horror by letting Gustave spend one last day with his ex-girlfriend, Sophie. Unfortunately, her time is up. As the sun sets, the Paintress writes 33 on her monolith, and Sophie dissolves in Gustave’s arms.

Gustave, his plucky sister Maelle, the polymath Lune, and several others embark on Expedition 33 the next day. The mission: Kill the Paintress so she never paints death again.

Except, that’s not really what the game is about at all.

Gustave dies. Renoir, an apparently immortal old man, kills him. He nearly kills the weeping Maelle, too, until the game’s true protagonist swoops into save her. Verso reveals that he is a survivor of the very first Expedition. He, too, is immortal. And he will help Expedition 33 kill the Paintress, so she never paints death aga-

Well, that’s not quite right, either.

The player learns the truth only after the game’s second act. All along, Maelle has been the protagonist. It turns out that her true name is Alicia Desendres—Verso’s maimed sister. Alicia comes from a family with the power to paint worlds into being. They can then enter those worlds as godlike Painters, warping reality at will.

But Painting has never been Alicia’s strong suit. She loved literature, and a hostile clan of magical Writers used this against the Desendres family. They somehow used Alicia to set the Desendres manor ablaze. Verso died saving Alicia’s life, but she still suffered horrific wounds—a lost eye, a burnt face, and damaged vocal chords.

The tragedy broke the Desendres family. Aline, Alicia’s mother, escaped into the last vestige of Verso’s soul: His canvas. She then used her power to create her own version of Lumiere, a Lumiere where Verso still lived. She began living there as the canvas’ Paintress.

The allure of the canvas was far too tempting for the grieving Aline. She never wanted to leave. Desperate for his wife, the real Renoir entered the canvas to force her out. He concluded that the only solution was to destroy it, to rid his family of the temptation forever. Thus, Aline and Renoir entered into a titanic struggle over the canvas’ fate. The Paintress was trying to save the Painting; the Painter tried to destroy it.

Alicia had entered the canvas to retrieve her father. However, lacking her parents’ level of skill, she was “painted over” with the new identity of Maelle. She forgot her life outside the painting until it was later revealed.

Ultimately, the game has two endings. The player can destroy Verso’s canvas, killing every Painted person but ridding the Desendres of their version of the Matrix. Alternatively, Maelle can choose to stay in the canvas as the new Paintress, keeping Painted Verso alive against his will. She will eventually die, but until then she will live without her scars.

The Ethical Value of Imagined Realities

Herein lies the core conflict of the game: Is it right to destroy the canvas? Most critics rush to say “Yes.” They psychoanalyze the game as an allegory for grief. To these critics, Maelle’s ending is simply living in denial. The canvas has no value—indeed, it has negative value.

But the question is more complicated once you take the lives of the Painted Lumierens into account. As far as we can tell, these Painted people can think, feel, and act no less than anyone else. They may be created, but they are still real. Destroying Verso’s canvas means destroying thousands of autonomous beings. Is any family’s grief worth the lives of an entire world? I think most people would say “No,” especially if you are inclined to sacrifice yourself to save a thousand shrimp.

The question becomes even more complicated when viewed from Alicia/Maelle’s perspective. For Alicia, “Maelle” is not just some costume she put on to play in Verso’s canvas. Maelle is a real aspect of her identity. She lived an entire life as Maelle, complete with different parents and a different childhood. She is as much Maelle as she is Alicia. Yet Maelle, too, is an imagined reality.

If reality truly does come in degrees, then surely the Painted world is not many degrees removed from Alicia’s own. And that suggests that the moral gravity of interfering with that world is similar to the moral gravity of harming the “real” world.

Hence, ontological pluralism vastly complicates the meaning of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. The game is not just asking us to think about the cycles of grief. It is interrogating our beliefs about reality itself. The game illustrates how fictional realities, though imagined, still possess a moral status. And that status rises the closer the fictional “mode of being” is to our own.

Maelle is as morally valuable as Alicia because Maelle is a fictional identity that still exists at the level of Alicia. And if the other Painted individuals are not equally as valuable, they must be close, given how much they resemble “real” people.

“So what?” you ask. “Why should I care?”

Well, you should care because you are like Maelle. I do not mean you are literally a product of magical painting. I mean that your sense of self is an imagined reality. The “you” that unites all of your experiences is a fiction imagined by the psyche.

The sustained work of piecing together a coherent narrative from all the events you experience creates a persona that gives shape to the person. Whatever you are numerically identical to, be it a soul, body, an atom, or something more esoteric, the shape of the self comes from sustained imagination.

Therefore, if you say, “Fiction doesn’t exist,” you are forced into the disturbing conclusion that you don’t exist. You may be a soul, but the content of that soul is an illusion if fiction is totally unreal.

And it turns out an awful lot of other important things are imagined realities, too. Nations, democracy, money, architecture, culture—these things depend on our imaginative faculties for their existence. They are fictions deeply integrated into our reality. Just like Alicia was united to the Painted world through the persona of Maelle, everyone is united to society through the self.

The Aline-Renoir Dialectic

In a sense, all of us are Painters and Paintresses. We all use the power of imagination to shape both ourselves and our world. And that fact forces us into the Aline-Renoir Dialectic, the dialectic between the will to create and the caution to refrain.

Aline symbolizes the will to create. She accepts no limitation on the power of her imagination. It does not matter that Verso is dead; she will remake him. Reality is solely what she wills. She is the epitome of the “Everything is a social construct” meme.

Renoir, in contrast, represents the limits of imagination. He recognizes that all imagination is bound by a higher reality, and that reality is recalcitrant to change. Painting Verso will not bring him back. It will only create a copy of Verso. At some point, the imagination must bend to the greater world.

These two archetypes are common in our own world. The progressive mind is archetypally Aline in its insistence that one can remake reality by changing social constructs. The conservative, Renoirian mind rejects Aline’s world-remaking assumptions. He remembers that even Painters are mortal, that the world is not endlessly malleable. Nature has the final word.

The Aline-Renoir Dialectic, therefore, symbolizes the ethical struggle inherent in our status as imaginative beings. We have the power to influence the world through producing fictional realities. Yet we disagree on how far we should, or even can, go. To what extent can we shape ourselves? What are the ethics of “painting over” another? Can our imaginations produce beings just as real as us—artificial general intelligence, perhaps? These are the pressing questions of our time.

The beauty of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is the way it invites us into that dialectic. The game brings us face to face with the power of imagination, as well as its limits.

Conclusion

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a meditation of the ethics of fictional reality. It asks us to reckon with the implications of ontological pluralism. If existence really does come in degrees, then to what degree are the things we imagine “real?” And does that make them any less valuable? These questions bear heavily on our responsibilities as imaginative beings. We have the power to shape the world. We have to use it wisely.

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Those of us deep in the gaming subculture have settled into a familiar rhythm. Every year, we play new games, argue about their quality, and choose one for our “Game of The Year” (GOTY). Then summer hits and we watch Summer Game Fest to see what developers are cooking up. Finally, at the end of the year, we watch The Game Awards to see if everyone shares our taste.

This cycle of gaming seasons revolves around one man: Geoff Keighley. He’s one of gaming’s most enduring media voices. He’s the butt of endless jokes, he’s the target of constant criticism. And he is also one of the main bulwarks preventing gaming culture from being a mere extension of corporate PR. It’s time he gets some praise.

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The Corporate Dark Ages

Before we can properly appreciate Keighley’s influence on the gaming community, we need some historical context.

For decades, journalistic institutions did not take video games seriously. Video games were toys. They therefore merited the attention the news paid to toys—not much. If video games showed up in the mainstream news, it was probably because a politician blamed them for violence. The idea that NBC or the New York Times would bother to review video games was laughable.

The Video Game Crash of 1983 did not do much to help. This catastrophe basically destroyed the industry, and with no new games, there was not much to report on anyway.

Enter Nintendo. The arrival of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) reignited the embers of the gaming market. People were buying games again, and consequently, Nintendo needed to communicate with them. Nintendo Power Magazine was their solution to this problem. Through Nintendo Power, the gaming giant could connect with its fans.

As beloved as Nintendo Power was, it is important to remember its true purpose: Selling Nintendo products. If Nintendo had its way, the gaming community would not exist outside of Nintendo’s gaming ecosystem. Gamers would play Nintendo games on Nintendo consoles, then read Nintendo Power to learn about new Nintendo games. Nintendo and gaming would be synonymous.

All major game platforms basically share Nintendo’s media philosophy. Sony and Microsoft would love it if the social dimension of gaming existed totally as an extension of their products. They don’t want to send their messages through a middleman, and they especially don’t want to send it through each other’s systems.

These monopolistic attitudes make it difficult for an independent gaming culture to survive. For gaming culture to exist, the community needs space that isn’t owned by one of the big publishers. It needs space where players can appreciate the games as games, not as products. And that neutral space is directly contrary to the interests of corporate public relations departments.

In short, the interests of game publishers threaten to create a “Corporate Dark Ages” scenario. Such a Dark Age would basically resemble the mid-80s, when the only available gaming news came from official sources.

Only a thin net of independent influencers, conferences, and institutions stands between gamers and the Corporate Dark Ages scenario. While I do not want to downplay the importance of influencers, independent institutions are quite important, too. And Geoff Keighley is one of the few people keeping them running.

A Man For All Seasons

Keighley is significant because his career has primarily been about building independent game media institutions.

He literally began as a teenager. In 1996, he founded Gameslice to report on the development of video games. From there, he wrote behind-the-scenes features on the development of games for Gamestop. These years of journalistic work helped him develop the industry connections he needed, but importantly, he never became a PR manager for anyone in the industry himself. He always kept a certain degree of distance.

While his journalism helped him build industry connections, his broadcast career helped him connect to the general gaming public. Keighley became the voice of gaming on television through his shows and Spike TV’s terrible attempts at making a game awards show. Despite the poor quality of these early attempts, they catapulted Keighley into the public’s consciousness.

Keighley’s unique career turned him into a nexus between the gaming public and the industry. If gamers wanted to know what games were coming next, Keighley would tell them. If the industry wanted to speak to the public, Keighley was an ideal choice. For this reason, he was often the Master of Ceremonies at industry-wide events.

All this might remain merely a fascinating biography were it not for one event: The demise of E3.

The Electronic Entertainment Expo, or “E3” for short, was a trade show for the games industry. Every major publisher would go there to showcase their new games and hardware to journalists. Countless booths held overworked developers trying to promote their latest projects. The real draw, however, was the series of press conferences held by Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo. These gave everyone a picture of where the industry was going.

But E3 was always a marriage of convenience. It existed only because the industry needed a way to get information out to retailers and journalists. Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft would rather tell everyone themselves, but that was easier said than done in a world of televised news. They needed a middleman, and no one wanted to be left out.

Two developments killed E3.

The first was YouTube. As it became easier and cheaper to communicate directly to stakeholders, E3 looked increasingly pointless to the big publishers. Why rent out a huge stadium when you can livestream a showcase at a fraction of the price? That is precisely what the major publishers began to do.

COVID-19, the second development, destroyed any remaining inertia keeping E3 alive. The global catastrophe reshaped everyone’s plans. It also helped the major publishers realize E3 was obsolete. In 2023, they finally announced the permanent death of E3.

The death of E3 was also the death of gaming’s most powerful independent media institution. For all its faults, E3 created a gaming “res publica,” a space shared in common. It transcended the fiefdoms of Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo. That space further empowered other institutional middlemen like Gamespot and IGN. With E3 gone, the Corporate Dark Ages scenario looked like it was on the horizon.

Then Geoff Keighley stepped in. He created the Summer Game Fest to fill the void left by E3. The Game Awards, which had been around long before E3’s disappearance, also began to pick up the slack. Keighley’s award shows have created a new “res publica” for gaming. They are a space to discuss games as gamers, not as Sony customers or Nintendo customers.

I don’t want to oversell Keighley’s contribution here, but it is hard to think of who else could have done this. Keighley had the relationships, the experience, and the talent to create a new media space for gaming. He leveraged his broadcasting skills to turn gaming’s res publica into an event livestreamed by 154 million people. The very thing that killed E3, Keighley harnessed to empower the community. That is a feat worth celebrating.

All Hail the Dorito Pope!

The tragic irony of Geoff Keighley is that he is frequently accused of being the very thing he prevented. He earned the nickname “Dorito Pope” for doing an interview featuring a ridiculous amount of product placement. Ever since, there is no shortage of claims that he has “sold out” to the big companies for fame and profit. Every year, people accuse him of complicity for not more clearly calling out the problems in the games industry.

But these critiques miss an important fact: He was advertising on behalf of Doritos, not as an employee of Doritos. He’s not really even advertising for Microsoft here so much as for Doritos’ partnership with Microsoft. He maintains his independence. In fact, Keighley turned down a chance to monetize the Dorito Pope meme.

If Keighley had truly sold out, we would be watching “Sony’s Game Awards” every December. The only games qualified for an award would be Playstation games, judged by a Sony-approved jury. Only Playstation games would be revealed at Sony’s Game Awards. To top it all off, the Game of the Year gets a trophy shaped like the Playstation 5.

That’s the version of the Game Awards corporate PR departments would prefer, if they have it at all. Keighley averted that nightmarish future. Like the Pope uniting warring feudal dynasts into Christendom, Keighley unites the competing spheres of gaming into a common culture. He saved us from the Corporate Dark Ages that would inevitably emerge if the entire media ecosystem lost its independence.

Certainly, institutions like IGN and the army of influencers on YouTube have played their part. However, Keighley’s influence has been indispensable. Not many people can draw 154 million livestreams. Keighley can.

Will this year’s Game Awards have gaffes and cringe moments? Almost certainly. Will someone sneak on stage and shout that Bill Clinton is his orthodox rabbi? Quite possibly. But is that preferable to a world totally managed by game publishers? Absolutely.

Independent media institutions have made games stronger by providing a voice for the community to speak back to the publishers. They rally public sentiment to the importance of video games. They elevate the medium to art, not just a product. They empower players to fight back against anti-consumer practices. Keighley’s career has been a perpetual fight to preserve that independence.

Not bad for a Dorito Pope.

Sid Meier’s Civilization VI (2016)

Developer: Firaxis

Publisher: 2K Games

Time Played: 786 hrs

Does history make progress? It’s a question that we are all probably tempted to ask from time to time, given current events. But to answer it, we would first need to know what it would look like for history to make progress.

Sid Meier’s Civilization VI can help us imagine a history that does not just change but moves toward a definitive end. It models a “progressive” view of history through its game mechanics. Through the game’s victory types, it empowers us to imagine history as a movement toward some ultimate goal. This post is going to break down the ideals of progress implicit in the victory types.

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A Brief Overview

But first, let me briefly explain what the game is basically like.

Sid Meier’s Civilization VI is an entry in the long-running series created by legendary designer Sid Meier. These games basically invented the “4X” genre. “4X” stands for explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate. The player takes control of a historical civilization which they lead from the Ancient Era to the Future Era. They have a god’s-eye view of a map, which they explore using units. Some units allow the founding of cities—the “expand” part of the formula. Those cities then exploit natural resources available to them, turning them into gold, culture, science, or production. These products help the player do things like build more units, create buildings, unlock new technologies, or acquire new cultural institutions.

The goal of the game is to “build a civilization that stands the test of time.” Practically, that means fulfilling one of the six victory conditions.

The Six Types of Progress

A player can win a game of Civ VI through the Score, Science, Culture, Domination, Religion, or the Diplomatic victory types. Each of the six victory conditions embodies a different ideal end state of history. Each one, in other words, provides a definition of progress you can use to judge the events of history. When events are moving toward the goal, there is progress. When they are moving away from the goal, history regresses.

Relative Progress: The Score Victory

"From our humble beginnings ages ago have you forged a civilization that has withstood time itself. Though countless civilizations rise and fall around us, we do not just survive. We prosper." — Score Victory

The Score Victory triggers when the game runs out of turns. At that point, it automatically tallies up who has the highest score based on factors like the number of cities a civilization (“civ”) has. Then it compares all the civs’ scores. Whoever has the highest score wins.

The Score Victory, by nature, embodies a relative ideal of progress. Progress is defined simply as doing better than everyone else. It does not matter if the civ “hits the target” so long as no one else is closer.

Moreover, this victory imagines progress as multifaceted. There is no single factor that divides the winners from the losers. It’s a collection of things: Cities, Great People, urban development, the total population, etc. All of these come together to reveal who has made the most progress.

In the real world, this is the kind of progress represented by measures like the United Nations’ Human Development Index. Progress in this sense is multifacted, but not absolute.

Technological Progress: The Science Victory

“Much as our ancestors did ages ago, we thrust forward into the unknown. The first pioneers set forth on an uneasy course, and yet once again did our people thrive. Now, under your leadership we plot a new course and make another world our own.” — Science Victory

The Science Victory is about being the first civilization to colonize a planet outside the solar system.

It unfolds in a series of stages. First, the civ must build a space port. Then they go to the moon, then they found a colony on Mars. The last step is the “exoplanet expedition.” This is a project the civilization launches and can support continuously. Each turn, the expedition gets closer to the extrasolar planet. The civ wins the Science Victory when it arrives on the extrasolar planet.

The Science Victory embodies the ideal of technological progress. To the technologist, progress is about measurably improving one’s ability to control the world through instruments. And this is a large part of what Civilization VI is about. Civilizations start knowing little more than agriculture and end up going to another planet. Progress comes not merely from knowledge, but through deploying that knowledge to impose humanity’s will on the cosmos.

I can think of no better real-world representative of this view than Elon Musk. The world’s richest man claims his mission is to make humanity a multiplanetary civilization. Why? I’m sure there are many reasons, but it undoubtedly has to do with the need for progress. One can quibble about whether a faster computer counts as “progress.” However, building a city on Mars is the kind of grandiose feat no one can reasonably deny is progress.

Indeed, I think the whole “Build better tech so we can make a space utopia” vision has animated popular science, and thus Silicon Valley, for a long time. Carl Sagan famously spoke of how the humanity that goes to space will be better than humanity is now. The same idea is present in Star Trek’s Federation. The same idea is in Civilization. In all these cases, progress boils down to technology’s ability to let humanity dominate space.

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Humanistic Progress: The Culture Victory

"The worth of a culture is not measured by its accomplishments, but in how those accomplishments last, and how they are remembered. The beauty that you have inspired our people to create will ensure that our culture stands for all time." — Culture Victory

The Culture Victory is about making one civ’s culture dominant over all the others. It’s a complicated process, but the gist of it is that civs can invest in units and buildings that promote tourism. By attracting Great People like Michelangelo, the civ earns their art and houses that art in museums. People come from all over the world to experience these works. By extension, they experience the culture of the civ that produced them. When that civ’s culture overpowers everyone else, they win.

Progress in the Culture Victory is what one might call “humanistic progress.” Unlike technological progress, which comes from improving our tools, humanistic progress comes from improving ourselves. We make humanistic progress when we improve our culture through art and education. The further away we get from subsisting on wild grapes, the further our humanity has progressed.

Classical Athens is an example of humanistic progress from the real world. While Sparta had a reputation for military power, Athens developed a reputation as a center of culture. Athens gave the world democracy, the art of rhetoric, philosophers like Aristotle, playwrights like Aristophanes, and Hellenic architecture. Sparta may have conquered Athens through war, but Athens conquered the world through art. No one uses Spartan armor today. Everyone teaches Aristotle. That is the power of humanistic progress.

Unfortunately, Civilization VI models humanistic progress in a somewhat problematic way by tying it to nationalism. In Civ, cultures belong to nations. In reality, it’s the other way around. We speak of “American culture” or “Italian culture” as shorthand, but it can be tough to cleanly divide these two. Both countries are republics—a Roman institution. Pizza is a part of both countries’ cuisines, yet America has arguably had more influence on the dish than Italians. And some of the greatest American Western films, like The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, were shot in Italy. Which nations gets to claim these cultural achievements? Well, both of them do because both belong to a broader Western culture.

The example of America and Italy illustrates how problematic it is to imagine humanistic progress as tied to a single national identity. At the end of the day, culture is mostly a collaboration where the whole human race borrows and builds upon the past. That’s what Civ VI gets right: “The worth of a culture is not measured by its accomplishments, but in how those accomplishments last, and how they are remembered.” But a culture’s accomplishments cannot be contained to a specific geopolitical location. What happens in Vegas doesn’t stay in Vegas. What happens in Venice doesn’t stay in Venice. They echo throughout all of time, from one mind to another.

Spiritual Progress: The Religion Victory

“We have a basic need to believe in something greater than ourselves. We crave solace in the darkness, a light unto our path. Thanks to you, we’ve found meaning amid the Cosmos. — The Religion Victory

The Religion Victory is won by converting most of the world to one’s religion. I have plans for a more in-depth post on Civilization VI’s Religion mechanic, but I will make some preliminary remarks here.

Put simply, Civilization VI portrays spiritual progress as a type of cosmic sensemaking. Religion is a practice that allows us to initiate what theorist Joshua DiCaglio calls a “scalar shift” in our thinking. Through the lens of religion, we see ourselves as part of a larger picture. And that picture makes everything else fall into place.

I think this view is basically correct, which is why I cited DiCaglio extensively in my dissertation. But further discussion will have to wait.

Liberal Progress: The Diplomacy Victory

“From your earliest desire to live in peace to the times when you've stood against aggression, you have always sought cooperation. You did not do this merely to brighten your own glory, but because dignity belongs to each of us. And in so doing, you have proved that your ancient and eternal commitment to a shared peace will be the foundation of the world of tomorrow.” — Diplomacy Victory

Winning the Diplomacy Victory requires 20 Diplomatic Victory points. A civ can win these points in many ways—building the Statue of Liberty, completing projects for the World Congress, and voting oneself World Leader of the World Congress, to name a few. In other words, one wins by forging an international consensus on how nations ought to live together.

At the risk of sounding like a pundit, I call the type of progress in this victory “Liberal Progress.” I don’t mean liberal in the sense news anchors use the term. I mean “liberal” as in the Liberal tradition, the tradition of thought embodied in thinkers like John Stuart Mill, Locke, and politicians like Woodrow Wilson.

The Liberal tradition of thought emphasizes individual freedom and equality as the supreme values. A good society is one that maximizes the liberty of its citizens while preserving their equality.

The fundamental challenge of a Liberal society is that freedom and equality occasionally conflict. If I am free to steal all your money, I upset the premise that everyone is on a level playing field. Liberal societies try to get around this problem by restricting some freedoms and maximizing others, but power blocs will always disagree on where exactly the correct balance between freedom and equality lies.

Progress in the Liberal sense happens when these competing power blocs make a breakthrough in how they relate to each other. When seemingly contradictory interests find a way to coexist, they strengthen the Liberal order. They preserve the balance between freedom and equality.

In the real world, the United Nations is perhaps the most famous Liberal institution on the planet, and Civilization VI’s World Congress is clearly channeling that energy. It was founded on the premise that Liberalism could extend to the society of nations, not just individuals.

But the Diplomacy Victory embodies the fundamental paradox inherent within Liberalism: How can a single civilization “win” and everyone else lose on a liberal paradigm? Does that not throw away the all-important principle of equality? I think this reveals something interesting about Liberalism. As a philosophy, it cannot be implemented as a zero-sum game. A successful Liberal society cannot allow one interest to win and everyone else to lose. There is probably more here to discuss, but I will have to revisit it.

Hegemonic Progress: The Domination Victory

“Though its face may change throughout the ages, history is written from the hand of the victor. By your actions this day, you ensure our people are glorious tomorrow.” — Domination Victory

The Domination Victory is the philosophical opposite of the Diplomacy Victory. A civilization wins this victory by capturing the original capital city of every other civ. It is a victory familiar to gamers, a military victory. It is the triumph of domination over consensus.

I call the view of progress embedded in this victory “Hegemonic Progress.” Hegemony is the pre-eminence of one group (the hegemon) over all others. Whereas a Liberal society seeks to keep a plurality of groups on a level playing field, a society that embraces hegemony is fine with exalting a single champion. In other words, equality is not an important value. To achieve hegemonic progress is to advance the power of the hegemon.

Of course, the alternatives do not just lie down and disappear. They fight back. Realistically, hegemony requires violence to keep everyone in line with the reigning power bloc. If the people cannot be moved by speeches, they will be moved by swords. Hence why Civilization VI ties hegemonic progress to military prowess: The hegemon needs a strong arm to impose their will.

The tricky thing about Hegemonic Progress is that no one says they want it, but everyone seeks it. No sane person wants to live in a society where the secret police will arrest you for wrongthink. However, even the most die-hard liberal will reveal their hegemonic cards if terrorists threaten the Liberal order. Everyone seeks dominance, but no one admits to it.

I have long tried to puzzle out how to exclude hegemony from society. I have seen much smarter minds try. At the end of the day, though, the competition for hegemony may be a necessary feature of any social order. That’s what the Domination Victory asks us to contemplate, at least.

Conclusion

Civilization VI allows the player to experiment with what progress means. Its six victory types embody corresponding types of progress: Relative, Technological, Humanistic, Spiritual, Liberal, and Hegemonic. We can find believers in these ideals of progress in our own world. Perhaps that’s part of the problem: We cannot make progress because we all have a different idea of what it is.

Civilization VI cannot tell us which type of progress is “real” progress—only we can decide that. But it is a tool for thinking about it. Perhaps that is its own kind of progress.