{"id":776,"date":"2011-09-01T06:07:57","date_gmt":"2011-09-01T12:07:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jeffwofford.com\/?p=776"},"modified":"2019-07-19T11:33:16","modified_gmt":"2019-07-19T17:33:16","slug":"all-the-worlds-a-game","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jeffwofford.com\/wp\/?p=776","title":{"rendered":"All the World’s a Game"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Origin<\/a>I\u2019ve been playing a lot of Minecraft lately. Exploring its complex, primal, randomly-generated environments has helped me to firm up an intuition about games and religion\u2014at least my religion\u2014that I\u2019ve been toying with for years.<\/p>\n

The intuition started at the first game company I worked for: Origin Systems. Origin\u2019s slogan was \u201cWe Create Worlds,\u201d and they were right. Origin created the Wing Commander universe with its planets and starships and leonine aliens. It developed the world of Britannia, featured in the Ultima series. The dystopian cities of the Crusader<\/em> games, the Citadel Station in System Shock<\/em>, the moon Daedalus from Bioforge<\/em>\u2026 Origin created worlds and more worlds.<\/p>\n

As a player I wanted to discover those worlds, to explore and enjoy them. As a programmer I wanted to create new worlds of my own. A lot of the appeal of games and game-making is the opportunity to experience new places with new rules, undiscovered beauty, and intriguing new challenges. It\u2019s this appeal that has kept me involved, playing and making games, these last fifteen-odd years.<\/p>\n

Now if it\u2019s true that a game is a kind of world, then it\u2019s also true that a game developer is a kind of god. This need not be an arrogant or blasphemous notion\u2014a sane game developer makes no claim to being a god of the real<\/em> world.<\/p>\n

But within the domain of the game itself the developer is divine. He (or she) has all power: to set the bounds of the world, to determine its shape, to set the gravitational constant, to eliminate gravity, or to replace it with some other force. The developer decides what creatures live in his world, how they look, how they move, what they want, how they think. He has the power to stop time, to record at one moment the state of things, to skip ahead to the future, to rewind to the past. He decides whether the sky is blue or green or chartreuse or whether there\u2019s no sky at all. In every respect, from the smallest pixel to the broad expanse of time and space, the game developer owns and controls his world. In every way he is its god.<\/p>\n

And this makes me wonder whether the world we\u2019re living in is also a kind of game, with a Developer of its own.<\/p>\n

If we follow this idea out a little way, it seems to me that there are a lot of similarities and at least two big differences between digital worlds and the real one.<\/p>\n

The first difference is the question of design<\/em>. When we think of a video game, we normally think of a world that has been hand-crafted by a highly active human designer. In a world like the Wasteland of Fallout 3<\/em> or New Vegas<\/em>, artists, level designers, and programmers painstakingly contour the land, lay out mountains, highways, and buildings, then populate the terrain with each and every rock and tree and blade of grass. The world is pervasively designed<\/em>. There is no evolution in the Wasteland. It\u2019s intelligent design all the way.<\/p>\n

If we take this idea back over to the real world, we\u2019re led to imagine that the real world might have been carefully hand-crafted in just the same way. Now many religious believers will have no qualms with that suggestion. But many other people, from a variety of religious persuasions, will reject this idea out-of-hand. \u201cNo god or gods,\u201d they may say, \u201cplaced every mountain and boulder or designed every creature in the real world. In this respect the real world is nothing like a game.\u201d<\/p>\n

I actually don’t think that this conflict is a terribly important one. To see why, take a look at Minecraft.<\/p>\n

Despite its simple graphics, Minecraft is a very sophisticated game. Although the game itself is programmed, it has no level designer. Instead the world is generated in a pseudo-random manner, fresh for each player who starts a game. The world generation algorithm lays out the earth and sky. It carves out mountains and valleys, caves and caverns. It fills the earth with water, hides seams of coal and iron and jewels, and sprinkles plants and creatures wherever they may go.<\/p>\n

The result, to my mind, is even more beautiful, more diverse, more ripe for exploration and more full of discovery than the most skillfully crafted hand-made world in any game I\u2019ve played. The world of Minecraft is not designed\u2014it is produced<\/em>. It is crafted indirectly, through rules that are themselves carefully designed by a thoughtful and skillful programmer. The gods of Minecraft\u2014that is, the programmer named Notch along with the other developers at Mojang\u2014don\u2019t dictate every leaf or pond or mountain. Indeed, they have never even seen the world that I\u2019m playing, because it was made just for me on my computer. They only dictate the rules by which the world is created.<\/p>\n

It may be that the real world is something like that. Perhaps God didn\u2019t lay out every sea or mountain so much as he carefully crafted the rules\u2014rules of matter, energy, motion, magnetism, gravity and the like\u2014that would produce a world such as ours.<\/p>\n

This is hardly a new idea. What I\u2019ve just described is Deism, a concept that was popular in the 18th<\/sup> century. As we look at this analogy between game-worlds and the real world, I think we can and should go beyond Deism.<\/p>\n

I said that there were two big differences that might harm the analogy. The first was the concern that whereas most game worlds are carefully designed<\/em>, the real world seems to be more indirectly produced. We\u2019ve just seen that a game like Minecraft helps to resolve this dilemma.<\/p>\n

The second big difference is the question of players<\/em>. In a game, players and developers are the same sort of thing: they\u2019re all human. Notch may be the god of Minecraft, but he is still just a regular Joe like you or me. In a game, the god of the world and the inhabitants of the world are in truth the same sort of being. Our difference is capability<\/em>, not nature<\/em>. Notch and I are different because he can change the code and I can\u2019t (well, not easily). That gives him powers within the digital world that I don\u2019t possess. But if we were to meet, I expected I would discover him to have much the same sort of nature as I have. He probably wouldn\u2019t emit light. He probably wouldn\u2019t be able to move elementary particles with his mind. He probably wouldn\u2019t float beyond the linear course of time. He\u2019d be a regular guy, ontologically speaking.<\/p>\n

But the Developer of the real<\/em> world can\u2019t be the same sort of thing as me. He\u2014if \u201che\u201d is the best pronoun for this person\u2014not only is bigger, more powerful, and more capable, but he fundamentally exists on a higher plane than I do. I am entirely in and of the real world. I am made out of its particles. I cannot escape its flow of time. Yet whoever created this world made<\/em> the particles and established <\/em>the flow of time. He is beyond this world, not subject to its rules. Just as a human is \u201cbeyond\u201d a game, God is beyond the universe.<\/p>\n

So perhaps a better analogy between the real world and the game would compare a human in the real world to a character <\/em>in the game\u2014a character like Alyx Vance from Half-Life<\/em> or Joe “Red” Hartsock from Brothers in Arms<\/em>. A character doesn\u2019t exist outside of the game. It is crafted from the same pixels and vertices and transforms as everything else inside the game. I am a character in the real world in just that way: although I am hardly a lump of dirt, I am like a lump of dirt in the sense that I am made out of the same \u201cstuff\u201d\u2014the same rules, the same particles\u2014as the dirt is made out of.<\/p>\n

Before this begins to sound too demeaning, let me point out that to be a \u201ccharacter\u201d in the real universe turns out not to be such a bad deal. Maybe the universe is a game, but if so it is a very fine game. A computer game can only host characters with artificial intelligence, but characters in this Game have real intelligence. Characters in a computer game are not aware of anything, but characters in this Game are aware of themselves and everything around them. Characters is a computer game are disposable\u2014mere pixels and bits. We can blow them away without remorse (even if senators will ring their hands while we’re at it). But characters in the Real Game are valuable, beautiful, anything but disposable.<\/p>\n

At this point we may very well ask, \u201cAre <\/em>we really that valuable? Are we really anything but disposable? We see it that way but does God see it that way?\u201d It\u2019s a fair question. If we gods of the digital game have no compassion for our characters, why should we think that the God of this Game has compassion on us?<\/p>\n

This brings me to the crux of the analogy. Because as a Christian, I don\u2019t believe that God is merely a designer or developer, programming his game in some darkened office, hacking and clacking, tinkering and toying. I don\u2019t believe, like the Deist, that God wrapped up the code, committed the revision, built the project, and shipped off the game, never to play it. I don\u2019t believe that he clicked off his light and left the Game running a soak test overnight.<\/p>\n

As a Christian I believe that God stayed with the Game, watching and guiding, steering, perhaps tweaking it. I believe he stayed involved.<\/p>\n

More than that, I believe that he took the ultimate act of involvement. He became a character, joining in the Game to play it along with us.<\/p>\n

As Jesus of Nazareth\u2014I read it on his gamertag\u2014he did the things all characters have to do, being born, growing up, living, and dying. Along the way he shared what he knew about the Game: what it really was, how to play it well, how to get all the achievements, how to win.<\/p>\n

He didn\u2019t just talk. He also did things\u2014lots of things, seen by thousands and well documented\u2014that showed he was from beyond the Game, showed he was more than a character. Things like manipulating particles at will. Reading minds (easy for a programmer with access to the mind\u2019s source code.) Escaping the confines of time. Even the ultimate particle-mind manipulation: he brought the dead back to life.<\/p>\n

I think it\u2019s true that he himself rose from the dead and in some strange way now exists both inside and outside of the game. I believe he is there now, or perhaps I should say \u201chere\u201d\u2014absent yet still involved. Waiting for the end. Waiting, as we all do, for those bittersweet credits to roll.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been playing a lot of Minecraft lately, and it\u2019s got me thinking about worlds and creators, players and characters, design and chance. I don\u2019t know if all the world\u2019s a game\u2014whether that\u2019s the best analogy. Shakespeare thought it was a stage, but then he was a poet and I\u2019m a game programmer\u2014maybe everybody casts the world in the terms they know best.<\/p>\n

Whether it\u2019s the best analogy or not, I think it\u2019s an interesting one, and I hope you\u2019ll explore it with me.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been playing a lot of Minecraft lately. Exploring its complex, primal, randomly-generated environments has helped me to firm up an intuition about games and religion\u2014at least my religion\u2014that I\u2019ve been toying with for years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faith","category-games"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jeffwofford.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jeffwofford.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jeffwofford.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jeffwofford.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jeffwofford.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=776"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.jeffwofford.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1921,"href":"https:\/\/www.jeffwofford.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776\/revisions\/1921"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jeffwofford.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jeffwofford.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jeffwofford.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}