breaking through the ceiling

The Nintendo Entertainment System came out when i was in middle school. My first experiences playing it, at a friend's house, helped shape the contours of my life. I had played video games before, in arcades (Pac-Man, Galaga, Centipede, Gauntlet). I had even owned a gaming system for several years — the Atari 2600, the greatest Christmas present i have ever received (a story for another day). Video games had already cast a spell on me. But one fall afternoon in Christian's basement when i first played Super Mario Brothers, something changed in my relationship to digital worlds. One facet of the spell began to come into focus.

Super Mario Brothers is a platformer, meaning that you run and jump through variously themed environments, avoiding obstacles and defeating enemies. The second level of the game, "World 1-2," is an underground system of tunnels. Its walls and ceiling are made of dark cyan bricks. The soundtrack is a low, ominous keyboard melody. Green pipes house carnivorous plants, lead down into a chamber full of coins, and mark the exit to the next level. Smashing upward into the bricks, you can find hidden items, including a green and yellow mushroom that gives you an extra life.

One of us found that you could break through the ceiling, jump on top of it, and run over the rest of the level, not just to the exit but beyond it. This was the first game i'd ever played that made hunting secrets part of the experience, and i loved it. I remember wishing that this game had no time limits. You had a couple of minutes to get to the end of a level or you would die. But the point, i now felt, was not to get through a level fast or beat someone's high score, but to unlock and explore each world, to bathe in its atmospheres.

I've been thinking back to this formative moment of desire to "be" in a game — not busily completing the tasks that the game pushes you to accomplish, but soaking up the ambience — because of the work of a YouTuber who calls himself Any Austin. Specifically because of his series about "unremarkable and odd places" in video games. In each of these essays Any Austin shows footage from a video game, mostly of him just wandering around several locations. He analyzes what he sees and hears in each place in an effort to articulate what makes it so strangely affecting. The analysis tends to boil down, as it does in his essay about NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams, to the feeling of being somewhere "that wasn't made to be explored, that you can explore." And this idea explains the apparent contradiction in the title of the series, "unremarkable and odd": each place is unremarkable insofar as the game doesn't encourage you to pay attention to it, but odd because of how beautiful or strange it is if you do pay attention.

The first location he showcases in NiGHTS (a game i had never heard of) is, as he says, "disgustingly beautiful." But it's his analysis of its strangeness, not its beauty, that has made me remember and become curious about my early experiences of video games. He begins by talking about the "hub" at the very start of the game, which feeds into all of the levels proper. Instead of entering any of those levels, he loiters in the hub itself — a place that, with respect to the core gameplay, is incidental. He shows how the edges of the game world extend farther from the center of the hub than he would have thought, and compares this periphery to what you might find if you could pause a dream, while you're dreaming it, and walk away from the scene of current activity: "you would sort of start to see the logic end, and the roads kind of stop, you know?" The dreaming mind, he says, projects all the "accoutrements necessary to create a convincing space. But ... when you're dreaming about your house, as a kid, if you're in the living room, your mind isn't rendering, so to speak, the bedroom closet."

Any Austin's "unremarkable" spots are aspects of the game world's unconscious design: consequences of there needing to be a space between two other spaces; locations that the developers created for a purpose they later abandonded, but that they left in the game anyway; landscapes meant to serve as mere scenery that the game doesn't stop you from entering; visual representations of the limits of the game's digital space. Any Austin relishes the feeling these places give him of "walking up kind of against the edges of the simulation."

This way of talking about video games reminds me that they can serve a function beyond mere distraction and escapism, beyond the profit motive. To play a game in the way Any Austin does is to practice being conscious of how the world around you is structured, and about the kinds of experiences that structure makes possible. Any Austin's analyses show that you can access a specific and powerful kind of pleasure by investigating the limits of the structuring environment. This is especially important now, when the structuring environment is making so many of us sick.

I don't have the stomach for dwelling on the current political situation, but i have always enjoyed thinking critically about the (not unrelated) scientific worldview — materialist, causally-determined, without meaning — that has for a few centuries now dominated the planet. I'd like to discuss this worldview briefly. I promise to come back to video games and make a meaningful connection between the two by the end.

The underpinnings of this worldview are laid out clearly by Fay Dowker (professor of theoretical physics at Imperial College London, and former student of Stephen Hawking) in a talk she gave in 2018 at the University of Geneva. Using her own summaries of Newtonian and Einsteinian models of the universe, quotations from some living physicists and philosophers, and two-dimensional representations of spacetime, she shows that our scientific model of the world does not accord very well with our lived experience. Dowker explains that in Newton's theory, time does not flow. The Newtonian universe is a "block" of infinitely many "snapshots" of three-dimensional space, "stacked up" on one another. The universe "is" the whole stack, all at once. This model helped us understand celestial mechanics, but it does no justice to our sense of movement through time. This sense is an illusion according to Newton and, Dowker says, most living physicists.

Einstein's theory of general relativity, which Dowker says is still our "best" scientific model of the universe as a whole, also represents the universe as a "block." That is, time doesn't flow. Becoming is an illusion. And Einstein's theory is, in some ways, even more remote from our lived experience than Newton's. For example, in the universe according to general relativity, there is no such thing as three-dimensional space. Instead it is made up of infinitely many "point events."

In both Newtonian and Einsteinian physics, the universe is understood to operate causally and deterministically. This obviously contradicts the way we usually think of ourselves as agents in the world, making choices as we move through it (and as some of us legislate the lives of others and hold them accountable for their actions). Twentieth-century discoveries show that at the quantum mechanical level, events arise unpredictably. But, according to Dowker, no one has found a way to reconcile this picture of quantum uncertainty with the materially determined picture of the universe developed by Newton and refined by Einstein.

My point is that even though we flatter ourselves as being the most advanced organisms to inhabit the Earth, and revel in our manipulation of our material environment, the constellation of theories that enable and justify this manipulation is incomplete at best. In his admittedly pretty out-there book The Invisible Landscape, Terence McKenna hits this particular nail on the head: "Because the methods of science work, because they can produce results, science feels no need to concern itself with philosophy" (34). And so it mostly doesn't even acknowledge, let alone discuss or defend, the assumptions on which it is based. Here are a few that McKenna identifies:

  • the universe is rational
  • it operates according to immutable, abstract laws
  • humans can discover these laws by observation and induction
  • reality is made of matter and the interaction among material entities
  • mind does not exert a causal influence on the material world

Maybe there are some freak scientists out there (using "freak" in a value-neutral way, to indicate that such scientists would be outsiders with respect to the industrio-scientific complex) who question these assumptions, who treat them as hypotheses rather than foregone conclusions, but the people who wrought the world that we all live and do business in did so within the framework of a worldview built on these assumptions. Of course it's far from certain that the universe is rational, that it operates according to immutable laws, that we can discover them, and so on. That these assumptions seem obviously valid to so many of us is a sign of not their truth but our culture's hubris.

The constellation of theories that depend on these assumptions is, as i said, incomplete at best. If science as our culture practices it "works," i think it's reasonable to ask what it accomplishes, where it has gotten us. Does Western civilization seem like the work of people who know what they're doing, or even have a faint idea of what they're trying to accomplish? I don't mean to suggest that all science is bad, or that zero good has come from it. But i do want to emphasize that the dominant worldview that has given rise to and gathered momentum through modern science is neither unassailable nor inevitable. It is, like the games that Any Austin analyzes, a "simulation," a way of "rendering" the world around us.

Any Austin's essays about video games make me want to take an analogous approach to philosophy and cultural criticism, to do a better job of making my writing playful. The effort to bring to conscious attention the otherwise unconscious machinery of one's own worldview (independent of any question of disrupting the status quo) can be fun. And though I'm not suggesting that playing Super Mario Brothers one fall afternoon when i was a middle school kid helped prepare me to years later enjoy philosophy — actually, maybe that's exactly what i'm suggesting. I think back to that stretch of World 1-2, where you can be above the ceiling and it's not yet clear where the crawl space leads, if it leads anywhere. Keep running forward and you find a room with three green pipes each of which takes you further ahead in the game than a normal exit would. Nothing very weird, in retrospect. A typical video game secret. But before we understood this there was a moment, or there is now when i replay that memory, of slow motion. I am suspended, for the blink of an eye, in what Any Austin might call an "unremarkable and odd" place: i'm not supposed to be here, but i am here; let me pause and take in the vibes.

works cited and consulted

  • Dowker, Fay. "Past, Present and Future: The Science of Time." YouTube, uploaded by Beyond Spacetime, 25 May 2018.
  • Lagassé, Paul, editor. The Columbia Encyclopedia. 6th ed., Columbia UP, 2000.
  • McKenna, Terence and Dennis McKenna. The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching. HarperOne, 1993.
  • "Unremarkable and Odd Places in NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams." YouTube, uploaded by Any Austin, 27 March 2023.