The Self-Contained Universe?

I admit, though with reservation, that I am a frequent player of the latest Grand Theft Auto videogame. This pixilated distraction is emblematic of the trouble so many young men of the Nintendo generation that now find themselves in due to their reliance upon virtual violence as a source of entertaining input. No, this is not a journal to vindicate alarmist critics of media that supposedly incite tendencies toward ultraviolence amongst youth culture (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066921/); this first entry in this journal merely draws attention to a influence that is more subtle but seems to be present throughout many forms of media: the notion of a self-contained universe.

I recently realized something viewing the ABC show Lost a couple of months ago (http://abc.go.com/primetime/lost/index.html). If you’re not familiar with the show, it tells the story of the survivors of a plane crash on a deserted island. I should note at the outset that Lost is one of a few shows currently on television (Fox’s 24 among them) that is highly episodic in its style: cliffhangers at the end of nearly every show link episodes together in a grand unraveling of a “mythology” (to use parlance associated with rabid fans of the now-defunct The X-Files). This narrative approach underscores the concept of this deserted island itself, as the characters on the show cannot leave the island by its very design. To give one example, when one of the leaders of the survivors is faced with the problem of protecting the camp from other mysterious inhabitants of the island, he remembers firearms in a briefcase carried by a marshal on the plane. He had buried the marshal, however, after he died from injuries sustained in the crash. To open the briefcase, he must then exhume the marshal’s body, retrieve the key from around his neck and only then can he access the guns for defensive purposes. This kind of process struck me as a familiar one, but it took me awhile to recognize where I had seen this kind of process before; finally, I remembered my gaming experience.

Role-playing games do stimulate the imagination, but only to the extent that the designers of the game are capable of providing an imaginative space. As you walk from screen to screen in a game, you cannot walk into an area that has not already been created. Rare glitches offer new corners for exploration, but these areas too are but extensions of a self-contained universe that has already been fixed and figured out, its gravities and logics always and immutably set. We empathize with our digital daimons for the same reason we enjoy Lost: the playing field is leveled when we are bound alongside the characters inside a universe that is self-contained, in which guns cannot be manufactured, only found as they already exist. Reading some of the work of Slavoj Zizek recently (his contribution to the On Belief: Thinking in Action series, http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0415255325/qid=1110750995/sr=1-22/ref=sr_1_22/103-5169284-2356632?v=glance&s=books), I am convinced that we seek refuge in the digital world not to escape our material bodies and suspend our identities, but we come here looking for new ones. Paradoxically, I christen my first foray into the blogosphere with an attempt to discover myself (an attempt that is counterintuitive in a world in which the invention of a persona and re-creation is standard) and also to explore different facets of my personality that are not so easily classifiable (hence this blog’s esoteric name). This is indeed a self-contained universe: all that will nourish or destroy me is already here, but that we already knew. The exploration is the part that makes for good television.