Art Appreciation (and Theory) As Video Game

Reading Heidegger is the Elden Ring of philsophy

A well-designed video game in some sense hijacks our evolutionary reward system. Our ancestors who were more motivated to learn about their environment, spend the effort to get a bit better at weaving or figure out a clever new strategy for hunting were more likely to survive. Video games are to these kinds of rewards what cartoon porn is to our sex drive — a hyperstimulus of those reward systems that’s divorced from the original context in which they were beneficial. Not that there is anything bad about that, I believe in using every aspect of our biology to make our lives better and more enjoyable. However, it’s very important to keep in mind the fact that even though getting the next skill in tomb raider or figuring out the next puzzle in Myst may give you the same kind of reward that learning how to use Excell or solving a problem a work it’s not actually of any intrinsic value so you don’t abuse that hack in a harmful way¹.

Previous generations may not have had video games, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t make use of the same principles to enjoy themselves. Just like video games, some works of art are instant flashy enjoyment that quickly gets boring while others reward increasing levels of investment with the feeling of discovery and insight. The “ahh hah” one feels when one makes a realization about a book you’re reading is quite similar to the reward when you figure out some puzzle in a video game. And just like video games, people often prefer a work of art that challenges them at first. In a video game this might be a game like Elden Ring where it seems like you get killed every time you turn around but that makes finally defeating a boss that much sweater while in an art work it often takes the form of being initially unapproachable or difficult to understand but allowing you to prise sense or aesthetic pleasure through dint of effort (think Finnigan’s Wake).

I’d go so far as to say this is also what’s going on with certain works of ‘continental’² philosophy. I mean why exactly is it that Being and Time is so fucking ridiculously impenetrable and hard to understand? The Heideggerheads out there would claim there is something essential to the content which makes it impossible to truly express in a more straightforward (maybe more analyticish) fashion and that’s why we shouldn’t just replace Being and Time with a more modern easier to follow expression of those ideas the way we have with Newton’s Principia. This, however, is very hard to square with the practice of teaching these works where the students are assigned a dense impenetrable piece of text each week only for the professor to explain what it means in exactly the straightforward language that supposedly can’t express the content. And I have no doubt that the Heideggerheads out there have an explanation for this in which the straightforward explanation only works in light of the impenetrable text.

I have a much simpler explanation, books like Being and Time are the Soulslike games of philosophy. Just like Elden Ring, they draw people back time and time again because the feeling of success when you finally wring some kind of understanding from the text is so sweet. This theory also explains one of the other really puzzling thing about this kind³ of philosophy: If the goal is just to figure out what’s true like we do in math or physics⁴ why do bother to read original works? Assuming you don’t believe the discipline is epistemically useless presumably it offers at least some mechanism of realizing certain ideas were wrong or arguments incorrect⁵. The video game theory explains this all perfectly. The satisfaction comes from wresting understanding from a difficult text, replacing that text with a straightforward easy to understand account would be like using an invicibility cheat in Elden ring — it would turn what once was an experience of satisfying progress into something cheap and boring.

Of course, it’s not just the humanities which have this feature. Half the things that get studient in mathematics of physics are choosen because how they seem to balance the challenge and feeling of reward/insight. But I think we are more aware of this in these other areas. We don’t necessarily try and defend a silly problem in mathematics as itself of deep intellectual value, but rather point to the fact that often the way we discover useful results is by encouraging exploration and fun and it’s hard to know where such useful results will be hiding. Additionally, these kind of explorations are fun, do traint the mind and offer some side benefits (the way it turns out that video games make for better surgeons). So my point isn’t to denigrate these pursuits anymore than I would some of my own mathematics which isn’t always about very useful areas.

However, I fear that there is a tendency to confuse the feeling of progress and insight offered by reading or interpreting some literature or philosophy for genuine intellectual value. Just as with video games, we need to be careful not to let the feeling that we are making progress, discovering new insights etc.. etc.. convince us we are doing something more than playing a game. Games can be fun, but they are rarely perfectly aligned with maximizing our understanding of what’s true in the world or making the world a better place.

[Yes, I’ll try to get back to correct the spelling and stuff but you understand my point so does it matter?]

1. I’m being a bit loose here. Depending on what you do, solving a problem at work might not really offer any intrinsic value either (whatever that is) and getting better at some video games can be socially valuable. But I think we all understand the sense in which a video game accomplishment is in some sense not a real accomplishment. I won’t try and define any of these words, I’m just pointing out the kinda obvious fact that the feeling of accomplishment or insight you get in a video game can be out of proportion to how much benefit that accomplishment offers to your life or to society and you need to keep this in mind so you don’t stop putting in effort at school or work to focus on video games (assuming you don’t have e-sports talent).

2. The term continental isn’t quite correct (and certainly post-modern isn’t the right term). I mean the category of philosophical works by authors like Heidegger, Husserel, Derrida etc.. characterized by exteremely impenetrable and hard to interpret text which is claimed to slowly reveal deep meaning.

3. Not that it isn’t present in other kinds of philsophy, even analytic, only that it’s particularly strong in ‘continental’ philosophy.

4. Yes, obviously, the original has important value for the history of ideas and understanding how people at that time thought about and developed the subject. But that’s a very different kind of value that might be important to doing intellectual history but isn’t what we usually assume we are trying to get out of these courses.

5. No matter how smart you may think some dead philosopher might have been it’s crazy to think they had no bad ideas or dumb mistakes. If Newton could fuck up the product rule despite being much easier to check of course they must be able to get it wrong. And either the discipline is essentially useless because it’s just epistemic coinflipping or you should think that over time we are able to at least get a bit better at guessing what ideas are good and bad and thus should be able to replace the original work with one that has a higher expected correctness/goodness of ideas. And yes, I know people will insist that there is some value in seeing how the idea was developed or how the author was thinking of it, and that’s no doubt true. But all education and learning is a matter of trade offs. If you had infinite time you would read every scrap of paper since the begining of time, the quesiton is whether or not you could better use that time and just as learning the product rule correctly is probably a better use of time for most introductory calculus students than seeing Newton fuck it up it would be surprising if a philosophy student wouldn’t be better served by extracting the best parts of those author’s ideas and letting them go back to the original if they later need to write a paper in the history of ideas.