On Set Theory and the Bastardization Process
By Alex Kierkegaard / January 24, 2014
Let's kick off the second circle of videogame culture essays with a bang: with stuff that will blow your mind and with theories which no one else besides a bona fide genius could devise.
Now, the issue of the connection between art and videogames should already be a dead horse for everyone who's read my Genealogy: videogames are not merely an artform, but the highest artform possible, and therefore also the last — and this can be seen, as I explained in detail in that work, by considering the evolution of art from the perspective of immersion and the technological sophistication of the tools invented and employed throughout the ages in order to increase it. Thus in the Genealogy I approached the issue from the angle of the history of art. There is another angle from which we could approach the same issue, however, and gain a slew of amazing new insights in doing so: the angle of mathematics, and more specifically that of set theory, and in particular the distinction between supersets and subsets.
What is set theory? Here is its definition:
Set theory is the branch of mathematical logic that studies sets, which are collections of objects.
And this is the definition of supersets and subsets:
In mathematics, especially in set theory, a set A is a subset of a set B, or equivalently B is a superset of A, if A is "contained" inside B, that is, all elements of A are also elements of B. A and B may coincide. The relationship of one set being a subset of another is called inclusion or sometimes containment.
According to this definition, then, the various primitive artforms are subsets of videogames, or equivalently videogames are a superset of all the primitive artforms.
But what exactly does this mean, in everyday language? Brace yourselves, because here comes the mind-blowing part. It means that music, novels, paintings, sculptures, photographs, movies and the like are TYPES OF VIDEOGAMES. The issue therefore is not so much that videogames are art, but that ART IS VIDEOGAMES. Hahahaha. Ebert must be turning furiously in his grave right about now. But, thankfully for us, no amount of turning in a grave can change reality.
Let's consider some examples to solidify our understanding of what all this means in practice. Take a videogame and strip away all aspects — text, graphics, sound effects, user inputs and force-feedback — except the music. What are you left with? A piece of music, obviously.
Now take another videogame and strip away the music, the sound effects, the graphics, the user inputs and force-feedback, and in a similar manner you'll be left with plain text. If it's fiction, it's a novel. Similarly, a movie is merely an unbroken cutscene, an illustration is a static screen, and a painting or a sculpture is a three-dimensional object which can be viewed (and even interacted with) from all angles in stereoscopic 3D via a VR headset.
Moreover, not only are the primitive artforms subsets of videogames, they are in fact proper subsets of them. What is a proper subset?
A proper subset S' of a set S, denoted S' c S, is a subset that is strictly contained in S and so necessarily excludes at least one member of S. The empty set is therefore a proper subset of any nonempty set.
That is to say that, in the case of novels, for example, all novels ever written, and that will ever be written, are videogames, and it is not possible to find — indeed it is not even possible to imagine — a novel that is not also at the same time a videogame. No technological advance will ever be able to change this. No amazing novelist will ever be born who can surmount this issue. It is simply a mathematical fact that all novels are videogames and that is the end of that.
And voilà: we've demonstrated that all primitive artworks can be reduced to videogames in which the majority of the means of artistic expression ARE SIMPLY NOT BEING USED. In other words, we have demonstrated that all primitive artforms are ARTISTICALLY INFERIOR ARTFORMS (since they can only allow for a far lower level of artistic expression than that which videogames can).
Now, there is no way to get around these conclusions. This is mathematics, not journalism or pseudo-academia, in which black can be made to seem white and white black. There is no room for "opinion" here — you either understand what you've just read, or you've failed the class and will not be allowed to graduate until you've taken it again and passed.
One thing, however, remains to be explained, and this is the question of how on earth it was possible for mankind to become so hopelessly confused on something which, after a genius has explained it, appears to be such a simple matter. As always, it's an issue of semantics. "Mankind" — that is to say homo sapiens — is simply not adequately equipped to handle abstraction and conceptualizing beyond the level of the most basic grunts and groans, and the merest change in terminology will often suffice to send entire millennia of human beings into a whirling frenzy of ideological wars and terminal confusion. It is only one in a million who, by a fortuitous turn of fate, is born with a brain capable of thinking beyond mere words (which is to say, with ideas), and this is what the common people call a "genius".
Take the case of movies, for example, to see how the confusion first begins and, over the course of generations, finally grows to envelop everything and stifle all reasonable discussion and lucid thought. The original movies were black and white with no sound. After sound was added, movies (which were named thus to distinguish them from "stills", i.e. from photographs) were not called movies anymore — they were called "talkies", to distinguish them from the original movies, which were now called "silent films". But after a while ALL new movies produced were talkies, so the "talkies" label was dropped and everyone went back to simply calling the talkies "movies". But something fundamental had changed. The new movies were by no means equivalent to the old, since an ENTIRE NEW DIMENSION OF ARTISTIC EXPRESSION HAD BEEN ADDED: the AURAL dimension: that of sound and music. The scientists and engineers had done their job, by giving the artists a whole new avenue, in addition to the old one, in which to express themselves, and thus the old artform (that of silent films) had been killed, since no self-respecting artist would ever bother with it again. Of course the older artists and critics, who failed to make the transition to the new artform, regarded it with contempt and many of them scribbled long and impassioned essays in defense of their doomed craft; but sooner or later they all dropped dead, and their manuscripts ended up decomposing in the trash along with their authors, which is precisely where they all belonged. Finally, a September 2013 report by the United States Library of Congress announced that a total of 70% of American silent films are now believed to be completely lost, and I for one would be too busy watching and enjoying modern 3D color "talkies" to shed a single tear if I one day learned that every last one of them was forever gone.
What we have just examined then is how the definition of the term "movie", originally intended to signify an artwork consisting of 24 black and white photographs being projected every second onto a theater screen, was progressively ENLARGED over the years and decades to include first sound, then color, then eventually even stereoscopic 3D and force feedback technologies — and of course ever higher levels of visual and aural fidelity in the form of higher resolution source images and sound. To realize what a gigantic level of confusion this seemingly harmless little semantic mixup has caused, consider that most movies, even today, are referred to as "motion pictures" or even "photoplays" in legal documents. Just watch the end credits of practically any modern film (another obsolete term that refuses to die, since there is no longer any filming involved in modern "films") and wait for that last burst of logos and the legal mumbo jumbo in the very end, and you'll see what I mean. Why is such an obsolete term as "photoplay" still being used in the twenty-first century to describe 48 frame-per-second, 4K 3D digital color films that support D-BOX force-feedback seats and 7.1 Dolby Surround sound? Because average people have a massive incapacity when it comes to abstraction, and all it takes is a slight change of terminology for their tiny little brains to completely lose track of what is happening. If, instead of continually enlarging the definition of the term "movie" WITHOUT REALIZING IT, they had simply adopted a new term for every new invention — e.g. talkies, colories, 3Dies, force-feedbies, et cetera — "videogames", or "games", or "interactivies" or whatever you want to call them would have simply been seen as yet another term in the long sequence of terms that started with "scratchies" (aka cave paintings), and no one would have got their panties all in a bunch over them. But, people being what they are (which is to say, stupid), they didn't, and this is why we are presently in the mess we are in, and why it took nothing less than a genius to come in and clear up the accumulated confusion of millennia.