Sisyphus: The Game
The Myth of Sisyphus and the imperative to live consciously
I took an Intro to Computer Graphics course this past spring. Our final project was open ended, and since nearly everyone was creating games, i figured I should too. The problem is that I haven’t played video games since high school because I see them largely as a waste of time. So I decided I would make a game that was a commentary on my view on games, and Sisyphus was the result.
The Greek myth of Sisyphus is the story of a king who cheats death and pisses off the gods. As a punishment, ”The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.” This is the opening sentences of Albert Camus’ essay The Myth of Sisyphus, in which he uses the absurd nature of the story to conveying his philosophy of life.
My own take on the story is that it is an attack on the gamification of life. In a game one is given a well defined goal, such as rescuing a princess, and is given many tasks leading up this goal. Stopping before accomplishing the goal would lend all the exerted effort as null.
Sisyphus’ crime was considering life as one would consider a game. His aversion to death marks the sign of a gamer; how can one accept death before achieving the end goals, and with no chance of a second go (or, if you believe in reincarnations, a second attempt without any recollection of the first one (or, if you believe you can tap into past experiences, then you’ll be reminded of how long you’ve been attempting to achieve these goals without success))?
His punishment, then, matches his crime. One of the greatest frustrations a gamer can experience is achieving the end goal and reaching the credits, and then losing account of this and having to trudge through the same battles all over again. This happened to me many times in Super Mario bros. on the Super Nintendo back in the day. To reach the summit of the mountain only to watch the boulder roll back down and have to start all over must be complete agony.
There remains a lingering question, one which my mother raised: what compels Sisyphus to continue his arduous task? After witnessing the boulder fall back down the mountain, or at least after the hundredth time, one would imagine him sitting down and saying ‘oh well, it was worth a try’.
To answer this question, one must shift one’s perspective on punishment. In the common notion of punishments a criminal’s warped perspective on the world leads him to commit a crime, and so an external force imposes its will on in order to fix the criminal’s mind, or at least to prevent him from repeating the crime.
Sisyphus’ punishment, on the other hand, is that he is given the tremendous opportunity to exactly fulfill his own will, without any interference from external forces. For a novice gamer, having to redo a task seems treacherous; for a seasoned gamer, this is the greatest joy. What distinguishes these two gamers is a mindset: the first is motivated to play because of the imagined satisfaction of accomplishing the goal; the latter has completed many games and is not interested in completing another one. He knows that the momentary satisfaction of reaching the end pales in comparison to the extended satisfaction of accomplishing each individual task. The brain likes putting things in order so is satisfied regardless of the importance of the task. If this gamer has completed it before, there is even a greater satisfaction because the brain has to do less work.
Sisyphus’ mindset is that of an experienced gamer, and his punishment for this crime is that the world has transformed to one in which this mindset triumphs. He has a task: pushing a boulder up a hill; he has a goal: resting the boulder at the peak of the mountain; he has a game-over screen:the boulder falls back down; he has a replay button: walk back down the mountain and start again. He now has the capability of repeating his task for eternity, losing any semblance of consciousness, which for a Greek is worse than a thousand agonizing deaths.
The game I created attempts to convey these ideas to the player. It actually turned out to be a quite impressive game, largely thanks to my teammate Philip Woytowitz (and to a lesser extent my other two teammates Alexander Yang, who helped display the text on the bottom of the screen, and Tristan Jones, who helped incorporate sound effects). Here is a screenshot:
The gameplay is akin to Helicopter. The boulder moves forward and leftward (down the mountain) unless the user presses the right arrow key, which causes it to move forward and rightward (up the mountain). The terrain is constantly regenerated in a random patter, and the game ends if the boulder rolls all the way down the mountain (to the rocks on the left of the screen), at which point this menu screen appears:
This may seem easy, but its in fact really challenging. Physics is modeled so that the boulder moves with acceleration rather than just velocity, which takes some practice getting used to. Hitting a log on the path or the rock wall on the right causes the boulder to bump, and avoiding nine logs completes a level and increases the forward speed. In order to make it a little easier, the boulder is given the ability to jump over logs or jump back on the path after a certain amount of time.
My whole plan pretty much backfired because I got extremely obsessed with the game, spent a lot time “debugging” it, and stayed up late many nights during the three weeks it took to complete. I designed the menu obsessively, added music ( Philip Glass — Renfield for Dracula ), added cheats (including Atlas mode, in which the boulder turns into a hovering earth), and incorporated the LeapMotion controller to allow the player to control the boulder with his hand instead of the keyboard (open fist ‘pushes’ the boulder up the hill, closed fist lets it drop, raise hand to jump, etc.).
In the process of creating a game to mock games I have learned that they have the potential to be learning and mind expanding experiences. I have also been pleased to discover a selection of indie game developers who are fighting the status quo in the gaming world by creating games (Braid, Little Inferno, Journey) with the intention of increasing the player’s consciousness.
