… So once the South Park kids in 2D animation morph to digital characters, from drawings to pixels, then comes the new video game South Park; Fractured but Whole:
This isn’t the first South Park game. The South Park franchise produced a first-person shooter game in 1998, and this style of game is perhaps not the most challenging game for our metaphysics. But even then, do our metaphysics keep up? We haven’t come to terms yet with Shane Hipps’ “communities of individuals” identified in Flickering Pixels. So how do we recognize communities reconstructing themselves as games? They might refer to themselves as ‘virtual communities’ but they are very real.
Who recalls “Chose Your Adventure” books? They are closer to these games than regular printed pages, inviting interaction. The robust quality of modern games is matched by the communities they create – groups of people engaged, creating their own identities – go far beyond those children’s books. And these programs overtake television and movies as the preferred medium, not just preferred by adolescent men but women of all ages as well.
At least for the purposes of philosophy, I want to crawl back to the printed page. I don’t even own an Xbox. Yet, I was one of the Pokemon Go traffic hazards. I chased after virtually real objects which is a misnomer for sure given any metaphysics, And am I now preparing to go where no metaphysicians have gone before…
… Just not yet. Let’s get back to the concept of “virtual” as in “virtual reality” after taking the weekend off to play South Park, Fractured but Whole…