(Identity) Games Philosophers Play

Warning: This post contains spoilers for the video game Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic!

I couldn’t decide whether to file this under Philosophy or Culture & Media, but figured that the more interesting material is the philosophical questions touched on by the media, so I went with Philosophy. And it’s a good way to talk about the memory theory.

The memory theory is a way of trying to answer the question of personal identity: what is it that makes me, me? What is it that, if it were changed, would mean that the person I am would cease to be? Theories based on the body tend not to work, because the use of artificial limbs, organ transplants, and so on provide a pretty easy counterexample – our physical composition can change in some pretty dramatic ways, but we don’t think that we’ve become different persons. Likewise, it’s hard to use personality or beliefs as the key identifier, because people tend to change their minds about things.

The memory theory basically argues that we can form a viable definition of the person based on the following:

• As human beings, we each have a unique perspective on the world. I don’t see through your eyes, you don’t see through mine.
• We are aware of our perspective of the world – we have the sense that this is what I’m seeing/thinking/experiencing at any given time.
• We are aware that what we’re experiencing right now is part of a sequence of events that have been perceived from my particular unique perspective. I remember what I saw an hour ago, what I thought a week ago, how I felt a year ago. I am aware that these things all felt like they were happening to me in the same way that what I’m seeing right now is happening to me.

So this awareness of myself, my memory of my continued consciousness, is what makes me who I am. As long as those memories are intact, I’m me. When they’re lost, I cease to exist. Now, the memory theory has a lot going for it, but there are potential problems with it. If the relevant memories/perceptions/consciousness are physical states, it is at least conceivable that they can be replicated – that you could build another physical structure that would have the memories that are considered key to personal identity. Science fiction loves this problem. Any time there’s a transporter accident or a clone with duplicated memories followed by existential angst, you have an examination of the memory theory and its consequences.

So a few months ago, I was playing Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, a computer role playing game (RPG). The idea of an RPG is that the player creates a character and then plays that role in the story. From a mechanical standpoint, the player decides the strengths and weaknesses of the character. From a narrative standpoint, the player is supposed to make decisions that shape the unfolding of the story’s plot. In a computer RPG, this is somewhat limited – all of the possible branches have to be programmed into the game from the start. But through dialogue options and other branching points, the player can make things unfold in different ways. In a Star Wars computer RPG, it should be little surprise that one of the big factors the player controls is whether the central character is going to fall to the Dark Side of the Force or not.

What the heck does any of this have to do with the memory theory? Well, I’m going through, playing the game, playing a goody two shoes, Light Side character trying to help out the Jedi. In this game, set during a time well before any of the movies, the Jedi are getting their butts handed to them by a Sith Lord named Darth Revan and his apprentice Darth Malak. The Jedi manage to get the drop on Revan, fight him, and he’s presumed dead, but Malak just ascends to the top spot and keeps making life hard for the Jedi. So they need the central character to go on various quests to find the mystical doo-dads that might help them turn the war around, and as I’m playing the game, all of a sudden there’s a big twist. Revan wasn’t killed in the big attack. He was critically wounded, and brought back to the Jedi. Who promptly put a new personality and a new set of memories into Revan’s body, hoping that the new personality would be able to use Revan’s subconscious memories to find the aforementioned mystical doodads.

Yep. My character turns out to be, or to have been, Revan, the big bad guy. My responses to this twist were twofold:

1. Jeez, I’ve been trying to play this guy as a goody two shoes, and you’re telling me his subconscious wants to take over the galaxy? Thanks for the late tip, folks!
2. For crying out loud, have these game designers never heard of the memory theory?

The latter response may not be entirely fair, since it’s certainly not required that everyone in a fictional universe have an understanding of and agreement with a particular philosophical theory. But conveniently, the good characters decide to stick around because hey, my character isn’t the same guy as Revan, so they want to give me a chance. The not-so-good characters stick around because they’re hoping I’ll start being more Revan-like. Meanwhile, I had to decide whether to start playing the game differently, and going in more of a bad-guy direction, and I decided to stick with my previous idea of who the character was. Basically, using the memory theory, even though my character was in the body that Revan had, he was a different character. But as I kept to the goody-two-shoes path, all the other characters kept talking about how this was a chance for Revan to redeem himself. And the game is not giving me any “Hey, you people killed Revan when you stuck me in here. Don’t give me that redemption crap!” dialogue options. I’m not sure if I’m upset about what they did to my mental image of “my” character or about the seemingly cavalier way the big twist was handled. Or maybe I’m just upset that they didn’t give me the option to stop swinging a lightsaber around and have a deep conversation with my compatriots.

Ah well. It was still a fun game. And just another example of how you never know where you might run into some philosophy fodder.

About Dave Thomer

Born and raised in Philadelphia. Studied philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, where I made many great friends and met my wonderful wife. We moved back to Philadelphia, where I studied philosophy some more and became a teacher. Online and off, I'm looking for ways that we can be better citizens and build stronger communities.

January 5, 2007 @ 11:15 pm

Philosophy