Block Puzzles, Animism and the Rise of Digital Household “Gods”

When I relax, I sometimes like to listen to short stories while playing games on my phone. Nothing unusual there, of course. Cell phones have become multi-purpose entertainment systems for millions, perhaps billions, of people.

But the type of games I play, which can generically be referred to as “block puzzles,” makes me think of animistic mythologies. I know that sounds a bit nuts, so let me explain.

Animism in the 21st Century

Animism is the religious belief that objects, places and creatures possess distinct spiritual essences (and, therefore, preferences).

Religious writing depicts these spiritual essences as inherent in natural objects, plants and animals, but it’s sometimes associated with human-made artifacts, including even language itself.

I think many of us share stereotypes about animism, especially the idea that it is one of the most “primitive” of spiritual traditions. But not only is traditional animism still seen in ultramodern nations like Japan, but some thinkers such as the physicist Nick Herbert have argued that “mind” permeates everything in the universe. This is why the term “quantum animism” has been coined.

Digitism the New Animism?

But even if one is skeptical of quantum as well as traditional animism, it’s hard to argue against the notion that a lot of our artifacts are getting smarter. We can, for example, speak directly to some our digital devices, which can understand us well enough to give us reasonable and even helpful responses to a huge range of questions. What is the weather forecast for tomorrow, how tall is Lebron James, when was Shakespeare born?

What has gotten me thinking about animism and what I’ll call “digitism” is game play. I don’t play a lot of games on my smartphone, but I do find block puzzle games engaging and relaxing.

There are lots of versions of these games, but they’re all based on the same goal: to fit together virtual blocks in a grid so that they span horizontally, vertically and (in some versions) diagonally from one side of the grid to the other.

That sounds simple enough, but the games tend to get harder the longer you play. Sometimes the game will throw in progressively more complex shapes, which are hard to fit together. And, if the game genuinely “wants” you to lose, it can always give you one huge block after another in such a way that death and disaster is inevitable.

The longer one plays, the more the invisible game algorithm feels like a “little god” that determines, at least within the confines of these tiny universes, your fate. If you want to live long there, then you need to figure out what pleases and displeases the digital spirits within. And they are not all the same. Some are relatively benign, even merciful, but most are demanding, some even verging on sadistic.

There’s one thing common to all these games: the digital spirits “want” you to move in specific ways that are not always obvious. Indeed, in the best of these games, every single move is a separate puzzle that you must solve in order to “extend your play,” aka, live.

Digital Sacrifices

There’s nothing new in any of this. Most computer games work along similar principles, wherein in the game itself is an animate (and animating) spirit that determines your digital fate. But, for some reason, this feeling is especially acute in the realm of block puzzles for me.

The little digital spirits even demand their own version of sacrifices, as gods of all mythologies are apt to do. In this case, the sacrifices tend to mean spending 30 seconds allowing some advertisement to run, after which the game may grant a favor (perhaps, for example, some blocks suddenly disappear, allowing you avoid certain digital death). In essence, you are literally offering up a very small chunk of your time (that is, your actual life) so that the algorithm will safeguard you.

This is a kind of parody of a genuine religious experience, and I don’t mean to say that game algorithms are literal gods. But I do think we increasingly need a way of describing this eerie and, even in my eyes, slightly blasphemous feeling of wanting to understand and appease these digital beings.

Brave New Mythologies

This dynamic does not only apply to play, of course. As more and more of our tools and arts are digitized, we increasingly need to know what our machines want from us. For example, why won’t my printer work? Is it angry at my laptop? Did I not feed it paper correctly? Must I give up some portion of my life to finding a print driver on the Internet and downloading it onto my computer? Will that appease it, or only make it more angry still, perhaps freezing or rebooting my entire system?

In coming years, such digital spirits will inhabit more and more of our gadgets via the Internet of Things phenomenon. They will also increasingly crawl up over our eyes and maybe someday even into our brains, if the likes of Elon Musk have their way.

Spooky stuff. What kinds of sacrifices will they demand then? What kinds of new powers will they wield? Will digitism become the new animism? And, if so, what new mythologies will come to dominate our lives?

These questions are both old and new. We live in a Promethean Age, and I doubt anyone can tell us how humanity’s tale will ultimately end.

The post Block Puzzles, Animism and the Rise of Digital Household “Gods” appeared first on The Tollkeeper.