Greek philosophers, that is. If Plato and Aristotle disagreed on the good and bad work that art does, how do we talk about something similar in video games?

When a video game gets an 8000+ word feature in the New York Times Magazine, what’s clear is that this isn’t just any old game. And if you were looking for why The Beatles: Rock Band seems to have the world in a bit of a tizzy, you could do worse than asking Seth Schiesel, who reviewed the game for the NYT. “By reinterpreting an essential symbol of one generation in the medium and technology of another,” he says “The Beatles: Rock Band provides a transformative entertainment experience,”. TB:RB, we’re told, is about to do for video games what The Beatles themselves did for pop music: make them not just popular, but culturally significant*.

Still, as you’d expect, it’s precisely the transition from cultural touchstone to video game that has some feeling uneasy. The Times itself is rife with commentary about the distinction between this blasphemous knock-off and ‘the real thing’. But a far more intelligent, subtle critique was made by web thinker and occasional curmudgeon, Nick Carr:

Rock Band is a means of distancing rather than immersion. It’s yet another sign of the commercialization of the intimate, the replacement of real personal experience with a purchased, preprogrammed replica of experience…

Rock Band is the aural equivalent of paint-by-number… But, like paint-by-number, Rock Band is also a metaphor… What’s creepy about the game isn’t the faux guitar necks with the color-coded digital frets (that’s just rock-by-number). It isn’t even the waxworks avatars (though they are certainly ghoulish). No, what’s creepy about it is its cynical, paint-by-number rendering of sixties counterculture, from, progressively, the Ed Sullivan go-go soundstage to the trippy mindscapes of psychedelia to the flowerchild fields of the hippies.

Carr’s critique is expected, but worth paying attention to. After all, besides Carr’s usual intelligence, it articulates a fundamental fear about video games: if games are about recreating experiences, what happens when they recreate pivotal cultural symbols or events? Do they cheapen them? Do they do away with either their cultural significance or intellectual rigour? What exactly is at stake in virtual representations of culture?

In a loose sense, Carr’s concerns are akin to Plato’s in Republic. Moving away from an original in a way that reduces certain valued qualities – here, originality, rigour – is a kind of corruption. The distinction at work is between, on one hand, creativity and counter-cultural rebellion, and on the other, the mindless repetition of music and consumerism. In order to argue this, Carr has to assume this: video games are attempts to replicate the things they depict. That point is up for debate.

When Plato proposed the poets and their imperfect imitations be banished from the ideal state, Aristotle responded by suggesting that the purpose of artistic imitation wasn’t to simply replicate something, but was to recreate and stage stories so that we might learn both how to live and how not to live, while purging emotions in a safe and healthy way. Imitation was good because experiencing it made you a better person.

An argument about video games works in an analogous fashion. Video games only attempt to replicate their aesthetic or mimetic content; the mechanics of game are somewhat different realm. When a video game presents a battle or a sporting match, the point isn’t so much to recreate an event as it is the rules of the event. As I’ve argued previously: create a world; set its rules; let the player create their experience within that arena of action. It’s a system that video game theorist Gonzalo Frasca has called ‘simulation’, as a distinctly separate field from ‘representation’ (imitation, mimesis) or music. Rather than attempting to recreate or simplify musicianship, games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero attempt to produce their own set of mechanics and rules in order to create their own unique experience.  To put it simply, the point of Rock Band isn’t to recreate being musician – it’s to play Rock Band.

But it’s not quite as straightforward as that, is it? After all, a good deal of the cultural force behind video games stems from precisely how they create fantasy spaces to act out culturally significant tropes and symbols. What is the appeal of the World War II shooter if not making you feel like ‘you’re right there’? Though games do not simply depict these important things, whether famous wars or everyday actions, they do constantly refer and point to them. It’s too easy to say that ‘games are their own thing’ and not take this into account.

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A few months ago, I was chatting about this to a friend while sharing some beer on his deck. This is something we do often – lazily shifting between topics of academic fascination while slowly getting buzzed. This time round, I was suggesting that we needed a word – one better than ‘simulation’ – to denote how video games didn’t simply recreate the objects and spaces they showed, but set up a world and rules for their own kind of creation.

Because literature people so frequently talk about the prefix ‘re-’ in ‘representation’ – that little gap that reminds us of the fictiveness of literature, film etc. – I suggested the counter-intuitive term ‘resimulation’ to refer to the same gap in video game depictions of real-world things. My friend’s lightning quick response? “How is that different from the simulacrum? Isn’t that kind of repetition of things in the world exactly what we don’t want games to do?”.

It was a good point. If the power of games lies in their creative capacity, then maybe a term that seemed to further connote repetition and corruption was the wrong one. Rather than the kind of creativity and uniqueness of video games, to resimulate something seemed instead to suggest one was simply ‘acting it out again’. It’s like playing a famous football game in the Madden series simply so that one can repeat it; it’s nostalgia, rather than creativity, and importantly, it’s about culture and representation, not gameplay, or what game theorists call the ludological aspects of play – the theoretical term for how games work by rules of play and simulation rather than by the rules we use to approach literature and film.

Not to be proven wrong again – which happens all too often when you have very smart friends – I took what seemed like a half-hearted stab: “Okay, what about presimulation?”. “Huh,” my friend replied. And as we hashed it out a bit, it wasn’t as bad as it initially sounded. After all, if resimulation is the tendency in games to repeat and act out common aspects of culture, then presimulation refers to the potential in game worlds: to presimulate is to set up a world with its rules precisely so you don’t repeat something, but create your own experience. It still refers to things in the world, but does so in a way that isn’t about imitation, but setting up an arena for possible action. You don’t exactly know what’s coming next; you’re ‘before’ the simulation has taken place, and in a sense, you always will be.

And as I’ve thought about this over the past few months, what I’ve realised is that it’s not that good games are ‘presimulative, creative and open, and bad games are ‘resimulative’, linear, closed and mindless; quite to the contrary, it’s that all games contain both presimulative and resimulative aspects, traits that respectively are about the creativity of play and the force and weight of those symbols and events that are culturally significant.

To give an example, the standard ‘war game’ suffices. Take a Call of Duty title and you will find aspects that are resimulative, that repeat both historical events and their cultural underpinnings. The games beckon you to repeat the tropes of our cultural past, from definitions of gender, to ideas about the nation, to an evaluation of war and nobility. Its presimulative aspects, however, are the things the resist the neat repetition of a historical narrative, i.e. the manner in which the player both decides his or her path (to some extent), but more importantly, the way in which the minute, second-to-second experience of the game while sitting in your living room produces a distinct, unique effect, one that is as productive and creative as it is reactive and resimulative. Perhaps the best example of this was the parent who insisted that if his son wanted to play Call of Duty, he had to do so according to the Geneva Conventions. Because the resimulative aspects of a game push you one way, doesn’t mean you can’t push back.

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So. After all that, it’s time to return to the question: what is at stake when video games represents not just blocks and shapes, but culture? Well, to me it’s this: video games always-already are capable of reaffirming or challenging their cultural underpinnings. By both asking you the player to repeat certain aspects of culture and produce your own experience of it, video games neither denigrate forms they riff on nor celebrate or elevate them. As a cultural form, video games always have the potential to do both, and one is left looking at them on a title-by-title basis to examine how, through a combination of both mechanics and aesthetics, individual games relate to ‘culture’.

In my mind, this reframes the debate about TB:BR. To say that it is a corruption of musicianship is to miss the experiential and formal uniqueness of video games – their presimulative aspect. But Carr argues that TB:BR also corrupts the counter-cultural message of The Beatles because it renders their images in them frame of a consumerist video game. Before responding to that, I think that at this point, it’s worth noting the The Beatles have sold 2 billion albums (no, that’s not a typo) and that whatever their counter-cultural impact was, it died and was co-opted long before Rock Band was created – or, for that matter, before I was in the late seventies.

But in some ways, I still agree with Carr. Why? Well, to me, the ‘resimulative’ danger of TB:BR isn’t that it co-opts the counter-cultural potential of the The Beatles – it’s that it acts out the same corruption to which The Beatles were themselves a part. Here is our aesthetic of counter-culture – now go lavish in it and enjoy yourself. Whatever The Beatles may have been able to achieve in taking resistance and making it mainstream, rebellion has long been taken over by the mechanisms of late capitalism and consumerism in which the signs of resistance become yet more things up for sale in the marketplace. Even though Rock Band is a great way for people to engage with the music, the best we can hope for is that people new to the music will enjoy it. No-one, as a result, will really consider ‘giving peace a chance’ – or, more importantly, question the vapidity of the message in the first place.

Still, it’s important to note that there is nothing about it being a video game that necessitates this result. Instead, it’s precisely the lack of a video-game-specific approach to the cultural impact of the The Beatles that has rendered TB:BR impotent. More specifically, it’s the lack of a presimulative way to experience The Beatles that reduces the counter-cultural potential of TB:BR.

While I firmly believe music games are an amazing way for people to newly relate to music, little about the kind of ludological satisfaction of repeating a song, even in this new form, will bridge the formal specificities of video games and cultural significance in ‘the real world’. The game will simply celebrate the aesthetics of an overused and tired cultural symbol. The Beatles: Rock Band, if it ever had anything to do with counter-culture, fails at it not because it is a video game, but because it isn’t enough of one.

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* Of course, video games already are culturally significant; it’s just that there’s a large part of the mainstream, NYT/Globe and Mail reading public who don’t (or aren’t willing) to believe they are.