Outside Your Heaven

Posted: 28 Jun 2019 08:47 AM PDT

Speaking as A Person Who Knows About Video Games I am amused by these hot takes of the latest Black Mirror episode -- the one about the gamerbro friends who end up becoming lovers in their VR-enabled fighting game -- that accuse it of not understanding games. Maybe I'm just a fan, but I do think Charlie Brooker is one of the few (perhaps only?) television writers who seems to understand video games, probably owing to his time as a game critic. While not the end-all-be-all of interactive narrative, I did think Bandersnatch was genuinely clever and worked, and his Season 3 video game episode, Playtest, while not my favorite, was not cringey in the ways I associate with clueless portrayals of games or game culture in mainstream media. Even when Black Mirror's treatment of games has been hit or miss, it has been hit or miss for normal writing or storytelling reasons, not because the makers of the show have no idea about the subject.

It must be tempting to lord your expert knowledge over a storyteller, even one more familiar with your expertise than average. My dad was a doctor, and he insisted on ruining every medical scene in a movie for my entire childhood. ("You can tell Harrison Ford's not a surgeon. His hands aren't steady enough." "Thanks, dad!") That's how articles like this strike me, which act like they've caught Black Mirror with its hand in the getting-video-games-wrong cookie jar. I don't think Black Mirror or Brooker are getting much wrong about games or VR in this episode, but understanding that does require you to be engaged with the consistent sci-fi tech of the Black Mirror universe to some degree. For me it serves as a good example of how a smart worldbuilder slots fantasy technology into our real world technological landscape, and in ways that actually clarify how real technology functions.

The article claims that the episode, Striking Vipers (named after the Street Fighter-like game the bros love), makes no sense because the ability to have sex would not be designed into a fighting game, even one with a VR mode. But this is missing how VR has been shown to work in the Black Mirror universe. It it is very much a Matrix-like neural interface, and in this episode those consistent sci-fi rules are being laid over the top of real life video game conventions. Obviously in our world sex would need to be designed into the game, but that's not how "VR" works in Black Mirror, and several episodes at this point have shown that.

VR in Black Mirror is clearly some sort of complete recreation of human embodiment in a virtual space, similar to what Morpheus in The Matrix calls "residual self-image". It's not simply your mind inhabiting a designed avatar, but some sort of machine-learning powered "copy" of your complete neuro-physiology -- sometimes called a "synaptic snapshot" -- into a virtual space, and with that comes a lot of non-designed baggage, i.e. things that are just part of your neuro-physiology, like sex. In other words, the way consciousness and embodiment function in Black Mirror isn't really "designed" at all. It's just a byproduct of being able to copy human beings into a digital space, like the way voice chat or video works. "Sex" is possible in Striking Vipers for the same reason yelling racial slurs is possible in voice-enabled online play. No one needs to design racism into an online game, it happens because people have voices and can talk through the game. VR in Black Mirror is the same thing, but with virtual bodies that can -- apparently -- either be copied wholesale or not at all.

One of the interesting things about Black Mirror is how the one element of narrative continuity it seems to have is the technology. While not literally every episode takes place in the same timeline, several clearly do, and one of the main reoccurring threads is how embodied consciousness works in virtual space. The technology we see in Striking Vipers -- the little disc that attaches to your temple and sends a perfect mind/body copy of you into virtual space -- is the same one from U.S.S. Callister, San Junipero, White Christmas, and several other episodes. That same company that made Striking Vipers is the one from Playtest, where we apparently see an early version of the same neuro-immersive tech.

There seem to be two experiental variants of this technology in the Black Mirror-verse. One is living humans minds that can travel into a virtual space. Another is "copied" minds that exist in the same space, but are not connected to a body in real life. The implication seems to be that, whether it is a living mind sending synaptic information to a virtual world via a head interface or a digital copy of a synaptic snapshot sending the same information, at the software level the experience of embodiment is identical. You can be a human brain connected to a computer or a copy of a human brain downloaded to the computer, and either way the virtual world is taking the sum total of synaptic brain information -- which, like in The Matrix, includes very aspect of embodied human experience -- and just dropping it unfiltered into a virtual world. This is why, in U.S.S. Callistar and San Junipero, copies of people and actual people can be in the same virtual world and not know the difference. The only difference is one of them cannot ever leave.

It's clear that Striking Vipers is using some version of this, though with some alterations from what we've seen so far. I don't think it's a poetic gesture that the anime-inspired cartoon fighters are played by real actors in the virtual world. I think it's because, as every other episode of Black Mirror has shown, virtual embodiment is some sort of weird all-or-nothing proposition. The only way to make someone feel like they are in a virtual space is to dump the full synaptic information of a human mind into it, so maybe you can't ever really be a cartoon because that's a type of synaptic snapshot that doesn't exist. The best they can do is find the closest human approximation -- literally a movie actor dressed up like the character -- and use them as the model. Yes, I know these very human-looking avatars are not the literal brain dumps of the humans piloting them, but neither are the "young" versions of the two protagonists of San Junipero, who are able to be in younger versions of their real life bodies while in the virtual world. The limitation could be that, while you can alter bodies, they have to be bodies that were "captured" from real life and are always derived from a real body somewhere. They cannot be designed -- without genitalia -- from scratch.

To be fair virtual body modification does appear elsewhere in Black Mirror, specifically in the Star Trek nerd dystopia episode U.S.S. Callister, where the dudebro gamer idiot-god Kirk analog can remove body parts from people at will. But the key word here is "remove": by all implications they are there by default. If you want some form of physiology from real life NOT present in the game you have to remove it. Game designers can't create sex anymore than they "create" your ability yell certain words over voice chat. They can only target certain things and block them, and clearly the Striking Vipers designers chose not to block sex.

What seems to be happening in the Striking Vipers VR mode is they've taken this synaptic snapshot tech -- the same tech from all the other episodes featuring VR -- and used that as a bass level of interactivity, i.e. you can do there whatever you could do as a live human. Then they build the Striking Vipers fighting moves, including all the cartoony zero gravity and flaming punch Street Fighter stuff, on top of it. It's not a fighting game where they added sex. It's a default full neuro-physiogy simulation where they added fighting game moves, and this shouldn't seem strange to anyone who works in real life VR. It's similar to how current headset-based VR games aren't normal video games that you "add VR to". They are headset-based stereoscopic 3D virtual spaces with limited hand interaction and walking that you add game mechanics to. Any "game" has to take place inside the base level interactivity footprint that comes with VR by default. The developers of Striking Vipers aren't "adding" sex any more that the makers of Job Simulator are "adding" head-tracking.

The only thing I find unbelievable about the episode is not that sex exists in the virtual space but that toxic gamer culture wouldn't make it a consent nightmare shitshow so fast that the company wouldn't be forced to block it for legal and PR reasons. I guess you do have total control -- anyone can just scream "EXIT GAME" and you're safe -- but even with that the opportunities for toxic misogyny, trauma, and abuse seem catastrophic. There is a hint of a wider world of virtual sex tourism when one of the characters, in the episode's funniest line, admits he "fucked a bear" trying to find the same feeling he had with his best friend. (Imagine what getting that synaptic snapshot was like.) It's clear in the episode that there is a massive community of people who seem to mainly use Striking Vipers for sex, which on one hand is good worldbuilding, but on the other it seems weird that its reputation for this wouldn't have overwhelmed its reputation as a fighting game. If Street Fighter VI came out, and you could fuck in it instead of fight, I'm pretty sure people would talk about nothing else. This is how I read Charlie Brooker's comment in a recent podcast that the players in Striking Vipers "really shouldn't be able to" fuck, but that he decided to stretch credibility slightly to explore the sexual topics he was interested in. The stretch isn't the tech that allows sex. It's the social reality where leaving it in wouldn't be a legal nightmare.

Storytellers always take some liberties. That's what storytelling is. The question is what liberties they take and where and why. Harrison Ford's shaky surgeon hands in The Fugitive don't bother me. Storytellers make certain decisions in order to focus on the story they want to tell. Striking Vipers could have been a story about the nightmare of consent in fully embodied virtual space, but similar sorts of horror scenarios have been explored elsewhere in the show. Instead it's a love story that explores the murky performance of heteromasculinity that -- like any good science fiction -- absolutely understands what's real and what isn't about its technology.

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