“Plato’s caving” is the process of gradually dissociating certain knowledge one has about how a show was put together in order to immerse oneself further inside the show itself.
By ‘show’ I mean just about anything: movies, music, videogames, social media feeds. A ‘show’ could be a plate of breakfast sausages, or the people walking past you in the park while you’re seated at a bench. In Plato’s original allegory of the cave he imagines a sort of prehistoric cinema (a procession of different shadow puppets projected onto a cave wall using hidden light sources, such that there are no visible human operators and the figures seem to move on their own).
By ‘dissociating certain knowledge’ I mean reacting to a situation as if certain facts about it were somehow disconnected from it. People do this all the time—especially when they’re taking in a show—because a bit of plato’s caving makes the show a little better. Many fun & interesting experiences involve a certain forgetting of reality, and we have a bunch of different words for it: ‘suspending disbelief’, ‘roleplaying’, ‘getting into the spirit’, ‘losing yourself in the moment’. It’s a fundamental aspect of storytelling, and for there to be a ‘show’ some degree of it must happen.
Take Disneyland. Most people who visit Disneyland understand that the officially-costumed characters appearing in the park belong to a cast of professional actors. This means that in most ways, they aren’t ‘really’ a gang of classic fictional characters magically come to life. We know that when the show ends, these visions we see before us will turn back into regular humans leading regular lives (people who deserve more money from the Disney corporation, as it happens). And yet, should we encounter one of those actors in the midst of their doing a great performance, we’d be readily inclined to set the ‘realest’ parts of our knowledge & experience aside—maybe for a moment, maybe for much longer—because sometimes, it’s just more fun and more interesting to be at Disneyland and somehow be meeting THE Mickey Mouse.
Other times we’ll be dealing with a more morally-complex moment, and a bit of plato’s caving might help us get through it. For example, take me & my diet. I’m an off-and-on vegetarian who tries to avoid the aforementioned plates of breakfast sausage as much as I can…yet sometimes I choose to enjoy eating that stuff anyway. The problem for me is that I can’t really enjoy eating sausage at the same time I’m envisioning a pig factory, so I have to mentally disconnect those two things in order to finish the plate. This is just how it works with meat in places like Canada! I can still hear various people from my adolescence repeating one of our most common aphorisms: ‘Hey kid, don’t ask how the sausage gets made’.
The funny part, I suppose, is that only rarely were the folks who said these words actually talking about dead pigs. Usually they were speaking in metaphor about other products (products they were implying to be made in similarly-unspeakable ways). We have so many products like that in a place like this. You could say it’s part of the lifestyle here to concentrate the ugliest aspects of industrialism within large, dense, remote factories: places it is possible for us never to ask about & never to hear about. We do not wish to see how the sausage gets made, and maybe that’s what makes us who we are.
There is in fact a large benefit to never asking & never hearing about stuff like pig factories, and it’s pretty simple to explain. If you want to keep on living the same way you have been in a world that’s always getting worse, you need to find better & better deals. But every time you find out how some type of sausage gets made you become more aware that in some important moral sense, the deals you’re getting cannot ever be made ‘good’. It might be right for you to seek morally-better deals at that point, which is certainly what some people do… but it costs more time to organize that, and it costs more money to sustain that. This is why a person might learn not to ask.
I guess we could say that for a whole wide range of industrial products—movies, music, videogames, social media feeds, plates of breakfast sausage—our potential for ‘experiencing a show’ instead of ‘witnessing a catastrophe’ comes down to our skill at dissociating just the right details. I couldn’t really tell you whether it was right or wrong to become this good at contextually not knowing the stuff we know concerning what we eat… but this is what my society has been like since it began, more or less (so when it comes to the grand spectrum of plato’s caving behaviours, we’re still squarely in ‘normal & adaptive’ territory here).
The thing about plato’s caving is that it has this fulcrum point beyond which a person ceases venturing more into the cave and commences venturing less out of the cave (because they live there now). This is the moment when immersion in the show gains unconditional primacy over respect for the performance: the moment when one ceases employing bits of make-believe to enhance their show-going experience, and commences weaving many strung-together shows into a sustained and continuous layer of make-believe.
To understand how this fulcrum works, we’ll need a new rendition of the metaphor Plato wrote down in Republic all those years ago: Let’s call it Sprawlbug’s ‘allegory of the puppet’. Suppose that it is ancient times, and there’s a marionettist in the city square using a cool marionette (one of those human-shaped wooden puppets that you control using strings) to give a brilliant street performance.
There are exactly nine spectators in the audience. The first is a marionettist themselves, and is mostly just watching to see on a technical level what the performer does with their hands. The second is a critic who wants to know the details of the story being told so they can dissect its various moving parts. These two spectators are not plato’s caving.
The third spectator is a fan of this performer’s, but they’re slightly bored this afternoon because they haven’t been feeling this person’s latest work… yet the fourth spectator is the third one’s husband, and he’s finding himself surprisingly invested in the storyline playing out (maybe something about a little puppet who wants to become a real kid). These two spectators are plato’s caving just a little.
The fifth spectator is on the far side of the fulcrum point, which is to say they’re plato’s caving too much. They seem very invested in the story, much like spectator number four; except this person seems really invested, in a way that’s kind of scary. They find themselves inordinately distracted by the appearance of the strings that connect the puppet with its performer. (“Isn’t there some way to make those invisible?”) And unlike spectator number 1, this person couldn’t care less about whatever the marionettist might be doing with their fingers. (“Why does that performer even have to be visible at all, when we’re only here to watch Pinocchio become a real kid?”)
The sixth spectator feels that if anything, this marionettist currently performing in the show must actually somehow be standing in the way of the show (surmising that it must be this performer’s constant need for food, rest and/or money that’s preventing Pinocchio from more permanently existing). This person still understands that of course, the show cannot possibly be real… but they understand this as being a kind of temporary inconvenience that’s limited to the present situation. To them the puppet seems realer than it is fake, and so we simply need to find some way of deleting the strings from the proceedings (as well as whatever puppeteers might be working at the end of the strings); at that point, the spectator privately believes, Pinocchio might finally be able to move on their own.
The seventh spectator is someone who fails on a much more consistent basis than number 6 to understand that the show is not real (causing them to react to it in slightly-psychotic ways). At one point they threaten to kill the marionettist because of the way this dude’s 10 minute water break caused Pinocchio to suddenly de-animate. An eighth spectator then threatens to kill spectator number two, because they gave this performance an 8 out of 10 when it obviously should have been a 9 out of 10 (an entirely-equivalent action in their eyes since, as far as they’re concerned, the other spectators are also part of the show).
Eventually comes the ninth and final spectator, who isn’t really here to watch puppets at all; they’re just here to incite violence against any marginalized people who might happen to be standing nearby, and to this end they keep riling up the crowd with confusing slogans that don’t really make sense (‘something something justice for marionettes!!’).
If it were me at that old-timey puppet show, I would have avoided threatening to kill anyone (and I imagine it’s the same for you). To be honest I find it quite unacceptable for the spectators of any show to be acting the way spectators 7–9 do! It should be quite an outlandish thing to enact what I described in those preceding two paragraphs… but it isn’t outlandish, is it? Because here we are in 2025—a little ways past the 10-year anniversary of GamerGate—and from this vantage point, we can experience the ‘entertainment-based harassment campaign’ as something of a long-established tradition.
It’s a tradition much bigger than videogames, to be sure, and I’d never suggest the problem was limited to this one specific subculture… and yet, do we not sorta expect ‘gamers’ in particular to be the ones who just keep doing this stuff forever and ever?
It seems that for as long as there are ‘gamers’, we are given to expect ongoing episodes of harassment—always targeting those who fall outside the privileged category of straight white men. Each episode will be predicated on a string of fictitious claims concerning the target’s alleged wrongdoings; each claim will be noticeably more irrational than the one which preceded it.
We are given to expect that this is all quite normal, actually. We’re given to think of “gamers” and “hate mobs” as concepts that go together implicitly. Sometimes people will even implore us to love and accept the social role of being a ‘gamer’—including the harassment and everything—on the basis that having more ‘gamers’ heralds a bigger game industry, and we’re supposed to really want one of those.
Well, I’m a ‘gamer’ kid who’s turned into a lifelong game industry labourer, and of course I’m eager to give you my two cents about that. Do I love and accept the social role of being a ‘gamer’, including the harassment and everything, under the pretext that it could maximize the videogame industry’s business prospects? No. Not at all. Not even a little. I think that shit is stupid.
My personal belief about ‘gamers’ is that they are over now. (Hadn’t you heard?) They ended back in 2014—during the height of GamerGate—when a certain legendary games writer composed the hardest editorial of all time and cast it straight into the fires of Mount Bronze League. This was our signal that the age of ‘gamers’ had ended: a moment for us to reflect on how the vitality & flourishing of our previous dominant subculture had reached its conclusion, and it was time to move on. Some of us ‘gamers’ set off from that point to found a succession of smaller, kinder, less-online communities… but others chose to double down on the old dying subculture, and thereby initiated a kind of slowly-decaying time loop that persists to this very day.
Everyone in the whole damn world plays videogames now, so of course there are billions of gamers in the general sense of the word. But then there are also the people I’ve identified as ‘gamer’ using scare quotes: people engaged in upholding various signifiers, passions and rituals inspired by game subculture from the ‘90s thru the early 2010s. Sometimes I think it’d be less confusing if we chose different words to represent these two groups. But then I see some ‘gamer’-led movement threatening one of my colleagues again, and I remember that this lingering confusion between ‘gamers’ and regular people is among the sole points of leverage that ‘gamers’ have left (so we’d more or less have to pry the label from their cold, dead fingers).
In March of 2024 there was another wave of ‘gamers’ advancing another series of irrational claims (this one concerning a small, narrative-focused gamedev studio based out of Montreal). First was the claim that the 3-odd game writing contractors dispatched from this company to work on Alan Wake 2 had somehow forced its creative director against his will to make his game’s main character a Black woman (which somehow made it so the actually-highly-acclaimed, soon-to-be-fairly-profitable Alan Wake 2 project was in their eyes a complete failure). Needless to say, this claim turned out to have no basis in fact.
Next came the noticeably-more-irrational claim that this tiny studio had actually inflicted similar-such wokeness crimes upon most major video game releases from the past 5 years (a claim that is too far-reaching to have ever had any basis in fact).
Finally came the noticeably-even-more-irrational and even-more-unfactual claim that the tiny studio was to blame for tens of thousands of layoffs that by 2024 had plunged the videogame industry into crisis. (This, reader, is what spectator 9 looks like when they appear in real life.)
In the end a few hundred thousand ‘gamers’ would join the Steam Group associated with this movement, and it briefly became part of the internet news cycle. Which is why, for a few weeks, my colleagues and I all just had to tolerate people in our lives casually alleging the above series of childish, paranoiac, impossible claims as if they were plain facts.
I often wonder what I would say, were I ever to bother explaining my point of view to these people. I could perhaps argue that it’s numerically impossible for the 3-odd writing contractors mentioned by the hate mob to have somehow dominated an 1800-person production such as Alan Wake II. And furthermore, there is simply no way they could have subjugated the heavily-entrenched boss guys at Remedy Entertainment (who’ve been star players in their studio’s bigtime game industry productions for 20+ years). The person who is actually most responsible for the creative direction this game took is Sam Lake; and this makes sense, because he was the creative director of the project.
If the ‘gamers’ we’re discussing could simply combine a handful of basic facts they already know concerning how AW2 was put together, they would immediately see how the writers they targeted in 2024 could never have been guilty of the crazy stuff alleged as part of this movement. But they cannot successfully combine those facts, because the kind of ‘show’ they’ve grown accustomed to (a culture war, more or less) requires such facts to be dissociated in order for it to continue.
People like this are plato’s caving so close to the core that most of what they say about their favored subject will come off as utter nonsense, and the tangible details on which they focus blame will inevitably reveal more about the cave system they’ve fallen into than about the show itself. It’s certainly a problem that ‘gamers’ continue trying to explain every issue in terms of which non-white-man happened to be present at the moment they encountered it! But I guess in the end it isn’t really all that interesting to keep track of which specific fake complaints these miserable assholes most recently invented. It’s more interesting, I think, to identify the shared aesthetics that unite all acts of excessive plato’s caving: aesthetics that we can find both in & outside videogameland.
In cases when somebody is plato’s caving too close the core, you’ll probably find them doing the following things:
- Acting as if their supposed ‘favorite’ show can only be improved by sacrificing the health, safety and autonomy of their supposed ‘favorite’ performers
- Acting as if there’s a ‘true’ version of the show that doesn’t exist in reality, but which any real fan like themself is able to see (and which performers are constantly trying to ‘ruin’ by making creative choices in the real world)
- Acting as if a show gets better (more moral, more artful, more powerful, more complete) the more it excludes any & all connection to the reality in which it’s being performed
- Acting as if the morality of eating sausage varies not according to how it gets produced, but rather according to which questions get asked about it
For me the best possible show-going practice is less like living inside Plato’s cave, and more like belonging to a cool mystery cult. Sometimes you get to go and visit the Mithraeum, but the reason why that’s special is because you get to go in and then go back out. (If all I got to do was go into the cave then the whole thing would actually be a kind of trap, wouldn’t it? Or perhaps it would be a kind of funeral.)
I think the era before ‘gamers’ became over was the last era when commercial videogames could still be mysteries in the ancient sense of the word. Something special was happening with the industry at that time! Our friends didn’t necessarily know about or get it, and none of us could say where it was all gonna end up. We drew a sense of identity from our part in that process: We were ‘gamers’ during a moment when that word implied a wild & boundless possibility.
Today when I see somebody shouting threats because a diversely-coded reviewer awarded their favourite puppet show less than 9 out of 10, I cannot help but think of the people in Plato’s original allegory with their heads chained to a motherfucking wall. A stream of ‘new releases’ goes continuously by, to which they cheer & boo & hiss. In between the releases go streams of product reviews: 9 (cheer), 9 (cheer), 9 (cheer), 9 (cheer), 8 (boos & death threats). Everything & everyone they see around them now has become a part of the show—shadows upon shadows, scrolling past them on the wall. These people aren’t here to consider the wild possibilities; they’re only here to expect things (and the things they expect are atrocious).
What’s that, mister ‘gamer’? Are you angry that the shadow drifting past you on the wall this time didn’t get as many 9/10s as the shadow that drifted past you three years ago? Uh-huh. And what’s that? You heard there was a woman nearby, and you’ve got a whole big theory about how everything’s her fault?
I guess that’s just what being over is like.
Further Reading
Leigh Alexander’s ‘Gamers’ don’t have to be your audience. ‘Gamers’ are over.
Matthew Seiji Burns’ The King And His Objects
Marina Kittaka’s Divest from the Video Games Industry!
PMG’s 100 Slaps: The Breaking News The Games Industry Ignored in 2024