JOHN THE OBSCURE ™

By John Ruch

© 2007

Plato’s Orc Cave: The Paranoid Ultimate Reality of Video Games

“It is a strange picture, he said, and a strange sort of prisoners.

Like ourselves, I replied…”

—Plato, “The Republic”¹

Video games, be they “Pac-Man” or “World of Warcraft,” are fundamentally about exploration.

In the most straightforward sense, the exploration involves the ongoing active hunt for the next screen, the next area, the next interesting NPC to meet. On our thoroughly mapped, satellite-observed globe, video games are the new frontiers we invent, occult and exchange, becoming modern explorers—or Conquistadors—of our fellows’ inner worlds.

These worlds vary greatly, but a particular mode to the exploration is always the same: paranoia. The worlds are at least partly hostile. You can explore a gorgeous and enormous landscape in, for example, the “Elder Scrolls” series; but you must also watch for death and disaster lurking behind trees and over hills.

Video games are spectacularly, uniquely involving, like lucid dreams (or nightmares). As with dreams, we’re aware they aren’t objectively real. And yet they exist, rooted firmly in something so dully material as a computer. As dreams spring magically from dull gray tissue, so these virtual worlds spring magically from flat CDs and circuit boards. Most players likely don’t bother considering the question of video games’ ultimate reality, and it’s easy to see why: the mystery is daunting and the clues are few.

In the most literal sense, the ultimate reality of a video game is its programming code, which most people would find unintelligible even if they found it accessible. But for those who can hack it, the code is a whole new way to explore a video game world, revealing secrets of its physics and narrative with specificity that any scientist or theologian would envy.

This level of exploration, too, comes with its own brand of paranoia. Hackers often discover unused or disabled code lurking within games—sound files of mysterious dialogue fragments, images of unknown characters, miniature movies suggesting untold subplots. In some cases, they are the remnants of entire characters or plotlines cut from the final version of the game, and potentially expanding or changing its narrative meaning greatly. This game-code junk DNA, as a friend of mine called it, can be a surprising reminder that the convincing illusory reality of a game often contains other possibilities and intentions within itself.

The “Star Wars” game “Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords” (2005) is one such game, infamously rushed to release and loaded with disabled artifact code and files. An entire group of fans, the Sith Lords Restoration Project, is working on a “restored” version of the game that makes use of this dormant material.

This paranoid world of narrative leftovers met the paranoid world of traditional censorship in the “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas” “sex scene” controversy. That game’s code contained a disabled, unpolished sex-action capability or mini-game. Through a complex series of hacks, a fan discovered and activated this capability. Censorship thrives on ignorance—that being its main goal—and censors went into an immediate frenzy, mis-calling this feature an easter egg accessible by any user and viewing it as a Trojan horse, so to speak. Proving that rating systems are just censorship systems, the game was branded “adults only” and thus banned by major retailers. But the sex capability was just one of many bits of disabled outtakes lurking in the code. Software isn’t like movies, or books, or any other artform that leaves its detritus on some cutting-room floor. All the huffy outrage totally misunderstands the unique nature of the medium and that demanding “clean” code is not only undesirable but impossible. (Not to mention that America has a pathological problem with sex.)

But is code really the ultimate reality of video games? Run through processors and brought to life on a screen, a game is clearly more than the sum of its code (sometimes literally, in terms of elements that behave randomly and/or with user direction.) In a way, a video game adventure is always an indirect exploration of the underlying code, a non-hack way of testing its limits.

But there are always certain areas in a game where the superficial reality of the adventure and the deeper reality of the code meet in odd, ambiguous ways that merge the two types of paranoia and suggest a very strange state of being. All video games take place in a “flat Earth” realm with a defined edge, and those edges are the most obvious mystery spots in games. There, where possibility ends and the finite code takes over, the laws of physics change, mistakes are revealed and mysteries are born or die.

For example, the video game “Gothic II” (2002) allows players to explore a large world of forested, mountainous terrain much like that of central Europe. In many places, it is possible with a bit of effort to climb onto a high cliff or ridge that was intended to be inaccessible. There, the player may be confronted with a sudden endless plunge into purple haze—the edge of the world—or discover that boulders that looked solid from far below are actually flimsy, curtain-like facades. All the world really is a stage in video games, and it’s possible to fall off it. The emotional effect is surreal and paranoid, yet endlessly entertaining. Questing for the edge of the world is, I think, a very common practice among video game players, yet frequently unacknowledged by dry criticism.

This is separate from, but related to, the search for deliberately included hidden areas or easter eggs, a very common feature of video games. Sometimes game programmers reward such boundary-testing players by putting a message of some sort in remote reaches of the world—for example, developer names that you can find in “Grand Theft Auto III.”

It was during one such run to the world’s edge, again in “Gothic II,” that I made a shockingly paranoid discovery—and one so strange that even game developers, those experts in ultimate reality, have struggled to explain it.

The plot of “Gothic II” involves an invasion by orcs, those “Lord of the Rings” bogeymen borrowed by Dungeons & Dragons and every fantasy genre since. In the game, the orcs are invading from the sea and massing behind a gigantic wooden stockade or wall. The story never involves a direct assault on that army, so the wall remains impassable, serving merely as a narrative device—an edge of the world.

Naturally, I was determined to find a way over the wall.

One end of the wall abuts a very high cliff connected to a ridge. There is no obvious way to get atop the ridge, but from one part of it, far from the wall, I noticed promising finishing-touch features—a tree and a bit of fence—that suggested the developers thought somebody might make it up there to appreciate them. After about two dozen attempts, I was able to run-jump up a nearly vertical ridge face and arrive on the top. Walking along and checking my virtual map, I saw that I must have passed the wall, shrouded in mist far below at the bottom of a sheer cliff.

Using a “god mode” cheat code to render myself invulnerable (another reality-altering aspect of video games worthy of attention on its own²), I leaped off the cliff, bounced a few times, and found myself behind the orc wall.

The immediately obvious thing was that there were no orcs. Not surprising, of course, since they would serve no narrative purpose. There was also only barely a wall; from the inside, the wall was mostly transparent, visible only as a framework. (I later discovered that the PC can walk right through the invisible wall from that side, but of course cannot go back through.)

The terrain was rendered as an interesting, convoluted rocky slope, but virtually featureless. It looked half-developed, as though the programmers had considered staging some action there. The semi-finished quality was evident at the seashore that marked the area’s limit: in certain spots, instead of swimming, the PC would simply plunge through the beach or water, reappearing in the sky and dropping again in an endless fall. It was a true world’s end, where only crude and unpredictable physics applied.

Walking along this rugged landscape, I came to a narrow chasm. As it was impassable, I jumped into it, and found that it actually formed the mouth of a cave leading underground.

Down I went, and at the end of the cave I found—a pile of human corpses.

Eight bodies lying in a stack makes for a hair-raising find on its own. But truly disturbing was that they were all identified as minor characters, at least some of whom I knew were still “alive” elsewhere in the game.³ Imagine finding a graveyard of clones of people you know. That’s what I experienced.

When I recently loaded up an old game and double-checked the cave, I noticed something even stranger: there are two corpses of the same NPC, just dressed in different costumes.

This discovery, in a remote, inaccessible part of the world, was like Plato’s cave in reverse: it seemed there was some astonishing truth revealed in the puppet show there, while all outside was shadow. What exactly it signified was unclear, but I was suddenly in a world of secret clone corpse-pits, wondering if the landscape was dotted with them.

After leaving the cave, I found one other surprise with a much clearer intent. In a large field behind the wall is posted a sign reading, in the German development company’s odd English:

“Ok man, you made it behind the great orc wall

…

as you see, the story of the orcish hordes

behind this wall, is a complete fake

there is nothing more to find here..

this place is abandoned

it’s the end of the world

But me (a mighty alien dwarf, which not

depends to this game story, and which name

is not of public interest here!) wanted to

warn you. You’ve been tricked to believe a

story, which is not true. (they want to get you!)

Do not believe anything they say.

Keep your eyes open !

….

The mighty alien dwarf [accompanied by crude face sketch]”

Paranoid in its own amusing fashion, this “1984”-ish joke is a classic easter egg with no mystery involved. Since my own explorations, I have learned in online forums that it actually is possible to scale the wall directly in one spot using a complicated series of moves; this sign appears close to where you’d cross over by that method.

What stood out to me is that the sign also tells a total lie: there certainly is more to find there—a cave full of weird replicant corpses. If anything, it seems to want to dissuade you from finding them.

When I started to research this bizarre phenomenon, the first thing I learned is that my most paranoid fantasy was true: the “Gothic II” gameworld is riddled with corpse caves.

According to other players, there are at least two others, one a cave near a Stonehenge-like structure called the Circle of the Sun, and another in the city of Jarkendar in the game’s “Night of the Raven” expansion pack.⁴

The Circle of the Sun cave is especially odd. It is a fully accessible cave where the PC can acquire a fancy sword at one point. But, players report, occasionally the corpses of still-living NPCs will appear in the cave. The NPC represented reportedly varies. Sometimes there are multiple corpses of the same NPC, just dressed differently.

One fan claimed, presumably based on some sort of hack, that there is actually a hidden, inaccessible cave adjacent to the normal one, and that it always contains these NPC corpses, just as my orc-wall cave does. Some bug accidentally draws the corpses in the normal cave by accident from time to time. Of course, I have no idea if that’s valid.

Piranha Bytes, the German company that developed the game, no longer exists independently; the company that now owns the name and the game, Pluto 13, did not respond to my questions about the corpse cave. (And yes, I asked in German.)

So we’re left to speculate. As in real reality, virtual reality phenomena presumably come down to the operations of some natural law. In reality, I’d ask a bunch of scientists. In video game reality, I discovered, academics are still pretty virtual themselves.

Serious video game studies are still in their cradle. Game design courses are dominated by non-traditional schools that, while valuable and accredited, run more towards professional development than abstract academics. The teachers are still largely coders active in the industry and more focused on moonlighting than on theorizing. And of those academics who do study video games, the vast majority are interested in the social and/or business end-user aspects, have zero knowledge of actual coding, and even lack familiarity with the full range of games. I did find some helpful experts, but none of them had ever played the popular, mainstream “Gothic II.” Imagine film studies courses that never mentioned editing or lighting, and had nothing to say about movies that weren’t in the top 10.

In the end, I found independent developers to be the most insightful sources of hands-on information and speculation.

What everyone made clear to me quickly—and to my surprise—is that these corpse caches are not a common feature of video games. That, at least, reduced my anxiety that every game I play is filled with “Coma”-style clone stashes.

David Rosen, founder of Wolfire Software and creator of the martial-arts rabbit game “Lugaru,” laid out the basic possible explanations for me: the cave was intended as an easter egg; it is used as a cutscene, or cinematic, illustration image at some point in the game; the area was meant to be used, but left unfinished (a rendered version of junk DNA in the code); the bodies need to be there “due to some idiosyncracy of the game engine (e.g., maybe the models were meant to be loaded at that point in time to decrease load times later)”; it’s an inside joke; it has some narrative function that I missed due to player error.

The cave could also be an area where developers play-tested various characters, an idea suggested by Prof. Tim Langdell, a video game expert at National University, and Sherman Chin, co-founder of the Malaysian game company Sherman3D and creator of the upcoming “Alpha Kimori” anime game. Langdell also suggested sheer software error, though he acknowledged it would be a strange coincidence for all the characters to be ported into the same cave.

Before I start stripping away some of these possibilities, note that these guys all offered explanations before I could more fully describe my discovery, and in some cases before I even knew significant information such as the existence of other corpse caves. They also tended to presume that “Gothic II” is an online game, when it’s actually single-player-only.

In a way, this investigation of paranoid reality comes down to etiology: is the corpse cave an evolutionary accident, or is it Intelligent Design?

The multiplicity of corpse caves (including one appearing in a separate expansion pack) and their location in inaccessible areas suggest intent and utility. I’m comfortable discounting bugs and inside jokes. I’m also certain, from having played the game through twice, that the piles of corpses have nothing to do with cutscenes or other narrative elements. They are also unlikely easter eggs, particularly if the report about the totally inaccessible Circle of the Sun cave is correct, and in light of the overt (and apparently deliberately misleading) easter egg “mighty alien dwarf” sign behind the orc wall.

But what could be the utility of having dead clones of living minor characters?

An unfinished or play-testing area is certainly possible. There’s something interestingly similar to the orc wall in the game “Jurassic Park: Trespasser” (1998): an impassable wall the PC can climb atop, but not drop over for some distance, until they eventually fall over into a new, secret level that contains a kind of demonstration of all the game’s features, weapons, etc.⁵ It’s something between a play-test and an easter egg.

Chin’s helpfulness went so far as giving me a detailed, hands-on tutorial in NPC scripting for “Alpha Kimori” (whose animations are quite charming and fun, I might add). The basic demo I worked on was a play-testing battle among the heroes and various monsters—all conducted within a doorless fight pit that would be inaccessible to anyone outside.

But why only play-test some minor NPCs and not all? Most of the corpses in my cave were people who are never supposed to engage in combat or, in some cases, even interact. The cave was also quite small for eight characters—not a convenient test area (nor was the area immediately outside the cave).

So I’m inclined to go with the remaining possibility: that the game for some reason needs those clones to exist in hidden caches.

Langdell, I think appropriately, was dead against this, viewing it as a kind of naïve realism, something like a viewer believing that a character in a movie exists all the time even in scenes they aren’t in. (I should note he was also working under the misunderstanding that “Gothic II” is an online game, though his argument would appear to be the same for single-player-only.)

“Sorry to play with the existential side of this, but there is no such thing within a 3-D online world as an NPC with a specific, unique identity,” Langdell told me. “What I mean is, it is mere data sets that determine if an NPC is unique or repeated tens, hundreds or even thousands of times around the world, with each version of itself being either utterly independent or fully synchronized or somewhere in between. What I don’t think you saw was any kind of ‘cache’—not in any usual sense of that term, at least. And there is no programming reason I can think of for why they would have deliberately placed NPC bodies in that cave—a cave which you say no one was supposed to be able to get to.”

I was very happy that Langdell got existential, because that’s exactly what this experience was—a virtual paranoia freak-out. And what he said made a lot of sense: NPCs aren’t real people, they’re lines of code triggered to manifest at certain times and in certain circumstances.

Here’s the problem: Chin said he has seen exactly this sort of NPC cache in the old 2-D game “Ultima VI” (1990): “There was a secret room where all the characters were loaded and ready to go.”

“It was my first time encountering such a place, and your experience brings back memories for me, as I had just started programming then and I was also wondering about the purpose of such an area,” said Chin, no stranger to ultimate (not to mention “Ultima”) reality weirdness.

Chin said such caches aren’t standard, but could be useful under the demands of a particular game engine.

“The main reason would be for game performance,” Chin said. “Technically, it would take some time to load a character definition file with all the attributes of the NPC. It will then take even more time to load the character and its associated animation. By loading the NPCs before you actually see them in the game and placing them in a hidden area, it is just a matter of moving them to their actual in-game position when you see them. As the name you gave implies, the hidden area serves as a ‘cache’ so that there will be no delay in loading an NPC, as it can be deployed when it is needed.”

(Also operating under the misconception that “Gothic II” is an online game, Chin also suggested that such a cache would be a good place to check and edit NPCs without disrupting ongoing play.)

Fan guesses have also involved NPC caching.⁶ The basic idea is that there are independent models for all NPCs, and if an NPC changes—moves elsewhere in the world, changes costume, etc.—the outdated model can’t be destroyed, but rather must be hidden away somewhere while its new doppelganger inhabits the gameworld. Call it the law of conservation of NPCs.

I find it hard to believe just because it sounds so inefficient. But the appearance of multiple clones wearing different costumes argues in its favor. So does another aspect reported by one fan regarding the Circle of the Sun cave corpses: they carried letters that, when opened, were unreadable and disappeared. That suggests they are cicada shells of the original NPCs, with such belongings as letters no longer linked to the appropriate code.

Whatever the specific reason, deliberate NPC caching is also strongly suggested by the behavior of at least some of the NPCs involved, and by “Gothic II’s” curious treatment of traveling NPCs.

The main landmass in “Gothic II” is broken up into two or three basic sections that load separately when the PC enters them. The Circle of the Sun is in one section; the orc wall is in another. (The third section is fairly small and contains no non-enemy NPCs.)

In the orc wall section, most of the NPCs appear inside a besieged castle. At least two or three of the NPCs whose clones are in the cave appear in the castle only briefly, “passing through” on their way somewhere else and pausing to speak to the PC. I recognized some of the clones as NPCs who had already briefly passed through at that point in the game. For example, one was a monk who stopped in only very briefly to return to a post outside a monastery in another section of the game.

Likewise, one of the characters reportedly found in the Circle of the Sun cave is a wizard who travels to the circle for a brief time from elsewhere (though within the same game section).

Perhaps when an NPC “travels” in the game, he or she indeed can’t be deleted for some reason of need or convenience and instead must be stowed in a secret cave in a form of suspended animation. And perhaps it is also convenient to pre-generate them there and then port them into the castle or wherever.

In general, NPC travel in “Gothic II” is unusually detailed—uniquely so, in my experience.

In most games, if an NPC “leaves” with a plan to meet up with you somewhere else, they just disappear quickly, sometimes during a cutscene during which the PC can’t even move.

“Gothic II” is different. The NPC will walk away at a deliberate pace, remaining fully rendered until they reach the draw distance and disappear. Then, like NPCs in other games, they will reappear wherever it is you’re supposed to meet them. But if you choose to follow the walking NPC, they will actually remain fully rendered and walk the entire journey, which can be quite far.

So “Gothic II” appears to give NPCs an unusually high degree of independent existence, even when it’s not really necessary. That might affect the need, or at least the decision, to create corpse caches.⁷

These are pretty logical speculations, and video games are fundamentally logical things; and yet there’s still no clear answer to be had. That’s only partly because so few people—including experts—deeply understand this incredibly important medium. It has a lot to do with the medium itself.

When the movies were about as old as video games are now, Paramount Pictures put out a self-congratulatory promo reel called “The House That Shadows Built.” It’s a lovely title that applies even better to video games, that mysterious dream form that can’t be broken down into something as simple as a string of little photographs.

Video games were compared to Plato’s cave as early as 1988.⁸ But I (or my avatar) may have been the first person to stand inside an actual Platonic cave and recognize it as such. It’s a whole new kind of Plato’s cave, one where you can find a copy of Plato that gives it all away (the code) and some occasional cracks in the wall (the world’s edge and similar peeks behind the curtain). (The Sith Lord Restoration Project truly is working on “Knights of the Old ‘Republic.’”)

Plato’s cave is no longer an allegory. It’s the space of every video game, where we can live in it, move freely in and out of it, pass from lucid dream to surprising surreality and back, and remain unable to ever really see it all clearly because even the Sun is code, an amazing achievement in lighting effects. Every gamer has had some weird exploratory moment like mine; every gamer at some point adopts the same ever-undescribed mindset I had, that my little cheat-code-enabled exploration behind the wall was somehow non-canonical, that I would later return to the “real game,” an attitude that made the bizarre cave even harder to reconcile with a gameworld gestalt I was already violating.

Plato believed that education wasn’t enough; for true enlightenment, we must totally reorient ourselves toward the Sun of pure knowledge. Video games bid us to orient ourselves to another sort of truth—an ambiguity of knowledge and experience that prevails no matter (and often directly because of) how thoroughly we explore a virtual world.

In the end, what difference does it make exactly why there was a cave full of corpses? The truly significant thing is simply that it did exist, that I felt the experience of following the bend of the narrow passage and coming upon that unsettling sight. There is a pure thrill to discovering something whose very secretiveness is itself cryptic. It was emblematic of all of those dangerous virtual worlds we plunge into because everything matters but all is mysterious, because they push the frontiers of our own paranoia.

That cave is why we play.

¹ F.M. Cornford translation in “Greek Philosophy: Thales to Aristotle” (second edition), Reginald E. Allen, ed.

² Some time ago it occurred to me that it might be fruitful to create a “god mode” superhero—one who can’t use his/her invulnerability all of the time, but only by employing a “cheat code” or undergoing some type of penalty. Perhaps “god mode” would literally change the way physics work, as such cheats often do in video games. At the very least, it would be the only hope of making Superman at all interesting.

³ For those familiar with the game, the bodies were those of: Milten, Angar, Kervo, Geppert, Gorn, Dobar, Parlaf and Diego. (I actually didn’t notice Parlaf during my original discovery, but only on my double-check, which had better lighting conditions; he may have always been there, or may have been rendered there for some reason only in my second loading of that area.)

⁴ At: http://forum.worldofplayers.de/forum/showthread.php?t=112382; http://forum.jowood.com/archive/index.php/t-117693.html; http://forum.jowood.de/showthread.php?t=113757&highlight=cave+death and http://www.neoseeker.com/forums/index.php?fn=view_thread&t=426990.

⁵ See description at: http://trescom.3dactionplanet.gamespy.com/index.php?page=trespasser/secrets.htm

⁶ See forum citations above. Who these fans are, and what their expertise level is, cannot be determined.

⁷ It is perhaps worth noting that there is also an unusual persistence of NPC corpses in the game, particularly if the NPCs were not intended to die in a given part of the narrative. For example, in the mercenary camp area of the game, I inadvertently got into a fight with a very minor NPC who acted as a guard at one fringe of the camp. He was minor, but not generic, possessing a name. I tried running away—particularly because I was attempting to join the mercenaries, and didn’t wish to anger them—but he chased me, so I killed him in a wooded area a fair distance away. When I left that section of the game and then returned, the guard’s corpse persisted—but transposed back to where he was originally standing. The corpse then remained there throughout the game, with no one else noticing. A similar oddity occurred in the same area during a fight in the camp’s tavern. This fight was part of the narrative, but I handled it perhaps atypically, by running away and fighting from a more strategically advantageous spot. I then returned to the tavern and killed one remaining foe, whose corpse persisted on the floor there throughout the game. I did not investigate the issue of corpse persistence at all, but it may be relevant to the issue of independently existing NPCs.

⁸ In “Looking at Philosophy: The Unbearable Heaviness of Philosophy Made Lighter” by Donald Palmer.

Many thanks to Mr. Chin for extraordinary assistance. Posted April 29, 2007. Updated May 22 and June 29, 2007.

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