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The Lama and the Game Designer

All materials Charles Cameron 1995-2006 Charles Cameron 3059 East Ave R-4 Palmdale, CA 93550 Phone 661 575-9930 hipbone@earthlink.net

The Lama and the Game Designer

Tibetan Buddhism offers its advanced practitioners an extended training in visualization, comparable in intensity to a western PhD program. * In this article, I propose that a Tibetan Buddhist meditation is homologous with, and thus perhaps surprisingly close kin to, a first person shooter video game (FPS). Trivially, it follows that an FPS game / mod could be built incorporating Tibetan graphics (architecture, demons, weaponry). More interestingly, it suggests that such a game played in slomo, designed in cooperation with a team of lamas, including a mandalaform structure, embedded Tibetan ritual directions, a soundtrack of appropriate Tibetan chants etc., might serve as a Tibetan virtual training and ritual device, while the same game played fastforward might keep the kids happy for hours. And it makes a structural connection between warfare and meditation an anthropological linkage of considerable theoretical interest suggesting to us the concept of a weaponry of compassion, which stands in the same relation to the weaponry of war as blessings stand in relation to curses.

And more * Motto: Opposition is true friendship William Blake

The mindfield:
Many people are aware of Tibetan mandalas as designs for focused meditation, but not so many realize that these beautiful and highly symmetrical diagrams are in fact ground plans or blueprints for imaginary three-dimensional spaces.

The idea is that with meditative practice, you will eventually be able to hold in the mind's eye a complex three dimensional architectural structure --

This one based on the mandala shown above -- so that you can pass through the virtual space in imagination, visiting now this "room", now the next, encountering a preset variety of, well, "demons", "wrathful" and "peaceful deities".

Flowers and weaponry:

There are all sorts of objects decorating the rooms you visit: plates and goblets, food and drink, bells, flags, flowers, jewels, phurba daggers, damaru drums

Just take a look at that trumpet it was hollowed out of a human femur. That drum was made of a couple of human skulls joined back to back. Look again: the phurba with its three-angled blade -- that's a curious piece of weaponry. In all this, I'm describing advanced mandala-based meditation as practiced in Tibetan Buddhism here, but I could almost be describing a game design. Tibetan Buddhists are not exactly shy about the gruesome details of human life and death. One celebrated meditation sequence invites those who wish to transcend their normal human impulses in the interest of ascetic detachment to visualize the body of a loved one, first as wishful fantasy might present it, naked, then without skin, and so on inwards, stripping away layer upon layer until only the skeleton is left. Lamas wear saffron and burgundy robes rather than black trench coats, but their cultural sensibility surely has something of what we term the goth and the vampiric to it

The Demons
Tibetan graphics are stunningly designed, and the wrathful deities are not pretty. Here, for instance, is an important deity named Mahavajrabhairava.

This worthy, according to the scriptures which lay down the graphical canons observed by Tibetan thangka painters, must have a body of very deep blue colour, nine faces, thirty-four arms and sixteen feet. The legs on the left side are advanced and those on the right drawn back. He is able to swallow the three worlds. He sneers and roars. His tongue is arched. He gnashes his teeth and his eyebrows are wrinkled. His eyes and his eyebrows flame like the cosmic fire at the time of the destruction of the universe. His hair is yellow and stands on end. He menaces the Gods of the material and the non-material spheres. He frightens even the terrifying deities. He roars out the word p'ain with a voice like the rumble of thunder. He devours flesh, marrow and human fat and drinks blood. He is crowned with five awe-inspiring skulls and is adorned with a garland made of fifteen freshly severed heads. His sacrificial cord is a black serpent. The ornaments in his ears etc. are of human bones. His belly is huge, his body is naked and his penis erect. His eyebrows, eyelids, beard and body hair flame like the cosmic fire at the end of the ages. His middle face is that of a buffalo. It is horned and expresses violent anger. Above it, and between the horns, projects a yellow face. I'm inclined to think a Tibetan meditator accustomed to facing Mahavajrabhairava in all his full and terrible splendor might find some of our game demons a little tame...

Doom:
Lets bring the interior world of Tibetan Buddhist meditation and the virtual world of a first person shooter video game together, and then return to the issue of demons. The brilliant cyber-journalist Erik Davis once interviewed an eccentric Buddhist technophile, a fellow who was among other things translating a "Bonpo" text about the Chod rite, which happens to be another of my interests: it's a Tibetan shamanic ritual for compassionately feeding the demons called "hungry ghosts" one's own flesh -- to make them full, so they can go back to sleep... It turned out that the Buddhist technophile played computer games a lot, and Doom in particular.

When Erik asked him why, he said: Doom is a digital hell-realm, enlivened with violence and fear and excitement... You know, the Bon text I'm translating is all about Chod, a shamanic practice that was incorporated into the Kagyupa sect of Tibetan Buddhism. The aim of Chod is to cut away the ego by exposing yourself to demonic entities. Typically, a Chod practitioner goes to the charnel grounds at night. You invoke demons, offering up your body and mind as a tasty feast. But once you've generated these horrors, you are meant to perceive their ultimate emptiness, that the demons are without substance or self, that they are projections of your own unconscious processes. Okay, so this is what happens when a Tibetan Buddhist gets his hands on Doom... There's an instant recognition -- but also a deeper purpose at work or play.

The hungry ghosts

Then there are the hungry ghosts themselves -- the "pretas", to give them their official title. Fortunately, the Buddhist scholar William LaFleur has made a list of them for our convenience: ones with bodies like cauldrons, those with needle-thin throats, vomit-eaters, excrement-eaters, nothing-eaters, eaters of vapors in the air, eaters of the Buddhist dharma, water-drinkers, hopeful and ambitious ones, saliva-eaters, wig-eaters, blood-drinkers, meateaters, consumers of incense smoke, disease-dabblers, defecationwatchers, ones that live under the ground, possessors of miraculous powers, intensely burning ones, ones fascinated with colors, inhabitants of the beach, ones with walking-canes, infant-eaters, semen-eaters, demonic ones, fire-eaters, those on filthy streets, wind-eaters, burning coal consumers, poison-eaters, inhabitants of open fields, those living among tombs (and eating ashes), those that live in trees, ones that stay at crossroads, and those that kill themselves. These people have given a lot of thought to their demonology...

Or their western equivalents:

Not, mark you, that Im claiming a superiority for Buddhist tantric art over its Western equivalents we have the incomparable Hieronynmous Bosch to draw on for monsters and demons, for instance:

Okay, so where am I going with all this?

Integrating shadow energies

Among the most powerful transformations envisioned in the worlds religions is the power to transform negative into positive energy, and by extension, negative entities into positive ones, enemies into allies. The process by which compassion brings shadow forces into consciousness and thus liberates them, transforming them into their positive counterparts, is analogous to that process by which pagans are transformed into Christians when a Bible fired from a cannon hits them in the Simpsons mini-game, Billy Grahams Bible Blaster:

Theres really very little difference between this game, and one in which players use a cartoon image of Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden for target practice or for that matter Barney the purple dinosaur, the target in one popular internet game. And yet the munitions in Bible Blaster are positive in effect, dealing life (everlasting) rather than death, transforming sinner into saint and darkness into light

The breastplate of righteousness

Many religions and myths include metaphorical descriptions of what we might call positive weaponry from Cupids arrows in western myth and Kamas bow in Indian legend, to the armor of light (Romans 13), breastplate of righteousness, shield of faith, helmet of salvation, and sword of the Spirit which is the word of God (Ephesians 6) in Christianity.

Weapons manufacturers, on the other hand, are not in the business of selling nondestructive weaponry. * It is intriguing and a little disturbing to realize that in game design terms, magic is essentially the same as weaponry, that at the level of coding and damage, there is little difference between cursing ones adversaries and shooting them. But just as spells can be used to debilitate, so can they be used to heal which implies in turn that video games (and pen and paper role playing games before them) in which positive spells can be cast are games which effectively offer their players positive weapons. Or to put that another way, that in the game world, love and compassion can be as efficacious as hate and violence. And if that insight translates into real world terms, if love and compassion can be as efficacious in life as they are portrayed to be in games of this sort, it follows that idealism is no pipedream, -- and that generosity of spirit is the cure for what ails the world.

Love and compassion

Which may be why the great religions encourage and train us in compassion and love. * The Tibetan lamas who designed mandala-based meditations such as the Chod rite have motives beyond simply providing an engaging landscape through which their disciples can travel in the minds eye, compassionately blasting demons along the way and racking up Buddha points. For a start, they are interested in what we might call heaven realms as well as hell realms, and they lead the "player" ("meditator") in a very structured way into states of consciousness that most shrink-wrapped games don't attempt. What is significant here is that they achieve this by transforming negative into positive energies, and that making this transformation in the imaginative, virtual zone of meditation transforms both the meditator and his or her relationship with energies of the same type in real life. As Machik Labdron, the Tibetan yogini who created the Chod rite, tells us: With the hook of compassion I catch those evil spirits. Offering them my warm flesh and warm blood as food, through the kindness and compassion of bodhichitta, I transform the way they see everything, and make them my disciples Again, the imagery is deliriously goth, the objective unabashedly transcendent. I suspect thats an unbeatable combination. In line with such mythic examples as the Harrowing of Hell and Dantes Divine Comedy, and following shamanic tradition, I hold that a clear facing of the dark corners of human motivation is prerequisite for higher order quests (the grail, true artistry, the communion of saints, wisdom) in other words, that without facing ones own demons in some way, one is ill equipped to navigate celestial realms. Among which I would count the attainment of enlightenment, represented in the classic Tibetan iconography by the eight auspicious treasure-symbols:

the Umbrella, Fish, Vase, Lotus, Conch, Knot, Banner and Wheel.

Envoi: Life and Games

Think about it: a life is structured pretty much the same way a game is. By which I mean, life works like a game: it offers us a dazzling array of choices, which could in fact be represented by a logic tree -- but making those choices defines a singular path through life which thus becomes our story. So that in retrospect, "looking back from the high hill of my old age" as Black Elk says, narrative is what makes sense of the whole thing, while in prospect, looking forward from the almost infinite potentialities of youth, making choices is the thing to understand. Life is a matter of reconciling multiple choices with eventual plot. Shamans, visionaries, poets, and philosophers have thought about this issue a great deal, but not in these terms: their insights and proposals are worth looking at because they have dealt with, recorded or invented dozens of realms or kingdoms adjacent to our own "waking" reality, peopled with angels and demons and who knows what else -- and a whole slew of ways of getting "from here to there". They have been designing game-like models of reality since the dawn of time... Game designers have been thinking about these things, too -- in a technically appropriate language, with the appropriate concepts in place. Game designers insights and proposals are worth exploring as cosmological propositions, I'd suggest, because we have living experience of what makes for rich (fascinating, absorbing) game experiences -- in terms of both choice and story. We are the ones whose work demands that we think through this business of making good story out of a multiplicity of possible choices within a constrained system... Speaking as a game designer, then, I suspect the world's religions and visionaries from Buddhism to Blake -- have much to teach us about the "depth psychology" of games: the power of symbols and images to engage both the known and the suppressed energies of the psyche. And speaking as a theologian BA, Christ Church, Oxford -- I think those who are looking for a viable story of human existence should chat up some game designers: designers with a bent for seeing the bigger picture and spinning visionary games out of practical experience. Because game design is the only field I know where the contrasting emphases of choice and story mix and match. * Motto: To consider adversity as a friend is the instruction of Chod Tibetan yogini Machig Labdron, 11th-12th century

The Lama and the Game Designer is a repurposed, extensively rewritten and freshly illustrated version of a web-piece titled Games Lamas Play, which is itself the uncut version of an article I wrote for The Cursor: Game Developers Life, journal of the International Game Developers Network, of which I was Editor-at-Large, which appeared in our first issue, April 1997, under the title Doom Goes to Church. -- Charles Cameron