- [Michael] This video is brought to you
by Full Sale University.
(mellow music)
- What's up, everybody.
Helen here to tell you how to survive
the end of the world as an adorable kitten.
That's right.
We're talking about the video game "Stray",
which introduces us to a post-apocalyptic world
where robots have attempted to rebuild human society
after mankind went extinct.
But we think there's something deeper at this game's core
that's as satisfying as finally getting to scratch a rug,
because what if a game in which you pretend to be a cat
while hanging out with robots pretending to be people
could actually teach us a whole lot about humanity?
Let's explore in this Wisecrack Edition on "Stray".
"Do Robots Make the Best Humans?"
- But before we get into it,
I wanna shout out this video's sponsor,
Full Sail University.
Full Sail offers associate's, bachelor's,
and master's degrees in the fields of technology,
arts, media, and entertainment.
And they just launched a new bachelor's degree
in Game Business and E-sports,
which can help students
enter the industry from different perspectives,
from game development, to communications and marketing,
to competitive gaming itself.
And this new major
joins a roster of other cool fields of study,
like film production, computer animation,
sports casting, and web development.
With Full Sail University's accelerated coursework,
you can finish your degree in about half the time required
at other colleges and universities.
Plus, you can complete your classes and coursework online
or in person at Full Sail's campus in Orlando,
depending on what's right for you.
Whatever model you choose,
you'll get hands-on, real world experience
in the career path of your choice.
Plus, Full Sail accepts new enrollments monthly,
so you don't have to build your schedule
around traditional semesters.
To learn more about
Full Sail University's new Game Business and E-sports majors
or any of their other degree programs,
visit FullSail.edu/wisecrack.
That's Full Sail.edu/wisecrack.
And now, back to the show.
- [Helen] Upon entering the world of Stray,
we watch our darling, lonesome kitten avatar
enter a post-apocalyptic city.
Humanity, we learn, has been killed off by a brutal pandemic
that only their robot companion survived.
Too soon, too soon.
The gameplay obviously stands out from the get-go.
You're constricted by the ways an actual cat would move,
which obviously involves plenty of jumping
and knocking down boxes.
The game's been lauded for its realistic depiction of a cat,
a feat corroborated by real life cat fandom.
So by mimicking the abilities
and constraints of inhabiting a cat's body,
are we actually learning what it's like to be a cat?
According to philosopher Thomas Nagel
and his paper, "What is it Like to be a Bat?", nah.
Nagel argues that most living things
have a sense of consciousness.
A "Subjective character of experience."
That means that there is "Something that it is like
to be that organism, something it is like for the organism."
But we can never really
know what that consciousness feels like.
That's partially due to our limited imaginations,
as we inevitably map our sense of human consciousness
onto other animals.
But even if we animorphed into a bat for a day,
our brains have been hardwired since birth
for human consciousness.
Thus, we would still not be experiencing things
as a bat, Nagel explained, but as a person in a bat's body.
Sure, we can simulate cathood through adorable video games.
But because we haven't lived it from birth,
we can't fully understand it.
But these limitations actually open up interesting questions
about the robots we meet.
Because the game positions us from the cat's perspective,
it arguably seems to agree with Nagel,
that there is a consciousness to be had in cathood,
even if we can't quite comprehend it.
Thus, we can also presuppose the same thing
about the robots.
They're not human as much as they try to be,
but they have their own kind of consciousness
and frame of reference, their own robothood, if you will.
But what if anything, do robots share with humans?
Well, just as you can't truly experience
a cat's night vision, these robots probably can't understand
the nuances of the human experience.
Although they have, apparently, taught themselves
to get crunk.
But they're essentially living
in a Nagel thought experiment.
As our robot pal explains,
the companion started out personality-free,
existing solely to perform tasks.
But over time, they began mimicking humans
and forming societies.
First, we encounter a village called The Slums,
full of companions who are portrayed as working class
or lower class folks,
and there's a sense of melancholy, but not despair.
It's an actual community,
one where they look out for each other.
We learned that the robots
posthumously discovered humanity's art, music, and society,
and this inspired them to try to recreate the human world.
Fittingly, then, The Slums despite the grunginess,
are chock full of artistic vibes.
(eclectic music)
(robot chittering)
The robots seem to appreciate all things aesthetic.
(robot chittering)
They keep a beautiful tree alive, just for fun,
and use neon lights, just for the pretty colors.
Musicians play music for free,
as long as you deliver new song pages.
Most of the interactions you have here are bartering
or favor-based.
If you collect someone's notebooks,
they'll do you a solid, and so on.
This creates a sense of a pre-industrial society,
one where capitalism and commerce
haven't quite established a foothold.
What we are seeing are genuine signs of community,
encapsulated in the way the elders sit
in silent, collective meditation.
We learned that Momo, otherwise considered an outsider,
is desperate to recover his missing friends,
which demonstrates how important companionship is for him.
(robot chittering)
When you rescue a long lost scientist robot,
he's greeted with love by his son and former friends.
Everyone is basically kind to you.
And even the grouchy Seamus, we learn, is only rude
because he so missed his father.
(robot chittering)
What we see is robots interacting authentically
with one another,
and it gives them a convincing semblance of humanity.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
famously talks about this concept
in the context of recognition, which we've discussed before.
Essentially, in order to understand ourselves
as distinct individuals,
we need to be recognized as such by others.
Our personhood is thus established
through affirming interactions with others
who recognize us as human beings,
or as the Hegel-inspired Jean-Paul Sartre put it,
"The road of interiority passes through the other."
Philosopher Charles Taylor
thinks recognition is a "Vital human need."
And that "We need relationships to fulfill,
but not define ourselves."
In this way, the robots through recognizing one another
and affirming interactions are providing one another
an essential aspect of humanness.
Philosopher Axel Honneth contends
that recognition is essential to self-actualization
and living freely.
This is only possible
if you are "An active member of a social community,
the cohesion of which has emerged
from a mutually shared value orientation toward freedom."
Basically, you need community to be a fully formed person.
Now, a more advanced version of robot society
exists in Midtown,
which has a New York or Hong Kong feel to it.
But we aren't in The Slums anymore.
Here, arts and crafts are replaced by commerce,
and just about every interaction
takes place in that context.
And a sense of alienation permeates this level.
In contrast to The Slums,
people in public places mostly tend to keep to themselves.
When you do try to engage,
many of the robots are downright rude to you.
(pensive music)
Public culture seems somewhat superficial.
The closest thing to community is the barbershop,
which is still, after all, a commercial space.
For the most part, these robots seem defined by their labor,
rather than by any semblance of community
or by extension, humanity.
What we see here is what philosophers call "misrecognition"
or as Honneth explains,
"The withdrawal of social recognition,
in the phenomena of humiliation and disrespect."
Robots are reduced to their commercial value
and their ability to perform labor,
rather than their unique identities
or attempts at humanness.
Taylor argues that when others misrecognize you,
it can make you misrecognize yourself.
In the lonely nightclub, your companion,
who used to be a human, points out what's missing.
He used to drink with his friends during the bad times,
and the joy of these interactions gave their lives purpose.
(robot chittering)
He sees the lack of recognition
as essential to the apparent unhappiness we witness
in Midtown.
Indeed, commercial relations here
make for a cutthroat world.
We explore an ugly factory where workers are surveilled
by sentinel robots who also act as police officers.
One guy heartlessly gets you arrested, saying-
(robot chittering)
What we see here is that society has progressed
from a pre-industrial system of favors, bartering,
and small businesses, to a cutthroat corporatized world.
That shift is essential to the alienation
that permeates Midtown,
where everyone seems worried
that you're gonna steal from them.
The transformation recalls Rousseau's theory
about the dangers of private property.
He wrote, "The first man who,
having enclosed a piece of ground,
bethought himself of saying 'this is mine,'
and found people simple enough to believe him,
was the real founder of civil society."
Rousseau believed that much human suffering
could have been avoided
if everybody had told the loser claiming the land
to (beep) off, because according to him,
civil society was a misguided step away
from the state of nature, which is a morally neutral place
where people generally act towards self-preservation
and with compassion, much like what we saw in The Slums.
It's fitting that in this capitalist landscape,
a police state proliferates via the sentinel robots.
This mirrors the real world.
As historian Gary Potter explains,
"The police are primarily there
to protect business property first, not human interactions.
If that were the case, they would fail miserably."
This suggests that a system of capitalism
would appear simultaneously with a system of policing
to enforce that system of private ownership.
And when we make it to the final level, the Control Room,
we find an even more alienating environment.
Everything is antiseptic, like a boring office building.
The only nature
comes in the form of carefully manicured centerpiece,
and the only art is a banal postcard-like image of a beach.
The robots are also completely different
from their downstairs counterparts.
None of them have names
and they don't do anything except work silently.
When you try to ask them for help,
they won't even look at you
and just offer vaguely polite corporate speak.
Whereas other robots personally engaged with you,
these robots arguably are participating
in what Taylor would call "nonrecognition."
He writes that, "Nonrecognition or misrecognition
can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression,
imprisoning someone
in a false, distorted and reduced mode of being."
We see that by living in a world
where they're not recognized
for anything other than the work they perform,
the robots have been reduced to the role of, well, robots.
And that's in stark contrast
to their more human-like counterparts on the lower levels.
Interestingly enough, many folks in The Slums
dream of making it to the top,
where they assume life is better.
However, your travels
from the peaceful community of The Slums
to the antiseptic depersonalization of the Control Room
suggests they might be wrong.
The game seems to argue that progress isn't always good,
and the gameplay slowly reinforces this idea.
You're able to converse with just about any robot
in The Slums, but as you move up,
you have fewer options to engage.
In other words, you are recognized more in The Slums,
just like the robots themselves.
The importance of art to the human experience
is also emphasized by the game's focus on aesthetics
over expediency.
It's not about a race to finish the game.
It's about enjoying the artistic experience along the way.
That's something the robots in The Slums would know,
while the robots in the Control Room
seem incapable of thinking beyond capitalist efficiency.
So what can we learn about our own world from this?
Well, the game seems to be saying
that a big part of what makes the robots and us more human
is our ability to connect with one another
on an emotional and communal level.
And as Ephemera Journal recalls,
in the early 20th century,
German philosopher Walter Benjamin lamented
that long-term, meaningful and deep human connections
have been supplanted by short-term, isolated moments
that began to constitute human existence.
So what was the culprit?
You guessed it, capitalism.
As the OG Karl Marx explained,
"Alienation is the objective structure of experience
and activity in capitalist society.
Capitalist society cannot exist without it.
Capitalist society in its very essence
requires that people be placed into such a structure
and, even better, that they come to believe and accept
that it is natural and just."
And that's exactly what we see in "Stray".
As the world becomes more capitalistic,
the robots become more alienated from one another
and from you, which is wild because you are so cute.
Their total absorption into consumption and status
in Midtown goes hand in hand with their lack of socializing.
We're socializing only in the context of commerce,
theft, and policing.
This alienation only escalates
as you make it to the top floor, where you see robots
who have been completely reduced to laborers,
clearly believing that their tasks are natural and just.
What all this suggests
is that progress under capitalism has a major downside,
the breakdown of community.
We see this even in Midtown,
where entry into practically every community space
has a price, in contrast to The Slums
where you can roam freely.
What it seems to suggest is that we become more robotic,
more alienated, and more detached from one another
when we define ourselves
solely by our ability to perform labor and pay for things.
When we fail to foster communities
around mutual recognition,
we rob ourselves of something fundamentally human.
Still, this is a largely optimistic game.
Yes, it seems to say
that the efficient world of the Control Room,
where robots indeed act like robots, is bad.
And yes, the Control Room seems to mimic
aspects of our world where we are, in fact,
reduced to our ability to perform labor.
But what if there's a way out?
What if we can still recognize
the aspects of our fundamental humanity?
Your robot companion does as much
when he essentially destroys himself to override the system
and save all the robots.
This suggests that even as our own world
starts to feel like the Control Room,
that there's still hope for us.
Our basic humanity and need for mutual recognition
can be our saving grace and foster connection,
even in the worst of circumstances.
And if all else fails, you can go adopt a cat.
But what do you think?
Is "Stray" a warning about the perils of late capitalism?
Or are we reading way too much into a game
that your cat can probably beat you at?
Let us know in the comments.
Thanks to our patrons for all your support,
and don't miss our new Patreon perks.
And remember, you can join us every Thursday
for our weekly live stream.
Hit that subscribe button
like you're pouncing on the laser pointer,
and don't forget to ring that bell.
And as always, thanks for watching.
Later.
(energetic hip hop music)