We're Watching YOU...

In Michel Foucault's piece "Panopticism" he describes a method of control in which a group of society (i.e. prison, schools, hospitals) are placed into an environment in which the thought of being under constant observation determines how they respond and act to any given situation. Foucault describes panopticism best when describing how the plague was controlled during it's outbreak centuries ago - it is a system of keeping people isolated but under constant observation from an unseen/seen entity of power. It is this observation that alters how people react to their isolation as one would be less likely to do anything adverse when in the back of their brain they know someone is always watching them. The game "The Stanley Parable" is a good example of this concept of panopticism. The game is centered around one character called Stanley who has for years has been blinding doing his "boring" job without questioning his purpose or his importance within his own company. Stanley does his job as told simply because he is following orders and never questions anything, so when one day no one in the office is there and no orders are given to him to complete Stanley actually has to think for himself and this leads to the breakdown of the wall between Stanley and the powers that be. As Stanley breaks away from the order that has been laid out for him he finds out that everything in his life has been controlled by an outside force that watches him constantly and as the game progresses the game player has a choice of six different endings to the game. However, it is soon revealed that no matter what choice the player makes, the narrator has absolute control and if one does not follow his orders to a "T" the ultimate punishment is death. This is in direct correlation to Foucault's example of how the plague was handled through the use of an overseeing entity that watched every move made by the quarantined made and if they did not follow protocol they were subjected to the punishment of death.

There are many ways in which games (besides "The Stanley Parable") use this ideology of panopticism because games are created and designed with every possible outcome already mapped out and predetermined. Even though a player may feel they are making independent choices they are in essence making a predefined choice that will lead to another predefined choice or disposition. A player of a game literally has no real control within the game as all game play, no matter the choices made, have been laid out and conceptualized, creating a barrier that a player can never escape. Even in games like Skyrim, a game known for it's open format and story-line progression, the player is not free to make his or her own choices. Every choice of dialogue, location, quest, etc has been predetermined by the game creator and there is no way to circumvent this absolute control of the creator. Another example of panopticism I looked into was Italo Calvino's novel called, If on a winter's night a traveler, which is constructed in such a way that the reader has no ability to resolve the conflicts laid out by the text. Each chapter alternates between being a numbered chapter or a named chapter, and in each of these chapters a different story is being told with different characters, conflicts, and setting then the chapter that preceded it. Calvino, as the author, can be an example of "the overseer" archetype in Foucault's piece on panopticism because he is the creator of the construct of the novel and has complete (but invisible) control over the reader. As the reader, one can attempt to take control by just reading the numbered chapters or the named chapters in order to find a resolution to any of the conflicts in the text but ultimately finds out that Calvino created a novel that has no resolution to any of the conflicts that he flushes out within each chapter. By doing this Calvino created an open text that the reader can explore but gives the reader no real freedom to go outsides the boundaries he has set before them.