Concept Is Real? -- Baba Is You

 (This article contains mild puzzle spoilers for Baba Is You. If you have not yet played the game, I encourage you in the strongest possible terms to do so.)

Baba Is You is a critically acclaimed and award-winning puzzle game with a very simple but revolutionary premise. I was introduced to it by a video by Game Maker's Toolkit which goes into a lot more depth, but here's the short version. It belongs to the genre of block-pushing puzzles; a cute pig-like creature, apparently named Baba, must push blocks around to reconfigure their environment until it is possible to make their way to an end-of-level goal. The masterful innovation in this formula is that the properties and relationships of the game-world objects are encoded in word blocks which can themselves be pushed and reconfigured. For instance, there are graphical objects recognizable as walls, a commonplace in such games, and then there are the words "WALL IS STOP", each word its own block, arranged as a sequence which forms a simple sentence. The walls, as the sentence implies, stop the player from moving. But if the word "STOP" is pushed aside, breaking the sentence apart, the walls can suddenly be moved through with ease. If another word, such as "WIN", is then made the object of the sentence, then the wall becomes the goal; touching a wall "wins" the level. And if you form the sentence "WALL IS YOU"... well, I'll leave you that to discover for yourself. Each puzzle in Baba Is You involves the manipulation of these sentences to give to or remove properties from objects in order to create a situation in which progress to the goal is possible. As the levels progress, the constituents of the sentences and their possible permutations become more complex and further-reaching, requiring you to more orthogonally bend your mind to deduce what manipulations of the game's reality are possible. The primary mechanic is literally to rewrite the game's mechanics, to break and reconfigure them to your own advantage.

Things are starting off simple enough as the game teaches us how things work around here.

As a puzzle game in which play with language is so fundamental an element, Baba Is You has some very interesting implications for the theory of language, and in particular for the way in which signifiers, the symbols combined and manipulated in linguistic acts, relate to the signified, or that which constitutes the meaning of the word. The obvious idea here is that the referent of the word is the object in the world that it describes. If I say the word "tree", I am referring to a physical tree that exists in reality. In Plato's famous phrase, language "carves nature at the joints". However, this view quickly becomes problematic. What if I am not referring to any particular, specific tree, but to trees in general? Is there some property in reality that gives a tree its tree-ness, that makes it a different kind of thing from, say, a shrub? Plato reserved this role for the "forms", actually-existing abstract non-physical objects whose properties in some way determine what things such as trees are like. But this view is not usually considered tenable for modern philosophers; it is typically asserted that the definition of a word is purely arbitrary, a human-created convention without a physical analogue. There is nothing that inherently makes one plant a tree and another a shrub other than humans deciding which is which. Further, what of words that refer to things that don't physically exist? What does the word "Superman" refer to? Is it just various portrayals of this character on the page and screen, or is there in some way a real Superman which one is describing when one uses the name? What about things like love, justice, or truth? If one does not subscribe to the doctrine of forms, it becomes very difficult to see what in the world these references can actually mean.

Something is missing here; we're going to have to get creative.

The theory of structuralism solves this problem by divorcing meaning from physical reality entirely. The signified of any given signifier is not an actually-exiting object, but rather a concept in the human mind. Communication is fundamentally a matter of allowing humans to solve problems, and the meaning of a sign is whatever it takes to get the job done. Further, structuralism posits that the concepts defined by words are not things in themselves at all, but exist purely as a negative, a differentiation from all of the other signs in the linguistic system. The purpose of a definition is not to include, but to exclude. A tree is a tree not by virtue of some essential tree-ness, but by virtue of not being a shrub, a herb, or a fungus. Some went even further; the formalists conceived language as a pure system such as mathematics or logic, a system which could theoretically be analyzed without reference to meaning at all. Fundamentally, this is a problem of intentionality -- the manner in which mental states "are about" things or properties of things. One might be an externalist, believing that mental states are about real things in the world, or an internalist, believing that mental states are only about that which is in the mind itself. This further has implications for ontology, the theory of what exists and how. Most people at least believe that physical reality actually exists, but if one is a structuralist or formalist and an internalist, it is not a difficult step to ontological idealism, the belief that the only things that really exist are mental states and ideas. And this is a step that few are willing to countenance.

A sudden, dizzying reimagining of what is possible; it won't be the last.

The world of Baba is You is fascinating in this sense because words are themselves physical objects which are physically manipulated. Each noun has a distinct game-object referent, and each verb has a distinct game-mechanical referent. This might lead us to think in an externalist, Platonist paradigm, but it must be noted that we know what these correspondences are only by reference to our out-of-game understanding of human language. We know what "WALL" refers to only because we know what walls look like, though it could be argued (absent genre conventions) that we know what "BABA" refers to only through the onscreen definitory phrase "BABA IS YOU". However, the ability to break up and re-form the sentences that define the relationships between these objects and properties means that in a sense, the definition of each word is arbitrary -- and even more than that, the definitions of words don't just represent reality, nor are they neutral with respect to reality, but in fact actually create that reality. Definition simply is reality, and vice versa. This is a delightful ambiguity between internalist and externalist, Platonist, structuralist, and formalist paradigms that calls every intuition and theory we have about language into question, and in so doing creates an expansive play space that questions the boundaries of what a game can be, and how the relationship between game, language, and reality should be bounded and defined. This is what makes Baba Is You one of the most philosophically interesting games I have ever played, and an absolute masterwork that radically expands the possibility space of its genre.