Saving the Digital World: Children, Digimon, and Baudrillard’s Hyperreality

Clip #1 – Rika “For the third season of Digimon, we’re going to have to redefine some terms. We’ll start with the word Real.”

The first question I have to ask is: how many people have heard of Digimon? Among grownups, probably the most familiar are parents of Digimon fans. Others of you may have a vague sense that it is a cartoon show, vaguely like Pokemon, but you don’t know much about either one, and you have no idea why anyone would consider it worthy of an academic paper, much less one referencing Baudrillard. I have a handout for you that I call A Grownup’s Guide to Digimon.

Digimon is a cartoon show for 9-11-year-olds, produced in Japan and airing in America on the Fox Network. What makes it interesting is the premise. During the first two seasons of the series, a group of children travels to the digital world where they meet creatures, monsters, which are composed of data. The children bond with some of these monsters, have adventures and fight evil in order to save both the digital world and the “real world.” In the third season of the series, also called Digimon Tamers, children who have been watching the cartoon and playing with the associated games and toys discover that digimon aren’t just fictional; they’re real and they can leave cyberspace and enter the real world.

So on one level, Digimon is interesting because it considers cyberspace as a real place to which people can travel and meet its inhabitants and return to the real world. But it’s also interesting because the world which the story refers to as the “real world”, is actually at several removes from the world of the American viewing child. For that matter, the “real world” is at least one remove away from the world of the children in Digimon Tamers, who recognize the real world of Seasons 1 and 2 as a fictional world.

The Digimon Simulacra

Clip #2 – The children confront Ken about his treatment of digimon.

When I was describing the complexity of Digimon reality to a colleague in English Education who teaches children’s literature, she asked, “Is this good for children? Won’t it make it hard for them to learn to tell fiction from reality?” It’s a natural question, which I answered, to her shock, by saying, “I think reality is starting to become a meaningless concept.” It’s a concept that is being challenged by theories of simulacra, of a real world that only appears to be real but has been simulated to the point that the simulation constructs the world.

This is where Baudrillard comes in, alongside theories of cyberspace and virtual reality, such as Janet Murray’s discussion of narrative in cyberspace in Hamlet on the Holodeck. It becomes difficult to find reality within this list of worlds. Our world, which is a phrase I prefer to the “real world”, is play world #2, or the world of the viewer with the toys and the videos and all the paraphernalia of the fictional worlds. As Baudrillard says,

It is no longer possible to fabricate the unreal from the real, the imaginary from the givens of the real. The process will, rather, be the opposite: it will be to put decentered situations, models of simulation in place and to contrive to give them the feeling of the real, of the banal, of lived experience, to reinvent the real as fiction, precisely because it has disappeared from our life. (124)

But given that the world of the viewer is full of the games and toys associated with the fictional worlds, and allows children to imagine themselves into the story, it hardly seems any more real than any of the others, especially when you consider that play world #1 is encompassed within the fictional world. As Baudrillard says:

There is no real, there is no imaginary except at a certain distance. What happens when this distance, including that between the real and the imaginary, tends to abolish itself, to be reabsorbed on behalf of the model? (121)

What happens now is the imaginary is mass-produced, in particular the imaginary of children, in the form of action figures and other games. After all, both Digimon and Pokemon were toys before they were stories.

In the beginning a digimon was a virtual pet, as Hank Schlessinger points out. Virtual pets like Tamagotchis and the original digimon digivices were video games with one real goal: "to see how long you could keep the little thing alive." The player had to feed, play with and clean up after the virtual pet, and the device would beep when it wanted the player's attention. If the player ignored the device, the pet would become ill, listless or die. Sherry Turkle of MIT is currently collecting stories from people with virtual pets in order to explore the relationships between children and virtual pets that range in complexity from Tamigotchi to Furby and Shelby.

In some ways what is at issue is the relationship between gaming and living. Janet Murray observes that:

In games, therefore, we have a chance to enact our most basic relationship to the world--our desire to prevail over adversity, to survive our inevitable defeats, to shape our environment, to master complexity, and to make our lives fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. (143)

In games we work through models of the world and try out our choices within those models. By using a digivice to play with a digital pet, children try out taking care of a real pet. The interesting thing about Digimon is that not only does it allow students to model behavior towards a real pet, but it also models behavior toward bots. Andrew Leonard explains bots as robots made of software code, which work in cyberspace: “variously designed to carry on conversations, act as human surrogates, or achieve specific tasks--in particular to seek out and retrieve information. Bots entertain, annoy, work, and play” (10). Given these creations of ours, how are we to behave toward them?

When the digimon leave their world to enter the real world, whether it is FW¹ or FW², it is as though a a video game character or a chatterbot in an online environment like a MUD or a MOO were to leave its world and emerge into ours, with the intelligence and agency necessary to act in our world as long as we nurture them well. When we create bots as artificial life or artificial intelligences, Janet Murray says:

The rules for artificial life forms can be described as a kind of a game, but the knowledge about the world that the model offers us is not gamelike. It is a behavioral artifact that speaks to one of the most profoundly important aspects of our lives. The more we see life in terms of systems, the more we need a system-modeling medium to represent it--and the less we can dismiss such organized rule systems as mere games. (93)

In Digimon Tamers, for instance, Henry feels guilt towards the creatures in the computer game for making them fight and hurt each other, setting up a situation in which humans have ethical obligations to their digital creations. In Henry's guilt, the digital becomes just as real as the real and carries with it the same ethical issues as the real. Although his father tries to comfort him by reminding him that he's only playing a computer game, Henry isn't convinced. And it's because he isn't convinced that terriermon is able to bioemerge from the game and so become real.

Clip# 3 Henry’s guilt over making the digimon fight

This is the philosophical issue underlying Digimon. If in creating bots, we are creating artificial life and artificial intelligence, what are our ethical obligations to those entities that we create?

So what’s a question like this one doing in a children’s television show? The answer can be found, I think, in Donald Tapscott’s book Growing Up Digital. In this book Tapscott studies and interviews children from around the world who participate in a variety of online environments. Calling them the N Generation, or Net Generation, Tapscott sees this generation as uniquely comfortable and adept at moving back and forth between cyberspace and our world, you know, the “real world.” For them, as Sherry Turkle quotes one of her research subjects: Reality is “’just one more window.’” Thus a show like Digimon lacks the dystopian view of cyberspace that can be seen in fictions aimed at adults, such as The Matrix, Existenz, or The Thirteenth Floor, or the anime series Serial Experiments Lain. Whereas the unreality of cyberspace is seen as challenging/threatening the reality of our world in these adult fictions, Digimon accepts both as equally real, with the idea that one is equally capable of acting in both worlds, no matter which one originates from. So if cyberspace is to be considered a simulacrum of our world, then what the Net generation is learning, and what Digimon is teaching, is a way of navigating between simulacra but also their ethical obligations to the beings which exist only within the simulacra.

Works Cited

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.

Bright, J. E. The Quest for Crests. New York: HarperEntertainment, 2001.

Leonard, Andrew. Bots: The Origin of a New Species. New York: Penguin Books, 1997.

Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1997.

Nerz, A. Ryan. Digmon: The Official Character Guide. New York: HarperEntertainment, 2000.

Schlessinger, Hank. Digimon Power. New York: St. Martin's Paperbacks., 2000.

Tapscott, Donald. Growing Up Digital. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1998.

Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.

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