Guy’s Allegory of the server: Or an Analysis of “Freeguy”

Guy’s Allegory of the server: Or an Analysis of “Freeguy”

“Free….Guy”

A friend of mine who has known me about a score approached me last September and had mentioned that she had seen a movie I absolutely have to see. This person knows me well enough to know my interesting and some what “Narrow seeming” taste in cinema and literature. Between packing and other things, I indulged happily. What I saw, at first, seemed as though it was another “Liberal” commentary on screen use and the stereotype of the Manic Pixie Dreamgirl”. I was wrong….I am happy to report that the grey thing in my head is capable of logic.

In summary, the film follows an avatar known as “Guy” as he navigates the world in what he knows as a “Normal day” similarly to films like “A map of Tiny perfect things”, “Groundhog’s Day”, and the goosebumps ™ Episode “The Ghost Next Door”. It evolves into Guy finding out he’s in a game and breaking character through the person controlling him. He soon becomes a hit with several IRL Lpers**. Shortly after, He himself, is discovered and the person running the game at the company is in the process of creating a sequel to the game. This is the what the crux of the plot is.

Even thought this kind of plot has been popular these days, the way its done int his context is quite refreshing. The writers were probably aware of this, and made every effort to shield the real direction they were going using various writing tricks I have been a gamer since 1989 and into various schools of philosophy since post grad in 2004.

Ascension

In the famous dialogue written by Plato known as “the Allegory of the cave, the whole point of the piece was to illustrate a questioning of reality. Being that all the person in the cave knew was the cave and the shadows dancing and playing off the light, they believed this was in point of fact, reality. Similarly, in the film, once Guy puts on the glasses he’s given by another NPC, he realizes something isn’t as real about his world as he’s thought. He then begins to go against his programming. Thereby, he begins to see the “shadows” aren’t the only reality out there.

T he plot, however, takes an interesting turn near the end. Guy winds up using the powers he gains from figure out that he lives in a game environment to his advantage and convinces a few people to follow him across a bridge juxtaposed with a battle in the “real” world d between the person who runs the company and the main coder. This culminates int eh villain nearly winning until they find out that Guy somehow has the ability to reconstruct he bridge that is being defragged due to the sever destruction. They all cross it, event though it’s breaking down and start their own lives, where like at the end of ReBoot (tm), everything is reset.