Extra final chapter from the 2004 US edition of Trigger Happy

Over the last four years, as the new generation of videogame hardware — Sony’s PlayStation2, Microsoft’s Xbox, and Nintendo’s GameCube — came to maturity, there were a handful of standout videogames. One of the most heavily anticipated was Japanese master Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid 2 (2001), and it represented an ultra-refined concept of the much-hyped though problematic “convergence” with cinema.

As we saw in Chapter 4, the marriage between Hollywood and videogames is an uneasy relationship at best. Since this book was first published, newer examples have only confirmed the problems. Two Tomb Raider films (2001, reviewed here; 2003), starring the admirable Angelina Jolie, destroyed all the dynamic, gymnastic grace of the digital heroine in a mash of fast-cut editing, while ropey computer-graphic special effects and insultingly bad scripts ensured a thoroughgoing cinematic farrago, of which the second iteration was even worse than the first. Meanwhile, Japanese videogame-makers Square spent a reported $80 million on a movie of their long-running Final Fantasy. The new-agey computer-animated feature that resulted, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001), was so poorly received that Square had to shut down their newly created film studio almost immediately.

By contrast, in Metal Gear Solid 2, a filmic narrative was conceived and executed within the game’s structure itself. It boasted a great number of gameplay set-pieces that were engineered with extraordinary inventiveness and attention to detail (for example, nearly every surface in the gameplay environment was represented sonically as well as visually, and Snake could alert guards by splashing noisily through puddles or clanking over gates, as well as slip up on bird droppings), but what caught most critics’ attention was the great number and extended length of the cinematic “cut-scenes”, which were not interactive but didactic storytelling interludes.

Despite the still-unsatisfactory nature of this kind of mélange of watching and playing, Metal Gear Solid 2 succeded through sheer conceptual brio. It climaxed in a riot of hugely entertaining postmodern self-referentiality and a noble if somewhat confused disquisition about genetics, memory and war. It seemed as though, in the scorched-earth apocalypse of his own private cinema, Kojima was insistent upon pushing videogames to one kind of expressionistic extreme.

Meanwhile, Rez (2001) constituted a glorious fusion of sound and vision, as the relatively simple shoot-’em-up mechanics were married to a pseudo-interactive system that altered the dance-music soundtrack according to your actions. (It was only pseudo-interactive because the sound effects invoked by button-pushes were always artificially “quantised”, ie shunted to the nearest musically relevant subdivision of the beat, in order not to create an arhythmic cacophony.) The game’s designer, Tetsuya Mizuguchi, claimed that the psychedelic artistic style was influenced by the Russian painter Kandinsky, but Rez’s vision is as much influenced by the aesthetic history of videogames themselves, as a world of blocky wireframe 3D skyscrapers gradually morphs, over the game’s five levels, into a lushly solid representation of a green Earth, in a parable of human and machine evolution.

The arrival of true artifical intelligence predictably failed to happen, although large steps were made by Peter Molyneux’s Black & White (2001), a game in which the player’s teachable pet monster took on certain physical characteristics according to moral decisions made by the player acting as the gameworld’s god, and then by Halo (2002). A brilliantly engineered sci-fi first-person shooter, Halo placed you in a war movie, and through the illusion that both your enemies and your comrades were intelligent, created an extraordinary sense of involvement. In contrast to most previous games of the genre, no battle in Halo ever went the same way twice. You blinked in disbelief at the cunning of your enemies. You laughed when one of your men kicked a prone alien and said: “How does it feel to be dead?”. You shouted at them to get out of the way of enemy grenades. And when you let them die, you felt bad.

You also felt bad if you failed to help your friend in the exquisite fairytale of a game, ICO (2002). Playing a small horned boy who meets a luminous, ghostly girl in a vast castle, you try to help her escape, holding hands and conversing in nonsense language. Through its jaw-droppingly gorgeous environment — beams of light penetrating cavernous, gloomy stone interiors; bleached grass in sunny, verdant courtyards; distant battlements of the enormous castle appearing on the horizon in a bluish haze — the game constituted the best example yet for the emotional impact of architecture, the invocation of aesthetic wonder.

And then, on a wave of controversy, came Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (2002), a gleefully amoral gangster game that was widely criticised for its violence — you could, if you so chose, beat up passers-by in a baseball bat. But punishment did exist in this universe: kill innocent people and the police, shortly followed by the FBI and the army, would hunt you down, and the player also had the option to drive ambulances and save citizens, or merely to race cars against local hoodlums. In its fictionalisation of Miami in the 1980s, with characters in pastel suits and a contemporary pop soundtrack on the game’s numerous in-car radio stations, Vice City evoked tremendous period style and an unmatched freedom to play as you pleased.

Meanwhile, a peek into a more cybernetically fluid future was offered by the eventual release of Sony’s EyeToy in 2003. A simple web-cam device that sat on top of the TV, it put the player’s image on the screen and allowed her to control a number of amusing mini-games — punching tiny kung-fu fighters, washing windows, disco-dancing 1970s-style — by waving her arms and head about. The games were rudimentary, but the device represented a wealth of future opportunities for games to escape their dependence on a rebarbative plastic controller festooned with buttons. More than the modest successes of online console gaming enjoyed by the Xbox and PlayStation2, or the announcement in May 2004 of new handheld consoles by Sony and Nintendo, the EyeToy held out promise of a real revolution in gameplay. The ways we interact with machines are becoming ever more intimate.

Theodor Adorno, whom we met in Chapter 1, once observed that the products of mass entertainment secretly had much in common with work in industrial society. “Amusement in advanced capitalism is the extension of work,” he wrote. “It is sought after by those who wish to escape the mechanised work process, in order to be able to face it again.” One wonders what he would have thought of today’s videogames, so many of which themselves have continued to appear to offer little more than a “mechanised work process”.

If games are supposed to be fun, Adorno might have asked, why do they go so far to replicate the structure of a repetitive dead-end job? One very common idea in games, for example, is that of “earning”. Follow the rules, achieve results, and you are rewarded with bits of symbolic currency — credits, stars, skill points, powerful glowing orb — which you can then exchange later in the game for new gadgets, ways of moving, or access to previously denied areas. The only major difference between this paradigm and that of a real-world job is that, whereas the money earned from a job enables you to buy beer and go on holiday — that is, to do things that are extraneous to the work process — the closed videogame system rewards you with things that only makes it supposedly more fun or involving to continue doing your job, rather than letting you get outside it. It is a malignly perfect style of capitalist brainwashing. Even the common idea in many Nintendo games — for instance, in the disappointing Super Mario Sunshine (2002) of being able to take “time off” to play a subgame of collecting fruit can be read, on this analysis, as a cunning subterfuge to keep the masses happy: after all, they are still caught within the system.

In the overarching economic systems of games as diverse as Super Mario Sunshine, Deus Ex (2000), or Primal (2003), everything boils down to a matter of shopping. New skills — whether they be new physical moves, spells, or the ability to transform into a demon — are acquired instantaneously and thoroughly through currency exchange. The idea of gradually nurturing and learning a skill is largely absent, although this would be psychologically more rewarding. If I could save up and spend ten thousand dollars to become an instant kung-fu master, that would be cool, but I wouldn’t be as proud of my kung-fu as I would if I had acquired the ability through the normal channels of years of hard training. Even a game as apparently sophisticated as Deus Ex — a role-playing, first-person espionage adventure — can only offer a bland mechanical parody of “learning”, in which the next level of ability in, say, lock-picking can only be bought, not practised and learned for oneself.

Apart from comic early representations of menial jobs such as in 1980s arcade games Tapper or Burger Time, some kind of military position was for a long time virtually the only real-life job represented in videogames, apart from the venerable genre of football management. Yet what we are seeing now is an increasing labourisation of the game atmosphere: from the wry alternative employment market of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City’s Mafia-dominated world, to the square-jawed life-of-driving fantasy of Toca Race Driver (2002), games become structured around a fictional career.

Economic and political ideology was even more to the fore in The Sims (2001), for example, a God game in which you look after little people in a house, with some of the voyeuristic kick of a reality TV show. Rapidly becoming an extraordinarily successful multi-tentacled franchise, it is the soap-opera version of Pokémon, and an advert for the “American way”. Buy a Sim a large mirror and she will be happier, by virtue of being able to gaze at her reflection. Buy him a new oven, and he’ll become more popular after giving dinner parties. Help your Sim climb the slippery pole of a career as a politician or scientist. This is a game in which the brutal rules of free-market capitalism are everything. More money makes a Sim happier; social dissidents are not allowed. You want to drop out of the rat-race, wear charity-shop tweed suits and spend your days playing chess in the park? Sorry. Such gameplay possibilities are ruled out by the political assumptions buried deep in the game’s structure.

It would be nice to think that the famous episode in Shenmue where you actually have to go and get a job driving fork-lift trucks within the gameworld was an ironic acknowledgment of the job-like nature of too many games. But perhaps it is inevitable that, as products of decadent late capitalism, most videogames will, consciously or not, reflect the same values. You go through a period of training, and then it’s all about success and shopping, keeping your head down, doing what the system expects. Make-believe jobs, as the Marxist Adorno might have concluded, are the opiate of the people.

After George W Bush announced the “war on terror” in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, there was a surge of jingoistic online gamers, on servers for games such as the squad-based shooter Counter-Strike, dressing themselves up as digital versions of Osama Bin Laden. And the military-entertainment complex has become more close-knit than ever before. While commercial games such as the excellent Call of Duty (2003) were recreating in ever more detail historical conflicts such as the second world war, the US military itself paid for the design and free distribution of a highly realistic commando simulation, America’s Army, the first version of which was released on July 4, 2002, and explicitly described it as a propaganda tool to show American teenagers how exciting a career in the military might be.

The idea of showing school-age consumers exactly how accurately-modelled US-issue weaponry works, and schooling them in commando tactics, elicited off-the-record condemnations by some commentators close to the American military who talked to me. Furthermore, one might wonder just how good an idea it is to code all this realistic information into a game that is freely accessible for download. It doesn’t take much to imagine members of Al-Qaeda — who, after all, reportedly schooled themselves on commercial flight simulators — taking more than an academic interest.

These developments serve to emphasise that the more naturalistic videogames become in their modes of representation and modelling of real-life phenomena, the more they will find themselves implicated in political questions, and will need to have their ideology interrogated. A game like Dropship (2002), for example, supposedly a near-future combat flight simulator, blithely borrowed geopolitical capital by requiring the player to bomb terrorist camps in the Libyan desert, and overthrow a Colombian drug-lord, thus participating in a certain totalising idea of foreign policy without ever examining its own assumptions. Other developers are already seeing the problem and avoiding it: the squad-based combat sequel Conflict: Desert Storm 2 (2003), for example, was set like its predecessor during the first Gulf War, so as not to be embroiled in controversy about the 2003 war on Iraq.

But videogames are also becoming a site for a certain sort of symbolic political protest, as in the example of artist Anne-Marie Schleiner’s Velvet-Strike (2002), which represents what you might call aesthetic counter-terrorism. Schleiner says she was disturbed by the post-9/11 militarism in the online gaming community, particularly by one game modification in which Bin Laden was represented as an Arab liquor store owner in the US, and the gamer was enjoined to enter the store and shoot the proprietor. In response, she developed a series of provocatively pacifist graphical “spray paints” which can be used as graffiti on Counter-Strike servers. Stealthy spraying in the midst of the macho violence drops ironic images into the environment: gunman silhouettes form a big heart; a teddy bear holds a rifle; two soldiers embrace in various homoerotic poses. Sprays with provocative verbal slogans include “Hostages of Military Fantasy”, or “We Are All Iraqis Now”.
Velvet-Strike is not a game in itself but an attitude. The idea of invading online spaces that exist for no other reason than to gratify militaristic fantasies, and then gently defacing them with anti-war slogans, is not just funny (though funny it is), but also a demonstration of how online gameworlds, even those of apparently simple shooters, are already sophisticated enough to be arenas of political debate, sites of symbolic activism.

Steven Poole
London, May 2004