<nettime> Video games and collective fears

["Benjamin Geer" <benjamin.geer@btinternet.com>]

Yesterday, not having played any video games for many years, I downloaded
the arcade game emulator, MAME, and the original ROMs of several games
that I fondly remember playing in the U.S. in the early 1980s: Battlezone,
Tempest, Joust, Xevious, Tron, Star Wars, Major Havoc.  It was eerie
seeing and hearing them again.  After all those years, I still remembered
details of the terrain in Xevious.  I felt as if I was 13 years old again.  
It struck me that my adolescence coincided with the advent of video games,
and their early period of creative ingenuity using very limited
technology.  I have mixed feelings about them.  They were a much-needed
escape for teenagers who wanted desperately to get away from the real
world, which we found cold and hostile.  That may be part of the reason
why, although they're all war games, they're sufficiently abstract so that
the violence isn't disturbing.  Perhaps this came back to haunt us during
the Gulf War, when television showed us real bombings as if they were a
video game.  At the same time, the early video games definitely fed on
real anxiety and frustration.  Missile Command, from 1979, brings back
vividly the everyday dread of nuclear war.  Video games, as computerised
objects, offered us the opportunity to try to control, symbolically, the
computer technology that were were afraid was going to control us.  The
hint of political rebellion in the Star Wars game was tantalising: I
remember my intense desire to belong to a "Rebel Force" (a mixture of
medieval chivalry and a dash of proto-Marxism) and overthrow the
establishment.  But playing all these games again, I was struck by the way
they're all variations on the same theme: you're being attacked, your
attackers get increasingly numerous and fierce, your anxiety increases
because you're less and less able to fend them off, and finally you get
killed.  That probably reflects pretty accurately how a lot of Americans
felt about their relationship to the world in the 1980s: overwhelmed and
unable to cope.  It also struck me that, in order to learn how to play
these games, you have to die many times.  In Major Havoc, from 1984, you
have to engage in a series of suicidal experiments in order to learn the
exact procedure for getting through each level.  Of course, this was meant
to get you to spend as much money as possible while playing.  But I think
it also expresses a fear that we all had: whatever you do, something you
can't anticipate will be lurking around the corner, and it will get you.  
The cards are stacked against you.  I suspect that this collective
experience hasn't changed much in the past 20 years.  Even with the
emulator, which lets me give myself as many lives as I want, I still feel
the same anxiety.

I stopped playing video games when they started to be about bloody
hand-to-hand combat.  I couldn't relate to them anymore.  Did they start
tapping into different emotions?  Or just express them differently?

-- 
Benjamin Geer
http://www.btinternet.com/~amisuk/bg



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