Trigger Happy
Shoot first, ask questions later
Steven Poole investigates how ‘videogame’ became a dirty word
Alot has changed in 25 years. Dating apps, the Docklands Light Railway, drill music, Google Maps, an entrepreneur blasting one of his own cars into space, the resurgence of the far right, five-pound pints. It is truly a technological utopia we live in, apart from the annoying lack of tricorders and flying cars.
On the other hand, some things haven’t changed. Extremely good videogames still have the words ‘Mario’ and ‘Zelda’ in their titles, for one thing. And for another thing, commentators still employ the hoary old line that some cultural product they don’t like is “like a videogame”, even as videogames themselves (titles aside) have vastly changed.
During the World Cup, for example, David Runciman, writing in the London Review of Books, considered the prospect of the next tournament being held in Qatar, of necessity in hermetically sealed, airconditioned stadiums, and broadcast in 4K, with endless replays and machine-aided refereeing decisions. Perhaps, he suggested, the 2018 World Cup would be the last “when we are able to tell the difference between an international football match and a videogame”. Football, he argues, will become “like a videogame” once all the humanity has been drained from it, once it becomes somehow lighter than air, merely a spectacle of pixels beamed all over the world.
An attentive reader of some mid-century French philosophers would argue that this argument has the causation backwards. Guy Debord identified the “society of the spectacle” – “a social relationship between people that is mediated by images” in 1967, half a decade before the first commercial videogames. In 1990, Jean Baudrillard announced provocatively that the (first) Gulf War would not take place, and in 1991 said that it had not taken place – because it was designed primarily to be consumed as a televised spectacle. And the World Cup itself has always been, to the vast majority of its global audience who don’t travel to the tournament, a mediated spectacle: not just a thrilling spectator sport, but a shop window for footballers considered as commodities in the subsequent transfer trading, footballers who inevitably, for all their real gifts and courage, also match exactly Debord’s description of the celebrities of the spectacle: “Media stars are spectacular representations of living human beings, distilling the essence of the spectacle’s banality into images of possible roles.”
Videogames, inevitably, are part of the Debordian spectacle too, but to consider them some awful, logical, dehumanised endpoint of the spectacular is rather to let the actual institution Runciman is discussing off the hook: the World Cup as broadcast on television, the breaks all stuffed with adverts for betting websites, which profit from recruiting innocents and turning them into gambling addicts. Set beside that, a casual session of FIFA seems like the wholesome equivalent of a Victorian parlour game.
Another great engine of the spectacle that has appeared in Edge’s lifetime, of course, is social media, and here casual denigration of videogames also obscures a more interesting story. Charles CW Cooke, an American journalist, recently tweeted: “Political Twitter … was always a bubble, but now it’s a bubble floating off in space, millions of miles above the subjects it’s discussing. It’s a videogame.” Here the author is using the “videogame” slur to argue that what he is criticising is disconnected from reality, and somehow consequence-free. Well, if only it were. If discussing politics on Twitter really were a videogame, we can be sure that it would be more fun and have better graphics, and that it would not in fact lead to waves of mob fury, social shaming, and the general toxification of our culture.
On this subject, too, Guy Debord was prescient. The spectacle, he wrote in 1967, “erases the dividing line between true and false”. Twenty-five years ago we didn’t worry much about fake news; now the US President says that the New York Times and Washington Post are part of “the fake news media”. To call such cultural deterioration a phenomenon in which things are becoming more like videogames is, again, to get things backwards. Videogames, for the most part, build for us ideal worlds in which truth itself is stable: in which objects do what the description promises, and mission briefings contain trustworthy intel. If only the modern world were more like a videogame, we wouldn’t be in the trouble we are now.
If discussing politics on Twitter really were a videogame, it would be more fun and have better graphics