Trigger Happy
Shoot first, ask questions later
Steven Poole examines the disruptive goals of the V&A
There are plenty of things to enjoy about the new videogame exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, although its actual title is a bit annoying. ‘Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt’, it says. What if I don’t want to disrupt, but just want to shoot some bad guys in the face from a very long distance while crouching in a prickly shrub? Disruption is, of course, the great unexamined virtue of our age, a rhetorical import from Silicon Valley, where every new startup must boast of how it is going to ‘disrupt’ the laundry business, or higher education, without first having bothered to understand how the system already works in the first place.
That aside, the exhibition demonstrates brilliantly how much sheer artistic craft goes into modern videogames, with a rich assortment of concept art, designers’ notebooks and the like, along with a notably cagey attitude to violence. A big early room is dedicated, for example, to The Last Of Us, with a fascinating loop of footage showing Joel and Ellie moving between cover, overlain with wireframe explanations of how Ellie’s AI for following the player is working out her routes. Oddly, though, unlike anything that happens in the actual game, the scene does not become a bloody massacre after Joel is encouraged to murder everyone in sight, because he is a murderer.
Shooting, indeed, is limited to the room about how games are political, and in particular the eerie critical game A Series Of
Gunshots, by Pippin Barr. In a series of blackand-white street scenes, you press any button and a gunshot rings out, causing a flash of light in a window. That’s all. You don’t know who shot whom, or why. It’s a brilliant little interactive essay, though a bolder exhibition might have put it next to scenes from Sniper Elite 4, with X-rayed skulls exploding in showers of gore, and even tried to make an argument about the cathartic aestheticism of the latter, rather than carefully eliding the uncomfortable truth about the majority of the highestgrossing videogames of our era.
Similarly, the area about the sexual objectification of women in games features some thoughtful mini-works critiquing sexism, without much representation of the problem itself, so that an uninformed exhibition-goer may not understand what the critics are reacting against. Not that one would need a giant screen loop of Dead Or
Alive to make the point; a recent Tomb Raider would do. A provocative contribution is here made by the artist Robert Yang, with his
Rinse And Repeat, in which the player lurks in a steamy locker room until the arrival of a hunk, who may be soaped down naked under the shower. Replace the hunk with a woman and they would not put it in the V&A, but that’s the point: the power balance in gender representations is not symmetrical in the first place.
Of course, this is hardly a problem unique to videogames. This year’s film Red Sparrow, for example, stars Jennifer Lawrence as a Russian spy who is humiliated and tortured while naked. When such a film’s director can claim that such scenes are integral to his ‘art’, why should we be surprised that a recent advert for the game Mafia City, featuring an improbably pneumatic woman with tape over her mouth and the clickable options ‘Torture’ or ‘Finish Her’, was found by Facebook not to contravene its own guidelines, before it backtracked and took the ad down after adverse publicity?
Simpler pleasures are to be found in the exhibition’s final room, stuffed with ‘punk’ arcade cabinets and multiplayer games, as well as a lo-fi driving game with its controls built into the chassis of an actual car. But there are no classic arcade games. Pac-Man,
Space Invaders, Defender – take your pick, but a little bit of historical context would have gone a long way. The hilariously impossible
QWOP, for example, is an arcade game where you control an athlete running down a track – but because you are sadistically given separate control over each thigh and calf, any kind of forward locomotion requires fantastic feats of coordination. (I managed to propel my runner a whole metre before he fell over.) To help visitors understand why this game exists, you’d need to put Konami’s Track &
Field next to it. But here as in other ways, the exhibition celebrates ‘disruption’ while giving little sense of what exactly is being disrupted. And so it inadvertently echoes Silicon Valley’s own disruption-happy historical amnesia.
Replace the hunk with a woman and they would not put it in the V&A, but that’s the point