Trigger Happy
Shoot first, ask questions later
Steven Poole interrogates the cause of Goose Game fever
According to Brewer’s Dictionary Of Phrase And Fable, the goose symbolises conceit or foolishness. “You silly goose!” is an affectionate insult in literature of yore, mainly directed (you will not be surprised to learn) at women; but a vain and silly type of man is also portrayed as a goose in Egyptian hieroglyphics. In the present age of technology-enabled narcissism, of course, there is no shortage of such human geese.
The protagonist of Untitled Goose Game, however, is emblematic of a different tradition. A tailor’s iron used to be called a ‘goose’ because of the shape of its neck; and from there to ‘goose’ in theatrical slang came to mean to boo or hiss a performer on stage. More generally, from the 19th century onwards, to goose someone was to poke or tickle them, often with sexual intent. This is the goose as impertinent, lawless bird, and it is of course the goose of Untitled Goose Game.
It is a wonderful thing that such a leftfield indie game should have become the first videogame to become a mass cultural phenomenon since Pokémon Go. Supermodel Chrissy Teigen tweeted: “Welp as a contrarian, I wanted to hate goose game but I LOVE IT.” Blink 182 frontman Mark Hoppus namechecked it at a gig. Everyone loves it, but why? What does it really mean?
Some commentators have claimed that its success speaks to a huge unmet demand for games that are not ultraviolent murder simulators. For sure, the game’s minimalist suite of verbs – honk, spread wings, grab stuff with your beak – lacks aggressive options, but it’s not as though there aren’t scads of nonviolent games already: platformers, endless runners, driving games, sports sims. Untitled Goose Game’s ambience of slapstick mischief has a powerfully innocent charm, like a children’s version of Benny Hill, but it too is not unprecedented.
We get closer to the truth when players talk excitedly about how much fun it is to be “horrible” in the game, but this too I think is a revealing misreading. Let’s start by noticing that the central bird is a heroine rather than a hero, since strictly speaking a goose is a female goose; the male is called a gander. (Hence, “what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander” means that everyone should be treated the same way; and “to have a gander” at something means to look at it, as a curious wandering goose might.) She – the goose – is definitely not portrayed graphically as villain; indeed her face exudes a regal, amiable blankness onto which we are tempted to project our own more dubious emotions, while the brilliantly economical animation of her movements suggests a dancer or figure-skater more than a bull in a china shop.
Why, then, do we love to be this goose? Because we are unconsciously fed up of being the villagers. We are all just quietly trying to get on with our lives, to grow our carrots, to paint in our gardens, but the forces of havoc and disorder repeatedly spoil our plans. By inhabiting the avian personification of a capricious Fate, we are given back a fantasy of control over events. As with all great videogames, the lure of Untitled Goose Game is the dream of agency: the shining idea that our actions can have predictable and positive visible consequences in an uncaring world.
The denizens of Untitled Goose Game’s bucolic village must feel like Jupe, the unpopular circus performer in Dickens’s Hard Times, of whom it is said: “He was goosed last night, he was goosed the night before last, he was goosed to-day. He has lately got in the way of being always goosed, and he can’t stand it.” But aren’t we all in exactly the same situation? We are being goosed every day by the smirking forces of anarcho-nationalism, the Bannons and Trumps and Johnsons and Cummingses who are gleefully stealing our sandwiches and dropping them in a pond for no reason except that they think it’s a laugh.
It’s worth noticing, too, that the game’s villagers respond to the goose’s actions not by trying to scare it away for good, or actually killing it with a shotgun. They have an air of learned helplessness in the face of her relentless manipulations, in the same way that we can barely respond to the political forces changing the world with anything more potent than a helpless, questioning “Why?” So to be the goose in the game – this elegant heroine who believes in nothing except comic chaos – is to take our symbolic revenge on a grownup world where no one follows the rules any more.
Why, then, do we love to be this goose? Because we are unconsciously fed up of being the villagers