Trigger Happy
Shoot first, ask questions later
Steven Poole on the importance of powering up in the real world
The world’s premier long-running series of space films for children failed to please many fans with its last instalment, in which major characters suddenly acquired the ability to shoot bolts of coloured lightning at one another, just as they do in all other indistinguishable superhero movies. But all was not lost for fans of stories about galactic elves, since Disney’s show The Mandalorian proved that, by returning to the franchise’s Western roots, you could make a satisfying new branch of the mythic universe – even if it is momentarily confusing when Gus Fring turns up looking for Baby Yoda.
At the end of the first season of The Mandalorian (spoiler alert), the hero is given an item to help him in the next stage of his quest: a rocket jetpack. Very cool, and very obviously a borrowing from the narrative structure of videogames. You have fought bravely through the first world; now a mentor offers you a power-up that expands your abilities for the tougher challenges to come.
The English verb form ‘to power up’, meaning to increase the supply of power to something, already existed in the 1920s, while the intransitive form, when something ‘powers up’ (begins operation) was around long before that. As Lucy Hutchinson wrote in the 17th century of her husband John, a parliamentarian who was one of those who signed the death warrant of Charles I: “Sometimes he would say, that if ever he should live to see the parliament power up againe, he would never meddle any more either in councells or armies.”
The idea of powering up, then, is not new, and was applied to individual human beings long before electronic games. (One Ohio newspaper columnist wrote in 1925: “On this night I was all powered up, clean shirt, pants all pressed, and my curly hair all plastered down.”) Even the idea of a single item that gives the hero a new ability was present in literature: think of the sword Excalibur, or Tolkien’s invisibility-conferring One Ring.
So much is to say that there is almost never a cultural trope that is totally new, springing fresh-minted from a single work: everything has roots and foreshadowings, and how could it be otherwise, since it is existing art that feeds the imagination of future creators?
Ever since Pac-Man raced to munch the Power Pellets in the corners of the maze in order to turn the tables on his phantom pursuers, the specific videogame model of the power-up does seem to have ramified out into the wider world: not just in other entertainment media, but even in the wider cultural and political discourse.
Take, for instance, the British prime minister’s slogan of “levelling up” the country. This phrase, too, has pre-videogame forebears: in 1873, the artist Philip Gilbert Hamerton advised a student of modern languages that the only advantage classicists might have would be a better memory or “superiorities of sympathy to which he may ‘level up’ by that acquired and artificial interest which comes from protracted application.” But in 21st-century English, to “level up” a region or country is inevitably associated with the vocabulary of roleplaying games – which is quite appropriate in this context, given that the speaker in question appears to think of politics, and the lives of people in general, as a game, of a kind that he might have cheatingly played at Eton.
But such flippant talk of levelling up or powering up also serves an argumentative purpose, which is to reinforce a view of society that is focused on the individual and their freedom to pursue certain goals and desires. Which is also, inevitably, the point of view of heroic action videogames in which the player’s character pillages and kills to their heart’s content, periodically acquiring power-ups so as to rampage more effectively through a world that exists as mere scenery for their exploits. It is a fundamentally rightwing portrait of human affairs.
That such a view is dangerous to society as a whole is no more evident than in the controversy over mask-wearing during the Covid pandemic. Libertarian polemicists have called them “muzzles” and complained of “mask Nazis”, because they can think only of their own freedom and not of others’ balancing rights. But perhaps it’s possible to reclaim the videogame language and point out that, in the present situation where there are few tools available to us, what a facemask really is, is the best power-up we have.
The specific videogame model of the power-up does seem to have ramified out into the wider world