Trigger Happy
Steven Poole dons his tinfoil hat to delve into conspiratorial matters
Space Invaders (Tomohiro Nishikado for Taito, 1978) has by now become a genuinely universal cultural touchstone, one you don’t need to have actually played to understand. The road authority Highways England recently released a video campaign called ‘Don’t Be A Space Invader’, to discourage tailgating, in which a blocky avatar, glowing white, of one of the iconic invaders follows a car too closely behind, threatening to cause otherworldly havoc on the motorway.
Have many young drivers today who need to be reminded of basic driving rules ever actually played Space Invaders or any of its legion sequels? It doesn’t matter. We all know what that alien represents: it has become a potent symbol far beyond its original context. But that is not always a good thing.
The backstory of Space Invaders was, implicitly at least, part of the 1970s milieu of cold-war paranoia and Roswell conspiracy thinking. How did it get to the point where a single heroic cannon-pilot had to fend off waves of invading extraterrestrials? The government must have known. Indeed, an advance wave of aliens must have been here all along.
And one way that videogames develop over the subsequent decades is to become ever more elaborate conspiracy theories. The US, it turned out in the Metal Gear Solid games, really was secretly controlled by an elite group variously known as the Patriots or the La-li-lu-le-lo. Indeed, many videogames are vast semiotic systems designed specifically to appeal to the conspiriological mind. Every piece of information is relevant, and it all fits together neatly. This is not, needless to say, how the actual world works, where a lot of so-called information is actually rubbish and where, according to the programmers’ proverb known as Hanlon’s Razor, one should never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.
And yet Hanlon’s Razor seems increasingly difficult to apply in 2020, when world leaders are actively malicious and routinely lie to our faces in easily disprovable ways. In such a world, it seems only reasonable to assume that the government is lying to you about absolutely everything.
But here is the entrance to the rabbit hole, which leads to believing that Hillary Clinton runs a paedophile ring out of a pizza restaurant. Indeed the notorious QAnon conspiracy, as Six to Start’s Adrian Hon has brilliantly pointed out, itself functions like an augmented-reality videogame, particularly the pioneering web-based games of the late ’90s, in which clues to the fictional mystery came to the player via emails or through digging around on apparently real websites. Similarly, the adept of QAnon boasts of ‘doing their research’ by watching YouTube and combing Reddit, and thus builds up a highly unusual alternative picture of the world.
A lot of imagination and thought is thereby exercised, and if such conspiracy theories were merely a kind of fan-fiction about a nonexistent universe, they would be admirable constructs. But a conspiracy theory is not a conspiracy theory without its insistent truth-claim: this is how the world actually is. And to apply that mindset indiscriminately can lead to very bad places.
To be sure, conspiracy theories are attractive. They make narrative sense out of a world that is ordinarily just one damn random thing after another. Wouldn’t it be reassuring to think that, somewhere, some tiny group of clever people really were able to direct events? And it can’t be denied that history is full of successful conspiracies that actually happened. Osama Bin Laden and friends conspired to fly planes into the Twin Towers. The Allies conspired to trick the Germans into thinking they were going to be landing elsewhere than Normandy.
On the other hand, history is also full of completely fabricated conspiracy theories that tend to lead in only one direction, the same direction in which a naive victim of the modern YouTube algorithm will inevitably be sucked. It is the oldest conspiracy theory of all and the one into which new idealists can still all too easily fall: blame Jews for everything.
Videogames are not responsible for all this, of course, but it is worth remembering that they have trained us to interpret worlds that hang together much more logically than the chaotic one we actually live in. And yes, our governments might still be lying to us most of the time — but probably not about space invaders. If Donald Trump knew about alien visitors, he wouldn’t be able to help blurting it out.
One way videogames develop over the subsequent decades is to become ever more elaborate conspiracy theories