Death by Video Game: Tales of Obsession From the Virtual Frontline (14 page)

Regardless of whether the inspiration to stay is friendship or rivalry, it seems to be the sense of community that keeps people playing
Meridian 59
. Samantha K, a twenty-seven-year-old from Oregon, who asked to remain anonymous in order to keep her virtual identity from her real-life friends, was introduced to the game by her parents. During the past thirteen years, she’s tried some of the newer MMOGs, but she always returns to
Meridian 59
. ‘I mostly
enjoyed those other games,’ she said. ‘But the worlds were so huge, it was hard to get to know anyone. I didn’t know if I could trust people or not.
Meridian 59
’s smaller population keeps me going back. I know the game, and I know the people.’

Meridian 59
’s enduring population has also kept playing not only out of social obligation but out of grim necessity: if everyone left there would be no reason to keep the servers alive. ‘You couldn’t quit, really,’ Matt Dymerski, an author from Ohio, and one of the game’s best-known residents, says. ‘The game needed you. All your friends needed you. If you didn’t show up, the game would die.’ Some nefarious players occasionally attempted to force the game’s population to quit the game, in order to cause a type of virtual apocalypse. ‘This actually happened four or five times in the game’s ongoing lifespan,’ Dymerski recalls. ‘Each defeat generally required a huge update or change of ownership to draw the population back.’

These moments have formed part of an oral history, shared between players within the game and outside, on external forums. Dymerski refers to the ‘great destruction of server 107,’ ‘the subjugation of server 109,’ and so on. He plays infrequently today, but continues to contribute programming, tweaks, and improvements to the code on which the world is built. Dymerski says that he stays put not only out of a sense of duty and community but also because he believes that there are no satisfactory alternatives. ‘While there are certainly bigger MMOGs, I’m not sure there were ever better games,’ he says. ‘So we remain on
Meridian 59
, fighting with the same two hundred people we’ve known all our lives, always waiting for that next big update that might “fix the game” and give us hope again.’

There’s a tragic nobility to the game’s codependent players. They are ostensibly kept here out of a sense of shared responsibility: if everybody
leaves,
Meridian 59
will cease to exist. Nobody wants the end of the world on their conscience, even a virtual one.

But is that the truth? In 2012, the Kirmse brothers released the game’s files as open source, so that anybody can play and join in the great work of improving the world. The decision essentially freed the game’s population from having to reside there: the source files were public and, as such, the game would live on with or without its players.

And yet, still those players remain. Now Dymerski works to update the game with the Kirmses and a group of dedicated players. ‘Even if everybody else left,’ he says, ‘I’d just keep adding new content for the next fifty years.’

In the next few years, the group hopes to bring
Meridian 59
to Steam, the most popular global digital game store, to introduce it to a new generation of players. Even if Barloque fails to attract new tourists, Dymerski believes that this outpost on the ‘virtual periphery’ will endure. For him, the sense of belonging is too great to abandon the place. It needs someone to reside there, to keep the memory alive and to keep building the memory.

6

EVIL

Nobody remembers their first kill. It’s not like the high-security prison yards, where they pace just to forget. When it comes to video games,
nobody
remembers their first kill. If you can recall your first video game, well, then you’ve a chance of pinpointing the setting (over a blackened
Space Invaders
killing field? Atop a
Sonic the Hedgehog
green hill? Deep within a
Pac-Man
labyrinth?). But a name, date and face? Not likely.

It’s not just the troubling number of digital skeletons in the players’ closet that prevents recollection—although from
Super Mario
to
Call of Duty
, the trail of dead we virtual killers leave behind is of genocidal proportions. It’s that these slayings are inconsequential and forgettable (there is the odd exception: the sight of the crack Russian markswoman Sniper Wolf’s blood colouring the snow in
Metal Gear Solid
, for example, remains vivid in memory). Remember the first pawn or knight you ‘took’ in chess—the moment you callously toppled its body from the board? Hardly. Even if the piece had a name and backstory—a wife and children waiting for news back home, a star-crossed romance with a rival pawn—such details would have been forgotten the moment you packed away the board.

Most game murder leaves no imprint on the memory because it lacks meaning outside the game context. Unlike depictions of death in cinema, which can trigger keen memories of the viewer’s own past pains and sorrows, game violence is principally systemic in nature; its purpose is to move the player towards a state of either
victory or of defeat, rarely to tears or reflection. Likewise, there is no remorse for the game murder, not only because the crime is fictional but also because, unless you’re playing for money, there is no consequence beyond the border of the game’s fleeting reality. And yet, to the casual observer, the player’s bloodlust appears unnerving in both its flippancy and insatiability. Why are video games so unashamedly violent, and why is virtual violence apparently so appealing to humankind?

Video games were deadly from the get-go.
Spacewar!
—the protogame of the MIT labs played on $120,000 mainframe computers in the early 1960s—set the tone: a combative space game in which two players attempted to be the first to gun the other down. From this moment onwards violence was the medium’s dominant mode.

The arcades concentrated the sport-as-combat metaphor into sixty-second clashes between player and computer, dealing as they invariably did in the violence of sudden failure. This was a decision driven by commerce, not art: their designers needed to kill off the player after a minute or so in order to make money. Violence was part of the business model: in the battle between human and machine, the machine must always overwhelm the player. In such games, as the author David Mitchell wrote in his novel
Number9Dream
, we ‘play to postpone the inevitable,’ that moment when our own capacity for meting out playful death is overcome by our opponent’s. But the obsession with screen violence isn’t limited to the venerable arcade machines of the 1970s and ’80s. It seems to be within the DNA of all games, passed down from the playground (Cops and Robbers) to the board (chess, Go) to, finally, the screen. Longtime video-game players are guilty of innumerable virtual crimes, from minor indiscretions like jaywalking, in Atari’s
Frogger
, and smoking
indoors, in
Metal Gear Solid
, to more serious outrages like driving under the influence, in
Grand Theft Auto IV
; gunning down an airport filled with civilians, in
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II
; and full-scale genocide in Sid Meier’s
Civilization
series. In some cases, the appeal specifically derives from the thrill of illicit behaviour.

The medium’s core tenet—beat them before they beat you—is so familiar that it passes almost unnoticed. From the dawn of video-game time we have known to blast the Invaders before they blast us, to swallow the fruit and chase the
Pac-Man
ghosts back into a corner, to hoover up the health packs before our comrades get to them, to cast the first stone, throw the first punch, make the first headshot. This rule is part of the video-game contract, one of the few human pursuits that, alongside sport, repels notions of reconciliation or compromise.

We instinctively understand that our games are violent because they reflect a violence within us as both individuals and collectives. Games offer a way to explore violence within safe and fictional borders, allowing us to confront our more primal instincts. (Sony’s
Tokyo Jungle
is a good example: it casts you as an animal living in a postapocalyptic vision of Japan’s capital. Regardless of whether you choose to play as herbivore or carnivore, your ambition is the same: crush the weak in order to make yourself more powerful so that, in time, you or your offspring may crush the powerful. Just as
Minecraft
reminds us of the mortal dread of a shelterless night, so
Tokyo Jungle
taps into the ancient part of our brain that remembers what it is to shiver under a tree, mad with hunger and an urgent desire to procreate before it’s too late.)

Besides, conflict is a necessary function of all fiction, including games. So what, in 2013, inspired President Barack Obama to issue a call for Congress to fund a clutch of studies into video-game violence’s potential effects on the player? The problem must be to do
with the aesthetic of the violence—the way in which it’s rendered on the screen. It is a question of form, not function—something that moves the conversation into the realm of all screen violence. It is a
style
concern.

Depictions of video-game violence chart a similar trajectory as those in cinema. They too have moved, generally, from the staid to the outlandish (from the ‘ox-stunning fisticuffs,’ as Vladimir Nabokov put it, of 1940s-era Hollywood, to the gore of the contemporary slasher flick). But in video games, the journey’s pace was set by technology, not censorship. Early game designers couldn’t spare the graphical processing power needed to render a spout of blood or a glistening wound. They made do with guttural screams to bring the collapsing pixels to more vivid life.

Free from censorship and drawn to the potential marketing potency of being dubbed a ‘nasty,’ some developers even courted controversy with violent subject matter (notably 1982’s
Custer’s Revenge
, an Atari 2600 game in which players assume the role of General Custer, the historical figure who, in the game, is tasked with overcoming various obstacles in order to rape a Native American girl bound to a post). But even the most vulgar scene is robbed of its power when rendered in tubby pixels, like a lewd scrawl in a tittering teenage boy’s exercise book.

Finally the technology caught up, and games had the opportunity to begin to present the game violence and murders in something approaching a true-to-life form. Controversy was courted by savvy game publishers, who employed preposterously expensive publicists such as Max Clifford to whip the tabloids into a foam of indignation. But beneath the artificial outrage, the vividness of, say,
Grand Theft Auto
’s murder sprees, or
Call of Duty
’s spluttering
death animations, made explicit the violence at the heart of games that had formerly been abstract or just implicit.

The new-found clarity of depictions of video-game violence brought the question of its potential effects on us into focus. To what extent is the video game’s primal appeal based upon our baser instincts? And that question leads to another: to what extent does the video game’s preoccupation with virtual violence affect us?

On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik, a thirty-three-year-old Norwegian man, bombed government buildings in Oslo, killing eight people. A few hours after the explosion he arrived at Utøya Island, the site of a Norwegian Labour Party youth camp. He had posed as a police officer in order to gain entry to the ferry that would carry him to the island. When he disembarked, he fired a Ruger Mini-14 semi-automatic assault rifle into the crowd of unarmed adolescents. Sixty-nine teenagers died in the attack.

After his arrest, Breivik explained that he had staged the political attack in order to save Norway and Western Europe from a Muslim takeover, and that the Labour Party had to ‘pay the price’ for ‘letting down Norway and the Norwegian people.’ A few weeks later, the Norwegian police made public Breivik’s ‘manifesto’ diary, in which he mentioned completing the fantasy role-playing game
Dragon Age: Origins
, using the online game
World of Warcraft
to relax, and, most worryingly, playing
Modern Warfare II
as part of his ‘training-simulation’ in advance of the attacks.

Since their inception, games have struggled to shrug off the perception that they are violent, often mindless, occasionally sexist, and fundamentally unconstructive. The medium’s big-ticket blockbusters reinforce the viewpoint with their cacophonies and blooms of explosion. Video games may share DNA with chess, but their
likeness is often that of adolescent power fantasy, glorifying war’s aesthetic divorced from its graver consequences.

As a result of this perception, any public killing spree with a perpetrator under the age of forty or so throws a spotlight on video games and the question of whether their shadow falls across the story. Often, these headlines are generated in the cultural friction that exists between generations. On one side are the game-literate—for whom video games have always been part of the entertainment diet. On the other, the video-game-illiterate, who mistrust video games for their ability to so forcefully and entirely distract young people from other works of art and life, and the way in which they render explicit the abstract violence of childhood games such as chess and Cops and Robbers.

Studies continue to be inconclusive as to whether there is a causal link between violence and consumption of violent media. In their 2010 paper ‘Vulnerability to Violent Video Games: A Review and Integration of Personality Research,’ published in
Review of General Psychology
, Patrick and Charlotte N. Markey showed links between raised aggression levels in players with a predisposition for violence when playing violent games. Another paper, ‘Understanding the effects of violent video games on violent crime,’ published by the Social Science Research Network and reported by
The New York Times
, claimed to demonstrate a correlation between a drop in violent crime by youths, and the rise in popularity of violent video games. Despite the inconclusiveness of studies (which, it should be noted, have also never managed to establish a quantifiable link between the theatre, film or television and violence), numerous lawsuits have sought to implicate or even entirely blame the influence of video games for public acts of violence.