Why Game? 1 - TextFiles.com

very inappropriate phrase. It’s nice not to be
treated like an idiot sometimes.
So how about a game bent around total
control? Specifically, interrogation seems the
easiest way to do this. It’s a well-documented
phenomenon that prisoners and guards are both
necessary to a functioning state (police or
otherwise) but still invoke revulsion in all of the
population (They differ only on what counts as
torture and what counts as too human to
torment). There are hundreds of scenarios from
which to choose. One could make a historical
simulator with no shortage of scenarios, a
testament to human creativity and the power of
pain to destroy resolve and fix problems. Will
you break prisoners in Solovki or Gitmo? Play
the Catholic inquisitor cleansing Spain or put
Buddhists to the sword in 11th century India?
The box art practically writes itself.
This is something that is depraved in a way
that stomping on digital hookers is not. It is
both true and real, illustrating human nature
and history in a medium that doesn’t dig into
much of either. I played through HL2, and
through the exquisitely painful carpal and ulnar
choruses resounding through my dominant arm,
because it was showing me a little bit of both.
The farcical violence of teenagers doesn’t
require thousands of pages of ledgers in which
to track prisoners, divide by gender, separate
the sick from the dying and dead, make tallies
of boots and clothing and fillings and whatever
else can be seized. A game like Grand Theft
Auto can’t simulate the hundreds of otherwise
ordinary people doing what we consider
extraordinary violence to ensure the machine
runs smoothly. It’s far beyond game violence
because such things are normally faceless, and
done in the name of some sort of understand-
able fantasy, like survival against all odds or a
very nice car.
It’s a decent violence because it tries to say
something about itself.
From a political perspective, it would be
interesting to track what sort of people play
such a game, and what scenarios they pick. Will
the comfortable middle-class kids with the Che
Underoos walk in the digital footprints of their
idol and torture homosexuals, journalists and
other counter-revolutionaries for the sake of
international socialism? Will hawks pick a
modern American scenario and only find
validation in tormenting jihadis, farmers and
whomever else is unlucky enough to be in the
wrong place at the wrong time? Breaking the
politically brittle is fairly simple; but what about
savagery from another time and place? Can
moral revulsion – or an appreciation for the
practicality of brutality in certain places and for
certain goals – be induced by a game on
purpose?
Imagine if you will, something we might
call the reverse Jack Thompson effect; the
spectacle of games assailing politicians for their
amorality. Ideally, this mythical simulator of
human nature would be apolitical, and designed
only to make a point about human nature and
the reality of brutality separate from one’s
political opinions. However, that’s more or less
impossible, and perhaps unnecessary. All it
would take is one success from one political
viewpoint for their ideological rivals to respond
in kind.
Thus begins the equivocation. The Nazis
were worse than the communists. The commu-
nists weren’t as bad as the bankers. The
Ottomans were not nearly as savage as the
Aztecs, and both were eclipsed by singular
exploits of Andrew Jackson.
At least someone somewhere will be
proving a point about something. My hope would
We Shall Meet in the Place Where There is no Darkness 25