Thomas Bey William Bailey over at Vague Terrain has an analysis of Modern Warfare 2. It’s a bit too uptight for my taste, but it balances the lavish superlatives I’ve heaped on the game quite nicely. His objection is that because of the extremely compelling narrative of games like these, we’re fed a bunch of propaganda and taught a manufactured history of the world. This is completely true. Thomas critiques isn’t limited to this game but rather highlights the possibilities for nefarious uses which the medium can be put to. The FPS Americas Army is in its third iteration, and they have spun it off into a graphic novel as well — the first story unironically entitled Knowledge is Power — but they get a free pass since it’s an obvious recruitment tool for the US army.
As Walter Benjamin mentions (in an essay you might have noticed lately) film, like architecture, is an art form which you learn to appreciate by habit and osmosis, rather than contemplation. Computer games have the grandiose scenarious of movies, as well as the tactility of architecture (since you’re able to navigate the world and develop an appreciation of the physics of the place.) so they really act as a multiplier of knowledge and narrative. (Regardless of their relationship to fact, mind you)
The exciting thing with photo-realistic games isn’t that we might end up with a Matrix-like scenario where we won’t be able to distinguish between ‘reality’ and ‘not-reality’ but that our memories of events will be messed up. Are you remembering something which you experienced in the ‘real world’ or the surreal world? We don’t have to mess up our physical perception of things for this technology to be scary, only our remembrance of things. Look at how much importance we place on photography as an external memory, and multiply that.
I know that I have created historical narratives based on nothing else than the tech tree in Civilization, so obviously I give more credence to a story than to static statements of fact; And since we experience the stories of computer games first hand, we might absorb the sentiments expressed even more readily. MW2 is a kick-ass game exactly because it fits within the narrative which the West has spun, and which countless action movies has reinforced — it’s “as close to reality as you get” exactly because it’s a narrative which is fictionalized from start to finish.
To paraphrase: Guns don’t kill people. People who live in a world where guns are seen as necessary responses to certain crises, kill people. Political action is necessary if we’d like to change the story, and it would be awesome if computer games could be a change for good, instead of only mirroring an already dominant narrative of how the world works and who we are as humans.
[flv:https://monocultured.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/PBS_The_War_by_Ken_Burns.flv https://monocultured.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/PBS_The_War_by_Ken_Burns.jpg 640 360]
A more upbeat rider to this story comes from the podcasting world, where fictional parallel universes are less flat and predictable than in MW2:
Myke Bartlet has continued writing and podcasting stories in the Salmon & Dusk universe. The latest short story, Yesterday came too soon, is a nice introduction to his stuff if you don’t feel like starting on a longer series. As previously mentioned, Mykes reading is half the enjoyment of his podcast, not cause the stories are so-so, but cause his tempo and timbre is excellent. Go listen.