Uplink 3
“The Guerilla War Issue”
November 2005
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Contents:
• Introduction: Next-Gen Questions Need Geopolitical Answers
• C.J. Pwnz (Or, From RPG Geek to X-Treme D00d in Three Easy Steps)
• Metal Gear Solid, East Asian Liquid
• Snapshots from the Austin Game Conference
• The Return of the Black Widow
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Uplink 3 Introduction
Welcome to the third issue of Uplink, published at one of the true turning points in the history of videogames. No, it’s not just because the next-generation consoles are arriving from Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo. It’s because the console, mobile, and online game cultures are all taking off, all at once.
Simply, the hundreds of millions of consoles, cellphones, and mobile devices of all kinds purchased over the past decade are creating a raft of new cultural spaces, very different from traditional national and international broadcasting markets. This is especially evident in the East Asian region, where Japan continues to produce some of the quirkiest and creative games around, and where South Korea and China are leading the way in massive multiplayer online (MMO) games.
This unprecedented expansion comes with a price tag. This is the social responsibility of the gaming culture to its audience.
This isn’t meant in the usual narrow, moralizing way of certain politicians we could all name, who foam at the mouth about videogame violence while uttering not a word about the US oiligarchy’s monstrous war on Iraq.
Nor is this one of those saccharine pleas to ameliorate the so-called “digital divide” by donating a few cents to your favorite charity – a noble goal, which ignores the fact that the digital divide is just the latest iteration of six hundred years of capitalist plunder and social polarization.1
The real issue is that the videogame culture is one of the key spaces of the geopolitical struggles of the 21st century. Website by website, console by console, and cellphone by cellphone, the questions keep multiplying: who flourishes and who perishes in the global economy? Who benefits from privatization and marketization, aside from a tiny bunch of neoliberal elites? If the marketplace is so magical, why has 600 years of increasingly unrestricted capitalism failed to deliver food, clean water, housing and education to the majority of human beings on this planet? If the state is a barrier to development, why are East Asia’s state-guided economies booming? If high wages are a barrier to prosperity, why is the European Union rich and getting even richer? If the US is such a paragon of success, why do 25% of its children live in poverty?
At their best, the great artists, writers and activists of the anti-colonial and guerilla movements of the 20th century asked questions like these. They didn’t always come up with compelling answers, but they did unmask colonialism and neocolonialism for what they were – the nightmarish exploitation of human beings by market forces.
This episode of Uplink asks some tough questions about the role of gender, consumerism and postcolonial identity-politics in the videogame culture. We venture to the floor of the Austin Game Conference, and conclude by shedding some light on Neil Manke’s upcoming mod, Lost Souls, for the Half Life 2 engine.
Endnotes
1. In these allegedly postcolonial times, it’s easy to forget that colonialism was never antithetical to capitalism. Colonialism was capitalism, through and through. The slave trade was financed, organized and executed by entrepreneurs in order to make money. Colonization was about making money, by plundering local economies for silver, gold, and spices. Plantations were about making money, by producing sugar, coffee, tea, rum and raw materials for the colonizers’ home markets. Jim Crow and apartheid were about making money, by using African American and black South African labor to harvest crops and mine gold while paying them almost nothing. US Cold War interventions in Latin America were about making money, destroying democratically elected governments which refused to comply with the US oil industry (Iran 1953), the US produce industry (Guatemala 1954), and the US copper industry (Chile 1973). Even the US colonial war on Iraq is about money – the kind made on no-bid contracts, weapons sales and Iraq’s vast oil reserves.
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C.J. Pwnz!!! Or, From RPG Geek to X-Treme D00d in Three Easy Steps
by Brian Cowlishaw © 2005
Quick: describe The Videogamer – the stereotype, like The Jock or The Cheerleader. Certainly five or ten years ago – and perhaps even now, though he's changing – you'd describe someone much like this.
He's a young white male, unattached, probably age fifteen to twenty-five, but possibly older in especially pathetic cases. He has zero social skills; he cares too much about computers and game systems to relate to normal people. He lives with his parents, probably in their basement, far past the age this is socially acceptable. He has read The Lord of the Rings several times, long before the Peter Jackson films made it cool – and enjoyed The Silmarillion. He can explain, for hours at a time, exactly why his favorite game system reigns supreme and the other ones totally suck. His speech, insofar as it is at all comprehensible to nongamers, consists of references to Star Wars movies, classic Star Trek, anime, and classic video roleplaying games (RPGs) such as Final Fantasy VII.1 For all these reasons, and because he spends all his time playing video games rather than, say, shooting hoops or going outside, he is permanently pale, physically awkward, sexually unappealing. He is a virgin, or damn near. In short, he's a geek.2
As his love for all things LOTR and Japanese might indicate, The Videogamer tends to be an RPG Geek specifically. When you picture young men foregoing real life for games, the games they play most are RPGs: EverQuest, World of Warcraft, Diablo I and II.3 Roleplaying games have always been, and still are, among the most popular game series in the U.S.A. (Think of the long-bestselling Ultima and Final Fantasy series, in addition to those just named.) Many people simply equate The Videogamer with The Video RPGer.
Two current high-profile advertisements illustrate, and appeal to, this stereotype, this equation. Through the summer and fall of 2005, gaming magazines have run a print advertisement for the paper-and-pencil version of Dungeons and Dragons. A young man fitting the description above, apparently in his mid-20s, is pictured at medium-close range at the center of the page. Sitting alone in near-total darkness, he faces his computer screen, mouse in right hand, head propped on left, eyes at a very sleepy halfmast. The text over his mussed, somnolent head, perhaps anticipating our tendency to be this guy, chides us with mild parental exasperation, "If you're going to sit in your basement pretending to be an elf, you should at least have some friends over to help."
One advertisement aired on all major television networks during the same months uses the stereotype to promote a credit-card company. Two 20ish men, dressed in ridiculous hodgepodge fantasy costumes, play-act a turn-based battle in a generic hotel room (?) at the commands of two other 20ish men. ("Underarm attack!" "Magic spell!" "Cobra bite!" "Reset! Reset!") These geeks have to play this way, rather than with an actual game machine, because unlike the credit-card company that is advertising, theirs doesn't give out keen prizes like Nintendo GameCubes. They need their RPG/fantasy gaming, but they're too sad-sacky to pay for it, so they have to pretend. The vignette resembles a really, really pathetic version of a Society for Creative Anachronism fighting get-together. The ad wouldn't work unless we "recognized" The Videogamer instantly in these poor, sorry game geeks.
I have developed The Videogamer stereotype at length for two reasons. First, I aim to make conscious a mental stereotype we surely share but which we may not be fully aware we hold. Second, I want to make clear what the stereotype has been because it's changing fundamentally and quickly. The Videogamer is altering before our eyes from RPG Geek to X-treme D00d.
The X-treme D00d shares the RPG Geek's primary demographic characteristics: he too is young, male, and white-probably more of all three, even, than the RPG Geek. He feels free to spew out during in-game chat whatever racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise offensive things pop into his brain. (None of that pansy "infinite diversity in infinite combination" crap for him.) He chugs Mountain Dew,4 talks like an O.G. (original gangsta), and lives for over-the-top, graphic violence in videogames. He works very hard at appearing cool, macho, and above all X-treme <form fists into devil horns and roar>. Significantly, unlike the RPG Geek, he has-nay, loudly trumpets, preens himself on, wildly exaggerates – an interest in sex. His favorite game machine is the Xbox;5 the PlayStation 2 and GameCube are too geeky, too Japanese, and the PC is only good for playing first-person shooters or surfing porn. His favorite games include the Unreal Tournament, Quake, Doom, and Halo series, and above all the bajillion-selling PS2/Xbox/PC Grand Theft Auto games.6
Now, I'm no conspiracy theorist. I can't finally convince myself that an Illuminati-like cabal of media moguls held secret meetings at which they decided they would consciously, concertedly, change the popular image of videogames and The Videogamer. However, it's always valid to ask Bertolt Brecht's famous question: "Whose mill does the wheel turn?" In other words, who benefits from current cultural and material conditions? How do they benefit? Framing the issue in terms of cultural effects rather than conspiracy relieves us of the near-impossible task of proving intent. (To prove intent in this case, you'd need a videotape of those secret meetings, and good luck acquiring that.) Intent is not even particularly relevant; only cultural effects are, and those are evident to everyone. You can guarantee that if current conditions were running counter to a powerful faction's interests – for example, the videogame industry's7 – the industry would manufacture a way to change them. But instead, the industry continues ever more strenuously to turn RPG Geeks into X-Treme D00dz. The change works for videogame moguls, so they keep it moving, with remarkable consistency across gaming venues.
Let me offer a couple of other telling examples that dramatically delineate the industry's new image and core audience. First, consider the Spike TV Video Game Awards. They debuted on "The First Network for Men" (read: "D00dz") in December 2004, and seem to be scheduled annually for the indefinite future (including December 2005). Nothing could possibly more X-tremely D00dish than this awards program. It featured live performances from rap artists such as Ludacris and Snoop Dogg, several flavor-of-the-month rock bands, retina-searing lighting, and lots of hot cheerleaders. (Yes, cheerleaders. For videogames.) In addition to traditional, expected awards such as Best Military Game and Best Action Game, Spike TV gave awards for Cyber Vixen of the Year (BloodRayne)8 and Most Addictive Game Fueled by Dew (Burnout 3: Takedown – in which, it should be noted, the whole point is less to drive fast than to instigate spectacular multi-car crashes). X-treme, D00d!!!
Second, consider a current advertisement for the decidedly D00dish game expansion Rome: Total War: Barbarian Invasion. (The ad can be found in the December 2005 issue of PC Gamer.) This ad directly – with irony, yes, but directly – ridicules old-school gamers into getting with the new times, the new image. A 20ish young man, clearly unaware of the hapless impression his brown velour leisure suit and extra-wide Barney Miller tie are making, leers through monstrous 70s-style eyeglasses and shaggy hair at a shapely young woman already in the act of huffing away from him. "Hey, baby. You into turn-based gameplay?" he grins cluelessly. "Don't let this happen to you," warns the ad. "CivAnon can help. . . . The end of Civilization begins here."9 Then on the next page we find the welcome alternative to embarrassingly old-school games such as Civilization – namely, Rome: Total War: Barbarian Invasion.10 The associated ideas, then, lie thus: on the pathetic side, Geek --> sexual loser --> old-school gamer; on the cool side, X-treme D00d --> successful ladies' man --> new-school gamer. Turn off your Civ, fire up the Xbox, and grab a Dew, man!
Why change The Videogamer's image this way? At first look, the change resembles bad business: focusing on an audience that is even younger, more exclusively white, and more exclusively male would seem narrowly define and therefore contract that audience; this reduces potential profits, right? It's already an open secret in videogaming that racial minorities and women rarely play. Some (male) videogamers refer to gaming females as "unicorns,"11 they're so rare and elusive. The Videogamer's recent changes make the already rare, virtually nonexistent. (What heterosexual female, for example, could watch the Spike TV Video Game Awards with any enthusiasm whatsoever? How much interest can she really be expected to take in who's named "Cyber Vixen of the Year," or in the cheerleaders' pelvic gyrations?) As for racial minorities: I challenge anyone to name one character appearing in a recent game (i.e., since 2000) of "nonwhite" extraction who does not conform to stereotype. African American males in games are always either pimps or gang members, or both – and so on. I challenge anyone to name more than one African American – or Latino, etc. – gamer whom they personally know. Minority gamers, too, are a strain of unicorn. So again, videogaming, like, say, rock 'n' roll music, has always presented an extremely white male face to its extremely white male audience, and the recent image makeover only intensifies that tendency. So why the change?
The reason can be found in the one significant difference between old-school gamers and new-school gamers: sexuality. Sex sells, world without end. Thus the audience, by getting "maler" in this sense also, in fact grows to include the inner adolescent in a broader male audience – white teens, of course, but also 35-year-old Latinos, Caucasian midlife-crisis-sufferers, African American adult males, and so on. Let's face it: not only teenage boys leered at Lara Croft's gigantic udders in the 90s; or rather, the teenage boy inside more than just the chronological teenage boys leered. Changing the videogame industry's image may narrow the core audience a bit, but it considerably expands the secondary, or actual, audience – the people who finally do buy and play videogames. Women are still excluded, but… well, the industry doesn't really have an answer for that yet. Maybe that will be the next significant change.
So sex drives the change, as it so often does in business. This explains why the videogame industry has been working so hard12 recently to fabricate a "natural" connection between videogames, The Videogamer, and sexy females. Sexy females in videogames; sexy females embracing videogame tournament winners, in publicity shots; sexy females in videogame ads: lately, almost everything videogame-related gets paired with sexy females. It's rather reminiscent of 80s beer ads: bikini-clad babes jiggled up out of nowhere whenever a young man cracked a beer, so predictably that one ad featured two schmoes absolutely dumbfounded when they popped a top and babes didn't materialize. This is basic, John Locke-style "association of ideas": as he explained three hundred years ago in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, if incongruent or unrelated ideas are paired consistently, one quickly and automatically forges a mental connection between them. This is the same principle behind Pavlov's famous conditioning experiments: pair delicious food with the unrelated stimulus of a bell's ringing, and soon dogs learn to salivate at the sound of a bell. Show videogamers enough pairings of games and gamers with sexy females, and soon they…learn to salivate. They profoundly and involuntarily come to associate games and gamers with sex. This association comes to seem natural, unremarkable, original to us, when it has in fact been fabricated disingenuously to serve profit motives.
There are myriad examples, but some do stand out. One example that springs to mind is "booth babes." Every May at E3 (the Electronic Entertainment Expo), and every September at the Tokyo Game Show, the largely male videogame press spends a few days slavering over booth babes (which is what they universally call them) – beautiful young women in tight and/or scanty costumes hired simply to look sexy and thereby attract (male) attention to the games on display at their booth. They generally don't know the first thing about gaming; they are strictly there to bring in the boys. It works. All the major videogaming magazines and websites feature almost as much booth babe coverage as they do videogame coverage, which probably reflects both the reporters' own interests and videogamers' demands.
(Dis)honorable mention should also be made of Street Racing Syndicate. In this PS2 racing game, winning races not only wins the player new cars and virtual parts with which to upgrade them-he also wins multiple sexy girlfriends, whom he can trade like baseball cards with rival players. This is merely one particularly egregious example of a general tendency or atmosphere that always casts women as sirens, prizes, trophies, not full-fledged human beings.
And then, of course, there is the Grand Theft Auto series. So much has already been written already regarding the GTA games' sexual content, that I'll just quote GamePro's13 sarcastic celebration of its juvenility: "Look, when I let a prostitute into the car with me, it starts to rock and I get my health back. Hee, hee!" It's telling, too, that "dating" (as it's euphemistically called) is a large part of the most recent GTA game. CJ, the central character, has opportunities (approaching an obligation) to "date" a wide variety of women. Aside from prostitutes (and the tellingly named character "Candy Suxx" in GTA3: Vice City, famously voiced by a real-life pornstar), apparently there just wasn't enough sex in the first two GTA games. But now D00dz have been appeased.
Along the lines I'm drawing, the famous Hot Coffee controversy could be the best thing that ever happened to Rockstar Games specifically and to the videogame industry in general. True, the Hot Coffee code – which allows players to see fairly explicit sex scenes after they enter a fairly elaborate series of "cheat codes" – turns out to have been programmed into the game by Rockstar, not by hackers as Rockstar first claimed. True, this spells short-term trouble for Rockstar: the game's PRMC rating instantly dropped from "M" (Mature) to "AO" (Adults Only), which means that none of the big chains such as Wal-Mart, Best Buy, or Target will carry the game, and consequently that Rockstar's profits and stock values dropped by millions overnight. But in the long term, the scandal works so well for Rockstar as to make me suspect that they planned it that way. We already knew that GTA3: San Andreas was even more gangsta-oriented, violent, and X-treme-D00d-friendly than GTA3: Liberty City and GTA3: Vice City. Now it comes to light that it's even more about sex than we realized: pure marketing genius. So Rockstar loses some money in the short term-but in the long term it gains much more: 1) surely most of that money will be made back anyway, through prurient-interest-driven sales now and when the game reappears sans Hot Coffee, "M" rating restored; 2) as the saying goes, there's no such thing as bad publicity; 3) the controversy raises public awareness of, and interest in, this series even higher-so arguably the best-known (and all-time second-most-popular) videogame series forges even more convincingly and permanently the (artificially produced) link between videogames and sex; therefore, consequently, 4) the videogame industry expands its audience and its profits. If I were a paranoid man, I'd swear it was a conspiracy.
Hence my title. CJ, star of GTA: San Andreas, "pwnz"14 ("owns," i.e. dominates his rivals) indeed. He exemplifies the particular kind of sex- and violence-drenched gameplay prized by X-treme D00dz everywhere. In effect, CJ, acting on their behalf, points his big ol' phallic rocket launcher right at the atavistic RPG Geek and opens fire.
Dr. Brian Cowlishaw is an Assistant Professor of English at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. He specializes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and cultural studies. When he is not strictly working, he is an avid videogamer – but not an X-treme D00d. You can contact him at cowlishb@nsuok.edu.
Endnotes
1. Want to drive The Videogamer crazy? Ask him if he ever figured out how to make Aeris survive. (She dies during Final Fantasy VII.) There is no way, but bet on it, he has laid awake many nights pondering how to do so.
2. The word “geek” is now sometimes used with a kind of self-deprecating pride by
“geeks” themselves – as in the computer-repair company Geek Squad, or in videogamers’
self-identification as “game geeks.”
Nevertheless, as with ethnic or racial slurs, it’s one thing to call yourself something, and
entirely another to have someone outside your group call you that.
3. I have addressed this issue in another online article: please see "The Narrowing Experience of Experience in Video Roleplaying Games" at http://www.intelligentagent.com/archive/Vol4_No4_gaming_cowlishaw.htm. There, I argue that videogamers clock way more hours on RPGs than on other types of games. Players routinely spend hundreds of days – 24 real-world hours X literally hundreds – playing RPGs such as EverQuest; they almost never spend that kind of time on, say, racing games, platformers, or even shooters.
4. One very telling convergence of interests and audiences is Xbox 360 and Mountain Dew’s recent cooperative ad campaign. For three weeks in October, the two corporations gave away an Xbox 360 (which will actually be available in late November 2005, after the system officially launches) literally every ten minutes. To become eligible to win, one had to enter a code at <every10minutes.com> that was printed underneath a Mountain Dew bottlecap.
5. Consider the Xbox’s Platinum Hits, Microsoft’s catalog of best-selling games more than a year old. The list includes twenty Action (i.e., Violence) games, twelve Racing games, eleven Shooters, six Sports titles, and five RPGs. By contrast, the PlayStation 2’s Greatest Hits catalogue includes fifteen RPGs. Additionally, it’s quite telling that the time between PS2 exclusivity and release on the Xbox has decreased with each iteration of the X-tremely D00dish Grand Theft Auto series (see note #6 below). The first game took about 1.5 years; the second, almost a year; the third, a few months. D00dz demand the game on their system, dammit!
6. The only videogames in the last six years that have sold more copies than Grand Theft Auto 3, Grand Theft Auto3: Vice City, and Grand Theft3: San Andreas are The Sims games and expansions. But then, most people end up torturing or killing their Sims anyway.
7. Each year since 2002, Americans have spent more money on videogames than they have on movies. Now, that’s a powerful faction.
8. Naturally, since the primarily (and pretty much sole) audience for this show was X-treme D00dz – not D00dettez, or gay D00dz – there was no Cyber Stud of the Year category, or whatever.
9. Sid Meier’s Civilization games have been widely popular since Civ I in the mid-80s. Civ IV is being released right about the time of this writing.
10. I should point out that the colons are mine. The game’s title is laid out in such a way as to obviate the colons’ necessity. I’m sure they are way too academic-looking and therefore Geeky for Sega (which, by the way, produces lots of games annually for X-treme D00dz) to use.
11. Speaking of unicorns: I think the reason there are any female videogamers – not counting little old ladies who play Mah Jongg and Solitaire and the like – is the high concentration of Fantasy content in videogames. That is, Fantasy literature – Lord of the Rings, yes, and its legion close and distant relatives in this now-huge genre, which genre tellingly includes a very high percentage of female authors – Fantasy literature attracts lots of female readers, and so it makes perfect sense that many of those same people would also find attractive games that are often at least loosely based on fantasy conventions.
12. Again: whether this is a conscious, concerted effort by the industry is moot; the point is that it is happening, and that it does benefit the industry by selling sex, and lots of it, to a wide male audience.
13. See “The Seven Deadly Sins of GTA” in the November 2005 issue of GamePro. As the title would indicate, the magazine’s writers have had enough of this particular manifestation of X-treme D00dness.
14. This is a brief example of “l3375p34k,” “elitespeak,” the jargon in which young technoheads including videogamers type nowadays. There are lots of essays in online and paper journals on this phenomenon, so here I will merely observe that it’s an endemic, almost required, dialect among X-treme D00dz.
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Metal Gear Solid, East Asian Liquid
One of the most interesting contradictions of videogame culture is the yawning gap between its potentially global audience, and its much narrower user-base. Measured by access to computers, phones, TVs and other infrastructure, the current game audience is limited to about one third of the planet. Admittedly, this is changing fast, as game-capable cellphones become a truly worldwide commodity (there are over 1 billion cellphones in use today, and the total will rise to at least 3 billion by 2010). But the celling of the world does not signify the automatic arrival of utopia, any more than the wiring of the planet in the 1990s, the televising of the planet in the 1980s, or the cinematizing of the planet in the 1950-1975 period. The videogame culture, in its role as the cultural arm of information capitalism, cannot hide from the planetary contradictions, the social polarization, or the economic violence perpetrated by the capitalist world-system.
One of the few videogames which has dared to wrestle with this contradiction is Hideo Kojima’s legendary Metal Gear franchise. The original Metal Gear was a tactical espionage game created in 1987, during the 2D era of videogames. Kojima’s breakthrough hit, though, was Metal Gear Solid (1998), set in glorious 3D and powered by the first Playstation. The series kicked into high gear on the Playstation 2, where Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (2001) and Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (2004) transformed the tactical espionage thriller from a subcultural spin-off of the James Bond thriller into a true multinational art-form.
Kojima’s games put great emphasis on stealth, guile, nonviolence, and creative guerilla tactics. Note that “nonviolence” does not refer to pacificism per se, but to the minimal use of force necessary to achieve one’s goals. As a game designer, Kojima has consistently upheld the principle that nonviolent ends do not automatically justify violent means. Yes, you can charge through certain levels, shooting everything in sight, but you will never master the game or unlock its labyrinthine secrets with brute force.
The other noteworthy feature of Metal Gear is its penchant for mind-bending complexity. The storyline is a seething mass of conspiracies, plot twists, bizarre characters and high wire performances. This doesn’t always work, e.g. the latter half of Sons of Liberty occasionally suffers from an overgrowth of plot lines, which do not quite intersect at the end. But when everything does click, the effect is extraordinary. At their best, Kojima’s games are richly nuanced aesthetic experiences, worthy of serious study.
Unlike most games in the espionage genre, which focus on stereotypical Bond-style villains, rogue defectors from national security states, or skirmishes between rival security agencies, Metal Gear’s narrative universe is anchored in East Asia’s unique brand of post-Cold War geopolitics. This is most evident in the game’s recurrent theme of bickering global elites, the faceless but not entirely stateless “Patriots”, who pull the strings behind the facades of national governments. This comes very close to a diagnosis of Japan’s own ruling class, which is much more diffuse and tied to collectivized structures of accumulation than, say, the oligarchic elites of the US (e.g. the Gates or Walton families).
But what marks Kojima’s mature work as a departure from the international espionage thriller is the appearance of genuinely multinational character-systems. Consider the evolution of the main character of the franchise, “Solid” Snake Plisskin. In the storyline, Snake was once a member of a top-secret US military espionage unit. He resigned his commission in order to battle the spread of a fearsomely destructive cybernetic military technology, code-named Metal Gear. Snake is also a product of military genetic engineering, with speed and skill levels far beyond the human norm – a handy plot device, which enables any number of otherwise unrealistic game-play options (on-screen radar, fast healing, and so forth). In addition, Snake’s hard-bitten look and gravelly voice borrow from a US mass-cultural model, namely Kurt Russell’s iconic action-adventure character in Escape from New York and other films.
That said, while Snake may look and sound American, he has some undeniably non-American characteristics. For one thing, he is in constant communication with a multinational team of allies through a nanotech communications system, a patent reference to Japan’s dense networks of mobile technologies. For another, Snake is one of the more thoughtful protagonists in the videogame culture. One of the joys of the Metal Gear series are the well-nigh metaphysical debates on war, survival and the morality of both which regularly occur between Snake and his team-members. Most of all, Snake’s predilection for stealth, subtlety and guerilla tactics of all kinds is not just an issue of game-design. This signals a far-reaching refunctioning of the espionage thriller into a specifically East Asian format.
The reason is that contemporary East Asia was on the sidelines of one of the most innovative and successful guerilla struggles of all time – namely, the 30-year Vietnamese Revolution. Paradoxically, Japan benefitted from the revolution in two ways. Decades of US military spending powered Japan’s export boom, while the eventual defeat of the US opened a geopolitical breathing-space for the rise of autonomous East Asian developmental states in South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, China and eventually even Vietnam itself. By contrast, think of the grim fate of Latin America, where the US had a free hand to crush fledgling developmental states in Guatemala and Chile, strangle Cuba’s economy with an illegal embargo, and impose dysfunctional neoliberal regimes on Brazil and Argentina.
If Snake’s intense ideological skepticism, intellectual autonomy and lifelong commitment to his friends mark him as a new kind of border-crossing East Asian hero, the 21st century version of Tequila in John Woo’s classic Hard-Boiled (1991), then Kojima’s latest game, Snake Eater, answers the interesting question of why the videogame culture, unlike literature, TV or film, took so long to produce its own Vietnam War epic.
In our own era, it’s difficult to recapture the visionary excitement of the slogan, “One, two, many Vietnams”. The central story of the Vietnamese revolution was the story of one of the poorest countries on the Earth, trampled for centuries by colonialism and neocolonialism, rising up and defeating the world’s most fearsome military machine. Probably the closest the US videogame culture ever came to replicating this was Half Life, where an untrained scientist has to wage a guerilla battle against US death squads and alien shock troops in order to save humanity from its own worst impulses.
In Snake Eater, however, Kojima had the brilliant realization that it was not necessary to recreate Vietnam as a battlefield simulation per se. Instead, he turned the very concept of the guerilla war against the framework of Cold War identity-politics, effectively rewriting the Vietnam War into the prehistory of the East Asian metropole. Just consider the gorgeously-rendered jungle sequences of Snake Eater: the jungle is not just a battlefield, it is a source of great aesthetic beauty, a reliable source of cover, and a quite practical source of food, whose destruction by a miniature nuclear weapon is a cause for grief and outrage. This is also subtly relayed by the reflexive puns hidden in the title of the game, Snake Eater. Snake does indeed feed on snakes he traps in the wild, but we also learn how he acquired the nickname “Snake”, and the storyline is so full of betrayals, twists and double-crosses, that it eventually does loop back to devour its own tail.
The roster of villains in Snake Eater is especially creative, and unquestionably one of the best in recent game culture. Unlike the boss sequences in Sons of Liberty, which tended to be individual set-pieces with relatively few connections, each boss sequence in Snake Eater flows logically to the next. Additionally, each contest involves the acquisition of a specific set of player-skills. To defeat The Pain, for example, you must learn to elude his bee-swarms and swim; to defeat The End, you must learn patience and the virtues of sniper tactics; to defeat Volkov, you must identify the key weakness of the Metal Gear, namely its traction system, and so forth.
Perhaps the most interesting opponent is The Sorrow, who was romantically entangled with Snake’s final opponent, a powerful woman called The Boss. (Making things even more complicated, the Boss personally trained Snake in hand-to-hand combat). During a cut-scene, we learn that the Sorrow allowed The Boss to kill him in a Cold War skirmish, simply because he could not bring himself to harm her (at the time, she was working for a Western intelligence agency, and he was working for an Eastern one). This is the East Asian rewriting of one of the most enduring legacies of the Cold War in the East Asian region, namely the existence of sundered nation-states linked by a common culture and heritage, everywhere from the three Chinas (currently reduced to two), the two Koreas, and for a period of time, the two Vietnams.
During The Sorrow sequence, the player wades through an eerie swamp somewhere in the underworld, confronting the ghosts of all the on-screen opponents the player has faced. In a typical Kojima touch, if an opposing soldier was killed outright, its ghost reappears and must be avoided or eluded, while opponents who were rendered unconscious or tranquilized do not appear. After navigating through this river of the dead, Snake must somehow deal with The Sorrow himself (we won’t give away any spoilers, but suffice to say that ordinary weapons will not work).
The sequence registers, with unusual clarity, the grim price East Asia paid for its autonomy: the oceans of blood shed by Vietnam and other nations, during their long struggle for national self-definition and decolonization. Conversely, Snake’s escape from The Sorrow invokes one of the fundamental tropes of the media culture, the moment of a media-assisted awakening or coming to consciousness.
We do not learn the ultimate price tag of Snake’s victory, though, until close to the end, when The Boss reveals the true story of her past to Snake – and effectively sacrifices herself. Knowing she can no longer defeat Snake in pitched battle, she faces off against him anyway, for two reasons. First, she wants to be reunited with The Sorrow in death, if not in life. Second, she knows her life-story must be preserved, if Snake is not to experience the horrors she has endured. Multinational stories must be passed on, even at the price of the national bodies which created them.
This harrowing scene is closely connected with the single most geopolitically prescient cut-scene in the game. After returning from his mission, Snake is awarded a medal by none other than Lyndon Baines Johnson. Snake hesitates for several seconds before shaking LBJ’s hand – he finally does so, but icily refuses the handshake of the senior military staffer. This moment registers the ambiguity of the US Empire at its peak, when the utopia of the Great Society shipwrecked on the shoals of the Empire’s underlying military expansionism.
Remarkably, Kojima has one final surprise in store for us. The closing denouement reveals the crucial bit of information that China was covertly involved in the mission, from the very beginning. If Snake’s on-screen character symbolizes East Asian form, then this plot theme signals the arrival of an East Asian narrative content – or what amounts to the arrival of an autonomous East Asian geopolitical space. The subtle lesson here is that the Japan which can say no to US neoliberalism must still learn to say yes to solidarity with its East Asian neighbors.
One can only speculate about where the Metal Gear franchise is headed in the future. Still, if the trailer for the upcoming Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots is any guide, the action has shifted to the present, and the toxic fallout of the US Empire’s self-immolation in the sands of Iraq, a.k.a. the oiligarchy’s “Vietnam-in-a-sandbox”. But what the US Empire seems to have forgotten is precisely what Kojima insists that we remember: there are stories worth fighting for, and there are memories worth dying for. But there is no Empire, anywhere, which deserves the sacrifice of a single human life.
– DRR
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Snapshots from the Austin Game Conference
Recently, Uplink’s spies had the chance to attend the Austin Game Conference. Here are a few of the highlights:
(1) Depressingly, the senior levels of management at Microsoft still don’t get games. Their smoothly modular design for the Xbox360, increased developer support and retail strategy are all welcome improvements, but their marketing campaign continues to stupefy us with its sheer awfulness. The problem can be summed up by the signature Xbox360 poster adorning the conference, which plastered the corona of a black “X” against an all-black background. The word “EXPERIENCE” is stenciled across the middle, and the words Xbox 360 and XNA are at the bottom.
Whatever were they thinking? The logo is immobilizing rather than mobilizing. The effect is like staring into the gullet of a gigantic raptor, about to dine on your liver. If we were radical cultural critics, we’d note that the poster reads like an X-ray of Paul Allen’s disembodied id, powered by Microsoft’s Krell-sized marketing budget. “The Experience Project” is, after all, the name of Allen’s pet project, the Jimi Hendrix museum in Seattle, which is itself a gloss of Hendrix’ breakthrough album, Are You Experienced? (1967). There’s a disturbing racial unconscious at work here, or what amounts to white geek rage trying to dress itself in the garb of the African-American liberation struggle.
In fairness to Microsoft, there were individual employees who made it clear that senior management made the decision to launch of Xbox360 as the ultimate boy toy, but that things will change after the PS3 arrives. We’ll see if this is the case.
(2) To their credit, Nokia finally does get games. Scott Foe, part of the team responsible for the success of NGage Arena and Pocket Kingdom (a colorful multiplayer Sega title, resurrected by Nokia and parlayed into one of the leading multiplayer games), summed it up by noting that any game which can design around a 7 second network lag will instantly garner a market in the billions. Yes, billions. While Nokia’s cellphone game console, the NGage, had teething problems, the platform did eventually sell two million copies, and its technology is being ported into Nokia’s smartphones – which means a potential market of literally hundreds of millions of handsets. This summer, Nokia released a game development platform for mobiles, under the name of SNAP (the details are available here: http://snapmobile.nokia.com/n-gage/web/en/snapmobile/snapmobile_home.jsp). We’ll be following this story extremely closely in the future.
(3) The center of gravity of the game industry is rapidly shifting to East Asia. One of the unexpected highlights of the show was a public delegation from Daegu, South Korea. Their booth display featured a quirky platform game running on crystal-clear Korean-made widescreens. Due to its world-class broadband infrastructure, canny developmental state, and location next to China, South Korea is rapidly becoming one of the global centers of online gaming. China, though, isn’t far behind. One panel estimated employment in the Chinese game industry at roughly 3,000, which is tiny compared to the comparable US figure of 60,000 or so, but noted that Chinese universities are gearing up fast for the world of gaming.
(4) Videogame professionals care about micropolitics. It was especially welcome to see an entire section of the conference (the Women’s Game Conference) devoted to the issue of women in a male-dominated industry, as well as the responsibility of the gaming biz to break through gender stereotypes and reach its true market potential. We won’t name any names, but there are sizeable numbers of people who are thinking deeply about the future of games.
– DRR
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The Return of the Black Widow
The last issue of Uplink in 2005 just wouldn’t be complete without mentioning mapper extraordinaire Neil Manke, who deserves wider recognition as one of the leading game artists of our time. After a lengthy absence, Manke has returned to the scene with a new game mod called Lost Souls, which employs Half Life 2’s immensely powerful graphics engine. This is welcome news, to those of us who love games and care about game aesthetics.
Game mods, to readers new to the videogame culture, are simply customized versions of an existing game. They can range from simple color alterations of scenery by fans, to sophisticated game-worlds created by teams of highly talented programmers. (You do need to install the original game in order to run the mod, though.)
Manke’s mods have consistently been in a class all their own, combining terrific entertainment value with sterling sound-tracks and monster designs. Most of all, Manke has pushed the limits of game-play design. His greatest work, They Hunger, is a horror-survival variation of Half Life, which features some truly extraordinary opponents and settings. Swamps are swampish, trees are treeish, and caves are cavish – a remarkable achievement, considering the severe limitations of the 1998-era Half Life graphics engine. They Hunger also has some memorable moments of barking dogs, howling wolves, and that utterly creepy, impossible-to-describe gurgle otherwise known as the “zombie scrunch”.
Previously Manke’s maps have been released as freeware, available to the general public. While this contributed enormously to the Half Life fan community and to the art of mapping, it did not give Manke and his team any way to earn the money necessary to continue to develop new games.
This highlights a serious problem which the videogame community needs to address: the lack of independent financing for artists of Manke’s caliber, as well as for new and creative games of any kind. Essentially, the game community must create institutions which do for videogame-makers what Sundance, the EU’s Audiovisual Media program, and the South Korea’s Film Commission already do for filmmakers – that is, create spaces where independent, non-commercial artists and media can grow and thrive.
In the meantime, Manke’s site, Black Widow Games (http://www.blackwidowgames.com/), says that Lost Souls is going to be released in the near future as commercial software. However, the exact distribution mechanism has yet to be determined. Uplink has no doubt that Manke and his team have cooked up yet another blood-curdling classic in the lab, well worth the price of admission, so we urge readers to order a copy when it becomes available. Let’s hope the waiting period is short!
– DRR
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Stay tuned for Uplink 04: The PS3 Issue, coming February 2006.