Reading game-fictions

The concentration in this study on notions of authenticity and realism, beyond keeping it to a manageable size, should allow me to address another prevalent temptation. The sometimes understandable confusion that appears to exist in the popular mind, and particularly the popular press, regarding the effect of such simulations in the real world, and the supposed blurring of distinctions between game-worlds and the real world generate all sorts of negative comment. Too many things become confused, too many correspondences are made and generalisations allowed to stand without sufficient scrutiny. The remotely piloted vehicle used for space or deep-sea exploration, or for entry into hazardous environments such as the inside of nuclear reactors, is now a reality. It will not be long before such machines are deployed by the US military for first-strike missions. For all I know, they exist already. The interface between controller and real environment in such circumstances is often similar to that between player and game environment. As the use of video footage as part of the public relations offensive during Operation Desert Storm indicated, these all too real computerised interventions in the real world share many of the characteristics of their gaming cousins. Anecdotal and press accounts of more general confusion can range from the worrying (such as a USAAF mechanic who is rumoured to have learnt to fly a state of the art warplane using a flight simulator on his PC and then taken a real plane for a joyride), to the alarming (and possibly alarmist) tales of teenagers preparing for mass shootings using custom-designed levels for first-person shooting games that replicate the geography of their school buildings.

The relationship between fictional representation and real world acts of violence, whether supposedly inspired by films, novels, or computer games, is a notoriously thorny issue, but this formal examination of the computer game as fictional form is intended to clarify some of the general issues that are rarely addressed. Too many simplistic associations are allowed to pass without sufficient examination (players of Tekken 3 (1998) or Street Fighter (2000) are more violent in the real world than those who play Ecco the Dolphin (2000), perhaps), and the fictional status of the game and the necessity of the player’s recognition of that fictionality, is obscured. And there also seems to be some inconsistency in the responses generated by this form of fiction compared to the responses that greet other forms. The 'realistic’ violence of the opening Normandy landing sequence of the film Saving Private Ryan (1998) was critically praised: the ‘realism’ of first-person shooting games is often subject to condemnation and potential censorship.

It should always be remembered that however much the computer game might be (and particularly have the potential to be) ‘more than a game’, it is still a fictional form. As a form of mass entertainment, like punk, rock and roll, and the novel before it, the computer game has been seen as offering some sort of threat to society, particularly by providing a space in which otherwise taboo or outlawed behaviour (spitting and swearing, the sexual expression of pelvic gyration, adultery, and aggression as the first resort in problem solving) is given free range. But the confusion of game for real is indicative of individual dysfunction and‘misreading just as much as the confusion of the films A Clockwork Orange (1971) or Natural-Born Killers (1994) with a template for real behaviour is a misreading. This is fiction, and should be treated, and subject to rigorous examination, just as other forms of fiction are. Its fictionality does not remove the need for the development of an understanding of how it works.

In undertaking a primarily formal analysis of computer games within this book I have restricted myself to the discussion of a fairly narrow range of games that constitute variants of what I term game-fictions. The most interesting contemporary game-fictions, at least for the purposes of this study, are those that borrow heavily from literary and cinematic conventions in the construction of something that resembles a game/fiction hybrid (Tomb Raider, Half-Life), games that offer a fictional intersection with historical event in the creation of a species of historical fiction (Close Combat), and games that allow for the creation and management of fictional social constructions (SimCity). Without being overly reductive, and while I fully recognise the fluidity of genre distinctions in such a young and rapidly developing field, my interest is in those genres of games that appear to have the potential to develop into something approximating the sophistication of the currently culturally dominant forms of popular fiction: novels, films, and television programmes. 1 might be treating those ‘shoot-’em-ups’ that develop story seriously, but I will be avoiding talking at any length about those ‘beat-’em-ups’ that seem to go nowhere else other than towards ‘lefs-beat-’em-up-some-morel Somewhere in the storytelling of the game-fictions I focus upon, I see fictional possibility and fictional promise.15 As the advance of communication and print technology was intimately related to the rise of the novel, and technological advance was inseparable from the development of cinema and television, so one cannot ignore the potential for advances in this new fictional form that may yet accompany this truly startling rise in computer processing power. Given that rise, to assume that the computer game will always be the junior partner in the relationship between itself and other fictional forms might well be naive.16 The example offered by those would-be futurologists of the middle of the last century who predicted atomic powered cars, colonies on Mars, and a diet consisting entirely of brightly coloured pills by the year 2000 is salutary, and I do not want to offer too many such hostages to fortune in this volume. But it is already possible to foresee a not too distant future in which the progress of processor technology, if combined with the creative flair we are used to seeing applied in our other forms of popular entertainment, could lead to the development of a generation of games that transcend the pejorative classification of children’s entertainment and are taken as seriously as mass-appeal novels and films occasionally are. It would not take too much of a leap of the imagination to see the computer game develop into something like a new form of soap opera or action movie. One day, perhaps, the computer game will even produce its A la Recherche du Temps Perdu or its Ulyssesy its Casablanca or its Citizen Kane. It is, as yet, early days, and this is a reading of those early days.

Reading game-fictions

Reading game-fictions

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