So for the record, I am not Brian Mitchell. I don't go around kidnapping little Mormon girls. ...I much prefer 7th Day Adventists....
Anyway.....
Rant ahead, get ready. leave now if you aren't ready. It's late and I'm probably not going to edit this, so it will probably be much more than semi-rambling. Let's just aim for coherent, shall we?
This war thing. everybody's talking about it. I guess I should too. Whether its right or WRONG isn't really my point. we've got one, so we need to make the best of it.
I'm sure that some willl call this a videogame war. THe level of technology being used to present this conflict to us is facinating. I work nights, so since Iraq is 8 hours ahead of the US's east coast, when I go on break I get to see stuff that is happing over there as it happens. The other day there was a battle being broadcast live, as it happened. The CNN guy was talking to the reporting in Iraq and they were describing the events as they unfolded. Halfway around the world people were being killed and wounded and I was watching it happen live.
Bush likes to call this the shock and awe war. well that's what i felt. shock and awe. (OK here comes the reason why this is relevent to a videogame blog...) Because so many videgames are combat related, because we now have the abilities to watch combat as it happens, and because of the so called smart bombs, certainly some will call this a videogame war. but as i sat there watching this battle (issues of how the media presents to us what is "real," hyperreality, the implications of fact that it takes 2 seconds or so for the broadcast to travel from iraq, and scopophilic pleasures/masculine gaze aside) I realized it was nothing like a videogame.
Games are supposed to be fun first and formeost and if anyone thinks that war is fun, you are a sick bastard. secondly, games are about being in control and exerting your will over events. Watching that standoff, I felt totally powerless. the immediacy of the actions, this is happening NOW as you watch and there is nothing you can do. then realizing that it isn't happening NOW but because of that pesky speed of light, it really happened a couple seconds ago and right NOW over there the person on screen could be dead and that we won't know about it for two seconds so we could be watching this person "live" even though he isn't.
Anyone who has read my work knows I am all about players versus watchers. This is where bush's "shock and awe" comes in. this isn't a videogame, it is shock and awe. This war is about spectacle. This war is about, "Holy shit, look at that!" It is about our powerlessness to prevent it, and our inability stop it as well as our inability to influence it. We are spectators in this passion play, not participants. we can shout either boos or cheers as loud as we like, but like the images on a screen (and in a way for the vast majority of us that is all this war will EVER be, really) nothing we do will influence what happens. No matter how much I want the girl in the horror movie not to look in the closet, she will.
Watching the battle unfold I came to realize what this ware really was. The camerarok, the seemiingly random zooms, the unpredictability. This is not a videogame war. It is the reality tv war. the networks are using remarkably similar techniques to film and report this war as they are using to give us Survivor and Joe Millionairre. They way it is being filmed and the way it is presented is taken straight from reality tv so much so that I expect it to be a Mark Burnett production.
And guess what? the networks are cashing in on it just a much as they do on "real" reality tv shows. for the networks they are both easy and cheap to produce and result in audiences that can't bear to look away.
That paper was presented at the 2002 PCA under the title "More Than Moving Pictures:
Developing New Criteria For Designing and Critiquing Computer Games. The presentation version can
be found here. The handout I distributed can be found here.