Death by Video Game: Tales of Obsession From the Virtual Frontline (13 page)

If you are a member of a marginalised group, what better salve could there be than a video game, which, at its best, is the great contemporary leveller? Games rarely distinguish between privilege and underprivilege, between rich and poor (the games that can be played for free, at least), between gay and straight, between loved and abused: once you enter their dimension, almost everybody is given an equal opportunity, the same blank sheet.

The sense of betrayal, then, when the ‘community’ around games does not reflect these qualities, or when games fail to adequately represent you, can be devastating.

There’s a certain irony that
The Sims
, at least in part, gained same-sex relationships because of a reveal at E3. The event provides a sense of camaraderie and belonging for a certain type of person. But there are many who feel excluded by its tone, which primarily appeals to a young white male demographic—something further reflected in many of the big-budget titles on show there. Indeed, E3 was forced to clean up its objectifying act a few years ago by the Californian state, which objected to game publishers’ hiring of female models to attend their stands, usually in various states of undress.

At E3 in 2014, a male Microsoft representative told a female colleague during the company’s press conference to ‘just let it happen’ as he attacked her when demonstrating the fighting game
Killer Instinct
. ‘It’ll be over soon,’ he said, drawing a salacious comparison between his on-screen domination and a forced sexual encounter. ‘I don’t like this,’ his colleague said in the reportedly improvised exchange, for which Microsoft later apologised.

Such moments create an exclusionary atmosphere, something that runs contrary to the endlessly welcoming potential of the medium. They imply that video games are only for a certain kind of player, principally white, Western, indoorsy teenagers. The cliché has proved indelible and even has its own name. ‘Gamers’ (a term that further segregates ‘players,’ while adding ghost notes that call to mind the gambling industry) are routinely represented in the media as socially inept boys with poor hygiene and a proclivity for impotent rage, perhaps expressed down a Britney-style head mic while playing online shooters, or typed wrathfully onto an Internet forum.

Gamers have, throughout the first thirty-odd years of their emergence, been depicted as the contemporary nerd group, a mildly downtrodden crowd, shunned by the jocks and achievers. Gamers are the losers who spend their days in darkened bedrooms furiously tapping on controllers or keyboards in a solitary pursuit that sits close to masturbation in the mind. There is, as ever, a degree of truth in the cliché, both in aesthetic and historical terms. Video games allow the people usually picked last to become top athletes; video games allow the bullied child a power fantasy in which he or she can overcome the attackers and triumph; video games offer clear routes to victory to people who struggle to achieve on the other side of the screen.

The stereotype is powerful and, while it presents non-gamers with an image of the typical player, also informs those who play games themselves. Many gain instruction as to how the world views them and the expectation, as is so often the case, becomes self-fulfilling: they play to type. The result has been that many of the medium’s most staunch advocates and players view themselves as a certain type of person, perhaps wronged by society, for whom video games offer not only an escape but, more powerfully, a club in which they belong and triumph.

But while the cliché has endured, the context has shifted. Video-game players are not a homogeneous group, if indeed they ever were. The BBC estimates that 100 percent of British teenagers play video games in some form or other. Within the next few decades, ‘gamers’ will be a term that encompasses every gay and transgender person, every girl and woman, every politician in the cabinet, everyone with a title in the House of Lords, every teacher, nurse, banker, dustman and social worker. Video games and their players will be acknowledged as ubiquitous, and the medium’s commentators will be free to move from advocacy (the endless articles and
television programmes that, beneath the angle, exist primarily to plead the case that games matter) to more rounded criticism.

But for now, gamers are dishonestly classed as a standardised tribe, and events such as E3 broadly reinforce the illusion. Who gains from maintaining the pervading stereotype? There is an argument to say that the game-makers and -publishers benefit: they are more easily able to target their marketing to a large and discrete group (‘This is for the players,’ stated Sony’s advertising campaign for its PlayStation 4 console, for example). But this isn’t quite true: see Nintendo’s gargantuan efforts to reach people outside of the traditional gamer demographic, including taking out advertisements in magazines such as
Saga
in an effort to appeal to retirees and octogenarians.

In truth, it’s gamers who fit within the demographic who benefit the most: here, within the artifice of a ‘community,’ they find a place to belong, a place where they fit, are understood and are free to be themselves and, together with like-minded people, enjoy a sense of collective power.

There is nothing deplorable about this; the urge to form groups with like-minded people is a universal one. But when that collective power is turned against those on the margins of the group, or those who present valid criticisms of its unifying subject (such as the American-Canadian feminist Anita Sarkeesian, who has been subject to everything from verbal abuse to threats of violence following her Tropes vs. Women series), it becomes problematic.

In 2014, the fears of certain elements of the self-described video-game community that their identity might be compromised coalesced into a movement of sorts, dubbed ‘Gamergate’ after a cringe-inducing Twitter hashtag popularised by the American actor
Adam Baldwin. The Gamergate hashtag has been used more than a million times on Twitter, for myriad purposes. Some users have denounced the kind of harassment that Sarkeesian has received, and consider the tag a demand for better ethical practices in video-game journalism, including more objective reporting and a removal of politics from criticism.

Most saw Gamergate as a hate movement, born of extremists, which has grown by providing a sense of belonging, self-worth, and direction to those experiencing crisis or disaffection. The Gamergate movement is tiny relative to the mainstream audience for games, and its collective aims are ambiguous, but it has still managed to make itself heard. Outside of Twitter, the tag’s users organised e-mail campaigns aimed at companies who advertise on gaming websites with whom they collectively disagree. After the industry website Gamasutra came under criticism for its condemnation of the hashtag, Intel removed advertising from the site. (Intel later claimed that it was unaware of the hashtag when it made its decision, but Gamasutra maintained that this is untrue. Intel ultimately apologised for pulling its ads and later reinstated them.)

Regardless of the aims and beliefs of any one individual who used the tag, Gamergate was (and continues to be) an expression of a narrative that certain video-game fans have chosen to believe: that the types of games they enjoy may change or disappear in the face of progressive criticism and commentary, and that the writers and journalists who cover the industry coordinate their message and skew it to push an agenda. It is a movement rooted in distrust and fear.

For those who have found a sense of belonging in video games, the fear is that criticism is the first step towards censorship. They worry that the games that have been meaningful to them will change. Some feel that Sarkeesian, in criticising games for their misogynistic
portrayals of women, is also accusing those who enjoy the games of misogyny. Some believe that they are an oppressed minority.

And when the collective power of a group such as this is used to deny certain representations in games, or even the existence of certain subject matter within games, the medium is all the poorer. The remedy is, as always, education. Education establishes empathy, and video games are apt to participate in this work. They allow us to inhabit the shoes of ‘others,’ to view the world through their eyes and to experience the challenges that they endure. This act is not only appealing, it’s also educational.

Mattie Brice’s
Mainichi
(2013), for example, offers an arresting glimpse into life as a mixed-race transgender person and the daily challenges faced (the daily taunts you endure en route to work each day soon force you to take the back roads in an effort to avoid confrontation). Games that explore this subject matter can help us understand the lives and challenges of other human beings. If executed well by the creator and absorbed properly by the player, these works can even have a transformative effect both for the individual and, in turn, the so-called ‘community’ of players that exists around games. The sense of belonging becomes richer and stronger, even as its more negative tribal aspects fade.

The power of video games is to give people a place to belong, to see themselves represented, to share their stories, or even just to try out different ways of being. Indeed, the right game appearing at the right moment in a person’s life can have a transformative effect, in much the same way that a book or film can reassure you that you
are not alone, that other people think like you do or feel and experience similar things.

The difference, perhaps, is that a video game is a tangible place that can be visited, revisited, and, in some cases, settled in. For some, the sense of belonging can be so great that they never want to leave …

Barloque was once a bustling virtual city.

Its streets were filled with a babble of voices. There were the residents who visited Joguer’s Herbs and the Roots store, the tourists who settled down for a tipple at the Browerstone Inn, the griping criminals en route to the old jailhouse.

Barloque is the capital of
Meridian 59
, the first ‘massively multiplayer online game’ (MMOG), a style of game that allowed people from around the world to gather and quest together in a shared virtual space via the Internet. At the peak of its popularity, soon after the game’s release, in 1996, tens of thousands of players lived among its crudely rendered scenes filled with pixelated trees, shifting lava, and tired mountains. They’d battle over resources, form and break alliances, loot and terrorise one another, and assume new identities for hours at a time. As with any place where humans gather, friendships and rivalries blossomed. Two players who met in Barloque were married: a relationship seeded in fantasy, consummated in reality.

The idea for
Meridian 59
came from two brothers, Andrew and Chris Kirmse, who developed the game in the windowless basement of their parents’ house, in Virginia. The game’s title refers to its setting, the fifty-ninth provincial colony of an ancient empire.

More than twenty-five thousand people joined the game’s public beta version, and the pair sold the game to the now defunct 3DO
Company for five million dollars in stock.
Meridian 59
created the template that subsequent online worlds followed, but it enjoyed only a fraction of their success. The 3DO Company encountered financial difficulties in 2001, and sold the game’s rights to two of the company’s developers. They maintained the game as a commercial venture until 2009, but it was always a niche title.

Today, two decades after
Meridian 59
’s launch, Barloque’s streets are quiet, its cobblestones buffed and rounded by little more than a digital breeze. They are rarely visited by more than twenty people in the world at any one time. With the release of each new MMOG, such as
World of Warcraft
(a game that, at the height of its popularity, had a population of more than twelve million), more residents left
Meridian 59
’s servers, an exodus inspired, as is the case for so many émigrés, by the promise of a more interesting life, with greater opportunities—new types of monsters to do battle with, perhaps, or more vivid spells and bigger swords. A sense of belonging is what keeps people in a place. If the rest of the group moves on, the belonging goes with them and there’s no reason left to remain.

But in
Meridian 59
, a smattering of faithful residents still remains. These players decided that their investment in this world was too great to give up and, in their collective decision to stay, they have settled together in a game that looks, to an outsider’s eyes, technically crude and unwelcoming.

‘I’ve tried to leave the game many times over the years,’ says Tim Trude, a thirty-three-year-old player from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who first started playing the game at the age of fifteen. ‘But I always return. Some of these people I’ve grown up with. We have been enemies or friends forever.’

Relationships are often key in keeping people rooted to a place, but for many of those left behind in
Meridian 59
, conflict is the glue that holds them there. Unlike most contemporary MMOGs,
Meridian 59
is focused on duelling. Players can attack one another unprovoked and, if they manage to defeat their opponents, collect their loot. The stakes in these battles are high.

‘In most more recent MMOGs, death just means an inconvenient reset to a nearby starting point,’ Andrew Kirmse, who is now a distinguished engineer at Google, tells me. ‘Death in
Meridian 59
has real consequences, so people have to band together into guilds for protection. They form emotional attachments with both their friends and their enemies. We grew up on games where losing meant “game over.” Just like in real life, we felt that some level of risk makes things more exciting. If there were nothing at stake, combat would be meaningless.’

Joshua Rotunda, a designer from New York who has played the game since he was fourteen, says that it’s the high-stakes risk/reward dynamic that first drew him in and continues to hold his interest. ‘My friend and I began playing at the same time. Shortly after starting, my friend’s character was attacked and killed in one of the main city streets by a gang of veteran players. Even though I was much weaker than them, and alone, I attacked the group. My friend quit the game, but I was fuelled with the need for vengeance in this little world and drawn in.’